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The Present Situation of Eucharistic Theology

DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J.

[In his first article for Faith & Reason, Fr. Keefe brings his erudition
to an examination of contemporary eucharistic theology. This scholarly
essay reveals the inroads of immanest thought into Thomism.]

Introduction

In the two decades since the close of the Second Vatican Council, the
conciliar mandates of ecumenism, of openness to the secular world and
for the elimination of clericalism, juridicalism and triumphalism from
ecclesial life have combined to produce a diffidence among Catholic
theologians respecting themes both traditional in and familiar to the
preconciliar Church. The corollary is a willingness to consider the
confessional stance of those Protestant communions to which the Council
referred as belonging to the Church of Christ although not in full
communion with the Catholic Church in which the Church of Christ is
actual. The consequences have been particularly evident in the theology
of the sacraments, wherein the tensions between those within and those
outside the Catholic Church are most palpable.

Within the continuing ecumenical discussions of the past two decades, it
has been particularly in the area of the Eucharist and its correlative,
Orders, that the most refractory problems have been encountered, and, in
fact, left unresolved; nor is there any present likelihood of further
ecumenical progress in this direction.1 A considerable impatience has
resulted; the prospects of ecumenical union raised by the Council have
not materialized, and it is easy to indict the sacramental system of
Catholic worship as the major obstacle to the union of the People of
God.2 Attention having been focused particularly upon the Eucharist,
given that this is the sacrament of union, the question of
intercommunion has become crucial,3 for it raises the possibility of a
church union on the level of praxis without waiting indefinitely upon
one at the level of doxa. Perhaps in consequence, one now hears a good
deal about orthopraxis as the surrogate for orthodoxy. Such suggestions
place the whole of Catholic sacramentalism in issue, and have done so
with particular success in the American theological community.4 This has
been the case at least since the appearance in English of Hans K�ng's
The Church,5 which introduced a thoroughgoing revision of the Catholic
theological tradition on Reformation principles.6 The ecclesiological
focus of K�ng's book immediately put the issue of the ex opere operato
in the foreground, and K�ng's dismissal of that doctrine prefaced its
general neglect by American Catholic theologians henceforth, to the
point that the American episcopacy also is no longer entirely
comfortable with that emphasis.7 Neither are the various theologians of
liberation who, taught by K�ng and Metz, have discerned in the
sacramental structure of Catholic worship what their tutors postulate a
priori of historical structure as such, i.e., an imposition upon the
Christian freedom of the faithful.8 This relativization of the Catholic
sacraments rests upon the rediscovery and restatement of a classic
doctrine of the Reform in the contemporary idiom of historical
criticism, viz., the total corruption of the historical order, and the
consequent a priori incapacity, the unworthiness, of any historical
actuality to mediate the risen Christ. Under Luther this

emphasis focused upon denying the representation of the sacrifice of
Christ in the Mass; this is also the point of doctrine found most
neuralgic by the current movement for the ordination of women to the
priesthood,9 which here may stand as typical of those trends within
contemporary Catholicism which contend, as did Anaximander long ago,
that all historical differentiation is rooted in injustice.

What is most striking in the Eucharistic theology of these Catholic
theologians is its reiteration of the cosmological themes which,
although much older than the Reformation, are nonetheless characteristic
of it; at heart, the center of the "new" Catholic sacramental theology,
as of the Reformation, is a historical pessimism, a set conviction of
the opacity of history to the Kingdom of God. This pessimism is now
articulate as scholarly method, as an abstract ratio whose veridical
supremacy is not to be challenged. Such rationalist historical
scholarship, which arose during the renaissance and triumphed during the
Enlightenment, postulates a monist notion of truth irreconcilable with
that of the Catholic historical tradition of the revelation in Christ of
the Triune God. That same monism is now normative in the circles of what
used to be called positive theology, i.e., among the practitioners of
those nominally theological disciplines which exploit some autonomous
and overtly nonmetaphysical methodology of humane science such as
history, sociology, philology and the like. The abandonment of the
metaphysical interest is of course nearly if not quite axiomatic in the
secular academy; it is a point of view which not only has powerful
support in the theology of the Reform,

but which is also, as positivist, so identified with modernity10 that
Catholic theologians are not generally unwilling to contest its
validity.11

The Systematic Impasse

The positivist abdication by Catholic theologians of the Catholic
theological interest in metaphysics is due in considerable measure to the
fact that Thomism, the one significant metaphysics with theological
application, has largely exhausted itself in a doomed effort12 to
transcend, by appeal to the immanent necessities of thought, the Kantian
critique of rationalist metaphysics. Whether led by a Rahner or a
Lonergan, the systematically dehistoricizing thrust of "transcendental"
Thomism13 is the best indication of its continuing theological
irrelevance, for the only metaphysics -or historical science or sociology
or hermeneutics or whatever other humanism for that matter -- which can
serve the Catholic faith as a theological quaerens must first recognize
that the truth of the faith is free, and that it is appropriated only by
an intelligence freed from the immanent necessities of an otherwise
monist logic by the graced appropriation in faith of the Trinitarian
revelation.14 It is only by this emancipation from the determinism of
monadic logic that a humane discipline becomes a theology. The
methodology consistent with that theological emancipation must then be
comparably freed from the immanence of the fallen reason's spontaneous
monism by that reason's graced and therefore free subordination to the
prime truth which is the New Covenant, the historical revelation of the
Trinity, whose covenantal immanence in history constitutes and
establishes the criterion of all historical reality. Concretely, such
subordination to the Revelation as to the criterion of historical truth
imposes upon the abstract rational construct of the theoretician the
status of hypothesis, which is to say, of possible rather than of actual
truth; this alone permits the theologian's inquiry -- and that of any
other academic discipline -- to remain experimental and

historical.

However, the recognition that theological method is first and foremost a
method of inquiry into a radically free and therefore novel historical
reality is now generally lacking among Catholic theologians as a
consequence not only of the influence of a pervasive modernity, but also
because of the kind of theological method taken for granted by the
Thomism in which most of them were trained before the Second Vatican
Council. They find themselves in two camps, the one now disdainful of
all metaphysics and reliant upon one of the socalled positive methods of
theologizing, the other committed to the metaphysical realism of
Catholic sacramentalism, but led by the logic of school Thomism into
surrendering more and more of that realism.

This impasse may best be understood by examining two contrasting
Catholic studies in sacramental theology as these bear upon Eucharistic
realism. One of these, by Tad Guzie, is frankly antimetaphysical; the
other, by Colman O'Neill, O.P., is the work of an orthodox Thomist
theologian, entirely intent upon upholding and exploring the Catholic
tradition. Their only link, apart from an interest in the Eucharist, is
their common acceptance of the monadic notion of being and its
transcendentals which is proper alike to school Thomism and to the
positive methodologies which now more and more displace metaphysical
theology, together with the correlative tendency to dehistoricize the
sacramental worship of Catholicism. On this rationalist basis, Guzie has
constructed his rejection of all sacramental realism; O'Neill on the
contrary would ground his defense of that realism on that same
rationalism. On examination, it will be seen that Guzie's revisionism is
the more consistent development of this monist understanding of reality,
at the evident price of denying outright the historicity of the faith
and worship of the historical Catholic Church.

Nonetheless, however contradictory their intentions, Guzie and O'Neill
share a common error, the cosmological monism of an unconverted
Aristotelian logic, and we shall see that it drives both of them to
comparable dehistoricizations of the Eucharist.

This cosmological15 mentality, which from within the historicalliturgical
tradition of Catholicism can be described only as a false consciousness,
a historical pessimism in fundamental contradiction to the Catholic
optimism which worships in history the Lord of history, is for most
contemporary theologians simply the conventional wisdom and so the common
ground, express or implicit, for all theological discussion.16

Such false consciousness is a permanent reality in the Church of sinners;
it stands over against the Catholic faith as a temptation, a possible
idolatry, which would elevate above the truth of Christ some ideal and
nonhistorical criterion that must bar all historicity from the Word made
flesh. This consciousness became explicit in Marcion, but it was in the
air when John wrote his letters, and has remained as a miasmic
possibility throughout all the ages of the Church, precipitated here and
there across the centuries in banal variants of the prototypical gnostic
rejection of the compatibility of God and man in history.

When Luther was driven to deny the historicity of the Eucharist, i.e.,
when he rejected the event-character of Christ's presence in the Mass
whether labelled sacrifice or transubstantiation, he did no more than
accept the implications

of the nominalist denial of any intrinsic transempirical reality in the
historical order. This denial, the last consequence of the rationalist
elimination of illumination in favor of the immanent capacity of natural
reason, had been completed before the end of the thirteenth century;17
it was enthroned by Scotus in the beginning of the next, and had already
produced the anti-sacramentalism of Wyclif and Hus. Now, in Luther's
hands, it announced the end of the sesquimillennial Catholic unity, a
unity at once liturgical and historical, and proceeded to disintegrate
that unity by dehistoricizing the liturgy which had grounded it.18

Luther's own participation in this project was not wholehearted; he
insisted upon the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and if he
refused any language which would point to this as an event of history,
he nonetheless treated it as one, for he refused as well that
sacramentarian reduction of the reality of the Eucharist to the reality
of faith which was pressed upon him by his erstwhile followers. The
ambiguity he left unresolved; it remained to men such as Zwingli, Beza
and Calvin to cut the tie that bound Luther to the ancient realism, and
to make the presence of the Christ something indistinct from the faith
of the believer. The abstract sola fide criteriology then proceeded to
divorce that faith from any reliable manifestation or expression in
history, for history was now no more than the nominalist facticity, the
empirical dur�e, of time as quantified and so reduced to mere temporal
succession; meanwhile Christianity, heretofore the historical faith of a
people unified historically and intrinsically by their Eucharistic
worship, now became the nonhistorical faith of the individual's interior
union with the absent Lord: Sursum corda obviated the words of
consecration.19

The basic postulates of this pessimism are those of a monism, a
necessitarian rationale of the pagan conviction that material reality is
radically irredeemable, no more than an irrational tension between being
and its negation whose sole remedy is the absolute isolation of being
from nonbeing; thus conceived, being becomes the ideal immaterial unity
of number, and nonbeing becomes mere chaos, nothingness. This same
historical pessimism, this same refusal of the intrinsic unity, truth
and goodness of the material and historical creation, underlies the
heretical movements which have troubled the Church from its inception:
gnosticism, Marcion's heresy, monarchianism, modalism, the Montanism
which beguiled Tertullian, the Manichaeanism which for nearly a decade
was able to persuade even an Augustine, Arianism, Nestorianism,
Eutychianism, iconoclasm, millennarianism, the Eucharistic "symbolism"
of Ratramnus of Corbie and later of Berengarius, still later of Wyclif
and Hus, the Reformation itself, the contemporary "consequentialist"
morality, all rely upon the presumptive opacity of history to God, and
upon the consequent impossibility of the mediation of God to man through
any concrete historical event. For all these aberrant movements, history
is the realm of the senseless, of an absurd manifold, the intolerable
tension of being and nonbeing, of truth and falsehood, of unity and
multiplicity, of eternity and time, of God and man.

The denial of the historicity of the New Covenant attained a fuller
development as the dynamics of immanent reason were explored in
renaissance and post-renaissance philosophy and in the criticism of
historical religion which proceeds from the Enlightenment, but the
denial is firmly in place with the Calvinist sacramental doctrine
whereby the alienation of the risen Christ from the historical order is
accepted as the

inevitable corollary of justification sola fide, for this alienation
amounts to the logical, the necessary dissociation of the divine and the
human; pushed to its ultimate reaches, it can only conclude to the
nihilism which in history must say nothing of either.

The postulates of this pessimism have surfaced sporadically throughout
the Church's history in movements which amount to the rediscovery,
whether as a temptation or a heterodoxy, of the pagan despair of any
perduring human value, of any truth or goodness or beauty or unity which
time will not devour. The familiar monist logic then unfolds: truth
becomes simply the idea and reality the ideal, the immanent product of
the mind, and being is then a monadic absolute unity apart from which is
only chaotic nothingness. The conclusion is inescapable; the diverse
concrete particularities of history must be annulled: thought has no
other task and man no other recourse than to escape from the nonbeing,
from the illusion, the anguish, of significant, meaningful, sacramental
existence in history.

It is the tragedy of Catholic theology that it has been haunted and
continually tempted by this logic of monadic being, whose prime
analogate is not Triune but simply One. The Thomist attempt to transcend
this monadic logic by means of the analogy of being had failed by the
end of the thirteenth century; thereafter, the confident Catholic
rationality which Thomas above all exemplifies began to founder, and
with it failed the theological optimism of this, "the greatest of
centuries". Logic had triumphed over the free order of the trinitarian
creation, and the intrinsic truth, unity, goodness and beauty of the
world began to lose all concrete objectivity. This conviction emerged in
its clarity with Ockham, and proceeded to dominate the Western
intelligence to the point that the technological worldview of
"modernity" can no longer imagine a concrete unity which would not be
quantifiable, mathematical at bottom, nor a historical order which would
be free. It is not then remarkable that theology should share this
blindness, for the failure of the Western intelligence is its own. The
indebtedness of the classical theology to the genius of Plato and
Aristotle carried with it the assumption of a false, a radically pagan
problematic, that of rationalizing the otherwise dichotomous and
fragmented world in which monadic unity excludes all multiplicity
whether as structure or as history, and summarily, the divine opposes
the human. Plato had found the origin of these oppositions in a mythic
fall, and their remedy in a return to the primordial integrity through
eros, through dialectical ascent, through death. This, the most sublime
expression of the pagan religious quest, nourished the speculation of
Greek and Roman Christianity for a thousand years,20 until the reception
of Aristotelian metaphysics in the medieval West succeeded in minimizing
the factual fallenness of things by the projection of a naturally good
creation whose metaphysical structure corresponded to the act-potency
relation between predicate and subject in logical discourse. Thus the
Latin Christian conversion of Neoplatonism, the Augustinian anamnesis-
become-illumination which the Western patristic theology had adopted,
became otiose and was by the end of the thirteenth century abandoned;
henceforth, contra the need for illumination posited by the Christian
Platonism of the Latin Fathers from Ambrose and Augustine down to St.
Bernard and St. Peter Damian, and by the Augustinian theological
tradition through Bonaventure, the immanent logic of unaided reason was
held to suffice for an account of the relation between unity and
multiplicity, between permanence and change, between eternity and time,
even between man and God. All of these relations, intrinsic to
historical humanity under the Christian

dispensation, thus intrinsic to creation, under Aristotelian auspices
became natural, a term now imbued with the rationalist Aristotelian
necessitarianism. So complete was the triumph of this confident monist
logic that the order of freedom, of gratuity, of grace itself, came to
be rationalized as adventitious, accidental, arbitrary, extrinsic to
rationality and finally an affront to it, instead of as heretofore the
very wellspring of truth, the New Covenant from whose freedom
theological rationality proceeds and apart from reliance on which
foundation theology does not and cannot exist.21

This naive rationalism rendered the Trinitarian revelation of the
meaning of unity unintelligible, unavailable to theological assimilation
and exploitation; although all the great heresies rested from the
beginning upon a monadism, and required to be countered by a
reaffirmation of the Trinitarian faith, that central article of the
Catholic faith had been first immanentized by its rationalist isolation
from its Revelation in the Christ, and then, thus dehistoricized, had
become and thereafter remained an interest largely irrelevant to
systematic theology because extrinsic to its still monadic a priori,
whether as responsive to the medieval quest for a metaphysics, or to the
more historical and sociological interests of current theology. Among
the theologians of the high middle ages, only Saint Bonaventure seems to
have understood the unity of being as triune, believing as he did that
the Trinitarian nature of God was the condition of divine creativity.
But his Christology is still held captive by a literalist reading of the
patristic propter peccatum; and while he places Christ at the center of
creation, it is not clear how this consists with the prior centrality he
has conceded to the Word. Unless, as with O'Neill, Christ's historicity
is subordinated to a prior creation by the immanent Trinity;22 in which
case the historicity which Bonaventure attributes to creation, as
essential to its intelligibility, must be distinguished from that
historicity which, because it is Christocentric and consequently propter
peccatum, is therefore not essential to its intelligibility precisely
because sin itself is not. Bonaventure does not address the problem of
relating these two levels of historicity.

