Aidan Nichols on Connaturality with GodAs "Empirical Dogmatics"

St Thomas specifically says that the same understanding which the theologian gains by reflecting on sacra doctrina exists in a non-theologian through the 'connaturality' or sympathy with God which charity brings about.  In other words, an experimental intimacy with God, on the part of the saint or the lover of God, leads to an intuitive grasp of what the theologian comes to understand in a more roundabout way. In the Secunda Pars of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas's account of the theological virtues and of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit sets out to show in some detail how this can be so.  Furthermore, the whole character of theology as a science in St Thomas is linked to the notion that by faith we have a share in the absolutely certain and manifest knowledge which God has of himself and which the blessed have of him by participation.  However, a good deal of later Scholasticism, without necessarily denying ex professo these convictions of St Thomas, was cast in a strict deductive mould, dependent on a somewhat narrow propositionalist view of faith, differing markedly from Aquinas' own.  A certain kind of neo-Scholasticism, accordingly, had difficulty coping with the contemplative, and subjectively engaged, aspect of historic Thomism.  In brief, a breach had opened between theology and Christian experience.  This breach was widened by the Modernist movement. In trying to redress the balance between formal theologising and religious experience--in itself an entirely proper and laudable objective--Modernism finished by subverting confidence in the Christian access to a supernatural revealed content of truth, given in history and now available through doctrinal tradition.  As an error in fundamental theology, perhaps the first that the Church had encountered since the Gnostic crisis of the early centuries, Modernism threatened to undermine all doctrines rather than, as more customary with heresies, the occasional one or two--thus earning from Pope Pius X, in his encyclical Pascendi, the sobriquet 'heresy of heresies'.  The effect on the Catholic Church of both Modernism and its mirror-image, 'integralist' anti-Modernism, was to make the word 'experience' taboo for decades.  Only in the later 19405 did the Abbe Jean Mouroux of the Institut Catholique in Paris succeed in retrieving the word 'experience' in the context of Catholic theology in his book, L'Experience chretienne.

Revd Prof Aidan Nichols OP STM

Light from the East:  Themes from Orthodox Theology