Response to Eleonore Stump's "Union and Indwelling"

Initial Remarks

The rich reflections that Professor Stump shares in her paper on "Union and Indwelling"¹ invite, and merit, attentive and serious reflection. Of course, not the least value of her remarks is their intelligent account of the nature of human empathy and its foundation in cognitive perception. There seems no reason not to embrace her account of the Thomistic analysis of love into the component elements of willing the good of the beloved, and willing union with the beloved.² This is likewise the case with her observation that for God the willing of the creature's union with God, and the willing of the good for that person, are identical.³ While there are questions of scope that could be raised regarding "being in the company of " another—something that seems amenable both to very thin, and very thick, readings, as for example one recollects the phrase, "being among the company of the righteous"—nonetheless, her account distinguishing mere proximity from the reciprocal shared attentiveness of those who love one another is unassailable.

Along the way of her remarks one does happen upon a strategic theological consideration touching a subject that runs like a seismic event affecting the theological landscape. Here one observes her formulation of the relative role of the creature, and of the divine permissive decree of evil, with respect to grace and the divine good. Professor Stump affirms that, "If Jerome does not resist God's love, then God's love is productive of goodness in Jerome, not responsive to the goodness Jerome has already produced in himself by himself."⁴ Yet she also states that "Even on Aquinas's resolutely anti-Pelagian views, because Jerome can always resist the love of God, God's bringing about goodness in Jerome is responsive to something in Jerome."⁵ On the one hand, Professor Stump's embrace of the anti-Pelagian intention is pronounced and salutary. On the other hand, normally one would wish to observe at this point that her formulation appears to share the kind of problems that may be found both in Maritain's account of the permission of evil, and in the philosophy of logic of Gottlob Frege.⁶ The proposition that God bestows grace, and that if only the creature does "not negate" grace, the creature will then "receive grace," is somewhat like saying that God bestows to the creature a nose, and if only the creature does not not have a nose, then the creature will have a real nose. In other words, the formulation presents as causal what is not causal, because in a real subject, negation of negation is something positive. This means that for a real person not to negate grace is nothing different from having actually received grace, any more than not not to have a nose can be anything different in a real subject from having a nose.⁷ Thus there is more to the theological story here than simply the creature with its hand on the tiller, as the question of the divine permission of evil is not permission in the garden variety sense in which one person may "permit" another to do something. This is without prejudice to Dr. Stump's observation that "even on anti-Pelagian views, Jerome has alternative possibilities for willing with regard to God's giving him grace"⁸—but this presupposes extensive consideration both of the nature of free will and of its relation to God. By the divine simplicity, it is not possible for God to bring about an entirely indeterminate effect—which would be indistinguishable from God bringing about no effect whatsoever, thus nullifying divine causality. Of course, my reference to Frege above is a reference to his famed observation that "being is only the negation of nought," which suffers the exact same lack of distinction between conceptual and real "negation of negation."

Morally speaking, it is true that we may distinguish between acting, non-action by reason of a positive judgment—the sense in which not to act is itself a moral act—and non-action simpliciter apart...