Address to the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Baylor University. I gave this lecture in November 2017. As I reread it for purposes of placing it on this site (because it really is aimed at putting scattered stuff in one place), I am struck by how long it is. I really do need a good editor. I’m grateful for the patience of those who heard it. Despite its flaws, I think it still manages to say some things that are of continuing relevance as we try to understand the intellectual and cultural challenges of our days.
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Belonging to the WORD made Flesh
Address to the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 2017
+Daniel E. Flores, STD
Bishop of Brownsville in Texas
I will spare you an overwrought explanation about why I am speaking at this meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Briefly, I am not a philosopher. My studies were in Saint Thomas, but the bulk of my overly long dissertation aimed at trying to approach Saint Thomas as he primarily understood himself, namely as a Teacher of Sacred Scripture. That I am a bishop does not make me an obvious entry into these corridors either, given the fact that at least since 1277 bishops are not often encouraged to give a push one way or another to philosophical discourses. The thematic for this year’s convocation, “Philosophy, Faith and Modernity” suggests that there is hope that I might have something to say about Faith in relation to both philosophy and modernity. I will let you be the judge of that. I am, though, a friend of Tom Hibbs, or Dr. Hibbs, as we called him even when we were undergraduates at the University of Dallas. He was very good to me in those early days, and we had many a good laugh. He used to urge me to write in shorter sentences. I am still trying to do that. He asked me to come, and because friendship is an enduring habit which gently binds the willing conscience, I am happy to be here. It is not irrelevant to my purpose this evening to open with references to Thomas the Teacher of Sacred Scripture, the dawn of the 14th Century, and to friendship.
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I will start with Thomas, specifically with his commentary on the Letter to the Hebrews. His exposition of that letter is a beautiful expression of Thomas’ exegetical mind. It is also a text that has been somewhat neglected by both philosophers and theologians. This may have to do with the fact that within the commentaries on the Pauline corpus, Thomas’ commentary on Hebrews presents unique textual difficulties; it is transmitted to us through two interpolated reportationes.(1) This is vexing to the reader for reasons I need not go into here. For my purposes this evening I would simply point out that in the first lecture on chapter one, the received text reports Thomas commenting on the sense of the verse:
In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our fathers through the prophets; in these last days, he spoke to us through a son, whom he made heir of all things and through whom he created the universe […]
Thomas uses the occasion to explain that God’s speaking is first of all the eternal generation of the Word. Further, this eternal conceptum is expressed in three ways: First in creation, secondly in the revelations to the angels, the saints and the prophets of what lays hidden in the WORD, and thirdly in the Incarnation itself. Within this three-fold movement of expression that issues from the eternal WORD, only the latter two, revelation and Incarnation, have the character of a word, properly speaking.
Thomas says explicitly that this is because the latter two are ordered ad manifestationem. The first expression, he says, namely creation, is not ordered to manifestation but rather to being, and thus does not have the character of a word spoken. It is never said in Scripture, Thomas notes, that God speaks by creating creatures, but rather that he is known by creating them: numquam dicitur, quod Deus loquatur creando creaturas, sed quod cognoscatur. Rom. I, 20: invisibilia Dei etc,… (2) In short, creation is an act of the Word, but it is a speaking (Let there be light) producing something that is not quite a word.
This way of describing reality puts into play the existence of knowers other than God, namely angels and human beings. Because even if Scripture does not ever say God produced a kind of word by creating creatures, it does say that he is known in this creative act. Creation is capable, and in the divine wisdom was meant to convey something beyond itself, to other knowers. We might say that this expressive power of created being, in the long run, is fairly meager, for although it can express beyond itself, it never quite allows us to know the who behind all the whats.
When moving from expression to word, Thomas describes how God’s speaking ad manifestationem makes known more about the speaker than what his works convey. What characterizes this “more” made known by words is the manifestation of interior intentionality. This is equivalent to saying that God’s speaking to angels and prophets is variously ordered ad cognitionem sapientiae divinae. Thomas thus preserves the word “word” as an intentional revelation of a prior intellectual understanding, by its nature interior to the speaker, to another intellectual being. Thomas, not surprisingly, refers in this context to Augustine’s discussion of the verbum vocis being a manifestation of the prior Verbum cordis. The Incarnation, of course, is the singularly perfect self-expression to us of the Verbum cordis of the Father.
