Heart of Rahner: The Theological Implications of Andrew Tallon's Theory of Triune Consciousness (Marquette Studies in Theology)

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THE HEART OF RAHNER

Heidi Ann Russell

THE HEART OF RAHNER The Theological Implications of Andrew Tallon’s Theory of Triune Consciousness

marquette studies in theology no. 64 Andrew tallon, series editor © 2009 Marquette University Press Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-3141 All rights reserved. www.marquette.edu/mupress/

founded 1916 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Russell, Heidi Ann, 1973The heart of Rahner : the theological implications of Andrew Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness / Heidi Russell. p. cm. — (Marquette studies in theology ; no. 64) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87462-741-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Rahner, Karl, 1904-1984. 2. Tallon, Andrew, 1934- 3. Experience (Religion) 4. Emotions—Religious aspects—Catholic Church. 5. Consciousness—Religious aspects—Catholic Church. I. Title. BR110.R87 2009 230’.2092—dc22 2009009470

Front cover by darin weisensel Photo of Dr. Russell by Sue Weisensel

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

table of contents Preface........................................................................................................ 7 Dedication............................................................................................... 11 Acknowledgements................................................................................. 12 1. Faculty Psychology: The Concept and the Critique....................... 13 Faculty Psychology............................................................................... 16 The Philosophical Critique................................................................. 21 The Scientific Critique........................................................................ 25 2. Andrew Tallon’s Theory of Triune Consciousness......................... 35 Phenomenological Background.......................................................... 36 Triune Consciousness......................................................................... 51 Connaturality....................................................................................... 59 Quasi-intentionality............................................................................ 64 Tallon on Rahner................................................................................. 65 3. Karl Rahner’s Theology of the Mystical Experience of God......... 71 The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius............................................... 74 The Three Modes of Election............................................................. 75 Consolation with Cause...................................................................... 82 Consolation without Previous Cause................................................ 83 Certitude in the Experience of Consolation without Cause........... 89 Attunement in the Second Mode of Election................................... 91 The Spiritual Senses............................................................................ 93 The Structure of the Spiritual Senses in Bonaventure.................... 95 Spiritual Touch as Ecstasy or Mystical Union.................................. 97 The Question of Experience.............................................................105 4. Karl Rahner’s Theology of the Everyday Experience of God......109 Hearer of the Word...........................................................................110 The Horizon of Human Transcendence as Holy Mystery...........123 Faith and Human Consciousness....................................................136 5. Karl Rahner’s Theology of Grace....................................................141 Prevenient, Operative, and Subsequent Connaturality.................141

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the heart of rahner The Theology of Grace......................................................................143 The Anonymous Christian...............................................................153 Response to Objections....................................................................161

6. Affectivity: The Heart of Rahner’s Anthropology........................167 The Meaning of Love in Rahner’s Anthropology...........................169 Love as Self-Actualization................................................................169 Affection as Embodied and Spiritual...............................................175 Love Elevated by Grace.....................................................................179 Intersubjectivity as Primary Analogue for Relationship with God..................................................................181 Unity of Spirit and Matter................................................................186 Heart as the Symbol of the Human Person...................................191 7. Further Implications.........................................................................197 Thomas Sheehan................................................................................200 George Lindbeck................................................................................203 Karen Kilby........................................................................................208 Patrick Burke......................................................................................214 Conclusion..........................................................................................216 Bibliography..........................................................................................219 Index.......................................................................................................229

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PREFACE

he word “heart” in Rahner’s theology highlights both the central role of affectivity in his work as well his understanding of the heart as the symbol of the whole person, emphasizing the unity of the human person as embodied spirit. Andrew Tallon’s understanding of triune consciousness, which highlights the unity and distinction of the affective, cognitive, and volitive intentionalities of consciousness, corrects ambiguities in Rahner’s theological understanding of the human person and the person’s experience of God that arise from Rahner’s reliance on the dyadic (cognitive/volitive) categories of traditional faculty psychology. While I presume the insights Rahner has gained through his use of the transcendental method and the turn to the human subject, the approach to Rahner’s theology in this work will be more phenomenological. I also presume Rahner’s axiom that theology is anthropology and anthropology is theology; in other words, our understanding of the human person and human experience is related to the way we understand God and vice versa. Accepting Rahner’s axiom invites the consideration of what effect understanding the human person in terms of triune consciousness has on Rahner’s own theology. Focusing on Rahner’s theology of the experience of God and his theology of grace, a revision of his theology through this alternative model of the human person remains consistent with his central insights, but offers a phenomenologically and scientifically more credible interpretation of his theology than the traditional viewpoint of faculty psychology. Chapter one explicates the background concept of faculty psychology and the critiques of this approach to the human person found in contemporary science and philosophy. Chapter two then turns to Andrew Tallon’s intentionality analysis of consciousness as an alternative interpretation of the human person, specifically focusing on his understanding of the role of affective intentionality and his use of the concept of connaturality to describe affective intentionality. My intention is to explore the theological implications of Tallon’s philosophical position rather than to argue or advance the philosophical theses in themselves. This chapter concludes with Tallon’s own observations on the role of affectivity in Rahner’s theology.

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Using Tallon’s model of triune consciousness as an interpretive lens to investigate aspects of Rahner’s theology, chapter three uses triune consciousness as an explanatory principle for mystical or ‘non-conceptual’ experiences of God that St. Ignatius calls consolation without previous cause and that Rahner describes in The Dynamic Element in the Church as an experience of the horizon in which the conceptual object of one’s consciousness becomes transparent or disappears. This chapter then extends the application of Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness to Rahner’s interpretation of the spiritual senses to demonstrate that the concept of triune consciousness offers an advantage in clarifying Rahner’s contention that experience of God is beyond cognitive comprehension. Chapter four considers the experience of God in everyday life or the non-mystical experience of God. Rahner’s theology names the horizon of our questioning (in the cognitive sense) God, but also describes the horizon in terms of our experiences of freedom and love, specifically in the context of our intersubjectivity. This chapter interprets our concomitant (though non-thematic) experience of the horizon in terms of triune consciousness to offer a phenomenological explanation of why we name this horizon as personal God. This chapter contends that, given Rahner’s own conviction that we can never ‘know’ the horizon in a categorial, cognitive sense, triune consciousness better explains the sense of attunement or befittingness one has to the idea of a personal God. Chapter five contemplates the implications of a theory of triune consciousness for Rahner’s theology of grace. This chapter explains grace and the supernatural existential through Tallon’s theory of affective attunement and connaturality. For Tallon, the concept of connaturality is defined as having a second nature that gives one an affinity with or to another being or object. This chapter articulates Rahner’s concept of the supernatural existential through the concept of prevenient connaturality (i.e., connaturality that is the effect of our being loved by God) and our response to God’s offer of self-communication as operative connaturality (connaturality as the cause of our love of God). Finally chapter five explores the ways in which the theory of triune consciousness contributes to the debate over Rahner’s concept of the ‘anonymous Christian’ by clarifying the distinctive aspects of an affective experience and the cognitive interpretation of that affective experience.

preface

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Chapter six investigates the role of affectivity in Rahner’s anthropology and the unity of the embodied and spiritual nature of the human person, and thus human consciousness. Rahner’s theology of the love of God and the love of neighbor is analyzed as an experience of affectivity in which intersubjectivity as a subject-subject relationship becomes the primary analogue for one’s relationship to God. Rahner’s theology of symbol as it is applied to the body and to the heart offers an opportunity to explore the implications of the physical aspect of affectivity and the role of the heart as the symbolic mediator of the physical affective response and the affective intentionality in human consciousness while emphasizing the unity of spirit and matter. Chapter seven concludes that Rahner’s own inability to make explicit the distinct role of affectivity as well as the unity of consciousness within the framework of triune consciousness necessarily means his interpreters have not read him in this manner. Therefore this more phenomenological reading of Rahner’s theology is brought into dialogue with some recent commentaries on Rahner’s work. The works of Thomas Sheehan, George Lindbeck, Karen Kilby, and Patrick Burke are briefly explored in this final section.

To my mom and dad, who first taught me the faith out of which this entire work flows and whose constant love for me has made me the person I am today.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

irst and foremost, I would like to thank Andy Tallon both for the inspiration for this book and his support in seeing the project through to completion. His idea of triune consciousness has changed the way I understand the human person and has changed the way I read Rahner’s theology, and that change in my thinking has resulted in this book. I would also like to thank Bob Masson, the director of the dissertation that has evolved into this book and the editor of this work. His suggestions and our conversations over the course of the writing process always helped me to clarify my thought and gave me new insights into the further implications of my original idea. I also thank Darin Weisensel for his friendship and for using his creativity to design the book cover, as well as Sue Weisensel for allowing us to use her incredible photographs in the cover design. No less important are the family, friends, and colleagues who have journeyed with me during the process of writing and revising this work. Specifically I want to thank Anna Pagnucci and my mother, Janie Russell, for their help in proof-reading various drafts. Many others inspired me by engaging in conversation around these concepts, a process that always helps me articulate my ideas better and often engenders further insights. For your love, support, and encouragement, I thank you!

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FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY: THE CONCEPT AND THE CRITIQUE

ollowing Bernard Lonergan’s critique of faculty psychology and recent philosophical, scientific (e.g., neuroscience), and psychological investigations of cognition, Andrew Tallon has suggested a move from a faculty psychology to an intentionality analysis of consciousness. Tallon follows Lonergan’s argument that a faculty psychology leads to problems of priority and rank among intellect, will, emotion, sensation, and other aspects of the human experience of consciousness.1 The problems disappear when one moves from a faculty psychology to a set of interrelated intentional operations that include cognition, volition, and affection.2 In making such a move, Tallon argues for a triadic or triune consciousness rather than a dyadic spiritual soul. The major advantage of a triune consciousness over a dyadic faculty psychology is the significance the theory of triune consciousness gives to affection in the human person. A faculty psychology limits the intellective part of the soul to intellect and will, relegating affect (the passions) to the appetitive or sensitive part of the soul. In Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness, there is a oneness of consciousness but a distinction between the intentionalities of consciousness: affective intentionality, cognitive intentionality, and volitive intentionality. The three intentionalities are distinct but not separate. All three are equally operative in the human experience of consciousness. Tallon is not suggesting affection as a third faculty, but rather as a distinct intentionality. Tallon argues that it is metaphysically incorrect to set up affection as a separate faculty, but from a phenomenological perspective, he argues one can and must speak of a distinction between affection and cognition or volition. 1 Andrew Tallon, “Doctrinal Development and Wisdom: Rousselot on ‘Sympathetic Knowing’ By Connaturality,” Philosophy and Theology 15 (2003): 354. 2 Ibid. Affection, as it is used in these pages, is defined as the entire range of affective consciousness, which includes all emotion and feeling. Affection or affectivity will be used in conjunction with cognition and volition; affect will be used in conjunction with intellect and will.

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Recent scientific studies into the relationship between affect and the mind within neuroscience also have led to a greater understanding of the interrelatedness of cognition and affection in consciousness. Such a shift in understanding the human person allows affection a much greater role in theology than it previously has been given. Human experience is much better understood when one takes affection into account along with cognition and volition. In exploring the relationship of his theory of triune consciousness to theology, Tallon uses a theorem proposed by Newman to suggest that the omission of affection in the understanding of human consciousness has led to: the neglect of affection in theology; a mutilation of the human soul when it is understood as a dyad instead of a triad; and the distortion of the soul because functions of affection are explained by the concepts of cognition or volition.3 Given Rahner’s axiom that theology is anthropology, changing the way one interprets human experience also affects the way one understands God. Thus to allow affection a greater role in human anthropology has an impact on how one thinks and talks about God. Tallon, presupposing much of Karl Rahner’s metaphysics of knowledge, suggests that an intentionality analysis of consciousness requires a revision of Rahner’s philosophical anthropology. While Tallon has explicated the philosophical underpinnings of triune consciousness and has suggested areas of theology in which this theory of consciousness might offer alternative interpretations, he has not fully explored the theological implications of triune consciousness. Tallon has, for example, suggested that Rahner’s interpretation of the concept of consolation without previous cause found in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius can be more adequately understood as an experience of affective consciousness. This work takes Tallon’s investigation further to examine the implications of Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness for Rahner’s theology of the experience of God, his theology of grace, and his anthropology. Andrew Tallon’s analysis of the human person through triune consciousness rather than traditional faculty psychology augments Rahner’s theological understanding of the human person and the person’s relationship to God. Using Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness as a way to bring Rahner’s theology into dialogue with contemporary science and philosophy does for his theology what Rahner did for 3 Ibid., 362.

1 5 faculty psychology: concept & critique

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Aquinas’s theology and what Aquinas did for the theology of his own time. Rahner’s theological anthropology is dependent on Aquinas’s theology. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas synthesized the concepts of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy to explain the doctrine of Catholic theology. His innovation breathed new life into the theological world of his day, though not without some controversy. Today one must do for Aquinas’s theology what he did for the theology of his time, that is to say, re-examine the philosophical framework he used in light of contemporary philosophy and science to determine the places where a new philosophical framework would be more useful. This chapter will argue that Aquinas’s use of the philosophical framework of faculty psychology to describe the human soul provides an inaccurate understanding of the human person because intellect and will are understood to be incorporeal and immortal whereas affect is considered to be corporeal and thus a lower part of the human soul. This misunderstanding of the human person, which was based on the science of Aquinas’s time and Aristotelian philosophy, is problematic because it gives priority to cognition and volition in a hierarchical ranking of the immortal and incorporeal over the mortal and corporeal. Both the view of the human soul and the relationship between the body and soul thus end up being distorted. Phenomenological analysis suggests that consciousness is both embodied and spiritual, and the experience of consciousness includes affective, cognitive, and volitive dimensions. Faculty psychology distorts the soul because ultimately it excludes affection from equal partnership with cognition and volition. The relationship between the body and soul found in faculty psychology also fails to recognize the embodied nature of cognition and volition along with affection. Furthermore, within the framework of faculty psychology the body is looked upon with a certain amount of distrust and disdain. This chapter will explore how this framework can be critiqued by contemporary philosophy and science. Contemporary scholars who are mindful of the critique of faculty psychology are attempting to reclaim a role for the spiritual aspect of affectivity in Aquinas’s theology.4 4 For example, see R. J. Snell, “Connaturality in Aquinas: The Ground of Wisdom,” Quodlibet Journal 5:2, October 2003 [journal on-line]; available from http://www.Quodlibet.net; Internet; accessed 13 March 2005

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Faculty Psychology Aquinas uses an Aristotelian understanding of the human soul.5 He defines a soul as that which differentiates between a living being and a non-living being. All living beings have a soul because the soul is the first principle of life. Aquinas makes a distinction between vegetative souls, sensitive souls, and rational/intellectual souls.6 A vegetative soul is the principle of life in living things such as plants and enables of growth, nutrition and reproduction.7 The sensitive soul is the principle of life in animals, and in addition to the faculties of the vegetative soul, it includes “the faculties of locomotion, exterior and interior senses, and sensory appetite.”8 For Aquinas the sensitive soul includes emotion as can be demonstrated by the fact that animals experience emotions such as fear. The rational soul of the human person includes all of the faculties of the vegetative and sensitive souls, but also includes intellect and will. Since Aquinas understands the soul to be the substantial form of the body, he does not think of the human person as having three separate souls (vegetative, sensitive, and rational) nested within one another, because a being can only have one substantial form.9 Instead Aquinas maintains that the human rational soul possesses the faculties of the vegetative and sensitive souls, though these parts of the soul are considered to be lower than the rational part of the soul. The human rational soul is differentiated from the vegetative soul found in plants and the sensitive soul found in animals because it and Thomas Ryan, “Revising Affective Knowledge and Connaturality in Aquinas,” Theological Studies 66 (2005): 68. 5 In exploring Aquinas’s use of faculty psychology, this section will draw on two collections of essays: Thomas Aquinas: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Brian Davies, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002 and The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 6 Note that rational and intellectual or intellective are used interchangeably to describe this third aspect of the soul. 7 F. LeRon Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology: After the Philosophical Turn to Relationality (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 170, cites SumTh, I.2.22; I.2.28. 8 Ibid. 9 Norman Kretzmann, “Philosophy of Mind,” in Cambridge Companion, 131.


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alone is immortal. For Aquinas the human soul is immortal because it is incorporeal and subsistent.10 However, within the human soul only the faculties of the rational part of the human soul are considered to be immortal, because they alone are understood to be incorporeal and subsistent. The faculties of the vegetative and sensitive parts of the human soul are not considered to be incorporeal or subsistent, and therefore are not considered to be immortal (though Aquinas himself equivocates on this precept as will be seen below in his explanation of the presence of joy and sorrow in the soul after death). For the purposes of this introduction to Aquinas’s understanding of the human soul, a more in-depth examination of the rational part of the human soul and the place of affect or, in Aquinas’s terms the passions, in the human soul is necessary. For Aquinas the passions belong to the sensitive part of the soul because they are dependent upon the corporeal body. Since Aquinas did not have the benefit of the neuroscientific data that is available today, he did not understand the rational part of the soul, which is comprised of intellect and will, to be dependent upon the body. Norman Kretzmann states that for Aquinas, the intellective principle not only cannot be but also cannot directly use any corporeal organ in performing its distinctive operation. . . . One’s intellect does depend for its data on the operation of the corporeal organs of one’s other faculties, but in processing those data it does not use any body at all in the direct, essential way visual cognition uses the eye.11

Consequently aspects of the soul that are considered to be dependent on the body are classified as lower than those that are not dependent on the body, a hierarchical ranking that is a distorted understanding of the soul as well as the relationship between the body and the soul. As will be seen in what follows, the idea of the independence of intellect from any corporeal organ can no longer be held as valid given what is known about the brain, but for Aquinas this independence of intellect from the body is what allows the rational part of the soul to

10 Ibid., 133-134. 11 Ibid., 133. Cites ST Ia.75.2, ad 3. Italics always in original citation unless otherwise noted.

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be incorporeal and subsistent, and thus to exist after death.12 Aquinas states that the whole corporeal nature is subject to the soul, and is related to it as its matter and instrument. There exists, therefore, an operation of the soul which so far exceeds the corporeal nature that it is not even performed by any corporeal organ; and such is the operation of the rational soul. Below this, there is another operation of the soul, which is indeed performed through a corporeal organ, but not through a corporeal quality, and this is the operation of the sensitive soul . . . . The lowest of the operations of the soul is that which is performed by a corporeal organ, and by virtue of a corporeal quality. . . . Such is the operation of the vegetative soul.13

Aquinas’s worldview is hierarchical ranging from the incorporeal to the corporeal. God is the standard of this hierarchy, and thus among created beings, the angels as purely incorporeal stand at the top of the hierarchy, with humans as a union of corporeal and incorporeal in the middle, and the material world as solely corporeal at the bottom so that the hierarchy extends down from that which is most like God to that which is least like God. Ranking rational powers higher than the sensitive powers because they are incorporeal is problematic both because it presumes the rational powers are incorporeal and because it relegates affection to a lower status than cognition and volition in the experience of consciousness. While Aquinas does allow for “a passion for the things of God,” he does so by maintaining that affection in this sense does not involve corporeality or any type of physiological modification (e.g., the way one’s heart rate increases when one is afraid), and this affection is considered to be both voluntary and active, in short, an act of will.14 12 Ibid. 13 ST I.78.1. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Complete English Edition in Five Volumes. Volume One 1a QQ. 1-119, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948; Reprinted by Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981). 14 Anastasia Scrutton, “Emotion in Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas: A Way Forward in for the Im/passibility Debate?” International Journal of Systematic Theology 7 (2005): 175-176. Cites ST 1a.2ae.22, 3. Note that Scrutton draws out the significance of a distinction between corporeal passions and incorporeal affections in Aquinas’s theory and suggests that an understanding of “affections as potentially independent


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This practice of subsuming affection under volition when dealing with spiritual matters becomes a standard practice in theology. Tallon argues that doing so neglects the appropriate role of affection and distorts volition by making it account for functions that properly belong to affection. The other problem raised by this distinction of the corporeal and incorporeal parts of the soul is what happens to the corporeal parts of the soul upon death. Aquinas argues that the powers of the rational part of the soul, intellect and will, remain in the soul after death, but the powers of the sensitive and vegetative parts of the soul can only remain virtually, not actually because they are accidents of the composite of body and soul, and thus dependent on the corporeal organ.15 With the destruction of the body at death, the composite is destroyed, and so the accidents of that composite “do not remain actually; but they remain virtually in the soul, as in their principle or root.”16 He goes on to answer the objection that joy and sorrow must be present in the separated soul in order for the soul to rejoice or grieve over its eternal destiny by responding that “in the separate soul, sorrow and joy are not in the sensitive, but in the intellectual appetite, as in the angels.”17 Thus the intellectual appetite, will, is distorted to account for the functions of affect in the immortal soul after death due to a concept of the human person that excludes affect from the immortal soul (at least in actuality if not virtually). So while Aquinas grants affection a place in the immortal soul after death, he is unable to give it equal stature among the faculties of the soul because of its embodied nature. One is left to wonder how and why affect moves from the lower sensitive part of the soul to the higher rational part upon death. The problem of explaining this transition of affect from a lower part of the soul to a higher part of the soul after death is avoided altogether by using a different philosophical framework that does not impose a hierarchy on intellect, will, and affect, recognizing the embodied nature of intellect and will as well as the spiritual nature of affect. Contemporary science does not challenge the embodied understanding of the body” may allow for a way of conceiving of “the divine ‘emotional life’ (176-177).” 15 ST I.77.8. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid.

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of the passions or affectivity, but what it does challenge is Aquinas’s disembodied concept of intellect and will. Aquinas also holds that intellect and will belong to the rational part of the soul, that which makes the soul incorporeal, subsistent, and immortal, because their objects are universals rather than particulars. The passions cannot belong to the rational part of the soul because their objects are particulars. He states that the powers of the soul are distinguished generically by their objects. For the higher a power is, the more universal is the object to which it extends, as we have said above (Q77, a3, ad4). But the object of the soul’s operation may be considered in a triple order. For the soul there is a power the object of which is only the body that is united to that soul; the powers of this genus are called “vegetative” for the vegetative power acts only on the body to which the soul is united. There is another genus in the powers of the soul, which genus regards a more universal object – namely, every sensible body, not only the body to which the soul is united. And there is yet another genus in the powers of the soul, which genus regards a still more universal object – namely, not only the sensible body, but all being in universal. . . . In this way there are two kinds of powers – namely, the “sensitive” in regard to the less common object – the sensible body; and the “intellectual,” in regard to the most common object— universal being.18

Aquinas attributes a higher rank or priority to those powers that have universal objects as opposed to particular objects, thus intellect and will are regarded as “higher” powers than the passions.19 Based on this principle, Aquinas attributes the love of God to volition instead of affection, because God as the object of one’s love is an immaterial good not a sensible good. Such attribution of love to volition is an example of Tallon’s argument that volition has been distorted to account for what properly belongs to affection. Potencies can be distinguished as active or passive as well. Peter King explains that “active potencies enable the possessor to do something, whereas passive potencies enable the possessor to ‘suffer’ or ‘undergo’ something.”20 For Aquinas the potencies of the sensitive part 18 ST I.78.1. 19 For a further elaboration on Aquinas’s structure of the human soul, see Peter King, “Aquinas on the Passions,” in Thomas Aquinas, 101-132. 20 Ibid., 354.


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of the soul are passive and the potencies of the intellective part of the soul are active.21 Once again a hierarchy is inherent among the potencies in that within an Aristotelian framework; a potency that is active is higher than a potency that is passive. Tallon’s analysis of affective intentionality challenges the idea that affection is purely passive. As will be further explained in chapter two, Tallon defines affective intentionality as including both a passive element in terms of being affected and an active element in terms of a going out toward the other. In conclusion, Aquinas’s theological anthropology regards the intellective part of the soul that includes intellect and will as higher than the sensitive part of the soul, to which affectivity is relegated, for three reasons. First the intellective part of the soul is regarded as higher, because it alone is understood to be incorporeal, subsistent, and immortal; whereas the sensitive part of the soul is considered to be lower, because it is dependent upon the corporeal organs and therefore neither subsistent nor immortal. Second, intellect and will are considered to be higher powers, because they have objects which are universal, whereas the passions have objects that are particular. Third, within an Aristotelian philosophical framework, the active powers or potencies are understood as being superior to passive powers or potencies. The account of the critiques of Aquinas’s understanding of the human soul that follows will address the problematic nature of subordinating affect to intellect and will, of denying the intentionality of affection, and finally, of understanding intellect and will to be incorporeal given contemporary neuroscience. These problems will be investigated by exploring the contemporary philosophical critique of faculty psychology and the scientific critique of faculty psychology as well as the theological implications of both.

The Philosophical Critique Aquinas himself maintains that intellect is the highest faculty of the soul.22 The question addressed by Aquinas is the relationship between intellect and will. The fact that both intellect and will are higher than the passions is already a given precept for Aquinas for the reasons stated above. When exploring the relationship between intellect and will, however, Aquinas does allow an exception to this order in that 21 Ibid., 356. 22 Shults, 171. ST I.82.3.

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when the thing in which there is good is nobler than the soul (as in the case with God), will is higher than intellect; so that love of God is higher than knowledge of God, noting of course that love of God is an act of volition not affection.23 Thus even for Aquinas there is a difficulty inherent in ordering the faculties in a hierarchical arrangement, a difficulty which led to later controversies in theology such as the problem of voluntarism. While Aquinas acknowledges the difficulties in determining whether intellect or will is the highest faculty, he ultimately settles on intellect.24 Aquinas never even considered affect in his search for the highest power, though he did acknowledge that the passions can affect the operation of cognition and volition. In proposing the idea of triune consciousness as an alternative to faculty psychology, Andrew Tallon draws on theologian Bernard Lonergan’s critique of faculty psychology. It is precisely this question of the hierarchy among the faculties that Lonergan finds most problematic in faculty psychology. In a lecture given at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Newton, MA on October 23rd, 1969 Lonergan states that a faculty psychology divides man up: it distinguishes intellect and will, sense perception and imagination, emotion and conation, only to leave us with unresolved problems of priority and rank. Is sense to be preferred to intellect, or intellect to sense? Is intellect to be preferred to will, or will to intellect? Is one to be a sensist, an intellectualist, or a voluntarist? The questions vanish once one has ceased to think in terms of faculties or powers. What is given to consciousness is a set of interrelated intentional operations. Together they conspire to achieve both cognitional and performative self-transcendence. Such is the basic unity and continuity. No part of the process can be dispensed with, for each has its essential contribution to make.25

23 ST I.82.3. 24 Ibid. 25 Bernard Lonergan, “Faith and Beliefs,” in Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965-1980, ed. Robert C. Croken and Robert M. Doran. Lonergan Research Institute (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 37. For date and occasion of lecture, see p. 30.


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Lonergan brings the theology of the human soul into dialogue with contemporary philosophy that for him results in a shift from faculty psychology to intentionality analysis. For Lonergan, Kant’s Copernican revolution marks a dividing line. Hegel turned from substance to the subject. Historians and philologists worked out their autonomous methods for human studies. Will and decision, actions and results, came up for emphasis in Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Blondel, the pragmatists. Brentano inspired Husserl, and intentionality analysis routed faculty psychology.26

Other theologians also have noted the need for theology to take into account the developments that have occurred in contemporary philosophy. F. LeRon Shults points out that contemporary philosophy has shifted away from both the substance ontology of ancient philosophy and the autonomous subjectivity that was the focus of early modern philosophy.27 The conversation in contemporary philosophy centers on the problem of consciousness and “the self as always and already immersed in the dynamic processes of knowing and being known in community.”28 He highlights the effect of this movement on theology noting “that under the influence of the turn to relationality, and particularly due to contributions from liberation and feminist thought, human knowing is no longer understood as wholly self-determined nor as undetermined, but rather as conditioned and mediated by the embodied communal relations of the knower.”29 Shults notes the “resistance among some theologians to reforming ‘faculty’ psychological constructs in theological anthropology” and argues that “they appear to be unaware of the scientific and philosophical reflection that had led to the obsolescence of this model already in the nineteenth century.”30 Such ignorance of scientific and philosophical developments in the understanding of human consciousness perpetuates a distorted image 26 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Herder and Herder: 1972; Seabury Press paperback edition: 1979), 96. 27 Shults, 181. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 183-184. 30 Ibid., 185. Shults highlights Dewey Hoitenga Jr. as an example of a theologian who persists in using faculty psychology as a model of the human person.

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of the human person as opposed to an understanding of human consciousness that is both embodied and spiritual without the inherent problems of priority and rank found in faculty psychology. Contemporary philosophy also has struggled with understanding the role of affection in the human person. Andrew Tallon notes that the commonest reason for denying feeling, emotion, or passion a place equal to knowing and willing in consciousness has traditionally been association with embodiment, as though physical intensity automatically destroyed the objectivity of affection. The heady regions of intellect and will were supposedly able to remove themselves from the flesh with all its perturbations, reason alone achieving universal and objective truth while feeling was swamped by the material conditions of space and time. While reason transcended such worldly boundaries and attained objectivity, emotion was locked in ineluctable subjectivity. So the old admonition for philosophers was to keep head and heart apart.31

Tallon explains that this understanding of the embodiment of feeling, based on a model of sensation in which the senses and affections supply the raw material to the higher faculties for transformation, resulted in a denial of the intentionality of affection.32 In philosophy, Tallon credits Scheler, Heidegger and Levinas as a few of the philosophers who argue that affection must have an intentionality that is autonomous and irreducible to cognitive intentionality.33 Through phenomenology, these philosophers and those who have continued their work analyze affective intentionality by describing the experience of consciousness, thus demonstrating that affection deserves equal status to cognition and volition.34 Tallon highlights Calvin Schrag and George Turski as two philosophers who have made this argument. Tallon cites Schrag’s position that an intentionality analysis of consciousness, where the intentionalities are distinct but not separate, is not the same as a “psychic tripartism” or a “tripartite self, endowed with separate faculties containing distinct powers,” but rather is a model in which the intentionalities are differentiated “by the particular focus of attention 31 Andrew Tallon, “Triune Consciousness and Some Recent Studies of Affectivity,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70 (1996): 244. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 246. 34 Ibid., 247.


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[which is a distinct mode of intention] which each assumes.”35 Tallon also cites George Turski’s assertion that the traditional dichotomies between thought, emotion, and volition simply break down in favor of a more fluid transition between these phenomenologically different modes of intentionality. The multipartite self of the old faculty psychology . . . is definitively put to rest.36

What is important is to grasp in these philosophical developments is the movement away from a model of the human person using faculty psychology to an interpretation of the experience of human consciousness through intentionality analysis. Chapter two will investigate Andrew Tallon’s model of triune consciousness, which employs an intentionality analysis of human consciousness, in much further depth.

The Scientific Critique The critique of faculty psychology found in contemporary neuroscience is twofold, resulting from a new understanding of the role of the brain in the processes of cognition and volition as well as a new importance given to the role of affection within consciousness. Thus neuroscience supports both the importance of affective intentionality in consciousness and the embodied nature of cognition and volition, overturning the very reasons intellect and will were granted priority ranking in the soul and for omitting affect from the immortal part of the soul. Nancey Murphy argues that “all of the human capacities once attributed to the immaterial mind or soul are now yielding to the insights of neurobiology.”37 Murphy not only shows how the vegetative and sensitive parts of the soul can be attributed to various parts of the brain through the use of brain imaging techniques, she also explains that what Aquinas calls the passive intellect resembles “what current neuroscientists call declarative memory, and this has been found to be 35 Calvin Schrag, Experience and Being: Prolegomena to a Future Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 90. Cited in Tallon, “Triune Consciousness,” 248. Bracketed section is Tallon’s addition. 36 George Turski, Toward a Rationality of Emotions: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Athens, OH: University Press, 1994), 34. Cited in Tallon, “Triune Consciousness,” 249. 37 Nancey Murphy, “Darwin, Social Theory and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge,” Zygon 34 (December 1999): 594.

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dependent on the medial temporal lobe of the brain.”38 Furthermore the active intellect or process of abstraction, while less easily identified within the processes of the brain, seems to be related to Wernicke’s area of the brain and Broca’s area of the brain, both of which deal with the use and acquisition of language.39 Based on the work of Antonio Damasio, Murphy argues that volition is also dependent upon the proper functioning of the prefrontal cortices of the brain.40 Contemporary science demonstrates that the faculties of Aquinas’s intellective soul are definitely dependent on a corporeal organ, namely the brain, not just for the data presented to the intellect, but for the processes and functioning of cognition and volition themselves. Such a realization need not lead one to deny the soul but must call for the reexamination of what it means for the human soul to be embodied or the human body to be ensouled. William Stoeger would agree that from the perspective of the natural sciences, we can correlate our inner experiences with the actuation of certain regions of the brain— even relating certain areas of our experience with one another in new ways on the basis of overlapping regions of brain activity. And we can confirm these findings by studying the loss of perceptual, mental, and conscious function due to injury to specific parts of the brain,41

but he is not willing to assume a reductionist standpoint on the relationship of consciousness to the brain. Stoeger argues that based on the known and understood laws of nature (as opposed to the laws of nature as they actually function in reality), what we cannot yet do is explain or describe exactly how interacting neural events, or patterns of neural events, yield or instantiate the 38 Ibid., 595. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. Cites work of Antonio Damasio in Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon, 1994). 41 William Stoeger, “The Mind-Brain Problem, the Laws of Nature, and Constitutive Relationships,” in Neuroscience and the Person: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, Series on Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, ed. Robert John Russell, et al (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publications and The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1999), 133.


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inner integrated experiences of perception and consciousness, linking them intimately with the outer world. Nor can we yet explain how the inner experiences of intention and reference arise and are realized or expressed in a new series of interacting neural events. This is probably why the best we can do philosophically at this stage is to postulate an irreducible . . . psychosomatic unity.42

He goes on to explain that the mental and the spiritual as we experience and know them, are intimately connected with highly neurologically organized matter—they are not “immaterial” in the sense that they are separate from matter, or independent of matter. They possibly could be considered “immaterial” or “unphysical” in the sense that they involve characteristics of matter which go beyond what we can model and understand.43

The danger in defining a soul as immaterial in this sense, without an acknowledgement that an understanding of the laws of nature that govern these aspects of consciousness as well might one day be discovered, is precisely the danger of a “God of the gaps” theology.44 Stoeger is aware of this danger, and is thus using the terms “immaterial” and “unphysical” in a provisional manner. So while the functions of cognition and volition may go beyond what can be fully explained by neuroscience, there is no way one can accept the research of contemporary science and continue to hold the idea that cognition and volition are incorporeal. Cognition and volition are just as embodied as affection, which does not make them any less spiritual when one understands the human person as an embodied spirit. In addition to noting the dependence of consciousness on the brain, Stoeger notes that the brain is not enough to explain conscious mental behavior. His theory of “constitutive relationships” maintains that “the body is also essential, as are relationships among persons, which stimulate the development and proper programming and functioning 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 134. 44 A “God of the gaps” theology is one in which God is used to explain what cannot be accounted for by scientific explanation, i.e., by the laws of nature as they are currently understood. The danger is that there may come a time when science makes new discoveries, and those “gaps” in our knowledge are closed, thus eliminating the place and role of God in the process.

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of the brain relative to its bodily and environmental context.”45 Such a scientific approach lends itself to dialogue with a philosophical or theological system that has made a turn to relationality. Consciousness is not simply dependent on the corporeal organ of the brain; in the human person consciousness is intimately connected to embodiment and the relationality that entails through such embodiment. One’s relationship with other human beings is also a constituent factor in one’s consciousness. As will be explained in chapter two, this relational aspect of consciousness is key in recognizing the primary role of affective intentionality in an embodied and spiritual human consciousness. For Stoeger, “things are what they are because of the relationships they have with one another, and with the Ground of Being and order.”46 Stoeger defines the Aristotelian-Thomistic idea of a substantial form or soul, understood as “the entity’s principle of unity and activity,” as the complete network of constitutive relationships for a system or an entity as they actually exist and function which ‘our laws of nature’ only imperfectly describe and partially indicate. Some components of this complete network of constitutive relationships are accessible to the natural sciences; other components will never be.47

The question about the soul within the dialogue between science, philosophy, and religion thus becomes a question of to what extent the soul is reducible to the body. A strict reductive physicalism or determinism that reduces all functions traditionally attributed to the soul to the biological processes of the body in the sense that the whole is no more than the sum of the parts does not leave room for any dialogue between science and religion. Different theories are being developed, however, that recognize the relationship of the functions of the soul to the body without this type of reductionism. Stoeger speaks of a mereological irreducibility in which the constitutive relationships among its components, or with other systems or objects outside itself, render its properties, behavior, or function essentially different from that of its components, and endow it with functional unity and integrity so that some of the char-

45 Stoeger, 137. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 144, 145.


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acteristics of its components are no longer manifest separately, apart from the whole in which they now reside.48

In other words, the whole is more than the sum of its parts because of the relationships that exist both between the parts themselves and between the whole and its environment, including its relationships to others and possibly to God. Stoeger also defines a causal irreducibility in which “the higher-level causes within a system or sequence are not determined solely by the causes operating at more fundamental levels of organization in that system—there are external causal factors impinging on the system from equivalent or higher levels.”49 Mereological irreducibility and causal irreducibility, according to Stoeger, can then be used to explain top-down causality, emergence, and supervenience. Top-down causality is used to describe the situation in which “while higher-level human capacities (for example, thinking and deciding) are dependent on lower-level neural processes, the higher processes are nevertheless, causal in their own right (in other words, they have top-down causal influence on the lower-level processes).”50 Stoeger maintains that a system that demonstrates topdown causality is causally irreducible.51 The concept of top-down causality is important because it recognizes that cognition and volition are dependent on the corporeal body but not necessarily reducible to the body. The concept of emergence “refers to new functional properties that arise from increasing capacity and interactive complexity of complex systems.”52 Stoeger acknowledges that emergent properties are simply those that the existing laws of nature do not yet account for and that may well be accounted for given time and further research, but he defines as emergent any property that is mereologically irreducible (i.e., properties that cannot be accounted for based on the sum of the parts).53 Finally the concept of supervenience “is used to designate 48 Ibid., 140-141. 49 Ibid., 141. 50 Warren Brown, “Neurological Embodiment of Spirituality and Soul,” in From Cells to Souls—and Beyond: Changing Portraits of Human Nature, ed. Malcolm Jeeves (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 63. Brown calls this top-down causality “nonreductive physicalism.” 51 Stoeger, 141. 52 Brown, 64. 53 Stoeger, 141.

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a dependent but generally irreducible relationship that higher-level properties or states have with lower-level properties or states” so that “higher-level states (mental states) can change only if the lower-level states (brain states) also change.”54 The reverse is not necessarily true; lower-level states can change while higher-level states remain the same. Stoeger again accounts for this concept through mereological irreducibility and causal irreducibility in which “the distinctiveness of the higher-level (mental) states is kept very clear in the general sense, despite their utter dependence on the lower-level (brain) states,” so that “the supervenient states are essentially different from the subvenient states, though radically dependent upon them.”55 Stoeger explains that “each subvenient state partially determines a supervenient state, but complex supervenient states, or particular clusters or causal sequences of supervenient states are not mereologically or causally reducible to their determining subvenient states.”56 In the theories of irreducibility that are presented here, Aquinas’s faculties of the soul (including intellect and will) are dependent on the physical body, but not necessarily entirely reducible to the body. Recognizing the dependence of cognition and volition on the physical body undercuts the main rationale for assigning them a higher place than affection in the soul in Aquinas’s theology. The new understanding of the relationship between the mental states of thinking, willing, and feeling and the physical body on which they are dependent but not materially reducible offers new possibilities for understanding what it means to be embodied souls or enspirited bodies in a non-dualistic and non-reductionistic way. Susan Greenfield maintains that consciousness is an emergent property of the physical brain in this non-dualistic and non-reductionistic sense. Greenfield has demonstrated the complexity of locating consciousness in the human brain in a reductionistic manner. She points out three properties of consciousness. First, consciousness is spatially multiple, i.e., it is distributed all over the brain, but experienced as a single phenomenon.57 Second, consciousness is variable, not only from animals to humans, but within human development from a fetus to 54 55 56 57

Ibid., 142. Ibid. Ibid. Susan Greenfield, “Soul, Brain and Mind,” in From Soul to Self, ed. M. James Crabbe (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 110.


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an adult, and even in an adult from one moment to the next.58 Third, consciousness is always derived from some kind of specific stimulus, in other words, one is conscious of something.59 In phenomenological terms, consciousness is intentional. Consciousness seemingly takes place not simply in the brain cells themselves, but in the relationships between the cells, in what is called a neuronal assembly. The size of the neuronal assembly (and thus the capacity for consciousness) is dependent upon the strength of the stimulation, the degree of connectivity between the neurons, and the significance of the epicentre (in relation to the availability of modulatory chemicals such as dopamine, noradrenaline, serotonin and histamine).60 These three factors in relation to one another affect the capacity for consciousness in a human person at any given moment. The ability for rational and abstract thought, as well as the ways in which one’s will is operative, are dependent upon these physiological processes, but are not materially reducible to them. As opposed to a faculty psychology which understands intellect and will to be immaterial and incorporeal, science has shown the dependence of Aquinas’s faculties of the rational soul on corporeal organs. Such a discovery does not necessarily deny the existence of a soul, but it does force a redefinition of the concept of the soul. As is seen from the final factor affecting the size of the neuronal assembly, the flood of modulatory chemicals, science today gives emotion a key role to play in the processes of human thinking and decision-making. These chemicals are important from the standpoint of affectivity because emotions can cause these chemicals to flood the brain and body, thus affecting the receptivity of the cells in the neuronal assemblies, affecting both rational (i.e., concrete) thought and abstract thought. Contemporary science, specifically neuroscience, has highlighted the role of affection in the processes of consciousness. F. LeRon Shults notes that classical theology had emphasized the two faculties of intellect and will, rendering the affections or emotions subsidiary. This is due at least in part to the belief that the latter are rooted in the body, and so are at best part of the “animal” soul (Thomas) or at worst the 58 Ibid., 111. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 119.

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the heart of rahner source of sinful dispositions over which intellect and will are called to rule (Augustine).61

No one is arguing that affection is not embodied, but as was seen above, the contrary is the case in that it must be acknowledged that intellect and will are embodied as well. Degradation of the emotions based on their bodily nature is no longer valid, thus a reexamination of the role they play in the human person is required. Antonio Damasio has been on the forefront of the studies of the relationship between affection, cognition, and volition.62 Affection is essential to human thinking and deciding. In contemporary neuroscience, emotion and feeling are being understood as that which allows the human person to move from a seemingly endless cognitive analysis of various choices to the point of making an actual decision.63 Emotion and feeling are what give value to certain choices and help prioritize among the various choices. This aspect of emotion is demonstrated by the inability of a person with damage to the prefrontal cortices of the brain to make decisions, despite an unencumbered capacity for cognition and intelligence.64 The damage to the prefrontal cortices of the brain prohibits the use of emotion in the decision-making process. As opposed to the classic ideal of reason unencumbered by emotion, scientific evidence suggests that reason fails without the assistance of emotion. In order to define affection, which includes both emotion and feeling, emotion and feeling, as well as the distinction between the two, must first be understood. Emotion, as distinct from feeling, is defined by Damasio as “the collection of changes in body state that are induced in myriad organs by nerve cell terminals under the control of a dedicated brain system, which is responding to the content of thoughts relative to 61 Shults, 173. 62 See Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994); The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999); Looking for Spinoza (New York: Harcourt Brace, 2003). 63 John Bannon, “Emotions and Biology: Remarks on the Contemporary Trend,” The Review of Metaphysics 58 (2004): 289. 64 Ibid.


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a particular entity or event,”65 or in his later work, “a complex collection of chemical neural responses forming a distinctive pattern.”66 What is important in these definitions is the fact that emotion corresponds to Aquinas’s understanding of the passions in the sensitive part of the soul. Emotions are instinctual biological responses that trigger a series of reactions throughout the body. In this sense, one could argue that emotions correspond to the senses in that both provide data for consciousness. Emotions are to affective consciousness what the senses are to cognitive consciousness. Feelings, as distinct from emotions, seem to correspond to cognition and volition within the intellectual or rational part of the soul. Emotions are felt, processed, and identified through consciousness. Feeling is “the experience of such [bodily] changes in juxtaposition to the mental images that initiated the cycle.”67 In other words, feeling is one’s consciousness of emotion. It is also important to note in this distinction between emotion and feeling that the process of brain mapping in neuroscience has shown emotion and feeling to be located in distinct areas of the brain.68 In summary, affection, understood as both emotion and feeling, is embodied in the same sense that cognition and volition can be understood as embodied. Furthermore, cognition and volition are impaired in a person who lacks the capacity for emotion and/or feeling. When emotion and feeling are understood in their distinctive roles, a correlation can be seen between affection and cognition in the dependence of cognition on the senses and the dependence of affection on emotion. Faculty psychology ultimately fails because it accounts for emotion but does not acknowledge the wider range and role of affective intentionality in consciousness and in what is called the spiritual soul. In conclusion, a faculty psychology which relegates affection to a lower place in the human soul than cognition and volition is no longer tenable given philosophical developments that use a phenomenological approach to the human person and scientific developments that highlight the crucial role affection plays in consciousness as well as the 65 66 67 68

Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 139; cited in Bannon, 291. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, 53; cited in Bannon, 299. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 145; cited in Bannon, 291. R. J. Dolan, “Emotion, Cognition, and Behavior,” Science 298 (2002): 1193-1194.

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embodied nature of cognition and volition. Theology will benefit from taking these scientific and philosophical developments into account in order to understand the human person in such a way as to correct the distortion that occurs when intellect and will are given priority over affect. Such a new understanding of human consciousness also would correct the distortion that occurs when cognition and volition are forced to account for experiences in human consciousness that are more correctly attributed to affection.

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A

ANDREW TALLON’S THEORY OF TRIUNE CONSCIOUSNESS

s an alternative to faculty psychology, Andrew Tallon uses a phenomenological approach to develop his theory of triune consciousness. Using this approach, he argues that human consciousness, which is one, can be experienced as affective, cognitive and volitive. These three intentionalities are distinct ways in which we experience consciousness, but are never separate, hence Tallon’s use of the term “triune.” Tallon abandons the entire concept of faculties and thus is not suggesting that affection is a third and separate faculty. Affective consciousness is understood as a distinct and equal intentionality in addition to the cognitive and volitive intentionalities. A distinction can be made between the three intentionalities in the experience of consciousness, but there is no separation between the three intentionalities. Intentionality, when used in terms of consciousness refers to the fact that when one is conscious, one is conscious of something. Consciousness is directed toward something. Tallon maintains that there is a distinction between the experiences of being affectively, cognitively, or volitively conscious of something. While consciousness is always one, the terms affective consciousness, cognitive consciousness, and volitive consciousness will be used to describe the distinct ways in which one experiences being conscious of something. Experience is defined in these terms as something a person undergoes (passively), something of which one is conscious, and something to which one can but does not necessarily respond. An affective experience is an unthematic experience of which one is conscious but not necessarily in a cognitive or reflective sense. Affective intentionality implies that one not only undergoes affective experience but that affective experience also intends the other by whom one is affected and to whom one responds. A relationship between consciousness and spirit in which consciousness is part of what is meant by spirit also is presumed in this work. Spirit, understood as human transcendence, is intentionality beyond

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the finite. Spirit and soul will be used somewhat interchangeably as many authors refer to “soul” within the context of faculty psychology and “spirit” within a contemporary context. Soul will be understood to refer to the spiritual aspect of the human person. Reclaiming the place of affection in the experience of consciousness and subsequently in the spiritual soul allows Tallon to gain new insight into Karl Rahner’s theology. Tallon recognizes the implicit place of affection in Rahner’s theological system that has not been adequately developed due to Rahner’s dependence on a Thomistic understanding of the human person that either relegates the experience of affective consciousness to the body or subsumes it under cognition or volition. This chapter will offer an explication of Andrew Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness, specifically the role that affective consciousness plays in his theory. The chapter begins by highlighting key points from the phenomenological background that Tallon uses to develop his theory of triune consciousness. The chapter goes on to explain the theory of triune consciousness itself and the way in which Tallon employs the concepts of connaturality and habit to explain affective consciousness in this theory, thus moving to an understanding of the human person that recognizes the role of affection in the spiritual soul as well as the embodied nature of cognition and volition. The chapter concludes with Tallon’s interpretation of Rahner, focusing on the concepts in Rahner’s theology that Tallon argues have an affinity with affective intentionality.

