Dynamic Transcendentals: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty from a Thomistic Perspective

Introduction

1 Introduction The essays in this book have been in the making for over fifteen years. While they were initially devoted to the transcendentals in Thomas Aquinas, especially to truth and to beauty, the so-called forgotten transcendental,1 they were not meant as a systematic treatment of these. In the past twenty years excellent studies on the transcendentals have been published, among them Jan Aertsen’s masterful book titled The Transcendentals and Medieval Philosophy: The Case of Thomas Aquinas.2 In this book Aertsen points to the correlation between anima and being, between the transcendental openness of anima to all being, which makes the human being capable not only of knowing being but also capable of knowing God. For Aertsen, therefore, the anthropological motif of Aquinas’s doctrine of the transcendentals converges with the theological motif. Aertsen also points to the connection between the transcendentals and morality, the former providing the metaphysical basis for the latter.3 My interest here lies not only in these connections suggest1 . Jan Aertsen, The Transcendentals and Medieval Philosophy: The Case of Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996). See the chapter on beauty, 335–59. 2. Besides Aertsen’s book, see Jorge Gracia, editor of the special issue of Topoi 11, no. 2 (1992), devoted to The Transcendentals in the Middle Ages. 3. Aertsen, The Transcendentals and Medieval Philosophy, 431. 2  Beauty, Order, and Teleology 2  introduction   ed by Aertsen but also and more specifically in the role played by the human person in the perfection of the universe, in the return of all things to their source. Given the intellectual creature ’s place in the universe, the human person is responsible both for actualizing his own nature and for bringing everything else in the universe to perfection. In accomplishing this task the person also brings about what may be called an intensification of the transcendentals, such that those aspects of being that are said to be convertible with being and that are present to a greater or lesser degree in all beings acquire a higher level of actuality. We can thus say for example that although human persons are created true, they will through their proper operations maximize the degree of their truth (they will pass from being true secundum quid to being true simpliciter) and will bring all other things to the actualization of their truth and also of their goodness and beauty. To intensify the degree of participation in the transcendentals requires then a dynamic conception of the transcendentals rather than a static one, which is the standard consideration of the transcendentals as aspects inseparable from being. Such a conception is made possible through an understanding of the human person as image of an exemplary cause, as imago Dei, a being intimately related to the wise and loving God who created him and destined him to freely return to Him. Aquinas’s account of the human person as imago Dei is not static and ahistorical but is rather a dynamic and active conception of human nature. In having originated from a true and good God, the human person is naturally inclined to the true and the good; in his pursuit of truth and goodness he is, whether he knows it or not, actually pursuing God. Human perfection cannot therefore be separated from union with God or religious fulfillment.4 God as the exemplary cause of the imago is the measure of the human person in being and in activity and 4. See J. Augustine DiNoia, O.P., “Imago Dei—Imago Christi: The Theological Foundations of Christian Humanism,” Nova et Vetera 2 (2004): 267–78. introduction  3 in his return to the source. If the person is to achieve his end, if he is to perfect his nature and arrive at communion with God through his likeness to the Exemplar, the goods that the person pursues must be proportionate to the One True Good; disproportionate goods that are merely apparent goods and thus not true goods will only alienate him from his true end. In freely choosing true goods, the human person must, moreover, direct his actions to the ultimate true good; he must intend the right end and not act for the sake of some inferior or external good such as human glory. In other words, the person must act from love of God, love of the true good, rather than from a disordered love of self; only...