“Spirit Holds Time from on High”: Historicity and Humanity
“Spiritual activity, which is above time, does not vacate time;
it holds it from on high.”
– Jacques Maritain, On the Philosophy of History (p. 59)
The present essay was delivered at the 2026 American Maritain Association meeting in Los Angeles, dedicated to topics related to the philosophy of history. Given the vocal delivery of this work, the documentation in the footnotes is not complete. Those texts which are provided are included for the benefit of the reader. A fuller consideration of these topics will be taken up in a volume that I am currently composing. The present paper is related to another recent talk, available as “What is a World? Reflections on the Noosphere” on To Be a Thomist.1
As a certain neo-Platonist perspective would say: the human person is a kind of horizon. In us, the conditions of hylomorphic embodied existence meet with those of spiritual beings that do not require the conditions of materiality for their subsistence. Metaphysically, this unique kind of duality is reflected in the peculiar status of the relationship between the spiritual soul and the body: the spiritual soul subsists in itself as the form of the body. This little phrase contains an entire metaphysics of the human person: capable of self-subsistent existence without its body, and yet somehow truncated and abnormal without the body. Our feet seem to be on the ground, yet a part of us is in the heavens.
For this reason, the spiritual soul seems almost to be a kind of two-faced principle of our being. Through its loftiest aspect, its intellectual and spiritual mens (or nous), the spiritual soul “turns” toward God its source. And, as theologians can tell us, as mens, the spiritual soul is even the obediential subject of a higher life, the divine life of grace. Through its earthiest aspect, this soul is turned toward a different sort of task, ensuring that we have the conditions necessary for our agency, which requires a variety of conditions that are embodied. Yet, we must be careful not to view this as though the human person is dualistically “two-fold,” for once again, at its root, the spiritual soul subsists in itself as the form of the body. Its spirituality is that of a hylomorphic form, and its hylomorphic function is that of a spiritually subsistent being.
This embodied-spiritual character of the substance of our soul is reflected also in its operations. Our intelligence does not look at the world with a single eternal gaze, as though it were the divine creator of all things. Nor do we consider the world with a non-temporal2 actuality as would be the case for a purely spiritual, created intelligence. Rather, we win our way toward our knowledge step-by-step, drawing from experience a world that is not of our own making, and deliberating about a moral and artistic world whose contours we must discern through prudence and art.
Therefore, our spiritual intelligence stands in need of a body with its own bodily powers. In the jargon of the schools, the proper object of our embodied intellect is the quiddity or nature existing in bodily matter. We begin the quest of knowledge by experiencing the changing world around us, marshaling a great host of memories and thought experiments in order to begin to glimpse something of the necessary nature of things, as well as their more-or-less proper characteristics, effects, and causes. Everything else will build upon this knowledge. Even in our most metaphysical moments, we will only reach our destination by way of analogy passing through what is first discovered amid this changing world. Motion is the intellectual playground for coming to know something about act and potency; temporality remains our first attempt to articulate duration; mobile being is first known, before we try our hand at saying something about “being as being.” Nor will we escape from this embodied condition, unless we wish to escape from the human condition itself. The path to the immaterial is always traveled along the ways of the material, step by step.
