are part of this “all.” We are created, contingent beings that did not have to be. Only God exists by necessity, as Christians (along with certain others) claim. But Christians believe further that the God that exists by necessity is known only through contingent creatures. “Witness” names the truth that the only way we can know the character of the world, the only way we know ourselves, the only way we know God is by one person telling another.1
We believe an exploration of the relation between God, truth, and witness2 is appropriate in an essay that seeks to honor Fergus Kerr. We hope it helps illumine his work, in particular his understanding of Thomas. As Kerr observes in After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism, Thomas thought arguments for God’s existence were necessary not so as to convince hypothetically open-minded atheists, or even to persuade “fools,” but rather “to deepen and enhance the mystery of the hidden God. . . . Far from being an exercise in rationalistic apologetics, the purpose of arguing for God’s existence is to protect God’s transcendence.”3
Kerr develops this extremely important point by noting that Thomas’s arguments for God’s existence are expressions of his understanding of God’s simplicity. Divine simplicity makes clear that we cannot know what God is; rather, we can only reason to God from the existence of the world that did not have to be. Indeed, from this perspective, arguments for God’s existence are actually a way to resist idolatry, presuming as they do that those things about which we do have knowledge — that is, that which exists but requires no explanation — are best known as “effects.” According to Kerr, the notion that all that is testifies as “effect” expresses that all that is is created. In short, all that is witnesses to God by acknowledging that all that is is created.
Kerr thinks rightly that his understanding of the character of Thomas’s “proofs” expresses his affinity with Alasdair MacIntyre’s arguments in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition against the epistemological turn in modern philosophy.4 With MacIntyre, Kerr argues that the epistemological turn skewed readings of Thomas after Aeterni Patris.5 Joseph Kleutgen6 and other Thomists misread Thomas as responding to the Cartesian problematic to defeat skepticism. But this fundamentally distorts his position. It assumes that the Summa exemplifies a great system wherein the arguments are so tightly interrelated there can be no “externality.”7
Quite to the contrary, what Thomas meant to do was truthfully describe God’s world, in all its contingency. Indeed, one of the fundamental callings of the theologian is to read the world as God’s creation. As one of us has suggested, a suitable image for Aquinas at work in the Summa is that of an expert forester whose eye is trained to mark leaf and branch, bark and span.8 He draws distinctions, notes likenesses, groups in one way, then the other, all so as to draw toward a fuller and more truthful vision of what the forest is.
The image of Thomas as a forester, moreover, suggests how important is contingency in his work.9 Aquinas saw quite clearly that “accidents which are altogether accidental are neglected by every art, by reason of their uncertainty and infinity.”10 We need to know which accidents not to neglect. Put another way, if all that is bears the character of “accident,” in order to find your way through a forest of such contingent truths you will have to know which ones count to tell you what you need to know. The Summa is Thomas’s attempt not only to display the forest but also to negotiate a path through it without getting lost in the details.
This is how the whole of the Summa, not only its second part, can count as ethics — just to the extent, that is, that Thomas means to show throughout what it means that we are human beings who are the “principle of our actions.”11 We are beings capable of truth because we are capable of actions that require that we say what we have done — which we cannot do truthfully unless we know the world we act within. The repertoire of descriptions as well as their interrelation is complicated, requiring care and attention if we are not to be self-deceived. And this means we must describe all that is properly, namely, as God’s creative and redemptive work.
This is a tall order, for what could be more vast and varied than the contingencies of the created world? Yet, as Kerr notes, Thomas believed (and showed) that we can proceed with a certain confidence. Unencumbered by Cartesian doubt, “for Thomas, human beings are created in God’s image and likeness, and, more particularly, are born such that our own minds are connaturally open to the world that reveals itself to us and even reveals itself as created.”12 Since the created world includes us, knowing it means knowing ourselves — as created, as in God’s image, and as sinners.
A key point for Kerr is that modern philosophers have become entangled in the “Enlightenment’s mechanistic conception of causation.”13 Read back into Thomas, “first cause” is assumed to be something other than the personal God Thomas worshiped. But as Kerr notes, Thomas’s view about cause was much more subtle and supple, rooted in Aristotle and, in fact, in the quite sensible pre-modern notion that “cause” was carried in its meaning by what it is for us human beings to cause something. Summing up, Kerr notes that “God as First Cause is already [for Thomas] God as freely self-communicating goodness, and as final cause attracting created agents to their proper end or telos.”14
Cause and agency, then, are fundamentally related notions, both in God and in us. Here we find ourselves once again at the beginning of the prima secundae, where ethics “officially” begins and where Thomas launches his inquiry into the truth about human actions. Such inquiry is a kind of “science,” although different from what we usually call by that name, since it is not only about the so-called “natural world” but also about us as we live in it. Indeed, this is why it is rightly about all of “creation,” since it does not assume that “natural” and “human” world are radically different entities.15 But as just implied, the “science” becomes decidedly more complicated with the inclusion of human actions.
For instance, as Elizabeth Anscombe argued in Intention, human actions fall under a variety of descriptions, which means truthful inquiry can proceed in a variety of directions.16 Moreover, often it is not possible to give the description of an action, because to know what is the case or what has been done requires that the action be placed in a narrative that is still ongoing. This means the process through which we discover what has happened or what we have done requires that we reason practically — which of course we cannot do well without all the virtues.
We hope these points display our deep sympathy with Kerr’s attempt to “overcome epistemology” — just to the extent that the epistemological project was an attempt to escape contingency by supposing theoretical reason could entirely substitute for the work of practical reason. We also share his use of Ludwig Wittgenstein to “overcome epistemology.” Though we do not make extensive use of Wittgenstein in the account of witness that follows, it owes much to his work. Indeed, much of what we say is a sort of commentary on Wittgenstein’s remark that “a language-game must ‘show’ the facts that make it possible. (But that’s not how it is.)”17 Put differently, we think it is crucial for understanding the grammar of theology that we recognize that language is not one thing and the world another.
“Witness,” then, as we believe, is required by the Christian faith, does not sit atop the world as if it is an epiphenomenal layer of words that help us cope “morally” or “spiritually” in a reality otherwise ruled by the endless bump and grind of “cause” and “effect.” To witness is to speak the truth about the world as God’s, that is, the God of Israel, the same God who raised Christ from the dead — of which we are witnesses. This may make witness seem like a simple, formulaic thing that simply rehearses one alleged truth. Yet, to the contrary, we hold that proper attention to witness is essential if we are to avoid the sort of reductionism that assumes that some deeper account of “meaning” is necessary to support what we say as Christians. By rejecting such “deeper accounts” we do not mean to imply that Christians cannot be wrong in what they say; indeed, we invite objections to how we speak about the world — without supposing that fielding them demands that we speak a language more determinative than that we have learned as Christians.