The monadic reduction of truth to non-historical necessity of course
reduced historical freedom to randomness, regarding it as unintelligible
and irrational until submitted to the nonhistorical idea, the theory
whose atemporality and consequent immunity from change and fragmentation
was thought to be identically its security in truth. The lonely
individual, man as monad, formerly, when under pagan auspices, the pawn
of fate or the game of the gods, and submitted thus to an

arbitrary force majeure, was submitted again, under such pseudoChristian
speculation, to the same monadic authority whose sole function continued
to be to order the world by the elimination of the supposed randomness
which in actuality is the spontaneity of freedom and history. Thus is
understandable the enthusiasm in the medieval schools for the Roman law
and for the Aristotelian psychology and sociology; an enthusiasm echoed
in the contemporary sociological and political theology whose adepts
continue to find historical freedom meaningless until submitted to the
non-historical eschatological verities of the inexorable utopian process.

This monadism has been the native air of systematic theology since
Christians first tried to counter the pagan criticism of their faith. It
has not affected the magisterial proclamation of doctrine for that has
its ground in the historical worship of the Catholic community, radically
free because Eucharistic:

the Magisterium uses theology, but does not depend upon it. However, the
theological academy, when corrected by the higher truth of Catholic
doctrine, has an unfortunate tendency to regard that correction in
obediential and monadic terms23: not then, as an invitation to the free
conversion and reorientation of the intelligence to a higher and
historical truth, but as a voluntary submission to a command -- for that
the truth is free, appropriated only in freedom, is a notion alien to
the immanent rationality of the monadic mind. The historical tradition
of the historical faith then is encountered as suppressive, oppressive,
and the devil has all the good words: freedom, truth, intellectual
honesty -- these indices of human dignity are seen then to require the
sort of eternal warfare against doctrine, as against "all that would
enslave the mind of man," to which the deist Jefferson was vowed.
Unfortunately the outcome of this revolt of the autonomous mind against
the doctrinal tradition, which argues from the non-necessity or
gratuity, i.e., the historicity, of the revelation to its lack of
intrinsic truth and so to its merely arbitrary imposition ab extra by a
divine or ecclesial despotism, is the reinvocation of that despair of
the divine-human relation which is the hallmark of paganism: the
autonomous mind, having absolutized God and man, now finds both
absolutes to be empty as the logical implication of their absoluteness.

Outside the rather circumscribed environment of contemporary theology,
whether in Protestant or Catholic guise, the incapacities of the
autonomous intelligence have for some time been admitted.24 Since
G�del's famous proof of the incoherence of all arithmetical reasoning,25
the last bastion of monadic logic and so of the immanently self-
sufficient mind has fallen, a fall long presaged by the Pythagorean
discovery of irrational numbers and later by Aristotle's recognition of
the dependence of logical discourse upon the potentiality of all human
understanding.

It is long since commonplace that the value-free historical objectivity
which von Ranke ambitioned is illusory;26 even in modern physics, the
search for physical objectivity has produced the dead-end dilemma posed
by the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics versus
that required by Einstein and Planck, where on the one hand physical
reality is reduced to a chaos utterly dissociate from the equations of
the physicist, and where on the other the physicist still seeks the
equations which will annul the spontaneity of the sub-atomic world.27
The former viewpoint is equivalently that of Buddhism; the latter still
moves out of the traditional Judaeo-Christian conviction that the
physical world is intrinsically intelligible, but insists that
intelligibility must finally be ideal, not historical and not free.28
Neither position can justify the experimental mode of science, which is
intent upon the irreducible intrinsic truth of the particular event as
the historical corrective of all ideal nonhistorical theory and
hypothesis. Only a historical optimism can justify the experimental
method which underlies science as such, and only faith in the Lord of
history can warrant that optimism.29 But once that faith and that
optimism are in place, the determinist logic of monadic being has been
rejected; only the trinitarian logic of the free creation, i.e., of the
world whose intelligible unity images in history that of the Triune God,
can serve the experimental mode proper to historical intelligence, for
this logic relativizes the otherwise insurmountable dichotomies of the
autonomous mind, of truth as monadic, "the antinomies of reason," by
providing their historical, their trinitarian synthesis.30 This
trinitarian rationality is the structure of the Christian revelation
whose

articulation is the New Covenant, a free historical event which is the
immanence of God in man and in history. Only here is overcome the pagan
fatality, the divine-human antipathy, the contradiction found pervading
all non-identity whenever the Lord of history is not acknowledged and
the goodness and the unity, truth and beauty of the qualified,
variegated and multitudinous creation in its imaging of the triune God
is not in consequence admitted. Evidently, a theologian must take this
trinitarian, this covenantal sign-value of creation very seriously, and
so resist � outrance the allure of those arguments which would persuade
him that the finite is not capable of the infinite, that man is locked
within the ancient fatalities to which even God must be submitted.

To delineate the disaster attendant upon a monist nominalism is not at
all to urge the triumphant return of medieval or baroque or neo-
scholastic metaphysics; it is of these that nominalism was and is the
logical, the immanently necessary development, for such metaphysics
labors under the pagan notion of the monadic unity of being, and of the
transcendentals -- truth, goodness, beauty. This monadism necessarily
dehistoricized reality; it is not an aberration which has seen an
equation between the high medieval syntheses and those of German
idealism31 for the same notion of being as monadic identity rules both.
Clearly, the medieval theologians accepted doctrinal correctives, but it
did not occur to them that these entailed a revision of the notion of
being32 and therefore of metaphysics and epistemology. Consequently
there arose the conflict between the old cosmology and the revealed
truth, inadequately papered over by nominalist language: e.g., creation
became the placing of a finite reality outside its transcendent cause,
and grace became an accidental modification of natural substance. Such
nominalist recourses inevitably emerged triumphant once the Aristotelian
logic was employed critically in theology, and their emergence signalled
the demise of metaphysics as theology.

When in the twelfth century the old Augustinian theology gave way to the
new "dialectic" under the impetus provided by Anselm's quest for
necessary reasons, the faith could survive as always by the sustenance
given in its liturgical worship, but the Catholic quaerens intellectum
began to undergo a progressive rationalization which the structure of
the Summa Theologiae well illustrates: there the unity of God as Creator
is distanced from the treatment of the Trinity, which is dealt with
unhistorically in complete dissociation from Christology as well as from
creation, which are also conceived unhistorically; the treatment of
grace is the final consideration, which should have been the first and
indeed the only subject of a truly theological synthesis. This Thomist
synthesis of metaphysics and theology reflects the Aristotelian notion
of the necessary and monadic unity of finite being, not the Christian
revelation of the free and covenantal event of a creation in Christ who
is sent by the Father to give the Spiritus Creator. Thomism was forced
by this monadic logic to begin with the "One God," the creator, and
therefore to regard the creation as natural, prior to and independent of
the Christian revelation: nature then became the metaphysical prius of
grace, an incoherence which still embarrasses the entirety of Thomist
theology. The Trinity was considered in isolation from its revelation in
Christ, and so in isolation from history, from Christology; even the
radical shift imposed upon Aristotelian metaphysics by the gratuity of
creation and by the Chalcedonian dogma -- the expansion of the act-
potency analysis of the intrinsic intelligibility of material being by
the addition of the esse-essence polarity -- was never exploited

theologically save for the single application to the hypostatic union,
again conceived nonhistorically, viz., as the contingent structure of a
hypostatic entity rather than as the free historical event which is at
once Mission, Incarnation and the New Covenant. The freedom of the
supernatural was understood as merely logical, as a predicamental
contingency, as accidental in the technical sense, and its application
to the relation of divine and human freedom remained locked within this
determinism, an acute embarrassment to Catholic theology for centuries.

Such criticism, were it applied to the genius, the saint, the doctor of
the Church whose authority is matched only by St. Augustine's, would be
clearly anachronistic. Thomas died seven centuries ago, before he had
reached fifty years of age, but not before he made obsolete the eclectic
metaphysical theology of his time by his theological transformation of
the Aristotelian cosmological metaphysics; by adapting this determinist
act-potency analysis to a free creation and to the Incarnation of the
Word, St. Thomas established the method of a theological system whose
unlimited range of implication was open to exploitation by all future
theologians. It would be idle to complain that he did not do their work;
his astonishing achievement is to have seen what his predecessors had
not seen, that Aristotle was to be corrected on the level of what today
we would call method, for nothing less radical would permit a Christian
metaphysics logically structured by the act-potency relation to proceed.
It is the tragedy of that theology, in the centuries since the
foundation by St. Thomas, that its practitioners have not understood its
correction of Aristotle for what it is: a methodological conversion from
a pagan, monadic, necessitarian and nonhistorical notion of being to a
free, Trinitarian, and covenantal-historical notion. The result of this
failure to grasp the trinitarian dimension of the essence-esse
correlation has been the idiosyncratic and eclectic "Thomism" of the
schools: formerly those associated with the Spanish and Portuguese
universities which kept interest in the Thomist metaphysics alive during
the CounterReformation, more recently the Roman and Louvain faculties of
theology, and in the present century primarily those Thomist theologians
in such faculties as Lyon-Fourvi�re, Innsbruck, and the Gregorian
University who have followed Blondel and developed the Mar�chalian
riposte to the Kantian critique. Such Thomism as still survives
academically however does so in the main as philosophy, not as theology.

This is the price paid for the supposition that Thomist metaphysics is
not a formally theological science, not a method of inquiry into the
intelligibility intrinsic to the free and trinitarian creation, but that
it is on the contrary an already completed body of nonhistorical and
logically necessary truth buried somewhere in the text of St. Thomas and
only awaiting its discovery by the scholar who will at last thereby
uncover the entire, the adequate, the necessary statement of the Thomist
metaphysics. The attempts to derive this statement whether by means of
logic or by textual analysis have set the Thomist "schools" in
opposition, and have reduced Thomist scholarship to an unprofitable
search for the texts which finally nail down the preferred synthesis --
invariably one whose flaws are vividly apparent to the adherents of the
other brands of nominal Thomism.

It is not then very surprising that the notion of a free, historical and
trinitarian rationality should be unfamiliar in today's Catholic
theology, for it has never entered into the classic Thomist
systematizations of theology,33 and the

contemporary political and sociological systematizations of theology are
in no different case. It is nonetheless tragic, for it leaves the
historicity of the Catholic doctrinal and liturgical tradition
defenseless before a rationalist criticism already ancient but which
emerges now from within the Catholic household as though a fresh
discovery.

1. . Tad Guzie: Jesus and the Eucharist (New York, Paramus, NJ, Toronto:
Paulist Press, 1974)

Since this small book was published it has been widely received,
particularly in its paperback format, by the catechists, the directors
of seminary education and the instructors in religion in the Catholic
colleges and universities of North America. Its evident influence in
such centers of Catholic education is regrettable in that the work's
theological viewpoint is entirely incompatible with the Catholic
doctrinal and liturgical tradition. The chief appeal of the book would
seem to lie in its iconoclastic style, which insinuates that the
historical Catholic tradition was effectively abandoned at the Second
Vatican Council, and that this departure from the dogmatic and
liturgical constraints of an unsophisticated Catholic past, already
taken for granted by the catechists and theologians, should also be a
commonplace among those who do not wish to be left behind by the modern
Church (e.g., 103ff.). Notwithstanding its flippancy, Guzie's book can
be read with profit as an illustration of the rationalist critique of
Eucharistic realism first spelled out with clarity during the eleventh
century by Berengarius and exploited since by whoever is unable to
understand that the criterion of reality and truth is not the monad.
This inability is today a failure so common as to be characteristic of
those Catholic theologians who, finding themselves in full flight from
the school Thomism of their youth, now think to find an intellectual
haven in an illusory "historical consciousness."

Guzie's notion of the Eucharist is best described as warmedover
Calvinism. Its basic assumptions are, like Calvin's, those of late
medieval nominalism, restated in the context of contemporary analytic
philosophy by writers such as Suzanne Langer, with whose early work
Guzie has been much taken. Such nominalism, which rejected a priori all
metaphysical reality in the historical order and all metaphysical
connotation in religious symbols as implicit limitations upon the divine
potentia absoluta, had then to undertake to revise the traditional
solution to the problem of meaning, for at first glance the symbols of
Catholic worship would seem to affirm what nominalism exists to deny.
Guzie's version of this revisionism postulates a two-level universe of
discourse (2441, esp. 27ff.). In this universe, which he identifies with
that of religious sophistication, the first level of meaning is provided
by the quantitative or mechanical interpretation of experience which is
the specific concern and interest of the physical scientist; for this
interpretation, the symbolism of mathematics, of numerical unity, is
alone appropriate. This is the level of "things" and "events;" for
Guzie, these have no significance other than the pragmatic and
empirical, that which is applied to them by the scientist's use of
pointer readings and measuring sticks. Technological civilizations, in
which the use of mathematical symbolism is highly developed, are often
tempted as the West has been for three centuries by the mistaken notion
that truth is capable of statement by no other means, and that non- or
trans-empirical statements are without any meaning; here the early Ayer
may stand as a particularly vivid example of a viewpoint now rejected
even by Ayer.34 Guzie also knows better; he has learned from Langer,
inter alia, the

dangers of such naivet�. He finds another and second level of meaning;
since the first level is concerned with a quantified world, we may take
the second as concerned with the qualified world (the terms are not
Guzie's; he would prefer "factual" and "symbolic," although these terms
introduce confusion, inasmuch as he supposes the "factual" as well as
the "symbolic" world to be constructed by the symbolic interpretation of
experience). The qualified or "symbolic" world or universe of rational
discourse is the world of culture, of art, of religion; its "symbolic"
meaning is constructed not by an ever more subtle deployment of those
quantitative integers whose common sense application has already
constructed the world of pragmatic facts and events, but by application
of the archetypal symbols of human self-understanding through which man
expresses the meaning for him of "things and events out there." These
symbols are the stuff of myth; like the mathematical integers, they
utter not a truth intrinsic to events and things (for Guzie considers
that there are no events or things apart from our construction of them
through the symbolization of experience) but the truth as immanent in
man, the truth of human experience as human (97ff.). Both sets of
symbols, the mathematical and the religious or, as we have named them
here, the quantitative and the qualitative, are human in their origin;
they are the immanent forms of human consciousness (55), and their use
is at one with the use of the mind (29). The problem to which their use
gives rise, from Guzie's nominalist standpoint, is of course that of
their confusion, a confusion which Guzie believes to be perennial in
Catholicism. This is a confusion of meaning; the referent of the
quantitative symbol is taken to be the same as that of the religious
symbol, and there arises that fallacy of misplaced concreteness which in
Guzie's view so bedevils Catholic piety (1-7). It has in his view
produced such mistakes as the Tridentine doctrines of transubstantiation
(22ff., 63), of real presence (71ff., 111ff.), and of the sacrifice of
the Mass (150ff.). Such mergers of the quantitative and the qualitative
symbols, such mergers of the levels of meaning which they express, Guzie
thinks to be inevitable in popular religion, and he is unable to find
any self-corrective factor in this popular Catholic liturgical piety,
governed as it is by the doctrinal tradition, which would operate
spontaneously to remove such aberrations as may develop there. For that
purification we must rely upon theologians and theologically well-
informed catechists, who should be alert to counter any suggestion in
the contemporary liturgy of a world of physical things imbued with
arcane qualities and pervaded with the numinous (5, 58). Such was the
world of the medieval Catholic metaphysicians, who assumed without
question the intrinsic qualification of material reality (67).

