Thomistic-Balthasarian Comments on Thomas Joseph White’s The Incarnate Lord – St. Paul Center (original) (raw)

PASSION AND BEATIFIC CONNATURALITY ACCORDING TO ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, love is the overarching principle of dynamic receptivity at work between mover and moved in every human action; it brings the affects of attraction, union, mutual indwelling, ecstasy, and zeal all the while changing the patient, toward its good, into the form of the other (knowledge). Passion is the principle of affectivity in created being; that something ‘may be done’ to anything is proper to the capacity for passion. For St. Thomas Aquinas, passion (passio) is not only the capacity to be affected by like being corporally, but also in the soul. It is a principle of love (connaturality) which makes intellection possible. But we cannot speak of “passion” as proper to God; for He is not movable by another. The connaturality that shall enable our beatific vision, however, is made possible by, in a certain sense, a gratuitous act of Divine passio, namely, the Passion of the Incarnate Word: the nature of the relationship between the two senses of passio will be of central importance to our project. Thesis Statement: Using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas as a conceptual framework and foundation, we will show that the passibility of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, in His Incarnation and Passion, is a constitutive element of the saints' Beatific Vision. Description of Methodology: Taking the Doctrine of St. Thomas as our framework for this project in systematic theology, we will study those texts of St. Thomas that contain his teaching about beatitude, moral action, and the Incarnation. This will involve principally the works by Aquinas listed below in the Preliminary Bibliography, although occasional references to some of his other works will be included. We will draw our conclusions through a synthetic reading of Thomas’s teaching on these matters. Besides explicating certain syllogisms at work in the Gospel of John and letters of St. Paul, we will use secondary sources to help provide insights on the context and meaning of the writings of St. Thomas, and to compare our results with scholars who have considered closely related issues. A Description of the Project: Our thesis will investigate the mode by which Divine self-knowledge is communicated to and received by the blessed in the essential vision of God. Paying particular attention to supernatural charity, as the formal principle and medium which unites man to God mutually “in affection,” we will explicate the mechanism of connaturality in the teachings of St. Thomas. We shall then investigate the Thomistic doctrine of passio: the principle of receptivity which enables being to be affected by like being and which draws us toward God lovingly in this life. Showing that beatific connaturality is produced through God, insofar as He allows the Son to be affected as patient and undergo the same passio by which He has affected our wills to reach out to Him, we shall show that the Incarnation (consummated in the dolorous Passion) is the locus of co-naturality by which God is formally knowable to the human mind and that, consequently, the passibility of the Eternal Word is a constitutive mode of our beatitude. Whereas prior to this beatific vision, we pursue God ecstatically, in the beatific vision, we intellectually receive God, in lumen gloriae, formally in our passive intellects. Our beatitude consists in God making his dwelling with us: hence, we shall shed light on the full implications of the Incarnation in the context of Thomistic epistemological principles. Significance: Our investigation will offer a systematic account of the relationship between the Incarnation and the blessed’s connatural knowledge of God, an account which is only implicit in the teachings of the Angelic Doctor and which has received too little attention in secondary literature of the past century. Exploring the mechanism of connaturality in light of the Thomistic doctrine on love and passio may hold substantial implications for our understanding of the nature of the incarnation, the beatific vision, and the moral action itself.