What is implicit in this account, unspoken we could say, is that we human beings are capable of putting words together to describe expressions, that is to say, realities that are not words. This is the primordial grandeur of the human creation. Our first words are words about what is. And when it comes to other persons, our words are about who the what is.
Apparently, when speaking to human beings, the only way available to God is that of adaptation to our understanding. And this involves adaptation to the way signaled by our own prior exercise of the speaking power, which in turn derives from our interaction with created things and other speaking human beings. But to speak of God having to adapt to our way of speaking, while true, is not the most fortuitous way to say this. It is more accurate to describe Thomas’ wisdom here by saying creation was conceived originally in the WORD precisely to serve as the gentle medium of God’s speaking to us about what lies hidden in his heart, the verbum cordis.
Creation is the language God conveniently uses to address us precisely because he made us word capable beings who already interact and put words on creation. The sensible, intelligible and imaginal species granted to the prophets are communication via figuration, that is to say, meanings conveyed by images drawn from our experience of creation and specified to say something about the speaker. Part of what he speaks has to do with the deeper rationes governing creation (ad esse) in the first place.
Thus, the interpersonal use of wordy images to say something to each other makes it possible for God to specify created knowables to say something about Himself to us. Think of Hosea 11:4:
Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, who took them in my arms; I drew them with human cords, with bands of love; I fostered them like one who raises an infant to his cheeks; Yet, though I stooped to feed my child, they did not know that I was their healer.
We have to have had some interaction with cords and bands to understand their relation to love, and we have to have some concept of familial fostering to understand that God is saying something about himself beyond what our human interactions can express. Again, in the divine wisdom, creation is the medium through which God can speak a word to us.
Thomas, we should note, reserves a particular phrase for describing the Word Incarnate, viewed precisely as a Word. His coming in the flesh is ordered ad expressam manifestationem. With delightful austerity of words, Thomas says of the WORD: Et se nobis expresse manifestavit. The adverb expresse for Thomas implies a kind of literal directness. Jesus is the historically literal expression of the divine wisdom. Human nature is a created expression of image and likeness, but by the incarnation the human creation is elevated to become a word. And the concrete human nature of Christ becomes the word addressed by God to us. Indeed, the whole of Christ’s living, dying and rising (the acta et passa) is creation becoming the most expressive word from God to us.
In short, we could say that neither things nor persons could ever tell us how much love sustains the existence of all that is were it not for the WORD made flesh who in time showed us his heart.
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Maritain wrote a remarkable little work entitled An Essay on Christian Philosophy, based on a lecture he gave at Louvain in 1931. I am sure you are familiar with it. In it he forthrightly distinguished between the nature of philosophy as a discipline of the mind, and the conditions of its exercise. As a discipline of the mind, we could say, in the language of Thomas on Hebrews 1,1, that it is the worded consideration of creation’s native expressiveness.
I think Maritain is fundamentally correct when he goes on to say that Christian philosophy is an intelligible concept only if we take into account the historical state of the philosopher thinking. Faith, considered as the state of a thinking person, cannot help but influence the kinds of things we think about. Most basically this is as unpremeditated as deciding where to look when standing in front of a sunrise. There are reasons we look one way or another, though I suspect we are not always aware of those reasons. Directing the gaze of the philosophical beholder is part of what faith does for us.
When writing about the conditions of its exercise, Maritain illustrates how the Christian faith of a philosopher has historically impacted the turn of his or her gaze in philosophical matters. We are all familiar with the principal examples he proposes: the metaphysics of existence and the philosophical inquiry into the meaning of person. Both of these are powerfully at play in the exposition of the letter to the Hebrews I just alluded to. But that is not exactly where I wish to focus right now; rather I want to highlight another aspect of the condition of philosophy. At one point Maritain says the following:
The philosopher’s experience itself has been revitalized by Christianity. He is offered as a datum a world that is the handiwork of the Word, wherein everything bespeaks the Infinite Spirit to finite spirits who know themselves as spirits. What a starting point! Here is, as it were, a fraternal attitude towards things and reality, — I mean in so far as they are knowable – for which the progress of the human mind is indebted to the Christian Middle Ages. There is every indication that it was this attitude which laid the groundwork for the flowering of the empirical sciences on the one hand and for the expansion of reflective knowledge in which modern times pride themselves on the other. (3)
A fraternal attitude towards things and reality. Here, Maritain refers to a stance before creation. Christianity brings to the believer a conviction that the universe we dwell in is at its deepest root a friendly and intelligible place because it is an expression of the WORD, who for the believer has laid bare the intentions of his heart.
