Part Ten - Atheism and Salvation
Emanuele Severino
Turning to Emanuele Severino [1], to whom we acknowledge the merit of insisting on the eternal, immutable, and necessary nature, defending the principle of non-contradiction, and combating nihilism, it must be said that he falls into some serious errors. Firstly, he idealistically identifies thought with being; secondly, he denies the existence of temporal, mobile, and contingent beings, distinct from and outside of eternal being; thirdly, he rejects the analogy of being because he does not admit the degrees of being; fourthly, he judges the doctrine of creation as nihilistic because it refers to nothingness (creatio ex nihilo), while nothingness, according to him, does exist.
It is true that outside of being, nothing exists. But being is not only the eternal and necessary being, so it must be noted that outside of eternal and immutable beings, contingent, changeable, and temporal beings exist. Severino has the concept of ipsum Esse, and with this, we can say that he has the correct concept of the essence of God. However, by identifying being as being, with ipsum Esse, he loses sight of the fact that contingent beings are created by necessary beings. He fails to realize that producing a being from nothing is the proper act of ipsum Esse and that the concept of creation as creatio ex nihilo is not contradictory; it does not involve the confusion of being with non-being but is the transition from potential being to an actual being.
Severino' God is an impotent God who cannot create because he does not admit the possibility of a being inferior to his own, a being participating in his being, distinct from his being, which is being by essence. Therefore, his God does not justify the existence of the world but is nothing more than the world transformed into a finite appearance of God; thus, we are in pantheism.
The concept of God that can be derived from Severino is not sufficient for salvation because it is a God only conceived as ipsum Esse, but not the real God, whose existence is demonstrated as the cause of the effect starting from the consideration of creatures.
Let's point out to Severino that nothing is non-being, but it exists as a concept, an ens rationis (italics mine): it is thought and expressed with the term "nothing," on which we all agree, a term that everyone understands what I mean, a notion of very easy understanding, so much so that even children understand it. Severinus should rather say that he does not like the concept of creation because it reminds him of that Christian God he abandoned to assume the god of Parmenides, and he will show himself sincere.
The comparison between Severino and Leopardi is interesting. Both stumble on the problem of the relationship between the necessary and the contingent and therefore on the relationship between being and nothingness. Faced with the problem of becoming, that is, the contingent, they do not know how to apply the principle of causality and found the contingent, i.e., the world, on the existence of the necessary, i.e., God.
Severino, in the face of Leibniz's famous question, "Why is there being and not nothing?" would react in two opposite ways. Severino would observe that it is not the case to ask why a being exists since it exists by itself. Regarding Leopardi, he would say: that what is certain is that nothing exists. As for the being, which is purely contingent and corruptible, it, for Leopardi, has no reason; it exists, begins, ends, and that's it. It is neither preceded nor caused by a first, absolute, and necessary being. For him, only the contingent exists.
However, Leibniz's question is not well formulated; the real problem is not "Why is there a being?" but "Why is there a contingent being?" Being, as it also encompasses the absolute, exists necessarily. Here Parmenides and Severino are right. What needs to be explained, instead, is why the contingent exists, which does not have a reason for its existence within itself.
In saying that the contingent exists by itself, as Leopardi does, and does not refer to a cause, he shows that he does not know how to apply the principle of causality, which says that if there is an effect, there is a cause; there cannot be an effect without a cause. It is something even children understand.
So, while Severino affirms being, excluding the contingent that seems contradictory and nihilistic, Leopardi, on the other hand, sees only the contingent suspended in nothingness, which he absolutizes without fearing the contradiction of admitting a contingent without a foundation in the necessary.
In both cases, the driving force behind this false vision of reality is pride, which refuses to accept the dependence of the self on God. In Severino, (saying that ) I am the being that depends on no one. In Leopardi, the self plays the victim of an adverse fate and takes it out on the harsh nature, frightened by the idea of being nothing from nothing and for nothing. But in reality, he puts himself in the place of God by refusing to trust in God, deciding what the truth is, and refusing to humbly conform to the truth of himself and God.
