A Response to Blondel’s “Action” by Ambroise Gardeil: Pt. 2, “The Objective Requirements of ‘Action’” (Cont.)
III. God as the “Ultimate Object”
In a previous study, we acknowledged the necessity of placing at the forefront of all our human activity the influence of objective ends, of ultimate goals that in fact dominate any given set of activities. Pursuing this analysis further, we observed a common element in all the objective ends that we propose to ourselves under the notion of an ultimate end. Uniformly present in all our appetitions, whatever they may be, this common element is: the proper good of our nature. The proper good of man thus appears to us as the “ultimate object,” as the universal and profound source of all our appetitions. We have not defined this object by way of our own personal preferences; it has imposed itself upon us. It is not a hypothetically desirable thing: it is a thing actually desired. All that stirs and reverberates through the complex mechanism of our willing comes from it. The appetite for man’s proper good, bonum conveniens homini, is—whether we will it or not—the ultimate mover of action.
Can this proper good of man be further determined? Is it one thing? Is it a thousand things? According to Saint Augustine’s report,1 Varro counted no fewer than 288 schools of moral thought devoted to the veneration of 288 sovereign goods. What should we make of this mocking allegation?—Might man’s proper good be nothing more than an extract of his subjectivity, a hollow ideal, the objective synthesis of a thousand illusory aspirations? Are we not ourselves the creators of our ultimate object, “enchanting” it, as Feuerbach said?—Or again, might it be forever unknowable? And must the final movement of our heart end in that sorrowful complaint of one of our most disquieting literary dilettantes: “Surely there must be, somewhere, great joys that lay in hiding.”2—Finally might Pascal be right when, in order to name “this ultimate object,” whose contemplation must govern our activity to the point that “no one can take a single step with sense and reason” without it, he used a term which seems so weighty, so rustic, so old-fashioned to contemporary ears: “eternal goods”?
Such is the new phase into which the problem of the “objective requirements of Action” now enters. We cannot hesitate in choosing the appropriate method for approaching, if not resolving, it. Our ultimate goal is essentially the proper object of our human appetitions, the good that suits us and perfects us, bonum conveniens appetitui. Therefore, we must turn, once more, toward the immanence of our appetitions, to probe them more deeply, to ask what they are, what they are capable of demanding, what good they are apt to respond to. It is quite evident that this objective agent cannot be lacking if we observe its specific impression in the [acting] subject, if the subject reacts under that impression in a characteristic manner, as the litmus test reacts to the acid or base placed upon it.
Behold, therefore, the rigorous manner—the scientific way, if one may still dare to say so, at any rate experimental—in which we intend to seek out and, if possible, to discover what Pascal so aptly called: a God sensible to the heart.
1. The Facts
Man’s heart and will perpetually find themselves oscillating about—this is the great fact. It is spread out broadly and openly throughout history, moral psychology, and literature. Every moment of our life confirms it anew.
Because of this fact, we occupy a unique place among beings.3 Let us listen to one of those men upon whom humanity left its deepest imprint:
The grass of the fields makes happy the herds;
if the lion roars, hunger it is that drives him forth; and satisfied,
he lies down and is content.Man alone, though he satisfy all his senses
and pleasure pursue, hears a voice crying in his heart:
Your days are sorrowful.Always he longs for new thoughts; always
he suffers from an unrestrained thirst for knowledge and power;
always a thorn tears him apart.Among all beings alone, beneath the ashes of his friends,
he sees life, and believes that beyond the grave,
there, joys and sorrows still remain…A wandering star, yet despite his shadows,
he retains a ray of his primitive glory:
he stirs, striving to rekindle his flame…4
But let us leave the poets aside with their “malady of the infinite.” The magic of their images, the burning flame of their aspirations, might carry us away. Our intention is to be a kind of naturalist of the human species. We seek to isolate and to determine the psychological species named the human will.
Therefore, let us consult a distinguished specialist. In matters concerning the psychology of the human heart, none will contest the competence of someone like Pascal. Here is one of the most detailed and most keenly observed monographs left to us by that incomparable analyst. We take it as our theme, ready to correct it if necessary:
All men seek to be happy. There is no exception to this fact. Whatever various means they employ, they all tend toward this goal. This same desire is what leads some to go to war and others to avoid it, pursued with different perspectives. )I write these lines, and one reads them only because they bring a certain satisfaction.)5 The will never makes the least step forward except by moving toward this object. It is the motive of all actions, of all men—even of those who hang themselves. And yet, for so many years now, no one, without faith, has ever reached this point at which all continually aim. All complain: princes, subjects; nobles, commoners; old, young; strong, weak; learned, ignorant; healthy, sick; men from all countries, all times, all ages, and all conditions. A trial so long, so continual, so uniform ought surely to convince us of our inability to attain the good by our own efforts. Yet, example teaches us nothing. Things are never so perfectly similar that there are not some small differences, and these are what enkindle our hope that our case will not end as the others did. And so, with the present never satisfying us, hope deceives us like the pied piper, and from misfortune to misfortune, it leads us to death, which is its eternal climax.
I do not know whether it is even necessary to prove the truth and lived reality of such a description. Apart perhaps from a reference to the happiness of faith—which it is not our task either to establish or to refute—does not this passage overflow with self-evident truths? He who has not observed this fact, who has not experienced the perpetual oscillations of the human will, stop reading now. I can only refer him to the school of life, the only master of such lessons.
Therefore, let us attempt to draw out the general lines, the characteristic traits of this living psychological monograph. Four may be counted:
The oscillatory character of our voluntary movement.
The universal extension of this phenomenon.
Its intensity.
Its objective indeterminacy.