When nonetheless that medieval metaphysics broke down under the demands
made upon it by the supposed need for a notion of being sufficiently
unified to infer God from creation without presupposing His existence as
the prime analogate, the Scotists and later the nominalists attempted to
replace the failed analogous notion of being with one more unified
because more abstract. The new concept of being was found to be usable
only insofar as capable of conceptually distinct determinations, whose
conceptual distinction tended to remove the unity of being from the
qualifications marking historical finitude, inasmuch as these
qualitatively diverse concepts were conceived of as extrinsic to the
pure concept of being as being, i.e., as unqualified unity. Thus was set
the stage for the contemporary monist logical analysis whose model since
Galileo has been secular, that of "natural philosophy," and whose
symbolism has been quantitative simply; the monist logic led ineluctably
back

to Plato's punctillist mathematicism, the rediscovery of which, with its
attendant expulsion of qualities from the universe, ironically opened
the modern age.

In consequence, the contemporary "scientific man" is locked into the
ancient and inexorable monist dilemma, identical to that which rendered
experimental science abortive in the great non-Christian cultures of the
past. Physics when governed by the monist logic of mathematical symbols
must either abjure any relation of its mathematical symbols to reality,
as the Copenhagen School requires, or following Einstein and Planck must
resist all suggestion of an indeterminate material reality and so strive
continually to find the master formula which will remove materiality
from all historical contingency -- because from the viewpoint of that
logic, any contingency which is irreducible to necessity by theoretical
reason is randomness merely. Paradoxically, as we have seen, the end in
view is then the elimination of experimental science; whether the quasi-
Buddhist stance of the Copenhagen interpretation is adopted or the
quasi-Aristotelian stance of Einstein and Planck, the same dichotomy
between truth and historical reality is presupposed.

Theology, once conformed to this historical pessimism as by a Guzie,
cannot but be equally bent upon the same dehistoricizing of its object,
the Word made flesh (97ff.); Guzie posits the necessary evolution from
myth to metaphysics to the immanent necessities of monadic reason (18-
21, 128ff.) which the Newtonian mechanics once was thought to have
forever vindicated, which Kant systematized, which Comte preached as the
secular faith, before whose criticism Schleiermacher surrendered and
which theological liberalism has since continued to celebrate. Guzie's
version of this monism proceeds out of the routine liberal postulate of
a primitive Christianity uninterested in history which then fell into
the urkatholische materialism that in Luke-Acts unfortunately reverted
to a mythic-historic interpretation of the supposedly nonhistorical
symbols of the primitive Christian faith (96ff.). Recovery from this
Fall of the Church -- a theme indispensable to liberal theology, which
in this follows Plato's cosmology blindly -- must proceed by way of the
"interiorization" of the symbols which the mythic imagination of
Catholic piety has insisted upon reading as expressive of a truth
intrinsic to the things and events of the historical order (139ff.).
Once these symbols are understood, under theological correction, to be
"second-level interpretations" uttering a meaning entirely distinct from
and in no sense immanent within the physicalhistorical world, Catholic
worship can recover its pristine freedom from the randomness of space
and time, and from the hopelessness of historical necessity (111ff.).
Guzie's pseudoCatholic liberalism knows, as the Church Fathers, as the
Evangelists themselves and as Paul could not, that the Resurrection of
the Christ is not event but idea, an interpretation of the death of
Jesus corresponding to no novel event in history and to no novel reality
in Jesus, but expressing merely a human ideal immanent in human
subjectivity, whether that of Jesus or of anyone else (55ff., 88ff.).

For Guzie, the Eucharistic symbolism is thus a general statement about
death, an ideal tied to no particular event or even ritual, but ever
emergent in man's ongoing selfinterpretation: all meals, if one will
have it so, are Eucharists.35 Here again is an echo of Calvin: only
those who rightly interpret the Eucharistic symbolism can receive the
reality symbolized: there can be no manducatio impiorum. This view is
also akin to Luther's rejection of the event-character of the real
presence, whether as transubstantiation or as

sacrifice; otherwise one must invoke a metaphysical sacramental realism
ruinous to justification sola fide.

Such nominalism, as has been said, reduces the historical order "of
things and events" to that upon which the old Newtonian physics bore, a
world supposedly governed by ideal mathematical necessities
appropriately stated in the equations governing the relations between
bodies moving blindly in fields of force. Freedom and history are
disjunct in such a calculus: this the Reformation knew, this Guzie has
understood. So had the entirety of the pagan world. We have pointed out
sufficiently the bankruptcy of this position. The notion that Historie
is available as a value-free object or as a blind process thrives today
only among those Catholic historians who have been persuaded that the
unity of the Catholic faith, the Catholic worship and the Catholic
Church is not historical, and this on the same authority which persuaded
Schleiermacher. The consequent surrender of the intrinsic value and
significance, the inherent objectivity, of the Church's historical
worship, in favor of a faith which has no permanently valid historical
and liturgical expression has permitted many of these scholars,
committed to what they presume to be historical criticism, to suppose
that it is therefore compatible with their Catholicism to submit its
liturgically-grounded affirmation, its credal symbolism, to the erosive
criticism of some approved necessitarian rationale, Marxist for
preference, of the historical order of reality, a rationale which
crystallizes a despair of history into a determinist historical-critical
methodology now presumed to be the single criterion of historical
honesty and the sole avenue to historical freedom and responsibility --
understood always as a radical dissociation of the present from the
past.36 It is only in Modernist and neo-Modernist circles that this sort
of historicism still reigns; elsewhere the work of men such as Newman,
Dilthey, K�hler, Gadamer and Pelikan has made it obsolete.37

Meanwhile, the Cartesian clarities upon which this positivism relies
have elsewhere provided their own refutation; the dichotomization of
quantity and quality, of object and subject, of thing and idea and all
the rest have concluded to dead ends in physics, in the social sciences,
in historiography, in philosophy. It is no longer possible to posit as
of course the reductionisms which the resolution of such antinomies
entails; only in contemporary theology does the need to nullify the
intrinsic significance of the material individual and of the temporal
event continue to dominate discussion, and this, by a supreme irony,
under the aegis of "historical consciousness". That it does so is not
difficult to understand, for it is the historical and sacramental
appropriation of covenanted reality which is in issue -- the issue upon
which the Reformation turned and turns yet. Once it is accepted that the
nominalist account of the real is inadequate, simply false, it is
necessary to come to grips with the consequence, viz., given the
collapse of the sole base yet suggested for the rejection of sacramental
realism, the ancient faith in the sacramentalcovenantal-trinitarian
order of Catholic worship remains in possession. It is on this ground
that theology as Catholic must stand; there is no other. It is time to
abandon the futile quest for an Archimidean point outside the world from
which to launch a discovery of God's immanence within the world.
Theology, as fides quaerens intellectum, is not fideism, not
obscurantism; it is a free inquiry into the free truth of creation, and
has every right to maintain its freedom.

Guzie, in his early years, was the victim of such a

presentation of "school" Thomism as has been described; while still a
student he produced a book on Thomist epistemology38 under the
tutelage of the Jesuit faculty of Thomist philosophy at St. Louis
University, at that time the protagonists of what was known in Jesuit
circles as "St. Louis Thomism." Later on, informed of the inadequacies
of this supposed metaphysicaltheological synthesis by the Protestant
theologians under whom he studied at Cambridge, he abandoned the
metaphysical naiveties of his Jesuit mentors for such anti-
metaphysical simplicities as Langer's analysis of sign and symbol.39
That this refusal of all metaphysics entailed also the refusal of
sacramental realism he has accepted in good part.

Here Guzie simply finds himself in the company of K�ng,40

Kilmartin,41 Cooke,42 Schillebeeckx,43 Martos,44 Power,45 and in fact
most of those who have published material on these subjects in the
popular Catholic press in recent years. Like K�ng, like Guzie, these
theologians have long distanced themselves from the school Thomism in
which they were trained during the years of their theological and
religious formation. The Thomism of that pre-conciliar period had been
thought of by its protagonists as continuous with the magisterial
proclamation to the point that the distinction between theological and
doctrinal certitude had for them become blurred. The qualitative
difference between the doctrinal statement itself and its immediate
logically-structured theological analysis could not but be difficult to
appreciate for a generation whose metaphysicians still argued over the
reality of "possibles" and whose theologians had earlier to be restrained
by papal edict from logically reducing theological disagreement to heresy
per se.46 The controversy De auxiliis was still alive for the generation
of Jesuits who taught Guzie his Thomism, and it is hardly to be wondered
at that he should, in discovering the deficiencies of the metaphysics
which had generated it, find himself in difficulties with the doctrines
of his faith, for he had not been much alerted to the difference between
the one and the other, and still less to the reasons underlying that
distinction. Like his Jesuit professors, he thought his brand of Thomism
to be identified with the Catholic faith in meta-empirical sacramental
reality simply, and the failure of the one was the failure of the
other.47

However, such difficulties may be experienced on the one hand as spurs to
a fides quaerens intellectum, or on the other as the motive for dropping
the quest entirely and transposing the entire theological problematic to
a nonhistorical plane which allows no space for metaphysical questions.
This latter option, the refusal of the historical significance of
religious symbols, is basic to Guzie's understanding of the Eucharist; as
it empties the consecrated bread and wine of any intrinsic meaning so
also it frees him from the credal symbols such as those promulgated at
the Council of Trent. Such formal declaration of independence from the
Church's historicity is not very interesting any more; its modalities
have long since been explored and spelled out in the two millennia of the
Church's history and nothing very startling emerges in Guzie's version of
it. Novelty does not arise from within the monadic mind; if one cannot
learn at all, and soon it becomes necessary to deny what has been
learned, for the revelation, as free, always turns out to be unnecessary.

Guzie's eucharistic theology is simply a popularization of Calvinism; his
argument for that position restates the nominalist denial, required by a
monist logic, of the intrinsic, free significance of historical reality;
upon this

denial, as has been seen, the Reformation rests.

2. Colman E. O'Neill, O.P., Sacramental Realism: A General Theory of the
Sacraments (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1983).

O'Neill has been for twenty years professor of systematic theology at
the University of Fribourg; his particular concern has been sacramental
theology, and over the two decades intervening since the publication of
an earlier book in sacramental theology it led him to appreciate the
need for a systematic restatement of Catholic theology across the
board.48 He particularly wishes to avoid the impersonalism and
juridicalism which is associated in his mind, as in that of most
contemporary theologians, with the neo-scholastic sacramental theology
of the pre-conciliar epoch, and which some, perhaps more than ordinarily
afflicted by modernity, would find inseparable from any reliance upon a
salvation achieved fundamentally by another human being, even if the
Christ. At the same time, O'Neill is alert to the contemporary
temptation to reduce sacramental efficacy to "the category of the word"
(139, 149, 184).

Consequently he has looked for a synthetic principle which might serve,
as the title of the book proposes, to ground a general theory of the
sacraments whose realism, as he insists, must be affirmed as
indispensable to the Church's life and worship, and that would at the
same time protect the equally indispensable freedom of that life and
worship. He recognizes that such a principle would immediately provide
the a priori base for systematic theology across the board.

O'Neill thinks to find this base in the Thomist philosophy of creation,
exemplified in the "five ways," seen not so much as means of
demonstrating the existence of the One God as of justifying the
categories of God-language as such (158, 162-3) and particularly that of
causality, which he thinks basic to all theological systematization. For
O'Neill, the realism of the Eucharistic presence and of its res et
sacramentum analogues in the other sacraments absolutely requires a
metaphysics of natural creation, a philosophical entry into the
irreducibility of existence as grasped in the judgment whereby the
realism of sense experience is affirmed:

The only way there is to say something positive about God and his
creative and saving activity, however imperfect the concept must be
acknowledged to be, relies in the last analysis upon the conviction that
it is legitimate and helpful to speak of the act of creation in terms of
efficient causality. (160)

O'Neill maintains that the Father's creative love, which has formed man
in his image and has been revealed in the Christ and in the gift of the
Spirit, can in principle be known apart from revelation (190); the
articulation of this knowledge is the task of metaphysics, while the
task of Catholic theology is to synthesize the reality of creation with
that of revelation (27ff.; cf. 146, 160).

This task is not distinct from that which the older theology knew as the
problem of the relation between grace and nature, and shares the
confusion typical of that problematic, a confusion which is due to an
uncritical oscillation between an experiential and an analytic
understanding of such terms as creation, nature and grace. For example,
creation passive spectata can be looked at in the Augustinian fashion as
that which is universally given to experience, or it can be looked

at analytically as ontological dependency in the order of substance. In
either view, creation is thought of as nature or natural; this latter
term is again read ambiguously, denoting either the universally given
(the phenomenological, Augustinian or common-sense notion), or as the
condition of possibility of some supposedly ungraced activity (the
analytic Thomist notion which looks for intrinsic causes in terms of
act-potency). The temptation to identify these usages of the term
"nature" is at the heart of the Thomist theological dilemma, for such
identification assumes that the supernatural gratuity which is gratia
Christi is distinct from the supposedly natural gratuity of creation.
The usual remedy is merely nominal, an explanation assigning
nonmetaphysical meanings to words whose prima facie denotation is
metaphysical and analytical: grace becomes a gratuity on the level of
the accidental, while creation is seen to be a substantial gratuity.
This merely verbal solution works well enough until submitted to the
Thomist metaphysical analysis, whereupon it is seen to be a nonsensical
subordination of the gratuity of grace to the necessity of nature. From
this point onward, nature is the dominant category. It then becomes very
difficult to take the Fall with

any real seriousness,49 a problem which is native to the Thomist
theology, and it becomes impossible to understand the Incarnation to be
absolutely novel without dissociating it absolutely from the order of
creation. The classic Thomist theology has found no solution to this
problem.

O'Neill therefore accepts the usual postulates of school Thomism when he
relies upon a creationist metaphysics as the ground of his theology
(27ff.). This Thomism considers that creation is through the Father's
Word, and therefore is at least implicitly Trinitarian (the Father is
seen to be the Creator, through the Word), but not Christological,
inasmuch as only its renewal, its redemption, is through the Incarnation
of the Word (30ff., 124, 161). The Incarnation then is not understood to
be implicit in creation itself, but rather is given independently of it,
i.e., propter peccatum (92).