Gustavo Bontadini
Gustavo Bontadini [2] also speaks about God. He even considers himself a Catholic and has taught at the Catholic University of Milan, being a student of the Thomist Monsignor Amato Masnovo. But what concept does he have of God? How does he know that God exists? How does he demonstrate His existence? What attributes does he attribute to Him?
He starts from the Parmenidean conception of being, as one, univocal, necessary, immutable, and eternal, where becoming appears contradictory, impossible, or pure appearance. Therefore, he believes he can demonstrate the existence of God not based on the principle of causality, which involves the production of becoming entities, but based on the simple principle of non-contradiction. To avoid falling into contradiction by affirming that becoming is God, that is, does not become, it is necessary to affirm the existence of God not as the cause of becoming but simply to resolve the contradiction [3].
However, one wonders how much this "God" transcends the world and human thought, turning a metaphysical problem into a logical one. Bontadini follows the ontologism of Anselm, carried to the utmost in the Gentilian idealistic form, where being is not beyond thought but immanent to thought. Thus, the idea of God is enough to know that God exists.
But our idea cannot be the cause of reality. Now, the true God is the cause of reality. Therefore, to conceive the true God, it is necessary to demonstrate His existence as the cause of reality, starting from the experience of reality, not from our ideas, however beautiful and sublime they may be (absolute being).
Unfortunately, Bontadini is influenced by Gentile, for whom there is no being outside of thought, but being coincides with the thought, even though Bontadini does not reach Gentile's position of equating being with the act of thinking. However, what has been said about him is enough to prevent a correct concept of God. The good side of Bontadini's theism, however, is the decisive conception of God as a subsistent, absolute, eternal, immutable, and necessary Being.
It seems like a trace of Thomism, but in reality, Bontadini prefers Parmenides, in whose idealism he finds Gentile, with the difference that Bontadini does not accept Gentile's conception of being as becoming, inherited from Hegel. What compromises Bontadini's theism, in addition to the ideological approach, is the inability to understand the ontological value of becoming and therefore the material world. Influenced by the Parmenidean conception of being, the existence of becoming entities can no longer be proof of the existence of God.
Apart from the fact that Bontadini does not realize that the materialism rejected by the idealist comes back through the window, since, if thought coincides with being and being is also material being, thought will coincide with material being. However, the Bontadinian conception of God as an absolute Identity is good, which rightly makes Bontadini say that atheism is absurd.
Karl Rahner
How often Karl Rahner [4] speaks of God! But let's ask ourselves: what is his concept of God? How does he come to know that God exists? How does he demonstrate it? What does he mean by the word God? Is it the true God?
A God experienced originally in self-awareness, as he repeatedly and in various ways asserts, a God object of a pre-conceptual transcendental experience (Vorgriff ), which is at the same time an experience of self and being, an absolute mystery of God, inconceivable, unrepresentable, unspeakable, and un nameable, a God at the apex of human self-transcendence, a kenotic God who denies Himself to return to Himself, a changing God who becomes matter and suffers, a God responsible for good and evil, is it the true God? Is this concept of God sufficient for salvation?
For Rahner, we come to know that God exists not by starting from the experience of things and discovering, in the line of Romans 1:20, that they, to exist, need to be caused by a First Cause Being that exists by its essence, but through the aforementioned transcendental experience.