Thus, our intellect needs its “phantasms” as its objective instruments, themselves the product of a long history of experience, beginning from our earliest days of life. What is more, our bodily powers are what they are precisely as servants of these higher powers. Thus, what is practically oriented estimation in animals becomes cogitation in humans, who have an amazing ability to see stable intelligibility in fleeting particularity—doing so with a kind of openness such that when we speak of imagination or “phantasy,” we mean to refer to the active power of prospectively considering new possibilities, new possible human acts, or new potential cases for reflection through thought experimentation. And memory enables us to actively recall in a way that, as recollection, is arguably different from the memorative capacity of mere animals.3
Similarly, human volition is not merely a bare, spiritual will that has a fraught relationship with a kind of external, mechanistic body. Rather, our will stands in need of bodily passions and appetites as a support and channel for its desires, aversions, and forceful drive. So too, in these appetites, there is a kind of openness to the higher direction of practical reason and execution by the spiritual will. Hence, one speaks of reason ruling the appetites “politically,” not despotically.4 Moreover, just as our capacity for particularized cogitation can see intelligible notions in particular realities—this just act, this tree—and thereby in some way participate in the higher life of the intellect, so too, the appetites become impregnated with rationality and a readiness to be directed by practical reason.5
In other words, our embodied powers are, in a sense, transfigured by our spiritual-intellectual existence and activity. A sound anthropology is not reductionist, whether of spirit-mind to matter, or of matter to spirit-mind. Nor is it parallelist, as though spirit and matter were primarily coordinate, dual principles. Nor is it hegemonic—as though our spiritual capacities would require the rejection of our embodied ones, or as though authenticity required reason to be the slave of the passions. Rather, one must recognize that if man truly is a being whose form of life is to spiritually subsist as informing a bodily life, then that bodily life will have the prerogative of participating in spirituality itself.
Within a generally hylomorphic metaphysics, this is only an additional step in a direction already prepared by the notion of form-matter unity. According to such a metaphysics, material beings are already not merely material. By maintaining a certain kind of intelligible structure across time, they escape the vibrating chaos which would be the fate of a “purely material” being lacking any formal structure whatsoever.6 This is why one can say that there is at least something non-material in every material being. Or, if one looks at the same point with a metaphysical eye that ultimately resolves this non-material formal causality to its ultimate Principle—God, who is the Exemplar Cause of all things—one can also say that form is, in a way, something divine in things.7
To look at this same point from a different perspective, let us say that intelligence and will are not merely bottled up in a noetic heaven. The activity of intelligence and will takes place “in the world,” in the bodily world itself. This is required by the very nature of the human person, whose soul—to keep repeating the principle of all that I have said and will say—subsists in itself, as the principle of being and activity, as the form of the body. The agency that finds its ultimate root in the substantial human form is one that requires, as its connatural conditioning, a body providing the powers necessary precisely for this intellectual and volitional action itself.
But that also means that it requires the entire environment in which these powers exercise their own potency. Objects are needed for the specification of powers, even if these powers also interpret or articulate the realities that they objectivize. A fulcrum point is needed for efficient causality to be exercised in the effective achievement of deeds. And, as we will take a moment to recognize later, this very environment will find itself elevated to the level of human activity, creating a world filled with the spirituality of human knowledge and willing: “A border is not only a line on a map, it is also a spiritual limit that expresses a spiritual decision.”8
***
Therefore, it should not be surprising to us if our own process of cognition requires conditions that are very befitting of embodied natures. In other words, we should not be surprised that it takes time to form knowledge, and that we spend a great deal of time debating whether we are truly sure about what we know. Embodied natures have an intelligible consistency. If they did not, science would most definitely be impossible. But they have a consistency that holds, as the sound and sober Aristotelian maxim runs, “always or for the most part.” Should we be surprised that human reasoning experiences the same conditions? It is the reasoning of a being whose very intellectual power is in need of all the resources belonging to the embodied condition. Therefore, although definitive acquisitions are possible for the mind, we spend the preponderance of our time reasoning in a way that is dialectical, seeking to increase the certainty that we have concerning truths grasped with a probability (or, “plausibility”) rather than utter sureness.9
This means that human cognition enters the stage of knowledge “already begun.” No parent teaches children as though we have to learn, once more, how an alphabet can be constructed. No teacher sets forth a subject as though today is year zero in the instauration of a glorious new discipline. Any person of a sound mind begins an investigation by considering what, perhaps, has already been discovered concerning the topic in question. In other words, we begin the work of reasoning by taking into account endoxa, the received positions that pre-exist us.
