Are There Two Consciousnesses in Christ? Transposing the Secondary Act of Existence

1. Two Questions ¹

In the present paper I will be answering two questions that have haunted me for quite some time. The first is a question I have entertained for nearly 50 years. Bernard Lonergan insists there must be two consciousnesses in Christ, one divine and one human. ² His thesis 10 in the recently published volume The Incarnate Word reads: ‘There are in the incarnate Word two distinct consciousnesses, a divine and a human consciousness; by these two, nevertheless, one and the same divine person is present to himself in both a divine and a human way.’ ³ The argument is compelling from a doctrinal point of view. It is based in the dogmas of Chalcedon and the Third Council of Constantinople, as well as in Lonergan’s own philosophical position regarding consciousness. He correctly observes that most other commentators on the issue go wide of the mark because they identify consciousness with perception or with some other form of knowledge, rather than with the simple self-presence that constitutes experience or awareness. To say that there are two consciousnesses in Jesus is to say that the one divine person incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth is present to himself in two ways, one divine and the other human. But once I grasped his argument, which I found quite liberating, the immediate question for me, one that has endured all these many years, has been, How are these two consciousnesses related to each other precisely as consciousnesses?

Thesis 10 in The Incarnate Word is the last thesis in a section of the work devoted to ