Mark K. Spencer

This book is an overview of the Catholic conception of God and of philosophical problems regarding God that arose during its historical development. After summarizing key Catholic doctrines, the first section considers problems regarding God that arose because Catholicism originally drew on both Jewish and Greek conceptions of God. The second section turns to controversies regarding God as Trinitarian and incarnate, which arose in early church councils, with reference to how that conception developed during the Middle Ages. In the third section, I consider problems regarding God’s actions towards creatures, including creation, providence, predestination, and the nature of divine action in itself. Finally, the last section considers problems regarding how we relate to God. I focus on tensions among different Catholic spiritualities, and on problems having to do with analogical language about God and human desire for God.

Table of Contents

1. The Basic Catholic Conception of God and its Jewish and Greek Inheritance
2. Trinitarian and Incarnational Controversies
3. Problems with God’s Relations to Creatures
4. Problems with Human Approaches to God

"Mark Spencer is a rising star among Catholic philosophers. This is a big book in every sense. In confident and accessible prose, Spencer argues that the mystery of human personhood can best be understood by drawing together perspectives and schools of thought often deemed incompatible: phenomenology and traditional metaphysics, Thomism and Scotism, Balthasar and Aquinas, and many more. Sure to provoke a number of arguments due to the extraordinary range and boldness of the work, this book succeeds in showing that its 'aesthetic method' has a tremendous amount to offer to the study of human (liturgical) personhood in its manifold dimensions. A rich, exciting, vastly erudite, and immensely fruitful debut."―Matthew Levering, James N. and Mary D. Perry Jr. Chair of Theology, Mundelein Seminary

"Mark Spencer has given us a tour de force, an extremely ambitious and irenic work of synthesis in which he attempts to sketch out a philosophical portrait of the human person, attentive to beauty, that does not suffer from various opposing kinds of reductionism. He brings phenomenology, Thomism, Scotism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Nouvelle théologie, and analytic philosophy into dialogue as he ventures into debates on metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, nature and grace, affectivity, liturgy, and eschatology. In doing so he also proposes synthetic solutions to many nodal metaphysical and anthropological problems, including the interactions of divine causality and human freedom, divine simplicity and energeia, and the spiritual soul and the body, here and in heavenly beatitude."―Lawrence Feingold, Kenrick-Glennon Seminary

"Mark Spencer has produced a remarkable work of reconciliation. He proposes to harmonize strands of thought in the Catholic philosophical tradition that are too often at odds with each other. In particular, he wants to harmonize the work of those who take seriously the modern turn to the subject, with the work of pre-modern Catholic thinkers who smell subjectivism in the turn to the subject and who want to build on a more "objective" and "metaphysical" basis. Spencer wants to capture the truth in each position, and to root out the onesidedness (he speaks of the reductionist tendencies) in each. On this basis he wants to work towards a new Catholic synthesis. This is an original project, and much needed in a world in which Catholic philosophers seem to prefer refuting each other to harmonizing their views. Spencer also maintains the original idea that this new synthesis is achieved by a certain kind of aesthetic imagination. Spencer brings to his ambitious project a vast knowledge of the different movements of thought within the Catholic tradition."―John F. Crosby, Franciscan University at Steubenville

"I can think of few if any books so comprehensively synthetic. Spencer draws from traditional – and nontraditional – Thomism, the personalist tradition, phenomenology (which overlaps with but is not identical to personalism), the Fathers, the work of thinkers in Eastern Christianity, and several contemporary secular sources; it is a work of extremely impressive breadth and learning."―Christopher Tollefsen, University of South Carolina

Catholic philosophical anthropologists have defended views of the human person on which we are irreducible to anything non-personal. For example, it is not the case that we are nothing but matter, souls, or parts of society. But many Catholic anthropologies have overlooked ways in which we are irreducible and so have not given an adequate account of the uniqueness of each human person. This book presents a philosophical portrait of human persons that depicts each way in which we are irreducible, with the goal of guiding the reader to perceive, wonder at, and love all the unique features of human persons. It builds this portrait by showing how claims from many strands of the Catholic tradition can be synthesized. These strands include Thomism, Scotism, phenomenology, personalism, nouvelle théologie, analytic philosophy, and Greek and Russian thought. The book focuses on how these traditions' claims are grounded in experience and on how they help us to perceive irreducible features of persons. While many metaphysical claims about persons are defended, the picture of persons that ultimately emerges is one on which persons are best grasped not through abstract concepts but through aesthetic perception and love, as unique kinds of beauty.