And beyond considering past achievements, we undertake the task of assessing such knowledge in shared conversation. Obviously, humans might muse within themselves while reflecting upon some topic. But we most naturally take our question-and-answer with others, not merely with ourselves. We have dialogue and debate with others who hold us honestly to the common work, the koinon ergon, of the discovery of truth. This is, after all, the work of dialectic itself. And even when the day dawns upon a definitive truth, this truth must be shared from one person to another, from one generation to the next, through a process of gradual assimilation. The intelligent geometry student really does know something about geometry, but often his knowledge is marked by the contingent fact that he does not grasp it directly in its first principles, or precisely under the aspect of being a scientific, per se conclusion. Such knowledge is probable knowledge of a truth that is de iure capable of being grasped with complete certainty (whether principial or scientific).
All of this goes a long way to saying: the exploits of knowledge are a shared work, an achievement that happens in the shared space of fellow humans.
So too one can say something similar concerning the knowledge that we have of moral truths. Even at the level of contingent, human law, there is a gradual process of assimilation through shared communal practices, recognized as providing measures of human acts. Even at the level of law itself, it is only within this shared communal space—i.e., the space of custom—that practical rationality can grasp human, civil law.10 So too, within the shared, rational community of sufficiently developed societies, there is the common framework of a kind of generalized moral science known as the ius gentium, the law of nations, which relies upon the shared world of discourse for its very existence.11 And even in our knowledge of the natural law itself, there is a kind of development which relies upon our own shared space as rational agents of more or less lofty moral rectitude. In other words, even the most natural human knowledge of moral truths depends upon the conditions of development and uprightness in which we find ourselves.12
So too, our substantial rational nature cannot become the maker of tools and artcraft without the apparatus of shared technical rationality. This is most obvious in the case of trades and the methods of the fine arts. A carpenter or woodworker has entered into the long story of man's use and manipulation of wood, and the painter or musician benefits from the methods gradually acquired in a tradition. A piano instructor might well choose a given method because it was that of his own instructor, perhaps going back in some line to a particular great figure in the history of piano performance. I am convinced that too many parents are bitten by the rationalist bug of method, which would supposedly begin with some clear and distinct Method that would deliver optimal instrumental performance. What is more truthful is that there are a variety of methods, with different histories, somewhat like different endoxa that serve as a starting point for launching out—in this particular example—into the art of piano playing.
But this dynamic goes far beyond these mere cases of entering into the practices of a craft. And along all of these axes—the speculative, moral, or technical—the human person shows himself to be the semiotic animal. Through speech, deeds, institutions, and all sorts of physical effects, we create a world of meaning so all-embracing that, if anything, we risk overlooking it. We are constantly interpreting signs—both speculative and practical—which communicate something to us and offer the basis for our own prospective engagement with the human world, the world of culture, but a world whose dynamism and movement is also historical. We are always agents in history, making history. Human intelligence lives “out there,” in the world that we create—or, in view of a more careful metaphysics, that we “sub-create.” Was not the commission given to our first parents that of “tilling and keeping” the earth? Though now performed with sweat upon the brow, this commission has not been abrogated.
***
From layer to layer, therefore, we find that the human soul—which subsists in itself as the form of the body—holds together bodily activity—and therefore, too, time as the measure of this mobile activity—from on high. That is, it provides some kind of intelligible structure within the shared space of human activity—whether the activity of knowledge, of moral life, or of artcraft. But we should not think of it as imperiously agglomerating a kind of utterly materialistic substructure, as though we were a ghost in a machine manipulating the world around us. No, rather, precisely because of our rank—the lowest rank among intellectual creatures—we stand in need of our body so that we might know and will effectively within the physical world around us, so that such actions might attain their real and existential purchase.
Yet, on the other hand, neither our body nor this world around us is left untouched by this activity. The human world is not merely a kind of sub-human world that is merely organized in a new way, merely at the level of subhuman meaning and formality. Rather, the human world is something new. It involves the activity of impressing spirit upon matter. Or, perhaps to express this with better metaphysical vocabulary, it is the activity of reaching within what is deepest in material realities—their obediential potency, their profound propensity to reach above themselves toward a formally higher level to which they are not opposed, and in which they find their true fulfillment—it is the activity of reaching within that deep root of things and elevating it to be the recipient of a higher mode of being, the being of knowledge and love.
