Soundings in the History of a Hope

The Soteriology of Thomas Aquinas
in Transcendental Theological Reflection:

Notes on the Tertia pars of the Summa Theologiae

Richard Schenk OP
Berkeley

Lectures:

I.
Introduction to the Topics and Methodology of the Lectures

It is a well-proven custom of philosophical and theological discourse to begin a discussion of this kind by stating three things: firstly, what different topics are to be addressed; then, what unity is to be sought among these different topics; and finally, how one intends to proceed to find that unity. Post-medieval scholasticism spoke in the first case of the "obiectum materiale" or "materiale quod"; then of the "obiectum formale" or "formale quod"; and finally of the "methodus", the "lumen formale" or "formale quo". Before you feel yourselves uncomfortably reminded of neo-scholastic textbooks, let me recall that 20th century phenomenology speaks in a similar way. In what was arguably the most important philosophical book of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, as well as in the lectures at Marburg which prepared the book, the question of being is also posed according to this three-fold discretion: firstly, the broad field of study ("das Sachfeld") or the individual items to be investigated ("das Gefragte"); then, the precise issue at stake, what unitary aspect is to be looked for among all the many objects ("die Sachhinsicht" or "das Erfragte"); and finally, the manner of treatment ("die Behandlungsart"), in particular whatsspecific text or being is to be examined or "interrogated" ("das Befragte") as a method of coming to the theme sought. My first obligation is thus to give you some initial orientation on these three points. (Perhaps what is meant with these three points will become clearer as well). Let us begin, in somewhat unorthodox manner, with the final point, explaining in part what method we will follow.

II.
First Approach to the Question of Method: Examining a Certain Text

My methodological task has been made simpler by the fact that, if I might use military terminology, I have already received my "marching orders" from the organizers of this series: I am to conclude a lecture series on the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas by talking about its shortest and uncompleted third part. The text chosen for interrogation seems therefore clear enough, at least at first, although the method is complicated by an addition to my "instructions": the text is to be viewed in the con-text of contemporary problems. Formal methods are always determined by the formal aspects they are meant to reveal, and any revelations which can possibly be expected in the course of an investigation are in turn co-determined from the start by the method applied. In our case, soteriology, which, as we shall see, is the aspect of theology which Thomas talks about in the text of the Tertia pars, could never be appreciated fully apart from the context of our own need for salvation. This necessary addition in my "marching orders" of a contemporary context to a medieval text makes our method more sensible and more sensitive, as will become clearer when we look more closely at the formal concern of our discussions; but it also makes our method more complicated and less capable of comprehensive application within the six hours allotted for this series of talks. Even for these reasons of method, our presentation can address only fragments of what could be talked about. The method of interrogating Thomas Aquinas' text would appear even more complicated, were we to articulate some of the other contexts necessary for this text, for example: the more or less contemporary opponents of Thomas; the changes he makes over and against his own earlier opinions; the earlier Jewish-Christian traditions of texts and belief to which Thomas refers; the common human nature underlying historical epochs; and those differences between the epochs (say, between the 13th and 20th centuries), which individuate, qualify, and transform or re-form human nature and Christian belief. But let us return for the moment to the text itself, lest these many contexts become our main text and theme from the start.

III.
The Multiplicity of Material Objects

The necessarily fragmentary character of our discussions should also be apparent from the numerous fields investigated by Thomas (the material objects) in the text of the Tertia pars. Most generally speaking, the topics Thomas wanted to cover here belong to Christology, sacramental theology, and eschatology. Thomas seems to have begun this final section of the Summa during his last weeks at Paris in the early spring of 1272, and he continued the text probably during his journey to Naples and certainly during his stay there for the next year and a half, breaking off work on all his writing projects in the middle of the treatise on sacraments four months before his early death in March of 1274; Thomas was not yet 50 years of age. The medievals did not mind publishing completed major sections of works, say, a commentary on the third book of the Sentences or the Prima pars of a Summa, but they had an abhorrence of uncompleted sections, of fragments. If the unfinished section of some work was worth publishing at all, it was worth a "continuatio", a supplement prepared by others, preferably made for the occasion after consulting the works of the author himself; at worst, by tacking on an independent work of another author. In this case, the preferable mode was chosen. Thus we have about half of the Tertia pars from Thomas himself, 548 articles grouped into 90 questions on Christ and the sacraments, then a supplementum prepared after his death, comprising 448 articles organized into 101 questions on individual sacraments and eschatology.

