“Substantial Union with God in Matthias Scheeben.”

Church Studies 15 (2018), 313-327.

In this study, following Gr. Palamas’ treatise entitled Περί θείας ενώσεως και διακρίσεως, our main goal is to examine the objective existence of the divine energies and their relation to the divine essence. The Christian interpretation of the theory on unions and distinctions proves that these are just two different ways of existence, without any ontological difference between each other, as Barlaam and Akindynos suggested. It is remarkable that the understanding of Gr. Palamas’ thought allows us to conclude that he is a consistent researcher, who, on the one hand, follows unchanged philosophical foundations for expressing his theories and, on the other hand, corresponds with the previous Christian tradition.

In this paper, I am going to argue that Aquinas’ conception of the ontological status of the human soul involves one of his typical “balancing acts” that his admirers love him for and his detractors hate him for. Myself, being a humble admirer of Aquinas, will attempt to show that Aquinas is successful in balancing the human soul on what he construes as a razor-sharp line separating the realms of matter and pure spirit, running right across our very being. Putting the point less figuratively, I will argue for the consistency of Aquinas’ conception, according to which the human soul, uniquely in God’s creation, is both the inherent, material, substantial form of the human body, and the subsistent immaterial substance underlying the immaterial operations of its immaterial, rational powers, namely, intellect and will. But putting the point this way, the case may appear hopeless. How can one and the same entity be both material and immaterial, both inherent in matter and a subsistent, immaterial form?

Traditio, 2008

Journal of Reformed Theology, 2017

2014

This paper responds to Bruce Marshall’s use of logic to clarify the metaphysical issues at stake in the doctrine of transubstantiation. While appreciating and agreeing with the general approach of finding connections between logic and metaphysics, on the one hand, and the communal and ecumenical significance of Eucharistic doctrine, on the other, this paper criticizes Marshall’s particular analysis as beholden to a distinctively modern approach to logic, and displaying a typically modern neglect of the notion of substance. The conclusion suggests that distinctively Catholic teaching on transubstantiation is significant today not only for proclaiming a mystery of Christian faith, but also for calling attention to classical categories of reality, categories once considered more natural and common but subsequently obscured by modern philosophical and theological developments.

Discussed at St. Louis Catholic Theological Society 09/15/08 For more than fifty years, I have been fascinated by the sacrament of the Lord's Supper that presents Christ to Christians in the context of the Pascal mystery. My studies for this essay have moved out of the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century to focus on two aspects of the Eucharist: the Bezan use of metonymy and relation on the one hand and, on the other hand, the change in the theological use of the term "substance" from an unseen, underlying reality to the whole of an existing being. Bound up in these concerns has been the modern and still more the post-modern breakdown of symbols into mere signs that may point, but cannot present, as instruments of divine action, what they signify. The richly symbolic world of the early middle ages, summed up best in the poetry and perception of Bernard of Clairvaux, yielded first to the more closely reasoned scholasticism of the thirteenth century. The Aristotelian-Christian synthesis of Thomas Aquinas was then challenged by the breakdown of symbolic meaning in the Franciscan theory of occasional causality and again in the denial of universals in the system of William of Ockham. Nominalism warred with Thomism in the sixteenth century and both can be found in the eclectic philosophical underpinnings of the theologies of Luther and Calvin.

Studia Liturgica, 2018

2 "Creature is all that exists by creation, therefore everything that has a higher meaning than itself, which is finite, open to God and to his disposition (obedience power). " (K. Rahner and H. Vorgrimler, Petit dictionnaire de théologie catholique, art. "creature", p. 109 ff.).

What Is theology? In terms of its goal, Theology is the science of God, that is, the knowledge of God and of divine things, while Theology properly so-called is God’s Knowledge of Himself which He communicates to humans at various times and places for His Love and Providential Care of mankind, His chosen likeness to Himself in the universe of space-time-energy-matter, if not in the whole physical reality of the entire Transuniverse, the Universe of all universes. Theology so defined is necessarily experiential superconsciousness in the one who is gifted with It, for that one Knows God somewhat as God Knows Himself and is gifted to humanity by God for the further gifting of the knowledge of God to all mankind.