Phenomenological Background Andrew Tallon proposes a theory of triune consciousness which he defines as “the union of affection, cognition, and volition as an operational synthesis.”1 In his seminal work on the subject, Head and Heart: Affection, Cognition, Volition as Triune Consciousness, Tallon outlines his project as follows: This book defends the right of feeling—meaning the whole realm of passion, emotion, mood, and affection in general—to be admit1 Andrew Tallon, Head and Heart: Affection, Cognition, Volition as Triune Consciousness (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 1 (hereafter cited as HH). See also, Communities of Emergent Persons: A Gentle Introduction to Philosophy with Help From Computational Neuroscience (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2005), hereafter cited as CEP.

2 5 tallon’s theory of triune consciousness

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ted to equal partnership with reason and will in human consciousness. It does so not only by proving the existence of affectivity as a distinct kind of consciousness inseparable from the other two, but also by showing precisely how affection works, how it operates in synthesis with those two, and by offering a new concept of triune consciousness as a paradigm for the human spirit.2

Thus Tallon’s concept of the human person is free from the distortion that occurs when the role of affection in human consciousness is neglected. Tallon approaches this task of admitting affection into an equal partnership with cognition and volition through the use of dialogical and existential phenomenology. A phenomenological approach takes a descriptive stance toward experience, attempting to put aside presuppositions in doing so. In other words, it tries to look directly at experience and describe particular concrete phenomena.3 Such an approach leads Tallon to conclude that affection is part of the experience of human consciousness as will be demonstrated in what follows. Tallon comes to such a conclusion by analyzing the intentionality of human consciousness. Tallon draws on the phenomenological approach of Heidegger, Buber, and Levinas. He then uses Ricoeur’s understanding of the heart as thumos and the descriptions of affective intentionality found in Scheler, von Hildebrand, and Strasser. This section will briefly explore the key points in each of these philosophers that are essential to understanding why affection must not be relegated to a subservient position as compared to cognition and volition in the human experience of consciousness, and subsequently, in the understanding of the human soul.4 2 HH, 2. 3 Jane Howarth, “Phenomenology, epistemic issues in,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, V. 7, Nihilism to Quantum Mechanics, edited by Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1988), 343-348. Note that in describing an experience one is already in the cognitive realm of consciousness. 4 In Head and Heart, Tallon devotes the first seven chapters to developing the phenomenological underpinnings of triune consciousness. He explores the thought of many more philosophers than those listed here, but for our purposes, I will limit my account to those whose concepts I believe are the most helpful in understanding Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness.

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The focus on action and the body in phenomenology is important in Tallon’s account of human subjectivity, especially as it relates to the role of affection in human subjectivity. Building on Brentano, phenomenology maintains that consciousness is intentional, that is, directed onto objects. Phenomenologists interpret this to mean that subjects and objects are essentially interrelated, a fact which any adequate account of subjects and objects must preserve. Phenomenological accounts of subjects emphasize action and the body; accounts of objects emphasize the significance they have for us.5

Tallon does not take Husserl’s transcendental approach to phenomenology, but rather turns to Buber’s dialogical approach and Heidegger’s existential approach leading to an understanding of human consciousness as embodied and interrelational, and thus affective. Tallon is among those phenomenologists “who deal with intersubjectivity without [Husserl’s] Cartesian starting point, that is, who begin not with the idealistic methodological condition called ‘constitution of the other’, but rather with the already always given real world of the ‘we’ prior to any subsequent ‘I’ or ‘Thou’, to use Buber’s terms.”6 Heidegger is critical of Husserl’s transcendental self and adopts the existential starting point of the self in the world. Heidegger and existential phenomenologists argue that one does not ever experience an abstract, transcendental self or ego. Husserl adopts a “‘transcendental’ standpoint, ‘outside’ the natural world,” whereas “existential phenomenologists believed that such a standpoint is neither attainable nor necessary. The human standpoint is essentially in the world. The reduction is only partial: one cannot put aside all one’s existential assumptions at the same time.”7 The important point in this perspective for Tallon is that the human person in the world is embodied, and that embodiment is key to the way the human person experiences consciousness. One does not have an experience of cognition or volition that is not embodied, and the experience of embodied consciousness always includes affection as well as cognition and volition. Heidegger actually gives affection, as that which is felt, priority over cognition. Tallon explains that with Heidegger and the existential tradition, one “speaks of 5 Howarth, 343. 6 HH, 28. 7 Howarth, 344.


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human being felt as bodily movement in space and time before knowing in concepts and ideas, that is, as motion before notion, kinesis before noesis, bodily movement before conceptual knowledge.”8 Tallon points out that “the primacy of a kinetic, temporal being-in-the-world, logically prior to thought (that is, earlier than cognitive intentionality), an intentionality that is experienced as affectivity, received the status of serious philosophy thanks to Heidegger.”9 For Heidegger, one’s mood or attunement (Stimmung, Befindlichkeit) is the nonrepresentational but nonetheless intentional way one is in the world, and this affective, nonrepresentational intentionality is reducible to neither cognitive intentionality nor volitive intentionality.10 Affection is restored to its rightful status as equal to cognition and volition in human consciousness and ultimately in the human soul. The importance of Buber for Tallon lies in his category of ‘the between’, which Tallon also interprets as affective, nonrepresentational intentionality, in other words, a category which includes sensations, perceptions and feelings as “present-ations” as opposed to images and ideas which are “re-presentations.”11 Tallon explains that one must not adopt Descartes’s cognitive starting point, but go back “to a world lived in before thinking, to a more primordial starting-point in the prereflective and prevoluntary lived world, the world that forms the field or ground in and on which all reason, feeling, and willing occur.”12 The world lived in before thinking is a world in which human beings are embodied and occupy space and time. Buber describes ‘the between’ as an encounter rather than an experience.13 Tallon explains that ‘encounter’ is an affective consciousness that keeps the distance that makes relation possible, whereas ‘experience’ is a cognitive consciousness that absorbs the otherness, reducing others to my mental state of mind and making others the same as my ideas or images of them, ‘totalizing’ them, as Levinas would say. Space makes relation possible as our embodied motion transforms space into place.14 8 HH, 38. 9 HH, 80. 10 HH, 79-80. 11 HH, 29. 12 HH, 28-29. 13 HH, 39. 14 Ibid.

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There is a priority to the lived, embodied encounter by the very fact that it is meaningful before that meaning is ever articulated by ideas and concepts. There is an experience of affective consciousness that cannot be subsumed under cognitive or volitive consciousness, but rather must be recognized as having its own distinct intentionality. Furthermore, representational or cognitive intentionality is only possible because of intersubjective space. Tallon states that intersubjective space, as a coconstitution by persons, is already filled with meaning in the present, before reflectively appropriated in thought as re-presented in speech. There is an intentionality prior to representation; a step before head, the two are linked by a relation so tight that if the ‘presenting’ intentionality were destroyed, so also would be the mind’s ‘re-presenting’. In other words, if we cannot first know in that material, embodied, felt subjectivity called heart, we will not know in that formal, rational subjectivity called mind or head.15

The interdependence and unity of affective intentionality and cognitive intentionality (as well as volitive intentionality) is due to the fact that human persons are finite and embodied. Part of the insight gained from Heidegger and Buber is that even one’s experience of oneself, self-presence, is only possible through this intersubjective space, that is to say, through self-absence. In cognitive intentionality the sense of self-presence through self-absence is explained by Tallon through the conversion to the phantasm, a concept found in Aquinas and Rahner, for whom self-presence by self-absence is the experience of being spirit in the world. Aquinas and Rahner, however, do not account for the affective dimension of this experience of being spirit in the world.16 In affective intentionality self-presence is experienced through the encounter with otherness (primarily embodiment) and ‘the other’. For Tallon, following Levinas and Buber, finite human being, therefore, is necessarily turned toward the other, dynamically open and, by its very nature, exteriorization, and thus best known, felt, experienced, and lived not in ‘intentional analysis of contents of consciousness’, but in the face of the other, in culture, 15 HH, 41. 16 Note that Rahner will include the experience of love as part of the way one experiences oneself as finite spirit drawn toward an infinite horizon, but he does so by subsuming love under volition or cognition in the tradition of faculty psychology.


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media, institutions, history, the arts and sciences and all the othernesses in and by which finite spirit makes and finds itself.17

Tallon explains that “for Buber (unlike Levinas) and for general experience, the other need not be a person but must be an affecting presence . . . (e.g., a great work or art, a mystical experience that resists reduction), a thoroughly interactional event dependent on both the presence of the other and my affectability.”18 Rahner would not disagree with Tallon’s analysis of finite being “finding itself ” through what is other, but he neglects the affective dimension of being open to what is other. Tallon includes affective intentionality in this ‘intentional analysis of contents of consciousness’. He states that once intentionality is recognized to be something said about our whole finite being, and not just about cognition, then intentionality immediately opens to include all embodiment, since it is but the emanation of finite spirit in its self-becoming, embodiment being its first ‘othering’, and thus to include affectivity (and volition) as irreducibly distinct ways of intending the other.19

Tallon does not limit the human experience of self-presence through self-absence to its cognitive dimension, but restores the affective dimension to its rightful, equal status, recognizing that openness to the other and the mediation of self-presence through “otherness” is both an affective and cognitive experience, and ultimately, a volitive experience as well. To highlight the necessity of ‘the other’ for human consciousness and self-presence, Tallon also draws on key points in the work of Emmanuel Levinas.20 Levinas also maintains that the experience of the other is not only or even primarily a cognitive experience, but rather is first and foremost an affective experience. The primacy of the other is what makes ethics the first philosophy for Levinas because the near17 Andrew Tallon, “Intentionality, Intersubjectivity, and the Between: Buber and Levinas on Affectivity and the Dialogical Principle,” in Thought 53 (September 1978): 299. 18 Andrew Tallon, “The Criterion of Love and the Accusing Heart in 1 John,” Philosophy and Theology 17 (2005): 194-195. 19 Tallon, “Intentionality,” 299. 20 For an indepth analysis of Levinas and Rahner, see Michael Purcell, Mystery and Method: The Other in Rahner and Levinas, (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998).

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ness or proximity of the other “is felt ethically as the other addressing me: my felt meaning is to-be-for-the-other, responsibility.”21 For Levinas, the primary experience of consciousness, before one thinks or acts, is being affected by the other (one’s sensibility), a being-affected that calls forth a response to and for the other. Levinas’s concept of sensibility is what Tallon identifies as affectivity. Tallon states that sensibility as affectivity is that very aspect of the person by which person, who is finite spirit, tries to overcome finitude. Though spirit as such is self-presence, a finite spirit because finite becomes selfpresence only through other, through the self-absence of embodiment (first otherness) by which he or she mediates all second othernesses (whom he or she needs to know and love in order to become fully). Thus because all finite self-presence is first self-absence— which means all self-presence is first presence-to-other (and this absolutely excludes all intellectual intuition, even of self )—the experience of the self is the feeling of the self (recall Marcel again). But if the very same ‘organ’ of self-feeling is the ‘organ’ of otherness, then, before thought and freedom (as spirit) the self is ‘othered’— thus Levinas is right: I am touched, addressed by the other before I know it, before I agree to it by any contract, through my embodiment (sensibility, affectivity).22

Tallon does point out that Buber’s concept of ‘the between’, coconstituted by the self and the other, offers a valid corrective to Levinas’s sense of the self that is totally passive in the face of the other.23 Affection is not merely passive, a being-affected, but it is also intentional, a going out to what is other. Just as cognition always involves reaching beyond any finite object because the human person is capax infiniti as spirit, so too does affection reach beyond the finite other to the Infinite Other. Tallon notes this idea of reaching beyond the finite in Levinas’s concept of l’Infini or the Infinite and connects it with Rahner’s idea of Vorgriff to explain that the experience of the horizon of human consciousness is an affective experience. He states that neither l’Infini nor Vorgriff is a cognitive abstraction nor a knowable object, on the one hand, nor a presence or absence subject to volun21 Tallon, “Intentionality, Intersubjectivity,” 304-305. 22 Ibid. 305. 23 Ibid. 304.


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tary control, on the other, but both are unoverridable structures of consciousness, together naming a transcendence of everything and everyone finite toward a horizon that is not only horizontally but vertically infinite, toward a “ground” that is a “height” (or “depth”) more than a “ground,” and that is always figured but never a figure, always personal without being a person, desired without being needed.24

The experience of the horizon or the trace of the Infinite, however, is experienced through embodiment and the mediation of the other (though for Rahner, there are exceptions to this mediation through the other in certain mystical experiences, such as the experience Ignatius calls “consolation without previous cause”). As will be further explored in chapter four, affective intentionality offers a key insight into why the horizon in Rahner’s theology can be named as personal God instead of remaining an abstract, infinite mystery. Tallon explains that the Infinite’s ethical reality emerges with the advent of the human Other (i.e., another person), an approach that is mediated, to be sure, by embodiment, by that ambiguous first otherness of my own flesh which I both and neither am and have; this is the fact of the Other, which in Levinas’ philosophy gets its ethical power from connaturality with the trace of the Other whose trace in consciousness is the Infinte (Tallon 1995). That Infinite, never an object, is operative in all knowing and loving of persons and things, revealing their finitude and our own finitude.25

The connection between the affective experience of the Infinite Other and the finite other also will facilitate a deeper understanding of Rahner’s connection between love of God and love of neighbor as will be explored in chapter six. So in Tallon’s reading, Heidegger, Buber, and Levinas offer a phenomenology of consciousness that acknowledges the existence of the human subject who experiences him/herself as already in a world in which meaning is coconstituted in relation to the other and in which self-presence is only accessible through one’s radical dependence on what is other. One’s experience of one’s embodiment in the world 24 Tallon, “Head and Heart in Rousselot and Lonergan,” in Continuity and Plurality in Catholic Theology: Essays in Honor of Gerald McCool, S.J., ed. Anthony J. Cernera (Fairfield, CT: Sacred Heart University Press, 1998), 162 (hereafter cited as “Rousselot and Lonergan”). 25 Ibid. 164.

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and one’s response to the other is first and foremost an affective consciousness, an experience that is felt before it can be thought or willed. Furthermore, because this experience of self-presence through selfabsence is always embodied and because the three intentionalities are distinct but never separate, one must recognize that cognitive consciousness and volitive consciousness are just as embodied as affective consciousness. The insight offered by existential and dialogical phenomenology, that there is no abstract, transcendental self, but only an embodied self experienced in the world, opens the door to the acceptance of an affective intentionality. To focus exclusively on the embodiment of affective intentionality, however, does not move one beyond Aquinas’s theory in which the passions are part of the sensitive soul because they are embodied, whereas cognition and volition are understood as part of the intellective soul because they are not embodied and therefore able to be subsistent and immortal. While the recognition of the rightful place of affection in an analysis of consciousness is important, affection cannot be understood to have an equal status with cognition and volition simply because of the primacy of embodiment in human consciousness, but rather must have equal status because all three intentionalities are understood to be both embodied and spiritual. The distortion of the human person is avoided only when affection, cognition and volition are given equal spiritual status and when all three are recognized as being embodied because the human person is embodied spirit. Tallon draws on the work of Paul Ricoeur to establish the dual role of affection as both embodied and spiritual. To restore affection to its rightful place as spiritual while still recognizing its embodied nature, Tallon uses Ricoeur’s description of the heart as thumos and his definition of affection as comprising both being affected and an intention. In his work Fallible Man, Ricoeur develops Plato’s idea of the heart as thumos mediating between the physical and the spiritual.26 Heart mediates between and unites the human experiences of the world of bios and its corresponding desire for pleasure (epithumia) and the world of logos and its corresponding desire for happiness (eros).27 “Heart” is the experience of the tension between the desire for pleasure and the 26 Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, rev. ed., trans. Charles Kelbley, (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 123-124. Cited in HH, 95-96. 27 HH, 96.


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desire for happiness, the experience of the human as animal and the experience of the human as spirit.28 For Ricoeur this tension is the source of both human happiness and sinfulness in that one can confuse the partial good (pleasure) for the total good (happiness).29 There is an inherent risk in Ricoeur’s analysis that the head will be seen as exclusively part of the world of the logos, but the head also mediates between the world of bios, which is the world of the sense, and the world of the logos, which is the world of ideas in cognitional structure. There are no ideas without embodiment and the experience of the world. Likewise volition moves one to action in a way that can not be separated from one’s experience of being embodied in the world. Tallon explains that heart for Ricoeur is “a third kind of consciousness, a third way of being and moving (intending), an ambiguous, mixed kinesis—a mixture of affection (passivity as autoaffection, as a being-affected, as a receptivity to otherness) and intention (a going out to otherness).”30 He further uses Ricoeur’s directional description of this consciousness as one that both streams up, out, forward, and is a dynamic primal force, rooting down and back into flesh and blood, evidently not merely a nonspiritual or material, organic, bodily something outside the soul and consciousness, but very soul itself, experienced in affective conciousness as affective intentionality (feelings, moods, symbols) and also as available to cognitive consciousness through reason and to volitional consciousness as will.31

Tallon understands this dual movement to be representative of the core of affective intentionality. The movement up and out is the intention, and the movement down and in is the being-affected.32 Again one must exercise a caution in using Ricoeur’s concept of heart that one 28 HH, 104-105. 29 Ibid. Note that the sinfulness is not in bodily pleasure in and of itself, but only in the tendency to make what is finite absolute. See pp. 106107. 30 HH, 90. 31 HH, 91. Note here that Tallon tries to balance the distinction among three types of consciousness with their unity, so that at times ‘heart’ is described as affective consciousness while at other times it is described as the ground of triune consciousness. 32 HH, 95.

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does not put so much emphasis on the embodiment of affective intentionality that one forgets or excludes the embodied nature of cognitive intentionality and volitive intentionality. The final three phenomenologists who offer key concepts that facilitate Tallon’s restoration of affection to its rightful place in the understanding of human consciousness and the human soul are Max Scheler, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Stephen Strasser. Scheler offers an argument for the primacy of affectivity, and von Hildebrand describes the difference between intentional and unintentional states as well as making a strong argument against faculty psychology. Finally Strasser offers an understanding of the three moments of intentionality and its circular structure. Max Scheler attempts to offer a corrective to the tradition that has placed affection exclusively in the body or in a lower aspect of the human soul. For Scheler affection is the core of human spirit. He argues that there is a primacy to affectivity because it involves value perception. Tallon explains that “the reason for this primacy of love and heart lies in value perception, which resides in feeling; such perception is called ‘value-ception’ (Wert-nehmung, literally ‘worth-taking’, taking as worth or value, analogous to Wahr-nahmung, true-taking, taking for true).”33 Scheler’s point is especially important given what contemporary science has now learned about the inability of the human person to reason without the ability to feel precisely because affection is what allows the human person to value certain objects, choices, and ideas over others. Without that ability to perceive value (Scheler’s value-ception), one would be victim to an endless reasoning process of evaluating one’s options without ever coming to a point where one decides and takes action. Scheler argues that one has an ordis amoris, an emotional (affective) a priori or an affective attunement that is the foundation of the ability to perceive value.34 Furthermore Scheler argues that the perception of value through love precedes both cognition and volition and is what gives rise to both cognition and volition.35 Not all may agree with the primacy Scheler attributes to affection, and in fact Tallon criticizes Scheler for holding “too much independence of heart from reason and heart from will” as well as for placing so much 33 HH, 140. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid.


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emphasis on the spiritual aspect of affective intentionality that it runs “the risk of losing its anchor in embodiment in the ambition to be considered as spiritual as these latter two kinds of consciousness [cognitive and volitive].”36 What is needed is a dual corrective that reclaims the spirituality of affective intentionality and the embodiment of the cognitive and volitive intentionalities. Dietrich von Hildebrand offers insight into the structure of affective intentionality by first making distinctions within the experience of human consciousness that restore an equal and distinct role to affection. He also criticizes faculty psychology for excluding affection from the highest aspect of the human soul. Von Hildebrand outlines a structure that distinguishes between intentional and unintentional experiences, naming affective response as a distinct, intentional experience. On the one hand, an intentional experience is one in which there is a conscious relation to the other, for example, relating to another in joy, love or hatred, or experiencing conviction or doubt.37 An unintentional experience, on the other hand, is one in which there is no conscious relation to the other, as in a feeling of tiredness or irritability.38 By naming affective response as an intentional experience, von Hildebrand restores both an embodied aspect and a spiritual aspect to affection. As can be noted in his critique of faculty psychology, von Hildebrand argues that there is no reason to presume that cognition and volition are not similarly both embodied and spiritual, thus moving the argument to a more scientifically and theologically credible position that understands the human person as embodied spirit. An unintentional experience can be a pure state, e.g., being tired or irritable, and may have a causal relation, but it does not have an intentional relation.39 Von Hildebrand also distinguishes intentional experiences from teleological trends (e.g., hunger) which have a direction toward something, but not a relation to the other.40 Within intentional experiences, which have a meaningful direction toward the other, von Hildebrand outlines both cognitive acts and responses. A 36 HH, 142. 37 Dietrich von Hildebrand, Ethics, (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1953) 191-193. Cited in HH, 175-176. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Von Hildebrand, 194-195. Cited in HH, 177.

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cognitive act is the reception of the revelation of the other to oneself, and is presupposed by any possible response.41 The structure of act and response is circular, however, because one’s response also conditions one’s perception and the cognitive act of receiving the other.42 Von Hildebrand further defines three types of responses: the theoretical, the volitional, and the affective. Tallon notes that an affective response is distinct from a volitional response because one cannot will oneself to love. At the same time there is what von Hildebrand calls a cooperative freedom involved in one’s affective response because it is both given as opposed to willed, and it is one’s own response.43 Because of this dual nature of affective response, one is capable of conversion. One is responsible for one’s response-ability. Von Hildebrand also draws attention to both the distinct role of affection and the necessity of all three intentionalities for the highest synthesis of human consciousness. He makes a distinction between perceiving the value of the other and being affected by the other. One can cognitively perceive value and not be affectively moved by that value.44 Both cognition and affection are required for a response. The necessary “precondition for response” is “interest-plus-importance.”45 For von Hildebrand this concept of “being affected as the necessary condition for my affective response” is “more than perception, yet less than response, not solely in the other nor solely in me but (as Buber says) between us.”46 Affective conversion must take place in the realm of this ability to be affected. It requires the interaction of cognition and volition with affection as well as the presence of the other by whom one is affected. Cognition, affection, and volition are distinct in this process of conversion, but inseparable. 41 HH, 179. Note here that von Hildebrand uses “act” in the opposite way that most of our other philosophers are using the term, namely as receptive, though he denies that these acts are merely passive (he calls it an “active passivity”), whereas most of the others would use the term “act” to describe what von Hildebrand calls “response.” 42 HH, 158. 43 HH, 159. 44 HH, 163-164. 45 HH, 162. 46 HH, 164.


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Von Hildebrand also offers a strong critique of a traditional faculty psychology, specifically against the exclusion of affection from human spirituality and the tendency to subsume love under the will. He states that in order to save its spiritual character, love has been deprived of its affective character and made either an act of will, an appetite striving for self-perfection, or a mere movement toward an end. . . . Thus, as one accepted the verdict of the non-spirituality of all affective experiences, the artificial problem imposed itself of interpreting love as something non-affective and as an act of will.47

Within Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness, there is no need to interpret love as an act of the will, because affection is allowed its own distinct intentionality. Von Hildebrand further makes the point that hand in hand with the denial of the spirituality of affectivity goes the thesis that affectivity essentially presupposes the body and is linked to it in a completely different way than is an act of knowledge or of willing. However, this thesis is by no means evident, nor has it been ever really proven.48

He does not deny the fact that there are bodily feelings (such as pain or even depression) which are caused by physiological processes, but distinguishes these from value responses.49 He also notes that “there is, of course, the general mysterious relation between the soul and body, but acts of will and of intellect are no more exempt of this mysterious relation than are affective responses.”50 The human person is embodied spirit, where there is a unity and equality of the affective, cognitive, and volitive intentionalities in human consciousness, all three being embodied and all three being part of human spirit. The final phenomenologist to make a contribution to Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness is Stephen Strasser. Like von Hildebrand, Strasser contributes to the understanding of affection as spiritual. He 47 Dietrich von Hildebrand, “Phenomenology of Value in a Christian Philosophy,” in Christian Philosophy and Religious Renewal, edited by George F. McLean (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1966), 12. Cited in HH, 173. 48 Ibid. 15. Cited in HH, 174. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. (Italics added by Tallon.)

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defines “happiness as the goal and term of human self-transcendence.”51 Tallon points out that when one defines the very meaning of the spirit as capable of experiencing the absolute (capax Dei). . . . there is no stipulation that this experience must be theoretical or volitional rather than affective; Strasser stipulates no limitation of the absolute to idea or free choice to the exclusion of emotion. May not affectivity offer as good access to the absolute?52

In examining Rahner’s theology in light of Tallon’s idea of triune consciousness, and therefore reading Rahner as a phenomenologist, one realizes that affectivity is not only a possible way of experiencing the absolute, it is an essential element of the experience of the absolute. Similarly to von Hildebrand’s idea that one can experience conversion in one’s ability to be affected through the interaction of cognition, volition, and affection, Tallon interprets Strasser’s spiral structuring of intentionality to be the interaction of head and heart. Strasser breaks down intentionality into a pre-intentional moment, the intentional moment, and the meta-intentional or post-intentional moment. Tallon explains that “a kind of continuous conversion (change as change of heart) is essential to the move from preintentional, through the intentional, to the postintentional, where by the ‘postintentional’ is meant a new pre-intentional, i.e., a new (pre)disposition whence flow the new intentions.”53 Tallon explains this spiraling structure as the development of a second nature (the new pre-disposition) through the acquisition of virtues as habits in the intentional moment. In this process of self-determination, one finds the highest synthesis of affection, cognition and volition. One determines oneself through the acts one chooses (volition) and through reflection upon those actions (cognition) which potentially changes one’s ability to be affected or one’s predisposition (affection). Human development is an on-going process of conversion. Tallon explains that “the circular (feedback) structure of intentionality accounts for the self-transforming structure of habit formation, and for the way we acquire the virtues and vices 51 HH, 187. 52 Ibid. 53 Andrew Tallon, “The Concept of the Heart in Strasser’s Phenomenology of Feeling,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 66 (1992): 348.


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that constitute our second nature.”54 The fact that the three intentionalities are distinct but inseparable is what allows for conversion and growth in the human person. The circular structure of intentionality also offers a response to concerns raised by theologians such as George Lindbeck and Patrick Burke about the ways in which cognition affects experience, but these concerns will be addressed in chapter seven. Tallon uses the phenomenologists discussed in this section to ground his own theory of triune consciousness which holds for the equality and distinction of all three intentionalities: affective, cognitive, and volitive. His phenomenology begins with the embodied human person as experienced in the world whose very being is defined by reference to otherness (embodiment) and to the Other. The phenomenology of consciousness Tallon draws upon emphasizes the primacy of affective intentionality, but also the interplay between affection and cognition, which lends itself to conversion and results in volitive action. Tallon maintains that these three intentionalities, while distinct, are inseparable, hence his use of the term “triune” to describe his theory of consciousness.

Triune Consciousness As was noted in chapter one, Tallon draws on Bernard Lonergan’s use of “Newman’s Theorem” to explain what happens when affection is not given an equal partnership with cognition and volition. Newman develops his theorem to address what would happen if theology was eliminated from the curriculum of a university, but Lonergan uses it to address what would happen if any significant part of knowledge is omitted and explains it as follows: First, people in general would be ignorant of that area. Second, the rounded whole of human knowing would be mutilated. Third, the remaining parts would endeavor to round off the whole once more despite the omission of a part and, as a result, they would suffer distortion from their effort to perform a function for which they were not designed. Such was Newman’s theorem.55 54 HH, 185. 55 Bernard Lonergan, A Second Collection. Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., eds. William Ryan and Bernard Tyrrell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 142. Quoted in Tallon, “Doctrinal Development,” 361. Newman originally presents this theorem in his work, Idea of a University.

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Tallon suggests that this theorem applies to the omission of affection from the idea of the spiritual soul. He explains that first, expulsion of affection from the spiritual soul led to its being practically ignored as an available explanatory principle along with intellect and will. Second, the received way of conceiving the soul became mutilated, a dyad instead of a triad. Third, the functions properly belonging to affection were forced either under cognition, as when . . . emotions are called judgments or under volition, as when against all experience love is called an act of the will and affection is reduced to volition. Only when the triadic structure of human consciousness is restored will these mistakes be corrected.56

Tallon demonstrates how this theorem applies to the omission of affection from the spiritual soul. In a faculty psychology in which only intellect and will were understood to be part of the spiritual or intellectual soul, “the operations of affective consciousness were mistakenly attributed to either intellect or will, when they were considered spiritual, or to sense and embodiment, when they were not.”57 With the general acceptance of faculty psychology among the medieval theologians, one finds the attribution of love and/or affectus to the will. The medieval theologians argued that “spiritual beings like God and the angels were not to be denied the power to love; but since they had no bodies, love had to become a will-act.”58 Again affection is ignored as an explanatory principle, and volition, as part of the dyadic soul, is distorted in order to account for the experience of love. Love as a willact also was understood to be incorporeal, thus when affection was given a place in the spiritual soul, it first had to be dissociated from the body.59 Tallon also notes the movement in contemporary philosophy to reduce affection to cognition exemplified in “philosophers like Robert Solomon and Martha Nussbaum saying that emotions and passions are judgments.”60 Tallon argues that restoring affection to an equal partnership with cognition and volition is

56 57 58 59 60

Tallon, “Doctrinal Development,” 362. Tallon, “Rousselot and Lonergan,” 160. Ibid. Scrutton, 176. Tallon, “Rousselot and Lonergan” 160.


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good for all three kinds of intentionality that constitute triune human consciousness. Cognition will not have to carry the burden of value judgments without value apprehensions that occur in feelings, and volition will not have to account for the absurd hypothesis that makes love an act of will, almost always to the disparagement of feeling. There is not a single act of the subject that is not constituted by all three intentionalities of triune consciousness. We do not pursue knowledge without deciding to do so, nor appropriate our emotional lives responsibly without reflection and decision to do so, and so on.61

Triune consciousness does not simply add a third faculty to the spiritual soul, but completely abandons faculty psychology to develop a phenomenology of consciousness in which distinct intentionalities in experience are recognized, but the inseparability of those intentionalities in consciousness is maintained. All three intentionalities of human consciousness are both embodied and spiritual. To explain affective consciousness, Tallon uses Bernard Lonergan’s structure of cognitive consciousness.62 His basic analogy is that “insight is to truth what feeling is to value” so that in triune consciousness, affection intends value, cognition intends truth, and volition intends action.63 Value, for Tallon, includes the beautiful, the just, the good, and the sacred and holy.64 Cognition and affection are inseparable yet distinct, and “their very irreducibility to one another is what makes them able to be for each other and give to each other what they both need to fulfill their finality in action.”65 Tallon explains that the intentionalities are distinct because they are irreducible causes that bring about distinct effects, so that 61 Ibid., 161-162. 62 One should note that Tallon does raise the question of whether or not we give affection its due when we set the terms for understanding feelings by using the other two forms of consciousness, e.g., using Lonergan’s structure of cognitive consciousness as an analogy by which to define affective consciousness as he is doing here. See “Rousselot and Lonergan,” 166. 63 HH, 200. Also see Robert Doran, Subject and Psyche: Ricoeur, Jung, and the Search for Foundations (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981); 2ed. (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1994). 64 HH, 215. 65 HH, 200.

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the heart of rahner cognition has effects, such as ideas and judgment, very different from the effects we trace to affective consciousness, namely feelings, emotions, mood; and volition, especially as “will power,” as the freedom to make voluntary, responsible choices and actions, is irreducible to cognition and affection, even though our choices, if they are to have meaning and value, depend on knowledge and affection.66

Ultimately it is in the interaction between affection and cognition leading to action that the highest level of human functioning is discovered. Tallon bases his structure of affection on Lonergan’s model of cognitive consciousness. Thus on the level of experience, one has an emotion (is moved).67 This level is passive, involuntary, and embodied. In other words, one has the experience of an emotion. Note the correlation between the experience of sense in the realm of cognition and emotion in the realm of affection on this level. On the level of understanding one identifies that emotion as a feeling, bringing it into explicit consciousness. In other words, one recognizes that one is happy, angry, in love, etc. Tallon demarcates three aspects of feeling on the second level of consciousness that are analogous to the three aspects of understanding in Lonergan’s structure of cognitive consciousness. Feeling on the second level of consciousness includes affectability, affective apprehension (being affected) and affective response (response to a possible value).68 With the dual aspect of apprehension and response on this level of affective consciousness, feeling includes both “the more passive, receptive moment” and “the more active moment of intentional feeling or mood.”69 Tallon cites Lonergan who recognizes the ability to modify one’s ability to be affected and respond appropriately. Lonergan argues 66 CEP, 109. 67 Note here that Tallon suggests the possibility of feeling being the lower more passive level of consciousness and emotion as the higher more active level of consciousness (HH, 218-219, n. 2). I prefer to follow Damasio’s distinction between emotion and feeling where emotion is the instinctual, biological response to stimuli, similar to sense experience in cognition, and feeling is one’s consciousness of emotion. See chapter one, pp. 2728. For a more detailed correlation of affection to cognition using Lonergan’s four levels of cognition, see CEP (pp. 108-118), in which Tallon describes affection as empirical, intelligent, rational, and responsible. 68 HH, 210. 69 Ibid.


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that while feelings are spontaneous, “once they have arisen, they may be reinforced by advertence and approval, and they may be curtailed by disapproval and distraction. Such reinforcement and curtailment not only will encourage some feelings and discourage others but also will modify one’s spontaneous scale of preference.”70 Bringing one’s emotions into explicit consciousness and identifying one’s feelings is a necessary precondition to such modification.71 On the level of judgment, one accepts or rejects the feeling as valid, i.e., as intending what is truly or objectively good, beautiful, holy, etc. This level of judgment is the level of value apprehension in which one is affected by and responds to a real, actual value.72 The level of judgment implies a self-transcendence that enables one to choose what is objectively good instead of what is merely subjectively preferred.73 Tallon explains that feelings put us in touch with what may or may not turn out to be real, actual values. To ascend to truth we need to verify insights by satisfying certain conditions and reaching the virtually unconditioned, at which point judgment becomes the intelligent and reasonable thing to do. The analogous move in the realm of feeling, as would be expected, requires fulfilling conditions so that it would be reasonable and valuable to make the equivalent move in the domain of affective consciousness. In both cases, the conditions to be met, taken as a set, are called self-transcendence, which means achieving an objective relation to oneself: rather than being swayed by selfinterest, bias, or prejudice, just as we must conform to the truth as it imposes itself upon us, so also we must respond to values even when they are not what we want or subjectively prefer.74

Thus on the third level, there is an affective conversion that allows a second affective apprehension and affective response, but now to an actual value, not just a possible value.75 The valid feeling adds the apprehension of value to the endless possibilities presented to one, enabling one to move to the fourth level of decision and action. This 70 71 72 73 74 75

Lonergan, Method, 32-33. Cited in HH, 206 (italics added by Tallon). Ibid. 33-34; cited in HH, 218, n. 1. HH, 210. HH, 209. HH, 209. HH, 210.

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process of transcending self interest to objectively apprehend value is a conversion process that involves cognition and volition in addition to affection. Tallon notes that what one spontaneously is could be other than what one wants to be or should be, and a major role of headwork is to change one’s spontaneous responses. Successful working of reason and will upon heart and feeling is part of self-transcendence, which is the necessary condition for an affectivity worth trusting, with all its power to influence cognition and will, as it operates as the heart of triadic consciousness. Self-transcendent affectivity is in touch not just with the subjectively agreeable but with objectively authentic value.76

Due to the fact that determining objectively authentic value involves cognitive consciousness, people, religions, and cultures will not always agree on which values are objectively authentic. Therefore the ways in which cognition and volition shape affective consciousness may cause variations in affective experience itself as well as in the interpretation of affective experience. While noting the importance of the three intentionalities operating in a synthesis, Tallon also highlights times when affection offers an intuition that allows one to act spontaneously without discursive reason and deliberative will-acts, which he calls affective connaturality. At this highest level of the operational synthesis of affection, cognition, and volition, feeling as value-apprehension, because it operates through connaturality, has the capacity to give us not only nonconceptual, spontaneous knowledge, but also to give the equally valid experience of our affective responses sublating will-acts: as we are, so we connaturally love, with a love that flows spontaneously from the core of our being without need of discursive reasoning or deliberative will. Connaturality operates on the basis of who and what we are and have become rather than solely because of what we think.77

At these times, affective experience moves one directly to action because affection substitutes for or sublates the levels of cognition. For Tallon this level of spontaneous action flowing from affective connaturality is the highest form of human consciousness because it most closely approximates God and the angels who do not need ratio in 76 HH, 207. 77 HH, 212.


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order to act. Ratio is a human substitute for intuition due to our inability to act spontaneously. Affective connaturality is “the substitute for the substitute.”78 Yet even when affective connaturality substitutes for cognition, cognition must still be operative in the experience of consciousness, but it is operative within the predisposition and in the subsequent reflection on the experience. In the Thomistic-Aristotelian concept of connaturality, connaturality is a primarily affective experience of union of form between oneself and another under the finality of action, i.e., for the sake of volition (willing, doing). Connaturality is not really first and foremost about cognition at all, but about action: all of Thomas’ and Rousselot’s examples are experiences of actions that affective connaturality makes possible either by complementing or substituting for cognition; and any knowing that results does so because we indirectly learn from our experienced doing, as the first level of cognition. We really don’t know any more about the subject directly, but we can decide and act now whereas we could not do so before, thanks to the affinity, the sympathy, the feeling, the affectus. Affection adds something essential to cognition that is other than and beyond cognition, resulting in sympathetic knowing, which Rousselot finds Aquinas introducing, when discussing wisdom, under the name “connaturality.”79

The process still requires cognition in order to be the highest synthesis of human consciousness. Even when acting through affective connaturality, subsequent reflection is required in order to appropriate the experience. Cognition gives one the categories and concepts through which one understands and interprets one’s affective experience. Likewise Tallon is presuming a proper cognitive moral development in which one has acquired certain habits or virtues that allow one to act spontaneously. Connaturality, for Tallon, is an inclination toward action based on a felt resonance between one’s being and the proposed action.80 In other words, one is moved to spontaneous action because “it felt right.” Determining whether or not it was right requires a cognitive judgment. A person who acts wrongly also may be doing what feels right or good to him or her, acting through vice instead of virtue. 78 HH, 229. 79 Tallon, “Doctrinal Development,” 356. 80 Tallon, “Doctrinal Development,” 368.

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Thus cognition plays an essential role in connaturality both in developing the predispositions that allow one to act spontaneously and in subsequent reflection upon one’s actions and feelings. Tallon explains that there are different levels of interaction between cognition and feeling, so that knowledge can be accompanied by feelings or inclinations that give one an added sense of certainty or doubt; knowledge can include a consciousness of one’s feelings so that the judgment made is dependent on the awareness of one’s feelings, or finally, one may know and decide through affective connaturality.81 In the process of substitution or complementation, Tallon warns that feeling does not produce concepts because feeling is not an insight. He states that concepts come from insights: no insight, no concept. A feeling is not an insight (nor a judgment). Insight is to knowledge and truth what feeling is to value and worth. Connaturality produces no concepts because it produces no insights. Connaturality is affective consciousness (an experience of ‘shared form’), completely distinct from and irreducible to cognition and volition.82

Pascal’s reasons of the heart are not reasons at all in the sense of concepts, but rather “are called ‘reasons’ because they’re intelligent, not because they’re understood: understanding would involve a later asking questions, getting insights, forming concepts, etc.”83 In the fullest sense of what it means to be human in the model of triune consciousness, such later reflection is optimal. In such subsequent self-reflection, the experience of spontaneous action through connaturality then becomes the source of questions, insights, concepts, etc. Tallon explains that faith is not simply a cognitive response to God, but it also requires an affective response. He uses the example of the apostles who knew Jesus, but still had to have faith in Jesus. He states: 81 HH, 223-224. 82 Tallon, “Doctrinal Development,” 367. Also see “Translator’s Foreword,” to Pierre Rousselot, S.J. Intelligence: Sense of Being, Faculty of God. A New Translation of L’Intellectualisme de saint Thomas with a Foreword and Notes by Andrew Tallon, xx-xxi. Volume 1 of The Collected Philosophical Works of Pierre Rousselot (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1999), xvi. 83 Ibid.


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Witness an apostle Thomas who could know Christ and still doubt him, and an apostle Judas who could know Christ and still betray him. There was room for faith even for those who lived in the very presence of Christ himself. If faith was possible even for those who knew Him face to face, faith must be more, not less, than knowledge; faith must include love, as when for Thomas knowledge with love becomes “Lord, I believe” and for Judas knowledge without love becomes betrayal. The assent of faith (which is volition), a voluntary commitment is made possible when affection is added to cognition.84

Faith is an example of the synthesis of affection, cognition and volition in triune consciousness. Tallon concludes that “faith is, then, neither a (new or ‘higher’) cognition alone nor an affection alone nor a volition alone but a commitment based on and made possible by both cognition and affection, on knowledge and love together.”85 Love is ultimately an act of triune consciousness as well, involving all three intentionalities, but it is also a specific emotion and/or feeling of affective intentionality. When love is experienced as bodily, it should not be denigrated as not spiritual or less spiritual, as has too often been the case in the history of Christian theology. The embodied nature and the spiritual nature of love exist in a unity. The over identification of affection as embodiment misses the deeper sense of the heart as that which is most spiritual. Moving beyond the intellectualism of Thomism and the dualism of Descartes is necessary for theology to appreciate the true dynamism of the embodied spirit which is a dynamism of intellect, will, and affect. Loving the other is an act that involves an emotional/feeling response to the other, a certain, albeit limited, knowledge of the other, and a commitment to the other. Love as an act is embodied and lived out and as such is also a spiritual act. The experience of this embodied spiritual relationship ideally includes a consciousness of transcending the finite beloved to encompass the wider world and ultimately the Infinite Beloved.

Connaturality Tallon takes the concept of connaturality from Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, 2-2, q. 45, a. 2, a text that he argues “is for affection what ST 1 84 Ibid., 358. I would even go further than Tallon to speculate that emotion played a role in Judas’s betrayal of Jesus as well, for example, knowledge plus anger or possibly even hatred. 85 Ibid., 359.

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q. 84, a. 7, is for cognition.”86 In this passage, Aquinas argues that one can judge matters through the use of reason or through connaturality. In Tallon’s interpretation, connaturality, as it is described by Aquinas, is affective consciousness, so one “judges” (i.e., makes decisions about) matters either through cognition or affection. Aquinas gives two examples of connaturality, one in the realm of the ethical and the other in the realm of the mystical. In the realm of the ethical, he explains that one might act chaste because one has learned the science of morality, i.e., through cognitive intentionality, or one might act chaste by virtue of the habit of chastity, i.e., through affective intentionality. Tallon states that Aquinas is actually explaining two ways we make ethical decisions, not judgments, placing us on Lonergan’s fourth level: we can either use knowledge, i.e., cognition—hence the per modum cognitionis— or we can use something else—not knowledge—but a sympathy or empathy we feel with the proposed action—feel as attuned to our nature (first and/or second), in harmony, consonance, affinity with oneself—hence the per modum naturae, the way of connaturality.87

In modern parlance, this affective way of making decisions is often called affective knowledge or emotional intelligence. Tallon interprets Aquinas’s second way of making an ethical decision as one in which affective connaturality replaces the levels of cognition used to make the decision in the first case. The second example, in the realm of the mystical, is the situation in which one knows about matters divine through studying theology or through wisdom granted by connaturality. Tallon notes that Aquinas does not attribute connaturality to affect, but rather reduces connaturality to intellect in the ethical realm and to will and intellect in the mystical realm, as was the practice of his time given the acceptance of faculty psychology.88 Tallon, however, explains that “connaturality is either the cause or the effect of affection, especially of affective habits whereby we become attuned to whom and what we know, love, and do, and thereby enact our nature as second nature, closer to action,

86 Ibid., 362. 87 Ibid., 362. 88 Ibid., 357, 363.


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more inclined to certain actions, better at those actions, etc.”89 Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness accounts for the experience of connaturality without reducing affection to either cognition or volition. Tallon uses the concept of virtue as habit to explain how connaturality works. Habits are a middle term between one’s being (not one’s knowing) and one’s doing.90 When habit is acquired (as opposed to infused), it is the result of the effect one’s actions have on one’s being, that is to say, the way in which one’s actions change who one is, creating a second nature. Tallon explains that the act is both within one’s nature, so that one changes oneself (one affects oneself ) as one acts (this is autoaffection, one’s self-transformation as a learning being), and outside one’s nature insofar as one affects the world. The act’s effect back upon one’s nature through the medium of the habit modifies the power, perfects the power and constitutes each habit a second nature.91

Tallon understands connaturality through habit to be a remedy for finitude. In the realm of the ethical, habit can be acquired and in the realm of the mystical, habit is infused (i.e., a gift of the Holy Spirit). As one acts through connaturality, one approximates asymptotically the realm of spirit where there is no need for discursive reason or deliberative willing.92 If discursive reasoning is the substitute for the intuitive knowing of pure spirit, connaturality is what Tallon calls “the substitute for the substitute,” and should be considered a higher synthesis of human consciousness than discursive reason and deliberative will-acts.93 At the same time, Tallon warns that “we are never so spontaneous that we need no other in order to act; we need the conversio ad phantasmata that is the hallmark of finite cognition, and the turning to the affections that is the hallmark of finite will.”94 Hence Tallon 89 Ibid., 357. Tallon cites Kieran Conley, OSB, A Theology of Wisdom: A Study in St. Thomas. (Dubuque, IA: Priory Press, 1963), 112-141. 90 HH, 263. 91 HH, 269. 92 HH, 258. 93 HH, 229, 259. 94 HH, 269. One should note here that Tallon does seem to be falling back on a usage of affection that is in line with traditional faculty psychology where affection (being bodily) is to the will what sense perception is to

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uses the qualifying phrase “approximate asymptotically” to avoid the impression that one actually achieves the level of pure spirit. Relationship to God involves prevenient, operative, and subsequent connaturality, concepts taken from Tallon and Kieran Conley,95 to distinguish between connaturality as the cause or the effect of affection. In prevenient connaturality “God’s love (expressed synecdochically as the infused gift of the virtue of wisdom) connaturalizes us to res divinae, to ‘matters divine’.”96 That connaturality becomes operative as it “enables us to decide about ‘matters divine’.”97 Connaturality with God can be prevenient and operative simultaneously, both the effect of God’s love for the human person and the cause of the person’s love of God. With prevenient connaturality, love causes the shared form as in the case with friends and lovers where “love is thus also personal, and hence the two persons are not already one but want to be one, desire to become one.”98 The human person is not by nature one with God, but God loves the person and that love creates a shared form, a prevenient connaturality, present before the human person responds in any way, that is the effect of God’s love for the person. That prevenient connaturality can become operative enabling the person to love God in return. In operative connaturality, love is the result of a shared form, so that “the love flows from union, from an already existing oneness, i.e., because they are already one in form, already of the same

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96 97 98

the intellect. However, I include the quote because it is important to note that we do not ever escape our finitude or embodiment. Tallon, “Doctrinal Development,” 357; cites Kieran Conley, A Theology of Wisdom: A Study in St. Thomas (Dubuque, Iowa: The Priory Press, 1963), 112-141. Tallon and Conley use the terminology of consequent and antecedent connaturality, but do so in slightly different ways. To account for this difference, I use the terms prevenient, operative, and subsequent where prevenient connaturality is equivalent to Tallon’s use of consequent connaturality, operative connaturality is equivalent to both Tallon and Conley’s use of antecedent connaturality, and subsequent connaturality is equivalent to Conley’s use of consequent connaturality. Tallon, “Doctrinal Development,” 375. Note that Tallon uses the term “consequent” connaturality. Tallon, “Doctrinal Development,” 375. Note Tallon uses the term “antecedent” connaturality. Ibid., 365.