1. The oscillatory character of our voluntary movement.— All oscillation occurs between two contraries. When the pendulum swings, furnishing the typical case of oscillation, the end of one upward movement immediately becomes the beginning of a downward movement, followed by a renewed ascent toward the opposite side. And so on, indefinitely….
Is this not the very state that Pascal’s relentless analysis uncovers in the human heart? Happiness—there is the center of gravity of the system; various sources of happiness—there are the ever-changing, opposed poles. And, like the pendulum, displaced from its center of gravity, its place of rest, now spontaneously seeking it anew, so too, it seems, does our appetitive power seek out its place of rest. However, as the pendulum driven by its own momentum overshoots the mark and again deviates from the vertical, so do we. Hence, we perpetually oscillate. Happiness is what we seek, as the pendulum seeks its center of gravity; and what we find are various sources of happiness. The pendulum, upon finding only an approximate center at the end of its swing, now finds in its relativity what we might call a principle of a new motion. “The cause of our inconstancy is our sense that present goods are vain and absent causes unknown,” as said the master we are commenting on.
2. The universal extension of this phenomenon.—Such oscillation is the common situation of all men; its extension is universal. Even the tragic situation of those who “go to hang themselves” are yet another case of the swinging human pendulum. Death is a deliverance for the miserable man, and by that very fact, it appears to him as a good. And how is it that those who take their own lives are most often the very ones who once clung most ardently to life? In this extreme case, which forms as it were the outer limit of our series of attempts to strive for happiness, one may judge concerning the universality of possible oscillations: “All complain: princes and subjects; nobles and commoners; old and young; strong and weak; learned and ignorant; healthy and sick...” What does this mean? In short: looking upon the relative happiness which is their portion, all men and women find a sufficient reason to withdraw from this state of affairs. Will the “satisfied” escape this law? No, for the cause of our disappointments is inherent to our nature: “The nature of self-love and of this human self is to love only itself and to consider only itself. But what will it do? It cannot prevent the object it loves from being full of deficiencies and miseries.” What it will do, according to Pascal, is to hate this truth which rebukes it and convicts it of its deficiencies. This means the only way for one to hide the oscillation of one’s desires is by diminishing what is human within oneself—by developing, instead, the animal part, or at least the imagination, “our deceptive part.” And if one chooses to prop up oneself through pride, that “counterweight to all our miseries,” will not such unnatural equilibrium endure only for a short while? The proud man’s heart, with its continual hardening, forever beset by opposing desires… is it not itself—by its inevitable failures—a fresh proof of the universality of the human condition, oscillating from one thing to the next?
3. Its intensity.— Such a universal fact could only have deep roots in human nature. The intensity with which the law of oscillation manifests itself is further proof of this. The more that a condition reaches into the depths of a being, the more intense it is. In psychology, the intensity of a phenomenon is recognized by its persistence, the force with which it asserts itself, and the vividness of the pleasant or painful impressions it provokes. We encounter all these marks in our strange need to oscillate from one thing to the next. Persistence: “the trial which we experience, so long, so continual, and so uniform” from our failures in attaining happiness “teaches us nothing.” Vigor: the need to stir about is so pressing, so tyrannical, that man, not finding enough in the natural objects of his desire, invents others. Just as we can deceive and divert the feeling of hunger, so too by “diversion” do we deceive our appetite for happiness. “They have a secret instinct that drives them to seek amusement and outward occupation. What is its source? Their sense for their continual miseries. And they have another secret instinct... which enables them to know that happiness is really only in rest and not in agitation. And from these two contrary instincts a confused project arises within their breast... It leads them to seek rest through agitation and to imagine that the satisfaction they lack will come to them if, by overcoming some of the difficulties they foresee, they can thereby open the way to rest.” Finally, how vivid the impressions one experiences as this need to oscillate finds itself satisfied or frustrated: “How is it that this man, who but a few months ago lost his only son, and who this morning, overwhelmed with lawsuits and quarrels, was in such distress, yet now here he is, as one for whom these things never seemed to have taken place? No surprise! He is completely absorbed in watching the course of the boar that the dogs have been chasing with such fervor since six o’clock. Nothing more is needed. No matter the depths of man’s sorrow, if someone manages to persuade him to take up some diversion, well, then, behold: he is happy for that moment!” Nothing, then, is more intense than the need to stir, to oscillate from one particular source of happiness to another which we observe in ourselves. And, consequently, nothing is more deeply rooted or appears more closely identified with the very causes of human nature itself.
4. Its objective indeterminacy.— How strange, the source of universal and intense need of our nature its character: our nature’s indetermination. Although the pendulum indefinitely swings back and forth, at least it has an orientation. But, now, imagine a pendulum that turns aside with each swing, a pendulum that actually performs the motion that Foucault’s famous pendulum only seemed to describe (since it was the earth that turned). Such is the human condition. We never return exactly to the same point. “Never is it so perfectly alike that there is not some subtle difference.” It seems that we have within us some kind of indefinite capacity to adapt ourselves to real or imaginary goods. We do not live in the present; the future pleases us precisely because it is undetermined. This is what the friends of the Muses call the thirst for the infinite. In any event, it is the thirst for the indefinite, for “one thing after another.” At the very least, amid this incessant and eager chase, we may note that no good, however strange it may seem, ever leaves us indifferent. No, our nature refuses none of them: “stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war, famine, vices, adulteries, or incest,” as Pascal sarcastically enumerates.
We have now reached the end of our inquiry. Let us summarize its results. Subjectively, our voluntary movement is characterized by its oscillation between various goods. This state belongs to the very nature of the will, for its universality and the intensity of its manifestations reveal that this cannot be an artificial or accidental state of affairs. Objectively, our proper good—hence our ultimate object—is marked by a character of indeterminacy, of indefiniteness. None of the goods that present themselves to our appetites realizes it; all seem capable of realizing it. Our proper good is everywhere… and it is nowhere. Such are the facts. What are we to conclude from them?