O'Neill's use of these postulates is inconsistent; in the hands of a
Schillebeeckx they are shown to conclude to the secularization of the
Church and/or the sanctification of the world on some extra-
Christological base,50 but O'Neill's willingness to accept implications
which are in tension with the realism of the doctrinal and liturgical
tradition is tempered by his conviction of the necessity of that realism,
and his desire to defend it (139ff.). It is the possibility of mounting
that defense on such a metaphysics of a supposed nonChristocentric
creation that is contested here. Before entering upon an examination of
its details, some central religious ideas of O'Neill's should be set out,
because they are not obvious and yet they control a good deal of his
theology. In the first place, for O'Neill, Christ is the image par
excellence of the Triune God (35ff.) and is therefore in some sense
archetypal (56-7), present at the creation (60); although not implicit in
the Father's creative act nor in the Old Alliance, he renews the former
and is the final form of the latter (39, 59); he is therefore mediator of
the "alliance," of salvation, of the Spirit, and of the "Father's
creative love;" by his death and resurrection the New Covenant is
established (35ff.). If creation and Old Covenant do not identify, their
association is so close in O'Neill's thought as to permit that inference
(27, 59); similarly Christ's mediation is single (33). Secondly, O'Neill
echoes the Thomist minimalization of the consequences of the Fall in that
he does not consider and even excludes suffering as a positive factor in
the redemption of the world except insofar as it may be reduced to a
painful

struggle for personal maturity (43-44); the evident question as to why
the redemption required the Cross is either refused (45) or trivialized
by observations which refer it to the physical environment together with
the corruption effected by sin (43). In O'Neill's view such penal
connotations as those which associate Christ's suffering with
"propitiation for sin," "reparation" and "satisfaction" invoke a God of
vengeance, a deity intent upon vindicating his own dignity against the
affront of sin, a Father whose just anger must be soothed by guilt-
offerings (33-49). This unchristian and mythical view of God, as he
thinks, underlies much of the proclivity for the juridical and
impersonal categories which plague the neoscholastic theology of grace
and redemption. It leads him to a further conclusion: the exclusion of
any question of an a priori redemptive suffering of Christ which as
substitutional for the punishment due the sins of the world would be
radically effective independent of its free appropriation by the
faithful (37, 104). In association with this distaste for all
objectivizing of the redemption worked by Christ's passion and death,
and for all talk of satisfaction for sin, propitiation, ransoming and
the like, there goes an experiential approach to theology (53), one in
tension with the Thomist act-potency metaphysics of intrinsic causality
(whose categories are nonexperiential of necessity, denoting as they do
the intrinsic conditions of possibility of experience) which intends to
stress the phenomenological side of Eucharistic worship to the detriment
of the metaphysical. This eclectic methodology, not unknown in the work
of Thomas himself, is best illustrated by O'Neill's reduction of the res
et sacramentum of the Eucharist to the "real presence" of the risen
Lord, and his referring all talk of Eucharistic sacrifice to the
phenomenological or experiential dimension, that of the sacramentum
tantum or of the res tantum in the classic idiom (91-92, 94, 106-108),
in such wise that any identification of the "real presence" with
Christ's self-offering is ruled out. This leaves to one side the
theology of transubstantiation; while O'Neill accepts the term as the
implication of the "This is my body" of the words of institution, he
declines to enter into any metaphysical or theological examination of
that dogmatic event, leaving at least one reader with the impression
that he considers such interest to be "cosmological," concerned with
"the nature of matter" and so not properly existential or of interest to
metaphysics (155ff.). This in turn leaves a considerable doubt as to the
historicity of the "real presence" which he has in view; granted its
reality as living, personal and existential, the "real presence" turns
out to be incapable, or at least highly impatient, of any metaphysical
analysis (i.e., an analysis in terms of intrinsic causality) and is
therefore "presence" in a merely nominal sense, indistinguishable as
idea from "absence." Its historicity or event-character is similarly
nominal, for its "beginning" or event-dimension is not to be identified
as Christ's sacrifice. Thereupon reappear all the dilemmas which
Luther's Eucharistic doctrine set -- but could not resolve.

A further set of difficulties arising out of the phenomenological or
experiential approach which O'Neill associates with the personalism to
which he is committed has to do with our solidarity with Christ as well
as our solidarity in sin, which cannot be dealt with simply as
experiential realities without impoverishment; in order that the grace
of Christ be grace for us there must be some antecedent community
between ourselves and the Christ. O'Neill does not discuss our
solidarity in sin, but takes it for granted, while our solidarity in
Christ is in O'Neill's hands less than Christocentric, since it finds
its roots in our creation to the

image of the Trinity through the non-Incarnate Word, in the Father's
creative love, and so is metaphysically prior to the Incarnation
(29ff.). Our historical solidarity with Christ is for O'Neill a matter
of our truly acting as persons, of imaging God in imitation of Christ's
imaging which culminated on the Cross, and of accepting the suffering
which this growth toward maturity and real personhood imposes: in short,
of conforming our love to his in the unity of "one person." It might be
asked what the slaughter before Verdun or the holocaust at such killing
grounds as Belsen had to do with growth in personal maturity and
humanity; one might even instance the agony routinely undergone by the
animal world and by children born and unborn, or the senseless lottery
of carnage played out on our highways and airways, and so on
indefinitely, none of which tragedies, great or small, seem to be
touched by O'Neill's account of the ethical meaning of our suffering in
its relation to Christ's passion (44). Here the instinctus fidei patent
in the liturgical piety of reparation finds a depth of mystery in the
evil of sin transcending all mere impediments to personal maturity and
speaks far more profoundly to the human condition than can the theology
which O'Neill's would summon to its approfondissement (91). This
traditional Catholic piety, this devotion to the Cross, finds in our
fallenness a negation vast to the point of horror to be undone by the
redeemer, and the cultic language of reparation and satisfaction, of a
suffering servant-hero, by which this faith-instinct is uttered is not
to be dismissed summarily as myth: there is more than myth in the common
conviction of the New Testament writers that the Christ "had to suffer
these things" as the ransom, the price of the renewal of the good
creation, in which he was as man primordially immanent, and in which his
immanence did not cease by reason of the Fall but became a humiliation,
a passion and a crucifixion. Thus understood, the creative primordial
immanence of the Son becomes, upon the Fall, at once recreatio as well,
in obedience to a single Mission from the Father to give the Spiritus
Creator now the Spiritus Redemptor as well. In such a Christocentric
creation, the emphasis upon creation through the Word remains, but
through the Word as He reveals himself, Incarnate, actual in history as
the Lord of history, and not through some putative cosmic divine decree
antecedent to the Incarnation and unknown to the New Testament, as
O'Neill would have it (27-30, 38). For O'Neill, however, our graced
solidarity in Christ, incarnate propter peccatum, looks to a future
completion or achievement; it is not a fact already objectively
irrevocable because at one with the primordial Incarnation.

The central theological problem, one which O'Neill recognizes as
central, is the systematic or metaphysical account of the relation
between creation and the order of redemption in Christ (30). The
assumptions which govern O'Neill's metaphysics make this task
impossible; when confronted by the crucial metaphysical questions, he
lapses back into the experiential mode of explanation, which has nothing
to do with his metaphysics, and which contributes nothing to our
theological understanding of sacramental reality. The remainder of this
discussion will demonstrate the fact.

There is already an anticipation of this tension between O'Neill's
Thomist metaphysical ratio and Catholic doctrine in Thomas' own
conviction of the intrinsically nonhistorical character of creation; St.
Thomas considers the idea of creation to be intelligible apart from any
temporal beginning (30), as against the more traditional view of an
Augustinian such as Bonaventure that creation to be intelligible must
have a beginning in time -- or that, to use a more contemporary

idiom, its free contingency is intrinsic and so is ultimately
historical.51 The Thomist stress upon the logically necessary conditions
of a creation which is by theological postulate free makes
unintelligible O'Neill's own proper insistence upon the novelty and
originality of the existential order, for such terms invoke the free
intelligibility which is the historicity of creation, not Thomas' notion
of the contingency of creation as a timeless and ultimately merely
logical and nominal relation of substantial dependency upon the
transcendent God who is not immanent in creation and is a priori
incapable of relation to creation.

It then becomes impossible for Thomas to solve the central theological
problem, viz., the construction of a metaphysical account of the
relation of the Incarnation, the Father's sending of the Son to give the
Spirit, to the Father's act of creation. Presupposing these to be
distinct, Thomas was unable to explain how or why they are so, inasmuch
as he applied exactly the same metaphysical analysis of esse-essence to
provide for the intelligibility of both. But this analysis of intrinsic
causality, entirely adequate to investigate the clearly intrinsic
intelligibility of the Logos sarx egeneto, i.e., of the Christological
immanence of God in creation, is by reason of its methodological a
priori entirely unable to account for a free creation apart from the
immanence of God in that creation, for without this immanence of the
Creator in creation there is no more than a nominal or extrinsic
relation of creation to the Creator-God -- which does not satisfy the a
priori postulate of this act-potency analysis: viz., the intrinsic
intelligibility of its subject matter, creation as such.

These incongruities have their theological consequences; when it becomes
impossible to provide a metaphysical account of the relation of the
Father's "decree" of creation to his sending of the Son to give the
Spirit, some sort of non-metaphysical, which is to say non-theological,
statement of that relationship must be set out (once given the Thomist
postulate of a natural creation). O'Neill uses for this the analogy of
marriage, which like Schillebeeckx he assumes to be at once "natural"
and sacramental, and therefore an apt illustration of the creation-
Incarnation relation, understood as a "merger" -- but so to proceed is
again to provide purely nominal or verbal solutions without undertaking
the metaphysical analysis of that relation, a task which for O'Neill is
the raison d'�tre of theology (25ff., 187ff.).

When the historicity of creation is understood to be merely nominal (a
postulate which we have seen to be proper to classic Thomism), i.e.,
when historicity is not intrinsic to the very intelligibility of
creation as contingent, and when creation so understood is uncritically
merged with the historical order of gratia Christi proper to sacramental
theology, the historicity of gratia Christi cannot but suffer, to become
also merely nominal and not essential to its intelligibility, for the
alternative would be the abandonment of the notion that "natural"
creation can serve as the non-historical prius of the order of grace,
and the consequent formal recognition of the systematic prius of the
historical order of gratia Christi -which would be to accept the
Trinitarian, Christocentric and covenantal character, the historicity,
of metaphysics as such. This in turn would invert the priority of
creation over Incarnation which is implicit in the classic Thomist
metaphysics (27), and in the propter peccatum Christology which is its
theological correlative (61).

The usual objection to requiring a Christocentric ground for metaphysics
is that it amounts to "fideism." Since O'Neill has not employed it, this
is not the place to reply to that rather obscure indictment, save to
remark that its usual interpretation relies upon the supposition that
the Dogmatic Constitution Dei filius of Vatican I interpreting Rom I:19-
20 is to be read as a Thomist statement about the ungraced order of
creation. Whether or not O'Neill is of this opinion, rather than accept
the radical Christocentrism systematically demanded of any metaphysical
inquiry into a free creation, he has allowed the distinction between the
res et sacramentum and the res sacramenti of the Eucharist to evanesce
by reducing the event of the Eucharistic sacrifice to the purely
symbolic order (that of the sacramentum tantum) of the Church's
sacrifice of praise (106) or to the ethical order of personal response
(210). While O'Neill is well aware of the sola fide implications of this
reduction, he is unable to circumvent them, as his theology of
eucharistic sacrifice, which we will presently examine, manifests.

Some of his other emphases, such as the distinction between symbolism
and realism in the sacraments and the need to find a balance between
these aspects (15, 104), his fastidiousness over the impersonal
juridicalism which he thinks latent in the Tridentine ex opere operato
and in all talk of Christ's merits, vicarious satisfaction for sin,
propitiatory sacrifice and objective redemption, together with his
consequent reduction of Christ's "propitiation" and "satisfaction" to "a
change brought about in man when God's love reaches out to him" (31ff.,
91-92; cf. 111), also closely parallel Guzie's program for the
"interiorization" of Eucharistic realism. Like Guzie, O'Neill fails to
grasp that the Eucharistic symbolism of the liturgy is intrinsically
realist from the outset (104) and that its causality requires no
theological "justification" by appeal to an antecedent hermeneutical
norm, whether that provided by a philosophical metaphysics of creation
(162, 204ff.) or by Guzie's two-level epistemology. In consequence
O'Neill must not only refuse to ground his metaphysics in Christ's
incarnational and covenantal immanence in the good creation ab initio
(27), but must also systematically exclude any Christocentric
metaphysics by referring the universal dimension of our redemption to
the order of a non-Christocentric creation by the Trinity (39, 46, 55,
59, 87). This is to add to the patristic propter peccatum Christology a
rationalist sensu negante thrust which distorts it (29, 92).52 Clearly,
the Fall is more than an accidental modification of the good creation
which fell in Adam; the Fall is at the level of substance, from life to
death, from pneuma to sarx; if the Christ does indeed redeem and renew
the fallen good creation, he does so on the level of creation (161), and
unless we are to deal metaphysically with two orders of creation, which
is systematically impossible, it is necessary to recognize at the outset
that creatio and recreatio are both in Christ, a single consequence of
the Mission of the Word. If the efficacy, the irrevocability, of the
Father's sending of the Son to give the Spirit is not achieved
primordially in an unfallen creation antecedent to the Fall, then there
is no alternative to supposing, as O'Neill supposes, that the full
efficacy and significance of Christ's sacrifice waits throughout history
upon the historical response of the faithful (45), and an ambiguity is
then at work which cannot be resolved by the merger of Christ and the
faithful into "one person," as O'Neill translates the Pauline "one body"
(37, 109); the Calvinist ring of his language is here unmistakable: the
Spirit can do that which is contradictory:

Clearly also the community cannot ratify and make its own the

sacrifice of Calvary if Christ has not already sent his Spirit on the
assembly; and this means that Christ offers in his members in virtue of
that mysterious union of the Spirit which identifies them with him even
though they retain their autonomy (107).

It is not at all accidental that this dilemma emerged in its sharpness
for Thomism with the problem posed by the Immaculate Conception, which a
sensu negante interpretation of the Anselmian propter peccatum account
of the Incarnation could not accommodate. The New Covenant, as a matter
of definition, is God's free immanence in humanity, actual in the
Father's sending of the Son to give the Spirit; it is a reality whose
complete historical mediation by Jesus the Christ may wait upon the
vagaries of our fallenness, for its reality, the Covenant itself, is
already given, as Paul tells us, "once and for all." Nor will a "one
person" Christomonism suffice for the free, because covenantal,
Eucharistic immanence of the risen Christ, an immanence which not only
does not but must be understood not to override and annul human freedom
in order that the Emmanuel may be given us; otherwise, theology
abdicates before the mystery which it exists to question. If the paradox
of God's freedom causing our own is to be paradoxical rather than flat
nonsense, it must rest upon an utterly gratuitous Covenant already in
place, fulfilled, irrevocable, the created marital image of the Triune
God which thus grounds in freedom and in mystery all created reality and
truth -- a mystery and paradox which invite the fides quaerens
intellectum.

