The archeology of human thinking described in the preceding three chapters support Iqbal’s sense of the essentially religious character of thought. He is concerned to protect religion against the tendency of analytic rationality to reduce the mind to its empirical content and to bind it exclusively to physical reality, or at least to what could be conceived clearly and distinctly by the human mind. Iqbal’s approach was to show the limited character of such a view, not only in terms of its objects, but especially as a description of thought itself. He did this by majestically describing the broad (religious) reaches of the mind. For this he reinterpreted time, light and freedom in ways that echoed the thought of such of his contemporaries as Bergson, Whitehead, Alexander, Royce and Einstein. He much enriched their thought with the cultural resources of the Islamic tradition. This is a special power and grace of Iqbal’s thought.

Iqbal’s response is different. He is eloquent in his exposition of the essential importance of limited, categorial thought, precisely in its own sphere, and reaches out to welcome the positive contributions of modernity. But he also gives even greater voice to the infinitely richer domains of thought grounded in the divine. Thus the divine appears, as it were dimly, as the background of every limited human encounter; human life becomes theonomous and can be seen in its transcendent significance. For Iqbal, when related to their infinite ground, science and technology become concrete manifestations and articulations of the meaning of God in time.

But, as he warms to this subject in his Reconstruction, Iqbal edges ever closer to that mystical vision of Hallaj (the misunderstood Islamic mystic executed for blasphemy) in which all is so suffused with divine light and meaning that man and nature seem almost divine. Iqbal reacts against any identification of the two; with the full force of the Islamic tradition of fidelity, he would answer: ‘Never; there is but one God and no other!’

In this lies the contemporary drama of Islam, as of all religious visions, for man today is intent upon an answer to the question: "how is he to be understood?" Note, this is not the question of how God could create our world of finite beings. The answer to that question is hidden in divine love which we must seek to acknowledge (as we shall suggest below). But we can never comprehend that love, for such understanding could only be the divine life itself. Rather, the question is how, in view of God’s love, can we overcome the hubris by which the human ego claims to be absolute, and yet at the same time understand the reality of the human person as having the autonomy required for the responsibility and creativity required in order to survive and flourish. How can men and women come truly alive so as to recognize themselves not as God, but in His image, and thereby be enabled to undertake the creative exercise of their proper freedom and responsibility? This is a point of high metaphysics on which I would like to suggest a way to carry forward Iqbal’s work as a way to God.

Hermeneutics tells us that in approaching an issue we need a question in order to focus our attention and to be able to draw out new insight. This concerns existence and its implication for creation, and hence for the path or way of a systematic metaphysics to the Source and Goal, the Alpha and Omega, of all.

GREEK PHILOSOPHY OF PARTICIPATION

This way to God has long roots in the human cultural tradition to which we must return in order to be able to understand how the philosophical ways grow out of the totemic, mythic and ritual traditions sketched in Chapters II, III and IV. In Chapter I we saw how a process of development takes place when a need arises, and that the development will be relatively minor if the need can be resolved by competencies already possessed. When, however, a new competency must be evoked and developed a dramatic shift in human cultures can occur. This would appear to be the case as the intellect steps beyond the mythic pictures drawn by the imagination to proper terms that state directly the realities involved. Not incidentally, this was identically the point of initiation of philosophy proper.

It is time now to turn directly to the development of such philosophic thought in order to determine the distinctive way to God constituted by properly philosophical thought and its corresponding cultures. It is not that no attention had been given to these issues in earlier times. Indeed, as they concern the most essential requirements for human life, their understanding had been the central human concern in all ages; this was the burden of the previous chapters.

The thought of those, such as Pascal or Kierkegaard, whose ingenious intuitions purposely lacked a corresponding structure of reason for their articulation and defense in order to protect their unique and deep content of subjectivity proved to be of limited impact at the time.

Something quite analogous is to be found in the history of Indian philosophy. After a long period of Hinduism the imagination had so corrupted the original purity and sacred character if its rites that a reform was needed, which was provided by Buddha. The Lord Buddha himself predicted that his Sangha would last for only 1000 years, and indeed some 1000 years later it was ripe for the reform realized by Shankara.

Xenophanes removed the imaginative factors and stated the meaning of the gods in more proper and specifically intellectual terms. Thus, he proceeded to affirm that

In these terms he demonstrated that a way had been found, namely, philosophy, to state these crucial realities in terms which were susceptible to clear and controlled reasoning. Philosophy had been born.