We must not abandon the results that we previously obtained through rigorous psychological analysis. Therefore, we must continue to uphold the primacy of our proper good’s objective influence. Nor must we conceal from ourselves that objective indeterminacy is contradicted by the determination inherent in the activity of a nature as determined as the human will. This contradiction must be resolved, and this can only be done by resolving the indeterminacy of the object of our activity into a loftier determination. Now, to determine the nature of our object, we have at our disposal only the subject to which it is correlative. An observation of our subjective psychology was what gave rise to the contradiction we now perceive. Perhaps a deeper look into the intimate structure of the willing subject would dispel it? In any case, we cannot take rest in an impossibility:6 what is impossible does not exist, and it would be better to deny all that we have observed and so solidly established with Pascal concerning the objective indefiniteness of our action than were we to admit that a determined nature can effectively tend toward the absence of all determination, that such a tendency would for it an intense and relentless need, and that sterile agitation would be, in the end, the ultimate object of action.
2. The Cause
“What, then, does this avidity and this powerlessness cry out to us, if not that man had once upon a time experienced true happiness, though now all that remains is its mark and empty trace, which he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking from absent things the assistance he does not find in those present. Yet, all the while, they remain incapable of providing what he seeks, for this infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, by God Himself.”
I wish to cite this passage at the beginning of this new phase of our inquiry because it so aptly expresses its poignant relevance. However, in the interest of the truth, I must declare that although I agree with Pascal on the conclusion, I cannot agree with the means by which he demonstrates it. A Jansenist theory—philosophically problematic and theologically false—has here influenced his genius. And this, no doubt, is why, although the fervor of his passion is captivating, nonetheless, his demonstration does not seem rigorous. Pascal invokes a historical circumstance when what is needed is a strictly psychological cause. We might readily accept the expression “infinite abyss” to characterize the acknowledged amplitude of our willing. However, when one says that the infinite horizon of our aspirations7 is the trace and mark of a former state of perfect happiness, this is something philosophy does not know and something that Catholic theology, especially that of Saint Augustine, contests. And yet only that theology could support Pascal’s argument, and he claims that he is drawing upon it. As for us, we hold to a purely psychological cause, and we maintain that we must look into the nature of “philosophical man” to find the cause of the natural phenomenon of the indefinite voluntary oscillation that we have observed.
Since the refusal to accept Pascal’s mode of proof has great significance for apologetics—and since, moreover, some knowledge of the theological underpinnings for this famous argument will enable us to better appreciate, by contrast, the reasons Saint Thomas offers in support of a shared conclusion—we ask permission to insist upon this matter a bit more.
A. Pascal’s Proof
Pascal, like all the Jansenists, does not believe in the possibility of the philosophical man—that is, in what theologians call the state of pure nature. According to revealed doctrine, God, in creating man, made him upright. This uprightness of nature consists in a perfect harmony between body and soul, between the lower and higher faculties, and between these faculties and their efficient, exemplary, and final principle: God. Now, according to Catholic theologians, this uprightness is the consequence of the supernatural gift of innocence. Therefore, it remains possible that it might not have existed, and man could have been created in the state demanded by his simple definition—in the state of pure nature, that is, in the condition which ancient and modern philosophers seek to define by natural reason. No doubt, such uprightness is, in itself, a perfection of nature. However, it is supernatural in its historical cause, namely grace or the gift of innocence. Hence Catholic theologians say that it is connatural. The Jansenists, by contrast, maintained that God, in creating man, was bound by His own nature to create him upright, that is, that original uprightness would be owed to nature itself. Therefore, the state of integral nature would not be merely connatural to man; it would be natural to him, given the justice and goodness of the Creator. God could not have created man in the state of pure nature. Being Good and Perfect, He owed His creature all the perfection of which it was capable.
Consequently, one can understand how the two systems will come to understand original sin in two very different ways. For Catholic theologians, after the Fall, man is stripped of his gratuitous gifts and merely wounded in his natural faculties. According to many of these theologians, this wound would consists simply in a return to the state of pure nature. Sublata causa, tollitur effectus: original justice having vanished, the integrity that followed from it ceases to exist. Nonetheless, the wound remains no less real: for the perfection of integral nature was a perfection of nature, and its loss is a wound for nature.8 Fallen man differs from primitive man as a man stripped differs from one who was never clothed, sicut nudatus a nudo. Other Catholic theologians—the greatest—emphasize more strongly the disorder caused by sin. Yet none of them ever supposed that the very principles constituting human nature—e.g., reason or free will—were changed in their essence, or that nature itself was corrupted. Would this not imply that even the very definition of man would have changed in the wake of the Fall? However, for the Jansenists, this state of corruption is the very reality of man “deprived of grace.” “What is nature in animals, we call nature in man; thereby we recognize that his nature, now like that of the animals, has fallen from a better nature that once belonged to him.” Reason would be affected in its very root; and the same would be true concerning his will and free willing as well. Fallen man is incapable of any good. “Behold our true state. It is what renders us incapable of knowing with certainty and of being completely ignorant. We drift about in a vast middle space, forever uncertain and wavering, pushed from one end to the other. Wherever we think that we have a firm place to cling and fix ourselves, this wavers and slips away. And if we follow after it, it escapes our grasp and glides away in an eternal flight. Nothing stands still for us. This is our natural state and, yet, it is the one most contrary to our inclination: we burn with the desire to find a firm footing and an ultimate stable base upon which we might build a tower that rises to the infinite heights. But, all about, our foundation cracks, and the earth opens up to the abyss.” Total skepticism and fatalism are the outcome of this doctrine, and this is why Pascal, having founded all his apologetics on it, will only attempt to deliver us from the former by making us stake our eternity upon a wager, by telling us, “Stupefy yourselves,” and from fatalism only by appealing to victorious grace which, by necessitating our action, is merely a new and more absolute systematization of it.
