Adam the Catholic?
Nature and Grace in Eden
Early in the twentieth century, Catholic theology was rocked by a debate over the notion of “pure nature.”1 Theologian and future Cardinal Henri de Lubac and others challenged a reading of Thomas Aquinas that had reigned supreme since the counter-Reformation, and in so doing they challenged the entire structure of Catholic theology and laid the groundwork for the remarkable shifts in Catholic theology and practice that received conciliar approval at Vatican II.
Though the full development of this notion of “pure nature” did not occur until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,2 medieval theologians had already toyed with it.3 In this context, “pure” is not the opposite of “impure.” The theologians who developed this idea were not claiming that Adam was created innocent, though they believed that. Rather, “pure nature” means “nature and nothing but nature,” “undiluted nature.” Examining human beings from the perspective of “pure nature” provided a way of speculating on their capacities – reason, will, moral capacities – while bracketing man’s communion with God. “Pure nature” spoke of human nature untouched by grace, a human nature that has received no revelation, human nature undiluted by the special presence and gifts of God. For the earliest medieval theologians who employed this concept, the state of pure nature was conceived as purely hypothetical, since theologians taught that in reality Adam the natural man was also endowed by his Creator with some sort of supernatural gifts that would enable him to reach his ultimate destination. For some theologians, however, this hypothetical condition opened the possibility of defining human nature in purely natural terms, without any reference to grace.
The question of “pure nature” comes into play especially in connection with the questions of desire and the ends (or purposes) of humanity. On Aristotelian assumptions, every nature aspires and desires to reach the perfection of its nature. For Aristotelians, the question, What does man aim for and desire as his highest perfection? is answered by examining the unique capacities of his nature. A nature cannot, by Aristotelian definition, transcend itself; a nature is a principle of action and life that is limited by the capacities of nature. So, if man is considered as purely natural, he has only a natural end and desires only a natural, this-worldly fulfillment. As a pure nature, he aspires only to employ his reason and will within the natural world and for natural ends. As pure nature, he may be interested in scanning the heavens, but has no desire for the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars. He may use his reason to manipulate numbers, but he will not purpose to know the God who is One and Three. He may in fact aspire to commune with his Creator, but on this paradigm this desire for God must be added to his nature. It is not an intrinsic impulse of his “natural” being, but “extrinsic” to that being. It is a “super-natural” gift, a gift “over and above” his natural being. A theologian operating on a strict natural/supernatural dichotomy would therefore conclude that man has a double desire and a double end, more or less unrelated to each other. He can reach his natural end of building skyscrapers and exploring space without union with God, and, by the same token, he can bypass his natural desires and aims in his progress toward the beatific vision of God.
This dualistic conception of human nature is not the view of the church Fathers or the best of the medieval scholastics, whose “focus was on one, sole order: the concrete order of grace in which humans were made for God and human nature could be intelligible only by reason of its finality, divination.”4 On this earlier view, there is no such thing as “pure nature,” since man is created with a desire to seek his fulfillment in communion with God. Thomas Aquinas retained this earlier conception. His notion of a “natural desire” for God was an Aristotelian version of Augustine’s “unquiet heart” seeking rest in God. Thus, despite his use of Aristotelian terms and categories, Thomas maintained two propositions in tension: On the one hand, he claimed, human beings have a natural desire to enjoy the vision of God, and, on the other hand, this natural desire is only fulfilled by an act of pure grace on God’s part. The fact that man has a natural desire for God does not in any way obligate God to fulfill it. Nor is the “supernatural” fulfillment of man’s natural desire a divergence from his original nature. Man’s “supernatural” fulfillment “fits” his character as created. Supernatural grace is not a crown on a canary; it crowns a creature created to be a king, though this creature is made a king only by the favor of the High King.
