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| Medieval depiction of a cog on a seal of Stralsund |
Dooyeweerd – The Four Formative
Undercurrents of Western Thought:
3) The Scholastic (Thomistic) Nature-Grace Motive
Excerpt from ‘In the Twilight of Western Thought’, Paideia Press, 2012, pp 39-32)
In the first phase of Christian thought, in which the Augustinian influence was predominant, the central working of the biblical basic motive [see previous post] was restricted to dogmatical theology.
In the second phase, beginning with the rise of Thomism, philosophy and dogmatical theology were sharply distinguished. But at the same time a third religious basic motive arose, which excluded the radical and integral influence of the central biblical motive on philosophy. This is the motive of nature and grace, which ever since has been the starting-point of scholastic philosophy as it developed both in Roman Catholic and Protestant circles. It originally aimed at a mutual accommodation of the biblical and the Greek religious basic motives. But since the Renaissance it could also be serviceable to a mutual accommodation of the biblical and the modern Humanistic starting-points. It implied the distinction between a natural and a supra-natural sphere of thought and acting.
Within the natural sphere a relative autonomy was ascribed to human reason, which was supposed to be capable of discovering the natural truths by its own light. Within the supra-natural sphere of grace, on the contrary, human thought was considered to be dependent on the divine self-revelation. Philosophy was considered to belong to the natural sphere; dogmatical theology, on the other hand, to the supra-natural sphere. In consequence, there was no longer a question of Christian philosophy. Philosophical thought was, in fact, abandoned to the influence of the Greek and Humanist basic motives in their external accommodation to the doctrine of the Church. These motives were masked by the dogmatic acceptance of the autonomy of natural reason. The scholastic meaning ascribed to this autonomy was determined by the nature-grace theme. Natural reason [according to this scholastic line of thought] should not contradict the supra-natural truths of the Church’s doctrine, based on divine revelation.
This implied an external accommodation of either the Greek or the Humanistic philosophical conceptions to this ecclesiastical doctrine as long as the ecclesiastical authority was factually respected by the students of philosophy. The Thomistic attempt at a synthesis of the opposite motives of nature and grace, and the ascription of the primacy to the latter, found a clear expression in the adage: Gratia naturam non tollit, sed perficit (Grace does not cancel nature, but perfects it).
But the dialectical character of the nature-grace motive clearly manifested itself in the late medieval nominalistic movement. The Thomistic synthesis of nature and grace was replaced by a sharp antithesis. Any point of connection between the natural and super-natural sphere was denied. This was the beginning of shifting the primacy to the nature-motive. The process of secularization of philosophy had started.
Excerpt from ‘In the Twilight of Western Thought’ by Herman Dooyeweerd, Paideia Press, 2012, pp 29-32)
For similar analyses of religious ground motives, see New Critique Volume I, Part II; and Dooyeweerd, The Roots of Western Culture, Collected Works, Series B, Volume 3.
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