This book also explores irreducible features of our subjectivity, senses, intellect, freedom, and affections, and of our souls, bodies, and activities. It includes discussions of divine simplicity and causality, and of the nature of angels, matter, organisms, and artifacts, all of which must be understood to fully grasp our irreducibility. In showing how to synthesize various traditions' claims, the book also offers new solutions to a number of debates in Catholic philosophy. These include debates over natural law, the natural desire to see God, the separated soul, integralism and personalism, idealist and realist phenomenology, and scholastic accounts of the act of existence.

Accounts of deification presuppose an anthropology, an account of what we are such that we can be deified. This chapter surveys such anthropologies. It begins with anthropologies that account for deification through particular powers and activities, focusing on accounts within the Augustinian-Thomistic tradition, which emphasize the role of spiritual powers like intellect and will in deification. It next turns to anthropologies focused on the nature of activity as such, with special attention to the Greek tradition. This section discusses the role of the body, rest, and creativity in deification. Finally, the chapter considers anthropologies that focus on substantiality or personhood as such, and contends that only such an anthropology adequately accounts for the possibility of deification. This section discusses of the role of our relationality and communal nature in deification, as well as surveying (and arguing against) views on which we have the same nature or personhood as God.

The Consolation defends many claims about human nature and personhood, and depicts an exemplary human person, Boethius the character. This chapter synthesizes the book’s often puzzling and apparently divergent claims, while illustrating them with the depiction of the character of Boethius. It begins by outlining Boethius’ account of human powers and human nature, and then considers the Consolation’s account of human personhood. While Boethius’ account of personhood in the Consolation lacks the technical precision found in his Trinitarian works, he does give an account of some fundamental characteristics of persons, consonant with his more explicit treatment in other texts. Finally, the chapter considers three distinctive themes in the Consolation’s account of human persons. First, this text controversially depicts human nature as able to change into that of a god or of a beast. Second, the Consolation depicts all human persons as microcosms, including within ourselves all aspects of the cosmos. Third, Boethius, like many classical writers, depicts human persons as most understandable in relation to beauty. Since this theme sums up earlier ones, the chapter closes there.

I present a phenomenology of spiritual perception, using Max Scheler’s phenomenology of value-perception as a framework.

First, I describe Scheler’s phenomenology. Value-perception is an intentional act whereby one feels the value or disvalue of things. Values, which fall into an objective hierarchy, include the usefulness, vitality, beauty, and holiness of things. Value-perception guides our actions, sense-perceptions, and reasoning.

Next, I develop this phenomenology by describing two kinds of spiritual perception, sacramental and intuitive perception, both guided by feeling the value of holiness. In the former, one perceives God present in or signified by creatures, as in a saint or in nature. In the latter, one perceives God directly, without creaturely mediation, as in mystical experience. I focus on sacramental perception so as to argue that spiritual perception guided by the feeling of holiness yields the most accurate view of the world, revealing that creatures just are revelations of God. I briefly present a metaphysical account, supported by this phenomenology, of how God, creatures considered as revelations of God, and the value of holiness relate to one another.

In order to spiritually perceive, one must prefer holiness to all values lower on the hierarchy. But I argue that once one attains this perception, one also attains the ability to perceive God in ways guided by other values, such as vitality, beauty, and moral goodness, as well. Spiritual perception is also not just an experience of the world as revealed through a hierarchy of values, but also as containing values and features that one alone can perceive, by which one is directly addressed by God, as when one perceives one’s vocation. But many other instances of spiritual perception are only possible if one experiences oneself as a member of certain communities or traditions. I close the paper by describing individual and communal value-guided spiritual perception.