Now, this very doctrine is what forms the core of the demonstration by which Pascal (unfaithful to his own system—but is that not, for him, the ultimate logic?) attempts to draw from the inconstancy and fickleness of our desires a proof for their orientation toward God. “What, then, does this avidity and this powerlessness cry out to us, if not that man had once upon a time experienced true happiness, though now all that remains is its mark and empty trace?”
This clearly demonstrated origin allows us to weaken the force of Pascal’s conclusion all the more, namely: “And since he has lost the true good, everything may equally appear good to him—even his own destruction, even though it is so contrary to God, to reason, and to nature all at once.” For what can be said about premises drawn from Revelation when they are contradicted by the official interpreters of Revelation and by Saint Augustine himself?9 How can one accept a absolute corruption that philosophers universally declare to be fictitious and which Pascal’s own rhetorical skill and dialectical finesse effectively disprove?
The Jansenist thesis covers over a latent sophism. From the fact that man was in fact created in the state of integral nature, the Jansenists concluded that integrity is natural. They failed to consider the accidental cause of this perfection. Their reasoning is a classic case of cum hoc, ergo propter hoc in its purest form.
Pascal’s demonstration does not hold. We cannot grant the notion of total corruption, and consequently, neither can we grant the necessity of a former fully ideal state. The subjective datum is pure nature—the nature that corresponds to the definition of the species and that each person can study within himself through psychological observation. The rest is merely Jansenism.
This observation cannot fail to be painful. It is an emotional thing to feel the need to depart from a soul so lofty and a mind of such depth. This truly human thinker—how many men did he not rouse from their torpor? In how many did he not awaken the sense of that great problem which is the human problem par excellence? And why must it be that he had encountered, as his guide into the theology of grace, so sad an introduction as that found in Jansen’s Augustinus?
B. St. Thomas’s Proof
“The good which is the ultimate end of a being is the perfect good corresponding to its appetite. Now the human appetite, which is the will, has for its object the universal good, just as the intellect has for its object the universal true. Consequently, nothing can satisfy man’s will except the universal good. Now, the universal good is not found in created things but, rather, only in God. For every creature has a participated goodness and is therefore particular. And therefore, God alone can fulfill man’s will, according to the words of Psalm 102: ‘It is He who fills your desire with good things; your youth will be renewed like the eagle’s.’”10
Here, we are faced with a psychological cause, one inherent in our voluntary nature. If our whole life is spent in sterile agitation, to the point that it seems we “seek less the things themselves rather than the very search for these things,” this is because there is an innate disproportion between the human appetite and the created goods by which we try to satisfy it. The good that is adequate to our voluntary appetite is the universal good, the absolute totality of good. But, never—not even by adding one created goods to another created good indefinitely—swill we reach that limit in which our will is naturally and immediately placed. This is St. Thomas’s entire demonstration.
Let us try to make the method and rigor of this demonstration understood by means of a comparison. Geometers calculate the circumference in relation to the radius by considering it as the limit of an inscribed polygon whose number of sides increases indefinitely. Let us stop the polygon at a given stage of its development, on its edge there are points A B C D E F, etc. Let us draw radii from the center O to each of the points where the polygon touches the circumference. Have we exhausted what we might figuratively call the radiating power of the center? No. Between each angle of the polygon there remains room for an infinite number of chords, which are as many sides of new inscribed polygons. So long as we are dealing with a definite polygon, we shall never exhaust the center. The capacity of this center will always be a disproportion to the number of points of contact we could realize by joining this center to the vertices of the inscribed polygon. This center, by its definition [as a circular center], by its nature—very real nonetheless—exceeds in virtuality the sum of its irradiations as long as these remain finite in number. To exhaust it, one must go directly to the limit of the inscribed polygon and conceive the center as a virtuality that looks from the outset toward the infinite.
The center in question here is the human will cast forth amid things. The vertices of the polygon where the rays meet the circumference are the created goods. The circumference is the universal good.11 In each created good we encounter a part of the universal good, but we do not for that reason exhaust the capacity of our will. It retains the power to turn toward another created good, and toward the sum of all these goods—which itself is necessarily finite—and to seek in each and in all of them the universal good. Yet none of them, nor their sum, can satisfy it, for from the outset and by its very definition, the will is directed toward the universality of good.
We do not present this comparison in order to prove Saint Thomas’s thesis but, rather, to furnish an analogy to help render intelligible the type of proof he employs, along with its rigor. However, we must immediately register two reservations: 1˚ the universality of human good resembles only distantly the quantitative infinitude of the circumference; and 2˚ the virtuality of the center belongs to the mathematical order—it is a purely formal concept—whereas the virtuality of the will belongs to the dynamic order, it is an active psychological reality. These reservations granted, the two proofs have this in common: they are both applications of the doctrine of limits.
If this likeness holds any truth, I can begin to see the reason for what I was experiencing a moment ago: my constant oscillations, the impotence of my pursuits. Am I not doing what a geometer would do if he tried to reach the circumference by endlessly multiplying the sides of the inscribed polygon? Wild imaginings, multiplied projects, the most carefully devised plans—all these are inscribed polygons! They touch my good only at a few points and leave the virtuality of my will empty and filled with infinite desires. Is this not my condition? Thus, I would not need to appeal to history to find the cause of my state: I carry that cause within myself, and it is the disproportion between the innate capacity of my will and the goods by which I ordinarily claim to fill it.
And yet, everything remains to be proved in Saint Thomas’s argument: the major premise (the proper object of the human will is the universal good); as well as the minor (the universal good cannot be found in created things, but only in God). Let us now apply ourselves to this task. Let us redouble our attention and our exactness: we are approaching the end, and “everything is at stake.”