Thomas had finished the Christological section, subdivided roughly into, first, the traditional tract of questions on the personal union of two natures and the consequences of that union (Questions 1-26) and then, second, a new kind of tract which Thomas developed for the first time, dealing with the birth, life, death and exaltation of Jesus Christ (Questions 27-59). He then dealt with the sacraments, beginning, as was usual at the time, with a general treatise on sacramentality in general (Questions 60-65).

This section was shorter than we would expect today. Post-Vatican II theology would have developed here more explicitly than Thomas did the treatise on the church as a whole, the main topic of the Council and of Catholic theology in the 20 years following the Council. A "post-post Vatican II theology", if you will forgive the term, now seems to be replacing the post-conciliar period. It can be characterized per modum negationis as no longer feeling itself particularly obliged to justify its main concerns by an appeal to the letter or even the spirit of the Council. Per modum affirmationis, this "post-post Vatican II theology" would develop at this point of soteriology an explicit Christian theology of non-Christian religions. A good example of this shift is the newest book on Christology by the T¸bingen theologian, Peter H¸nermann: Jesus Christus. Gottes Wort in der Zeit (M¸nster 1994). Although the work ends with the ecclesial dimensions of Christology and sacramental communication, including a few references back to the II Vatican Council, it begins with the problems of modernism/postmodernism, the claims of Christ and Christianity over and against other religions and their founders, and the older problem of faith vis-a-vis the historical-critical method. These non-conciliar issues provide the systematic background for the bulk of the book, a review of the history of Christological reflection.

Thomas Aquinas, after dealing briefly (all too briefly) with these topics of sacramentality in general, the church, and the cultic practice of non-Christian religions, goes quickly onto his treatise on the individual sacraments, completing the sections on the sacraments of initiation (baptism, confirmation, and eucharist, Questions 66-83), before breaking off his work in the middle of the treatise on reconciliation (at Question 90). Abandoning his writing projects, Thomas never finished the parts on the remaining sacraments or the crucial section on eschatology.

Now, you might think that, as I have already mentioned the necessity of accepting the fragmentary nature of our discussion, I might be satisfied to deal with the smaller sum of a mere 548 articles. Your suspicion would increase, if you knew of my opinion that our own age, in contrast to Thomas', prefers fragments to total systems. We tend to like ancient, ruined temples more than new Mormon ones; we prefer half-restored, "conserved" churches to totally repristinized ones; we find unfinished art-works a relief over and against total vision. At least in Western Europe and the United States, we are willing to pay more money for new blue jeans made to look tattered and torn from the start. We don't trust order without a perceptible degree of chaos, which means that there might be hope yet for the future of the Dominican order. Whereas Hegel belonged to the older world in saying that truth is found only in the totality of the whole, our times are more summed up in Adorno's response that totality will always be false. So we should choose Thomas' authentic fragment over the artificial whole, right? Well, not quite. It is true that I will not be dealing with any of the articles from the supplement, just with Thomas' own work, but in presenting the Tertia pars I will be doing a bit of supplementing on my own, re-doing in a sense what the medieval Dominicans had already done; and that, for three reasons:

The least important reason involves the value of the history of the reception of an idea for evaluating the idea itself. If you want to find out what a thinker chiefly thought, it is best to start with what was new about his thought. If you want to find out what was new about his thought, you should look for places where he states or at least reveals that he has changed his mind or where others state that this thought is new, perhaps even new and shocking. What is new need not be true, but it will usually be intended by the author. Some of the most controversial and thus most intentional positions which Thomas Aquinas maintained during the roughly 20 year span of his teaching career had to do with the problem of death, the dark side of the mystery of the resurrection. This topic was near the center of the controversies in which Thomas' teaching was opposed in 1277 by the bishops and theological faculties of Paris and Oxford, including the Dominican primate of England, Robert Kilwardby, and, from about the same time on, by the Franciscon William de la Mare, whose work Correctorium fratris Thomae is the first sytematic compendium written entirely against Thomas. These condemnations and works, which were responsible for awaking Dominicans from their usual indifference to their own theologians, led indirectly to the first serious school of Thomism. As with most thinkers, Thomas owes his initial fame more to his opponents than to his supporters. This controversial theme of death and resurrection was meant to be the final topic of the Tertia pars and the Summa, the climax of the work, and since Thomas had rather unique views on the subject, it would hardly be possible to due justice to the intention of the Tertia pars without reflecting on what Thomas had planned for this climax to his work. Conversely, the authentic part of the Tertia pars appeared too late to become a central part of the controversies. It is not included among the works criticized by William de la Mare or defended against him by the early Thomists.