But that had never been the root human issue. Totemic and mythic thought were not ways of understanding and working merely with nature, although they did that as well. Fundamentally, they concerned the metaphysical and religious issues of what it means to be, the divine basis of life, and the religious terms in which it needs to be lived.

The search, for a positive statement of this unity continued. Pythagoras (c580-500) thought it consisted in numbers. Even Heraclitus, the classical proponent of diversity, was engaged in the same search for unity, for through all diversity he sought the unity of the logos. Thus, he considered fire to be the basic principle because, though darting up and dying down, it manifests throughout a certain unified form or shape. Both Pythagoras and Heraclitus recognized a certain unity and difference in what was numbered or changing, but on their level of abstraction the issue of the reality of that unity and diversity could not be directly confronted. That would be the work of Parmenides.

Parmenides is the father of metaphysics in the West precisely because he remedied this situation by deepening the level of thought in order to be able to speak, not merely of this or that kind of thing, but of being or reality as such. It is important to note that for Parmenides this knowledge (noeton) is not simply a product of human reasoning. Like the Theogony and the Vedas, it is the divine knowledge found in the response of the goddess, Justice. Euripides held that the nous in each person is divine, and for Aristotle it is by the nous that we immediately recognize the first principles and premises upon which deductions are based.

In the proemium of his famous poem Parmenides moves seamlessly, but dramatically from myth to philosophy. Speaking still in the language of myth, Parmenides described a scene in which he was awakened by goddesses and sent in a chariot drawn by faithful mares along the arching highway that spans all things. In this process he moved from obscurity to light, from opinion to truth. There, the gates were opened by the goddess, Justice, as guardian of true judgements, and he was directed by her to examine all things in order to discern the truth.

The chariot then moves along the highway of being and the procedure is analogous at the two subsequent forks in the road where the signposts tempt one to consider being as changing and as multiple, respectively. Each of these, Parmenides reasons, would place nonbeing within being itself, which would destroy its very character as being. Nonbeing is contained in the notion of change, inasmuch as a changing being is no longer what it had been and not yet what it will become. But for nonbeing to pertain to the essence of being would destroy being. When, however, nonbeing is removed then being emerges as unchanging. Similarly, nonbeing is essential to the notion of multiplicity, inasmuch as this requires that one being not be the other. When, however, nonbeing is removed what emerges is one. These then are the characteristics of being: it is infinite and eternal, unchanging and one.

Being as such transcends the multiple and changing world in which we live: it exists in a manner more perfect than could possibly be appreciated in the graphic, figurative and hence extended terms of the internal sense of imagination which characterized the mind in its mythic mode or stage of development.

In this way Parmenides discerned the necessity of Absolute, Eternal and Unchanging Being — whatever be said of anything else. Neither being nor thought make sense if being is in any way the same as nonbeing, for then to do, say or be anything would be the same as not doing, not saying or not being. If what is real is irreducible to nothing and being is irreducible to nonbeing — as it must be if there is any thing or any meaning whatsoever — then being must have about it the self-sufficiency expressed by Parmenides’s notion of the absolute One.

The issue then is not how the notion of the divine first entered human thought; it has always been there. This is true not only as fact, as seen in totemic and mythic thought, but in principle as shown by Greek philosophy. For without that which is One, humanity would be at odds with nature, and humankind would lack social cohesion. Without that which is Absolute, in the sense of infinite and self-sufficient, thinking would be the same as not thinking, and being would be the same as nonbeing.

It is unfortunate that attention has been directed almost solely to Parmenides’s negation of differentiation, and that this has been taken as a negation of differentiation between beings and hence of multiple beings, rather than the separation of being from nonbeing. What is central is his direct and lucid clarification

- that being is, is one, and is intelligible;

- that as such it is self-explanatory or able to justify itself before nous; and

- that it is the ground of all metaphysics or understanding of being.

In stating this Parmenides was able to confront directly and for the first time, not merely the fact of differentiation among beings, but the issue of the reality of such differentiation. It is neither surprising nor of great importance that he was not able to resolve this issue. What is important is that due to his contribution the Western mind was able to go to work on the issue. No longer limited to asking about particular differences between specific beings or groups of beings, it could now begin to enquire directly concerning the reality and bases of differentiation. In time this would lead to the discovery of one’s own uniqueness and the nature of one’s relation to others. Progress in philosophy — as philosophers East and West observe — lies in understanding how this unity is lived, not destroyed, and that whatever meaning there be to the many is had in terms of the one.