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nature, already connatural.”99 The form that God’s love has given to the human person enables the person to love God in return. Tallon uses familial love as an example of operative connaturality. The already existing connection between family members is operative, causing love to result. Tallon proposes that “when God love us, flooding our hearts with the Holy Spirit who is given to us, this grace creates connaturality, divinizing us, and we find our whole consciousness changed, our horizon transformed; nothing is the same again.”100 Kieran Conley agrees that operative connaturality, as “the existential pre-requisite for love,”101 causes the love one has for God, but adds that this love of God in turn causes a deepening of the shared form, a subsequent connaturality, because the deepened connaturality is the consequence of the mutual love or the union between God and the human person. Thus Conley explains that now recognized as a common sharing of the same nature and seen as the foundation for subsequent love, the prior connaturality is deepened but in another order. The unio and mutual inhaesio associated with love add a new dimension to the connatural roots of love, an affective or intentional dimension.102

One can conclude that connaturality is initially experienced as a ‘being-affected’, but with Conley’s insight, the recognition and acceptance of this shared form adds an intentional dimension to the experience of connaturality, the active dimension added to the passive dimension, which subsequently deepens the connaturality. When one moves to a more dynamic understanding of the human person and the development of the person’s relationship with God, one can understand connaturality within the ongoing process of the appropriation of one’s self-identity and relationship with God. The model that emerges begins with prevenient connaturality in which one is connaturalized as a result of God’s freely given love. So long as one does not reject God’s offer of love, there is an openness within human nature that allows that operative connaturality to make possible one’s love for God. As a result of the love the person has for God, 99 Ibid., 364. 100 Ibid. 101 Conley, 115. 102 Conley, 115-116. Note that Conley uses “ontological or antecedent” and “intentional or consequent” to describe these two aspects of connaturality.

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an intentional affective response, the realization and actualization of one’s ‘connaturalized nature’ is deepened adding a new intentional dimension also called subsequent connaturality. Recall from earlier in this chapter Stephen Strasser’s spiral structure of intentionality that allows or accounts for a continuous conversion moving from a preintentional moment to an intentional moment to a meta- or postintentional moment.103 In a similar way, prevenient connaturality is the pre-intentional moment, operative connaturality is the intentional moment resulting in a subsequent connaturality that is the post-intentional or new pre-intentional moment. The deepening of the intentional response to God and its affect on one’s being has an infinite potential and occurs over a lifetime as one becomes more the person one has been created to be, actualizing the relationship with God that is always being offered. Of course, given human freedom, the positive development of this relationship is not a given; the possibility of rejecting one’s ‘true nature’ and relationship with God, or on a lesser note, not acting out of that identity and relationship, is also always a possibility.

Quasi-intentionality In his theory of triune consciousness, Tallon also speaks of what he calls a “quasi-intentionality, so-called because it aims at no object but rather at a nonobjective and unobjectifiable horizon beyond all objects.”104 Tallon explains that for there to be objects there must be a nonobject as ground against which the objects are defined or outlined as finite objects; for there to be beings there must be the nonobjectively co-given horizons of truth and goodness in all acts of knowing and loving. It is an experi103 Tallon, “Concept of the Heart,” 348. 104 Tallon, “Doctrinal Development,” 365. Note that in this article, Tallon calls this quasi-intentionality a “fourth quasi-intentionality.” I would not use the term “fourth” to describe this intentionality because it is coexperienced with the other three. Tallon uses the analogy of the Triune God to explain how the three intentionalities are distinct, but still one. I would stretch this analogy further to say that the co-quasi-intentionality is like the Godhead or oneness within the Trinity. The quasi-intentionality toward the horizon is not a fourth intentionality but rather is what unites and grounds the three intentionalities of consciousness as part of their inseparability.


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ence without understanding, a permanent question about meaning, and a quest for value, worth, goodness.105

He calls this intentionality a quasi-intentionality because it is co-given with the three distinct intentionalities of affection, cognition, and volition. In his translator’s foreword to Rousselot’s Intelligence, Tallon explains that there is a difference between the quasi-intentional attunement of consciousness in general prior to or distinct from its operations, and those three kinds of intentional operations (affection, cognition, volition). In Rahner’s terms, there is a Vorgriff, an anticipation of a horizon toward which we move, conceivable in spatial and temporal metaphors, a horizon we cannot grasp.106

The quasi-intentional attunement is what grounds the three intentionalities of consciousness. Tallon argues that one finds in Rousselot a deeper quasi-intentional connaturality with God and Being prior to and underlying all conscious operations (affection, cognition, volition). It is a ground or horizon not set by cognition alone (and so not “intellectualist” in the Aristotelian sense of contemplation as our end or finality) but also by affection (and if we follow Heidegger . . . it is chiefly affection, not cognition, that attunes us to Being).107

We will return to this concept of a quasi-intentionality toward the horizon of love, knowledge, and being that is co-experienced in every act of knowing and loving in the next two chapters. As Tallon identifies this quasi-intentionality with Rahner’s concept of Vorgriff, an exploration of the role affection plays in Tallon’s interpretation of Rahner follows.

Tallon on Rahner Two key articles highlight Tallon’s interpretation of Rahner: “Affectivity in Ethics: Lonergan, Rahner, and Others in the Heart Tradition” and “The Heart in Rahner’s Philosophy of Mysticism.”108 In “Affectiv105 Ibid. Also see Tallon, “Translator’s Foreword,” xix-xxii. 106 Tallon, “Translator’s Foreword,” xxi. 107 Ibid. xxi. 108 Andrew Tallon, “Affectivity in Ethics: Lonergan, Rahner and Others in the Heart Tradition,” in Religion and Economic Ethics, edited by Joseph F. Gower (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990), 87-122

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ity in Ethics,” Tallon explores the role of affectivity in three Rahnerian concepts: the horizon of being, the Ignatian concept of consolation without cause, and connaturality. In “The Heart in Rahner’s Philosophy of Mysticism,” Tallon interprets Rahner’s concept of heart in the Thomistic tradition of Rousselot in which the intellectual includes the affective. He then highlights the interplay of head and heart in spiritual growth and conversion. Beginning with the presupposition that affective intentionality is non-representational, as opposed to cognitive intentionality which is representational, Tallon states that all three Rahnerian concepts he discusses in “Affectivity in Ethics” are “characterized by absence of representation, either due to its impossibility or to its disappearance, and in its place a kind of spiritual feeling, not so much physical or empirical in the sense of the peripheral senses but as felt at the heart, core and center of the spirit.”109 While Tallon applies the concept of affectivity to the experiences that Rahner describes, he acknowledges that Rahner himself stays within the tradition of faculty psychology.110 Tallon describes Rahner’s idea of the horizon as “the non-objective co-known ground or field on or against which objects are known, the background consciousness—a content of consciousness that is not an object, is not objective knowledge.”111 He explains that for Rahner (note that the table of contents in this book lists the article as, “Affectivity and Praxis in Lonergan, Rahner and Others in the Heart Tradition”) and “The Heart in Rahner’s Philosophy of Mysticism,” Theological Studies 53 (1992): 700-728. Tallon’s major work on Karl Rahner is Personal Becoming: In Honor of Karl Rahner at 75, Revised Edition (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1982). Original edition published in The Thomist 43 (1979). This work by Tallon was written prior to his development of the theory of triune consciousness, but his interpretation of Rahner presented in this work will be drawn upon in subsequent chapters. See also “The Experience of God in Relation to Rahner’s Philosophy of Heart,” Philosophy and Theology 7 (1992): 193-210; “The Connaturalized Heart in The Splendor of Truth,” in Veritatis Splendor: American Responses, edited by Michael Allsopp (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1994), 137-156; and “The Meaning of Heart Today: Reversing a Paradigm according to Levinas and Rahner,” Journal of Religious Studies 11 (1983): 59-74. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid., 95. 111 Ibid., 97.


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there is a distinction between knowledge that is based on deliberate explicit reflection and the experience of consciousness.112 One experiences the horizon in consciousness, but it is an experience that is unthematic and non-objective. On the one hand, this unthematic experience of the horizon is that which Tallon refers to as quasi-intentional, prior to the distinction between affection, cognition, and volition. In this sense one’s experience or consciousness of the horizon is as much pre-affective as it is pre-cognitive. Tallon uses the analogy of reaching out and touching without grasping (cognition) or possessing (affection) to explain Rahner’s concept of Vorgriff as prior to or beyond both cognition and affection.113 The horizon is what grounds love, knowledge, and freedom. The Vorgriff, for Tallon, is both touching-without-grasping and desirenot-satisfied-by-possession. One experiences the movement and the desire, but not the comprehension or satisfaction of possession that would then allow one to transcend the horizon as an object. Thus one’s experience of the horizon is quasi-intentional, prior to the distinction that can be made between the three intentionalities. On the other hand, Tallon follows Heidegger’s conviction “that it is chiefly affection, not cognition that attunes us to Being.”114 In this sense there is a fittingness between one’s experience of the horizon that one experiences in an unthematic, non-objective, and non-representational way and affective intentionality, which is a non-representational intentionality. Although Tallon does not suggest a Trinitarian analogy here, one might be helpful in understanding the role of affective consciousness in the experience of the horizon. While all of the actions of the Trinity belong to all three persons, certain actions are described as the appropriations of certain persons, e.g., the Father and creation, the Son and redemption, and the Holy Spirit and sanctification. Likewise the experience of the horizon, while being concomitant with one’s consciousness in general (and thus all three intentionalities of consciousness), is appropriated to affective consciousness precisely because the experience is non-representational. 112 Ibid. 113 While Tallon uses the concept of touching without grasping in CEP (see pg. 192), he used the analogy of desire without possession in correspondence to me, and to my knowledge it does not appear in any of his currently published works. 114 Tallon, “Translator’s Foreword,” xxi.

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The second aspect of Rahner’s theology that Tallon draws upon is Rahner’s interpretation of the Ignatian concept of “consolation without cause.” Rahner describes consolation without cause as the experience of the horizon without an object or an experience in which the object becomes transparent or almost disappears; it is the experience of human transcendence as such in which what is experienced is the dynamism of the human person.115 Tallon describes this experience of transcendence or human dynamism in affective terms. For Tallon the non-objective character of this experience leads him to attribute it to an intentionality that is non-representational, i.e., affective intentionality. The third aspect of Rahner’s theology that Tallon locates in the affective tradition is the concept of connaturality. Rahner uses the concept of connaturality to explain the way in which one makes a decision or choice based on a harmony or disharmony of one’s being with the choice to be made rather than through the process of discursive thought.116 Tallon describes this idea of connaturality found in Rahner as “the felt rapport of the whole subject’s self-presence to the whole other (as ground, as horizon). This holistic relation is whole to whole, ground to ground, not figure to figure, and suggests heart to heart more than head (or mind) to head.”117 For Tallon, this decision making by connaturality is a process in which affective intentionality takes the lead over cognitive intentionality. Having explored Tallon’s interpretation of the Rahnerian concepts of the horizon, consolation without cause, and connaturality, this section will now turn to Rahner’s understanding of the heart as the symbol of the human person in Tallon’s article, “Heart in Rahner’s Philosophy of Mind.” Tallon understands “heart” in Rahner’s writing to be used as a symbol for the highest operational synthesis of the human person where affect and intellect work together to move the person to action. Heart, in other words, encompasses the cooperation of head and heart in spiritual growth and conversion. In affective language this synthesis is referred to as “heart,” and in cognitive language, this syn115 Tallon, “Affectivity in Ethics,” 98-99. See Karl Rahner, The Dynamic Element in the Church, Quaestiones Disputatae 12 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964) 134-139 (hereafter referred to as DE). 116 Tallon, “Affectivity in Ethics,” 100. See DE, 161, n. 43; 166-167. 117 Tallon, “Affectivity in Ethics,” 100.


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thesis is referred to as “intellectus” which is more than ratio (cognition) because it includes affection. While Tallon identifies descriptions of experiences where the operational synthesis of triune consciousness is evident in the work of Rahner, Rahner himself stays within the Thomistic framework of faculty psychology to define these experiences. For example, Rahner attributes value apprehension to intellect instead of to affect, an attribution that Tallon and contemporary science would challenge. Tallon cites a passage from The Dynamic Element in the Church on the discernment of God’s will: the content of this will is not simply what can be known by the rational reflection of a believing mind employing general maxims of reason and faith on the one hand and their application to a definite situation that has been analyzed in a similar discursively rational way, on the other. That does not mean that the contrary of this kind of knowledge . . . is ‘feeling’, ‘instinct’ or something similar, contrary to or apart from the intellect. It is, rather, a thoroughly intellectual operation of the ‘intellect’, in the metaphysical, scholastic sense of the word, in which it is capable of apprehending values. Only it is not cognition of the rationally discursive and conceptually expressible kind but an intellectual knowledge which is ultimately grounded in the simple presence to itself of the intrinsically intelligible subject.118

Rahner attributes value apprehension to the intellect, but distinguishes it from discursive reason. Tallon defends Rahner’s attribution of value apprehension to the intellect through a benevolent interpretation of Rahner’s Thomistic framework. He claims that Rahner is not at all denying that discernment is by affective connaturality, . . . but rather is affirming a spiritual affectivity, a metaphysics of the embodied spirit that is Aristotelian-Thomist rather than Platonic-Augustinian in that it understands heart to mean ratio qua perfected into intellectus (and also, by synecdoche, into will: ‘intellectual being’, by usage, includes both logos and eros) rather than a separate third part of the soul that could be metaphysically construed as ‘contrary to or apart from the intellect’.119 118 DE, 94-95; note 9 included in text. Cited in Tallon, “Heart in Rahner,” 711. 119 Tallon, “Heart in Rahner,” 712.

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In other words, Tallon finds in Rahner a role for affection that is distinct but not separate from cognition and volition; it is not a third faculty. While acknowledging that Rahner does not fully develop this line of thought apart from the tradition of faculty psychology, Tallon argues that Rahner would be making a categorical blunder to attribute valueapprehension to intellect were he not understanding feeling of the higher spiritual sort as a linear continuous development of ratio  intellectus  cor affectus: the highest actualization of intellectus is by affective connaturality, where intellectus (taken synecdochically for the whole incarnate person) operates with the (almost angelic) intuitive knowing and spontaneous love we associate with heart.120

In this sympathetic reading of Rahner, Tallon acknowledges the limits of the Thomistic framework Rahner uses, but also finds in Rahner a continuity with a phenomenological interpretation that allows affection a distinct (though not separate) and equal intentionality to cognition and volition. Tallon’s interpretation of Rahner’s theology has provided a starting point to delve more deeply into the role of affection in Rahner’s theology. The chapters that follow will explicate the further consequences of reading Rahner’s theology in light of Andrew Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness.

120 Ibid.

3 KARL RAHNER’S THEOLOGY OF THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE OF GOD

W

hen asked by Leo O’Donovan about the influence of Ignatius of Loyola on his own religious experience, Karl Rahner replied, “Naturally, I don’t want to say too much about that, because it isn’t really anybody else’s business. But I do think that in comparison with other philosophy and theology that influenced me, Ignatian spirituality was indeed more significant and important.”1 Since Harvey Egan’s work, The Spiritual Exercises and the Ignatian Mystical Horizon, for which Rahner himself wrote the Foreword, and Egan’s subsequent book, Karl Rahner: The Mystic of Everyday Life, more attention has been given to the role Ignatian spirituality has played in Rahner’s theology.2 Contemporary scholars who have examined the role of Ignatian spirituality in Rahner’s theology include Declan Marmion and Philip Endean.3 1 Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews, 1965-1982, ed. Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowons; translation edited by Harvey Egan (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 191. 2 Harvey Egan, The Spiritual Exercises and the Ignatian Mystical Horizon, foreword by Karl Rahner (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1976) and Karl Rahner: The Mystic of Everyday Life, The Crossroad Spiritual Legacy Series (New York: Crossroad, 1998). 3 See Philip Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality (Oxford Theological Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Declan Marmion, A Spirituality of Everyday Faith: A Theological Investigation of the Notion of Spirituality in Karl Rahner, Louvain Theological & Pastoral Monographs 23 (Louvain: Peeters Press, 1998). Also see Michael Gallagher, “Ignatian Dimensions of Rahner’s Theology.” Louvain Studies 29 (2004): 77-91. Note that Endean does not conclude that Ignatian spirituality plays a central role in Rahner’s theology, noting that it “did give psychological and spiritual impetus to Rahner’s creativity, but still in a relatively weak sense. (241)”

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Rahner himself highlights the importance of Christians having a mystical experience of God in his essay, “Ignatius of Loyola Speaks to a Modern Jesuit.”4 Rahner asserts the centrality of an immediate (unmittelbar) mystical experience of God that goes beyond words and concepts and results in a certainty of faith. Writing as Ignatius, he describes the experience, stating, all I say is I knew God, nameless and unfathomable, silent and yet near, bestowing himself upon me in his Trinity, I knew God beyond all concrete imaginings. I knew him clearly in such nearness and grace as is impossible to confound or mistake.5

He notes that “my mystical experiences had given me such certainty of faith that it would remain unshaken even if there were no Holy Scripture.”6 The experience Rahner describes is not a cognitive experience of God, but an affective experience that leads to a conviction that cannot be adequately accounted for using cognitive consciousness alone. Rahner struggles to account for this experience of God because he does not have the descriptive category of affective consciousness at his disposal. Instead he continually subsumes affect under intellect or will following the traditional model of faculty psychology. He maintains that this experience is possible for all people, and that the modern Jesuit’s job is to facilitate this non-conceptual experience of God for the faithful.7 He warns the reader, you ought not mean to succumb today to the temptation that, in order to be itself, the silent and infinite incomprehensibility which we call God could or might not turn towards you in free love, not come to meet you, not empower you from your innermost heart where it dwells to say ‘Thou’ with confidence to this Nameless One. This incomprehensible miracle which breaks the bounds of all your metaphysics, whose potential is only realized when its reality is tested, is a miracle which itself is part of the ineffability of God. It 4 Karl Rahner, “Ignatius of Loyola Speaks to a Modern Jesuit,” in Ignatius of Loyola. With Paul Imhof and Helmuth N. Loose, historical introduction by Paul Imhof, trans. Rosaleen Ockenden (London: Collins, 1979), 1138 (hereafter cited as IL). Original edition, Ignatius von Loyola. Freiburg: Herder, 1978. 5 IL, 11. 6 IL, 12. 7 IL, 13, 14.

3 5 RAHNER’S THEOLOGY OF MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE OF GOD

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would remain an empty formality still subject to your metaphysics, if and when it were not experienced as part of God’s affection for us. You must be on your guard today as always against thinking that this familiarity is the preliminary step to the fall into God’s silent incomprehensibility; it is rather a consequence of that fall, it blossoms as the fulfillment of surrender to God’s affection for us, it allows God to be greater than we think him, if only we understand ourselves as unceasingly dependent and worthless.8

The experience is available to all because God is always already present to all. The experience is an affective consciousness of God’s love that enables a conviction that the horizon of human transcendence is the personal, loving mystery that is not only called God, but can be called ‘Thou’. Rahner, writing as Ignatius, states that he ought to have made it clearer that the dawn of such divine experience is not the indoctrination of something not previously present in man, but a more explicit awakening of and to the self, and the free acceptance of man’s state of mind which is always a given factor, usually blocked and repressed, but inevitable; this is the grace in which God himself dwells in all his immediacy.9

The experience that he describes is a becoming conscious of God who is always already present to the individual; but it is not a cognitive consciousness of God, it is affective consciousness of God.10 For Rahner this experience of God’s love then leads to love of one’s neighbor, or in Tallon’s words, volitive consciousness.11 As will be further explored in what follows, cognitive consciousness is also necessary in this experience of God in terms of a cognitive framework in which the experience takes place, as well as for subsequent reflection on the affective experience of God and the volitive action one is led to take. In other words, 8 IL, 19. 9 IL, 15. 10 See John Jerome Mueller, “Appreciative Awareness: The Feeling-Dimension in Religious Experience,” Theological Studies 45 (1984): 58. Mueller states that “Karl Rahner’s incarnational theology invites an examination of the feeling-dimension as a means of God’s communication to the individual, but he lacks a theory of affectivity for individual religious experience.” In footnote 3 he adds that Rahner’s “popular and devotional works contain the feeling-dimension but without any integration with his theological work.” 11 IL, 18.

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the mystical experience Rahner describes as central and necessary for all people is best understood through Andrew Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness. As was noted in the previous chapter, Andrew Tallon highlights the role of triune consciousness in Rahner’s understanding of the Ignatian concept of consolation without previous cause. Triune consciousness actually functions as a better explanatory system for Rahner’s understanding of mystical experience than the faculty psychology that is his default position. This chapter will begin with a more in-depth explication of Rahner’s understanding of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises and then will turn to his work on the spiritual senses in the theology of Bonaventure. Rahner’s description of mystical experience in both of these areas demonstrates the primary role affective consciousness plays in these experiences, despite the fact that he ultimately attributes all affective elements to either intellect or will.

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius In the exploration of the way triune consciousness is inherent in Rahner’s understanding of the Spiritual Exercises, this work will not attempt to defend Rahner’s interpretation of Ignatius or evaluate the correctness of his interpretation,12 but rather will focus on Rahner’s own theology of the spiritual exercises. This section will begin by exploring the interrelatedness of the three modes of election in the Spiritual Exercises before focusing specifically on the affective nature of the second mode of election. Rahner interprets the second mode as the normative method of discernment, an interpretation that highlights the role of affectivity in the experience of consolation, both with and without previous cause. Finally the certitude that Rahner maintains results from the experience of consolation without previous cause and the discernment of an attunement between that experience and the specific object of choice will be interpreted as experiences of affective consciousness.

12 See Declan Marmion, Spirituality, 228ff. and Endean, Karl Rahner, 157164.


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The Three Modes of Election In his article, “The Logic of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola,”13 Rahner addresses the question of how one can know God’s will. In this article Rahner explores the three modes of discernment found in the Spiritual Exercises. The first mode is that of direct revelation. The second mode discerns whether or not the object of choice is in attunement with the experience of consolation without previous cause. The third mode is discernment through the use of discursive reason. Rahner maintains the second of these modes is the norm in discerning God’s will,14 but understands all three modes to be interrelated. He states that the three modes of making the Election have one and the same nature and are only distinguished by the differing degrees to which they realize that nature. The first method is the ideal higher limiting case of the second method and the latter itself includes the rationality of the third as one of its own intrinsic elements. The third method is the less perfect mode of the second (and must be so regarded) and itself seeks to rise beyond itself into the second kind of Election.15

Rahner argues that for Ignatius the first mode of direct revelation is “a miraculous, prophetic experience,” and thus, “an extraordinary phenomenon.”16 Given its extraordinary character, the first mode of discernment cannot be the norm. The third mode, knowing God’s will through discursive reason, is for Rahner the deficient mode, only to be used if the first two are unavailable, and even then one is to attempt to return to the first or second mode, asking God to move (bewegen) one’s will.17 Thus cognitive consciousness is insufficient by itself to discern 13 Karl Rahner, “The Logic of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola,” in The Dynamic Element in the Church, Quaestiones Disputatae 12, trans. William J. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), 84-170 (hereafter cited as DE). Translation of German text, “Die Logik der existentiellen Erkenntnis bei Ignatius v. Loyola” in Das Dynamische in der Kirche, Quaestiones Disputatae (Freiburg: Herder, 1958), 74-148 (hereafter cited as DK). 14 DE, 96, n. 11. 15 DE, 105-106. 16 DE, 127-128, n. 25. 17 DE, 96. DK, 84.

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proper volitive action. One also needs affective consciousness. Rahner uses the verb bewegen, to move, which implies a necessary interaction between affective consciousness and volitive consciousness in addition to cognitive consciousness. To be moved entails being-affected in such a way that one is compelled into action. Rahner argues that one cannot fully know God’s will through discursive reason alone, asking “what use would all this be if this Spirit of God had nothing to say from the start and in principle, except what is recognizable by rational reflection alone in any case and in any conceivable situation?”18 The second and third modes both involve a cognitive and an affective dimension leading one to action, but there is a difference in emphasis between the two. The third mode is primarily cognitive while in the second mode the affective experience is the rule against which cognition is measured. Thus the second mode is not merely a confirmation of something already known by reason. Rahner states that the second mode of Election differs from the third not by total disparity but as the larger whole differs from a part which is necessarily contained in the whole even though by itself it does not constitute the whole. And the third mode in its turn is rather to be conceived as the deficient form of the second, a way of making the Election which, as we have already said, aspires to be integrated into the greater, more comprehensive whole.19

There is a parallel here between Rahner’s understanding that the third mode is a deficient form of the second, and Tallon’s understanding that knowing through discursive reason and conversion to the phantasm is a deficient mode of knowing through connaturality. The ideal for making an Election is not pure reason, but an intuitive affective consciousness that the object of choice, which has already been rationally determined to be good, is in fact God’s will for the individual. The third mode of Election, however, is an important cognitive element of the second mode (part of the whole) that is “a defense against facile mysticism and sentimental enthusiasm seeking to avoid the trouble of objective and cautious reflection.”20 The third mode is also 18 DE, 97. 19 DE, 103. 20 DE, 104. Note Rahner’s constant caution against ‘sentimental enthusiasm’ that implies his distrust of the emotions, a distrust that is not surprising given his presupposition of a faculty psychology. His warning,


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important in its own right because for Rahner, God’s “silence is also a way in which he speaks, a complementary form, not the opposite, of utterance. By it God points out for us the modest self-help of ‘rational reflection’.”21 Just as Tallon notes the inseparability of the three distinct ways in which one experiences consciousness, this interpretation of Rahner is not denying the necessity of a role for cognitive consciousness in this experience. Cognitive consciousness gives one an interpretive framework for the experience both in prior concepts and the rational determination that the object of choice is good, as well as in subsequent reflection upon the non-conceptual experience of God’s presence.22 Rahner explains that there are times where God’s intention is for the decision to be made through rational reflection because there is no need of the conviction that comes from the second mode in that the choice is one between the good and the good. In those cases, the experience of having tried the second mode and not having received any consolation “may show the actual indifference of the object of Election in this particular instance, so that choice may be made by purely ratiocinative methods.”23 Rahner also suggests that “this silence of God may itself be an answer, manifesting his will for the exercitant to remain in the darkness of uncertainty, of the provisional, of unfinished experiment.”24 Finally Rahner suggests that where one thinks one has decided through the discursive reasoning of the third mode of Election, it could be that “in actual fact the process of the second

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however, is a valid recognition of the need for cognitive consciousness to evaluate the experience of affective consciousness. In a theory of triune consciousness, the three intentionalities work as a system of checks and balances. DE, 105. Endean suggests that a better term to describe this experience would be ungraspable or incomprehensible. I agree with his rejection of the term non-linguistic, but I will use non-conceptual to encompass the ungraspable and incomprehensible element of the experience in that the experience itself goes beyond what can ever be articulated in words and concepts. Non-conceptual in this case does not mean that one’s pre-existing concepts and language have no impact on the experience itself, nor does it deny the necessity of both in order to have, process, and think about the experience. See Endean, 171. DE, 168. Ibid.

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mode is occurring but in a less explicit form.”25 In this instance, affective consciousness is at work in the experience of what Ignatius calls a “time of calm” and what Rahner calls “that delicate receptivity to God, which a man does not notice at all,”26 but that affective consciousness is never explicitly brought into interaction with cognitive consciousness whereby one subsequently reflects upon the experience. Consequently, the individual “thinks he has found the right solution by pondering and calculating acutely and lucidly, pencil in hand, without being moved by any spirits at all.”27 The reason that the third mode of Election is generally considered to be deficient by Rahner is because the object of discernment in these three modes of Election is God’s will. To discover God’s will requires an experience of God’s grace, an experience that for Rahner belongs to the second mode of Election.28 This experience of grace “has to be taken as a reality different from the human being and his own impulses and yet something that is operative as a psychological movement occurring in consciousness even though it takes its origin outside the consciousness.”29 Rahner draws on the theological principle that God works through secondary causes to explain that something that is beyond consciousness, the experience of grace, nevertheless has effects that are experienced in and through human consciousness.30 Tallon, as was noted in chapter two, also holds the possibility of an experience of God’s grace that is beyond consciousness, but is nonetheless experienced in consciousness. Tallon describes the experience of grace as non-conceptual, beyond one’s cognitive ability to grasp and one’s affective ability to possess. Nonetheless, one has the experience of reaching out toward the term of one’s knowing and loving, as well as the resulting conviction from the experience that this term is the God who has drawn near. In explaining human consciousness, Rahner makes an important distinction between “being consciously known and being susceptible 25 26 27 28 29 30

Ibid. DE, 168. DE, 168-169. DE,100. Ibid. DE,119-120.


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of being known by deliberate explicit reflection,”31 that can be better understood through Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness. When the understanding of consciousness includes affective consciousness as well as cognitive and volitive consciousness, there is an explanatory principle to account for the experience of being conscious (i.e., aware) of something that is non-conceptual and thus inaccessible to cognitive consciousness. Being known is different from “being an object of a concept for consciousness”32 because they are two distinct, though not separate, modes of consciousness. The former is affective consciousness, and the latter is cognitive consciousness. The ‘knowing’ that comes from the experience of “the actual concretely personal, radical love of God”33 in which God is ‘known’, is an affective intuition, a nonconceptual awareness of the love of God. Rahner uses self-awareness as an example of the difference between consciousness of an object and a ‘being known’ in consciousness.34 There is a further distinction between making one’s self-awareness the object of consciousness, using concepts and propositions to express that awareness and the selfawareness in itself.35 Like one’s self-awareness, one might objectify the experience of God in subsequent reflection, but the experience itself is always more than can be objectified. Tallon uses the category of affective consciousness to describe non-conceptual experiences of which one is conscious in a non-cognitive manner. Rahner, however, subsumes this experience of God’s love under the will. He describes this experience of transcendence that is not “mediated by the conceptual object” as one that “occurs not only in cognition but also as the pure dynamism of the will in positive affirmation and receptivity, in love that is to say.”36 Rahner understands love to be part of the dynamism of the will, and thus volitional, not affective. Following Tallon’s argu31 DE, 126. DK, 110, “Bewußtheit und Reflektierbarkeit.” 32 DE, 134, n. 28. DK, 117, n. 42, “‘Gegenständlichkeit’ für das Bewußtsein.” 33 Ibid. 34 DE,134, n. 28. 35 Ibid. 36 DE, 146. Note that Rahner is allowing the possibility of the cognitive dimension being active here as well in the context of an experience in which the conceptual object becomes ‘to a greater or less degree more transparent’ (147). Thus he understands the possibility of different lev-

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ment, one can account for this move by Newman’s theorem, according to which Rahner does not have the concept of affective consciousness at his disposal, and thus volitive consciousness picks up what would otherwise be attributable to affective consciousness. In the theory of triune consciousness, positive affirmation and receptivity demonstrate the passive and active dimensions of affective consciousness in which one is receptive or able to be affected and intentional in desiring that which one cannot possess. While Rahner does not use a theory of triune consciousness, one can argue that the experience of triune consciousness is implicit in his understanding of the discernment of God’s will. The second mode especially, which Rahner considers to be the norm, can be understood as a way of guiding the interaction of cognitive consciousness and affective consciousness in order to move one to decision and action (volitive consciousness). The second mode of discernment helps the exercitant bring the cognitive element of consciousness into attunement with the affective element, and thus make a valid judgment about whether or not the object of choice is the will of God. Due to his presuppositions within the framework of faculty psychology and a concern that the mystical experience he is describing not be confused with a “mystical subjectivism” or “an uncontrolled mysticism,”37 Rahner is quick to clarify that when he refers to a knowledge that goes beyond discursive reason, he does not mean feeling (Gefühl) or instinct (Instinkt).38 Rahner is susceptible to the bias of his day that feeling is a lower, more subjective operation in the human person than reason/intellect. He wants to assure the reader this nonconceptual experience is different from cognition, but not less than or lower than a cognitive experience. Ultimately, he will say in a sense that it is a ‘higher’ experience in that it is the norm against which all cognitive reason must be judged. As was noted in chapter two, Tallon points out that Rahner is operating from a scholastic understanding of the terms ‘intellect’ and ‘intellectual’ in the tradition of Rousselot.39 Even so, while Tallon is willing to give Rahner a sympathetic readels of this type of experience that may be different not only in degree, but in kind. See pp. 145-146, n. 34. 37 DE, 93-94. 38 DE, 94, n. 9; DK, 83, n. 23. 39 Tallon, “Heart in Rahner,” 711.


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ing on this point, Rahner’s reluctance to associate the terms ‘feeling’ or ‘instinct’ with this form of intellect demonstrate his inability to put affective consciousness on an equal footing with cognitive and volitive consciousness. Following Newman’s theorem, Rahner’s ignorance of affective consciousness as an explanatory category leads him to try and account for this experience through the categories of intellect and will. He argues that intellect, “in this metaphysical, scholastic sense of the word, . . . is capable of apprehending values.”40 Recall that in the theory of triune consciousness the apprehension of values is part of the experience of affective consciousness, but Rahner attributes the apprehension of values to an “intellectual operation of the intellect” that is not “cognition of the rationally discursive and conceptually expressible kind.”41 In Tallon’s theory, the non-conceptual experience of God is a distinct experience of affective consciousness, and the words ‘feeling’ and ‘instinct’ can apply without being understood as “contrary to or apart from the intellect”42 because of the unity of consciousness. Rahner explains that in the second mode of Election the object of choice is apprehended “by a kind of cognition, a making known, which is in some sense directly due to God himself,” but this making known is not the beatific vision nor is it the direct revelation of the first mode.43 This “making known” is also a kind of knowledge of this will [of God] that is distinct from the usual kinds, such as, for example, are obtained by the third method of Election, knowledge based on faith and reason drawing on the principles of morality and the analysis of a particular case. God himself ‘speaks’ here in a way that goes beyond those sources of knowledge.44

Note that Rahner is trying to explain the distinction between this type of consciousness of God and cognition, while nonetheless explaining this consciousness as a “kind of cognition.” Volition also is used to account for this non-conceptual experience because Rahner subsumes love under will in accordance with faculty psychology rather than al40 41 42 43 44

DE, 94, n. 9. Ibid. Ibid. DE, 106. Ibid.

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lowing for the distinct intentionality of affective consciousness. Love is considered to be a part of the will, and yet, love cannot be willed.

Consolation with Cause The second mode of discernment, which Rahner understands to be the norm for Ignatius, is a way of making a decision that involves both affection and cognition moving one to volition, but the primary experience in the second mode, that of consolation, is best explained as an experience of affective consciousness. Rahner, following Ignatius, describes two types of consolations, consolations (and desolations) that have a created origin and consolation without (previous) cause that has a divine, uncreated origin.45 Consolations that have a created origin involve “being consoled on account of a certain limited object.”46 These consolations or “interior movements” are more important in the discernment process than “the exercitant’s ‘own thoughts’, that is to say, his deliberate reflections.”47 When speaking of these consolations with cause, Rahner explains that the consolation “signifies the inner frame of mind that follows from the object, things that Ignatius designates as paz, tranquilidad, quietud, etc. (peace, tranquility and quiet),”48 which would be the affective dimension. While the affective experience of the consolations is primary, they also involve cognition. Rahner explains that even within this second mode of making Election and within the stirrings of the spirits, rational reflection can and must develop as an indispensable element in the motion of the spirits. After all, stirrings do not consist of merely indifferent, blind drives like hunger, thirst and so on. They consist of thoughts, acts of knowing, perception of values, etc. They themselves contain an objective conceptual element, they can be expressed and verified. The experience of consolations and desolations is not the experience of merely physiological states but of impulsions having a rational structure. They are always also the product of one’s own activity of an intellectual kind.49 45 46 47 48 49

DE, 159. DE, 137. DE, 96, n. 10. DE, 133. DE, 102-103.


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Rahner is setting up a distinction between consolations that have “an objective conceptual content” and consolation without cause. In doing so, Rahner makes a distinction between consolations and blind drives that recalls von Hildebrand’s distinction between teleological trends and intentional experiences.50 What Rahner is describing is an intentional experience involving acts of knowing and perception of values. For von Hildebrand and Tallon, the perception of values is an affective response not a cognitive act. Rahner explains the consolation itself must be “distinguished from the object that is its motive, the perception or experiencing of a value from the value itself.” The experience of consolations that have a created origin involves affect, intellect and will; in other words, they can be described as an experience of triune consciousness.

Consolation without Previous Cause The second mode of Election does not stop at the experience of consolations with a created origin. It also requires the exercitant to have a foundational, mystical experience, namely the experience of consolation without previous cause (consolación sin causa precedente). Rahner describes the experience as “the pure non-conceptual light of consolation of the whole human person who is being drawn above and beyond all that can be named into the love of God.”51 While Rahner does consider this experience to be mystical, in that it is an experience of the mystery of God that goes beyond cognitive concepts, he does not consider it to “be of an extraordinary and miraculous character”52 as is the first mode of discernment. The experience of consolation without cause is the experience of transcendence and the term of transcendence in which the object becomes transparent or disappears. The experience results in a conviction that the term of one’s transcendence is God. The second mode of election discerns whether or not the object of choice, which has been rationally predetermined to be a good choice, is in attunement with this non-conceptual experience of transcendence. In other words one asks, does the object of choice increase one’s openness and receptivity to God who is the term of one’s transcendence? 50 See Tallon, HH, 175-180. 51 DE, 137. 52 DE, 128, n. 25.

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Rahner makes a distinction between a conceptual object of consciousness that is grasped explicitly and the horizon of cognition that is known concomitantly and is the condition of the possibility of all knowledge.53 He defines “the supernatural formal object” experienced in consolation without cause as the “horizon given in a non-explicit and non-conceptualizable manner, the ultimate term and aim, or perspective vanishing-point, of the cognition of objects consciously apprehended in concepts.”54 Rahner adds that this horizon cannot “be distinguished from the limitless horizon that extends before the human mind through its self-transcending openness in intellect and will to all that is.”55 While he does not mention love here, it is important to note that Rahner would certainly not deny that this horizon is also the horizon of human self-transcendence in love, though one can speculate that he does not specifically mention love in this passage because he understands love to be part of volition. When he does refer to the horizon as the horizon of love, it is usually in conjunction with freedom, so one can further speculate that in those instances he is referencing what he considers to be two aspects of volition, love and freedom. Unlike the consolations that have a created origin, the experience of consolation without cause does not involve a conceptual object. Rahner quotes Ignatius as defining sin causa as “without any previous sense or knowledge of any object whereby any such consolation should come by (the soul’s) acts of understanding and will.”56 Rahner explains that the absence of object in question is utter receptivity to God, the inexpressible, non-conceptual experience of the love of the God who is raised transcendent above all that is individual, all that can be mentioned and distinguished, of God as God. There is no longer ‘any object’ but the drawing of the whole person, with the very ground of his being, into love, beyond any defined circumscribable object into the infinity of God as God himself as the divina majestad: trayéndola toda en amor de la su divina majestad. This ‘by drawing totally into 53 54 55 56

DE, 124-125. DE, 125. Ibid. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, n. 330. (Rahner’s translation. No publisher or edition is cited.) Cited in DE, 132.


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the love of his divine Majesty’. . . is precisely and unambiguously the positive side of sin causa. It is a question of God and God alone, precisely inasmuch as he is other than any individual object, one might say inasmuch as he is the absolutely transcendent.57

The experience one has of God is through affective consciousness because it is a non-conceptual experience of oneself as openness to God and God’s fulfillment of that openness in love. Rahner makes the further point that the experience is “without object (non-conceptual), though not without content.”58 The content of the experience is the love of God, but it is a non-conceptual, affective experience. Rahner struggles to explain what he means by a content that is non-conceptual because he does not have the category of affective consciousness at his disposal. Philip Endean wants to step back from reading Rahner’s description of transcendence becoming thematic as an experience and instead develop the idea of Klaus Fischer that Rahner’s idea of transcendence becoming thematic is an abstraction rather than a reality that “occurs purely or unambiguously.”59 Endean sees a conflict between Rahner’s description of transcendence becoming thematic and the proclamation of his general metaphysics that all transcendental knowledge or awareness occurs in and through the categorial. Thus Endean objects to the term non-conceptual out of a concern that it implies non-linguistic. His interpretation, however, is incongruent with Rahner’s insistence that transcendence becoming thematic is an experience of which one is capable and an experience that should be encouraged and facilitated by ministers of the Church.60 When the experience of transcendence becoming thematic is interpreted in terms of triune consciousness, one can allow for both the interrelation and distinction between the possibility of such an experience of affective consciousness and the cognitive framework that both shapes and interprets the experience, creating a necessary level of ambiguity. To say the experience is non-conceptual does not mean that cognition plays no role in the experience whatsoever, but rather expresses the fact that the experience goes beyond what can be captured by language and concepts. To use Endean’s own language, the experience is ungraspable 57 58 59 60

DE, 135. DE, 139. Endean, 156. IL, 13, 14, 19.

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and incomprehensible, but one can also say non-conceptual in that it is primarily experienced affectively. While Endean objects that Rahner is creating a disjunction between God’s self and the categorial representation of God,61 I would argue that Rahner is not advocating a disjunction between the experience and the concepts used to describe it but a necessary distinction, a distinction grounded in the distinction between affective and cognitive consciousness. Certainly Endean is correct in stating that without an object does not mean disembodied as all consciousness is embodied. The affective experience of God’s love as part of consolation without cause is what has been referred to as operative connaturality because it is not an experience of the individual’s love for God, but of God’s love of the individual. Using Rahner’s language, one can say that it is an experience of God’s offer to us and our openness or receptivity to that offer, but it is not the experience of our actual acceptance of that offer. Rahner notes that one feels certitude in this experience, but not certitude about one’s own state of grace. He explains that the experience of certitude “concerns God, not ourselves, and the experience of transcendence, though occurring through love, is an experience of God’s operation in our soul. But it is not in precisely the same sense an experience that we have also accepted this grace of God that we are experiencing.”62 The experience is one of being-affected, which includes one’s affect-ability or receptivity, but does not go so far as to include an affective response. Rahner quotes Ignatius’s letter to Sister Teresa Rejadella in which Ignatius describes this experience of God: It frequently happens that the Lord himself moves our soul and constrains us as it were to this or that action by making our soul wide open. That is to say, he begins to speak within us without any sound of words, he draws up the soul wholly to his love and gives us a sense of himself, so that even if we wished, we could not resist. This interior feeling . . . . is filled with deep humility.63 61 Endean, 219. 62 DE, 150, n. 35. 63 H. Rahner, Ignatius von Loyola, Briefwechsel mit Frauen (Freiburg, 1956), 387. Cited in DE, 152. Note that Endean comments on discrepancies in the translation of this letter as it bears on Rahner’s interpretation, but the intention here is not to evaluate the validity of Rahner’s interpretation of Ignatius, but to interpret Rahner’s own theology of mystical experience. See Endean, Karl Rahner, 161-162.


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In this description the experience of God is clearly an affective experience as is demonstrated by the fact that the Lord moves the soul and gives us a sense of himself that is irresistible. Hence the experience cannot be subsumed under the will because the experience cannot be willed, nor can it be resisted; it is involuntary. The acceptance or rejection of the experience is voluntary, but the experience itself is, as Ignatius states, an interior feeling; it is an affective experience. Rahner goes on to explain that this actual concrete central experience is identical with a ‘perception’ or ‘sense’. For theological reasons we must exclude an interpretation that would make this a visio beata immediata in the doctrinal sense. Nevertheless, it has an immediacy about it that makes it possible and necessary to term it a ‘perception’ or ‘sense’ of God.64

Rahner is struggling to describe an experience of affective consciousness in which one perceives or senses God, but not in cognitive terms. One experiences the presence of God. One experiences God as love in this non-conceptual experience, therefore the term of human transcendence also is experienced as personal. The non-cognitive nature of the experience means it is not the relation of subject to object, but rather the relation of subject to subject. One comes out of this experience with a conviction that God is loving and personal, but that conviction comes out of an affective intuition about God. Rahner has been critiqued for presenting the horizon of cognition as a personal God.65 The problem Rahner encounters is that cognitive experience does not allow one to make the leap from horizon of infinite mystery to a loving, personal God; affective experience is what leads to a conviction that the horizon of human transcendence is the loving, personal God of revelation. Rahner explains that “one might also describe this consolation as the consolation without conceptual object in the actual concretely personal, radical love of God. . . . This radical love of God neither states nor presupposes any ‘conceptual content’ for the experience of consolation.”66 Rahner cites the prec64 DE, 154. 65 See Thomas Sheehan, Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations, Series in Continental Thought 9 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987). 66 DE, 134, n. 28. German text – “dann könnte man diesen Trost auch definieren: der gegenstandslose Trost in der existentiell radikalen Liebe

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edent found in Bonaventure “according to which here on earth there is an experience of the love of God which occurs without the intellect having any share in it.”67 As will be noted in the section on the spiritual senses, when Rahner explains Bonaventure’s position, he does so by subsuming this experience of the love of God under volition. Rahner maintains that there are different levels to the experience of consolation without cause. The lowest level “would be an experience of transcendence, of a certain purity and strength.”68 In this experience, in which there is an awareness of one’s transcendence, the conceptual object “can also become more transparent, can almost entirely disappear, remain itself unheeded, so that the dynamism itself alone becomes more and more the essential.”69 Rahner carefully denies he is suggesting that “between transcendence as the necessary condition of any act of the mind, even the most ordinary, and transcendence explicitly experienced, there is only a difference of degree, of greater or less explicitness,”70 but rather makes clear that he also allows for a difference in kind. A difference in kind allows for the gratuity and supernatural nature of a mystical experience. He explains that the more intensive and ‘mystical’ the experience becomes, and the more the supernatural elevation of the transcendence exerts its influence (lending a meaning and function which is no longer simply that of making possible the apprehension of objects of knowledge belonging to this world and of God by means of concepts formed from such objects, but designates in contrast to these modes of cognition a directness and independence in the anticipatory reaching out towards God), the clearer it must become that this emergence into awareness of transcendence and of the term to which it tends, discloses a transcendence qualitatively different from the merely concomitant and implicit form.71

Rahner wants to leave open the question of the relationship between this type of mystical experience and the possibility of a “natural” expe-

67 68 69 70 71

zu Gott. . . . diese radikale Liebe zu Gott keine ‘Gegenständlichkeit’ der Trosterfahrung besagt oder voraussetzt.” DK, 116, n. 42. DE, 134, n. 28. DE, 144. DE, 145. DE, 145, n. 34. DE, 145-146, n. 34.


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rience of transcendence or the experience as it is found in non-Christian spirituality.72 Were one to integrate Rahner’s understanding that there is no “natural” human nature that is not always already embraced by the love of God with Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness, one could describe a similar affective experience found in Christian mysticism and non-Christian spirituality that is given different prior cognitive frameworks and subsequent cognitive interpretations.73 Such a development of Rahner’s theology allowing for a distinction between affective experience and the cognitive framework and interpretation of that experience opens up new possibilities for interreligious dialogue.74

Certitude in the Experience of Consolation without Cause In describing this experience of the term of one’s transcendence, Rahner goes on to state that because it is the condition of the possibility of all cognition, it is without error, and is the ultimate certitude. By that it lends the same ultimate certainty and authentic guarantee for us of the term inseparable from it. And since this term is what we call God, we have here the ultimate ground of our knowledge of God. All that has been said is, of course, not meant merely of an intellectual phenomenon but as freedom and love.75

This affective consciousness of God as present leaves one with a conviction that God is the term of one’s transcendence. The conviction is not based on cognitive knowledge, but on an affective intuition that what one is moving toward is in fact God. For Rahner the resulting conviction or certitude that comes from this experience of consolation without cause is what makes this ex72 Ibid. 73 Note, however, that at times different cognitive frameworks may lead to a difference in the experience itself. See the section on “The Question of Experience.” 74 Chapter six further develops the potential of interpreting Rahner’s theology through Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness for interreligious dialogue through a discussion of Rahner’s concept of the anonymous Christian. 75 DE, 149-150.