That leads us to a second and more important reason for including eschatology in the topics to be discussed here, one which also marks the transition from our consideration of the individual themes (obiecta materialia) of our general field of interest (das Sachfeld) to a consideration of the common aspect (obiectum formale), under which all the topics of the Tertia pars should be viewed: soteriology. The prologue to the Tertia pars unites the general fields of interest under the common aspect denoted by the related words salvator, salvus, salus (corresponding to the Greek soter, soterion, soteria), which occur seven times in the short text. The prologues to the three major parts of the Summa, just as the short introductions at the transitions between the subsections of these parts, are like hinges or cornerstones, showing the true angle and alignment of what follows. Because of the importance of this introduction for understanding the unity of the Tertia pars, I would like to have it read to you in full. Please notice the unitive soteriological (salvator noster, populum suum salvum faciens, salus nostra) motive running through all three general themes, Christ, sacraments, and the ultimate fulfillment of human life:

Sth III, prologus:

Because our savior (salvator noster), the Lord Jesus Christ, in the words and witness of the angel, ìsaved (salvum faciens) his people from their sins' (Mt 1: 21), he made clear to us in his own self the path of truth by which we are enabled to attain the perfection and bliss of immortal life by resurrection. It is necessary, therefore, if we are to complete the whole project of theology, after our initial reflection upon the final goal of human life, with all its virtues and vices, that our reflection now turn to this very savior of all (de ipso omnium salvatore) and to the gifts he uniquely bestowed upon the human race. This theme touches three topics: first, the savior himself (de ipso salvatore); then, his sacraments, by which we attain salvation (salutem); and finally, the goal of immortal life which we attain by resurrection in him. On the first of these three sub-topics, a two-fold reflection is presented: first, on the very mystery of the incarnation itself, according to which God became a human for our salvation (pro nostra salute); and then, on those things which were done or suffered by our savior himself (per ipsum salvatorem nostrum), God incarnate.

Salvation has a special, technical meaning for Thomas, closer to "salvaging", to rescue and reparation, than to perfection in general. It is a meaning which Thomas explicates in the six articles of Question 1, which belong to the tract on the hypostatic union, but also serve as a fundamental preface to the whole of the Tertia pars. Special attention should be paid to article three, where Thomas, arguing against a position made famous by Robert Grosseteste, insists that it is not fitting to portray the incarnation as an expected part of a plan for a perfect universe, but rather as a response to severe imperfections stemming not as much from divine command as from human culpability; were it not for sin and injustice, there might never have been this kind of union between God and humankind. The union is not just for our perfection towards the best, but this union is initially and most urgently, "first and foremost", for our salvation from dangers posed to our limited and imperfect, but vital and eminently lovable goods. It is not meant immediately to augment but to save finite goods, especially the three goods which will be spoken of in the second lecture: knowledge, freedom, and personal dignity. The point is one of accentuation: for Robert Grosseteste, the imperfection of the world cries out most loudly for final perfection; for Thomas, the imperfection of the world, because it is good, cries out most urgently for the salvation of its imperfect goodness.

