(Hankey Wayne) Theoria Versus Poesis - Neoplatonism

Modern Theology 15:4 October 1999
ISSN 0266-7177
THEORIA VERSUS POESIS:

NEOPLATONISM AND
TRINITARIAN DIFFERENCE IN
AQUINAS, JOHN MILBANK,
JEAN-LUC MARION AND
JOHN ZIZIOULAS*
WAYNE J. HANKEY
Introduction: Theology after Heidegger’s Critique of Onto-theology

The position of postmodern Christian theology vis-à-vis philosophy is strik-
ingly ironic. The totality with which it asserts its right and need to proceed
independently of philosophy is, in fact, philosophically situated and deter-
mined. Heidegger above all defines the problem and the project for theology
and sets the terms within which it proceeds.
The problematic is set up by his narration of Western Fate as a history of
Being, or rather, of its progressive hiding. In this story of ontological closure, he
gives the leading role to onto-theology. Jean-Luc Marion, John Milbank and
others now define this category more strictly than Heidegger did, and efforts
are made to limit those theological positions to which it is supposed to
apply. Their enthusiasm for ancient and medieval Christian Neoplatonism
lies in its subordination of being and its limitation or elimination of ontology
or metaphysics autonomous in respect to theology.1 However, despite the
limitations and exceptions, the use of this category by contemporary Christian
theology to describe and judge its own history is determinative.2
When we think about theological history through the notion of onto-
theology, we think that God is understood through, or, better, enclosed in,
the historical horizons given by a succession of notions of being. Further, we
understand that the human relation to itself and to the world occurs within
Wayne J. Hankey
Department of Classics, King’s College and Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S. B3H 2AI, Canada
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
388 Wayne J. Hankey
particular ontologically determined theologies. At root, then, philosophical

theology confuses Being with beings, and turns God into a super being. God
becomes comprehensible within a particular conception of being. Looking at
reality from the divine perspective, we gain a rational hold on the world. As
Christians, we are related to being from the side of the Creator’s will. This
relation reduces being so understood to manipulable things.3
I. The First Theological Difference: Trying to Get Beyond Philosophy

Two trinitarian differences are required of theologians who understand the-
ology’s situation through Heidegger’s narrative.4 The first is associated with
the trinitarian differentiation of the Son or Logos from the Father. Its neces-
sity may be recognised at the point we have reached. The confusion of Being
with beings which, according to Heidegger and his Christian theological heirs,
belongs to the origins of Western metaphysics, must be disentangled. An ac-
count of the procession of the Logos from the Father as font of Being must be
resisted. Such an account is suggested when, as with Augustine, Exodus 3:14
is interpreted to make Being the highest name of God. And, indeed, with other
Neoplatonists, Augustine makes his account of the triadic hypostases the
basis of a theologizing of the Stoic sciences:
According to Augustine, physics has for its object God as cause of being,
logic God as norm of thought, ethics God as rule of life. This Augustin-
ian order: physics, logic, ethics, corresponds to the order of the divine
persons in the Trinity: the Father is the principle of being, the Son of intelli-
gence, the Holy Spirit of Love. The systematic unity of the parts of phil-
osophy reflects here the reciprocal interiority of the divine Persons.5
If this is developed in accord with the orthodox Christian teaching that the
Persons of the Trinity have an identity of essence, being and logos would be
identical in the Son. Thus, theology would provide the basis of a well founded
ontology. The logos or science of being, would be placed at the heart of divinity.6
But, post-Heideggerian theologians demand above all theology’s independ-
ence from philosophy, or, more precisely, to use their formulation, from phil-
osophy as ontology or metaphysics.7 In fact this is to oppose philosophy having
a subject matter of its own, its own content and its proper autonomy. At most,
for example, with Marion, it may be phenomenology as opposed to meta-
physics.8 For Milbank, quite inconsistently, given how completely he relies on
contemporary philosophy to constitute “the real as linguistic” and to describe
the character of reality so understood,9 even phenomenology is too much.10
This is the first way postmodern theologians derive their programmes
generally, and their trinitarian theologies above all, from father Heidegger.11
Jacques Derrida is right in seeing that Heidegger opposes “Christian phil-
osophy” because it requires a mixing of Greek ontology with a theology
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.
Theoria versus Poesis 389
which is revelation. A separation of these would avoid onto-theology.12 How-

ever, ultimately, avoiding this mixing requires that neither being nor God can
be thought philosophically. Marion thus wants to keep theology from becom-
ing science. Milbank hopes to regain both science and being for God by elim-
inating the independence of philosophy.
So far as the first trinitarian differentiation, the begetting of the Logos, or
the question of ontology, is concerned, the answer of Milbank to Heidegger’s
problem is more radical that that of Marion. Marion accuses Heidegger of
making ontology our encompassing paradigm, and sets in opposition to him
philosophically a phenomenology of the gift and theologically, “hors-texte”,
charity. Initially Marion pushes this so far as to insist on God Without Being.
But he recanted this extremism to allow, in a Neoplatonic fashion, God to have
being provided that this was a gift even to himself as the Good beyond being.
This allows Marion to make his peace with St. Thomas Aquinas, who notori-
ously said that Being is the highest name of God.
Professor Marion has now decided that Thomas’s philosophical theology is
fundamentally Neoplatonic, and is not onto-théo-logie, imprisoning God beyond
the power of revelation within our conceptualization of being, but rather théo-
onto-logie, revelation which determines the concept of being.13 For both Marion
and Milbank, the acceptance of Thomas’s position on this point requires noting
that for him God, not being, is the proper subject matter of theology; being is
the subject of metaphysics. Neither, however, is able to give metaphysics, the
theology which is part of philosophy, or philosophy, in general, the independ-
ence, substantiality and necessity within sacra doctrina which Thomas gives
them.14
For Milbank, Marion, though profound and accurate in his perceptions of
the character and faults of Heidegger’s thought, remains too much within it.
His theology of love is an opposed mirror of Heidegger’s preoccupation with
being.15 Despite the intentions of his own work, he retains a Cartesian foun-
dational subjectivity.16 Further, and directly related to these, Milbank judges
Marion’s correlated phenomenology to be the contemporary equivalent of
Scotus’s fideistic metaphysics “independent of theology”.17 This, when de-
veloped by Suarez and Descartes, Marion also understands to be at the root of
modern deformity. Marion followed Étienne Gilson in finding the Scotistic
transformation of scholasticism by Suarez as a “univocist drift”18 which leads
in Descartes to “a rationality not theologically assured by Christian Revelation,
but metaphysically founded on the humanity of ‘men strictly men’”.19
The generally assumed antimodern or postmodern account of the regret-
ted historical movement bringing the West to the modernity now to be over-
come is well summarized by Catherine Pickstock.
… Descartes follows in the tradition of Duns Scotus, for whom a being

is that which is univocal and therefore graspable … Marion and
Courtine agree in developing Étienne Gilson’s analysis of Descartes, by
390 Wayne J. Hankey
pointing out that the turn to epistemology is pre-enabled by a radical

reconstrual of ontology itself, inherited from later scholasticism … [As
a result] for Descartes, secure being has become being for the Cogito …
a single legislating subject … 20
Clearly, if Milbank understands him rightly, Marion has not fully aban-
doned, as theology now must, “all scholastic attempts to graft faith onto a uni-
versal base of reason”. He has not fully turned to the method of the Church
Fathers. But rather continues “doing philosophy as well as theology”.21 Marion
is “still within a self-sufficient metaphysics, which is identical with secular
modernity”.22
The problem, for Milbank, is not philosophy, metaphysics and ontology
absolutely, if their substantiality and autonomy could be eliminated. Ancient
philosophy sought objective substantiality and modern philosophy sought
subjective substantiality because they remained “inside the horizons projected
by the Greek mythos, within which the Greek logos had to remain confined”.23
Milbank envisages “another ontology” which is “ ‘another philosophy’ ” and
“another metaphysics”.24 This would be properly Christian, inscribed within
the Christian rather than within the Greek mythos.
As with Marion, Milbank’s theology now turns again to Neoplatonism,
though with equal selectivity. Milbank’s other philosophy, which does not
“position” Christian theology from some pretense to a self-sufficient reason,
is prefigured by “the radical changes undergone by ontology at the hands of
the neo-Platonists and the Church Fathers: in particular Augustine and Dio-
nysius the Areopagite”. It was “no longer exactly Greek”. The ancient Greek
notions of “presence, substance, the idea, the subject, causality, thought-before-
expression, and realist representation” would be criticized. Those eliminated,
“the Platonic Good, reinterpreted by Christianity as identical with Being”,
could remain.25
We must attend to the condition for Milbank’s return to a notion of God in
which the Good and Being are identical, apparently produced despite Hei-
degger. For Milbank, in the wake of Derrida, reality is linguistic.26 Moreover,
he follows Wittgenstein in Cambridge, and so it is now the task of the the-
ology which describes itself as “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism”27 to ex-
punge its Augustinian interiority and intellectualism. Though this is presented
as an opposition to Cartesian dualism, in fact, the Wittgenstein it follows
stands with Nietzsche against Plato, Aristotle and the whole tradition of west-
ern rationality.28 Wittgenstein and Milbank are right to judge that for such a
project, Augustine is, of necessity, the Christian theologian most to be over-
come or reinterpreted.29
The divine Being has been radically transmuted in accord with this lin-
guistic ontology. As usual today, history is scoured to find precedents so that
a notion of reality as linguistic expression or indefinitely infinite dissemin-
ation—to use a more Derridian phrase—can be presented as Christian.30
Equally, an element of Augustine’s trinitarian theology which Anselm placed

at the heart of its medieval developments is downplayed. This understands
human language as true so far as it is similar to the divine natural language
in which word and thing are identical. This unity is ultimately the ideas in the
Divine Word to which we have access by the movement inward and upward.31
In contrast, only by making being linguistic and by proposing this as the
authentic Christian theology of the begotten Word, can Milbank bring back
“another ontology” in the face of Heidegger. Man creates his linguistic world
so totally, that “man as an original creator” participates “in some measure in
creation ex nihilo”.32 In fact, we now have not ontology but “logontic” in which
the divine and human are interchangeable. In creating a “logontic”, Milbank
responds to Heidegger in Heideggerian terms. For Heidegger is, as much as
any philosopher of our century, a thinker for whom thought and being are
limited to language.33
Milbank is forthcoming about the character of his theological and trinitarian
theology, his théo-onto-logie, and Thomas’s inadequacy from this perspective,
(I am less certain than he that Augustine really is any more than Aquinas on
his side). He writes of Vico and, indirectly, of Herman and Cusanus:
Factum … is Verbum in God, and so the made cultural object is promoted
to the status of a divine transcendental … and this is equivalent to saying
that God in his creation ad intra in the Logos “incorporates” within himself
the creation ad extra, including human history … Because Verbum marks a
primordial difference in the Godhead, it realizes a perfect tension be-
tween Unity and Being … and allows no lapse into either a henological
totality of system or structure, nor an ontological totality of the isolated
subject. When Verbum is included as a transcendental, all the transcen-
dentals are transformed into personal intersubjective trinitarian categories:
but this leaves us with more than a “social God”, it leaves us also with a
cultural God. A Christian ontology that takes account of language and
culture, will then be, more fully than before, a Trinitarian ontology.34
So much, then, for the first trinitarian differentiation. Milbank’s treat-
ment of it through a theology which is social, linguistic and cultural35 leads
directly to “The Second Difference”.
II. The Second Theological Difference: Getting Beyond Theology

