Thoughts from a Byzantine Thomist (SDP Conference, 2025)

The present posting was given, in slightly different form, as a paper at the Sacra Doctrina Project conference, “A Dialogue Renewed: Scholasticism and the Ressourcement Movement on the Nature of Catholic Theology,” held in Washington DC in June 2025. It is not at all meant to be a complete statement of my thought on the matter but, rather, merely a reflection offered to colleagues and friends, most of whom are Roman Catholics. I hope at some time to write a survey article based on a variety of Orthodox, Eastern Catholic, and Western Catholic authors concerning their various positions regarding the nature of theology. However, that was not the task I had set before myself for this conference.

I think you can all imagine that it is a bit strange to be a Byzantine Catholic and a Thomist—especially one like myself, who has labored in the recovery of some un-Byzantine figures and who has deep sympathy with the Toulouse and Roman camps in the 1940s debates over the so-called nouvelle théologie. Sure, one can say, with a pugnacious tone: “What do you expect from a Uniate? Such a state ultimately will drift toward Latin captivity of their nous.” Or, in a more dismissive way, one could say, “What do you expect from a Ruthenian Catholic? They’re uniquely Latinized.” Or, perhaps, with a little more grace, one could say, “Everyone muddles along, and those who didn’t grow up in the Eastern ‘phronema,’ will always be Western with a merely Eastern layer of gilding.” By contrast, though perhaps with equal naivety about the difficulties involved, one could cite Gennadios Scholarios saying that Thomas was merely a Greek born in the wrong place. Or, drawing from eastern Catholic figures, one could cite certain works by Josef Slipyj, Andrey Szeptycki, or Bl. Theodore Romzha and hint that such a “Byzantine Thomism” should be—if one were merely docile enough—a simple affair.

I assure you, however, it is not. And, I have the bruised knees to attest to this fact! My own experience teaching in an Eastern seminary has been a long attempt to discern the right way to be, at once, truly Catholic and also Byzantine.¹ I suspect that you can all imagine what I was like, first coming in to teach fundamental moral theology, Garrigou-Lagrange in hand, with a bit of a monastic background and some readings from the Philokalia. It was, to use a technical term… a gangly mess; not a hot mess, but a gangly mess. Thank goodness, one of the students I had for many of my classes those first years was himself comfortable with all things Western. This gave me space to gradually change my curriculum from basically something that resembled the Secunda pars in Byzantine drag to something which, I hope, is more influenced by my modus vivendi as a Ruthenian Catholic. May my more eastern-inflected students be recognized and thanked for their patience during this process!

Before presenting a schematic outline of some of my pedagogical changes, allow some words on the very issue of the “emergence” and structure of thinking as a Byzantine theologian. These comments are meant only to be relatively brief and without technical apparatus, though they are based on many of the themes present in my book with Dr. Kirwan. The thoughts are, however, my own, not Labourdette’s or Garrigou-Lagrange’s. Yet, they are a very important context for the particular points that I will present below.

Theology is faith seeking understanding. The expression is nearly threadbare from use. Nonetheless, we should not allow familiarity to prevent us from taking seriously the implications of the expression. First: the terms theology and faith. We all know of the threefold division of theology: “natural theology”; “scientific” sacred theology; and mystical theology. But, equally well known is the division between “theology” and the “economy”, the Triune God and the order of all things dependent upon Him and filled with His presence (or “presences” of immensity, grace, and hypostatic union). In Thomist idiom, it is a distinction whose border is ST I, q. 43 on the divine missions. From this perspective of vocabulary, theology is the hidden depths of the Triune God, in view of which God Himself knows the economy of creation and salvation. And, as we also know, faith is the illumination of the mind which enables us to know—though only through supernatural, divine attestation and in the form of many dogmas and doctrines proposed by the Church²—the Trinity and all things in and through the Trinity. The primary grandeur of all supernatural theology will be the fact that it is polarized not by the logical and methodological canons of the academy, nor even by the rational needs of a discursive intellect in the service of faith, but rather by Vision, by the Theology, by the intra-Trinitarian life.