So-called “intentional being” is not merely “inside the mind.” It is a mode of being that belongs to realities themselves.13 As Maritain once said, the pagan deity exists in the statue, but in alio modo esse.14 Or, as the initiates of the mysteries of second intentions say: the relations studied in logic exist in things insofar as they are known—in other words, insofar as they belong to the higher being they receive through objective union with human knowers. In fact, the task of being human is to create an entire world in this other mode of existence. It is to exist in a world of intelligence, morality, and art.
Yet it is a human world. And that means that it does not merely exist in facto esse, as a completely finished and polished reality. It exists in fieri. In fact, because at its principle—the spiritual soul, subsisting, as it does, in itself as the form of the body—it is always involved in the flux of materiality, it will forever be spread out from generation to generation, from one person to the next. It must be attained. And therefore, it must be historical. In all of our knowledge, in all of our civilization building, we find ourselves living out the life of spirit in time. Our head is in the heavens, but we remain with feet forever on the ground.
The present talk is meant merely to indicate thoughts in a particular direction. Therefore, drawing to a close, I think it is appropriate, especially among a group such as ours, to note that all of this is quite fitting also for a Christian. The work of God does not happen only within our noetic height. To be Catholic (or Orthodox) is to recognize that the immaterial mediates itself through the material, the invisible through the visible. It is to recognize, as Péguy once wrote: “The city of God will have its own body. Over the ages it will be ceaselessly built. For the supernatural itself has a body of flesh, and the tree of grace, with roots that thrust deep down, plunges into the soil and seeks out its depths.”15 It is to recognize that salvation reaches us through the visible Church and her sacrifice. It is to recognize that the divine message reaches us through a divine pedagogy that is salvation history and the history of the Church. It is to recognize that the divine is communicated first and foremost to the very situated sacred humanity of Christ, and that this Divino-Triune communication is mediated by the many dogmas—with their own histories—stewarded by the Church, His body and receptive subject of these mysteries.16 It is to recognize that even where objective mediation comes to its end in the vision of God, we still subjectively receive this eternal bliss in view of the wayfaring labor of merits coming to us from Christ-God, who in the divine flash of actuality that is eternity will be the efficient cause of the light of glory by which our minds pass from wayfaring to terminal existence in bliss. In Eternal Beatitude, history will no longer mediate truth and love, but history will be crowned by our God, as a harvest whose seeds were planted in time.17
Original Abstract
Many Thomistic accounts of knowledge rightly emphasize the initial moments of speculative cognition, especially the abstraction of intelligible essences from the phantasms. This act—by which what is potentially intelligible becomes actually known—marks a decisive moment in human understanding. Yet when abstraction is treated as the center or endpoint of cognition, the fuller dynamism of human knowing risks being obscured.
Human cognition is neither angelic nor merely animal. As spiritual and embodied, infinite in intellectual scope yet finite in mode, the human knower exercises intelligence under the conditions of temporality. Even speculative knowing unfolds as a labor of articulation: through defining, judging, and reasoning, the intellect seeks to express reality as it is, drawing not only upon immediate experience but also upon the historically mediated state of human knowledge itself.
Moreover, human knowing is not exhausted by the speculative order. As practical—both morally and artistically—intelligence leaves an imprint upon the world. Measured by reality even as it comes to measure what it knows, practical reason gives form to human practices, communities, artifacts, technologies, and works of art. In doing so, it generates a world of meaning marked by new forms and practical signs.
Human thought thus exists not only in the soul of the individual knower, but also in the cultural and material matrix through which human understanding, willing, and loving are exercised and sustained. In this sense, the human person is uniquely historical: knowing, acting, and creating within a world that both receives and bears new traces of intelligence.
This paper, conceived as preparatory work for a chapter in a larger project, proposes a metaphysical account of the historical character of human cognition and practice. While philosophical in method, the eventual chapter will also gesture toward the theological implications of this claim. The paper will itself present the general project of the chapter, without all of its technical details.