The differentiation which Heidegger requires of theology demands more than
a recasting of the begetting of the Son from the Father. Milbank thinks that
“For a Trinitarianism Without Reserve”, “The Second Difference”, the proces-
sion of the Holy Spirit, must be more strongly taken up by theology than
hitherto.36 The end which Milbank requires theology to serve in his trans-
muted ontology suggests another metamorphosis. Following Heidegger into
the realm of the Spirit will transform theology into poesis and praxis. But such
392 Wayne J. Hankey
a self-overcoming does not take place all at once. We must proceed step
by step.
Appropriately Jacques Derrida, whose philosophy is as indispensable for
John Milbank’s trinitarian theology,37 as Plotinus and Porphyry are for August-
ine’s, or Aristotle and Proclean Neoplatonism are for Thomas’s, provides a
guide to those who would traverse the negative theology of the Black Forest.
In his “Comment ne pas parler:Dénégations”, Derrida gives directions for the
new way which Heidegger provides for theology. This way, “neither Greek
nor Christian”,38 would enable theology to escape the problem his narrative
creates.
It is necessary to distinguish between, on the one hand, onto-theology or
theiology [sic], and, on the other hand, theology. The former concerns the
supreme being, the being par excellence, ultimate foundation or causa sui
in its divinity. The latter is a science of faith or of divine speech, such as
it manifests itself in revelation (Offenbarung). Heidegger … seems to dis-
tinguish between manifestation, the possibility of Being to reveal itself
(Offenbarkeit), and, on the other hand, the revelation (Offenbarung) of the
God of theology.39
For Westerners to get beyond their spiritual malaise, they have to know
the power and reality of revelation before and independent of philosophy.
There must be for us divine revelation which cannot be contained, reduced,
entrapped by conceptualizing and objectifying reason. Such a theology must
be, and, Derrida, quoting Heidegger, tells us that it can be: “Faith has no need
of the thinking of being”.40
This theology as “science of faith or of divine speech, such as it manifests
itself in revelation” is evidently a theology independent of philosophy and so
of ontology. But, this is not enough to free the God of the Hebrews from fatal
entanglement with the Greeks.41 Derrida does not judge Heidegger to have
succeeded in this negative theology without Greek philosophy. Something
more radical may succeed. Derrida in his return to his Jewish roots, like post-
modern Christian theologians, looks for religion in the direction of negative
theology, provided it does not merely postpone presence and union with
reality as hyperessentiality.42 It would be a religionless atheistic “nonknow-
ledge”, which, nonetheless, prays, as Derrida does, but which, he maintains,
Heidegger does not.43
Here we have a key to how theology will respond again to Heidegger’s de-
mands upon it. It will again go beyond him—or rather, beyond what he says
at this point. For here, and in respect to “The Second Difference”, theology
moves beyond theoria, which it takes as well as philosophy and logos to be
Greek, to poesis and praxis.44 Again, it moves in accord with Heidegger’s own
response to the modern forgetting of Being. Heidegger also turned to poesis
and did so consistently. But to satisfy him it is not enough to attend to the
difference of Being and beings. The primal difference for him is between
Being and thought. In his interpretation of Parmenides’s poem, a reading

determinative for his philosophy, they are not the same but “meet in the
Same”. This must divide him from orthodox Christian trinitarian theology,
especially that which follows Augustine in understanding the Persons through
Being, Understanding and Willing.45 The divine thinking is the divine being.46
Derrida is right in designating Heidegger’s negative theology as neither Chris-
tian nor Greek. The postmodern Christian theologians who follow Heidegger
have not faced this problem directly enough in their own approach to “The
Second Difference”.
Responding to Heidegger’s demand that the theology of revelation be separ-
ated from philosophy, at the end of our century a series of Christian theologies
have appeared of which the nearest historical likeness is the neo-orthodoxy
of Karl Barth.47 Barth’s refusal of the philosophical logos was prophetic for the-
ology in our century generally. But the new postmodern theologies are well
beyond Barth. To understand fully what is moving, and to appreciate the irony
of theology’s position, we must understand how contemporary theology is
specifically determined in its antiphilosophical stance by its specific location
relative to the given philosophy of our time. Assuming the failure of the
Hegelian endeavour to unite philosophy and Christianity, an endeavour which
postmodern theologians agree must be taken as final, Barth discovered the
extremely narrow space for his work within what Kant allowed. Equally,
theologians like John Milbank, Jean-Luc Marion and John Zizioulas, work
within the space Heidegger assigns them. Even if Milbank accuses Marion of
seeking “to be both Barth and Heidegger at once”,48 when to Heidegger are
added Derrida and Wittgenstein, the same applies to Milbank.
The space philosophy after Heidegger allows Christian theology is defined
by quotations from Heidegger’s “The Onto-theological Constitution of
Metaphysics”49 rightly set at the very beginning of a recent French doctoral
dissertation on the thought of John Zizioulas.50 Dr. Konstantinos Agoras uses
Jean-Luc Marion to disassociate God from ens commune and to reverse “the
idol of an absolute conceived after the manner of the most high existent”. In
this matter, Heidegger laid down one of the dogmas of postmodern religion.
Here his words are quoted to remind us that we—as opposed to ancients,
medievals and moderns—cannot worship God as cause:
Humans neither pray nor sacrifice to this God. It is possible neither to fall
on anxious knees nor to make music, sing and dance before the causa sui.
In order to restore the personal liberty out of which religious communion is
possible, Zizioulas will want to exorcise from the interior of theology the
God of the philosophers, the God to whom we cannot pray. For, as
Heidegger prescribes:
Christian thought must no longer fight a campaign to find a philosophy

or a science considered definitive in order that this might immediately
394 Wayne J. Hankey
be inappropriately baptized or awkwardly adapted. It ought rather to

return to what has originally and properly been given to it.
This gift Agoras specifies as “the ‘presence’ of God in Christ”. He concludes

by quoting Heidegger again on theology proper:
She has a double mission: to elaborate the concepts which permit think-
ing the strict specificity of revelation and to contribute to the develop-
ment of the reason common to all.
If theology stayed exactly here, the result would still be theoretical. In fact,
Zizioulas, in ways which Marion and Milbank also develop, unifies koinonia as
mystery of the Church with koinonia as mystery of God, Pneuma with Ecclesia,
Christology with Pneumatology, liturgy—especially the Eucharist—with
theology. Praxis, in the ecclesial community, and poesis, as creative experi-
ence of charity, subsume theology as science and even as theoria.51 By this
means, still working ever more deeply and completely within the fundamen-
tal Heideggerian narrative, framework and conceptions, postmodern theology
expands its room by changing theology’s character.
Professor Marion took a step in this direction in his first theological book,
L’ídole et la distance. Cinq études, and never turned back. For him, the Dio-
nysian theology negates philosophical conceptualization, theology as science.
The Dionysian writings are not the medium of Neoplatonic philosophy, but
its overcoming by the Christian religion. Dionysius’s statements are not
propositions conveying a conceptually graspable philosophical and theological
content. Rather they are directions for religious acts, hymns of praise and
guides to union.52 In fact, Marion’s theology is not a turn away from Neo-
platonism, which was as much religion and spirituality as theology and
philosophy. In Neoplatonic terms, we are moving from Plotinus and Porphyry
to Iamblichus and Proclus, moving from philosophy and theology to theurgy.53
Postmodern Christian theology is generally moving this way.54 Crucially,
Milbank’s embrace and interpretation of Plato is at one with his opposition
of philosophy and theology. This opposition is fundamentally Heideggerian
even if Milbank understands the history of theology and philosophy differ-
ently than Heidegger does. Milbank turns to Platonism as against metaphys-
ical, ontological and autonomous philosophy. Closest to his Platonism is that
most thoroughly developed by Iamblichus and his followers where revela-
tion and theurgy have essential place. The Plato who is usually seen as the
archetypal philosopher has been replaced by one who inscribes reason
within myth and sacramental ritual.
One of Milbank’s students celebrates Plato as leading “dialogue … into
doxology, which for Plato is our principle human function and language’s
only possibility of restoration”.55 Catherine Pickstock’s use of the Latin Mass
against a modern division of subject and object, requires an emphasis on its
theurgic aspect. It is essential that material things are numinous and be
addressed as if personal.56 Her return to a Christianity for which the problem

is how it may be distinguished from Platonism, depends upon an effective
critique of Derrida’s reading of the Phaedrus.57 Her purpose, however, lies
entirely within a contemporary problematic. She wishes the “restoration of
the subject”, a “living subject”, with “a substantive, though not completed
identity”, having “a definite but open identity”.58 Appropriately coinciding
with this is a Neoplatonic reading of the Platonic Good, which is affirmed,59
and an embrace of the Socratic dependence on myth as modeling a Christian
restoration of language as liturgical. Indeed, the myth about the origins of
writing told by Socrates is treated as wisdom.60 She might be very happy in
the Academy under Proclus, as happy as some think the pseudo-Dionysius
was. But, her Christian supplement to Platonism is found in the church as
historical and practical intersubjective community.61 Here she is trapped
within the constraints of post-Heideggerian theology in a way that both
Milbank and Marion make clear.62
So, this theology has no sympathy for what in Augustine is Plotinian, his
interiority, intellectualism, etc.63 In the alternative Neoplatonic tradition which
extends from Iamblichus, acts beyond understanding give saving contact
with the divine beyond philosophy, beyond theology confined to the logos.
Union with the One beyond theoria is by ineffable acts. To quote Iamblichus,
theoretical philosophy does not secure union: “Rather, it is the perfect
accomplishment of ineffable acts, religiously performed and beyond all
understanding”.64
In our day, and in our terms, we travel this route on our way, as Milbank
proposes, to art as “modernity’s own antidote to modernity”, to poesis and the
key to theology. Milbank puts it thus:
poesis may be the key to … a postmodern theology. Poesis … is an integral

aspect of Christian practice and redemption. Its work is the ceaseless re-
narrating and “explaining” of human history under the sign of the cross.65
Christian life is to be understood as a poesis, or, more precisely, as most like
making music. Life and theology come together in such poesis, not in thought.
Milbank describes his theological writing as “composing a new theoretical
music”.66 Theory belongs to composition and is not separable from it. The
requirement that we join in the poesis means that there can be no theoretical
distance or objectivity. Theory occurs as a necessarily incomplete moment
within praxis.
[P]ractice cannot claim to “know” the finality of what it treats as final …

We know what we want to know, and although all desiring is an
“informed” desiring, desire shapes truth beyond the imminent
implications of any logical order, so rendering the Christian logos a
continuous product as well as a process of “art” … Now desire, not
Greek “knowledge” mediates to us reality.67
396 Wayne J. Hankey
Our present is getting over this objectivity:

The end of modernity … means the end of a single system of truth based
on universal reason, which tells us what reality is like. 2. [T]heology …
no longer has to measure up to accepted secular standards of scientific
truth or normative rationality … 4. … the point is not to “represent” …
externality, but just to join in its occurrence, not to know, but to inter-
vene, originate.68
Here, again, we have moved beyond theology to poesis in a way analogous
to—but far from identical with—the ancient pagan move from theology to
theurgy. The ancient Neoplatonists had no desire to end with endless commu-
nitarian praxis but with the life of the gods turned toward the One. Human
poesis was therapeutic, its aim was unity with the good by which the gods
are creative, but cosmogenesis is not final for gods or humans.69 Eriugena, whom
we shall meet again shortly, deals with this restful and contemplative final-
ity by making God revert upon himself as neither Created nor Creating.
The last step in the postmodern version of this move brings us to commu-
nity, and, from there, we arrive at “The Second Difference”. The First Differ-
ence involved including Verbum as a transcendental category. Thus “all the
transcendentals are transformed into personal intersubjective trinitarian cat-
egories”. This left us, at minimum, with a “social God”. Community is essen-
tial. When theology is poesis, Christian community is the concentus musicus,70
and the Church herself is “the second difference”. Milbank writes:
God involves not just the first difference of expressive articulation of con-
tent (inseparable from content), but also the second difference of inter-
pretation of expression (inseparable from expression) … God as Trinity
is therefore himself community, and even “community in process”
infinitely realised, beyond any conceivable opposition between “perfect
act” and “perfect potential”. A trinitarian ontology can therefore be a
differential ontology surpassing the Aristotelian actus purus.71
It will be crucial to our purpose to return to the criticism of Aquinas im-
plicit in this contrast between true trinitarian differential ontology and that
possible from within Aristotelian categories like potency, act and actus purus.
But before considering what response might be made on behalf of an older
philosophical theology both to this description of its philosophical character
and to its development of trinitarian difference, we must allow Milbank to
complete his description of trinitarian difference as this is determined by his
post-Heideggerian philosophical circumstances.
Above all, as other contemporary theologians from Johann Baptist Metz
developing Rahner’s thought, to Jürgen Moltmann on the Protestant side test-
ify, the Holy Spirit is endless communitarian praxis.72 Generally, Milbank finds
that other contemporary theologians have not pushed postmodern linguistic
philosophy radically enough. They have not completely eliminated all
substantial objectivity and subjectivity—the philosophical remnants of Greek

myth. This elimination he has made essential to his “Radical Christian Ortho-
doxy”.73 Whatever distinctions Milbank makes between their theologies and
his own, he is with his contemporaries in this: theoria must give place to div-
inized praxis.
For him, by the kenosis of the Holy Spirit, the “Church perpetuates or renews
a Creation prior to all coercion and conflict” and is the divine community
where all is external.
This event of reconciliation must be not merely believed in, but actively
realized as the existence of a community in which mere “self-immediacy”
is infinitely surpassed.74
With the surpassing of interiority and self-immediacy, we also pass beyond
theoria and theology as theoria:
Unless it reflects upon the singularity of Christian norms of community,
theology has really nothing to think about … [I]f Christians ask what is
God like? then they can only point to our “response” to God in the
formation of community. The community is what God is like.75
Dr. Milbank is correct in judging that trinitarian theology as theoria must
come to an end when it attempts to give an account of difference within con-
temporary antiphilosophical philosophy. It remains to ask if the same is true
for earlier accounts. Certainly, other accounts of the history of theology than
his might be given. Further, Derrida is right in describing the determinative
Heideggerian directives for postmodern theology as neither Greek nor Chris-
tian. No doubt earlier accounts are Greek, self-consciously dependent on
Greek philosophy and elevate Greek theoria. They may have still as much or
better claim than postmodern theologies to be Christian. Whatever they
claim, neither escape determination by philosophy. Further, intentionally and
unintentionally, postmodern theologies reiterate features of the Neoplatonic
thought in which orthodox Christian theology and doctrine were developed.
In order to compare them, I propose to look at the treatment of God in
Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. I will consider how the Aristotelian actus purus
is modified by the Neoplatonic intellectual structure within which it is
contained and developed in that system. I shall show how in this philosoph-
ical medium Thomas has an account of difference which remains within
theoria.
III. Thomas’s Trinitarian Theology: Difference within Theoria

A. Aquinas: Onto-theology, Metaphysics and the Primacy of Theory
With some exceptions, Milbank tends to treat Aquinas as if he were an Aristo-
telian. When he does take account of the differences between Thomas and
Aristotle (as when Aristotle is treated as an onto-theologian and Aquinas
398 Wayne J. Hankey
is not), these are ascribed to his Christianity rather than to his Platonism.76
For example, he writes that, in contrast to Eckhart: “Aquinas tended to derive
unity, intellect and goodness from actus purus”.77
Milbank sets the Aristotelian actus purus against a differential ontology. In
this paper, we cannot look at Aristotle directly. We might wonder, however,
if actus purus adequately translates entelecheia, a notion which requires the
thought of a self-relation. The interchangeability of entelecheia and energeia is
crucial to Aquinas’s conception of being. Plotinus regards the inherent division
of Aristotle’s noetic actuality as a deficiency which reduces it to second place
relative to the One. So he might also raise a question.78 But the Plotinian ques-
tion is not directly mine here.79 Further, I do not wish to deny that “Aquinas
… derive[d] unity, intellect and goodness from actus purus”. The words of
the Summa Theologiae stand against that.80 Rather I want to look at the context
and character of “derive”.
In differing from the Pseudo-Dionysius on whom his theology is so depend-
ent, Aquinas recognised how much he owed him.81 If Rudi te Velde’s treat-
ment of the relations between Thomas and Dionysius be correct, the key to
how Thomas will relate participation and substantiality may well have come
to him from Dionysius.82
Aquinas will take the notions of participation which he received and forge
of them a tool to explicate how God in one single act creates things “ac-
cording to their kinds,” not only presupposing nothing but bestowing the
richest diversity through that very ordering act.83
This understanding of Thomas’s teaching on the creative act differs expli-
citly from that in the existential Thomism of Gilson and Fabro.84 John Milbank
writes comparably to te Velde:
God’s essential Being, the esse ipsum, or the coincidence of Being with es-
sence in God, is conceived as the full giving of Being as an infinitely deter-
mined essence, whereby, alone, there is “to be”.
Milbank judges that such in a view there could be “a stronger link between
the theological account of esse, on the one hand, and trinitarian theology on the
other”. But this stronger link is not, as Milbank supposes, “beyond Aquinas”.85
Significant in Aquinas is the way multiplicity and division come to be intro-
duced into the divine and so how the divine names are diversified and ordered.
The first name Thomas gives to the divine existence is Simplicity. Within
Simplicity, the identity of esse and essentia appears for Thomas. This identity
belongs to God who “est … per essentiam forma” and forma … per se sub-
sistens.86 Identity is therefore no existential exclusion of essence.87 The divine
esse is dynamic so that the diverse predicates emerge out of the simplicity.
God is “bonum per essentiam”,88 a goodness by its nature infinitely diffused
within the existence of things. Yet the divine esse is also Immutable, Eternal,
and One. It is both the Unity essential to beings and One in se.89
The effect of the Neoplatonic positioning of being, understood as entelecheia,

relative to unity appears in Thomas’s theo-logic. Return to source becomes
fundamental to the structure of being. Self-relation introduces that otherness
which allows the derivation of which Milbank writes. Perfection comes imme-
diately after Simplicity in order to correct the human understanding of the
simple as deficient.90 Perfection, (and so Goodness, a name which is in a way
prior to Being for Aquinas),91 occurs within the dialectical movement between
the divine Simplicity and the divine Unity. There are here, in principle, both
“a henological totality of system or structure” and “an ontological totality
of the … subject” (not the “isolated” but, nonetheless, a total subject), which
the “primordial difference” of Verbum for Milbank would exclude. Indeed,
when we take the step beyond the first circle which the divine Being
circumscribes in its relation to Unity, we borrow from the Proclean Liber de
causis to discover that God Knows. Here too the logic is a return to unity as the
self-relation of perfectly actual being: ipse est maxime rediens ad essentiam suam
et cognoscens seipsum.92
Being is act, and, as perfect act, it is also simple. As perfect simplicity, it is
also good, and, as good, infinitely self-diffusive. As diffusive good, the divine
unity must be inclusive as well as a transcending negation. As a perfect re-
turn upon itself into unity, it is thinking. Thought’s inherent desire for itself
as object implies that the divine is the good to itself as will. Because the ac-
tivities of thinking and willing are purely internal, they are self-relations. But
relations existent in the simple must be subsistences, and so the trinitarian
differences, the Persons, appear. Thus, in its medieval Neoplatonic context,
Aristotle’s purus actus is an entelecheia both self-differentiating and complete
within the undifferentiated unity of essence.93
What is crucial here is incomprehensible for postmodern theology. The
trinitarian differential ontology—so to speak—depends upon metaphysics. So
the trinitarian differentiation, the trinitarian theology, is through and through
metaphysics and ontology and theology. It is an Aristotelian onto-theo-logy—
Milbank is right in regarding Aristotle as an onto-theologian,94 modified by
Neoplatonism. Here lies its strength as Christian theology.
To the end, Aquinas is consistent in this regard. When late in his life he is
writing an exposition of the Liber de causis and comparing it with Proclus’s
Elements and with the Corpus Dionysiacum, Aquinas finally knows that it is
not “The Theology of Aristotle”. The editors of a recent translation into
English tell us that the Liber is for Thomas “metaphysics” in contrast to the
theology proper, and refer to the beginning of the Commentary. But, that,
when read, turns out to lead the philosophic quest for the ultimate hap-
piness by means of intellectual contemplation to the gospel hope for eternal
life in the knowledge of the one true God. By the continuity of what is sought
in philosophy and in the gospel, Thomas explains why theology is one with
the philosophic knowledge of causes.95 To his views on this in the Summa, I
turn next.
400 Wayne J. Hankey
So far I have said nothing about the location of Aquinas’s trinitarian dif-
ferential ontology within the history of Christian trinitarian theology. I do
intend to say a word about that—at least as it bears upon the Christian trans-
mission of Neoplatonic thought. From there I shall conclude with some further
remarks about how far Aquinas can go with postmodern difference. To pre-
pare for both, I need to make a remark about theoria in Aquinas. Here we juxta-
pose Christian faith, Aristotelian First Philosophy as the knowledge of causes,
Dionysian and Augustinian Neoplatonisms.
The primacy of theoria in theology is asserted at the beginning of the Summa
Theologiae and stands in relation to two contrasts. Both are relevant to our
considerations. The first contrast is between the theoretical and the prac-
tical. Theology is theoretical because its subject is God and is ultimately
God’s own science. God knows himself and what he does eadem scientia,
by the same science. Participation in that science is human beatitude. Both
for God and for us, the practical is contained within scientia speculativa.
Principally, then, seeing theology as theory involves getting to the divine
perspective.
The second contrast is between this science and the philosophical sciences
which Thomas without hesitation presupposes. They have as their subjects the
various forms of being and are all either practical or theoretical. The know-
ledge which is sacra doctrina, overcoming the distinction between science
and wisdom, as well as that between practical and theoretical, comes from,
and participates in, the unity beyond the reach of philosophical theology.96
Thus, sacra doctrina is at least as much the successor of the all embracing theo-
logical systems of the later Neoplatonists as it is the heir of the First Philosophy
of Aristotle. Still, the knowledge attained in Aristotle’s sapiential science must
not be despised; according to Aquinas, it pertains to beatitude.
The most important discussion of beatitude occurs in Question 12 on how
God is known by us. There we find Thomas’s notorious doctrine of created
grace developed in order to explain how we can have knowledge of God’s
essence. In asserting the necessity of direct vision of God’s essence for human
happiness, Aquinas sets Augustine against the Pseudo-Dionysius. Indeed,
in his late exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, Aquinas accuses Eriugena
of heresy because Eriugena has absorbed the Dionysian negative theology
more completely than Thomas will himself. Aquinas accuses Eriugena of deny-
ing that all the angels see God “per essentiam”. This was a mistake, Aquinas
asserts, “de primis studentibus in libris Dionysii”. Such was “Ioannes Scotus,
qui primo commentus in libros Dionysii. Sed haec opinio haeretica est …” 97
Haeretica est!
For Aquinas the denial of such sight is contrary to both faith and reason.
Faith would be nullified because its purpose is human beatitude. “Since
the final happiness of man consists in his highest activity, reasoning, if no cre-
ated intellect could see God, either it would never achieve happiness or its hap-
piness would consist in something other than God. This is foreign to faith.”98
Reason, in turn, would be denied. It is fulfilled in the knowledge of the