In a later lecture, we will discuss the ecumenical status of Thomas' soteriology, defended here by Protestants such as W. Mostert. Thomas' opposition to Grosseteste suggests, however, another possible connection, which, although not certain, is plausible. It has to do with the suggestion made in 1939 by M.-D. Chenu about the plan of the Summa. Chenu suggested that the first two parts of the Summa reflected the static metaphysical schematic exitus/reditus familiar from Neoplatonism, whereas the third part of the Summa broke through the strictly hierarchical ordo of beings with an event of salvific history. The next 25 years after Chenu's suggestion saw a vigorous debate with no conclusive winner on whether the Summa was more a work of metaphysical theology or one of a salvific history (cf. the recent review by A. Metz). The general and not unreasonable consensus was that it had both elements in all three parts; e.g. covenant and race in the second part and the sensual constitution of human knowing in the third. A new footnote to the debate has now been added by Jean-Pierre Torrell, whose book Initiation ‡ saint Thomas d'Aquin (Fribourg/Paris 1993) is arguably the most reliable compendium on Thomas available today. Torrell compares the exitus/reditus structure of the Summa, including occasional remarks made there to Christ as the way we are returned to God (reditus per Christum), with an image employed by Thomas in the Sentences-Commentary (III 2, 1, 1) and the Compendium theologiae (201) that the hypostatic union, as it were, closes a circle, rejoining what had gone forth from God in creation with God again in the hypostatic union. Torrell's references reinforce the argument that the exitus/reditus scheme itself was in part meant as a salvifically historical model.1  At roughly the same time as Torrell's book, Joseph Goering in Toronto edited a disputed question by Robert Grosseteste, De universi complecione. There Grosseteste uses that very image of the closed circle to show the necessity of the incarnation: else the world would remain imperfect, a still open and unclosed circle. Thomas initially used this image of the line made into a circle by the hypostatic union despite his opposition to the idea it was meant to illustrate.

I would suggest that, although Thomas thus found the image attractive, he avoided using it in the Summa in order to underscore the possibility that God could well have left the world in its natural but imperfect state or restored it to the same, not needing to connect his creation immediately to his own intimate life; and that our first and foremost desire for Christ is situated not so much in the desire for perfection but for salvation, answering the pain and danger involved in the culpable loss of natural but imperfect goods and not just in the perception of their imperfection, however much certain conceivably greater goods might also seem desirable. This is the main argument of Question 1, article 3, that God need not fulfill our every capacity and desire. Whether vague desire ever becomes a burning need depends on several conditions, e.g. whether we perceive that such conceivable goods have become factually possible due to God's choice to offer us such goods over and beyond the necessity of our nature. By way of contrast, the reign of death and what is like death touches areas of our life which are evidently possible: goods which are admittedly imperfect but vitally necessary, the object of unconditional desire, which, when deprived, can call forth the true yearning of Advent. If, again with Heidegger, we can define death as "the becoming impossible of human possibilities", then the relation of death to sin and injustice as noted especially by St. Paul becomes clear: as certain ways in which vital human possibilities are rendered impossible, sin and injustice are historical powers of death. According to Thomas, it is first and foremost against this kind of historically culpable deprivation that the hope for salvation is directed.

Grosseteste's image of the circle is as timeless as geometry itself, an apriori necessity, looking too quickly beyond the limited perfection in this world's goods for them to appear as a sacrament of ultimate concern. Thomas stresses in article 5 of the first Question of the Tertia pars the important historical experience of waiting for an as yet uncertain salvation, of experiencing over time the need for salvation from the results of human sin without being sure by evidence that such salvation will ever appear. Article 6, while arguing conversely that the basis of salvation in Christ should not, therefore, have been postponed until all time had passed, repeats the stress placed on the historical dimension by Thomas: "Such postponement would not have suitably manifested divine power, which saved (salvavit) humans in several ways, not only by faith in the future, but also by faith in the present and the past". Why our faith manifests God's power, is a question to which we will return later. Although Thomas acknowledges the implicit desire for that beatific vision which is attainable only by union with God and which, if not fulfilled, would leave something to be desired, article three insists that the best is not necessary for a divinely created world. What seems more necessary for us, are the matters of life and their salvation from death. Thus the prologue mentions resurrection twice, which involves not only unsurpassable perfection but more basically the overcoming of the powers of death. This is the focus which weaves Christology, sacramental faith, and eschatology into a unified soteriology of hope: the hope of coming to the fulfilled goal of human life by resurrection, by overcoming the reign of death in the world.

