Aquinas on the Natural Desire for the Vision of God: A Relecture of Summa Contra Gentiles III, c. 25 Après Henri De Lubac

The Thomist 73 (2009): 523-91 AQUINAS ON THE NATURAL DESIRE FOR THE VISION OF GOD: A RELECTURE OF SUMMA CONTRA GENTILES III, c. 25 APRES HENRI DE LUBAC REINHARD HOTTER Duke University Divinity School Durham, North Carolina Thomas ist ein schwieriger Denker, der sich im Licht verbirgt und niemals seinen ganzen Gedanken auf einmal sagt.1 Josef Pieper lOSEF PIEPER'S apt observation has special pertinence when one approaches the interpretive as well as the speculative challenge of comprehending Aquinas's thought on the natural ire for the vision of God. This teaching was contested among interpreters of Thomas Aquinas long before Henri de Lubac contributed to the debate in 1946 with his influential and controversial study Surnaturel.2 William O'Connor, in an unjustly forgotten, instructive study from 1947, The Eternal Quest: The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Natural Desire for God,3 argued that since the days of the principal sixteenth-century commentators on Aquinas's thought on the natural desire for the vision of God, one can usefully distinguish between a tradition of minimizing and a 1 "Thomas is a demanding thinker who so conceals himself in the light that he never reveals his complete thought at once without remainder." 2 Henri de Lubac, Sumaturel: Etudes historiques, ed. and intro. by Michel Sales, S.J. (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1991). On the background of the controversy that erupted shortly after the publication of Sumaturel, see Aidan Nichols, O.P., "Thomism and the Nouvelle Theologie," The Thomist 64 (2000), 1-19. 3 New York and London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1947. 523 524 REINHARD HUTTER tradition of maximizing interpreters. These two tendencies of interpretation draw in differing ways upon two series of texts in the vast corpus of the angelic doctor. In the first series of texts, Aquinas understands the desire to know the essence of the First Cause as a natural desire; in the second series he holds that the desire to know the divine essence is supernatural. Both series of texts run from the early through the later works and Aquinas sees no need anywhere to reconcile them.4 O'Connor argues that the tradition of "minimizing" interpretations has its roots in the commentatorial work of the Italian Dominican theologian Thomas de Vio Cajetan (1469-1534) and of the Spanish Dominican theologian Dominicus Banez (15281604 ), while the tradition of "maximizing" interpretations emerges from the commentaries of the Italian Dominican theologian Sylvester of Ferrara (1474-1528) and the Spanish Dominican theologian Dominicus Soto (1494-1560).5 Cajetan and Banez strongly privilege the first series of texts and prefer to interpret the natural desire in terms of an "obediential potency," a nonrepugnance or even a suitability in the created spiritual nature for the vision of God as he is in himself. Sylvester of Ferrara and Soto, on the other hand, read Aquinas as teaching a genuine natural desire for the vision of God, although with the significant difference that Soto understands this desire primarily as a "pondus naturae," a profound, innate natural impulse toward the vision of God as true human beatitude, while Sylvester of Ferrara takes the genuine desire to be not an innate, but an elicited desire that follows upon cognition. All four interpreters of Aquinas react to the profound impact Duns Scotus had on this debate with his strict Augustinian insistence that God in his divine substance is the natural end of the human being. All human volitions, Scotus argues, are ordained 4 O'Connor, The Eternal Quest, 7-23. For a complete listing of all the relevant passages in Aquinas's writings, see Jorge Laporta, La destinee de la nature humaine selon Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: J. Vrin, 1965), 147-61. 5 O'Connor, The Eternal Quest, 24-39, 55-72. For a concise introduction to these eminent interpreters of Thomas Aquinas, see Romanus Cessario, O.P., A Short History of Thomism (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005). NATURAL DESIRE FOR THE VISION OF GOD 525 to the divine substance as to their ultimate end. Scotus's doctrine had such discursive weight that it inevitably impacted the subsequent interpretations of Aquinas's thought, especially in the fifteenth...