principles and causes. This frustrated, human natural desire would be vain. So
both faith and reason require that “the blessed see the essence of God”.
Presence, vision, essence, theoria are ultimate, and Scriptural theology must
respect the integrity of what philosophy demands.
B. Eriugena, Anselm and Bonaventure

To locate Thomas’s treatment of the Trinity in the history of Christian the-
ology in the Middle Ages, three figures may be mentioned: Eriugena, who
here chooses Dionysius against Augustine, and Anselm, who chooses August-
ine, perhaps—though this is only a guess—against Eriugena,99 and Bonaven-
ture. Bonaventure tries to unite Anselm’s Augustine with Dionysius. Aquinas
will do the same and the difference between them is illumining.
Eriugena works between two opposed trinitarian logics.100 The first: ousia,
dynamis, energeia, he attributes to Dionysius, the other: esse, uelle, scire, to
Augustine. The Dionysian triad is fundamental to all things, both intellectual
and unintellectual. The triad “constantly and incorruptibly present in all
natures”101 constitutes them as manifestations of the divine substance, in it-
self unknown. The triad of ousia, dynamis, energeia is not for self-knowledge
directly, but rather it moves to manifestation and externalization by which
the divine becomes knowable. However, Eriugena identifies ousia, dynamis,
energeia with another trinity: nous, logos, dianoia. Through the movement from
intellect to reason to sense, and by their relation within the human, saving
self-knowledge is finally achieved.102 Crucially, the first triad remains dom-
inant in Eriugena’s system. Self-knowledge is attained only as a result of a total
self-othering, a self-othering which is also the divine self-creation and,
thus, the creation of the world in and through the human. Humans are known
to themselves only through a complete externalization, a total exitus and
reditus.103
It is no surprise that John Milbank writes enthusiastically about Eriugena.104
He seems a precursor of Milbank’s cultural theology where the divine and
human meet in poesis.
Aquinas uses the Dionysian triad to structure treatises on God, the angels
and the human within the Summa. Its principle also governs the overall struc-
ture of the Summa itself. In it, the human and the divine come together through
a total exitus and reditus, which must include the whole of what is other, in-
cluding the physical.
Augustine’s own use of his trinity of being, intellect and will to establish
individual self-certainty in a turn inward105 does not suit the purposes of
Eriugena. In contrast, Eriugena’s self is situated between the extremes of un-
knowable essence and perfect knowledge attained by total exteriorization.
Eriugena says that in the beginning humanity turned away from a possible
Paradisal knowledge allowing immediate knowledge of God and self without
the passage into sense. He avoids contradicting Augustine on the Trinity
402 Wayne J. Hankey
by transposing intellect and will—he writes, instead, of esse, velle, scire—by

using Augustine’s triad very little, and by assimilating it to the Dionysian
triad.106
The opposite is true of Anselm. Both Monologion and Proslogion claim to be
no more than results of reflections on Augustine. This is mistaken humility.
Augustine is carried beyond himself into the freer relation to reason which
places Anselm on the way between Augustine and Descartes.107 Still the elem-
ents are all Augustinian. The arguments of Anselm’s treatises require not only
the Plotinian and Augustinian move ab exterioribus ad interioria, ab inferioribus
ad superiora, but inclusion of the presupposed externality, the per aliud, within
the divine per se. From the union of these, both in the meditative soliloquy—
one of the theological genres Augustine invented—(the Monologion), and also
in the alloquium, address to another, (the Proslogion), faith is transformed into
rationes necessariae.108
For Anselm, the Augustinian mental trinity of being, knowing and loving
is both pure self-relation and also the primal self-othering to which all that is
per aliud is reduced. The identity of word and reality, on which divided human
speech and thought depends, is also the locutio rerum, the production of a
mental word. This production is essential to mind or spiritus.109 So far as this
Verbal self-differentiation, this “First Difference”, is identical in finite and in
infinite mind, a deduction of the Divine Trinity is possible. This deduction from
the univocal structure of mind, a deduction which Augustine never made,
Anselm undertakes in his Monologion.110
Aquinas refuses such a deduction in his Summa. A genuine development
in his teaching brings him to the conviction that a conception of a mental
word is essential to thought. Intelligere is dicere.111 And so it might seem that
he is on his way to a linguistic cultural theology. But, from the character of the
human production of a mental word, he does not think anything can be safely
concluded about a divine differentiation. This prevents Aquinas being re-
cruited for contemporary cultural theology where the divine and human meet
in the original poesis ex nihilo. Anselm’s Augustinian need to find his quest
contained within the divine per se, where the divine differentiation into equal
substances is within the self-relation of being, intellect, and love prevents his
being converted to poetic theology.112
Bonaventure’s complex Itinerarium includes marriage between Augustine,
(sometimes read through Anselm), Anselm himself, and Dionysius. Triadic
logics, though not used to exclude binary and other patterns, dominate.
Perhaps in their combination, we may find something positive for
theological poesis. To look, we must first move from the Monologion to the
Proslogion.
In the Proslogion, Anselm neither uses nor arrives at Augustine’s psycho-
logical triad in order to consider the Trinity.113 Proslogion’s beginning, its mis-
named “ontological argument”,114 Bonaventure unites to Dionysius’ doctrine
of the self-diffusive good. Bonaventure informs us: “Dionysius, following
Christ, says that the Good is God’s primary name”.115 Describing the highest
good, Bonaventure calls it:
without qualification that than which no greater can be thought. And it
is such [Bonaventure continues, following Anselm in the Proslogion] that
it cannot rightly be thought not to be, and since to be is in all ways better
than not to be, it is such that it cannot rightly be thought of unless it be
thought of as three and one. For good is said to be self-diffusive, and the
highest good (summum bonum) is supremely self-diffusive.116
The self-sufficient and perfect good communicates itself so that persons are
formed who give “to one another their entire substance and nature”.117 In this
emanation, “Ibi est summa communicatio et vera diffusio”.118 “You are able to
see that, through the utmost communicability of the Good, there must be the
Trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit”.119
The arguments of Anselm in the Proslogion, and of Bonaventure in the Itin-
erarium, are from the simple self-sufficiency of the highest good communi-
cating itself within the divine unity so as to bring forth distinct divine Persons.
The two doctors differ so far as the explicit Dionysian character of Bonaven-
ture’s argument makes the dialectical confrontation between being and
unity, good and triadic diffusion stronger. In Bonaventure, they are the op-
posed visions of the Cherubim who gaze across the Mercy Seat. For both
doctors, the relations of the Persons are the relations of love (other constitu-
tive activities are not mentioned). The Seraphic Doctor begins and concludes
his Itinerarium not with the intellectualism of Aquinas but with love.120 How-
ever, the Proslogion concludes with the demand to know; delectatio is com-
plete knowledge of the perfect good.121 Love in the Itinerarium does not lead
to poesis or communitarian praxis. The Itinerarium concludes beyond div-
ision in the silence and darkness essential to union as represented in The
Mystical Theology of Dionysius.122 Bonaventure’s Anselm leads to Dionysius,
and a “spiritual” union fulfilling vision is said again and again to be
“enough”.
C. Aquinas: The Ontology of Difference

We come back now for the last time to Aquinas and to a brief consideration
of the ontology of difference. I shall deal with two general questions: 1. how
theological difference is constructed, and 2. difference within the Trinity.
In respect to the second, there are three subheads: (a) motionless motion,
(b) giving and receiving, (c) the difference of the Holy Spirit. In dealing with
each of these I have in mind the literature both contemporary and medieval
which we have considered already, though space will not permit bringing out
the points of comparison.
Difference is constructed in Thomas’s Summa Theologiae, as in Neoplatonic
systems generally, by a movement from a higher to a lower level requiring the
increase of differentiation. When this process is complete, it is reversed. Thus,
404 Wayne J. Hankey
Aquinas begins with a treatment of the substance of God through a dialectical

