PERSPECTIVES IN PHILOSOPHY VOLUME 2

Rethinking the existential

by

Edward Holloway

PhL STL

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. THE IMPACT OF THE REAL

2. PERSPECTIVES OF THE LIVING

3. MATTER AND FORM: SINGULAR AND UNIVERSAL

4. THE CONCEPT OF THE RELATIVE FORM

5. THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE

6. REFLECTIONS IN EPISTEMOLOGY

7. THE INTUITION OF THE SELF AND OF "THE OTHER"

8. THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

INTRODUCTION

In the first volume of these Perspectives in Philosophy one wrote that "the medieval Scholastic synthesis, abstract and essentialist, has become increasingly irrelevant to the philosophy of science". One must add, - and irrelevant therefore to the interpretation of matter in what Teilhard de Chardin would have called its "complexification" first through "biosphere",  and  then  through  "noosphere"  in  the  evolution  of  the  higher  forms  of material life. As a result Relativism and Secularism have disintegrated Christian culture, and they are now in the process of disintegrating the doctrine of the Incarnation itself. It is fair to concede that Aquinas is himself less sheerly abstract and idealist than the presentation of his teaching in which I was formed at Rome. Indeed sometimes, as in the subject matter of the doctrine of Original Sin and its consequences,  the perspective which I was taught at the Gregorianum all those years ago, is not only unfaithful to St. Thomas, but reprehensively so. Nevertheless, the school manuals of my youth seem to me, as a summary of the main thrust of the doctrine of St. Thomas to have been overall a fair depiction. Duns Scotus, of whose works I have only a few, including however the Opus Oxoniense, is less abstract, because more psychologically orientated. Yet his philosophy too is basically in the same abstract and idealistic mode of the real distinction of the formal from the material principle in the composite reality of matter, which is below the order of the being of man.

Yet,  if  those  principles  which  are  truly  perennial,  and  basic  to  the  philosophic foundations of Catholic Christianity are rethought, and realigned within the perspective of a cosmic Unity-Law of Control and Purposive Direction which culminates in man, within the  evolution  of  life  in  the  universe,  the  result  is  no  less  than  startling.  From  the emergence of the complex life-form and its existential relativity to its "environment", we obtain immediately the concept of "the nature" or "essence", and we do so without any recourse  to  the  static  formalism  of  Aristotle,  which  also  is  the  inheritance  of  the Scholastics. In this new, existential rethinking of the cosmic unity which is actually at the basis of all Catholic thought, and intrinsic to the presentation of the book of Genesis itself, we grasp the dependence of the brain of the living animal as a "nature", an organic structure, in its relationship to environmental control and environmental programming. This "programme"  of the brain or nerve  centre within,  and unto  the environment  of Nature around, gives us the very fact or type of "ministry of being" within the concept of evolution itself. It is usually said that systems of Existentialism of their very perspective, deny the recognition of essence or "nature". We can show this to be scientifically, as well as  philosophically,  untrue.  Then,  in  man  the  apex-point  of  cosmic  evolution,  we recognize a brain which patently is not controlled by this hitherto universal co-relation to cosmic environment. This ontic "freedom" of the brain from specific determinism all must concede. Here we are. It is us. The paradox of mankind should be impossible. The brain immediately below the fully reflexive, human order ought to be the ultimate possible within evolution, for the pedigree of all brains is organic, and as organic, specific for life success to its perfect integration into its controlling environmental and ecological programme of life and meaning within Nature.

The answer to the paradox of the animal called "man" is not to be found in the confusion  of matter and mind, the reflexively  free, and the organically  deterministic, within one common  order of being, of definition of the real. To do so, destroys the characteristics,  especially  the  scientific  characteristics,  of  both  matter  and  mind, although the characteristics of mind belong, of course, more to the philosophy of science than to physics or chemistry as sciences of the factual. From the existential rethinking of the  living  form  within  a  philosophy  of  evolution,  there  follows,  a  vivid,  indeed  a stupefying, realisation. The secret of man is the necessary evolutionary mutation to a brain which, against the whole course of its pedigree, is not intrinsically relative for its life-law to that ontological dependence upon a specific correlation to environment, which defines the very being and "nature" of all else that exists! That we are such a reality, such a paradox, and yet not simply a diseased sport of evolution, is just a fact of life.

The answer we will give to the mystery of mankind, is to demonstrate that the brain, which materially speaking seems to define "man", is not a "sport" of evolution unrelated to  any  meaningful  environment  within  Nature  as  "cosmos"  and  hence  destined  to disease and death. This unique brain, as a material formula of life, is uniquely related in its very being (i.e. its so-called ontic order) to the order of the soul, or spirit: an order which is not within the fabric of evolution, nor capable of being coherently understood as a final product of material evolution. The being of man is a unique composite of both matter and spirit, which far from contradicting evolution, is required for the perfect comprehension of cosmic evolution. The soul is not of one order with matter, nor of one "complexification". For spirit is that which controls and directs: matter is that which is controlled  and  directed,  -  by  spirit.  This  law,  and  this  order  of  differentiation,  has prevailed  since  the  ordered  explosion  of  the  cosmic  energies  of  material  evolution, however this process is finally to be explained by cosmologists. The two orders are not dual aspects of a common ontic energy: they are differential but co-relative orders of the existent.

The spiritual in man is neither the "radial" energy of an order of matter which is also, as  more  grossly  physical  "tangential"  in  nature,  descriptions  taken  of  course  from Teilhard de Chardin. Nor is the spirit of the soul in man simply the "self-transcendence" of matter itself in evolution, a teaching of Karl Rahner which can be shown, from a more realistic  concept  of matter  than Rahner  uses, to be implicitly  self-contradictory.  Yet, whether matter, spirit, or the communion of them both, as in man, the finite can be shown to need its own proper order of control and direction to personal and specific fulfilment. Nothing created is its own self-determination,  nor its own final and formal principle  of  completion  in  being,  and  in  joy.  The  vision  we  will  offer  stems  from  a teaching  of  St.  Paul  which  only  now  is  capable  of  its  full  understanding   and development, namely that God is the Environment, or better the Environer, of man for "in Him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:27-28). This concept will not of course be found developed in this booklet. To a very limited degree it is presented as theology rather than philosophy in Catholicism: A New Synthesis (1969 and 1976). For the most part, the full impact of such a vision has yet to be developed, because it will lead to the percept of the Incarnation of God in Christ, as Lord and Heir of all creation, visible and invisible, to be implicit (though not in the order of common necessity) in the creation of the Universe itself. Such a perspective will certainly unite science and religion in a common ontic unity, because the correlation of both matter and spirit implies a common need for environmental determination both to be and to become, and also to be fulfilled once become. The chapters of this booklet are concerned almost exclusively with rethinking, and applying anew, the basic insights not only of St. Thomas, Scotus, and the Scholastics to a new synthesis of principles now outgrown by the development of science, but also those of Plato and Aristotle. If this seems arrogant, one must point attention to the fact that both Teilhard and Rahner do exactly the same, without drawing much attention to the fact. Metaphysics is the more general reflection upon the data of physics, and systems which date from around 350 B.C. are definitively out of date. This must  affect  also  the  metaphysics  of  the  great  minds  derived  from  that  era.  It  can however be shown that by rethinking the principles of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Scotus, and others, we are able to show a continuity of development, a perennial inheritance, from those great minds of the past. One admits that the systems proposed either by Teilhard de Chardin or by Karl Rahner seem to be dissolvent of the Faith of the Church, and the perspectives on the nature of man taught by the Church. These perspectives, one would like to observe go back much farther than Aristotle and Plato, to the book of Genesis  itself,  and  therefore  to the  nascent  potential  of the  Christian  Church  itself. Indeed, the authentic insight into the nature of man as an existent within two different orders of being, the material and the spiritual, is the common inheritance of the great Faiths of all mankind. We think they are correct.

The reader will find this volume much easier to read, follow, and understand than our first volume. Yet, for a full understanding of the manner in which this way of thinking was produced, and the revolt against a philosophy based first upon the categories of the mind, and only consequently upon the analysis of the real below mankind, it is a help to read and to know the earlier volume of Perspectives. No claim is made, or even secretly thought that this booklet is the final triumphant resolution of the work of the human mind, as it surveys at least the order below itself. Imannuel Kant seems to have nourished such a pretension for his own system. This writer most certainly does not. It is not the end, nor the beginning of the end. In only the most primary school sense is it the end perhaps of the beginning. At least, so one hopes the c a t is on the m a t!

Edward Holloway, St. Ambrose, Warlingham, Surrey. January 1995

1 THE IMPACT OF THE REAL

We write perspectives in philosophy, but in all sobriety and all honesty to claim to be a philosopher in a specific and professional sense would be an untruth, - and a vanity. From the windows of my room as I write I see sunbeams glinting off glass, hitting back upon the eye from path and tarmac, glinting in the new green and leaves of a day in May. In that more humble and secondary sense one writes reflections of personal consciousness: Cogito, ergo sum proclaiming the Good News so to speak of his own self-revelation. Yet, even after reading the Discourse on Method one was sure that more correctly Descartes should have said Sum, ergo cogito. Everything starts with the perception of our own existence, own reality. The principle of non-contradiction is only the more explicit application of the principle of identity. The affirmation of self-identity is that  I am,  I perceive,  reflect,  think,  feel,  and  know:  from  birth  and  before  birth  the affirmation of self is dynamic, and never, never "agnostic" in any way whatever. Beyond this dynamic self-intuition and fulfilling it, is the question who I am, and what I am, and then, consequent upon cognition in general, - the judgement, the appraisal of the real. Judgement  has many facets,  but primarily  it speaks  and recognises  co-relationship. There is in judgement whatever its "sentence" an affirmation of entitative unity between the self and "the other". Entitative relationship means not only the basic relationship of communion in being and becoming between "things" whatever things may be. It means also the intuition in basic, unsophisticated recognition, (that of simple people) of a knowledge of the sort, or the kind. It is first a knowledge of the singular event, but even in the child, as human knowing develops, it embraces the percept of the good, true, and right: that which is proper to the wholeness the integrity of something real. Even in a school playground, in the first school, you can see, hear, and watch the angry rejection of  that  which  is  "no  good",  "messed  up"  not  proper  and  integral  to  its  sort.  This recognition, especially in terms of the authentic, is often implicit, but it belongs to man as mankind. Many a philosopher will deny what we are trying to say, because what is asserted is the implicit and primary percept of what is meant by nature and the nature, in the categories of philosophy. The intuitive recognition of oneself, and of "the other" is the recognition of the related, the ordered, the "proper". Again from the windows of a study one can ponder it in very, very unphilosophical mothers fitting their infants and babes into the car. Sometimes they leave the car, and the six year old they have just brought from school, and grab up the crying baby and make a rush back to the school... there is a problem, nappy work to be done however inconvenient. The concept of the nature is a fact. The recognition of that which in Latin is proprium, belonging to the definition, and its dynamic  unfolding.  It  is  found  below  the  rank  of  mankind,  and  will  demonstrate something to us. The birds of the air build their nests finding, picking, choosing the right twig and finally the soft mossy lining. They in some sense "know" what is proper, correct to the nature, and in this very important sense, the essence or nature is embodied into the very dynamics of being. Reality much below the level of human kind is aware of it, lives by it, and could not survive without it. The recognition by man of the proper, the right, the ordered, and what it is, we will have to ponder later; when the implicit and uncensored   (but  living  and  dynamic)  in  intellectual   recognition   passes  into  the judgement.

It was necessary to write the above, because later one will reject the real distinction between the phenomenon and the noumenon in Kantian terms. Also one will reject, in material being below the human order, a real distinction between a principle of entelechy or  "form"  which  gives  individual  and  especially  specific  unity  to  being  which  is compounded  of "matter"  and "form" in the Aristotelean,  and also Thomist,  sense. A special study and case must be made out for man, because man is the limiting case of the whole material universe. In Man, matter and spirit, or "soul" are, despite the denial of many modern philosophers and theologians, two distinct energies, or orders of being, in entitative synthesis. For now we leave the human being to one side, when stating that we think it now possible to synthesize matter and form, as also substance and accident, as principles of being into a new concept. It would mean that we can explain intellectual knowledge without using a principle of the abstraction of the form, the intelligible per se, from the "matter" in which and through which it is said to be individuated. This is the process in which basically the Kantian distinction of the phenomenon (in Scholasticism, the phantasm) and noumenon (form or principle of intelligibility) is found to consist. Yet such a synthesis of matter and form, noumenon and phenomenon, will not dissolve the all important concept and percept of the nature. The dissolution of the nature of the existent is at the heart of modern Nominalism, and most forms of Existentialism. At the time of writing there is a furore in the University of Cambridge over the propriety of awarding an honorary degree to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Among his "sins" is the allegation that he subverts and denies the very possibility of the concept of truth! Yet, anyone who traces a path through Nominalism and the denial of the concept of the nature, is bound, via Sartre and many an ancient Sophist, to arrive at the denial of the  very  notion  of  truth.  One  does  not  usually  associate  the  philosophy  dons  of Cambridge University with shocked orthodoxy. Perhaps they are a little short on both history and Bible studies. After all, Pontius Pilate got there a long time before Jacques Derrida! (John 18:38) There is of course a fundamental  difficulty in too sweeping  a rejection of the concept of truth. In the classic words of a famous international tennis player,  himself  noted  for  setting  cats  among  pigeons,  "you  can't  be  serious"  in proclaiming the truth that there is no truth.

There is no philosophy or philosopher however agnostic, however Idealist, that does not communicate. Communication lodges within a communicator. Communication is part of, or at least consequent upon, the awareness of self. The basis of self-awareness is the self-identity principle: the self-reflection and implicit assertion that "I am". "I am" is actually the very root of the idea of truth, as also of the concept of the nature. As far as I am concerned, "I am" is true. There is an identity between subject and predicate, if we write it as "I am myself". Sorry, - but it's true. One did not of course write I AM WHO I AM, yet between the truth of our own self-conscious recognition in existence, and the I AM WHO AM of God, there is an analogy of entitative proportion. For "I am" as self- identity exists in different degrees of intrinsic proportion in all things: in sentient life lower than man, in matter below life, matter in the first formulation of the Universe. The Scholastics called these lower and lowest of all relationships to God the Creator, the vestigial  likeness,  the  lowest  conceivable  intrinsic  analogy  of created  being  to God. Aristotle was right to see in all movement, not merely local and extrinsic to being, but also and much more so, that which was intrinsic and from the substance, the potential, the power of coming to be. Such being is intrinsically relative in its identity to meaning and to fulfilment. Anything that acts and reacts, that "responds" must be said to possess a certain principle of identity which is in some minimal sense "dynamic". All movement, all change howsoever conceived implies intrinsic relationship to be and to become. In this recognition stands the distinction between God the Transcendent, and creation, the related. All created being intuits itself in its identity principle as co-relative. It is moved and itself is a mover. It is changed and it causes change. A "cause" is that which "inflows being  into  another".  The  created  in  its  ultimate  self-consciousness  is  not  the  self- sufficient  proclamation  of  its  own  identity.  The  spiritual  creation  as  literally  a  "free thinker" may contradict its basic relationship to God, and attempt self-adoration. Nevertheless  its  self-consciousness  is  always  defined,  for  perfect  intelligibility  unto "some other". God is not thus. God's self-consciousness, God's self-identity, is always "to be" without any intrinsic relationship whatever except unto the full possession of I AM WHO AM: this identity defines the Trinity and the Trinity defines the simple Being of God. What we call the Holy Trinity is simply (in every sense!) the self-conscious Life of God. The Divine Nature is not "common and static". It is defined by the dynamism which is the Living Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In that pure ACT of God, consists at least for this  writer,  the  meaning  of  the  assertion  of  St.  Thomas  that  in  God  essence  and existence, definition and actuality, are one in a predication which is "simpliciter simplex", the Simple, the Undetermined without any qualification. Of nothing created, visible or invisible can such be predicated. Whether a man accepts the concept of creation or not, of nothing else that exists can the biblical concept of God be formulated: - I AM WHO AM. All besides is intrinsically co-relative; or better correlative in one word, which better emphasizes the interdefinition of all created entities, especially in the material universe. As it has been written "no man is an island".

The priority of metaphysics and its pitfalls

If we will begin to philosophize, we must begin from our own "I am". We prescind from such analysis of our intuitions, perceptions, sensations and consciousness as might allow us to propose that the other is truly other, not merely the extension of the consciousness which is "me". Every school of Pantheism or Panentheism, every school of Idealism, will deny in greater or lesser degree the distinction between the personal "I am" and other reality around. Human self-recognition, even within the womb in the early weeks between mother and child, is "unto the other. All is co-relative  and not Self- Relative as in the I AM of God. So in this query concerning the delineation of the "self" and  "the  other"  we  leave  for  now  unresolved  a  node  of  philosophy  which  calls  for appraisal. Yet all admit their own consciousness of existence, the internal and external content of their "I am". If a man says that he doubts the consciousness  of his own existence, he has already proven that he does not and cannot prescind from it. It is necessary  for  the  human  person  to  begin  to  philosophize,  i.e.  to  ask  meaningful questions about the self, the real; the other, the meanings and goals of existence first from the self. In this respect it is virtue to be selfish. As far as "I" am concerned, even God exists unto me because first of all I exist myself. The more basic the man, the culture  and  the  community,  the  more  inevitably  all  questioning  in  philosophy  and theology begins from the ego of man. It is not a scandal that primitive man attributes to the direct intervention of God or of gods, powers and effects which we now know are due to secondary causes, to scientific effects etc. To me, it would be a scandal if man did not do so. Because long before mankind could guess even the more macroscopic of the engineering of the Universe, he recognised the role of thought and reason in the Universe around. He perceived that entities that existed and interacted were not great enough in being, and were too narrowly specific in their powers to account for the order and the "governance" of the whole. Because man was a "freethinker" he made God in his own image and likeness. Sin distorted the image and inclined to crass errors... but nothing below man dreams, speaks, or bothers in any way about "God". It must be from a new power in man, - possibly from some community of being, i.e. of "nature" that man does so? I would be scandalised indeed if there were in human history no "gods" to make rational sense of creation, even as man is rational, alone among created life.

It  would  happen  that  as  human  culture  developed  systems  of  physics  and metaphysics would develop according to the natural law of community and tradition. Physics indeed would be slow to match metaphysics, because only now at "the end of the ages" do we begin to comprehend the intricacy and relativity not just in space and time, but in very being and essence of the Universe. The majesty of what may be called its "engineering" has taken us long to grasp. Because the intelligence of man is spiritual and  not,  pace  so  many  moderns,  evolutionary  in  nature,  the  development  of  a philosophy,  theology and anthropology of the higher faculties in man would outpace what he really knew of detailed creation around him. There is something magnificent, but highly precocious about the achievement of the Greeks within their tiny City-States. It is a mark of their wonderful achievement in all fields of human knowing and loving that at the time of the very birth of Christianity, St. Paul could speak to the Athenians in their own philosophical idiom, saying that "in Him we live, and move, and have our being" because only now, nearly two thousand years after, are we beginning to understand the enormous implications, and coherent beauty of God as "the Environment of Man". As yet, we have not succeeded  in developing  this concept in its fullness into a deeper synthesis  of the  Christian  faith  in which  it made  its first  appearance.  The  Christian synthesis built by the Fathers of the Church and by the Scholastics in the West, upon the bases of both the Gospel and of Plato and Aristotle was something like the golden statue of King Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 2:38). The theological head indeed was gold, but as the body of wisdom passed down from theology to philosophy to physics, it ended inevitably in feet of clay. The metaphysics was taken for granted, as also the physics of which the metaphysics   was   the   ultimate   unifying   principle   of   what   Kant   would   call   the transcendental reason. The presumption grew in the medieval period that in terms of ultimate reason there was little more to learn of substantive importance. The principles and applications of metaphysics were now absolute. There came to be an overmuch reliance upon the analyses of the intellect, and too little upon new analysis of that nature and  environment  around,  in which  what we now  know  as "science"  has  its various disciplines  and dimensions.  After a certain degree of progress  had been made, not without its own iconoclasm of what was valid in the achievements of the past, Immanuel Kant would do very much the same: too much insistence on the a priori and too little humble  investigation   of  the  basics  of  nature  and  of  human  and  even  animal consciousness. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant does presume to think that he is laying down for mankind the ultimate principles through which, and upon which, all future knowledge of man, as organisation and valid inference could now be built! From human fallibility which is natural to us all, and from human sin, which is not natural but very much a built-in condition of confusion in both flesh and spirit, very great achievements of the human soul outlive their usefulness and the heirs are not aware of it. It does not mean that every formulation from the past has to be discarded or considered irrelevant. Such  in  fact  does  come  to  be  the  impact  of  today's  historic  relativism,  but  the presumption is not true. The core principle of historic relativism is the presumption that matter  and  spirit  are  simply  dual  aspects  of one  common  cosmic  energy,  and  that therefore, everything is a process of mutual evolution, and will be ad infinitum. On such a philosophy - and theology - there is no norm of "truth". There is only an accommodation, fuzzy at the intellectual edges, which serves a turn for most people, but never for all. This presumption of philosophy, theology, and also of anthropology is untrue to reality and will be challenged.

In philosophy as in physics thought has to be realigned. The formula which has become too small for a reality now known in better detail has to be rethought. It need not mean that an old concept is plain wrong. Like Newton with respect to Einstein, an earlier achievement explained much of the truth. It may have been a good working model. It is very likely that at all times there were difficulties with the older synthesis. As with knowledge by the abstraction of form from matter for instance, it meant that while the philosopher sturdily taught that all knowledge was of being, of that which subsists, in fact his principles allowed you to know only the formal aspect of the real and the singular. There was a problem all the time. At all times the philosopher has to return to Nature, to see what is known more in detail, and more certainly of the real, through the senses and from tested experience.  The philosopher  must never presume  that his ontology and epistemology, in a word his Metaphysics is completed, - valid in expression beyond any question of correction  into a yet more perfect intellectual  perspective.  This is not to preach flux in metaphysics. It is to say that while the higher, the transcendental power of the mind to know and to unify must ever seek to reach that perfect unity-in-diversity by which the Mind of God intuits all that He has created, we may hope for some fuller approximation  as we come to realize more fully the unity-in-diversity  of the physical detail of the Universe. We are never going to reach it or express it with the simplicity it possesses in the Mind of God.

This reminder to the spirit is well expressed in the derivation of the word "metaphysics".  Apparently we have it so because Aristotle composed these ultimate reflections meta, i.e. after a Physica, the Physics. In thinking as in historical sequence he could not have done otherwise. Metaphysics is the pondering of the ultimate intelligible principles of knowledge, in which and through which "being" has its final and formal interpretation. A great and unifying synthesis of thought was built in the ages to come, by the Christian Fathers and by the Scholastics of the Middle Ages on the one hand, and rather  differently  by  Arab  culture  in  the  same  Medieval  period,  upon  the  ultimate reflections of Aristotle and Plato. Democritus and the Atomists have had their historical revenge in more recent times! The Christian synthesis which fashioned Western culture has lasted long and rendered noble service. Subject as are all things human to old age, it has outlived and lost its élan vital. It needs rethinking in view of the "culture shock" of the  rapidity  of  the  increase  in  our  knowledge  of  the  physical  Universe  in  all  its dimensions. There is not only the detail of the new knowledge to be absorbed, there is also the new, and even a century ago totally unexpected "mathematical" and equational relativity of all forms of being in the universe, which even in the biological sciences is explaining the origin of species in ways which Darwin could never have dreamed of, but in which a Christian for example would find a much closer approximation to his vision of the Universe. Just as there has been development in our understanding of the inter- relationship and fine tuning of the macroscopic universe from our new knowledge of the microcosm, so also there is needed not only a correction, but also one dares to think, some development  in the metaphysics through which the ultimate unity of reality as "being"  is interpreted  and explained.  If it is feasible  it will not be a progress  which arrogantly discards the past and thereby renders invalid any objective judgements of the human mind, but a progress akin to that of say physical science, in which a perspective which has rendered valuable service and explained certain facts, is yet found to have "difficulties" and discrepancies from fact, which require unlikely further hypotheses to keep it in balance. Then say a Newton may be followed by an Einstein able to subsume the achievements of the older theory in one which of its own perspective explains what were "difficulties" before. And of course, Einstein will not be the last word either! One thinks that there is progress possible also in Metaphysics, until we comprehend all reality in that perfection of its entitative correlation which it possesses in the Mind of God. That ultimate haven we are never going to anchor in. Nevertheless we can make progress towards that ultimate principle of unity by which, all things are known and defined in the Mind of God. The haven and the heaven - same word! - are beyond us earth bound ones, but we are not at all in so poor a condition as Kant would have us. The transcendental reason can possess some objective knowledge of God, and of the metaphysical. We have come a long way in the physical sciences, - and in continuity notice, not sheer historic relativism, - from what was potential in our fathers, the cave men, looking, wondering, and arguing about the stars above and the world around. If Metaphysics  allows  of correction  and  development,  the  same  basic  progress  in the objectively known will also be true.

Greek philosophy, and by the term one is thinking now of that school in which the spirit, the intellectual,  the principle of "soul" dominates  the interpretation  of the real, erected an edifice beautiful, coherent, but static. The work as it comes down to us is dominated by the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Those wonderful Greeks got to the verge of so many modern discoveries some two thousand years before the rest of the world, but their civilisation was too small to develop and prevail. Technology usually requires a base of considerable size. They were overwhelmed. They also had another school,  we  may  call  them  the  Atomists  rather  than  just  Materialists,  the  names  of Leucippus and Democritus come to mind, who suspected there was a layer below the world of the macroscopic, below the Physics of Aristotle, which the "spirituals" had failed properly to recognize and to synthesize. That work, the work adumbrated by the Greeks two thousand years ago, is very much a work urgently necessary in the world of the third millennium after Jesus Christ. That the Greeks were not totally overwhelmed as a tiny oasis in shifting sands of barbarism, was largely due to the birth of Christ, and to the development  of  one  aspect  of  especially  Platonic  thought  by  the  Greek  and  Latin Fathers of the Church. We find it as a key insight in St. John, and we know that it had been taken up by Philo and the Jewish Diaspora before John. One means of course the Platonic teaching of The Word, through which as divine intelligence all things "formal" were made. With or probably without the influence of Greece, it lives in the Wisdom literature of the Bible, in the books of Wisdom and the Proverbs. The Word is God's own self-realisation as Mind. That which is true in the insight of St. John and the Fathers of the Christian Church will stand forever, but not necessarily in one and exactly the same synthesis, especially of philosophy. For Aristotle and the Scholastics, the concept of the "nature" of anything real was static and of "universal" application in its intelligibility. The process of knowing being, knowing the singular, was by abstraction, through the agent Intellect, of the formal; the intelligible as abstract and universalized, say humanness from human. It was this abstract and universal principle of definition which alone was "intelligible". It had to be "abstracted" from matter, for matter, as a principle of pure potentiality, of the possibility of "becoming" was not intelligible in its own right as a co- principle of the real. Matter was known only through the individuation of the form. It was nature's principle of individuation. While St. Thomas taught that knowledge was of the whole being of the "ens subsistens", subsistent real, and of course individual, there was nothing in his philosophy to justify the assertion. To know the singular one had to "reflect consciously"  on  the  individual,  and  the  impression  of  sense  and  knowledge,  the "phantasm" one has possessed in the mind before the agent intellect had abstracted the principle of sheer intelligibility which as now pure ie. abstracted from ‘matter' it could now present to the intellectus possibilis. The intellectus possibilis, intellect as "power to possess" i.e. cognize actively was for St.Thomas a separate function of cognition from the intellect as agent, although the intellect as faculty was defined as one power of the spiritual nature of man. Nevertheless, through the mist of words no principle was given by which the singular as singular was knowable intelligibly as singular. One asserted that knowledge was of the individual real, but one's principles forbade the knowledge of the singular, simply because it was individuated through matter, a principle of limitation upon knowledge as such.

Rethinking metaphysics within nature

Just as knowledge for Aristotle and St. Thomas, and of course even more for Plato, was built upon the ‘pure' but static concept of "the formal" the "second intention" or universal idea, so was the utterly logical, coherent, and supremely non-developmental structure of philosophy and theology built upon such thought. This has now to change. The revealed world of our scientific knowledge, (and by revealed there is a play upon words,) one means the knowledge of the material Universe proven in its derived works and artefacts, requires a new synthesis of both natural and divinely revealed truth and wisdom. This urgent need, and the dynamic pressures behind that need was, in the case of the Western Catholic Church the real cause which forced the calling of the Second Vatican Council. The failure to find a new philosophical synthesis in sympathy or should we say empathy, with orthodoxy of the Faith is the continuing cause of the inner anguish of spirit which now and continuously afflicts the said Church. In terms of a new vision and  perspective,  a  true  aggiornamento,  the  Council  gave  nothing  and  has  so  far achieved little. The old structure of Scholasticism, and especially of Thomism, its more prestigious  variant, was brushed aside. Nothing  new has come in to take its place, except  variations  of  the  Historic-Relativism,  "Liberalism"  or  man-based  Humanism, which had been condemned under the blanket name of Modernism by Pius X some sixty years earlier. The hopes and aspirations of the Council are held in suspended animation, while all around doctrinal and moral disintegration continues in the Household of God. New knowledge of the physical forces of Nature obliges us to rethink our philosophy of Nature. This will, one suggests, involve a rethinking of the metaphysics of being within Nature.  If it is wisely and truthfully  done,  it will not be so  much  a discarding  as a development, and a beautifying of our philosophy of Nature. Human knowledge and the advance of human culture should be a continuum. In the sciences of matter, living or azoic, in medicine and technology we trace a rough and ready continuum. In the higher satisfactions of thought, or beauty moral and artistic, men speak of highs and lows of peaks and decadence. Not everyone will accept the presumption of moral highs and lows, but the collapse, whether military or cultural, of great empires is a fact. What we name decadence in the achievements of man is related not merely to lusts and greeds. It  is  related  to  a  decline  in  the  general  acceptance  of  the  theological  and  ethical principles by which in society, the innate greeds of men have been in some measure contained. Likewise, achievements of sheer beauty in human living, in art of every kind, in architecture too, which expresses - as does great music, - something of the unity in complexity of the human spirit, have been inspired by theological and ethical principles which buttressed the noblest in man. Such principles could be called "anthropological" if wished but they have never been far from the concept of God. Today a collapse in the highest of the perennially human can be traced in very different cultures from Moscow to Los Angeles. We come to accept as inevitable the human misery of the Indian subcontinent, which does not lack an ancient culture. The Moslem world too, for all its Fundamentalist protest against the moral squalor of the West, has never yet succeeded in demonstrating even post-Christian charity to its poor, despite great oil riches. The scandal seems to be of the nature of man; or is it the de-naturing of man of which we are speaking? There will be found a startling depth to this concept of the nature, concerning which Western man in particular thinks and cares so little. The anomaly of the human kind escapes us, unless and until we dare to wonder whether human nature as we now find and possess it, is whole, integral, and the original. Is it in alignment with its proper and  natural  environment?  Could  there  be some  principle  of damage,  some  intrinsic distortion latent within the human psyche? The Christian will know one is hinting at the doctrine of Original Sin, a damage at the origins of man. H. G. Wells was no Christian, but at the end of his life he meditated gloomily upon the evolutionary disorder in the nature and personality of the human life-form. There was this gap between the godlike intellect which had penetrated to the secret energies of the foetal universe, and the misery and pettiness of a disordered will which enshrined this first great cultural manifestation of power - which Wells indeed had prophesied and foreseen - in a bomb of unparalleled destructiveness  and power to poison the natural environment of all life. There would seem to be some inherent, constant, and in the widest sense of the term hereditary  penalty,  within  the  psyche  of all  mankind.  If the  uncommitted  reader  will boggle at the word "penalty" at least let us admit some sort of "burden" on the nature of human kind. For the paradox of unbalance manifest in the psychology of man is a fact of observation all through human history, a fact of observation also in individual lives, and in "the people in the street". An explanation of the misery of man may be attempted later.

Nevertheless there has been a recognisable element of continuum especially in the achievements of Romano-Greek, i.e. Western civilisation. This is a greater achievement in some ways than the continuities in the cultures of China, Japan, or India. For Western civilisation is, by its very nature the most scissile of all the cultures of the world. It alone, leading out from the achievement of ancient Greece, among people of the same basic ethnic stock, has divined the intimate secrets of the material Universe. This is because the psychology of these people, and above all their Romano-Greek inheritance, is the most critical and questioning and individualist of all the cultures of mankind. All through the two thousand  years of the Christian  Church - which we bear in mind senses a universal, not merely a Western mission among all the races and cultures of man - this restless, enquiring, independent,  and let us admit arrogant psychology of Caucasian mankind has been a perpetual threat to unity of faith and morals, and unity of culture. It may be a coincidence, although it also may be relevant, Arius from his name at least would be an Aryan. In the history of Christianity the more "Aryan" the people within her fold, the more they seem to have been prime movers of disintegration  of faith and culture, although prime movers also of scientific discovery in the field of the natural sciences. This is a sweeping statement, subject to all the qualifications of very general statements. Yet, anyone who will study the sweep of, shall we say, philosophy among the "Nordic" peoples (Cardinal Danielou once referred to them delicately as the North Atlantic  peoples!)  will  have  to  acknowledge  a  trend  largely  corrosive  of  doctrinal Christian culture. One is thinking in such a statement mainly of the last four hundred years, and perhaps most of all (not uniquely) of German philosophy. Before the year one thousand of the era of Christ however, through all the surgings and chaos of the "Dark Ages", the spiritual and cultural force of the Christian and Catholic Church of the West, had ensured that the so-called "Dark Ages" were not all that dark. The taming of the Barbarian peoples who swept in successive waves across Western Europe is one of the glories of the Christian Church. In the mind of this writer, principal and continuous in causation was the work of the monks, first of Augustinian rule and then later also of St. Benedict's. At the peak of the Middle Ages we add the teaching and preaching friars of St. Dominic, and the Poverelli of St. Francis. This is not to suggest that there were no other personalities and factors, but a work of sheer heroism called for a spirituality of heroic dimensions. To regain the new Barbarians of the post-Christian age will take the same again, and as much as before. This culture of faith and morals, reason and revelation, embracing all the many facets of the psyche of man (not simply the scientific, technological, and commercial) is now in a state of disintegration and looks urgently for redintegration.

St. Thomas More: a mind for all seasons

The present  disintegration  begins  some  four  hundred  years  back with  the rise of a philosophy of Nominalism in opposition to the static formalism of the Scholastic achievement.  In terms of the religious schism it may look like a clean break. If it is weighed in terms of the ultimate consequences of causation we see today in the final unravelling of the West, it can be seen rather as a gradual, continuous cracking. For not every value that belonged to "Christendom" regarded as a culture fractured cleanly into two between "Catholic" and "Protestant". It is not suggested that in all that happened then and since, there was no influence of "sin" whether Original or personal, in what took place. There was sin aplenty in arrogant minds and flawed wills. Nevertheless, "sin" abounds where principles falter in the guidance of the ever restless, ever selfish psyche of man. A major facet of the disintegration of the last four hundred years in the spiritual unity of Western man, has been the by-product of this revolt against the a priori and the formal in the philosophy and theology of the Middle Ages. The conversion of the best minds to the investigation of the physical world, with its emphasis upon the singular, the inductive, the experiential has brought enormous dividends in terms of scientific knowledge, - a knowledge proven in the everyday amenities and technological expectations of the "advanced" peoples of the West. Yet how greedy, flawed, and Nominalist is our science in its Capitalist phase may be gauged from the fact that twenty- five per cent of the world's population use seventy-five per cent of its non-renewable resources,  and  contribute  an  even  higher  percentage  of  its  gross  pollutants.  As developing countries demand more and more of the same amenities and luxuries, it becomes obvious that the earth cannot cope, not as yet at least principally because of population pressures, but much more because the concept of nature, and of shall we say detoxification, has gone from a purely throw-away, profit seeking, culture of man.