The major premise: The proper object of the human will is the universal good.
Saint Thomas proves it in a single sentence: “The will,” he says, “has for its object the universal good, just as the intellect has for its object the universal true.” This appeal to the universality of the intellectual object is not, as one might think at first glance, a mere comparison. Saint Thomas clearly thinks it is a proof. To be convinced of this, it suffices to recall that the human will, according to our master, is inseparable from an element of consciousness. There is no true act of willing without intelligence. If one may speak of will in the case of irrational beings, this is because a higher intelligence has preordained their appetitions. In animals, there is already a preconception of the end, though only an imperfect one. The animal knows its end, but—as the instinctive spontaneity of its movements shows—it does not reason about it (Non agit, sed agitur). Man alone acts knowingly. Not only does he carry out intentions, but he forms them. He possesses within himself, in a conscious manner, the form of his voluntary movement. It is in him we find the fullest application for the two fundamental principles of the Aristotelian teaching: “no desire without the perception of some good”; “the will follows the intellect.”
Therefore, to judge the amplitude of the voluntary appetite, it is in keeping with its very law of organization to consider the extent of man’s perception of the good. The extension of the intellect determines the extension of the will. Our method is imposed upon us by the internal structure of a will that originates in an intellectual act.
Is this capacity for adaptation indefinite? Can we assign it a limit? Let us shed light on this question by examining what happens in our mind when we know something. The perfect act of knowledge—the one that alone completes the assimilation of the intelligible to the intellect—is judgment. Now, whatever objects we come into relation with, one same formula recurs in their conception and in their expression: we say, a given a thing is; a given a thing is such another thing.12 Whatever we conceive, we conceive it as being, and the transfer of one quality to another quality or to a subject is effected in and through being. Not only is it impossible for us to do otherwise, but we also see that it must be so—that the intellect, without ceasing to be itself, cannot renounce this objective form common to all our conceptions. Hence, if it is a natural thing, its connatural object is not this or that particular being but, rather, being itself without addition—being purely and simply. Therefore, it is not surprising that neither particular objects, nor even the totality of them, exhaust the intellect. The adequate object of our understanding surpasses them;13 it is, in its own way, their limit. Just as ascending fractions never reach unity, so too the multiplication of our particular conceptions will never attain to being.
But let it not be imagined that such being is a common genus, a hollow category. On the contrary, it is sovereign actuality. Every known being is one of its parts. There is no being that, in all its differentiations, is not a participation in being. No doubt, we conceive it abstractly. But in itself it cannot be an abstraction, since it is the universality of all beings and all modes of being, whether existing or possible. It unites comprehension and extension. The state of abstraction in which the idea of being is found in our intellect is due to the proper role and mode of operation of the intellect. That role consists in reproducing, through internal judgments, the connections that exist in things. As Aristotle says: the intellect composes and divides. This operation would be impossible if the general predicates to be applied to subjects were not considered as abstracted from those subjects. The idea of man, for example, could not be attributed to Peter, Paul, or any individual man if it had not first been isolated by the mind from the different men in whom it was discovered, and considered by the same mind as having a tendency to be applied to all human subjects. However, this universal capacity for attribution (intentio universalitatis—universalitas in prædicando) is not a mere abstraction. Though it is expressed explicitly only in the intellect, it nonetheless has its foundation in things: the intellect knows well that really, though implicitly, in each man there is a common element shared by all men, by which they resemble one another. Therefore, the real universal precedes, in its own way, the abstract universal. We do not fabricate the universality of our concepts: it is but a translation of the latent universality that is in things. Therefore, the will need not fear that it will grasp at an abstract phantom when it turns toward universal being as represented in the intellect. Abstraction is only a condition of intellectual work: in reality, the universal form of being is one with the subjects to which it is attributed, and thus cannot be emptied of them. Accordingly, the will, the faculty of the concrete par excellence, the will that seeks being in the idea, finds in the idea of universal being—connatural to our mind—universal being itself.
But I can hear the possible objection: must this universality in the object of our intellections necessarily reflect upon the object of our volitions? For the will does not have being as its object. It does not even have the abstract good—that transcendental attribute of being—as its object. Its object is our proper good. The will can only follow knowledge where knowledge presents it with something as its good. Now, it has not been demonstrated that my good is adequate to absolute being.
We reply: being is, at the very least, the good of the intellect, the keystone of man’s capacities. By the fact that being is the adequate object of the human intellect, it is a good for the intellect to know it. Therefore, the will has cause to be stirred in the presence of such an object. Is not its proper function to respond to the attraction of whatever is a good for man, and to direct the faculties toward seizing it? But what is better for man than the good of his intellect? What good is more properly human than the attainment of certain knowledge [science]? What function would be more fitting for a human will than to urge the intellect toward the conquest of the intelligible? Therefore, since the intelligible has no limit other than universal being, the will must have within itself a capacity to adapt to the universality of the good. To suppose that it could stop short along the way would be to admit that the possession of an intelligible is not a good for the intellect—which is a contradiction in terms.
Therefore: 1˚ the intellect has for its object universal being under the aspect of the true and the intelligible; 2˚ universal being is the good of the intellect, that is, of the whole man; 3˚ the will follows the intellect wherever the latter presents something good for man. Thus, it is legitimate to conclude from the universality of the intellectual object to the universality of the voluntary object, and consequently to the universality of the immanent tendency that constitutes our will.
And, therefore, it is by a structural necessity that the human will, originating in the human intellect—the faculty of universal truth—has for its object the universal good.14 Objectum voluntatis est universale bonum sicut objectum intellectus est universale verum.
The minor premise—The universal good is not found in created things, but only in God.