Simplicius and others concluded from the first half of his Poem that for Parmenides not only that there must be one being which was absolute, but that there could be nothing else. This, however, does not at all fit with the second, longer half of the Parmenides’ Poem, which treats at great length the many changing beings of the universe. Hence, it would appear to be a more correct reading of the first section of his text that being requires the one infinite unchanging and eternal Being, i.e., an Absolute which transcends the world of multiple and changing beings, and on which the universe of changing reality depends. But how the universe of multiple beings described in the second part of his Poem is related to the One is not worked out by Parmenides. It could be expected, however, that whoever would work out this relation of the many to the One would thereby be the father of the Greek — and hence of the Western — philosophical tradition.

It is no accident then that the great figures, Plato (429-348) and Aristotle (384-322), who marked out the major paths in Western philosophy should follow Parmenides in rapid succession. Once directly confronted with the unity of reality and hence with the issue of the reality of differentiation, the Greek mind had either to accept the skeptical position of the sophists which excluded any basis for organized civil life, or to begin some steps toward the resolution of the issue. These steps proceeded along the route of Plato’s notion of participation of the many in the One. Based on this some Church Fathers listed Plato among the precursors of Christ, while Whitehead considered all subsequent Western philosophy to be essentially a series of footnotes Plato’s work.

On the other hand, that the community of things is similar or alike requires a source which itself is one. Because John, Agnes and Thomas are alike as humans, their forms share, partake, or participate in the one form of humanity. This form is not limited to the perfection of any one person, but is itself the fullness of the perfection of humankind. Like the totem, it is able to be participated in by an indefinite number of humans. To participate means to have one’s being in derivation from, and hence as image of, absolute Being itself. Hence, I am by imaging or participating; imaging is not what I do, but what I am.

By philosophizing in this mode of participation one escapes becoming become trapped in the alternative of either constructing personal but arbitrary intellectual schemata, or elaborating an impersonal science. Philosophizing is rather a gradual process of discovery, of entering ever more deeply into the values which we have in order to comprehend them more clearly in themselves and in their source. Because progressive sharing or participating in this source is the very essence of human growth and development, the work of philosophizing and the religious sensibility implicit in this notion of participation is neither an addenda to life nor merely about life. Rather, as was seen regarding totem and myth, philosophy and religion are central to the life process of human growth itself and at the highest level; from this process it draws its primal discoveries.

Aristotle and the Systematizing of Participation. Though Plato began the philosophical elaboration of the notion of participation, as his method was dialectical he did not construct a system. His terms remained fluid and his dialogues ended with further questions. It was left to his pupil, Aristotle, to develop the means for more rigorous or systematic work in philosophy. For this Aristotle elaborated a formal logic for the strict codification of forms or terms, their cognition in judgments, and the coordination of judgments into patterns of syllogistic reasoning. With this tool he was able to outline the pattern of the sciences which have played so dominant a role in the Western world to this day.

This notion of participation according to which the many derive their being from the One which they manifest and toward which they are oriented and directed would subsequently provide the basic model for what the Chinese refer to as "outer" transcendence or the relation of creatures to God. In Plato’s thought, however, the order of forms was relatively passive, rather than active. Hence, the supreme One or Good was the passive object of contemplation by the highest Soul, which was conscious and active. Most scholars, therefore, consider the highest Soul or contemplator in Plato’s thought, rather than the highest One or Good upon which it contemplates, to correspond to his notion of God.

Further, while the individual’s actions were stimulated and patterned — each in its own way — upon the one objectless Knower (noesis noeseos) as final cause, the many individuals were not caused thereby, derived therefrom or known by that principle of all meaning. Thus, though intense human concern is expressed in hellenic dramas which reflect the heritage of human meaning as lived in the family and in society, Greek philosophic understanding was much more specialized and restricted, particularly as regards the significance of the person.