The  spiritual,  which  gives  the  ultimate  control  and  direction  to  human  life  has drained out of Western civilisation, an alarm is sounded by a multitude of writers, one of them very recently and he a scientist by training.1  What has been progressively undermined since the period of the Reformation in the West, is the key concept of the nature. This it is which gives finality and meaning to the life of the individual, and the life of society. There needs to be a return to the centre, to the centre of the meaning of Man. The protest against the static and the formal was not unjust. St. Thomas More, even, in the  Utopia,  a  remarkably  liberal  book  by  a  Catholic  who  proved  his  orthodoxy  by martyrdom (there is a completely modern diatribe against hunting in the Utopia!) takes a swipe at the formalism, even the Idealism, of a Scholasticism of "second intentions", no different from that in which I was reared in my tender youth at the Gregorian University of Rome. It is worth quoting a few lines:- "Furthermore, they were never yet able to find out the second intentions, in so much that none of them could ever see man himself in common, as they call him, though he be, (as you know) bigger than ever was any giant, yea,  -  and  pointed  to  us  even  with  our  finger".2    With  the  rejection  of  medieval Scholasticism there went also the gradual drying out, and withering, of what Aristotle, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas meant by the nature in all existent things. This loss is now a total disaster of the human spirit. This concept is essential to all culture worthy of the dignity of man. It is essential especially to every aspect, theological, philosophical, and anthropological of the Catholic Christian Church, both Roman and Orthodox. The crisis lives  in the  lonely,  derided  stand  of  the  Catholic  Church  against  such  concepts  as abortion, sexuality as simple, individualistic pleasure divorced from life meaning, and from that artificial contraception which seeks to control the results of non-meaningful sex by the pill, the condom, the surgical scalpel: as if the dignity and majesty of man could ever have been meant to be so controlled, and the indignity be called "progress"! If there is to be any hope for man as meaningful, the Chair of Peter at least must not waver in its witness, - its witness to a human nature.

We need to return to the centre, the centre of our souls, and look again at the maps along our way. We will need a reappraisal of what the Greeks called Logos and in English we translate as Word. Our English translation may be correct, but the emphasis is quite different. It is the insight of the ancient Greek idiom to which we need to return. For the Greek, Logos in primary sense means mind, wisdom, principle of reason, - in fact  all  that  directly  and  derivatively  is  contained  in  "Logic".  For  the  Greeks,  the Platonists at least, the Logos, or wisdom, in some way personified as the emanation of God, is that in which, and through which, all things are made, and centred. For us, in our more  Nordic  idiom  the  word  is  rather  the  sound,  the  wrapping  in  which  mind  is enwrapped by us. Even so, the intellectual, the content of the word as sound or symbol is not only logic or wisdom in the more profound sense of the ancient Greeks, but as mind and meaning capable of being translated into meaningful wisdom in the sounds or symbols of quite different languages of mankind. It may be true that in translation some unique beauty of the original will be lost, but the content can be expressed as equivalent. In philosophy and theology however, we are familiar with the ethos and meaning of that content which was directly incarnate in the term for Plato and his disciples. For two thousand years ago St. John the Evangelist used it at the head of his Gospel in ringing, dramatic tones to express the essential in the Divinity of God, the Logos or ordered wisdom, made Flesh and Son of Man for human kind, in Jesus Christ. Plato was in many ways, like Socrates before him - the only Greek known to me who had a Christian philosophy of love - something of a "catechumen" in the Christian faith. The Fathers and Councils of the first five hundred years of Christianity were to correct, baptize, and refine the insights of the Greek spirituals into the service and apologetics of Christianity. Not that the contribution of the Greeks ever was, or is now, the wholeness of the Christian Faith. Decadence in the Christianity of the West has gone so far, and bitten so deep that most, even of the better educated of the clergy have lost that tradition of Mysticism in communion with God, which owes so much to "Greeks" who were in fact Fathers of the middle and near East, and in whose monasticism so much of the existential of man's most perfect knowing and loving of God lives as both liturgy and doctrine.3  With the loss of its experience of contemplation, always an active, never a passive communion with God, modern Catholicism has lost its links with the annunciation of Christ to the East. Nevertheless, as it was in the beginning so now a return to the concept of the thought and theology of the Word could be of supreme benefit and not only to Western mankind. The South and East of the world is now baptised without grace into the scientific and technological thought forms of Western man. For the Word as the Wisdom Declared in which all creation is made and inter-related will lead us first into the nature of God. Then, through that dynamic Nature in which and through which all things were made, we may hope to find with a living conviction the true nature of man.

Notes

1. Brian Appleyard: Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man.

(Picador, 1992.)

2. The Second Book of Utopia:" Of their Journeying or Travelling abroad, with divers other Matters cunningly Reasoned and wittily Discussed". In the Everymans Library edn, p.83, there follows praise of the existential and scientific culture of the Utopians. The diatribe against hunting is  on page 89 of the edn quoted: e.g. "For they count hunting the lowest, the vilest and most abject part of butchery, and the other parts of it more profitable and honest, as bringing much more commodity, in that they kill beasts only for necessity,  whereas  the  hunter  seeketh  nothing  but pleasure  of the  silly  and woeful beast's slaughter and murder etc. " The Utopians however do not belong to the "Meat is Murder" persuasion - they simply delegate to their butchers, who are their "bondsmen" the task of hunting for provision of food.

3. One has in mind that glorification of Christ, the "Universal Man" as Son of Man in whom, from the beginning mankind is willed unto the consortium of the Divine Nature. This  aspect  lives  abundantly,  together  with  immense  glorification  of  Our  Lady's mediatorial role especially in the Liturgies of St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom; for the role of Mary see the "mesiteia pros ton Poiytyn ", "mediatrix before the Creator" of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. In my Faith Press edn, p. 12.

2 PERSPECTIVES OF THE LIVING

Philosophers tend to begin their philosophizing from mankind, - from people. It is very natural, and in the beginning primitive man must needs have done so. This perspective would have yielded the basic insights needed for the understanding of man himself, — his nature and purposes, and the impetus within his own being which lifted him, so unlike the animals and plants, above himself, to seek the fulfilment of his life and being. The famous,  I think  therefore  I am,  comes  to mind  together  with  this writer's  suggested emendation  I am therefore I think. At the present stage of human knowledge of the Universe as one process of equational meaning, this so natural approach can be too introvert. We can gain something by looking beyond and below ourselves. Bernard Lonergan remarks on how the "categories" of philosophical schools have been undone as a priori synthetics of the mind by the discoveries and interpretations of space, time, and energy given us by very modern scientists.1   Quite so: yet they also transcended Euclid and Kant from above, from themselves, by applying the genius of the free-thinking mind within man to new ‘realities' of matter, space and time. There is something also to be learned of eventual interest to metaphysics and epistemology from the study of life below the noosphere, i.e. the man-sphere. It is interesting that Einstein himself, a man who of course proceeds and argues very much indeed from the abstract "transcendental" reason, shows some amusing annoyance with philosophers, although one is forced to think that it must be Kant whom chiefly he has in mind. In the first few pages of his Meaning  of  Relativity  (and  I  cannot  claim  to  understand  the  mathematics)  Einstein remarks  on  the  delay  in reaching  knowledge  caused  by  philosophers  who  from  the heights of Olympus pontificate on the static, a priori nature of our concepts of space and time. He calls them a nuisance.2  He should have been a little more merciful, because it is in the nature of all great minds, philosophers and creative scientists to philosophize. Einstein would never have reached his own vision of the unified relativity (so close to one's own concept of a Unity-Law) of the universe, had he not also, as a great mind, been forced inevitably to be a philosopher. Besides, he seems to make naughty little forays of his own into philosophic presumptions. In the writer's own ageing edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he remarks that "reality of course exists only in so far as it is thought". He would seem to be an objective Idealist, and, one speaks as a man less wise and no specialist, - it could be derived from the difficult, but all embracing Panentheism of Spinoza, for whom Einstein is said to have had a high regard.

In our day we should realise that there are no once and for all final syntheses of philosophy, or even of theology. There is a principle of objectivity from which we may advance and which saves us from the morass of historic relativism, a principle we may ponder when we come to ask what if anything is "the soul" within the human person. Our syntheses are always clearings in the forest. We never reach the rim of the world, over which we may peep with fear of a vertigo that may topple us into the realm of Chaos and Old Night.

Let us then, leave ourselves and our own admittedly godlike minds, and look a little below us. It is at once obvious that there is a sense, an important and exciting sense, in which the recognition and use of both space and time are used by the birds of the air, the fishes of the sea, the beasts of the field. Within this ambience they live, and move, and are, and have their being. All their times and seasons, their migrations, the sleek accommodation  of  their  bodies  to  space  and  time  and  speed,  bespeak  an  ontic "knowledge" so to speak, written into the very fabric of their being. At the level of local space and extrinsic judgement of time, animals that hunt whether as individuals or as packs, show just such a judgement of the right place (space) and right time to move in upon their prey. The hunting and ambush techniques of some animals of prey, wild dogs for instance, as the scientists capture it for us with the camera show a degree of synchronisation of both space and time worthy of the hunting skills of man himself! This response of life-forms below reflexive intellect was named, when first one came to study experimental psychology a judicium naturale literally a "natural judgement". Another, and I  would  say  deeper  of  my  teachers  in  philosophy  commented,  say  rather  judicium naturae, a judgement proceeding  from the nature, which I think expresses  the more accurately the relationship of life below man, to the governance of the environment within which it lives, and moves, and finds its being. This has its importance, because one will say that judgement of space (place) and time is built into the very basic organism of life, life very much below the advanced brains of anthropoid apes and hunting animals.

The judgement of space and time cannot simply be placed among the synthetic constructs a priori of the mind of man, especially if, as presumably for Kant, mind is conceived as belonging to an energy and order higher than that of matter alone. After all, Kant does clearly believe in God and in a life after death, however fuzzy his concept of soul must be, when it finds its ultimate fulfilment in an order beyond matter, but cannot know or argue directly to God because of its being synthesized with matter. Living forms are interdefined to their environment around. This environment it is which gives  a  'life-law  to  their  being  whatever  the  formality  of  that  being.  This  very environment too, is itself defined through space and time, both of which are aspects of the energies and relationships involved in being and becoming in all its dimensions. In fact, it is material becoming in its co-relationships which is space and time or space- time. Movement  is the basis of all space and time, and applies analogically to the concept of "change" even in the relationships of purely spiritual natures to one another, and to "development" in their knowing and loving of God. In the definition of space and time in the order of material entities one must go far below the mind of man, far below even the structured brain of advanced life to find responses and creative use of local motion, and the sense of succession or of depth which we associate with the concepts of time and of space in their most basic definition. In our own case, the eye does not give us that "three dimensional" vision which we associate with space and time and bodies. Vision itself is but a neurone response, data taken in by the eye to that brain of which it is the outward looking aspect. Vision even as we see it, is as a projection outwards as flat as a television screen. A baby will grasp and search at distant objects with as yet patently very little existential dynamic of space and distance. It is the cooperation of the whole living entity within its environment, and as determined by, and for, that environment, which gives us the illusion that space and time are "obvious".

The intellectual appraisal of space and time, especially as known to man through modern science is very obviously an intellectual percept. The response however of life to space and time in its basic aspects is in no sense an a priori category of the mind as reason, it is basic to the response of living forms to their environment. Something within man does indeed interpret and penetrate this energy relationship we call space, time, space-time on a level beyond all animal ken. We will have later to consider whether this is in virtue of a power synthesized with living matter in ourselves but transcending the order of matter. We can already argue that the recognition of space and time belongs to life and brain, not to mind against the categorising of Kant. Should we be able to show that the use man makes of space, time, movement, change, potentiality, surpasses the entitative limitations of matter and of brain as such, - then we will be able to dismiss Kant's assertion that man can know nothing of God, nor have any objective knowledge of that which is not synthesized with matter and the phenomenal in its being. Whether in the recognition of space and time, or in any other sensual response to the other; life- forms below man are interdefined to their environment, and to its giving of a life-law through the brain, or, in very primitive living forms, whatever is the nerve centre that takes the place of the brain in advanced life. This less than intellectual response in terms of space, time, union, and life fulfilment is built into the very structure of their being. The relationship is in no sense arbitrary or random. There is an interdefinition of the real between being; "the other" which environs, and the life-form which in being environed is in a relationship of receiving and interpreting the controlling and directing force of a life-law  from that "other".  There is nothing incidental  or "random"  in this relationship,   so  often   symbiotic   in  its   interplay.   The   relationship   is  essentially "equational"  as  with  every  process  from  the  explosion  of  the  Universe.  In  this recognition there enters again the concept of the nature, that which is never without a life-law, never without intrinsic finalism to life purpose, never an unrelated "individual" with only incidental, extrinsic bonds of being to that cosmic environment within which "it lives, and moves, and has its being"

Formal and final causality in the empirical

Therefore to be rejected with a touch of impatience is the mentality of some who have  degrees  in  science,  usually  in  physics,  but  who  are  not  by  that  distinction "scientists", that science is not concerned with the vague, comfortable notion of "the thing" but only with the phenomenological, the predicamental, - the "accident" in terms of Aristotelean  philosophy.  They add that "science" is not concerned with final causes, those that ask "what is it for?", but only with the final efficient cause, that which answers the question "how does it happen?" between existent phenomena. They may add, that "science" is always reductionist in principle. Science with the capital letter is in no way confined  to physics.  Moreover,  there are many deep and humble  minds in physical science  who  would  dismiss  the  narrow-minded  arrogance  of  the  mentality  outlined above. Biochemistry, biology, botany, every science of the phenomenon of life is as rightly called "science" as physics. It is not dealing with the disembodied spirit, but with the observable, the phenomenon logical. Before we consider the manifest need to ask the question "what is it for?" in knowledge of the living, the final cause, the concept of purpose, we have to challenge its irrelevance even for the physicist. The concept of the formal and final cause occurs even in molecular and atomic structures. The periodic table of the elements for instance, in giving us the relationships of the elements one to another, and the building so to speak of the complex upon the basis of the simple, indicates not only a new form, a whatness, but also, from that new unitary reality, an indication of the properties and effects this complex and composite new unity may effect within other being, or in relationship to the environment around, or the state of say the organism  of life with  which  it may  come  into  contact,  whether  as  radiation  or from intrinsic chemistry. In relationship then to other entity around, i.e. to environment, there can be effects from a new unitary form built upon more basic forms of being, which is specific to the new unit, whether say atom or molecule which could not be predicated of its constituent parts, which as "reductive" could be and would be "non-specific" to a multitude of other reactions and effects. In a given relativity then, say as a component of the molecule, or in some other specific organic relationship within the living, this physical form has also a finality, a purposiveness, which does, in a given context pertain to the question what is it for? In truth, because all being is totally related to other being, is cosmic in its relativity, it is not possible to separate out material and efficient, formal and final "causes" in a strictly departmental manner. The concept of nature, which we are in process of defending and explaining is a concept of a reality which is, in various degrees and relationships immersed as being in all four conventional causations of "being" at one and the same time. The ascent of being within the Universe, as for instance Stanly Jaki and many another scientist and, or, philosopher will indicate is from the less specific to the more narrowly specific.3   The suggested notion of an anthropic principle is based upon this dynamic:- in so far as man created in the "last ages of time" is possible, conceivable,  and  actual  only  within  this  ever  more  narrowly  specific  relationship  of matter, including life, in evolution. The recognition of this fact, of its very concept raises the question of a final or purposive cause operating within the basic relationships of matter from the beginning of creation as evolution.

The recognition of formal and final causality becomes immediate and detailed in the sciences of the living organism and its functions. The very notion of a "function" involves a final cause, the recognition  of purpose. The meanings  of causality within material being,  including  mankind,  should  perhaps  be underlined  at this  stage.  The  material cause is the recognition of the energies of "matter" on which and within which a being, a "thing" is constituted. The efficient cause is that which answers the question how does it come about, of what is it made, also ultimately, but not in an immediate and scientific context, in the end by whom it is made, if the being-form is not self-explanatory. The formal cause, so often unmentioned, is the unity as "thing" as "this individual", usually with the notion of species or sort attached. In the nature of man, if the orthodox Christian theologian is right, we say that God is the "formal" cause of man, in as much as man is "made to the intrinsic likeness" of God, through the spiritual soul. This concept, though true of man, is not applicable to the consideration of say the formal cause of a bird or a beast etc. Here one must say that this life-form, this "thing", whether we consider it as phenomenon only or as phenomenonnoumenon in one concept, is a unitary function of being within the cosmos as environment. A bird, beast, fish or whatever, as life is a unitary function in the universe, and the concept of life-form or thing, the what-it-is, is the recognition of its being as formal cause within the universal whole. It might be asked would it not be simpler if you said that the formal cause, as the expression of whatness, thing, or sort, was the concept of the nature of a reality. One must answer yes, - it would be simpler and more convenient and more accurate so to say and express. The word nature however is in dispute concerning exactly what it does involve and does mean, and it will not help to use it in senses in which at one time the Christian philosopher would use, - the heir that is to the Thomistic tradition however much that tradition needs to be realigned, - and again in a sense or meaning, usually that of common speech, in which a Nominalist philosopher would also use it, while denying of it properties and attributes which we would consider "essential" to a philosophy of the "nature". The final cause  in  being  is  obvious  from  the  most  brief  consideration  of  all  organisms  and everything organic. It is superfluous to ask what is it for of the sense of sight, of any organ of the body, of certain clear physical adaptations of a whole organism to a special environment and so on. This sense of final cause, or purpose, which pervades the very essence  of  life  though  the  basic  matter  of  its  scientific  study,  opens  out  upon  an interesting question: may we posit a final causality which transcends the individual, and even the specific life form, and relates rather to a function in and of the Universe as a whole? An example would be the ascent of life in evolution, in which the pyramid of greater versatility comes to its apex in the brain of man. Can we say that this implies a finality within which all life below man is gathered up into a dynamic movement, that man as man may come to be? Most scientists would say no: this further purpose or end you envisage is not contained within the immediately observable "nature" of a lower life-form as phenomenon. Some would deny the very concept of "higher" or "lower", taking their stand upon the adequacy of a life-form to its immediate environment. They would protest that you cannot ask whether a road-sweeper or a teacher are higher or lower forms of work person, both are fulfilled within their proper environment. On the other hand, there is a clear movement of ascent to greater intrinsic power of achievement in being through the brain, (even if we concede that the brain does not explain all), in man at least. Man must as an observable and phenomenonal "animal" be included within the ascent of life.

Scientists like Julian Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin, Paul Davies and countless others do clearly argue for an ascent not only in complexity of life, but in superiority in intrinsic degree of being. The very use of the word "ascent" does imply such an assumption of degree. To this, many a scientist would say, - but then scientists speak no longer as scientists, but now as philosophers. They have every right to do so, but they have left the objective forum for the subjective. This begs a very interesting question, whether the sensual and phenomenological is the only "objective" knowledge man can have. The Christian  will  and  must  answer  - no.  The  presumption  however  is held  by  many  a scientist, even those who are devout Christians.

At the time of writing there is an interesting Leader in The Times (June 10th, 1992).

It is written in commentary on the alleged discovery that a very primitive fish called a conodont possessed teeth with bone and enamel, and also a backbone, bless it, and could thus be numbered among the ancestors of modern man, pushing our family tree back another fifty million years or more etc. There is written a typically pontifical Times Leader entitled "Fish Past". One quotes at some length because a certain, somewhat dated type of scientific, and even religious "orthodoxy" is expressed :- "The current surge in scientific discovery about the remote past, is as exciting as the first wave a century ago, ridden by Darwin and Huxley.... To suppose that such knowledge can ever be definitive is to make a category mistake about science as silly as ‘the conodont will be elected president'……What man is doing here on Earth (their capital!) is a question that admits only mystical answers. To suppose that man, proud man, even scientist, proud scientist, can ever know the mind of God is to mistake the human condition and the semantics  of words  such as God. Such questions  are philosophical  and provisional rather than scientific. Conodonts were successful because they wasted no time on metaphysical   speculations.   They  simply  bit  their  way  through  life  and  into  the evolutionary textbook. The unscientific but venerable Bede compared human life to a sparrow flying at speed through a lighted hall in winter. We come from the dark and we go into the dark, and can see the bright light only briefly and partially. In spite of the wonders of modern science, this still remains as true of us as it was of our ancestor, - the conodont".

There is a basic agnosticism here containing a number of the facets of modern thought we have been pondering. First, and not every relevant example mentioned in the said Leader has been quoted, there is the increasing preoccupation of modern scientific thinkers with God, God as the ultimate unitary explanation of a unitary cosmos. There are so many minds not content to say (and certainly St. Bede the Venerable never held it!) that "we come from the dark and we go into the dark". It is true that the most exact knowledge of "science" is not going to give us the answer to the ultimate finalism in the questions of mankind, above all the questions who am I?; where do I come from?: where do I go? An interesting  question  on which not all philosophers  and theologians  will agree, indeed not even all who may accept the broad outlines of this writer's synthesis in Catholicism: A New Synthesis is whether science as science is part of an ascending and unitary process of knowledge, so that the ultimate finalism of say the Christian revelation is analogically but directly one with the discoveries of physical science, in much the same way as the many analogical degrees of being are all one as intrinsically "stepped" up  to  God.  In  other  words,  is  science  as  science  in  its  own  intrinsic  principles autonomous as wisdom and truth, or is it incomplete and still in movement, still potential even as knowledge until it is capped in the ultimate meaning of Man? In the article quoted, the answer says more than that science is fully and perfectly autonomous. It relates the subject-matter of the ultimate and surely most important meaning of man to the philosophical, provisional and mystical. In the ethos of English thought, there are few words  as  pejorative  as  mystical;  it  means  little  more,  maybe  less  than  mythical. Apparently philosophy, and one thinks the writer means here to include theology within the term, is every bit as subjective and provisional. One could not call it a post-Christian concept of knowledge but rather a post-Kantian concept of God. For Kant God was an objective in semantics, however unknowable as phenomenon, as well as noumenon. One thinks that the Aristotelean and the Thomist would agree that physical science as natural  knowledge  was  essentially  autonomous  in  relationship  to  revelation  and theology. St Thomas would, of course, insist that such knowledge however autonomous in principle, did not answer the fact of man, so that man, as an observable phenomenon, looked for a wisdom above and beyond such science. The question one asked earlier demanded more. Can one say that the finalism of man, as man is the peak of the ascent of being in the cosmos is intrinsic to the datum of science as that datum is part of an organic whole which is a garment woven without seam unto God and into God? The answer of Plato and of St. Augustine would one thinks differ from that of Aristotle and St. Thomas. For myself, I am a Platonist in the matter. All wisdom one suspects is unitary and of one finalism in the all-Simple Intellect of God, and this will be reflected in the total understanding of the whole cosmos. There will be no "autonomies" in the unified field of God's knowledge within the WORD. The aspiration of human knowledge and wisdom is to attain as closely as possible to the unity of the wisdom of God. The theologian, and for that matter also the philosopher, who holds closely to an Aristotelian point of view, even more one who relates nature and supernatural in the purely historic and extrinsic manner of post-Reformation Thomist theology, already has a difficulty in both the field of biology, for man is matter and spirit in synthesis, and of psychology and psychiatry: man is unintelligible except within that relativity to God which is the life of grace. If ever man finds the intrinsic reason within living matter for constant, orthogenetic, ascent of being through some form of mutation to the brain of man... then we would clinch the argument, because the so-called Anthropic principle would merge into St. John's proclamation of the meaning of THE WORD. I side with St. John, - and Plato!

Mathematics as meta-physical to merely animal life

We may now summarize a little. Life below man, in a proportion of being called "analogical" has its own perception of I am. It is not, as with man, a clear, cut, intellectual perception freed from the limitations of instinctual determinism and programmed interrelationship. It is however dynamic, assertive, and utterly non-agnostic : every living form seeks its individual and specific life, and seeks it more abundantly. These life forms which live through the interplay of the brain with the environment, seek their law of life and fulfilment in, and through, that environment. The environment is simply other being around, in every dimension, ultimately in a cosmic dimension. Every life form receives and gives of its own entity, from its essence. This is the perception of an equational relationship of being and becoming, on which all realities are based. It penetrates everything they have, are, and give. They are correlatives in a unitary cosmic Law of Control and Direction. In this recognition of the nature of the material as co-relatives we vindicate also the concept of the nature : the nature is that which has a fixed definition, a metaphysical as well as a physical "equational" formula, if you will. It is caused, and is a principle of cause. One accepts the Scholastic concept of cause as id quod influit esse, but in the more literal translation, as "that which inflows being" into another, because to be  the  principle  of  making  being  flow  in  to  the  other,  is  more  and  more  deeply metaphysical  than  to  influence  the  becoming  of  the  other.  In  this  definition  from ontological active causality and dependence all things come, and all things exercise an ontological and active causality on the life being and life-pattern of the other. This is the core principle of the concept of the nature. Everything looks for a law of life and being, and acts to the other as a law of life and being. All things are embedded reciprocally in another. The concept of the incidental, the random, the non-ontologically related, is a lie against cosmic facts, as well as against "nature". One does not accuse, but profoundly suspects that deep in the subconscious of many a philosopher and many a scientist, the refusal to accept the concept of causality, and its corollary of ontological dependence, is the subliminal recognition that once this principle, so obvious in the evolution of the Universe is applied to man, it will imply an ontological life-law and dependence on "the other" of the human psyche and personality. In a blunt word - it will mean relativity to, and dependence upon God, and for them would be insupportable. For the concept of the nature involves an ontological right and wrong, what is proper and truly ordered or "apt" in the relationship of being to its creative background and its individual fulfilment. That is why one has suggested elsewhere that Nominalism, with its denial of the nature, of intrinsic causality, and relatedness for being, becoming, and rightful fulfilment is so apt a figure for what is called "sin" in the appreciation of the religious dimension of man. To put it in an historic parable:-"And the serpent said to the woman, what is this talk of death? God knows full well that as soon as you eat this fruit, your eyes will be opened, and you yourselves be like gods, knowing good and evil. And with that the woman, who saw the fruit was good to eat, beguiling to the eye, and desirable for the knowledge it gave, took from the tree and ate it; and she gave to her husband, who ate with her. Then the eyes of them both were opened, they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together to make coverings for themselves". (Gen. 2:4-7) It makes a very apt commentary on Western man in particular.

In pondering the assertive dynamism of being below the human level, the taking of meaning,  nature,  and  provision  of  a  fulfilment  for  granted,  we  considered  also  the dynamics of space and time. In the animal life-form there is no consideration of space- time! There was not either in human reflex thinking until very, very recently. Such a concept is a refinement even of human recognition. It is totally irrelevant to the life-law and fulfilment seeking of any form of animal life. Because such a percept is irrelevant to the very pattern and formula of animal existence, it will not be found "embedded" in the ontological make-up of life below man. Nevertheless, the recognition, rather than the judgement  of space and time is embedded  in its local basics within the ontological dynamism of life below man. It is not therefore an intrinsically a priori principle. One could ask whether there are any intrinsic a priori principles in man. Certainly the principle of non-contradiction, as the first application of the principle of identity, must be a basic principle of reflexive knowledge. We will find no true sign of it in animal life. If there is a soul in man, then even those principles of reason which transcend the animal life must have a certain fundamentum in the brain, in the highest of animal life, or man, as a synthesis  of the spiritual  and the animal,  could not be a working  harmony.  For the philosopher who believes the brain is all in man, or rather that spirit and matter are one principle of ontological energy, there is an enormous difficulty in the explanation of the power to evoke and to understand modern mathematics. Here we are dealing with the utmost refinement of abstract reasoning concerning the phenomenological, and the concepts  now  involve  elements  of  relativity  in  say  Relativity  and  also  in  Quantum Theory, which whether right or wrong in fact, tend to bind philosophy and physics into one quite new unity of cosmic interpretation, an interpretation which I would call, and so I think would Heisenberg metaphysical, in so far, as according to him at least, it is no longer possible to interpret the physical world except in terms of potential to be and to become which is a basic principle of Greek philosophy, explicit and refined in Aristotle and in St. Thomas Aquinas. It is difficult to relate any such power to the interplay of the purely   animal   brain   and   its   environment.   Such   interplay,   however   refined   and equationally perfect is an interplay in the macroscopic world, and that is not the world of Quantum or Nuclear physics! Yet, if on any hypothesis of man, the brain is to work in harmony with the principle of intellection, reflexive intelligence, if there is an energy in man over and above matter - there must be a fundament for cooperation. I would not suggest that the basic concept of "number" again in the context of survival and food- finding was above the brain before the soul. Experiments with apes, of which we read constantly,  show that there is a very basic concept of "number"  in terms always of physical "reward". This one must expect, but the problem of transcendence beyond the interplay of brain and environment in terms of survival in the macroscopic world, remains as a principle not of degree but of order and relevance. The relationship of the animal form through eye, brain, and all the senses of life, which are indeed but one integrated sense of control and direction in terms of finalism (seeking of specific fulfilment) and formal and final causality proves the unitary reality and nature of complex life. It is true of life, whether vegetable or animal, and for our purposes reflecting within philosophy, more importantly the animal. To life as unity in all its manifestations and correlations, but as a unity founded upon elements which in their own entity are non-specific to this one form non-specific indeed to any one higher form, but yet which integrate, through many a development  and  mutation  of  evolution  the  higher  unities  of  life,  we  next  turn  our attention. In this consideration we may find the proof of many a theme philosophical and theological,  and  also  the  master-key  to  the  reinterpretation  of  the  singular  and  the universal in terms of reflexive human knowledge.

Notes

1. The most useful indications within the reading of oneself would be from Fr. Lonergan's

Insight. For instance, The abstract intelligibility of Space and Time, section 3 of chapter

5, especially pp 150-157. Fr. Lonergan is fond of depreciating the objective value of knowledge  as  recognition  of  the  real  by  "standing  back  and  taking  a  look".  This presumes the non-involvement of the subject in the being and movement of the object. One must agree with him, that the immediate presumptions of "commonsense" are often falsified by any such presumption. Yet, it is equally false to reduce reality to the status of that which is known only in so far as my mind determines its reality and relationships, because it is precisely in as much as the data of reality and research contradict the obvious judgements of physical and "macroscopic" commonsense, that new, and mathematical solutions have to be sought which, at least immediately are removed from commonsense. It is the data as "not me" but "real" which forces my intellect as not sensuously  conditioned  in  exactly  the  same  way  as  the  animal,  to  find  new  and abstractly intellectual solutions to data, which nevertheless are data of experience. While this applies to Relativity theory it equally applies to Quantum Mathematics. There is not really  a  discontinuity  of  the  principle  of  knowledge,  there  is  in  man  a  principle  of continuity which operates through a sensorium, but is not one in entitative principle with the sensorium. We cannot discuss the matter now, but in fact the original sense-intuition of  an  objective  space  and  time,  as  extrinsic  to  the  observer  has  a  limited,  natural relevance to the basic, macroscopic life, needs, and energies of primitive man. It is only when later he is forced to examine all these "animal" presumptions in greater detail that he can, and must rise to a recognition of the total, and wonderful ontic inter-relativity of being in the Universe, and the "correction" of his primitive insights, from the level of basic animal  needs  and judgements  to those that approach  in some  degree  to the universal interrelativity of the unifying Mind of God. Through this we come to see that percepts like "colour" are objective to the being of man, in aspects of his being which define him as "this sort of animal" within the universe. They do not however, as radiant energy specify all the universal functions of the waves which to us are specified as "colour". There are roles of such radiation which escape our purely animal needs and physical life-responses. They are not however beyond the principle of "mind” or intelligent spirit in man. In all of which analysis we come to recognize both the principle of the spiritual in man as distinct from "brain" alone, a sensorium relative only to a specific, macroscopic law of life within the environment of surrounding matter, and also the existence  of an  overall  Entity-Law  of Control  and  Direction,  formalism  and  finalism, within which the total inter-relativity of the cosmos is framed. Useful indications of the danger of appealing to the "a priori", purely subjective nature of human knowing, i.e. "that being derives from me and is subject to my subjective intellect" could be found in: The  Dialectic  of  Method  in  Metaphysics,  and  General  Transcendent  Knowledge  of Insight. For this writer though, there is, despite disclaimers, a tendency in Lonergan to over relate the subjection of the real to the intellect of man, rather than recognise the determination of the mind of man, through the ages, by the nature of that real over which, in the end man finds he has no control. The continuity of process in the further true knowledge of the real, as proved by experiment,  comes about from a common principle within the being of man, and the nature of the Unity-Law  within which the cosmos is defined: that common principle is the intellect as such, as it participates by "proportion"  in  the  nature  of  God,  the  source  of  the  intellectual  unification  of  all whatsoever in the Universe. The full, comprehensive scope of that unification and all its meanings we discover only by slow degrees, and perfectly probably - never. This "development" in the nature of the real as science and philosophy will integrate finally with the nature of being in the order of theology. Jesus Christ, as God and Son of Man, will be found, ultimately to be the peak and unifying principle of that Knowledge-Unity in the Divine Intellect. To say this is of course to project ahead by a pre-sight rather than an in-sight. It is not yet, we concede, demonstrated at all ontological levels.

2. Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity (Methuen Edn.) On page 2, Space and Time in Pre-Relativity Physics, he is very blunt. He writes, "I am convinced that the philosophers have had a harmful effect upon the progress of scientific thinking in removing certain fundamental concepts from the domain of empiricism, where they are under our control, to the intangible heights of the a priori. For even if it should appear that the universe of ideas cannot be deduced from experience by logical means, but is in a sense a creation of the human mind, without which no science is possible.... this universe of ideas is as little independent of the nature of our experiences, as clothes are of the form of the body. This is particularly true of our concepts of time and space, which physicists have been obliged by the facts to bring down from the Olympus of the a priori in order to adjust them, and put them in a serviceable condition.”

3. Professor Stanley Jaki is a very prolific writer. One is thinking especially of The Road of Science and The Ways to God, God and The Cosmologists, and Brain, Mind and Computers.  There  are  however  many  modern  physicists  and  scientists  in  other disciplines, who are coming to see the sheer inter-relativity of the cosmos in terms of formal being and finalistic meaning as the mark of a programmed Universe. A long list of these, as well as an introduction from the Bible and the Schoolmen is contained in Fr. Roger  Nesbitt's  important  Faith  Pamphlet  The  Path  From  Science  to  God  (1991 Obtainable from: Faith Keyway Trust, 16A Off Coniston Way, Reigate, Surrey RH2 0LN). A programmed Universe will inevitably be the creation of a Personal God, for only from Intelligent Unity is a Unity-Law explaining the ascent of creation possible.

3 MATTER AND FORM: SINGULAR AND UNIVERSAL

The higher manifestations of animal life are all of them built upon the basic elements of the cosmos. They are not only built, they are built up, - upon many a form foregoing and more primitive, by a process of specific change, and in the long, long line to man in the anthropoid stem, by what must be honestly recognised as an ascent of being. The norm of the ascent is the development of an advanced brain, and the norm of perfection is the approximation to the brain of man, especially us, homo sapiens. We do not yet know the actual processes of specific evolution, but as one has pointed out elsewhere the presumption of species formation by random mutation favoured by Darwinians of, say, the school of Huxley is unacceptable as an adequate explanation. The expected vast array of intermediate forms is not found, and most significantly not found in relationship to true man. True man is known not so much by the toolmaker, until tools become quite elaborate, but rather by the fire user, and the ceremonial  or at least reverential burial of the dead. Primitive stone or bone tools would not, one suggests, inevitably prove reflexive intelligence. The control of fire does; so does any sign of religious ceremonial however primitive.1  Apart from man, no other animal "thinks" God. God has no relevance to their environmentally determined finality of life.

