There is No Esoteric Doctrine in Christianity

The title of the present talk is appropriated from a section in Charles Journet’s little volume, What is Dogma?: “There is No Esoteric Doctrine in Christianity.”¹ The choice for the topic, however, comes from a more recent personal encounter. In the summer of 2025, I found myself engaged in a rather unexpected debate over Christian Hermeticism and Esotericism. I tend to find these kinds of online discussions unhelpful, because they often occasion a great deal of talking past one another. Nonetheless, the events led me to reflect quite a bit more concerning various epistemic and ecclesiological claims regarding revealed truth, Christian praxis, and the nature of human experience and reason. For this opportunity to reflect more upon such important matters, as well as for the apparent good will of my principal interlocutor, I was, and am, grateful. My remarks today are not directly aimed at him, but rather, represent my own first attempt at a positive construction in relation to the important problems that he and others have been gesturing at for some time.²

Christianity has, from her earliest days, struggled with the temptation to Gnosticism. We have received a message that is rejected by the world—a message that calls man to a personal conversion establishing a new society, a new way of life unlike the world. And through the ages, the open persecution of the faithful only deepens the gnostic temptation. Ours is a wisdom that is not of this world, one that is rejected by the masses. How could the simple believer—the “pistic” Christian—be a wholly true Christian? Is it not, rather, the "gnostic” who is the true Christian? Elements of such language have been used, even within the bounds of orthodoxy, to describe the mystical life from the time of at least Clement of Alexandria, if not earlier.³ However, this pistic-gnostic language (whatever its form) has runs the risk a two-tiered view of the salvation, in which the “true” Christian life would in some way represent a break with the “exoteric” life of the “simple believer,” a kind of hidden mysticism that in some way is discontinuous with the public life of the sacraments, liturgical life, and faith informed by publicly articulated truths. In all its many hues, such Gnosticism has plagued the Christian world in many forms: Valentinianism and its many relatives in the early Church; the remnants of Christianized Manichaeism; the Albigensians and the Bogomils; the Christian Kabbalism and Hermeticism of the Renaissance; Masonry; Sophiology….

We might consider several examples of this recurring pattern in more recent history—not always with all the hallmarks of “full blown” Gnosticism, but risking a kind of reviviscence.

Twentieth-century modernism was, to my eyes, another rebirth of this same gnostic temptation, albeit in a new form. The term “modernism” is fraught, no doubt, and it wears several faces in relation to the inspiration of scripture and the theology of revelation. The latter is of particular interest to me this evening. The modernist epistemology presented by Pope St. Pius X (and substantially found in someone like George Tyrrell) takes the form of an anti-dogmatism or, at least, an anti-“theologism”: the profound kernel of Christian experience would be something beyond dogmas, a kind of religious sentiment of the Absolute, expressed only according to a variety of merely symbolic statements of doctrine, subject to mutability.⁴ This is, of course, a gnostic impulse in its own right, for on such a view, any exoterically expressible, public dogmatic truth would be merely the outer husk of an ineffable religious experience—whether personal or communal.⁵

Or, we might consider another case. There is also a temptation to locate the ultimate measure of revealed truth in the moral and sanctifying effects it produces in life — a kind of pragmatism declaring that truth is best understood as the conformity of mind with holy and upright living (as though to say lex vivendi est mensura legis credendi, the law of [holy] living is the measure of the law of belief). This claim, appropriately understood, touches on something correct in the domain of moral-practical truth: an action is indeed judged true when it conforms with right appetite for a particular virtuous good ordered within the overall, comprehensive good of the human person, above all as called to divinization. Yet this claim can harden into a general theory of knowledge: conceptual affirmations would be a kind of malleable scaffolding wholly subject to a sub-conceptual assertion of vitality. Faced with such moral pragmatism, one is justified in asking: has the gnostic temptation truly been left behind, or merely relocated?⁶

A similar risk appears in a particular misreading of the relationship between liturgical praxis and doctrine. There is a way of wielding the dictum lex credendi, lex orandi that would have doctrine be valid only insofar as it produces holiness among the faithful—dogma reduced to a kind of public statement of what is really a non-public, vitally lived sanctity. This would be merely a new form of the temptation to hold that lex vivendi est mensura legis credendi. It is not for nothing that the great public dénouement of George Tyrrell's life was immortalized in two books entitled, Lex Orandi and Lex Credendi.⁷ Yet the lex orandi is itself a declaration of the faith of the Church, the true stand she takes upon the logos of reality:

In the sacred liturgy we profess the Catholic faith explicitly and openly, not only by the celebration of the mysteries, and by offering the holy sacrifice and administering the sacraments, but also by saying or singing the credo or Symbol of the faith—it is indeed the sign and badge, as it were, of the Christian—along with other texts, and likewise by the reading of holy scripture, written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. The entire liturgy, therefore, has the Catholic faith for its content, inasmuch as it bears public witness to the faith of the Church.