More could not be expected while being was understood in terms of form alone. If, however, the meaning of the human person in this world of names and forms is of key importance today in both East and West; if the protection and promotion of the person become increasingly problematic as our cultures become more industrialized, technological and global; and if the search for freedom and human rights is central to our contemporary search to realize a decent society — then it will be necessary to look to further developments of the notion of being and of divine life. These will create higher levels of equilibria by retrieving and making explicit more of what was meant by Parmenides’s One than had been articulated in the Greek philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, the fact that the thought of Plato and Aristotle was not brought into synthesis by Aristotle himself suggests that it simply was not possible to do so in terms of being as understood merely as form as was the case in those times. Thus, in order to draw upon the full contribution of both Plato’s notion of participation and Aristotle’s systematic structures it is necessary to look to a later equilibrium predicated upon a significantly deepened understanding of being, namely, being not as form, but as existing.

The new equilibrium would have three components: (a) the development in the awareness of the meaning of being as existence; (b) its fruition through Plato’s insight regarding the participation of the many in Parmenides’s One; and (c) the systematization of both (a) and (b) by the tools of Aristotle’s scientific philosophy. As Plato’s contribution (b) had been continually employed, what was required was the discovery of being as existence (a) which took place with the early Christian Fathers, and the rediscovery of Aristotle’s works (c) which took place a thousand years later.

Dependence on the Divine. Development in the understanding of being required transcending the Greek notion which had meant simply to be of a certain differentiated type or kind. This meaning was transformed through the achievement of an explicit awareness of the act of existence (esse) in terms of which being could be appreciated directly in its active and self-assertive character. The precise basis for this expansion of the appreciation of being from form to existence is difficult to identify in a conclusive manner, but some things are known.

Beyond Form and Matter. First, it was a period of intensive attention to the Trinitarian character of the divine. To understand Christ to be God Incarnate it was necessary to understand Him to be Son sharing fully in the divine nature.

This required that in the life of the Trinity his procession from the Father be understood to be in a unity of nature: the Son, like the Father, must be fully of one and same divine nature. This made it possible to clarify, by contrast, the formal effect of God’s act in creating limited and differentiated beings. This could not be in a unity of nature for it resulted, not in a coequal divine Person, but in a creature radically dependent for its being. But to push the question beyond being one simply of nature or kind of being is to open directly the issue of the reality of beings, and hence not only of their form, but of their matter as well. This is to ask not only how things are of this or that kind, but how they exist at all rather than not exist. It constituted an evolution in the human awareness of being, of what it means to be real. This was no longer simply the compossibility of two forms, which Aristotle had taken as a sufficient response to the scientific question "whether it existed"; instead to be real means to exist or to stand in some relation thereto.

One might follow the progression of this deepening awareness of being by reflecting upon the experience of being totally absorbed in the particularities of one’s job, business, farm or studies — the prices, the colors, the chemicals — and then encountering an imminent danger of death, the loss of a loved one or the birth of a child. At the moment of death, as at the moment of birth, the entire atmosphere and range of preoccupations in a hospital room shifts dramatically. Suddenly they are transformed from tactical adjustments for limited objectives to confronting existence, in sorrow or in joy, in terms that plunge one to the center of the entire range of meaning. Such was the effect upon philosophy when human awareness expanded and deepened, from concern merely with this or that kind of reality, to the act of existence in contrast to non-existence; and hence to human life in all its dimensions; and, indeed, to God Himself.

The Philosophical Impact of Redemption: Radical Freedom. Cornelio Fabro goes further. He suggests that this deepened metaphysical sense of being in the early Christian ages not only opened the possibility for a deeper sense of freedom, but itself was catalyzed by the new sense of freedom proclaimed in the religious message.

I say "catalyzed", not "deduced from," which would be the way of science rather than of culture. Where the former looks for principles from which conclusions are deduced of necessity, a culture is a creative work of freedom. A religious message inspires and invites; it provides a new vantage point from which all can be reinspected and rethought; its effects are pervasive and enduring. This was the case with the Christian kerygma.

That message focused not upon Plato’s imagery of the sun at the mouth of the cave from which external enlightenment might be derived, but upon, the eternal Word or Logos, the Son who entered the cave unto death so that all might rise to new existence.

But this was more than light to the mind. Christ’s resurrection was also a freeing of the soul from sin and death. Fabro suggests that reflection upon one’s free response to the divine redemptive invitation was key to the development of the awareness of being as existence. The radically total and unconditioned character of this invitation and response goes beyond any limited facet of one’s reality, and/or particular consideration according to time, occupation or the like. It is rather the direct self-affirmation of one’s total actuality. Its sacramental symbol is not one of transformation or improvement; it is not a matter merely of reformation. Instead, it is resurrection from the waters of death to radically new life. This directs the mind beyond any generic, specific or even individual form to the unique reality that I am as a self for whom living is freely to exercise or dispose of my very act of existence. This opened a new awareness of being as that existence by which beings stand outside of nothing ("ex-sto") — and not merely to some minimum extent, but to the full extent of their actuality, which Fabro calls an intensive notion of being.

