Paul Crittenden

David Coffey: Reshaping Traditional Theology

The article seeks to locate the genealogy of David Coffey’s systematic theology in his original search for a unified account of grace. This led to the recovery of early but forgotten ways of thinking about the central doctrines of the Trinity and Christology related especially to the role of the Holy Spirit in the Incarnation. Coffey’s Spirit Christology, based on the Synoptic Gospels and patristic reflection, complements the traditional Christology of Chalcedon in ways that throw light on Christ’s humanity and the redemptive character of his death and resurrection. It also grounds a theology of grace, Christian anthropology, death and resurrection, the Church, and the salvation of unbelievers. Coffey is a prominent Australian theologian and the discussion of his thought is set within a brief account of the development of theological studies in the Australian context.

Faculties or Powers of the Mind

While continuing to speak of intellect and will as faculties, Tallon is dissatisfied with this way of thinking and believes that it should be replaced by a focus on conscious and intentional operations. The uncertainty manifested here points to a basic lack of clarity in the undertaking as well as to a task yet to be completed. He looks to Bernard Lonergan in particular as the guiding authority in abandoning talk of faculties of the mind. Tallon says that ‘we must stop thinking in terms of faculties of mind and will […] (1997, 146). Or again: All this talk of faculties must finally be overcome anyway, as Lonergan has so well said, when a ‘faculty psychology’, based on a priority of metaphysics over epistemology gives way to a contemporary priority of the phenomenology of consciousness over hermeneutics, leading to an operational description of affection, cognition, and volition. (254–5)

Cognition and Volition, or Reason and Will

There is a sense in which cognition and volition are taken for granted in Andrew Tallon’s argument for triune consciousness, for their status within the domain of consciousness is conceded from the beginning. With this concession, his concern is to argue the case for admitting feeling or affection to equal partnership with the readily acknowledged pair. The project is expressed, in effect, in the question: ‘Can feeling be at the center along with cognition and volition, intellect and will? (1997, 139). As a consequence, he does not provide a close analysis of either cognitional or volitional consciousness (or intellect and will). Again, with the focus on affection as a distinct form of consciousness with cognition and volition, there is also a sense in which the nature of consciousness itself is taken for granted in the inquiry.

Affectivity and Value: Two Modern Views

The phenomenologist Max Scheler argued in his essay ‘Ordo Amoris’ that ‘love is always what awakens both knowledge and volition; indeed, it is the mother of spirit and reason itself’ (Scheler, 1973b, 110). His argument is that, in knowing something, one transcends the self and its conditions to come into contact with the world. But this presupposes the movement of love precisely as the primal act by which a being ‘abandons itself’ to participate in being other than itself. Similarly, the act of willing something actual in the world ‘presupposes an anticipatory loving that gives it direction and content’ (Scheler, 1973b, 110). It follows that ‘before he is an ens cogitans or an ens volens, the human being is an ens amans’ (110–11). Before thought or will, there is love.

Ricoeur in Search of a Philosophy of the ‘Heart’

The focus of reflection in Paul Ricoeur’s Fallible Man (1986) is human fragility and fallibility understood as ‘the constitutional weakness that makes evil possible’. Platonic myths, images and ideas, especially in the Symposium and the Republic, play a mediating role in the inquiry. Ricoeur also draws inspiration from Pascal’s Pensees, notably section 199 entitled ‘Disproportion of man’. Pascal asks, ‘After all, what is man in nature?’ and replies: ‘a nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle point between all and nothing […]. Limited in every respect, we find this intermediate state between two extremes reflected in all our faculties’ (Pascal, 1995, 59–65, 61). In these terms, Ricoeur’s hypothesis is that human fallibility consists ‘in a certain non-coincidence of man with himself’, a ‘disproportion’ of self to self (Ricoeur, 1986, 1).

Reason and Desire from Socrates to the Stoics

Socrates, as portrayed in Plato’s early dialogues, held that virtue is a single thing (moral goodness in effect), that it consists in knowledge, and that ‘no one voluntarily does wrong, but that all who do wrong do so against their will’.1 To do wrong is to act out of ignorance. Again, he says that ‘no one voluntarily pursues bad things, or what he thinks to be bad. To prefer bad things to good is not in human nature’ (Protagoras 359c-d). To act badly, therefore, is to be misguided and ignorant. Socrates thus denies the possibility of incontinence or weakness of will (akrasia), that someone could know what to do to achieve good, but would choose to act badly. The motivation for action lies entirely in one’s knowledge or beliefs. The difference between good people and bad in this case is not a matter of will, but of belief. Wrongdoers act as they do because they have false beliefs about values.

