Soundings in the History of a Hope The Soteriology of Thomas Aquinas Notes on the Tertia pars of the Summa Theologiae Richard
Schenk OP Lectures:
I. Of the three "material objects" of soteriology, Christology, sacraments, and eschatology, the treatment of the first two in Rahner's thought has been briefly addressed. The basic theses on Christology have been mentioned; sacramentality will be dealt with thematically in the fifth lecture. Let us therefore turn to Rahner's theology of death. In the course of his thought, Rahner changed his position on the precise meaning of death, but he maintained the general tendency or, as he put it, the "positive sense" of the earlier view throughout. He began with a suggestion that humans are constituted not only by soul and body, but by person and nature, corresponding to freedom or act on the one hand and passivity and suffering on the other. The definition of death as separation of body and soul seems to say too little and too much: too little, in that the soul as nature also "suffers" death, too much, because the soul never is without some relationship to matter. Rahner suggests that the soul in death gains more than it loses: it gains a relationship to the whole cosmos. By including the passivity in an affirmation of its own freedom and act, death can be personalized, made into a deeper opening of the self and self-perfection. As taken over into an act of personal freedom, death becomes birth and ripening, the removal of all that is not person. This possibility of personalized dying, as the gift of a self-perfecting conquest of passivity by freedom, is what the whole of earthly life is about. Encouraged by the earliest spirituality of the Society of Jesus, Rahner sees the death of Christ and, closely related, the death of the martyrs as examples of what death means generally. Later Rahner would see that the theory of gaining an all-cosmic relationship did not solve one of the problems he had identified. The soul, as the form of the body, could truly not be without some relationship to matter; but, since the soul did not become the form of the cosmos, this new relationship did not fully solve the problem posed; the post-mortal soul is not related to the cosmos as its form. Rahner gradually took up the position that had come to be known as "resurrection in death", which owed its beginnings to several suggestions Rahner himself had made earlier, notably, as we will see in the final lecture, in his Mariology. Although the terminology of a nature/person duality becomes less frequent, the basic tension between passivity and freedom becomes more extensive. So, too, does the positive description of death as self-perfection, the birth of eternity from time, liberation from the prison of time, final validity, the exemplary and highest act of freedom. Within the dialectical unity of salvation from God and self-salvation, death is the zenith of divinely empowered self-transcendence. Death-in-resurrection says more than that the negativity of death becomes merely hypothetical with the end of earthly life. The reason why death corresponds of itself to resurrection lies in the self-perfective character of death itself, which gives birth to the final validity of one's own history. Rahner interprets the death of Jesus in this way as well, reinforcing the general structure of self-perfective death: "The death of Jesus is such, that it ends and completes itself (sich aufhebt) into the resurrection, into which it dies."1 Even in the early work, the resurrection of Christ is nothing more than "the epiphany of what has happened in his death"2. This position has been criticized by theologians stressing against Rahner's theologia gloriae a theologia crucis, where the negativity of the cross would be given more weight to accentuate the darkness of faith vis-a-vis experience. Not surprisingly, this includes both Protestant theologians and Catholic theologians interested in ecumenical discussion. Criticism has also come from political theologians, including Rahner's co-worker and close friend, J.-B. Metz, who sees in this ability to overcome the negativity of death both an excessive expectation for individual freedom and the danger of a spiritualizing indifference over and against the forces of death and what is like death. It clearly does not correspond to the context, in which a soteriology after Auschwitz would want consider death. The face of death today (though not only today) does not look like the visage of self-perfecting freedom. And yet not only the context, but also the text of the Tertia pars and the texts which prepared its uncompleted eschatological section will give a view of death, including the death of Christ, which is quite different from Rahner's. Thomas' thoughts on human mortality and death, especially in their philosophical presuppositions, are often commented upon. That is not surprising, since his position in this particular question raised eyebrows in his own day, and since it was interconnected with other notable positions which Thomas held on human knowledge (finite transcendence) and freedom (conditioned intellectualism). Unfortunately, the theological dimension, especially the question of Christ's death, is often overlooked. Thomas distinguishes between