In  the  last  chapter  of  these  "cahiers",  or  with  acknowledgements  to  Cardinal Newman "philosophical notebooks", the point was made that while some scientific types, not the most gifted, think of science as "reductionist" in principle and also as prescinding from the question posed by the final cause - why or what purpose - in the progression of evolving forms, finalism, dynamic purpose and seeking is embodied in all organic relationships, and in all the quests of every form of the living. New and more fruitful lines of  evolutionary  discovery  may  be  hoped  for  from  the  now  general  recognition  of a principle of finalism upon which also the concept of the form, i.e. the type or "nature" is educed. The study of genetics, the very recognition of DNA as embodying "maker's instructions" even if we disguise so shocking a concept by speaking of the instructions embodied by Nature, with a capital letter, bespeaks both finalism and formalism, i.e. the "sort". In these days one notices in the learned reviews that the molecular geneticists are involved in an interesting war with the palaeontologists concerning the unitary origin of mankind  (the  Eve  theory)  while  on  the  Open  University  programmes,  which  can,  I presume, be counted as "learned reviews", theories are put forward which are claimed to make  Natural  Selection  "irrelevant"  and  begin  to  explain  Evolution  in  terms  of  one Equation of environment and environed in relationships, not unlike, so it seems to me, the inter-related forms and dynamics of a newer type of Mandelbrot theorem. It is far too soon  to  even  speculate  how  far  such  lines  of  thought,  if  any  of  them,  are  truly explanatory of the efficient causes of the development of life, but in a cosmos which is only intelligible nowadays as an equation, and as a mutual correlation of all "events" in mutual action and interaction, some form of Equationalism, in the broad sense of the word will have to be true. The interested reader would need to ponder and study the principle of a total equation of Finalism, of Control and Direction that is, uniting all reality from the explosion of the ordered energies of the Universe to the fulfilment of mankind's relationship (or since Jesus Christ, shall we write correlationship) to God, to grasp the full import of what we are trying to say.

It is however now the subject-matter of the "one and the many" the unitary form of versatile and complex life, built up upon many a lower level of cell and molecule, and itself relative in being ultimately to the basic laws of elemental being and sub-atomic radiation which must engage our attention. It is in this phenomenon - the word used in the general, non-philosophic sense! - that we may hope to find the perspective of an understanding of the individual and the specific, the universal and the singular, which will enable us to go beyond Aristotle, Plato, St Thomas and the Scholastics, towards a new synthesis in philosophy and a better more unified perspective in metaphysics. It must seem appallingly arrogant to make such a claim. One remembers the polite, but shocked annoyance in the voice of a certain bishop to whom one explained this ideal (he was not in any case sympathetic to this writer's theology) "to be putting all these giants of human history right, seems to me a little ambitious". Others are also trying, for example Karl Rahner and Teilhard de Chardin, but their efforts seem to corrode the Faith of Christ, and leave Nature itself badly explained. Nobody seems to mind when the "Liberals" of philosophy undertake to shatter or by-pass the giants of human history! All thinking men think, even though not all of them admit in man a spiritual soul, and those that do, regard it often as one principle of entity or "energy" with matter. It is therefore lawful to consider the question of the unitary and the complex, the singular and the universal, even before discussing the "proof' of the traditional and historic concept of the soul, whether for Plato and St Augustine, Aristotle and St. Thomas, the Self-Transcendists, or any other school of thought all the way down to the most agnostic forms of Materialism and Behaviourism.

The unity-in-relativity of matter

It was not possible to think along the lines presented here, nor for that matter along the lines of most (for the meaning of the term differs according to the writer) Transcendental Thomism, without familiarity with, and also sympathy for the theory of Evolution in its cosmic sense and dimension. The viewpoint here presented likewise could not even be conceived, right or wrong, without intellectual acceptance of both cosmic evolution and the upward dynamism of being, i.e. the ascent to man. The higher forms of life manifest themselves to us as unities both of thought, and of nature or essence. It is impossible to apply to them any form of reductionism into physics. Their whole relationship to nature around them, their very organs, their reproductive attraction and courtship rituals, everything, but everything within them acts as this thing, i.e. this unity of being and essence. Yet, there is a most true sense in which we can consider them as patterns of particles, waves or particle-waves, in stable and coherent interaction with all the other similar particle-waves around. We may try to envisage say this bird on the lawn in such a manner. We may advance from any primitive concept of billions and billions of atoms or subatomic elements etc. We may consider this bird, and all life like it,

- "them" as complex galaxy-like energy-wave relationships. Yet if we do, we have to recognise that the elements which compose them, which we have difficulty in conceiving in any accurate way, because a unified expression of matter as particle and wave has not yet been achieved by us, are of themselves non-specific,  to this bird. They are non- specific to any complex in creation. These are the energies, waves, radiations, call them what one will, of which all distinct phenomena are formed and composed. First they are built in continuity of complexification (a useful term from Teilhard de Chardin) through intermediate  forms of biochemistry,  molecule and cell, upon the raw energies of the Universe. This stuns the mind again with the sheer unity-in-relativity of all being in the Universe  itself.  We  admit  the  manner  in  which  all  things  are  "membered  one  unto another" in the unity of a Universe which simply must be intelligibly considered as poised upon a Unity-Law of Control and Direction which embraces and pervades all partial laws; i.e. the laws of life and structure which define the individual nature of any given form of being. Nothing in the Universe is autonomous. The concept of a "random" Universe, or even of a major aspect of it as being "random" is unintelligible.

If we were to try to interpret the Universe in a reductionist manner we would have to regard this enormous wave-particle complex which is our "bird on the lawn" as driven nevertheless by one finality in relation to all the other wave-particle complexes around which also act upon it to achieve one given specific finality. You may do it if you like, but it is very, very, clumsy because you are simply recognising a unitary effect from a unity of nature built upon a massive complexification of lower elements, none of which are specific to the event we call "this bird". The said elements, either as basic or as complex in cells and molecules, could just as well be part of the complexification which is called - "me". If I were a hungry huntsman, and a good shot, that change of specification could well occur, given that it was the right sort of bird.

So the living life-form is unitary, it acts and reacts in all its relationships to other being around, which is what "environment" means, as unitary in intelligibility, as this thing of this sort. It is however built upon the basic, primordial, non-specific elements of the Universe. It is here that we can better define, and to a degree replace, the concept of both "prime matter" and "materia secunda", quantified matter, of Aquinas, Aristotle, and the   Scholastics.   Unless   and   until   one   possesses   an  adequate   realisation   and acceptance  of  the  principle  of  evolution  as  Transformism,  to  use  the  name  for  the process sometimes used in Scholastic textbooks of several decades ago, one cannot make intelligible sense of this miracle of the unitary in the elementary. It was obvious to the ancients that when change occurred a "form" was lost and another form, or forms, took its place. In this process, a certain common fundament remained, the substratum common to both events, this fundament as common to all material changes and non- specific in apprehension was the matter as opposed to the entelechy or form. Matter of itself as a principle of sheer potentiality to change was not intelligible per se, but only through the principle of form which gave it a specific principle of intelligibility. Everything material was, and is, composed of matter, prime matter or sheer matter, and form or entelechy the principle of understanding, meaning, and dynamism: the principle that is, of its "nature". There were difficulties in the principle at all times. In scholastic philosophy it was taught that the subsistent entity, the res or thing, was alone an ens quod, i.e. the specific entitative real this. Entities however, composed of matter and form as on this philosophy are all things in the physical Universe, were in fact constituted by two distinct principles, two entia quibus ens est, that is by two distinct principles of reality which were not subsistent things or facts in themselves, but made one subsistent reality when the principle of form or intelligibility diffused or "informed" the prime or "raw matter". Prime Matter (for quantity was regarded as a first formal property of actual being) was not intelligible in itself at all. It was known and perceived only in the "limitation" of the form, which in itself, in its own intelligibility was universal or capable of being participated by many, and individuated when received into composition of being with the other principle, the other ens quo, or principle by which, the actual subsistent existed, and was defined. There was always a problem. For Aristotle if I remember, matter was eternal simply because it was unknowable, and could not be created by God, the principle of sheer Intelligibility.  Plato too, one remembers  saying to the Dean of Philosophy,  himself a personal friend, had called this prime matter, this non-specific  fundament of change which made a succession of "forms" possible, a principle of "mee on", or not being, presumably the principle which prevented all pure ideas from being the Pure Idea, the one and only of its type, like the archetypal "Lion" idea etc. He denied that Plato had called prime matter a "not-being", but in fact Plato had. At the very beginning of life in philosophy one had put a dilemma to one's revered professor which still seems to me to be  a  valid  argument  against  the  Aristotelean-Thomist  synthesis:  -  If  all  knowing whatever, all intellection, is only through a principle of form, then the concept of prime matter was illogical. We were taught that matter and form were distinct principles of being, the "beings" by which the real actual existed (entia quibus ens est). How is matter intelligible as distinct from form, unless matter possesses its own principle of intelligibility by which to be known as "other"? It is incoherent to say it is known through form in composition, and therefore is "known". If it exists as a principle distinct from form, then it is other than "form". If nothing is intelligible to the human intellect except through the formal principle, then to be itself, even as a principle by which of actual entity, it must possess an intelligibility other than that by which form or entelechy is defined. He replied quite  simply,  -  there  is  a  problem  here,  but  all  philosophical  systems  have  their problems. We can say that ours has fewer unsolved mysteries than the others!

The theory of evolution solves the problem. Below the unitary complex real, - this bird in my garden, - there is an order of the real, ultimately non-specific to "bird" or other higher type of entity, which lies at the base of all the unitary and individual types of life and being, indeed at the root of all the unitary types (one is trying to avoid using the word  "form"  now  in  its  popular  and  now  in  its  philosophical  meaning!)  of  mineral, molecular, and atomic being from below the periodic table and upwards. St. Thomas for instance  would  recognise,  from  transformation  of being  in nature  both  the  common fundament, and also the unitary and universal principle of perfection, i.e. essence or "whatness" in things. One could see dogs, and talk of dogginess. There were many types of dogs. Dog was a shared or participated  perfection.  There were also many variations in beings, and natures, which seemed otherwise to be of the same nature or essence or species. From this would arise the concept of the "accident" that property, quality, or perfection which acceded to the form as principle of definition in an entity but which was not of the essence or basic principle of intelligibility. From this it would follow that while not in nature, yet by superhuman, i.e. divine power, a substance or essential nature, could be separated from its accidental properties. In fact, since all the phenomenological properties of material beings admitted of mutation, they all were basically accidentia, - accidents or perhaps one could say "incidents" with metaphysical relationship to the substance or essence. It is not quite accurate, I admit, to translate the Latin "accidental" by the English "incidental" but in common speech it gets near enough. From this position, it is very easy to see how all phenomena as mutational appearances, came to be understood as the non-essential in the cognition and intellection of being in its "essential". Such a philosophy is of course useless to science, totally static in its conception of Nature with the capital and natures with the small "n". In the Middle Ages, long before the Renaissance, long before Thomas More, we see the stresses of such a philosophy of the real in thinkers who were scientists like Roger Bacon. As far as I can understand St. Thomas Aquinas all the purely phenomenological  was other than the essential. I used to regard it as a hopeless philosophy of the organic living flesh of man or beast.  I have found  scholastic  manuals  among  my books  which made  a clumsy distinction between properties, i.e. qualities which followed directly from the nature or substantial definition which could not be separated from the substance, (presumably by divine power), and those which could. There was of course no philosophical principle of natural differentiation offered. The very concept of quantity is only the first formal but accidental  property  or  quality  which  accedes  to  the  material  substance,  already constituted through its essential "form". The manualists who state that some properties, i.e qualities of first intention, or comprehension, in the perception of composite being are capable of being, by divine power separated  as phenomena,  or accidents,  from the substance or basic entity are of course thinking of the application of this static and totally and hopelessly a priori scheme of philosophy to the explanation of transubstantiation in the Holy Eucharist. In the book Catholicism: A New Synthesis one has gone into most of the subject-matter now being considered under matter and form, substance and act. It is, in the writer's opinion, better and more concisely done there. It has to be repeated again here because, quite honestly, in that narrowly specific application to the Holy Eucharist and a suggested realignment of the philosophy (not the doctrine) of transubstantiation in the current Thomist sense, the revolutionary nature of the philosophy we are now trying to present simply has not come over in its wider repercussions, even to truly deep and competent minds. It has to be presented again in a purely and (one hopes at least) a coherently philosophical context.

Kant and Transcendental Thomism

A probable reason for the statement that some at least of the properties of a reality composed of matter and form can be separated from the substance in which they inhere, at least by the supreme power or God, without saying that all of them could, may rest in the sheer incomprehensibility of thinking in terms of human reality, existing in any sense however metaphysical, without literally "blood and guts". In the Blessed Sacrament a small white wafer does not seem to offer any difficulty to the intelligence. Nevertheless, since after the consecration by the priest, this wafer is now literally Jesus Christ, - body and blood, soul and divinity, under the species of bread and wine, it does mean that the entire phenomenon, the totality of anything the senses could attain, is the real phenomenon,  i.e. accidents  of bread and wine, sustained  without inherence  in their connatural substance, by the power of God. For me at least, this has always meant that any "accident"  is in the order of pure, intelligible  being, i.e. the metaphysical  order, separable  in  ultimate  reality  of  definition  from  the  "substance".  Even  in  the  Holy Eucharist, if we prescind from the phenomena of bread and wine, and state as we must in Catholic orthodoxy that these phenomena are sustained by a miracle, or even by the substance of the human nature of Jesus, since whatever is phenomenological about this consecrated host is not Jesus, the concept of the "substance" of the body and blood of Christ becomes, at least for this writer, unintelligible. The people in the pews understand that they see Jesus under the appearances of bread and wine. What, mercifully one thinks, most of them do not realise, is that not in the actual doctrine of the Church indeed, but in the teaching of the most prestigious of her schools of philosophy, these "appearances" are objectively real, they are the actual species of bread and wine. What can be located as "Jesus" in any sense which entails the concept of "body" is not, at least for this writer imaginable or intelligible.

One  sees  at  once  where  Immanual  Kant  drew  the  distinction  between  the noumenon the unity-as-thought, of physical, material reality and the phenomenon, the "nature"  as  attainable  by the  senses,  and  also  the only reality  the  practical  human intelligence could work on, comprehend, and reason from. In my book earlier quoted, in the passages  concerning  the  Eucharist,  one  stated  that  the  distinction  between  the phenomenon and the noumenon is latent in the philosophy of Aquinas. To me it seems that Kant is the logical development of St. Thomas Aquinas in this aspect of Thomism, at least in the order of logic. It is the reason why modern Catholic theology, especially that called Transcendental Thomism, worships, to quote one young priest student, "at the shrine of Kant". It is not an accident, (in now the popular use of the word) because for Kant, the transcendental reason is the ultimate unifying principle in man, and it is this aspect of human intellect, the so-named "transcendental" which conceives of the noumenon,  the intellectual  form or unity-as-thought,  which the human mind, since it receives all its information through the senses, cannot directly reach, and concerning which it can affirm nothing with the finality of actual real knowledge.2  Fr. F. Copleston SJ in his  outstanding  History  of Philosophy  does  state  that  Kant  nowhere  teaches  the actuality of the noumenon in the essence of the real, but only uses it as a presumption, against which to make his Critique of Pure Reason, and to establish the limits of human certainty. In other words, that Kant, taking over what would be defined as substance in the order of the composite in St. Thomas, in effect reduced it to mean the same as the form,  that  by  which  in  abstraction,  the  material  reality  possessed  its  principle  of transcendental  unity,  but a "something"  which in fact if it existed,  the  mind of man receiving all its data from sense and the phenomenological, could not actually know. One would defer to the wider knowledge and intelligence of Fr. Copleston, but state that from one's own reading of Kant he does accept, at least in the sense of presume, the existence  of  the  noumenon,  the  non-phenomenological  "thing-in-itself'  behind  the practical and observable, while the inability of the human mind to affirm any reality which is not cognisable by sense and within the sensible order, (because of the dependence of human reason on what St. Thomas would call the phantasm in all knowing), makes it impossible to demonstrate the existence of God, - who is indeed pure noumenon, - that order exists. It has  often seemed  to this  writer  that  the  whole concept  of "form"  in Scholastic philosophy - although the only school of Scholasticism of which I ever had any objective knowledge was St. Thomas as interpreted by Cajetan, does reduce to some kind of soul-principle. In the case of any living form of being at least, we were taught that the "form" as entelechy (principle of actualisation) "transcended  physical- chemical forces". While this would not apply to the notion of form as applied to the non- living, it would mean that in the living animal, high or low in complexification, the "form" was a sort of soul. This animising principle was not identical with the physicochemical elements or forces of the living: therefore it was not phenomenon in order of perception. It did not have any power of thinking or knowing in a separate reflexive sense, it was not reflexively intelligent in nature. It did not survive death. To me it seems again, an unintelligible concept when you reduce it to its distinct property as a principle of the manifestation of "animal" life. We were of course taught the existence of animal and vegetable souls. The word here does indeed mean soul only as "animal" principle of life, its unity and specific dynamism. I simply query what intelligible actual concept could be given to it, since it prescinded in its reality as an ens quo, i.e. principle of reality, by which   the  concrete   existent   is  defined,   from  physical-chemical   forces,   reflexive intelligence and ability to survive the dissolution of the said physico-chemical forces. It has the properties of a deus ex machina. One would suggest that it is possible to explain the unity of the living form, i.e. the living existent, without recourse to any such principle of animation of an order above the phenomenological.

In the philosophy of Kant it is manifest that although he denied to the human mind, given  its  living  synthesis  with  matter,  any  ability  to  demonstrate  with  certainty  the existence of God from reason, Kant did believe in the existence of God. One of his "persuasive" arguments towards the existence of God is the lack of reward the virtuous often receive in this life, and the need in the whole body social that the good and noble be rewarded, and the anarchic not profit from any sort of ill-gotten gain. The positing of the categorical imperative was for Kant a certain sign, demonstrable  in the order of man's life and nature, and therefore a principle of true demonstration, of the existence of God. God must have been considered for Kant to be of the order of the noumenon, for had He been also in any sense phenomenon man would have been able to argue to his existence from natural reason. For Kant, reason as the principle of attaining the real never prescinds from its compounding with matter, either in thought, or in that which it can attain in the order of human experience. It is true that Kant never "tied up" his philosophical perspectives neatly in these matters. The transcendental reason, for him, did remain a mystery even to the end. In the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, (and at times in the text), Kant praises the moral aspirations of good and simple men, by which they aspire towards the good and the true, to moral and ethical "perfection". It remains true that for him all such aspiration, as all religious "experience" remains in the field of the provisional and the unknowable, - the analogy again with the sparrow flying through the bright banquet hall of human life, and out again, into the darkness outside. The Categorical Imperative itself is a philosophical botch, lacking all internal coherence.

Kant was not simply a man, who believing in God with a subjective faith, had to find some way, through the concept of ought, of bringing Him into the empirical order of the phenomenon of man. Beyond this, there is in Kant a form of Utilitarianism in the highest possible sense of the word. Kant was interested also in the stability and philosophical harmony of the Commonwealth of Mankind. The transcendental reason in its most metaphysical principles was the order and unity principle not only of human knowledge as culture, but also of the destiny of man. Kant does have some sense of the destiny of man. So he tries desperately  to bridge the gap, between  God the unknowable  and unprovable, the principle of "reward" and moral goodness, and the ultimate ontological needs of human society. For this reader at least, although not fully explicit, the seeds of a philosophy of human Progressivism, of the "Enlightenment", are implicit in Kant. All writers comment on the fascination which the Ontological argument to the existence of God offered for Kant, even while he sternly denied its probative power of demonstration. One suggests that the reason is that the Ontological argument, from the analysis of pure abstract  thought  concerning  the nature  of God, and  the relationship  within  the very concept of God, of essence and existence,  is the ultimate projection  forward of the transcendental reason as the principle of "drawing up and on" the principle of perfective striving and moral cohesion in human life and ethics. Kant needed it, subconsciously, though his philosophy could never justify it through the empirical order.

From Kant to Hegel

We can easily see where this inconclusive analysis of the nature and meaning of man must lead. It must lead to the next step, to the Objective Idealism of Hegel. For Kant men are defined by hands and feet, by the empirical order. Their minds lift them to beauty and moral order, they seek an end beyond the futility of matter, a goal beyond the grave. There is a principle within them which does indeed surpass the non-reflective order of the beast, but which at the same time prevents them from attaining God with an objective certainty. Nevertheless, the whole of history witnesses both the preoccupation of mankind with God, and the role, not simply of social unification - though that is present and important - but also of moral personal ascent to greatness of soul and leadership of the brethren which God, as somehow "objective idea" has always exerted upon man as individual, and man in society. We know how Kant attempted to bridge the gap with the appeal of subjective recognition in all men, of God as the principle of moral law, of the ought and the must. This principle breaks down on the level of its philosophical incoherence. Yet if manifestly, human society and community is integrating through the very technological power of scientific, empirical discovery into ever closer union as a world community of man, with common bonds of scientific culture, then in the name of a now nascent concept of cosmic evolution, we can do what, it seems to me, Hegel did. One can stand Kant on his head, it can be taught that ideas have hands and feet; that the transcendental in the psyche of man is the summative and perfective wisdom in man,   the   empirical   a   lesser   derivative   through   which   the   transcendental   and metaphysical operates. There is now possible a vast new concept, in which a new world order  can  be  assessed.  We  know  it  was.  It  culminated  in  Marxism  and  in  Fascist National Socialism. It would be a great mistake to say, or even think, that it is now dead and buried. Other forms of it are conceivable. The incoherence of the concept of God in Kant, is easily explained  within Hegelian  principle.  The Ontological  argument,  which Kant considered as the only one to "have a chance" from its own principles, does fail to prove a God personal and transcendent. Yet its fascination, and apparent "necessity" for the intellect of man consists in the fact that God is not totally "other" and transcendent outside the creation: God is immanent in man. God is immanent as a power not yet fully formal, but yet in some way ahead, drawing, immersed within the cosmos (the vision also of Christ, in Teilhard de Chardin, as Omega point) and uniting all things material and empirical in the ultimate substance, which is the transcendental peak of matter and mind as one Energy not just of creation, but of all being and all thought. Ideas have hands and feet: for hands and feet are objectivations of ultimate energy of mind, of The Idea. This consideration has had something of the nature of a discursion. We may not dwell upon it. We may dare to hint how of itself it will, as impersonal and collective, cause a reaction into the various philosophies of Existentialism.  Then, so this writer would wickedly suggest, show something of a return to Hegel, via Existentialism, in the philosophy and theology of Karl Rahner. Hegel used Christian and theological terms of reference. Yet the whole of his thinking was a subjection of theology to philosophy. This is the subjection of the meaning of God and the Revelation of God, to the mind of man, and the meanings of man in the existential order, - the Humanist order. It is with us now.

Notes

1. I am told that some years ago in the Natural History Museum in London, one of the key distinctions between Homo Sapiens and the animals was that, whilst some animals may use tools, only Homo Sapiens uses tools to make tools.

2. The doctrine of Kant here is actually self-contradictory in a number of places in The Critique  of  Pure  Reason.  Indeed,  I  think  it  true  to  say  that  error  or  inadequacy  in philosophy (and theology) begins always from a wrong or incomplete analysis of the first datum of consciousness, namely the self-conscious experience of I am. It is from this existential self-relative content that the man in the street, and the peasant in the field, always reasons and argues with a dynamic self-assurance, and as completely untaught. It was this one laboured  to present  in the Impact of the Real. The Categories  and Schemata of Kant are too clumsily artificial, and beg far too many questions, to be a true reflection  of  man  knowing,  thinking,  feeling,  loving.  Kant  always  presumes  that  the positive noumenon cannot be the object of a non-sensuous intuition. It does not occur to him that the positive noumenon, as the object of both reasoning and experience, could well be the object of an intuition at once intellectual and sensuous, for the sensuous is not fully comprehensible even as positive phenomenon or as negative noumenon, to the mind of man, except through such a relationship which relates the material and phenomenological to the Positive Noumenon, i.e. God. The whole doctrine of Kant stumbles, as a doctrine of transcendental reason, because of this flaw in the existential analysis  of  human  consciousness  as  a  composite  of  the  spiritual  (noumenal)  and sensuous  (phenomenological)  in  one  same  percept;  indeed  Kant  actually  tries  to separate out basic human consciousness as thought from self-experience as sensuous, and subject to the Categories, which is amazing.

On  the  datum  of  consciousness:-   Transcendental   Doctrine  of  Phenomema   and Noumena (the italics are in the text): "If by the term noumenon we understand a thing in so far as it is not an object of our sensuous intuition, thus making abstraction of our mode of intuiting it, this is a noumenon in the negative sense of the word. But if we understand by it an object of a nonsensuous intuition, we in this case assume a peculiar mode of intuition, and intellectual intuition, to wit, which does not however, belong to us, of the very possibility of which we have no notion, - and this is a noumenon in the positive sense." If there is in man a power superior to animality, - which especially in his later works, and his unpublished letters, Kant clearly presumes, then the cognition of man is phenomenon-noumenon in the positive sense, and indeed this is an empirical experience of self-consciousness. Man will be a phenomenon defined through a positive noumenon. In this case, it will be possible to argue to the Noumenon (God) as the source of all created being. It will also be possible to experience the Noumenon through the soul (positive noumenon) and experience also its overflow as physical joy or love in the body (phenomenon). This reality, of course, all the saints and mystics of all religions teach and manifest in their personalities.  It is also basic to the Catholic teaching of sanctifying grace, as man's basic, existential union and communion with God. In saying that the distinction between the phenomenon and noumenon seems to me to be implicit in the theory of knowledge of Aquinas, it would go like this: Thomas places the phenomenon as sensuous and mutable among the "accidentia", the form, as noumenon (positive  noumenon)  among  the  categories  of  substance,  the  alone  knowable.  But, stripped  of  all  sensuous  cognoscibility,  it  is  hard  indeed  to  give  any  empirical  but intellectual meaning to this noumenon, or form, until at least we come to mankind. Kant, accepting basically the same "division" of the real, dismisses the noumenon as unknowable, which for Aquinas is the sole really known. The phenomenon as negative noumenon   is  for  Kant,   the  representational   as   unity   for   the  intellect,   i.e.   the transcendental reason, but the noumenon as such is dismissed as non-knowable and hence non-essential as far as we are concerned, almost like an "accidens" in the philosophy  of  Aquinas.  The  basic  problem,  one  would  suggest  is  the  "curse"  of abstraction. Once we can offer a mode of knowing the real which dispenses with this, both the weakness of the system of Aquinas, and the strength of the objections of Kant mutually evaporate.

Kant seems to have no ability to make a direct, honest appraisal of the real oneself as the "existential me"'. In the Transcendental Dialectic, transition to Cosmology, near the end  of Book  One, he writes:  GENERAL  REMARK:  "Thought,  per se, is merely  the spontaneous  logical  function  which  operates  to  connect  the  manifold  of  a  possible intuition; and it does not represent the subject of consciousness as a phenomenon- for this reason alone, that it pays no attention to the question whether the mode intuiting it is sensuous or intellectual. I therefore do not represent myself in thought either as I am, or as I appear to myself; I merely cogitate myself as an object in general, of the mode of intuiting which, I make abstraction. When I represent myself as the subject of thought (italics in text) as the ground of thought (italics in text), these modes of representation are not related to the categories of substance, or of cause, for these are functions of thought applicable only to our sensuous intuition….. in  what  mode  my  Self  (italics)  is given in intuition I do not consider and it may be that I, who think, am a phenomenon, although not in so far as I am a thinking being:.… the consciousness of myself in mere thought….. does not present to me any property of this being as material for thought." Against this, in my own copy, I see I have put: nonsense, - there is no abstraction in self- intuition!  But  perhaps  that  is  the  point!  There  is  nothing  more  phenomenal  and noumenal, than the intuition of self as I am. That is why one turned the Cogito: ergo sum, to Sum: ergo cogito. Kant never could have watched kids playing in the school playground,  or  the  local  park.  From  their  self-intuition  there  pours  out  a  stream  of thought, assertion, will, and seeking. Tidying it all up later is only the secondary work upon a primary, non-agnostic, existential, and essential "representation". I find this sort of writing in Kant to be quite amazing, and the contradiction of sheer observation, and commonsense.

4 THE CONCEPT OF THE RELATIVE FORM

We return to the consideration of the material "event" - to that earlier "bird upon my lawn". It cannot be thought, intelligibly understood or evaluated through any process of reductionism into its lower and compounding parts. It was proposed that theoretically it could be thought of as a unit of complexification, a "waveparticle" complex still beyond our imagining or full comprehension. To think of the bird this way would face us towards an order of complexity far beyond our knowledge, even now so very limited, of the equational content and instructional weaving of "natures" involved in the interpretation of RNA and DNA as factors of genetic law and form. However much, even lawfully, we tried to  view  our  bird  as  an  energy-complex  we  would,  in  sheer  factual  perception,  and empirical common sense, be obliged to recognise it as also a unitary being, a "thing" in its entity, and in its actions, reflexes, and reactions in the whole of its environment. Consider our bird vis-à-vis a worm on the same lawn. It really would not do, even as physics, but much more as biochemistry and biology, to be thinking of the bird and the hapless worm in terms of physical-chemical transmutations between wave-particle complexes of appalling complexity. We concede the latter perspective is true. We insist that the unitary-in-relativity is also true, and even more true. The unitary defined from, and in, the complexity represents an ascent of being and of intelligibility. Therefore we say, thinking frankly within Aquinas' principle of analogy of being, it is even more true.

At a learned open lecture in London on a certain occasion one overheard a conversation between a student and a gifted physicist. It was roughly along the lines of consideration given above. The physicist said to the simpler soul, "Well, yes, there are of course bodies, limbs and hands and feet, but they are not separate and independent of all else around them as you would naturally think. If you could view Nature as we do through electronics, radiation, interaction of every kind, you would find your hands were fuzzy, not clear cut. At the fringes of your being you would find constant exchange and interaction, you are not the solid reality you think you are at all"... true, but yet not too true. In spite of the interchange and interaction, there remains an intrinsic and stable unitary pattern of reality, which remains the "me" through all the exchanges and vicissitudes down through the years of being, when the fading of the flesh admits to exchanges and interactions with the environment which are a lot more than fringe or marginal events. It is in this abiding and unitary pattern that in this meditation within principles of philosophy, one is going to place the recognition and the interpretation of what is called nature, and also what is called form while not admitting any real distinction in the order of actuality between "the matter" and "the form". Any distinction that exists will  be  relegated  to  what  scholastic  philosophy  would  call  a  distinctio  rationis,  a relationship of perspective, not a true principle of entity. At the same time, in as far as both the scientist and the philosopher must make the same concession, namely that within energy fields of being we live and are, and have our being, we must marvel at the sheer unity-in-relativity of the cosmos and all things within it. There is nothing at all which stands  alone,  or  which  even  in  the  concept  of  a  nature  or  essence  is  abstractly segregated and independent of the Universe around. If it is true in the order of physics and chemistry, we will find it to be true in the order of philosophy of thought; of thought as unity-in-relativity as well. We will have to dispense with the Aristotelean essence as "spiritual", as abstract, as other than matter-energy, that is until we reach the limiting case of the whole process, the nature and essence of Man. For the reader who is already familiar at least in part with the concept of the Unity-Law of Control and Direction which operates  within and throughout  the whole material  Universe  (and beyond  the merely material into mankind) the concept of the unitary within relativity we have just outlined  will  emphasize  that  within  the  laws  and  interactions  of all  "being"  within  a Universe  poised  in relativity  to ascent,  there is an overriding  Law  of Finalism.  This finalism is distinct from, but operates through and in and within the specific and in some sciences,  basically  reductionist  laws  of their  own  apparent  autonomy  of nature  and operation. When the cosmos is grasped as so great and amazing an equation both of energies and of unitary beings, still acting and interacting as principles of cause and effect within their new environment as higher unitary natures, the very concept of a Universe based on the "random", howsoever conceived, is not so much an absurdity as a blasphemy against truth and beauty.

In the development of the Universe we see the production of new unities of being, of higher and living "things" which are integrated  through correlationship  to more basic energies  and  formulations  of  being,  -  to  living  cells,  to  molecules,  to  atoms  and elemental energies. These new unities act and interact within the environment of nature around as specific unities of life, form, and finalism. They form new principles of being- making, of control and direction within that same environment. The very concepts of ecology, of symbiosis, of environmental  law are based upon this recognition. So we proceed to ask: what they are and how do we know them and come to the process of knowing them? The reflections, or perhaps more truly the meanderings of this writer's style, are not in strict philosophical order. They are not meant to be. Behind this manner of writing in meditation there is a presumption; a presumption that basic human minds think straight and until corrupted by sophistication judge straight. We present continually a picture of reality which from observation or from the study they know. We presume their  right  "instinct"  in  judgement  once  the  overall  presentation  is  grasped.  Yet, eventually, in the course of our thought we hope to give also objective reasons for the arguments within these reflections. Remember where we began. We began with the child in the playground, the mother panting and puffing after school, with the dynamism of life, its ontic certainty, its lack of agnosticism, its recognition of nature, form, right, wrong and proper...  "not fair", "no good",  "messed  up". We are still presenting  and thinking in this order of the existential, but we will not forget in due course, the need of the proof, the delineation of the "essential". In a philosophy of knowledge it would seem we should first have vindicated the nature of the soul, and its distinction from the energy order of matter. It will have to be done, but, not here. We are still so anxious that in passing to the realm of knowledge as human, as intellectual, as transcendental we do not overpass or overlook those relationships of the animal to the animal, and of the brain to the intellect, on which whole systems of metaphysics  have collapsed and still do collapse.

No place below man for "second intention" abstraction

Our bird upon the lawn, how does another see it, another animal, maybe a cat upon the lawn? Does next door's cat see it as a complexification of dynamic elemental wave- energy particles? God forbid! Pussy sees it as prey, as hunter sees the hunted. Muscles tense, eyes glisten, a stalking posture is aligned... a sudden pounce, a squawk, flutter of feathers, and our bird is away on the wing... A foolish looking pussikins with tail a- wagging. Yet what did the cat see and react towards? It was a unit, a one thing, and moreover it was a sort, and a sort is a nature. Our cat has no immortal soul, no free- thinking intellect but yet she has made some sort of judgement, in no way reductionist, concerning a nature. Yet more, the intuition of this cat and that nature is itself unique to the nature, the unitary sort which is bird. How different would that intuition of reality have been in pussikins, had it been a dog on the lawn, even more had it been a leopard on the lawn. In that case - vamoose! Hence there are natural animal judgements (judicium naturae  we  wrote  earlier)  concerning  unitary  things,  singular  things,  which  are  also natures  and  therefore  in  some  way  universal  or  sort  things.  It will  be  obvious  that Aristotle and St. Thomas have not been talking nonsense about things, forms, natures, the singular and the universal. If we presume to disagree with their syntheses of reality, we must do so with human respect and respect for great humans. Any reassessment of their  doctrine  must  be  built  upon  what  they  first  achieved.  Why,  before  we  have proceeded to vindicate the exact nature of the spiritual intelligence, we find a measure of agreement  with their philosophy  from pussikins  upon the lawn. There  are individual birds, there is a nature, a sort in being a bird. There is something in the concept of birdiness. There is unity-in-relativity, there is universality in singularity. We are not yet in the order of the spirit, but living nature is aligned to this recognition, and this recognition is built into the actions and reactions of living birds and beasts, before ever a man walked on the earth.

It would be presumed in the analysis of Platonist and Aristotelean philosophy that the vindication of nature, or sort, must imply the vindication of the intelligible recognition of form, and that we are now on the threshold of the intuition of abstraction and the abstract. It does not follow. The percept of the nature, the sort, already reveals to us an embedded and embodied mutual ministry of "things" to each other, in terms of cause and  effect.  We  appeal  to  pussikins;-  does  this  judgement  concerning  the  blackbird involve a unitary thing and a singularity, well, as least a singular? Yes it does. And it involves a relationship of cause and effect, in as much as birds of this sort may be, at least partially, eaten? It does indeed. There would not be the same reaction, if the bird were a dog, or being a bird be say, a golden eagle... oh, too big to take on, better go home! But, pussikins, do you have any concept of birdiness from bird? As I understand pussikins, she does not. The interdefinition of the sort which is cat, and the sort which is bird, involves a recognition of meaning on the utilitarian level. There are individual birds which one can hunt, and others from which one would run, because according to sort, the birds minister a meaning to the cat, a meaning interpreted, one must surmise, not so much in terms of flesh and feather as in sheer brute size. One is jumping, to be honest, a perfect coherence in the argument, to say that the animal "judgement" is always in terms of the immediate, the meaning administered by sight, smell, other senses, and the relationship  of  preyer  and  prey  or  something  similar.  Later  it  will  be  possible  to demonstrate fairly conclusively that this is so. There is no place in the survival value judgement of the animal nature below mankind for the second intention, the "Maniness" of  man.  Whether  the  argument  is  rather  a  presumption  than  a  deduction,  the consequence we have in mind to follow is that the reality of nature as the sort or kind, is indeed inbuilt into the animal brain and body. This percept is in some way and degree "universal". It is superfluous to talk of a kind, or nature, if there is, or could be, only one of them. One is far from sure that St. Thomas has made all things clear when he says that every angel is its own distinct and unique "species". There is if not a problem, at least a lack of clarity in the consideration of angels as "many" generically but not specifically. However, this thought is not important to us now. The reality of the nature or kind does not, for all its implicit generality or universalism, necessarily involve the need of abstraction in the Thomist and Aristotelean sense. Against Nominalism however, and against some forms of Existentialism it does involve a concept of nature as "essence", as the "kind", a pattern of being which must be intellectually interpreted in terms of causality, interaction, the influencing and the needing a pattern of life and being. It is impossible  to interpret  any science  of nature  without  this concept.  Transferred  from philosophic to theological terms, the concept of the nature involves a natural ministry within the order of Nature and the cosmos, and the concept also of a being ministered unto, of finding the means of one's fulfilment; the Law of Control and Direction unto one's proper finality.