This affirmation has two parts. The first of these may itself be considered under two aspects. One may admit, indeed, that the universal good is not found in created things taken distributively, and yet maintain that it is found in their totality. This position is not without resemblance to the theory of happiness through progress.
A. Let us take created goods one by one. And let us take up anew the facetious inventory undertaken by that honorable Sir John Lubbock containing all the little pleasures in this world that may fall to the lot of a gentleman of good appetite and cheerful disposition. We shall find—his opinion notwithstanding—that some piece is always lacking for our human happiness. And the very pieces composing it each carry within them a radical insufficiency. Wealth, you say!
…For all things,
power, fame, honor, and things divine and human,
are subject to splendid riches…
Ah no! It may be the universal means, but it is not the universal good. It would be tedious to pursue the point.15 Ab uno disce omnes. One example tells the tale for all the others. The Use of Life and The Duty of Happiness are works of such insipidity, such naïveté, such intellectual shortsightedness as to sicken any soul of depth, any soul that knows how to see.
But the ideal of progress! Ah! Yes, that happy state where humanity, mastering all things through science, will be able to satisfy all its desires!—The theory is not new. It is amusing to see our old scholastics taking up this aspect of the question, asking whether our dissatisfaction with the goods of this world might not come from the imperfect possession we have of them, and whether the totality of creatures might not, in the end, constitute the equivalent of the universal good we seek. As John of Saint Thomas remarks with fine irony: how many intellectual acts our blissful savant would have to perform! Or, if he sees everything at once, what a complicated and vague view of things he will have! That is a very questionable sort of happiness. Add to this the impossibility of the infinite number of such acts… But let us suppose he has found a bridge across the indefinite expanse of creatures—will he find that he is any further along? No, for at the end he still stands face to face with the great question. The problem concerning the origin and destiny of the world remains completely intact. There he stands, mouth agape before unknown shores: “suspensum et hiantem ad causam totius illius collectionis.”16 Truly, that scholastic has something to him. He may not be far from having guessed the cause for what someone might call the bankruptcy of the theory of happiness founded on the progress of science. And what does it matter if one possesses the totality of conditioned things, if man—truly man, that is to say, clear-sighted and concerned for his destiny—finds himself at the summit of this relative progress in the state of soul of a Pascal or a Jouffroy?
This radical impotence of conditioned being to equal the sovereign good is what Saint Thomas has taken as the foundation for the proof we are analyzing. The very fact of being conditioned, he holds, prevents the creature from ever equalling the universal good sought by our will: omnis creatura habet naturam participatam et consequenter particulatam. The world is composed of parts, and none of these parts justifies its existence in the eyes of reason. All these parts have being, but none is being by itself. If they had being of themselves, their definition would reveal it. But their definition speaks only of the specific determination proper to each being. It leaves out being itself—the great common reality whose concept overflows all the beings in which it is concretized, all genera, all species, all individuals that participate in being without exhausting it. Here lies the fundamental mark of the indigence stamped upon the natures all around us. There is a disproportion between what they possess and what they ought, by their nature, to possess. Since the world does not have being of itself, we must posit its cause outside of it, in a being that has being by itself. However grave this step may be for the human intellect—casting it into the transcendent—it is nevertheless necessary. The world is there, with its contingency, demanding it. Omnis creatura habet naturam participatam.
Et consequenter particulatam. Since it requires a being outside of itself in order to exist, creation cannot be the whole of being. Therefore, it does not possess all goodness. Its goodness is specific, particular. It is not the best part of the good, since creation is not the best part of being. It is not the universal good that our nature demands.
These considerations hold independent of any question regarding the real objectivity of the external world. We are simply comparing the concept of a creature with the concept of the universal good—the latter being certainly and objectively valid by virtue of the demands of the will.
B. Sed solum in Deo. The universal good is found only in God: this is the affirmative counterpart of our minor premise.
Saint Thomas could have deduced the universality of the divine good from the universality of God’s being. However, that would have gone against the method he consistently follows in the questions we are examining, where the predicate continually appears ultimate unfolding of the subject. Therefore, he regarded this second part of the minor premise—sed solum in Deo—as a necessary consequence of the first: omnis creatura habet naturam particulatam. In this way, his argument takes on the value of a proof for the existence of God drawn from the divine attraction implicit in every created attraction. It is a proof by the final cause of human activity.
This clearly shows that Saint Thomas intends the second part of the minor premise to carry its own proof within itself, that it is demonstrated by its very opposition to the first part—expressed by the word sed. For in the question at hand, there is nowhere any trace of a formal demonstration for so important a proposition. Therefore, it must be either self-evident or based on a very ordinary line of argument. And indeed, here is such an argument, as rigorous as it is simple: if A is the cause of B, then to find the cause of C, which is the contrary of B, one must take the contrary of A. C is assumed as given and therefore requires a cause. That cause is unknown; we determine it by opposition to the known cause A, which is necessarily understood to account for the effect B. Suppose effect B is attributed to the influence of positive electricity; we may then legitimately conclude that the contrary effect C—attraction, for example, instead of repulsion—must be attributed to negative electricity. This principle constantly used in both philosophy and the sciences.
Let us apply this kind of argument to our case. The attraction of the universal good is given, by the very demands of action. We seek to link it to some objective reality, but this objective reality eludes our investigations within the world of conditioned things. We come to suspect that this quality of being conditioned is precisely what prevents the world around us from being the universal good that solicits us. Upon examination, this proves to be the case: omnis creatura habet naturam particulatam. We are thus led to posit the state of being conditioned as the cause of the specialization or particularization of the good. To identify the cause of the universal good, we must therefore, by our principle, posit the contrary state. Only the unconditioned being can cause the attraction of the universal good. But that attraction exists. action lives by it. Therefore, as consequence of action, God exists.