This power of being bursting into time through Creator, Redeemer and Prophet:

- directs the mind beyond the ideological poles of species and individual interests, and beyond issues of place or time as limited series or categories;

- centers, instead, upon the unique reality of the person as a participation in the creative power of God — a being bursting into existence, which is and cannot be denied;

- rejects being considered in any sense as nonbeing, or being treated as anything less than its full reality;

- is a self, or in Iqbal’s term an ‘ego’, affirming its own unique actuality and irreducible to any specific group identity; and

- is image of God for whom life is sacred and sanctifying, a child of God for whom to be is freely to dispose of the power of new life in brotherhood with all humankind.

The Historical Challenge. But what was the relation of existence and essence — and of the beings thus structured — to Parmenides’s One? This is the essential question if the new insight regarding existence is to constitute a way to God. In order to achieve this the previous philosophical accomplishments regarding participation in plenitude must not be lost, but integrated within a cohesive structure. For this, both the participational insight of Plato and the systematic tools of Aristotle will be required. Since Plato and Aristotle had worked together as teacher and student for twenty years it might be expected that their two contributions would have been inseparably linked. In fact, such was not the case. While the body of Aristotelian texts lay sequestered in Pergamon for 150 years, the Platonic influence was gradually extended as the heart of Greek culture through Asia Minor to Alexandria.

Thus the philosophical atmosphere in which the thinking of the Church Fathers took place was Platonic, and in some contrast to the Aristotelian. Especially through the works of St. Augustine Plato’s thought pattern became the general context of the Christian thought through the first millennium in medieval Europe. The knowledge of Aristotle in the West during that period had in large part been restricted to Boethius’s translations of the Organon, and the body of medieval thought itself could be called a Christian Platonism.

In this situation it can be understood how new was the situation when the expansion of Islamic culture into Spain and the contact with the East resulting from the First and Second Crusades led to the introduction, within the short span of one century, of practically the whole body of Aristotle’s works. This was not the mere discovery of some new principles or concepts which, by the proper genius of the medieval mind, developed according to the demands of the previously existing Platonic thought pattern. Rather, it was the sudden opening of a new world, which had been scientifically articulated according to its own genius and its own pattern prior to Christian culture. Though genetically related, it was not just a new arrival to be reared according to family patterns, but a full grown relative with whom one discussed as with an equal.

But the visions of Plato and Aristotle could be brought into mutually fructifying union only on the basis of a radically new insight drawn from the root meaning of human experience. This was available in the understanding of being as existence, as described above, which was sufficiently profound and open to draw out further implications of both earlier orientations. The result was Thomas’s systematic philosophy of participation.

A Structure for Thinking about Ways to God. With the three major components in hand, namely, being understood in terms of existence, the Platonic notion of participation, and Aristotle’s structure for scientific knowledge, Thomas proceeded to develop a systematic metaphysics whose integrating structural principle was that of participation. In view of what has been said above, the test of such a system would be its ability to retrieve and elaborate some of the content of Parmenides’s awareness of the One in a manner that allows for multiple or differentiated being. We shall consider, then: first, the systematic character of his metaphysics as a science of being (this will provide the basis for his five ways to God, which are to be discussed in the following chapter); second, the internal structure of participating beings.

There is a classic danger in systematic metaphysics, and it lies just at this point of establishing its subject. The danger is that what is taken as the subject will be only some limited form of reality which the philosopher has comprehended. As a result his scientific metaphysics will systematically reduce reality to his limited vision. Such reductionism is the characteristic difficulty both of materialism and idealism, indeed of rationalisms of every sort. Thomas protected his thought against this in two ways.

First, he recognized that if the subject of the science must be susceptible of qudditative human understanding then in principle it could include only limited beings. Hence, if an absolute is to enter the purview of this science it will be as the cause, rather than as a component of the subject. This is a humbling beginning for metaphysics, but it enables it to retain its scientific rigor. At the same time it protects the transcendent and unlimited character of the Absolute from being cut down to the limitations of the capacity of the human mind for quidditative knowledge. This is where alternate metaphysical systems tend to skepticism or to idolatry.

