John F. X. Knasas

Over the years I have written a number of articles critiquing Transcendental Thomism both from philosophical and from textual points of view. In the course of these articles, I have made comments on Bernard J. F. Lonergan’s epistemology. These comments have caught the eye of Jeremy D. Wilkins, and have provoked his article, “A Dialectic of ‘Thomist’ Realisms: John Knasas and Bernard Lonergan.” The violence of Wilkins’s reaction leads me to believe that despite the passing nature of my comments, they are sufficiently incisive to have cut a nerve. Nevertheless, it is my opinion that no reader of Wilkins would come away with any accurate grasp of my understanding of Lonergan, my reasons for it, and the precise point of contention between us. So, both for the record and the benefit of calm discussion of this influential figure, I would like to provide my hermeneutic of Lonergan and to pinpoint my trouble with him. To this end, I will repeat some descriptions of Lonergan from a recently published monograph, Being and Some Twentieth-Century Thomists (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), and then address the criticisms of Wilkins.

Chisholm's concluding "table of categories" offers a device to report the book's contents. Entity, the overarching category, subdivides into the contingent and the necessary. The contingent is what can come to be and pass away. The necessary is what is not contingent. Subdivisions of the contingent are states and individuals. States, like the being-warm of a stone, exist only of something else. Individuals are contingents that are not states. Individuals divide into boundaries and substances. Boundaries are constituents that necessarily are constituents. Substance is a contingent individual that is not a boundary. These last two definitions allow Chisholm to understand a part as a substance, since a part is simply a constituent that is not a boundary. Chisholm acknowledges without explanation that in contrast to Aristotle's hylomorphic substances, his conception of substance allows for parts that are actual substances.

My article confronts three of Spinoza’s four arguments against free will in God with Aquinas’s contrary position in the Summa contra Gentiles, Book I. Spinoza’s three arguments come from his Ethics, props. XVII and XXXII. First, since free choice is always exclusive, free choice in God would leave unactualized power in God. Second, if God’s will could be different without entailing divine mutability, then a divine voluntarism would reign. Third, if God has freedom of will but his willing is his essence, the God’s essence could be otherwise. I note that these pitfalls open by assuming that the divine will bears upon creatures directly and immediately. I then show that since for Aquinas, God wills creatures by principally willing himself, none of Spinoza’s criticisms follow.