But, of course, the classic expression, “faith seeking understanding,” defines something distinctively human. Although docile faith places us in vital continuity with the eternal Theology—“He who hears you, hears me” (Lk. 10:16)—precisely as faith, it is subject to the limits of our human, developmental nature, dependent upon finite images (phantasms), the need for defining, attaining truth only through complexes of subject and predicate, often only at the end of a course of reasoning. And for this native multiplicity, there is a twofold “remedy”: ascetico-mystical knowledge; and discursive articulation of the mysteries, their interconnections, and their implications. By the former, faith comes to “understand” the revealed mysteries—and above all the Triune God Himself, supernaturally present both by his causal immensity and by His indwelling³—by apophatic “savor.” The mystical life perfects the theological virtues themselves; they call for this, and such divine union—possible only through purification of the heart and effected only by God, who gives Himself as He will, in accord with our state of life and calling—is the normal, even if rare, perfection of the life of faith. It is the foretaste of glory, the most profound experience of the fact that the eternal kingdom of God is within and among those who live in the presence of Christ in His Mystical body (Lk. 17:20–21).⁴ This is nothing other than to say that he who most “understands” the mysteries is the divinized saint, he who most truly can say: In your light (your grace, which has subjectively divinized me and which has objectively capacitated me for uncreated knowledge and love) I see (the Triune) light.

Now—and here is an important point of distinction—such mystical experience remains subjectively⁵ supernatural. As a fulfillment of supernatural faith giving a foretaste the glorious fulfillment of faith itself, we are capacitated to “give God back to God.”⁶ The “labor” here is God’s own “labor” within us.

But, even as divinized, we remain human and live as humans. We are rational, discursive intellectual beings. Even if our fulfillment is found in the silent peace of the indwelling divine presence, we also live in history and articulate our thoughts by means of discourse. In fact, this befits the very nature of revelation, which “is made in human concepts, in statements whose truth—which is supernatural and guaranteed by God—is a truth that has the typical form belonging to human, logical truth.”⁷ Such truths are “superanalogized” truths, bearers of meanings that are only knowable in the light of faith.⁸ But, they remain truths—formally-eminently speculative and practical, ⁹ but still primarily concerned with reality viewed in light of the Triune Divine Reality. They are truths proposed through the ages by the Church, through various channels of the magisterium, praxis, and so forth. But even when directing divinized human action, such knowledge contains, as a kind of unbreakable nucleus, an assertion about what we might call Revealed Reality.¹⁰

It is completely human to ask: “What do these truths mean? How are they related to each other? What are their principles? How do they relate to the universe of my other knowledge?”¹¹ Such questions are born of faith itself. They are an homage to the belief we have in the God who reveals the Trinitarian “Theology on high.”¹² Such a questioner is not placing himself above the divine message, as though to ask, “How shall I know this?” (Lk. 1:18). Rather, with confidence, it is like asking with the Mother of God, “How shall this be?” (Lk. 1:34). Such discursive theology is born of trust in the intelligibility of the message delivered to us by the Church as coming from God who can neither deceive nor be deceived (or as coming from the infallible Church, in the case of those truths that are not immediately revealed but nonetheless are declared to have a necessary connection to that message).¹³

However, because such knowledge is not infused by God, it remains—and we must not overlook the supernatural mystery involved here—subjectively natural, though objectively supernatural.¹⁴ It is a work of a cultivated Christian mind receiving the message of revelation and putting its own natural capacities at its service, as its instrument. Because it is the most human of supernatural theologies, it is perhaps the most familiar. Doubtless, this is what can lead one to say that it is theology “tout court,”¹⁵ but this is only true in our customary discourse and use of terms, not in terms of grandeur. Discursive theology is the lowest of supernatural theologies, born of living faith¹⁶ and always subservient thereto. It knows whence it comes and whither it must return.¹⁷

The message of faith comes to us as it is mediated through the Church in our own day and in our own experience. For this reason, it will be marked by the way in which supernatural truth and ecclesiastical practice are proposed to us by the Church in our own particular Churches. But all the various liturgies, ascetic-mystical practices, and all the various catechetical traditions are but doors by which we are led into the twofold mystery of the Triune God and the Redemptive Incarnation.¹⁸ Whatever might be the subjective differentiation caused by our particular ecclesial traditions, the overall élan of the theological virtues is toward a united, Triune center. To live within the life of faith is to be carried along to this eschatological center, not to look at the process itself as a particular tradition leading you there.¹⁹ Whatever might be one’s particular ecclesial tradition, the ultimate reality is that this is being instrumentalized by God, who is Himself leading us into the Godhead. Thus, faith operates on a kind of universal level of Christian common sense, bearing marks from history and its development, yet always striving for a kind of universality and unity.²⁰ Faith is heard from God and returns its assent to God; it is a foretaste of the Heavenly Vision.