Further — and this will subsequently be of importance regarding the Absolute or Plenitude of perfection — the form of the judgement by which the subject of metaphysics is separated out is negative; it negates or sets aside whatever might in principle restrict or limit the affirmation that is being. It is the judgement that the being with which the science will be concerned will not be limited only to those things which are of a changing or material nature, that is, to the working of the intellect in conjunction with the senses. Because there are both material and non-material things, there follows the negative judgement that in order to be real a being need not be material. Hence, being as being, or that according to which it is being, is not material or changing. This judgement is negative in that it negates limitation to only one type of being, namely, to material being (but it does not exclude material beings).

Being as the subject of the science of metaphysics is thereby liberated in principle from restriction to a particular kind of existence in contrast to others. It is opened for any and all being, for every aspect of being, and for whatever might prove either to characterize or to be required by being precisely as being.

As a science it will constitute a systematic process of inquiry. With being as its subject it will proceed without shackles, able to respond with faithful accountability before Parmenides’s principle of contradiction, and to consider all inasmuch as it is being rather than non being. It will consider in positive terms every evidence of being whether dependent or Absolute, effect or cause. Indeed, the path from the one to the other will itself be a way to God.

Participation as Life in God. The systematic construction of participation begins with an analysis of the structure of multiple, differentiated or finite beings. By conjoining Parmenides’s analysis of the impossibility of being differing, either by being or by nothing, with the evidence of the fact of differentiation, Plato concluded that there must be some principle by which one being (X) is not another being (Y). The principle will be non-being in the sense, not of nothing, but of not-that-being, as I am not you. The relation of this principle to being, however, had not been explained. By the beginning of the thirteenth century the question had evolved into that of the relation between the essence or nature by which the existence is differentiated and the act of existence itself. Drawing upon both Parmenides and Aristotle, Thomas contributed a solution whose structural principle was that of participation.

Being as such, as Parmenides had noted, was not limited and not differentiated: affirmation was not negation. Thus, if an existence is found to be limited — that is, negated with regard to any more of existence than the certain existence it exercises — this must be due to some other principle than existence. Further, if this principle, even though it is other than existence, does exist then it must be made to exist by existence, to which it is then related as a passive capacity or potency. Finally, if the result is a limited being it must consist conjointly of both this principle as a delimiting capacity or potency and its corresponding act or existence.

Aristotle had discovered this relation of potency to act as the way in which matter and form, as two principles, constitute one changing or physical being. Thomas extended the meaning of act and potency from that specific relation to the more general one between the various constituent principles. He did so by employing the relation of act and potency to explicate the relation he had discovered between essence and existence as constituents of limited or finite being. In this way he was able to identify the internal constitution of being, the subject of metaphysics.

This step was as crucial for metaphysics as was the discovery of atoms for physics. Neither existence nor essence is itself a being, nor even intelligible by itself alone. Rather, beings are composed of existence and essence, not as beings, but as intrinsic principles or constituents of beings. Existence is the act by which essence is made to be, and essence is the limiting and defining capacity or potency by which the existence is distinct from all other existents and is of a particular kind.

Attempts to think in terms of existence without essence have produced anarchic personal affirmation without order, just as thought in terms of essence without existence has produced order that is totalitarian, lifeless and oppressive. Neither existence nor essence can be or be thought without the other. Attempts to do so produce monstrous caricatures of being which have come to characterize our century and turn what is a garden of paradise into a jungle ravaged by ferocious aberrations.

Philosophizing in a Religious Culture. Before moving in the next chapter to the impact of this for the realization of beings in time and, hence, of life and meaning in God, let us reflect for a moment on the dynamics at play in the impact of this Christian vision upon philosophy. We must ask first whether, when situated within a cultural context grounded in a revealed vision, philosophy, as knowledge gained by the natural light of reason, ceases to exist and is transformed into a theology based upon revelation? Certainly, that which involves formally the mysteries of the Trinity and the plan or economy of Redemption in Christ can be known only by revelation and is, therefore, a matter of theology. Today, however, we are more conscious of the significance of the cultural and social context within which thought takes place. One who is raised in a loving and generous family will be more able and more liable to make place for love and generosity in one’s interpretation and response to life, just as one who lives in a more calculating, manipulative and exploitive environment is less likely to factor love into one’s thinking. Today, we recognize that, like economics and even mathematics, philosophy is created by real persons who live in specific places and times, and that it is stimulated by their physical, social and hence cultural circumstances. Philosophy reflects the deepest experiences and free commitments of its creators.