For this reason, whenever there was question of defining a truth revealed by God, the Sovereign Pontiff and the Councils in their recourse to the "theological sources," as they are called, have not seldom drawn many an argument from this sacred science of the liturgy… But if one desires to differentiate and describe the relationship between faith and the sacred liturgy in absolute and general terms, it is perfectly correct to say, ”Lex credendi legem statuat supplicandi”—let the rule of belief determine the rule of prayer.⁸

In the post-conciliar Church, these questions took on yet another form: the relationship between what older Latin theology called the Ecclesia docens and the Ecclesia discens—between the teaching Church and the learning Church. For a kind of broad, progressive Catholic consensus—yet does it wholly lack a certain traditionalist flank too?—the sensus fidelium would be a more important measure of dogmatic truth than is the objective authority of the Church proposing the truths of faith.⁹ Here too the gnostic temptation is at work, though now diffused throughout the body of the faithful itself, or at the very least, we are told, among some group who faithfully “recognizes and resists” the supposed spirit of a false church. The locus De ecclesia (including the ecclesia credens) is very important—it is, after all, the third locus theologicus in the categorization coming from Melchior Cano. Nonetheless, our era needs a new Melchior Cano to update the De locis theologicis, attentive to the full range of ways that false positions now present themselves, sometimes wearing the costume of orthodoxy.¹⁰

Why rehearse all of these examples? Because they trace a single recurring pattern across very different theological cultures. The gnostic temptation is so all-pervading precisely because it can be reached by many roads, coming from surprisingly different directions: from the liberal dissolution of doctrine into experience, or from the conservative sublimation of doctrine into liturgical vitalism. Somewhat as pantheism stalks behind every metaphysical error, gnostic esotericism lurks behind every assertion that privileges secret or pre-conceptual knowing over the open, public teaching of the Church—perhaps beginning from that teaching, but ultimately departing from it, for fear of sullying the divine faith by contact with the messiness of human realities.

It is all too tempting to say, “He who prays is the true theologian,” or, “Rationalist scholastics reduce revelation to a scattered array of free-floating truth-propositions to be assented to,” and then walk off the stage having dropped one’s microphone. These assertions touch on things that are quite essential—and they are not wholly wrong, as far as they go. It is, in fact, most important to speak God back to God in the mystical life born of the liturgy. This is infinitely more important than talking about God as a discursive theologian. And the truths of faith are not desiccated notions catalogued in some little book of intellectual affirmations, to be retrieved when needed. They express our essential relationship to reality, in the presence of the Triune God who works to divinize us and make us true partakers in that work of divinization.

Nonetheless, the martyrs shed their blood for the words of Creed. Perhaps a bit more nuance is needed concerning the relationship between dogma, theology, and lived ascetico-mysticism. In the face of present-day critics of supposed scholastic rationalism, let us defend a primacy of the mystical that is, however, not subject to the temptation to a kind of esotericism that would not risk treating public revelation as a mere stage toward a deeper sight. Dogma reaches beyond concepts into the mystery of the Triune God; yet it does so without ever losing the path of concepts expressed in the Creed for which the martyrs died.¹¹

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We receive the mystery of our Triune God in the form of a dual communication. At the height of all the mysteries is the Trinity, the uncreated communication of Three Persons: the Father in the Son, and the Father through the Son in the Spirit. And at the center of the entire universe stands the central mystery of the “economy”: the uncreated communication of the hypostasis of the Word, drawing to Himself the human nature of Christ for the sake of our salvation—which is nothing other than the reconstituting of the right glorification of God in a way that is at once satisfactory, sacrificial, meritorious, and doxological.¹² These are the two great communications, the latter of which is destined to draw human nature into the former. The salvation wrought in Christ is ordered to this end: that we should be, in Him, beings who live the life of communion that is the Trinity’s own.