But, when we come to discursive theology, the human element is much more evident. Here, we ask about the datum itself; we look at it. Rather than speaking to God we speak about God and about what God has said and done. Here, we recognize that the data of faith are marked by the various ways that they are proposed. We heed that they come to us from the Church and from the particular Church in which we receive the revealed given. We notice that this environment involves different modalities of proposal of one and the same mystery. One mystery, such as our divinization through grace, takes on different resonances depending on whether we consider what the Church proposes universally, what she proposes in her liturgies (and the reading of Scripture presented therein), or in her particular catechisms, or in the particular Fathers and theologians present within her bosom, more or less, whether universally or in particular ecclesial contexts, etc.

This is not to say that dogmatic propositions are merely symbols of an ineffable mystery, or that they only pseudo-“analogously”²¹ approximate the mystery. Rather, it means to say that by becoming expressed as truths—either dogmatic or practical—the mysteries’ reality become objects of cognition in various ways throughout the Church’s history and locales. At times, magisterial authority will need to articulate these truths in clear terms, creating sine qua non conditions for the objective proposition of faith, universally binding in nature.²² Yet, just as one reality can have many non-competing definitions, taken from different perspectives,²³ so too there can be something like various “dogmatic minds” within the Church, both across time and even at one and the same time.

This is not at all to say that opposed statements might be true at the same time. Rather, what is meant by this multiplicity of “dogmatic minds” is that the terms of dogma and doctrine will at once take the universal teaching of the Church as their foundation and yet, in various ways,²⁴ nuance the terms in secondary ways. (To use a very scholastic way of speaking—but it is necessary, lest we fall into a kind of dogmatic relativism—one and the same objective truth will be attained by slightly varying subjective processes of defining²⁵ the terms of the propositions that are a necessary backbone for the assent of faith. Thus, for example, Trent tells us that grace is the formal cause of redemption. But how one ecclesial tradition proposes this intrinsic qualifying of the soul by grace will differ, as expressed in various liturgical rites, preferred Fathers and theologians, local teachings, etc.) The most foundational influence upon such a “dogmatic mind” is the universal sensus ecclesiae; but the most proximate influence, giving dogma and doctrine its particular, lived “nuance” will be the particular ecclesiastical tradition in which one finds oneself: Latin Catholic, Byzantine Catholic, Maronite, etc.²⁶

It is not surprising, therefore, that discursive theology will tend toward a kind of pluralism as it seeks to set forth the truths of faith as articulated by the universal Church and the particular reception of the faith. To the degree that it is truly theo-logical, it will remain the same habitus: faith seeking to discursively “understand” all things in light of the Trinity and the Redemptive Incarnation. But, the way that this habitus enables one to articulate the objective interrelation of the revealed mysteries will be marked with various inflections, based upon the way that the data of faith is objectively proposed in a given tradition.

The practice of “Byzantine Catholic” theology is a kind of relatively new desideratum, receiving particularly strong impetus from the Second Vatican Council. It is dangerous, however, to predefine one’s method before trying to walk. The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. Or, to put it in a less Hegelian way: if one starts with the premise that all things must be mathematically certain, one will end by rejecting all of reality that is not marked by such mathematical certainty.²⁷ I think that this is a risk in the way that some people think about being both Byzantine and Catholic in theology. They take models from Orthodoxy (a very important locus for Byzantine Catholics, I admit) or the academy (a more dangerous bed-fellow) and take them as being definitive. Yet the former is not Catholic (and thus lacks a fully living magisterium) and the latter is much more dangerous, for it often implies an academicism cut off from the mystical life of faith.