The  first  judgement   we  draw   from   the  consideration   of  the  environmental relationships of birds and beasts, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is that the recognition of the sort, and the mutual ministry of sorts to one another is not derived directly and radically from the mind of man as spirit. Just as we were able to state that because animal life uses relationships of space and time, and passes "judgements of nature" upon these relationships in their manner of living, so also now, in consideration of the brain alone and the senses as animal, before the advent of free-thinking spirit there is a recognition of the sort as kind, as universalized. Therefore the root of such judgement as such recognition, what we may call the purely abstract is to this degree not a priori, not of the transcendental mind alone. In the judgements made by man, there is once more a cooperation of spirit and the merely animal, of soul and brain. There is, whatever our ultimate judgement concerning the "universal idea", a fundament of cooperation again, between mind and matter. In the matter of abstraction too, it is noticed in passing that the animal concept of number is extremely limited. They cannot count and count and count. The animal brain recognises the individual, the several (i.e. the "pack") and also the sort. It does not judge the specific as the "pure idea" of the sort. Its reaction to the sort is embedded, and embodied, in its own being, and the relativity of that being to other "sorts" as ministries to it of life, or death. Like the recognition of "God", the sort as abstract has no place in the animal psyche, - it is irrelevant to personal meaning or survival. At the end of our considerations if we come to believe that the postulate of an abstraction is unnecessary to explain human knowledge, and a poor explanation at that, it may be that we will be able to dispense with the whole concept of the "a priori" idea or concept. So far we have retained it in a broad sense for the principles of identity and of contradiction as concepts. Even thus far it may prove possible to reduce this aspect of the a priori to the intuition of the real, of "being" in its basic, its ontic significance to use a fashionable in-word. In such an intuition of being would be contained the necessary affirmation  of  what  was  meaningful  or  non-meaningful  in  the  first  apprehension  or percept  of  the  real  as  the  actual,  the  more  than  possible.  This  could  perhaps  be equivalent to the principles of identity and non-contradiction. Ultimately we will state that all knowing is by intuition and percept, while judgement is the perception of meaning-in- relativity between beings as they "relate" i.e. act and interact in a mutual intercourse of being. There will be a similarity, even an intrinsic analogy of proportion between our power to recognize, even in the beginnings of human history that natures, i.e. "things", are ontologically co-related in the equational Universe, and the processes of human judgement by which we perceive and assess meaningful relationships in the order of the mind. The mental "intuition" will be an interpretation of the physical co-relativity, and then will, in the order of the judgement, be the same as truth or "the true". If something is untrue, this synthetic relationship between things is said to be non-meaningful  in its ontological relationships. There can be degrees, as approximation, to the true. Take the case  within  physics  of  the  synthesis  effected  by  Newton,  and  that  of  Lorentz  and Einstein. There were always "problems" in the original Newtonian formula, magnificent in success as it was. The synthesis of Relativity theory given us by Einstein, in giving us both  mathematically,  and  (reductively)  ontologically  a  more  perfect  unity-in-relativity, gave us also a higher or more complete "truth". The nature of mind, of the intellect that is to say, especially in composition with matter, but even more so in the purely spiritual creation, is to intuit, to perceive both the real, and its unity-in-relativity. It is of course difficult to think of the pure spirit knowing by "abstraction", there is no facility either to form  a  "phantasm",  a  neurone  reaction  to  the  sensual  input,  nor  to  process  the abstracted  form  from  the  sense  impression.  If  the  manner  of  knowing  which  we anticipate be true, then the basic process of intellectual knowing will be the same in every  spiritual  nature,  either  pure,  or  in  synthesis  with  matter-energy.  Apart from anything else, it will have the bonus of further removing one of the reasons why Kant denies to the mind of man the power to affirm God. The knowledge of man, as reflective and reflexive, will be a percept of ontological relationships, the sense data of which is indeed entered within the mind of man as into a computer. The power to interpret by assessment of the ontological relationships,  (i.e. the meaning of such data), will not depend intrinsically and formally upon the neurone store-bank, i.e. in St. Thomas's or Aristotle's terms, - the phantasm, - but it will be a "scan" or interpretation of the stored data. The Scholastics defined "truth" as the coadequatio intellectus et rei, the co- equivalence, or "matching-up" of the mind with the real. This does not seem to be so much a definition, as a description masquerading as a definition. It presumes the point and begs the question: what precisely is this equivalence which you affirm, in its own ontological relationships?

Could philology assist metaphysics?

Before an attempt is made to present a new interpretation of the knowledge of the real, especially of the sort or nature, by-passing the process of abstraction, a thought occurs from the general knowledge  merely of a lifetime, which the specialist,  above all the philologist  might  be able  to develop,  to  correct,  or to reject.  It has  never  been  my possibility to study philology as the science of the origin of language, as those origins leave their imprint not in philosophers, like Wittgenstein, but in the coded signs of writing. It does seem a neglected branch of philosophy, one which again suffers from the unconscious  theorizing  from.    Olympus  of  the  transcendental   philosopher.  During Scripture studies, my teacher remarked in response to a question concerning the expression  of philosophical  ideas in ancient Egyptian, that with pictograph  language there  was  always  a  problem  here.  The  universal  or  abstract  idea,  he  said,  was expressed by the sign of the plural, and one had to judge from the context whether it meant  the  second  intention,  say  "humanity"  or  whether  it  meant  "men"  or  human creatures etc. One must presume that the same will be true for ancient Hebrew. In languages like Chinese and Japanese too, which are still based closely on the stylized pictograph character, one understands there are not any abstract nouns, not native ones at least. If it can be found that there is no native and original way, of expressing the abstract  as quality or species, except by the sign of the plural or in some similarly concrete way, it will argue that the basic recognition of mankind is not of knowledge by abstraction of a formal principle, but by the recognition of the quality or sort, or nature, among more than one of a kind. It would be from the many or the plural that one arrived at the intellectual perception of the quality of "itness" and that even so, there was a technical  difficulty  in  the  expression  of  the  "second  intention"  because  knowledge, percept, judgement is first from the singular in its relationship to "the other", not from a formal, universal idea.

The spiritual  principle  in man, the "soul" as principle  of sheer and freethinking intelligence has not yet been demonstrated to be other than energy-matter. It will be presumed for now, because this very discursive style is meant to introduce the younger mind who may read it into the manner by which the reflections garnered, for better or worse,  were  obtained  and  pondered.  For  many  of  them,  it  is  only  in  this  broad descriptive vein that they will be able to grasp what it is we are thinking about, and how we come to the process. There is then, in man, a centred principle of intellection, which is not bound nor bonded by purely deterministic laws. The brain of man may be, later we shall say more expressly that it is, inter-related and programmed as much as any other brain in nature, for brain as brain is a purely matter-energy organ in mankind as in any lesser animal. The brain of the lesser animal is programmed to its surrounding natural environment, to receive its law of life, of control and direction to its formal and final end. The brain of man is not so programmed, not at least in its highest faculty and natural relationships, - it is programmed unto and by the spiritual soul of man. The soul as spiritual, is a principle of a different order of being and energy. It does not evolve, it cannot evolve, and is substantially analogous by analogy of ontological proportion, to the being of God - also of course to the being-principle of the "angel", the pure, created, but limited spirit.

We suggest that the spiritual soul, the "transcendental" intellect in man, if we may borrow that term, is knit unto the body and brain of man in a strict, substantial and ontic union of being. The brain is basically a computer in its mode of action and reaction, but it is knit to a principle of sheer perception or recognition, which can and does "scan" the brain in terms of that meaning-in-relativity to other being in which we postulated the essence  of "the  true" and "the  truth".  The intellect  of man then does not abstract, leaving behind an unintelligible residue, a residue which nevertheless belongs to the very  substance  of  composite  being,  and  therefore  to  its  entity  as  singular,  its haecceitas, the "this" which makes it a unity, an ens subsistens, the "thing" as real and actual.  That  unintelligible  residue  is  left  behind  in  the  Aristotelean  and  Thomist synthesis. The intellect of man sees through the soul, which is indeed the principle of true   transcendental   intellect   (for  it  transcends   matter   in  essence,   and  all  the determinism  and  materialism  of  matter-energy  in  man),  it  perceives  through  the phantasm, through the neurone input which is the sensual data to the brain a singular thing, which is also universal in its being and nature. It perceives in one operation, not two or several, both the singularity as real, and the natural or formal relationship to an equational office of being in the world, in the cosmos ultimately, which is of the very inner substance as being or nature of this singular event. But, we insist knowledge is of the  singular  as  intellectual  knowing,  yet  every  singular  is  universal  in  very  nature because it is defined unto the environment of nature as a function-in-relativity, as an "act" in the Aristotelean sense, which of its sort, of very definition within the world first, and the Universe  reductively,  is more than one unique function,  more than one as enough. Put into the language of theology, the material substance manifests,  in its intelligibility, a ministry of being within the Universe, it is a cell, a function, and to be multipliable is of its very intellection.

The reader may now see why so much time was spent laboriously insisting on the manner in which the recognition of sort was embodied and embedded in the animal's recognition of "this thing", this "bird". The recognition is of the singular, but the singular is defined intrinsically as singular by the notion of its sort or kind. We stated this to be the same as the recognition of a nature. The reaction to the individual as a sort-in-a-singular was programmed into the very material brain of the animal below the order of man. That is why percepts of vision, of smell, of shape, of size, will mean to the animal mate, or food, or prey, or predator... the signature of the "kind":- the universal or sort, within the very percept of the singular, is part of the ontological relationship of all Nature as a function of control and direction to ordered finality. The soul in man since its relationship to the brain and the sensual input to the brain is ontic and ontological, simply judges actually and naturally of that which is fact, - fact which was imprinted within the mutual relativity of singulars as natures before men crowned the ascent of universal evolution.

This implies that the human intellect will perceive  the composite  perfection,  the material reality, as a relative perfection. By this is meant that the nature, the thinginess which is perceived is always perceived as bounded by limits which never transcend entirely the order of matter. This occurs even in the most abstract of judgements, and was again a principle of "scandal" to this writer when a young man in Rome. Take the concept and abstract noun humanity; it expresses a nature and a concept about man in the most abstract and formal possible sense, but the notion of matter is implicit, indeed one would say explicit, in the very idea of humanity. This formal abstraction is in no sense pure form. Perhaps someone will answer by saying, - we never taught that the perfection which informs matter, let us say animality, or humanity, totally prescinded from matter in its intelligibility, or else it could never inform materia prima. All the same, the materia prima is implicit in the very intelligibility of the noun and name "humanity" in its most abstract and transcendental percept. It is implicit in what is said to be a pure formal perception. It is also thus, not it seems to me, implicit in its twofold reality as twin and mutually exclusive "entia quibus ens est", i.e. being-sources or principles by which one subsistent real exists. Matter and form are equally and indivisibly contained, one suggests, in that one totally abstract second intention which is "man in common", or "humanity". It makes a lot more sense to say that the intellect of man, in cooperation with the data of the brain, into whose material fundament the notion of "sort" is already inbuilt through animal evolution, interprets this singular in its nature as at once this thing, and this universal or multipliable function of form, i.e. of being-meaning, within the cosmos. Everything  within  the  material  entity  as  a  perfection,  i.e.  a  form-function  of  being, bespeaks multiplicity, as well as singularity. It is obvious from every aspect of matter, inanimate and animate. In the animate the most obvious ontological sign of the many in the one is of course the fact and organic form of reproductive organs!

In the book Catholicism: A New Synthesis, one has used the expression "relative form", and also for greater clarity of grasp, the expression "elastic form". The sense is this:  -  in  the  philosophy  of  Aristotle  and  the  heirs  to  his  inheritance,  the  form,  the recognition of the thing-as-the-sort, is static, rounded, and totally clean cut. It is very neat, but untrue to nature, exact observation, and of course modern science. It is almost incompatible with any coherent theory of the evolution of species, i.e. of sorts. In the theory we are offering, since knowledge is by intuition and perception, not by abstraction of only part  of the  singular  real,  this  ultimate  universalism  of the nature  as sort  or species, is said to be a singular real and also a concept defined within a distinct limit of formal  variability,  both  as  real,  and  also  as  concept.  In  the  Thomist  synthesis  the "nature"  as  static  and  formal  possesses  no  intrinsic  principle  of formal  relativity,  or "elasticity" in very concept at all. An oak tree and an acorn are equally and formally one in notion. Every distinction of growth and development is accidental, a further incidental accretion  to the static perfection  of oak-tree nature. The same is true of horse and horsiness;  the early foetus horse is as much and as perfectly  horse in essence,  in nature, as is the mature winner of the Grand National. In the system we are proposing, this will not be so. The very concept of oak-tree is defined both as an entity, and as the concept of an entity within a variability of fact, and also of environmental law within limits. These limits are set by the cosmos itself, of which this entity as a "nature" is a function. For  example:  first,  the  concept  of the  oak-tree  involves  a  process,  an  intrinsic  and entitative process of development, from early acorn to majestic oak. This process for us is not accidental, it is a real increase in the perfection of the intelligibility within which the formal notion of "oak" is defined. We dispense with the concept of the accidental and incidental, and place both within the variability of the intrinsic notion of the essence.

The implicit cosmic reference of knowing

This concept of the substantial form as "relative" means intrinsically relative both to its full natural perfection, and also to the cosmic limits within which its very notion is intelligible. For example, the concept of tree whether oak or any other variation of tree is not compatible with growing on the surface of the sun. Indeed, it is not compatible with existence as that thing, or that form, or "idea" in temperatures that rise to one hundred degrees centigrade. Just as the entity itself is not intelligible, except within implicit conditions of environment, of "equationalism" within the Universe which begot it, so also the idea, the concept is defined within such limits. Beyond those limits it is a chimera, figment of myth. The "form" which in the ens subsistens we would identify with the entire suppositum; the entity as complete, exists within variations of manifestation from seed to maturity. Also, its very "nature" is variable, or "elastic" to use a loose concept, in as much  as it exists  within  degrees  of tolerance,  defined  proximately  by its immediate environment and remotely by its function as a "nature" within the total process of the Universe within which, and because of which it evolved as this thing of this sort. There will be one case, and one alone in creation in which there is a true distinction of matter and form, because it is a synthesis, in the order of the ontic, i.e. existential suppositum, of matter and spirit. That will be the nature of man alone. The notion of sort, through which the concept of the universal is derived does indeed derive from matter in the sense imperfectly apprehended by Aristotle. We considered earlier that the unitary, this bird,  could  also  be  thought  of  as  a  unitary  nature  existing  in  and  through  a complexification, i.e. a wave-particle synthesis of lower elemental energies, the order of the subatomic. It is this substantial unity-in-relativity which gives us both the concept of the singular, and also its multipliability; - for whatever the ultimate definition of the basic particle or wave function, it is many in relation to the unitary; to the bird, and man also and in relationship to the uncountable galaxies woven out of it. It is the "prime matter" of the individuation of "form", but the form is not a distinct principle of being from it. What we call the "form" is only the whole unitary and with its own principle of function as a unity built upon that lower, non-specific elemental field of force. It is therefore possible to know unity as singular, as nature, and in its relationship as this "sort" to all the Universe around which environs it. We do not need the concept of the separate form and separate matter, because the matter is organised form, as a unit, as a singular, as an intelligible thing or nature. We will need something like the Aristotelean concept of distinction of matter and form in man, of the entia quibus ens est: we will consider it when we reach it. Even within the concept one is offering, there is not an ultimate answer, not a perfect metaphysic of the real. To comprehend that, we would need to know if the Universe did indeed expand from a point of ordered  energy of unimaginable  intensity,  how there derive the basic elemental energies themselves, and how they are as "other" in form and function related to the initial point of relativity. This writer does not know. Nor at the moment does anybody else. The metaphysic here offered of the substance as singular and also universal in one singular reality and one simple but "relative" concept does one thinks, take us further than Aristotle. It will not be, cannot be, the last word. Within its own formulation here suggested there may be more to perceive, correct, and may be something to reject. St. Thomas could not have attained any such vision of the nature of reality, or of human knowledge, simply because he knew nothing about the evolution of matter, and nothing about the manner in which the principle of individuation, which gives us the species and the specific, was indeed a reality, a substratum of elemental energies which of themselves, like the materia prima of the ancients, are non-specific in their own "relative" entity, but the principle upon which many a unitary-in-relativity is built through space, time, and the ascent of life. If anyone had been able to make a synthesis of Plato, Aristotle, Leucippus, and Democritus, even in the ancient, brilliant world of those Greeks, we might much sooner have got to the heart of the matter. It will be noticed that in the system we are suggesting, the materia prima, however low in the scale of elemental being we take it, does have its own principle of basic intelligibility, in which lies the solution to the dilemma of the intelligibility of matter as "prime". It is in this utterly basic intelligibility that it is other than the unitary forms built upon it. In reality of course, in the living form, there is succession of forms of being which are in some sense complex unities,  - the components  of the higher atoms,  the molecules,  the proteins  and the building blocks of life, of DNA and RNA….. but whatever we say of all this there is only the  one  "me"  that  lives  and  acts  as  one  unit  of  this  sort;  whether  it be  myself,  or pussikins, or the bird that got away on the lawn.

An immediate consequence of the replacement of the Aristotelean system of knowledge  by abstraction  of an "essence"  which at least in complex  being became almost if not quite unintelligible, and its replacement by the intuition and percept of the singular in its connatural "universal" relationships, is the doing away with the necessity of the theory of the accident and the substance. Knowledge is of the singular "thing". This "thing" is also a nature or kind. This thing, whether as real being (ens subsistens), or as a possible a nature in the abstract, is defined within limits of tolerance within the cosmos, and more precisely within limits of tolerance of the environment of planet Earth. That is why we called it a relative form, when we consider the whole in the abstract, i.e. the conditions of its possibility or of its existence as a "sort". The very concept of substance we present is actually defined within limits of possibility and limits of perfectibility. For St. Thomas the oak-tree, or at least "tree", was not so defined. It was a pure, static formal essence, as fully defined in the acorn as in the great oak. All that acceded by change in the phenomenological order was an "accidental", non-essential perfection, inhering in the  substance  by subsistence,  but  not  of  the  definition  as  such.  In  the  system  we propose, there is an intrinsic perfectibility in the concept of the substance, which is now identified with the subsistent thing of a given sort: the oak is more perfectly an oak than is the acorn, but they must both be posited within the relativity, the elastic perfectibility, of the sort, the nature which is the oak. One of the facets of the philosophy taught to me as a student so long ago was that all the strength, beauty, majesty, and loveliness in the quantified of the material being around me, sun and shower, woodland, hill, and rolling pastureland, all this beauty and harmony of the loveliness of the creation of God was accidental  and  incidental  to  the  inner  reality  of  things.  It  seemed  an  intolerable metaphysic as well as an irrational one! There is no need to live with it.

The mind of man, the intelligence which guides and interprets the data of the brain, brought to the ken of the Greeks the perception of change, of the substratum which remains when "form" succeeds "form" and which is the condition of successive forms. The same intelligence saw at once the sort or nature, and the principle of possibility and universality, of "itness", this-kind-ness, which goes with it. Upon this base they built a brilliant solution, having from sheer common sense so much truth in it, and offering so many possibilities of interpretation and of use. They knew nothing about the real nature of a cosmos built by evolution upon elemental energies which, while potential to the higher form or intelligible "principles" of advanced life, did possess an intrinsic reality of their own. They knew nothing about the wonderfully complex nature of that world of ordered, non-specific, elemental energies which was, and is, the basis of the higher forms and natures of being, the basis too of the singular, the this thing, built upon such energies both as substratum (matter) and also as a higher unitary entity upon lesser unities of being which unto it, lose in composition their own absolute or "personal" entity as it, as "me". In saying this, we are thinking of the Thomistic teaching by which the attributes of the lower reality, exist as virtual but not fully formal in the higher composite being.  A  final  thought  now  comes  to  mind  in  this  matter  of  the  re-interpretation  of substance and act, matter and form. What is the formal cause of an entity so produced within the cosmos, as a function of being, a ministry within the material creation, and specifically within this planet? The formal cause will be that very function within a total environment  of being, living and non-living,  the equational  place in nature,  in all its checks and balances within the Law of Control and Direction upon which the so called "Big Bang", or ordered explosion of forms in evolution, began. Reductively then, the mind of God is the formal cause of the individual natures of the planet and the cosmos. God as true formal cause, is such only to mankind and the angelic nature. These are directly relevant for their very intelligibility and finality to His being alone. All that is lesser has its formal cause in its necessity or virtuality within the ordered energies and natures which have produced it; it is defined as a "ministry within Nature" as we have named it, taking a term and relationship from theology. At the same time, since all natures are interdefined as cause and effect, and they all act and interact as principles by which the harmony of the ascent of being grows, they may well be called "ministries" by very concept of Nature itself. Such forms may have their day, fulfil their function, and be cancelled, as apparently were the dinosaurs. Others may be wiped out by man, for good or for evil. They do not necessarily belong to the very fabric of Nature when man, the steward of nature is there to take their place, or replace their function. Nevertheless, while man, like God, is a disposer of "ministries" within creation, only with the greatest care, and humble foresight may he, or should he, interfere radically with the balance of nature  for  there  is  such  a  thing  as  the  unbalancing  of  a  basic  ecology,  and  the toxification of a living planet.

In the concept of reality and of "the nature" which we are proposing, certain other factors also come to light. In the Aristotelean synthesis, all forms of a given nature are formally, intellectually and definitively equal and same. This will not be so totally true in the percept we are offering here. The individual as a "sort" is subject to the interplay and pressure of the whole environment around. The species or sort is simply an aspect of the full meaning of its singularity, its individuality. Since the entity, as also its concept, is defined within "variables" it can be subject to change, even to mutation, and ultimately as a "sort" to specific mutation. In the Aristotelean synthesis all natures are, as formally such,  identical,  and  univocal  in  definition.  In  the  synthesis  we  would  offer,  actually nothing that exists is totally and utterly univocal, for time and space define its entity, and even to be different in place, space and time, is a factor which brings a certain principle of  analogy,  rather  than  univocity  into  being.  This  can  be  disregarded  in  the  basic elements, where at least as far as now known only place, space and time differentiate the elements, but it becomes a principle of deeper differentiation in the higher forms of life. There is too, as we know, a principle of mutation, not necessarily specific, built into living matter by the existence of genetic factors, and sexual replication. Even among "same  sorts"  there  would  be  a  certain  principle  of  analogy.  As  "sorts"  diverge  in evolution, we recognize a phenomenon (in the popular sense) which is difficult to explain in the biology or psychology of life for Aristotle,—the viable, but infertile or not fully fertile "cross". One is thinking of the mule. It is viable, and very useful, but sterile. It marks the limiting  case  point  where  what  seems  to  be  one  species,  or  sort,  has  diverged  to become another. It is neither incompatible, nor fruitfully compatible. On the philosophy we offer here, it can be explained,  because  the sort or nature is defined  within an environmental function and conditioning. This, at least in principle can allow for change, because  the  perfection  of  nature  concerned  is  relative  and  variable,  in  fact  and  in concept or definition. It is still of course quite possible to talk of accidental variants which are mutually exclusive, like brown hair and fair hair, brown eyes and blue eyes etc. All we  wish  to  do  is  to  enumerate  them  as  aspects  of  the  intrinsic  variability  of  the substance itself. They are not separable accidental qualities, they are only minor aspects of the variability of the substance as substance. Yet the substance is defined within limits of sort or nature. The effort to cross a monkey and a goose is unlikely to produce offspring  which  will  find  any  ontic  or ontological  equation  within  the  planet  and  the cosmos. In plain English, it is not on.

5 THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE

How far down the interaction, the ontological relativity of "being" do we go to vindicate the name of "knowledge"? I would take my stand with Aquinas, and argue from what seems to me the deepest of all the metaphysical percepts of St. Thomas, - the intrinsic and  proportional   analogy  of  "being"  in  depth,  meaning,  unity,  and  degree.  So considered, "knowledge" can be predicated of the meaningful interactions of the most basic elements. They "know" their entitative combinations and co-relationships; - those by which they build up "the other", the atom for instance, and all the equational relationships of the Periodic Table of the atoms. In this sense, all physical relationships of being and becoming may be called analogically a "knowing". We may go further. This "knowing" is also an interdefinition of being, i.e. substance and essence. It is not free. If it were, the harmonic determinism of matter within classical physics at least, and the harmonic determinism of the macroscopic Universe, the Universe in evolution, to ascent of beings and of forms, would be an impossibility. If there were non-deterministic "free- thinking" in the nature of evolving matter, then there would be an entitative randomness within the cosmos which would make physical evolution impossible. The galaxies could never have formed,  and whatever  one may think of the Uncertainty  Principle  within Quantum theory (the which I gather is now, very recently, being at least theoretically challenged) it cannot be interpreted as a basic random principle of free-will within nature and  physics.  It  must  be  interpreted  as  it  was  by  Heisenberg  himself,  namely  as  a principle of potency to be and to become.1  It is the very determinism of Nature which has allowed, in the ascent of being the very exact interplay between the controlling nerve centre, eventually the animal brain, and the interplay of other reality around, - the environment, to which that brain responds for its life-control and pattern of being. Thus the recognition of the nature, as that which is defined by a pattern of being and fulfilment can, by analogical steps, be taken back to the basic physics of the Universe. As "being" ascends into "life" and as the brain ascends within the complex versatility of advanced animal life, so the process of "knowing" becomes the more complex, and shows certain analogies even with the "intelligence" of man.

At all time however the brain is determined by the interplay of the brain with the environment towards the "knowing" of the individual, the singular; whether as just one or as  a  group  within  the  natural  habitat.  It  is  survival  knowledge,  knowledge  strictly patterned, - or one would prefer to say programmed, like that of the computers of man, themselves  built  up  by  the  study  of  the  animal  brain  and  nervous  systems.  It  is determined to the pragmatic effect. This way of knowing does not philosophize, does not abstract, nor does it invent outside the inbuilt variables of the animal "sort" or nature. The most advanced of modern computers can do just the same. The animal brain does not form nor use patterns of knowledge irrelevant to, and far beyond, the definition of fulfilment, individual and specific contained within the brain and the body of that form of life. Only man transcends these environmental limits of the natural inter-definition and causality  of  natures  one  upon  another.  We  will  find  this  interesting!  Even  on  the pragmatic level of man as "phenomenon" in the Kantian sense, there is the germ here of an  argument  that  there  exists  a  "something"   within  the  psyche  of  man  either phenomenon or noumenon (or as we would say phenomenon and noumenon in one fact and one concept) which transcends the office and quality in Nature of animal being, animal fulfilment, and animal survival. The knowledge of the human mind is in no way, alas, programmed  only for our personal and specific "good". Mankind might well be relieved if it could forget that knowledge of the energies which underpin the cosmos, and which will allow us perhaps already, but certainly in due time, to disintegrate life on earth and possibly the planet itself. Unfortunately, the "good" and the "bad" in this our human ability to "know" and to "will" cannot be so sorted into categories only of the good. The knowledge itself, like the energies cognized is non specific to any one finality, any end in view.  We  decide  the  specification.  It  is  interesting  that  within  the  evolution  of  the Universe itself, these mighty energies have, all through the cosmic process of evolution, been controlled and "specified" in the ascent of being, into harmonic interplay of forces, living and non-living to "good", to the equational development of harmonic balance. It may be a very primitive apprehension, but it does rather look as if there was in some entitative relationship to the cosmos, a mind determining the entire non-specific energies of the cosmos to one, universal specific harmony of the real. It may again be a primitive apprehension,  but  it  also  begins  to  look  as  if,  within  man,  there  is  some  power transcending the animal relationship of interlocked determinism, also able to apprehend the non-specific elemental energies of the cosmos, but woefully unable to direct such knowledge to an entitative harmony within the life of mankind, or the community of life upon the planet. This again is a discursion. One must not dwell upon it. We do however remember that little Christian children who are well taught (this will be a minority in the Western hemisphere) are taught that "God made me to His own image and likeness; this likeness to God is chiefly in my soul". In other words, we teach a substantial likeness, a likeness in the ultimate defining principle (personality) of human reality.

The  animal  perception  of  the  thing  known  or  cognized  (and  we  speak  in  an analogical sense) is of the unitary by the unitary. It is important to insist again in passing that while from a reductionist point of view it may be possible to think of the animal life- form as a wave-particle complex, it is impossible to apply such thinking to the living organism, its structure, its brain-environment relationship, i.e. the recognition of the individual of a sort, or to the subjective interpretation of a neurone input into the animal brain, which as sense input and neurone reaction, is the same as our own human sense perception. The determinism of the animal life form is not only in the lower elements of which it is made, but also in the deterministic unitary being, or in our own sense of the term, which embraces the whole subsistent thing (suppositum)  the "form". It is as a deterministic form, subject to variables built into the being, and variables imposed by the environment  around,  itself  other  being  in  constant,  meaningful  movement,  that  the animal receives as a unit, a "thing" from the environment, and acts as a cause within that environment. For example, kestrels keeping down the mouse population along the banks of motorways, are acting as units of a sort, upon units of a sort. As the process of evolution ascends to its peak in man, the new unitary harmonics of kinds and species themselves  work  as  new  principles  of  the  harmonic  law  of  control  and  direction perceptible and necessary for the ordered ascent of higher beings as "kinds". There is no desire to stress here points of philosophy which have already been argued at length in Catholicism: A New Synthesis so we are content with the essential percept that the entire gamut of animal life, whatever the degree of "variability" within which the form can exist, in fact and in thought, is completely contained within an organic, deterministic, but unitary interplay of its being (brain) and the environment  of Nature (other reality as factors  of causality  and  life-law).  In this  is not only  the  specific,  the sort  difference between the animal and the human, but also the essential proof of the other, i.e. the spiritual principle in the personality of mankind.

The sharp-witted critic might remember that earlier we postulated in the concept of substance,  as  "defined  within  limits  of  environmental  tolerance",  the  possibility  of mutation, even of specific mutation of type or species. Does this not argue a certain freedom from sheer determinism?  Actually it does not. It defines merely an organic potentiality to change and adaptation, even to specific change. It must be noted that all through the process of evolution with the development of being (the transit from potency to act, in Scholastic terms) every form of life as individual, and as singular-sort in one idea, has been, and is always programmed to the environment to receive its life- determination. Mutation, if it is progressive and not disease or defect, in which case in Nature it comes to die out, is itself in ways not yet determined by us, a progressive response to an environment which itself is moving. It is moving to that ascent of cosmic perfection which is crowned with the advent of Man. Nothing in Nature is without its control and direction.  Moreover,  no principle of freedom  from such programming  of brain and Nature is conceivable within the perfect and competitive adaptation of living forms to their environmental control. This is going to be important when one evaluates (but indeed it has been done in Catholicism) the Rahnerian and Teilhardian perspective of "self-transcendence" into the nature of man.

Where brain meets soul

If man has evolved from the anthropoid to mankind of the third millennium, then we have  a  major  problem.  The  pedigree  of  the  brain  of  man  is  embedded  within  the pedigree of the development of the brain from say the notochord over at least three hundred million years of evolution. During this time the interplay of natures, i.e. of brain to its co-natural environment, has been total. If the nature of man were in all respects the  same  as  that  of  the  animal,  then  the  interplay  of  the  brain  of  man  with  the environment should still be complete and specific, as it is still in the highest surviving apes. It is not possible along this path, to invoke a principle of self-transcendence, i.e. a becoming more free by degrees, within an entity said to be defined by matter and spirit as aspects of just one cosmic energy, i.e. "matter" as we name it. This freedom must evince itself along the way, well below mankind, and if it exists, it will of its very concept interfere with the correlation of brain, form, and habitat in which the competitive success of animal life does lie and has always lain. What can an entity do with a partial, a growing "free-will" and free-thinking "mind" which of its very definition as vague and unformed is at odds with the beautiful and programmed relationships of form and environment both require for continuing evolution, and in fact do demonstrate?  The answer to the problem of "Man", as one has discussed in detail in the work earlier mentioned, is unique in the history of the cosmos... but then so is mankind itself. It is necessary that the energies, powers, and form relationship of the animal brain, even in the anthropoid, shall be always in harmonic proportion to the power of natural law within the environment to provide a way of life. That way of life, as a programme of being, must still be specific and hence deterministic even though the variability and versatility of the highest forms, e.g. the anthropoid apes, is now at a peak of achievement within the  pyramid  of life.  There  is  an  inevitable  limit,  especially  within  a  relatively  static environment to the range of a life-cycle held within the exigencies of food, food-finding, familial  life  style  (the  highest  apes)  reproduction,  and  defence.  An  engineer  once likened it to me in conversation to the bicycle in relationship to man and human muscle power; - there are strict limits to intrinsic development.

A new factor arises, and indeed it did arise, if an animal brain, already at the limits of environmental control, should mutate further within the energies and capacities of the brain, beyond the power to be directed to any deterministic and new specific life cycle. Such an event should not happen. If it did it should be a diseased sport, a cancer within the environment of Nature. It should die, even if it could come to birth. It would have no inbuilt and intrinsic life harmonics between itself and the environment of matter-forms. The brain had always, through its entire pedigree been so relevant to environmental control and direction. The concept of a final ape half programmed to environment, and half wildly free makes no sense whatever of the animal brain as a harmonic of life order. There  must  necessarily  be  a  confusion  of  environmental  determination,  and  the organically non-related. Yet, it certainly did happen, for here we are, and whatever one's philosophy and theology of man, we are not deterministically controlled in our life-style by the environment of the jungle or the savannah. We can make an utter sense of man, as has been argued at length in Catholicism, against Teilhard de Chardin, if we presume a more radical and integrated answer. The brain in that mutant which is us, is in its intrinsic energies and potentialities above the order of environmental law to determine to a finality of being. Yet as organic, and as brain it still needs organic and intrinsic life determination.  At  the  point  of  the  supreme  mutation  within  the  power  of  matter  to achieve, this supreme mutant brain is now, of its own physical order and definition, ontologically relative necessarily and uniquely to a new and higher entitative principle, to which it is ordered in substantial synthesis of being: that principle is the spiritual soul.