It is He who reveals the Father, who manifests to us the Life that is God. It is by our incorporation into Him, as members of His body, that we live in communion with Him.¹³ Had Christ chosen to remain among us in the flesh, our communion with Him would in a real sense have been restricted — we would forever have been tempted away from our local church in the hope of being with Him wherever He happened to settle among the peoples. But with His Ascension and the sending of the Spirit at Pentecost, He has enabled a new kind of presence: His presence in the Church, of which He is at once the redemptive, efficient, and exemplary cause. We should take His words in their strongest tenor: “He who hears you, hears me” (Lk. 10:16, RSV); “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4, RSV). The Church, in this "age of the Spirit," is the place of encounter with Christ, through whom we return to the Unbegotten Father from whom all things proceed.¹⁴

Christianity is, therefore, at its core an encounter with the Trinity in Christ as members of His mystical body. It is an encounter — a “way” — that is all-embracing. It proclaims to us the truth of reality, the truth of who we are as sinful beings nonetheless called to begin eternal life even upon earth. It is a shared space of moral practice, of a divine love that is nothing other than an extension of divine charity-friendship: "As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Mt. 25:40, RSV). It is a life of shared asceticism (cf. 1 Cor. 9:24ff, etc.), a shared life of liturgical worship (Acts 2:42ff, etc.). And yes, it is a life that includes the ineffable knowledge of truths that cannot be spoken by human lips but only by God: “‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him’ —God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God” (1 Cor. 2:9–10, RSV).

“But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher?” (Rom. 10:14, RSV). At the root of all the theological virtues, which spring forth from grace like properties, there is faith—the personal assent to God who reveals Himself to us through His Church.¹⁵ In heaven, this revelation will find its fullest expression: the glorious manifestation of the Trinity to our glorified minds, each according to his particular degree of love.¹⁶ There we will truly, as divinized beings, “give God back to God,” entering into His Triune life of unitive knowledge and fruitive love in a way whose immediacy belongs, in its stability at least,¹⁷ to the terminal state of eternal bliss. But just as we receive the eternal Word in the Incarnate Christ, so too do we receive the eternal splendor of our Triune God in the incarnate form of many truths, many dogmas and doctrines. The unified light of the Trinity is already refracted the moment we say, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

But God has not set up the order of salvation such that we must await a kind of hiatus, as though eternity could only break into time at the moment of its final dawning. No—just as all Christ’s human acts have a kind of theandricity,¹⁸ insofar as they are always elicited by an uncreated Person, so too, mutatis mutandis, can the eternal truth of God be truly manifest in the uncreated truths that we are taught in and through doctrines expressed in a language drawn from our creaturely condition. God gives Himself in the single hypostasis of Christ the Incarnate Word acting through His human nature, in the sacraments, and in doctrines themselves. Each are, so to speak, active theophanies of the uncreated God. Noetically illuminated by faith, our capacity for affirming reality elevates creaturely concepts drawn from the world around us—humble words such as father, son, begetting, vine and branches, bridegroom, and so many others—and make them the bearers of the manifestation of uncreated reality. He who truly affirms, “The Father begets the Son,” expresses back to God the reality of God. He speaks God back to God, even if only under the non-evident knowledge befitting the superanalogy of faith in God who reveals through His Church.¹⁹ He affirms Subsistent Reality. Or, to be very exact about what is meant by “affirms”: the believer is that reality, by one and the same act; the believer is he to whom the Triune God is manifested, though under the wayfaring conditions of incarnate doctrine and not yet in the full light of the unmediated Vision of the Triune God.²⁰

These truths are not, however, mere speculative data—neat little tidbits about the inner life of God, as though one were to say, “Huh. That's neat. I didn’t know that about Him.” No: they are expressions of who God is, showing us His face, making us present to Him in His self-manifestation. (There is a reason that the language of the mystics is a nuptial language.) And many are the ways He brings about this manifestation, through the many channels of revelation. I have some criticisms of the way that many treatises De fontibus revelationis sidetracked discussions properly belonging to the De locis theologicis. Yet the best of them had one merit I cannot deny: they presented all the various channels of faith—scripture, tradition, magisterium, liturgy, the Fathers, the theologians and jurists, etc.—as means by which we organically reach the message of revelation.²¹ How many and varied are these means! The one proposition, “The Father begets the Son,” is expressed in so very many ways throughout Church history. But, at the core, there stands the definitive creedal affirmation. To affirm this truth—a truth which does presuppose a subject and a predicate, “The Father begets the Son”—is to respond to the voice of God by speaking back to Him, by standing in the space of God’s objective self-manifestation: “The Father begets the Son.”