The influences on this essay are rather broad. I would like to signal two works in particular that influenced me rather deeply many years ago: Anton C. Pegis, At the Origins of the Thomistic Notion of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1963); Armand Maurer, St. Thomas and Historicity (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1979). In addition, I would signal a subsection of an essay by Fr. Jean-Pierre Torrell, “Saint Thomas et L’Histoire: État de la Question et Pistes de Recherches” in Nouvelles recherches thomasiennes (Paris: Vrin, 2008), 131–175 (here, 132–152). Briefly, Fr. Torrell avers to the theory of habitus in relation to the dynamic and historical character of man’s being. As I develop themes in this text into their final form, I believe that this point will be of importance, although it was studied at much greater speculative depth in the long sequence of articles on evolution by Fr. Gardeil in the early years of the Revue thomiste.↩︎
Though it is, of course, durational as “aeviternal.”↩︎
On this, see Aquinas's commentary on the De memoria et reminiscentia. In a text in Untrammeled Approaches, Maritain would even go so far as to say that we should hold this for all of the internal senses; likewise, there is the phenomenon of what he refers to as
“intelligenated sense,” discussed in his works on the philosophy of art.↩︎To the degree that constraint by reason seems to be a kind of despotism, this is an effect of their perversity through the effects of sin, whether original or personal.↩︎
Hence, the Thomists resist the temptation to say that the acquired moral virtues—or even the supernatural, infused moral virtues—connected with temperance and courage would only be subjected in the will. On this, the reader might benefit from some of the observations made in a draft work posted on To Be a Thomist, “The Political Implications of Acquired Moral Virtue—Even Amid the Life of Grace.”↩︎
In other words, pure materialism fails to be a sufficient explanatory structure of reality precisely because it would entail the reduction of all realities to prime matter.↩︎
See the study of this theme in Lawrence Dewan, St. Thomas and Form as Something Divine in Things (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2007).↩︎
Pierre Manent, A World Beyond Politics: A Defense of the Nation-State, trans. Marc LePain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 68–69.↩︎
It is not for nothing that Thomas Aquinas makes precisely this comparison to embodied natures whenever he situates dialectical logic—the logic first developed in Aristotle's Topics—among the various disciplines of logic. See “An Introduction to Dialectical Logic: The Recovery of Probable Certainty as the Labor of the Human Intellect” on To Be a Thomist.↩︎
For a recent study of interest on this topic, see Jean-Rémi Lanavère, Loi naturelle et politique chez saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 2024).↩︎
For some further indications of what I mean concerning this, see Matthew K. Minerd, “Ius Gentium as Publicly Articulated Moral Science,” Nova et Vetera, English Edition 21, no. 3 (Summer 2023): 1043–1058.↩︎
This is an important theme that recurs in the work of Jacques Maritain. In a somewhat inchoate form, I studied the relevant themes in Matthew K. Minerd, “Natural Law and History in the Moral Philosophy of Jacques Maritain,” Ph.L. Thesis (The Catholic University of America, 2014).↩︎
Here, the reader would do well to note the distinction between the objective concept and the formal concept (or, the thing known, as objectively specifying the intellect) and the formal concept (the subjective quality in which one knows this objective concept). On the distinction between the formal and objective concept, see the relevant discussions in John Frederick Peifer, The Concept in Thomism (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2026). Here is a case of mutual causality, though in different genera. The reality becomes an object by exercising specifying causality (objective extrinsic formal causality), but it can only do so insofar as it as specifying the possible intellect, whose operation (which requires the virtually productive uttering of the formal concept) gives this object its intentional (or objective) existence.↩︎
See Jacques Maritain, “Language and the Theory of Sign,” in Frontiers in Semiotics, ed. John Deely, Brooke Williams, and Felicia E. Kruse (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 51–62.↩︎
Taken from Charles Journet, The Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 2, trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2025), 48n68 (translation slightly modified).↩︎
The informed reader will sense here something of the influence of Ratzinger upon my idiom. The deposit of truths of faith can only live in the Church. It is not for nothing that the third of the loci theologici enumerated by the best followers of Cano is the Church herself, both as teaching and as believing.↩︎
One must, of course, take care to distinguish the temporal and the eschatological. Nonetheless, it is also true that one can say, with Charles Journet, The Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 3, trans. Dominic Spiekermann, ed. Matthew K. Minerd (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2026), 1090–1 (lightly altered):
At the level of spiritual or ecclesial activities, the supreme law, though not the only one, is a supernatural law of unity: the Church, the mystical body and the kingdom of God on earth, has a divine unity. At the level of temporal and secular activities, the supernatural law of unity ceases. Christian ecclesial unity only affects the temporal level by infusing it with the secular Christian unity of tendency and inspiration, which strengthens the fundamental natural unity of our species. Without attenuating them, this secular Christian unity penetrates the diversity of ethnic, linguistic, and social groups, political or cultural preferences, and forms of art and thought, and—to the extent that people give it their ever-feeble assent—it gives rise to the beginnings of a Christian humanism….