This implies that matter and spirit are intrinsically  related  and compatible,  pace Immanuel Kant, and that man is at once a continuity within the development, and within the ultimate overriding finalism of the Law of Control and Direction, and yet withal, a special creation. The Christian will not be surprised; after all, the orthodox Christian believes that God is a spirit, the Pure Spirit, without any composition of essence and existence, i.e. entitative limitation of any kind. If matter-energy is created by God, then there is no intrinsic incompatibility between matter and spirit. The nature of spirit, as principle of intellect, is to be concentrated knowing and willing, as also loving, without structural parts or composition:- a living "it" of free thinking, free-willing unity. Man indeed is a composite synthesis, but through his organised matter, not through his ultimate principle of identity, - that which says "I" in him. Apart from the intrinsic contradictions which arise when we try to derive the free function of spirit from and through matter in evolution (and in any case we would have to start well below the anthropoid apes) those philosophers, especially Catholic ones, like Rahner and Teilhard have another difficulty. They  manifest  it almost  unconsciously,  but  it follows  from  their  thought.  They  have difficulty in believing not only in angels (and many of these philosophers and theologians do not) but also in the spirituality and Transcendence of God as Pure Act. Directly or indirectly, or else like Rahner taking refuge in sheer complex verbal incoherence, they identify God and the cosmos just as Hegel did. They believe in Pantheism, though they smother it in the name of "Immanence" as a form of Panentheism: i.e. all being as an intrinsic aspect of God, and God as the ultimate entitative "form" of all being. In this relationship they would better write it as "Being:, but it includes man's definition within the Being and the very Immanence of God. Creation for them is not truly contingent. For instance we quote from Karl Rahner (Theological Investigations Vol 5: Christology within an Evolutionary view p.170): "The one material cosmos is, as it were, the one body of the multifarious (his underlining) self-presence of this self-same cosmos and of its orientation to its absolute and infinite foundation.... For in his corporeality every man is an element of the cosmos which cannot really be delimited and cut off from it, and in this corporeality he communicates with the whole cosmos in such a way that through this corporeality of man taken as the other element of belonging to the spirit, the cosmos really presses forward to this self-presence in the spirit.... God does not merely create something other than himself, - he also gives himself to this other. The world receives God, the Infinite and ineffable mystery, to such an extent that he himself becomes its innermost life. The concentrated, always unique self-possession of the cosmos in each individual spiritual person, and in his transcendence towards the absolute ground of his reality, takes place when this absolute ground itself becomes directly interior to that which is grounded by it. The end is the absolute beginning" (pp. 170-172, the context is a strict continuity). To this writer it seems that while written by Rahner, the thought could as easily be lifted out of Hegel. For which reason one wrote that Hegelianism returns in Rahner, via Existentialism, and in Rahner's case influenced by the school of Heidegger. Rahner has an interesting habit of putting in brackets, or as an aside within commas, traditionally reassuring comments, echoes of traditional Catholic philosophy or theology. His  text  will  read  much  more  coherently  without  them,  and  indeed  he  shifts  the substance from within its traditional shell.

We are more interested in the delineation of knowing truly and humanly such, which will follow from our own the traditional and orthodox Catholic concept of the soul as spiritual, non-evolved, and making one composite substance with matter in man. In the unique case of mankind we cannot make the terms act and form equivalent to the whole entity of the being; differing only by a "distinction of perspective" (distinctio rationis) as we did for life below man. Animal life in its whole entity is defined wholly within a cosmic matter-energy relationship or order of being and actuality. Man is not. The material in man is so defined and produced up to and inclusive of the ultimate brain-mutation: then, this living matter, as a "formula of life" is aligned unto the soul, and intelligible as living only through ontic union with the spirit. In this context the "soul" is the "form" of the brain and the body of man just as Aquinas would define it. For myself I doubt whether the body as matter is the sufficient reason for personal human individuation. One admits to not having thought it through. These two truly entia quibus, body and soul, of the unitary nature of man are not aspects  of just one common  order of substantial  energy,  as Rahner and Teilhard would have them be. The soul both survives the dissolution of death, and is beatified in its own right before the resurrection of the body. But now, we are only interested in the soul as the eliciting principle of reflexive human thought and knowing.

The creation of the soul is the direct act of God. We should not think of it like something added in a human production process, and then the whole person rolls off the production  line as "finished".  In the process of evolution to complex life, the higher, unitary   form   of   being   remains   in   another   sense,   the   sense   of   physics,   a "complexification" of wave-particle energy. Why then is it a unitary "thing-of-this-sort"? First we concede it has, this higher animal other than man, been built up across long ages on a foundation of other, simpler complexes of being, which themselves are unitary natures, complex in relation to even more elemental being. The question remains, what makes such a complexification "unitary", i.e. a "me" and not simply a complexification of wave-particle energies? The final answer must be sought in the Scholastic concept of the concursus divinus, the fiat of the always immanent knowing and willing of God to the creation. For it is the knowing and willing of God upon this complexification which makes it to be this one thing, this unity in essential relativity, this more than a reductionist assembly  of  elements,  or  a  merely  incidental  and  accidental  unity,  a  unity  not transcending the order of human transfinalisation in the wonderful inventions of man. In God, this implies no sort of "ad hoc" interference, or "wand-waving". In the Active Immanence  of the Divine Pure Act, there is no sequence  of time or becoming,  this immanence  with  complete  transcendence  of  divine  being  is  always  present  to  the creation made by time, - and in time. Yet it is this concursus, this correlation of the formation of a "thing" as a unit; a person if used of spiritual rational being, a suppositum in Thomist terms, if used of merely material finalities, with the active creating will of God, which is the formal cause and reason for the intrinsic unity of the complex, relative, material entity. God knows it as this unitary "thing" of this "sort", or entitative function, in the cosmos to which its being is formally defined.

Thus,  this unitary living form, this "bird on my lawn" interprets  the environment within which it "lives, and moves, and has its being" as a unitary real (ref. Acts 17:28). It judges, i.e. it relates its being as "sort" to the interpretation of the environment of its life, through its brain, its formal and, final life-control. This interpretation of the environment, and  its  life-control  signals,  varies  with  the  structure  of  the  brain  of the  form  of  life concerned. Science has not yet got to the bottom of this relationship as structure with an inbuilt, definite  formality, but anyone, however,  little learned in science,  may see its effects. For example, if that "bird on my lawn" moves to the vegetable plot, and that bird is a pigeon, then my growing peas will have a lovely finalism for that bird and brain, which will indulge itself at my expense. For Pussikins, now skirting the bushy edges of the garden, refreshed with elevenses of "Top Cat", her débacle over the blackbird forgotten, my peas mean, fortunately, nothing at all, - just greenery. But the pigeon, that is a different matter. Should this pigeon be too greedily preoccupied with the pods close the ground, Pussikins pounce may be more successful this time! So, according to its nature, there is a differential correlation between brain and environment in any living form. This is the limited, specific, singular-sort knowledge of every animal kind. When however the spirit is created into the mutant brain which is to be the physical control centre of man this being is substantially defined, in its ultimate unitary formality and finality within a principle  of free knowing,  free willing, spiritual  and non-deterministic "form".

It is the whole "man" who knows;- body, brain, and spirit cooperate as one entity in harmony. The eliciting principle of knowing in man is this spiritual principle of intellect, the soul. As spiritual this principle is centred, neither deterministically ruled nor controlled by instinct. This spiritual principle will, though simple and centred, an "it" of perception in its essence, direct the brain in the unity of one personal awareness, one "I" to relate to, and know in unity, all the relativities of matter in the Universe. It is from within the unity of its self-affirmation that the personality of the human being will interpret all events, i.e. all realities within its immediate environment, and ultimately within the cosmos to the unity of the order of one process of creation. In this the soul in man will enormously develop the brain itself within a very few generations relatively speaking, from the point of hominisation. For hominisation we insist is not a gradual process. The moment of true reflection in man is immediate from the synthesis of body and soul, there is a new point de départ within the Universe, and also the peak and apex of the evolutionary process within the material order. Any further development will be within the order of the intellect and will of man as a spiritual being. Of all flesh that runs, flies, or swims we can say that within the Unity-Law of finalism within the environment of matter, "they live, and move, and are, and have their being". From the moment of man, we must say of him and her that within God alone "they live, and move, and are, and have their being". But St Paul, - his knowledge of the truth attained by the Greeks sharpened by the inner inspiration of God, taught that to us a long time ago (Acts17:28). We do not know yet how far, or for how long, there is, or will be, any intrinsic development within the brain of man in terms either of size or complexification, or both. We can agree with Teilhard de Chardin that in mankind, the genetic as principle of ascent in knowledge is far outweighed by the power of the cumulative addition and preservation of tradition. Each generation in this time and age, starts from a power base of knowledge greater in one generation than in hundreds of years among Barbarian man.

The "abstract" as approximation to the knowing of God

Our immediate concern is with the process of intellection, how to understand it. We suggest  that  while  the  animal  "personality"  was  unitary  awareness  present  to  itself simply in terms of immediate, determined survival apprehension, the personality of man, which alone truly deserves the name is quite other. It is analogical to the being of God: it knows with a centred "I" transcending all determinism. The being of God as Pure Act knows all things in their relativities to each other and to the Universe in one centred relationship of "I", one perfect penetration and immanence. The spirit of man knows analogically in the same way by the universal idea or concept. Knowledge is of the singular, and of the nature or sort. The data of matter-energy is provided by the senses to the brain, to the neurones in their as yet little understood relativity to object, and to man as subject. It is a less comfortable picture than the old Scholastic "phantasm". Yet, however the brain objectifies that sense impulse as for us "the picture in depth" within the brain, we have to conceive of it as a neurone impulse. We do not have a flat screen within our heads. It is the intellect as soul, spirit-principle which interprets first the individual, then the individual-in-relativity,  on which depends the final concept of the abstract, the relationship of "sorts", say atoms of hydrogen, in general, and in literally universal relativity. In this the human intellect apes God from afar. God knows all things in their individuality, and in their mutual relationships in entity. This the spirit of man cannot do, but in the conceptual as universal he does proceed some way along the path. We said earlier that we conceived of the process of knowledge as a sort of unitary "scan" by, and in, the spirit of the data and relativity of sense, without the determinism to this specific thing, or meaning, as in life below man. In the system we suggest, man knows singulars as singulars, scans them as singulars in all their entity, including the phantasm, the neurone input. The human mind knows them also as sorts or natures. This we have shown exhaustively is not an a priori synthesis or recognition. The animal brain, the very interactions of chemical elements etc, also do this, in a type of natural "recognition". The spiritual intellect of man knows and interprets this both as unitary and relativity, in the assertion of simple apprehension and recognition. In man the abstract is not part of reality drawn out as "form" by the intellect, it is the reality itself, apprehended in its widest entitative relativity, either as actual function of being a "sort", or simply as possibility to be. For mankind has knowledge also of the contingent. Man has knowledge of death and non-existence. There is no evidence whatever that an animal has either. It is inconceivable that such "relationship" should be within the scope of being and brain built for self-affirmation and survival only. Anything and everything which the universal concept validly affirms and supplies, can be granted and explained within the synthesis we offer. It will also follow that only man, and presumably  angel, can know "in the universal"  for  so  to  know  is  to  surpass  determinism  in  being.  For  the  Greeks  and Aquinas the power was built upon an abstraction which attained only a part of the real, something like, but actually a lot more than the noumenon of Kant. The phenomenon as such was unknowable, it had to be de-coded by the intellectus agens and the singular as such, the subsistent real, was beyond pure intellection within the intellectus possibilis, the intellect as power to become one with the knowable as such. For us, the process of universalisation, found in its basic much below the order of human mind, as the animal's reaction to sort or kind is known first in its singularity, and then in its essential and intrinsic relativity to the environment. For, as we have said, the very concept of "sort" within matter-energy implies the multipliable, the singular as many possible singulars, within a ministry of nature defined by function within the Universe as a whole, and this planet Earth in particular. In this system the phenomenon is the entity itself, as a whole, as "ens subsistens". The noumenon of Kant, the form of the Greeks, does not exist at all. This perspective is simply the relativity of the entity as phenomenon to other reality, and to its multipliability as unitary unit built out of lower complex elements. It is always a unitary-in-relativity, a ministry within the order of Nature, and in this recognition every concept which relates to the abstract, or the universal in ideas and in logic, can be accommodated. The distinction of substance and accident disappears as soon as the principle of intellectual abstraction of an essential form is superseded. We explain the phenomena for which the accidental form is invoked, within the concept of the singular as  a  nature  defined  within  intellectual  and  ontological  variables.  Only  within  these variables can the nature exist, and the nature is intrinsically subject to these variables. The concept of "the man in the moon" is a chimera. Man is real, and man as concept, a possibility to be, is not intelligible within the context of "moon" and its atmosphere, or rather lack of the same. The "nature" is defined within the environment as existential fact:- and also as concept, or form.

There follows, as we have written in earlier pages, that the nature is not perfect in its reality, in what may be called its ontic reality by the mere fact of definition. For the Scholastic, the acorn and the oak are equally the one specific reality as "idea". Any accretion  of  being  in  development  is  accidental  to  the  basic  definition.  For  us,  the definition cannot be "changed" by development, but the acorn becomes more fully itself, is perfectible within its own "idea" because that idea is "elastic", i.e. defined unto and within the environment of matter by the mind of God. This percept has the added advantage, important at least to the poet, if not to some analytic philosophers, that the beauty and loveliness of being in itself, and in its natural relationships, is not accidental or incidental, but the manifestation of the mature perfection of the form, - and the form, until  we  consider  man,  is  the  subsistent  singular  in  the  universal  perspectives,  or "ministry" within Nature, of its being. Up to now there has always existed tension, even war, between the philosophy of the existential, the singular as factual and phenomenon, and the essential, the knowledge derived through the singular of the sort, the nature, the universal. We are making a synthesis of the two percepts, and it is based on the singular real, because this is the actual grass roots entity. The philosophers of Existentialism either deny the concept of the nature or have grave difficulty with it. The reason is that the nature, or "sort" is a universal, or at least say better, a determinable concept. The notion  of  the  nature  implies  a  perfection,  a  way  of  life,  ministered  unto  it  by  the environment of Nature itself. In being built upon matter-energy the notion of the sort does always imply the multipliable, the many, together with the seeking and finding, the environmental ministry of a way of life and being. The multipliable in this particular sense need not perhaps be true of the reality or the idea of the angel, the pure spirit, but from this  we prescind  now. The  Existentialist  philosopher,  as also the Nominalist  who is usually an Existentialist at least in implicit principles, denies the concept and the reality of  "the  nature".  We  have  been  at  pains  to  show  that  all  existence  below  mankind witnesses the opposite. Philosophers so often begin to philosophize from man, and their own ego, that they ignore the testimony of the real below the human order, although they use and rely upon its data and amenities in all the aspects of their daily lives. Whatever Sartre might say, most of us would not like to rely upon the aeroplane, or even the horse, which was working out its unique, existential "nature" as it went along. For Sartre, man may be une passion inutile, but there is panic if something analogous is found in the structure of a Boeing 747.

Notes

1. Heisenberg, like all great physicists, including Newton in his day, is also forced to be a philosopher. The ultimate questions of physical science in the end become a matter of metaphysics,  that is to say the overriding  unity-principle  of all being,  of that which, whatever its degree and manifestation "is". I am not quoting Heisenberg, nor imputing any  such  thought  to  him,  when  I  would  say  that  just  as  in  the  concept  of  the proportionate analogy or inner content of being, in Aquinas' philosophy everything "is", so also that analogy of inner proportion is related in degrees to the I AM of God. There are many degrees of being, but God cannot be put into the series as one of a number, because in God the I AM is necessary by definition, whereas every other "I am", or "being", exists in the relative order of non-necessity. Its reality is a "gift" of God, it is essentially in the order of charity, not of necessity. The very meaning of Ontology which is the core science of philosophy as metaphysics  means, - the science of being as being, - the unity of intelligibility which is common to all that is, according to degree and order and relativity to the "other" and to God.

In Physics and Philosophy Heisenberg constantly recurs to the basic thought of Aristotle, and to the concept of matter as entitative potentiality. I have referred to it in much more detail in the first chapters of Catholicism. Heisenberg clearly regards the "uncertainty" or better' "discontinuity" principle behind Quantum Physics, not as a sign of some basic free-will in the origins of he Universe, nor as the sheerly random, but as a potentiality to be  and  to  become.  He  has  an  excellent  summary  of  "prime  matter"  according  to Aristotle, which I would venture to say has been "developed"  by Heisenberg  a little beyond the actual vision of Aristotle. Heisenberg makes of Aristotle's matter, precisely what I would make of it, and while not a scholar in the actual text of Aristotle, I would venture to think Heisenberg has taken Aristotle more correctly along that great genius's right  way.  It  is  impossible  from  the  viewpoint  of  300  BC  to  be  right  about  the metaphysical detail of the theory of matter in 2,000 AD or thereabouts. Yet, Aristotle does, in the concept of "potency to be" which is a positive idea, have something to offer now.

Heisenberg writes: "[For Aristotle] Matter in itself is not a reality but only a possibility, a "potentia ": it exists only by means of form. In the natural process the ‘essence' as Aristotle calls it, passes from mere possibility, through form, into actuality. The matter of Aristotle is certainly not a specific matter like water or air... it is a kind of indefinite corporeal substratum, embodying the possibility of passing over into actuality by means of the form ". (Quantum Theory and The Structure of Matter, pp 129-130). Elsewhere Heisenberg  comments  that Aristotle's  "prime  matter"  would  be our energy,  because nowadays a real distinction between "matter" and energy cannot be sustained, but "to every field of force (matter-energy) there belongs a specific kind of elementary particle, with essentially the same properties as all other atomic units of matter". It is precisely this specific kind, a real intelligibility in the definition of "prime matter" which one found lacking in Aristotle and Aquinas, and queried in one's early critique of Thomism. One's own  realignment  is  essentially  the  same  as  that  of  Heisenberg.  In  Physics  and Philosophy, Heisenberg "massacres" the many synthetic categories a priori of Kant. But one  cannot  delay  to  quote  again  and  again.  In  his  introduction  to  Physics  and Philosophy,  Professor  Northrop  remarks  that  Anaximander  (600  BC)  was  also  an influence on Heisenberg, a thinker whose ideas were "developed" by Aristotle. Anaximander seems to make Aristotle's "materia prima" to be the Unlimited, but out of this Unlimited, which has no specific intelligibility there is woven and spun through complexification (as Teilhard would call it) the diverse and specifically distinct elements of  the  cosmos  in  evolution.  Anaximander  does  seem  to  have  taught  a  process  of evolution, and to have made the Unlimited basically "God" in a pantheistic sense. Here again, although it would be incorrect to make him the distant ancestor of Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner, it might not be unfair to regard. him as a hominid ancestor of Hegel.

6 REFLECTIONS IN EPISTEMOLOGY

Some reflections in epistemology are now offered, but with very great diffidence. We dwelt a very long time on the nature of the animal, and of the ontological relationship of the animal to its natural environment, indeed to the cosmos, within which it evolved. This is because I have never read any "leading" philosopher who has done so, and because the a priori errors or insufficiencies of philosophers seem to derive so often from their failure to philosophize upon the data of material beings below life, and in the order of the living. Had they done so, in modern times at least, they would have perceived that the recognition of space and time is not a priori, and that the recognition of the nature, or sort, is not a priori. They would have obtained a leading clue also into the nature of knowledge as intuitional and perceptual, not abstractive, again from the analogies with the animal way of knowing and perceiving; even while we grant the analogical and in no way univocal sense of "knowing" as between man and beast. We have made it clear that for us the proof of the distinction between matter and spirit in man lies in the entitative determinism   of   brain   and   environment   in   the   animal,   and   the   unique   human transcendence of that order. Animal "relativity" in knowing does not transcend the phenomenon as "sort" and as singular, though animals can recognise the "many" in a limited  conglomerate  way.  The  animal  relativity  in  knowing  to  the  "other"  is  of  the singular and the sort. In this lies the programmed nature of a knowledge which is dependent upon the entirely organic, and hence functionally programmed, nature of the brain. The knowledge of man on the other hand is non-specific to given "sorts", and the relativity of that knowledge to other being as "other", but in entitative communion with the "self" it is both universal and as wide as the whole Universe. The free and centred self of man is concentrated in and elicited from a centred principle of "it", which reductively is the same identity as the centred self of "me". That "me" is free, i.e. not intrinsically determined, nor intrinsically determinable by the environment of matter. It is free thinking being, free willing being, and able to comprehend, and relate in phenomenologically unified percepts the entire cosmos, its nature and its laws of science. In this sense, science could well be rendered as "law of entitative knowledge". If we are asked to express in an aphorism the real distinction, the entitative distinction between matter and spirit as principles of being, we would say: intellect or "mind" is that which controls and directs, while "matter" is that which is intrinsically controlled and directed by mind. If man is as we explain him to be, certain interesting deductions follow. The most glaring inconsistency   in   Kant's   philosophy   it   seems,   lies   in   his   recognition   of   man's transcendence of the animal kingdom, the proof of which lies first in Kant's concept of the transcendental reason, and its total, i.e. cosmic, power as the unifying principle in all human cognition, and his insistence that this transcendental power within man must at the same  time be limited  by its communion  with matter  or in matter,  to the factual knowledge only of the material, i.e. the empirical. It would have made more sense to postulate  instead  a principle  of knowing  in man's  empirical  reality which intrinsically transcended matter-energy. In such case, in Kant's philosophy, there would have been in man a principle of "noumenon" which would have invalidated his claim that the transcendental reason could not attain to that order, if indeed it existed. The very proposition of the Categorical Imperative as Kant uses it, implies that God exists, and is to be placed in the order of the noumenon.  Since Kant presumes  at least that the personality of man in some way survives death, his entire analysis of the human person is extremely  incoherent.  Should  a principle  of "soul"  in man  transcend  the order of matter-energy in entitative being, then it does not follow that man, even if (which we will not accept) all his knowledge does depend intrinsically on the sensual input, is limited to the knowing with certainty only of the physically "empirical". If there is a principle in the nature  of  man  which  is  "transcendental"  in  relation  to  matter  (and  Kant  admits  his problems  with  the  transcendental  reason  and  what  we  may  call  its  "unnatural" metaphysical urges) then the affirmations of that intellectual principle beyond the order of the empirical, will not be intrinsically invalidated by synthesis with matter.

To this point we will have to return in more detail later. In our present context of the relations between mind and matter, we are interested in something more immediate. We have placed the intuition of the real in the termination of the brain in man, in entitative synthesis as "nature" with the infused spirit, which is truly immanent in, and to, the body of man. The most immediate function of the spirit as free and centred intellect is the intuition of its own reality, in synthesis with matter, and the intuitive perception of the empirical  world  ministered  by  sense.  From  this  it  is  to  be  inferred,  at  least  in  our synthesis, that intellectual knowledge of the material is easy to man. It is the very first rung of being to which its powers are entitatively related. The lower the order of material being, and therefore the more univocal the sort-same in nature, the more easily the human intelligence, - and this word more properly should be reserved for knowledge which is a full and natural cooperation of mind and matter in the human - can intuit its being  and  its  cosmic  relativity.  The  mathematical  is  that  very  "universal"  type  of knowledge. This knowledge is totally above the mere brain because non-programmed, and yet it deals with matter which is, at least as far as our present use and achievements allow  us  to  say,  univocal  in  nature,  "same-sort"   throughout  the  Universe.  The diversification  of matter through space and time, (although space-time is an intrinsic denomination  of matter-energy  in potential  to  development,  and  neither  an extrinsic category nor some sort of "container" within which matter-energies are "kept") does not seem to be such that it affects the very accurate use we can make of abstract mathematics, i.e. "pure" mathematics, to discover the most recondite engineering of the cosmos, or the use we can make of that knowledge. In the line of the ascent of being, mathematics deals with basic forms and same sorts, and number, measure, and weight in its most undifferentiated. I would expect physics and chemistry therefore to be easy knowledge to the human mind, because it is an order of being directly relative to the brain, but much below the order of the spirit, the order of the soul. Psychology will not admit of similar methods or criteria. If it does, it will be very false psychology, and much of now recently outdated American and Soviet Russian Behaviourism was.

Mathematics as "pure" reasoning concerning the more recondite mysteries of the physical  universe  is usually referred  to as "abstract".  The  term is true even on the system we propose, not because such reasoning applied to the basic energies of matter and their interrelationships, has anything to do with the Scholastic meaning of the abstraction  of intelligible form from matter, but because it operates on the basics of sameness of nature or "sort" in the basic energies of matter wherever they exist in the Universe. As an "abstraction" from individuality in any sense unique to the individual entity, the word is correct, as well as convenient and recognised usage.

Transcendental Thomism is often presented as an answer to the problems raised by Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason. The exact meaning of the term seems to differ from writer to writer. One of the founding fathers of the school, Rousselot, in his Intellectualism of St. Thomas does not seem to say more than this writer would fully accept. He seems to be saying that the Thomist concept of the knowledge of God, as found in Aquinas' own writings, suffers from the confusions of Aristotle's thought. At one time he suggests that God can be known, but not "attained" in any direct sense by man, because all human knowledge comes to us through the phantasm. By reason we know that God is, but his nature we know only by the via remotionis, the denial of that which He is not. In other places, not only when he speaks of the order of Revelation, and the life of grace, he clearly implies that some sort of knowledge of God "per speciem" is attained  because  of the  unitive  love  between  God  and  the  graced  spirit.  One  has touched on the subject in FAITH Magazine (July/August 1989 God the Real, can we know and love Him?, and also in the same Magazine March/April 1990, States of Love.) It  is  rather  from  the  desiderium  naturale  Rousselot  seems  to  argue.  Whatever  the dubiety within his philosophical system, - the insistence that the mind of man attains the "thing",  the  ens  subsistens,  within  a  framework  of  knowledge  in  which  Aristotle's definitions of matter as intellectually "unknowable" ensures that we do not attain the singular real in all its entity, - St. Thomas has other sources. He seems to relate the desiderium naturale - "the desire of God evoked from within nature by its own finality"- to the transcendental (i.e. non-material) nature of the soul, seeking by very nature its fulfilment  in  not  just  the  knowing  about  God,  but  the  possession  of  God,  in  that existential longing. St. Thomas takes it for granted that this can be attained only by turning to God, and seeking from Him alone, the means of this fulfilment. He remarks, and as all these quotations are basic stuff of the theological manuals, one does not delay to seek them out in references, that nature indeed has provided for all other creatures,  with  hair  and  claws  and  all  they  need  for  their  natural  fulfilment.  Man however, God has provided with natural reason, in which recognising the disproportion between his natural powers and their orientation to God their fulfilment, man should turn to God, who will provide him with the means  to attain this end beyond his natural powers1. The order of natural wisdom is made potential to the seeking of God, in the order of grace. I would not claim that St. Thomas teaches it, - but this seems to be saying, a view which oneself would prefer, that man is by nature fully intelligible only in the order of charity, - a view not shared by the Cajetanian interpretation of Aquinas in which I was reared!

God as transcendent, not the existential ground of man's being

There  exists,  one  has  read,  a  tradition  within  the  Jesuit  Order  that  Rousselot privately thought more. If all he meant was nature in man, as nature transcendentally, i.e. from the core of the spirit seeks God in possession, and is a "cry for grace" like an infant crying in its pram for the milk of mother, I would accept it. All Catholic Christian systems teach that God alone is the natural, as well as the supernatural, finality of man, in whatever distinctions of possible order they postulate that fulfilment of the nature, or in whatever differences of degree as joy in possession. If Rousselot means that we must free St. Thomas from the pagan chains of Aristotle, and grant that from the nature of the soul, there is an entitative, i.e. "transcendental", seeking for God, and all seeking implies some sort of distant "knowing" by which to "seek", an implicit knowing shall we say, he would seem to me to be within the bounds of rational philosophy and Catholic orthodoxy. Yet to be fully coherent within orthodoxy, he would be saying that since no created nature can have an intelligible claim from nature as a "right" upon the very being of God, who is incapable of essential interdefinition with the "other" the created, because He is the Transcendent:- then this intrinsic transcendental urge of the soul by which it seeks from nature but beyond nature to the Source of its nature, is in the order of the Divine Charity.

What we must not do, and it seems to me that Karl Rahner does it, is to relate God as "ground of being" to the very inner substance and core of the soul as in some way (for all erroneous concepts must be found to be interiorly incoherent) a part or aspect of the creature's being. Besides the quotations given at some length earlier from Rahner, there comes to mind that comment from vol. 4 of the Theological Investigations (p.116): "if God wills to become non-God, man happens". It is true that Rahner insists that God as ground of being is apprehended only as a most general "'horizon" and as a "great emptiness"  on  the  horizon  of  man's  entitative  seeking  in  knowing  and  loving,  an emptiness which can be filled only by acceptance and growth, by the inner word of God within man's spirit and the outer word of God's manifestation  in human culture and theology (or should we more rightly say anthropology?) in an order of charity. Yet, as has been said before, the concept is panentheistic and incoherent. If man, or rather a man,  can  refuse  the  intrinsic  redintegration  into  the  Divine  Transcendence,  what happens to his being, as grounded intrinsically in God, even within an order only of charity? There can be no bits of God whose transcendental ascent is lost to the Unity of the Transcendent. There is just no sense, ontological or ontic, in such a phrase as "if God wills to become non-God, man happens". God as God is Pure Act, unshareable in Actuality, incapable as being posited as the implicit ground of a return in beatitude to Actuality.  It may be a Buddhist concept, as it is certainly an Hegelian,  but it is not Christian, and moreover fails to make philosophic sense. Should people comment that one line taken out of a context never proves anything, one must insist a line can and does. For instance in Foundations2  Rahner has the comment that "of course", there is a sense in which Jesus is not God". This is in the context of making Christianity acceptable to "modern man", demythologising it in plain English. There is no sense in which Jesus is not God. The predication is of the person, and the person can be but one "I". Rahner of course has no coherent distinction between person and nature in his theology, and in more  than  one  place  it is obvious  that  Christ  is not God  in the orthodox  sense  of Christian  Faith.  That  orthodoxy  in  fact,  Rahner  again  and  again  impugns  with  the defensive accusation of "monophysite:" The nature of an entity designates the relativity of sort or kind. The person designates the ultimate finality of identity, the point of the affirmation of "I" to which all else is relative, whatever its nature, as "mine". In Christ there are two natures, the human and the divine, but only one finality, one person to whom both belong and which are integrated into that personality, that "I". In us men too, there are two principles of being; although not two natures, the material and the spiritual, these  are  not  the  same;  - but  there  is  only  one  ultimate  predication  and  entitative dynamism; one person who says "I" or "Me".3

Transcendental  Thomism  as it writes  in Rahner  will appear  to answer  Kant for exactly the same reasons that Hegel did. It has seized upon a fundamental weakness in Kant, - the recognition that the power to universalize, to abstract, and to argue about the total relativity of the Universe as one, as a "cosmos" implies a power existentially above matter, even living matter. The "unifying function" which Kant attributes to the transcendental reason of man has been all through history the basic attribution which has explained the human assertion of the "divine"; the power behind the temple, the gods, and the ethical and cultural life of mankind in society. The very product of the transcendental reason, looked at from this angle, has been, and is, so immensely higher than Kant's purely empirical knowledge. Hegel as we know, stood Kant upon his head, and made a much more potent and much more social philosophy out of the powers of man by so doing. The weakness of such systems, whether in Rahner or in Teilhard is that they yield to the temptation to make matter and spirit one order of energy, and therefore one order of reality. It is the easiest of temptations, especially to fallen man, whose clarity of intellectual perception is confused by the fact of "sin" and its damage within human nature. Transcendental Thomism of this ilk fails to see the uniqueness in the Universe of the free intellect of man. It teaches not only an analogy of being as entity, but an analogy of intellect indeed, radically a univocity of intellect in man and in the animal. For, if matter and spirit are but one principle of reality, distinguished  by degrees of one centeredness of form through complexification into the noosphere, we are thinking of the ascent of one univocal power, just as matter in its basic manifestation, what Teilhard would call its tangential aspect, is the same in a man and in any animal. If you reply to Kant by identification of the Transcendent with the transcendental in man you do not demonstrate the existence of God personal and transcendent; you identify God and creation ("if God wills to be non-God man happens"). You postulate the recognition of the existence of God as one with the experience of your most profound though  informal  core and ground of being. You ignore the protest of so very many people,  especially  males,  that  they  recognize  no  such  entitative  and  "religious" experience, and they want God "proved". You affirm "God" in this existential sense - for Rahner in particular is a synthesis of the Existentialists and of Hegel - not by demonstration, but by an entitative subjective "faith". For in this context "faith" is the existential striving of man to realize God in fulfilment of the empty "horizon" in which He exists in an in or non-formal way to the human personality in the beginning of human existence. It is the implicit reason why the "new catechetics" (horizontal indeed, in all senses!) which have wrought the loss of Catholic identity in our young these last twenty- five years, never even attempt to use "proof” of the existence of God. Why should they? They bow to the Antinomies of Kant. They simply presume, and indoctrinate by repetitive insistence, the recognition of "The Father". Any argument from potency to act, causality, contingency, in a word the intrinsic relativity of created being to the Absolute in which alone it finds its sufficient explanation is "out". However transcendental it may be it is not the Thomism  of St. Thomas.  It does not even answer Kant on Kant's own ground, because it does not demonstrate the existence of God as non-material and the totally "other" i.e. the Uncreated who as Pure Act is neither participated nor interdefined within creation.

The inadequacy of St. Thomas' theory of knowledge

Our next consideration is not a direct answer to Kant, but rather an insinuation that St. Thomas is not correct, on his own terms, to insist that all man's natural knowledge comes to him only or uniquely through the senses and the phantasm. Does St. Thomas believe that men can enter into contact with the spiritual order, as say mediums or "witches", or that "evil" spirits can tempt human beings or take over their spirit by possession or obsession? We know he would accept this possibility, and especially the power of evil spirits, under the general title of "the Devil" to tempt by influence  the intellectual spirit of man from within. Is this done by the power of divine grace, or the "draw"of the supernatural order on the mind of man? If a man is living in rejection of the grace of God, and is influenced by a spiritual power also out of the grace of God, then the common bond of influence between both the man and "the devil" must be a natural power of influence and mutual "knowledge".

The proof, or to be correct in at least Scholastic language, the demonstration of the existence, i.e the certainty and necessity of God must follow from the recognition of the certainty that the soul, or spirit, in man is a principle, however much in synthesis with matter,  of  simple,  non-material  reality,  not  entitatively  defined  to  its  proportionate fulfilment through the determinism of matter-energy and its living forms. We have dwelt on this at some length. If we add to this recognition of the meaning of "soul" a denial of that presumed knowledge by abstraction, a knowledge which ascertains only a part or a principle of empirical being, then we are well on our way. If knowledge is by intuition, perception, entitative affirmation, - call it what we may, then there is no distinction real or possible between what Kant names as the noumenon and the phenomenon. Because the noumenon is the phenomenon; the distinction being only one of perspective, hardly amounting to as much as may be contained within the Scholastic distinctio rationalis, - a qualification of logic rather than of reality. Then, the very root of the Kantian antinomy is cut away. We repeat the importance of recognising the soul, as a principle of centred intellect and also a principle of centred unity in knowing and in the affirmation of knowledge. In this respect Kant is confused, for while he insists on the need to discipline the transcendental  reason  and resist its tendency  to indulge  in a metaphysic  which transcends the empirical, he gives no reason whatever for the tendency and, in the adage of the ancients, natura nihil frustra facit, - nature makes nothing without its use.

If man were in the Kantian sense only phenomenon, or if being more he can know with certainty in affirmation of knowledge simply the empirical order, taking empirical to mean  phenomenal  only,  then  a  consideration,  we  may  say  an  abstract  of  animal knowing in awareness will give us what ought to follow and does. Within these limits, as we have seen, animal recognition demonstrates a knowledge of the singular as real, of space and time in relationship to its own "sort" and also a knowing of the "sort" of other being  in  a  specific  and  entitative  relativity  to  its  own  brain.  If  there  is  within  man, composite of matter-energy and spirit though he be, an entitative principle of intellect which truly and uniquely transcends  matter, then in that same order as mind it can transcend the deterministic limits of matter-awareness, which is in terms of individual fulfilment and survival, just as within its own composition as substance, it transcends the order and limits of matter. A principle of finality which is the ultimate principle of self- affirmation (that which says "I" or "me") and personality,  and which truly transcends matter,  has  at  least  an  intrinsic  potentiality  to  argue  to  a  Transcendent,  immaterial principle of all created entity, matter or spirit, visible or invisible. Once we are forced to accept the existence of the soul as true spirit, then the soul is within the empirical order. Kant is in error to limit the empirical order to the order of the physical phenomenon. The empirical is that which we can demonstrate as real from the real. That order is real which we can demonstrate from within ourselves by the intuition, i.e. dynamic perception, of our own being and its self-reflective freedom and all-relating judgement. It is because we demonstrate within ourselves the truly transcendental that we find we can, and must argue to the non-relative, i.e. all sufficient Transcendent. In terms of analysis, of power, and of proven achievement over all material energies and powers, we affirm within our being a unique, fully self-reflective, free-thinking, free-willing power. This is what is transcendental in man. It puts the transcendental into the order of the empirical and brings God and man, by a common factor of the entitative, into a common order of affirmation and then of at least possible mutual communion. One thinks Aquinas would agree thus far. It is the root of the only true, authentic Transcendental Thomism.