Using the context of Jorge J.E. Gracia’s neutralist metaphysics of categories, I argue that every category is beautiful. I first consider an objection to neutralism that has been raised by Thomistic and realist phenomenologists: that this metaphysics is unduly separated from contact with reality and from what is given experientially. I then summarize three metaphysical accounts that form the background to my thesis: Gracia’s neutralism; the scholastic account of beauty as a transcendental property of all beings; and the Baroque scholastic idea of supertranscendental being, a category which includes all real, possible, and impossible beings. In the last of these three sections, I focus especially on the argument of seventeenth century Iberian scholastic Sylvester Mauro that every supertranscendental being is beautiful. Gracia’s categories bear many striking resemblances to Mauro’s supertranscendental being, though I contend that Gracia’s metaphysics reaches a more fundamental level of analysis than Mauro’s. Using this background, I show how the arguments for transcendental and supertranscendental beauty can be used to show that every neutralist category is beautiful. In conclusion, I answer several objections, and argue in particular that grasping how each category is beautiful overcomes the objection with which I began the paper. Most importantly, grasping this also helps us to see more clearly how Gracia has identified what is fundamental to metaphysics more successfully than Thomistic or realist phenomenological metaphysicians have.

In an earlier paper, Mark Spencer synthesized three understandings of divine simplicity, arguing that the Thomist account can be enriched by Scotist and Palamite distinctions. After summarizing that earlier work, this paper builds upon it in four main ways. Firstly, it relates Scotus' logical (diminished) univocity to Aquinas' metaphysical analogy in language about God. Secondly, it explores the limits of univocity and the formal distinction as applied to the divine essence (in the Palamite sense), utilising the scientific metaphor of tomography. Thirdly, it defends Palamite energies from the charge of being Thomistic accidents by introducing the concept of "intrinsic ramification" and applying that concept to the Thomistic divine ideas. Fourthly, it tabulates some significant pre-existing parallels between the three systems' nomenclature in referring to similar aspects of the divine.

Thomistic metaphysics has been challenged on the grounds that its principles are inconsistent with our experiences of divine action and of our own subjectivity. Challenges of this sort have been raised by Eastern Christian thinkers in the school of Gregory Palamas and by contemporary personalists; they propose alternative metaphysics to explain these experience. Against these objections and against those Thomists who hold that Thomas Aquinas’ claims exclude Byzantine and Personalist metaphysics, I argue that Thomas’ metaphysical principles already have “flexibility” built into them, such that they can accommodate ways that reality is given in experience, which Thomas did not consider. I argue for this claim using the work of Byzantine and Personalist Thomists, and especially of Jacques Maritain, who outlines several ways in which Thomistic metaphysical principles can be expanded to explain experiences that he did not consider.

Thomas Aquinas holds that we have a natural duty to offer God external sacrifice, in which something is destroyed or killed. I propose a metaphysics on which that claim makes sense. I first consider the Thomistic grounding for this duty in relations between spiritual and bodily acts, and between natural sacrifice and Christ's sacrifice; these groundings are a preamble to the faith. I draw an objection from Francisco Suárez to the anthropological grounding, and another from René Girard to the claim that natural sacrifice prefigures Christ's sacrifice. I respond by developing the Thomistic anthropology that grounds this duty, using the paleoanthropological, evolutionary theory called the "hunting hypothesis" (especially using the ways this hypothesis has been joined to an analysis of ancient myth and sacrificial practice by Roberto Calasso) to argue that we have a natural teleological orientation fulfilled through destructive sacrifice. I argue that we are naturally priests, who offer creatures back to God; grasping this shows how our natural duty to sacrifice prefigures Christ's sacrifice.

While all phenomenologists aim to grasp the “things themselves,” they disagree about the best method for doing this and about what the “thing themselves” are. Many metaphysicians, especially Catholic realists, reject phenomenology altogether. I show that many phenomenological methods are useful for reaching the goals of both phenomenology and realist metaphysics. First, I present a history of phenomenological methods including those used by Scheler, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Marion, Kearney, Rocha, and others. Next, I consider two sets of challenges raised to some of these methods. Finally, I outline how to join these methods with each other and with the methods of realist metaphysics, ultimately arriving at an aesthetic method, inspired by the work of von Balthasar, for considering fundamental phenomena.

Some recent philosophers of religion has argued that no divine attribute sufficiently grounds an obligation to worship God. I argue that divine beauty grounds this obligation. This claim is immune to the objections that have been raised to claims that other divine attributes ground this obligation, and can be upheld even if, for the sake of argument, those objections are granted. First, I give an account of what worship is. Second, I consider reasons for and against the claims that the obligation to worship is rooted in God’s having created us, God’s being our final end and lawgiver, God’s numinousness, and God’s goodness. Finally, I show how divine beauty grounds the obligation to worship, by drawing together accounts of beauty from Thomas Aquinas, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Plato, Aristotle, and others.