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perience the criterion against which all other religious experiences are tested.76 The very aspect of this experience that allows for such certitude is the fact that it is non-conceptual, that it is not a cognitive experience. Were the experience to involve cognitive concepts, error would be possible, if not even probable. Rahner notes that it is not a question of conceptual representation of God, nor of a theorem or a proposition about God constructed out of human concepts which even when they refer to God are of necessity built of the material of limited and earthly ideas and images and with conversio ad phantasmata. And in that conceptual description and reference to God there can, of course, be just as much error and misapprehension as there can be in any other judgment or in regard to any other object on which love is freely bestowed.77

Again when one looks at mystical experiences in other world religions, the differences in interpretation come from subsequent cognitive reflection on an experience that is beyond concepts. Rahner notes that “a deception is possible in what subsequently occurs in the soul, not in the actual consolation.”78 Unlike the possibility of deception in subsequent reflection, Rahner argues that transcendence pure and simple cannot deceive. It has nothing to compete with that might be missed in its aspiration and consent. Pure openness and receptivity is always genuine and can miss nothing because it excludes nothing but includes all. It always refers to the true God because it attributes no law to him that would do violence to what he is and expresses no judgment that is finite and so might falsely circumscribe him. Where the whole of a person’s being is poured into this pure movement of receptivity, we have the consolation which cannot deceive because it carries its own evidence with it, presupposes no other, does not stand in contrast to

76 DE, 131. Note that the certainty or conviction is not in regard to the object of choice one is discerning, but in response to God as the term of one’s transcendence. Both Philip Endean and Avery Dulles seem to be misinterpreting Rahner in this regard. See Endean, 172. Endean cites Avery Dulles, “Finding God’s Will: Rahner’s Interpretation of the Ignatian Election,” Woodstock Letters 94 (1965), 150-151. 77 DE, 148. 78 DE, 153.


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any other that might be preferred to it, and it is the foundation of all truth, certainty and consolation.79

The experience carries with it a feeling of certitude that Rahner argues is authentic precisely because it is an affective rather than cognitive experience. Any false or deceptive understanding of God comes not from the affective experience but from the subsequent cognitive interpretation of the experience. One experiences one’s own openness and God as the term and fulfillment of that openness. One’s openness and receptivity are what Tallon calls one’s affectability. Openness to God is the condition of the possibility of the ability to be affected. Rahner explains that if there is such an experience carrying with it an intrinsic certitude of its purely divine origin, it cannot consist in a knowledge of God by way of particular concepts in which God is known discursively, by thinking a thought about him. God’s presence in it must be of another kind. And this different way of his being involved must eo ipso possess intrinsically an irreducibly self-evident self-sufficient character.80

While unable to categorize this certitude as an affective consciousness or intuition of God, Rahner nonetheless argues that the certitude does not arise from an experience of cognitive consciousness. The experience is one of presence, that is, the presence of a personal other, a subject to subject experience, not a subject to object comprehension. Tallon has demonstrated that the experience of presence, subjectivity, the other who cannot be categorized or defined or made finite, is an experience of affective consciousness. The knowledge of God that Rahner refers to is a knowing by connaturality, not concepts. However, as is done in relationships between human persons, God is inevitably objectified, as one who is beyond objectification is conceptually categorized in subsequent reflection.

Attunement in the Second Mode of Election Once one has the experience of consolation without cause, one then discerns if the object of choice one is considering is in attunement with one’s openness to God. Even this discernment involves the inter79 DE, 149. 80 DE, 143.

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action of affective consciousness and cognitive consciousness. Rahner explains that in the second mode of election, the experimental test is made whether the two phenomena are in harmony, mutually cohere, whether the will to the object of Election under scrutiny leaves intact that pure openness to God in the supernatural experience of transcendence and even supports and augments it or weakens and obscures it; whether a synthesis of these two attitudes, pure receptivity to God (as concretely achieved, not as a theoretical principle and proposition) and the will to this limited finite object of decision produces ‘peace’, ‘tranquility’, ‘quiet’, so that true gladness and spiritual joy ensue, that is, the joy of pure, free, undistorted transcendence; or whether instead of smoothness, gentleness and sweetness, sharpness, tumult and disturbance arise.81

One discerns the rightness of the object of choice through an awareness of one’s feelings and the degree to which the object supports one’s feeling of openness to God. Rahner himself describes this process of discerning the attunement between the object and one’s experience of consolation as knowing by connaturality. He explains it is not a case of ‘thinking it over’, that is to say one is not analyzing the object of choice in factual, rational considerations. One is trying out in a sort of make-believe or even play-acting experiment, whether one can discover in oneself in regard to the object of choice a certain global ‘connaturality’ (to use Aquinas’ term: 2a 2qe q.1 a.4 ad 3; q.45 a.2; cf. Denzinger 2324), which is not susceptible of further analysis.82

He further notes that this is also the case in the Third Mode of Election, so that even “Ignatius’ rational method of making the Election when more intense divine consolation is lacking, is not a purely discursive one after all.”83 Rahner explains that in this process a person “mobilize[s] the actual real centre of his own nature in relation to the situation, so as to bring into full awareness how the person he really is (which may be hidden from him), reacts to some possible object of choice.”84 The process Rahner describes is one of affective attunement. 81 82 83 84

DE, 158. Cites Spir. Ex., n. 335. DE, 161, n. 43. DE, 161. Ibid.


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Rahner argues that all grave decisions are made in this way so that the person will probably make his decisions through a fundamental global awareness of himself actually present and making itself felt in him during this space of time, and through a feeling [Gefühl] of the harmony or disharmony of the object of choice with this fundamental feeling [Grundgefühl] he has about himself. He will not only nor ultimately make his decision by a rational analysis but by whether he feels [Empfinden] that something ‘suits him’ or not. And this feeling [Empfinden] will be judged by whether the matter pleases, delights, brings peace and satisfaction.85

For Rahner, as for Tallon, the norm for human decision making is connaturality, and his language explicitly demonstrates beyond doubt the role that feeling or affect plays in this decision making process. In exploring Rahner’s primary work on the second mode of election in Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, it is evident that Rahner’s description of the mystical experience of God demonstrates the non-conceptual, affective mode of such an experience. Tallon’s use of Newman’s theorem proves true in Rahner’s theory. Presupposing the precepts of faculty psychology, Rahner does not have a conceptual category of affective consciousness to use as an explanatory principle, and so while he describes the mystical experience of God in affective terms, he ultimately attempts to explain the experience by subsuming affect under intellect or will, warping the concepts of cognitive and volitive consciousness in the process to account for an experience that is not conceptual and cannot be willed. The same pattern is found in Rahner’s explication of the spiritual senses in the theology of Bonaventure.

The Spiritual Senses As Rahner recounts the various perspectives on the spiritual senses in the theologians of the Middles Ages, one discovers that for each of them, the senses are attributable to intellect and/or will. Such attribution makes sense because for these theologians the immortal soul was only composed of intellect and will and did not include affect. Therefore if the senses are to be spiritual and not physical, they must be a part of intellect or will and could not belong to affect. Rahner similarly interprets Bonaventure in this manner, reading affectus in Bonaventure 85 DE, 166 (emphasis mine); DK, 144.

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as referring ultimately to volitive consciousness rather than affective consciousness. 86 This section will first examine the structure of the spiritual senses in Bonaventure that attributes each of them to intellect or will. The second half of this section will focus specifically on spiritual touch or ecstasy as an experience of affective consciousness that is subsumed under volitive consciousness. A brief summary of Rahner’s survey of the spiritual senses in the middle ages shows that: for William of Auxerre the senses are intellectual activities; for Alexander of Hales they are the various ways in which intellect grasps an object; for Albert the Great, they are acts of intellect and will, with taste and feeling as expressions of will.87 One interesting possible ‘exception’ is Pseudo-Denis [Dionysius], who according to Rahner, seems to describe all of the spiritual senses as acts of intellect, but has the object of taste and touch as the good, whereas the object of the other senses is the truth.88 If one were to follow Tallon’s analogy of correlating cognitive consciousness with truth and affective consciousness with value (i.e., the good), then one could argue that there is an interpretation of Pseudo-Denis, drawing on the Platonic influence, that allows for spiritual taste and touch to be part of affective consciousness rather than cognitive consciousness. Such 86 Karl Rahner, “The Doctrine of the ‘Spiritual Senses’ in the Middle Ages,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. XVI: Experience of the Spirit: Source of Theology, trans. David Morland (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 104134 (hereafter cited as TI 16:7). See also in this volume, “The Spiritual Senses in Origen,” 81-103. The validity of Rahner’s interpretation of Bonaventure will not be addressed in this work. For an example of the way Rahner’s interpretation of the spiritual senses differs from Balthasar’s interpretation, see Stephen Fields, “Balthasar and Rahner on the Spiritual Senses,” in Theological Studies 57 (1996): 224-241. Even though it is beyond the scope of this work to directly engage Fields’s article, note that a reinterpretation of Rahner that highlights the affective dimension of the spiritual sense of touch provides a middle way between Fields’s reading of Balthasar and Rahner. Affective consciousness allows for “the subtle interplay between sense and spirit” that Fields does not find in Rahner’s interpretation of Bonaventure without muting the “appreciation of Bonaventure’s highly developed mysticism” as Balthasar does in Fields’s opinion (241). 87 TI 16:7, 107-109. 88 TI 16:7, 109, text and n. 20.


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openness to the affective in Pseudo-Denis is important because Bonaventure was strongly influenced by Pseudo-Denis.

The Structure of the Spiritual Senses in Bonaventure For Bonaventure, Rahner explains, the spiritual senses are acts of both intellect and will.89 In Rahner’s interpretation of Bonaventure, the spiritual senses are acts, not powers, and as such they “can have their principle in either the intellect or in the will.”90 Rahner’s concern is to avoid adding another power to the immortal soul. Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness replaces the concept of separate powers with a single consciousness that has distinct intentionalities. Thus a new interpretation of the spiritual senses that allows affective intentionality its own distinct, proper role is possible without introducing an additional power into the soul. Rahner explains that for Bonaventure, the two ultimate principles in the treatment of these senses are intellect and will; given Bonaventure’s view of the relationship of these two powers of the soul, it is hardly surprising that he can refer the same operation to two faculties. It is natural for him to regard the five spiritual senses as acts both of the intellect and of the will. But just as the various operations relate in a different way to the intellect and the will according to their own particular character, so do the spiritual senses.91

Bonaventure understands sight and hearing to be connected to intellect and taste, smell and touch as connected to will.92 Rahner explains that Bonaventure correlates the senses to three modes of operation for a soul in the state of grace: a theological virtue, a gift of the Holy Spirit, and a blessing of beatitude.93 Sight and hearing are correlated to faith, understanding, and purity of heart; whereas smell, taste and touch are correlated to love, wisdom, and peace. Rahner points out that “one should not assume from this description that these gifts possess a definite intellectual stamp, for some of them be89 90 91 92 93

TI 16:7, 112. TI 16:7, 110-111, n. 27. TI 16:7, 112. TI 16:7, 112-113. TI 16:7, 111.

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long primarily to the realm of the affections.”94 Frustratingly enough, Rahner says no more on this topic, and thus one is left to speculate on the relationship between the gifts and the realm of the affections. In explaining how Bonaventure relates the senses to the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, Rahner maintains that faith is first of all rooted in the intellect; from faith proceed spiritual sight and hearing as soon as the corresponding operation of gifts and blessings have their effect. Hope, and especially love, are rooted in the will, from which the spiritual sense of smell and the higher senses, the taste and touch of love proceed.95

Once again love is subsumed under will, therefore the higher senses of love, which are taste and touch, will be understood primarily as acts of will. For spiritual sight the first stage of knowledge of God “consists in the simple acceptance of revealed truth in virtue of faith and understanding.”96 The second stage is a deeper understanding through the gift of understanding that comes from the Holy Spirit. The third stage is “the simple vision (simplex contuitus) which is reserved to purity of heart.”97 Rahner clarifies that such “simple vision of God is not a direct perception of the divine essence free of any intermediary.”98 In other words, spiritual sight is not beatific vision, but it is the earthly precursor to beatific vision. Taste is described as an act of will, but also as an affective experience. Rahner states that “taste is for the will what sight is for understanding.”99 The parallel between sight and taste is important because while sight is the precursor to beatific vision,100 taste is the precursor to spiritual touch or mystical union. Thus for Rahner, mys94 TI 16:7, 114. 95 TI 16:7, 113 (emphasis mine). 96 TI 16:7, 115. 97 TI 16:7, 116. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 Rahner does note that raptus is an intermediary stage of the intellect that is “a clear vision of God through the intellect, and is a foretaste of the beatific vision,” but understands raptus to be “a privileged and exceptional state” unlike ecstasy which “is not extraordinary.” See TI 16:7, 117.


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tical union and beatific vision are in some ways parallel or rather semiparallel experiences corresponding to will and intellect respectively because they both deal with a direct experience of God, though there is a qualitative difference between the two.101 In accounting for both spiritual taste and touch, Rahner uses will to categorize experiences he describes as affective. Rahner explains that Bonaventure defines spiritual taste as “the highest act of the will” and as “an appreciation by the affections of the influence of created divine grace with regard to the direct experience of God”102 clearly subsuming affect under will. While Rahner says taste is the highest act of will, it is also less perfect than touch because it only experiences created grace, whereas touch is the experience of union with God.103 Taste precedes touch as “the act of the will which can be directly felt with complete fulfillment,”104 but it is not yet ecstatic union in love. Again note that Rahner describes this act of will as an experience that is felt, describing the experience as affective. He goes on to argue that while spiritual sight is the goal of human understanding, it is not the highest form of contemplation, because it is knowledge of God instead of union with God.105 Rahner explains that “the ‘excessus ecstaticus’ is, by contrast, the experience of the will, the union with God of a more direct love. Its act is ‘spiritual touch’, the highest spiritual sense.”106

Spiritual Touch as Ecstasy or Mystical Union For Bonaventure, ecstasy or direct, mystical union with God is not an act of intellect, which is always only knowledge through created 101 TI 16:7, 120. One can also say that there is quantitative difference because the beatific vision only takes place upon death as opposed to ecstasy, which is experienced in the here and now. Rahner does not deny the quantitative difference, but qualifies that the difference is not “merely quantitative.” I will use ‘semi-parallel’ to describe the relationship between beatific vision and ecstasy to take into account this quantitative difference between the two. I will argue below that the qualitative difference between the two is the difference between cognitive and affective experience. 102 TI 16:7, 116 (emphasis mine). 103 Ibid. 104 TI 16:7, 116-117. 105 TI 16:7, 117. 106 Ibid.

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grace, but ecstatic love. Rahner, lacking any category of affective consciousness, defines ecstatic love as “an act of will” that “effects union with God, which permits an experience of God that surpasses any in which God is perceived in the created operations of grace.”107 Ecstatic union, as an act of will, is higher than raptus which is an act of intellect. Rahner and Bonaventure understand the ordering of the senses to follow “the principles from which they originate (will higher than intellect).”108 The question remains, how can ecstatic union be an act of will when it is absolutely gratuitous, a pure gift from God? One cannot will oneself into direct, ecstatic union with God. Rahner attributes ecstatic union to the will because love has been subsumed under will, and he does not have an understanding of the soul or consciousness that allows affectivity its own intentionality. Affective consciousness, with its passive element of being-affected and its active intentionality of desire, accounts for the experience of ecstatic union better than volitive consciousness. The connection between the experience of ecstasy and the spiritual sense of touch in Bonaventure’s work is significant in that even the vocabulary that is used speaks to an affective experience. Rahner refers to touch or ‘feeling’ to describe this experience.109 In common parlance, one who is emotionally moved by an experience often describes the feeling as being ‘touched’. The descriptive words Rahner uses all point to the experience of being-affected. Rahner describes the experience of spiritual touch in ecstasy as ‘contact’.110 Contact describes the presence of subject to subject rather than the grasp of an object by a subject. Rahner states that the two characteristics of directness and darkness in the experience of God are best expressed by the word ‘contact’. Bonaventure offers the term in the spirit of his philosophy and theology and discovers 107 TI 16:7, 119. 108 TI 16:7, 115, n. 47. 109 TI 16:7, 126. See German edition, “Die Lehre von den ‘Geistlichen Sinnen’ im Mittelalter,” in Schriften zur Theologie, Band XII, Theologie aus Erfahrung des Geistes, (Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1975), 137-172 (hereafter cited as ST 12). German text states: “Zudem ist nach ihm das Fühlen und Berühren der höchste und geistlichste Sinn, weil er an besten mit Gott, dem höchsten Geist, vereint und die Erfahrung Gottes in der Einigung bedeutete” (162-163). 110 Ibid. “Kontakt” in the German, ST12, 163.


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the principle of this ‘night’ in the essentially affective nature of the direct grasp of God.111

Rahner does not deny that the experience is affective, but he attributes the affective nature of the experience to volitive consciousness instead of allowing affect its own intentionality. The experience of this union with God, this ecstatic love, is not a cognitive experience because it is non-representational. Rahner describes this experience as “a ‘cognoscere’ or better a ‘sentire’ of God which is a direct process (‘in se’) without any intermediary means of perception (not ‘in effectu’).”112 The experience involves a feeling or sense of God, not cognitive knowledge or perception of God. Rahner explains that this sense of God in Godself is similar to the beatific vision in that it is a direct experience of God, but it is not a beatific vision because it is not an experience of knowledge.113 The beatific vision as an experience of ‘sight’ is cognitive. Rahner’s main argument is to distinguish the experience of ecstasy or union from the beatific vision, but in doing so he makes the argument that this experience of ecstatic union is one of affection, not cognition. Rahner notes that the difference between a direct experience of God in mystical union and beatific vision for Bonaventure is that the experience of ecstasy is ascribed “to the ‘affectus’ alone.”114 Rahner explains that the difference between this direct experience of God in ecstatic love and beatific vision is not a quantitative difference, but a qualitative difference because of the distinction between sentire and cognoscere.115 Rahner is trying to explain a distinction that is much better understood through triune consciousness in which there is a distinction between affective and cognitive consciousness. When Rahner discusses the experience 111 TI 16:7, 127 (emphasis in original). German text states, “Bonaventura legt es im Geist seiner Philosophie und Theologie dar und endeckt das Prinzip dieser «Nacht» in der wesentlich affektiven Natur dieses unmittelbaren Gotteserfassens.” ST12, 163. He does note that “subjective feeling [subjecktive Gefühl] should not be regarded as the mark of ecstasy” (n. 104), demonstrating his continued reluctance to allow ‘feeling’ any substantial role in the experience of union with God. 112 TI 16:7, 119. 113 TI 16:7, 120. 114 Ibid. (emphasis mine). 115 TI 16:7, 120, n. 78.

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of consolation without cause in the Ignatian Exercises he also argues that the difference between mystical experience and beatific vision is qualitive rather than quantitative.116 The difference is qualitative because it is the difference between an affective experience and a cognitive experience. Mystical union is to affect what beatific vision is to intellect.117 Rahner himself explicitly makes this point, stating that “a more precise understanding of ecstasy reveals a qualitative difference from the beatific vision, since it consists essentially and exclusively in an experience of God in the ‘apex affectus’,” and again, that “ecstasy is an act of the ‘apex affectus’, while ‘visio’ is primarily an act of the intellect.” 118 However, while Rahner clearly describes mystical experience in affective terms, he continues to subsume affect under will instead of allowing it a distinct intentionality of its own. The distinction between the beatific vision as cognitive and union as affective in human experience plays itself out in Rahner’s Christology. If beatific vision is understood in terms of cognitive consciousness, as it is for the saints, Jesus cannot have a human consciousness and enjoy the beatific vision. Rahner suggests that when we hear about Christ’s direct vision of God, we instinctively imagine this vision as a vision of the divine essence present before his mind’s eye as an object, as if the divine essence were an object being looked at by an observer standing opposite it, and consequently as if this divine essence were brought into Christ’s consciousness from without and occupied this consciousness from without and hence in all its dimensions and layers. Once we have adopted this imaginative scheme . . . then we pass equally unconsciously and naturally to the thought that this divine essence offering itself and viewed in this way as an object of vision from without, is like a book 116 DE 145-6, n. 34. 117 Note that Endean interprets spiritual touch as “a middle position between a clear vision and an inferential knowledge of God [i.e., between beatific vision and spiritual sight and taste]; a dark but immediate touch, accessible to the will but not to the intellect, apprehended not through knowledge but through love” (27). I would not agree that touch is a middle term, but would categorize it as a semi-parallel experience to beatific vision so that spiritual sight is to beatific vision on a cognitive level what spiritual taste is to spiritual touch on an affective level. I use semi-parallel to make the distinction that beatific vision is something possible only after death whereas spiritual touch is possible in this life. 118 TI 16:7, 122.


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or mirror offering, and putting before Christ’s consciousness, more or less naturally all other conceivable contents of knowledge in their distinct individuality and propositionally formulated possibility of expression.119

Beatific vision in this sense is cognitive consciousness, the cognitive understanding of an external object, and in this sense would be incompatible with Jesus’ human consciousness. Rahner, however, argues that this direct presence of God is the plain, simple self-awareness— the necessary self-realization—of this substantial union with the person of the Logos himself . . . this and nothing more. This means, however, that this really existing direct vision of God is nothing other than the original unobjectified consciousness of divine sonship, which is present by the mere fact that there is a Hypostatic Union. . . . This consciousness of sonship and of direct presence to God (which is not something merely known by starting from outside it, but consists in a direct presence to God which is at once— and absolutely identically—both the reality itself and its inner illumination) is therefore situated at the subjective pole of our Lord’s consciousness.120

In other words, Jesus has an affective consciousness of the direct presence of God that is also an experience of self, an affective self-awareness that goes beyond what can be fully grasped by words and concepts, by Jesus’ human cognitive consciousness. Rahner tends to avoid the term “beatific vision” when speaking of this affective consciousness because the term for Rahner indicates a cognitive consciousness as described in the first passage. Instead Rahner uses terms such as “direct vision of God” or “visio immediata” to make it clear that the experience is not one of cognitive consciousness but is affective consciousness (albeit without using these terms).121 Rahner makes the case, when speaking of the affective experience of mystical union with God, that such an affective experience is at that innermost point of the human spirit. He states that 119 Karl Rahner, “Knowledge and Self-Consciousness of Christ,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. V: Later Writings, trans. Karl-H Krueger (Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press), 207 (hereafter cited as TI 5:9). 120 Ibid., 208. 121 Ibid., 208-209.

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the heart of rahner ecstasy is the direct union of the soul with God, and this contact is realised essentially and exclusively in the ‘apex affectus’, that is in an affectivity which is higher and more interior than the intellect. In the experience of the direct spiritual union with God in the highest point of the soul every activity of the intellect as such is excluded. The reason for this is that the innermost part of man lies beyond the intellect. Here God dwells exclusively, which means that no one else can touch this highest point of the spirit, the innermost depths of a man. A man may, however, enter the innermost part of his spirit through ecstatic union and here he reaches the highest point of his soul. The whole mystical enterprise up to this point was nothing other than the gradual return of a man to the interior domain, as ascent to the highest point of the soul. Because this can only be reached in ‘affectivity’, a man must leave behind him all intellectual activity at a certain point on his mystical path on this earth.122

Rahner explains that such mystical union is not imperfect knowledge, but rather an experience that does not involve intellect at all.123 Both Rahner and Bonaventure are quite clear on the point that the experience is not cognitive. Rahner specifically warns us to be “wary of putting too much weight on expressions such as ‘knowledge’, etc. used in his [Bonaventure’s] account of ‘ecstasy’. It is a question of mysterious experience, not of intellectual knowledge.”124 However, without the conceptual category of affective consciousness, Rahner is at a loss to explain the experience of ecstatic union within the framework of faculty psychology. Having clearly described this experience of a direct union of love with God as one that is affective and having warned the reader that the experience is not cognitive, Rahner continues to attribute this noncognitive experience to intellect or will. Rahner himself acknowledges the lack of appropriate categories of consciousness to account for this experience of union with God. He notes that direct union with God is “experienced in some real way,” but it is “a peculiar kind compared to other forms of knowledge” and therefore, the difficulty is “how to interpret it except as intellectual knowledge.”125 Ecstatic union is a real experience in which one is conscious of God, but the consciousness 122 TI 16:7, 123 (emphasis mine). 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid. 125 TI 16:7, 124.


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is not cognitive, and so Rahner says it is a ‘peculiar kind’ of knowledge instead of recognizing the distinct intentionality of affective consciousness. Again Newman’s theorem accounts for Rahner’s struggle due to his lack of a category of affective consciousness to account for or adequately describe this experience that is sentire and not cognoscere. He is trying to use cognitive and volitive consciousness to account for an experience of affective consciousness. When he attempts to account for this non-cognitive experience of union through volitive consciousness, he proposes that this experience of union is problematic when one considers “the principle that nothing can be willed which is not first known.”126 This principle does not raise a problem if affective consciousness is given an equal role to cognitive and volitive consciousness, because volitive consciousness is not being warped to account for an experience that is better described as affective consciousness. Without the concept of affective consciousness, however, the principle does cause a problem for Rahner because he tries to explain ecstatic union as an experience of the will, but one in which God is not known cognitively. Rahner notes that Bonaventure “did not explicitly address himself to this problem, but he could have offered the following reflections which would fit in with his basic line of argument.”127 In offering an explanation for why the above mentioned principle is not problematic, Rahner points out that if there is no object being presented to the will by the intellect, then the object itself, in this case God’s own essence, must be informing the will. What is important to note is the way in which Rahner identifies will and affect. He states that “the direct ecstatic union of love is realized without the assistance of the intellect; therefore the reality of God’s own essence must be the ‘informing object’ of the will (more precisely of the ‘affections’) in its innermost being. For in ecstasy the ‘apex affectus’ is ‘transformed’ completely into God.”128 Rahner’s reflections are remarkably similar to a description of affective consciousness, without ever drawing the conclusion that there is an affective consciousness that is a real and distinct, though not separate, mode of consciousness along with cognitive and volitive consciousness. Note also the passive element in this 126 TI 16:7, 123. 127 TI 16:7, 124. 128 TI 16:7, 124 (emphasis mine).

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experience, the being-affected by God, that is accounted for if one accepts a theory of triune consciousness that allows affection its own, distinct intentionality. Rahner explains that for Bonaventure there is no need of rational representation because the object itself is present as a principle of perception. Thus in our case it happens that the ‘apex affectus’, in which God is present, is not merely a capacity of the same order as the intellect. As the highest and most interior element in the soul it belongs to a deeper level of reality than the intellect and all that is related to it in the same order of being and can be characterised as will or normal ‘affection’. Now this highest point of the soul (according to the genuine Franciscan model) bears a closer resemblance to the will than to the intellect. Nevertheless this ‘apex’ lies deeper than the will and is the ground of the soul which supports the capacities of both understanding and will.129

This affective apex of the human being that has been or has the potential to be transformed by God is what Rahner calls in other places ‘the heart’.130 Rahner explains that if, according to a general scholastic notion of the metaphysic soul, the capacities of intellect and will spring somehow from the deepest and innermost ground of the soul, then the soul must possess these capacities as a unity in the depths of its being, capacities which develop ‘outwards’ into two separate faculties. Now if God touches this deepest point from within, giving form to it, as it were, then the ‘apex affectus’ will become conscious of this direct union of love without the intellect taking any active part. Naturally the soul experiences God directly in the ground of its being only as the motive power of ecstatic love which leaves all knowledge behind it, and in consequence the experience remains obscure until the intellect as well is flooded, without being blinded, by the dazzling brilliance of God in the beatific vision. But at any rate God is here the dark fire of love.131 129 Ibid. 130 For example, see Part Five, “Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. III: Theology of the Spiritual Life, trans. Karl-H. and Boniface Krueger (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1967) 319-352. Chapter six will further explore Rahner’s notion of ‘heart’ as symbol of the unified experience of humans (body, soul and spirit) and as a model for understanding affection, cognition and volition in triune consciousness. 131 TI 16:7, 124-125.


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Rahner is following a traditional faculty psychology. Note that it is the apex affectus that is conscious of God in Rahner’s description, not the intellect. For Rahner, using the framework of faculty psychology, if the consciousness of God is not cognitive consciousness, then by default it must be volitive consciousness. At the same time he wants to maintain that this apex “lies deeper than the will,”132 but if it does, it must be distinct from the will. Tallon’s theory of a triune consciousness accounts for this essential unity of intellect, will, and affect at the depths of the soul, while allowing the three modes of consciousness, one of which is affective, their own distinct intentionalities. Triune consciousness is thus able to account for this experience of God as the ‘dark fire of love’ in a way that Rahner’s faculty psychology cannot. In Tallon’s theory the three intentionalities are always distinctions, not separations, within one unified consciousness, so even though different experiences are better accounted for and described by one or the other intentionality, it is always an experience of the one consciousness.

The Question of Experience Rahner describes experiences of consolation without cause and mystical union that can be interpreted as affective experiences that lead to a conviction that the horizon of human transcendence is the loving, personal God of revelation. The question that must now be addressed is whether or not one must have such an ecstatic, mystical experience in order to come to such a conviction. In his article, “Karl Rahner, Theologian of the Experience of God?” Rik Van Nieuwenhove argues that “we should abandon all talk of ‘experience of God’ in relation to Rahner’s theology if (as it usually is) this notion of experience of God is understood in terms of an unmediated, passive, transient experience by the human subject.”133 He notes “the hermeneutical difficulties associated with experientialism” in that “it is naïve to think that there is such a phenomenon as pre-linguistic experience. All our experiences in this world are mediated and shaped by language (in the broadest sense).”134 Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness does not deny 132 TI 16:7, 124. 133 Rik Van Nieuwenhove, “Karl Rahner, Theologian of the Experience of God?” Louvain Studies 29 (2004): 92. 134 Van Nieuwenhove, 96. Note that George Lindbeck makes a similar argument, and his argument will be addressed in chapter seven. Endean also protests what he calls a “disjunction between ‘God’s own self ’ and

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this fact. As is seen in Rahner’s description of consolation without cause there is always an understanding that the experience is being had within the cognitive framework of Christianity. For this reason Rahner is even hesitant to address “natural” or “non-Christian” mystical experiences of transcendence.135 Cognitive consciousness is not simply active in subsequent reflection on a common experience; it is also active prior to the experience thus having a formative effect on the experience as well. Contemporary neuroscience demonstrates this fact, as can be seen in the studies of meditation done by Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg.136 D’Aquili and Newburg note not only the different interpretation between the mystical experience of those who report a oneness with God versus those who speak of an impersonal void; they also note a difference in the brain activity leading the former to experience a blissful or positive affect and the latter to experience neutral affect.137 Contemporary understanding of the effect of top-down causality on the brain helps to understand that the difference in cognitive consciousness can actually have an effect on the development of our neuronal pathways, leading to different types of experiences in which different parts of the brain are activated.138 Given the differences in mystical experience, one must ask, is there an experience that is common to all people that can a categorial representation of God” (219) in Rahner’s description of consolation without cause, preferring the distinction between desire and outcome. I would argue along with Rahner that even when “God’s own self is, through grace, expressed in the world of space and time” (Endean, 219), one must still maintain the distinction between the experience and the categorial expression of the experience. The distinction being made is the distinction between affective and cognitive intentionalities of the one consciousness, and therefore is not a disjunction. 135 DE 145-146, n. 34. 136 Eugene D’Aquili and Andrew Newburg, The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999). Also see, “Religious and Mystical States: A Neuropsychological Model,” Zygon 28 (1993): 177-200. Note that their study has not been received without some criticism of their use of scientific techniques. See Michael Spezio, “Engaging d’Aquili and Newberg’s Mystical Mind,” Zygon 36 (2001): 477-484. 137 D’Aquili and Newburg, “Religious and Mystical States,” 178. 138 Carol Rausch Albright, “The ‘God Module’ and the Complexifying Brain,” Zygon 35 (2000): 740.


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lead to an affirmation of a loving, personal God as the horizon of all being? Rahner’s theology affirms that “a transcendental, un-thematic and anonymous experience of the divine accompanies all our acts of knowledge and freedom.”139 Van Nieuwenhove points out, however, that this notion of ‘experience’ in Rahner’s understanding “is not direct; it is not passive; it is not transient; and, most importantly, it precludes understanding the notion of the experience of the divine in terms of subjectobject.”140 One must note, however, that Rahner’s understanding of mystical experience also is not to be understood in terms of subjectobject, but rather subject-subject, hence the use of affective consciousness as the appropriate descriptive category to understand this experience. God is not an object, so there can be no subject-object notion of the experience of God (which is not to say that the experience of God is not subsequently objectified). The analogy of a subject-subject relation from the experience of human relationships is applicable because subject is understood as that which has an infinity that is beyond our ability to know or grasp. While a human being is a finite subject, there is an infinity to the other that resists being ‘totalized’, to use Levinas’s term. Recall that Buber refrains from even using the word ‘experience’ to describe this relation, and instead uses the word ‘encounter’ to imply a distance between the subjects that allows for relationship.141 Cognition implies a subject-object relation in which the subject grasps the object, “reducing others to my mental state of mind and making them the same as my ideas or images of them, ‘totalizing’ them, as Levinas would say.”142 Such is the case when one objectifies another person or God. When the encounter with God is described as affective consciousness, God is allowed to be God beyond one’s cognitive grasp, to remain subject rather than be objectified. The encounter with God as subject is not limited to the mystical encounter. As was noted in chapter two, just as cognition reaches beyond the finite object, so too does affection reach beyond the finite other or subject to the Infinite Other or subject. One cannot examine the mystical experience of God in Rahner without understanding it to be 139 Van Nieuwenhove, 99. 140 Van Nieuwenhove, 100. 141 Tallon, HH, 39. 142 Ibid.

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one end of a continuum of the experience of God in everyday life. The experience of God as Infinite Other is mediated through the affective encounter of the finite infinity of another human person. Chapter four will suggest that it is the affective dimension of consciousness that allows one to name the horizon of everyday experience the personal, loving God of revelation.

4 KARL RAHNER’S THEOLOGY OF THE EVERYDAY EXPERIENCE OF GOD

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arl Rahner maintains the axiom that theology is anthropology and anthropology is theology. This chapter will explore how what Rahner says about God says something about the human person, and what he says about the human person is relevant to his understanding of God. Such an exploration demonstrates the connection between understanding the horizon as loving, personal God and human consciousness as triune. A revision of Rahner’s theological anthropology that allows affective intentionality a distinct and equal place to the volitive and cognitive intentionalities of consciousness is tenable because the basic triune structure of human consciousness is already implicit in Rahner’s description of human experience in terms of knowing, freedom, and love, which for Rahner are also experiences of God. Making the role of affection explicit by allowing affect its own distinct intentionality then makes Rahner’s theological anthropology more credible in dialogue with philosophy and science. Declan Marmion’s work on Rahner’s theology and spirituality highlights the importance of human experience in Rahner’s theology, while at the same time notes that “throughout his writings Rahner frequently uses the term ‘experience’ without defining it.”1 Marmion summarizes Rahner’s understanding of the experience of God in terms of seven characteristics: we can say, firstly, that everyone has such an experience. . . . Secondly, such experience is both unthematic and prior to any subsequent attempt, on our part, at conceptualization analysis. Thirdly, this experience of God is, at the same time, an experience of the self. . . . Fourthly, the experience of God constitutes the radical essence of every personal experience (of love, faithfulness, etc.). . . . Fifthly, religious experience involves gradations—ranging from ordinary ex-

1 Declan Marmion, “Theology, Spirituality, and the Role of Experience in Karl Rahner,” Louvain Studies 29 (2004): 59. Also see Marmion, A Spirituality of Everyday Life, 111.

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the heart of rahner periences of grace to more mystical experiences. Sixthly, religious experience is susceptible of reflection and objectification. . . . Seventhly, the experience of God takes place in concrete, everyday experiences of both a positive and negative kind.2

The discussion of the “experience of God” that ensues in this chapter will presume these seven characteristics. This chapter will begin by exploring the concepts of God and person found in Hearer of the Word before turning to Rahner’s later development of the horizon of human transcendence as holy mystery. The chapter will conclude with a brief exploration of faith and human consciousness.

Hearer of the Word Building on his seminal work in metaphysical anthropology, Spirit in the World, Rahner summarizes his transcendental Thomist position in Hearer of the Word and builds on that position incorporating the human experiences of freedom and love. While Spirit in the World remains primarily in the realm of cognition, Hearer of the Word opens up the possibility of interpreting Rahner’s metaphysical anthropology through the lens of triune consciousness, though Rahner himself maintains a dyadic structure of consciousness, subsuming affect under will. Nevertheless the understanding of human experience in freedom and love is precisely what allows Rahner to name the horizon of human knowing, loving, and freedom as the personal, loving God of Christian revelation rather than stopping at infinite mystery. Through the human experience of cognition, Rahner explains that one affirms both one’s finite contingency and the absolute necessity of that affirmation. The human person inquires about being, and Rahner explains that insofar as we must inquire we affirm our own finite throwness; insofar as we must inquire, we affirm it necessarily. And as we affirm it necessarily, we affirm our existence—in and despite its throwness, as unconditioned, as absolute.3 2 Marmion, Theology, 62. See A Spirituality of Everyday Faith, 122-123. 3 Karl Rahner, Hearer of the Word: Laying the Foundation for a Philosophy of Religion, translation of the first edition by Joseph Donceel; edited and with an Introduction by Andrew Tallon (New York: Continuum, 1994) 67 (hereafter cited as HW). Original edition, Hörer des Wortes: Zur Grundlegung einer Religionsphilosophie (Munich: Kösel-Pustet, 1941); 2nd rev. ed. edited by J. B. Metz, 1963.

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We experience our contingency in the fact that we ask the question about our existence. In the fact that we cannot escape such a question, that we are compelled to ask such a question about our existence, we experience ourselves as affirming our existence as absolute, despite our contingency. Such an absolute affirmation allows volition to enter the picture because for Rahner, “to posit something contingent absolutely is to will.”4 Rahner understands the human person as a being of intellect and will. Rahner goes on to make the case that this necessary affirmation of one’s contingent existence requires that one’s existence be freely posited as absolute, and thus “can only be the work of the absolute being of God,” in which “this positing of the finite being by God must be an act of free will.”5 Thus for Rahner God can be spoken of as “person” when person is understood as intellect and will because in God is absolute self-presence and absolute freedom. From this argument Rahner concludes: it follows we do not stand before pure being, the final horizon of our Vorgriff, as if it were a lifeless [unbeweglichen] ideal which, always at rest, must always be available to our grasp; we stand before it as before a subject of free self-disposition.6

The relationship between a human person and the horizon of knowledge, freedom, and love is not a subject-object relationship but a subject-subject relationship. Freedom is the mark of subjectivity for Rahner. He states that as spirits who know the absolute being, we stand before the latter as before a freely self-disposing person. And this personal face of God is not ascribed to God because we belatedly provide absolute being with human features. Rather God appears as person in the self-disclosure [Sicheröffnen] of absolute being for human transcendence, because absolute being appears in the totality of being about which we not only can but must inquire.7

4 HW, 68. 5 HW, 70. 6 Ibid. All German words/translations offered in brackets in HW citations in this chapter are the translator’s clarifications found in the 1994 English edition. 7 HW, 70.

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In other words, God is not person or subject because humanity projects an image of itself onto God, but because the horizon of being is revealed as such through the experience of human cognition and volition in which one necessarily and absolutely affirms one’s contingent existence. For Rahner God’s subjectivity or personhood is essential to the issue of revelation, because persons are free to reveal themselves to another or not. Human nature does not and cannot demand God’s revelation. Rahner argues that when in our knowledge we meet a free, autonomous person, our knowing slips back into an unknowing. Because of freedom, persons manifest of themselves only what they wish to manifest. . . . Insofar as the free positing of God makes God appear to us as a person, the knowledge of this personal God depends always on God’s own free decision.8

Even when a person freely reveals self, one’s knowledge of that person is still limited because there is always more to a subject than can be objectified. Thus affective intentionality, which is non-objective, is a key component to one’s consciousness of other subjects. For Rahner when humanity is understood as spirit and thus open to God, revelation can be said to be necessary if it is defined as word or silence.9 There is no necessity placed on God because God is free to speak or not speak. Rahner again explains this freedom in the sense of God’s personhood: when persons face one another as free beings, they always manifest themselves, precisely as the persons they wish to be in regard to others: as a person who keeps aloof or as someone who opens up. In this sense revelation occurs necessarily.10

What Rahner fails to grasp, however, is that freedom opens up the space that is necessary for encounter, and encounter between persons requires an affective intentionality that is distinct but not separate from cognitive and volitive intentionality. The openness that is human spirit has an affective dimension in terms of one’s affectability and one’s response-ability or the ability to 8 HW, 70. 9 HW, 72. 10 HW, 73.


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respond to the other. Affective intentionality also plays a role in motivating persons to reveal themselves to one another. The free decision to reveal oneself to another is never based on cognition alone, but also on affection, hence the interrelated nature of cognition, affection, and volition. In using this analogy of personhood or subjectivity in relation to God, a definition of person or subject that is limited to intellect and freedom leaves one with a capricious and arbitrary God. Understanding person as intellect, will, and affect allows the motivation for the free response of revelation, namely love. Why does God reveal? Why does God create (or freely posit as absolute that which is contingent)? Certainly God does so out of complete freedom, but that freedom is better understood in the context of love. God’s love leads to God’s free self-revelation and self-bestowal. In Rahner’s later theology, the supernatural existential is God’s offer of self-communication to every human person. The supernatural existential enables the human person to respond to God, opening up the affective space that is needed for relationship. Rahner is not unaware of the role of affect in the form of love in this process of self-revelation, but when he does address the issue of love, he subsumes it under will and intellect. Rahner explains that the finite has its ground in the free, luminous act of God. But a free, self-present act is love. For love is the luminous will willing the person [gelichtete Wille zur Person] in his or her irreducible uniqueness. It is precisely such a will that God sets in action in creating a finite being. It is God’s way to exercise will in free, creative power. Thus the contingent is understood in God’s love and only in it: the finite contingent being becomes luminous in God’s free love for self and for what God freely creates. Thus love is seen to be the light of knowledge.11

Rahner would agree that the motivation for God’s creation, revelation, and self-bestowal is love; but falling back on an understanding of personhood that is shaped by faculty psychology, love becomes an act of knowledge or will. Rahner has all of the elements of triune consciousness here: cognition manifested in knowledge, volition manifested in freedom, and affection manifested in love. The problem is that he does not allow affection its own intentionality. 11 HW, 81.

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True to his axiom that theology is anthropology and anthropology is theology, Rahner defines human personhood in the same way he has defined the personhood of God. For Rahner the human person is first and foremost knowledge and will, and he recognizes the distinction as well as the unity between the two. Using a “Thomist ontology,” Rahner explains that knowing cannot be adequately grasped in its own essence, unless it be also grasped as will. It follows that willing is not merely an inner aspect of knowing; it is also at the same time a transcendental determination of being, one that proceeds in a certain sense beyond knowing.12

In Tallon’s terms, cognition and volition are distinct but not separate; affection, however, is overlooked entirely in this definition of the human person. Rahner explains that human persons necessarily affirm their existence despite its contingency, but what is being affirmed is the free act of God that “can become luminous and understandable for another only when that other co-performs [mitvollzieht: co-enacts] this act as free act, when the other loves it.”13 Again love is associated with freedom and subsumed under will. Rahner explains that if the free action of God in positing the human person “seems to be dark and unintelligible, it is so only for a knowledge that tries to understand it while standing outside of it,” not “when one takes part in the performing itself, or, by ratifying [Nachvollzug: re-enacting] it, lets it, as it were, emerge also from oneself. In this emerging itself the free activity may be present to itself, i.e., it may be understood.”14 Implicit in Rahner’s explanation is a triune consciousness that understands its existence only through freely affirming and loving that existence. Love becomes the link between volition or free affirmation of self and cognition or self-presence. Rahner states that God’s free action is luminous for us only when we do not merely take it as a fact. We must also ratify [nachvollziehen: re-perform, re-enact, identify with, actively unite with] it in our love for it, thus experiencing [erleben] it, as it were, in its origin and its production. Thus love is the light of the knowledge of the finite and since we know the infinite only through the finite, it is also the light of the 12 HW, 77. 13 HW, 80. 14 Ibid.


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whole of our knowledge. In final analysis, knowledge is but the luminous radiance of love.15

In understanding oneself one becomes conscious of God, and implicit in Rahner’s explanation is the fact that this consciousness of God involves the distinct intentionalities of cognition, volition, and affection experienced in knowledge, freedom, and love. Rahner explains that the knowledge that comes through the ratification of our existence in love and freedom is only possible because of God’s love. Rahner clarifies that insofar as God, in self-love, freely loves as the creator of the finite, God understands the finite itself in this love. In this light the thrown is also raised to the light of being. Because and insofar as God loves the finite, it shares in the luminosity of pure being. There is for it no other way of sharing this light. Only in the logic of love does logic reach the understanding of free being.16

One experiences love, freedom, and knowledge because one shares in the love, freedom, and knowledge of God. Triune consciousness is part of what it means to be created in the image and likeness of God, and it is through the experience of one’s triune consciousness that one becomes aware of the horizon of all love, freedom, and knowledge. So for Rahner, to ratify one’s contingent existence is to ratify God’s free love.17 For Rahner this means that at the heart of the finite spirit’s transcendence there lives a love for God. Our openness toward absolute being is carried by our affirmation of our own existence. This affirmation is a voluntary attitude of ours with regard to ourselves and, in final analysis, a reaching out of finite love for God, because, as will of the spirit, it can affirm the finite only as carried by God’s self-affirmation. This implies that our self-actualizing [sich vollziehende] standing before God through knowing (which constitutes our nature as spirit) possesses, as an intrinsic element of this knowledge, a love for God: our love for God is not something that may happen or not happen, once we have come to know God. As an intrinsic element of knowledge it is both its condition and its ground.18 15 16 17 18

HW, 81. Ibid. HW, 82. HW, 82.

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On the one hand, love clearly is not relegated to the body but is also an essential part of what it means to be spirit. On the other hand, Rahner continues to define this “finite love for God” as “will of the spirit” because in a Thomistic framework spirit is ultimately intellect and will. Nonetheless, the unity of love, knowledge, and freedom is present. The distinction of the intentionalities is also implicit because, as Rahner is describing it here, love is involuntary; it “is not something that may happen or not happen,” and so he falsely subsumes it under will. The affirmation or ratification of that love is voluntary and is an act of will, but the love itself has its own distinct intentionality. Rahner is unable to comprehend this distinction, however, given the framework of faculty psychology, and goes on to note “the mutual relation between willing and knowing as the two inseparable components of the one basic human structure, as we stand before God,”19 once again displaying the way in which affection is neglected in faculty psychology. Rahner leaves out love because to him it is part of will. In a description that brings to mind triune consciousness, Rahner states that “knowledge and love constitute originally the one basic stance of the one human being, so that neither can ever be understood except as a turning into the other, as grasped in function of the other.”20 However when he attempts to explain this relationship in scholastic language, he states that we must conceive of knowledge and of will as essentially intrinsic elements of being and of each being insofar as it is being. . . . Will and knowledge can only be understood in a reciprocal priority with regard to each other; their relation is not a one way affair.21

Human being is knowledge and love or knowledge and will, but Rahner is unable to take the step beyond the identification of love and will to say that human being is knowledge, love, and will because of his dependence on a scholastic framework. Understood within the framework of triune consciousness, human persons experience self as knowledge, will, and love, and thus understand or experience Being, i.e., God, as intelligent, free, and loving. God is personal, and hence subject, not object. 19 Ibid. 20 HW, 83. 21 Ibid.