In demonstrating the existence of God, while we may underline in a deeper unity of theme and more detailed and majestic insight the reasons for the proclamation of God in simpler ages, we may not bring in any new principle of basic knowledge. 'We may not speak as if the sufficient reasons for God did not exist until our time, at the peril of making the certainty of God an historically relative process. We may however and we ought, to dissipate confusions of analysis concerning man, the empirical, and the modes of intellectual  knowing.  The  basic  error  of Kant  after  all, lies  in the  analysis  of the personality and powers of human nature, and the degrees of human knowledge. He would have been saved from the Nominalism which is at the heart of his system by studying  Nature  below  mankind  with  the  wonder  and  the  joy  of  a  child,  and  the intelligence of a philosopher. This is why we pored over the relationships of animal life and environment with such exasperating prolixity.

Securus judicat orbis terrarum!

The man in the street, as distinct from the student in the university or seminary, and the professors who rule their day, has never ever obeyed the detailed rules of either Kant or Aquinas, in his and her reasoning to the existence of God, or the reasons for its denial. They have never felt within themselves any distinction of noumenon and phenomenon. If they did they should be aware that ninety-nine per cent of the human race, in the street, at school and university, in the "pub" or in the discussion group have simply no intrinsic right to argue about such things! Against Kant here, purely as an argumentum  ad  hominem  (making  a  point,  without  full  analysis)  one  could  quote Wiseman against Newman, or St. Augustine against the Donatists - "securus judicat orbis terrarum" which is somewhat freely translated as "when ninety-nine are out of step, or just one, the majority feel happy in their judgement". The common folk argue from the intrinsic dynamism of their one unified being, and just as they sense themselves to have the power to argue from the natures of things, and the Universe as a unity, so they think themselves well within order to ask whether the ultimate and all-sufficient explanation and explainer is something transcendent like themselves, transcendent that is, in relation to  matter-energy  even  in life,  for  they recognise  intrinsically  and  often  explicitly  the essential difference between the wholly deterministic and the free-thinking, freely relating and ordering intelligence of man. At the same time, they would be surprised indeed to learn that they know the natures and realities of things by a process of pure lambent "form" from the gross ore of material reality. They take it for granted they know things as things, and recognize in them a universal relativity within the "sort" which is inseparable from their singularity and individuality. One would dare to flatter oneself that they would recognize the more philosophical analysis of that process attempted here, as much more what they really did than the process of Aristotle and St. Thomas. They would recognize a scan-in-unity of the phantasm (or to be more with it, a neurone input) rather than the de-lousing of the phantasm (or neurone input) by something called the agent intellect. An imagined unavailability of God to the mind of man has never ever cramped the style of ordinary people in their discussion and converse. Their biggest stumbling block has been, and still is, the problem of evil, and the multiplicity of religions, i.e. the uncertainty in detail of man's knowledge  of God; although  even now and in the West the vast majority affirm God's necessary existence. As the negative factors belong to the consideration of the effects of "sin" as an entitative damage within human nature, we do not attempt to answer that question now.

The ability of the human intellect to argue to the existence of God, in so far as we have an eye on the problems raised by Kant, depends first on the recognition that the synthesis of spirit and matter in man, raises the entire persona into the order of the spiritual, or if one prefers, into the order of the transcendental, with the meaning of that which transcends the structured determinism in knowing and acting of forms of life below mankind. Through the spirit, the sense world of Kant's phenomenon is translated into a principle of spiritual perception, free and universal in its ability to relate. Since the phenomenon is the noumenon the entire being of man is able to judge and affirm from the entire reality of the inter-related and unified cosmos. One has to confess that this is what the man and woman in the street, and the youth at school has always done and presumed at all times, from the sheer spiritual and intellectual dynamism of their being. You do not have to prove you have a soul to exercise its properties. You do not have to put your finger in the fire to prove that fire burns. What we are doing now is attempting to give a philosophical justification for the dynamic judgements of unsophisticated minds. If ordinary people do not think or reason within the limits Kant sets for them, neither do the same people think or reason within the limits of the detailed philosophy of Aquinas. This may explain the long depressed queue outside the rooms of some of us in seminary days. The shamans who were supposed to be initiated into this esoteric wisdom, had to provide homogenized notes to help the simple citizens through their exams. It could explain perhaps why they forgot every word of it, immediately after getting their "bene probatus" never used it again, and cheerfully and truly proclaimed that they never found it to be of the slightest pastoral use when dealing with the hunky and chunky people of God. The system of knowledge we are proposing is of use in the knowledge and work of science, simply because it does away with the distinction of substance and accident, and the static, univocal, and unchangeable form. Through the powers of the soul, simple as a spiritual principle of knowledge and will, this philosophy will justify the power of man to penetrate  to the depths  of matter-energy,  and rise to the heights  of God, and in a different relationship, communion with God.

Notes

1. There are so many texts explicitly and implicitly relevant to this matter, and the reader looking up one in a good edition of the Summa will find a cross reference to many another. Perhaps the classic reference is from the Prima Secundae, quaest. 5 art. 5, especially ad primum. The presumption is so clearly that there is no intrinsic natural end for man. Thomas does not even consider such, or he would surely have set the one off against the other, with his customary care. But, in addition, in the earlier quaestio, no. 4, there is a thorough consideration  of the requirement for perfect happiness, in which Thomas makes it so clear that only God, in his Divine Essence is the perfect fulfilment of man not only according to intellect and will, but also according to delectation and fruition. I notice as an appendage in my Marietti edition an uneasy little footnote appended to St. Thomas's discussion on Whether the Blessedness of Man consists in the vision of the Divine Essence (nature, or being). It reads: "What follows here concerning that natural desire we possess of attaining the vision of God, is to be referred not to that vision of God according as He is the Supreme Blessedness (summum bonum) but only as God is the First Cause, as appears from later comments in the text". This reads to me very like an uneasy echo of later Thomistic efforts to deny to man a natural as opposed to a supernatural desire of the Vision which is beatific. Myself I find no such echo in the prior and later considerations in the text, and much less so, in the earlier discussion on the nature of perfect happiness, or beatitude. There is here, as even more grossly in the subject matter of the nature of Original Sin, a clear break with the sincere doctrine of Aquinas, and consequential detraction from that teaching, in the name of later and knotty problems concerning the consequences of the Fall in mankind.

There are cross references in some of this matter, to the Pars Prima, quaest. 79 and 86. In quaestio, or chapter 86, Thomas makes it as clear as the noonday sun, that for him, the human intellect in its natural state on earth does NOT know the singular. He gives also no clear meaning to the expression "by reflection back upon the phantasm". He also follows Plato, in trying to make the universal a "higher mode" of knowing the singular, which of course could only lead us back into archetypal ideas.

It is a matter of interest too, that, in discussing the primacy of the powers of the soul in the beatific vision of God, St. Thomas as explicitly gives it to the intellect as Blessed Duns Scotus gives it to the will. If however one does not accept that intellect and will are faculties or properties distinct in any way from the substance or essence of the soul, then neither teaching is acceptable. In the philosophy one offers here, the intellect and will proceed  from, and define,  the very nature  of the soul as spiritual  essence  and substance. There is an ontic analogy of proportion between the spiritual being of God, and that of the angel or of man. Thus, just as the self-conscious possession of God Himself as the I AM consists in the existential generative procession of the Son from the Father, according to Intellect and the procession of the Holy Spirit, from the Father and the Son according to will so also in man, the principle of blessedness is in the whole person, in the knowing and the loving as one act without any mutual subordination of intellect to will, or will to intellect. The fruition of the beatific vision is not really vision, but possession which is the fullness of the Beloved known in the possession of the Beloved willed. As there is no subordinationism in the nature of God as Trinity, so also, by the same ontic and intrinsic analogy, there can be no subordinationism in the powers of blessedness through which the soul is defined in the image of God.

2. There is an interesting parallelism in Aquinas, Pars Prima quaestio 86, art 1: "Whether our intellect knows the singular" and Kant, as we quoted him in the appendix to Matter and Form: Singular and Universal. From the General Remarks, at the end of the first book  of the  Transcendental  Dialectic.  There,  Kant  denied  that  the "I"  as  subject  of thought, or as the ground of thought (italics in the text) was related to the categories. For such primary function of pure thought was not related to the categories, and there was no evidence in the act of mere thinking whether the ego was phenomenon or not. Since there can be no thinking however "mere" without positive self-consciousness and awareness,  which  is  phenomenal  in  the  Kantian  sense,  one  called  this  analysis "amazing". Later down the page he argues that to recognize myself as "I exist thinking" is "phenomenal" but precisely because of that it does not allow me to know myself as "noumenal". It is an analysis of self-consciousness as existential which, salva reverentia debita, is almost puerile.  It is expressed  simply to save his preconceived  and false analysis of human experience. At all costs, Kant must reject and refuse the possibility of recognising the "noumenal" within the "phenomenal" of man.

Now Thomas has an interesting reflection, which is the exact opposite of the Kantian: Pars Prima, quaestio 86. On Whether our Intellect knows singular things (singularia). The adversaries argue, in the third difficulty: "Moreover, our intellect knows itself. But our intellect is a singular: otherwise it would have no 'act' (i.e. entelechy or 'driving force') But the 'act' or 'entelechy' of beings can only be singular, individual. Therefore our intellect does know the singular".

Thomas answers ad tertium : "I reply that the singular is not incapable of intellectual understanding as singular (non repugnat intelligi) but because it is material: because nothing is understood by the intellect (nihil intelligitur) except in an immaterial way (nisi immaterialiter). Therefore, if something exists which is both singular and immaterial, as is the intellect itself, there is no contradiction in its being known (non repugnat intelligi)."

3. So, Kant rejects mere thought, which yet involves self-consciousness, because it is merely noumenal, and only the phenomenal can "get the categories working" and so count as knowledge, for all knowledge is of the empirical singular as negative noumenon at the best. Aquinas rejects the knowledge of the singular, because it is empirical and phenomenal.  However,  Aquinas  accepts  the  validity  of  self-intuition  as  valid  and singular, because the intellect as noumenon, positive noumenon, is immaterial as well as singular and, in union with matter, empirical. Thomas is the more logical of the two, but even Thomas takes no account of the role of the brain in self-consciousness, a role which is phenomenal, is sensuous. Karl Rahner, in this respect does do much better than either Kant or Aquinas, but only at the cost of making spirit and matter not simply a synthesis of energies distinct in ontic order, but of one common order. For my part, I accept the difficulty proposed as no.3, but do not regard Thomas's answer as exact, although it is true. Thomas makes here a dichotomy between soul and body in man, - while elsewhere he is always insisting that there is no human knowledge except in and through the phantasm (phenomenon). There is no problem if knowledge is by intuition of the neurone input by, in, and through the intellect as such. Actually, what I am saying could, as a mere possibility, have been deduced by Aquinas from his response to the third difficulty!  It was not, because it would have meant the rethinking  of the whole Aristotelean perspective.

7 THE INTUITION OF THE SELF AND OF "THE OTHER"

When we speak of the self, we have to use the word intuition because there is no further more underlying principle of proof to which we may reduce the experience of "myself". We may not argue from the external, and we will not find any principle more internal. All recognition of the real begins from the existential self, i.e. "my-self". For this reason in the  beginning  of  these  reflections  we  began  from  the  impact  of  the  real;  from  the existential dynamism of raw, dynamic, driving human life. All our philosophizing if it is going to be true, i.e. measured as an equational harmony with the real, must begin from, and reverence, the initial existential experience of "being". This existential is the order of being within which live, love, and suffer those teeming human hordes who in so living, working,  starving,  seem  to  have  neither  thought  nor  care  for  philosophy.  This "existential"  is  also  the  order  which  spans  the  more  ordered  lives  of  the  relatively educated and affluent. These too live and love with purpose; they suffer as well, but in the spirit rather than the starving flesh. They are men and women who incline the head with reverence to the sacred names of "culture", "thought", and "philosophy", but for the large majority judge this realm except on its periphery, to be far distant from their powers or their practical needs. Yet, as we surmised earlier, everyone lives by a philosophy of life, in their suppositions and judgements of value, - except maybe that first human class for whom the struggle to survive is so bitter and urgent a preoccupation that they are robbed of the power to be existentially a thinking human. Such bitter poverty of spirit and body  together  with  an  utter  heedlessness  from  "the  neighbour"  is  for  most  of  us associated more with the East than with the West. It could have some bearing upon the Eastern (yet never Jewish) preoccupation with, and passivity before, "fate" : kismet, - it is written; karma, it is decreed in your being.

In earlier chapters we pondered and sensed the raw, non-agnostic dynamism of life in  the  family  unit,  and  adjacent  to  the  school  playground,  where  the  would-be philosopher  towered,  but  not  in  ivory.  One  concluded:  Sum!  ergo  cogito.  We  could enlarge: I am,- therefore I think, and thence I act, desire, love. My I am contains implicitly my  thought,  and  my  act  in  will,  or  love.  Strangely  enough,  the  Ultimate  in  being manifests an analogy of its real. The I AM of God holds implicitly his Thought, the Logos, and God's consequential appetitive Act of self-love, - The Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father through the Word, the Logos-Son. It is part of the philosophy of this writer, that the analogy of being in the order of the "soul" between God and Man or Angel, does pass beyond the essential into the existential order, the conscious order of the self: we will not develop  it here.  Such  digressions,  which  will  be found  in other  places  and themes, are meant as a hint to the committed student mind that here is material for reflection and development. The digression is indulged partly from mental excitement, but more lest death overtake the developmental intentions of this writer, for all flesh is grass, and his own is in the sere. Perhaps the thought, the cogito of the raw dynamism of the playground  is very minimal, closer to an appetitive  animal reaction. Even so, implicitly it is mind-driven, even if the appetitive, the rawly volitive is uppermost. It is of mind and will; it is of soul and spirit, and the development of the individual beyond first- school age will endorse the assertion. Let the philosopher therefore beware of too sophisticated  a stance in the assessment  of human meaning, and the value of raw human judgement. It really may be possible to "stand back and take a good look" and learn something of value. The philosopher prescinds from the immediacy of the rawly existential at his peril. All else is built upon it yet not, one admits, without purging in the fires of close analysis. The philosopher must beware of establishing his methodology from too cerebral, too a prioristic a pitch. He may end self-declared as a cut-flower. Such flowers fade; they have no root, and they set no seed.1

The roots of the existential

There comes to mind an occasion during the Kruschev-Kennedy confrontation when nuclear  war  between  East  and  West  seemed  an  all  too  terrible  possibility,  of  an exchange between oneself and the chairman of the local Ethical Society. It was in the Guildford area. He was a Humanist, and a professed atheist. "It will be the end of the world, he said, - the utter end of all meaning in human society, if we survive in any form at all". To this your unregenerate servant replied: " It will be the end of your world, its easy affluent living, paper money Capitalism, and the pleasant agnosticism of the Establishment classes it will not be the end of my world. The parish priest is a primitive thing, sometimes a very primitive thing!". It would be the end of the world of the Agnostic, the sterile flower that sets no seed. In such a catastrophe there could be a return to the basic primitive realities of real money and barter, family obligations, and easy violence and easy death. Babes in the womb would live with more certainty however. There would be a return probably to a religion which was utilitarian and muscular rather than interior and contemplative, although it was of course the contemplative, hard-working monks who civilised the last Dark Ages. He was appalled at me, but I was not hoping for a new age darker than dark, but simply making the point that when "civilisation"  is swathed down, and society must regenerate from its roots, the priest survives, - but not the chairman of the Ethical Society.

We postulate the other as "other" only in an existential polarity to the "self". The self is self-assertion, the "other" is not. There is a necessary positing of the a priori; the existential aspect perhaps of the haecceitas, (i.e. the thisness) of Duns Scotus in this dynamism of the self. The awareness of the myself consists in that which I sense, think, feel, and above all control with self-determination within my personal ego, within the I am.  This  personal  finalism  redounds  into  the  principle  of  identity,  against  which  I measure the principle of non-contradiction, said to be the root of all proving and judging. There are so many existential impacts upon my existence, my thought, my finalism, my purposes, in a word myself which I do not control and over which I do not exercise this unity-in-existentiality which is myself. These "so many" impacts I call "the other". The "other" exists unto me for pleasure and for pain, it determines my self most intimately in all that I do and seek, especially in terms of immediacy; - the needs and survival of the bodily within my "ego", but it is not the eye of the storm of existence. We take this metaphor from the eye of the vortex of a storm: the eye is a centre of quietude and peace, around which swirl the furious winds and rains of the storm. The likeness is very partial, for the "eye" of the storm is indeed part of the storm. The analogy is not perfect, but it makes a point: the impact of the "other" determines me in the deepest manner possible. It decides my physical survival and certainly through operation and cooperation with the "other" I reach what I call my fulfilment. Yet, it is riot the me: in so many aspects of pleasure and pain, fear and avoidance, finding and losing, I recognise a most intimate bond of being to which I am intrinsically self-relative, but I do not intrinsically control it; it is not haecceitas it is not the me. Beyond this existential, self-validating principle of self- consciousness there is no further principle of experience to which to appeal. You are, or you are not: you cannot both be and not be at the same moment of experience, in the same place and same time of existentiality. Thus the principle of non-contradiction is only the more explicit recognition of the meaning of the self, of my personal "I am". If you are not, then there is no principle of consciousness around which to debate at all. The philosopher who doubts his own existence is like Satan, (but we use the word in a philosophical not an insulting connotation) "a liar from the beginning" (John 8:44)

Yet is there something in this philosophical doubting either of one's own existence, or much more often of the real distinction of the me and the other? One would suggest there is a certain principle which while it cannot in any way justify idealistic agnosticism, does go some of the way to explain its occurrence. This principle one suggests, and it is indeed a purely subjective personal judgement, - is the contingency of man linked to one of the effects of Original Sin. The contingency of man means that at the heart, or better say root, of our being there is a certain insecurity, a recognition of not-being, of a reality which is neither self-explanatory or self-sufficient. This recognition penetrates at times with profound melancholy and a quiet, civilised, good natured desperation, even despair into the lives of very ordinary, very non-philosophical people. Transferred to the spiritual sphere, and speaking only metaphorically but yet analogically, one could call it a terror of the dark. Perhaps when young especially, and above all in frustration of spirit, some of us have been acutely aware of this debility of the contingent, - we know not what we are, what we do, where if anywhere we are going. There comes to mind the verses so well known  to  Christians,  which  in  the  first  years  of  priestly  life  (and  frustration!)  one purchased at Mowbrays, the Christian bookshop (my copy does not have the name of the author): "I said to the Man who stood at the gate of the year give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown. And he replied: Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way!" Because there is, in all of us, whether we analyse it rightly or not, this sense of fear of the darkness, the nothing-ness from which we came in the beginning, and the course of the future, which lies neither within our vision or our power. There is a basic insecurity in this existential recognition of contingency, of our own non-necessity. We argue about contingency in the essential order, we use it as a proof of the existence of God. Do we fail to recognize that also we experience contingency, and its "out of nothingness into what? - perhaps nothingness?" in our existential psyche, our innermost spiritual consciousness.

The reader will wonder what all of this has to do with Original Sin? It has more to do with the penalty of Original Sin. The penalty of the sin which is the damage of our human stock involves more than concupiscence of the flesh or the spirit. It brings in also the burden of our coarseness of spirit, and even in the state of grace a degree of union and communion with God within our being which is much below the heirlooms with which God intended and intends to endow our nature. Again, we think and speak so much in the essential order, the order of doctrine, but here we are thinking of the existential order, which is also the order of doctrine, of doctrine as lived out in the individual life. Cardinal Newman, in his Difficulties of Anglicans has a passage which marks the lesson he learned before his Catholic days, when in fact he was Anglican Rector of Littlemore. It came of his pastoral visiting and conversational exchange, and moved the emphasis of his mind, originally evangelical, with orientation to orthopraxis, doing the good and living the good, to more recognition of the role of orthodoxy, as the sole light and long term guarantor of orthopraxis itself. We quote from FAITH (March/April 1988 Editorial Communion in God: the Identity of the Church) this editorial was in introduction to Dr. James Tolhurst's important work "The Church a Communion." The passage concerned ends "For the natural tendency of the children of the Church as men, is to resist her authority. Each mind naturally is self-willed, self-dependent, self-satisfied; and except so far as grace has subdued it, its first impulse is one of rebellion. In matters of conduct, of ritual, of discipline, of politics, of social life, in the ten thousand questions which the Church has not formally answered, even though she may have intimated her opinion, there is a constant rising of the human mind against the authority of Church, and that in proportion as each individual is removed from perfection. " The sting of course is in the tail, - in proportion as each one is removed from perfection.2

Many philosophers are more than a little removed from perfection, especially in the matter of unconscious arrogance of mind. Thus, the human spirit which tends to be uncertain, insecure, and agnostic because of the recognition of the non-ens within its being, can so easily pass into a scepticism and agnosticism which is at the same time quite compatible with self-adoration and self-sufficiency. "Eat, drink, and be cultured, for tomorrow we die". This agnosticism which derives from the deep half-conscious or even unconscious intuition of self-contingency is very far removed from the raw non-agnostic dynamism of the school playground, but then, younger children are very, very rarely tortured introverts, weighed down with angst. To be such requires both development of spirit and also the wrong handling of the intuition, especially if it pass into the conscious recognition, of self-contingency. God of course will be quite otherwise. The divine I AM is self-evident truth, love and abiding joy. In God there is no contingency. The self- contingency which can become the basis of doubt concerning the reality of the "other" and the reality, in terms of meaningfulness, of the reality of the self, is both a positive and  a  negative  aspect  of  our  created  being.  The  baby  that  cries  at  the  breast  for mother's  milk  could  be  said  to  be  demonstrating  an  existential  recognition  of  its "essential" contingency. Yet it cries in hope to receive its staff of life. In its entitative contingency, it proclaims, as it cries for milk, that its contingent being is relative to "the other" to that other, alias mother, who is made to provide, while remaining herself in the same order of contingency. But, there is nothing agnostic about the cry of a baby for its milk. In the order below mankind at least, the baby that did not cry, would be the baby that did die. At the root of this thinking is the surmise that the very intuition of our contingency in being can become, so to speak, a source of ontological panic, of an existential scepticism and agnosticism, and also that the root of this aberration is the greater, in proportion as the thinking mind is introverted into self, and into self- complacency and sufficiency. However self-centred we may be, however much our own self is made our God, we never escape this intimation of contingency which is more even than an intimation of created mortality. As for the baby which cries for milk with a demanding assurance, and a complete lack of ideological scepticism or agnosticism, an assertion which says "I am, - and I expect" the answer to the recognition, and also the terrors of contingency as an existential insecurity, lies in the cry, the upsurge of the spirit to the "other" who is there, and who provides. The terror of contingency then passes into the peace of belonging; again like the newly weaned child, according to the psalmist upon its mother's breast.

"O Lord, my heart is not proud nor haughty my eyes.

I have not gone after things too great

nor marvels beyond me. Truly I have set my soul in silence and peace

A weaned child on its mother's breast, even so is my soul." (Ps 131).

One would suggest, without any question of passing a moral judgement, that where the  inevitable  and  completely  existential  intuition  of  contingency  is  conjoined  in  the human spirit with total turning in upon the self that here we will find simpliciter, that is in its raw unprocessed ore, the existentialism of Sartre. Because in this intuition the self is not  presented  as  intrinsically  and  ontologically  co-related  to  "the  other"  there  is  no "nature" no structured looking to the other for fulfilment, no crying for mother's milk. It will be inevitable that man's nature essentially is identified with the changing kaleidoscope of his existential living. A man will "make his nature and his meaning" as he goes along. To me it seems a very short step, even an inevitable step, to proclaim the "absurdity" of human existence within such a philosophical stance. In so far as the "other" around man, the "other" of science, commerce, human labour brims with causal purpose and seeking, whatever the value of that seeking in the phenomenon of man, such a philosophy and such a philosopher is a living denial of his own intuited existential principle of identity. From this position of self-surrender to contingency as such, derives the despairing but yet beautiful  description  by Sartre of human  life as une passion  inutile.  There is of course a sense in which every bunch of cut flowers is une passion inutile, - beauty sterile of its promise.

"As new-born babies seek your rightful milk"

It is not necessary to labour in intense detail the intuitive distinction between the "me"  and  the  "other".  It  could  be  indefinitely  enlarged,  indeed  a  very  readable philosophical novel might be written around the theme. In every aspect of knowing and learning, in the knowledge which is natural faith, the knowing with which we assent to books, and the confirmation of such faith when we walk the streets and ways of ancient, historical cities; in the anxiety and pain of loss, the joy of rediscovery, in all that we name "life experience", even in the so personal communion of love with "an-other" existentially we intuit the perception of the self, through which and in which I base my I am. There follows  consequent  to  this  existentiality  the  intuition  of  what  is  intrinsically  and necessarily co-related to the self. However dependent upon it my very being may be, it is not-me, not that ontic principle of identity at the root of all my reasonings, all the making of beauty or destruction upon "the others" which emanates from the deep well of my-self. That  "other"  which  surrounds  the  my-self  is  the  very  meaning  of  environment,  the definition of its name. In its material and sensual impact, environment that is, our very agnostic, very Sartrean world is yet very essentialist, structured and "certain" of the need to safeguard the environment within which all life began and man himself evolved before the moment of man. Yet, when this type of today's man comes to relate to "environment" his own higher being, a being neither held within nor fulfilled within ecological Nature around  him,  at  once  he  denies  the  law  of  contingency  unto  dependence  and  unto fulfilment within which his own brain and body, and all life below him has been nurtured. It may be said that today's man denies not only a creating Father, but also the Divine as a nourishing mother: there is no milk for him. The human spirit dies of thirst, desiccated in the desert of its own vanity. Teilhard de Chardin of course has written astringently and beautifully of this intrinsic contradiction within mankind, the chaotic waste of potential, in his work L'Energie Humaine. Indeed so much of human energy, whether of the flesh or of the spirit is wasted on the formless and the chaotic. In this mankind is an intrinsic denial of the ontological Law of Control and Direction within which all things, including his own emergence as being, is poised. Out of all this looms more forebodingly, and gloomily, the relationship between philosophies of agnosticism and scepticism, ultimately of Nominalism as the intrinsic wound of Original Sin within the nature of man. It is self- evidently an intrinsic  lesion of the nature of man. The Christian  recognises  the raw dynamism of the life of man, in the flesh and in the spirit; in the yell for justice ("not fair") in the school playground, in the exigency of the wet nappy in the car as mother would drive  off  home;  in  the  initial  cry  for  mother's  milk.  St.  Peter  teaches  it  with  sweet simplicity: "As new-born babes seek you your rightful milk without guilefulness, that upon it you may wax strong unto salvation; if indeed you have tasted the Lord, and known Him sweet... " (I Peter 2:2)

For  this  is  the  answer  to  the  ontological  insecurity  of  the  contingent  spiritual creation, and the exorcism of its angst. Our being cries in the dark for its milk as an infant cries in its cot. The relationship and the very recognition is natural to us. The baby is insecure, as so are we who have grown old, maybe in our sins and our angst, but the infant's insecurity is totally positive, and non-agnostic, its cry expects, and its existential principle of identity asserts the concomitance of the milk. There is a lesson here for the agnostic philosopher and the pride of modern man, whose "ontological insecurity" is deepened into pessimism and the non-meaningful by loss of a connatural relationship to God. This is a non-meaningfulness itself born of sin, or as we said, say better the penalty of sin, all the many facets of which are covered by concupiscence in its deeper definition of all disordered desire. For even our natural desire of God, who is "father and mother" to us, is disorientated by loss of Original Grace, i.e. by the milk of God to which our very being is made correlative. This original state of inter-definition between  the  contingent  and  the  Non-Contingent  is  so  beautifully  rendered  by  the Genesis account of God, walking in the Palace Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening air, and calling for Adam his son, Eve his daughter: they had never hid themselves when they were naked and unashamed, only when shame and disorder had sullied their innocence. So can the nothing-ness of self-contingency disorientate the professional and the unconscious philosopher, - the man in the street. From the primary life urge to its natural development, he is exercising a growth both of spirit and of matter. All the operations of a human being which are profoundly ontological are operations of spirit and matter evoked as one principle of synthesis, and because it is through the spiritual in man that "I" or "Me" is predicated in such dynamic, entitative development towards the very meaning of man, it must be called a spiritual operation. Now, this entitative and existential seeking and development is both prompted by God at the moment of man, the moment of precise individuation, and also God abides with, and within, the soul in the "draw" upwards of his creative work. This "draw" is on the whole person, the flesh also through the spirit. In God this relationship is one continuous operation in the presentiality of the divine ACT to our being made co-sharers of the divine nature in beatific possession. Therefore in the human foetus there is an intrinsic orientation which is existential towards God, and from God a seeking and a "drawing" in the order of the spiritual finality upon that synthesis of matter and spirit. Anything which is an intrinsic finality, a "drawing" in the spiritual order, is in some sense of the word a spiritual "knowledge". This process will also be an ontological indwelling in the order of grace. Man is much more complex than the medieval theologians, with the partial exception of Duns Scotus, knew or could know. The human person, even a child barely into the double figures of age, who has a deeper and more personal awareness than is average of God, will show this "radiance" both in personality impact, and in the spontaneous actions, judgements, and play-interaction of childhood life. The interaction of body and soul in the human personality is a terrain still poorly explored.

When this is said there is, as hinted earlier, a sort of "knowing" in an analogous sense in the reactions of matter below the level of life. There is a sort of "knowing" based purely on sense perception, in life below the human order. There is a knowledge within humankind, spiritual synthesis though we are, which derives from, and may be directed towards,  pure  sense  perception.  A  good,  inventive  scientist  can  be  a  saint  or  a deliberate,  hard-boiled  sinner.  What  then  does  this  scientist,  -  or  the  average  man driving in the busy, ruthless city thoroughfare, attain by his senses? Is it the real, or only the mediation of the real, what the Scholastics would have called the phantasm and earlier we have called "the neurone input"? First, one would wish to take issue again with Karl Rahner, in his interpretation of the real in Aquinas, while admitting that Aquinas' theory of abstraction did and does bear such a tendency towards philosophic Idealism. Rahner writes:- "In point of fact the relationship between the content of knowledge and the  metaphysics  of knowledge  or, as the case  may be, an empirical  psychology  of knowledge,  cannot  be  described  without  a  theory  of  the  more  precise  relationship between  act  and  content.  One  could  for  example  show  that  Thomas  Aquinas's metaphysics  of  knowledge  rests  ultimately  on  the  fundamental  axiom  that  being, knowing,  and  being  known  are  originally  and  ultimately  one  and  the  same  thing: therefore  that  ultimately  the  object  known  is nothing  other  than  the  act  of knowing present to itself, so that the difference between the act of knowledge and the object of knowledge and the distinct character of this difference which is also present between the two, are secondary phenomena which are the expression of the creatureliness of finite being"' To my mind, this is an excellent summary of Hegel, and quite untrue to the doctrine  of  St.  Thomas.  It  is  true  that  St.  Thomas  often  uses  expressions  like  "in knowledge the intellect becomes, in a certain sense all things", but St. Thomas is notorious, and dare one suggest exasperating, in his use of expressions like "secundum quid" - in a sense, and "quoddamodo," - in a way, which are imprecise and not really helpful.  In  various  passages  of  the  Summa,  Thomas  Aquinas  clearly  uses  the expression "similitude" of the end product of sense perception.  He does not identify knowing and being known. Hegel does: and the Hegelian overtones of Rahner's thought are recognisable, as far as this writer is concerned, in so many of his statements. When a student, and first coming to criticise Aquinas' theory of knowledge by abstraction, one used to say that Aquinas was the distant forbear of Hegel. Later, student friends going to Oxford for degrees would tell me that Hegelians among the dons thought much the same. A theory of knowing which attains only that which is intrinsically universal, and leaves behind an aspect of the particular which is un-knowable, easily can identify the intellect and the intelligible known. We know that St. Thomas did not; whether his theory of knowledge is happily married to his robust commonsense, is quite another matter.

If the "other" is "other" then knowledge is objective

Where are we to put the final product of the act of knowing? Will it be at the other, in itself and in its being, or must we be content to say that the content of knowledge terminates   in   the   subjective   sense   impression   itself?   Commonsense,   and   the presumption  of all ontological  dynamism, whether the animal fleeing its prey, or the infant and its mum in the school playground, clearly opt for sheer realism. Unless he stops to correct himself as maybe an Idealist philosopher,  the scientist scanning an abstruse experiment in physics does much the same. There would not otherwise be the intense excitement among "the team", nor the rush to beat the opposition into the pages of the Scientific American or whatever. The answer to the problem of the self and the other is again a matter of the correct analysis of the existential identity of the self. It is a mistake to make an implicit distinction between the object, my sense perception, and me judging or knowing: the distinction is between myself and the other. There is an unconscious tendency, at least for thinkers trained in the Scholastic tradition, to think of the "phantasm" as a television screen placed between myself and the other. This gives: the mind knowing,  the phantasm,  or picture,  which is exactly  similar  to a television screen as I "see" an object, and finally my intellect judging the percept. This so naturally leads us to ask does my knowledge  as direct knowing attain the object as real, as existentially other, or is this knowledge only of the mediate impression, from which I must  argue  further  to  the  exact  nature  of  that  which  energises  the  "phantasm"?  Is Rahner treating knowledge of the other as purely mediate and secondary, in the sense of the phantasm as "television screen" when he concludes in the passage above quoted that the distinct character of the difference between the subject's act of knowledge and the object of that knowledge is "secondary phenomena (and therefore ontologically "accidental"?) which are the expression of the creatureliness of finite being"? It is psychologically important to realise that no television screen exists. There is a reaction of brain energy  and  structure  (we  called  it "neurone  input")  to signals  coming  from outside the self. Sometimes these signals appear to be a direct interaction between the self and the other, sometimes,  as in the all important  case of vision, a relationship mediated through a third constant medium. We can probably reduce all signals and chemical sense reactions ultimately to phenomena of an electronic kind. What we have in the end is myself, matter and spirit, acting as one principle of unity, to the direct or mediate being of "the other". We do not, in all obviousness actually and in act become the other, and it is better to say that through sense and spirit perception in one act, our " knowledge " terminates at the being of the other, as it is environmentally meaningful for our own being, for its survival, its fulfilment, or its destruction. If we speak of a reaction to "a neurone input" it is the whole myself which is aware and is judging: there is not a picture, a "phantasm" within my brain upon which the soul passes judgement much as a man looks at and reacts to a monitor screen. This would be too much a "horse and rider" theory of knowledge. In past chapters one has spoken of the spiritual principle in man "scanning" the signal or neurone input. This is and was to make a distinction between knowing  the  singular  as  singular,  and  merely  "abstracting"  one  element  in  the information.  The actual knowing of a human being is, at least in natural knowledge through sense perception, a unitary percept, difficult to define in detail, simply because the essence of man is composite, and has all the unity of an ontological synthesis. The brain and the spirit act as one unity in the reception and perception of that through which the "other" is known. This pattern is common to all humankind, and itself evinces the total inter-relativity in terms of purpose and end, of the entire material Universe; - the nature of "the nature", the interdefinition of meaning of all beings one unto another, and the sheer unintelligibility of old-fashioned Nominalism, or for that matter Agnosticism. If your body reacts to a hydrogen  bomb explosion  by total vaporization,  then there is nothing agnostic in the structure of your body as matter-energy to ultra-high velocity elemental energy. The reaction of the senses, whether in the animal, or in mankind, animal and spirit in synthesis, is one of total reaction to that which is meaningful and purposeful in terms of being, existence, fulfilment, survival. For that reason one suggests we ought and must talk of our knowledge terminating at the other as "thing" and "real" while  admitting  the  ontic  and  ontological  entitative  relativity  of  all  being  within  an equational Universe. This will not reduce to Rahner's interpretation of Aquinas.

