Rabbi Tzvi Freeman writes about the dichotomy between
natural and supernatural and how unnecessary it is. He quotes a question ask
him form the general public, a question that shows the extent to which
supernature has been discredited and slandered:
The supernatural seems irrational, superstitious, archaic and primitive.
So far, the natural world has provided explanations for the previously
mysterious unknown: social psychology, psychiatry, chemistry, mathematics,
biology, medicine, physics, astronomy, geology and history have aided humanity
and preserved our mental and physical health and extended our lives.
So why do we refer to
G-d to as a
supernatural being? Where is the evidence that the supernatural exists, or has
any bearing on our lives? Does the word "supernatural" even mean
anything, other than "I don't understand this (yet)"?
[1]
Here we see several of these misconceptions about the
supernatural, not only because it’s linked to superstition, which it clearly
has nothing to do with, but also the idea that God is “a supernatural being”
(whatever that is) and that there’s no evidence for it, when in reality the
evidence everywhere, in the previous article Dawkins gives us a bunch of it,
even though he thinks it’s disproving supernatrue. The questioner puts this
dichotomy in terms of the known (nature) and the unknown (supernature). The
Rabbi’s answer takes off along these very lines; known and unknown.
“Superntural” he deduces is based upon whatever doesn’t’ fit the categories of
knowledge listed; all of course are scientific categories. That’s the only form
of knowledge that atheists will think about or accept. Everything must be
scientific or it doesn’t exist. Dawkins concept of a rational form of religion
is a scientific (“Einstein”) religion.
The Original Concept of Supernature
All
of these objections assume a certain version of the supernatural. The
supernatural
has become a catch-all for anything non materialistic or naturalistic that
scientistic types want to snub without really having to disprove it.
Supernatural today means anything from ghosts, Bigfoot, UFO to psychic powers,
and angels and demons and God in heaven. Not so with the original concept. In
the early centuries of Christian philosophy the original Greek fathers thought
of God as transcendent but they did not necessarily conceive of that as
“supernatural.” The Supernatural was something very different then than it is
now. This is important because that original meaning, which Christian
spiritually was predicated upon, is empirically probable and completely
naturalistic and can be shown to be real by simple scientific means. We have to
understand the original concept, there are two thinkers who tried to restore
the concept to it’s original form and we need to listen to what they tried to
say. The first one was Matthias Joseph Scheeben (born,
1 March, 1835; died at Cologne, 21
July, 1888.) His major work was
Nature
and Grace.
[2] Scheeben was a mystic who
contemplated and studied divine grace and hypostatic union. He was also of
greatly accomplished academically and was a fine scholarly of scholastic
theology. He studied at the Gregorian
University at Rome
and taught dogmatic theology at the Episcopal seminary
at Cologne. Scheeben
was the chief defender of the faith against rationalism in the nineteenth
century.
In the summer of 1888, Scheeben died in Cologne,
having spent most of his fifty-three years teaching dogmatics and moral
theology in the archdiocesan seminary there. He was Germany's
most persuasive defender of Vatican Fs decision on papal infallibility and an
impassioned advocate of religious freedom in the Kulturkampf, Bismarck's
determined but finally unsuccessful effort to subject the Catholic Church to
the control of his new German state. He was also the author of three major
dogmatic works: Nature and Grace (1861), The Mysteries of Christianity (1865),
and the massive Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics, left unfinished at his death.
The generations that followed Scheeben regarded him as one of the
greatest minds of modern Catholic theology. His books were repeatedly
republished in Germany
up into the 1960s and translated into other European languages, including
English (the Dogmatics, alas, only in highly truncated form). Since the Second
Vatican Council, though, he has mostly been neglected by theological teachers
and students who have wrongly imagined the nineteenth-century Catholic
tradition to be a period of antimodern darkness.
The Catholic world of a hundred or more
years ago was quite right, I think, to see the Cologne
seminary professor as perhaps the finest modern Catholic dogmatic theologian.
His writings not only yield rare insight into the mysteries of Christian faith,
they draw the attentive reader ever more deeply into the mysteries themselves.
Scheeben is more important now than he has ever been. He can teach a
theological generation that has sold its inestimable birthright how to restore
and renew dogmatic theology.
