The Natural Desire to See God according to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters by Lawrence Feingold (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Natural Desire to See God according to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters. By LAWRENCE FEINGOLD. Second edition. Ave Maria, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2010. Pp. 528. $34.95 (paper). ISBN: 978-1-932589-542 . Few people would have the historical learning and speculative acumen to undertake a comprehensive re-evaluation of the complex issues raised by Henri de Lubac's famous work from 1946, Surnaturel. De Lubac's controversial treatment of the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas concerning the final end of man and the natural desire to see God is challenging not only because it appeals (or sometimes leaves unexamined) a broad swath of texts in Aquinas, but also because it makes ambitious claims about a variety of subsequent interpreters whose speculative thoughts are themselves quite involved and subtle-from Scotus and Cajetan to Suarez and Baius-and whose works are often composed in reaction to one another. Lawrence Feingold has produced a work that attempts to revisit the question of Aquinas's doctrine on this contested topic in such a way as to provide criteria for evaluating subsequent interpretations of St. Thomas's doctrine-from Cajetan to De Lubac-through both historical analysis and speculative comparison. The book is composed of sixteen chapters and a lengthy conclusion. The opening chapters (1-3) treat Aquinas's analysis of natural desire (appetite, inclination, objects of the will, conditional desires), and many of his texts concerning the natural desire to see God. From the beginning of the book, Feingold establishes a distinction that is central to his interpretation not only of St. Thomas but also of the subsequent debate: an innate inclination or appetite of a nature (which precedes any conscious reflection) versus an elicited desire that arises consciously as a result of knowledge, proceeding out of the natural desire for knowledge of causes. The distinction is not proper to Aquinas, but is one employed commonly by theologians on both sides ofthe debate, from Scotus to Suarez and including De Lubac. (Thus there is no escape from terminological anachronism.) Throughout his work, Feingold is at pains to show that the distinction has a basis in Aquinas's own texts and that without it his various 461 462 BOOK REVIEWS statements on the natural desire cannot be treated adequately. Classically, interpreters of Aquinas from Soto and Toledo down to De Lubac have argued that the natural desire to see God in Aquinas is rooted in the first element of the distinction: an innate tendency naturally inscribed in the inclinations or appetites of created spirit as such for the supernatural. Meanwhile, the mainstream Dominican and Jesuit commentary tradition (Sylvester of Ferrara, Banez, John of St. Thomas, Vazquez, Suarez) has argued for the latter interpretation: the natural desire to know God in himself pertains to a natural appetite for human knowledge, elicited by the knowledge that there exists a first cause of all things, and by the natural desire to see or know immediately this first cause. The two interpretations differ on substantive issues: Is the natural inclination of created spirit capable by its own powers of tending formally toward the supernatural? Is the human desire for immediate knowledge of God demonstrable by reason or known only by way of revelation? Is this desire conditional (based on the idea of a possibility nature cannot realize itself but which would be wonderful were it possible) or something inscribed in the spirit in such a way that its absence would imply natural failure for the creature, considered precisely with respect to its natural orientation toward an end? Ultimately the answers one gives to these various questions affect deeply how one understands the structural relations of grace and nature in spiritual creatures. Chapters 4 and 5 treat the doctrines of Scotus and of Denis the Carthusian respectively on the natural desire for God. The contrast elaborated between the two is instructive. The Subtle Doctor held to the presence of an innate inclination in created spirits toward the beatific vision, yet based on a potency for what is not due to the creature. Thus Scotus holds that the souls of infants who die without baptism do not suffer from the privation of the vision of...