Let us take care, moreover, lest our manner of speaking reduce this affirmation merely to the order of speculative truth. The truths of faith, by which we partake in God's own knowledge, share in the divine prerogative of being at once speculative and practical: in knowing Himself, God knows all things that He makes.²² By commanding our actions we are what we affirm. And the truths of faith are eminently at once truths about what reality is —“The Father begets the Son”—and truths about how reality must be in us: the Father begets the Son in us, who are sons in the Son and must live accordingly. Through faith, God manifests who He is because we are destined to truly be Him, through spiritual acts of knowledge and love configured to His uncreated, Trinitarian depths. Grace—which only fully flowers in hope and charity—enables us to give God back to God, to enter into union with Him as persons who are divinized in all the nooks and crannies of our being. Thus, we can indeed say that truths of faith are quite truly truths of life, the measure of all our capacities of cognition and appetite.²³

But we are mere humans. This Triune grandeur is refracted. We are raised to eternal life—yes, even now—yet as wayfarers. Our day has not fully dawned. We walk in the light, but it is the light of the earliest morning rays, refracted in the form of many truths. Our assent (or assents) of faith—living and objective union to the self-manifestation of God and His works—therefore invites us to a kind of understanding, and it is here that a twofold path opens before us. One is understanding in the most profound sense: the way of mysticism, by which we most closely anticipate heavenly union with God to the degree possible for wayfarers. The other is the path more akin to native human intelligence, which cannot avoid reflecting on what it knows and seeking some articulation of the ways the mysteries of faith illuminate one another and illuminate all that we know of reality. This is the path of discursive theology—acquired by human study, illuminated by faith.

The discursive mode of “faith seeking understanding”—“theology” in the way that term is generally used, especially in the academy and especially in the Catholic West—is the human attempt to articulate the unified structure of the mysteries of faith. It is not a mere game of drawing out conclusions, further and further from the deposit of faith. Rather, it is the labor of studiously attempting to show ourselves—to the degree this is possible—the inner structure of revelation, as well as the ways revealed truth illuminates all that we know of the world. It is the supreme work of articulated discursive knowledge, illuminated by a light that is not evident but is firmly certain, with the divine certainty of the revealed message itself. It is an attempt to strengthen, in our own human manner, our grasp of the great mystery delivered to us, though scattered across many places (loci theologici). It is an endeavor undertaken through a natural human activity—discursive reasoning—elevated by the supernatural light of faith.

Such reflection doubtlessly creates a kind of expert class—and we have all met the theologians whose discourses are less than, shall we say, comprehensible at first glance. However, when theologizing tends toward the hermetic and obscure, it commits a grave sin against its own beginnings, which are always infinitely more than such theology can ever be: the truths of faith, delivered not to this or that group of experts but to all. If sound philosophy is born of common-sense questions and truths, it is doubly true that sound discursive theology is born of the Christian common-sense concerning the truths revealed by faith. We should not expect an uneducated “baba” to follow a theological argument at first hearing; but we should expect a theologian to continually ask: how can this ultimately be expressed by the two great and luminous mysteries that precontain all the others—“God is Triune, and He is the Provident God who has saved us in Christ,” truths taught to me by my “baba”? Yes, the “baba” knows and lives these truths; it would be a salutary exercise for every theologian to attempt to return—as to first principles—to the level of the child and the “baba.” It is an exercise that reminds one that discursive theology is itself a handmaiden to revealed truth. Its light is a pale reflection of the very public and non-esoteric life of the Church herself.

However, infinitely more important than this kind of discursive knowing is the life of union. In discursive theology, we speak about the revealed depths of the Triune God and His saving ways. But through faith, we affirm God to God—mediated, to be sure, through the many creaturely notions taken up into the statements of living faith. Among the most practical of such affirmations is the fact that Christ has divinized human nature in Himself and, in His Church, continues that work of divinization until the end of the ages. We do not affirm this by a kind of vitalistic, supra-conceptual urge to "act as though Christ were God." Were that the case, we would be guilty of a kind of pragmatism that was blessedly condemned during the papacy of Pope St. Pius X: “the dogmas of the Faith are to be held only according to their practical sense; that is to say, as preceptive norms of conduct and not as norms of believing” (Lamentabili sane exitu, no. 26). Such pragmatism would be founded upon a theory of action that does not place our objective commerce with reality—in this case, Revealed Reality—at the root of our freedom. As Thomas Aquinas puts it so laconically but so well: totius libertatis radix est in ratione constituta, reason stands as the root of all freedom. Or as Maritain expresses it in a text that deserves citation at length:

The liberty of these philosophers of liberty is singularly fragile. In uprooting it from reason, they have themselves made an invalid of it. But we, for our part, do not fear to counsel human liberty. Cram it with advice as much as you like; we know that it is strong enough to digest advice and that it thrives on rational motivations which it bends as it pleases and which it alone can render efficacious.

In short, by suppressing generality and universal law, you suppress liberty. [One might add, for our purposes: In short, by suppressing doctrinal fixity regarding the reality of God and the reality of what He is doing within humanity for our salvation and deification, you suppress liberty.] And what you have left is nothing but that amorphous impulse surging out of the night which is but a false image of liberty. Because when you suppress generality and universal law, you suppress reason, in which liberty, whole and entire, has its root and from which emanates in man so vast a desire that no motive in the world and no objective solicitation, except Beatitude seen face to face, suffices to determine it.²⁴

Truth and freedom, doctrine and praxis, propositions and prayer—in the very concrete life of belief it is obvious that these cannot be disconnected. I often think of this as a Byzantine Catholic. Very often, our liturgical hymnody is filled with clear affirmations of the dogmas of the Church—a kind of doxology that passes spontaneously from “speculative” statement into the lived praise of the mystery of God’s saving work, both past and present. Prayer itself is an act of practical reason, all of whose actions are saturated with affirmations of reality. One may choose to call these affirmations something other than “propositions,” if that term is too freighted with a certain impulse to “catalogue” external nuggets of truth. Yet, such affirmations have a content, and such content expresses itself in the form of judgments, the human intellect’s native operation for grasping the truth. Nobody dies the death of a martyr for a creed that does not touch down on a solidly expressed reality: God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the Word became incarnate for the sake of our salvation; He suffered under Pontius Pilate….

Yet it is also true that our human means remain human. Often, when I meditate upon the divine agency that traversed Christ’s sacred humanity, with its human faculties and operations, I feel almost as though humanity would burst under the pressure of Triune glory. Something similar can be said concerning all revealed truths, for they communicate to us an uncreated mystery that strains the fabric of creaturely reality. The mystery contained within the Creed, and in all the statements of faith, presses against the creaturely structure at every point. And, thus, it leads to a kind of crucifixion of nature—a crucifixion lived out through the ascetical struggle against our human sinfulness and attachment to what is worldly, as well as through the active and passive purifications of the spiritual life. Just as the sacred humanity of Christ was perfused with a divine mode of activity proceeding from His Divine Person, so too, mutatis mutandis, do the Gifts of the Holy Spirit lift us up to our own kind of participation in the reality of such divino-human agency.

The perfection of the mystical life is the perfection of the very faith that we have in the truths exoterically proposed to us by the Church. Just as we never kick the sacred humanity of Christ out from underneath us—and indeed, even in heaven, His humanity will be the cause of the light of glory in our intellects—so too we never kick the Creed out from underneath us. The great saints of the Church's life were men and women whose lives are animated by a true spirit of loving acceptance of the revealed message from the hands of the living Church. The divine lifeblood of their mystical transfiguration is nothing other than the mystery proclaimed to them in word—for we can only become “made Word” if we listen to the voice of this Word still living among us: “He who hears you, hears me….” It is a life that intrinsically requires a message coming from His very public body, the Church.

This message is received in many ways: in the sacraments and liturgy, in preaching, in the various official acts of the magisterium. But it is a public life, an exoteric life. There may well be a disciplina arcani proper to the sacraments. But this is not because of any gnostic impulse to reduce the Christian life to a secret society of hidden knowledge and praxis. Rather, it is because the Church herself is the beginning of the New Jerusalem—a true sacramental society whose light and life is the Lamb, who incorporates us into Himself with the intimacy of truly making us His body. He invites us into a new public: the only true public, the Church who stands at the heart of all reality.

And each and every human is called to this Church, whether or not he or she responds. No matter the height of perfection ever reached—whether by the discursive theologian or by the mystic—these heights will be illuminated by the same two central truths of faith: the Triune God; and the Incarnate Christ, the center of the Providence of God. Already within the first glance of the simple believer's faithful acceptance of the public message preached by and lived in the Church, there is contained the whole weight of glory, the whole of eternity, the full radiance of that utterly public day when God will be all in all.