So, allow me to make a few summary observations regarding my own changes in moral theologizing. I am not proposing some grand narrative rallying cry. Rather, I merely mean to indicate the ways that I have noticed my theological teaching change over these years, almost imperceptibly, but significantly enough that I stopped teaching fundamental morals at a Roman Catholic institution at least in part because I could not in conscience teach things directly on the model of the Secunda Pars, even within an integrated Thomist curriculum. Here are some summary examples of what I have changed over a period of teaching over two dozen iterations of fundamental moral theology at the graduate level at two institutions:

• Although there are elements to the structure of the Thomist “treatise on beatitude” which I implicitly retain, my presentation has undergone significant alteration. I subsume the concerns of the Nicomachean Ethics (parts of bks. 1, 2, 6, and 10 in particular) into a different, more dominant theme: beatitude as being shaped in the “mind of Christ,” as achieving Triune communion by being refashioned as a kind of “living mirror”²⁸ in the likeness of the Trinity. I do not go so far as to present theosis as a kind of Christification, but my approach has similarities to those who favor such an approach.

[Note, now, a shift in ordering that has gradually taken place, as I place something like the De gratia immediately hereafter, out of a desire to deepen my emphasis on the supernatural-uncreated context of everything that follows.]

• I retain elements of the anthropology found in the Treatise on Human Acts (though for pedagogical reasons, I need to connect some of this directly to the treatment of prudence). However, I emphasize the question of our (obediential)²⁹ capacity for grace, the nature of mens / nous in the natural and supernatural orders and implications for the theological virtues and the relationship between the ascetic and mystical life. I here draw on both western sources and also on Maximus and texts from the Palamite controversy itself. I treat this in moral theology because I feel that it is an intrinsically necessary preamble for understanding human acts in a way that clearly surpasses a merely philosophical psychology. I personally think that there is a real risk that many Thomists approach the treatise on human acts as though merely natural agency is being treated, as a kind of reprise of Nicomachean Ethics 6, with some added elements.

• Alongside this I have seen that my emphasis on grace as objectively uncreated makes some Western theologians uncomfortable, even though one can find almost exactly the same language in Garrigou-Lagrange as a correlate to the term “supernatural”, at least when speaking of the objective specification of grace, the theological virtues, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and (arguably) the infused moral virtues. This does not lead to a denial of created grace, though it continually leads me to inflect my description of it always toward the fact that this Trinity-participation is uncreated in its specification.³⁰

• Pedagogically, I generally hand off the discussion of the gifts of the Holy Spirit to what scholastic vocabulary would refer to as “the divine missions,” to the degree that is treated in our spiritual theology courses. However, this connection to the divine missions deserves fuller treatment in morals, as the structural framework not only for mysticism but for every increase of grace, that is, for the entirety of Christian holiness.³¹ In its own way, this becomes the framework for how I will end up presenting the gifts of the Holy Spirit. (Thus, while retaining the Augustinian-Thomistic framework,³² attempting to graft this into the more “dogmatic” foundation that is the divine missions in general.)

• Alongside this, I also present what today might be called a theological anthropology along the lines of Gaudium et Spes 22. I personally see it as being more of a kind of integration of dogmatic theology concerning capital grace and our grace. Thus, too, I consider the way that theosis, as well as the notions of image and likeness, apply to the Word Incarnate (as a kind of Christological grounding for the treatment of grace). This also leads me to make clear connections with the theology of redemption.³³ All of this leads me to emphasize the “Christic” character of grace and how it takes on a kind of co-redemptive, co-doxological character in all the faithful.

• I present the Aristotelian analysis of the passions, though this is an example where overemphasis on the Aristotelian vocabulary feels foreign to the Eastern tradition. The received vocabulary of the “passions” in the Byzantine East is significantly different, due to its Evagrian and Stoic derivation. It effectively falls to the discussion of vices and sins.³⁴

• I have not yet ascertained the best way to treat what would be the Thomist “treatise on law.”³⁵ Contemporary antinomianism in the Orthodox East is either wholly polemical or a reaction to casuistry. My treatment of the natural law is very minor, as I emphasize the infused moral virtues and the theological virtues. Most of my treatment of the natural law remains at the level of general patristic history. If I could do more, I would discuss law, custom, etc. in relation to the economy of salvation and ecclesial culture and ascetical practices.