The difference and distinction between philosophy and theology, human interaction with the world and faith in the word spoken by God to us and proposed by the Church is vital for us. But the seamless character of Thomas’ thoroughly theological account in the commentary on Hebrews is part of its attraction and persuasiveness. It establishes the perimeters of our fraternal and friendly attitude towards things and realities.
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A pronounced feature of the current configuration of modernity is a nearly complete cultural evaporation of this conviction about our fraternal relation to things and reality. Perhaps it is only through the condition of this cultural waning that we realize how much Western culture has taken for granted the Christian sources of our once having felt “at home in the universe”.
The optimist narrative of the Enlightenment has given way to a post-modern cultural narrative of skepticism and isolation: a cultural deconstruction that stares at the abyss and blinks. Indeed, it is cruelly ironic that the attitude which, on Maritain’s telling, early on emboldened both empirical and reflective knowledge has brought us to this place.
A growing literature of contemporary historical study describes the condition of post-modernity as the manifestation of the slow philosophical collapse that unfolded as a result of theological options taken in the 14th century. John Milbank, Brad Gregory, Michael Gillespie, Thomas Pfau and others have contributed to a reconsideration and reconfiguration of the post-modern narrative.(4) In these accounts, the Scotist insistence that the term being be applied to God and creation univocally, and Ockham’s focus on the distinction between the potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata of God variously initiate shifts in intellectual inquiry. These, in turn, affected subsequent political, social and cultural configurations.
In differing ways these authors identify the decisive turns in late medieval theology that set the gaze, so to speak, of the philosophical discourse in the ages that followed. The more recent historical narratives focus on the philosophical, literary, political and cultural effects of intellectual roads taken and not taken. It is the tale of the move away from what Thomas describes in his commentary on Hebrews 1, 1, as the fitting relation between creation and the God who speaks to us. And, it seems to me, it is the narrative genealogy of what could be described as the opposite of Maritain’s fraternal attitude toward things and reality. In this sense, it is the tale of the maturation of our current cultural condition, appropriately called the aggressively adversarial.
The balrog never went away, he only slept. But the dwarves dug too deeply in the mines, and he was awakened.
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In the reading from the Gospel of John that I often use at Funeral Masses, after saying to Martha I am the resurrection and the life, the Lord asks her: Do you believe this?” When I say Funeral Masses I sometimes experience what I call a suspended moment. The suspended moment happens especially when the Mass is for an elderly grandmother or grandfather, lifelong communicants, with the 8 or so surviving children present, and the two hundred or so grandchildren and great grandchildren, cousins and grand-nieces and great-nephews. I gaze at the younger ones, the teenagers and young adults. Some are devoutly participating in the Mass, others are present but in some way are looking in from the outside, aloof and perhaps bewildered by the Gospel read and the unfolding liturgy. As I look across the expanse of the Church, all are in sorrow, and many could say with Martha, “Yes Lord, I have come to believe”. Others, I think, cannot say it; they would like to believe, but for some reason, at this juncture in their lives, they cannot. And so in a suspended moment of blankness, I wordlessly say: Lord, you know better than any of us how it is hard for them.
Grace, of course, can insinuate itself in the most inhospitable circumstances, as rain can give life to the most parched land. I am in no way suggesting our time is particularly adept at frustrating the surprising ends of grace. I am suggesting, though, that the Church as a communion of self-moving agents, needs to understand more deeply how the parching manifests itself, so as to better offer our graced agency for the advancement of the the Kingdom. Is the difficulty today due in part to a sense that the final hope for a reconciled universe in Christ Risen seems “unreal” to so many, especially young people, today, given the way they experience life? And is this perhaps related to being born into a culture of adversarial presumptions?
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There’s a lot of ugly stuff in the world, I say to Confirmation candidates. I think the young people I speak to, and their parents for that matter, get what I am referring to when I say this. I think they get it more readily than if I were to say there is a lot of bad stuff in the world, or if I were to say there are a lot of lies in the world. It is a deliberate strategy, because I am banking on the fact that the apprehension of the ugly and the beautiful can still have a spontaneous impact on human experience. People trust their gut more when it comes to the experience of beauty and ugliness, than they do when it comes to the good and the true. As Walker Percy might say, as a society we have surrendered judgments about the true and the good to the experts. I do not think ordinary folks have yet similarly surrendered judgments about the beautiful.