Jesus' facing death and the fate of Christ during the three days in the tomb. With regard to the first, Thomas gives extended attention to the mourning of Jesus over the past or future death of his friends and disciples, but also his own death. Both in the Tertia pars and in his commentary on John (cf. in a concordance the places where the word tar·sso, turbatio occurs), Thomas stresses not only the fact of Jesus' mourning, but gives five kinds of reasons for it: ontological (death is destructive of full human being), moral (mourning is due in justice to the friend), Christological (to prove his true humanity), soteriological (to convince us of his solidarity with us) and exemplary (so that we would not be misled by the teaching of the Stoics, who claim that the wise do not mourn). Thomas speaks of tristitia aliqua laudabilis, a certain praiseworthy sadness, precisely when proceeding from reason. Thomas takes pains to show the rationality not only of Christ's "voluntas ut ratio" (a willingness to accept death "by reason of" further considerations, "for certain reasons" such as solidarity), but also Christ's "voluntas ut natura", the primal abhorrence of death: indeed, this second will is not only the necessary, but also the reasonable basis of the first. Thomas also defends Christ's aversion to death with an extreme example, comparing it to the aversion a family feels to having one of its members, convicted of theft, condemned to death by a judge. We are meant to will not what God or the whole universe wills, but what God wills that we will: again, an anti-Stoic position; and, in this case, avview Thomas shared with many contemporaries. Whereas Rahner objects against the Anselmian idea of satisfaction that, for Anselm, who did not recognize the self-perfective character of death in itself, any deed of Christ might have been the basis for satisfaction, given that God must choose to accept it anyway, Thomas stresses that "Christ's death caused our salvation not by the very essence of death, but only due to the divinity associated with it." The humanity cooperated more by its love than by the death itself or the death-pains in themselves: non satisfactio... nisi ex caritate. Thus Christ suffered only those pains and accepted in the incarnation only those defects which were com-patible with his being able to continue to love. The models by which Thomas tries to express what Christ's enduring death contributed to our salvation all presuppose this negativity of death: satisfaction, sacrifice, redemption as buying back at a price, even efficacy (as by divine virtue) underline this. We will come to these models in the next lecture, but for now let it be said: Christ's solidarity with us in death is not salvific because it is a mutual experience of self-perfection and self-transcendence. This was clear already from the first question of the Tertia pars on, especially in article 2: the incarnation and the cross, perceived in their negativity as the exinanitio of one who did not need to be born or to die, are motives of hope and counter-love, the source of a new sense of human dignity not based on presumption. As in the case of causality, so, too, here in the line of our perception: the bearing of this negativity is only liberating, when the bearer is more than human; without this, his solidarity is of little importance: "The death of Christ effects our salvation by virtue of his united divinity, and not by the mere meaning of death"3. Thomas also speaks of Christ in death. The triduum mortis and the decent into hell were meant to show the reality of this death. Death itself moved Christ not into resurrection, but into the realm of the dead. The overcoming of death did not occur by reason of any principles of his humanity, but ex virtute divintatis.4 Because of this, Christ's being dead could only be co-productive of salvation by the divinity still associated with it, but not by human merit. Being dead, even for the humanity of Christ, was of no merit.5 The focus of hope is thus Christ's overcoming of death by a resurrection opposed to it. The hope, to which Christ gives cause, is a hope against death, the hope for a resurrection which is not the fullness of death, but its contradiction. B. The Anthropological Meaning of Death in Thomas' Thought Before we can draw out the general soteriological significance of this basic difference between Rahner and our text, especially in light of the context we have defined, we must ask about the general anthropological meaning of Thomas' text. Thomas' theology of death was called into question in his own day with reference to Christ's triduum mortis. If Thomas' general anthropology of body-soul-unity was correct, it would seem generally that the corpse no longer belonged to the dead person. Indeed, Thomas held, with the sententia communis of his contemporaries (but in marked contrast to Rahner's view of death as perfected personalization), that the anima separata is not the full person at all (and, even as imperfect subjectivity, is less spontaneously active than on earth). It seemed to Thomas' contemporaries that his view on the loss of the corpse's identity was meant to apply to Christ's body in the sepulcher as well; and it certainly applied to relics, whose significance for