It is objected that the relative and subjective nature of knowledge is proven by the fact that the knowledge mediated to man by the senses and interpreted by the spirit in that same one act, is in no way similar to the interpretation of that "knowing" in respect of say a wave-particle unitary synthesis, in terms of atomic and subatomic physics. There is an error implicit here. To be relative and subjective is not to be non-objective or even agnostic. It simply means that the knowledge of the world and of the cosmos, ministered by and through our sensory and spiritual being is relative intrinsically to the macroscopic world of human life and basic living. It proves only the entitative inter-definition of the world, of the living, and of the entire cosmos. These "subjective" forms of awareness and our connatural reaction to them are the condition of our life and basic fulfilment. The animal and the animal brain goes no further and achieves no further. In man, the final judgement power is the free, non-deterministic  soul, and so, in a sense, we are "all things".  But  this  "in  a  sense"  bespeaks  only  the  range  and  relativity  (through  the synthesis of matter-energy and spirit) of all creation, as it impacts upon our being, and is the heritage of our being. The point is made in passing how truly in this, the human nature of Christ, and the Sacred Head of Jesus Christ, is vindicated as the "Heir of the Ages" in the universality through the soul, of the knowledge range of man, and man's essential liberation from animal entitative determinism. The fact that modern man can know and define the nature of matter and material forms in terms of a more elemental energy through which the macroscopic order is constituted, proves only that the macroscopic order is true and made for us, in the basic physical nature and fulfilment of mankind. The fact that we can surpass this order of knowledge and perception, proves also that within our being and our psyche, there is a nonmaterial principle of energy, not defined to the deterministic action and reaction of the animal brain, but surpassing it in principle,  and  developing  its  powers  beyond  the  needs  of  animal  survival.  To  man belongs the dignity of knowledge for its own sake, a reflection of human nature as taken up by God in the Son of God and Son of Man. We can and do contemplate a universal glory, - the chimpanzee does not. We acknowledge that in God we live, and move, and have our being - and are. We acknowledge also that in the interplay of "the other" upon our personal being, especially matter upon matter, we also "live and move, and are and have our being" although in this aspect of entity not all our being; for God is the environment  of  man.  Yet  it  is  necessary  and  intelligible  to  say  that  mediately  or immediately we attain as real the real "other". The ultimate key of course is the exact, and in terms of immediacy sheerly existential, analysis of our self as first principle of identity, from which derives our a priori assertion of the principle of non-contradiction. There is a feeling abroad that to say "existential" is to imply the non-structured, the non- essential, the denial of form or nature. This is so false. It is a hangover from the systems of knowledge by abstraction, in which the existential is not fully known or knowable. The existential  is itself known as singular  only in an environment  of determinability  unto fulfilment, and this is essential to the existential. If all being is analogically related to God in a proportion of unity of entity (which is what intrinsic analogy means) then we have always had the clue. In God Essence and Existence are one ACT. In the creature too, especially the spiritual creature, there is no distinction of the essential (the universal and formal) and existential (the singular and non-determinable). The distinction between the singular  and  the  universal  relativity  in  the individual,  the  distinction  of essence  and existence, is in this sense of the use at least, a distinction of reason, and not of an intrinsic principle of being or of order.

Notes

1. A comment aimed at Bernard Lonergan, both in Insight and also, and much more clearly in Method in Theology.

See Insight pp. 253, 320-323, 412-416, 634, 646, and in other places. See especially General Transcendent Knowledge and Special Transcendent Knowledge. In page 646, Primary Component in the Idea of being he writes : "The Idea of being has been defined as the content of an unrestricted act of understanding", and later that "nothing is known (in the epistemological sense) except the content immanent within the act of knowing."

To me it seems clear, and from many places and chapters of the Method in Theology, that Lonergan is an Idealist who identifies the Transcendence of God within and from the Immanence of the concrete, for him, notion of "being" universally subsumed.

In Method in Theology especially, we are in the presence of sheer process theology, in

which  a  dichotomy,  actually  an  autonomy,  is  claimed  for  theology  over  doctrine  as defined. The opposition he makes between "knowing immanently" and "taking a good look", a description aimed especially at the ethos of the psychology of Duns Scotus, is really drawn from his refusal to make an ontological and an epistemological distinction between  transcendence  and  immanence,  and  hence  we  have  his  conclusion  that "nothing is known except the content immanent within the act of knowing". Basically his philosophy is a more coherent and much (in this writer's estimation) more thoughtful and beautiful form of Karl Rahner's.

Both men define self transcendence as growth into the being of God, in which "Act" all

being is known universally and in particular, and the "unrestricted desire to know" is satisfied in the unity of the immanent and the transcendent. One notices, both in Insight and in Method a complete absence of any concrete notion of Magisterium in the sense that distinguishes the Transcendence of God from the evolutionary development of the creature, and man in particular. Likewise, as in both Rahner and Lonergan, the concept of Original  Sin  in the  authentic  sense  of a  lesion  of nature,  and  within  nature,  is ignored. This will guarantee error in the analysis of the problem of evil.

The final peroration of Method runs as follows " While the existence of division and slowness of recovering unity [among the churches] are deeply to be lamented, it is not to be forgotten that division resides mainly in the cognitive meaning of the Christian message. The constitutive meaning and the effective meaning are matters on which most Christians very largely agree. Such agreement however needs expression and, while   we   await   common   cognitive   agreement,   the   possible   expression   is   in collaboration in fulfilling the redemptive and constructive roles of the Christian church in human society. "

It will be obvious to any pastoral priest that the constitutive and effective meanings do not very largely cohere: the eternal and pre-Existence in terms of time of Christ the Divine Word: the truth of St. Luke's Nativity chapters, the concept of Magisterium, as Divinity guiding development through the ages, any moral concepts whatever in moral, especially sexual matters, and the authority of God revealed in The Word, over and through the consciousness and conscience of man. To distinguish the cognitive from the constitutive in the Church is of course an impossible dichotomy, and fits in well with Lonergan's thesis that "Faith is the knowledge born of religious love" (Method, p 115) He subordinates constantly the cognitive to the blind draw upon the intellect and will of man, of God the "ontological draw" at the foundation of man's ontological being. His theology of "doctrine" is in fact a Fideism which fuses intellect and will in the common notion of "conversion" or the draw to God. In the end the final judgement of truth is the personal "interiority" of the individual in any religion anywhere. It will follow that for Lonergan,  as for Rahner, all "faiths"  are ontologically  the same "Faith"  in different cultural milieu and different stages of development.

2. The complete quotation in full context may be found in Volume one of Difficulties of Anglicans, lecture 10, Differences among Catholics no Prejudice to the Unity of the Church.

3. Quote from Rahner: Theological Investigations, Volume 21, Act and Content of Faith p152. There are so many passages in St. Thomas which might be relevant, especially in the Pars Prima, between Quaes. 50 and 90. My preference would be Quaest 55, in which discussing the nature of angelic knowledge, Aquinas constantly distinguishes the knowledge which is of the essence or from the essence, as in God's knowledge and the similitudo, which is the knowledge either of connaturality, infusion, or abstraction in angel or in man, according to the diverse powers of those natures. Thomas never identifies the knowing of the intellect and the content of the thing known intellectually. In my Quaracchi edition of the Summa Theologica, the footnotes by Sylvius are at pains to point this out.

8 THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

The proposition of the existence of God is a percept and an affirmation of the spiritual intelligence alone, in man. To be sure, the data of sense is the first, the natural, and we think always the most important gateway to the certainty of the reality of God. Yet, it is the spirit in man as a principle of knowledge universally, and without intrinsic limits, which allows us so to penetrate to all the powers and the limitations, and the interrelatedness of being, so that we rise to the assertion of God. In the animal, - the brain is everything. There is a unitary awareness, a certain knowledge of the self as "me", but it is circumscribed within all the limits we have pondered so often thus far. For St. Thomas the animal world would be suppositum, an awareness centred in an identity which closed the whole limits of consciousness. It would not be persona; for the person, from the very derivation of per se, of itself, in its own intuition is free thinking, universal awareness and self-consciousness. To us it belongs to range the whole cosmos in that meaningfulness we call "truth". The truth we ascertain is of the essence and being of all that is, in its powers but also in its intrinsic limitations. There is no animal with us on our way. The human mind is like a spacecraft ranging the galaxies. We are alone. The animal is safely, quietly, innocently anchored within the earth and the brain that lives by the  earth  alone.  There  is nothing  so dramatic  in contrast  with  man,  as  the  simple, peaceful, non-confrontational atheism of animal life. God is not programmable.

We begin within that unity of the spiritual intellect. We find it is indeed a sort of "scan"  although  we  are  one  essence  and  not  horse  and  rider.  We  intuit  all  the relationships of sense and sense data, but by none of them are we bound. We are bound  by the body in pleasure  and pain, hunger,  weariness  and urge,  yet even  in experiencing these with something of the urgent, specific dynamism and determinism of the animal, - in knowing and willing we stand above them. We can interpret as one above, even while we may fight for water in the desert. Through this centred power of "knowing" we enter within the essence of other things, of sense data itself, as it reveals to us "the other" with a complete universalism. We are our own spacecraft of universal voyaging in that entitative relativity we call knowledge: we are also super-man, no lesser form is with us. We begin with our self-identity. There will be no God to me, unless first "I am". As we said in an earlier reflection, we do not argue to our being from our thought. We do not experience "Cogito, ergo sum". We affirm our dynamism of being, we find ourselves  in intuition of self and of the other together. We relate as we "exist" and declare our self-consciousness as thought: I am, - therefore I think. Descartes' aphorism is in an ontic i.e. being-experience sense, essentialist. We would concede that in the affirmation of self-existence we are all existentialists. It is in the dynamism of being that we find ourselves in thought. It is the consequence and measure of what existentially we are, and the manner we relate to the "other" in which we swim like a fish; the "other" in which  we  are  immersed.  There  is  a  principle  we  draw  as  a  primary  assertion  and condition of the functioning of our being as intelligent. It is also a declaration of the nature of knowledge, further back than which, no man,  can go. It is the principle of self-identity,  in  direct  relation  to  its  most  common  application,  the  principle  of  non- contradiction. We experience "I am myself". How do we pass from the dynamism to the assertion that nothing can be, and not be, simultaneously and in all respects? We will find no principle to prove it, because the principle of non-contradiction is a reflection existential, not essentialist, on the manner and condition in which we find the necessity of our own reality. There is, it seems to me, an implicit recognition of contingency, and of a relativity of being, a nuance of dependence, in the assertion that one cannot simultaneously be and not be. If God exists, would we expect to find this principle within the Being of God? I would not think so. The concept of God is I AM WHO AM. There is no room for the recognition, implicit or explicit of "not be". If there is a God, all things created will be known to God as able not to be, for all their being is relative to Himself, and not to itself. In God Himself, there is no recognition of what the Scholastics call being "extra causas", outside, as now existent, the causes in which your being was implicit. God alone is always Explicit; because He Simply Is.

When we know the created, especially the first data of knowledge, the ministry of the senses to our spiritual intellect, we use implicitly in our judgements all the time, the principles of identity and non-contradiction. When we perceive the true, we are apprehending the perfect relativity of some thing, or some proposition of judgement, to the necessary conditions of its being. We are not going to follow this all the way through, but we do bear in mind that for the Greeks and for Aquinas, being, good, true, and nature (res) are synonyms, or rather necessary aspects, of the meaning of the real in its perfect  self-conformity,  its  truth.  Plato  would  add  also pulchrum,  the beautiful,  as a synonym existentially for what is contained in the concept of "being". Is he right? I would think he is, for beauty in this intrinsic sense is being as the joy of its own being. St Augustine will define such beauty as "the apt"; but it is the conformity of a being to the norm by which it is defined as both good and true. It has an existentialist rather than an essentialist tone, which is why one suggested that it is the joy of the real in its own self and reflection. God after all is beauty in the definition men give to Him. In this He is apprehended as the joy of His own Being, and the bestower of joy upon the creature. It is hard to define loveliness, except as the perfect; in that which is its own joy in self- possession, and the joy it communicates to another. To me it seems the more intrinsic and existentialist perspective of "true" and "good". As such one would judge it to be among the percepts of being which are "interchangeable" and fundamental.

It was suggested that in our own personal identity, we define our self as "I am" within an implicit non-sufficiency. We do not, cannot assert, "I am who am." Certainly, as soon as we begin to reflect explicitly we discover this entitative relativity in ourselves, and  in  all  other  things.  It  is  here  that  we  discover  causality,  contingency,  and  the principle  of sufficient  reason,  - i.e.  that  which  is required  for  the  truth  of  things,  in themselves as in their inter-definition one with another. The process covers the entire Universe. We do not presume cause, we intuit cause, and in this intuition we "discover" all the sciences of matter, all the entitative interrelationships within which "things" are bound, in order to be fully intelligible at all. One repeats that to know the truth, in any field of empirical knowledge, is to know the meaningful relationships to "the other" in which, and by which, its being is adequately defined. This is the older Scholastic adaequatio intellectus et rei, but the truth is some necessary relativity of the being as "res" either to its nature, or else to its environment and circumstances. The point has been  made  already,  that  the  principles  by  which  men  affirm  "God"  are  common  to primitive man and to modern man. The data for modern man is so much the richer, because all the diversity of the whole cosmos, is now manifest to us as focussed in, and from, unity and necessity: yes, even mathematical necessity. The best and most perfect expression of this power in man to relate the contingent, the dependent, and the partial to unity of order, and then to a unity-principle of intelligibility, will be found in the Psalms. There are a number of absolutely lovely "Nature" Psalms.1  The psalmist one observes, does not, with some desperation try to identify intellect and will, knowing and loving, in one synthetic power to prove the existence of God. He argues from intellect alone, he relates the order and the finalities of things, together with their own specific insufficiency to explain themselves or their mutual ministry, to a principle of unity above the order of their insufficiency. He relates this harmony of reality, this control and direction through mutual environment,  to a principle made like to himself. The existence of God as a principle of recognition, is then relative to the nature of spirit, as self-conscious order-in-relativity,  sufficiency  of  being  in  relativity,  causality,  and  meaning  in  relativity.  The Psalmist transcends the relativity of beings one to another as the final explanation of the whole…..he rises to God as commander-in-chief of being, in its very nature and in all its attributes. We must note that in so doing, the Psalmist is proclaiming the dynamism and the unity of his own being, the unity of brain and spirit in one composite principle of perceiving and assessing. As we have said before, in the experience of man, he is realising and experiencing, and affirming the dynamism of the spirit into which matter in him is integrated, and bringing it, as part of himself into the empirical order. If the spirit in the empirical order of man's own existential self-experience, is able to affirm the total relatedness to be and to become of the cosmos itself, then the same spirit is justified in relating its causality and contingence to something like in nature to a man's own universalism and power to cause, i.e. interrelate in order to bring to be. It all depends on whether in the penetration of the real, the phenomenal takes us into the nature as "sort" to the thing in itself, leaving nothing in the apprehension of the real which escapes us.

The relatedness of "essence" demands an "absolute"

The argument to the existence of God is certain as soon as the mind apprehends a relativity to be and to become which defines the created being in all its aspects as entity. The very notion of contingency is expressed in so saying. The evidence for us is more detailed and more overwhelming because of our awareness of a Universe which is an integrated equation of beings mutually causal one upon another. St. Thomas' argument from  motion,  so  long  as  we  use  it to  mean  the  potency  to be-come,  and  interpret "movement" as determined from within (not local motion) the individual, and the whole cosmic equation to bring forth, "make being inflow" into even higher complex forms in a cosmic unity and relativity must end at a "Prime Mover" in the sense of the sufficient reason. This is the Absolute to which all "relativity" all intrinsic dependence is defined for existence. In Catholicism one has stated that given what we now know of the Universe, we can state that Mathematics, as the most universal and basic relationship both of being,  and  of  becoming,  requires  the  existence  of  God  for  the  intelligibility  of  the Universe both for being and becoming. One cannot separate out the "becoming" from the "being". The relativity of essence is intrinsic to its nature; and its nature as the non- self-sufficient cannot and does not necessarily include existence. The dependency in being suffuses both the "sort" and the existence, what the Scholastics would have called to be " extra causas", existing real, outside the causes which in-flowed being into it. A respected  and  distinguished  professor  at  the  Gregorian  University  of  Rome  has suggested to me that all Aquinas' proofs of the existence of God depend upon extrinsic "motion". I would not agree. All of his proofs reduce to the relationship in very essence and existence of the relative to the Absolute. In all of these, but very obviously in the argument from intrinsic movement of the potency by which the unfulfilled in its nature seeks intrinsically for its proper "act" or form, this relativity is dynamic, and must also be put under the head of "motion".  In as much as Aristotle  seems to presume  that all material motion is local motion, it would limp as a proof. Yet, since Aristotle teaches the relativity of potency to act as an entitative movement of coming to be, he must surely have meant that all movement, as an expression of the coming to be:- that which is not at rest in its final fulfilment, requires to be intelligible a Prime Mover who is also the Pure Act. The extension of such an argument to modern cosmology, in say Catholicism, and in beautiful detail in Stanley Jaki,2  and less fully but convincingly in writers like Paul Davies and Fred Hoyle, is not only convincing  but the expression  of an insight still radically valid in primitive man. It is expressed in "man" more simple, but culturally very advanced in the Nature Psalms of the Judaeo-Christian Bible and its tradition. To me it is interesting that expressions like: "fool, can he who made the eye not see, he who made the ear not hear?" use the related, organic "wisdom" embodied in the physical organ, to argue to the matter-free Mind of God. It fits well with the suggestion that the soul as spirit raises the whole being of man into the free, non-deterministic order of the soul. A simple man can argue from the wisdom embodied in an organ of matter, to the primary wisdom of God, who is the "absolute" to that "relativity;" for the Jew knew full well that God had no body, and must not be represented under any image.

At all times, but especially in this materialistic age, the "cosmological" argument is the most important for the man in the street. He sees the essentials of it himself; the scientist and the philosopher can only elaborate it in more detail. The more detail does however increase the power of the argument to convince. In the detailed expression of the cosmological argument, the nature of the unitary, i.e. the higher form of life, built upon the basis of elemental energies and an ascent of living forms which are always in causal relationship within the environment, emphasizes again the "divine concourse". That is, - the definition of this complex of elements as this singular, living thing of this sort, as intelligible only in and through the Intellect of God, in the poising of the cosmic equation.  This  total  equation,  i.e.  interdefinition  of  realities  in  coming  to  be,  and remaining  a  cosmic  harmony  of  environmental  law  is  just  one  "present"  fiat  in  the Intellect  of  God.  For  the  non-self-sufficiency  of  being  created  through  evolution  as evinced in the cosmological argument, and in a difference only of perspective in the arguments from contingency and causality have a common root principle. The created, whether  as singular  or sort, is ontologically  relative  in all aspects  of its being.  The relative is the intrinsically dependent, the not self-defined in essence and existence, and to be intelligible ultimately demands the Absolute; or the principle of non-contradiction is voided.

When talking to the young, one takes the development of the world back in time (a form of de-volution because things unravel) to that pin-point of the primal explosion of energies which is the Universe "in the egg". Then one may, and rightfully does, ask where there may be placed the centred unity of mind which so orders these raw, primal energies that infallibly they bring forth the body of man, in the ultra-complex Universe of modern study and modern science. It is a valid illustration, because all movement is "mathematical"  passing  in  higher  complexes  of  being  into  the  "deterministic"  until mankind  the  free  and  reflective,  is  found  at  the  end  of  the  ages  as  the  crown  of universal, inter-relative evolution. The fact that at the moment there is no perfect communion  of quantum  physics  with  the  classical  physics  of macroscopic  evolution makes no difference. As the macroscopic is built up in very entity upon this microcosm, there is in fact a "passing over" of order, and of "potency to be and to become". We cannot make sense of a primal, democratic convention of raw energies, gathered to agree on the "plan" and "anthropic principle" which will bring into being ourselves and the cosmos we know. Yet such energies, as the building elements of things, sorts, and scientific laws do make sense if we presume A Unity-Law of Control and Purpose within which all energies, and all "events" and "sorts" are integrated at the moment of primal explosion. Of itself the primal energy, as manifested in the most primal elements within 10-43 of the first second of time, are non-specific to any one necessary combination and purpose. Yet we do find them cosmically so integrated. This cosmic Law of Control and Purpose in its ultimate and formal relativity connotes a unity of formal and final poising in being and becoming. This is the Absolute, a dynamism of Intellect, Will, and Being, which men call "God". Curiously enough the concept of this Absolute in its relationship to the Universe, and especially to humankind which is its apex and also part of its environmental relativity, is summed up in One who said, "I AM: the Way, the Truth and the Life" (John 14:6).

It so happens that one is writing at a time when the irrepressible Professor Hawking has remarked that if we can obtain a unified field theory of all matter-energies, "we will have understood at last the ultimate meaning of the Mind of God". A Times Leader has castigated  this  as  "a  blasphemy  of  arrogance  equal  to  that  of  the  Church  which condemned Galileo". Not at all: the insight is on the right lines, and very likely a unified field theory of all matter-energy will eventually be discovered. Yet, only theology will take science and the philosophy of science into the "meaning of the Mind of God" in creation. For the intentions of God are embodied in a cosmos woven without seam, actually and intellectually, culminating in the mind of man, and the Incarnation of God as also Son of Man. Primitive man was forced to assert a creator like unto himself, in the recognition of the centred spirit of man as mover, maker and then comprehensor of all the relativities of his then so limited Universe. Today the anthropic principle means both that the Universe is poised across the birth of the galaxies to produce us, and our kind. Thus we know that we are right to argue so to God, because the Universe makes a unity-sense to our brain and its senses, and to our spiritual and intellectual soul when we turn our persona to the comprehension of the laws of the Universe and to the uses of its "organic" engineering.

The ontological argument

This most fascinating and to this day hotly argued proposition, derives originally from St. Anselm. St. Bonaventure also uses a form of it, St. Thomas denies its validity. The actual concept of a Supreme Being, the being greater than which none other can be conceived, the necessary being, which also is the source and fount of lesser reality, - is this a coherent and valid concept? There is no contradiction in the a priori concept of such  a  being.  Even  Immanuel  Kant,  who  does  not  accept  it  because  this  is transcendental, "noumenal" reasoning, agrees, that the idea is fully coherent, and as the summit of the unifying function of the transcendental reason, even probable, but he says there is no possible way of demonstrating such an existence.3  The argument is not from the empirical, phenomenal order. For Anselm, and those who accept his argument, the argument  from the nature and concept of being, and the relativities  of being to the existence of God follows from the admission and recognition of the concept. Because, the supreme attribute of the necessary being, the being greater than which no other may logically be conceived, is existence. In such a "being" essence and "existence" are one same thing, and also one same, necessary idea. If this concept is necessary in the order of thought, within the transcendental order of the degrees of imperfect, non-necessary being, to make the concept of such being intelligible  at all, then granted the logical validity and apex of the concept, we have also asserted the reality. The idea is logically perfect,  and the relationship  of all contingent,  non-necessary  being to this Supreme Being  is  logical  and  perfect,  therefore  from  the  primacy  of  the  idea  alone  in  its relationship to the concept of lesser being, concepts drawn indeed from the empirical order, we can proclaim the existence of God. The concept of the necessary being is unique in our transcendental  reason, and also the postulate of necessary existence, even in the order of pure thought, is unique to this one being, which even in concept, is the greatest and the ultimate which may be conceived. Anselm is saying that we cannot think coherently without a concept of being, which is the key-pin of all lesser concepts of being, because without this supreme concept of Pure Being, no other concept of being, is feasible.  The very concept of being as the real, is as open ended as the actual existence of lesser being. We are not arguing, - or so he would claim - from the fact of contingency  to the fact of the Supreme  Being who by inference  exists and is Pure Perfection   (Actus   Purus).   We   are   arguing   from   the   a   priori   and   necessary interdependence of the concepts of the real which impose themselves on the nature of the intellect  itself. In the order of pure thought,  our lesser  concept  of entity,  of the possible but not intrinsically necessary, is not logically coherent except in the relativity to this  affirmation  of the  ultimate  Essence.  But,  the  Ultimate  Essence  is one  which  is inseparable, even as thought from Ultimate Existence (esse existentiae) because the Essence of God is pure Existence.

It is, I think I will be told, out of order to suggest that there is a clear parallel in this manner  of  reasoning,  between  the  Ontological  Argument,  the  argument  from  the processes of sheer intelligibility to the Necessity of God the Word (Logos) from the processes of the principle of non-contradiction in the mind of man; - to the fourth way of Aquinas. The "fourth way" is the argument from the degrees of being, and while not at all identical   with   the   Ontological   Argument,   I   myself   find   it  similar.   From   Cursus Philosophiae ad usum seminariorum, Vol. 2, by Fr. Charles Boyer S.J. (Desclee, 1937) I quote first, a "pure" summary of the ontological argument: "That which is spontaneously conceived in the very thought (conceptu) of the perfect being, has to exist in the real order: otherwise the very objectivity of our concepts perishes. But, in the concept of perfect being, that which is conceived by the intellect is the existential perfect being (ipsum ens perfectum). Therefore, that being must exist in fact (in re). "(Fr. I. P. Lepidi O. P)".

Further  down the page (Vol. 2, p. 302) Fr. Boyer has another  projection,  it proceeds: "The Perfect Being exists, if it is intelligible: but it is intelligible, otherwise imperfect (i. e. non self-sufficient) beings would not be possible, which is contrary to experience. Therefore the perfect (i. e. necessary) Being exists (Fr. C. de Beaupuy. S.J.)”

Boyer comments that this is Leibnitz's formulation of the argument of St. Anselm and is only a further development of it in the hierarchy of logic.

This formulation of Leibnitz, is very close to that which I would myself accept, but I do not think it is really and truly, at least as Fr. Beaupuy puts it, the pur sang ontological argument. Fr. Charles Boyer of course, repudiates the argument for the same reason as that given by Aquinas. Aquinas argues, and for my part I think he is right, that however much we argue from the concept of God as the being whose idea includes existence (whereas the "idea" of all else is potential and possible) this is not objectively  certain  as  far  as  we  are  concerned.  The  scholastic  terms  of  this distinction are:- necessary quoad se (in itself), and necessary quoad nos (as far as we are concerned). We, says Aquinas have to argue from the factual not the logical as such; not from the abstract, to the requirements, in the order of being, of the real. We apprehend by sense and by intellect. Kant and Aquinas are at one in this. Kant, because our intellect is incompetent to argue directly to the noumenon, the thing-in- itself, whether it be "form" as opposed to physicochemical forces, or whether it be "soul", the pure spirit as object. St. Thomas agrees that we have to proceed by abstraction from the concrete data of sense, from the phantasm to the necessary real. But of course for Aquinas the spirit in man as "form", as the principle of a free- ranging  intellect,  is competent  to  argue  to all  levels  of being,  even  to the  Pure Noumenon, to God. Kant, who was always attracted by the Ontological Argument, however much he denied it, because it was so to speak the "Original Sin" of all the illegitimate strivings and metaphysical temptations of the Transcendental Reason, rejected the argument because reason must stop at the order of the phenomenal. Aquinas rejects it because reason, to be the practical reason, must start at the order of the phantasm, i.e. the order of the phenomenon. We must, says Aquinas, in effect argue from things to The Thing, not from thoughts to the Thought, and then claim that this Thought is also "Thing" by definition.

Yet, one may ask, is not the whole controversy a little bedevilled by the process of abstraction whether in Thomism, in which abstraction alone gives the noumenal, the principle of intelligibility as also of "reality", or in Kant, in whose system the "abstraction" of the noumenal, the "real" form is illegitimate, because we have no way of knowing its existence  for certain. For Kant, the "form" or "noumenon"  of abstraction, what he calls the negative noumenon is only the phenomenon in its most universal relationships as "sort", or "nature". It is a sort of "concretization"  of the phenomenon, made useful for universal and abstract a priori reference, but in itself either nothing, or the problematical.

The question arises whether there is a hidden reference, almost explicit in Fr. de Beaupuy's "Leibnizian" form of the ontological argument. He links the intelligibility of the concept of the necessary being to the experience we have of the contingent. But the concept of the contingent is derived from experience and the empirical. However, even as concept, once formed from facts it requires logically the concept of the Necessary Being, the logical guarantor of both the contingent as real, and the contingent  as  logical.  This,  it seems  to  me,  is indirectly  to be arguing  from  the contingent as fact, and its mental representation, to the Necessary or Absolute Being as fact, because here the concept of the contingent is a posteriori from the real. To argue then to a logical need for the Ultimate Concept to be intrinsically necessary to the whole process of concepts, is in reality to be arguing from the empirical to the Necessary. That is why one suggested an affinity between the Leibnizian form of the argument at least, and St. Thomas' "fourth way" from the objective degrees of being found in creation. In the philosophy one has argued in these "Perspectives",  we would not be bedevilled either by the noumenon-phenomenon  factor, nor by the derivation of the concept by abstraction, which admittedly gives us only a part of the singular real. In our system, the concept is derived in man from the singular, which is invested with the characteristics of both noumenon and phenomenon in one reality, and in one intellectual intuition of the real via the phantasm. The thought follows the real, and is the "eikon" of the real. In this case, we can argue from the degree of lesser being to the Actus Purus, because our "thought" is neither, as intellectual, a part-only  percept  or judgement,  nor a phenomenon  only.  In human  thought,  the entire  persona  is  engaged  as  noumenon-phenomenon  in  synthesis.  In  such  a system, in which the thought, if true, is a reflection of the whole being of the real, then one must ascend to a formal assertion of the Necessary Essence which makes logical sense of every lesser concept. But, our thinking, i.e. thought "quoad nos", starts from the singular, but is wholly representative of the real. It will, an ontological argument of this sort conclude to God as the Objective Justification in every order, logical and factual, of the created entity. It will therefore be demonstrative; but let us observe, such an argument never loses its contact with the real quoad nos (in the empirical order) and it is not bedevilled either by Kant's refusal to see the noumenal as part of the empirical  nature  of man,  as synthesis  of matter  and spirit, or by Aristotelean refusal to grant to the human psyche an intellectual intuition of all that the singular is, in the entirety of its cosmic environmental relativity: i.e the singular as "sort" in a universal concept.

It must be admitted that the Ontological Argument, whether in the purely Idealist form, or in that form in which the concept reflects the necessary ontological relationships of the real in the consequential intellectual order is a dead loss with the "'man in the street". Pastorally also, with God's Holy People, it is best forgotten except with fellow philosophers. I have known seminary professors sneer also at the argument from the "degrees of being" in such a way as to derogate from all the traditional proofs given by St. Thomas. I would deplore this, because all the proofs from reason seem to me to argue  from  the  entitatively  non-self-sufficient,  i.e.  the  "relative"  taking  the  term  in  a dynamic sense, to the Absolute, again taken in the dynamic sense of Thomistic Actus Purus (Supreme Dynamic Being). I think the "fourth way" does prove. Yet, I remember across the years that when as a student one "did this" with Fr. Henri Renard S. J., a French Canadian, he remarked slyly in class in English "but I would not recommend this one, Fathers, except with poets and artists". At all times the Cosmological arguments from  the  total  inter-relatedness  through  cosmic  evolution  of  the  ascent  of  creation, together  with  the  continuing  environmental  harmony  of  life-law  and  causality  of advanced  unitary  forms  one  upon  another,  is  the  best  presentation  for  the  man  or woman in the street. It manifests a Unity-Law of Formalism and Finalism, i.e. Control and Direction, within which the entire equation of matter-energy is poised, and this is unintelligible except in the recognition of a Unity-Principle of Intellect and Will, not commuting within the contingency of the energies of matter.

The argument from Existential Experience

It can nevertheless remain true that there are many ways to God from intellectual recognition of the creation. This also must include an argument from one's own self, and the  argument,  used  as  long  ago  as  Plato  and  Socrates,  from  the  seeking  for  true happiness and blessedness. Of course, St. Thomas devotes a lot of space to this, as we have indicated in earlier quotations, but he is rather short on its existential dimension in the order of the grace of God. If communion with God in a living bond of intercourse is a fact, and it is, then it is going to affect the perceived reasons for which people, especially simple people and hardworking peasant cultures actually believe in God. It is absolutely necessary to demonstrate the certainty of God from extrinsic reasons of natural intellect. It is also true that we have no natural, per se intuition, either by intellect or in will, of God. It is however true that we have per se directly a seeking of God as first cause, and the source of being, especially as beauty; an inherent intellectual seeking and a yearning of will. We seek the source of the intrinsically beautiful as "wisdom", and we seek to love that Principal of all that is, as the good, in beatitude. We cannot lay hold on God, but God can and does lay hold on us existentially, not simply in the essential order. In which case the desiderium naturale passing into the knowledge of God as a living IT, principle of all being and sufficiency, and reinforced by the "peace which surpasses all understanding", becomes itself, because of the order of grace (even though this communion with God can be lost by sin), an intrinsic reason from the insufficiency of the human  personality,  together  with  the experience  of fulfilment  at the apex  of human personality, to demonstrate the existence of God. To say this is to say much more than Kant's Categorical Imperative. But let us realise that the Categorical Imperative of Kant was itself an argument, not in the direct intellectual order it is true but yet from the existentiality of the human person. If we argue from the experience of God "known" and "loved" in the individual, we are not making an argument which can be used universally. Some will not be in this state, others, including "atheists" may be in it, but will not be able to explicate all that they dimly cogitate and "feel". So to know and love God, in that order of the "Divine Indwelling" which is a basic doctrine of Catholicism, East and West and universally, does not imply the knowledge and love of God "by very essence". So to attain God by grace is transforming of the creature; becoming "cosharers of the Divine Nature", "when He is revealed we shall be like Him, for we shall see him as He is".

To  this  writer  there  has  always  seemed  to  be  a  fault  both  philosophical  and theological  in  Aquinas'  "all  or  nothing"  attitude  to  the  knowing  and  loving  of  God. Because there can be no knowledge "per speciem impressam"  of the Divine Being, since the Divine Being is incapable of either phantasm or intellectual "imprint", Thomas argues that God cannot be both known and loved in possession. The contradiction has been mentioned before, because there does seem to be a contradiction here between Thomas  the  philosopher  and Thomas  the  saint.  In fact in S.T.,  2.2,  24-28  Thomas teaches clearly that charity, or love, in the order of grace terminates directly at God, while the apprehension  of God as savoured  wisdom, does not. Augustine,  so often quoted by Aquinas especially from the book De Trinitate, speaks more warmly by far of a communion of knowing and of loving. Thomas does not allow us even by grace to "lay hold upon God" by an imperfect possession of knowing according to the intellect, even though he has stated that "grace is nothing else but the very beginning of the state of glory in us" (2.2, 24.3 ad. 2). In the state of contemplation, and in the order of charity as love in possession, Thomas allows that the love of God attains God directly, but that the knowledge of God in the order of grace is only mediate, i.e. we know at God, but do not know God. On the other hand we do not love at God, but we attain God as the terminus of charity. This one must say, seems inept. Why does God have to be attained totally by knowledge  or  not  at  all,  simply  because  there  is  no  possible  species  intelligibilis (intelligible representation or similitude) of God? The whole economy of the Incarnation, and especially the Gospel of St. John, seems to teach otherwise: God can be known as object - not just known at - and loved as object. Certainly when Peter replied, consummating his penance, "Lord you know everything, you know that I love you" (John, 21:17) his love terminated at an exterior and an interior knowledge of the one whom he loved. It is an adage of Aquinas that nil volitum, nisi praecognitum, and Aquinas admits it when it is put against him in the order of the love of God as object. One must ask whether his answer is not unduly clumsy. In 2.2, 27 art.4 we have, and it is necessary to abbreviate : "The unknown cannot be loved, as Augustine says (de Trin. lib. 10) but in this life we do not know God with immediacy, because we see as in a glass, darkly. Therefore, neither do we love Him with immediacy (immediate)... " Thomas answers: "God in Himself is the supremely knowable and lovable, because in His essence, He is very Existential Truth and Good, through which all else is known and loved... but as far as we are concerned (quoad nos) because our knowledge takes its rise from sense, those things are first known which are closest to the senses. The final term of our knowing is that which is most removed from sense... and thus accordingly charity immediately  loves God (by appetition)  and all else because of God. In our knowing however the opposite is the case - we know God through that which is not God (per alia). We know Him as cause through his effects either by the postulate of pre-eminence, or else by the postulate of negation by what He is not, as Dionysius shows etc". There it is, and I do not think that Aquinas ever coherently gets above it.4 Yet, it seems inconceivable that elsewhere Thomas can speak of the contemplative life as the love of complete union with God, whilst the intellect, itself also perfused by divine grace, may only know  towards  God but not know Him. There  seems  no reason  to dismiss  the solution which suggests that "faith", as the infused virtue of intellectual response to God as truth and wisdom, may also be a direct knowledge, however imperfect, which like the will terminates directly at God. The imperfection of human cognition much deepened by the burden of ignorance, crassness, and concupiscence since the Fall, could well act as a sort of pseudo-species which makes our apprehension of God by infused faith and wisdom,  so  very,  very  imperfect.  Of  course,  even  had  mankind  never  fallen,  our knowledge of God as an internal apprehension would still have been not by "essence" and still darkly mirrored. But, even if one sees in the polished metal or uneven primitive glass of St. Paul's day, what you see "darkly" and with distortion you do yet see directly: you do not see "at". St. Thomas' doctrine of the "natural desire" of seeing God, as we saw earlier, is taken first from Augustine, who like all the Fathers, never even thought of a real distinction between an end which was "natural" and another which was "supernatural". Aquinas, fixated by "the supreme Philosopher" (Ipse Aristoteles) makes the natural desire derive indeed from basic nature, but be inconceivable of fulfilment without man's turning to God by reason for the "means" which will fulfil him. In the mankind of history at all times, both in Aquinas and in Augustine and the Fathers, man has always been only in the order of grace. An essential question of course is whether all our knowing in this life derives only from the phantasm, the senses and sensuous. Many of us, like Augustine, would not concur with Aquinas and Aristotle in this. The soul of man has a double spiritual power, and these are linked as co-relative in the operation of human fulfilment. The human spiritual faculty is of both intellect and will: both of these are  perfused  by  the  indwelling  of  God's  Holy  Spirit  within  us.  If  their  proper  co- relationship in the order of grace does not parallel the order of very nature, as we find it through the senses, then our love of God through the infused virtues is indeed, and so incoherently, the love of the blind!