The triumph of the ugly is an option a teenager learns about quickly. Gangs and a culture of violence are about power made glamorous. Drugs, alcohol and pornography are about an escape culture made preferable to reality; and the drug and human trafficking trade is about a wealth culture that visualizes people only as buyers, sellers and commodities. As Pope Benedict put the question: maybe the beautiful is the illusion, and the ugly is what is most real.(5) This is the question I know a great many teenagers in my diocese ask themselves in one form or another. To abandon hope in the triumph of the beautiful over the ugly is another way to describe despair.
In Laudato Sí Pope Francis makes the almost apocalyptic argument that we are witnessing the normalization of the notion that goodness and beauty are synonymous with utility. It’s an old human threat, but technical prowess and economic power make the grasping manipulation of ourselves, our neighbor and our surroundings monstrously achievable. This limitless commodification of reality for purposes of provoking limitless consumptive desire in turn stimulates adversarial stances that mark the relations between the wants of wanters and the wanted. The voracious advance of this age of usage makes human ecology increasingly hostile to humanity itself. The first sign of this hostility is the manipulation of the poor. Vulnerability is a synonym for poverty in this situation. For power is identified with the ability to use the less powerful, and to defend oneself from being used by others. The second sign is the devastation of the natural ecology. We are deeply down this road.
Another sign, not surprisingly, is the cheapening of words. In the world of the young people I meet at funerals or at confirmations, words are mostly experienced as things aimed at them, strategically designed to provoke their consumptive desires, or more sinister still, to seduce them into accepting someone else’s consumptive desire. This aggressiveness holds powerful sway, and suggests that our cultural moment despairs that words, bodiliness, and the whole of material creation, in the end, are anything more than instruments of power. In this environment the Church in her intellectual endeavors and in her moral and social witness must be particularly conscious of how suspiciously people today view the use of words.
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Cultural awareness of this phenomenon addressed by Laudato Sí is at least partially expressed in the enduring popularity, especially with the young, of much dystopian fiction. Sometimes in confirmation homilies I say something like: “the world was not supposed to be like the Hunger Games or like the Game of Thrones». Really good dystopian fiction, somewhat apocalyptic in form, places in plain view what a lot of our people suspect is underneath the mundane order we currently inhabit and participate in: the ugly understood as adversarial dominates. And I think this is one of the reasons young people are attracted to such stories: the levers they suspect operate beneath the superficial niceness of the world they experience run about undisguised.
Of the two, the Game of Thrones is the darker, and I am not sure what to make of its final intentions. I am waiting, like many others, for the final volume. My read of the novels to date suggests the subversion is aimed at any notion that goodness has a recognizable face in this world. Except perhaps for Ned Stark, there are few likable characters. Early on Ned is killed brutally in plain view, as if to tell us at the outset that in these stories do not expect the unexpected arrival of the eagles, nor any other sign within history to prefigure better things to come. Motives and alliances, plots and plans, the use and abuse of power and the exploitation of the desires for power, sex and revenge are so intricately complex that the narrative forces the reader to suspend judgment about any basis for discerning the noble in life. The novels teach the reader that the surest sign someone will die brutally soon is that the author graciously grants them a likable trait.
The Game of Thrones, whether conceived so or not, is a parable of deconstruction. As a philosophical, literary and cultural phenomenon deconstruction is a movement that sees meaning as a pure invention of the aggressive mind; meaning, thus, is something like a human institution. And like institutions, words must be shown for what they are when deconstructed: at root, words are tools of an aggressive kingdom that keeps its subjects within a controlled dominion. In that sense worded meaning is an extension of the human power-play. This distrust of meaning is extended to the Church in a particularly intense way because she is perceived as the paramount institution that proposes meaning.
Being an institution whose intellectual tradition is inherently protective of the claims of signification is not the real problem, though. The problem for us is construing the institution and the meanings without relation to their their original source and final end in the WORD eternal. The various versions of deconstruction admit of no such original source that lies behind and above both meanings and institutions. We, in fact, do admit of this source, which is why the fruit of our labor should be hope. Deconstruction, thus, is an apophaticism that cannot conceive of the WORD both before and beyond human wordiness, and that cannot conceive of love as relevant to the question of meaning.(6)
For the Catholic, therefore, the idolatry of worded meaning is a temptation, as is the rendering of Church in her temporal form as an absolute. In the case of the Church, her form derives from the Kingdom of the crucified and risen Christ, just as in apophaticism, meaning is derivative and relative to the WORD beyond human speaking. Temporal meanings and ecclesial forms are necessary for us as vehicles toward that which they both sacramentally signify. Words and the Church house us in a forward moving fashion. Their form will give way when they have served their poor yet noble purpose.