The exact meaning of this soteriological focus is the topic of the next two weeks. For now, we have said little more than that the combination of Christology, sacramentality, and eschatology is neither an accident nor dispensable. There is no adequate Christology without eschatology, and eschatology is a part of historical anthropology. Human need is the locus and focus of Christological hope and belief, and thus Christology arises from soteriology. This thesis has often been abused or misunderstood, and thus a clarification is necessary even at this early stage. The book by Peter H¸nermann cited already is trying in its own way to escape the framework of traditional Christology, but that does not mean that its analysis of all other post-traditional Christologies is favorable. Just as its consciousness of the challenge posed by other religions is typical of current trends, so, too, is its critique of a simply moralistic Christology. H¸nermann criticizes the Christologies of Hans K¸ng, K.-J. Kuschel, and Karl-Heinz Ohlig for trying to perpetuate a 19th century view of Jesus Christ as a social reformer and ethicist, representative of Jewish Messianickkingdom of God soteriology. It is in this context that H¸nermann criticizes Ohlig's statement: "Christology is a function and specification of Soteriology" (14). H¸nermann refers with approval to Josef Blank's view this derivation contradicts a close reading of the New Testament and would amount to nothing more than a superficial "projection-Christology". "With that (dependence of Christology on soteriology - R.S.) even soteriology itself would be paralyzed, because beginning from this starting point no more 'objective basis' (no 'extra nos') for the salvific certainty of faith could be shown" (ibid.) Leaving aside the question of whether the talk of a "salvific certainty of faith" ("Heilsgewi_heit des Glaubens") is helpful, it is certainly a welcome development that post-Bultmannian New Testament studies are now convinced that we can justifiably claim that the historical Jesus of Nazareth was never considered simply a social reformer or simply as the preacher of a free state of Israel. It is also to be granted that, if systematic attention to the soteriological context of the Christological development were meant to make the Christological dogma itself superfluous and dispensable, then that would obviously be a quite different project than the one Thomas Aquinss was involved in. Thomas thought that the Christological development was and is necessary to meet and maintain soteriological hope. The basic dispute is not whether the Christological development occurred, perhaps not even if it preceded or followed the soteriological development, or both alternately, but whether it was necessary, irreversible, and "genuine". If this question can be answered positively, there is not the same danger of reductionism involved in the priority of soteriology before Christology within the hermeneutical circle which joins them with each other inseparably. Thomas' stress in the Prologue to the Tertia pars that the "very mystery of the incarnation, according to which God became a human, (is) for our salvation". Here he echoes the creed itself.

V.
Soteriology after Auschwitz: The lumen formale of the Idea of Salvation and the Darkness of our Times

Until now we have not yet made explicit what its title suggests. Please recall that we have argued two major points. First: The three major groups of topics belonging to the plan of the Tertia pars, Christology, sacramentality, and eschatology, belong there not just due to the weight of tradition but because of their inner unity; without the problem of death and resurrection, the problems of Christology and sacramentality could not be posed adequately. The three groups of individual themes are not just a loose, unconnected series; they are interrelated. Second: The unity by which these individual themes are interconnected is the common aspect of salvation, understood less immediately as the greatest possible perfection than as the urgent salvaging of vital and finite goods. The text itself insists upon an experience as the point of departure for faith: namely the experience of the need for the salvation of vital but imperfect goods; an experienced need, the fulfillment of which is experientially uncertain. We can be experientially certain of the need for salvation, but we cannot be experientially certain of the fact of salvation. This final section of our first approach to the Tertia pars wants to return to the question of method and show that the context of our times casts a unique but not a foreign light onto the text. The lumen formale which is qualified by the darkness of our times brings the idea salvation into its proper relief. What is the situation of our times?

It is surely not what Poland wanted to give to our times, but there is a Polish name which has marked the whole age of European-dominated thought: Auschwitz. "Auschwitz" is the short formula for the self-experience of mass murder in the 20th century which may well have ended the modernist age. It has become less a geographical and more a chronological signpost, marking the end of modern times in the sense of the Enlightenment. It remains a word which cannot be dealt with comfortably. The call from Adorno, Horkheimer and others for a new kind of "thinking after Auschwitz" raises new problems of its own. If the catastrophe or Shoa is incommensurable with all previous history, will it not become isolated and meaningless, a mere episode? If, on the other hand, it is to be the source of a new and less inadequate kind of thinking, isn't there the danger of instrumentalizing it, maybe moralizing it, using it all too often to introduce lectures of this kind, etc.? And yet the alternative, which is silence leading to forgetfulness, seems even less appropriate a response. Justice and rationality demand that account be taken of this particular self-experience of injustice and irrationality in our now ending century and millennium. What has changed in our world in light of, or better, in the shadow of Auschwitz?