• My treatment of the theological virtues accepts the universal terminology of faith, hope, and charity. However, eastern sources do not always use these terms with the settled precision of the West. Thus, while encountering eastern sources, my students must learn how to understand the realities under discussion in a way that can translate such language into the contemporary Magisterium’s use of the more developed and defined Latin vocabulary.³⁶

• My treatment of the moral virtues is increasingly inflected in the direction of emphasizing how they purify the soul and remove impediments to the mystical life.

• I present the Christianized moral virtues (which I do propose as being the infused moral virtues, along lines similar to the Thomist presentation) as effecting the transfiguration of the passions and internal senses. I present this as a kind of inchoation of the way that the resurrection will involve the full divinization of even our bodily faculties. This has led me, I admit, to wonder at the substantially supernatural character of this resurrected glorification of our faculties.³⁷ In any event, this also inflects my discussion of virtue toward something like a kind of “anticipated-eschatological” focus. Doubtless, this runs the risk of downplaying the suffering state of the perigrinal Church, though elements in the Byzantine liturgical and ascetical traditions help to counter this trend.

• Obviously, the sources for my discussion of the various moral virtues is much more mixed than a scholastic framework. Pedagogically, I basically draw on various selections from the Philokalia. However, I also present my students with a framework basically derived from the structure of the ST II-II, with a few additions, in order to give them a stable, analytic ability to distinguish virtues (especially as needed for judging the objects of acts, something that remains very necessary for pastors). It’s pretty clear to me that there is a conceptualization difference between the two vocabularies. The proximity to action and its guidance, with the dynamism of the moral life in relief, is much more present in the ascetical literature.³⁸ This perspective seems to bring a unique voice to the treatment of the virtues, perhaps providing a remedy for the legalism of casuistry while also recognizing the moral theologians must have a capacity to articulate the concrete conditions of the life of grace, doing so from the saintly masters.

• I still feel that I need to work on my presentation of the states of life. I leave this for our courses in spiritual theology and liturgical theology, who covers these sorts of topics, at least in part. It’s also something that I have tended to take back up when I have had to teach the documents of Vatican II, though I’ve not quite hit the right balance from Eastern sources, which I have changed many times over my years of teaching.

As I pulled together this list, I realized that to some people I might look like a two-headed monster, especially to my Orthodox brethren (although, I have good reason to suspect that this is true, also, of certain Thomist brethren as well). The super-structure of my presentation is, ultimately, still quite marked by the treatises of Thomas’s Summa theologiae (though, the keen Thomist reader will sense the shifting of certain elements of Trinitarian theology, Christology, and Ecclesiology present in my structure). My sourcing is a mixture of all sorts of things from Scripture,³⁹ selections from Fathers, chapters by Catholic and Orthodox theologians, etc. And I tend to stay away from most of the arguments between modern and contemporary theologians, sticking as close as I can to what ultimately can be articulated either from the data of scripture or a broad consensus of theologians, Fathers, and common sense.

I’m not sure, truth be told, whether my practices merit being called “Byzantine Catholic” or, rather, just Thomism with some Eastern gold plating. Nonetheless, I have wanted here to explicitly articulate some of the concrete ways in which my own teaching has changed over the years of forming Ruthenian and Melkite seminarians. If nothing else, this paper has given me a chance to reflectively explicate my own methods for myself, as I continue the blessed—albeit quite tertiary—enterprise of discursive theologizing, to help my students understand the revealed mysteries a bit more and hand them on to their parishioners.

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1. And, moreover, how to avoid being one of these reactionaries who abandons their entire past and creates spiritual-intellectual discontinuity where it is not necessary. Very often, when one does this, one will need to return, many years later, to reconcile with one’s past tradition. I have seen this enough in the lives of others that I wish to learn from their own “conversion” zeal.↩︎

2. I am setting aside here the question concerning the proposition of truths of faith in other ages of salvation history, as well as in other existential states in which one is only, at most, implicitly in voto Christian.↩︎

3. For a general account of what I think about this topic, see my essay “The Ontology of the Divine Indwelling

   A Hard-Headed Thomist Meets with Palamas” on pages 34 to 52 in the forthcoming volume by the American Maritain Association, to be published by CUA Press, edited by Heather Erb.↩︎