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Before I let you go in peace this evening, part of our current situation that I would like to address involves the reduction of social relationality. An individual’s relations to the world outside are increasingly difficult to account for, apart from our having willed them. As a consequence, our wider social and political culture has no basis to talk about mutual concern and compassion apart from the language of purely willed associations. These willed associations resolve to the isolated individual who tends to view relations suspiciously.
In our current social predicament, for example, law is conceived as primarily a matter of discerning how to avoid the evils that unrestrained relationality might cause to the good of national sovereignty, community safety and individual rights. This state of affairs is precisely the result of the dropping out of our political consciousness a sense of legally expressed positive norms that govern the prior good of human relationality. Law as aimed at promoting the good ordering of relations, so that goods can be achieved by individuals and families within a community, seems to have passed out of our perception of social order. This makes it extremely difficult, for example, to discuss legal reforms that address the human goods of immigrants and immigrant communities. Moral claims based on the responsibilities that flow from our common humanity are unintelligible to large parts of the population.
The eclipse of human relationality as a fundamental given of politics and law is the legacy of a post-Kantian search for an expression of law that serves as a kind of individualist imperative derived a priori and applied universally. The tragedy of our age is that the a priori universal that seems to govern our moral/political discourse is that of individual autonomy and the radical freedom of the will. Limitation of freedom by secondary laws is permitted only in so far as the freedom is perceived to cause injury to another. At present the “perception of injury” that society permits to be legally prohibited capriciously excludes vast swaths of the population, from the unborn to the comatose patent, with the poor and the immigrant standing temporally somewhere in between.
The adversarial is at work in the world precisely as a competitive human paradigm: Resources are limited and so the world belongs to those who know how to attain and use them to construct for themselves a modicum of security. Thus Darwin has become popularized into a kind of eschatological frame. Survival of the fittest is the destiny of man. Theological neglect of Christological eschatology has left us in a void that philosophical eschatologies, based on faulty accounts of human relationality, have filled in the popular mind.
The stark question that hovers unnoticed over moral and political discourse is this: Is the human a conflicted animal in search of communion, or a conflicted animal poised to fight the final conflict so that the stronger individuals may survive. I would note that the last writings of Rene Girard tended to frame the apocalyptic question this way.(7) Yet, whether or not one accepts the basic premises of Girard’s theory of mimetic violence, the setting into relief of the importance of competing eschatologies is of great value. For the simple truth is that as human beings, the future we believe in decisively informs the present we work for.
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Thomas Pfau’s book Minding the Modern is both a joy to read and deeply instructive, but of all the elements in that volume that impressed themselves on my memory, the most striking is a comment he makes late in the book, almost in passing. While discussing Emmanuel Levinas he says the following:
Levinas rejects modernity’s leading paradigm of knowledge as “thematization and conceptualization.” For in taking possession of the object within a categorical framework we invariably account for it in terms of what it is not (as per Spinoza’s omnis determinatio est negatio), thereby conceiving knowledge as something altogether “impersonal.” The result, in Levinas strident phrase, is a “philosophy of injustice” (TI, 46). Plato (as indeed Coleridge himself) might have simply called it a philosophy that no longer offers a conceptual or imaginative space for love—which might itself be the most salient characteristic of philosophical modernity.(8)
Pfau describes the one thing modern philosophical project has left unattended: “a philosophy that no longer offers a conceptual or imaginative space for love.” I would like to hold this text in mind while further invoking something else Thomas says in the first lecture on Hebrews 1,1:
What is said, in many and varied ways, etc., shows forth that all ordered multiplicity should be ordered to One. Thus it says that granted the mode is multiple, nevertheless all is ordered to this newest thing.(9)
This “newest thing” (Istud novissimum)to which Thomas refers is the coming of the Word made flesh.
There is a kind of “belonging to the Word” which establishes our inherently relational condition as creatures. This belonging inclines us toward a fraternal attitude towards things and reality. A Catholic philosopher, it seems to me, must find sources in the faith of the Church to breath deeply this air. This means that his or her life must follow the dynamic of grace and dwell in this world as one belonging to the WORD made flesh, the expresse manifestavit se of the Incarnation. Christ the Lord seeks to permeate this natural yet wounded relationality with the breath of Trinitarian love. No dystopian deconstruction can eclipse this outpouring, unless we, unsure of our agency in grace, let it.