But the world of nature and of culture is animated by a dynamism all its own, and temporal history has a meaning. Aided by the city of God and perverted by the city of evil, and with its victories and catastrophes, it advances towards the parousia, where it will enter into eternity. Then, the Church, absorbed into the glory of Christ, will draw to herself all that is pure in the cosmos, and all the genuinely human elements that have been secured in the struggles of history, so that she might suffuse them with her transfiguring rays.
And, also, ibid., 1364–5:
↩︎The definitive catholicity of the Church must be understood in reference to her consummation, when Christ will hand over the universe to God, Who will be all in all (1 Cor 15:28). This catholicity will not appear as something created ex nihilo; rather, it will be the coming of age, or ultimate fructification, of the Church’s process of growth over the course of historical time: “The harvest is the close of the age” (Matt 13:39, RSV). The time of the Church, like the life cycle of wheat in the field, transforms all that it touches into a harvest. And this mystery can be expressed in poetic language.
In [Paul Claudel’s] Cantata for Three Voices, Fausta, the exile who sings the Song of Gold, represents the Church. A long time has passed since her Spouse departed, leaving her to administer all His possessions. Whatever elements of the world’s darkness and colors she could embrace in her arms, she embraced so that she might, through her love, change them into a harvest, into a golden harvest. But has she not been changed as well? Will the Spouse recognize her when He returns? He will say to her:
Is this the Fausta whom I loved!
Where is her springtime? Where is that youthful radiance?
Where is that pristine blue, and that almost glowing green?
Where is the freshness of the wild rose? Where on your face is that crimson radiance of Pentecost?
The intense purple hue,
Like twilight in a pine forest and sun’s ray in May!
Then, she will answer Him:
Only gold remains!
It is I, oh my spouse!
And though the day has not yet dawned, it is all there amid the night, the immense manna in the night, and the rolling seas!
And you know very well that this land is not ours, and that this wind is not the breath of our homeland,
And that this river is not its voice, whose eternal noise you hear.
But I am here at least, and you, too, are finally here!
At least I am not lacking, I too am like gold,
Like a treasure on your heart and a great harvest in your arms!
At least I am true!
All that belonged to the night has become like gold.
Like the sky that is first red, then violet, then blue, then green, and then, at last, the unchanging color of gold!
All that belonged to the night has become like gold in me.
All these great goods are mine, and none of those things that I acquired in your absence have endured, yet all have been changed and ripened in my hands, and all now turns to gold before my eyes!
Then, as the Church and her harvest pass over to her Spouse at last, all that was grace in her becomes glory, and all that was gold becomes snow:
And this is the approaching day of the woman who has gone up to God,
clothed in a great harvest, the harvest that streams from her shoulders,
And when she passes over to her Spouse and to her Father;
What was golden becomes white as snow!