The basic affinity of O'Neill's with Guzie's Eucharistic theology
emerges in O'Neill's treatment of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross,
both as the historical sacrifice which is the cause of our redemption,
and as represented sacramentally in the Eucharist (89ff.). In the first
place, he finds an impossible ambivalence in the idea that the past
event on the Cross is sacramentally represented; this seems to him to
smack of the repetition of an irretrievably past event (92, 104, 105,
108), the typically nominalist and anti-sacramental conclusion to which
Luther also was led. Neither is O'Neill at peace with the Servant
Christology underlying the most ancient liturgical tradition, i.e., with
that symbolism, explicit in each of the Institution Narratives,53 by
which Jesus' "once for all" sacrifice on the Cross, sacramentally
represented in the Eucharist, is the unanticipatable fulfillment of the
prophecy of the Servant Songs in Isaiah54 (45). Unless it is carefully
dehistoricized, O'Neill finds this Christology to invoke the juridical
mentality implicit in all talk of vicarious suffering, vicarious
satisfaction, vicarious merit, objective redemption, and summarily, in
the view that Christ's redemptive sacrifice is effective in se without
reference to its free appropriation by the faithful. To this it must be
said that our solidarity with Christ is certainly not to be relegated to
a "natural" creation in the image of God, but is rather the most
fundamental level of gratia Christi, of our graced creation in Christ,
and is actual, a reality, apart from and prior to any appropriation; we
are not free to avoid this solidarity, which is not juridical but
ontological, not prospective but actual, and finally, not accidental but
substantial, in the order of creation. O'Neill following St. Thomas
considers the ontological reality of creation to be eo ipso independent
of the Incarnation of the Word, who mediates a gratuity created entirely
apart from his Mission to give the Spirit (38). This entails a strained
reading of the pre-existence passages in the Johannine Prologue and the
hymns in Ephesians, Colossians and Philippians; there is no
justification for reading into the

biblical attribution of preexistence to the Christ the immanent-

economic distinction of much later Trinitarian speculation. The New
Testament always treats concretely of the Christ, and never prescinds
from the Incarnation, even in the Prologue, whose Logos sarx egeneto
speaks of the kenosis of the Christ who, in Pauline language, is made
sin, not man, for us -- for his humanity is the prius of our own: we are
created in him as the implication of his Incarnation; his Incarnation is
not the implication of our fallenness. This is not the place to pursue
the exegetical problem, but it is time to abandon the supposition that
one can read the New Testament as though it were a Thomist document, and
proceed to translate sarx as natura humana materia quantitate signata
individuata. In any case, even O'Neill recognizes that the mediation of
the Christ is effective on the level of creation, for he understands the
Christ to be the mediator of the Father's creative love. While it is
undoubtedly true that the free creation must be appropriated in freedom,
an appropriation made possible by the gift of the Holy Spirit, the
metaphysical analysis of this appropriation is not provided in O'Neill's
theology; it would conclude to the requirement of a Christocentric
creation to provide the graced conditions of possibility of the Fall,
which in turn obviously would demand a Christocentric metaphysics.

There well may be an entirely too ready willingness to externalize or
objectify the grace of Christ in Catholic as well as in Protestant
theology, as O'Neill has intimated, but his remedy, the identification
of Christ and the faithful as "one person," is hardly the panacea for a
juridical sacramental impersonalism, apart from being a doubtful
rendition of the Pauline "One Flesh" of Christ and his Bridal Church. In
the first place, as has been seen, O'Neill's theology does not provide
for the intrinsic conditions of possibility of such a union, but offers
a merely verbal or nominal analogy, that of marriage, in which natural
creation and sacramental grace are thought to "merge" (30) -- which is
only to beg the question which theology is expected to answer. In fact,
while leaving the problem of juridicalism and impersonalism intact,
O'Neill introduces a Christomonism quite incompatible with the
historical presence-as-event of the risen Christ to his historical
Church, but quite consistent with the Lutheran ecclesiology, according
to which Christ's Eucharistic presence insofar as dynamic can only be
cosmic (cf. 163), for it is not historical, not by way of any event:
this nominalist refusal of the historical reality of the transempirical
or metaphysical is the refusal of the ex opere operato effect of the
sacramental sign, the res et sacramentum of the classic Augustinian
analysis. Certainly this is not O'Neill's intention; unlike Guzie, whose
reading of the ex opere operato explicitly requires the
"interiorization" of the res et sacramentum, O'Neill wants to rest his
sacramental realism on the objective reality of Christ's Eucharistic
presence, which he knows to be fundamental to Eucharistic realism as
well as to the realism of all the other sacraments. Nonetheless, he is
unable to refer to this Eucharistic presence (the res et sacramentum) as
that of the event of Christ's sacrifice on the Cross, represented here
and now in the event of the sacrifice of the Mass. This Tridentine view
of the Eucharistic realization of the historical sacrifice of Christ on
the Cross as the once-for-all and utterly transcendent fulfillment of
the entirety of the promises of the Old Testament is incompatible with
the cosmic interpretation of the Christ which is intrinsic to O'Neill's
theological base (27, 161): if the creative love of the Father is the
real ground of our salvation, then the concrete suffering of the Christ,
if not irrelevant to it, is certainly peripheral (43, 44, 46), little
more than a necessary concomitant and therefore unimportant reflex of
his presence in

a humanity whose sins add to but do not seem to account for the
suffering of the world (43, 124). On this theory, Paul's doctrine of
fall through a First Adam and redemption through the Last Adam, a
dialectic which knows that suffering and death are rooted in original
sin and not at all in the laws of the physical world, is unintelligible,
as is his invocation of the Adamic and covenantal solidarity of fallen
humanity with Christ in creation, in suffering, in death and in
resurrection. In O'Neill's theology, the redemptive value of the Cross
relies for its efficacy upon the response of the faithful, upon their
acceptance of suffering as the price of "Christian maturity" and of
growth in the image of God (here there is a clear resonance with Guzie's
talk of "personal process" toward the "interiorization" of the "will of
God": cf. Guzie, 128ff., O'Neill 21).

O'Neill begins his discussion of the place of Christ's sacrifice in the
Mass by remarking that there is no theological agreement as to the
meaning of Eucharistic sacrifice in the New Testament and thereupon
deciding to pursue the inquiry by looking first to that which is more
clear, the non-Eucharistic uses of the word (82ff.). This leads him to
suppose that the ethical meaning of the term as it appears particularly
in the Letter to the Hebrews can clarify the specifically cultic usage.
He makes the point that the ethical dimension of sacrifice as this is
presented in the New Testament cannot be separated from the
Christological dimension; he then goes on to say that in the New
Testament the spiritual sacrifice of Christians "is stated in terms of
its ethical demands which derive from the holiness of God himself" (84).
Taken at the letter, this is unexceptionable; within the cosmological
context of O'Neill's Thomism however it implies a theological priority
in the creative love of the One God over the historical death of Christ
on the Cross, so that the latter is submitted to a cosmological a priori
(the One God exploited by the Jewish and Moslem Aristotelianizing
theologians tributary to St. Thomas, such as Alfarabi, Avicenna,
Avicebron, Averrhoes and Maimonides: cf. 27, 158ff.) elevated over the
historical Revelation and effectively nullifying, through its
criteriological role, the redemptive value of the latter's novel and
concrete historicity. Again, this is by no means O'Neill's intention: he
wishes to save the Eucharistic reference of the sacrifices of the
faithful to the One Sacrifice of the Christ, but he does so by
dehistoricizing that relation:

The question must, therefore, be asked whether the New Testament
writers, when they applied sacrificial terminology in so broad a
context, were using simple figures of speech, or whether they intended a
much more concrete allusion. Their acute consciousness of the all-
pervading mystery of Christ suggests that they did not use such terms so
lightly.

The proposal made here is that, when the Christian life is spoken of in
terms of spiritual sacrifice, it is being related, whether explicitly or
implicitly, to Christ's personal sacrifice on Calvary (86).

No doubt: but is the relation historically concrete and actual in the
Eucharist, or does it rather depend upon the psychological affects of
the faithful? The latter is the case, for according to O'Neill, the
sacrifice of Christ on the Cross is not represented in the Eucharist:
the blood of the Covenant is not offered there (112), and even as
offered on the Cross, it may be called sacrificial only insofar as it is
understood to be an act of obedience to the Father, and a mediation of
his

creative love which images Him.

So, the whole ethical life of Christians is sacrificial, not only
because it depends on the mediation of one whose love brought him to
suffering and death; but, as well, because it is the service of ideals
whose final meaning comes from the fact that they conform to the
Father's will and, as such, are inwardly related to the obedience and
worship of Christ on the cross (92).

This language amounts to an insistence upon the priority of Creation
over the Mission of the Son. Further, the sacrifice of the faithful is
of the same order, viz., ethical conduct referred indeed to the
exemplary image of Christ on the Cross, but as clarified by and so not
as itself clarifying, by revealing, the antecedent will of the Father.

For it is not to be forgotten, O'Neill continues, that while the Christ
is the Mediator, he mediates "the creative love of God." It is this love
which is primary, and while in fact it is mediated by the Christ, there
is no systematic explanation of why this should be so; i.e., there is no
theological linkage between the historical sacrifice of Christ and the
Father's creation of man in the image of God: as has been seen,
O'Neill's Christology is exclusively propter peccatum. When he passes
from the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, the once-forall event by which
we are redeemed, to the relation of this sacrifice to the Eucharist, the
same disinterest in the historical dimension of the Christ is apparent:
we are told that it is the real presence of Christ which is primary in
the Eucharist (210), and we find the sacrificial dimension of the
Eucharist seriously diluted in O'Neill's account of it, for he limits it
to the sacrifice of the faithful (45, 104, 108, 110, 112), restricting
the "abiding" aspect of the Eucharist (the res et sacramentum) to the
real presence of the risen Christ whose One Sacrifice is an event of the
past, not of the present. O'Neill sees in the sacrifice on the Cross a
closed historical event; cosmically it is presented by the risen Christ
semper interpellando for us before the Father, but who is not present in
the Mass as victim (108); his sacrifice is not represented in the
Eucharist. This undercuts the historicity of the Church: patristic
theology, as de Lubac informs us, has always seen in the Eucharist the
sacramentally real representation of the event which at once links,
unifies and distinguishes the Old Testament and the New, viz., the One
Sacrifice, fulfilling all sacrifices, of Jesus on the Cross.55 Apart
from the res et sacramentum realism of this representation of the
historical event of the Cross, there is no historical Church, for the
Church's historicity is that of her worship: it is a sacramental
historicity, for all her reality is sacramental, caused by, because
signified by, the sacramental, covenantal immanence within her of the
High Priest and the One Sacrifice. If the "sacrifice of the Mass" is
reduced to the "sacrifice of praise" as O'Neill would have it, there is
no substantial difference between his view of the Eucharist and
Luther's. Luther also knew a real presence; he also refused the
Eucharistic representation of the Cross, and this on grounds which are
not distinct from O'Neill's, whose Thomism is finally a nominalism. If
this nominalism is given further scope and allowed to infect Christology
as well, it can only conclude explicitly to the dichotomy, instinctive
to liberal theology, between the Jesus of history and the Christ of
faith, for this is already implicit in O'Neill's isolation of the cosmic
from the historical Christ in the Eucharist; if these are not "one and
the same" in the event of Eucharistic worship, they can hardly be so in
doctrine and in theology.

Something of this dichotomy is already available in O'Neill's less
guarded statements, e.g., "Though Christ goes to his death in the full
autonomy of his freedom, the essential feature of this sacrifice is that
it is God who is primarily active" (89).

For O'Neill, it is the Son's eternal imaging of and eschatological union
with the Father that is effective for our redemption, not the Blood of
the New Covenant, not Christ's oblation on the Cross; at its fullest,
here Jesus' love only "shares . . . in the creative power of God's own
love" (36-37). This amounts to a cosmic view of salvation as
accomplished not in a historical self-offering by Jesus the Christ which
culminates upon the Cross, but effective rather through that imitation
of him by the faithful which makes his own sacrifice meaningful because
conducive to their maturity, to their imaging of the Creator's love
concrete in Jesus' presence among them. Further, if the love of the
Father is effective radically in our creation to His image, then our
imaging of God is quite independent of the Christ, as creation is, and
Christ, as image, is no more than an instance or exemplar of a value
independent of the Incarnation. It is a value, moreover, which is cosmic
rather than historical, for on this view, our historical existence is
not a consequence of having been created to the divine image, because
O'Neill does not understand this image to be historical, as Thomas
himself did not -- as Thomas saw it, angels are created more to the
image of God than men are, because they are more purely intellectual and
this by reason precisely of their nonhistoricity, their incorporeality,
their monadic nature.56 But O'Neill is not very clear about what
"creation to the image" means; he does not specifically invoke the
Thomist notion, neither does he disavow it. On the one hand, he refers
it to the so-called psychological analogy of Augustine, later developed
by Thomas, which finds the Trinity imaged by the human soul as at once
memory, intellect and will (66 ff.); this quite nonhistorical and
structural notion of our imaging of God matches the quite nonhistorical
notion of our creation to the divine image, a creation which is in fact
renewed by Christ, but cosmically rather than by reason of any deed in
history, and in terms of a propter peccatum Incarnation which has no
intrinsic nexus with our creation in the image of God. For O'Neill, the
Pauline and Johannine doctrine of our creation in Christ is to be
referred to the "immanent" Trinity, to the Word apart from any
Incarnation. This is a classic Thomist exegesis; it reads back into the
New Testament a rationalist and cosmological isolation of the Trinity
from the revelation of the Trinity which is today indefensible.57 On the
other hand, there can be no question but that O'Neill considers that our
imaging of God is fulfilled in terms of our imitation of Christ's
imaging. In the last analysis, it is the transcendent novelty, the
unique historicity, of the imaging which is Christ's that is in issue.
Can this novelty remain, if foreclosed by the antecedently naturally
known dimensions of creation, which Christ mediates but does not
constitute? The systematic answer must be in the negative.

The logical consequence of this nonhistorical and therefore cosmological
notion of our imaging of God is O'Neill's radically cosmological
interpretation of Catholicism and of Catholic worship as centered indeed
upon the Eucharist but understood in a way which avoids the trap of
reducing the Eucharist to the "category of the word" only by failing to
develop the final consequences of this cosmological logic. When O'Neill
admits (115) that the presence of the risen Christ in the Eucharist
"begins" he seems to accept, if hesitantly, the event-character of the
Eucharistic "presence" of the Christ

(115). This presence, the sacramental representation of that historical
life of our Lord which found its culmination on the Cross, the sacrifice
which is the cause and source of the Church, is therefore historical as
a covenantal and constitutive event, the event in which the freedom of
the Bridegroom the Head, as such signifies, causes and meets the
integral created freedom of the Bride in the One Flesh of their imaging
of the Triune God. The Council of Trent has identified that event as
sacrifice and as transubstantiation, and the sacrifice as that of Christ
on the Cross, thus precisely meeting and contradicting the Lutheran
denial of the representation of the sacrifice of Christ in the Mass.
Doubtless the consequences of this Tridentine definition, in the context
of the theological rationalism of the time, was an over-emphasis upon
the points stressed and a failure to develop the covenantal character of
the Eucharistic sacrifice; analogous consequences attend all conciliar
statements, not least those of Vatican II. However, the Tridentine
doctrine does not stand in the way of the fuller appreciation of the
Eucharistic worship which is now necessary. Rather, what blocks

that development is the sort of nominalism by which the Counter-
Reformation theologians rationalized divine authority, and which in our
day rationalizes human autonomy; both nominalist mentalities, with their
talk then and now of Christ's Eucharistic "presence," lose sight of the
sacramental event of New Covenant, the sacrificial community of the "one
flesh" in which the freedom of the sacrifice of Christ and the responsive
freedom of the Church's bridal sacrifice of praise, inseparable from and
irreducible to each other in their covenantal union, are represented in
the Eucharistic worship by the One Flesh of the Eucharistic sacrifice.
For this union, "real presence" will not suffice; it is a name without
historical content once dissociated from the Cross and from that event of
change in the Eucharistic elements from bread and wine to the sacrificial
body and blood of Christ which Trent, following the ancient realist
tradition, designated as transubstantiation. This sacrificial content
removed, only the name remains, which refers to no historical reality, no
actual "beginning" because no actual event in history. O'Neill wishes to
identify this real presence as an "offer of grace, which becomes grace
only when it has been transposed into personal response" (210). "Offer of
grace" is mere metaphor, and juridical at that; until submitted to
metaphysical analysis, it is nominalism, not theology. When so submitted,
a real offer will turn out to require a real event.

It may be that at bottom the point of agreement between Guzie and O'Neill
is that both have a nominalist and merely empirical conception of the
Church which prevents their seeing her as the sacramental bride of Christ
in the Eucharistic worship that here and now is at once her historical-
covenantal reality and His.58 Insofar as O'Neill is concerned, this
ecclesiology seems to be rooted in his forgetting that the res et
sacramentum of the Eucharist must be dynamic, for as sacramentum it is
not only effect, but also causal sign, which by signifying causes that
which it signifies. "Presence" is not a sign; because without significant
content, it cannot cause by signifying. The correlative of this presence
is therefore the congregation, those of the faithful who are "present" to
the empirical sacramentum tantum in an empirical sense and whose
Spiritual unity is that of the nonhistorical, cosmic Christ. From this
ecclesiology, the consequences which we have seen proceed; they amount to
the corroboration of a revisionist interpretation of the Eucharist which
cannot come to terms with the substantial reality of the New Covenant in
history.

In the Eucharist, the risen and glorified Christ is present as the
sacrifice offered to the Father in and by which our own sacrifice is
accepted because offered in union with His Body, the Church; the risen
and glorified Bride, the Kingdom, is sacramentally present in history as
the worshiping Church, caused to be sacramentally actual in history by
the historical representation of Christ's sacrificial body and blood.
Where His sacrifice is not historically represented, not sacramentally
actual, the actuality of the Church, caused and specified by the
Eucharistic Lord, can not be historical, nor can her worship, and the
Eucharist ceases to escape "the category of word." When O'Neill finds
the Eucharist to represent the Church's sacrifice merely, he forgets
that this sacrifice can be offered in the here and now only if "one
flesh" with Christ's, here and now. This consequence has been explored
to its outer limits in the theology of the Reform, and it entails the
elimination of the res et sacramentum of the Mass, and so of the entire
sacramental worship of the Church; no sacramental realism can survive
the loss of the historical event which is the sacramental representation
of Christ's sacrifice in the Mass. This, and not the "real presence," is
the center of Catholic life and worship, and no Catholic theology which
fails to find there its ground can stand.

Resum�

For as long as the Thomist metaphysics ignores the intrinsic and
historical contingency of creation, which is to say, for as long as the
contingency of the Incarnation is not identified with that of creation
as such (the systematic ground for this identification having been
provided by Thomas' application of the same esse-essence analysis to
both), it will remain no more than a static cosmology unable to
accommodate the historical order of gratia Christi, the New Covenant,
for between a contingency within the a priori order of cosmological
structure and a contingency in the order of history is all the
difference between the Aristotelian act-potency analysis proper to a
necessary cosmos incapable of a more than nominal accommodation to the
ex nihilo whether of creation or of Incarnation, and the properly
theological analysis proper to the ex nihilo at once of creation and of
the Incarnation. When Thomas used the esseessence relation to account
for the Incarnation as well as for the contingency of creation, he
applied it to what is in fact a historical and free contingency, that of
the New Covenant; from that moment, it became systematically necessary,
which is to say, necessary if Thomist metaphysics were to continue to
make sense, to identify the freedom of the New Covenant with the freedom
ex nihilo of creation: creation in Christ, in the incarnate Word, then
became the single possible basis for and single interest of Thomism, an
act-potency metaphysical analysis henceforth methodologically
theological, radically Christological and Trinitarian. The only
alternative is the

methodological and metaphysical incoherence of the philosophico-
theological Thomism of the schools. It need astonish no one that Thomas
himself did not realize the radical character of his achievement, but it
does become somewhat puzzling to find this intrinsically historical
methodology of the Thomist metaphysics so resolutely ignored in favor of
a cosmology during all the centuries which have seen avowed Thomists at
work. The loss for Catholic theology is beyond calculation, for every
systematic question which arises finds in conventional Thomism, such as
O'Neill uses here, at least its impoverishment and more often its entire
frustration; the ancient dilemmas recur, time-honored in their antiquity
-- for they are much older than St. Thomas -- and adamantine in their
intractability. They arise out of the Greek cosmological

penchant for the rationalization of God and man, which demands that
there be some a priori ground in the cosmos, in the supposedly
determinate order of the everyday world, for their interrelation, or, in
Christian terms, for the contingency of grace. Thomas accepted this
cosmological prius without question;59 although he did not enter into
the mediante anima trap which has hampered Christology since Origen and
which since Blondel has become integral to the transcendental Thomism of
Rahner and his disciples,60 Thomas did suppose that the natural order of
creation is in some fashion the metaphysical prius of the order of
grace, since he assigned to grace the category of accident rather than
substance, having reserved that of substance to nature, to the
nonhistorical contingency of creation.61 This is to understand an event,
a historical contingency, the New Covenant, as already given within the
cosmological and merely structural contingency of the "natural" creation
-- which is to say, to assume grace to be within the potency of nature,
as though freedom could be discovered as implicit within the necessary
structures of natural substance. On this radical incoherence Thomist
theologians are still fixed; it has removed them from the possibility of
serious theological speculation which is their sole justification, for
they are engaged in a most fundamental contradiction at the level of
method and it poisons all they do; not least, it forces the
trivialization of the Fall.

There is no continuity, no analogy whatever between cosmos and history,
between the contingency of Aristotelian act-potency relations and those
of essence-esse, and to assert one nonetheless is to accept a nominalist
deformation and implicit disavowal of the ex nihilo of creation as well
as of the Incarnation. The ex nihilo does not refer merely to the
absence of a prior material cause; it refers to the absence quoad nos of
any prior possibility, of any prior ratio, whether in God or in the
cosmos, of the free creation. It forbids, for example, the referring of
creation to the prior omnipotence or to the creative love of God, even
to the prior freedom of God: the ex nihilo sui et substantiae means
precisely that, and the proof, if one were needed, is the impossibility
of relating a priori the One God to the created order. Certainly the ex
nihilo imports the end of all metaphysical dualism, but it also by that
fact imports the end of prior logical-ontological potentiality, as the
structuring principle of reality: reality is now the structured freedom,
free structure of the event of the New Covenant, and its theological
analysis must begin with this freedom, this free structure whose prime
analogate is the Trinity in free and irrevocable historical relation to
its image, the New Covenant, and not with some prior notion of the Deus
unus who is also the Creator apart from any consideration of the Logos
sarx egeneto. To insert the Trinity into the nonhistorical cosmos is to
dissociate it from its historical truth, to reduce the Trinity to some
absolute level of status quo ante immanence -- which is to deform it in
the interests of cosmological neatness, for of such a divinity nothing
can be known, as a matter of definition, and so considered the Trinity
cannot be known to be Triune. The Trinity cannot be dissociated, without
its dissolution, from its free revelation in Christ and from the
historicity of the New Covenant. Ever and again, we suppose that the
given as given in history is no longer free, and we then look to some
nonhistorical prius to protect the freedom in history of the Lord of
history, a manner of proceeding which is on its face arbitrary, and
which cannot be made systematically coherent.

When the Trinity is cosmically conceived, in dissociation from faith in
Christ, the notion of a "natural" created imaging of

the Trinity becomes pressing; its solution has been to find a timeless
analogical structure of nous (the intellectus, memoria, amor adopted by
Augustine62 and adapted by Thomas) which then ineluctably begins to be
seen as the prior possibility of the Incarnation, with the cosmic
implication now explicit, i.e., that the creation of humanity is the
prius of an Incarnation merely propter peccatum (O'Neill, 92). The Fall
then can no longer be understood as from Christocentric integrity, and
the solidarity of our humanity in fallenness then has only an extrinsic
and nominal relation to our unity in Christ. From this point onward,
theology becomes a more and more unlikely narrative of divine decrees
imposed despotically by a God the Father whose Old Testament unity is
affronted by all qualification in being, by all multiplicity, as Ockham
pointed out, and this impasse is simply unbridgeable by any rational
device whatever, including the analogous predication of being, for the
analogy bespeaks a prior compatibility, which is not available from the
One God on any basis other than the juridical, the master-slave relation
which is eo ipso dualist. The revelation of the Old Testament cannot
stand alone; it is a propaedeutic, as Paul insisted in Galatians, a
guide to Christianity and apart from that telos, the inner paradox of
the Old Testament, that posed by the One God whose unqualified unity is
active in history, remains unresolved. One cannot, as O'Neill wishes,
found a theology on a least-common-denominator, philosophically
constructed divinity, on the One God common to Greek, Christian, Jewish
and Moslem speculation. The One God is Triune, and no ecumenical
theology may suppose Godhead to be dissociable from the Trinity, or the
Trinity from Christ, or Christ from the Covenant, or the Covenant from
the Church's historical worship of the Lord of history (O'Neill, 23, 28,
159). A theologian may transmit the question of whether one can
construct philosophy on a theological foundation, after the manner of
Blondel, but it is far too evident that the reverse is quite impossible:
seven centuries of Thomist disputation witness to the futility of such
efforts.

Thomas did not merely add a set of act-potency relations to those
already in place, in such wise that Aristotelianism is merely an
incomplete Thomism; it is rather the case that Aristotelianism is a
merely potential Thomism. The actualization of that potentiality is ex
nihilo, for it has the character of conversion, which is to say, of
grace. By this conversion from its essential and determinist paganism to
the Christian reality and truth, Thomas transformed the entirety of the
Aristotelian metaphysical analysis, giving it an object unimaginable to
Aristotle, and leaving no aspect of Aristotelianism in possession. For
instance, there is, from the determinist stance of the Aristotelian act-
potency analysis nothing whatever to be learned from the individual,
from the "material singular." Such a dismissal of all interest in the
concrete individual is paradoxical, considering Aristotle's enormous
curiosity for the world about him, but he was a pagan before he was an
empirical scientist, and in his metaphysics the pagan derogation of the
concrete physical entity was not second nature but first; he never was
able so to transcend Platonism as to allow a material, a world-immanent
prime analogate of being, however intent he was upon the immanence of
form in matter, and on this account his act-potency analysis finally
fails, for it can in fact provide no world-immanent specific and non-
individuated form in which the individual might participate as a member
of the common formality of the species and which might account for the
unity of the actio immanens of the species, nor is there any immanent
cosmological principle of unity which might transcend and so unify the
multitude of species: the cosmos itself fails to be one, and

therefore truly to be, precisely because of its materiality, and this
failure infects the individual itself, which for Aristotle and often for
Thomas as well is not intelligible except insofar as referred to the
universal, the specific form -- this, both for Aristotle and for Thomas
must be ideal, for it can not be immanent to the world except as
individuated by materia quantitate signata. This failure cannot but be
proper to Thomism also for as long as it remains a cosmology, a
nonhistorical analysis of nonhistorical reality, for it too can provide
no world-immanent principle of unity, as the common reliance upon the
divine ideas, the Thomist version of the Platonic forms, well
illustrates. These ideas are in God, not in the world, and reliance upon
them is impossible for any metaphysics which presupposes, as Thomism
does, as Aristotelianism did, as any act-potency metaphysics must, the
immanent, intrinsic intelligibility of the physical world. Plato can
logically invoke the world of forms as the ultima ratio, but he does so
in consequence of an explicit pessimism; for him, the cosmos is as
cosmos fallen, and its redemption must be acosmic, the return of cosmic
multiplicity, variety and change to the ideal condition of unity by the
absolute exclusion of matter from form. For Aristotle, the only way out
is Hegel's, a pantheism of the intellectus agens; for a Thomist, the
only solution which is theological is that first proposed by
Rousselot,63 in which the Word made flesh is the source of all
theological intelligibility, apart from the consideration of whose free
and covenantal immanence in creation theology does not exist because
creation does not.64

O'Neill's Thomism tries to make the best of both worlds, the Aristotelian
and the Christian, a compromise in which he is hardly alone.65 The
compromise in this instance amounts to the ongoing cosmologization or
dehistoricization of the historical worship of the historical Church, a
process which when followed to its immanent conclusion is identical to
the interiorization of the Eucharist upon which we have seen Guzie to be
intent, and which is the program of the Reformation. This dehistoricizing
follows upon the supposition, common to both Guzie and O'Neill, that the
ultimate criterion of the historical actuality and truth of the
Eucharistic symbol is the nonhistorical logic of Aristotle. This is by no
means what O'Neill believes; his Eucharistic orthodoxy is explicit and
unquestioned. However, we are here concerned with his theology, not his
personal fidelity to the Catholic tradition, and that theology, like
Guzie's, is in flight from the historicity of the Eucharistic worship,
and for the same reasons.

_______________________________

Notes

1. The success of the efforts to transcend the polemic of the sixteenth
century has been rather diplomatic than theological. None of the new
approaches to ecumenical union which have been presented in the inter-
faith discussions held since Vatican II have yet shown themselves able to
lend any degree of approfondissement to the sacramental doctrine of
either side, and thereby to provide any really new base for doctrinal
agreement; what has been accomplished has not gone beyond the recognition
that both sides have on occasion willingly misunderstood each other. When
the fog produced by such obstinacy is dissipated however, the battlements
which dominated the theological horizon of the sixteenth century reappear
to loom over our own: ex opere operato and sola fide still confront each
other as they did four centuries ago, and neither side is able to abandon
its position and yet remain itself. See e.g.: Lutherans and Catholics in
Dialogue, III: The Eucharist as Sacrifice (New York and Washington:
1967); "Observations on the Anglo-Roman Catholic International Commission
Final Report," Origins 11/47 (May, 1982) 752-756; Das Opfer Jesu Christi
und seine Gegenwart in der Kirche: Kl�rungen zum Opfercharakter des
Herrenmahles; herausg. von Karl Lehmann und Edmund Schlink. Ser. Dialog
der Kirchen, III. (Freiburg am Breisgau: Herder; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck
and Ruprecht, 1983).

2. See, e.g., "Documentation and Reflection: A Colloquium on the
Canterbury Statement," Anglican Theological Review 57 (1976) 8295, in
which the Protestant and Catholic participants, the latter including a
bishop, agreed on the wrong-headedness of the Vatican II insistence upon
the priority of the Eucharistic presence of Christ over the faith of the
Church. The theme is now a common one; see Edward Kilmartin, "Apostolic
Office: Sacrament of Christ," Theological Studies 36 (1975) 243-264,
cited further in note 9, infra.

3. The problem of intercommunion had already been wrestled with from the
founding of the World Council of Churches (Life and Work had recommended
intercommunion now, as the apt means of fostering doctrinal union, while
Faith and Order had insisted that doctrinal agreement, particularly with
regard to the Eucharist, must be achieved before intercommunion could be
a reality), and the opposing attitudes of these two organizations whose
joinder established the World Council in 1948 at Amsterdam presaged those
now observable within the Roman Catholic community, in which however the
typically Protestant tension between pastoral and doctrinal emphases is
difficult to justify. For a detailed examination of the W.C.C. debate,
see David P. Gaines, The World Council of Churches: A Study of Its
Background and History, (Peterborough, N.H.: R.R. Smith, 1966), esp.
332ff.

4. "American" is used here to denote English-speaking North America; if
the usage is arbitrary, its avoidance would be equally so.

5. Hans K�ng, The Church; tr. Ray and Rosaleen Ockenden (New York: Sheed
and Ward, 1968).

6. It elicited from Karl Rahner the famous observation that henceforth
one must deal with K�ng's theology as with that of liberal Protestantism.
See the subsequent exchange, "A `Working Agreement' to Disagree," in
America 192/1, (July 7, 1973) 9-12.