There is a kind of evangelization of the mind that we need to pursue. It takes as its starting point the fact of charity unleashed upon the world by the WORD made flesh. This is the principal condition affecting the work of a Catholic philosopher, a Catholic theologian, a Catholic novelist. The WORD, who in the end shows Himself as the WORD of love, seeks to work Himself, as love, into the fabric of being. It is this love, the basis of friendship with God, with one another, and with creation that has its own attractive power.
There is an Augustinian text from the Tractates on John that Jean-Luc Marion is fond of citing : Ista attractio, ipsa est revelatio, Saint Augustine says: This attraction is itself the revelation.(10) We forget how extraordinary the original Christian claim of a loving God inserting himself into a broken but at root friendly universe was to the pagans. The adversarial character of our surroundings was never far from a great deal of ancient mythology. And it is not far from a great deal of contemporary mythology. The announcement that proposed dispelling the darkness while accounting for it was, and is deeply attractive. The truth itself is attractive, but its attractiveness in every age must be manifested against the backdrop of a kind of wounded resistance: The philosophical task is to let the faith gently guide our gaze at creation, so that its expressiveness might be properly worded. That wording is our noblest service of love both to God and to the world he seeks to befriend.
Thank you for your kind attention.
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Notes:
1) The Marietti printed editions, and the Busa electronic versions that convey this text to us most readily, make note of this feature of the textual tradition.
2) Super Epistolam B. Pauli ad Hebraeos lectura a capite I ad caput VI instructa a Remigio Nanni. Textum Taurini 1953 editum ac automato translatum a Roberto Busa SJ in taenias magneticas denuo recognovit Enrique Alarcón atque instruxit (corresponding to Marietti no. 15): […] Prima autem expressio, scilicet in creatione, non ordinatur ad manifestationem, sed ad esse, Sap. I creavit Deus ut essent omnia. Cum ergo expressio non habeat rationem locutionis nisi prout ordinatur ad manifestationem, manifestum est, quod illa expressio non potest dici locutio, et ideo numquam dicitur, quod Deus loquatur creando creaturas, sed quod cognoscatur. Rom. I, 20: invisibilia Dei per ea quae facta sunt, intellecta conspiciuntur.
3) Jacques Maritain, An Essay on Christian Philosophy (Translated by Edward H. Flannery, Philosophical Library, 1955), 23.
4) See John Milbank (Beyond Secular Order: Wiley and Sons, 2013), Charles Taylor (A Secular Age: Belknap Press, Harvard, 2007), Brad S. Gregory (The Unintended Reformation, Belknap, 2012), Michael Allen Gillespie (The Theological Origins of Modernity, University of Chicago Press, 2008), Thomas Pfau (Minding the Modern, Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions and Responsible Knowledge, Notre Dame, 2013)
5) Ratzinger, “La Belleza” in La Belleza, La Iglesia (Ediciones Encuentro, 2006, electronic format): Hoy tiene mayor peso otra objeción: el mensaje de la belleza se pone completamente en duda a través del poder de la mentira, de la seducción, de la violencia, del mal. ¿Puede ser auténtica la belleza o al final no es más que una mera ilusión? La realidad, ¿no es en el fondo malvada? El miedo de que, al final, no sea el aguijón de lo bello lo que nos conduzca a la verdad, sino que la mentira, lo que es feo y vulgar constituyan la verdadera «realidad», ha angustiado a los hombres de todos los tiempos.
6) See William Franke, Dante and the Sense of Transgression (Bloomsbury, 2013).
7) See esp. Rene Girard, Battling to the End, Michigan State, 2010, translated by Mary Baker.
8) Thomas Pfau Minding the Modern, Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame, 2013), Ch 20.
9) Marietti no. 14: […] Quod enim dixerat, multifarie multisque modis, etc., ostendit quia omnis multitudo ordinata, ad unum debet referri. Ideo dicit, quod licet sit modus multiplex, tamen totum ordinatum est ad istud novissimum.
10) Opere de Sant’ Agostino, commento al Vangelo e alla prima epistola Di San Giovanni (Nuova Biblioteca Agostiniana, Citta’ Nuova Editrice, XXIV/1, 1968/1985.) Tractatus 26, 5. Pg 600. See Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Revelation (Oxford, 2016), Ch 2.
Words and Things 