medieval piety, architecture, and political symbolism had been intense, if not excessive. The condemnations of 1277 raised this point. As Thomas' yet unknown Tertia pars would point out, Christ's divinity made him an exception to the rule. Only by the presence of his divinity to both soul and body was he spared this dissolution of personal identity in death. This exception by reason of the divinity, apart from showing the necessity of Christological for soteriological faith, highlights all the more the destructive side of death for humans in and of themselves. We must therefore turn to the anthropological dimension of Thomas' reading of death. In the view of Thomas' contemporaries, the controversial implications of his thought as a whole lay in his anthropology. The questions about the range of reason, the basis of praxis, and the future of hope always came together in the question about human being itself. Kant would later say that philosophy itself is summed up in the questions, What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for? These three questions, taken together, make up the basic question of life: What is the human? That a final answer to this question is not possible by evidence or introspection is the meaning of the antinomies, but also the meaning of that call to a hope in one who is "the Truth, the Way, and the Life". It was in his anthropology that Thomas' earliest positions on the necessary and necessarily spontaneous genesis of knowledge were given an ontical basis, which in turn was challenged and tested in the question of death. In contrast both to those who made choice the prerogative of a free will unbound by knowledge and to those who bound choice to the immediacy of understanding, Thomas grounded human freedom in the very imperfection of knowledge. The controversies surrounding these issues during Thomas' lifetime continued after his death. Thomas' contention that the human soul was intellective as the substantial form of the body, or conversely, that the substantial form of the body was truly intellective, brought him opponents on both sides: those who denied the corporeal bonds of soul, intellect, and will, as well as others who denied that corporeally existing life could ever become the proper subject of truth and intellective identity. Thomas' position meant that the human identity of personal individuation was only given with bodiliness, a dimension transcending the limits of self-consciousness, but a bodiliness which self-consciousness needs as its own to become or remain fully itself. The anima separata remains the identical, incomplete principle of the former whole only by its abiding (subsistent) relation to its own lost matter, i. e. by its abiding, unfulfilled need and desire. In an historicizing interpretation not entirely free of "violence", Thomas identified the two groups of his contemporary opponents respectively as "Platonists" and "Averroists" (the latter a polemical term he seems to have coined himself). By compartmentalizing spirit and body, both groups of opponents could claim simpler identities for human being than Thomas, who despite the attempt to appear harmonious thematized the ambiguity and tension of human existence more explicitly than his critics. The "Platonists" were largely theologians, who would themselves be transformed unwittingly by their opposition to Thomas and the "Averroists". As F. Van Steenberghen described it, "Neo-Augustinianism" (which, like every "Neo-", was a novelty over and against its patron) had its inspirer in Bonaventure, its founder in John Pecham, and its first systematician in William de la Mare.6 Although these were all Franciscans, the movement was not simply a matter of one religious order against the other. Pecham would renew and sharpen the prohibition of his predecessor as archbishop of Canterbury, the Dominican Robert Kilwardby, who in 1277, with the support of the professors of philosophy and theology at Oxford, forbade teachers or students to decisively affirm the central Thomistic positions. In an open letter to one of Thomas' defenders at the papal curia, Kilwardby drew on local Dominican help to expand his criticism of Thomas' teaching on the question of the unicity of the substantial form.7 The Dominican reaction against Kilwardby and his local Dominican supporters, nicknamed the "Cantuarienses" by Gilles of Lessines, succeeded in England only after the intervention of a Dominican general chapter, and it was here that a clear idea of what "Thomism" could mean emerged for the first time.8 Without his opponents, Thomas might have been forgotten. His defenders wrote not only against Kilwardby and Pecham, but especially against William de la Mare, who in the meantime had published the first long systematic treatise against Thomas. His "Correctorium fratris Thomae" referred back to the condemnations of 1277, especially the one in Paris pronounced on the 7th of March of that year by the local bishop after consultation and support from the faculty of theology. While Thomistic theses were only several among the many positions criticized and the doctrine of forms remained in the background of this particular document, there followed a few weeks later a condemnation by the same forces of one of Thomas students, Aegidius