Later scholasticism failed to maintain this tension, and the notion of a natural desire for God was qualified out of existence. For later scholastics, to speak of “pure nature” was to speak of a nature without any intrinsic desire or trajectory toward God. Thomas is not wholly free from blame for this development, largely because his attempt to combine the patristic/biblical emphasis on man as image of God with an Aristotelian view of nature was not entirely successful:
The tension, bordering on contradiction between the patristic notion of human being as image of God and the Aristotelian classification of it as a “nature” is a recurrent motif in [de Lubac’s book] Surnaturel. Human being as image of God is meant to grow into the likeness of God in vision of the divine glory. This patristic position was rooted in “the essential differences between the beings of nature, whose diverse ends are proportioned to their diverse natures, and the spirit, which is open to the infinite.” Whereas the Fathers distinguished human spirit and nature, with Aristotle one could speak of human being as one did of everything else, viz., as being a nature, a principle of operation with a defined and limited set of powers. Thus the “nature” to which Thomas refers . . . even though spiritual, does not differ essentially from other natures. It was “philosophical” nature as conceived by the Ancients, who did not speak of a Creator God. No longer was it the image of God as understood by the Fathers, whose climate was “mystery” and who were less taken by Plato than by Scripture. . . . For the Fathers there is no nous [mind] without an anticipatory sharing, gratuitous and precarious as it is, in the one pneuma [spirit]. For Aristotle, nature, as a center of properties and source of strictly delimited activity, is locked up, sealed off in its own order. In Thomas, the Aristotelean and patristic conceptions of nature uncomfortably lie side by side and uneasily intermingle in unresolved tension.5
As a result, the “Aristotelean transposition of the patristic heritage” in Thomas “paved the way for later misrepresentations of his thought by those paleo-Thomists who betrayed the nourishing soil of the tradition with their over-rationalized theology.” Thomas rightly asserted that man is created, as a “natural” being, for communion with God. But he erred in accepting too much of the Aristotelian conception of nature. As a result, “Thomas transformed Augustinianism and ended by allowing an autonomous philosophy to take up residence in the Christian house of intellect. . . . In time his position came to be read as menacing orthodoxy and provoking the extrinsicism that sealed off the supernatural from nature and welcomed in all the demons of dualism that have come to haunt the Catholic household.”6
Thomas’s unstable, but still unified, vision of natural and supernatural broke apart in the sixteenth century. In his commentary on Thomas, Cardinal Cajetan argued that the notion of a natural desire for God was a “theological” rather than a “philosophical” opinion, and argued that “Thomas saw the desire simply as a response to God’s revelation calling humans to a supernatural finality.” Following this suggestion, later sixteenth and seventeenth century theologians developed an ever more explicit theory of “pure nature” according to which “humans could possibly be created with a goal proportioned to their natural powers and not called to beatific vision.” By the nineteenth century, this vision “had solidified and become a wedge driven between the natural and the supernatural” and by the twentieth century had become so entrenched than any questioning of it was viewed as a threat to the gratuity of grace.7
For counter-Reformation Thomists, the logic went like this: If man has no inherent natural capacity, and not even any natural inclination or desire for reaching the final end for which he is created, then that end must be a sheer gift from God, a surprisingly unexpected gift. Even the desire for this supernatural end is an “extra” gift of God, given in addition to man’s nature. On the other hand, if man has natural inclination toward God, then he might have some capacity in himself to reach communion with God. And, if God created man with a natural desire for and inclination toward God, it seems that God would be unjust if He refused to fulfill that desire and realize that inclination. If man is created with a natural desire for God, then human fulfillment is not gracious; God is virtually obligated to bring man to his final end. Thus, to retain the surprising gracefulness of grace, these theologians posited a notion of “pure nature” without any human capacity for, inclination toward, or desire for God. For grace truly to be grace, it must come from outside the human situation as created. If it is always already there, then it cannot be truly grace.
But in their desire to protect the gratuity of grace, these theologians forged a profound dualism at the foundation of Christian theology. They were forced to conclude that the realm of the supernatural is “external” or “extrinsic” to what man is by virtue of creation. Grace appears not so much to elevate or perfect nature as simply to replace nature with a different (super)nature. As a result,
grace seems irrelevant to human existence in this world precisely to the extent that it is supernatural, and the question arises of why human beings in their strictly human nature should not be indifferent to it. Moreover, if the very sharp distinction between what is natural and supernatural slides into a separation between these two orders, other separations naturally follow: between religious life and temporal “natural” life; between the Church and the world; between salvation history and the rest of world history.8
On this paradigm, supernatural grace does not bring the natural inclinations and interests and capacities of human life to fulfillment; rather, it cancels them in favor of other inclinations, goals, and capacities. Naturally, human beings aim for dominion over the natural world; supernaturally, they aim for communion with God. And these two aims have virtually nothing to do with each other.
In this scheme, grace is truly gracious, but this gratuitous grace is the crown on the canary.