He links his discourse to Cartesian metaphysics, where we do not arrive at our self-awareness starting from the sensory experience of external things, but this knowledge is made possible based on "the original self-possession of the knowing and freely disposing existence of oneself."[5]
Now we must say that the true demonstration of the existence of God, as already hinted at by Aristotle with his concept of the Unmoved Mover, starts from the experience of things and asserts the existence of God based on the application of the principle of causality, which establishes a first cause, leads to self-awareness and awareness of the existence of God.[6]
Instead, for Rahner, the demonstration by induction or by passage from effect to proportionate cause, starting from the experience of things, only evokes and expresses in concepts the previous aprioric pre-objective experience of the existence of God in the horizon of original self-awareness. According to him:
"While man reaches the objective reality of his daily life by acting actively and thinking conceptually, he carries out, as a condition of possibility for this conceptual understanding, the non-objective anticipation of the inconceivable and elusive fullness of reality, which in its original unity is at the same time the condition of knowledge and of the single thing objectively known and that, as such a condition, is always affirmed non-objectively, even in the act that thematically denies such a thing." [7]
Here we see how Rahner overturns the order of knowledge: it is not the pre-conceptual experience, which for Rahner is already an experience of God, that is the condition of possibility for the empirical knowledge of the "objective reality of his daily life." On the contrary, it is this knowledge, transcended through the inductive application of the principle of causality, that is the condition of possibility for the knowledge of God.
Furthermore, a false assertion emerges here, present in other Rahnerian texts and connected with the thesis of anonymous Christians, according to which, since the substantial adherence to God occurs in athematic experience, the conceptual formulation of atheism would not compromise the substantial tendency towards God that characterizes the original pre-conceptual transcendental experience based on Cartesian self-awareness.
Rahner claims to base this thesis on a passage from Lumen Gentium of the Second Vatican Council, where it is said that a way of salvation is possible even for those who "have not arrived at an explicit knowledge of God" (n.16). He equates the implicit knowledge of God supposed by the Council with his transcendental experience of God, which is not relevant at all. According to sound reason and the doctrine of the Church, we come to know that God exists by applying inductive reasoning to the principle of causality, and not at all by Rahner's transcendental experience, which does not exist, and admitting it would equate human self-awareness with divine self-awareness.
Rahner would like to admit a transcendental theism alongside a thematic atheism, where the subject would remain a believer despite the verbal profession of atheism. It must be said, however, that his pre-conceptual and experiential transcendental theism does not exist. The only valid and acceptable theism is expressed in concepts and using, as I have said and repeated, the a posteriori principle of causality.
Therefore, it makes no sense to argue that one can be transcendently and authentically a believer, even if they are atheistic in concepts. Not at all. Whoever is atheistic in concept is atheistic tout court because the pre-conceptual experience of God is an invention of Rahner, devoid of any theoretical foundation and indeed contrary to the teaching of the First Vatican Council, which states that the existence of God is demonstrated only " per ea quae facta sunt -through those things which have been made" (Romans 1:20, Denz. 3004).
In addition to this, Rahner confuses the transcendental knowledge of being, necessary for every act of thought and necessarily belonging to every thinking subject, with the practical orientation to God through the will. This practical orientation, depending on the choice of free will, is proper only for those who freely decide to direct their lives toward God.
Due to his theory of "pre-conceptual transcendental experience" of God, Rahner also inverts the relationship between theology and mysticism, between the theology of the word and that of silence. We do not start from an athematic and aprioristic mysticism to move to words and concepts. On the contrary, we begin to know God by representing Him in the concepts elaborated by reasoning. We learn to know the Symbol of faith, and then, if our heart is well disposed in charity, God can grant us mystical experience. This experience does not abandon concepts at all but rather makes them fiery and luminous by the power of love, although it is true that words fail due to the ineffability of the experience.
Therefore, Rahner is wrong when he says that speaking of God "formulating words and drawing concepts, translating God into an object of our consciousness, this is only the second form of the original relationship with God, and this thematic relationship of second instance is carried and supported by a previous, athematic, transcendental mode of integral spirituality towards the elusive Infinite" [8].
With his transcendental (pre-conceptual) - categorical (conceptual) distinction, Rahner falls into the usual distinction made by idealists who conceive human thinking as placed on two levels concerning two representative schemes and two terms: a higher term (philosopher) and a lower one (common man); the original-derivative scheme and the adult-minor scheme.