7. Bishop Thomas Murphy, "The Local Community and the Future Priest,"
Origins 12/27 (Dec., 1982) 428-431.

8. K�ng urges this historicism most vehemently in his On Being a
Christian; tr. Edward Quinn; (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974); the same
annulment of history in favor of the eschaton dominates Johannes Metz'
Theology of the World; tr. W. GlenDoepel (New York: Herder and Herder,
1969). For the Latin American version, see e.g. Gustavo Gutierrez, A
Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation; tr. and edited
by Sr. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson, (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1973), 13ff.,
204, 256-279; John Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads; tr. by John
Drury; (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1978), 24, 29, 31, 35-46, 65, 66, 125-139, 226,
275-292; Juan Segundo, Theology for the Artisans of a New Community, vol.
4: The Sacraments Today, (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1974), 81ff.; The Liberation
of Theology, (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1976), 41ff., 231ff.

9. Edward Kilmartin, art. cit.; Kilmartin proposed in this article an
eight point revision of the Catholic Eucharistic worship; the eight
points were those insisted upon by the Reformation and include the
rationale since most relied upon by the women's ordination movement,
i.e., the presence of Christ in the Mass as secondary to the faith of the
congregation. Kilmartin was honored in 1978 by the Catholic Theological
Society of America for, among other things, his contribution to the
renewal of sacramental theology. See the CTSA Proceedings 33 (1978) 269-
270. His lead has been followed by many others, e.g., Bernard Cooke,
Ministry to Word and Sacraments, History and Theology, (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1976), Joseph Martos, Doors to the Sacred, (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1981), David N. Power, The Sacrifice We Offer: The Tridentine
Dogma and its Reinterpretation (New York: Crossroad, 1986).

10. For a comprehensive discussion of the influence of modernity so
conceived upon the contemporary reception of the Catholic tradition, see
Gustave Martelet, Deux mille ans d'�glise en question: crise de la foi,
crise du pr�tre, (Paris: Cerf, 1984), esp. 121-148.

11. Bernard Lonergan particularly, in Method in Theology, (New York:
Herder and Herder, 1973, 312-330) has been impressed by the victory of
what he terms "philology," meaning the congeries of secular human
sciences whose vindication, as he believes, marks the end of all
confidence in the a priori historicity of the Catholic doctrinal
tradition. Historical matters, in Lonergan's view, now await the judgment
of the secular academy; Tad Guzie's Jesus and the Eucharist (New York:
Paulist Press, 1974), as shall be shown, is committed a priori to this
triumph of the secular, but we shall see that some of Colman O'Neill's
observations in his most recent work, Sacramental Realism: A General
Theory of the Sacraments (Wilmington, DE: Glazier, 1983) also echo it,
however inadvertently; see e.g., pp. 70, 73. I have dealt more
particularly with Lonergan's theology in "A Methodological Critique of
Lonergan's Theological Method," The Thomist 50 (Jan., 1986) 28-65.

12. �tienne Gilson, in R�alisme m�thodique (Paris: T�qui, 1936) and
R�alisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance (Paris: Vrin, 1939) has
pointed out long since the futility of trying by means of an immanentist
logic to argue oneself out of that immanence. Although he is not
sufficiently conscious of the theological character of his prescription
of dogmatic realism, Gilson's criticism of the rationalism of
"transcendental Thomism" stands.

13. For a criticism of Karl Rahner's Christology in this regard, see
Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ, tr. V. Green (London: Burns & Oates; New
York: Paulist Press, 1976), esp. ch. 2. I have presented a comparable
view of Lonergan's theological method in "A Methodological Critique of
Lonergan's Theological Method," The Thomist 50, no. 1 (Jan., 1986), 28-
65.

14. Hans Urs von Balthasar insisted upon the impossibility of any
systematic theology, understanding that term as the imposition of
necessary structures of thought upon a free truth. That theological
system must have this effect is hardly established, but insofar as it
does so proceed, the criticism is apt. See particularly his discussion of
the systematics of Karl Rahner and of Teilhard in Cordula, oder der
Ernstfall, mit einem Nachwort zu zweiten Aufl. (Einsiedeln: Johannes
Verlag, 1967), and in the earlier discussion of the failure of Barth's
systematization in Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie,
2nd ed. (K�ln: Verlag Jacob Hegner, 1962), 306-312; for a summary of this
criticism, see Die Wahrheit ist symphonisch (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag,
1972), 54ff.

15. "Cosmological" is used here to designate that implicitly dualist
metaphysics which takes "natural" creation as its subject and attempts to
coordinate the Christian revelation to that philosophy of being,
inevitably by a propter peccatum Christology. So used, the term describes
a metaphysics of "natural" creation which wishes to be a theology as
well, and is then to be contrasted not with "anthropological" but with
the Trinitarian, Christocentric, covenantal and historical version of
specifically theological metaphysics proposed here. The semantic point is
of some importance since O'Neill uses the same word to denote "theories
about the nature of matter," a usage which reflects the title of one of
the philosophical tractates of manual Thomism.

16. David Tracy refurbished this Bultmannian notion in his Blessed Rage
for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury, 1975) but it
was already taken for granted in Bernard Lonergan's Method in Theology
and was the native air of K�ng's The Church.

17. See O'Neill's citation (155) of St. Thomas' "quite staggering
thought" according to which the infinite power of God "can take away
whatever it is that distinguishes one being from another." The reference
is S.T. iii a, q. 75, a. 4, ad 3. St. Thomas' appeal to the absolute
power of God to negate the intrinsic intelligibility of creation
anticipates the entirety of the nominalist dissolution of metaphysics.

18. The Eucharistic unity of history had been a patristic theme; see
Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: L'Eucharistie et L'�glise du moyen �ge.
�tude historique; Deuxi�me �dition. Revue et augment�e. Col. Th�ologie,
3. (Paris: Aubier, 1944), 75ff. The Eucharist was understood by the Latin
Fathers in the early middle ages to be the actual union of the Old and
the New Testaments, as scripture, as revelation, as salvation history and
as worship of the One God of that one history.

19. Institutes, IV, 17, 36; see also Calvin's Tracts and Treatises, II,
On the Doctrine and Worship of the Church, which contains his other major
eucharistic writings. It is paradoxical that later Calvinist liturgies
became so preoccupied with the consecration formula, given the radical
devaluation of sacramental worship by the famous finitum non capax
infiniti. For further discussion of the perduring influence of this tag,
see Arthur Charles Piepkorn, Profiles in Belief, II, Protestant
Denominations (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 283; Louis Bouyer, The
Spirit and Forms of Protestantism; tr. A.V. Littledale (Westminster, MD:
Newman, 1956), 78, 86; John Hardon, The Protestant Churches of America
(Westminster, MD: Newman, 1969), 249-265.

20. The legacy of Platonism, through Philo's scriptural commentaries to
Origen, and from that towering genius to East and West alike, had its own
peculiar incoherencies, which can only be pointed to here: these would
seem to center on the assumption (a commonplace among both the Greek and
Latin Fathers) that the hypostatic union of God and man in Christ and the
Christ-Church union share a communicatio idiomatum, which if taken at the
letter would force either a Nestorian Christology or a Christomonist
ecclesiology. This notion has its origin in Philo's Platonizing exegesis
of the Song of Songs, whose mystical marriage theme is referred by him to
the union of the soul and the Word of God, a notion much relied upon in
the patristic Christology to account for the union of the Logos with the
human soul of Christ. This mediante anima Christology finds in the
intellectual soul the prior possibility for the Incarnation, which is of
course to undercut the utter gratuity and novelty of the Logos sarx
egeneto. For an examination of this Philonic usage and its entry into
Christian theology see Henri Crouzel, Virginit� et mariage selon Orig�ne.
Coll. Museum Lessianum, Sec. Th�ologique, no. 58; (Paris et Bruges:
Descl�e de Brouwer, 1962).

21. The Christian historian's appreciation of the nominalist movement
will be in function of his confessional stance: for a meliorative and
Lutheran view, see Heiko Obermann's Harvest of Medieval Theology
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). Gilson's pejorative
view, as set out, e.g., in L'Esprit de la philosophie m�di�vale (Paris:
Vrin, 1944) is of course informed by Catholicism.

22. St. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum; ser. Works of St.
Bonaventure II, tr. and edited with commentary by Philotheus Boehner (St.
Bonaventure, NY: St. Bonaventure University Press, 1956). Augustine is
concerned with a trinitarian creation in De Trin. vi, 10, 12, and De
divers. Qq. lxxxiii, 18.

23. E.g., Avery Dulles, "Jus divinum as an Ecumenical Problem,"
Theological Studies 38 (1977) 696. Reliance upon the logical implications
of such juridical tags as ecclesia supplet beguiles conservative as well
as liberal; cf. Pierre Grelot, "R�flexions g�n�rales autour du th�me du
Symposium: le ministre de l'eucharistie," Minist�res et c�l�bration de
l'eucharistie, Coll. Sacramentum I, Studia Anselmiana 61 (Roma: Editrice
Anselmiana, n.d.), 83.

24. See Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (New York and London:
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1965), for a luminous account of the
idolatry involved in the nominalist denial of any intrinsic reference to
God in the historical order. Curiously, this idolatry concludes, contra
the nominalists, to the identification of possible with actual truth: see
Marion Montgomery, "The Abandonment of Reality: Emerson's Legacy of `Man-
Thinking'," Modern Age 25/1 (Winter 1981), 60ff. for a discussion of the
apotheosis of theory after Galileo.

25. See Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, G�del's Proof (New York: New
York University, 1958).

26. The situation of the historian is analogous to that of the physicist;
a historical-critical method cannot be taken very seriously if its thrust
is to suppress either the inquiry of the historian or the reality of the
object of that inquiry. Historical inquiry cannot proceed under the
agenda of necessary reasons, nor does its object survive if its
intelligibility is in principle anticipated by such reasoning: of such an
object, there could arise no curiosity for it could offer nothing new. A
value-free objectivity demands a value-free object, one fundamentally
uninteresting, for from it nothing new can be learned.

27. See the recent Marquette University dissertation by Joyce A. Little,
Esse/Essence and Grace: A theological inquiry into Thomist methodology
(Ann Arbor, MI and London: University Microfilms International, 1984)
esp. ch. 9, for a brilliant analysis of the quandary of the autonomous
mind as poised between determinism and indeterminism, in physics as in
the humanities. See also Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (New York:
Bantam Books, 1979) for the affinities, long since perceived by Ernst
Mach, linking Buddhism to contemporary quantum theory, and Ernst Mach,
"The Guiding Principles of my Scientific Theory of Knowledge and its
Reception by my Contemporaries," in Physical Reality; ed. S. Toulmin (New
York, Evanston, London: Harper Torchbooks, 1970). For a Catholic
philosopher's commentary, see T. Molnar, "Science and the New
Gnosticism," Modern Age 27 (Spring 1983), 132-138. For a general
discussion by a scholar at once physicist, historian and theologian, see
S. Jaki, The Relevance of Physics (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1966), and his Gifford Lectures, The Road of Science and
the Ways to God (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1978); p. 144 of the latter work contains a mention of Mach's conversion
to Buddhism.

28. A recent statement of this determinist viewpoint, a commonplace among
contemporary physicists, is that of Sheldon Lee Glasgow, in "Toward a
Unified Theory of Physics," Michigan Quarterly Review 23 (Spring 1984),
220: "Beyond the grand unified theory lies `the Theory,' which unifies
all the forces of nature. This is the greatest challenge of physics."
Both the Einstein-Planck and the Copenhagen School interpretations of
quantum mechanics would accept this statement, the former because it can
be referred to the necessary causal sequences intrinsic to material
reality, and the latter because it can be read as referring to the
determining structures of mathematical reasoning by which our brute
experience is rationalized. In the latter case, physical intelligibility
is intrinsic to the mind, and is thus ideal, while the physical world,
being intrinsically unintelligible, is relegated to the chaotic; in the
former, truth is intrinsic to a physical world independent of the human
mind, but has a structure isomorphic with that of the logical necessities
of human thought; Einstein considered it miraculous that this hypothesis
should continually be verified; see his letter to Jaki, cited in The
Relevance of Physics, 192-3. Reductively, Einstein's view is pantheist,
looking to an impersonal Mind as the unitary intelligence to whose
necessary and monist rationality both the world and human minds conform.
See A. Einstein, B. Podolsky and N. Rosen, "Can Quantum-Mechanical
Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?" in S. Toulmin,
op. cit., 124; see also Max Planck, "The Unity of the Physical World-
Picture," ibid., 25.

29. Stanley Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God, 143144; A.N.
Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The New Modern
Library, A Mentor Book, 1925), 45.

30. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological
Aesthetics, I: Seeing the Form; tr. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis; ed. Joseph
Fessio, S.J. and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press and New York:
Crossroad Publications, 1982), 70-71, 142146, 171, 447, 459, 484, 610-
611.

31. For Hans Urs von Balthasar, both are "identity systems;" see his
criticism, in the works cited in note 14, of the entire project of
systematic theology.

32. It will be recalled that for St. Thomas, creation was a natural
truth, not a matter of revealed faith, and his transformation of the
Aristotelian metaphysics was not understood by him to be theologically
grounded.

33. Witness the four centuries of Thomist contention. The debate
continued until the Second Vatican Council; if it has since been dropped,
this is not because anyone discovered how to provide for the prior
possibility of human freedom under divine Providence. See T. Ryan,
"Congregatio de Auxilius," The New Catholic Encyclopedia, iv, 168-171.

34. A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd ed. (London: V. Gollancz,
1946 [1936]).

35. See, e.g., Arthur Cochrane, Eating and Drinking with Jesus
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), esp. the First Appendix, for a
statement, by a contemporary follower of Zwingli, of a notion of the
Eucharist indistinguishable from Guzie's.

36. Some fourteen years ago, John O'Malley, in "Reform, Historical
Consciousness and Vatican II's Aggiornamento," Theological Studies 32
(1971), 55-71, provided a paradigmatic statement of this dehistoricizing
"historical consciousness." It was greeted upon its publication as a
"theological break-through." This article, and its reiteration twelve
years later, "Developments, Reforms, and Two Great Reformations: Toward a
Historical Assessment of Vatican II," ibid. 44 (1983), rely upon the same
hermeneutic as does Guzie and later, does Power (op. cit., n. 9 supra) in
his revisionist "reinterpretation" of the Tridentine dogma on the
sacrifice of the Mass: this taught, contra Luther, that the One Sacrifice
of Christ is offered sacramentally and really in persona Christi in the
Mass. For such revisionism, history is whatever man (Lutheran or
nominalist man, sine nomine, sine persona, sine specie) will make of it,
for it has no intrinsic meaning of its own. The contemporary romantic
historicism of such as Guzie is no more than the rationalization of
Luther's pessimism. It is in every way comparable to liberation program
of Gustavo Gutierrez, op. cit., who proposes a renewal of the Roman
Catholic Church through the relativization of the entirety of the
Church's historicity -- doctrine, sacramental worship, morality -- by its
submission to comparably nonhistorical and therefore revolutionary
criteria. Whether the ideal truth which these criteria envisage be
imposed by a putatively scholarly historical critical method or by a
political praxis is quite immaterial: as Marx knew, the two are not
distinct; cf. his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, in which
criticism becomes denunciation. For a discussion of Marx's understanding
of "theory" see Paul Eidelberg, "Karl Marx and the Declaration of
Independence: The Meaning of Marxism," The Intercollegiate Review 20
(1984), 3-11.