The   constant   requirement   of   knowledge   by   abstraction   and   our   human subordination to the intellect as agent (intellectus agens) is undoubtedly at the bottom of St. Thomas's refusal to allow our intellectual apprehension of God to terminate, however indistinctly at God Himself. The interested student will find the evidence in many places of the Summa, (Pars Prima) where Thomas speaks of the knowledge of the angels, and the distinction between knowing the singular which is immaterial, and not knowing the singular because of a nature which can abstract only from the phantasm. One of the most interesting articles is 1.56, art. 3. Here Thomas states that the angel because it is all spiritual and a perfect image of the Divine Nature can "know God" through its own natural powers. He does try to explain what he means, but as so often the quoddamodo (after a fashion) or in this passage the aliqualiter (to a certain degree) comes in to lend an infuriating element of sheer imprecision to what exactly he does mean. Yet, when one reads Thomas on the nature of love as communion and mutual inhesion, a love which is of the order of grace (as in 1.2, 28 and articles) the dichotomy between knowledge as prompting the content of love, i.e. similitude in the one power of the spirit, but union in the other becomes increasingly incoherent. As soon as Thomas is talking about the beatific vision of God, - he promptly returns to his basic principle of nil volitum nisi praecognitum (nothing is willed except as foreknown) and moreover, gives the primacy of fulfilment not to the will, but to the intellect! One could agree with Rousselot that the ontological doctrine of Aquinas is not fully consistent. Thomas does not seem to realise that the union of body and soul, matter and spirit, in man, is not meant to subordinate the soul to matter, but to elevate matter through the spirit to the full knowledge of God, manifest in the order of the Incarnation. There are so many passages where Aquinas speaks of the low order of our knowledge of God because of the union with the body, and  promptly  exalts  the  spirit's  manner  of  knowing  immediately  after  death.  One wonders why God bothered with matter at all! If Aquinas had seen the vision of the Incarnation through the eyes of the Greeks and Scotus, he might have realised more acutely that, while sin does cause all the "imperfection" he recognises, the soul of man in grace is well able to commune as properly in its order with God according to the intellect by grace, as does the will. And this of course is so obviously the teaching of St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, and all the great mystics who are the true existential philosophers of Catholic Christianity.5

If we are to fulfil the aspiration of the new Catechisme de l'Eglise Catholique that God "knows of some way by which the unbaptised little ones may enter into the fullness  of His salvation"  and do away with  the completely  incoherent  theological presumption of the Limbus puerorum, then it will have to be by development of the doctrine of baptism of desire. We can do this by the presumption that the animated foetus in body and soul, and specifically through the soul as the "forma corporis" (defining and unitive principle of man in the body) is sought by God in the Word Incarnate from the first moment of true animation. The response of the conceived foetus is a response in union and communion of spirit and matter. The very thrust to development of that initial life is to the fulfilment of its meaning in the knowledge and love of God: i.e. from the Father, through the Son, in the love of the Holy Spirit. There is no need of a fully formed brain for this initial response, which is always in the spiritual order through the soul, and always in the historic order of the supernatural. i.e.  divine  essence  finality,  of  the  created  human  being  at  all  stages  of  our development. Because the conatus, the "thrust" as St. Thomas calls it, the dynamism of being in both angel and humankind is unto God as formal and final end, it is suggested that we can assimilate man's knowledge of God by infused faith, to the manner of the conatus or "God thrust" of the angel. We may do it aliqualiter, as Aquinas puts it of the angel, with a learned imprecision. Thus there is a straight line of "intentional", i.e. intellect led, seeking of the foetus in the womb, from the dimmest grey line of the dawn of the inner communion of grace, up to the noonday sun of the highest degree of mystical union in the "Unitive Way" that short-lived "shadow of the beatific vision" as St. John of the Cross calls it.

The explicit and complete gift and status of Christian initiation into God in the economy of the Incarnation is given in the sacrament of Baptism. We always, and properly,  think  of it in  terms  of the  lovely  rites  and  prayers  and  blessings  of the sacrament of the font. Yet, in terms of grace and status, we have to remember that as much is given, by some sweet little Hindu nurse, in the premature baby unit to a tiny tot gasping its last, using the, form of the Church with water, with the intention of doing "what Christians want done" for a dying child. We already accept baptism of desire for the human being totally devoid of explicit knowledge of Christ, so we must not set the baptism in voto against the baptism of the font as two distinct entities. The one is the incarnational fullness of the other. We can take this barest minimal of the conatus of the knowledge of the spiritual creature all the way to that maximal knowledge of God possessed in infused faith, hope, and charity of Our Blessed Lady. She, in this life presumably  did not possess  the entitative  transforming  communion  of the beatific possession. Yet, if any one would tell me that Our Lady in her soul most pure, which in grace and dignity transcends the highest angel, did not "know" God by the direct term of her spirit, I will answer them in the comment of St. Augustine concerning Our Lady and Original Sin:- "that concerning the Blessed Virgin Mother of God, I will hear no mention of sin in any sense whatever". I will not accept that our Lady loved "at God" because she had allegedly to draw her innermost intuition of God from the abstraction of a "form" from the phantasm. It is not true that all human knowledge, even "`natural" knowledge, let alone that of the communion of sanctifying grace, is only that of the intelligible species drawn from the neurone impulse made by sentient objects within the brain of man. There are species intelligibiles (intelligible impressions) from matter, and species intelligibiles derived from the "play" of God upon the human spirit. The communion  of  knowing  of  the  soul,  that  by  which  according  to  Aquinas  "a  man becomes potentially all other things", is by intuition and inhesion, not by abstraction. If we can find a way round the need for abstraction we can, like Einstein, do a much more beautiful and unitive job upon the work of Newton. Without any reference to Original Sin and its consequences, it is certain that no created being can lay hold upon the essence of God by any created power of its own. If St. Thomas is to be allowed his imprecise aliqualiter concerning the knowledge of God of the angels before their beatification, then I would appeal to the image used by myself in an article in Faith Magazine: "That just as there is a link of union all the way from the sun ‘come up in power' of the summer harvest, and the first dim response of the wheaten grain six inches down in the gelid earth of March in our northern clime, so there is a seeking and responding in love unto God as term of formal and final fulfilment to the moment of complete transfiguration as ‘co-sharers of the Divine Nature". The first quiver of response to breaking the husk of the wheaten seed of spring sowing does not see the sun, but yet responds  to distant  light and a whisper  of warmth,  - the promise  of Springtime.  This  may  be  imprecise,  but  it  does  say  by  metaphor  in  the  order  of intrinsic analogy, something more than "aliqualiter"! Unless one accepts this analogy of beginnings and ends, I do not see what sense Aquinas can make of his statement that sanctifying grace “is the very beginning of the life of glory itself, and of the beatific possession of God. "

The Argument from Conscience

The argument from Conscience as it is presented by Kant seems unsatisfactory. The form of the argument as he presents it, does not allow the intellect any probative force, because beyond the phenomenal order the intellect is blind. There is a certain parallel  here  with  the  reasons  for  which  Aquinas  refuses  to  allow  the  intellect  in knowing to terminate at God as object rather than similitude. The intellect in Kant's projection,  is  bludgeoned  by  the  will.  The  intelligence  recognizing  an  "imperative" above its own power to "know" affirms from an existential imperative the source of the higher law, namely God. In such a relationship to God, intellect and will do not act as joint "harmonics" of man's nature. In an age of materialism, and of a self-sufficient, reductionist form of Scientism people can always affirm that the "conscience" is a relic of either caring, or of inhibition, found also in animals of quite low degree and nothing more than that. At root this would be a common survival mechanism of evolution itself. This is the easier to object against a perspective like Kant's which does not allow the reason  in  man,  whether  practical  or  transcendental,  to  rise  to  an  ontologically necessary affirmation of God. Yet it will be true that however much the imperative as I must or I must not is relegated to the rank of an evolutionary left-over irrelevant to the present condition of man, and historico-relative in any case, it will still derive from the nature  as  existential.  We  will  be  back  with  the  cosmological  argument,  and  the concepts  of  contingency  and  causality  again.  The  very  concept  of  the  nature  will always  bring  one  back  to  God:  if  not  by  the  front  door,  then  by  the  tradesmen's entrance.

How  does  the  argument  from  Conscience  look  once  we  have  convincingly demonstrated the soul in man as a non-material principle, one which lifts the entire synthesis which is man, "noumenon-phenomenon", into the spiritual order, through the human principle of formality and finality, - the soul ? It is really only the argument from the life-form of the animal, its nature, exigencies, and relativity of essence through the various perspectives of causality and contingency to "First and Sufficient Cause". But in mankind, it becomes a personal and existential argument, from intrinsic self- recognition in the order of freedom to a law of life and being. The recognition is that the human being is neither its own life-law, nor lawless. It does look to something in the likeness of man, i.e noumenal, and looks to that Noumenal as determiner of the finality of the existential entity of man. There is a problem, however, in the argument from Conscience. There is such a thing as a law of conscience, i.e. the recognition of right and wrong, which derives from the nature of man, as non-self sufficient, and looking for its own, spiritual environmental law, - namely God. Mankind however has never existed in "a state of pure nature" in any individual, or any culture of man, at any time in the history of the planet. We cannot in fact keep the relationship to man of God the Environer, the source of grace and final end, the power and the "draw" upon the human psyche out of the equation at any time. The person who utterly denies any sense of conscience whatever, at least as more than a utilitarian survival mechanism of the species, can be challenged on the intelligibility of the cosmos and of mankind, from the "external" arguments. The argument from the conscience, although true is a subjective argument, although one of great power to the "good". There is little doubt that, as much as the arguments from the intelligibility of the world and the Universe, this subjective argument has been and is, at the root of the allegiance to God of the mass of mankind, and of men in simpler ages and culture. I do not see that it so easily rises to God as personal "Environer" of mankind, and yet as fully Transcendent in relationship to the Universe. This can be done, by further argument, analysis, and judgement, but does not belong to the simple apprehension of the argument, at least not since the Fall of humankind from original grace and inhesion unto God. So many mystics, great and good souls, whether of Christianity or non-Christian religions, have tended towards, or been confused by the intimate relationship of creature to Creator. However, at least all of the great souls have, in reaching enlightenment in God, proclaimed a law and an order of the good, the true, the ascending, and the fulfilling, in relationship to God. Most, if not all, have proclaimed also the distinction of matter and spirit, in man, and in God, as the distinction of the lesser and transitory from the greater and the permanent. In the argument from conscience at its highest peak, we are dealing with the argument from consciousness, and in so far as this transcends the deterministic and the specific in life-value and life order, I fail to see how it can possibly be challenged. There is no animal, however high, which shows the slightest sign of ontic "looking higher" for the law of its life and being. Man is the only "animal" who looks beyond his sentient entity, and an inbuilt law of life, to the recognition of a law and an Environer, i.e. source of life-law and life-energy beyond the sentient and beyond the body. Man is not intrinsically determined. This is the point. Man is not determined by material entitative law, but however we express it, man is determined by need to seek, and need to recognise, a non-programmed, nonprogrammable Law of life and being. The argument from conscience is of course bedevilled literally by all the arguments  and  problems  of evil which  derive  from  human  sin,  self-adoration, arrogance, and ignorance. We are all so afflicted in varying degrees. To follow this out in full would be far beyond the scope of this perspective. There is no brief dealing with the problem of evil as such, and in this section we are not pondering the problem as such. Religion and conscience can be used deliberately, or by distortion, to justify the greatest  evils, as well as the greatest  good. However  no family lives sweetly,  no human psyche lives and loves without recognition of good and of evil. The order of nature becomes one with the order of grace, because the natural desire of human beings for truth and for happiness is not, and historically cannot, be found within the same peaceful atheism as the animal world. Yet, one repeats: the argument from conscience is personal and subjective, it is variable indeed in its power to convince. For the man or woman who has come to know and love God as a Living IT of wisdom and joy, sweetness and fulfilment, the argument from conscience, simply because it is existential, passes into an argument from possession: but as such it cannot be passed on to others. You do not doubt what you already know and love. This may be a knowing as in a mirror of ancient times, a glass showing darkly. It may be an order of charity which is imperfect, and incomplete, still dominated by faith and hope. Nevertheless it is an argument not just from conscience but from consciousness. This is the apex to which the argument from conscience leads. There are many ways to God, and the sweetest is the argument from possession. To quote a beautiful hymn: "But what to those who find? Ah this, nor pen, nor tongue can show. The love of Jesus, what it is, none but His lovers know. " It is the fruit of such possession which will give conviction and hope to others. The argument from the wonder, order, and inter-definition of Nature has always been an argument to every human culture. But now, and perhaps even more in the beginning of ancient civilisations, at least among the less affluent and "imperial" tribes, the argument from "conscience" has linked up as one, with the more external argument, deepening in power according to the communion with God of the individual. It is confirmed by the greatness and goodness of soul of priest and prophet, the "holy" man and the "holy" woman: the Enlightened ones.

In Conclusion

Some modern dictionaries of philosophy could be said to "cheat" a little in their definitions of matter and form. Aquinas and the Scholastics normally define "matter" and "materia prima" as the substratum of change in respect of the principle of "form" in the composite  substance,  i.e. the substance  and form of the empirical,  sensuous  world known to our intellect indeed, but only through the order of our animal senses. In other words, "matter" and "form" delineate the Universe as we know it, the Universe. of the Kantian phenomenon, and negative noumenon. Neither Thomas nor Aristotle when they argue of the metaphysics which is the ultimate unity-principle of the world of physics use matter and form as one principle of being and becoming with the world of the purely spiritual, and purely intelligible. It is the problem of the substratum which allows of the principle of formal change in "material being". That is the being which is the proper object of sense knowledge, and which evokes the doctrine of the "phantasm" and the "agent intellect". There is a tendency among the moderns to define potency as such, the power to be in one common order of entity as principle, with the "matter and form" of the "composite  substance".  This  is  very  convenient  for  those  modern  philosophers,  like Rahner who define matter and spirit within one common order of being, indeed in one common order of the real with God ultimately, by a process of Panentheism.

Aristotle  sometimes  speaks with a certain ambiguity of "matter" in the sense of potentiality to change in any sense of the word change. This is in part at least because of the ancients mistaken belief that the heavenly bodies were composed of a special sort of "matter" and "form", because they were changeless, and incapable of generation in any sense of the word. So, we read Aristotle in the Metaphysics:  (Prime Mover, bk Lamda): "Now while everything that changes has matter, different things have different kinds of matter. Eternal things, which though incapable of generation, are movable in space, have matter, not the matter presupposed by generation but that presupposed by locomotion". Aristotle would, as also one must think Aquinas, see "potentiality in being", from the highest angel, to the least atom, to be in some way a common "genus" because all are intrinsically relative to be and to become. However, neither ever would, or ever did, see "matter" as one common species or "kind" of substratum. Indeed in the same brief book of the Metaphysica, (Lamda) Aristotle writes: "Substance cognisant to sense perception is mutable, and since change is from one opposite or an intermediate to the other opposite, there must be some substratum which changes into the contrary state for the contraries, (i.e. the forms, E.H.), do not change, and this substratum remains when the contraries do not, this substratum is matter".

Aristotle, even when he uses "matter" to delineate an underlying "power to be and to become" is always speaking of this in terms of that which, of itself is unintelligible except through  the  principle  of  form.  He  does  not,  nor  does  Aquinas,  use  the  concept  of "matter" to be one same principle of being and becoming in any and every order of reality. In other words, he does not identify God and Creation. He is not a pantheist, nor a panentheist. It is a misuse of the meaning of "materia", especially "materia prima", to make of it a principle underlying every kind of essential possibility to be. This avoids all relevance to matter as the substratum of the composite essence as such, that which is composed of matter and form in the traditional sense. To use the concept of "matter" to define any reality which is not Pure Act, which Aristotle does not do, is very convenient for philosophers like Rahner, who would identify matter and spirit, as in "Spirit in the World", as aspects of one common ontic energy. So defined, creation is ultimately of one nature with God. It is a breach of the principle of non-contradiction to say "If God wills to be not-God, man happens". The concept of Pure Act, "I AM WHO AM" excludes any voluntary participation in "not being", - "man".

Some  of  the  Schoolmen,  including  St.  Bonaventure,  do  speak  of  some  sort  of "matter" in the angelic nature. The poet Milton indeed does so much more crudely. This could  be  due  again  to  the  error  concerning  the  "matter"  of  the  bright,  unchanging heavenly  bodies,  and  Aristotle's  suggestion  of  different  sorts  of  matter,  including therefore a type which is not the substratum behind formal change. In those days of a rather immature Biblical criticism, the description of the "manna" as the "bread of the angels" could possibly be a factor. Aquinas shows no trace of it in his own treatment of the angelic nature, and the "separated substances". Such a concept for the angel is simply not coherent. If the angelic nature were composed of "Matter and substantial form" in any sense at all, then it should be in an empirical order of possible sense perception.  In  any  event,  there  would  still  be  the  problem  of  the  distinction  of  the intelligible  form,  and  the  non-intelligible  principle  of  prime  matter.  One  is  protesting against the use of "matter" in a connotation irrelevant to the empirical order of sense, so that matter and spirit may be reduced to one common order of being or "energy", and in the end become one common principle of a pantheist, or panentheist Idealism. There are many ways of arriving at the certain knowledge of a Transcendent God from the intrinsic relativity of the material creation, and from the intrinsic potentiality also of the spiritual nature of man. Yet one insists that those proofs which may be called extrinsic, or empirical, in the sense that they do not derive from the degrees of being like the "fourth way" of Aquinas, the ontological argument, or the inner analysis of conscience and consciousness, but rather from causality, contingency, and the cosmological argument, will always be the best. Because these are now, and have always been, the common ground upon which argue and debate the hard-headed, rough-grained citizens of the fields and the cities of the world of mankind.

Notes

1. Nature Psalms:- In many of which of course we must not look for an autonomous philosophical  proof  of God's  existence,  but the recognition  of an intrinsic  order and entitative  subordination  of beings  one to another,  and  then  the proclamation  of the certainty of God as the King of the Universe. See for example: Psalms 8, 32, 46, 64, 89, 92, 97. Special note also of 103, 106, 135, 144, and the "cosmic praise" of psalm 148. Numbering according to modem standard versions.

2. Stanley Jaki is not merely a convincing  scientist, but a brilliant theologian  of the interaction of science, philosophy, and theology. His works are very numerous. One may remark:

The Road of Science and The Ways to God, (Scottish Academic Press, 1980)

Brain, Mind and Computers, (Gateway Edns Indiana, 1969) God and the Cosmologists, (Scottish Academic Press, 1989) The Saviour of Science, (Scottish Academic Press, 1990)

One should also see, especially if a student, a brilliant exposition of Jaki's work and thought by Paul Haffner, Creation and Scientific Creativity (Christendom Press, 1991). This book is extremely valuable in its own right, because Fr. Haffner not only expounds Jaki in a relationship to theology of great value to the student, but gives also many quotations and exchanges between Jaki and other scientists and workers in philosophy. Haffner's own thinking as a theologian and a philosopher of science, as it comes over is clear and succinct. He has himself lectured Cosmology at the Gregorian University of Rome  in  the  nineties  of  this  century.  An  indefinite  number  of  works  could  be recommended, in my own library: Bernard Lovell: In the Centre of Immensities (1979 but still valuable: Granada Books) Paul Davies: God and the New Physics (Dent)

Hugh Montefiore: The Probability of God (SCM Press)

Also in the Faith Pamphlet series: The Path from Science to God and The Path from Science to Jesus Christ.

3. We may take Kant in the Transcendental Dialectic, section 3, the illuminating pages, the last four specifically, of the section. These bring out the sheer internal contradiction in  Kant's  system  of  the  natural  workings  of  the  human  speculative,  transcendental reason, and the arbitrary limits imposed by Kant's presupposition that if God is to be demonstrated  from  the  practical  reason,  then  God  must  be  an  object  within  the phenomenological-empirical series. There is room only for the peroration as a quote: "These remarks will have made it evident to the reader that the ideal of the Supreme Being, far from being an enouncement of the existence of a being in itself necessary, is nothing more than a regulative principle (his italics) of reason, requiring us to regard all connection  existing  between  phenomena  as  if it had  its  origin  from  an  all-sufficient necessary cause, and basing upon this the rule of a systematic and necessary unity in the explanation  of phenomena.  We cannot, at the sane time, avoid regarding, by a transcendental subreptio (misappropriation - E.H.) this formal principle as constitutive, and hypostatizing this unity (my italics). Precisely similar is the case with our notion of space... it is the primal condition of all forms, which are just so many different limitations of it. And thus, though it is merely a principle of sensibility, we cannot help regarding it as an absolutely necessary and self-subsistent thing-as-an-object given a priori in itself. In the  same  way,  it  is  quite  natural  that  as  the  systematic  unity  of  nature  cannot  be established as a principle for the empirical employment of reason unless it is based upon the idea of an 'ens realissimum' as the supreme cause, we should regard this idea as a real object, (emphasis added) ... and that in this way a regulative (Kant's emphasis) should be transformed into a constitutive principle".

This is the repetition  of a prime error in Kant. He recognises  the "addiction"  of the transcendental  "reason"  in  the  name  of  sheer  cosmic  coherence,  to  presume  a necessary ground for the individual ontological relationships of phenomena. In effect he makes the reason of man God in as much as the intellect of man is the source and seat of a necessary formal principle of necessity in the full cognition of the real, which the intellect itself is of its nature unable to demonstrate. Kant here is on the very verge of Idealism, and indeed cosmic Idealism. The full analysis and then synthesis of this "paradox",   cries   out   for   Hegel.   Or,   later   for   Rahner,   who   by   identifying   this transcendental necessity with the "Vorgriff" of the intellect of man, brings God into the existential personal order as "empirical" within the "phenomenon of man". Thus Kant, to overcome the intrinsic contradictions in his analysis of man, is shown to be the precursor of quite "modern" forms of Pantheism.

4. There is a world of difference in the ethos of St. Augustine when he speaks of the knowledge and love of God, and that of Aquinas. Two books which are useful in this analysis I have in my own library. They are Cayré, Initiation a la philosophie de Saint Augustin (Desclee de Brouwer 1947) and La Contemplation Augustinienne (Desclee de Brouwer 1954). For the purposes of these comments it is the Contemplation which is the more important. While quoting from Cayré, I would like to add that I have in each case checked his interpretation against St. Augustine, and find no reason to disagree with him, save only in a few cases where Maréchal (Psychology of the Mystics) would seem to have penetrated Augustine's thought a little more profoundly.

Cayré tries always to identify the teaching of Augustine and Aquinas. To me, Maréchal seems  less  careful,  because  perhaps  a  bolder  mind.  The  fundamental  difference between  Augustine  and Thomas,  in my own opinion,  is the difference  between  two theories  of cognition,  abstraction  in Aquinas,  and  illumination  in Augustine.  In other words Plato through Plotinus and St. John in the one, and Aristotle in the other. Cayré gives a very thorough analysis of the "philosophy" of contemplation in Augustine, and two of the principal works are easily available. These are The Soliloquies and much more The Confessions especially books IV to XI. In addition, much can be gained from the De Trinitate especially books XIV and XV. The theory of St. Augustine, to my mind at once so beautiful and so true, is that man is made to the living, dynamic image of God. This image is not static as "nature" as so often in the older Thomists, but existential, not simply essential. Nature in man is directly under the "ray" the "sunshine", of God's grace, in which the Holy Spirit develops within us, in much the same way as a child grows from infancy to maturity, the living Image of God, and that Image is the Word Incarnate. Augustine for instance (De Trinitate, ch. XIX) quotes the: "Now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the Only true God, and him whom you have sent, Jesus Christ. (John 17:3)". Now, translating from Cayré: (Ch.VI.) The Mediate Vision of God pp.186-7): "Thus the image of God in man will not be perfect except in heaven: but the earth is the place of continuing transformations (author's emphasis). It means there are those who can rise above themselves from here below to a high degree of glory, to the clear rays of divine wisdom. It is to this peak that Augustine would lead his reader, as he declares  himself  (he  quotes  De  Trinit.  bk  15,  ch.VIII).  Augustine  would  teach  the Christian to see God in his own soul by the intermediary of his (God's) image projected upon a silvered screen. The soul is itself that screen, but a screen which sees and lives (my emphasis). When, by faith, she knows both God and herself as the image of God, she is able to see Him in that image. For she is that living image, provided only that the image is perfect, and the eye of the spirit pure, without mote. For wisdom (i.e. as gift and virtue) actualizes either condition (realise). Thus, by this "wisdom" the indirect sight of faith becomes now a vision real, though mediate (author's emphasis). In heaven, by the light of glory, man will be able to see God a specula from the heights of God; on earth, even now, he may already enjoy a vision of Him in speculo, by contemplative wisdom, the privilege of perfect souls, such as have been transformed by the Holy Spirit of the Lord..."

Maréchal, quoted in a number of places by Cayré, openly considers  that Augustine teaches the direct knowledge of God in the gift of wisdom, which is the intuition of the Logos, in the "sunshine" (rayon) of the Holy Spirit. I think he is right, but Augustine does not teach the attainment of the beatific vision of God in this life, although he does accord it to Moses and St. Paul, in the state of "ecstasy beyond all sense perception", and in this Aquinas follows him. Most other theologians do not. My own modest opinion would be to deny that in this life, anybody created, even our Blessed Lady possessed God by the  beatific  vision,  although  its  final  gift  of  transformation  may  well  have  been  the occasion of Our Lady's presumed "death" or dormition. I would not accept the division in Augustine of a "mediate" and an "immediate" vision of God. I think this is imposed by authors who feel obliged to accept the doctrine of St. Thomas that God is either totally possessed "totaliter" or not at all. St. Augustine so obviously thinks and writes in terms of an attainment of God as "person to person" by the further inward penetration of the spirit to that centre where "we will come to him and take up our in dwelling with him" (John 14:23). There are the closest possible parallels between the contemplative doctrine of Augustine, and that of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. Cayré for instance gives a reference  to the Ascent  of Mount  Carmel,  (1.3, ch.1-14)  on the theme of the inner purification of the soul. In an article written for a Louvain Revue, Cayré uses the expression, impossible to translate literally of contuition of St. Augustine's doctrine of the knowledge of God. That is to say of a mutual communion of intellect and will between God and the created person, which merits, one thinks, a better word than the mediate intuition of God. I would, like Maréchal, prefer the expression "direct" or better "actual". The doctrine of Augustine on the manner of the elevation of the person of man by grace, is, for me, even more accurate, because of the philosophical genius of Augustine, than that of St. John of the Cross. Augustine teaches that the role of grace, which of itself leads, or at least beckons, to contemplation of God, first raises the intelligence so that the spirit may begin to penetrate the intrinsic reasons for the Mysteries of Faith. Then, there follows wisdom, the attaining and savouring also in love of the Wisdom of the Logos, revealed  in Christ Incarnate.  Through  this the created  spirit glows, and also grows with the fruits of the Holy Spirit of the Love between the Father and the Son. The effect is to first restore, then to mature the "image of God" within man, an image which is made to the ontic likeness of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is no  room  in  Augustine's  theology  for  any  sort  of  "state  of  pure  nature",  and  the relationship of the fulfilment of all spirits to God is one which is intelligible only in the order of gratuitous charity. One is so refreshed and relieved in reading Augustine to find that for him faith is not the extrinsic assent to the incarnate, public, Magisterium of the Church,  as  so  usually  taught  in  the  West.  It  is  that,  but  also,  by  contemplation,  it becomes the deepening in the image of God, of the understanding of man to penetrate something of the interior "reasons" of God. One need hardly say that the whole concept of the development of doctrine does, and must, depend on such a perception process. Cayré, faithful as always to the effort to make Aquinas see as deeply and say the same as Augustine, aligns the doctrine of Augustine with St. Thomas' statement (2.2, 180. a.3 ad  1.):  "Contemplatio  pertinet  ad  ipsum  simplicem  intuitum  veritatis",  contemplation attains  to  the  utterly  simple  intuitive  percept  of  the  truth.  Yet,  when  I  turn  up  the reference I read: "To the second objection I reply that human contemplation in the state of our present life, cannot be had without the phantasm. Because it is connatural to man to see intelligible realities (species) in the phantasm, as the Philosopher teaches (my emphasis). But of course intellectual knowledge does not inhere in this the picturable (in ipsis phantasmatibus):  but in such there is contemplated  the purity of the intelligible truth. This is true not only in our natural knowing, but also in those things which we know by revelation." So Aquinas does not pace Cayré, concur with Augustine, as Maréchal, and Rousselot before him were so well aware. For Thomas, we can only know at God. We do not know God. Thomas even drags the inevitable Aristotle again, into the matter of  the  graced  communion  of  God  with  the  soul,  a  relationship  for  which  Aristotle's philosophy  can  in  no  way  cater.  For  Augustine,  believing  in  knowledge  of  God  by intuition, illumination, contuition, by the penetration of the real by the Real, there is quite a different perspective. For Augustine our knowledge of God at least, does not come by abstraction  from the sensuous "phantasmata",  but from the direct illumination  of the Divine Logos upon the created spirit. In man, this overflows into the physical brain, creating the picturable by which and through which the sublime intelligible is expressed unto others (and more explicitly to oneself) in a direct analogy with the Incarnation of God. Thomas has written: Contemplation attains to the utterly simple (ipsum simplicem) intuitive percept of the truth. Augustine would have written: "Contemplation enters into the intuition of the Eternal Logos, the Word who is Truth" All of Augustine's meditations on the Gospel of St. John (in the Homilies) are full of it. The one approach is of the earth, of Aristotle, of the abstract, of the essential order. The other is of God and Grace and of the  contuition  of  the  Eternal  with  the  created  spirit,  from  which  there  overflows  an impress of wisdom with joy and love also into the senses, the seat of the phantasm, the "picturable". In just the same way, "The Word was made Flesh, and dwelt among us". Both Thomas and Augustine,  - and after them it would seem Maréchal, make what seems to be a mistake in thinking of the beatific vision through an "illumination", the lumen  gloriae,  coming  to  the  soul  as  an  extrinsic  and  philosophically  speaking "accidental" quality. In this sort of divine elevation, the spirit, after rapture, as in the case of Moses and Paul, is still able to return to this life and its pedestrian level again. If, rather, we think of the beatific possession in both intellect and will, as a point of transformation into the full content of sharers of the Divine Nature, we can better develop a philosophy and theology of the direct (but never total) knowledge of God which is not yet the beatific fullness, for the latter as a transformation does not allow of any return to "things of earth" as we know them now. It is hard to find an exact parallel, but perhaps one could say that as with the heating of water, there is a warming by degrees, but at "boiling point" a specific change of quality takes place. So also in knowing and loving God in this life, by comparison with the beatific possession of God. Once we have found a way to dispense with the alleged need to justify knowledge in the human being by a process of abstraction, and replace it with a knowledge by intuition of the singular in its universal   relationships,   then   there   is   a  tremendous   scope   both   for   the   better understanding of Augustine and the existential development of his teaching concerning the inner meaning of "faith" and the love of God in possession. Such a development is utterly  and  urgently  relevant  to  the  needs  of mankind  today,  and  the  needs  of  the theology of the Church.

5. From St. John of the Cross (Ascent of Mt. Carmel: bk 2 ch 24. sec.4 quotation from the revised Allison Peers edn BO&W)

"But although these visions of spiritual substances cannot be unveiled and be clearly seen  in  this  life  by  the  understanding,  they  can  nevertheless  be  perceived  in  the substance of the soul (emphasis added) with the sweetest touches and unions, all of which  belongs  to  spiritual  feelings,  whereof,  with  the  Divine  favour,  we  shall  treat presently. For our pen is being directed and guided to these - namely to the Divine bond and union of the soul with Divine Substance. We shall speak of this when we treat of the dark and confused mystical understanding which remains to be described, wherein we shall show how, by means of this dark and loving knowledge (emphasis added) God is united to the soul in a lofty and Divine degree: for, after some manner, this dark and loving knowledge, which is faith, (emphasis added) serves as a means to Divine union in this life, even as, in the next life, the light of glory serves as an intermediary to the clear vision of God".

The   doctrine   of  the   saint   presumes   throughout   the   whole   treatise   on  infused contemplation, that the knowledge which is "divine wisdom" and the love which is "divine joy", is given from the Spirit of God, directly to the spirit of man. There is no place, in this mode  of  prayer,  as  there  was  in  the  preparatory  time  of  meditation  and  the  lower degrees of contemplation such as the prayer of recollection and of "quiet" for the direct use of the brain as "phantasm" or "neurone input". Indeed much of the dark night of sense is focussed around the purging of the sensuous, both according to knowing and to loving, although the soul as spirit has to be purged as well; the more fully in the "Dark Night of the Spirit". The whole philosophy and theology of St. John, as of all mysticism, is a process of existentialist  illumination  from the Divine Nature,  as Supreme  dynamic Truth... no Nominalism is conceivable here! St. John ends his total description of the pilgrimage of the rare and perfect spirit, with the ladder unto heaven, upon which God leans. On the ninth step the soul "steps over the parapet" of the created order, and is lifted off the tenth step into the embrace of God. We conclude with this description (Vol 1. The Ascent. Bk 2 - Dark Night of the Soul, ch. 20 p. 469): "The tenth and last step of this secret ladder of love causes the soul to become wholly assimilated to God, by reason of the clear and immediate vision of God which it then possesses; when, having in this life (emphasis added) ascended to the ninth step, it goes forth from the flesh (the tension  between  the  created  order  and  the  "draw"  of  the  Uncreated  being  now impossible to bear longer - E.H.) These souls, who are few, enter not into purgatory, since they have been wholly purged by love. Of these St. Matthew says ‘Blessed are the clean of heart: for these shall see God’ (Matt. 5.8). And as we say this vision is the cause of the perfect likeness of the soul to God. For, as St. John says, ’we know that we shall be like him’. Not because the soul will come to have the capacity of God, for this is impossible; but because all that it is will become like to God, for which cause it will be called, and will be God by participation".