movement from simplicity to unity developed in nine questions. He goes on
to the self-related activities of knowing and loving and to the activity ad extra
of power. This section in the descending triad which structures the treatment
of Deus in se concludes with the divine happiness. God’s Beatitude is a function
of his knowing in much the same way as God’s Unity corresponds to Sim-
plicity at the immediately higher level. Knowing and loving, as the activities
making internal relations in God, become the first and second substantial dif-
ferences. Self-knowledge and Self-love become, at this third “personal” level,
the begetting of the Son or Logos from the Being of the Father and the pro-
cession of the Spirit or Love from both. It is crucial to see that after these
emanations—Thomas’s own term123—differentiating emanation continues. But,
because differentiation is then no longer within the medium of the divine
substance, its character is radically dissimilar.
Within the divine substance, differentiation produced only numerical multi-
plication of equal substances. Once outside divinity itself, the mirroring of
the divine goodness requires inequality of grade and distinction of kind as
well as numerical multiplicity—making this transition is logically the most
difficult; in later Neoplatonism the henads serve this necessity. Three ranks are
created by the various forms in which matter and form—already analogously
present within divinity itself—relate. These three are: the angelic realm of
pure intellect, the realm of material and sensible things without intellect, and
the human which is in between.
Most of the Summa is devoted to the world humans make for themselves
as free principles of their own works, little gods, seeking their own happi-
ness.124 Certainly this is poesis, and poesis of which the basis is the human
imaging of the divine, but it is poesis and praxis which is outside that mind
and love which are united and subsisting in the identity of esse and essentia.
In that otherness, the self-relation of knowledge and will in which happiness is
sought falls into the confusion and self-assertion which are sin. To overcome
that impossible frustration of the common human and divine will for the hap-
piness of spiritual creatures requires a divine self-othering by which human
difference in its opposition to the divine goodness may be drawn back with-
in it.125 For this, the substance of the divine Son must be found to contain an
as yet unknown difference: the divine actus purus is the identity of esse which
contains the difference of essence and existence. So, in accord with the formula
of Chalcedon, the one divine Person, or hypostasis, or essence as esse, has two
existences. By this difference, having its logic in a treatment of being, which
Pierre Hadot and others traced from Porphyry to Aquinas,126 metaphysics is
already—in principle—trinitarian theology, and trinitarian theology is already
Christology. The end is in the beginning.
Thus, there is perhaps greater difference in the original actus purus than may
have been supposed. I turn to look at it again to bring out differential features
in the Neoplatonic form in which Aquinas received it.
This is not the place to trace how Aquinas came to read Aristotle in the way
that Neoplatonists often did when reconciling him with Plato.127 The most
important medium of this interpretation for him was the Liber de causis and
the Arabic commentators. In the case we examine, Averroes, for one, whom
Aquinas called “The Commentator”, handed on the reconciling reading al-
ready present in Proclus. Aquinas supposed that Aristotle did not assert
against Plato that intellection was different from motion (as text and argu-
ment of the de Anima say) but that intellection was a different kind of motion.
Intellectual motion is not, like physical motion, the act of the imperfect, but
is rather the activity of the perfect (actus perfecti), a complete return upon self,
in fact, motionless motion. This is, for the Neoplatonists, the character of the
life of Nous, and we encounter it when Aquinas comes to the questions about
God’s knowledge. When he considers life, we arrive simultaneously at what
is always in act, at Aristotle’s self-thinking thought as God’s perfect life, and
at the Neoplatonic motionless motion as the means of ascribing life to God.128
Just to have the categories, motionless motion—which Aquinas will not
always employ—and activity of the perfect—which he is pleased to use—is
enough. Neoplatonic being, which, when perfect, is self-knowing subject-
ivity because perfectly returned upon itself, is a metaphysical Circumcession.
The moving circle is full of differences but always also complete. Aquinas
would have difficulty with John Milbank’s statement:
In God … potential is itself infinitely actualized, yet the category insists

that an infinite actus purus (unlike that of Aristotle) is not a closure, or a
circumscription—God does not limit even himself, any more than he
causes, begins or ends himself.129
The activities of knowing and loving, and their essential interconnection

expand the difference generated by and contained within the always complete
circle.130 Self-knowing by the creator requires self-differentiation, because the
truth of the divine ideas necessitates a comparison between God’s essence as
cause and as imitated.131 Distinguishing love from knowing requires distin-
guishing two forms of the divine self-possession. In the first, being is for it-
self and moved to itself under the form of truth. In the second difference, which
must not be the first—the negative here is crucial—the movement is ultimately
spoken of as impulsion, and it is being’s relation to itself as known, but known
as good, and so also desired. The identity and difference here produces the
trinitarian “double procession” of Father and Son as origins of the Spirit. One
more element is required in order to appreciate the significance of “impulsion”
in the divine motionless motion, and therefore the nature of “The Second
Difference” in Aquinas.
Aquinas moves from the divine considered as self-related activities to exam-
ine the relations within the essence. These the divine simplicity requires to
be substances—so, significantly, as with Bonaventure, it is Neoplatonic
406 Wayne J. Hankey
simplicity which requires differentiation to be substantial! Moreover, the

move to trinitarian Persons from activities is also for the sake of the greatest
unity. When an intellectual procession is concerned, “so much more
perfectly it proceeds, so much greater is the unity with that from which it
proceeds”.132 The activities are modified when objectified as Persons, so that
the divine seems to have submitted itself to a kind of passion. The Persons
are the essence as given and received. Even if the motion is not proper, (the
act of the imperfect), there is, properly speaking, accipere.133 The procession of
intellectual activity engenders a substantial difference, a difference of infinite
subsistences. Moreover, the divine knowing, as source, is Father; as the essence
known, thus, as object, it is Son. “The Son understands not by producing a
word but as being a word which comes forth from another.”134 Father and
Son are thus opposed as well as united. The opposition engendered must be
overcome. The connexio duorum is the Spirit who receives his being from both
as love. As Aquinas says, “If you leave out the Spirit, it is not possible to
understand the unitas connexionis inter Patrem et Filium.”135 Aquinas is explicit
that this whole trinitarian process is an exitus and reditus. It is the basis of that
other going out and return which is creation.136
Thomas’s position on “The Second Difference” is difficult to understand. The
Spirit has two opposed aspects. On the one hand, it is connexio, nexus, unitas,
because it is bond of love overcoming the opposition of Father and Son. As
spiritus, which is the proper name of the third Person as well as the nature of
divinity as such, the return to it is return to the unity from which Personal
difference arises. On the other hand, the Spirit is love as ecstatic. Love is “an
action passing from the lover to the beloved”.137 The Spirit is thus “Gift”. Love
is the primal gift, since, as he quotes Aristotle: “a gift is a giving which can
have no return”.138 The Spirit is the love by which all graces are given. So, by
the Holy Spirit, the Trinity comes in a mission to humans.139 In sum, the Divine
Love is both the bond of unity and ecstatic.
Significantly, in the circular motion doubling on itself which is composed
by the questions on the Trinity in the Summa Theologiae, the questions on the
Spirit are transitional. They are both the term of the outward movement and
the beginning of the return to origin.140 However, these opposed aspects are
only the two aspects of the nature of spirit: “which seems to signify impul-
sion and motion”. “It is the property of love that it move and impel the will
of the lover into the beloved.”141 So the motion and impulse of love carry both
God in se and us back to unity.
At the conclusion of divinity proper we are left not only with the
difference by which willing was distinguished from knowing, but also
with the dialectical motion, the reditio ad seipsum by which being is
constituted. There is a second difference and it is process or motion, but it is
actus perfecti.

Conclusion
For Aquinas the self-differentiation of God, his internal emanation, which is

the return of the divine being upon itself in knowledge and love, is the origin
and ratio of the divine emanation ad extra, creation. But in Thomas’s view, for
creation to be free, to be a genuine act of love, a gift, the process of the divine
life must be complete in itself. The circle is moving, but it is perfect, moving
upon itself.
Such is the result in a theology which remains with philosophy and within
Greek theoria, even if philosophy and theology have been limited and trans-
muted in their Neoplatonic passage to the Christian doctors. Theology remains
with the thinking of being, with ontology. The self-related structure of subject-
ivity becomes essential in the henological modification of that ontology. The
mutual modifications of the henology and the ontology do nothing to reduce
the perfection of the divine subjectivity or the totality of the system. The nega-
tive theology is for the sake of a hyperessential vision which is total presence
and complete theoria. Even in hac vita, theology theoretically encircles and orders
praxis. Finally, or one might better say, firstly, metaphysics remains at the heart
of sacra doctrina. Theology is always moving hors-texte to the structure of being
and God in se at once. The present incapacity of divided human reason to
complete an analogy with the divine thinking does not make us by poesis
participants in the original linguistic creatio ex nihilo. Rather it makes us aware
of the difference between the identity of intelligere and dicere in us and in God.
By the standards of postmodern Christian theology, it would be hard to find
anything worse than Thomas’s science of sacra scriptura.
There is no neutral ground on which to stand in attempting to judge be-
tween postmodern trinitarian theology and Thomas’s. John Milbank demon-
strates correctly that there is no raw Christian experience of the Holy Spirit
“without being able in some way to articulate to oneself the rationale for the
personal subsistence of the Spirit”.142 Revelation is not independent of theology,
and neither postmodern nor Thomistic theology are independent of philoso-
phy. Thomas is more ready to admit that dependence than are his postmodern
successors. For nothing is more determinative of the present anti-philosophical
stance of theology than its dependence on the current anti-philosophy. The-
ology’s dependence is so total that it appears, in fact, to be a new apologetics.
In any case, the result is that neither revelation, nor theology, nor philosophy
provides neutral ground for an arbitrator.
There is perhaps one reconciling word to be said, though it contains a rock
of offense. So far as the primary trinitarian difference requires the passage of
divinity into infinite indeterminacy, into an endless finitude, which as a prin-
ciple of divinity prevents theoretical completion, Thomas’s self-differentiat-
ing Trinity and a postmodern one are incompatible. The same is true of “The
Second Difference”, if, as a consequence of infinite verbal indeterminacy, the
communitarian process which is both divine and human becomes endless
408 Wayne J. Hankey
praxis. However, if trinitarian difference requires only that difference is essen-

tial to divinity and not just once but twice, then Thomas’s trinitarian the-
ology is fuller and richer than an antiphilosophical and anti-Greek polemic
can think.
If, however, its rich logic be set in opposition to the Aristotelian actus
purus, and if an opposition to onto-theology be also required, we are in a bad
way. For this would exclude from view the continuity between Aristotle’s
ontological theology and the systematic henological theology in which it was
conveyed to Thomas. It is just these which make difference fundamental, all
pervasive, and understandable in Thomas’s trinitarian theology.
NOTES
*This essay was originally delivered as a lecture for the School of Hebrew, Biblical and Theo-
logical Studies, Trinity College, University of Dublin, November 6, 1997. I am grateful to Dr. Lewis
Ayres for the invitation and for the stimulation he and his students provided, to Trinity College
for its hospitality, and to Ian Stewart, Robert Dodaro, Robert Crouse and Ken Keirans who
helped with its revision for publication.
1 I have Marion and Milbank in mind. Their positions differ, see W. J. Hankey, “ReChristian-
izing Augustine Postmodern Style: Readings by Jacques Derrida, Robert Dodaro, Jean-Luc
Marion, Rowan Williams, Lewis Ayres and John Milbank”, Animus, 2 (1997), an electronic
journal at http://www.mun.ca/animus, pp. 33–69; idem, “Denys and Aquinas: Antimodern
Cold and Postmodern Hot”, Christian Origins: Theology, Rhetoric and Community, edited by
Lewis Ayres and Gareth Jones, Studies in Christian Origins (London: Routledge, 1998),
pp. 150–161 and idem, “The Postmodern Retrieval of Neoplatonism in Jean-Luc Marion
and John Milbank and the Origins of Western Subjectivity in Augustine and Eriugena”,
Hermathena, forthcoming.
2 See the special issue of the Revue Thomiste devoted to Saint Thomas et l’onto-théologie, t. XCV,
no. 1 (Janvier–Mars 1995), especially Jean-Luc Marion, “Saint Thomas d’Aquin et l’onto-
théo-logie”, and Olivier Boulnois, “Quand commence l’ontothéologie? Aristote, Thomas
d’Aquin et Duns Scot”, pp. 36, and 84–108; Marion, “Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A
Relief for Theology”, Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994), pp. 576–579. John Milbank also uses it as a
critical category, though for him, as for Marion, it has ceased to have the near universal
application that it had for Heidegger: see “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics”, The
Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, (Oxford: Blackwells, 1997), pp. 40ff.; idem,
“Can a Gift be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic”, Modern Theology,
11:1 (January 1995), pp. 140ff.
3 For an account of the argument and why Heidegger got it wrong, see Milbank, “Only The-
ology Overcomes Metaphysics”, pp. 40ff.
4 See the newly-available Heidegger texts: “Einleitung in die Phänomenlogie der Religion”,
“Augustinus und der Neoplatonismus”, and “Die philosophischen Grundlagung der
mitteralterlichen Mystik”, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens: Gesantausgabe II, vol. 60
(Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995).
5 P. Hadot, “Les divisions des parties de la philosophie dans l’Antiquité”, Museum Helveticum,
36 (1979), p. 212; quoted in W. J. Hankey, God In Himself: Aquinas’ Doctrine of God as Expounded
in the Summa Theologiae, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987), p. 124.
6 I recognize that this “Greek” reading of Augustine is much disputed by postmodern theo-
logians, see recently Susan Mennel, “Augustine’s ‘I’: The ‘Knowing Subject’ and the Self”,
Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2 (1994), pp. 291–324; John Milbank, “Sacred Triads: August-
ine and the Indo-European Soul”, Modern Theology, 13:4 (October 1997), pp. 451–474;
John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion,
(Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997).

