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

1. A Metaphysics of the Truth of Creation: Foundation of the Desire for God

11 A Metaphysics of the Truth of Creation Foundation of the Desire for God The question of the natural desire for God as it is posed in Aquinas has been the source of much discussion and controversy throughout the centuries, from the revival of Scholasticism in the sixteenth century in which a purely natural end for man was hypothesized, to the late 1940s and early 1950s during which discussion centered on the compatibility between a natural end for man and Aquinas’s theology of supernatural beatitude . During this latter period, Henri de Lubac’s work on the supernatural flatly denounced man as a thing of nature and therefore argued that man has no natural end, only perfect beatitude which is supernatural, since its object is the transcendent being of God.1 More recently, moral philosophers such as John Finnis and Alan Donagan have recognized the distinction between what has been named perfect and imperfect beatitude; the latter would be comparable to the Aristotelian thesis which identifies eudaimonia with contemplation. Yet, one could argue that if eudaimonia, reinterpreted as beatitude, is merely imperfect , then how could it possibly constitute the ultimate end of chapter 1 1. See Gerald McCool, S.J., From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989). 12  Beauty, Order, and Teleology 12  Truth, Measure, and Virtue human life or how could it satisfy the deepest aspiration of human nature? If eudaimonia is then equated with imperfect beatitude and this can only be truly understood in reference to perfect beatitude which is supernatural, then it would seem that Aquinas’s treatment of the Aristotelian doctrine of happiness ceases to be a philosophical one.2 Apart from the controversy between imperfect and perfect beatitude and whether this question is to be treated philosophically or theologically, I wish to show that given a certain interpretation of Aristotle’s metaphysics and theology that emphasizes the relationship between mind, the universe, and the divinity, it is possible to posit the Aristotelian world as “an expression of desire for God,”3 and thus by extension affirm that man does indeed have a natural desire for the supernatural, for that which transcends his nature. This interpretation does in effect identify the contemplative life with the happy life. Thus, we will not question, as some commentators of Aristotle have done, whether contemplation is in fact for the Philosopher the single best activity because it is the activity of the best part in man.4 It is further my contention that an interpretation of Aristotle that conceives the order of the world as a response to God5 coincides with Aquinas’s treatment of the truth as the origin and end of the universe in the Summa Contra Gentiles. It is here where Aquinas follows “the dynamic intellectualism of Aristotle ” and gives “a more adequate realization to that most magnificent of Aristotelian ideas, the affinity between intelligence 2. See Kevin M. Staley, “Happiness: The Natural End of Man,” The Thomist 53 (1989): 215–34. 3. Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 295. An interpretation of God as exemplary cause is in consonance with Aristotle’s biological works, although in the Metaphysics Aristotle does shy away from such an interpretation. I am indebted to Alasdair MacIntyre and to W. Norris Clarke, S.J., for this clarification. I think that Lear’s interesting interpretation of Aristotle’s metaphysics and theology may be seen in this light. 4. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 377. 5. Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, 295. Metaphysics of the Truth of Creation  13 and divinity.”6 I wish also to point out in these introductory remarks that Aquinas’s reflections on the natural desire for God are meant to give an account of creatures as beings that are directed toward God and return to him as their final end.7 It is this return or inclination toward perfection that I will particularly emphasize in Aquinas. My interest here lies primarily in elaborating a metaphysics of the truth of creation as the ultimate explanation of the desire for God, which desire “lies at the root of the moral life.”8 I will begin then by considering Jonathan Lear’s interesting interpretation of Aristotle’s metaphysics and theology, and will proceed to show how this interpretation is completed within a Thomistic framework.9 The World as...