"Our" century (who's will be the next?) is to a large degree a history of its world wars. A certain process in three stages has repeated itself more than once: the dynamic, first, of an initial self-confidence (say before World War I); followed secondly by the despair of self-confidence (say after the first, "Great War"); and then finally by the despair of despair (in the face of all that happened during World War II and its aftermath). If the first war brought disillusionment with cultural and social claims to great self-achievement, the events of 1933-1945 showed the biting necessity for more than mere disillusionment. Let me note a few examples. After a nearly exclusive dedication to critical theory, Th. W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer sought during the second war to articulate the paradoxes immanent in enlightenment-style critique itself. Their reflections were first summed up in their joint work, The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, and the kind of dialectic meant is of the unresolved kind, the bright and the shadow side of the Enlightenment. They realized that something other than the desire for critique was necessary, if critique were to remain a possible force of liberation. Recalling the work of Bloch, Benjamin, Scholem and other writers rooted in Jewish traditions, they pointed to contrafactical visions of justice, that is to say, visions of a justice which had never been fully realized and never would be, as the necessary precondition for identifying, comparing, criticizing, and mourning crimes of injustice. Without such visions of justice, there is no way to identify injustice. Even for the sake of critique, more than just critique is needed; critique alone will trivialize itself.2 Another example: In 1919 under the impact of the first war, Karl Barth dismissed his own beginnings in a liberal theology and social Christianity for dialectical theology's critique of human knowledge and freedom. Again it was the unresolved dialectic, the no of God to every yes of human production. Under the impact of the National Socialist government in Germany, Barth returned in 1934 to an insistence on the social and doctrinal missions of Christianity, a defense of humanity from the conviction of God's solidarity with it. A final example: In his essentially dual or twofold hermeneutics, P. Ricúur attempts both to foster a suspicion towards historical documents and to recollect their sense, giving further testimony to the course of the century. Ricúur, like Barth, draws on the older, Calvinistic, dual scheme of extrinsic justification (self-suspicion) and sanctification (affirmation of a new gathering of meaning) to do so. In none of these thinkers, however, was there an attempt to simply carry on, as if radical self-doubt were unfounded, but they all came to realize that doubt alone was no match for injustice.

Today there is a debate going on which seems for the moment more extreme, a debate still very much in the shadow of Auschwitz, a debate about how badly the foundations of a self-reliant and self-confident modernity have been shaken. On the one hand, there is a "post-modern" denial that any new universal counter-ideals are possible. Opposed to this, there is a "neo-modernistic" claim that the older ideals of the Enlightenment, if slightly adjusted, would still work. The reception of Friedrich Nietzsche by postmodern writers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault seems convincing on at least one point: that the "death of God" proclaimed by Nietzsche would in fact lead to the death of the human, the anthropological standpoint, to the death of an unconditional human ideal with universal standards. They are convincing in their unmasking the intolerance behind an easy rhetoric of tolerance, showing the self-serving side of many would-be liberalisms, pointing out the dogmatisms of the Enlightenment, and identifying the historicality and subjectivity behind many modern claims to judge what are acceptable and universal standards. The protests against this development of thought found in the neo-modernistic reaction of J¸rgen Habermas appear by contrast as a futile attempt at the restoration of "the good old days". Habermas speaks for an idealized community of discourse, excluding not only metaphysics and religion, but also severe new doubts about his style of critique. An ideal community is to be re-formed through pragmatic or performative rhetoric to insist upon a return to the project of autonomous social progress, but of a kind without the radical postmodernist criticism of modernist critique. The self-confidence of the Enlightenment is to be saved by simply shifting responsibility from the individual autonomous subject to the collective autonomous subject. Kant had been confident that even without - or precisely without - metaphysical or religious dogma the political and moral order could be upheld. After two hundred years of experience, Kant's political innocence about personal and public morality without metaphysics or dogma can no longer be regained by the pragmatic appeal to a Neo-Kantian intersubjectivity of supposedly presuppositionless discourse. But it is also true that direct access to comprehensive metaphysical truths or undoubted dogmatic ones (if such a salvific certainty of faith was ever possible) can no longer relieve the self-doubts which have arisen in regard to the validity and value of human subjectivity. As observers of the Foucault-Habermas debate put it: "While the insistence of anti-thinkers on frivolity makes them immature and not yet of responsible age (in Kant's sense of the antipode of enlightenment -R.S.), Habermas' refusal to admit his dependence upon interpretation makes his position professorial"3, academic.