7 “… it is arguable that recent researches suggest that ‘modernity fulfills metaphysics’

should be radicalized as ‘modernity invented metaphysics’”. Milbank, “Only Theology
Overcomes Metaphysics”, p. 40.
8 Marion, “A Relief for Theology”, pp. 574ff.; idem, Étant Donné. Essai d’une phénoménologie de
la donation, Épiméthée (Paris: P.U.F., 1997), pp. 8 and 10. At p. 11, he writes: “nous n’insinuons
pas qu’elle réclame un donateur transcendant … nous ne sous-entendons pas que cette
phénoménologie restaure la métaphysique”. At p. 329, n. 1, there is: “Même si elle en avait
le désir (et, bien entendu, jamais ce ne fut le cas), la phénoménologie n’aurait pas la
puissance de tourner à la théologie. Et il faut tout ignorer de la théologie, de ses procédures
et de ses problématiques pour ne fût-ce qu’envisager cette invraiseblance.” See the critical
remarks of K. Keirans, “Beyond Deconstruction”, Animus, 2 (1997), an electronic journal at
http://www.mun.ca/animus, n. 17.
9 Milbank, The Word Made Strange, p. 2.
10 “An independent phenomenology must be given up, along with the claim, which would have
seemed so bizarre to the Fathers, to be doing philosophy as well as theology … [P]hilosophy
as autonomous, as ‘about’ anything independently of its creaturely status is metaphysics or
ontology in the most precisely technical sense.” Milbank, “Only Theology Overcomes Meta-
physics”, pp. 49–50.
11 See W. J. Hankey, “Making Theology Practical: Thomas Aquinas and the Nineteenth
Century Religious Revival”, Dionysius, 9 (1985), pp. 99–103, 107, 111–112. Note here how
Karl Rahner anticipates our postmodern theologians in the turn to the historical as a way
out of the emptiness of metaphysics which his following of Heidegger requires. See also
Hankey, “Denys and Aquinas: Antimodern Cold and Postmodern Hot”, p. 151; J.-L. Marion,
L’ídole et la distance. Cinq études, (Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 1977), pp. 177–243; idem, God
Without Being: Hors-texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), pp. 44–52.
12 Jacques Derrida, “How to avoid speaking: Denials”, in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play
of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, edited by S. Budick and W. Iser (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 55. The French is Jacques Derrida, “Comment ne pas
parler: Dénégations”, in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1987), pp. 535–595.
13 Marion, “Saint Thomas d’Aquin et l’onto-théo-logie”, pp. 31–66, the retractatio is at pp. 33
and 65. In it Marion notes that he was already moving in this direction in the 1991 “Preface
to the English Edition” of his Dieu sans l’être.
14 See Marion, “Saint Thomas d’Aquin et l’onto-théo-logie”, pp. 37ff.; idem, “Phénoménologie
et philosophie première. La question de la donation”, in Le Statut Contemporain de la Phil-
osophie première, Philosophie 17 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1996), pp. 29–50; Milbank, “Only Theology
Overcomes Metaphysics”, p. 44. For philosophy and theology in Aquinas in relation to these
positions, see Hankey, “Denys and Aquinas: Antimodern Cold and Postmodern Hot”,
pp. 162ff. For a summary of two opposed interpretations of Aquinas as an onto-theologian,
see Géry Prouvost, Thomas d’Aquin et les thomismes. Essai sur l’histoire des thomismes, (Paris:
Cerf, 1996), pp. 164–165. The differences lie in the degree to which God is identified with
being and is thus positively known. Prouvost cannot decide between the alternatives and,
so, commits “demi-parricide”.
15 Milbank, “Can a Gift be Given?”, pp. 138ff. and “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics”,
p. 46: “And if the ultimate phenomenon is exactly describable as the gaze of a subject, it
would appear that it is after all merely ontic, and in seeking to trump ontological differ-
ence, one has instead connived again at its obliteration”. He notes that this was Marion’s
criticism of Levinas. For Jacques Derrida also there can be a move to negative theology
within the Heideggerian criticism of onto-theology which assumes what it seems funda-
mentally to deny; “How to avoid speaking: Denials”, p. 9: “Yet the onto-theological reappro-
priation always remains possible … my uneasiness was nevertheless also directed toward
the promise of that presence given to intuition or vision. The promise of such a vision often
accompanies the apophatic voyage.”
16 Milbank, “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics”, pp. 37ff.; idem, “Can a Gift be Given?”,
pp. 132ff.
17 Milbank, “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics”, p. 45; idem, “Can a Gift be Given?”,
pp. 137ff. where Milbank considers how, for Marion, theology’s “exit from metaphysics”
has to do with “his relationship to Heidegger”.

410 Wayne J. Hankey
18 On the crucial role of Suarez in Marion’s account of the rupture between the modern and the
premodern see Graham Ward, “Introducing Jean-Luc Marion”, New Blackfriars, 76, No. 895
(July/August, 1995), “Special Issue on Jean-Luc Marion’s God Without Being”, pp. 318–321.
This analysis is also picked up by John Milbank, “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics”,
p. 40 and by Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy,
Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 61–62, 122ff.
19 Jean-Luc Marion, “The Essential Incoherence of Descartes’ Definition of Divinity”, trans. by
Frederick Van de Pitte, Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 306 and 297.
20 Pickstock, After Writing, p. 62.
21 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 381;
idem, “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics”, p. 49.
22 Milbank, “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics”, 47.
23 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. 295.
24 Milbank, “Can a Gift be Given?”, pp. 152 and 137 with 132 and “A Critique of the Theology
of the Right”, in The Word Made Strange, p. 29.
25 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, pp. 295–296.
26 Milbank, “Introduction”, “The Linguistic Turn as a Theological Turn”, “The Second Differ-
ence”, in The Word Made Strange, pp. 1–4, 113, 189.
27 John Milbank, “ ‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’: A Short Summa in Forty Two Re-
sponses to Unasked Questions”, Modern Theology, 7:3 (July 1991), pp. 225–237.
28 See Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, second edition, (London: SPCK, 1997), pp. 186–90
with 74–76, 80, 206–211. Illumining, for the kind of understanding of the consequences of
Wittgenstein for theology and religion moving here, is George Guiver, C.R., Faith in Mo-
mentum: Distinctiveness of the Church, (London: SPCK, 1990). The key to the future is ridding
the western soul of its interiority, the “inner depths of personality”. Here Guiver locates a
positive link with Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and nineteenth century atheistical Christianity in
the need to overcome Augustine’s influence.
29 Milbank is clear about this and chooses an extremely selective reinterpretation. See his
“Sacred Triads”, p. 465: “What must be argued here against Charles Taylor and others, is that
Augustine’s use of the vocabulary of inwardness is not at all a deepening of Platonic inter-
iority, but something much more like its subversion”. On the reinterpretation of Augustine
by Milbank and Lewis Ayres to this end, see my “ReChristianizing Augustine Postmodern
Style”, pp. 6, 45ff. and n. 41. For the opposed interpretation of Augustine both in relation
to Plotinus and Descartes, see Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
30 Most notable is his dusting off of William Warburton in “Pleonasm, Speech and Writing”,
in The Word Made Strange.
31 See Anselm, Monologion, chap. 10 and W. J. Hankey, “The Place of the Psychological Image
of the Trinity in the arguments of Augustine’s De Trinitate, Anselm’s Monologion, and
Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae”, Dionysius, 3 (1979), pp. 99–110; idem, “Dionysius becomes an
Augustinian. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium vi”, Studia Patristica, edited by Elizabeth A.
Livingstone, vol. XXIX (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), pp. 252–259.
32 Milbank, “Pleonasm, Speech and Writing”, p. 79.
33 See J. A. Doull, “The Philosophical Basis of Constitutional Discussion in Canada”, Animus
2 (1997), an electronic journal at http://www.mun.ca/animus, p. 25: “In the medium of
language was sought a community anterior to the tyranny of thought and the universal.
Language might be taken in a fragmented and empirical form (Wittgenstein) or as inspired
and unified poetical utterance (Heidegger).”
34 Milbank, “Pleonasm, Speech and Writing”, p. 80.
35 Here he is moving with George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a
Postliberal Age, (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1984), p. 69; see Hankey, “Making
Theology Practical”, p. 122.
36 The original is “The Second Difference: For a Trinitarianism Without Reserve”, Modern The-
ology 2:3 (July 1986), pp. 213–234; my references are to the version in The Word Made Strange,
(Oxford: Blackwells, 1997), pp. 171–193.
37 Milbank, “ ‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’ ”, pp. 231 and 234; idem, “The Second
Difference”, p. 178; idem, “Pleonasm, Speech and Writing”, pp. 79–80.

