Difference and indistinction Meister Eckhart
In the formulation of Meister Eckhart's theology, however, the Dionysian hierarchy - whether in the form of an ontology of degrees of being, or in that of the outflow of descending illuminations - notably plays little if any part. If 'difference' is central to that theology and spirituality, the carefully structured hierarchical gradings of the pseudo-Denys found in chapters 4 and 5 of his Mystical Theology in Eckhart are relatively underplayed, yielding central place within his theological...
Bonaventure and the centrality of Christ
In Bonaventure's Itinerarium Mentis in Deum5 we find a complex interweaving of at least three strands of theological tradition. First, there is his own Franciscan piety and devotion, which place at the centre of Christian thought and practice the human nature of Christ, but very particularly the passion of Christ. Secondly, there is a rampantly affirmative theology of 'exemplarism', in which, in classically medieval style, he constructs a hierarchy of 'contemplations' of God, beginning from the...
Presence and absence in Thomass Eucharistic theology
Our merely illustrative examination of Thomas's Eucharistic theology may begin in an iconographical setting. In the once medieval Catholic, now Calvinist-maintained, cathedral at Bern in Switzerland, one is confronted by a visibly Calvinist architectural revision. Altars once richly ornamented are stripped niches once containing images of saints are now empty walls, once brilliantly hued, whitewashed the glass now plain the orientation reversed, the stalls facing north, not east. The effect is...
A metaphysics of Exodus
At this point it is necessary to dispel a myth which may have been thus far reinforced by my own lax terminology. Thomas's 'simple' God is not, in the first instance at least, a 'God of the philosophers', as I, in a dubiously helpful concession to Pascal, may appear to have been saying. Thomas's God, whose simplicity is ultimately guaranteed by the divine identity of esse and essentia, is, at least so far as he is concerned, the God of 'Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob', that is to say, the God of the...
Scotus and univocity
I call a concept 'univocal' if it has that sameness of meaning which is required so that to affirm and deny it of the same subject amounts to a contradiction also, if it has that sameness of meaning required such that it can function as a middle term in a syllogistic argument - thus that where two terms are united in a middle 1 Catherine Pickstock, 'Modernity and Scholasticism A Critique of Recent Invocations of Univocity', forthcoming in Antonianum. I am grateful to Dr Pickstock for allowing...
Thomas and ontotheology
And so we return to the question whether to say that esse is predicable of both God and creatures is 'onto-theological'. Thomas, of course, knows no such nomenclature but he knows the question and entertains it for himself. If God's simplicity gets its root meaning in the identity of God's essentia and esse,30 this poses the further objection that if God's esse and God's essentia were identical, if God were to be described as ipsum esse subsistens, it would seem to follow that God's existence...
The univocal predication of being
Scotus is quite clear about one proposition central to his theological epis-temology 'being' ens is the proper object of the intellect and is predicated univocally of anything whatever. I say that Scotus is clear about this. But followers of Thomas Aquinas are likely to judge this proposition to be thoroughly confused when they read it in conjunction with another, equally unambiguous, statement of Scotus ens is not a genus and the logic of ens is not that of a genus.26 In saying this, Scotus is...
Nietzsche Derrida grammar and God
In his Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche tells us of his 'fear that we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar',5 thereby expressing, perhaps seminally for much French interpretation of Nietzsche, its logophobia, its fear of language. For all his supreme wordiness, Nietzsche fears language - it torments him with theological paradox. Language, constructed internally from the formal constituents of grammar, divides. Not that language fails merely as expression - because it...
Acknowledgements
My first, and principal, debt of gratitude is to my wife, Marie, who not only has helped me with advice about some details of the text of this work, but has throughout the long and painfully slow process of its composition selflessly provided me with the kind of support and encouragement without which that process could not have been easily endured. Nor can I imagine ever having completed this book without her having created the sort of personal and domestic circumstances in which alone...
Theological rhetoric
Anyone who has had the least acquaintance with the writings of Thomas Aquinas and of Meister Eckhart will be struck by how it is that the writings of these two Dominicans, educated as both were albeit some forty years apart in the same priory at Cologne, and possibly taught by the same Albert the Great, could differ so starkly in rhetorical 'feel'. It would be easy to put these differences down to a relatively superficial matter of style and imagery, dictated by differences of intellectual...
The Barthian objection
One different kind of ground for contesting the propositions of the Vatican Council - I shall characterise it in terms which are broadly 'Barthian' -is distinguishable from Kant's in that on this account an authentically Christian faith rules out the standpoint of natural theology as rivalling Christian faith as if with an alternative 'standpoint of unbelief', as Alvin Plantinga puts it.8 On this account of Barth's position, natural theology is a form of betrayal of the divine purposes of...
Affirmative and negative in the Christology of Bonaventure dynamics
Which brings us to the 'dynamics' of the structure of the Itinerarium. We have noted that the hierarchical principles of Bonaventure's exposition could lead us to read the movement from vestigia through imagines to the highest concepts of God, from 'outer' to 'inner' thence 'above', as successive phases of affirmativeness into an ultimate negativity. But such a reading is defensible only on neglect of a contrary movement of'centring', a movement which clearly predominates in Bonaventure's...
Natural theology and ontotheology
As a first step in response to what seems to be a widespread and general hostility to 'natural theology' we must next begin a long process of consideration of two particular forms that the criticism takes, sometimes linked, sometimes not, as directed at some key high and late medieval theologians, including, some say, Thomas Aquinas, while others find them in Duns Scotus but not in Thomas. The first accusation is that of the theological error which, since Martin Heidegger, is described as...
The apophatic and the cataphatic
That Thomas's theological starting point lies in the defeat of the human mind by the unknowability of God, whether in the mind's own nature as rational or as transformed by grace, will perhaps seem hard to reconcile with any case for the demonstration of the existence of God unaided by faith - for such a case, if any does, would seem to lay claim to 'know God', indeed to know God all too well. But this unknowability will seem, on the other side, just as hard to reconcile with the nature of that...
The formal and material objects of faith and reason
As a first step in setting out how this argument will proceed, let us note a crucial ambiguity in Kerr's conclusion from the propositions of the 'nouvelle theologie' that the 'God exists' of the philosopher's reason 'means something radically different' from the 'God exists' affirmed by the Christian 'under the conditions of faith'. This is partly, but only partly, true, and to see in what sense it is true and in what sense false, we can ask why does the Vatican Council, in distinguishing what...
Christology statics
For there are two general principles which organise the structure of the Itinerarium, embodying, as it were, the theological statics and the theological dynamics. They are of equal theological importance. As to the 'statics', these are most visible in the purely formal elements of exposition and chapter division of the work, though they are by no means merely formal in their significance. The work is set out on the model of a 'ladder of ascent' and so on conventional principles of medieval...