The sense of meaning experienced through earlier ages and articulated in the myths provided Plato with content for his ideas. By his dialogical method he sorted out this meaning, rather than simply creating it. Similarly, in philosophizing, the Christian thinkers returned to Platonic and Aristotelian themes with a new heart and mind, sensitized by their new redemptive and Trinitarian experience. The result was an inversion of the Aristotelian perspective, even by those who would be most Aristotelian in the technical implementation of their philosophy. For Aristotle, the point of initiation of knowledge was the senses, and his philosophy arose through his physics. It was built upon the requirements and implications of matter and change in the physical order. The human was seen to transcend the material, but was defined especially in relation to the physical order as care-taker of nature.

1. Iqbal, Reconstruction, p. 4.

2. Ibid., pp. 128-129, 142.

3. Jaeger, p. 10.

4. Metaphysics, 1, 1, 981-982.

5. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1971), pp. 4-5.

6. Ibid., pp. 6-13; "St. Thomas’s Thought on Gratia Operans," Theological Studies, III (1942), 573-74.

7. McLean and Aspell, Readings, p. 31.

8. Ibid.

9. Anaximander, fragments, see McLean and Aspell, Readings, pp. 14-17; McLean and Aspell, Ancient Western Philosophy, pp. 22-28.

10. McLean and Aspell, Ancient Western Philosophy, ch. III.

11. Dasgupta, I, 53, See Paul Deussen, The Philosophy of the Upanishads (New York: Dover, 1 966) , pp. 182-95, 237-39.

12. Jaeger, pp. 24-36.

13. McLean and Aspell, Readings, p. 40, fr. 3.

14. W.K.C. Guthrie, The Earlier PreSocratics and the Pythagoreans, Vol. I of A History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1962), p. 41.

15. McLean and Aspell, Readings, p. 40, fr. 3.

16. Ibid., p. 40, fr. 3 and 6.

17. Ibid., pp. 42-43, fr. 8. See Guthrie, pp. 28-29.

18. Fragment 8; see Alexander P.D. Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides: A Study of Word, Images, and Argument in the Fragment (New Haven: Yale, 1970).

19. Metaphysics, XII, 7, 1072 b 26-29.

20. McLean and Aspell, Readings, pp. 42-43, fr. 8.

21. Plato, Sophist, 259 A.

22. Ibid., 248 E.

23. Plato, Republic, 509.

24. Ibid., pp. 509-511.

25. Noesis noeseos: "Thought thinks itself as object in virtue of its participation in what is thought," Metaphysics XII, 1072 b 19-29.

26. Ibid.

27. Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being, The Aristotelian Metaphysics: A Study in the Greek Background of Mediaeval Thought (Toronto: PIMS, 1951).

28. A. Mansion, "Positions Maîtreses de la philosophie d’Aristote," in Aristote et Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain: Université de Louvain, 1955), pp. 58-67.

29. Mulla Sadra, see Chapter VII below.

30. Iqbal, p. 4.

31. Plotinus, Enneads, II 5(25), ch. v.

32. Maurizio Flick and Zoltan Alszeghy, Il Creatore, l’inizio della salvezza (Firenze: Lib. Ed. Fiorentina, 1961), pp. 32-49.

33. Mortimer Alder, The Idea of Freedom: A Dialectical Examination of the Conception of Freedom (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), I, 609.

34. John I:1-5, 8.

35. Comelio Fabro, La nozione metafisica di partecipazione secondo S. Tommaso d’Aquino (Torino: Societa Ed. Internazionale, 1950), pp. 75-122.

36. A Survey of a number of authors on this point is found in Robert Henle, St. Thomas and Platonism (Hague: Nijhoff, 1956), p. xviii. See also William D. Ross, The Ideas of Plato (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 226; Joseph Owens, A History of Ancient Western Philosophy (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959), pp. 358-59.

37. Arthur Little, The Platonic Heritage of Thomism (Dublin: Golden Eagle Books, 1950), p. 14.

38. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 1, 2, 71 b-72 a.

39. The Method and Division of the Sciences, trans. by Armand Maurer (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1953).

40. Metaphysics, I, 2.

41. Vedanta Sutras, I, 1, 2.

42. John Paul II, Encyclical Letter: Faith and Reason, Sept. 1998.