Let us note how our principle applies in full rigor in the present case. In the sciences, the rule that opposite causes correspond to contrary effects often has only a relative scope: nothing proves that positive and negative electricity may not eventually find some sort of synthesis [in some higher reality]. Therefore, the principle is only as strong as the opposition of the causes. However, in the present case, the opposition is irreducible: it is not, in fact, between two secondary terms capable of finding unity in a higher principle. Rather, the opposition here is between the totality of secondary terms gathered under the name of creatures and the first term of all: the Uncreated, the principle of every possible synthesis. Conditioned and unconditioned are absolutely and definitively opposed. Therefore, our proof is absolute and admits of no appeal.
Nor should we exaggerate the scope of this proof. The demonstration we are examining is rigorous, but it is purely negative. Saint Thomas, with his usual precision, gave it its character from the very outset of his article when he stated: “It is impossible that man’s beatitude would be found in any created good.” Therefore, it is through the impossibility of one term that we are logically compelled to throw ourselves into the opposite term. We arrive at the transcendent by way of an indirect path. As is the case in every demonstration of God’s existence, it is through the perception of a property immanent in things, which we cannot adequately explain by nature, that we are led to the transcendent—considered not in itself, but in one of its activities. Therefore, action does not reach the Transcendent in itself, in its being, though it does reach the Transcendent itself, considered under the aspect of its proper attraction.
The supreme exigency of human action is action in the contrary sense, the action of God.
But there can be no doubt in the external objectivity—the transcendental17 realism—of this action. It is a shock that I receive, a stirring that I do not produce in myself. Something other than myself draws me. It is in these rudimentary terms that the central psychological fact of the problem of action must be stated, so that even the simplest act of self-consciousness may attest to its evident truth. From that point, everything is won: for the determinations coming from this other-than-myself, whose attraction stirs me and implants within me the seeds of action, do not belong to me. I have, in a sense, drawn them from myself in that my will, as a moved power, has declared its requirements concerning its mover: “For nothing can adequately move some mobile thing unless the active power of the mover exceeds, or at least equals, the passive power of the thing moved. However, the passive power of the will extends to the good in general (bonum in unversali).”18 But, the mover of a will that is essentially passive must necessarily be external. The irreducible opposition between the active and the passive demands it. The passive, as such, is in its very being distinct from the being of the agent acting upon it. These are two properties that must be subjected in two beings distinct from one another. And thus, what acts upon me is indeed a God who is distinct from myself—not an immanent ideal extracted from my subjectivity.
Thus, in our ultimate object, we reconcile both transcendence and immanence. Transcendence is required by the very nature of the attraction that stands at the first origin and birth of action. The method of immanence serves to draw from the subject the features of that supreme object, external to us, upon which, nevertheless, the whole of our action depends. The first cause of action is indeed situated outside of us. However, its second, proximate cause—the love of our good—is immanent: it is placed at the point of junction between divine attraction and human activity. It is through this love that our ultimate object enters into our acts at every moment.
Therefore, action does not demand heteronomy. Heteronomy supposes that foreign things condition and govern one another—an evident impossibility. By contrast, our ultimate object is the correlative required by the very nature of the human will. We possess our divine object in potency—that is, as though in seed—but this seed needs to be quickened by the divine attraction, acting under the diminished form of created goods that form its living vesture.19
Therefore, the ceaseless movement of our voluntary dynamism—our constant oscillations and unbridled activity—is not caused by “the mark and the empty trace” of a former state of bliss, as the great Pascal would have it. No, far from being an imperfection or an evil, its cause is the sovereign perfection of man as a being who acts. Saint Augustine gave voice to this cause in the famed cry that echoed forth from his soul: “You, O Lord, made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.” And Father Lacordaire too: “God is the one who stirs about in the hearts of twenty-year-olds!” Yet who does not, in some sense, retain this sentiment of adolescent youth, when the thought of that totality which is ultimately God, our true happiness, dawns upon him? This is the very conclusion of Saint Thomas’s proof: “And thus, God alone can fulfill man’s will, according to the word of the psalm: ‘It is He who fills your desire: your youth shall be renewed like the eagle’s.’”
* * *
Some have attempted to oppose Saint Augustine to Saint Thomas: the method of the heart to the dialectical method; the order of charity to the logical order; God who is felt by the heart to the God who is the First Cause. But the works of these two great Christian minds stand open before us, happily, to defend them. With all due respect to Pascal, Saint Thomas knew “order,”20 and there is dialectic in Saint Augustine. And why should the method of charity be strengthened by the rigors afforded by the logical method? Why should the God who is felt by the heart not also be, as we have shown, the God who is the First Cause—through His attraction—of all love and all action? Why should we not be able to lay out, with logic—that is, with their natural sequence and connections—the demands of Action? This is precisely what Saint Thomas has done in the present question, as well in many others. He is nothing other than the faithful interpreter of the teaching of Saint Augustine. Let the reader judge from his own words. After the doctrine of Action, it is now Action itself that will speak:
Therefore, I have gone astray like the distressed sheep, seeking thee outside, thou who are within. Much have I labored, seeking thee outside myself, yet thou dwell within me—if only I desire thee. Through all the streets and all squares of the city in this wide world, I went about seeking thee without finding thee, for I was seeking outside of me the one who is within.
I sent messengers—my outward senses—in search of thee. Yet that was a poor way to seek thee... for thou are within, and the senses do not know by what way thou entered. The eyes say: if He is not colored, He did not come in by us. The ears too: if He makes no sound, He did not pass through us. And the sense of smell: if He has no scent, He did not come by means of me. Taste too: if He has no flavor, I could not perceive His presence. And touch: if He is not corporeal, do not question me about Him...