[3]
The other
thinker is Eugene R. Fairweather (2
November 1920-) was Anglican scholar and translator of Church
fathers from Ottowa. MA in Philosophy form University
of Toronto (1943) Ordained priest
in 1944 and became tutor at Trinity college Toronto
same year. He studied theology at Union theological seminary and earned his
Th.D. in 1949. He had an honorary doctorate from McGill
University. At the time he wrote
his article “Christianity and the Supernatural” he was editor of the Canadian
Journal of Theology and professor of dogmatic theology and ethics at Trinity
College, Toronto.
[4]
Fairweather quotes Scheeben and bases part of his view upon Scheeben’s.
Fairweather’s
view of the supernatural is contrary to the notion of two opossing realms, or a
dualism. He uses the phrase “two-sidedness,” there is a “two-sidedness” about
reality but it’s not a real dualism. The Supernatural is that which is above
the natural in a certain sense but it is also working in the natural. There are
supernatural effects which in the natural realm and make up part of human life.
Essentially we can that “the supernatural” (supernature) is an ontology.
Fiarweather doesn’t use that term but that’s essentially what he’s describing.
Ontology is a philological description of reality. Supernature describes
reality in that it is the ground and end of the natural. What that means is
unpacked by Fairweather to mean that it is an ordered relation of means to
immediate ends with respect to their final ends. “The Essential structure of
the Christian faith has a real two-sidedness about it, which may at first lead
the unwary into a dualism and then encourage the attempt to resolve the dualism
by an exclusive emphasis upon one or the other [side] of the severed element of
completely Christianity.”
[5] He
explains the ordered relation several times through paring off opposites or
supposed opposites: human/divine; immanent/transcendent; realm of Grace/realm
of nature. All of these he refers to as “ordered relations.”
[6]
If this was Derrida we would call them binary oppositions. In calling them
“ordered” he is surely saying one is ‘above’ the other in some sense. They are
not necessary oppositions because that’s his whole point, not a true dualism.
Supernature
is working in nature. It’s not breaking in unwelcome but is drawing the
workings of nature to a higher level. Fairweather describes it as the “ground
and end of nature.” In other words is the basis upon which nature comes to be
and the goal toward which nature moves. Now it’s true that science removes the
teleological from nature it doesn’t see it as moving toward a goal but that’s
because it can’t consider anything beyond its own domain. Science is supposed
to be empirical consideration of the natural realm and is supposed to keep its
nose out of the business of commentary on metaphysics. Of course modern science
does the opposite it become a form of metaphysics by infusing itself with
philosophical assumptions and then declaring there is nothing beyond the
natural/material realm. That is to say, when it is dominated by secularist
concerns that are the direction science is put in by ideological interests. Be
that as it may, theological we can take a broader view and we see a goal
oriented aspect to the natural. Supernatural effects draw the natural toward
supernature. That is to say human nature responds to the calling of God in
elevating humans to a higher level of consciousness. Another example of the
ground and end of nature that Fairweather doesn’t give, but I like to use, is
Martin Luther King’s statement about the arch of the moral universe is long but
it bends towards justice. Nothing in nature bends toward justice, if by
“nature” we mean rocks and trees but there more to the natural realm than just
those aspects that science studies. Humans are part of the realm of the natural
and it’s part of our social world that we understand concepts of justice. Due
to our own purposive nature we bend the arch of the moral universe toward
justice.
The term
Supernatural (SN) comes to us from Aquinas.
[7]
He gets it from John Scotus Erigena and Burgundio of Pisa, who in turn take it
from Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus.
[8]
The latter used the adverbial form
Supernaturaliter. This is coming from
the Greek hyperphuos.
[9]
“From an early period the concept of ‘that which is above nature’ had been
seized upon by Christian Theologians as an appropriate means of stating the
core of the gospel, so far example, Origen tells how God raises man above human
nature…and makes him change into a better and divine nature.”
[10]
John Chrysostom speaks of speaks of humans having received grace “health beauty
honor and dignities far exceeding our nature.”
[11]
“In the West the most concise expression of the idea is to be found in the Leonine
prayer ‘grant us to be partakers of his divinity who deigned to become
partakers of our humanity.’”
[12]
“In these and a multitude of patristic texts the essential point is just this,
that God, who is essentially superntrual perfects with a perfection beyond
creaturely comprehension. Nevertheless elevates human creatures to a true
participation in divine life an indwelling of God in man and man in God.”
[13]
The important point here is that human nature is being raised to the higher
level of divine. We can see this manifests itself through the experience
commonly known as “mystical.” That I will take up shortly, First, let’s turn to
Scheeben to document further that is the nature of the supernatural.