38 Derrida, “How to avoid speaking: Denials”, p. 53.

39 Ibid., p. 55.
40 Ibid., p. 58.
41 Marion, L’ídole et la distance, pp. 177–243; idem, Dieu sans l’être, pp. 111–122; Louis Bouyer,
Mysterion, Du mystère à la mystique, (Paris: O.E.I.L., 1986), pp. 230ff.
42 See, discerningly and creatively, Mark C. Taylor, “Denegating God”, Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994),
p. 603.
43 “How to avoid speaking: Denials”, p. 60 and Circumfession, fifty-nine periods and periphrases
written in a sort of internal margin, between Geoffrey Bennington’s book and work in preparation
(January 1989–April 1990), published in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques
Derrida, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993). It
translates a book with the same title published in French in 1991. The relevant references
at this point are at pp. 3, 16, 44, 55–56, 141–142. See the comments of Marion, “A Relief for
Theology”, pp. 587 and 590.
44 On theoria as Greek and especially Plotinian, see Maria Luisa Gatti, “Plotinus: the Platonic
tradition and the foundation of Neoplatonism”, in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, edited
by Lloyd Gerson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 31–34.
45 For Milbank’s reinterpretation of this triad, see his “Sacred Triads”, p. 463.
46 See Hankey, “Making Theology Practical”, p. 112.
47 Marion, Étant Donné, p. 329, n. 1 describes the fact of revelation (if there is one) as exceed-
ing “l’empan de toute science”, so “seule une théologie, et à condition de se laisser construire
à partir de ce fait seule (K. Barth ou H. U. von Balthasar …) pourrait éventuellement
y accéder”. Also consult Taylor, “Denegating God”, p. 601 and Hankey, “Denys and Aquinas:
Antimodern Cold and Postmodern Hot”, p. 150.
48 Milbank, “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics”, pp. 36–37.
49 I am here translating from the French but an English version may be found in Identität und
Differenz, trans. J. Stambaugh, (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1969).
50 Konstantinos Agoras, Personne et Liberté, ou “être comme communion” “ειναι ως κοινωνια”
dans l’oeuvre de Jean Zizioulas, an unpublished doctoral thesis for the Université de Paris—
Sorbonne, December, 1992, p. 1.
51 Ibid., pp. 306ff.; see Marion, “A Relief for Theology”, p. 579.
52 See Hankey, “Denys and Aquinas: Antimodern Cold and Postmodern Hot”, pp. 150ff.
53 For a beginning exploration of this three-fold division at its origins, see Andrew Smith,
“Iamblichus’ Views on the Relationship of Philosophy to Religion in De Mysteriis”, The Divine
Iamblichus: Philosopher and Man of Gods, edited by H. J. Blumental and E. G. Clark, (London:
Duckworth, 1993), pp. 74–86; Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of
Iamblichus, (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996), pp. 4–5.
54 Here again it moves in step with philosophical reassessments see, for example: Shaw,
Theurgy and the Soul, pp. 93–94; H. J. Blumental and E. G. Clark, “Introduction: Iamblichus
in 1990”, The Divine Iamblichus, pp. 1–4, and Stanislas Breton, De Rome à Paris. Itinéraire
philosophique, (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1992), pp. 31, 152–154, 164. The older view is
represented by E. R. Dodds in Proclus: The Elements of Theology, (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1963), p. xx or by the early writings of A. H. Armstrong.
55 Pickstock, After Writing, p. 43.
56 Ibid., pp. 195ff.
57 Ibid., pp. 3–46.
58 Ibid., pp. 95, 199, 114, 118, 192, 211–212, 214. This position is less polemical than that of
Milbank.
59 Ibid., pp. 20–22.
60 Ibid., pp. 23–46.
61 Ibid., pp. 268–272.
62 Hankey, “ReChristianizing Augustine Postmodern Style”, pp. 41 and 52ff.
63 Ibid., pp. 52ff.
64 Iamblichus, De Mysteriis II, 11, p. 96, 13–p. 97, 2 (ed. des Places).
65 Milbank, “A Critique of the Theology of the Right”, p. 32.
66 Milbank, “‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’ ”, 227 and 237; idem, The Word Made Strange,
p. 4. For his development of the notion that Christian faithfulness will require a
poetic surrender to the musical flow which, as against static spatialization, stresses “‘temporal

412 Wayne J. Hankey
occurrence through us’” (The Word Made Strange, pp. 44 and 142) Milbank relies upon
Catherine Pickstock. See especially Milbank, “Pleonasm, Speech and Writing”, p. 83, n. 62
for the interpretation of Augustine’s De Musica which is required and Catherine Pickstock,
“Ascending Numbers: Augustine’s De Musica and the Western Tradition”, in Christian
Origins, pp. 185–215.
67 “‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’ ”, pp. 231–235. See also “Pleonasm, Speech and
Writing”, pp. 79–80.
68 “‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’ ”, pp. 225–226.
69 See Annick Charles-Saget, “La théurgie, nouvelle figure de l’ergon dans la vie philosophique”,
in The Divine Iamblichus, p. 113; on the relation of theurgy to cosmogony, see Gregory Shaw,
“Theurgy as Demiurgy: Iamblichus’ Solution to the Problem of Embodiment”, Dionysius,
12 (1988), pp. 39–40; idem, Theurgy and the Soul, pp. 45–57, 127–141.
70 Milbank, “‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’ ”, p. 228.
71 Ibid., pp. 233–234.
72 E.g., Johann Baptist Metz, “Suffering unto God”, Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994), pp. 611–622; see
Hankey, “Making Theology Practical”, pp. 113–114 and idem, “Aquinas and the Passion of
God”, in Being and Truth: Essays in Honour of John Macquarrie, edited by Alistair Kee and
Eugene Long, (London: SCM, 1986), pp. 318–333.
73 See, for example, Theology and Social Theory, p. 158, where Hegel “is ‘unorthodox’ because
he posits a prior ‘moment’ of relatively unrealized and merely abstract subjectivity in God.
He is also ‘heretical’ because he conceives of creation as a negation which results in self-
alienation …”.
74 Milbank, “The Second Difference”, pp. 184–186.
75 Milbank, “‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’”, p. 228.
76 Compare Milbank, “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics”, pp. 40 and 44.
77 Ibid., p. 45.
78 See Ennead V. 1 3ff. and Hankey, “Aquinas’ First Principle, Being or Unity?”, Dionysius, 4
(1980), pp. 143–145. Ennead V. 1 7 speaks about the connection between the contemplative
return of Intellect to the One and Intellect’s self-definition. This passage, with statements
ambiguous with respect to the One itself, and Ennead VI. 8 12–13, contain language about
the interconnection of activity, being, substance, self, knowledge, will, and the One’s “choice
and willing of itself” which are well on the way to the doctrines of Porphyry, Augustine,
Dionysius and of the Liber de causis which stand between Aristotle and Aquinas. “The first
principle posits itself and creates itself as well, and is self-productive activity. In it activity
and being coincide.” Gatti, “Plotinus: The Platonic Tradition”, p. 29; see pp. 31–32.
79 For something on Aristotle see my “Aquinas and the Passion of God”, pp. 325–326.
80 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (Ottawa: Piana, 1953) = ST, I,3,1; I,3,2; I,4,1; etc.
81 The following reproduces my argument in “Denys and Aquinas: Antimodern Cold and
Postmodern Hot”, p. 171.
82 Rudi A. te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas, Studien und Texte zur
Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters xlvi (Leiden, New York, Köln: E. J. Brill, 1995), pp. 93ff.
and 254–279.
83 David Burrell in a review of Velde in International Philosophical Quarterly, 37 (1997),
p. 102.
84 See, on their differences, Hankey, “Denys and Aquinas: Antimodern Cold and Postmodern
Hot”, pp. 146–148 and Andrea Robiglio, “Gilson e Fabro. Appunti per un confronto”, Divus
Thomas, 17:2 (1997). The entire issue is devoted to “Etienne Gilson. La riflessione teoretica”.
85 Milbank, “Can a Gift be Given?”, pp. 153–154.
86 ST, I,3,2, resp. and ad 3. This is the overall argument of Hankey, God in Himself.
87 See my “Making Theology Practical”, pp. 97–107 and “Dionysian Hierarchy in St. Thomas
Aquinas: Tradition and Transformation”, Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité en Orient et en
Occident, Actes du Colloque International Paris, 21–24 septembre 1994, edited by Ysabel de Andia,
Collection des Études Augustiniennes, Série Antiquité 151 (Paris: Institut d’Études August-
iniennes, 1997), pp. 411–413.
88 ST, I,3,2.
89 Hankey, God in Himself, pp. 57–80; see, on the contrary, Prouvost, Thomas d’Aquin et les
thomismes, p. 140, n. 1, quoting Yves Labbe (Revue thomiste, 92 [1992], p. 654), with whom he
agrees. Their common position is that Dionysius separates himself from Proclus by giving

priority to the Good over the One. So far as Thomas follows Dionysius in this, his theology
would be equally apophatic. I see no evidence either that Dionysius separates himself from
Proclus in this way or that Thomas follows him. Moreover, Aquinas does not interpret
Dionysius as giving a priority of this kind to the Good.
90 ST, I,3, prologue: “quia simplicia in rebus corporalibus sunt imperfecta and partes”.
91 See Hankey, “Aquinas’ First Principle”, pp. 133–172. On the contrary, see Jan A. Aertsen,
“Ontology and Henology in Mediaeval Philosophy (Thomas Aquinas, Master Eckhart and
Berthold of Moosburg)”, in E. P. Bos and P. A. Meijer, On Proclus and his Influence in
Mediaeval Philosophy, Philosophia Antiqua 53 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), p. 121; idem, “The
Platonic Tendency of Thomism and the Foundations of Aquinas’s Philosophy”, Tommaso
D’Aquino: proposte nuove di letture. Festscrift Antonio Tognolo, edited by Ilario Tolomio,
Medioevo. Rivista di Storia della Filosofia Medievale, 18 (Padova: Editrice Antenore, 1992),
p. 54; idem, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas, Studien
und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters lii (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), p. 203.
92 ST, I,14,2 ad 1. Throughout it will be necessary to consult my God in Himself in order to
find the support for my interpretation of the Summa.
93 Porphyry is crucial to the mediation between Aristotle, Neoplatonism and Christian
trinitarian theology. See Hankey, “Denys and Aquinas: Antimodern Cold and Postmodern
Hot”, pp. 167ff. and G. Girenti, Il pensiero forte di Porfirio. Mediazione fra henologia platonica e
ontologia aristotelica, (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1996). G. Reale, in an introduction (p. 21)
remarks: “Si tratta evidentemente di un tentativo di recuperare la teologia aristotelica
all’interno del neoplatonismo”. W. Beierwaltes makes the same point in Agostino e il
neoplatonismo, (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1995), pp. 105–106 and in other works.
94 See also Marion, “A Relief for Theology”, p. 579.
95 St. Thomas Aquinas. Commentary on the Book of Causes [Super Librum De Causis Expositio],
trans. and annotated by Vincent A. Guagliardo, O.P., Charles R. Hess, O.P., Richard C.
Taylor, introduction by Vincent A. Guagliardo, O.P., Thomas Aquinas in Translation 1
(Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), pp. xx, and 3–4.
96 For my argument here see ST, I,1 and my God in Himself, pp. 25–27, 58–63. For the distance
between Thomas’s sacra doctrina and Aristotelian science, see J.-P. Torrell, “Le savoir thé-
ologique chez les premiers thomistes”, Revue thomiste, 97:1 (1997), pp. 29–30.
97 Thomas Aquinas, Super Epistolam ad Hebraeos Lectura, in Super Epistolas S. Pauli Lectura,
edited by Raphael Cai, seventh edition, 2 vols., ii (Taurin/Rome: Marietti, 1953), p. 354,
s. 85. On the late date for these commentaries amongst Thomas’s writings, see vol. i, p. vi.
Significantly, this has recently been confirmed by the discovery of a reference to Proclus
in the commentary on Colossians; see Simon Tugwell, Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings,
The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1988), p. 247, n. 472 and
Super Epistolam ad Colossenses Lectura in Super Epistolas S. Pauli Lectura, edited by Raphael
Cai, p. 134, ss 41 and 42 and W. J. Hankey, “Aquinas, Pseudo-Denys, Proclus and Isaiah
VI. 6”, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, 64 (1997), p. 74.
98 ST, I,12,1. For a complete treatment of the issues involved in the relation of faith and reason
here, see Denis J. M. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happi-
ness in Aquinas’s Moral Science, (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
1997).
99 The almost endless discussion of nothingness at the beginning of the Monologion so as to
turn trinitarian theology to the inner production of the locutio rerum raises suspicions, but
other explanations are possible.
100 Periphyseon, V. 942A; see L. Michael Harrington, Human Mediation in Eriugena’s Periphyseon,
M.A. Thesis, Department of Classics, Dalhousie University, 1997; idem, “Unusquisque in
suo sensu abundet: Human Perspective in Eriugena’s Periphyseon”, Dionysius, 16 (1998),
pp. 134–137.
101 Periphyseon, I. 506B.
102 Periphyseon, II. 570A.
103 On the political and ecclesiastical consequences of this, see W. J. Hankey, “ ‘Dionysius
dixit, Lex divinitatis est ultima per media reducere’: Aquinas, hierocracy and the
‘augustinisme politique’”, in Tommaso D’Aquino, p. 138.
104 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, pp. 424–426; idem, “Pleonasm, Speech and Writing”,
pp. 79–80.