And yet, when I seek my God, I seek a light that surpasses all light, a light which the eye cannot grasp, a voice more harmonious than all voices, unheard by the ear does not hear, a fragrance beyond compare, never perceived by the sense of smell, an inexpressible sweetness that taste cannot imagine, an embrace without equal, yet unknown by the sense of touch... This is what I seek when I seek my God; this is what I love when I love my God.
Late have I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new. Yes, very late I loved thee... and yet thou were within me, and I was outside, and it was there that I sought thee. Deformed, I threw myself upon the beautiful things thou had made. Thou were with me, and I was not with you; those things held me far from thee—things which would not exist if they were not in thee! I questioned the earth and asked if it were my God: it answered no. I questioned all that is in it: they made the same confession. I questioned the sea, the depths, all living creatures: they replied, “We are not your God. Look above us...” And I said to all these things around the gates of my flesh: ‘Tell me what you are not, if you cannot tell me what He is.’ And they cried out with a great voice: ‘He it is who made us.’”21
The immanence of the desire for God conceived as the total good: incomparable and perfect light, voice, fragrance, flavor, and embrace. The powerlessness of creatures to explain or satisfy this desire. The oscillations of the human will in search of its final object among created things. At last, the definitive answer: Seek Him above us. All these elements of Saint Thomas’s proof we find alive and beating in the soul of Saint Augustine.
In the text we quoted at the beginning of this inquiry, we listened to Pascal telling us: ““All our actions and thoughts will follow quite different paths depending on whether there are eternal goods to hope for or not. So different will be their trajectories that it is impossible to take a single step with sense and judgment unless it is guided by the view of that end which must be our final object.” We are now informed concerning this final object of our life. Eternal goods are no chimera. Action requires them.
But can we govern our Action in view of this point, and how should we go about it? The question concerning the objective exigencies of Action naturally calls forth the problem concerning the subjective resources of Action. This will be the subject of a forthcoming series of articles.
City of God, 19.1.↩︎
Cherbuliez.↩︎
ST I-II, q. 30, a. 4.↩︎
Silvio Pellico, L’Homme.↩︎
[—] Lines struck through in the manuscript.↩︎
See ST I-II, q. 40, a. 4c: “As it is said in the third book of the Ethics: when something impossible is reached, then men turn away.”↩︎
We are here speaking about the infinity of our aspirations. It remains understood that the wounds resulting from original sin are a probable argument in favor of the existence of that sin and of the prior integrity of human nature. See SCG, bk. 4, ch. 52: “On the supposition of the fact of Divine Providence, which has adapted suitable perfections to each perfectible thing, we can estimate with sufficient probability that God joined a higher nature to a lower one so that the former might rule over the latter, etc… Therefore, it can thus be sufficiently proved, with probability, that such defects are penal in character and thus it can be inferred that the mankind is originally infected by some sin.”↩︎
On this point, Pascal says very rightly: “Was Paul Emile thought unhappy for no longer being consul? On the contrary, everyone considered him happy for having once been so, for his condition was not to remain so forever. But Perseus was thought so unhappy for no longer being king, because his condition was meant to remain in force always...”↩︎
Cf. Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio, 3.20; Retractationes, 1.9; etc.↩︎
ST I-II, q. 2, art. 7 and 8; ST I, q. 105, art. 4.↩︎
Goudin, Ethica, q. 1, art. 2.: “Our will is like a point from which infinite lines of desire can proceed in every direction, whereas the divine goodness is like a circumference uniting in itself the beginning and the end of goodness. Thus, although infinite lines may be drawn from a point fixed at the center, there is none that does not touch the circumference.”↩︎
Trans. note: Or, technically, that this object is that other object, in some thing (res).↩︎
See ST I-II, q. 30, a. 4: “Non-natural concupiscence is absolutely infinite, for it follows reason, to which it properly belongs to proceed to infinity.”↩︎
One will note the difference between this argument and that of Scotus, which we refuted in our earlier article. Scotus, wishing to conclude that the will is absolutely autonomous, imagines that we can construct by abstraction the idea of an absolute good, bonum absolute, and that we can therefore will this object which escapes the objective chain of ends and means. This is an error, because this abstract conception formed by our mind necessarily represents no human good. Things are entirely different for this universal good—natural and not fanciful, concrete and real and not the product of arbitrary abstraction—which we recognize as the object of our will.—And this, by the way, is what distinguishes our doctrine of the will from the theory of “idea-forces” of Alfred Fouillée, who is a Scotist without knowing it. Monsieur Fouillée attaches appetite to every idea simply by virtue of its being an idea. This is incorrect. Abstract ideas arouse no feeling. Or if they do, this is only once the representation of some good for the subject emerges from them. Geometric figures, for example, say nothing to the untrained mind; they say much to a mathematician because they represent for him a perfection of his intellect. It is not the idea that stirs us, but the good—granted, as represented in the idea.↩︎
Saint Thomas carried out this task with conscientious care. See ST I-II, q. 2, a. 1–7.↩︎
John of St. Thomas, Cursus theologicus, In ST I-II, disp. II, art. 1, parag. 6.↩︎
Trans. note: Or, transcendent.↩︎
ST I, q. 105, art. 4c.↩︎
Deus appetitur in omni fine. In every end, God is desired.— See De Veritate, q. 22, a. 2c.↩︎
Pascal, Pensées, ed. Brunschvicg, pensée 61.—In a note where he clearly shows that he has grasped only the external structure of the Summa, Brunschvicg offers this commentary: “Such an argumentation has no roots in the mind; it does not show how a truth is begotten in man; it has no power to make itself believed.” One is tempted to reply to the learned annotator, in the words of the poet: non equidem invideo, miror magis; Indeed I do not envy you; no, I marvel at you.↩︎
Trans. note: The citation is from Soliloquies, 31,though the reference contains a variety of texts from Confessions, bk. 10.↩︎