Supernatural is the power of God to raise us to this higher level.
Scheeben
deals with the distinction between natural and supernatural faith. Throughout
his writings we see this typified in terms of the tendency of the power of God
to elevate humanity to a higher spiritual level. This means consciousness as
well as habit. He speaks of “supernatural effects,” the effect that the pull of
the supernatural has upon the natural. This is why it’s valid to think of the
supernatural as an ontology, it’s a description of reality, or what is. Empirically
that description tends toward the realization of human consciousness reaching
to a higher level as a result of certain kinds of experiences. Scheeben
expresses this in terms of “higher nature.” Super nature is the higher nature
to which human nature is being elevated.
If the lower nature is raised in all of
these respects to the level of a higher nature, and especially if this nature
modifies the lower nature so deeply and affects it so powerfully that the
limits of possibility are reached; if God, purest light and mightiest fire,
wishes through to permeate his creature with his energy, to flood it with brightness
and warmth to transform it into his own splendor, to make the creature like the
father of spirits and impart to it the fullness of his own divine life, if I
say, the entire being of the soul is altered in the deepest recesses and in all
its ramifications to the very last, not by annihilation, but by exaltation and
transfiguration. Then we can affirm that a new higher nature has come to the
lower nature, because it has been granted a participation in the essence of him
to whom the higher nature properly belongs.
[14]
He seeks in one point of his work to resolve a fine point of
difficulty between the Thomist-Molinist dicthotomy. Scheeben didn’t like dichotomies
and thus seeks a third way. His solution is to see the natural as a mirror of
the divine. The dichotomy deals with predestination, grace and free will.
That’s not the issue I don’t want to get off into that. For Scheeben the
authority of God is the sole formal object of faith. Thus faith is divine both
in its source and object.
[15]
According to this position faith is neither the result of rational self
interest nor a consequence of the human spirit. We must not mistake the
manifestation in experience for the motive of faith. Faith is the result of
obedience to the drawing power and call of God.
[16]
Nature (Greek
Physis, Latin
natura) is the realm of life from
life, according to Scheeben. Super nature is the overarching principle toward
which nature strives
The whole point is that the life of the
children of God is directed to such specific objects and ends as cannot be
striven for or attained, at least
in a way that corresponds to their
loftiness, except by acts of a supernatural perfection, that is, of a
perfection unattainable by nature, —in other words, by acts which are kindred
and similar to the proper life of God in its loftiness.
[17]
We can see in his answers to the Thoamsit/Molinist issue the
basis of the claim that Super nature is the power of God to rise us to a higher
level. This is how Schebeen construed it. In summarizing Murry speaks of “power which flow from the new nature,”
that is his starting point(16). One
conclusion follows immediately: the new powers which flow from the new nature
must themselves be “an image of the divine vital powers”(17), i.e. the specific
perfection of the divine vital powers must reflect itself in their working.
That is Scheeben’s “Grundanschauung”, on which rests all his theorizing about
supernatural acts. In a word, to the divinization of man’s nature corresponds a
divinization of his activity(18). And Scheeben is occupied wholly in drawing
out the nature of this divinization and its consequences. The immediate
consequence, in which I am here interested, is that man’s divinized activity
must be directed to objects of the specifically divine order. The essence of
Scheeben’s thought is revealed in this sufficiently characteristic passage:
[18]
The passage in Scheeben to which he refers:
If we have truly become partakers in
the divine nature, and by this supernature have become most intimately akin to
the divine nature.... then we are taken up into the sphere of its life; then
the Godhead itself in its immediacy and in its own proper essence as it is in
itself becomes the object of our activity. Then we shall know God Himself,
illuminated by His light, without the mirror of creatures; then we shall love
God immediately in Himself, no longer as the Creator of our nature, but as One
Who communicates His own nature to us, —penetrated as we are by His fire, and
made akin to Him in His divine eminence . . . In a word, if we become partakers
of the divine nature, our life and our activity must be specifically similar to
the divine. To this end it must’ have the same specific, formal, characteristic
object as the divine activity has.