Medieval accounts of the separated soul (that is, the disembodied soul after death and prior to the resurrection) parallel, in certain respects, contemporary models for understanding disability, including the medical, social and cultural models, and they parallel aspects of contemporary thinking about the relation between disability and well-being. In this paper’s first section, consider accounts of cognitive impairments and disabilities in the separated soul, first presenting the views of Dominicans like Thomas Aquinas and Bernard of Trilia, and second considering the views of Franciscans like Bonaventure, Matthew of Acquasparta, and John Duns Scotus. In the second section, I consider accounts of impairments in well-being in the separated soul resulting from its lacking a body, again drawing first on Dominican views and second on Franciscans. Throughout I show the parallels mentioned above, and I formulate principles that at least implicitly guided medieval thinking about disability, focusing on how medieval accounts of disability were largely determined by their accounts of human nature.

Abstract: Aquinas defines justice as having a will to render to each individual his or her right, and he divides justice into commutative and distributive justice. But I argue in this paper that phenomenological analyses of our communal experiences have shown, that there are cases in which we owe rights not to individuals, but to communities, and in which we owe rights to individuals in a non-commutative, non-distributive way. Accounting for these cases, while maintaining Aquinas’ account of right, requires revising Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics. First, a new category must be added: the category of artifacts, which includes both material artifacts and communities. Second a new kind of causality, distinct from per se and per accidens causality, must be posited: causality by free cooperation. With these changes to the metaphysics, the Thomistic account of justice can be revised to fit more clearly with our experience.

Dietrich von Hildebrand's Aesthetics contains a number of significant metaphysical developments of the scholastic and Aristotelian tradition. Among these are the positing of a new category of being, aesthetic entities, which include things like landscapes. I systematize von Hildebrand's metaphysics of these entities in light of the older tradition. After giving some arguments that these are real beings, irreducible to other kinds of beings, I show, by comparison with the traditionally-enumerated categories, that they constitute their own category. Then, I show how considering aesthetic entities allows us to see how von Hildebrand builds upon the scholastic account of the principles and properties of being, positing new principles and properties of being such as the appearance of a being. This is, in fact, in continuity with the metaphysics of beauty found in Aristotle and some of his followers.

Phenomenologist Dietrich von Hildebrand argues that many properties of the material world only exist in relation to persons, that sense perception is not merely a bodily act, but a properly spiritual, personal act, and that our highest act is not purely intellectual but involves bodily sense perception. By his own assertion, his philosophy must be understood in the context of the Catholic philosophical tradition; here, I consider his account of the material world and of sense perception in comparison to two strands of the Aristotelian tradition in Catholic philosophy, represented by Thomas Aquinas and Gregory Palamas. I show how von Hildebrand's views on the material world and sense perception can be better understood, their phenomenological bases defended, and their deficiencies corrected, by drawing on the notion of energeiai from Palamas' thought, and of participation and obediential potency from Aquinas' thought.

Dietrich von Hildebrand is often seen as being at odds with the scholastics in his anthropology. I argue that he in fact uses scholastic principles when distinguishing the powers of the human soul, but he uses these principles to distinguish many more powers in our souls than the scholastics do. His expansion of the list of human powers both is supported by and safeguards his expanded metaphysics of given reality. I first consider the principles that the scholastics use in reasoning about powers. I then show how von Hildebrand’s account of the human person is hylomorphic. I finally present von Hildebrand’s account of human powers, in light of the scholastic principles, considering his accounts first of bodily powers and then of powers in the soul.

Christian Personalists (such as Balthasar and Yannaras) have objected to Thomism's claim that humans could have existed in a state (status) of pure nature, on the grounds that this claim entails that historical states like grace do not give fundamental meaning to us, that these states are merely accidental, and that it led to modern secularism. I show that Thomism can affirm its traditional claims regarding grace and pure nature, while denying the first two implications, by developing the Thomistic metaphysics of status. On Thomism rightly understood persons develop historically through status in non-accidental ways and grace gives fundamental meaning to our lives. But I also argue that modern secular experiences (such as experiences of secularity, anxiety, and absurdity described by Heidegger, Camus, and Taylor) are natural to the human person, not merely the result of sin, and that this is rightly supported by the theory of pure nature.