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An interpretation of the human person in light of triune consciousness is especially fitting as Rahner specifically addresses this human ratification and affirmation of self, and thus of God’s free act. He notes that this affirmation is implicit but conscious.22 As was noted above, this affirmation of self is necessary, but at the same time voluntary in terms of the attitude that is taken toward oneself.23 In Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness, affective intentionality is understood as directed toward value or goodness, whereas cognitive intentionality is directed toward truth, and the interaction of the two leads to volitive intentionality or action. In explaining human knowledge of particular objects, Rahner notes that “insofar as this transcendence happens within a voluntary attitude, these objects are grasped as possible goals of a voluntary attitude, of an affective [emotionalen] decision, i.e., as values.”24 Value perception is affective intentionality. Science has confirmed that emotion and feeling are what allow the person to value one choice over another, and thus are necessary in addition to reason for the person to come to a decision. Rahner recognizes the affective or emotional element in such a decision, but again subsumes affection under volition. Rahner goes on to explain that in perceiving any particular value one transcends the particular and moves toward absolute value, which is God.25 Tallon’s explanation of value perception draws on Scheler’s concept of an ordis amoris or emotional a priori that is the foundation of the ability to perceive value.26 For Rahner this a priori is openness to absolute value, i.e., God, which is the condition of the possibility of openness to any particular value. One is free as regards a single value, and is even free with regard to the conditions of the possibility of our openness to value as such, if and insofar as they become, in our reflection, objects of knowledge. This makes it possible to understand suicide or hatred for God, although implicitly we continue to affirm ourselves and the absolute value, as the conditions of the possibility of our negative attitude with respect to our own existence and to the abso22 23 24 25 26

HW, 83-84. HW, 83-84. HW, 84. HW, 84. HH, 140.

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the heart of rahner lute value. As objects they are not conditions of possibility and that is why we can be free with respect to them.27

In other words, one can cognitively reflect on values and make volitive choices in regard to them. Tallon explains this possibility in terms of conversion, the ability to affect one’s affect-ability (one’s ability to be affected; what one values) or response-ability (one’s ability to respond to value). Human persons can refine what they value. One can even make such decisions about one’s own existence or God. Absolute value (or God) and one’s own existence are necessary as the conditions of the possibility of valuing anything finite, but either can be objectified in reflection and then freely rejected, even though there would be a simultaneously implicit affirmation of self and God/absolute value. One’s everyday activities then affirm or reject a “right order of values” that is “implicitly contained in the transcendence toward being and value.”28 Rahner argues that “love for God, which is necessarily present deep down in human existence, may be explicitly welcomed by us in our free activities, or the latter may contradict it.”29 Furthermore, the free decision about single values (among which belongs also the decision about the absolute value as objectified by our reflection in our a priori openness to values) has a repercussion upon our fundamental openness for the right order of values. This does not mean that this openness could be altogether destroyed. But a free decision about a single value is ultimately always a decision about and a molding of oneself as a person. In every decision we decide about ourselves, not about an action or a thing. Thus in our free decisions we work back upon ourselves; we affect the very criteria of our love, which determine our own being.30

Tallon uses Aquinas’s concepts of habit and virtue to explain this process. An acquired habit is the way one’s actions change one’s being. Through one’s actions and through reflection upon those actions, one can change one’s ability to be affected or one’s affective predisposition. One uses judgment to respond to real, actual value, choosing the objectively good over the subjectively preferred.31 As Rahner notes, “we 27 28 29 30 31

HW, 84. HW, 85. HW, 85. Ibid. HH, 209, 210.


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affect the very criteria of our love.”32 Rahner parenthetically adds that the decision one makes in regard to absolute value, having objectified it in reflection, also affects one’s openness to absolute value. In other words, one’s attitude toward God affects one’s openness to the right order of values and toward God as absolute value. Rahner’s point regarding the decision one makes about God is important when evaluating his concept of the anonymous Christian, because there is a difference between the explicitly believing Christian and the anonymous Christian in his theory, but this concept will be explored further in chapter five. Rahner’s description of one’s ability to affect the person one is and becomes through one’s actions is best understood through triune consciousness. He describes this becoming as the interplay between affection, cognition, and volition, though never using these concepts explicitly. He argues that through our actions we construct, above the true order of love, which we always implicitly affirm . . . our own order of love. We know and act according to our self-chosen order, according to what we ourselves have freely decided. We can behave according to the right order of love only after having rendered it explicit before our minds. That is why we know this order, as established by God, only in combination with the freely constructed order of our love, which we have rightly or wrongly set up through our free reaction to single values.33

Cognition and volition occur according to what one affectively values or loves, but this order of love is constructed through one’s actions and reflection upon those actions. Consciousness is triune and involves the interaction of the three distinct, but not separate, intentionalities of cognition, volition, and affection. In terms of one’s relationship to God, Rahner maintains that our concrete transcendence toward God always contains, as one of its intrinsic elements, a free decision. The free decision does not merely follow from knowledge; it also influences the latter. It follows that the deepest truth is also the freest truth. The way we know and understand God is always also carried by the order or disorder of our love. We do not first know God in a ‘neutral’ way and afterwards decide whether to love or hate God. Such a neutral knowledge, such 32 HW, 85. 33 HW, 86.

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the heart of rahner ‘objectivity’ is an abstraction of the philosophers. It is real only if we suppose that our concrete order of love is correct, that it agrees with the necessary order of love, which comes from God and rules in our innermost being. The concrete way in which we know God is from the start determined by the way we love and value the things that come our way.34

One does not know God through reason alone. One does not come to believe the horizon of cognition is the personal loving God of revelation without experiencing love in this world, and in doing so, making explicit and freely choosing to affirm the absolute love that grounds all human love, God. Prior to his work on triune consciousness, Andrew Tallon wrote Personal Becoming: In Honor of Karl Rahner at 7535 on Karl Rahner’s anthropology. In this work Tallon draws on Metz’s critique “of Rahner’s Thomist starting point and orientation” due to which “his analyses draw almost entirely on experience of the world of things rather than on relations of persons.”36 In Tallon’s interpretation of personal becoming, one becomes a person through interpersonal relationships, through opening oneself to the other in knowledge and love. Such a concept of personhood cannot involve cognition alone, but requires volition and affection as well. Since Tallon had not yet developed his own theory of triune consciousness at this point, he is uncritical of Rahner’s tendency to subsume love under will. Tallon explains that the free act is the act of personal becoming, of self-enactment through self-transcendence (in a cognitive context this self-transcendence is called Vorgriff; in a volitive context, as we shall see, it is called love), i.e., through the other-oriented openness essential to finite spirit as such: a finite being is precisely one who cannot find what he needs in himself, and so must turn to other.37

The seeds of his later understanding of consciousness are already present though, as he argues that 34 HW, 86-87. 35 Andrew Tallon, Personal Becoming: In Honor of Karl Rahner at 75, Revised Edition (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1982) (hereafter cited as PB). Original edition published in The Thomist 43 (1979). 36 PB, 74. 37 PB, 82.


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as long as we remain entirely within a cognitive context, i.e., within a discussion of knowledge, of man as knower—no matter how dynamic the interpretation—we will never reach a satisfying understanding of man as person; we must speak of will, of affectivity, of choice, of freedom.38

This understanding of person that includes knowledge, freedom, and love is enacted in history, which for Tallon means in community. Rahner, due to his Thomist framework and a cognitive bias, has “more focus on things than persons,” but ultimately one’s historicity means “that personal becoming happens within community, i.e., in, through, by and with other persons.”39 Shifting the focus to personal becoming through interpersonal relationship within community, the need for a distinct affective intentionality in consciousness is apparent, because the ability to be affected and respond to the other cannot adequately be explained by the cognitive or volitive intentionalities of consciousness. Tallon notes that Rahner’s metaphysics is more anthropocentric than Thomist metaphysics, but argues that to the extent that this even anthropocentric metaphysics of knowledge is applied to man as person, whose mark is less the transcendence (openness) of intellect than the transcendence (openness) of freedom and love, then it would come under the criticism contained in Kern’s suggestion that categories coming from a cognitive context (for example, self-presence: Beisichsein) cannot, without adaptation, be simply applied to an affective, volitive context. He suggests that spirit cannot be adequately expressed as self-presence (Beisichsein) but as presence to self/other of the self/other: Bei-(dem Selbst/Andern-) Sein (des Andern/selbst). And he suggests that bei (presence) cannot be interpreted merely spatially, but must mean in and with and through (in und mit und durch); becoming person in, with, and through other persons.40

To be a human person in this sense involves interpersonal relationship, and thus affective consciousness is essential to what it means to be a person. Rahner’s later work reflects an integration of the inter38 PB, 76. 39 PB, 88. 40 PB, 90, n. 83. Cites W. Kern, “Einheit-in-Mannigfaltigkeit. Fragmentarische Überlegungen zur Metaphysik des Geistes,” in Gott in Welt. Festgabe für Karl Rahner (Freiburg: Herder, 1964, two vol., ed. by J. B. Metz, W. Kern, A. Darlap, and H. Vorgrimler), Vol. I, 207-239; see esp. 232.

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subjective nature of personhood. In his article, “The Experience of Self and the Experience of God,” he states the only way in which a human being achieves self-realization is through encounters with another person who is rendered present to his experience in knowledge and love in the course of his personal life, one, therefore, who is not a thing or a matter, but a person.41

He goes on to explain the experience of life is an experience of other persons, one in which material objects are encountered as elements connected with, and surrounding concrete persons and not otherwise. . . . The ‘I’ is always related to a ‘Thou’, arising at the same moment in the ‘Thou’ as in the ‘I’, experiencing itself in all cases only in its encounter with the other person. . . . The original objectivity of the experience of self necessarily takes place in the subjectivity of its encounters with other persons in dialogues, in trustful and loving encounter. A human being experiences himself by experiencing the other person and not the other thing.42

Human persons realize their personhood through encounter with the other. This relational aspect of personhood requires an affective intentionality within consciousness distinct from the cognitive and volitive intentionalities of consciousness. One is affected by the other and goes out toward the other. As a transcendent person, who is openness of intellect, freedom, and love, one experiences God as person, the horizon of intellect, freedom, and love. Rahner states that on the one hand the experience of God and the experience of self are one, and on the other that the experience of self and the encounter with neighbor are one, that all these three experiences ultimately

41 Karl Rahner, “The Experience of Self and the Experience of God,” Theological Investigations, Vol. XIII: Theology, Anthropology, Christology, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1975), 125 (hereafter cited as 13:8). See Leo O’Donovan’s article, “Karl Rahner, SJ (1904-1984): A Theologian for the Twenty-First Century,” Theology Today 62 (2005): 352-363, in which he highlights this intersubjective element of human personhood as a “pivotal interpretive issue” in Rahner’s theology. 42 TI 13:8, 127.


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constitute a single reality with three aspects mutually conditioning one another.43

Tallon argues that for Rahner, “God must be part of my community for me to achieve personal becoming,” and that “God, as personal, is at least implicitly included in every statement about person made in HW.”44 If theology is anthropology and anthropology is theology, then understanding triune consciousness as essential to what is meant by person has consequences for one’s understanding of God as personal and is grounded in the understanding of God as personal.

The Horizon of Human Transcendence as Holy Mystery In Foundations of Christian Faith, Rahner moves in the direction indicated by both Metz and Tallon, by focusing not exclusively on the realm of things, but on the human person in a world that is first and foremost intersubjective and interrelational. For Rahner “transcendental knowledge or experience of God is an a posteriori knowledge insofar as man’s transcendental experience of his free subjectivity takes place only in his encounter with the world and especially with other people.”45 Rahner defines the human as person and subject. He explains that “what exactly is meant by these terms can only follow from the whole of our anthropology, and hence only after we have treated man’s transcendence, his responsibility and freedom, his orientation towards the incomprehensible mystery, his being in history and in the world, and his social nature.”46 The experience of being finite spirit in an intersubjective world is what leads to the consciousness of God as person, rather than an impersonal principle or cosmic law.47 In terms of triune consciousness, one can say that affective intentionality, which is necessary for the relation of one human person to another, is also necessary for a human person to be conscious of God as person. 43 TI 13:8, 128. 44 PB, 91. 45 Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 52 (hereafter cited as FCF). Original edition, Grundkurs des Glaubens: Einführung in den Begriff des Chrisentums (Freiburg: Herder, 1978). 46 FCF, 26. 47 FCF, 75.

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As opposed to an understanding of the person that relegates affect to the body while disembodying intellect and will, Rahner’s concept of the human person is also congruent with Tallon’s concept in that it encompasses the unity of body and soul rather than a dualistic understanding of body and soul. For Rahner, to be a human person is to be embodied spirit or enspirited/ensouled body. He notes that from the Christian standpoint there is no reason to limit the claims of empirical anthropology within certain materially and regionally defined areas of human life, and to call what lies within the province of these empirical anthropologies ‘matter’ or ‘body’ or something similar, and then to differentiate this from another part which can be empirically and clearly separated, and call this ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’.48

Rahner does not explicitly refer to the fact that cognition and volition are both embodied and spiritual, but one can infer they are both from his holistic understanding of the human person. Logic then allows one to conclude that an understanding of consciousness in which affection is also embodied and spiritual is not incongruent with Rahner’s anthropology. Throughout the first two chapters of Foundations, Rahner uses the terms experience and knowledge of God interchangeably. He most frequently refers to “knowledge of God,” even while asserting that “the original knowledge of God is not the kind of knowledge in which one grasps an object which happens to present itself directly or indirectly from outside.”49 In other words, Rahner is not referring to cognitive knowledge. He refers to this knowledge of God as “transcendental experience, . . . an experience in which he whom we call ‘God’ encounters man in silence, encounters him as the absolute and the incomprehensible, as the term of his transcendence which cannot really be incorporated into any system of coordinates.”50 The experience is a consciousness of God that is not cognitive consciousness, and can only subsequently be made an object of cognitive consciousness. The experience of God as horizon is an experience of holy mystery. Describing this experience in terms that are clearly affective, Rahner explains that mystery is something with which we are always familiar, something which we love, even when we are terrified by it or perhaps even an48 FCF, 27. 49 FCF, 21. 50 Ibid.


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noyed and angered, and want to be done with it. For the person who has touched his own spiritual depths, what is more familiar, thematically or unthematically, and what is more self-evident than the silent question which goes beyond everything which has already been mastered and controlled, than the unanswered question accepted in humble love, which alone brings wisdom?51

The consciousness of God Rahner describes is an affective consciousness. For Rahner transcendental experience is that “in which a person comes into the presence of the absolute mystery which we call ‘God’, an experience which is more primary than reflection and cannot be recaptured completely by reflection.”52 He clarifies that “a person knows explicitly what is meant by ‘God’ only insofar as he allows his transcendence beyond everything objectively identifiable to enter his consciousness, accepts it, and objectifies in reflection what is already present in his transcendentality.”53 Here Rahner implicitly describes what Tallon calls triune consciousness. The openness to the horizon is affective consciousness; the acceptance of it is volitive consciousness; and the objectifying of it in reflection is cognitive consciousness. To understand God as the term of transcendence, one must understand what it means to be human, for “at this point theology and anthropology necessarily become one.”54 Human transcendence cannot be understood without a discussion of its source and term, which is God; and God at the most basic level of reflection must be understood as the source and term of human transcendence. Rahner, however, does not define the human person in terms of triune consciousness. Despite the role love plays in the experience of the horizon, he maintains an understanding of the human person to be intellect and will. Rahner defines person as “the self-possession of a subject as such in a conscious and free relationship to the totality of itself.”55 In Rahner’s definition “conscious” refers to cognition and “free” refers to volition. Affection is not included. He explains that one is subject and person in that one is confronted by oneself and responsi51 52 53 54 55

FCF, 22. FCF, 44. Ibid. Ibid. FCF, 30.

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ble for one’s self.56 Rahner highlights the cognitive and volitive aspects of the human person but neglects the affective aspect in which one is responsible to and for the other as well. In this openness to or responsiveness to what is other, one encounters the fundamental responseability toward God, and that ability to be affected by and respond to God cannot be accounted for by cognitive or volitive consciousness. At the same time Rahner does describe an affective response when arguing that the horizon cannot be nothingness, because a person experiences both emptiness and inner fragility, but also hope, freedom, and responsibility.57 Rahner maintains that a person “cannot think that the movements of hope and the desire to reach out that he really experiences are only a charming and foolish illusion. He cannot think that the ultimate ground of everything is empty nothingness.”58 In other words, one has an affective intuition that human transcendence is moving toward something meaningful, not just mystery, but holy mystery, the personal God of love. Recall Tallon’s description of human transcendence as affective consciousness, “to desire without possession.” In the longing and hope of human transcendence there is an affective consciousness of God. When one reads Rahner’s transcendental theology, it would appear at first glance that the human experience of transcendence is the movement toward a horizon which is total mystery. The relationship is at most asymptotic; one moves closer but never arrives. Rahner states that “the infinite horizon, which is the term of transcendence and which opens us to unlimited possibilities of encountering this or that particular thing, cannot itself be given a name.”59 For Rahner, to name the horizon is to objectify that which is non-objective. So how does Rahner end up naming the horizon not only holy mystery but 56 FCF, 34. 57 FCF, 33. Note that when Rahner criticizes the view that the horizon is nothingness, he occasionally includes Eastern religions in this group. In the philosophies and religion of the east, nothingness is more accurately understood of no-thing-ness and emptiness as emptiness of any particular object or concept, both ideas that would not be incongruent with Rahner’s understanding of the horizon. See Heidi Russell, “Keiji Nishitani and Karl Rahner: A Response to Nihility,” forthcoming in Buddhist Christian Studies (2008). 58 Ibid. 59 FCF, 61.


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personal, loving God? When Rahner refers to the horizon as holy mystery or even God, his intention is not to objectify the horizon, but rather to name it as that which is nameless.60 The word ‘God’ for Rahner is unique in its ‘emptiness’ as a word, because it does not in and of itself define what it names.61 The horizon is not an object alongside other objects. Rather the horizon is that which “extends beyond our reach and thus offers to knowledge the space for its individual objects of knowledge and love.”62 While Rahner wants to avoid “any kind of ontologism,” he also objects that “going to the extreme of banishing God and of being radically silent about him is and remains false and does violence to the true nature of Christianity.”63 Rahner is able to move beyond horizon as nameless to horizon as God, and not just God, but personal, loving God, because he brings in the affective (even though Rahner never uses the language of affective consciousness) and volitive intentionalities of consciousness. While Rahner’s personalist perspective enables him to utilize the human experiences of freedom and love, he does not manage to completely break free of the presuppositions of faculty psychology; and consequently, continues to subsume love under volition instead of allowing affection its own, distinct intentionality. Yet even within his framework of faculty psychology, Rahner implicitly affirms a triune consciousness. The horizon is not simply the horizon of human knowing, it is also the horizon of freedom and love. He claims that he is able to make the move from naming the horizon mystery to naming it holy mystery because when we speak of transcendence we do not mean only and exclusively the transcendence which is the condition of possibility for categorical knowledge as such. We also and just as much mean the transcendence of freedom, of willing, and of love.64

The cognitive experience of the horizon does not allow one to name the horizon God; it is the affective experience of the horizon that enables such a move. In other words, every act of human knowing, will60 61 62 63 64

FCF, 46, 61. FCF, 46. FCF, 62. FCF, 64. FCF, 65.

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ing, freedom, and love, is an act of human transcendence in which one experiences the ‘more’ beyond all finite objects. In that experience of transcendence, one concurrently and unthematically experiences the horizon that makes finite experience possible but which also in and of itself seems to draw us beyond all finite experience of knowledge, act/ choice, and love. In Rahner’s examples of self-transcendence in love and freedom, one finds a correlation to Tallon’s phenomenological description of human consciousness as triune. In Rahner’s description of human experience, the affective dimension is not limited to love but includes other emotions and feelings such as fear and joy. In addition to the experience of human knowing, Rahner describes times when a person reaches radically beyond himself; on annihilating anxiety, which is something quite different from fear of a definite object and is prior to the latter as the condition of its possibility; on that joy which surpasses all understanding; on an absolute moral obligation in which a person really goes beyond himself; on the experience of death in which he faces himself in his absolute powerlessness.65

Such experiences are experiences of affective consciousness, not cognitive consciousness. These affective experiences are not cognitive because they “surpass all understanding,” and they are not volitive because one cannot will such feelings. One might later reflect on these affective experiences, making the experience and feelings themselves the objects of cognition, but the initial experience is on the level of feeling and emotion, not cognition. Such affective experiences also may move one to choose and to act in a certain way but cannot be attributed to the will initially because one cannot make oneself have the initial experience through an act of will. The affective consciousness engendered in such experiences is not something separate from cognitive and volitive consciousness, but it is distinct. Rahner seems to understand implicitly the affective level of experience as something individual in that it cannot be categorized on an existential or universal level. Affective experience is subjective experience that needs an existentiell mystagogy which would describe and focus the attention of each individual in his concrete existence on those experiences in which he in his individuality had the experience of transcendence and of being taken up out of himself into the ineffable 65 FCF, 70.


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mystery. Since the clarity and persuasiveness of the various individual experiences of this kind—for example, in anxiety, in the subject’s absolute concern, in love’s unshrinking acceptance of responsibility in freedom, in joy, and so on—vary a great deal in individual persons, . . . such a mystagogy into one’s own personal and individual experience of transcendence would have to vary a great deal from person to person.66

Having affective experience is universal, but the specifics of such experience are bound up with all of the uniqueness of the person. Therefore Rahner is not saying, as some of his critics suppose, that there is one universal affective experience in which a person experiences God, but rather that God is co-experienced in the whole realm of diverse affective experiences. Cognition is required to reflect upon those experiences and identify them as experiences of God or not. Cognition also provides the cultural and linguistic framework of the experience, and as was noted in chapter three, that framework itself affects the experience. Triune consciousness gives theology a phenomenological category to address these diverse, affective experiences of the ineffable mystery by acknowledging a distinct affective intentionality in human consciousness. Rahner’s point is correct, however, that such a discussion of affective transcendental experience should not attempt “to describe intentionality as such without discussing its term.”67 Again note that anthropology is theology and vice versa. To discuss human transcendence is to discuss the term and source of that transcendence, and a discussion of the term of transcendence cannot be divorced from the human experience of transcendence. Here Rahner departs from Heidegger and Sheehan who claim a greater legitimacy for discussing human transcendence without addressing its term, which to their way of thinking cannot be known.68 Rahner acknowledges the difficulty of naming the term due to the limitedness of human language and concepts. He acknowledges that he is taking “a shorter, although to be sure less cautious, route” than the philosopher who wants to address “the question of how a transcendental relationship to what he calls being, and a transcendental relationship to God are related and how 66 FCF, 59. 67 Ibid. 68 See Thomas Sheehan, Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations, Series in Continental Thought 9 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987).

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they are to be distinguished,” but does so out of the need to “[risk] an understanding of existence that is always prior to philosophy.”69 Rahner does warn that the while there is an original unity of transcendence and its term, the two are not equal. The unity of transcendence and term is “the unity between that which grounds and freely disposes and that which is grounded.”70 He maintains that “by its very nature subjectivity is always a transcendence which listens, which does not control, which is overwhelmed by mystery and opened up by mystery.”71 Again the openness and response-ability, the “listening” of the human subject to mystery can be phenomenologically understood as affective intentionality. The very fact that this experience of mystery is one that the subject “does not control” demonstrates that this experience is not one of volitive consciousness. Rahner also connects the experience of self-transcendence in love and freedom with the ability to name the term of the self-transcendence as God. While Rahner explicitly declares transcendence to be not just “the condition of possibility for categorical knowledge,” but also “transcendence of freedom, of willing and of love,” he still subsumes love under will.72 A spiritual subject for Rahner is one that is knowing and free, but he also states that freedom is always the freedom of a subject who exists in interpersonal communication with other subjects. Therefore it is necessarily freedom vis-à-vis another subject of transcendence, and this transcendence is not primarily the condition of possibility for knowing things, but is the condition of possibility for a subject being present to himself and just as basically and originally being present to another subject. But for a subject who is present to himself to affirm freely vis-à-vis another subject means ultimately to love.73

Rahner has just described affective intentionality, even while continuing to subsume affective intentionality under will. Human tran69 FCF, 60. Note here that Rahner is describing an experience prior to both theology and philosophy as opposed to setting up a philosophy as a neutral grounding of theology. This point will be relevant when addressing Karen Kilby’s critique of Rahner in chapter seven. 70 FCF, 58. 71 Ibid. 72 FCF, 65. 73 FCF, 65.


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scendence is not simply a cognitive and volitive experience; it is also an affective experience. Human experience is intersubjective. Intersubjectivity demands a response to the other, and an affirmation of self only in and through relationship to what is other. That relational space, and especially the response of love, is ultimately an affective experience and response. The cognitive and volitive intentionalities of consciousness are not adequate to describe the experience of intersubjectivity; affective intentionality is also required. Rahner argues that if one understands human transcendence to include freedom, willing, and love, then we must also take into account the character of the term and source of transcendence as love. It is a term which possesses absolute freedom, and this term is at work in freedom and in love as that which is nameless and which is not at our disposal, for we are completely at its disposal. It is what opens up my own transcendence as freedom and as love.74

Rahner proposes that the horizon is the God of love, making the analogy that God is personal, i.e., loving and free, because God is the term of human loving and freedom. Rahner uses the phrase “holy mystery” for the horizon because he understands “mystery” to address the term of our cognitive transcendence and “holy” to address the term and source of our freedom and love.75 The word “holy,” by adding love and freedom to cognition, allows for faith. Cognition alone cannot account for faith. In that sense critics of Rahner, such as Thomas Sheehan, are right in noting that within the realm of cognition alone one should stay with the movement inherent in human experience rather than trying to talk about the term of that movement which can at most be called mystery.76 However, when one allows for the human experience of transcendence in freedom and love, Rahner can call the term of that transcendence ‘holy’, and state that the love which is “in the presence of

74 Ibid. 75 FCF, 66. Also see Karl Rahner, “The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology,” in Theological Investigations IV: More Recent Writings, trans. Kevin Smyth (Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press, 1966), 52-54 (hereafter cited as TI 4:2). 76 Sheehan, Karl Rahner, 317.

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the incomprehensible and the ineffable necessarily becomes worship.”77 Rahner warns that the term must be called holy mystery, lest in focusing upon the knowledge element we overlook the transcendentality of freedom and love, so that both elements remain present in their original and personal unity. The two words ‘holy mystery’, which are understood as a unity, but between which nevertheless there is an intrinsic difference, express equally the transcendentality both of knowledge and of freedom and love.78

Rahner has captured the essence of triune consciousness in this statement, noting the unity and intrinsic difference of the elements of knowledge, freedom, and love, but at the same time he continues to group freedom and love together so that God is mystery in terms of cognitive consciousness and holy in terms of volitive consciousness. In a theory of triune consciousness, love is to affective consciousness what freedom is to volitive consciousness, as opposed to grouping both under volition. Through one’s experience of love, as distinct from experiences of knowledge and freedom, there is an affective consciousness of the term of one’s movement. That experience engenders a conviction that one’s movement is not absurd and meaningless but is grounded in and moving toward an absolute love that can be called God. Rahner goes further to state that God is not simply holy mystery, but “is a person, is the absolute person who stands in absolute freedom vis-à-vis everything which he establishes as different from himself.”79 Rahner asserts that the claim of God’s personhood is self-evident because “the ground of a reality which exists must possess in itself beforehand and in absolute fullness and purity this reality that is grounded by it, because otherwise this ground could not be the ground of what is grounded.”80 Of course Rahner is quick to assert that God is not person in the same sense that the human is person with all of the finite limitations thus imposed. Rahner warns that the assertion that God is person must be “open to the ineffable darkness of the holy mystery.”81 Rahner argues that the assertion that God is person must “receive its content from our historical experience” so that “we allow God to be 77 78 79 80 81

FCF, 66. Ibid. FCF, 73. FCF, 73-74. FCF, 74.


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person in the way in which he in fact wants to encounter us and has encountered us in our individual histories, in the depths of our conscience, and in the whole history of the human race.”82 To speak of God as person in terms of God’s encounter with humanity is to speak of intersubjectivity and therefore affectivity. Rahner’s theology does not require an ecstatic, mystical experience of union with God in order to truly ground such a conviction but sees that mystical union as an extraordinary experience of the ‘everyday’ reality of such a union with God that grounds all human loving and freedom. The experience of God as the source and term of human transcendence in love and freedom is not a cognitive experience. This experience of God is unthematic and non-objective, but is experienced in every human act of love and freedom. The non-cognitive concurrent experience of the horizon as love is an affective consciousness that the human dynamism of transcendence is moving toward the horizon of personal, loving holy mystery that we call God. Rahner makes a break with philosophers such as Sheehan and Heidegger at this point because it is love that breaks one out of the anxiety of a human dynamism without a perceived destination. The experience of love is an experience of God that is given to us ultimately in grace. For Sheehan and Heidegger, the human is left to his/her own powers to break out of this anxiety or angst. For Rahner the human is empowered by God, the ground, source, and term of our experiences of love, freedom, and knowledge. In his article, “The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology,”83 Rahner implicitly affirms the idea of a triune consciousness, especially in terms of the unity and distinction of the intentionalities, but given his presupposition of a faculty psychology, he continues to subsume affection under volition. He is attempting to move beyond the limitations of faculty psychology by the emphasis he places on love but does not have the conceptual categories to do so in a coherent manner. He also remains within the realm of subject-object relations in this article instead of moving into the realm of subject-subject relations to talk about one’s relationship to holy mystery, thus staying within the cognitive realm of human experience. 82 Ibid. 83 TI 4:2, 36-73.

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Rahner’s understanding of knowing, willing, and loving supports the idea of a triune consciousness in which all three intentionalities are distinct but have a more basic unity within the one consciousness of the human person. Rahner actually uses a Trinitarian metaphor to talk about “the nature of spirit as being one in the ‘perichoresis’ (circumincession) of knowledge and love.”84 He excludes volition in this perichoresis because he identifies love as part of volition. Rahner rejects any dualism of knowledge and love, because of the oneness of the subject who is knowing and loving,85 or in Tallon’s terms, the oneness of consciousness in the individual subject. Rahner states that this one being must have a primordial and total relationship to itself and absolute being: a basic act, whose components are the interrelated and interdependent acts of knowing and willing, of insight and love, as we call them empirically. But this must ultimately mean that while guarding the distinction between knowing and willing, we must understand the act of knowing in such a way that it will explain why knowledge can only exist in a being when and in so far as that one being realizes itself by an act of love. In other words, the self-transcendence of knowledge, the fact that it comes to be only in so far as it passes over into something else, must be understood in this way: knowledge, though prior to love and freedom, can only be realized in its true sense when and in so far as the subject is more than knowledge, when in fact it is a freely given love.86

Note how Rahner correlates insight to knowing and love to willing, subsuming love under volition. Furthermore, he once again associates freedom and love as two aspects of volition instead of interpreting love as an aspect of affection with its own intentionality. He does, however, recognize the interrelatedness and interdependence of knowledge, love, and freedom and sees human self-transcendence as ultimately involving all three intentionalities. Such self-transcendence in knowledge, love, and freedom is only possible if knowledge is ultimately a faculty ordained to an object greater than the faculty. And what but the incomprehensibility of mystery can be such an object of knowledge, since it forces 84 TI 4:2, 42. 85 Ibid. 86 TI 4:2, 42-43.


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knowledge to surpass itself and both preserve and transform itself in a more comprehensive act, that of love?”87

Note that while Rahner highlights love as the more comprehensive act, he remains within the framework of subject-object relations more suitable to cognition due to his dependence on a faculty psychology. Love, as affective intentionality, moves one from the realm of subjectobject relations to the realm of subject-subject relations. Rahner’s language also demonstrates a movement from the cognitive realm to the affective realm when he describes the experience of consciousness that is not only reason but love. He explains that “as distinct from love [knowledge] is the faculty which grasps the object to submit it to its a priori laws, the faculty of weighing and judging, of seizing and comprehending.”88 Rahner’s description of knowledge aligns with Lonergan’s phenomenology of knowledge. Rahner understands that as the aspect of consciousness that seizes and comprehends, knowledge alone cannot account for an experience of the horizon that leads to a belief in a personal God. He is unable to allow affection its own intentionality however, even when his language moves from the realm of cognition to the realm of affection. He argues that in so far as the reason is more than reason, when it is understood as a potentiality only to be actuated in love, then it must indeed be the faculty which welcomes the greater sight unseen, the faculty of simple rapture, of submissive dedication, of loving ecstasy. But this it can only be if its most proper object is that sovereign and all-embracing exigence which cannot be mastered, comprehended or challenged: in a word, the mystery. And mystery is not merely a way of saying that reason has not yet completed its victory. It is the goal where reason arrives when it attains its perfection by becoming love.89

Affective consciousness allows for the desire that does not possess, to use Tallon’s words, along with the cognitive touch that cannot grasp the infinite mystery of God. Allowing for the subjectivity of the other as opposed to objectifying the other in cognitive consciousness is an inherent part of the intersubjectivity of affective consciousness. Due to its non-objective intentionality, affective consciousness allows an 87 TI 4:2, 43. 88 Ibid. 89 TI 4:2, 43.

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awareness of God as loving mystery, as personal subject, that goes beyond the awareness of cognitive consciousness, which objectifies the experience of the horizon in human consciousness. Both aspects of consciousness are necessary, however, because within the unity of consciousness the human person must objectify the experience in order to reflect on it, even while recognizing that the experience always exceeds the person’s ability to objectify it. Rahner acknowledges the unity of the human person and argues “there must be one last key-word which conjures up the essence of man, not two or three. And this Thomist intellectualism cannot deny that in Christianity the last word is with love and not knowledge. For we are not saved by knowledge but by love.”90

Faith and Human Consciousness Rahner addresses this experience of consciousness of God as faith in his article “Faith Between Rationality and Emotion.”91 In this article Rahner defines freedom as emotion, ultimately changing the topic from “faith between rationality and emotion” to “faith between rationality and freedom.”92 Again Rahner ultimately identifies the affective and volitive intentionalities of human consciousness. On a positive note, he comprehends the inherent connection between affection and volition as well as the manner in which the interplay of cognition and affection move one to volition, but due to the presupposition of a faculty psychology, he does not have the conceptual vocabulary to adequately describe the experience. Rahner begins by defining reason and emotion as essentially opposed to one another. While not denying that “ideally emotion and rationality are to be brought into harmony, so that emotion, in so far as it is legitimate, appears reasonable and rationality is accepted as desirable by the emotions,” he states that “we are considering emotion in so far as it is not covered by reason.”93 He explains that “it is crucial for 90 TI 4:2, 43. 91 Karl Rahner, “Faith Between Rationality and Emotion,” in Theological Investigations XVI: Experience of the Spirit: Source of Theology, trans. David Morland (New York: Crossroad, 1979), 60-78 (hereafter referred to as TI 16:5). 92 TI 16:5, 64. 93 TI 16:5, 63.


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our case that in fact such an element exists in emotion which is not rationally thought through and organized, which cannot be analysed adequately in any conceivable finite process and which is rationally recognized as such.”94 Rahner includes in the category of emotion particular moods and individual dispositions, patterns of behaviour biologically determined and conditioned by historical development, impulses and repressions, aggression and fears, both individual and collective, unthought out ideals, opinions, realms of understanding which are biologically, racially or socially conditioned and have an effect prior to any rational justification and analysis.95

He then highlights a “completely different category of emotion,” namely freedom.96 He categorizes freedom as part of emotion because of the inability of rationality to account for free decisions and the inability of freedom to be understood exclusively in terms of rationality. As has been noted in earlier chapters, both phenomenology and contemporary science would concur with Rahner’s points about freedom, but neither would categorize freedom as emotion due to those facts. First Rahner argues that free decisions and objective expressions inevitably are based on something and a condition of their possibility lies in all the emotional states. . . . No motivation, however rational it may and should be, can be sufficiently thought through (in the sense defined earlier) and justified, so that all emotional factors are excluded. Any reflection upon such motivation is always affected by particular forces which themselves cannot be adequately examined because this would lead to an endless process of reflection.97

Rahner’s observation concurs with contemporary scientific evidence that one cannot make a decision based on reason alone but also must have emotions and feelings which allow one to value one decision over another. Reason alone simply leads to an endless analysis of the different possibilities but leaves one paralyzed in the face of an actual decision. The interplay of affection and cognition are what lead to volition. Second Rahner notes that 94 95 96 97

TI 16:5, 63. Ibid. Ibid. TI 16:5, 63-64.

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the heart of rahner freedom of its essence cannot be subjected to adequate rational investigation. For freedom as such, i.e., the choice amongst a number of possibilities, is independent of its biological, psychological, social, etc. presuppositions. It is creative, which means that it does not, in its own self-realisation, merely put into effect what is sanctioned by reason, but sets goals in a creative manner which cannot be justified by a purely functional rationality.98

While Rahner continues to identify freedom and emotion, his first point highlights the distinct intentionality of affection from both cognition and volition, and his second point highlights the distinct intentionality of volition from cognition. Given his presupposition of a faculty psychology that does not allow affection its own intentionality, Rahner mistakenly concludes from these facts that “even if freedom does possess its own peculiar character, nevertheless it is a reality which, in its individuality, can be counted as belonging to the emotional element in man.”99 Due to the dependency of volition on affection, Rahner does not allow each a distinct intentionality. He does not collapse volition and cognition in a similar manner because he recognizes that freedom is not reducible to reason alone, but also because the framework of faculty psychology he presupposes already distinguishes between cognition and volition. Having identified freedom and emotion, Rahner is now prepared to situate faith between rationality and freedom instead of between rationality and emotion, thus collapsing a human triune consciousness into the familiar dyad of intellect and will. While Rahner acknowledges that “faith is indeed in part determined by such emotions and is continually placed in question by the rational process of critical analysis made of these emotions,” ultimately he defines faith as “the realization of freedom” in self-determination.100 However, the way in which Rahner understands human self-determination in freedom lends itself to an implicit understanding of faith as an experience of triune consciousness. He defines Christian faith as the ultimate event of rationality and emotion as a single whole, given only that rationality is grasped as rooted in the mystery of God and emotion is seen as the freedom by which a person comes 98 TI 16:5, 64. 99 Ibid. 100 TI 16:5, 64, 65.


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to definitive self-acceptance and in which rationality, rightly understood, first discovers its genuine fulfillment in the acceptance of the mystery. Since Christian faith forms the totality of rationality and emotion and binds them together, it cannot be determined by any other reality outside itself, or by the experience of such reality, as long as we grasp the basic meaning of faith. It is rather the self-realisation of rationality and emotion coming to free and eschatological fulfillment in history.101

Put in Tallon’s words, “faith is neither a cognition nor an affection alone, but is a free, voluntary assent of the whole person based on and made possible by both cognition and affection, both head and heart, arising from one’s fundamental attunement, which is the deeper quasi- intentional Vorgriff toward the non-objective horizon of being.”102 Put into intersubjective terms, Tallon concludes that “faith is the form cognition takes when the other is a person, and prayer is the bridge” which, as vocative, allows for the freedom of the other.103 Faith, for Rahner, is one of those absolute commitments that is both necessary and possible despite the inability to cognitively grasp the “object” of one’s faith. He specifically highlights this aspect of faith in his article, “Reflections on the New Task for Fundamental Theology.”104 In this article Rahner notes the disparity between “the relative human certainty of arguments of fundamental theology for the existence of a divine revelation and the absolute commitment of faith.”105 He further argues that traditional explanations for overcoming this disparity are inadequate in that “they simply appeal to the decision of ‘the will’,” in that “the will is supposed to overcome the disparity mentioned above but it is never made clear what justifies a man in making the absolute assent of faith.”106 He points out that the usual answer is grace, 101 TI 16:5, 70. 102 Andrew Tallon, “Feeling and Faith: The Connatural Attunement of the Believer,” Paper presented at the 45th Annual Wheaton College Philosophy Conference, Wheaton, IL, 30 October 1998, 2. 103 Ibid., 9. 104 Karl Rahner, “Reflections on the New Task for Fundamental Theology,” in Theological Investigations XVI: Experience of the Spirit: Source of Theology, trans. David Morland (NY: Seabury, 1979), 159-165 (hereafter cited as TI 16:9). 105 TI 16:9, 160. 106 TI 16:9, 161.

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but argues that grace as such must then be more definitively defined. Rahner then appeals to the spiritual exercises and the rules of discernment as an example of a time where conviction comes not from rational reflection alone, which only provides a relative certainty, but from the experience of God’s grace.107 Rahner argues that “the grace of faith must not appear as a theological postulate, a ‘deus ex machina’ which lies quite beyond verification,” but rather must be understood as “the radical reference of the transcendence of man to the immediate reality of God, and therefore a fundamental element present in human consciousness, i.e., a ‘supernatural’ formal object.”108 In terms of Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness one can argue that cognition needs affection (and vice versa) to move toward volition, but for Rahner and Tallon faith ultimately requires an experience of grace as “a fundamental element present in human consciousness” as well. To understand the human experience of God in terms of triune consciousness then, one must turn to the concept of grace in a theory of triune consciousness.

107 TI 16:9, 162. 108 TI 16:9, 164-165.

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or Karl Rahner the experience of God in one’s everyday life must be grounded in grace. Rahner understands the world and humankind to be always already embraced by the gift of God’s self-communication at least in the mode of offer. Such selfcommunicative love has an impact on the created world; the world and humankind are other than they would have been had God not freely chosen to communicate Godself to the world. This chapter will explore the implications of Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness for Rahner’s theology of grace and his understanding of the anonymous Christian. The first section of this chapter will explore the concept of connaturality in relation to Rahner’s theology of grace specifically correlating God’s offer of self-communication and the supernatural existential with prevenient connaturality and one’s acceptance of that offer with operative connaturality. The third section will explicate Rahner’s concept of the anonymous Christian using the interpretive framework of connaturality and triune consciousness, and the final section will respond to some of the critiques that have been leveled against this concept of the anonymous Christian.

Prevenient, Operative, and Subsequent Connaturality As was explained in chapter two, prevenient connaturality is when connaturality is the effect of affection or of being loved by God. This is the type of connaturality that Tallon describes as occuring between friends or lovers and is based on the differences between persons rather than their sameness or likeness.1 This form of connaturality “is a going out toward union” with the other where “two persons are not already one but want to be one, desire to become one.” 2 Tallon adds that “when God loves us, flooding our hearts with the Holy Spirit 1 Tallon, “Doctrinal Development,” 364. Tallon uses the term “consequent connaturality.” 2 Ibid., 364.

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who is given to us, this grace creates connaturality, divinizing us, and we find our whole consciousness changed, our horizon transformed; nothing is the same again.”3 In applying this concept of consequent connaturality to the relationship between God and the human person, it is clear that God and the human person are not already one and that the difference between the two that the connaturality is based upon is the difference between God and creature. The love in this instance is not a mutual love, but rather God’s love for humankind, and therefore I am calling the effect on humanity prevenient connaturality. The distinction between God and creature and the non-dependent nature of God’s freely given love protect the traditional concept of the double gratuity of creation and grace. God’s love for humankind and offer of self-communication to humankind create connaturality with God, the shared likeness and possibility of union of the human person and God. Thus as Tallon notes, human consciousness is changed and the horizon is transformed. The world is other than it would have been had God not freely chosen to love humankind. The relationship between God and the human person is not simply asymptotic, a horizon one moves toward but never reaches, because God has drawn close to humankind in offering God’s self-communicative love. Contrary, however, to Tallon’s statement which seems to imply a change in consciousness occurring in one’s lifetime, this prevenient connaturality is part of the de facto human person, what Rahner calls the supernatural existential. Rahner refers to pure nature as a Restbegriff, a remainder concept. There is no pure nature existing apart from God’s grace in this world; there is only nature always already embraced by God’s love. God loves humanity and offers Godself to humanity from the moment of creation. Tallon is correct in noting a human experience of consciousness of God’s love, but that coming to awareness of who one is by connaturality in which one finds oneself transformed by the very realization of one’s connaturalized self is operative connaturality. Operative connaturality is when connaturality is the cause of love or affection between two persons, as in family relationships.4 The union is given by nature and is prior to the love or affection between persons. Again, when applying this concept to God and humanity, there is no mutuality involved. That is to say, connaturality does not cause 3 Ibid., 365. 4 Ibid., 364. Tallon uses the term “antecedent connaturality.”

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God to love the human person, but it can enable the human person to love God. In the relationship between God and the human person, one is able to respond to God because one has been connaturalized to God. One’s response to God in love is enabled by grace. We love God because God first loved us. Such a love of God, however, requires an awareness of one’s shared form, the connaturality with God that one has because of God’s love. So prevenient connaturality is accounted for by God’s love of humanity, and operative connaturality explains the human person’s love of God, which is made possible by that connaturality. These concepts must be explored further in light of Karl Rahner’s theology of grace.

The Theology of Grace Karl Rahner’s theology of grace is grounded on the primacy of uncreated grace, the self-communication of God to the created world.5 God’s self-communication to the human person exists in the modes of offer and acceptance. God’s self-communication has divinizing effects in the human person which the theological tradition calls created grace. Tallon’s concept of connaturality can be understood as one of the divinizing effects of created grace, so long as a reified understanding of connaturality is avoided. One’s initial prevenient connaturality is a result of the offer of God’s self-communication, and operative connaturality corresponds to one’s acceptance of the offer. A continuing deepening of one’s connaturality or subsequent connaturality results from the fact that the acceptance of God’s offer is a process that takes place over one’s entire lifetime. In Foundations of Christian Faith, Rahner’s chapter on grace specifically addresses God’s self-communication in the modes of offer (even in the face of rejection) and acceptance, which correspond to prevenient and operative connaturality. Rahner defines the term self-communication as “signify[ing] that God in his own most proper reality makes himself the innermost constitutive element of man,” but warns that this self-communication “should not be understood merely in an objectivistic sense, objectified and reified, as it were.”6 Such a warning 5 See Karl Rahner, “Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace,” Theological Investigations, Vol. I: Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961), 319-346 (hereafter cited as TI 1:10). 6 FCF, 116.

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is useful when using the concept of connaturality as a way to speak about God’s self-communication, in that God’s self-communication must always be understood as broader than the connaturalizing effect it has on the human person. While Tallon addresses connaturality primarily in terms of affective attunement, it also must be noted that God’s offer of self-communication is present to the human person on the level of the unity of consciousness; and therefore the ultimate selfrealization of one’s connaturality must involve cognition and affection leading to volitive action. When Rahner describes the human person as the event of God’s self-communication, he explains that “‘self-communication’ is meant here in a strictly ontological sense corresponding to man’s essential being, man whose being is being-present-to-himself, and being personally responsible for himself in self-consciousness and freedom.”7 Once again Rahner is using self-consciousness to refer to cognitive consciousness and limiting the human person’s essential being to cognition and volition. Given the relational nature of the human person that has been defined by Tallon as affective, there is an affective dimension missing in Rahner’s definition that involves being able to respond to the other, including being able to respond to God. Thus one is not only responsible for oneself, one is response-able to and for the other as well. God’s self-communication, as the innermost constitutive element of human existence or one’s connaturality to God, is what enables one or gives one the capacity to respond to the other. We are able to love because God has first loved us. The capacity to respond to what is other is the result of a connaturality that is both prevenient (the result of God’s love) and operative (prior to and enabling our ability to love). Rahner explains that God’s universal will to save objectifies itself in that communication of himself which we call grace. It does this effectively at all times and in all places in the form of the offering and the enabling power of acting in a way that leads to salvation.8

The capacity to respond, in this instance first and foremost to God, is a result of God’s wanting to be in union with humankind and the gratuitous offer of self that enables humankind to be in union with God. Rahner notes that the human person 7 FCF, 117. 8 TI 14:17, 288.


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must be able to accept [this Love which is God himself ] (and hence grace, the beatific vision) as one who has room and scope, understanding and desire for it. Thus he must have a real ‘potency’ for it. He must have it always. He is indeed someone always addressed and claimed by this Love. For, as he now in fact is, he is created for it; he is thought and called into being so that Love might bestow itself. To this extent this ‘potency’ is what is inmost and most authentic in him, the centre and root of what he is absolutely.9

The actualization of that potency or capacity for God’s love can be called operative connaturality because the connaturality is what enables the response. Rahner states that God’s self-communication is “for the sake of knowing and possessing God in immediate vision and love.”10 In other words, God’s self-communication is for the sake of both cognitive and affective consciousness of God that will only find fulfillment in the beatific vision when rather than knowing and possessing God, one will find oneself grasped and possessed by God. Recall Tallon’s description of human consciousness of the horizon as both touching without grasping (cognitive consciousness) and desire without possession (affective consciousness). The deepening triune consciousness of God’s self-communication is a possibility that continues throughout one’s lifetime and culminates in the beatific vision.11 Rahner defines grace as “the communication of God’s Holy Spirit” and explains that in grace the event of the immediacy to God as man’s fulfillment [in beatific vision] is prepared for in such a way that we must say of man here and now that he participates in God’s being; that he has been given the divine Spirit who fathoms the depths of God; that he is already God’s son here and now, and what he already is must only become manifest.12 9 TI 1:9, 311. 10 FCF, 117-118. 11 One must not assume such a deepening of consciousness necessarily occurs (after all, humans are free to reject God’s offer) nor that the deepening of consciousness is necessarily a linear and progressive movement. Given the dynamic nature of human consciousness, self-awareness and awareness of God can fluctuate through one’s lifetime. 12 FCF, 120.