414 Wayne J. Hankey
105 For example at de Ciuitate dei, XI. 26.

106 This assimilation was normal in the Middle Ages and later, see my “Dionysius dixit”,
p. 132 and my “Augustinian Immediacy and Dionysian Mediation in John Colet, Edmund
Spenser, Richard Hooker and the Cardinal Bérulle”, in Augustinus in der Neuzeit, edited by
Dominique de Courcelles, (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 117–152. This is not to deny that
Eriugena also chooses Augustine against Dionysius—see Donald F. Duclow, “Isaiah Meets
the Seraph: Breaking Ranks in Dionysius and Eriugena?”, Eriugena: East and West. Papers
of the Eighth International Colloquium of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies,
Chicago and Notre Dame, 18–20 October 1991, edited by B. McGinn and W. Otten, Notre
Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies V (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1994), p. 241—and against pagan Platonism (see L. Nauta, “The Preexistence of
the Soul in Medieval Thought”, Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévalé, 63 [1996],
pp. 108–110).
107 See Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Inter-
pretation, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996),
pp. 261–278; Gerald J. Galgan, God and Subjectivity, American University Studies Series V,
Philosophy, Vol. 99 (New York/Bern/Frankfort am Main/Paris: Peter Lang, 1990); Gregory
Schufreider, Confessions of a Rational Mystic, Purdue University Series in the History of
Philosophy (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1994).
108 See Anselm, “Prooemium”, Proslogion, Opera Omnia, edited by Schmitt, vol. 1 (Edinburgh:
Nelson, 1946).
109 This is a summary of part of the argument of chapters 5 to 29 of the Monologion.
110 See Hankey, “The Place of the Psychological Image of the Trinity”, p. 109 and idem,
“Dionysius becomes an Augustinian”, pp. 256–259. R. D. Crouse, “A Twelfth Century
Augustinian: Honorius Augustodunensis”, Atti III, Congresso Internazionale su S. Agostino
nel xvi Centenario delle Conversione, Roma, 15–20 settember 1986, Studia Ephemerides
“Augustinianum” 26, (Augustinianum: Rome, 1987), p. 177, restates my point thus: “Anselm
has taken one side of the Augustinian dialogue between the word of God foris and the
word of God intus; he has thus, in his methodological independence of the revealed word,
in a sense re-platonised Augustine, in the context of an established piety where the
impasse of platonic spirituality, so acutely felt by Augustine, is no longer understood”.
111 See Hankey, God in Himself, p. 133.
112 Monologion, chap. 79.
113 Proslogion, chap. 23. Augustine likewise turns from it at the end of the De Trinitate; see
Stock, Augustine the Reader, p. 273.
114 See Jean-Luc Marion, “Is the Ontological Argument Ontological? The Argument
According to Anselm and Its Metaphysical Interpretation According to Kant”, The Journal
of the History of Philosophy, 30:2 (1992), pp. 201–218.
115 Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, Opera Theologica Selecta, vol. 5, (Quaracchi, 1964),
v, 2, p. 308.
116 Ibid., vi, 2, p. 310.
117 Ibid., vi, 2, p. 310.
118 Ibid., vi, 3, p. 311.
119 Ibid., vi, 2, p. 311.
120 Though on this question, Thomas and Bonaventure are both more subtle than an exclusive
either/or—Dante in the Paradise of the Doctors is right to make them complementary.
121 This complete knowledge must fully satisfy every aspect of the human, see Proslogion,
chap. 1, 14, 17, 24–26.
122 On this in Anselm (comparing the Monologion and the Proslogion), see Paul Gilbert,
Le Proslogion de S. Anselme. Silence de Dieu et joie de l’homme, Analecta Gregoriana 257
(Rome: Gregorian University, 1990), pp. 203–213.
123 ST, I,34,2; I,40, prol.
124 On the structure and character of the Secunda pars, and an argument as to why it does not
fit within a Neoplatonic exitus/reditus framework, see Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of
Sodomy in Catholic Theology, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), p. 141, n. 6.
125 This is the basis of the necessary reasoning by which the incarnation is deduced in the Cur
deus homo of Anselm, see the interesting remarks of John Milbank, “The Second Differ-
ence”, p. 182.

126 Pierre Hadot, Porphyre et Victorinus, 2 vols. (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1968); idem, “La
distinction de l’être et de l’étant dans le ‘de Hebdomadibus’ de Boèce”, in Die Metaphysik
in Mittelalter, edited by P. Wilpert, Miscellanea Mediaevalia (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1963),
pp. 148–153; idem, “Dieu comme acte d’être. A propos des théories d’Étienne Gilson sur
la ‘metaphysique’”, Étienne Gilson et nous: La philosophie et son histoire, ed. M. Courtier,
(Paris: Vrin, 1980), pp. 117–121; idem, “Dieu comme acte d’être dans le néoplatonisme,”
Dieu et l’être: exégèses d’Exode 3,13 et de Coran 20, 11–24, Centre d’études des religions du
livre, CNRS (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1978), pp. 57–63; idem, “L’être et l’étant dans
le néoplatonisme,” Études néoplatoniciennes, edited by J. Trouillard et al. (Neuchâtel, 1973),
pp. 27–39. See Mark D. Jordan, “The Grammar of Esse”, The Thomist, 44 (1980), pp. 1–26
which accepts these results and my “Aquinas and the Passion of God”, n. 60.
127 On the importance of this reconciliation in the development, see my review of Simplicius,
On Aristotle’s Physics 5, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997) for Bryn Mawr Classical
Review [http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/bmr.html], BMCR 98.3.19.
128 Aristotle, De Anima, I,3 and III,7; Aquinas, Sententia libri de Anima, Opera Omnia XLV, 1
(Roma/Paris: Leonina/Vrin, 1984), I,vi, p. 30, 219–222; I,x, p. 51, 207–210; III,vi, p. 230,
29–36; Summa contra Gentiles, I,13; ST, I,18,1 and 3; and my God in Himself, pp. 103–106.
129 Milbank, “Can a Gift be Given?”, p. 154.
130 Aquinas considers the ways in which the various motions may be attributed to God at
In librum Beati Dionysii de divinis nominibus expositio, edited by C. Pera, (Turin/Rome:
Marietti, 1950), IX, iv, pp. 839–842; God may be called circular.
131 Hankey, God in Himself, pp. 74–78, 100–102; idem, “Denys and Aquinas”, pp. 170–172; te
Velde, Participation and Substantiality, pp. 115–116; J. M. McDermott, S.J., “The Analogy of
Human Knowing in the Prima Pars”, Gregorianum 77, (1996), pp. 284–285, and n. 26; Vivian
Boland, O.P., Ideas in God According to Saint Thomas Aquinas: Sources and Synthesis, Studies
in the History of Christian Thought LXIX (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), pp. 297–332.
132 ST, I,27,1 ad 2.
133 ST, I,42,1 ad 3. See Hankey, God in Himself, pp. 126–127, 131.
134 ST, I,34,2 ad 4 and I,37,1 ad 4.
135 ST, I,39,8.
136 ST, I,32,3 ad 3; I,42,5 ad 3; I,36,4 ad 1 and I,39,8. See Hankey, God in Himself, pp. 119 and
131.
137 ST, I,37,1 obj. 2.
138 ST, I,38,2.
139 ST, I,43,5 ad 1.
140 See Hankey, God in Himself, pp. 115ff., and B. Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas,
edited by David B. Burrell, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967),
pp. 206–207.
141 ST, I,38,2.
142 Milbank, “The Second Difference”, p. 173.

(Hankey Wayne) Theoria Versus Poesis - Neoplatonism

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(Hankey Wayne) Theoria Versus Poesis - Neoplatonism

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Modern Theology 15:4 October 1999

THEORIA VERSUS POESIS:

Introduction: Theology after Heidegger’s Critique of Onto-theology

particular ontologically determined theologies. At root, then, philosophical

I. The First Theological Difference: Trying to Get Beyond Philosophy

which is revelation. A separation of these would avoid onto-theology.12 How-

… Descartes follows in the tradition of Duns Scotus, for whom a being

pointing out that the turn to epistemology is pre-enabled by a radical

Equally, an element of Augustine’s trinitarian theology which Anselm placed

II. The Second Theological Difference: Getting Beyond Theology

Being and thought. In his interpretation of Parmenides’s poem, a reading

Christian thought must no longer fight a campaign to find a philosophy

be inappropriately baptized or awkwardly adapted. It ought rather to

This gift Agoras specifies as “the ‘presence’ of God in Christ”. He concludes

addressed as if personal.56 Her return to a Christianity for which the problem

poesis may be the key to … a postmodern theology. Poesis … is an integral

[P]ractice cannot claim to “know” the finality of what it treats as final …

Our present is getting over this objectivity:

substantial objectivity and subjectivity—the philosophical remnants of Greek

III. Thomas’s Trinitarian Theology: Difference within Theoria

The effect of the Neoplatonic positioning of being, understood as entelecheia,

Reason, in turn, would be denied. It is fulfilled in the knowledge of the

B. Eriugena, Anselm and Bonaventure

by transposing intellect and will—he writes, instead, of esse, velle, scire—by

C. Aquinas: The Ontology of Difference

Aquinas begins with a treatment of the substance of God through a dialectical

In God … potential is itself infinitely actualized, yet the category insists

The activities of knowing and loving, and their essential interconnection

simplicity which requires differentiation to be substantial! Moreover, the

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.

For Aquinas the self-differentiation of God, his internal emanation, which is

praxis. However, if trinitarian difference requires only that difference is essen-

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.

7 “… it is arguable that recent researches suggest that ‘modernity fulfills metaphysics’

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.

38 Derrida, “How to avoid speaking: Denials”, p. 53.

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.

105 For example at de Ciuitate dei, XI. 26.

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.

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