I argue that Thomas Aquinas' account of divine simplicity is, contrary to many, compatible with the accounts of divine simplicity given by John Duns Scotus and Gregory Palamas. I synthesize the three thinkers' accounts of divine simplicity in a way founded on Aquinas' logic and metaphysics. This synthesis can answer three objections to the doctrine of divine simplicity more effectively than any of the individual accounts can: the objections that the doctrine of divine simplicity is inconsistent with distinguishing divine attributes, with the doctrine of the Trinity, and with the doctrine of divine freedom.

There has been a recent surge in literature on spiritual perception. The idea of spiritual perception, in which God is perceived in a sense-like manner, can be rendered more plausible by being fit into a plausible phenomenology and metaphysics. In this paper, I argue that there are many everyday experiences analogous to and providing a framework for spiritual perception described by the phenomenologists, and that all these experiences can be made sense of on a Thomistic metaphysics. In doing so, I respond to those Thomists who reject the notion of spiritual perception as metaphorical. First, I describe two forms of spiritual perception. Then, I place them in the phenomenological framework of Max Scheler’s value-perception and Jean Luc-Marion’s saturated phenomenon. Next, I review some texts of Aquinas on spiritual perception. I then present Aquinas’ metaphysics of perception in the context of his metaphysics of the human person, focusing on his notion of knowledge by connaturality. I then account for spiritual perception, and the analogous experiences described by the phenomenologists, in terms of this metaphysics.

On traditional Thomistic hylomorphism, the separated soul cannot preserve what it’s like to be particular human person. I present a phenomenological revision of Thomistic hylomorphism on which the separated soul can retain what it’s like to be a particular human person, and which is truer to our embodied experience than traditional hylomorphism. First, I present Aquinas’ account of what it’s like to be an embodied person and a separated soul, and then I present my revision. My revision highlights the central importance of holistic aesthetic, spiritually perceptive, and liturgical experiences to human flourishing and beatitude.

According to certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, the behavior of some physical systems is random—that is, certain current states of physical systems are related to other current and the set of possible future states in a probabilistic, rather than a deterministic, fashion. This account of physical systems seems to conflict with the claim that there is an omnipotent God—that is, a God Who can efficaciously bring about any logically possible creaturely state, and Who can cause efficacious secondary causes—and so raises problems for classical theism. After explaining these problems, I provide a solution to them based upon a version of hylomorphism, which I call Theistic Hylomorphism with Randomness. On this view, it can be affirmed that the physical world is both random and in determinate states, and divine omnipotence can be upheld in a random world. After presenting this version of hylomorphism and showing how it defeats the problems for classical theism raised by quantum mechanics, I defend it against three objections.

In this paper we present the standard Thomistic view concerning substances and their parts.  We then note some objections to that view.  Afterwards, we present Aquinas’ Christology, then draw an analogy between the relation that holds between the Second Person and the assumed human nature, on the one hand, and the relation that holds between a substance whole and its substance parts, on the other.  We then show how the analogy, which St. Thomas himself drew at points, is useful for providing a theory that answers the objections that the standard Thomistic view faces.  Finally we answer objections to our approach.  We conclude that there is a hylomorphic theory, founded on an analogy from Aquinas’s Christology, that fits well with the empirical data concerning substance parts, on which some complete created material substances have other complete created material substances as parts.

Are all God’s activities identical to God?  If not, which are identical to God and which not?  Although it is seldom noticed, the texts of Aquinas (at least on the surface) suggest conflicting answers to these questions, giving rise to a diversity of opinion among interpreters of Aquinas.  In this paper, we draw attention to this conflict and offer what we believe to be the strongest textual and speculative support for and against each of the main answers to these questions.

Abstract: Many personalists have argued that an adequate account of the human person must include an account of subjectivity as irreducible to anything objectively definable. The personalists contend that Aristotle lacks such an account, claiming that he fails to meet three criteria that a theory of the human person must fulfill in order to have an account of subjectivity as irreducible. I show first that some later Aristotelians fulfill these criteria, and then that Aristotle himself also does so. I do this through an interpretation of Aristotle’s accounts of substantial actualities, nous, friendship, and beauty.