can only come about by entering the suffering so fully that the suffering can no longer claim you as its own. This suffering is of a visceral intensity and it seems as if this period, Kali Yuga, is where one is most apt to find the means to overcome suffering. But can one become so lost that they freely become unfree? Have we lost something along the way, in Sutya Yuga, that immemorial immediacy, which alone can lift us above the suffering? Does the Kali Yuga period, most apt to suffer, have the tools to overcome it? Or are they most apt to suffer because they have squandered or hidden or forgotten where to find those tools? This is why the battle between Kalki (Vishnu’s final avatar) is described in apocalyptic language.
53. See Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas, 19: “St. Thomas takes the view that the souls of all the ordinary hard-working and simple-minded people are quite as important as the souls of thinkers and truth-seekers; and he asks how all these people are possibly to find time for the amount of reasoning that is needed to find truth . . . [this] shows both a respect for scientific enquiry and a strong sympathy with the average man. His argument for Revelation is not an argument against Reason; but it is an argument for Revelation. The conclusion he draws from it is that men must receive the highest moral truths in a miraculous manner; or most men would not receive them at all. His arguments are rational and natural; but his own deduction is all for the supernatural; and, as is common in the case of his argument, it is not easy to find any deduction except his own deduction. And when we come to that, we find it is something as simple as St. Francis himself could desire; the message from heaven; the story that is told out of the sky; the fairytale that is really true.”
54. Rousselot, Intellectualism of St. Thomas, 8–13. See also Eckhart, “Sermon 34: When Our Work Becomes a Spiritual Work Working in the World,” in Breakthrough, 483: “Listen then to this wonder! How wonderful it is to be both outside and inside, to seize and to be seized, to see and at the same time to be what is seen, to hold and to be held—that is the goal where the spirit remains at rest, united with our dear eternity.”
55. Cf. DA 430b–431a: “The cognizing agent must be potentially one contrary, and contain the other. But if there is anything which has no contrary, it is self-cognizant, actual and separately existent . . . Knowledge when actively operative is identical with its object.”
56. Moral arguments which advocate “it’s my body, my right” in, for example, abortion, envision a fallacious sense of self-sufficiency that exists neither in practice nor in the act of knowledge itself. It is simply nowhere to be found, and the very heart of intentionality attests to this moral truth. Human beings realize themselves only in ontological dependency.
57. Cf. DV XVI, 1, ad. 9: “Synderesis does not denote higher or lower reason, but something that refers commonly to both. For in the very habit of the universal principles of law there are contained certain things which pertain to the eternal norms of conduct, such as, that God must be obeyed, and there are some that pertain to lower norms, such as, that we must live according to reason.”
58. SCG II, 80–81.
59. ST I, 79, 12, resp.: “Synderesis is not a power but a habit; though some held that it is a power higher than reason; while others [Cf. Alexander of Hales, Sum. Theol. II, 73] said that it is reason itself, not as reason, but as a nature. In order to make this clear we must observe that, as we have said above (Article 8), man’s act of reasoning, since it is a kind of movement, proceeds from the understanding of certain things—namely, those which are naturally known without any investigation on the part of reason, as from an immovable principle—and ends also at the understanding, inasmuch as by means of those principles naturally known, we judge of those things which we have discovered by reasoning. Now it is clear that, as the speculative reason argues about speculative things, so that practical reason argues about practical things. Therefore, we must have, bestowed on us by nature, not only speculative principles, but also practical principles. Now the first speculative principles bestowed on us by nature do not belong to a special power, but to a special habit, which is called ‘the understanding of principles,’ as the Philosopher explains (Ethic. vi, 6). Wherefore the first practical principles, bestowed on us by nature, do not belong to a special power, but to a special natural habit, which we call synderesis. Whence synderesis is said to incite to good, and to murmur at evil, inasmuch as through first principles we proceed to discover, and judge of what we have discovered. It is therefore clear that synderesis is not a power, but a natural habit.”
60. ST I, 79, 13, ad. 3.
61. Cf. SCG II, 68: “Dionysius says: Divine wisdom has joined the ends of the higher to the beginnings of the lower. Thus in the genus of bodies we find the human body, composed of elements equally tempered, attaining to the lowest member of the class above it, that is, to the human soul, which holds the lowest rank in the class of subsistent intelligences. Hence the human soul is said to be on the horizon and boundary line [Confinium/aeviternity] between things corporeal and incorporeal, inasmuch as it is an incorporeal substance and at the same time the form of a body.” SCG III, 61: The human person, by virtue of his intellectual soul stands on the borderline, the horizon or confinium between eternity and time. St. Thomas stresses this point throughout his works emphasizing that the soul is shown to hold the last place among intellectual things. See SCG II, 80–81; SCG II, 80; DV X, 8 resp. See also Pseudo-Aristotle, Book of Causes §22: “Indeed, the being that is after eternity and beyond time is Soul, because it is on the horizon of eternity from below and beyond time.”; §84: “And indeed, Intelligence encompasses the things it produces, both Nature and the horizon of Nature, namely, the Soul, for it is above Nature.” See also É. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy, 235–37.
62. Cf. Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge, 192: “The philosopher knows that bodies have absolute dimensions, that there are in the world absolute motions, an absolute time, simultaneities which are absolute for events divided as far as may be in space: absolute signifies here entirely determined in itself, independently of any observer: the knowledge of what these are, the discernments of these absolute dimensions, movements, simultaneities (at a distance), time, by the aid of our means of observation and measurement, the philosopher renounces, voluntarily conceding that it is not possible. It is sufficient for him that they can be discerned by pure minds, which know without observing from a given point of space and time. The physicist makes a like renunciation, and with good reason. But for him, who does not philosophize and who is concerned with what he can measure and to the extent that he can measure it, the existence of these absolutes does not count and in their place he knows and handles only relative entities reconstructed by means of measurable determinations: entia rationis cum fundametito in re.”
63. See the objectors in ST I, 76, 5.
64. Cf. Pegis, Thomistic Notion of Man, 14: “Like other thinkers of their age, William of Saint-Thierry and Godfrey of Saint-Victor . . . had great difficulty in understanding how a simple and immaterial soul was present to the body and yet not in a spatial way. But this problem, which is at least as old as Plotinus and St. Augustine, not to mention Nemesius, is witness to the metaphysical innocence of the twelfth century.”
65.
