The Philosophical Approach to God: A New Thomistic Perspective, 2nd Edition

The Ascent through the Dynamism of the Will

The Ascent through the Dynamism of the Will The same process of discovery works even more powerfully and effectively—from the point of view of its psychological impact—when applied to the correlative dynamism of the human will, operating within the limitless horizon of being as the good, as the valuable and lovable.8 Reflecting on the operation of my human will, I come to discover or unveil the nature of this faculty, or active potency in Thomistic terms, as an unrestricted and inexhaustible drive toward the good, as presented by my intelligence. Our entire life of willing , desiring, loving, avoiding, is carried on within the horizon of the good, the formal object of the will as such. But this horizon of being as the good, like that of being as truth for the intellect, reveals itself to be also unlimited, unbounded . The process of discovery is similar. Each time we take possession of some new finite good, we are temporarily 22 The Ascent through the Dynamism of the Will 23 satisfied as we explore and enjoy its goodness for us. But again, as soon as we discover its limits, its finitude, our wills at once spontaneously rebound beyond, in prospective desire and longing for further fulfillment. Over and over throughout our lives this process is repeated. Reflecting now on this process as a whole, we can disengage its meaning in the light of its final cause or goal. Its ultimate goal, through which alone this dynamism—like any dynamism—is rendered intelligible, can be nothing less than the totality of the good, whatever that may turn out to be. There is, therefore, in the will a dynamic a priori orientation toward the good as such—i.e., a natural affinity, connaturality , aptitude for the good—which is written into the very nature of the will as dynamic faculty before any particular experience of an individual good, and defines this nature as such. Everything it desires and loves it loves as good, as situated within this all-embracing horizon of the good, as participating in some way in the transcendental character of goodness. Now this a priori orientation and natural affinity for the good implies that the will, in order to recognize and respond to a good when it finds it, must have written within it— analogously to the intellect—a pre-conceptual ‘‘background consciousness,’’ an anticipatory grasp—unthematized or implicit , obscure and indistinct—of the good as somehow present in its very depths, magnetizing and attracting it, luring it on to actual fulfillment of its innate potentiality by distinct conscious appropriations of actually existing concrete goods. This is what it means to live volitively in the horizon of the good. The entire life of the will consists in filling in 24 The Philosophical Approach to God determinately and concretely this unbounded, all-embracing, indeterminate, intentional horizon of the good as anticipated field of all possible fulfillment. As Plato said long ago in the Meno, in one of his profoundest insights, in any inquiry or search, unless we somehow dimly and implicitly knew ahead of time what we were looking for, we would never recognize an answer as an answer to our search. The passage is not from total non-knowledge or absence of the good to knowledge or presence, but from implicit and indistinct to explicit and distinct awareness. As St. Thomas put it in a striking formula, often highlighted by Transcendental Thomists, ‘‘Every knower knows God implicitly in anything it knows.’’9 Similarly, every will implicitly loves God in anything it loves. We must now analyze more precisely what must be the content of this unlimited horizon of the good, ever-present by anticipation as implicit ‘‘background consciousness’’ in the will and drawing it like a lodestar or hidden magnet. This analysis can be set, if one wishes, in the outer form of an Aristotelian demonstration; but in fact its inner soul is the drawing out into explicitness of what is already necessarily contained implicitly in the life of the will, if the latter is not to collapse into unintelligibility. The horizon of the good appears to us first as a vague, indefinite, indeterminate totality . It must be somehow a unity, first because of the analogous similarity of all that draws the will as good, second because the unity of any dynamism or active potency is...