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.AlbeitprescientiWc, nature serves as the all-encompassing noetic skein ofthe world, the grounding for all answers, but nature never questionsitself.The wonder of the Western mind has waZed between con-templation of the act of existence (Why is there something ratherthan nothing?) to the pattern of existence (How wonderfullywrought is nature!).It should not be surprising that the great metaphor for thisunderstanding of grace would be that of the light, though notAugustine s light as active, personal love. The image of light wasfar more than a literary Wgure; it was the consistent eVect of themetaphysics of emanation, which saw not only intelligence butnature itself as Wlled with the light of the supreme and motionlessGod and as becoming assimilated to the One through conscious orunconscious contemplation of it (Chenu 1997: 52).Of course lightis not only a Neoplatonic metaphor.It is biblical as well. Whether inSt.Augustine or pseudo-Dionysius, in Alexandrian theology or theliturgy, one of the best established commonplaces of Christianthought is the connection seen between such   light  and Biblicaluses of the image, all the way from religious exaltation of the sun inthe Old Testament to the concept of the Logos, light of men.The entire stock of such commonplaces was common during theMiddle Ages.The Dynamic Personalism of Aquinas 59Light is an obvious metaphor for the act of perception, since itenables it.The issue for Christianity lies in the conception of thedivine, as being either active lover or passive source of hierarchicalfullness.To push the metaphor to the point of distinction, thequestion is whether the light simply reveals the perfect ordering ofthe cosmos or attracts us to its very self as that which is other than thecosmos.Are we illumined in order to see the perfection, inherent inform, of the divine, or is illumination itself a dynamic, divineactivity, one which alters what it illumines? Is the perfection a patternthat speaks?The Neoplatonists who followed Augustine tended to follow Platoin making the good the highest of the Transcendentals, and the good,which is self-eVusive, is ultimately the perfect ordering of form.Remember that Greek thought has indigenous roots.Chaos is theunlimited, the unformed.Form deWnes the cosmos and hence Beingitself in Greek thought.7 When Aquinas shifts primacy in the Tran-scendentals to the act of being, he ultimately suggests that illumin-ation is an activity ordered toward communion, and not simply therevelation of the Xawless stasis of the Greek cosmos.87 For a perceptive discussion of Aquinas s relationship to his Greek inheritance onthis question see Clarke (1994: 65 88).Commenting upon Aquinas s teaching on thesimplicity of God, ST I q.3, Burrell notes that the Greeks used language to bring orderto chaos, to make of it a cosmos (1979: 14 16).Chaos is precisely that which cannotbe deWned and which therefore cannot be considered composite.Aquinas, on thecontrary, will speak of God s simplicity, of God standing beyond the ability oflanguage to deWne.To the Greek mind, such a deity is literally inconceivable, onecould even say, unworthy of being divine.Yet God s being for Aquinas is not limitedby his nature, nor his act of being by any potency.One can say that in Aquinas inWnity shifts from being that which deWes reason to that which reason must mostproperly ascribe to the deity.At 18,  Simpleness does not name a characteristic ofGod, but a formal feature of God as   beginning and end of all things.  It is ashorthand term for saying that God lacks composition of any kind.8 See Aertsen 1996: #489 for the leading discussion of Thomas and the Transcen-dentals.Most salient to the present discussion is at 185 6:  One of Thomas s relativelyrare   ego  statements concerns his understanding of being.  What I call esse is themost perfect of all.  His argument is that act is always more perfect than potentiality.Now, any form, such as humanity or Wre, is understood to exist actually only invirtue of the fact that it is held to be.  It is evident, therefore, that what I call esse isthe actuality of all acts, and for this reason it is the perfection of all perfections.  Thedistinctive feature of Thomas s understanding of being is the notion of   actuality.  Inhis own judgment he diVers in this respect from Aristotle, who conceived   being  asthe quiddity of something.60 The Dynamic Personalism of AquinasThe Platonic division between the world of matter and the idealworld of forms introduced a dichotomy into Christian thought un-known to the biblical mind.In Plato the cosmos is ultimately one; eachindividual nature Wnds insertion into a hierarchy of natures, which isordered toward the immaterial world of forms standing at the apex ofthe cosmos.What experiences division is the human person, who nowbecomes an ungainly dyad of dross material and an eternal soul.Inpre-Thomistic anthropology, Chenu argues thatMan was composed of a body and a soul, and through these he entered intotwo worlds.The soul, in itself, was one, substantial, reasonable, and indi-vidual, even when it was ruling a body.(This deWnition prevailed through-out medieval philosophy, despite the success of Aristotelianism.) Man sdualism had implications for the ways and means by which he knew; thesoul had two faces, one turned toward the intelligible world, the othertoward the sense-perceptible world.(Chenu 1997: 62 3)The soul in the Neoplatonism of the Middle Ages is no longer thatof the biblical picture, an animating and God-directed principle ofthe body, the word designating our corporeal presence in the world.Rather, the soul becomes the prisoner of the body. All accepted theduality of the human mind, its face turned upwards toward ecstasy;and thus they deviated from the biblical monism, in which man wascaught up in the drama of sin and grace in all his concrete reality, andin which God s action became incarnate in order to make contactwith creation precisely in its physical reality (Chenu 1997: 96).In Plato, there is no need to speak of a  supernature when natureor the cosmos is itself a hierarchy.The cosmos is one, while dyna-mism is twofold, involving passive emanation from and reassimila-tion into the arche.Yet the term  supernature will come to seemindispensable in Christian Neoplatonism if one wants to maintainthe dialogical character of biblical faith [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]