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The human person participates in God’s being. While not “son” by nature, the human person is already “son” by adoption through grace, that is to say, through prevenient connaturality, a shared nature that is the result of God’s love for the human person. God freely desires to be in union with creation and so chooses to communicate God’s own form to the human person. God’s love for the human person creates the shared form prior to any action of love on the individual’s part, and is thus prevenient connaturality. Christ shares a form with God by nature, but God has shared a form with all of humanity out of love. That form is not part of human nature but is the purely gratuitous consequence of God’s love. In Rahner’s vocabulary God’s communication of God’s own self to the human person in grace is called quasiformal causality. He defines formal causality as causality in which “a principle of being is a constitutive element in another subject by the fact that it communicates itself to this subject.”13 In using this concept analogously to speak of God, Rahner qualifies it as “quasi-formal causality,” because in the case of God the formal cause “retains in itself its own essence absolutely intact and in absolute freedom.”14 Generally in formal causality, the formal cause would be affected by becoming a constitutive element in what is other. Rahner speaks of quasi-formal causality because God is not affected by this sharing of self. At this point the love that leads to a sharing of form is not yet a mutual love, but refers exclusively to God’s love for the human person and so is called prevenient connaturality. Rahner does not use the concept of prevenient connaturality, but he does use the concept of God’s self-communication in the mode of an antecedent and enduring offer, as a supernatural existential of the human person.15 For Rahner the primary human situation consists of the fact that the world has always already been embraced by God’s offer of self-communication. Rahner uses the term “supernatural existential” to describe this situation in which God’s offer of Godself is always a gratuitous gift, not owed to the human person in any way, and thus supernatural. At the same time the offer is made to every human 13 FCF, 121. 14 Ibid. 15 There is some debate on whether the supernatural existential is the offer itself or the effect of the offer. See Coffey’s article, “The Whole Rahner on the Supernatural Existential.”


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person and thus is an existential of human existence, present prior to any decision the human person makes. Rahner explains that if God gives creation and man above all a supernatural end and this end is first ‘in intentione’, then man (and the world) is by that very fact always and everywhere inwardly other in structure than he would be if he did not have this end, and hence other as well before he has reached this end partially (the grace which justifies) or wholly (the beatific vision).16

Another term for this “otherness in structure” is prevenient connaturality. The human person is connaturalized to God because of God’s love which is offered to humankind prior to any action or decision the human person makes. As was noted above, for Tallon connaturality is about affective attunement, not cognition. Grace is the “miracle of God’s free love” as an offer that is “present in all men as an existential of their concrete existence, and is present prior to their freedom, their self-understanding and their experience.”17 Rahner maintains that neither the gratuitousness nor the supernatural nature of the offer is jeopardized by the fact that it is present to all people at least in the mode of an offer. He explains that “this divine self-communication as permanently offered to freedom can exist merely in the mode of an antecedent offer, in the mode of acceptance and in the mode of 16 Karl Rahner, “Concerning the Relationship Between Nature and Grace,” Theological Investigations, Vol. I: Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961), 302-303 (hereafter cited as TI 1:9). Note that there has been some debate regarding the supernatural existential and whether it refers specifically to the human person or also to the setting of the person’s existence. David Coffey would argue that it refers specifically to the person (see his article, “The Whole Rahner on the Supernatural Existential,” Theological Studies 65 (2004) 95-118), whereas William Shepherd would argue for the importance of the wider reference to the setting of human existence (see his book, Man’s Condition: God and the World Process, New York: Herder and Herder, 1969). While the answer to this question is not relevant to the discussion of connaturality in this chapter, which will focus on the effect of the supernatural existential on the individual person, I would argue that for Rahner the supernatural existential referred both to humankind and the world as the setting of human existence (see A Study of Karl Rahner’s Theology of Nature and Grace, (M.A. thesis, Washington Theological Union, 2000). 17 FCF, 127.

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rejection.”18 The offer of God’s self-communication grounds and enables any acceptance of that offer. Rahner explains that God’s self-communication must always be present in man as the prior condition of possibility for its acceptance. This is true insofar as man must be understood as a subject who is capable of such an acceptance, and therefore obligated to it.19

The offer is an innermost, constitutive element of the human person, and it is permanent. The person is connaturalized to God. Human freedom enables one to reject the innermost offer, but it cannot negate the offer. In rejecting the offer of God’s self-communication, one rejects who one is and does so by a freedom that is grounded in the very offer of self-communicative love that one is rejecting. For Rahner there is a radical distinction between grace as offered and grace as accepted, though the acceptance need not be understood as cognitive acceptance.20 All human existence involves prevenient connaturality, but all human existence does not necessarily imply operative or subsequent connaturality. While God’s offer of self-communication, as was noted above, is experienced in consciousness as quasi-intentional, there is a fittingness between affective consciousness and consciousness of God’s offer of self because of the unobjective and non-representational nature of the offer (recall that in chapter two this fittingness was compared to the appropriation of a certain action to one of the persons of the Trinity). Rahner explains that basically and originally man does not encounter this supernatural constitution as an object. The supernatural constitution of man’s transcendentality due to God’s offer of self-communication is a modality of his original and unthematic subjectivity. Hence his modality can at most, if at all, be made thematic in a subsequent reflection and objectified in a subsequent concept. Such a supernatural transcendentality is just as inconspicuous and can be just

18 FCF, 128. 19 Ibid. 20 Karl Rahner, “Atheism and Implicit Christianity,” in Theological Investigations Vol. IX: Writings of 1965-1967, I, trans. Graham Harrison (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 146 (hereafter cited as TI 9:9).


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as much overlooked, suppressed, denied and falsely interpreted as everything else which is transcendentally spiritual in man.21

The constitution or connaturality that the human person experiences is unthematic, and so can be described through affective consciousness. The offer and the ability to respond to that offer engender an obligation to respond. The response to God’s offer of self-communication, however, may be on a non-cognitive level of consciousness or may be interpreted through an alternative cognitive framework (i.e., not Christian). At the same time, full human integrity demands a synthesis of cognitive and affective consciousness moving one to volitive action; so subsequent cognitive reflection and cognitive awareness of God’s love that connaturalizes one, enabling one’s response, is necessary for authenticity and integrity of human life. Therefore Rahner, while allowing for a positive response that involves a false cognitive interpretation or even the possibility of no cognitive interpretation, understands the full integrity of the human person to be manifest in the recognition of one’s experience of God’s offer in the call of the gospel. Rahner notes that “conceptual knowledge [of one’s supernatural spiritual existence] is not primary,” and states that the call of the gospel preached by the Church only makes him consciously aware of–and of course forces him to make a choice about—the grace which already encompassed him inarticulately but really as an element of his spiritual existence. The preaching is the express awakening of what is already present in the depths of man’s being, not by nature, but by grace. But it is a grace which always surrounds man, even the sinner and the unbeliever, as the inescapable setting of his existence.22

In this passage Rahner is using “consciously aware” to mean cognitive consciousness. He also uses the term “consciously” in a non-cognitive sense when he states that our whole spiritual life is lived in the realm of the salvific will of God, of his prevenient grace, of his call as it becomes efficacious: all of which is an element within the region of our consciousness, though one which remains anonymous as long as it is not inter21 FCF, 129. 22 Karl Rahner, “Nature and Grace,” in Theological Investigations IV: More Recent Writings, trans. Kevin Smyth, (Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press, 1966), 181 (hereafter cited as TI 4:7).

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the heart of rahner preted from without by the message of faith. Even when he does not ‘know’ it and does not believe it, that is, even when he cannot make it an individual object of knowledge by merely inward reflexion, man always lives consciously in the presence of the triune God of eternal life.23

One is conscious of God’s offer even without knowing it. So Rahner can define the experience as unthematic and at the same time maintain that Christian teaching, which becomes conceptual in reflexive, human words in the church’s profession of faith, does not simply inform man of the content of this profession from without and only in concepts. Rather it appeals to reality, which is not only said, but also given and really experienced in man’s transcendental experience. Hence it expresses to man his own self-understanding, one which he already has, although unreflexively.24

Because the experience of transcendence is unthematic, cognitive reflection is both necessary and yet always falls short of completely capturing the experience. Rahner would still maintain, however, that one can experience and be conscious of God’s self-communication, and reflect on those experiences. He warns though that such experiences “cannot indeed be recognized with unambiguous and reflexive certainty within an individual’s experience, prescinding from possible exceptions, but they are nevertheless not simply and absolutely nonexistent for reflection.”25 God’s offer of self-communication is first and foremost about relationship. Within Tallon’s phenomenological framework, distance or otherness is what makes relationship or encounter possible. Recall Levinas’s warning that cognition absorbs otherness, objectifying the other, so any subsequent reflection must retain a certain degree of ambiguity in the face of the Infinite Other. For Rahner Christianity offers an interpretation of transcendental experience in which one recognizes one’s own experience.26 A person’s ultimate experience of God’s self-communicative love is an experience of

23 24 25 26

TI 4:7, 180-181 (emphasis mine). FCF, 127. FCF, 131. FCF, 131.


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hidden closeness, a forgiving intimacy, his real home, that it is a love which shares itself, something familiar which he can approach and turn to from the estrangement of his own perilous and empty life.27

In other words, it is an affective experience. Rahner notes that a person’s experience of the absolute closeness of God may be strong or weak, individual or communal, religious or secular, but is mediated through the experience of the depth dimension of human existence. Within the theory of triune consciousness, this experience of depth is described as affective consciousness. In these moments of depth, the experience one has makes it legitimate for him and gives him the courage to believe that the interpretation of this experience by mankind’s history of salvation and revelation, that is, the interpretation of this experience as the event of God’s radical self-communication, expresses the ultimate depths and the ultimate truth about this apparently so ordinary experience.28

The depth of the experience is the affective dimension of consciousness, and the truth of the experience is the cognitive dimension of consciousness. Not all people, however, accept the cognitive descriptive framework of Christianity as a legitimate interpretation of the experience of depth. More will be said on this situation in the section on the anonymous Christian. The offer of God’s self-communication ideally exists in the mode of acceptance, and in the mode of acceptance it can be understood in terms of operative connaturality. Operative connaturality involves love that flows from a shared form as opposed to love that causes a shared form. In the human relationship with God, operative connaturality describes the human response to God, the ability to love God because one is first loved by God. The capacity to love God, to accept God’s offer of grace is always grounded in and enabled by the offer itself. In scholastic terms Rahner correlates the enabling grace of God’s offer of self-communication with “a unity of so-called habitual and actual grace.”29 He also states that his understanding of grace 27 Ibid. 28 FCF, 132. 29 Karl Rahner, “Anonymous Christianity and the Missionary Task of the Church,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. XII: Confrontations 2, trans. David Bourke, (NY: Seabury, 1974), 170 (hereafter cited as TI 12:9).

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the heart of rahner is not a thesis discovered ad hoc, but a view which has always been upheld in Thomist theology even though hitherto it has probably hardly been applied to our present question – simply because we have regarded the prevenient and elevating grace too much as an isolated event taking place at a particular point, and only under specific circumstances.30

Instead, for Rahner the offer of God’s self-communication is an abiding existential that enables the acceptance of that offer. In Tallon’s terms, the human person is connaturalized to God and that connaturality as operative is what makes it possible for a person to love God. There is an awareness of the offer or of one’s connaturalized nature that is not cognitive, as well as the possibility of an acceptance of that offer or an actualization of one’s connaturalized nature that is not cognitive. God has made Godself a constitutive element of the human person through quasi-formal causality. God has connaturalized us to Godself. The human person recognizes the shared form and responds in love, but the recognition and response are not necessarily cognitive. The response to God’s offer results in union with God, a deeper subsequent connaturality. Conley calls this deepened subsequent connaturality consequent connaturality, though Conley would most likely understand this response to God’s offer to include a cognitive dimension. For Rahner the response is an acceptance of self that de facto includes the acceptance of God’s offer of self-communication as the deepest, most constituent part of the human person even if one does not cognitively recognize it as such. In Tallon’s terms, the acceptance of one’s connaturalized nature can occur even without a cognitive understanding of that connaturality with God. Given the dynamic nature of human relationships, including relationship with God, the deepening of connaturality, in the sense of becoming more and more the person one was created to be, takes place over a lifetime. Furthermore, Rahner would warn that there is always a certain level of ambiguity in one’s response to God, so that it is only in the surrender of death that one has ultimately said ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to God’s offer of self-communicative love. The acceptance of God’s offer of self-communicative love is always mediated by the categorial world. The awareness and/or acceptance of 30 Karl Rahner, “Observations on the Problem of the ‘Anonymous Christian’,” in Theological Investigations XIV: Ecclesiology, Questions in the Church, The Church in the World, trans. David Bourke (NY: Seabury, 1976), 289 (hereafter cited as TI 14:17).


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one’s connaturality can be mediated through the goodness and beauty of the world. These mediations through goodness and beauty are the work of the Holy Spirit preparing the way for Christ. Rahner states that the human person remains a subject who actualizes his gratuitously elevated transcendence in his a posteriori and historical encounter with his world of persons and of things, an encounter which is never completely at his disposal. And he actualizes it in his encounter with a human thou in whom history and transcendence find their one actualization together and in unity, and there he finds his encounter with God as the absolute Thou.31

The acceptance of the offer can be both cognitive (encounter with the world of things) and affective (encounter with the world of persons), but the relational aspect does seem to be primary, culminating in the encounter with the personal God of revelation. The acceptance of God’s offer of self-communication may be mediated through the world of persons and things, and thus may not involve a cognitive recognition of one’s relationship to God; but for Rahner one’s acceptance of God’s offer must always be moving in the direction of explicit, cognitive acceptance, ultimately a synthesis of cognitive, affective, and volitive consciousness. In order to more fully explore the difference between affective and cognitive acceptance of God’s offer of self-communicative love, the next section will turn to Rahner’s concept of the anonymous Christian.

The Anonymous Christian Rahner addresses the concept of the anonymous Christian from the perspective of pastoral theology, and he grounds this theology in the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. Rahner’s theology of the anonymous Christian defines an act of faith that is necessary for salvation but is not a cognitive act. He explains this anonymous, noncognitive faith through the concepts of transcendental and categorial faith. His explanation of the anonymous Christian can be interpreted through the idea of triune consciousness, which in turn addresses some of the criticism leveled against the idea of the anonymous Christian. Rahner uses various terms when addressing the salvation of nonChristians, including anonymous Christian, anonymous Christianity, 31 FCF, 133.

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anonymous theism, implicit Christianity, and transcendental theism. He acknowledges that the terminology is problematic and invites his critics to suggest an alternative term, but stresses the importance and insight of the concept behind the terminology.32 As is the case with much of Rahner’s theology, Rahner formulated his understanding of the anonymous Christian in response to a pastoral problem in the world. Rahner recognized that a great number of people in this world are not Christian either because they belong to different religions or because they are self-proclaimed atheists. Rahner points out that prior to the modern age European theology had no true idea of the enormous numbers of individuals outside Christianity or of the immense length of non-Christian history. . . . Today we can recognize the full length and breadth of non-Christian human history, and evaluate the power of the Cross of Christ at its true worth, and in view of this we can no longer assume that a majority of mankind is destined to perdition.33

Rahner also notes that such an assumption of the perdition of nonChristians is also untenable for many people from an affective point of view. He explains that “the man of today is first and foremost a man who feels himself at one (at that point at which he truly achieves the fullness of self-realization) with mankind as a whole. . . . He does not seek any heaven from which some other man is excluded at the outset.”34 The human person has an affective intuition of the unity of humankind and thus the possibility of ultimate salvation of humankind. The cognitive problem is how to justify that intuition within the conceptual framework of Christianity, which holds the universal saving significance of Christ and the Church. The recognition of the possibility of salvation of non-Christians affirmed at the Second Vatican Council grounds Rahner’s position within the tradition of the Catholic Church. In the teaching of the Council, “the only necessary condition which is recognized here is the necessity of faithfulness and obedience to the individual’s own per32 TI 14:17, 281. He also notes that there is a difference between the concepts of the anonymous theist and the anonymous Christian, see p. 282. 33 TI 12:9, 175. See TI 6:23, 391. 34 TI 14:17, 293-294.


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sonal conscience.”35 The Council explains that “God can bring men who are ignorant of the gospel through no fault of their own to faith by ways which he knows, and that without this faith it is impossible to be pleasing to him.”36 Rahner holds that faith involves both a categorial and a transcendental dimension, so the anonymous Christian makes an act of faith on a transcendental level, if not explicitly on the categorial level. This explanation can be understood in terms of triune consciousness where one can move to a volitive act through affective consciousness or cognitive consciousness, but the ideal is a synthesis of affection and cognition leading to volition. Rahner argues that there are people who stand outside of the Christian Church and yet are justified including “those who at the level of their conscious thought interpret themselves as atheist.”37 He explains that they are justified through a faith, hope and love for God and mankind which are to be qualified as specifically Christian in a special sense, even though this triad, constituting the single way to salvation and possession of salvation, is something of which they are not objectively aware in the sense of having consciously explicitated their specifically Christian dimension to themselves.38

In terms of triune consciousness, these people are using a different cognitive framework (that of atheism) to interpret their experience of the world and themselves. For Rahner they have not explicitated their “Christianity” on the level of cognitive consciousness (objective awareness in Rahner’s terms), but they are living out a faith, hope, and love on affective and volitive levels of consciousness. The question of what an act of faith is for those who have not explicitated their Christian dimension of themselves remains. For Rahner the act of faith is basically acceptance of oneself and one’s inner dynamism, which Rahner maintains is oriented to God as its end and fulfillment in all people. In accepting oneself, one accepts the revelation that is revealed within the human person by the fact that every person

35 36 37 38

TI 14:17, 284. TI 14:17, 285; cites Ad Gentes 7. TI 14:17, 282. Ibid.

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is always already being offered the self-communication of God.39 In accepting oneself, Rahner maintains the human person also “is accepting Christ as the absolute perfection and guarantee of his own anonymous movement towards God by grace, and the acceptance of this belief is again not an act of man alone but the work of God’s grace.”40 Thus the anonymous Christian, in accepting self, accepts the self-communication of God, God revealed in the incarnation and grace, but in an implicit and non-objective manner. The possibility of the act of faith thus rests on the question of “whether an individual freely gives himself to, or alternatively rejects, this existential which constitutes the innermost dynamism of his being and its history, an existential which is and remains continually present.”41 For Rahner this existential is always supernatural, the offer of God’s self-communication, but “it does not need to be consciously and objectively known as a dynamism of this kind.”42 Rahner argues that one may not be conscious (in the sense of cognitive consciousness) that this dynamism is “this grace constantly implanted in the nature of the creature,”43 (resulting in prevenient connaturality), but that one is nonetheless aware of it. It is the awareness of this grace that is called affective consciousness in terms of triune consciousness. Rahner explains that whether a man explicitly recognizes it or not, whether he can or cannot reflect upon it in itself and in isolation, man is, in virtue of the grace offered him and implanted in him as his freedom in the mode of a formal object and of a spiritual perspective of an a priori kind, orientated towards the immediacy of God as his final end. He brings his spiritual life to its fullness in knowledge and freedom in such a way that God in himself constitutes the ultimate point of

39 Karl Rahner, “Anonymous Christians,” in Theological Investigations Vol. VI: Concerning Vatican Council II, trans. Karl-H and Boniface Kruger (Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press, 1969), 394 (hereafter cited as TI 6:23). For the idea that the act of faith is the acceptance of self, see also TI 16:4. 40 TI 6:23, 394. 41 TI 14:17, 288. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid.


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orientation of his whole historical development in knowledge and freedom.44

Given Rahner’s framework of faculty psychology, he once again limits the spiritual life to knowledge and freedom, neglecting the dimension of affect. The spiritual life is brought to fullness and oriented to God in knowledge, freedom, and love. Rahner explains that this orientation to God in the spiritual life “is both known and unknown” and is, it is true, in order to be known at all (which does not mean reflected upon as an object or capable of being adequately reflected upon by the individual) mediated through the realities of his world assignable to ‘this worldly’ categories.45

The knowledge of one’s orientation to God is always mediated knowledge, but it is not necessarily objective, cognitive knowledge. Rahner refers to an original event of revelation consisting in the self-communication of God as addressed to all in virtue of his universal will to save and taking place at a preconceptual level in the roots of man’s spiritual faculties.46

Within a model of triune consciousness instead of a faculty psychology, the preconceptual, or more properly, nonconceptual level is affective consciousness. Therefore knowledge of God and awareness of one’s supernatural transcendence can be affective, non-objective consciousness. Affective consciousness of God is still mediated through one’s experiences of this world. The human person is always spirit in the world, never disembodied spirit. Affective consciousness occurs through embodied experience, as does cognitive and volitive consciousness. Rahner recognizes that an act of faith can be made even when that faith is not expressed in conceptual terms. He explains that when man of his freedom accepts himself together with this a priori awareness which is already revelation, then that is present which 44 TI 14:17, 288. 45 TI 14:17, 289. 46 TI 14:17, 293. Note that Rahner does find it important to make the distinction between the universal offer of God’s self-communication and acceptance of that offer. Even for the anonymous Christian, the offer must be accepted, albeit in a non-cognitive manner. See TI 9:9, 146.

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the heart of rahner can in the true and proper sense be called faith, even though this faith has not yet been objectively explicitated or conceptualized as the absolute openness of man to the immediacy of God in his act of self-imparting. Yet this a priori awareness of man (called revelation) is always accepted in faith wherever and whenever an individual in unreserved faithfulness to his own moral conscience accepts himself in freedom as he is, and so too in the as yet unrecognizable implications of the dynamism underlying the movement of his own spirit.47

Again Rahner employs an understanding of the human that is limited to intellect and will. Even when there is no intellectual, objective understanding of faith, the person can make an act of faith through the will by the free acceptance of self. The a priori awareness, however, can be understood through affective consciousness as something one experiences, albeit mediated through the experiences of this world, either without any subsequent reflection or with a different cognitive interpretation of the experience. In explaining the subjective knowledge of self that accompanies an act of knowledge, Rahner notes that it is quite possible for such an act, the content of which the selfknowing subject of this act wishes to present to itself, to be inadequately or falsely interpreted by this self-same subject, although on the subjective side what has been interpreted is present in its known reality.48

The cognitive interpretation of the experience of self is inadequate or even false, but the reality of one’s supernatural transcendentality is nevertheless accepted on an affective and volitive level, and even on a cognitive level, albeit in different cognitive concepts and categories. Rahner would argue both that the acceptance of self can already be called faith, but also that one has a drive and obligation to come to an authentic, objective interpretation of one’s experience of self-acceptance in faith. Ultimately one strives for a synthesis of cognitive, affective, and volitive consciousness. Using the analogy of a seed, Rahner explains that the seed has no right to seek not to grow into a plant. But the fact that it is not yet developed into a plant is no reason for refusing to 47 TI 14:17, 190. 48 TI 9:9, 154.


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give the name which we give to the plant destined to grow from it to the seed as well.49

Recall, as was noted in chapter two, that for Rahner absolute value, i.e., God, as objectified in cognitive consciousness, can affect one’s openness to the right order of values and God as absolute value.50 So Rahner is not saying that it does not matter whether or not one cognitively accepts God in Christ. Rahner appeals to the scriptural example of Paul at the Areopagus claiming the worship of the “unknown God” is worship of the God of Jesus Christ.51 Rahner agues that “no matter what a man states in his conceptual, theoretical and religious reflection, anyone who does not say in his heart, ‘there is no God’ (like the ‘fool’ of the psalm) but testifies to him by the radical acceptance of his being, is a believer.”52 Rahner explains the possibility of such anonymous belief through the concepts of transcendental and categorial knowledge. Rahner states now in so far as every instance of intellectual knowledge and freedom on the part of the subject and his act is a ‘transcendental experience’, i.e. an experience of the intellect’s unlimited rootedness in absolute Being, on the subjective side every instance of knowledge is a real, even if implicit (i.e. not necessarily objectified) knowledge of God, although we cannot show this in greater detail here. What we commonly call ‘knowledge of God’ is therefore not simply the knowledge of God, but already the objectified conceptual and propositional interpretation of what we constantly know of God subjectively and apart from reflection.53

Transcendental knowledge of God is subjective, non-objectified knowledge. The objectified, conceptual, propositional interpretation is what Rahner calls categorial knowledge of God. Rahner then argues that one may have both categorial and transcendental knowledge of God; or one may have transcendental knowledge, but not categorial knowledge of God. In either case, one can be considered to have belief in God, albeit anonymous belief in the latter case. Likewise one may have neither categorial nor transcendental knowledge of God, or one 49 50 51 52 53

TI 14:17, 291. HW 85. See Acts 17:22-34. TI 6:23, 394. TI 9:9, 154.

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may have accepted God on a categorial level, but nonetheless rejected God at the transcendental level. In both of these cases one would be said to have rejected God, despite the latter’s claim of explicit, objective or cognitive belief. In the vocabulary of triune consciousness, categorial knowledge of God would be cognitive consciousness of God. Transcendental knowledge of God would be what Tallon refers to a quasi-intentionality of consciousness. The quasi-intentionality of transcendental knowledge is at the level of the unity of consciousness, but due to its non-objective nature, the experience is most appropriately expressed through affective consciousness. Therefore in the language of triune consciousness, there is a cognitive and affective knowledge of God. One may have an affective awareness of God without an adequate or true cognitive understanding or interpretation naming that awareness of God. Likewise one may state an explicit belief in God, but not own that belief in the affective center of one’s being and not act on that cognitive belief. Authenticity calls one to a synthesis of cognition, affection, and volition. Rahner argues that to bring non-believers to explicit faith what is required is not logical arguments but rather a mystagogy that enables them to name the depth experiences in their lives as experiences of God. He explains that even if it is possible at all to speak to an atheist on the level of the ‘proofs’ so well known to us, to be successful today such a dialogue unavoidably presupposes that the atheist has been made aware of his own transcendental knowledge of God through a kind of ‘mystagogy’. If he is really acquainted with unconditional faithfulness, absolute honesty, selfless surrender to the good of others and other fundamental human dispositions, then he knows something of God, even if this knowledge is not present to his conscious reflection.54

Tallon would refer to such experiences as acting by connaturality. Affective consciousness moves one to volitive action. Mystagogy would add subsequent cognitive reflection and interpretation to the experiences to recognize and accept in an explicit way what one has already recognized and accepted in an implicit way. Within the spiraling concept of connaturality, such explicit, cognitive awareness of one’s con54 TI 9:9, 159.


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naturalized nature adds a deeper dimension to one’s appropriation of that nature in the pattern of prevenient connaturality leading to operative connaturality resulting in an ever deepening subsequent connaturality.

Response to Objections Rahner’s concept of the anonymous Christian has been heavily criticized in Christian theology. Eamon Conway outlines three major criticisms in his article, “So As Not To Despise God’s Grace.”55 As a precursor to these three major critiques, Conway addresses the criticism of Rahner’s theological system put forth by Hans Urs von Balthasar that Rahner depends too heavily on philosophy.56 He then goes on to address three critiques of the anonymous Christian: it relativises the historical Christ event, it undermines the Church’s missionary activity, and it is offensive to non-Christians.57 Rahner himself addresses the issue of the offensiveness of the terminology of the anonymous Christian inviting suggestions of an alternative phrase. Conway does an excellent job of addressing the remaining criticisms noted, so this section will simply add a footnote to his response based on the added insights of triune consciousness. Conway points out that while “in the original German, and in the sense Rahner intended it, ‘anonymous’ connotes a neutral ‘hiddenness’ or absence of recognition, in English, it tends to have sinister implications and can imply deliberate withholding of acknowledgment.”58 From the perspective of triune consciousness, the hiddenness or absence of recognition of explicit Christianity exists at the level of cognitive consciousness, either because of an alternative cognitive explanation or a lack of cognitive reflection on the depth experiences of human life. The experience of God is hidden in the sense that it occurs on a non-objective, affective level of consciousness. The Christ event is still central to Rahner’s understanding of the anonymous Christian because it is through the Christ event that 55 Eamon Conway, “’So as not to Despise God’s Grace’ Re-assessing Rahner’s Idea of the ‘Anonymous Christian’,” Louvain Studies 29 (2004): 107130. 56 Conway, 121. 57 Conway, 110-111. 58 Conway, 114.

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God’s self-gift to humanity has definitively taken place. Rahner points to three affective experiences that are ultimately grounded in the Christ event, whether that grounding is acknowledged explicitly or not; human love, readiness for death, and hope in the future. All human love, as finite and partial, is sustained within the absolute love of God revealed in the incarnation. Rahner explains that “a merely finite and ever unreliable person cannot by himself justify the sense of absolute love which is given him, a love in which a person ‘involves’ and risks himself absolutely for the other person.”59 Such human love implies a “searching for a God-Man, that is, for someone who as man can be loved with the absoluteness of love for God.”60 That person is Jesus Christ. While one may not cognitively accept Christ as the revelation of absolute love, one still experiences an affective love for the other that grounds itself in the hope and possibility of absolute love. Rahner expounds on this relationship in his writings on the unity of the love of God and the love of neighbor, a topic that will be addressed in chapter six. Rahner argues that the experience of an acceptance of death, if it is not to be absurd, must be an affirmation on some level of the conquering of death in the paschal mystery. On a cognitive level, without belief in some form of eternal life, acceptance of death is absurd. Rahner explains that the acceptance of death “implies the intimation or the expectation or the affirmation of an already present or future and hoped-for death which is of such a nature that it reconciles the permanent dialectic in us between doing and enduring in powerlessness.”61 That affirmation or expectation of a death that is not absurd takes place on an affective level of consciousness that again may not have been reflected upon or may have an alternative cognitive interpretation such as belief in reincarnation; but within an explicit Christian faith, that expectation is grounded in the Christ-event. On an affective level individuals tend to hope that life is ultimately meaningful. Part of human affective experience is to hope in the future. Within a Christian cognitive interpretation, that hope is justified because of the incarnation and paschal mystery of Christ. Rahner states that “a Christian acquires from this hope an understanding of 59 FCF, 296. 60 Ibid. 61 FCF, 297.


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what faith professes in the Incarnation and in the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the irreversible beginning of the coming of God as the absolute future of the world and of history.”62 While non-Christians justify their hope in the future with other cognitive explanations, Christians ultimately justify their hope in the Christ-event. The idea of the anonymous Christian does not relativize the Christ-event, but rather grounds basic affective experiences such as love, acceptance of death, and hope in the future in the Christ-event regardless of whether or not one accepts the Christ-event on a cognitive level. As has been noted above, for Rahner these experiences ultimately move one towards explicit acceptance of Christian belief, but the lack of that cognitive consciousness does not negate the reality of an implicit, affective consciousness of or belief in the absolute love and meaning found in the Christ-event that makes human love, acceptance of death, and hope in the future possible.63 The other objection Conway notes that can be addressed through the theory of triune consciousness is that the idea of the anonymous Christian undermines the missionary activity of the Church. In the article he wrote on this topic, Rahner argues that missionary preaching necessarily presupposes that which we may call by the name of anonymous Christianity or by some other name. On any right understanding of the nature of the Christian faith it is clear that a missionary preaching is possible only if we presuppose the grace of faith (at least as offered).64

Rahner argues that in the Christian tradition grace is necessary for faith. He explains that this grace is precisely something more than what it was maintained to be by a Molinist school of thought against Thomism and against Suarez, namely a mere ontological and subconscious alteration of the act of faith. Rather it also implies a genuinely conscious alteration and imparts a dimension of understanding which cannot be

62 FCF, 297-298. 63 Note that within interreligious dialogue this “fulfillment” conception of other religious traditions, the idea that ideally one should move towards Christian belief, is quite controversial. 64 TI 12:9, 169.

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the heart of rahner attained to by any merely natural act, having a formal object which is specifically supernatural.65

In other words, the missionary task of the Church presumes a prevenient connaturality that is accessible to consciousness on a cognitive level and an affective level. God’s love results in an alteration, a connaturalization, of the human person. The person can affirm that connaturality in both implicit and explicit ways through affective consciousness (anonymous Christianity) and cognitive consciousness (explicit Christianity), a process that can be called operative connaturality since the initial connaturality is what enables the affirmation. For Rahner the missionary activity of the Church helps to bring about a synthesis between the affective and cognitive dimensions of one’s consciousness of grace resulting in an explicit act of faith. Rahner maintains that the preacher of the gospel who seeks to impart faith as an appropriation of grace addresses himself, and must address himself (since it is impossible to preach the faith without the grace of faith) to an individual who already possesses justifying grace at least as offered, and indeed, it may be, as already freely accepted in an implicit way.66

Recall that for Rahner it is not the universal offer of grace but rather the implicit acceptance of the offer that makes one an anonymous Christian. The missionary activity of the Church also must address those who have rejected the offer (but for whom the offer always continues to exist representing the possibility of conversion) and those who have neither accepted nor rejected the offer. However, even for those who have accepted the offer in an implicit or anonymous way, either without cognitive reflection or with a different cognitive interpretive framework, there is an inner dynamism that demands explicit, cognitive expression.67 If by God’s love a person is connaturalized, there is a need for a conscious understanding, acceptance, and appropriation of one’s identity as beloved of God. Rahner states if man is consciously aware of who he is and what he is making of himself of his own freedom, the chance that he will succeed in this self-achievement of his and arrive at a radical self-fulfillment is 65 TI 12:9, 170. 66 TI 12:9, 171. 67 Ibid.


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greater than if he merely possesses and fulfils his own humanity at a merely inert and unconscious level.68

The actualization of one’s full potential as a human person requires a synthesis of affective, cognitive, and volitive consciousness. Explicit reflection and acceptance of one’s affective connaturality to God enables greater affective response-ability to God and the other. The human ideal is volitive action grounded in affective response and cognitive reflection. Rahner grounds the missionary activity of the Church in love of neighbor and the hope for the greatest possible fulfillment as a human person for one’s fellow human beings. He explains that love strives for what is greater, and this striving is not to be accounted as greed. In fact it is precisely this striving which constitutes that love which is an absolute duty. This also applies to mission, for it is in this that love for God and neighbour is realized.69

Far from undermining the missionary activity of the Church, Rahner’s concept of the anonymous Christian grounds the missionary activity of bringing the self-awareness of one’s connaturality to God into cognitive consciousness. The missionary activity of the Church strives to foster in the individual a synthesis of cognitive and affective consciousness of God’s grace leading one to volitive action in the world.

68 TI 12:9, 177. 69 TI 12:9, 178.

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hile Karl Rahner never explicitly abandons the traditional faculty psychology framework in his anthropology, one ultimately discovers an implicit triune consciousness in his understanding of the human person. Rahner points out that “it must never be forgotten that the most real factor in the spirit is its cognition, its freedom, its love.”1 At the core of this understanding of what it means to be human is love. Self-actualization, self-disposition, and self-realization occur only in and through interpersonal love, which Rahner takes to be the most basic act of the human person. Rahner explains that the self-understanding of man – understood as the assembling of his knowledge and of the free self-determination of man with a view to finality – takes place in the act of loving communication with the Thou.2

For Rahner one knows oneself (cognition) and disposes of oneself (volition) in the love of another (affection). Ultimately to be human is to be in relation; therefore within triune consciousness there is a cer1 Karl Rahner, “Why and How Can We Venerate the Saints?” in Theological Investigations, Vol. VIII: Further Theology of the Spiritual Life 2, trans. David Bourke (NY: Seabury, 1977), 13. 2 Karl Rahner, “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” in Theological Investigations Vol. VI: Concerning Vatican Council II, trans. Karl-H and Boniface Kruger (Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press, 1969), 242 (hereafter cited as TI 6:16). Note that Rahner uses “Du” in the original and capitalizes it both when referring to a human person and when referring to God. The English translation follows this practice capitalizing “Thou” for both references. See “Über die Einheit von Nächsten—und Gottesliebe,” in Schriften zur Theologie VI: Neuerer Schriften, (Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1965), 277-298 (hereafter cited as ST 6).

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tain primacy to affection as intending the other subject over cognition as intending an object. Rahner maintains that the original objectivity of the experience of self necessarily takes place in the subjectivity of its encounters with other persons in dialogue, in trustful and loving encounter. Man experiences himself by experiencing the other person and not the other thing.3

Chapters four and five have already explored Rahner’s connection between the experience of one’s transcendent self and the experience of God. Now Rahner connects the experience of self to the encounter with the other, and therefore finds the unity of the encounter with the other and the encounter with God. He explains that it follows from this Christian doctrine that in view of the fact that on the one hand the experience of God and the experience of self are one, and on the other that the experience of self and the encounter with our neighbour are one, that all these three experiences ultimately constitute a single reality with three aspects mutually conditioning one another.4

This chapter will explore the interconnection of these experiences of self, neighbor, and God, highlighting Rahner’s implicit use of a triune consciousness despite the fact that he continues to subsume love under volition and non-objective consciousness under cognition, both of which are aspects of affection in triune consciousness. The primary role of affection in this anthropology will be explored through Rahner’s understanding of human actualization through love. Affection assumes an important role in Rahner’s anthropology because of the embodied and relational aspects of the human person, so that for Rahner the heart is the symbol of the whole human person, body and spirit. The chapter will conclude with an exploration of that unity of body and spirit, Rahner’s concept of symbol, and the way in which the heart as symbol of the whole person can be correlated with Andrew Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness, ultimately making Rahner’s anthropology ideally suited for dialogue with contemporary philosophy and science. 3 TI 13:8, 127. 4 TI 13:8, 128. For a more extensive explication of Rahner’s essays that note the connection between the experience of intersubjectivity, the experience of self, and the experience of God, see the conclusion to Tallon’s Personal Becoming, 167-177.

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The Meaning of Love in Rahner’s Anthropology Rahner continues to subsume love under will in his anthropology, refusing to allow affection its own distinct intentionality. His description of love, however, defies the notion that love is an act of will, even while acknowledging the unity of affection and volition in consciousness. In addressing the concept of authentic love of neighbor, Rahner admits that action alone is not love.5 At the same time Rahner argues that there is a danger of love being nothing more than an empty feeling that is all talk with no action.6 Love without action is inauthentic. For love to be genuine and authentic it must be affection with cognition that moves to volition; authentic love is an act of all three intentionalities. There is a distinction between affection and volition in that there can be action without love and love without action, but the authentic human person seeks an integration of affection and volition. Cognition also plays a role as the “theoretical reflection which is carried by that action and at the same time necessarily illumines it.”7 Ultimately Rahner is talking about a triune consciousness, albeit implicitly, in which one’s action and reflection can shape one’s affectability, and one’s affect and reflection should motivate one to action. While the unity of the three intentionalities is primary, the real distinction between them should not be negated. Within this unity of consciousness the command to love God and neighbor becomes conceivable. One might ask, if love is primarily an affection that one cannot will, then how can the human person be subject to a command to love? As has been noted in the previous chapters, affective intentionality is both passive and active, a being-affected by the other and a going out toward the other. Conversion of affection, as was explained in chapter two, takes place through cognition and volition as reflection and action shape one’s ability to be affected by, and one’s openness to, the other.

Love as Self-Actualization Rahner’s theology may exhibit an implicit triune consciousness, but in his explicit theology he continues to subsume aspects of affect under will, by connecting freedom and love. Rahner defines freedom as 5 TI 6:16, 231. 6 TI 6:16, 232. 7 Ibid.

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the capacity of the heart or of love.8 Rahner’s insight that there is a connection between freedom as self-realization and self-realization as love highlights the unity of consciousness. The most authentic human freedom is love enacted. Love as an experience of affective intentionality is needed, in addition to the experience of cognition and volition, to be authentically, fully human and to experience God. Human persons live in an interpersonal world, and therefore, “knowledge must be integrated and elevated through this love in order to have a completely human meaning.”9 For Rahner “the love of God, and this love alone, is capable of embracing everything.”10 Love of God is ultimately the experience that integrates every other human experience. The experience of intellect alone only reveals infinite mystery, as critics of Rahner such as Thomas Sheehan have noted. The experience of affective consciousness reveals infinite love. Faith is not possible through intellect alone, and Rahner notes that love “alone finds the courage to believe in the mercy of the holy God. Love of God is the only total integration of human existence.”11 Love is not an act of intellect. Rahner explains that love of God is “something which is known only once it is accomplished.”12 Reflection is subsequent. In Rahner’s anthropology being fully human is connected to the human capacity to love, to go out toward the other and ultimately toward God. For Rahner this capacity to love justifies itself as opposed to being justified by cognition, and it is boundless.13 He asserts that “every sin is at root merely the refusal to entrust [one]self to this boundlessness; it is a lesser love, which, because it refuses to be greater, is no 8 Karl Rahner, “Theology of Freedom” in Theological Investigations Vol. VI: Concerning Vatican Council II, trans. Karl-H and Boniface Kruger (Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press, 1969) 187 (hereafter cited as TI 6:13). In PB, Tallon notes this correlation between love and freedom, but since this work is prior to HH, he does not yet critique Rahner’s tendency to subsume love under freedom. See Tallon’s “Introduction” to Michael Purcell’s Mystery and Method: The Other in Rahner and Levinas, p. ix, where he explains the development of his thought in this regard. 9 TI 8:1, 17. 10 TI 6:13, 187. 11 TI 6:13, 187. 12 Ibid. 13 TI 6:13, 188.


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longer love at all.”14 Recall Ricoeur’s concept of the heart which can tend toward earthly pleasure as a partial good and spiritual happiness as a total good.15 While Ricoeur’s distinction tends to be somewhat dualistic, one sees the correlation of pleasure, not bad in and of itself unless it refuses to become greater by going out toward the other in intentionality, with the finite good and happiness as the term of its human transcendence.16 Sin is stopping at the finite good; whereas love in the truest sense always moves beyond the finite good to the Infinite Other who is the living God of love. Rahner maintains that God is no impersonal ‘It’, no asymptotic stationary take-off point of the transcendence and love of the spiritual person but the ‘living God’ in whose regard every action of man is essentially a response to his call.17

One is able to move toward God in love because one is first loved and called by God. Nonetheless this relationship to the personal, living God must be mediated. Rahner explains that human freedom (and thus love) vis-à-vis God, is always freedom with regard to some category of object and vis-à-vis some intramundane Thou since even such an act of an explicit yes or no towards God cannot conduct itself directly in relation to the God of original, transcendental experience but only to the God of explicit, conceptual reflection, to God in the concept and not directly and alone to the God of transcendental presence. . . . The transcendental opening out requires a categorial object, a support as it were, so as not to lose itself in empty nothingness; it requires an intramundane Thou.18

Love of God requires both cognition and affection. Through affection one relates to other persons, and through cognition one interprets those experiences and develops a concept of God. Rahner argues that 14 15 16 17 18

Ibid. HH, 96. HH, 105. TI 6:13, 188-189. TI 6:13, 189. The exception, as was explained in chapter three, being the mystical experience of God in transcendence in which the categorial object becomes transparent or disappears.

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the heart of rahner the original relationship to God is . . . love of neighbour. If man becomes himself only by the exercise of love towards God and must achieve this self-mastery by a categorial action, then it holds good – and holds good perfectly in the order of grace – that the act of love of neighbour is the only categorial and original act in which man attains the whole of the concretely given reality and finds the transcendental and supernatural, directly experienced experience of God.19

Love of God is only possible in and through love of neighbor, and the experience of the unity of loving God and loving neighbor is the way in which one actualizes oneself in freedom and knowledge. One can only realize oneself in freedom and come to know oneself through what is other, and for Rahner, the other that enables self-knowledge and selfdisposal must be a person, not an object. Rahner maintains that this environment of persons is the world through which man finds and fulfils himself (by knowledge and will) and . . . gets away from himself. From a personal and moral point of view, the world of things is of significance only as a factor for man and for his neighbour. . . . [T]he world of things can be a possible object for man’s concern only as a moment of the world of persons.20

Rahner states that “love alone allows man to forget himself.”21 Love is intentional, a going to the other, and given the fact that humans are embodied spirit, self-realization is only possible by going out to what is other. One knows oneself by forgetting oneself. Rahner contends that in the act of love for another, and in it alone and primarily, the original unity of what is human and what is the totality of man’s experience is collected together and achieved, and that love for the other is not just something which also exists in man among many other things but is man himself in his total achievement.22

While Rahner still limits human consciousness to intellect and will, he nonetheless recognizes that human fulfillment is ultimately to be found in relation to other persons not in relation to objects. Affec19 20 21 22

TI 6:13, 189-190. TI 6:16, 240. See also TI 8:1, 17. TI 6:13, 187. TI 6:16, 243.


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tion as the intentionality toward the other must then have a primary role in consciousness. To be human is to be in relation. Tallon notes that “Rahner is metaphysically affirming that subjectivity requires intersubjectivity in order to even be subjectivity.”23 Rahner notes that “sociology is making an attempt to replace metaphysics or to convert philosophy into an ontology of intercommunication.”24 A theology that at least takes interpersonal relation into account by allowing affection its own distinct intentionality is better suited to dialogue with the social sciences than a metaphysics that relies on cognition alone. Without giving up his cognitive based metaphysics, Rahner’s theology incorporates the centrality of human relatedness to human actualization. He points out that human beings necessarily commit themselves, entrust themselves, to others, and that indeed they must do so. This self-opening of one’s own personhood to another, this handing-over of oneself to someone else, admits of the greatest variation in intensity and form. . . . Only if one thus abandons oneself, and lovingly sinks into the other, does one succeed in finding oneself. Otherwise, a person languishes in the prison of his or her own selfishness.25

Rahner acknowledges that there are reasonable grounds for such self abandonment, but maintains that the cognitive reasoning never adequately justifies such self-abandonment.26 Cognition cannot explain love, because every trusting, loving relationship to another human being has an uncancellable ‘plus’ on the resolution-and-decision side of the balance sheet—as over against the reflective side, the side that tallies up the justifiability and reasonableness of such risk and venture.27

In the terms of triune consciousness, it is affection, not cognition, that allows one to take such risk. Affection is primarily concerned with the other; whereas cognition is primarily concerned with the self. For Rahner freedom is also ulti23 Tallon, PB, 163. 24 TI 6:16, 233. 25 Karl Rahner, The Love of Jesus and the Love of Neighbor, trans. Robert Barr, (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 16 (hereafter cited as LJLN). 26 LJLN, 17. 27 Ibid.

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mately self-disposition, so it is only in affective consciousness that the self-centeredness of human nature is unseated to open the person up to the other. Rahner explains that knowledge is, however, of its nature a ‘being-within-oneself ’, or rather a return to oneself, and freedom is not simply the capacity to do this or that but (formally) a self-disposing into finality; the subject (from a formal point of view) is always concerned with itself.28

Ironically only in opening to the other through affective consciousness is the human person ultimately able to be self-actualized in knowledge and freedom. Due to the embodied nature of the human person, all consciousness is mediated consciousness. In terms of cognition, “the known personal Thou is the mediation, the being-within-oneself ’ of the subject,” and for volition, “the free self-disposal, when morally right and perfect, is precisely the loving communication with the human Thou as such.”29 Actualization of the human person occurs in love, because the act of personal love for another human being is therefore the all-embracing act of man which gives meaning, direction and measure to everything else. If this is correct, then the essential a priori openness to the other human being, which must be undertaken freely belongs as such to the a priori and most basic constitution of man and is an essential inner moment of his (knowing and willing) transcendentality. This a priori basic constitution (which must be accepted in freedom, but to which man can also close himself ) is experienced in the concrete encounter with man in the concrete. The one moral (or immoral) basic act in which man comes to himself and decides basically about himself is also the (loving or hating) communication with the concrete Thou in which man experiences, accepts or denies his basic a priori reference to the Thou as such.30

Affective consciousness is part of the transcendental, and thus spiritual, nature of the human person. Rahner does not explicitly allow affection its own distinct intentionality, once again making it an inner moment of knowing and willing, but the central role it plays in his understanding of the human person is undeniable. Furthermore Rahner maintains that it is in this act of loving one’s neighbor that 28 TI 6:16, 240. 29 TI 6:16, 241. 30 Ibid.