Even less likely of success than Habermas' pragmatism is the pragmatic appeal for social justice based chiefly on the hope of financial stability for all or for most. The resources of the world have proven too fragile and finite to extend or even maintain Western European living standards. And yet, at the same time, the alternative attempt to simply accept with Foucault the death of universal, human ideals or the successive births of unique, radically separate historical epochs could facilitate, through the inability to identify the accepted injustices of the age, new forms of human abuse. Against this trend, the very pain of abuse inflicted and suffered in the 20th century keeps alive the desire for at least enough of a belief in human dignity that injustice could be identified as such. Foucault's supporters have argued that no conviction about universal, unconditional human values is necessary, that culturally conditioned paradigms of justice would do just as well, just as T. Kuhn's historically conditioned paradigms serve the immediate purposes of science.4 Yet such communally accepted, but still non-universal and non-rational social paradigms would need fail as a standard for distinguishing liberation from subjugation as soon as acute self-doubt would articulate the arbitrary character of the paradigms and thus put them at the center of the question. Kant was right to see moral self-understanding as being tied to at least the subjective conviction of a certain universality and transcendence over the merely subjective.

An identity must be sought, founded at least on the hope for human dignity, which could provide a new critical basis for recognizing the difference between justice and injustice, for acknowledging what and who is other than my/our subjectivity. Postmodernity makes this task more urgent, but also more difficult than in modernity, which had continued to build upon the foundation of the Jewish-Christian ethos whose basis it was undermining. These modern constructs collapsed at Auschwitz, without restoring the ancient foundations. Postmodernity might be willing to live in the ruins of modernity without major building projects of its own, but such ruined cities are notoriously vulnerable to epidemic disease, that is, new, rampant injustice. It seems to me that our age is most united in its wanting to critique and to expose injustice, while less consensus exists on whether there are any well-founded, universalizable standards of justice, by which to identify injustice. The question is: can the hope for a sufficient belief in human dignity (and the dignity of creation) be saved, which would give us good reason to mourn and oppose the atrocities perpetrated by humans and all else that is suffered by them and the world around them?

A contextual reading of the text of the Tertia pars must try to map out what a "soteriology after Auschwitz" might look like. This context of our times demands that we include a greater attention to the darkness of existence within the lumen formale of our method, including an awareness that there is no possibility of remaining comfortably in that darkness or organizing it simply by moral and political consensus or by private, existentialist heroism. The context of death in our century, including the anticipation of death in all forms of injustice, is the third reason why eschatology should not be eliminated from the list of topics included in soteriology. What might seem inopportune in light of the "unsaved" experiences of our century, namely to entertain the possibility of salvation, is in fact the only way to do justice to the experiences of injustice and annihilation and to save the horizon, within which injustice can be identified as such. At the same time, we must learn to articulate better the abiding uncertainty of individual salvation and the abiding negativity of death and injustice. We must seek a sense of salvation which will cor-respond to, not simply pass over or minimize the "unsaved" experiences of nature and history. The belief in salvation must make us more and not less sensitive to "unsaved" experiences. The central thesis of the coming lectures is precisely that this contextually qualified lumen formale, which is even more sensitive to abiding negativity than even Thomas' text, corresponds to the obiectum formale of soteriology, the hope for salvation. Because Thomas' text was already more sensitive in this regard than most of its contemporaries, the historical text and the systematic context will support each other in this case. Our context will be able to highlight this text without violating it, at least not beyond the minimum violence implied by every interpretation. Our hope for salvation must be prepared for by "dis-illusionment", including the liberation from the illusion that disillusionment would suffice: that was the lesson which the Second World War added to the First. The problem is: how to move beyond mere disillusionment without falling back into the attitudes which eventually must give cause for it?

Endnotes