4. Always remembering—against the grain of a kind of gnosticism or universalism—that such a state is amissible.↩︎

5. I am using “subjectively” in the technical later scholastic sense, as well explained in someone like Deely.↩︎

6. An expression dear to Journet, drawn from the Carmelite tradition.↩︎

7. Marie-Joseph Nicolas and Michel Labourdette, “The Analogy of Truth and the Unity of Theological Science,” in The Thomistic Response to the Nouvelle Théologie, ed. and trans. Matthew K. Minerd and Jon Kirwan (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023), 204.↩︎

8. On the superanalogy of faith, see Matthew K. Minerd, “The Superanalogy of Faith,” Nova et Vetera (English Edition) 23, no. 2 (2025): 589–614; and “Notes on the Super-Analogy of Faith in Garrigou-Lagrange, Hugon, Journet, and Maritain” on To Be a Thomist (https://www.athomist.com/articles/notes-on-the-super-analogy-of-faith).↩︎

9. Such truths are, of course, formally-eminently speculative and practical, like God’s own knowledge.↩︎

10. Just as practico-moral truth (conformitas ad rectum intentionem) contains, as an unbreakable nucleus, the truths known through synderesis (conformitas ad rem).↩︎

11. Concerning the various types of discursive theological argument forms, see Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Reality: A Thomist Synthesis, trans. Patrick Cummins (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1950), pt. 2, ch. 6, art. 2 (p. 64ff, available at https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/reality-a-synthesis-of-thomistic-thought-10148). I am convinced that this deceptively simple enumeration contains many important things for one’s reflection, especially when read in view of the broader context from which this mature enumeration emerges.

    I would also stress even more the role of poetic and rhetorical argumentation in discursive theology, especially in arguments from fittingness (in the broadest sense, indicating any argument that seeks to persuasively or poetically illustrate the intrinsic radiance of the data of faith). One should recall, also, that such arguments are the loftiest in all of discursive theology. I do not think that I need to become anti-rational to say this either. See Emmanuel Doronzo, Theologia Dogmatica (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1966), no. 63 (p. 73).↩︎

12. This expression is used in the Byzantine liturgy, for example, in the kontakion of the Fathers of the First Nicene Council (the Sunday between the Ascension and Pentecost): “The preaching of the apostles and the teachings of the Fathers have confirmed the one faith of the Church, which she wears as the garment of truth, woven from the theology on high, as she faithfully imparts and glorifies the great mystery of devotion.”↩︎

13. Regarding the latter, I have in mind “secondary objects of infallibility,” once upon a time referred to as being known by “ecclesiastical faith.” On this topic, see Dylan Schraeder, “Theological Notes and Censure,” Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology (https://www.ect.org/en/article/theological-notes-and-censures); Matthew K. Minerd, “A Basic Introduction to ‘Ecclesiastical Faith,’” To Be a Thomist (https://www.athomist.com/articles/a-basic-introduction-to-ecclesiastical-faith).↩︎

14. I am thus following the line taken by someone like Gardeil, Garrigou-Lagrange, and numerous other Thomists—against Vincent Contenson O.P., as well as Luis de Molina S.J., who held that discursive theology was even subjectively supernatural. See Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, On Divine Revelation, vol. 1, trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2022), 104–105; Doronzo, Theologia Dogmatica, vol. 1, no. 46–48 (p. 50–53); Ambroise Gardeil, Le donné révélé et la théologie, 2^nd ed. (Paris: Cerf, 1932), 235.↩︎

15. I have in mind remarks by Fr. Labourdette.↩︎

16. I am not unaware of the fact that someone might have “dead faith” but still somewhat theologize. But this is an abnormal and crippled state.↩︎

17. Indeed, it will do so in a way that can never be the case for purely philosophical discourse. Obviously, the Christian philosopher can point the “natural theologian” (really, the metaphysician) toward the Vision which will fulfill his highest aspirations. But, in terms of per se, objective arguments, natural theology itself can only ever beget a desire for vision which remains objectively natural, inefficacious, and conditional.↩︎

18. I am taking the “door” metaphor from Journet.↩︎

19. Although I have a certain exhaustion with Catholics who would draw upon C.S. Lewis as a theologian of first rank for Catholics, nonetheless, I must recognize that I have in mind his “Meditation in a Toolshed.”↩︎

20. I have in mind some of the theses in the third section of Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Thomistic Common Sense, trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2021). While also acknowledging the various factors of differentiation discussed in the article by Nicolas and Labourdette above (though perhaps with some reservations regarding how to articulate the unity of theological science)↩︎