The cosmological, anthropological, political and cultural consequences of positing “pure nature” and the natural/supernatural dualism are vast:
the “supernatural” was a miraculous gift appended to nature. . . . The supernatural was accessible only by revelation; the natural could be known by unaided reason. Indeed some held that just as one might place a variety of caps on a bottle, all of which leave the bottle unchanged, so too no matter what destiny was assigned to human nature, “natural realities would perdure just as they are now.” The natural and supernatural orders are only extrinsically and juridically linked by divine decree. This dualism led to splitting the study of human being in two; philosophical anthropology goes on its own way in disregard of theology. No longer is desire for God central to anthropology. Theology’s stress on what human nature can do relying on its own resources opened a door to secularized construals of existence and the supernatural became increasingly foreign. Pure natural, a hypothetical possibility, was becoming a historical reality . . . . Nature and supernature were paired off and the latter was seen as an adornment of the former, a rather superfluous add-on to a system already integral and complete in itself. “Christianity took on an artificial character and the bread of doctrine was presented as a stone.” The theologians, not the philosophers, were the villains in the piece. They were the ones who cordoned off and isolated the supernatural. On the intellectual labors of reason it must not cast even its shadow, not a hint of its presence of possibility. Any rational reflection allowing the slightest opening of the human spirit to the absolute mystery had to be illusory. No wonder religion and culture were estranged.9
John Milbank offers a similar assessment: “Cajetan, unlike Thomas, explicitly says that human nature in actuality is fully definable in merely natural terms. This means that there can be an entirely natural and adequate ethics, politics, and philosophy and so forth. Man might even offend the moral law and yet not be directly guilty of sin.”10
By a tragic historical irony, the advocates of the natural/supernatural scheme often saw themselves as defenders of the faith, “opposing naturalism and exalting the transcendence of the supernatural,” while in fact they had become “the unwitting ally of naturalism and secularism” because they pushed “the supernatural to splendid isolation. Christianity thus became marginal to culture’s life.”11 Put differently, the natural/supernatural scheme implies that the natural realm is a closed system with its own goals and standards. Pious as the motivations behind it may be, the natural/supernatural paradigm plays into the hands of secularists.12
Though the categories and issues in debate are quite different, this Roman Catholic debate comes to mind in connection with contemporary Reformed debates concerning the covenant of works. For some Reformed theologians, Adam must have been created in a state free of grace; otherwise, grace cannot be grace. Only “extrinsic” grace, on this view, is truly grace. It must enter a situation that is not graced if it is to be free grace; it must enter a situation where man has already been damaged, or else it is not grace. For Michael Horton, God’s creation of Adam was an expression of “divine goodness” but he refuses to call it an act of “divine grace.”13 He criticizes O. Palmer Robertson for suggesting that “grace is fundamental to any divine-human relationship.”14 Grace cannot “retain its force as divine clemency toward those who deserve condemnation” if we claim that the Adamic covenant was founded in grace.15 Law is “natural” and human beings are “simply ‘wired’ for it.” Grace, Horton implies, is not natural, but comes onto the stage only after Adam’s sin.16
In this scenario, it is not surprising that Horton claims that “Adam is created in a state of integrity with the ability to render God complete obedience,” thus earning his “right” to receive the tree of life.17 Adam has all he needs in his own natural capacities; he did not, apparently, have to rely on God’s assistance to obey. His obedience was not the obedience of faith, but the obedience of nature. Though Horton is hardly a Thomist, the similarities between his account of Adam’s natural condition and that of post-Reformation Thomists are significant. And, I would suggest, the anthropological, cultural and political consequences of Horton’s construct are as vast as the consequences of the Catholic natural/supernatural distinction, and of a similar hue. It is no wonder that the debate over the covenant of works has been so heated and protracted. The Adamic covenant is at the foundation of Reformed covenant theology, and differences over this issue resonate throughout one’s theological system.
If Horton’s non-gracious, meritorious version of the Adamic covenant can be sustained, then a great deal follows both theologically and culturally. If his version of the covenant can be sustained, then there really is a dualism of nature and grace, nature and supernature; and there really is a secular realm that rightly remains impervious to the gospel. It is my contention, however, that this version of the Adamic covenant cannot be exegetically sustained. To demonstrate that, I will examine Bryan Estelle’s essay, “The Covenant of Works in Moses and Paul,” which presents a position close to that of Horton’s. About half of Estelle’s article is devoted to a discussion of Romans 5, but to keep my essay within reasonable limits, I have concentrated attention on the first half of the article, which discusses the Adamic covenant.