Romanus. Of the 51 theses condemned, some 30 represented Thomistic positions, including the thesis that composites have but one substantial form.9 An intended posthumous censure of Thomas' own thought at Paris was prevented at the last minute by sympathetic forces in the papal curia, who had gained a freer hand with the death of John XXI. The Paris controversies on the question of the unicity of forms had already persuaded theologians such as Henry of Gent to join the "Platonic" side of the anti-Thomistic camp.10 The "Averroistic" thinkers, including philosophers and theologians less unified in one single school than the Neo-Augustinians, were also critical of the Thomistic position. The sensible, corporeal form of human beings seem to preclude them as subjects of truth, which needed to be less subject to the realm of temporality, imagination, merely vital interests, and individuality; all of which was true of human beings, who were thus separated from absolute truth. Any contact with the truth could be little more than a transitory approximation; at best, an ecstatic transcendence beyond individual personality to the realm of intelligence and unity. Philosophy provides some access to the small realm of self-evidence available to us, while criticizing all that is transitory, historical and irreducible to self-evidence as the realm of individual fantasy, falling short of the truth. Were the Neo-Augustinians proponents of individual identity, here was the self-dissatisfied critique of human claims to truth, a disillusioned insistence on the illusory character of most human reflection, the multiplication of diverse fantasies, which do not, however, deserve fully the name of knowledge. The best available approximation to perfection is in the reflection on that separate transcendent identity of truth behind and beyond the diversity of human rationality and historicity. The eschatological implications of Thomas' position on the unicity of form were controversial. In his remarkable study of the Paris condemnation of 1277, R. Hissette sees the criticism of Thomas most clearly in the thesis that death is the most extreme evil to befall a human being.11 Although all thinkers of the time were agreed that the soul separated from matter should not be called a human person in the full sense, Thomas' position on the unicity of form forbade him to follow any easy "Platonic" reading of death as the liberation of the soul from matter or at least as the immunity of human subjectivity to the loss of body.12 As the body has always been demanded by the otherwise "empty", "vague" and "vacuous" subjectivity of human spirit, so its loss is an incomparable impoverishment, leaving subjectivity with few social or cognitive resources of its own.13 Its deficiency calls out for a resurrection of body and full personhood, but it cannot provide itself with what it desires; it must look to another for its restitution and, short of that, for solace. Resurrection is desired by human nature, but human nature cannot fulfill this desire; and without such fulfillment, human nature would remain unfulfilled. "Resurrection is natural if one considers its purpose, for it is natural that the soul be united to the body. But the principle of resurrection is not natural. It is caused by the divine power alone".14 The dialectic of the natural/supernatural character of resurrection is the reverse side of the unnatural/natural character of death: although there is reason to perceive in human nature a dignity which makes death seem especially unfitting, final preservation or salvation from death is not within the power of human nature; death can therefore be seen as a punishment which does not deprive humans of anything they have by nature, but which simply leaves them to their own resources.15 Fulfillment is only conceivable as "salvation", restoring the lost whole of which the separated soul is but an incomplete part. What is stated here in ontological terms corresponds in transcendental terms to the practical antinomy, the antinomy of the heart, the insolubility of the inner debate between vague hope and well-founded doubt. The final outcome of human destinies cannot be determined by introspection; their ultimate end depends on something more like history than like nature.16 Prior to any conceivable reconstitution of the person through resurrection, any conceivably "beatific" vision would have to retain a moment of the harsher reality of the "beatitudes". St. Peter is prayed to under this name because of historical memory and future hope, not because of the current ontological status of that subjectivity17, whose remaining individuality stems from the relation to its own unique, lost matter. The separated soul is less an image of God than incarnated spirit. That is why Christ's attitude to his own and others' death was meant to teach us the legitimacy, indeed the obligation of mourning.18 This call to mourning, which addresses the loss suffered in death, would be rendered impossible not only by the "Platonic" independence of subjectivity from bodiliness, but also by that other simple reading of death: the "Averroist" position of the total death of the individual. By its very survival, the deprived and incomplete remainder of a lost whole cries