21. I have in mind Marie-Joseph Le Blond’s problematic defense of Henri Bouillard.↩︎

22. Though with my own developments, influenced by Deely, Maritain, and others, I believe that I remain in continuity with what can be found in someone like Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange.↩︎

23. Consider the immense array of definitions for the Church provided in Charles Journet, The Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 2, ch. 5 and vol. 3, ch. 8.↩︎

24. It is a task all on its own merely to articulate these various ways.↩︎

25. Such “defining” may well be implicit in practices. But, nonetheless, faith is a form of knowing, and therefore requires noetic content.↩︎

26. It might be said that, in an understandable zeal for recovering our own traditions, the Eastern Churches after the Council have sometimes been too quick to treat all things post-schism as being merely local and not an expression of the universal mind of the Church. No doubt, some of the universal Magisterium takes up Latinate terminology with a bit too heavy of a pen. But, that does not, however, mean that the Eastern Catholic is free to ignore the universal magisterium. Rather, it calls us to live out a prophetic role, at once hearing the voice of the Universal Church and, yet, also reminding her that the One Church is not the Roman Church.↩︎

27. I have in mind insights well expressed in Gilson’s The Unity of Philosphical Experience.↩︎

28. This awkward metaphor is meant to capture both the vital character of divinization and the way that it is a received participation. Effectively, it is a combination of the scriptural metaphors of light and life.↩︎

29. One can find language in, for example, Ss. Maximus and Gregory Palamas that approximates something like the western concerns for articulating this obediential capacity clearly. Their accounts do not, however, neatly reduce to one of the schools, though they seem to straddle the Scotists and Thomists.↩︎

30. It might seem as though any good Thomist would know not to do this. I am, however, not so sure. I think that a kind of implicit naturalization of grace can be found in discussions of the theological virtues. (Sometimes, I refer to this as a kind of super “gilding” that remains merely modally supernatural.)↩︎

31. I am aware that there are debates in the scholastic world concerning “when” (or under what conditions) an invisible divine mission takes place. I do not propose to solve that problem here, though I believe that I tend in the more liberal direction. But, in any event, I’m obviously indebted here to Gardeil and others concerning the relation between mystical experience and the divine missions.↩︎

32. Though, admittedly, in my context, I present it to my students as a very stable theological position in the West—that is, as having, at least for initial consideration, a kind of significant probability.↩︎

33. For which I draw on elements from both the Thomist tradition (Journet and MJ Nicolas in particular) and Khaled Anatolios’s Deification through the Cross.↩︎

34. However, even eastern sources recognize the appetites / passions, as they are often discussed in the later West. (For rhetorical purposes in class, I use St. Gregory Palamas, Theophane the Recluse, and Dimitru Staniloae. I suspect a large catalogue could be gathered from Patristic and post-Patristic sources.)↩︎

35. This is due, for the most part, to time constraints.↩︎

36. In fact, some have even claimed that prior to Trent it was not definitively De fide that three theological virtues are infused into us with grace.↩︎

37. I hesitate to say this because I know that, for Aquinas, the glorified body is the highest of modally supernatural realities. However, what also gives me pause is that the later Thomist tradition itself recognizes that the infused moral virtues, subjected in the appetites (for the various species of infused courage and temperance), are substantially supernatural in their objects. I discuss this topic in a forthcoming essay, “Francisco Suárez and the Scholastic Debates Concerning the Infused Moral Virtues” in Jesuit Readers of the Secunda Pars, ed. Justin Anderson, Matthew Levering, and Aaron Pidel, S.J., to be published by The Catholic University of America Press.↩︎

38. This indicates something which, in my opinion, confirms the positions found in Maritain and Labourdette (and, in his own way, too, Garrigou-Lagrnage), a propos still-discursive mystical theology. (This is to be distinguished from mystical theology in the sense which refers immediately to the ineffable experience had by those who are moved by the Spirit.) On this, see Michel Labourdette, “What is Spiritual Theology?”, trans. Matthew K. Minerd, Nova et Vetera (English Edition) 23, no. 3 (2025): 1103–1132.↩︎

39. I have come to draw more and more on Ceslas Spicq in recent years.↩︎