[19]
Murray
summarizes again:
This one passage, out of many(20), is
sufficient to show how the theory of the supernatural object enters into
Scheeben’s system, namely as a consequence of (or if you wish, as a postulate
for the completion of) his favorite parallelism between the divine life of God
Himself and the life of grace in His creature(21). That parallelism suggests
the formula that man’s supernatural activity is “an image of the divine activity”,
and this formula in turn commands on the one hand the introduction of a
supernatural object (i.e. “God as He is in Himself”), and on the other hand
dictates the consistent use of the term “immediate” to characterize the nature
of the union with God that is effected by supernatural knowledge and love(22).
In this last detail, — that supernatural activity unites the soul immediately
to God, — Scheeben’s theory culminates. The idea appealed immensely to him,
though practically speaking it merely means that “God as He is in Himself” is
the immediate object of supernatural activity. Its contrary is that natural
activity effects no immediate union with God, since it reaches God only through
the medium of creatures, and not “as He is in Himself”
[20]
In all of
these descriptions we see one standard concept: that supernature is a life, an
experience, an inner relation between the divine and human nature. He says
supernture is that which we partake of divine life. Human nature is elevated to
the higher level by super nature and this primarily the way Scheeben speaks of
supernature. This is what super nature is, the power of God to elevate to a
higher level. There is an indication form what is said that “the supernatural”
is a level of being above he realm of the natural. That must be the case
because the power of God to elevate would surely be centered upon a higher
level than then natural. That doesn’t mean that we are free to associate the
supernatural with psychic powers and ghosts and unexplained phenomena and anything
“x-files” like. The sense that the supernatural is above the nature is an
implication of the ontology; the ground and end of the natural would sure be on
some higher level in a sense. The more important aspect that all of these
writers speak of is “participation” in divine life. Shceeben speaks directly of
super nature just that, the divine life in which we are elevated to participate
in.
The
important aspect of all of this in relation to science is that super nature is
not some juxtaposed belief in the unseen that has no analogy in the empirical.
The experience of being raised to a higher level through contact with the
divine life is clearly empirical. It may be a matter of interpretation as to
the cause of the effects, but the effects of what is called “religious
experience” are certainly empirical. It’s not hard to link those experiences
with the divine; the content of them is that of God and the divine relation to
the world. This is what most of those who experiences these things think they
experienced.
[2] Matthias Joseph Scheeben,
Nature and Grace, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2009 (paperback) originally
unpublished
1856.
Visitied August
14, 2012. Bruce D. Marshall is professor of Christian doctrine at
Perkins School of Theology.(c) 2012 Institute of
Religion and Public Life
[4] Editor’s introduction to
Eugene R. Fairweather, “Christianity and the Supernatural,” in
New Theology
no.1. New York:
Macmillian, Martin E. Marty and Dean G. Peerman ed. 1964. 235-256.
[7] Fairweather,ibid, 239
Pseudo-Dionysius Ep 4, ad Caium (PG 3:1072)
[10] Fairweather, ibid (239).
[12] Fairweather quoting
Leonine prayer, ibid.
[14] Maithias Jospeh Scheeben
quoted in Fairweather (239-240). Fairwether fn Scheeben the version he uses.
M.J. Scheeben, Nature and Grace, St. Lewis: Herder, 1954, 30.
[15] Avery Dulles, S.J.
An
Assurance of Things Hoped for: A Theology of Christian Faith. Oxford,
New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994, 90.
[17] Scheeben, quoted in
Works
by John Courtney Murray Chapter II “Natural and supernatural Faith.”
Website, Woodstock Theological
Center Library. P100 URL:
http://woodstock.georgetown.edu/library/murray/1937-2.htm visited August 14, 2012
Mathias Joseph Scheeben on
faith, Doctoral Dissertation of John Courtney Murry
Woodstock Theological Center Library.
This volume in the Toronto
Studies in Theology reproduces the doctoral dissertation John Courtney Murray,
S.J. (1904-1967) completed in the spring of 1937 at the Gregorian University in Rome. From then until now, the Gregorian University archives contained the original typescript of
“Matthias Joseph Scheeben’s Doctrine on Supernatural, Divine Faith: A Critical
Exposition”. A carbon-copy was incorporated into the Murray Archives housed by
the Woodstock Theological Library in the Special Collections Room of the Joseph
Mark Lauinger Library at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. John Courtney
Murray eventually published the third chapter, modified and disengaged from its
original context (1). The complete, original text is published here for the
first time.
[18] John Courtney Murray
summarizing Scheeben, ibid.
[19] Scheeben quoted in
Muarry, ibdid, p101
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