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one accepts or denies one’s ultimate reference to God because for Rahner self-actualization and self-acceptance are always simultaneously an acceptance of God, even if that acceptance is not articulated in a cognitive sense. Rahner connects this unity of love of God and love of neighbor to his concept of the anonymous Christian in which love of one’s neighbor is the basic moral, and therefore salvific, act of the human person.31 Love of God is mediated through love of neighbor. Rahner readily acknowledges that the experience of human love is ultimately a mystery.32 Affective consciousness deals with another subject rather than an object that can be circumscribed and understood. Rahner notes the need to show more fully what breadths and depths are implied by love of the Thou, how man really experiences in it who he is, how the ‘no’ to it imprisons the whole man within the deadly lonely damnation of self-created absurdity, how the totality of reality, which freely gives itself and is accepted and understood as the blessed incomprehensibility – which is the only self-evident thing – opens itself only if man opens himself radically in the act of love and entrusts himself to this totality.33

Through the unity of love of God and love of neighbor, “we understand what God and his Christ are, and that we accomplish what is the love of God in Christ when we allow the love of our neighbour to attain its own nature and perfection.”34 Here is the implicit triune consciousness in Rahner’s theology: through affective love of neighbor, one has cognitive understanding of God and Christ along with volitive action that accomplishes the love of God in Christ. The interaction of all three intentionalities of consciousness is what it means to be fully human.

Affection as Embodied and Spiritual Rahner’s understanding of the unity of the love of God and the love of neighbor illustrates the embodied and spiritual nature of affection. Rahner argues for 31 32 33 34

TI 6:16, 239. TI 6:16, 242. Ibid. TI 6:16, 233-234.

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the heart of rahner the mutual relation of dependence between the transcendental openness and readiness for unlimited communication with the Thou, on the one hand, and the concrete encounter with the concrete Thou, on the other hand.35

As will be argued below, it is precisely the finite infinity of the human subject that makes openness to the human other the most appropriate mediation of openness to the absolutely Infinite Other. Rahner draws on 1 John 4 to explain that we do not see God – he cannot be truly reached in gnostic-mystic interiority alone, in such a way that he would thus be really attainable by love (1Jn 4:12) – and hence the ‘God in us’ by mutual love is the God whom alone we can love (1 Jn 4:12), to such an extent that it is really true and that, although it is not at all clear to us, it is a radically convincing argument for St John that ‘a man who does not love the brother whom he can see, cannot love God whom he has never seen’ (1 Jn 4:20).36

In Rahner’s explanation of the unity of loving God and neighbor there is a correlation to Tallon’s description of affective intentionality in relation to God as desire without possession, because God is the horizon of all human love. The spiritual experience of loving God can be mediated through the embodied experience of loving another human being. Rahner asks, May we take the words of St John absolutely seriously, so that the ‘God in us’ is really the one who alone can be loved and who is reached precisely in the love of our brother and in no other way, and that the love of neighbour encounters the love of God in such a way that it moves itself, and us with it, closer to the brother near by and attains both itself and the peak of perfection in the love of this brother, i.e. specifically as love of neighbour, and brings us to God and his love by the love of our neighbour?37

The interrelated and embodied nature of the human being mediates the spiritual experience of love of God. Affection can be considered not only embodied but also spiritual because it is part of the transcendental experience of the human per35 TI 6:16, 242-243. 36 TI 6:16, 235. 37 Ibid.


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son, and for Rahner, human spirit is human transcendence. Rahner reminds the reader that it is first of all necessary to distinguish in a human spiritual act between its explicit object represented in a determined concept and category, which is envisaged in a systematic way both by the intellect and will, on the one hand, and the a priori formal object, the transcendental horizon or ‘space’ within which a determined individual object is encountered, on the other hand. . . . [T]he transcendental horizon is that which is itself given only in the encounter with the object of a concretely historical experience (it itself in transcendental experience), which of course does not mean that this experienced transcendental horizon of the categorized individual experience must be for this reason already systematically, explicitly and objectively represented and named.38

The human person cannot have an experience, spiritual, transcendental, or otherwise, that is not always already embodied and therefore mediated through the categorial. Rahner also would argue that all categorial experiences are always already spiritual or transcendental because the experience presupposes a transcendental horizon. The transcendental aspect of the experience, however, is not necessarily realized in an explicit, cognitive manner. Note that Rahner still limits the transcendental experience to intellect and will even in the context of the experience of love. Rahner also continues to use the language of object to describe the encounter with another person, an encounter better described as subject-subject than as subject-object. Rahner explains that not every instance of loving God involves loving one’s neighbor. At times one makes God, rather than one’s neighbor, the explicit conceptual object of one’s love, as in prayer.39 Rahner points out that one can argue that the religious act of prayer is a higher act than loving one’s neighbor because the object of the act is of higher rank, but he disagrees because God is not one ‘object’ besides others either objectively speaking or in the subjective intentionality of man (in knowledge and free action and their unity). God is not an object towards which the intentionality of man can be directed in the same fragmentary and particular way as it is towards the multiplicity of objects and persons encountered within the categories of intramundane experience. . . . God is 38 TI 6:16, 237. 39 TI 6:16, 238.

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the heart of rahner primarily and originally given in (or as) the transcendental, unclassified horizon of the knowing and acting intentionality of man and not as an ‘object’ represented by an idea within this horizon.40

The object of the religious act is not God in Godself, but one’s concept of God or one’s “objectified” idea of God. God is the horizon that is always given in any act of knowing, willing, or loving (note that Rahner does not include affective intentionality in the quote above) including the religious act. Likewise in loving one’s neighbor Rahner asserts that where the whole ‘transcendental’ depth of interhuman love is realized and represented (which, as has been said, can at least be caritas, as is quite certain from tradition), there such a love is also necessarily a conscious love of God and has God as its reflex motive (even though this is of course true once more in very different degrees of clarity).41

The experience of God is a mediated experience, and the primary analogue of mediation for Rahner is love of another human person. Rahner argues that even the explicit religious act in which God becomes the reflex theme of knowledge and love is once more underpinned and taken up by that act which offers a transcendental, inclusive experience of God (of a natural-supernatural kind) and this by the fact that this act – in our turning towards the people we live with, and therefore in our explicit communication with them – lets us also experience unreflectedly the transcendental conditions of this act (i.e. the transcendental reference to God and the transcendental openness to the human Thou). The act of love of neighbour is, therefore, the only categorized and original act in which man attains the whole of reality given to us in categories, with regard to which he fulfils himself perfectly correctly and in which he always already makes the transcendental and direct experience of God by grace. The reflected religious act as such is and remains secondary in comparison with this.42 40 TI 6:16, 244-245. See also 8:1, 17 41 TI 6:16, 238. 42 TI 6:16, 246. The second to last sentence in this passage in the German states, “Der Akt der Nächstenliebe ist also der einzige kategoriale und ursprüngliche Akt, in dem der Mensch die kategoriale gegebene ganze Wirklichkeit erreicht, sich ihr gegenüber selbst total richtig vollzieht


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The religious act is not the primary experience of God but secondary. Openness to another human subject is the primary way in which one experiences openness to the subjectivity of God.

Love Elevated by Grace Rahner’s definition of human spirit is human transcendence or openness to the infinite horizon of incomprehensible love. Rahner refers to this “absolute, infinite transcendentality of the spirit” as ‘potentia obœdientialis’ for grace and that it is liberated by grace – in its infinity which of itself belongs to this transcendentality – from being the mere condition of the possibility of grasping a certain categorized object to being the possibility of immediate presence to God as he is in himself.43

As has been noted above, to be human is to be in relation, therefore “this potentia obœdientialis is precisely the transcendentality towards the other who is to be loved and who first of all is one’s fellow man.”44 The potentia obœdientialis referred to here is not limited to cognition and volition, but includes affection, therefore according to Rahner’s definition, human spirit includes affective consciousness. Elsewhere Rahner remarks that the concept of potentia obedientialis must not be confined, as it too often is, to man’s knowledge. If, according to Scripture, God is love and not ‘thought of thought,’ no understanding of man and of the absolute fulfillment of his being (by grace) can succeed, unless man is considered as freedom and love, which may not be considered just a by-product of knowledge.45

In the de facto existing order in which God’s grace is always being given at least in the mode of offer, this potentia obœdientialis or the affective intentionality of consciousness that reaches out to the other is und darin schon immer die transzendentale und gnadenhaft unmittelbare Erfahrung Gottes macht (ST 6, 294).” The English translation of “macht” as “makes” does not seem to be accurate in this context as the person cannot “make” a direct experience of God. I would translate “machen” as “to constitute” in this sense, as “and in which the transcendental and graced direct experience of God is always already constituted.” 43 TI 6:16, 243. 44 Ibid. 45 TI 4:7, 186-187. Cited in Tallon, PB, 154, n. 15.

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enabled and elevated by grace into an act of love for God. Rahner calls to mind the fact that according to St John, we are loved by God ( Jn 15:12) and by Christ so that we may love one another ( Jn 13:34). . . . Thus for St John the consequence of this is that God who is Love (1 Jn 4:16) has loved us, not so that we might love him in return but so that we might love one another (1 Jn 4:7, 11).46

As was explained in chapter five, God’s love connaturalizes the human person (prevenient connaturality, in which the love of God creates the connaturality between God and the individual prior to any action or feeling on the individual’s part), and that connaturality in turn enables the human person to love both God and other human beings (operative connaturality, in which the connaturality is the cause of the person’s ability to act in love). Rahner explains that the primary basic act of man who is always already ‘in the world’ is always an act of the love of his neighbour and in this the original love of God is realized in so far as in this basic act are also accepted the conditions of its possibility, one of which is the reference of man to God when supernaturally elevated by grace.47

The human person is only able to love in an unselfish manner because that love is enabled and undergirded by God. Therefore when one loves another person, one is accepting the love of God that makes intrahuman love possible, even if one is not cognitively conscious of that acceptance. Rahner concludes that the categorized explicit love of neighbour is the primary act of the love of God. The love of God unreflectedly but really and always intends God in supernatural transcendentality in the love of neighbour as such, and even the explicit love of God is still borne by that opening in trusting love to the whole of reality which takes place in the love of neighbour. It is radically true, i.e. by an ontological and not merely ‘moral’ or psychological necessity, that whoever does not love the brother whom he ‘sees’, also cannot love God whom he does not see, and that one can love God whom one does not see only by loving one’s visible brother lovingly.48 46 TI 6:16, 235. 47 TI 6:16, 246. 48 TI 6:16, 246.


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Love of neighbor becomes for Rahner the primary experience of both God’s love for the person and the person’s love for God; and thus affective consciousness, albeit leading to cognitive and volitive consciousness, plays a primary role in the spiritual life.

Intersubjectivity as Primary Analogue for Relationship with God Rahner has clearly articulated that human actualization takes place through interpersonal relationship and that the ability to love another human person comes from God, therefore in loving one another we experience and affirm the love of God. The reason that loving relationship becomes the primary mediation for the experience of God is because human relationships are intersubjective. God is not an object, and therefore the experience of an object is not the best possibility for the mediation of God. The human person as a subject that is finite and embodied, but at the same time yields the depth of mystery contained in the capacity for the infinite, bridges the human experience of being both embodied and in this world, while at the same time being transcendental and reaching beyond any finite object in this world. The human person is embodied and interpersonal. Human existence and experience, and therefore human consciousness, is embodied as well as spiritual. Tallon refers to embodiment as the human person’s first otherness and interrelatedness as the second otherness of human person.49 To these two degrees of ‘otherness’ one might add a third otherness that is the world of objects as the setting or stage in which the first two othernesses are lived out (though Tallon, in effect, includes the world of matter in his understanding of first otherness). As Rahner points out, “the world of things can be a possible object of man’s concern only as a moment of the world of persons.”50 Priority is given to second otherness, the interrelatedness of human existence. Rahner explains that the original objectivity of the experience of self necessarily takes place in the subjectivity of its encounters with other persons in dialogue, in trustful and loving encounter. Man experiences himself by experiencing the other person and not the other thing. Man could not achieve a self-withdrawal in a world consisting exclusively in 49 Tallon, PB, 171-175. 50 TI 6:16, 240.

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the heart of rahner material objects any more than he could from his own body, the concrete experience of which as it de facto exists also in fact presupposes an encounter with the physicality of other persons. 51

While Rahner often uses cognition as the primary model of human transcendence, clearly cognition of objects is not sufficient for selftranscendence. Affection, as the consciousness that intends the other, is required for human actualization. Human relationship with God, and thus one’s spiritual existence, cannot be divorced from this necessary ‘otherness’ of human experience that involves not only embodiment but also interrelation. Rahner declares that transcendental experience of God . . . is possible only in and through man who has already (in logical priority) experienced the human Thou by his intramundane transcendental experience (of his a priori reference to the Thou) and by his categorised experience (of his concrete encounter with the concrete Thou) and who only in this way can exercise the (at least) transcendental experience of his reference to the absolute mystery (i.e. God).52

The phenomenology of Buber and Heidegger highlights the fact that there is a priority given to affective consciousness because one is embodied and interrelational before one thinks or acts. Rahner also acknowledges, at least implicitly, the logical priority of affective consciousness in recognizing the logical priority of the encounter with the other human person that then mediates the encounter with God. The human person understands and experiences what it means to be relational in and through other persons; therefore such concrete, categorial relations are necessary to understand and experience one’s relation to God, even though in actuality one is related to God from the very moment of existence by God’s act of loving creation. The spiraling development of connaturality is evident in this process. One has a prevenient connaturality to God gratuitously given by God’s love. That connaturality becomes operative, enabling one to love others, and through action and reflection on that experience in turn creates a second nature, or subsequent connaturality, deepening one’s experience of connaturality to God. The deepening experience of one’s connaturality 51 TI 13:8, 127. See Tallon, PB, 174-175 on the mediation of one’s own body through the otherness of the other human subject. 52 TI 6:16, 245.


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to God in turn becomes operative in one’s relations to other persons and to God. Recalling Levinas’s concern that cognition ‘totalizes’ objects, affective consciousness is necessary for relations between subjects because it allows the other to remain other. Affective consciousness does not attempt to circumscribe an object but intends another subject and at the same time remains passive in the face of the freedom of the other subject to reveal or not reveal. Contrary to the totalizing effects of cognition in which one absorbs the otherness of the object, Rahner notes that the otherness of the human subject is not an obstacle to love but rather the necessary condition for love. Rahner explains that in human love the difference between two persons is given in the very ground, the root, of this love. Indeed, their difference is actually to be reaffirmed in this love—for the lover loves and affirms the other precisely as other, certainly not seeking simply to absorb the beloved into his or her own peculiar way of being.53

Love between persons is the primary analogue for one’s relationship with God because love allows, and in fact requires, the otherness of God. In the intersubjectivity of human persons, affective consciousness enables the otherness, the infinity, and the subjectivity of the other. Analogously affective consciousness is the primary analogue for a subject-subject (as opposed to subject-object) relation to God who is infinite and wholly other. In his two part article, “An Excessive Claim: Rahner’s Identification of Love of God with Love of Neighbour,” Richard Roach also argues for the necessity of understanding love as a subject-subject relation, but in doing so argues against the identity of love of God and love of neighbor.54 Roach makes an excellent distinction between how one 53 LJLN, 21. 54 Richard Roach, “An Excessive Claim: Rahner’s Identification of Love of God with Love of Neighbour, Part I,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 5 (1975): 247-257; Part 2, Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 5 (1975): 360-372. Note that part of Roach’s main argument against Rahner’s use of “necessity” will not be addressed in this work, nor will his concern about Rahner’s understanding of the economic and immanent Trinity be addressed. Roach’s concern for Rahner’s claim to a necessary understanding of the relationship between love of God and love of neighbor as a result of Rahner’s transcendental method versus one possible understanding among many is to a certain extent repeated in

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“knows” an object and how one “knows” a subject. While recognizing the “noetic component” in subject-subject relations, Roach argues that knowledge and language function differently in subject-subject relationships in that they are used to “produce a response” as opposed to “impart information.”55 In terms of triune consciousness, one must objectify another to a certain degree in cognitive consciousness, but that objectification will never completely capture the essence of the other. Furthermore, that knowledge is not simply used for the cognitive purpose of imparting information, but is more important for the affective purpose of producing a response. Relationships between persons are primarily affective, though cognition is also necessary for relationships between subjects. Roach further points out that in a relationship between two subjects, “they are not primarily knower and known; they are rather two distinct realities, both knowers and both knowns.”56 The relationship with God is best understood as a relationship between subjects for the reason that objective, cognitive propositions about God are always limited and always meant to be at the service of the relationship between the person and God. Furthermore one can never know God as one knows an object because God always transcends any attempt to objectify God. As opposed to the relationship between two human subjects, the human subject is completely known by God, whereas the human subject’s knowledge of God is always only an approximation and attempt to categorize something that always goes beyond categorization. Roach objects not only to Rahner’s transcendental method, but to a phenomenology in which “an intentional analysis attempts to define the objects of the subject’s conscious states and activities by describing the subject’s awareness of, striving for, or tending to or from the object.”57 Roach does not seem to take into account a distinct affective intentionality (as opposed to cognitive intentionality) that allows for subject-subject relationships. Roach also argues against an analysis of Karen Kilby’s concerns about Rahner’s transcendental method and in that respect will be addressed in chapter seven. Some of Roach’s concerns regarding Rahner’s theory could also be addressed by using the concept of unity instead of identity between love of God and love of neighbor. 55 Roach, Part I, 250. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 254.


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intentionality that gives “positive content” (i.e., names as God) to what should only be understood as “negative content” or the capacity, but not the actualization, for the infinite.58 Roach argues that positive transcendence means the actual attainment of an object other than the self, not simply the capacity to attain such an object. Therefore a claim that attaining a limited object has actualized a wider capacity—that openness to a finite being has actualized openness to infinity—ought to rest on a description of the object attained rather than on the subject’s acts that strive for attainment.59

While Roach highlights the need to understand human relationships as subject-subject relationships, he minimizes the human subject to a finite other instead of understanding the human subject as a finite infinity, the insight gained by Levinas’s understanding of affective intentionality. One cannot “attain” a human subject in the way one “attains” an object. The phrase “desire without possession,” which Tallon used to refer to the human affective relationship to God, can be used to describe relationships between human subjects as well. While there can be a level or degree of “possession” or satisfaction of desire with regard to a limited human subject, one can never completely possess another human subject because of the infinity of subjectivity. Therefore when the human subject is understood as a finite infinity, one does partially actualize the openness for the infinite when loving another human subject, but recognizing the limitedness of the other human subject, there remains a transcendence even beyond this finite infinity towards the infinite Infinity of God. When understood in terms of affective intentionality, actualization of this capacity for the infinite affects one’s affectability and one’s response-ability, so that in intrahuman relationships one finds oneself open to being affected by and responding to the infinite in a way that transcends the limited human subject. Roach argues that the transcendence beyond the individual human subject need not be understood as God, but also could be understood as Feuerbach’s humanity and Marx’s civil society.60 Within an understanding of the finite infinity of the human subject, one can argue that 58 Roach, Part 2, 361-362. Note the similarity of Roach’s criticism to Sheehan’s point that one can only name the dynamism of human transcendence not the term of human transcendence. 59 Ibid., 362. 60 Ibid., 364-365.

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both the concept of humanity in general and a more concrete civil society are also finite infinities that can be transcended. The important insight gained from Roach’s emphasis on Marx’s use of civil society is that one never loves a human subject independently of the “complex network of human subjects” to which both subjects belong.61 Roach’s insight allows the extension of affective intentionality beyond the intersubjectivity of individual human persons to the interdependence of the human community to which those persons belong. One is not only always already relational (on an individual level), one is always already communal before one thinks about it or agrees to it, born into a complex web of social relations. Roach wants to argue that because one is dealing with distinct subjects, namely the human person, the network of relations that defines that person, and God, one must refer to loves between which there is conscious distinction. An alternative understanding would be acknowledging a distinction between love of God and love of neighbor, but within a greater unity so that one might not be aware or conscious of the distinction and so within that unity be loving God in and through loving one’s neighbor and vice versa. The distinction exists in the cognitive objectification of those relationships, but the unity exists in the affective intentionality of those relationships. The higher synthesis of consciousness would involve cognitive reflection on the distinction between one’s relationship to God and to neighbor, but the lack of such cognitive awareness does not negate the affective unity of those two relationships.

Unity of Spirit and Matter Chapter one explored the insights of phenomenology and science for theological anthropology. Phenomenology asserts that consciousness is both embodied and spiritual. The body is no longer something to be disdained but rather is an integral part of human spiritual existence. Within a theory of triune consciousness, all three intentionalities are equal and distinct but not separate. No hierarchical ranking or priority exists between the cognitive, affective, and volitive intentionalities. Philosophy also has made the turn to relationality resulting in an increased awareness of the role played in consciousness by affective intentionality. Science also confirms the embodied nature of not only affection, but also cognition and volition. All three intentionalities of consciousness 61 Ibid., 366.


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are dependent on the body, but not reducible to the body. Neuroscience also has demonstrated the inability of the human person to function without affection. Pure reason is no longer the ideal. The human person requires feeling and emotion to make decisions. Affective consciousness intends value, and only when one values one choice over another can one move to action. The work of William Stoeger also suggests that consciousness is not only dependent on the brain and the body; it is also dependent on human relationships that make up the environment in which it grows and functions. Thus science has made a turn to relationality as well. The developments in philosophy and science require a correlative development in theological anthropology, a new understanding of the human person in which the relationship between body and spirit is both non-dualistic and non-reductionistic. This development of theological anthropology also must take into account the turn to relationality in both of these fields. Karl Rahner’s understanding of the relationship between spirit and matter suggests precisely such an anthropology. This section will examine this relationship between spirit and matter as well as the body as the symbol of the spirit. Writing in response to the challenges of materialism, Rahner argues that the problem with many approaches to the relationship between spirit and matter is the tendency to begin with matter. Rahner insists that one must begin with the understanding of spirit as transcendence and unity and then determine the nature of matter. Rahner argues that the very question about a possible deduction of the spirit from matter has no meaning, since one would be trying to deduce what is logically and ontologically prior from what is posterior in both these senses.62

Matter is then understood as a limited and in a sense ‘frozen’ spirit, as limited being whose being as such . . . is exactly the same being which outside such a 62 Karl Rahner, “The Unity of Spirit and Matter in the Christian Understanding of Faith,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. VI, trans. Karl-H and Boniface Kruger (Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press, 1969), 166 (hereafter cited as TI 6:12). See also Rahner, Hominization: The Evolutionary Origin of Man as a Theological Problem, Quaestiones Disputatae 13, trans. William J. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965).

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the heart of rahner limitation means being-conscious-of-itself, knowledge, freedom and transcendence towards God. This limitation in material being, of course, its not-becoming-conscious-of-itself in transcendence towards absolute being, is of a metaphysical kind that is constitutive of its essence.63

Matter’s limitation is God-imposed; it cannot overcome this limitation by its own power.64 At the same time matter is created for the sake of spirit.65 Matter is created as the potential to be spirit’s own reality. Rahner maintains that matter is, therefore, the openness and the bringing-itself-to-appear of the personal spirit in the finite world and hence is from its very origin related to spirit, it is a moment in the spirit. . . . This is not meant in any way to turn matter idealistically into spirit, for by the same statements the spirit is equally originally ‘materialised’.66

Even the material world can be understood “as the environment and as the broadened corporeality of the spirit,”67 and in this sense the third otherness of the human person. Human spirit, for Rahner, can only be understood in unity with matter. It is the “unlimiting” of matter where the spirit itself enters so closely into materiality that it differentiates itself and keeps it as a factor of its own becoming as a spirit, of its becoming-conscious-of-itself, viz. in man.68

Spirit is dependent on the body, but not reducible to the body. Spirit and matter are “indissolubly referred to one another,” and cannot be thought of as existing “side by side” or as “words referring to particular regions of the total reality.”69 Rahner explains that the spirit or soul must not be thought of “as a fragmentary portion of the whole man,”

63 64 65 66 67 68 69

TI 6:12, 168. TI 6:12, 168. Ibid. TI 6:12, 170. TI 6:12, 169. Ibid. TI 6:12, 171.


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but rather is the “one originating source of the whole man.”70 Spirit and matter, “though essentially different, are everywhere correlative constitutive moments of one reality.”71 Rahner explains that “the finite spirit searches for and finds itself through the fulfilment of the material itself,” and this perfect achievement of the spirit takes place in a turning towards the material world, and this not only in a theoretical sense but also by an active transformation of this world, in which man is no longer merely an object but also becomes an active subject in the real history of nature. . . . If, however, matter is interpreted as frozen spirit, i.e. interpreted spiritually, then this also necessarily implies a highly ‘material’ explanation of the finite spirit.72

Rahner’s understanding of the relationship between spirit and matter/body as distinct but not separate realities enable a dialogue with scientists who take a non-reductionistic approach as well as with philosophers who understand consciousness to be both embodied and spiritual. Rahner’s theology of symbol, and specifically his understanding of the body as symbol of the human spirit, further enables such a dialogue to take place. Rahner defines a symbol as “the self-realization of a being in the other, which is constitutive of its essence.”73 Rahner believes that “all beings are by their nature symbolic, because they necessarily ‘express’ themselves in order to attain their own nature.”74 Human persons express the unity of their being in a plurality, in a succession of moments in time and space, i.e., through history and embodiment.75 One actualizes oneself through time and space, through a succession of moments in which one becomes more who one was created to be, and thus the original unity one is. Each moment of plurality is derived from one’s original unity, and thus is the expression of that unity. Rahner explains this self-actualization as being that 70 Karl Rahner, “The Theology of Symbol,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. VI: More Recent Writings, trans. Kevin Smyth (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966), 248 (hereafter cited as TI 4:9). 71 TI 6:12, 171. 72 TI 6:12, 170. 73 TI 4:9, 234. 74 TI 4:9, 224. 75 TI 4:9, 227-228.

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the heart of rahner expresses itself and possesses itself by doing so. It gives itself away from itself into the ‘other’, and there finds itself in knowledge and love, because it is by constituting the inward ‘other’ that it comes to (or: from) its self-fulfilment, which is the presupposition or the act of being present to itself in knowledge and love.76

The body is the first otherness that expresses the human spirit and thus enables the possession of self. The expression of self through the symbol of the body is not first and foremost about being known by a human other; it is first and foremost the process of becoming oneself in and through what is other, i.e., the body. Nonetheless there is a relational element to the human person, since one does ultimately seek to express oneself to another human person. One must give oneself away, in the first otherness of the body-symbol and in the second otherness of relationality, in order to find and possess oneself in knowledge and love. Tallon explains that for Rahner personal becoming occurs first as spirit becomes itself in world or matter, and second as this constituted “starting” essence of materialized-spirit-spiritualizedmatter now freely relates to a world constituted by others like myself.77

The human person is not simply symbolic, but is “symbolic for another.”78 Rahner explains that as a being realizes itself in its own intrinsic ‘otherness’ (which is constitutive of its being), retentive of its intrinsic plurality (which is contained in its self-realization) as its derivative and hence congruous expression, it makes itself known. . . . The being is known in this symbol, without which it cannot be known at all.79

Self-expression is by nature embodied and relational. On the one hand, one realizes oneself in the first otherness of the body only by making oneself known in the second otherness of relationship. On the other hand, one can only make oneself known to another in and through one’s first otherness of embodiment.

76 77 78 79

TI 4:9, 230. Tallon, PB, 171. TI 4:9, 231. Ibid.


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Heart as the Symbol of the Human Person The lynchpin of Rahner’s understanding of the human person is his theory that the heart is the symbol of the whole person, body and spirit. Rahner uses the term “heart” for what Tallon would refer to as affective consciousness as well as for the unity of the triune consciousness. As such, Rahner’s theology is completely congruent with a triune consciousness that maintains that consciousness is both embodied and spiritual in all three intentionalities. Rahner most frequently addresses the human heart in his reflections on the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Heart symbolizes the elements of unity, mystery, and love that are at the core of what it means to be a human person. Rahner refers to the word “heart” as a primordial word or an Ursymbol. For Rahner this means that one does not grasp the word “heart,” but rather is grasped by its mystery.80 He explains that as a primordial word, “it cannot be defined, it cannot be composed of better known words, because its meaning is an original unity and totality.”81 For this reason the word “heart” is entirely suited to refer to affective consciousness, the intentionality that is non-objective and non-conceptual. For all of the congruence found between Rahner’s understanding of heart and Tallon’s concept of affective intentionality as non-objective consciousness, it must be noted that Rahner still denies feeling its proper intentionality and subsumes non-objective consciousness under intellect. Rahner explains that in speaking of primordial words such as heart, this mystery [found in primordial words] is made present not in conceptual terms but rather in being touched and stirred into life. What we are treating here is not a ‘feeling’ or a movement of the affections in devotion which cannot be controlled, but rather that without which every concept would have to remain cut off in a state of isolation and incommunicability, in which it could no longer be understood. We are treating of that which belongs to the very es80 Karl Rahner, “The Theological Meaning of the Veneration of the Sacred Heart,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. VIII: Further Theology of the Spiritual Life 2, trans. David Bourke (NY: Seabury, 1977), 225 (hereafter cited as 8:11). 81 Karl Rahner, “‘Behold This Heart!’: Preliminaries to a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. III: The Theology of the Spiritual Life, trans. Karl-H and Boniface Kruger (Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press, 1967), 323 (hereafter cited as TI 3:21).

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the heart of rahner sence of intellectual knowledge as such, and upholds it in being, of a reference to the inconceivable and inexpressible, which is itself beyond the power of the human intellect to grasp or objectify, a reference such that the inconceivable and inexpressible itself is silently present in it.82

For Tallon being conscious of that which is beyond one’s ability to grasp or objectify is precisely what is called the affective intentionality of consciousness, and this intentionality does include ‘feelings’ or movements of the affections that may be able to be controlled but cannot be willed. To give Rahner credit, he is once again using “intellectual knowledge” in a Thomistic sense that includes both cognition and affection, but nonetheless he is forcing intellect to account for the properties of affect instead of allowing affect its own distinct intentionality. Rahner’s usage of heart reflects his non-dualistic understanding of the human person. The word refers to the depths of unity and mystery in the human person, avoiding any division of the person into body and spirit. Rahner further elucidates this unity of the human person by noting that it “is a personal unity, that is to say, one which knows itself, ventures forth and freely makes its own choice, which answers and – in love – affirms itself or denies itself.”83 Once again Rahner refers to self-knowledge, free actualization, and love, the three intentionalities of consciousness. Rahner also acknowledges the intentionality, or going out to the other, that is necessary to experience one’s unity. He states that as man goes out and away from himself, he must realize himself in something other that he has done and suffered, and can only in this way, in this other, looking away from himself, become conscious of the well-spring of unity of his being. And such a well-spring, from which the alien other really flows and which possesses itself only in the other, is called the heart.84

Ultimately any self-knowledge, i.e., becoming cognitively conscious, of one’s unity of consciousness requires going out to the other in affective intentionality and self-actualization in volitive consciousness. In Tallon’s words, 82 TI 8:11, 225-226. 83 TI 3:21, 323. 84 TI 3:21, 324.


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to advance in knowledge and freedom—which is asymptotically to “overcome our finitude,” in time—is to recognize our affective roots by becoming cognitively conscious of affective consciousness and by taking up our affective intentionalities (as motivations) into our volitional consciousness, or resisting taking that up.85

Rahner calls this well-spring of unity “heart.” Tallon refers to the “personal unity” of the human person as the unity of consciousness expressed, as Rahner also implies, not only in affection but also in cognition and volition, because the intentionalities are distinct from one another but never separate. The unity of the human person expressed in the term “heart” is prior to any division of the person into body and spirit. Rahner reminds the reader that in the concrete living out of our existence we always experience ourselves as one human being, we never have either spirit or matter by itself. When we have experience of the body, it is an experience of the living body and therefore – we could almost say – of the soul in the condition of a spatio-temporal aggregate (which of course only partially expresses it). And the highest knowledge of the spirit, where it comes face to face with itself, is still corporeal and takes place in image, word, sound, and gesture. . . . The original, background, unifying interior of his one reality (which interior is still as much a union of body and spirit as he himself is as a whole) he calls heart.86

Rahner’s concept of heart as unity of body and spirit is very similar to Ricoeur’s understanding of the heart as thumos, the “mediation and mélange of bios-epithumia and logos-eros.”87 Rahner’s understanding of heart as unity of body and spirit, however, requires a similar caution to that taken with Ricoeur; one also must note the unity of body and spirit in cognition and volition, avoiding a disembodied understanding of these other two intentionalities. Heart also refers to the mystery of the human person, what could be called the infinity of the human person who is subject, not object. Rahner states that 85 Tallon, HH, 92. 86 TI 3:21, 325-326. 87 Tallon, HH, 97.

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the heart of rahner when we use the term ‘heart’ we mean something original which is inexhaustible in itself, and never drained of its contents, so that when we look into it our gaze can never penetrate to an empty void within. It is something that realises its own nature in the unlimited fruitfulness of its thoughts and deeds, the manner in which it is expressed and presented to the outside world. And yet at the same time in all this its depths are never plumbed. It is never ultimately laid bare or reduced to its constituent elements. In brief it is, and remains, mystery because it is everything, and in a true sense – in that it is altogether itself and to the extent that it is heart – it has no norm beyond itself by which it can be defined and regulated. It is not for nothing that we speak of the heart’s secrets. It is not for nothing that we say of the all-knowing God that he alone knows the heart of man.88

The heart as the mystery or infinity of the human subject enables an understanding of interpersonal relations in which one does not objectify one’s fellow human being, totalizing the person through cognitive consciousness; but rather interacts heart to heart through affective consciousness, allowing the other to be other in all of his or her infinite glory. Consequently the relationship to God who is first and foremost inexhaustible mystery and totally Infinite Other is best understood in terms of affective consciousness which allows the space for God to be God rather than a conceptual object of our cognitive consciousness. Cognition then puts this experience of God into, albeit limiting, words and concepts so that one can communicate one’s experience, and volition allows one the freedom to act, to actualize oneself authentically, in accordance with one’s heart and head. Heart, in Rahner’s theology, is not just the symbol of unity and mystery but the symbol of love. One must note, however, that ‘heart’ does not denote simply and immediately love. This inwardcorporeal core of the personal being of man, which borders on the source of all mystery, can according to Scripture also be evil and the bottomless pit, into which the evil-doer who shuts himself off from love plunges. The heart can be empty of love, and even what can still be called love can be very peripheral.89

Heart, as affective consciousness, incorporates all emotion, feeling, value, etc. Love is the highest and most authentic actualization of af88 TI 8:12, 242. 89 TI 3:21, 327.


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fective consciousness, just as volition while including all choice and decision is most authentically actualized in freedom in the true sense of the word, i.e., the freedom to be who God created one to be. Through the love of God, the heart discovers its own truest identity in surrender to God. The Sacred Heart of Jesus models this love. Rahner maintains that only if we direct our gaze to the heart of Christ, therefore, do we know what love is: the mystery of the world, the overcoming of the terrors which are in the world, that which unifies and embraces, that which transforms, that which liberates and is tender, that which is only realized in its fullness when the one who loves makes a total surrender of everything pertaining to the movement of his own personal history towards its fulfilment. This is achieved when this love of his is pierced through and silently pours out its heart’s blood into the futility of the world, and thereby conquers it.90

In Christ the heart of God as grace and compassion is revealed, and the human acceptance of that love is definitive. Through that divine love, given and received, and united to Christ, one is able to love both God and neighbor. Affective consciousness ultimately realizes itself as one reveals and surrenders one’s heart to the other and is open to the revelation and surrender of the other’s heart in turn. That other is the human other that is called neighbor and the Infinite Other that is called God.

90 TI 8:11, 239-240.

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ndrew Tallon’s theory of triune consciousness provides an understanding of the human person that gives affective intentionality an equal and distinct role to that of cognitive and volitive intentionality in consciousness. Tallon’s theory also allows one to understand all three intentionalities of consciousness as being both embodied and spiritual. Developments in the scientific understanding of consciousness require an acknowledgement of both the essential role affect plays in the decision-making process and the embodied nature of cognition and volition along with affection. Likewise the phenomenological turn to relationality and the emphasis on intersubjectivity in contemporary philosophy require theological systems to reevaluate traditional understandings of affectivity. Tallon’s theory restores affective intentionality to its rightful place in the realm of consciousness. Tallon uses Newman’s theorem to show that when there is ignorance of affective consciousness, the whole of knowledge becomes mutilated, so that the human soul is understood as a dyad of intellect and will instead of a triad of conscious intentionalities, and intellect and will are then distorted to account for the functions of affective consciousness.1 Rahner’s theological system presumes a framework of faculty psychology for understanding the human person and so demonstrates the ways in which intellect and will are forced to account for affect when affective intentionality is not available as a possible explanatory category. Despite this dependence on faculty psychology, affectivity is central to Rahner’s understanding of the human person and the person’s relationship to God, so Rahner ends up making an implicit distinction between affective consciousness and cognitive or volitive consciousness without having the concept of triune consciousness with which to articulate the distinction in an explicit manner. The heart for Rahner becomes not only a way to speak of affective intentionality, but also the symbol of the whole human person, body and soul, in the unity of triune consciousness. 1 Tallon, “Doctrinal Development,” 362.

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This work has shown that when those implicit distinctions between intentionalities as well as the unity of consciousness in Rahner’s work are made explicit, Rahner must be read differently. Whether Rahner is addressing a mystical experience of God or the experience of God in everyday life, he tends to describe the experience in primarily affective terms. Rahner’s naming the horizon of human transcendence as the personal loving God of revelation is in reality grounded by an affective intuition arising out of affective experience. The conviction of faith does not come primarily from cognition but from affection. Faith should not be unreasonable, so cognition is also necessary, as is volitive action, but the conviction about the term of human transcendence requires affect. Because God is incomprehensible mystery, cognition does not allow us to grasp the term of human cognitive transcendence. The experience of human freedom enables one to experience God as free, but what Rahner is unable to articulate due to the limitations of faculty psychology is that freedom opens up the space necessary for affective encounter with God. Likewise the encounter presupposes affective intentionality. Affective experience cannot be reduced to volition. Affective intentionality is what allows the human person to be affected by God and respond to God. One cannot will oneself to be affected, and yet affection is not separate from cognition and volition because one’s affectability and response-ability are shaped through one’s action and reflection in the ongoing process of conversion. One experiences God as the horizon of all knowing and willing, but ultimately it is the depth of affective experience, particularly the experience of love, that gives one grounds for identifying that horizon of our existence with the loving God of revelation and not simply incomprehensible mystery. The highest synthesis of triune consciousness is experienced in loving relation with one’s fellow human beings, and this intersubjectivity becomes the primary analogue for understanding our relationship with God. Rahner’s later writing ultimately reflects the recognition that humans do not come to an experience of God and themselves primarily through the world of objects but through the world of persons. The world of objects is always secondary. Rahner’s realization about the importance of human intersubjectivity comes to fruition in his understanding of the unity between the love of God and the love of neighbor. Going beyond Rahner’s reflections on this experience, a phenomenological analysis allows one to recognize that the subject-

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subject relationship between human beings in which one encounters the finite infinity of the other whom one can never possess or cognitively circumscribe is the most basic mediation of our relationship to the Infinite Infinity that is named the personal loving God of revelation. Relationship to God is a subject-subject relationship, not a subject-object relationship. While there is some degree of objectification necessary in order to reflect upon one’s relationship with God and for providing the framework through which one experiences God, cognitive consciousness can never be the primary way in which one relates to God. Rahner recognizes the connection between the experience of oneself, one’s neighbor, and one’s God. All three of these experiences are experiences of subjects, not objects, and therefore require an affective consciousness that is embodied and spiritual. The experience of encountering the other, in terms of neighbor and God, cannot be exhaustively understood through cognitive objectification. The infinity of the other enforces a distance or space between subjects, but that space is precisely what makes relationship possible. The distance between God and the human person is what enables the individual to be affected by and respond to God. Reinterpreting Karl Rahner’s understanding of the human person’s relationship to self, neighbor, and God through the theory of triune consciousness suggests new ways to enter into dialogue with some of the well-known commentators on Rahner’s work. Because the distinctions between affection, cognition, and volition are only implicit, Rahner’s critics miss the tacit role of affective intentionality. Rahner’s discussion of human transcendence, for example, is typically understood as an experience of cognition. When affective intentionality is understood as distinct but never separate from the cognitive and volitive intentionalities of consciousness, Rahner’s theology is read differently, and so the evaluations of Rahner’s theology also must be read differently. Perhaps some of the conclusions drawn about Rahner’s theology and the critiques made of it can be rethought based on the insights gained from reading Rahner from a more phenomenological perspective. This chapter will explore a sampling of such commentaries, using the work of Thomas Sheehan, George Lindbeck, Karen Kilby, and Patrick Burke. While it is beyond this chapter’s scope to fully address each author’s argument, it will offer suggestions of where such dialogue might begin.

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Thomas Sheehan Thomas Sheehan raises an interesting challenge for theologians, particularly for Rahnerian scholars. The question he asks is whether or not one can really name a horizon that one in fact never reaches.2 What right does one have to call the term of one’s human transcendence God? Furthermore, what right does one have to call that term a personal God? For Sheehan, what can be named is the movement or kinēsis of humanity’s transcendence, but the term should be left enveloped in mystery. Sheehan, however, presumes that when Rahner discusses human transcendence, he is referring only to cognitive transcendence. Sheehan does not consider the possibility of an affective dynamism in human experience that puts human transcendence in a new perspective. Tallon’s concept of affective consciousness can be used to explain some of the moves, or in Sheehan’s reading, leaps, that Karl Rahner makes in naming the horizon of human knowing God. In his work, Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations, a work which limits itself to examining Rahner’s early work, Geist in Welt, Sheehan argues that Rahner goes too far in naming the horizon God. Sheehan points out that Rahner goes beyond Heidegger on this issue: What seems to separate Rahner and Heidegger is the question of the scope of man’s transcendence and therefore the knowability or not of the term of that movement. Heidegger will be able to go only so far as man’s appropriation by an unknowable recess (lēthē), whereas Rahner will see man claimed by the mystery of God.3

Sheehan follows Heidegger’s answer to the question of the scope of human transcendence, thus arriving at his ‘ātheology’ which he defines as “a mode of discourse (lōgos)—or better, a silent attunement to one’s own movement (logos as kinēsis)—that recognizes that the thēos of traditional metaphysics and Christian theology is hardly adequate to the mystery inscribed in that movement.”4 Rahner would most likely agree with the second half of that statement, that the God of traditional metaphysics and theology is too limited, but the question for Rah2 See Sheehan, Karl Rahner, particularly pp. 308-317. Also see Sheehan, “From Divinity to Infinity,” in The Once and Future Jesus, The Jesus Seminar (Santa Rosa, California: Polebridge Press, 2000) 27-44. 3 Ibid., 128. 4 Ibid., 316.


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ner becomes one of what makes one’s experience of that movement positive rather than negative, an experience of movement toward God instead of a movement into meaninglessness and absurdity.5 There is a conviction present in Rahner that the dynamism of human transcendence is directed toward God, that it is not endless and limited only to the claim of one’s own movement. Such a conviction can be better understood by an appeal to affective consciousness. Sheehan is correct that the cognitive experience of human transcendence only allows one to speak of the movement, not the term of human transcendence, which remains unknowable mystery. However when the experience of human transcendence is understood phenomenologically as affective, and so as an experience of being affected by the term in such a way that calls for a response, this provides grounds for a transcendental claim that the affective intuition presupposes as its condition of possibility a whence that is loving and personal. Sheehan concludes his argument by stating the goal of his ātheology: to take utterly seriously the historicity of man, not as a movement towards a guaranteed end but as an asymptotic measure of the unending mystery that lurks within one. . . . Such an ātheology might harbor the possibility of belief, not as a prevision of thēos but as a resolute commitment, a surrender, to an unceasing exploration that constantly returns us to where we started: the darkness of interrogative knowing.6 5 Rahner argues against Heidegger that the horizon is not nothingness, but I would agree with Sheehan that Rahner, who studied under Heidegger in his early years, did not fully grasp that Heidegger was using the term ‘nothingness’ in the sense of no-thing-ness, a concept with which Rahner would seem to be in full agreement. In his later works, such as Foundations, I would hazard a guess that Rahner, with his talk of absurdity and meaninglessness, is arguing more against philosophers such as Sartre and Nietzsche than Heidegger. For Rahner’s interpretation of Heidegger, see “The Concept of Existential Philosophy in Heidegger,” trans. Andrew Tallon, Philosophy Today 13 (1969). Also see Sheehan, Karl Rahner, 103-132. 6 Ibid. 317. For another description of Sheehan’s ātheology, see “From Divinity to Infinity.” Because Sheehan does not ever cite Rahner as one he is arguing against nor clarify on which ‘track’ he would put Rahner, I am not going to address his arguments from that article in this work.

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The affective response is still a surrender into the darkness of (cognitive) interrogative knowing, but one that presupposes one is surrendering to the claim of a beloved. The problem with this ātheology from a theological perspective is that, while it accounts for the experience of asymptotic movement toward infinite mystery, it does not account for the human experience of being grasped by that mystery. Sheehan is right in naming the movement asymptotic in that one can never come to a cognitive comprehension of the term of one’s movement—to do so would be to have transcended that term. He does not, however, allow for the affective experience of being grasped by that term, of having the holy mystery draw near to us, which is not to say that the term is no longer mysterious, but rather to say that one surrenders to that holy mystery as mystery with the affective intuition that what one is surrendering to is the infinite love of God. To put such an argument in theological terms, Sheehan’s perspective allows for the cognitive transcendence of human nature, but precludes room for articulating the affective experiences of God’s self-communication through the Holy Spirit (grace) and Christ. Sheehan remains in the cognitive realm of human consciousness and thus is dependent on a subject-object understanding of relationship. A theory of triune consciousness argues that this paradigm is inadequate to understand affective consciousness which deals with a subject-subject relationship. Sheehan argues in his article on “Rahner’s Transcendental Project” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner that “the only infinity that human beings know is not God’s, but their own finite infinity.”7 Limiting himself to Rahner’s Geist in Welt, Sheehan addresses Rahner’s understanding of the “otheredness” of human experience in a social and material world,8 but does not make the move from a cognitive experience of the other as an object of one’s senses to the affective experience of the other as unknowable infinite subject. The intersubjective nature of the human being means that one does not experience only the finite infinity of one’s own transcendence, but also experiences the finite infinity of the other subject whom one encounters. Sheehan argues that “we are ontologically fated 7 Thomas Sheehan, “Rahner’s Transcendental Project,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, ed. Declan Marmion and Mary Hines, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 2005), 33. 8 Ibid., 40.


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to meet nothing of which we cannot make sense.”9 He is referring to Rahner’s argument that one only makes sense of material things; but when one expands the frame of reference to the encounter with human subjects as well as material things, one now has an experience not only of one’s own finite infinity, but also of another’s finite infinity. The nuance that is missing from Sheehan’s statement is that one is ontologically fated to meet nothing we do not try to grasp. In other words, cognition demands one attempt to make sense of that which one encounters, including other human subjects or God, but those encounters can never be completely captured by cognition due to the infinity of the subject (a finite infinity in the human subject and the Infinite Infinity of God). Affective consciousness demonstrates the limitlessness not only of one’s own cognition, but of one’s own affectability and responsibility. When encountering another subject one is constantly able to learn and experience more of that subject, but never able to exhaust the knowledge of or transcend that subject. Sheehan is right to urge humanity to stay within the social material world,10 but not because an encounter with God is impossible, but rather because it is precisely in experiencing one’s own infinite subjectivity in an encounter and relationship with another’s infinite subjectivity that one encounters the Infinite Infinity of God, the personal, loving, holy mystery that is the horizon of all love, knowledge, and freedom. When Rahner is read from the perspective of a triune consciousness that is cognizant of the role of affective intentionality, Sheehan’s critique of Rahner must be reexamined. He is correct that Rahner’s naming the horizon God cannot be accounted for by the experience of cognitive transcendence, but Rahner is not addressing cognitive transcendence apart from affective and volitive transcendence. The experience of transcendence for Rahner is one of love, knowledge, and freedom.