out against death and makes possible a hope for salvation based on mourning.19 Death remains a state of privation, and thus the opposite tendency to sanction death as simply the normal and expected or even as the normative and perfectible state of affairs must be resisted. This resistance must apply, as well, to whatever is like death: the privation of possibilities of human life, including their corporeal dimensions, through culpability or nature itself: resurrectio - causa exemplaris iustificationis. Whatever "post-metaphysical" thought might be able to make of the details of the Thomistic thesis of the separated soul, the basic direction of this thesis illustrates a necessary attitude towards death and what is all too like death, the suffered or even forced loss of human possibilities of life, sociability, and the personally unique integrity of body-soul. Without hope, mourning (and accusation) will shrivel; without mourning, hope will become superficial. Both are related to the dignity of vulnerability. The insurmountable practical antinomy of undecided hope and doubt, which remains the transcendental basis for the possibility of any decisive act of theological faith in or con-fident, theological hope for grace, also provides the "discretion" necessary for love: breaking open the banal present into a remembrance of the history of neediness and into the concern about the uncertain future of fulfillment. Without self-identity, however, the "discretion" of hope and mourning is impossible, while, conversely, self-identity never comes to itself without an openness to that which is different from itself. This "distentio animi" or self-stretching of the human spirit is only possible as a unified extending of itself toward an Other. While admitting that the "Platonic" and "Averroistic" positions on death are simpler views20, Thomas insists on preserving the tension of his view not only for the interpretation of death and resurrection, but for the understanding of life: in order to preserve the complexity and ambivalence of human existence itself.21 This insistence on complexity dominates Thomas' epistemology in particular and demonstrates the ties he sees between his theories of mortality and cognition22; a simplification of the one would demand the simplification of the other. Thomas refuses on the one hand the simpler models of receptivity by divine illumination or passive abstraction from the sensible, nor does he see on the other hand the principle of spontaneity as more important than the knowledge it produces. His steady conviction from the time of his studies in Naples before joining the friars seems to be that knowledge "begins" in the senses (without "ending" there), to which it must again return, especially to know the object most congenial to it: the sensible singular. Knowledge is not simply "received" in a finished form from the start or in the course of history (innate or divinely infused ideas), nor does it receive its knowledge passively from sensation. Because sensation is too similar to the objects it mirrors, it is not itself a place of truth and falsity. Only where the mind produces in distance to the image something foreign to what is received, is there the possibility of truth.23 Truth is produced only when the intellect is more active than passive.24 What is true is not known to the human as it is in God's truth (the thing in itself), but as it is projected by us, known in the mode of the human knower.25 "The nature of truth is first found in the intellect when the intellect begins to possess something proper to itself, not possessed by the thing outside the soul, yet responding to it, so that between the two - intellect and thing - a conformity may be found".26 Truth involves the intellect relating itself to the thing, not the reverse. Such correspondence or ad-equation presupposes an initial freedom from correspondence, identity, or adequation which is lacking in sensation; the achievement of distance is the prerequisite of veritative approximation. This distance is given when the knower turns toward itself as other than its object; only then can the object appear as other than the self. Despite the claims of many transcendental Thomists, who in contrast to Thomas apply the full weight of a famous phrase of the Liber de causis not to angels but to humans, human knowers know themselves (by contrast with an ideal projected from self-experience) as imperfect knowers, whose imperfection is shown by their not "returning completely to themselves" or "to their essence" ("reditione completa in seipsum/ad essentiam suam"); the human knows itself only in its acts of relation and not in its essence.27 Perfect self-identification is impossible for the human subject, but openness to others demands this minimum of imperfect self-identity. Similarly inadequate for Thomas (criticized repeated for his view by William de la Mare) is the sought after knowledge of the singular, which can be known only through the universals applied to it in the return to its image. Singulars are approached by universals of distance seeking a nearness they can never perfectly achieve; despite sensation, the singular is mediated by the vague and clumsy universal. The human can know of an insurmountable finitude implied