For example, Spinoza distinguishes the sub specie aeternitatis view, proper to the wise, from the sub specie temporis view of the common man; Fichte distinguishes the philosophical point of view (idealism) from that of the common man (realism); Hegel distinguishes denken (idealism) from Vorstellung (realism); Husserl distinguishes the phenomenological or critical point of view (philosopher) from the point of view of naive natural realism (common man); Bontadini distinguishes the idealist (being immanent to thought) from the realist (extramental being).
Rahner, on the other hand, interprets Heidegger's being in the sense of the biblical "I am Who I am, (Dixit Deus ad Moysen: «Ego sum qui sum»(Nova Vulgata, Exodus 3:14 (Ed.)) the ipsum Esse of Saint Thomas. However, because he does not know how to detach himself from Heidegger, Rahner believes that the starting point of our thinking is the experience of ipsum Esse, or as he expressly says, the pre-conceptual experience of God, which he also calls transcendental experience.
But Rahner goes off course here, and it is difficult to understand how he could have considered Heidegger as his teacher when he had the splendid Thomistic school of the twentieth century at his disposal, from which, unfortunately, he has distanced himself. He is like a prodigal son who has remained content to eat carob pods with the pigs.
It should also be noted that Rahner, conceiving man as a historical being tending towards an absolute being, ends up identifying the human being with an absolute being, that is, with ipsum Esse, conceiving God as the apex of human self-transcendence and as becoming a man. But this is not the true Heideggerian conception of man. For Heidegger, man is the being in which and to which being appears. More precisely, he is the "there" of the Being- there(Dasein), that is, the place and time in which being becomes finite, temporalizes, and spatializes.
At the end of his life, Rahner declared that his only teacher had been Heidegger. Indeed, it is easy to find in Rahner the Heideggerian identification of thought with being, the original athematic and pre-conceptual experience of being and self, what Heidegger calls Vorverständnis and Rahner Vorgriff, an experience of which conceptual representation (and therefore the Catholic dogmatic notion) is a derivative, a "signpost," a conventional, pluralized, diversified, mutable, and relative representative model over time.
Edward Schillebeeckx
According to Edward Schillebeeckx [9], the concept of God, as such, does not grasp the divine reality as it is. Instead, to grasp it, it must be an expression, in the current historical-cultural context, of the original, athematic, and pre-conceptual experience of God that, according to Schillebeeckx, is inherent in the human mind as such.
To know, therefore, that God exists, according to him, does not require the application of the principle of causality, inherently linked to sensory phenomena alone. Rather, one must explicitly articulate and conceptually formulate, in the cultural climate of our time and according to the theological concepts of our time, that ineffable athematic experience of God that we all have by the very nature of our intellect or consciousness in union with the senses.
One can sense here an influence that is both Cartesian and Ockhamist: Cartesian, in conceiving the knowledge of the existence of God as an original datum of self-awareness; and Ockhamist, as for Schillebeeckx, the concept is not an abstract, universal, and immutable representation of the essence of the thing but only a conventional and contingent sign in the experience of the thing.
According to Schillebeeckx, all this means that the concepts we form of God and His attributes are not immutable because they do not, on their own, grasp the reality of the divine nature. Instead, they are mutable products of our thinking as history progresses, indicating only that reality is a historicized interpretation, surmountable by future interpretations and surpassing previous ones, of the universal athematic experience of God.
Thus, for example, today, we can no longer conceive of a God who punishes, who demands satisfaction for sins, a God to whom sacrifices are offered, a God as a spirit without matter, unrelated to the world and man, immutable and impassible, a God who leaves us with immutable dogmas. Instead, the image of God that we must form of God, always based on the perennial and universal athematic experience, is that of an evolutionary God, nameless, essentially historical and incarnate [10], relative to man, a God-for-man, the God-for-me, merciful, forgiving, and saving everyone, regardless of whether they repent, a God who does not demand any satisfaction but freely grants grace to all.
However, if we carefully consider these attributes, which Schillebeeckx presents as a modern and progressive concept of God, they are nothing more than those of the liberal Lutheranism of Schleiermacher in the 19th century, resurrected by Bultmann last century. It is the reheated broth of modernism.