And so, we always must be on the lookout against the temptation to gnosticism and esotericism. It is a temptation as old as the Church. We must not follow those who gather texts from Scripture and the Fathers in support of the claim that Christianity is a mystery religion whose message is known best by those who live according to the maxims of masters whose obscurity must be hidden from the merely “pistic” masses. Rather, we must always hold high this fact: never does the saint, the mystic, or the intellectual theologian—and should they not be one and the same?—ever step for a moment off the living path of the public message taught by the Church, which uses the open words of creaturely realities to manifest to us a beginning of eternity: the preliminary stage of a revelation whose natural terminus is the full dawning light of heaven.

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1. Charles Journet, What is Dogma, trans. Mark Pontifex (New York: Hawthorn, 1964), 75–78.↩︎

2. Concerning this debate, see Matthew K. Minerd, Thomas Mirus, and Matthew Scarince, “Hermetic Tradition or Catholic Tradition? A Critique of Sebastian Morello,” Catholic Culture, https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/hermetic-tradition-or-catholic-tradition-critique-sebastian-morello/; “Dialogos on Magic with Drs. Morello and Minerd,” The Meaning of Catholic, https://app.pelicanplus.com/tabs/home/videos/56343.↩︎

3. The present talk cannot provide a full and appropriately nuanced account of what is at stake in Gnosticism. The reader can consult various relevant articles on this topic, especially, the entry “Gnose et Gnosticisme” in the Dictionnaire de spiritualité and”Gnose” and “Gnosticisme” in the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique.↩︎

4. See Pius X, Pascendi dominic gregis, nos. 12ff.↩︎

5. This was the reason for the important critiques raised against Henri Bouillard and Jean-Marie LeBlond by Frs. Michel Labourdette, Marie-Joseph Nicolas, and Garrigou-Lagrange. To their eyes, the theory of a kind of pre-conceptual assertion, only thereafter conceptualized, was a mitigated but real form of epistemological errors committed by someone like George Tyrrell (even if they did not always name the latter). For critiques of similar issues in Karl Rahner, see David Augustine, “Tyrrell and Rahner on Divine Revelation” in Catholic Modernism: Loisy, Tyrrell, and the Ongoing Challenge to Dogmatic Christianity ed. Matthew Levering and Jeffrey L. Morrow (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2026).↩︎

6. This was, of course, the critique regularly raised by Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange in response to Maurice Blondel. The adjudication of the historical and textual basis for this critique is outside the scope of this paper.↩︎

7. For an critical appreciation of the states involved with Tyrrell’s positions, see Matthew Minerd, “How to Defend Oneself Against the Accusation of ‘Theologism’: Nuancing Gardeil’s Response to George Tyrrell” in Catholic Modernism: Loisy, Tyrrell, and the Ongoing Challenge to Dogmatic Christianity, ed. Matthew Levering and Jeffrey L. Morrow (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2026).↩︎

8. Pius XII, Mediator Dei, nos. 47–8.↩︎

9. The term “objective” is here used for very specific Thomist reasons, holding that the Church is a sine qua non objective condition for the assent of faith, but not the formal motive thereof. This objective proposition can be supplied for in deficient, “good faith” cases of those who are not Catholics, for example by remnants of real but decapitated magisterial authority (the Orthodox) or by purely scriptural remnants of the Church’s “orientation” of the act of faith (Protestantism). The case of “good faith” outside of Christian communities is more difficult to articulate and outside the bounds of this paper. On this question, I substantially agree with Journet, Nicolas, and Maritain.↩︎

10. I myself have attempted to provide some resources for this future Cano: https://www.athomist.com/articles/tag/De+Locis+Theologicis.↩︎

11. Without necessarily following him on every point of detail, I take this expression from Charles Journet, The Dark Knowledge of God, trans. James F. Anderson (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2020).↩︎

12. One will sense the influence of both the Thomist tradition (cf. https://www.athomist.com/articles/nicolas-notes-for-an-integral-theology-of-the-redemption) and the work of Khaled Anatolios, somewhat combined and rather simplified in my terminology above.↩︎

13. Though others could be cited, I am here deeply influenced by both Bl. Columba Marmion and Servant of God Charles Journet, along with their various scriptural, patristic, and theological sources.↩︎

14. This is not said in prejudice to the maxim holding that all the acts of God are performed by all three persons of the Trinity. Rather, it merely means to note that, in a certain but important sense, the Father is the Principle of all that is.↩︎

15. I here speak of the normative case and set aside the way that the Church remains present in the elements operative outside of her. See note 9 above.↩︎

16. On the beatific vision as the pinnacle of revelation, see the intra-scholastic dispute mentioned in J-H Nicolas, Dieu connu comme inconnu (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966), 198–200 and connected footnotes.↩︎

17. i.e., Making room for certain transient cases like Moses and St. Paul. Important disquisitions on this topic arise, classically, where Scholastic theologians—especially those in the line of Thomism that one finds, for example, in John of St. Thomas—discuss the fact that the beatific vision is not merely a kind of instrumentality (as though the Triune God merely spoke Himself within us) but, instead, is vitally elicited by the super-elevated creature. We truly as agents are granted this great and immense prerogative of truly being agents of a divine knowledge and love. Here we see the strongest sense of the “external Glory” of God—the Triune God truly manifested as Triune in actuality of creation itself.↩︎

18. I am here combining strictly theandric acts (those which are truly only able to be performed by God) and broadly theandric acts (all of Christ’s acts, considered as having the Incarnate Word as their principium quod).↩︎

19. See Matthew K. Minerd, “The Superanalogy of Faith,” Nova et Vetera (English Edition) 23, no. 2 (Spring 2025): 589–614 (https://archive.stpaulcenter.com/11-nv-23-2-minerd/). Also, see the notes gathered at https://www.athomist.com/articles/notes-on-the-super-analogy-of-faith.↩︎

20. “Unmediated” objectively, though mediated “subjectively” to the degree of the light of glory, by which each of the blessed will be partakers in the Life of Uncreated Glory, though to various degrees, forever short of the comprehensive self-presence of the Trinity in se.↩︎

21. For some discussion of this topic, see https://www.athomist.com/articles/the-de-locis-theologicis-its-nature-history-aftermath-and-potential-future.↩︎

22. See ST II-II, q. 8, a. 3; II-II, q. 9, a. 3; and II-II, q. 45, a. 3, ad 1. See Cajetan In ST II-II, q. 4, a. 2, no. 3: “Moreover, note that St. Thomas says this about faith by comparing [that which is solely] practical to [that which is solely] speculative. Indeed, speaking more loftily and truly, we must say, in accord with his own thought and also with the truth, that faith is a habitus that is loftier than the practical and the speculative, having both kinds of truth in an eminent manner, just as the common sense is related to the proper sensibles, and hence does the tasks [habet opus] of both. However, speaking as many do, solely speaking of the speculative and the practical when speaking about the nature of faith [comparando ad haec duo], it is said to be speculative. However, the fact that the proposed interpretation corresponds to St. Thomas’s thought is clear on two heads. First of all, as was discussed in ST I, q. 1, a. 4, theological science, which is contained virtually in its principles (which are truths of faith), is something of this sort [namely, formally and eminently speculative and practical]. Secondly, it is confirmed by what he says regarding the gifts of the Holy Spirit that emanate from faith (see ST II-II, q. 8, a. 3 and q. 9, a. 3) namely that [understanding and knowledge] also are [formally and eminently speculative and practical].–The truth of this doctrine is clearly manifest in light of eminence of the divine cognition, of which faith is an impression belonging to the same order of knowledge [est impression propria ordinis], as was said concerning theology in ST I, q. 1, a. 4.” Also see Cajetan In ST I, q. 1, a. 4, nos. 7–8. Cajetan seems to hold this position rather firmly. He will refer to These two texts when he remarks on ST II-II, q. 8, a. 3 and also in his very brief comments on ST II-II, q. 45, a. 4: “In the third article, in response to the first objection, note that the practical and the speculative are united together in a superior order. To this end, see what we have written elsewhere about this in more detail.”↩︎

23. Indeed, in a way, even the body will partake in this, at least according to the Thomist position concerning the infused moral virtues. Also, if I have focused here on the moral domain, we should note, too, that there is a way that we are also subordinately co-provident in matters of art / techne as well.↩︎

24. Maritain, “Action,” in Existence and the Existent, trans. Lewis Galantiere and Gerald B. Phelan (New York: Pantheon, 1948), 60–61.↩︎