in the re-interpretation of Boethius' axiom, whatever is received, is received in the mode of the knower; unlike the argument in the Consolation of Philosophy, Thomas applies the principle less to God's creative, elevating knowledge of the world but to the restrictive knowledge humans have of God; and even as a generalization "transcending" the limitations of singulars, human "reception" (even and precisely as a product of spontaneity) provides but a crude tool for coming to know the singular adequately. Self-identity and the recognition of difference remain goals which are sought together and, in each case, with only partial success. The greater or lesser realization of identity and difference corresponds to the their greater or lesser tension to each other. The experience of this finitude of self is the source for understanding act and potency in general. The self's experience of its own active powers (and the limits or impotence revealed in their sometimes frustrated desire to act) is the basis for the self's experience of its own passive powers (and the limits or impotence revealed in their sometimes unrealized desires or fears of being acted upon). These two kinds of self-experience taken together provide the basis for knowing the act and potency, agency and passivity in beings other than the self.28 The finitude slowly discovered in the self and the world reveal that the model perfections our intellect had posited in knowing, notably in the transcendental perfections of being, unity etc., were implicitly limited, even before the limits of these grasped modes of perfection became explicit to us. As with time the limits of its potencies becomes clear in principle, the self must begin to ask a question it cannot answer: how the fullness of such now explicitly limited perfections can be conceived. It must seek a fullness which appears as a mystery beyond itself; and yet, the thought of this unknown but sought after "other", precisely as the fullness of what the intellect knows itself and world must be, reveals a previously unrecognized mysteriousness about ourselves and our world as well. Analogy means not only that the mode of the transcendentals as they are God is unknown to us, but also that ultimate meaning of ourselves and our world is unknown to us. This structure of analogy is again a "discrete" dynamic of self-identity and difference; without the tense unity of their discretion, both selfhood and otherness would be reduced. A disputed question from an anonymous Thomist of the early 14th century, perhaps in the circle of Hervaeus Natalis, looks back on the controversies in which Thomas' epistemology had been involved.29 The "Platonist" opponents tended to deny the necessity of human spontaneity and an intellectus agens, because knowledge consists in receptivity over and against God and the world; whatever human spontaneity could possibly produce could not satisfy this ideal of knowledge. An opposite set of critics accepted the need for an intellectus agens, but were impressed by its god-like nobility and unitive spontaneity more than by that which it produced; the former alone deserves the name of truth and alone could be the locus of beatitude and fulfillment. Thomas subordinates the intellectus agens to the finite truths it projects; the fulfilled possible intellect perfected by such self-relation to the other is more important than the projective activity in itself. Fulfillment or beatitude could not be realized in the intellectus agens. For Thomas, cognitive spontaneity is both the condition of all humanly possible knowledge and a sign of its finitude. The perfected imperfection of human knowledge involves a relatedness towards others by the finite relation to self, the openness to difference through a non-self-sufficient identity.30 A similar structure is evident in the theories of basic freedom and of conscience. The condemnations in Paris in 1270 and 1277 seemed to have included Thomas in the criticism of an intellectualist foundation of freedom. Whereas the theological majority sought a freedom of will independent of the way in which things were viewed by various classes or elites of finite subjects, the criticized minority let will follow closely the appearance of the good. In basing liberty in a vague and merely habitual horizon of the good31, Thomas avoided the deterministic consequences feared by the majority. The incapability of satisfying the desire for the good is at the root of the very motivation to choose reflectively among goods constituting partial aspects of human perfection. Beatitude is present and active by its very allusiveness. God can be sought because he is not yet experienced as the good of all goods. The relativization of attainable goods implies a distance from and an attentiveness towards them; every good desired is a reflection of the fulfillment of one's own identity, but its possession should bring a kind of dis-illusionment and new sense of distance and desire.32 As individualized in a common species, humans have by nature a communality of obligations to one another, but the details of these obligations are not immediately evident. Because the conscience must follow the appearance of the obligatory good, a false appearance of what binds or excuses will lead