37. J.H. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Doctrine, ed. J.M.
Cameron (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974 [1845]); W. Dilthey, Meaning and
Pattern in History: Thoughts on History and Society, edited and tr. by
H.P. Rickman (New York: Harper, 1962); Martin K�hler, The So-Called
Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ; Translated, edited and
with an introduction by Carl Braaten; Foreword by Paul Tillich
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964); G. Gadamer, Truth and Method; Translated
and edited by G. Burden and J. Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975);
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson
Lecture in Humanities (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1984).

38. Tad Guzie, The Analogy of Learning: An Essay Toward a Thomist
Psychology of Learning (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960).

39. Throughout this book, a work of his youth, Guzie manifests no
acquaintance with the historical transformation of the myths and symbols
of the pagan cosmological religions by their adaptation to the Jewish and
Christian worship of the Lord of history. Neither does Suzanne Langer,
upon whose early work Guzie is heavily reliant; see her Philosophy in a
New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art, 3rd ed.,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1967), at the conclusion of whose
chapter on "Life Symbols: The Roots of Sacrament" the following rather
revealing summary statement appears: "`The myth-making instinct' however,
has a history of its own, and its own life-symbols; though it is the
counterpart of sacrament in the making of higher religion, it does not
belong to the lower phases: or, at least, it has little importance below
the level of dawning philosophical thought, which is the last reach of
genuine religion, its consummation and its dissolution" (170; emphasis
added). Guzie says the same: cf. 21ff., 66ff. However, the transformation
which is worked upon cosmic myth and symbol by their application to this
historical worship frees them of their dualistic pessimism and their
monist soteriology, to the point that the basic Christian heresy has
always been the gnostic effort to reconstitute that pessimism and that
soteriological flight from history. Hans Urs von Balthasar has discussed
this transformation in The Glory of the Lord, I: Seeing the Form, 637
ff.; see also Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, II, 349, cited by
von Balthasar at 649.

40. K�ng, op. cit.

41. E. Kilmartin, art. cit.

42. B. Cooke, op. cit.; see also his Sacraments and Sacramentality
(Mystic, CT: Twenty-third Publications, 1983).

43. Edward Schillebeeckx, Ministry: Leadership in the Community of Jesus
Christ (New York: Crossroad Press, 1981); see also Interim Report on the
Books Jesus and Christ (New York: Crossroad Press, 1981).

44. J. Martos, op. cit.; see also his Message of the Sacraments
(Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1983).

45. David N. Power, op. cit.; see also "Words that Crack: The Uses of
`Sacrifice' in Eucharistic Discourse," Worship 53 (September, 1979), 386-
404.

46. Denziger-Sch�nmetzer, �1997.

47. For a more signal instance of this confusion, see Hans Urs von
Balthasar, Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Aesthetik: Band III/1 Im Raum
der Metaphysik (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1965), 958-983; see also his
Karl Barth, 353. On this account, viz., the incompatibility with the
theological quaerens of such a metaphysics, Von Balthasar has rejected
the very possibility of a systematic theology; see his Karl Barth, 308-
312, and Die Wahrheit ist symphonisch, 54ff.

48. Meeting Christ in the Sacraments (Staten Island, NY: Alba House,
1964); see also his New Approaches to the Eucharist (Staten Island, NY:
Alba House, 1967).

49. The contrast between the Augustinian and the Thomist approaches to
the Fall has been discussed by Henri Rondet, Original Sin: The Patristic
and Theological Background, tr. by Cajetan Finegan, O.P. (New York: Alba
House, 1972); see esp. pp. 162-168. The rationalist reduction of the
"natural" to the necessary has had the result, e.g., of making physical
death "natural" rather than a consequence of the Fall.

50. Cf. Henri Cardinal de Lubac, Petite cat�ch�se sur Nature et Grace,
Col. Communio (Paris: Fayard, 1980), 137-163, in which the author,
criticizing Schillebeeckx' notion of the Church as the "sacrament of the
world," points out these consequences as implicit in that notion.
Schillebeeckx' creationist Thomism is similar to O'Neill's. Entirely
comparable Thomist emphases upon the naturalism of the created order have
led contemporary Catholic moral theologians of the "natural law" such as
Joseph Fuchs to a similar denial of any intrinsic moral quality in human
acts, which denial is no more than the ethical implication of the
standard Thomist refusal of the intrinsic intelligibility of the material
singular apart from its reference to an essential form immanent in the
species. Here, the Scotist haecceitas is a better guide. Better yet is a
Thomism which is theological from the outset, and therefore is committed
a priori to the sacramentality, and therefore the intrinsic
intelligibility, of history.

51. St. Thomas Aquinas, Siger of Brabant and St. Bonaventure, On the
eternity of the world (De aeternitate mundi). Translated with an
introduction by C. Vollert, Lottie Kendzierski and Paul M. Byrne
(Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1964).

52. The primordial marital covenant of Christ and the Church is a theme
of the earliest Judaeo-Christian tradition; latent in the Pauline
deuteros Adam of Rom 5 and explicit in Eph 5:31, and taken up by I
Clement and the Shepherd of Hermas, it was little developed outside the
circles of Judaeo-Christianity thereafter although mentioned by St.
Thomas (S.T. iia, iiae, q. 2, a. 7); see note 58, infra. Elsewhere, as by
Justin Martyr and the Apologists generally, Christ's pre-existence was
generally conceived in terms of the asarkikos in a fashion which too
easily identified sarx with human nature as such, which is hardly the
biblical and historical sense of the term as it is employed by Paul and
John. In our day, Pope John Paul II has revived the ancient covenantal
Christology in his sermons: see The Original Unity of Man and Woman
(Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1981), which associates marriage to our
imaging of the Trinity and to the primordial covenant of God with
humanity, esp. at 36, 38, 51, 62, 73-4. See also Pope John Paul II's
encyclical letter, The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World
(Familiaris consortio) (Boston: St. Paul Editions, n.d.) passim.

53. Albert Vanhoye, Pr�tre nouveau selon le Nouveau Testament, ser.
Parole de Dieu (Paris: �ditions de Seuil, 1980), 75ff., 343; to the same
effect, see also Rudolph Pesch, Das Abendmahl und Jesu Todesverst�ndnis,
Coll. Quaestiones Disputatae 80 (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 1978);
Robert Daly, Christian Sacrifice. The Judaeo-Christian Background before
Origen. Coll. Catholic University of America Studies in Christian
Antiquity 18 (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press,
1978), esp. 219-224, 237ff.; Helmut Moll, Die Lehre von der Eucharistie
als Opfer. Eine dogmengeschichtliche Untersuchung vom Neuen Testament bis
Iren�us von Lyon; Coll. Theophaneia 26 (K�ln-Bonn: Peter Hanstein Verlag,
1975), esp. 50-78; Stanislas Lyonnet, Sin, Redemption, Sacrifice. A
Biblical and Patristic Study. Coll. Analecta Biblica 48 (Rome: Pontifical
Biblical Institute, 1970), esp. 245-268; Edward Kilmartin, The Eucharist
in the Primitive Church (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965);
Johannes Betz, Die Eucharistie in der Zeit der griechischen V�ter. Band
iii, Die Realpr�senz des Leibes und Blutes Jesu im Abendmahl nach dem
Neuen Testament. Zweite, �berarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage (Freiburg,
Basel, Wien: Herder, 1964); Joseph Lecuyer, Le sacrifice de la nouvelle
alliance (Lyons, Le Puy: �ditions Xavier Mappus, 1962); for contrasting
views as between Catholic and Protestant, see the articles gathered by
Karl Lehmann and Edmund Schlink in Das Opfer Jesu Christi und seine
Gegenwart in der Kirche: Kl�rungen zum Opfercharakter des Herrenmahles;
Dialog der Kirchen, Band 3 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder; Gottingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983).

54. O'Neill cites Augustine's reference to the sacrifice of Christ as
offered under the form of the servant (95) but does not develop this
insight. Like Guzie, O'Neill thinks linguistic analysis important for
theological work, which approval would seem to underlie his
fastidiousness over the theological use of such terms as "suffering
servant," "sacrifice," "atonement," "satisfaction," and the like,
inasmuch as he takes the primary meaning of such terms to be critically
established not by the two millennia of Catholic worship, but by one or
another philosophy of religion, or even by "normal" speech: (89) it would
appear that the language of the Church's public worship is in some sense
beyond the linguistic pale. However his basic reservations are
theological: he is unwilling to understand the Eucharist as the presence
of the Suffering Servant, fearing that this would attribute to the Risen
Christ present in the Eucharist an impossible ambivalence. For O'Neill,
the Mass is a sacrifice only in the sense that the Church offers herself
sensu negante; he thus understands the famous passage in The City of God,
x, 6.

55. See note 18.

56. S.T.ia, q. 93, a. 3. Augustine was of the same opinion: cf. De trin.,
iv, 9, 2; De civ. dei, xii, 21.

57. Karl Rahner, The Trinity, tr. Joseph Donceel (New York: Herder and
Herder, 1970).

58. Guzie's rejection of any transempirical ecclesial reality has been
sufficiently accounted for; O'Neill's similar tendency appears in his
insistence upon grounding his theology in experience (20); his repeated
reference to the faithaffirmation as the ground of argument, rather than
the concrete reality in history which, because prior to faith, transcends
the faith by causing it (see, e.g., 21, 51, 61, 71, 81, 128); the
immediate "juridicalizing" interpretation of such notions as objective
redemption and satisfaction with no attempt to engage in an appropriate
metaphysical inquiry into the irrevocable historical achievement of
Christ to which they point (35, 39, 132); the attempt to reduce the
sacrifice of the Mass to either the ritual dimensions of the sacramentum
tantum (45, 83, 87, 106) or the ethical dimensions of the res tantum; the
continual attempt to reduce the entire historical activity of Jesus to
the revelation of a non-historical Providence (e.g., 58, 90, 191); the
definition of the Church as the assembly of faith (69) whose visibility
is that of a "sociologically determinable entity" (133); the view of
history as an extrinsic process to whose empirical determination by
academic scholarship the Church is submitted as of course (7173); finally
the quite unsatisfactory account of the sacramentality of marriage (whose
res et sacramentum is not the covenantal bond, the vinculum: 187). This
impedes his theological exploitation of the marital structure both of
image and of covenant (26-31, 62), and therefore of creation.

59. There is ground for thinking that in his later years St. Thomas came
to see the necessity of a universally distributed grace, prior to all
response, immanent in all human beings, to account at least for the
sinfulness of infidelity: see the discussion in Roger Aubert, Le probl�me
de l'acte de foi: Don�es traditionelles et r�sultats des controvers�es
r�centes, 3e �dition (Louvain: E. Warny, 1958), 65-66. In this work,
Aubert cites the In Joannem xv, lect. 5, no. 4, S.T. iia, iiae, q. 2, a.
9 ad 3, q. 10, a. 1 ad 1 and Quodl. ii, a. 6 to instance St. Thomas'
later theology of the interior instinctus ad credendum. For another view
of these texts, one refusing the theological issue, see the extensive
discussion of Max Seckler's dissertation, Instinkt und Glaubenswille nach
Thomas von Aquin (Mainz: Matthias Gr�newald, 1962) in Edouard
Schillebeeckx, Approches Th�ologiques, I: R�velation et th�ologie
(Bruxelles: �ditions du Cerf, Paris: Office g�n�ral du livre, n.d.), 285-
321. Later on in the Summa, St. Thomas appears to recognize the
ontological primacy of Christ to creation, but this later insight plays
no part in what I have referred to herein as the Thomism of the schools.
See S.T. iia iiae, q. 2, a. 7: "Videtur autem incarnationem Christi
praescius fuisse per hoc quod dixit Propter hoc relinquet homo patrem et
matrem et adhaerebit uxori suae ut habetur Gen 2, 24, et hoc Apostolus ad
Eph 5, 32 dicit sacramentum magnum esse in Christo et Ecclesia; quod
quidem sacramentum non est credibile primum hominem ignorasse." Such
passages must however be balanced against the repeated assertions of a
preference for a propter peccatum Christology: cf. S.T. iiia, q. 1, a. 3,
c. and q. 1, a. 5, c.

60. Thomas does repeat the mediante anima language of the theological
tradition (S.T. iiia, q. 6, a. 5 & 6), but because his act-potency
anthropology is more unified than that which e.g. Augustine derives from
the universal hylemorphism of Neoplatonism, the mediation problematic
imposed upon men such as Origen and Augustine by their often uncritical
acceptance of Neoplatonic metaphysics does not arise for him: Thomas'
analysis of the hypostatic union refers it to the ex nihilo of creation,
which as a matter of definition can permit no mediation. Transcendental
Thomism, by reason of the failure to exploit the implication of a graced
creation which is inescapable in the Thomist metaphysics of the
hypostatic union, falls back upon an alien problematic, that of
Neoplatonism, and not only in this instance.

61. Henri de Lubac's study of patristic exegesis has rediscovered the
sacramental meaning of reality, wherein "nature" is articulate as the Old
Covenant, "grace" as the New, both ordered, integrated and fulfilled by
their historical reference to the Kingdom of God, which order is concrete
in the One Flesh of the Church's Eucharistic worship. See Susan Wood,
S.C.L., The Church as the Social Embodiment of Grace in the Ecclesiology
of Henri de Lubac (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International,
1986).

62. T.J. van Bavel, Recherches sur la christologie de saint Augustin:
L'humain et le divin dans le Christ d'apres saint Augustin. Ser.
Paradosis: �tudes de litt�rature et de th�ologie ancienne, X (Fribourg,
Suisse: �ditions Universitaires, 1954), 32ff.

63. See John M. McDermott, Love and Understanding. Col. Analecta
Gregoriana, vol. 29, Series Facultatis Theologiae, Sec. B., no. 77 (Roma:
Universit� Pontificia Gregoriana Editrice, 1983) for a detailed analysis
of the discovery by Rousselot of the indispensability of Christocentrism
to systematic theology. This was long since anticipated by Bonaventure,
who considered Christology and metaphysics to coincide: see Hans Urs von
Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, II: Studies
in Theological Styles: Clerical Styles. Tr. by Andrew Louth, Francis
McDonagh and Brian McNeil, C.R.V. Edited by John Roches (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press; New York: Crossroad, 1984) at 329.

64. This theme has been explored in the recent pastoral letter published
by Gerald Emmett Cardinal Carter, Archbishop of Toronto: see "Do This In
Memory Of Me": A Pastoral Letter Upon The Sacrament Of Priestly Orders
(Toronto: 8 December, 1983).

65. Here may be instanced the attempts of the early Rousselot: The
Intellectualism of St. Thomas, tr. James O'Mahony (New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1935); of Mar�chal's Le point de d�part de la m�taphysique: le�ons
sur le d�veloppement historique et th�orique du probl�me de la
connaissance, i-v, 3e �dition (Paris: Descl�e de Brouwer, 1944), and of
the transcendental Thomism of Rahner and Lonergan to exploit the
intrinsic dynamism of rationality as the appropriate avenue of escape
from the ideal immanence of thought proposed by Descartes' methodic doubt
and systematized by Kant to the destruction of all realist metaphysics.
However, as has been said supra, one does not argue one's way out of the
immanentism of monadic logic. Those philosophical Thomists who eschew the
transcendental method and concern themselves instead with the esse-
essence correlation as the one access to Thomist realism are split as to
its implications, whether a regression to a Neoplatonic monism of esse or
to an Aristotelian monism of essence. See the discussion by Joyce Little,
Esse-Essence and Grace: a theological inquiry into Thomist methodology,
cited in note 27, Part One.

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