The Unravelling of Triune Consciousness

In the concluding chapters of Head and Heart, where phenomenology gives way to hermeneutics, Andrew Tallon is concerned with two topics. The first is to show precisely how affectivity fits into Bernard Lonergan’s model of cognition and volition to constitute triune consciousness. The second is to expound and develop the Thomistic notion of connaturality as the fundamental key to affectivity, specifically in conjunction with habit, in the ethical, aesthetic and mystical domains. Paradoxically, this second argument seeks to show that a properly attuned affectivity largely does away with the need for key operations in the Lonergan model altogether and introduces a virtually new version of triune consciousness. For, in the proposed integration of triune consciousness, affective connaturality is said to bypass, to a greater or lesser degree, the need for concepts, discursive reasoning, conceptual judgement, and deliberation in these domains, to be replaced by a higher form of ‘knowing and loving in one’s heart’. This is grounded, furthermore, in the appeal to ‘an anthropology from above’ in which ‘the human soul is a lesser spirit (un ange manque, une intuition manquee)’ (Tallon, 1997, 253).1

Thomas Aquinas: The Primacy of Intellectual Love

In her study of willing, Hannah Arendt moves from a discussion of Augustine as ‘the first philosopher of the Will’ to a chapter entitled ‘Thomas Aquinas and the primacy of Intellect’ (Arendt, 1978, 113–25). This would be misleading if it were taken to imply that the will is any less fundamental for Aquinas than it was for Augustine, or that there is any major divergence between them in regard to its nature.1 Aquinas’ account of the will is based primarily on Aristotle’s concept of rational appetite (boulesis) in its association with reason and the emotions; but at each critical point he develops his views in ways that draw directly on Augustine’s own insights and concerns. I think that Terence Irwin is right in his claim that ‘[Aquinas] sets out from an Aristotelian position, as he conceives it, and seeks to show that Augustine’s claims are all defensible within an Aristotelian framework’ (Irwin, 2007, 434–5).2

Affection in Triune Consciousness

In Head and Heart: Affection, Cognition, Volition as Triune Consciousness (1997) Andrew Tallon is concerned to argue against a rationalist focus on reason and will to the exclusion of feeling or affection as a mode of human consciousness.1 The book, he says, ‘defends the right of feeling — meaning the whole realm of passion, emotion, mood, and affection in general — to be admitted to equal partnership with reason and will in human consciousness’ (Tallon, 1997, 1–2). Triune (or triadic) consciousness is thus conceived as the union of affection, cognition and volition in an operational synthesis, a union in equal partnership of three distinct, irreducible but inseparable kinds of consciousness. The broad aim of the study is to show ‘how affection works, how it operates in synthesis with those two [reason and will]’ and to present this concept of triune consciousness as a paradigm for the human spirit (1997, 2).

Augustine: ‘Will Transformed into Love’

Dietrich von Hildebrand claims that the ‘unfortunate heritage from Greek intellectualism’ encompassed the exclusion of the entire affective life from the higher or spiritual dimension of human existence. What, then, could Christian thinkers, so deeply influenced by this tradition, say about the New Testament conception of love? Their starting point, he says, was to follow the Greeks in excluding affectivity from the sphere of spirituality. On the other hand, they could not suppose that the love proclaimed in their sacred writings was anything but spiritual. So, in von Hildebrand’s view, they took the disastrous step of stripping love of affectivity in order to save its claim to spiritual status. In a word, they conceptualised love ‘as something non-affective and as an act of will’ (von Hildebrand, 1966, 12). The original flaw in this reconstruction, as I have argued, is that it misconstrues the place of affectivity in Greek thinking about the mind. The question now is whether Christian thinkers were nevertheless misled in some way by Greek philosophy into excluding affectivity from the higher states of mind, as von Hildebrand alleges. Could this view be a fair rendering, for instance, of Augustine’s impassioned account of love and the will?