to tragedy or guilt; erring conscience places freedom in a conditionally perplex situation. The self-identity of conscience is the necessary but not the sufficient condition of its being-towards-others33; conscience is neither heteronomously determined nor purely self-referential. The self of conscience is more temporal and historical than its factical, presently actualized self-understanding would indicate. The call of conscience towards instigation, remorse and thus gradual self-accusation reveals (in both their perverse and their valid forms) an ecstatic temporality beyond the immediate business of present obligations and excuses; these quieter functions of conscience, though less often a topic of moral theory, reveal a self less present, the self in its past and future. This intrinsic relationship to what is other, the ecstatic temporality of conscience, makes possible a moral development from within and preserves the human from the ignominy of perpetrating the worst of crimes with the best of consciences. 4. Antinomian Self-Experience and Openness to an Other These three questions of philosophy, What may I hope for? What can I know? What must I do? were answered by Thomas in a way which wove a good deal of metaphysics into anthropology. What exactly can be appropriated today from the pre-modern reflection on the basic question, What is human being? is a more difficult question to resolve than a frequent apriori division of world history into pre- and postmetaphysical compartments would suggest. Perhaps the question would be better posed aposteriori, i. e. after re-reading the texts in light of contemporary problems. What is angeology and what an ideal revealing the finitude of human thought and freedom; what is the real state of the post-mortal soul (or the soul as such) and what the necessary conditions for preserving the perception of injustice in mourning or accusation; what minimum of system is necessary to preserve the possibility of critique; what possibilities of public truth are necessary to make even the ìprivacies' of selfhood sensible: these are questions touching upon pre-modern thoughts to which few could claim to know the exact answers in advance. It remains to be seen what, intersecting a metaphysics of being in the indicative mood and a metaphysics of possibility in the subjunctive mood, an "optative metaphysics", a "metaphysics of desire" might look like: directed above all by the uncertain antinomian desire that the hope for human dignity, including the capacity for significant truth, not be in vain.34 Until the analyses are finished, it is conceivcble that a request for temporary "dispensation" from the prohibition of systematic dialogue with metaphysical sources could be submitted to those authorities who consider themselves responsible for pragmatically, performatively defining the ideals of the ideal community of philosophical communication. Some "discreet" role35 for metaphysical research might be tolerated as part of the attempt to show the obligatory nature and the urgency of distributive or dispensatory justice (iustitia dispensativa). Thomas' answers to some of the problems raised by the three-fold anthropological question involve another kind of "dis-pensation": a thinking (pensatio) in discretion (dis- as dual, double, two-fold). Identity and difference are so far from being contradictions, that only their interrelatedness can do justice to both. This "discretion" avoids the self-referential autism of identity-philosophies. In recognition of one's own need for but uncertainty about the other, it opens us to a history which is more than the consequence of our factical nature; it leads beyond introspection and the experiences which have become a second nature. Thomas had learned from Dionysius a related sense in which "unitive" and "discrete" reason complement each other.36 Here, as well as in principle, identity and difference remain related to one another as contraries, and their ideal unity is one of intrinsically opposed tension, a kind of "distentio animi", as Augustine called temporality. Metaphysics begins with the "separation" from provisional but illusive view of the self as self-sufficient.37 The finitude now made evident in myself and in what is essentially bound up with myself needs a foundation it cannot provide itself; but the degree to which this foundation will be offered remains unclear. The needy certainty of such uncertainty (the antinomy) in all that can be experienced demands that the self stretch in itself beyond itself to ask about what is other than itself. The outcome of a transcendental reflection on Thomistic texts is a metaphysics of need, which is not the harmony of a final answer, but the fruitful tension of an abiding question. That this tension between self and other is not easily maintained became clear already in medieval times with various options for compartmentalizing the non-identical; but that the tension raised by unresolved need is something which is still felt in today's context seems no less evident. It can be the beginning of a wisdom of a larger order, the basis of our hope for a continued capacity to hope, to mourn, and to work for justice and the fullness of life. Endnotes
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