George Lindbeck George Lindbeck’s critique of Rahner also must be re-appraised if Rahner’s theology is read from the perspective of triune consciousness. Triune consciousness not only gives affective intentionality its equal and distinct role in consciousness, it also emphasizes the unity 9 Ibid., 37. 10 Ibid., 41.

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of the three intentionalities in consciousness. While one intentionality might be better suited to speak about a certain experience of consciousness, there is never a separation between the intentionalities that would allow one to speak of an affective experience that is unaffected by one’s cognitive and volitive intentionalities. Consciousness is one, and so affective consciousness is always shaped as well as interpreted by and through cognitive and volitive consciousness. George Lindbeck delineates three typical theological categories of relating religion and doctrine: the cognitive propositionalist theories, the experiential expressivist theories, and the theories that combine the cognitive propositionalist and experiential expressivist approaches.11 He places Karl Rahner in the third category, noting that such theories are equipped to account more fully than can the first two types for both variable and invariable aspects of religious traditions but have difficulty in coherently combining them. Even at their best, as in Rahner and Lonergan, they resort to complicated intellectual gymnastics and to that extent are unpersuasive.12

Lindbeck’s own position is the cultural linguistic approach in which doctrine functions as “communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude, and action.”13 Lindbeck’s concern is to emphasize “the degree to which human experience is shaped, molded, and in a sense constituted by cultural and linguistic forms.”14 A theory of triune consciousness allows for a combination of Rahner’s position and Lindbeck’s concerns because of the unity and interaction of the three intentionalities of consciousness. Cognitive consciousness, including one’s cultural and linguistic forms, definitely shapes affective experience and subsequently reflects on that experience. Lindbeck argues that “to become religious involves becoming skilled in the language, the symbol system of a given religion.”15 A theory of triune consciousness would agree that religion gives one the vocabulary with which one can articulate one’s affective experience but is also a condition of possibility for that 11 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 16-17. 12 Ibid., 17. 13 Ibid., 18. 14 Ibid., 34. 15 Ibid.


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experience. Lindbeck explains that one must learn the story of one’s religion “well enough to interpret and experience oneself and one’s world in its terms.”16 The problem with Lindbeck’s position is that it appears to make the relationship unilateral so that “religion is above all an external word, a verbum externum, that molds and shapes the self and the world rather than an expression or thematization of a preexisting self or of preconceptual experience.”17 If it were exclusively true that religion only shapes experience rather than also reflecting experience, it would be hard to explain how one would ever convert to a religion, because were one not raised in that religion, one would never have experiences congruent to that religion. There would be a disconnect between the story of the religion and the experiences of a person not immersed in that religion. Certainly one’s religious understanding shapes one’s experiences, but people also are drawn to religions because those religions offer an interpretation of one’s experience in a way that resonates with one’s affective consciousness of that experience. For this reason one often finds that it is not only one’s own religion that resonates with one’s experience, but aspects of other religions can resonate with one’s experience as well. For example many Christians are drawn to Buddhist spirituality because it highlights an aspect of their experience that is too often neglected in their own tradition. Likewise as people’s experience changes over time, religious doctrine is reinterpreted to remain congruent with contemporary experience. Lindbeck himself admits that the relation of religion and experience “is not unilateral but dialectical.”18 He admits that “it is too simplistic to say (as [he] earlier did) merely that religions produce experiences, for the causality is reciprocal. Patterns of experience alien to a given religion can profoundly influence it.”19 Triune consciousness offers a multi-directional and dialectical relationship between affective and cognitive consciousness because of their unity, whereas Lindbeck’s theory gives the appearance of defaulting to a unilateral position, wanting to interpret all affective experience as simply arising from cognitive consciousness. 16 17 18 19

Ibid., 34. Ibid. Ibid., 33. Ibid.

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Rahner’s anthropology can incorporate Lindbeck’s cultural linguistic position when understood in terms of triune consciousness. Human experience is never separate from the cognitive framework that both shapes and interprets the experience because of the unity of consciousness, and yet cognitive concepts never fully capture the depths of that experience. Lindbeck correctly argues that language is necessary for experience. He states that we cannot identify, describe, or recognize experience qua experience without the use of signs and symbols. These are necessary even for what the depth psychologist speaks of as “unconscious” or “subconscious” experiences, or for what the phenomenologist describes as prereflective ones. In short, it is necessary to have the means for expressing an experience in order to have it, and the richer our expressive or linguistic system, the more subtle, varied, and differentiated can be our experience.20

With the unity and distinction of affective and cognitive consciousness, the necessity of cognitive categories for affective experience can be upheld without negating the fact that such categories are never fully adequate to one’s experience and that one’s experience in turn affects one’s cognitive categories. Describing affective experience as prereflective is misleading because doing so implies that experience occurs apart from a cognitive context. Perhaps it would be less misleading to speak of such experience as unreflective or nonreflective. It is not that experience occurs before any reflection has ever taken place and as such is untouched by reflection, but rather that it occurs in an unreflective manner that requires cognitive articulation. Articulation and reflection not only interpret the experience but also identify the cognitive presuppositions that shaped the experience. The interplay of affection and cognition also accounts for the fact that the greater one’s cognitive, self-reflective skills, the richer one’s affective experience will be. Triune consciousness even allows for the possible connection between a linguistic a priori and sensory perception that Lindbeck highlights,21 because it maintains the connection between mind, body, 20 Ibid., 37. 21 Ibid., 37. Lindbeck gives the interesting example of tribes that cannot recognize the difference between green and blue, despite showing no physiological signs of being colorblind, because their language does not discriminate between green and blue.


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and spirit through the assertion that cognition, affection, and volition are all both embodied and spiritual. Lindbeck objects to the idea of a common religious experience in all human beings and religions, but for Rahner that common experience is the experience of being human. Lindbeck objects that Buddhist compassion, Christian love, and . . . French Revolutionary fraternité are not diverse modifications of a single human awareness, emotion, attitude or sentiment, but are radically (i.e., from the root) distinct ways of experiencing and being oriented toward self, neighbor, and cosmos. The affective features they have in common are part, so to speak, of their raw materials, functions of those feelings of closeness to one’s immediate fellows shared by all human beings including Nazis and headhunters.

The argument Rahner makes is precisely that the affective features of these experiences are shared by all human beings including Nazis and headhunters. That common feeling is augmented in a Christian or Buddhist interpretation that does modify that single human awareness to be a radically distinct way of experiencing self, neighbor, and cosmos. In other words, unlike the Nazi or the headhunter, Christian love or Buddhist compassion ultimately extends this feeling of closeness to one’s immediate fellows to those outside of one’s fellowship, to the stranger, the alien, the other. The affective experience is both shaped by the cognitive framework and can affect the cognitive framework. The examples Lindbeck gives do all arise out of the common human experience of affective consciousness, but each experience is also distinct due to the cognitive framework within which the experience is had. Lindbeck wants to discredit attempts to find similarities between religions by comparing them to languages. He argues that one does not establish that two languages are alike, so they might argue, by showing that both use overlapping sets of sounds or have common objects of reference (e.g., mother, child, water, fire, and all the more salient persons and objects in the world human beings share). What counts in determining similarities between languages are the grammatical patterns, the ways of referring, the semantic and syntactic structures.22

Yet by this analogy different languages are precisely different ways of articulating similar experiences or objects, i.e., mother, child, water, 22 Ibid., 42.

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etc., in the world humans share. Religions can be understood as different cognitive expressions of similar human experiences. Different religious practices and beliefs are the different grammatical patterns that express, shape, and yes, differentiate those experiences in the ongoing interaction of affective, cognitive, and volitive consciousness. Lindbeck has neither the distinction of the three intentionalities of consciousness to account for how and why affective experience can affect the cognitive frameworks within which people operate, nor the unity of the intentionalities to explain why one can never have an affective experience that is not always already also cognitive and volitive. As a result, Lindbeck reads Rahner’s account of unthematic experience as experience that occurs prior to any cultural-linguistic influence. Interpreting Rahner through the theory of triune consciousness allows one to clarify the distinction of affective experience without separating that experience from its cultural-linguistic influences.

Karen Kilby Karen Kilby’s critique of Rahner also is cast in a different light when Rahner’s use of human experience is interpreted in terms of triune consciousness. Like Lindbeck, Kilby understands affective experience in Rahner’s theology to be pre-linguistic, thus putting a separation instead of a distinction between the cognitive and affective intentionalities of consciousness. Intentionality analysis shows the limitations of framing the issue in such a way. When affective experience is defined as distinct but not separate from the cognitive framework within which it takes place, Kilby’s concerns about Rahner’s theology must be reassessed. In her work, Karl Rahner: Philosophy and Theology, Karen Kilby offers a nonfoundationalist reading of Rahner, as opposed to a foundationalist or semi-foundationalist reading. She objects that foundationalists maintain that there must be beliefs in the foundation that “are self-evident, or certain, or indubitable.”23 She goes on to object that “foundationalism represents an excessive desire for certainty, for intellectual security and closure; it is a philosophy over-reaching itself, a kind of intellectual hubris.”24 Within the framework of tri23 Karen Kilby, Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy, (London: Routledge, 2004), 3. 24 Ibid., 5.


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une consciousness, certainty in belief does not come from cognitive, philosophical arguments alone, but from an interplay with affective experience and intuition that is subsequently interpreted and articulated through cognitive categories. Rahner does not claim that his philosophical work is the foundation of his theological belief. Rahner openly acknowledges that the absolute commitment of faith goes beyond cognitive reasoning. Rational reflection can only play a relative role in arriving at a judgment of certainty. The conviction and certitude necessary for a commitment of faith also require an affective consciousness that goes beyond cognitive arguments. Kilby rightfully acknowledges that Rahner does not claim to be a foundationalist, but she does claim that he is often read as one.25 An interpretation of Rahner’s theology through triune consciousness is neither foundationalist nor nonfoundationalist but rather points to or draws on its phenomenological character that is often ignored.26 Kilby’s main points in her nonfoundationalist reading of Rahner are “first, that his theology is best understood as logically independent of his philosophy, and second, that experience, which has such a significant role in Rahner’s theology, is best construed not as the starting point of his theology, but as its conclusion.”27 From the perspective of triune consciousness, both Rahner’s philosophy and his theology are cognitive interpretations of affective experience. That affective experience, however, never exists in a vacuum apart from one’s cognitive framework, which Kilby rightly assesses for Rahner is Christian. Affective experience is Rahner’s starting point and truly the common center that holds his philosophy and theology together. Furthermore his theology develops out of his 25 Ibid., 9. 26 See Michael Purcell, “Review of Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy by Karen Kilby,” The International Journal of Systematic Theology 7 ( July 2005): 325, who notes, “‘Phenomenology’ is, perhaps, the unspoken interlocutor in Rahner’s entire discontinuous project of existential engagement.” See also Robert Masson, “Review of Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy by Karen Kilby,” Modern Theology 23 (2007): 159, who notes that “if philosophy is not construed so narrowly as neutral and universally persuasive demonstration, there is no reason to preclude that as with evolution it is not a case of deducing one thing from the other but of bringing out a certain harmony between theology and philosophy. On this less narrow conception of philosophy, appreciations of Rahner’s philosophical coherence are not necessarily foundationalist in character.” 27 Kilby, 70.

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previous experience which includes his Jesuit formation and spirituality as well as his philosophical study under Heidegger. Rahner’s philosophy should be taken within its historical context. His theology is not dependent on his philosophy in the sense that the philosophy offers some form of certain, objective foundation for his theology, but rather both his philosophy and theology rest or depend on the same experience of human transcendence; they are two interrelated explanations of the same experience. Kilby notes that chapters I and II of Foundations of Christian Faith, the “seemingly” philosophical chapters of this work, are “offering elements of an interpretation of experience—one interpretation among many possible ones, and one which is to be believed, not only insofar as it makes sense of experience, but also insofar as it helps make sense of Christianity as an interpretation of experience.”28 While Kilby wants to take a justification of Christianity for Christians as Rahner’s starting point, he in fact is starting from a phenomenological description of the Christian experience of human transcendence, which he takes to be true of all human experience, but which he readily acknowledges can have more than one interpretation (the existentialists say transcendence is an experience of absurdity). He is proposing that Christianity offers an interpretation congruent with an affective experience of human transcendence. The experience of transcendence is never meant to be an independent “proof ” for Christianity in the sense that one can prove the existence of God from affective experience, but rather Rahner appeals to the experience of transcendence as a putative common starting point and then offers Christianity as a cognitive, descriptive interpretation for that experience. One must recognize that there are both similarities as well as dissimilarities in the ways in which one experiences transcendence because, as Rahner strongly asserts, the experience of transcendence is always historically mediated. Obviously for Rahner historical categorial mediation of the experience of transcendence requires a cognitive framework. Kilby maintains that a nonfoundationalist reading of Rahner resolves the tension between pluralism and the transcendental aspect of Rahner’s theology better than a semi-foundationalist reading. The semi-foundationalist reading resolves the tension

28 Ibid., 81.


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by showing that that which is transcendental underlies that which is plural: beneath our experience of the multiplicity of the world is a pre-thematic experience of unity; behind the pluralism of theologies and philosophies lies a single transcendental experience which they all seek to express.29

Again Rahner is describing an affective experience that is not pre-thematic, in the sense that it occurs separately from cognitive consciousness and the categories that consciousness entails, but an unthematic experience that goes beyond objectification even while requiring objectification for its interpretation. A reading of Rahner’s theology through triune consciousness would be in agreement with Kilby’s sentiments, understanding the multiplicity of theologies and philosophies to be cognitive expressions and interpretations of affective experience, even while acknowledging that different cognitive frameworks can lead to differences in affective experience. Kilby notes that for these semi-foundationalists, “what Rahner says about transcendental experience is pre-philosophical. He is not aligning himself with any particular philosophy but trying to get at that which underlies all the different philosophies, to get at that which is prior to and more basic than any particular philosophical system.”30 Taking into account triune consciousness offers a different way to frame this point. Rahner’s theology is not dependent on an independent philosophical system, but on an affective experience of human transcendence that both his theology and his philosophy propose is common. Rahner is using a phenomenological approach of describing human experience, and then offering philosophical and theological theories regarding that experience. Kilby objects that Spirit in the World is not pre-philosophical, but is both highly philosophical and historically conditioned.31 Rahner would not deny either of these facts. The experience that is being described is unthematic, but the interpretation of that experience is certainly philosophically and historically conditioned as is the experience itself. A cognitive interpretation of an affective experience is being offered. There are other cognitive interpretations, both philosophical and theological, of the common experience of human transcendence, and while there are similarities in the human experience of 29 Ibid., 94. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 95.

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transcendence by virtue of the fact that it is an experience of being human, there also can be culturally conditioned differences in the experience itself. If Rahner’s philosophical approach is no longer valid, the affective experience it seeks to describe is still authentic. Approaches that focus first and foremost on the diversity of human experience, which results partially because affective experience is distinct but never separate from cognitive consciousness, sometimes negate the fact that there is a common experience of being human, a shared humanity that makes it impossible to be completely pluralistic. Humanity must be bound together in some way. Kilby wants to begin with pluralism and interpret Rahner’s transcendental theology as one possible approach among many.32 Such an interpretation is not incongruent with a triune consciousness that makes a distinction between the cognitive interpretation and the affective experience. Kilby does not seem to make the distinction between the philosophical argument Rahner offers for the Vorgriff and the affective experience the concept is attempting to interpret. One could conceivably reject the philosophical argument without denying the affective experience; an alternative explanation could be offered (e.g., that human transcendence is absurd and moves toward nothingness). Rahner does not claim to “prove” God’s existence through this argument in the narrow foundationalist sense that Kilby has in mind, but rather proposes that his explanation resonates with and makes best sense of most people’s experience. Kilby correctly points out that Rahner is addressing a Christian audience, so the framework of the experience is at times implicitly presumed by Rahner without adequate recognition that for people coming from a different cultural or religious context, his explanation might not convince them on a cognitive level or even resonate with them on an affective level. The claim that human transcendence is meaningful and not absurd is ultimately a faith claim that can be found in other religions and philosophies without resulting in an explicitly Christian belief. Kilby is correct that in a pluralistic world there can be no absolute cognitive certainty, but there can be an affective conviction in belief that can be justified by cognitive reason, even though it can never be independently and coercively proven.33 32 Ibid., 96. 33 In terms of the dictates of Vatican I that it is possible to know God with certainty by reason, I would interpret this statement within the framework of a triune consciousness that highlights the unity of cognitive rea-


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Kilby herself notes that the natural knowledge of God referred to by the First Vatican Council is, for Rahner located primarily on the pre-thematic level. Propositional proofs may be given, but these are secondary to, and expressions of, the more fundamental pre-linguistic, preconceptual awareness, the Vorgriff, of God. . . . Thus one could say that on the pre-thematic level there is absolute certainty about God: on the prethematic level there is no room for doubt, even though there may be a good deal of room for confusion, misinterpretation, and doubt in any attempt to articulate the pre-thematic on the thematic level.34

Again to highlight the unity of consciousness as well as the distinction of the intentionalities, perhaps the terms nonlinguistic, nonconceptual, and unthematic would be less misleading than the prefix “pre-” implying affective experience is somehow completely separate from and prior to cognition. Rahner argues for an affective experience that is unthematic and nonobjective, but he does not maintain that such an experience is “pre-linguistic.” What Kilby describes in this passage is triune consciousness where there is affective certainty, but the possibility of confusion, misinterpretation, and doubt in the cognitive articulation of that experience. Kilby implicitly agrees with the understanding of the unity of the affective and cognitive intentionalities of consciousness when she argues that while Rahner understands Christianity to be an articulation of an internal human experience, it is not as if “we can first identify a transcendental experience and then recognize Christianity as its most appropriate expression.”35 She acknowledges “that experience is never had apart from interpretation, and that one’s experience is not therefore a fixed quantity by which one can judge different attempts to interpret it.”36 Any articulation of experience is already a cognitive interpretation of that experience. Likewise the way in which one experiences human transcendence is affected by one’s cognitive framework. Kilby concludes that “Rahner makes censon and affective intuition or conviction. Reason, in this instance, could be interpreted as including the heart’s “reasons” which the mind might not know. The other important aspect of this doctrine is that faith is not unreasonable; it is cognition and affection moving one to volitive action. 34 Ibid., 102. 35 Ibid., 110. 36 Ibid., 111.

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tral use of the notion of a universal experience. But this need not mean that philosophy is his starting point, nor that he attempts to build his theology on an appeal to experience.”37 Philosophy is not Rahner’s starting point, but experience is the common ground of both his philosophy and his theology, and therefore one can strongly argue that Rahner’s theology does indeed begin with as well as conclude with human experience. At the same time, Rahner recognizes that human experience is always grounded in an inescapable historical concreteness. Rahner also assumes, however, that human experience within a Christian cognitive framework is not totally alien from human experience within other cognitive frameworks. There are dissimilarities in human experience due to cultural-cognitive context, but there are also similarities based on the very fact of one’s shared humanity. While it may be true that philosophy cannot provide independent and coercive proof for Rahner’s assumption and proposal that there are similarities shared in human experience, philosophical argumentation nevertheless can influence a person to confirm or disregard faith claims of this nature. Triune consciousness allows one to maintain belief in a certain commonality of affective experience while accounting for the very real differences among those historically mediated experiences due to the interaction of the three intentionalities of consciousness.

Patrick Burke The final commentator to be addressed in this chapter is Patrick Burke, a theologian whose reading of Rahner would be considered foundationalist. Burke is reading Rahner from the perspective of a faculty psychology and therefore is unable to acknowledge a distinction (as opposed to a separation) between cognitive concepts and affective experience. When one reads Rahner as arguing for a distinction, not a separation, Burke’s concerns about the relativization of the concept in Rahner’s theology can be addressed. In his work, Reinterpreting Rahner: A Critical Study of His Major Themes, Burke reads Rahner’s theology as a Schwebe or oscillation between the particular and the universal, between a tendency to make distinctions and a tendency to unify. Burke “calls this structure dialectical analogy because through it Rahner oscillated constantly between unifying dynamism and conceptual distinction and therefore united dialectically while still holding in distinction the traditional an37 Ibid., 127.


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tinomies of Christian thought—God and the world, spirit and matter, grace and nature.”38 One of Burke’s major concerns is the place of the concept in Rahner’s theology. Burke explains that the concept is never a “pure form” but rather always remains related to a “this” (Diesda) and stands in relation to the judgment as a possible to an actually realized synthesis. What was traditionally referred to as the passive intellect is reduced to a mere name (Titel), indicating that the spirit for itself effects and then possesses the receptive faculty of sensibility. Within this dynamic process of human knowing, the concept, which implies a moment of abstract distance, seems to be endangered.39

Burke does admit that Rahner maintains the necessity of the concept in order to differentiate his position from that of the modernists,40 but Burke ultimately maintains that in both Geist and Hörer “the concept is relativized owing to the inadequacy of [Rahner’s] understanding of the passive intellect, so also in Grundkurs and again despite his insistence to the contrary, the concept seems to be threatened and incapable of essential definition.”41 Burke maintains that “this weakness of the concept in [Rahner’s] foundational philosophy has consequences that become apparent throughout the development of his theology and account for the progressively stronger emphasis on the dynamic, unifying side of his thought.”42 My interpretation of Rahner’s theology through triune consciousness emphasizes the distinction between the affective and cognitive intentionalities of consciousness, whereas Burke understands the distinction to be a separation. Rahner, operating within a faculty psychology, did not have the conceptual categories of triune consciousness to clarify in an explicit manner that he was referring to a distinction as opposed to separation. Burke is not comfortable with Rahner’s insistence on the limitation of the concept, but Rahner is highlighting the inadequacy of the concept to fully express experience. This inability of the cognitive to completely articulate the affective does not negate the necessity of the concept in the unity of 38 Patrick Burke, Reinterpreting Rahner: A Critical Study of His Major Themes, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), viii. 39 Ibid., 229-230. 40 Ibid., 230. 41 Ibid., 240. 42 Ibid., 240.

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consciousness. Nor does it deny the extent to which the concepts themselves have a formative effect on affective experience. On the one hand, Rahner emphasizes the inability of the concept to completely objectify the unity of reality and its self-presence.43 On the other hand, Burke stresses the fact that “the original unity between reality and its knowledge of itself always exists in man only with and in and through what we can call language, and thus also with and in and through reflection and communicability.”44 Similar to Lindbeck’s position, Burke wants to note the ways in which there is no experience without language and concept. For Burke there is an inseparability of cognitive concepts and affective experience because he does not recognize the distinction between cognitive consciousness and affective consciousness. Rahner presupposes a distinction that he has not made explicit due to his own dependence on faculty psychology. He presupposes the distinction between the affective experience and the cognitive concepts that are used to express that experience, but in not articulating the difference as a distinction, he opens himself up to the possibility of its being read as a separation. The human subject always has a consciousness of self that goes beyond what can be put into words and concepts. Similarly the experience of human transcendence as orientation toward mystery requires some degree of reflection,45 but at the same time the experience can only be spoken of “by means of what is secondary to it.”46 Reading Rahner from the perspective of triune consciousness, one can maintain the distinction that recognizes the limits of the concept without a separation between cognitive and affective consciousness that would discard the concept. Language and concepts are necessary to the experience but unable to adequately and fully express the experience.

Conclusion Clearly this chapter has only touched on the interpretations of Rahner offered by these four authors, but doing so shows that interpreting Rahner’s theology from the perspective of triune consciousness can cast some of the recent debates about Rahner’s theology in a new light. 43 44 45 46

Ibid., 231. Ibid., 232. Ibid., 238. Ibid., 239.


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Since Rahner himself was subject to the consequences of Newman’s theorem on the ignorance of affectivity as a distinct but not separate intentionality of consciousness, it is not surprising to encounter the same lacunae in his commentators. Reading Rahner from a more phenomenological perspective allows one to recognize the continuity of Rahner’s philosophy and theology without the presupposition that Rahner’s theological insights are dependent upon an independently proven philosophical system. Recognizing the interrelatedness of the affective, cognitive, and volitive intentionalities of consciousness and making explicit the distinctions between those intentionalities, one can maintain the importance of the affective experience of transcendence in Rahner’s theology as well as the ways in which affective experience is always shaped by cognitive and volitive consciousness. One of Rahner’s axioms maintains that anthropology is theology and theology is anthropology. One’s understanding of what it means to be human affects one’s understanding of God and vice versa. Understanding human consciousness as triune, so that human consciousness involves three distinct and equal but never separate intentionalities, all of which are embodied and spiritual, furthers an understanding of God as personal and loving rather than simply the infinite regress of the horizon of mystery. Such an understanding of God is not simply an anthropomorphic projection, but an awareness that emerges from one’s encounter with God mediated in and through one’s embodied experience of self and one’s encounter with the other. The importance of the mediation of the encounter with God raises the question of how one experiences God when human relationships are not loving but instead are abusive, violent, and oppressive. Rahner’s understanding of God as horizon co-comitant with all human experience certainly maintains the belief that God is always present even in the darkest situations, but how is God co-comitantly experienced when intersubjectivity is experienced in destructive ways and when one’s historical situation mitigates one’s ability for self-actualization? If human nature is inherently relational, so that relationships are necessary for self-actualization as well as the actualization of one’s relationship to God, what happens to the person who does not experience loving relationships in life? How does one come to a cognitive interpretation of God as loving subject when in one’s own human relationships one has been objectified? Rahner maintains that even in the depth experiences of despair and sorrow God is present, but as Metz has inspired

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us to ask, does that help us understand Auschwitz? Metz’s concern is that the always, already there aspect of God’s universal salvific will eclipses the very real need to enter the furrow of history and actually run the race.47 Theology must take seriously the human “experience of contradictions, non-identity and possible failure and the experience of the absence of salvation.”48 How is God experienced by the people of Darfur or Iraq or the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay? When one grounds a theology in intersubjectivity, one cannot regard “history as a history of salvation considered as a totality without reference to the subject, in other words, of looking over the heads of the people who are bowed down under their own histories of suffering.”49 Metz’s critique of Rahner’s theology is not answered in this work and requires further reflection. This work has highlighted affectivity as a key, albeit often implicit, dimension in Rahner’s theology. The question that remains is how to address experiences that undermine and even contradict all that is good, loving, human, and holy. This work has not even begun to address those issues, but the place to begin is with the role of volitive intentionality resulting in concrete praxis. Levinas and Metz, in their shared concern for the other, point out the direction in which a theology grounded in triune consciousness must proceed. In today’s troubled world a theology that is grounded in the human experience of affectivity and intersubjectivity can seem overly naïve and idealistic, and yet because in such a theology affection is distinct but never separate from cognition and volition, it also may offer a profound hopefulness and a way forward for believers in a world where “the other” is too often feared if not even hated instead of loved.

47 Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. David Smith (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 162. For a brief account of some of the ways in which Rahner himself addressed Metz’s criticisms, see Declan Marmion, “Rahner and His Critics: Revisiting the Dialogue,” Irish Theological Quarterly 68 (2003): 195-212; Reprinted in Australian EJournal of Theology 4 (2005) [journal on-line]; available from http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/ theology/ejournal/aejt_4/marmion.htm; Internet; accessed 7 December 2006. 48 Metz, 164. 49 Ibid.

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des Glaubens: Fragmente einer modernen Spiritualität. Freiburg: Herder, 1971. Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopedia of Theology. 6 Vols. New York: Herder and Herder, 1968-1970. Original edition, Sacramentum Mundi: Theologisches Lexikon für die Praxis. Edited by Karl Rahner, Adolf Darlap, et al. 4 Vols. Freiburg: Herder, 1967-1969. Grace in Freedom. Translated by Hilda C. Graef. London: Burns & Oates; New York: Herder and Herder, 1969. Original edition, Gnade als Freiheit: Kleine theologische Beiträge. Freiburg: Herder, 1968. Hominisation: The Evolutionary Origin of Man as a Theological Problem. Quaestiones Disputatae 13. Translated by William J. O’Hara. New York: Herder and Herder, 1965. Spiritual Exercises. Translated by Kenneth Baker. New York: Herder and Herder, 1965. Original edition, Betrachtungen zum ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch. Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1965. The Dynamic Element in the Church. Quaestiones Disputatae 12. Translated by William J. O’Hara. New York: Herder and Herder, 1964. Original edition, Das Dynamische in der Kirche. Quaestiones Disputatae 5. Freiburg: Herder, 1958. Mission and Grace: Essays in Pastoral Theology. 3 Vols. Translated by Cecily Hastings. London and New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963. Original edition, Sendung und Gnade; Beiträge zur Pastoraltheologie. Innsbruck: TyroliaVerlag, 1959. Encounters with Silence. Translated by James Demske. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960. Original edition, Worte ins Schweigen. Innsbruck: Rauch Verlag, 1938. Happiness through Prayer. Westminster MD: Newman Press, 1958. Original edition, Von der Not und dem Segen des Gebetes. Innsbruck: Rauch Verlag, 1949. “Die geistliche Lehre des Evagrius Ponticus. In ihren Grundzügen dargestellt.” Zeitschrift für Aszese und Mystik 8 (1933): 21-38. With Hubert Biallowons, Harvey D. Egan and Paul Imhof. Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews, 1965- 1982. Translated by Harvey Egan. New York: Crossroad, 1986. With Paul Imhof and Helmuth N. Loose. Ignatius of Loyola. With an historical introduction by Paul Imhof. Translated by Rosaleen Ockenden. London: Collins, 1979. Original edition, Ignatius von Loyola. Freiburg: Herder, 1978. With Marcel Viller. Aszese und Mystik in der Väterzeit: Ein Abriß. Freiburg: Herder, 1939. With Herbert Vorgrimler, editors. Theological Dictionary. Translated by R. Strachan. Edited by Cornelius Ernst. New York: Herder and Herder, 1965.

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index A affect, 13-5, 17, 19, 21-2, 25, 31, 34, 59-60, 64, 68-9, 72, 83, 86, 93, 97, 99-100, 103, 105-6, 109-10, 113, 118-9, 124, 157, 159, 169, 192, 197-8, 207-8 affection, 6, 13-5, 18-22, 24-5, 27, 30-9, 42, 44-54, 56-7, 59-62, 65, 67, 69-70, 73, 82, 99, 104, 107, 109, 113-7, 119-20, 124-5, 127, 133-42, 144, 155, 160, 167-9, 1716, 179, 182, 186-7, 192-3, 197-9, 206-7, 212, 218, 221 affective, 7-9, 13-5, 21, 24-5, 28, 33, 35-60, 63-4, 66-70, 72-4, 76, 7883, 85-7, 89, 91-105, 107-9, 1123, 117-8, 121-33, 135-6, 144-5, 147-9, 151, 153-8, 160-5, 169-70, 174-6, 178-9, 181-7, 191-5, 197217, 226 affectivity, 6-7, 9, 13, 15, 19-21, 24, 31, 37, 39, 41-2, 46, 49-50, 56, 656, 68-9, 73-4, 98, 102, 121, 133, 167, 197, 217-8, 221-2 anonymous, 5-6, 8, 89, 107, 119, 141, 149, 151-7, 159, 161, 163-5, 175, 223 Aquinas, 14-22, 25-6, 30-1, 33, 40, 44, 57, 59-60, 92, 118, 222-3, 2257 attunement, 5, 8, 39, 46, 65, 74-5, 80, 83, 91-2, 139, 144, 147, 200, 221

body, 9, 15-20, 26-33, 36-8, 46, 49, 52, 104, 116, 124, 168, 182, 18693, 197, 206, 223 Bonaventure, 5, 74, 87-8, 93-9, 1024 Buber, M., 37-43, 48, 107, 182, 222 Burke, P., 6, 9, 51, 199, 214-6, 222

C

certitude, 5, 74, 86, 89-91, 209 cognition, 13-5, 17-8, 22, 24-7, 2930, 32-4, 36-42, 44, 46-8, 50-4, 56-61, 65, 67, 69-70, 76, 79-82, 84-5, 87-9, 99, 104, 107, 110, 112-5, 119-20, 124-5, 128-9, 131, 135-40, 144, 147, 150, 155, 160, 167-71, 173-4, 179, 182-4, 186, 192-4, 197-9, 203, 206-7, 212-3, 218, 221, 224 cognitive, 7-8, 13, 15, 24, 32-3, 35, 37, 39-42, 44-9, 51, 53-4, 56-8, 60, 66, 68, 72-3, 75-81, 83, 85-7, 8994, 97, 99-103, 105-7, 109, 112, 117, 120-2, 124-8, 130-3, 135-6, 144-5, 148-65, 173, 175, 177, 181, 184, 186, 194, 197-217 community, 23, 121, 123, 186 Conley, K., 61-3, 152, 223 connaturality, 5, 7-8, 13, 15, 36, 43, 56-66, 68-70, 76, 86, 91-3, 1419, 151-3, 156, 160-1, 164-5, 180, 182, 221-2, 226-7 consciousness, 3-5, 7-9, 12-5, 18, 22-8, 30-61, 63-7, 69-70, 72-87, 89, 91-5, 98-110, 112-7, 119-36, beatific vision, 81, 96-7, 99-101, 104, 138, 140-2, 144-5, 148-9, 151, 145, 147 153, 155-65, 167-70, 172-5, 179,

B

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the heart of rahner

F

181-4, 186-7, 189, 191-5, 197209, 211-8, 221, 223 consolation without cause, 5, 66, 68, faculty psychology, 5, 7, 13-6, 21-5, 83-4, 86, 88-9, 91, 99-100, 105-6 31, 33, 35-6, 40, 46-7, 49, 52-3, consolation without previous cause, 60-1, 66, 69-70, 72, 74, 76, 80-1, 5, 8, 14, 43, 74-5, 82-3 93, 102, 105, 113, 116, 127, 133, conversion, 40, 48, 50-1, 55-6, 64, 135-6, 138, 157, 167, 197-8, 21466, 68, 76, 118, 164, 169, 198 6 Conway, E., 161, 163, 223 faith, 5, 11, 22, 58-9, 69, 71-2, 81, 95-6, 110, 123, 131, 136, 13840, 143, 149-50, 153, 155-8, 160, 162-4, 170, 187, 198, 209-10, 212, 214, 218-9, 221-3, 225-6 Damasio, A., 26, 32-3, 54, 223 discernment, 69, 74-5, 78, 80, 82-3, feeling, 13, 24, 30, 32-3, 36, 39, 42, 46-7, 50, 53-9, 66, 69-70, 73, 8091, 140 1, 86-7, 91-4, 98-9, 117, 128, 139, 169, 180, 187, 191, 194, 207, 221, 223, 226 feelings, 33, 39, 45, 49, 53-5, 58, 92, election, 5, 74-8, 81-3, 90-3, 224 128, 137, 192, 207 embodied, 6-7, 9, 15, 19, 23-8, 30, 32-4, 36, 38-40, 44-7, 49, 51, 53- free, 37, 50, 72-3, 92, 96, 111-20, 123, 125, 127, 130-1, 137, 139, 4, 59, 69, 86, 124, 157, 168, 172, 145, 147, 158, 167, 174, 177, 192, 174-7, 181-2, 186, 189-91, 197, 198 199, 207, 217 embodiment, 24, 28-9, 38, 40-7, 51- freedom, 8, 42, 48, 54, 64, 67, 84, 89, 107, 109-16, 121-3, 126-34, 1362, 59, 61, 181-2, 189-90, 222 9, 144, 146-8, 156-9, 164, 167, emergence, 29, 88 169-74, 179, 183, 188, 193-5, 198, emergent, 29-30, 36, 221 203, 220 emotion, 13, 16, 18, 22, 24-6, 31-3, 36, 50, 54, 59, 117, 128, 136-9, 187, 194, 207, 223-4, 227 emotions, 4, 16, 25, 31-3, 52, 54-5, grace, 5-8, 14, 63, 72-3, 78, 86, 95, 76, 128, 136-8, 222, 227 97-8, 105, 109-10, 133, 139-49, Endean, P., 71, 74, 77, 85-6, 90, 100, 151-2, 156, 161, 163-5, 172, 178105, 219, 224 80, 195, 202, 215, 220, 223-4, 226 experience of God, 5, 7-8, 14, 65, 713, 77-9, 81, 86-7, 93, 97-100, 105, Greenfield, S., 30, 224 107-10, 122-4, 133, 140-1, 14950, 161, 168, 171-2, 178-9, 181-2, 194, 198, 221, 225, 227 experience of self, 41, 44, 101, 122, habit, 36, 50, 60-1, 118 130, 158, 168, 181, 217 hearing, 95-6 heart, 1, 3-4, 6-7, 9, 18, 24, 36-7, 401, 43-6, 50, 56, 58-9, 64-6, 68-70,

D

E

G

H

index

231

K

72, 80, 95-6, 104, 115, 139, 159, 167-71, 191-5, 197, 212, 221-3 Heidegger, M., 24, 37-40, 43, 65, 67, Kilby, K., 6, 9, 130, 183, 199, 208-13, 129, 133, 182, 200-1, 210 225-6 Hildebrand, D., 37, 46-50, 83, 224 knowing, 13, 23-4, 39, 43, 51, 57, 61, horizon, 5, 8, 40, 42-3, 63-8, 71, 64-5, 70, 75-6, 78-9, 82-3, 91-2, 73, 84, 87, 105, 107-12, 115, 120, 109-10, 112, 114-6, 127-8, 130, 122-8, 131, 133, 135-6, 139, 142, 134, 145, 150, 174, 178, 198, 200145, 176-9, 198, 200-1, 203, 217, 2, 215, 221 224 knowledge, 14-5, 22, 25, 27, 39, 49, 51, 53-4, 56, 58-60, 65-7, 69, 75, 80-1, 84-5, 88-9, 91, 96-7, 99-104, 107, 111-7, 119-24, 127-8, 130, 132-6, 149-50, 156-60, 167, 170, Ignatian, 66, 68, 71, 74, 90, 99-100, 172, 174, 177-9, 184, 188, 190-3, 224 197, 203, 212-3, 216, 226 Ignatius, 5, 8, 14, 43, 71-5, 78, 82, 84, 86-7, 92-3, 220 intellect, 13, 15-7, 19-22, 24-6, 302, 34, 49, 52, 59-61, 68-70, 72, 74, 80-1, 83-4, 88, 93-8, 100, 102-5, Levinas, E., 24, 37, 39-43, 65, 107, 111, 113, 116, 121-2, 124-5, 138, 150, 170, 183, 185, 218, 222, 226158-9, 170, 172, 177, 191-2, 197, 7 215 Lindbeck, G., 6, 9, 51, 105, 199, 203intellective, 13, 16-7, 21, 26, 44 8, 216, 225 intellectual, 16, 19-20, 33, 42, 52, Lonergan, B., 13, 22-3, 43, 51-5, 60, 66, 69, 80-2, 89, 94-5, 102, 158-9, 65, 135, 204, 221, 225, 227 191-2, 204, 208 love, 6, 8-9, 11-2, 20, 22, 40-3, 46-9, intentionalities, 7, 13, 24, 35, 44, 4752-4, 56, 59-60, 62-3, 65, 67, 70, 9, 51, 53, 56, 59, 64-5, 67, 76, 95, 72-3, 79, 81-90, 95-100, 102-5, 105, 109, 115-6, 119, 121-2, 127, 109-11, 113-6, 118-22, 124-36, 131, 133-4, 136, 169, 175, 186, 141-53, 155, 157, 162-5, 167-83, 191-3, 197-9, 203-4, 208, 213-5, 186, 190-2, 194-5, 198, 202-3, 217 207, 219, 221-2 intentionality, 7, 9, 13-4, 21, 23-5, loving, 43, 59, 64-5, 73, 78, 87, 10528, 33, 35-7, 39-47, 49-53, 59-60, 10, 114, 116, 120, 122, 127, 131, 64-8, 70, 81-2, 95, 98-100, 103133-6, 167-8, 172-4, 176-8, 1805, 109, 112-3, 116-7, 121-3, 127, 2, 185-6, 198-9, 201, 203, 217-8 129-31, 134-5, 138, 169-74, 1769, 184-6, 191-2, 197-9, 203-4, 208, 217-8, 222 intersubjectivity, 6, 8-9, 38, 41-2, Marmion, D., 71, 74, 109-10, 202, 131, 133, 135, 168, 173, 181, 183, 218, 225-6 186, 197-8, 217-8, 222 matter, 6, 9, 18, 27, 93, 121-2, 124, irreducibility, 28-30, 53 159, 181, 186-90, 193, 215, 221

I

L

M

232

the heart of rahner

metaphysics, 14, 32, 69, 72-3, 85, 109-10, 130, 139, 161, 168, 173, 121, 173, 200, 222, 224 186-7, 197, 201, 208-11, 214-5, Murphy, N., 25-6, 226 217, 219, 221-7 mystical experience, 5, 41, 43, 71-2, potencies, 20-1 74, 80, 83, 86, 88, 90, 93, 100, 105- prevenient, 5, 8, 62-4, 141-4, 146-9, 7, 110, 133, 171, 198 152, 156, 161, 164, 180, 182

N neighbor, 9, 43, 73, 122, 162, 165, 167-9, 172-8, 180-1, 183, 186, 195, 198-9, 207, 219 neuroscience, 13-4, 21, 25-7, 31-3, 36, 106, 187, 221, 225, 227 Newberg, A., 106, 227 Newman, J., 14, 51, 80-1, 93, 103, 197, 217, 220 non-conceptual, 8, 72, 77-81, 83-7, 90, 93, 191 non-thematic, 8

Q quasi-intentionality, 5, 64-5, 160

R

Rahner, K., 1, 3-9, 12, 14-5, 36, 40-3, 50, 65-107, 109-65, 167-84, 18795, 197-204, 206-28 rational, 16-20, 31, 33, 40, 54, 69, 76-7, 82, 92-3, 104, 137-8, 140, 209 reason, 24, 26, 32, 36-7, 39, 45-7, 56, 60-1, 69, 75-6, 78, 80-1, 102, 106, 117, 120, 124, 135-8, 158, 177, 181, 184, 187, 191, 205, 209, operative, 5, 8, 13, 31, 43, 57, 62-4, 212, 223 78, 86, 141-5, 148, 151-2, 161, Ricoeur, P., 37, 44-5, 53, 170-1, 193, 164, 180, 182-3 224, 226

O

P passions, 13, 17-22, 33, 44, 52 personal, 8, 43, 62, 65, 73, 79, 87, 91, 105, 107-12, 116, 120-3, 1267, 129, 131-3, 135-6, 153-4, 168, 171-2, 174, 188, 190, 192-5, 198201, 203, 217, 222 personhood, 112-4, 120-2, 132, 173 phenomenological, 5, 7-9, 13, 15, 31, 33, 35-8, 70, 128-9, 150, 197-9, 209-11, 217 phenomenology, 24, 37-8, 43-4, 4951, 53, 135, 137, 182, 184, 186, 209, 221-2, 224 philosophy, 7, 13-6, 23-5, 28, 36-7, 39, 41, 43, 49, 52, 65-6, 68, 71, 98,

S Scheler, M., 24, 37, 46, 117 science, 7, 14-5, 19, 26-8, 31, 33, 46, 60, 69, 109, 117, 137, 168, 186-7, 224 scientific, 5, 13-4, 21, 23, 25-8, 32-4, 106, 137, 197, 225-7 self-actualization, 6, 167, 169, 175, 189, 192, 217 self-communication, 8, 113, 141-53, 156-7, 202 sensitive, 13, 16-21, 25, 33, 44 Sheehan, T., 6, 9, 87, 129, 131, 133, 170, 185, 199-203, 227 sight, 95-7, 99-100, 135 smell, 95-6

index

233

spirit, 6-7, 9, 27, 35-7, 40-2, 44-7, 49-50, 59, 61-3, 66-7, 69, 76, 946, 98, 101-2, 104, 110, 112, 115-6, 120-1, 123-4, 134, 136, 139, 141, 145, 153, 157-8, 167-8, 172, 177, 179, 186-93, 202, 207, 211, 215, 219, 221, 223 Spiritual Exercises, 5, 14, 71, 74-5, 84, 93, 140, 220, 224 spiritual senses, 5, 8, 74, 88, 93-5, 224 Stoeger, W., 26-30, 187, 227 Strasser, S., 37, 46, 49-50, 64, 221 subject, 7, 9, 18, 23, 36, 42-3, 53, 57, 68-9, 72-3, 87, 91, 98, 105, 107, 111-3, 116, 123, 125, 129-30, 133-6, 146, 148, 153, 158-9, 1689, 174-7, 179, 181-6, 189, 193-4, 198-9, 202-3, 216-8, 224 subjectivity, 23-4, 38, 40, 91, 111-3, 122-3, 130, 135, 148, 168, 173, 179, 181, 183, 185, 203 subsequent, 5, 38, 57-8, 62-5, 71, 73, 77, 79, 89-91, 106, 109, 141, 143, 148-50, 152, 158, 160-1, 170, 182 supernatural existential, 8, 113, 1412, 146-7, 223 supervenience, 29

T Tallon, A., 3-5, 7-8, 12-4, 19-22, 245, 35-46, 48-70, 73-4, 76-81, 83, 89, 91, 93-5, 105, 107, 110, 114, 117-8, 120-1, 123-6, 128, 134-5, 139-45, 147, 150, 152, 160, 168, 170, 173, 176, 179, 181-2, 185, 190-3, 197, 200-1, 219, 221 taste, 94-7, 100 top-down causality, 29, 106 touch, 5, 55-6, 94-8, 100, 102, 135 transcendence, 5, 35, 43, 68, 73, 79, 83, 85-90, 92, 105-6, 110-1, 115, 117-9, 121, 123-31, 133, 140, 150,

153, 157, 171, 177, 179, 182, 185, 187-8, 198-203, 210-3, 216-7 transcendental, 7, 38, 44, 85, 107, 110, 114, 123-6, 129, 150, 153-5, 159-60, 171-2, 174, 176-8, 181-4, 201-2, 210-3

U union, 5, 18, 36, 57, 62-3, 96-105, 133, 141-2, 144, 146-7, 152, 193, 226

V value, 32, 46, 48-9, 53-6, 58, 65, 6970, 83, 94, 117-20, 137, 159, 187, 194, 221, 224 values, 55-6, 69, 81-3, 117-9, 159, 187 Van Nieuwenhove, R., 105, 107, 227 vegetative, 16-20, 25 virtue, 18, 57, 60-2, 95-6, 118, 1567, 211-2 volition, 13-5, 18-20, 22, 24-7, 2930, 32-4, 36-41, 44-8, 50-4, 56-9, 61, 65, 67, 70, 81-2, 84, 88, 104, 111-5, 117, 119-20, 124-5, 127, 132-4, 136-8, 140, 144, 155, 160, 167-70, 174, 179, 186, 193-5, 197-9, 207, 218, 221 volitive, 7, 13, 15, 35, 39-41, 44, 467, 49, 51, 73, 75-6, 79-81, 93-4, 98-9, 103, 105, 109, 112, 117-8, 120-2, 125-8, 130-2, 136, 144, 149, 153, 155, 157-8, 160, 165, 175, 181, 186, 192, 197-9, 203-4, 208, 212, 217-8 Vorgriff, 42, 65, 67, 111, 120, 139, 212-3

234

the heart of rahner

W will, 7, 13, 15-25, 28, 30-2, 34-7, 40, 43, 45-6, 48-9, 51-6, 59-61, 65, 68-70, 72-84, 87-8, 90, 92-8, 100, 102-5, 108-11, 113-6, 11921, 124-5, 128, 130, 134, 138-9, 141, 144-5, 147, 149, 151, 153, 157-8, 161-2, 164, 168-9, 172, 176-7, 183-4, 187, 197-200, 206, 218, 224 willing, 24, 26, 30, 39, 49, 57, 61, 80, 113-4, 116, 127, 130-1, 134, 174, 178, 198

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