Jean-Luc Marion
Jean-Luc Marion's denial that God is a being, replacing the predicate of an entity with that of goodness and love, leads to atheism. Now, there is no doubt that God is absolute goodness. However, if something is good, it is clear that it is something, so it makes no sense to affirm that God is good while setting aside the predicate of being. Goodness is also being. Goodness that is not being is nothing because outside of being, there is nothing.
Marion initiated what is now called Giovanni Colzani and Piero Coda's "ontology of love" and Bubner and Ebner's "ontology of being as relation." This also gave rise to "trinitarian ontology," which confuses metaphysics with Triadology, an operation that is not new, as it was already found in Hegel and was taken up in the 19th century by Günther, Hermes, and Frohschammer. It is forgotten that the Trinity of being is the exclusive property of God and is a matter of faith, not reason.
Conclusion
"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven" (Matthew 7:21). Theism and atheism are ultimately not so much two theoretical positions as they are two attitudes of the will: a theist does the will of God, even if they do not name Him or have an inadequate concept or consider themselves atheists; atheism is disobeying God, even if one memorizes all Thomism.
For this reason, Christ in the parable of the good Samaritan teaches us to ultimately distinguish those who seem atheists but are believers from those who are believers even though they seem atheists, by referring to how we behave towards our neighbor, without denying the importance of the criteria of doctrinal correctness or divine worship.
The common and obvious definition that I have mentioned remains certain, namely: theism is affirming God; atheism is denying Him. Therefore, it remains true that a question of truth is at stake. It is essential to determine whether it is possible to prove that God exists rationally and, if possible, how to do so. It is also very important to determine the concept of the true God.
However, atheists and theists can also be represented by the parable of the father who commands his two sons to go work in the vineyard: "'Son, go and work today in the vineyard.' And he answered, 'I will not,' but afterward he changed his mind and went." (Matthew 21:28-30). Who is the atheist? And who is the believer?
Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, November 3, 2023
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/ateismo-e-salvezza-decima-parte-1010.html
[1] See the insightful critique of Severino by Fabro in his book "L’alienazione dell’Occidente" (The Alienation of the West), Edizioni Thor Quadrivium, Genoa 1981.
[2] A recent and in-depth study on Bontadini is by Marco Berlanda, "L’unica svolta di Bontadini. Dal fideismo attualistico alla metafisica dell’essere" (Bontadini's Unique Turning Point: From Actualistic Fideism to the Metaphysics of Being), Vita e Pensiero, Milan 2022.
[3] See Antonino Postorino's study, "Il concetto di «creatio ex nihilo». Ipoteca nichilistica e rigorizzazione metafisica" (The Concept of "Creatio ex Nihilo": Nihilistic Hypothec and Metaphysical Rigor), in Sacra Doctrina, 1, 2017, pp.199-269.
[4] Refer to my book "Karl Rahner. Il Concilio tradito" (Karl Rahner: The Betrayed Council), Edizioni Fede&Cultura, Verona 2009, ch.II.
[5] "Corso fondamentale sulla fede" (Basic Course on Faith), Edizioni Paoline, Rome 1978, p.100.
[6] This rational process is also indicated by the First Vatican Council (Denz.3004).
[7] Ibid., p.102.
[8] "Esercizi spirituali per il sacerdote. Iniziazione (del)l’esistenza sacerdotale" (editor's parentheses.)(Spiritual Exercises for the Priest: Initiation into Priestly Existence), Queriniana, Brescia 1974, p.9.
[9] Refer to my article "Il criterio della verità in Schillebeeckx" (The Criterion of Truth in Schillebeeckx), in Sacra Doctrina, 2, 1984, pp.188-205.
[10] See, for example, the God of Schelling illustrated by Walter Kasper: "L’Assoluto nella storia. L’ultima filosofia di Schelling" (The Absolute in History: Schelling's Latest Philosophy), Jaca Book, Milan 1986.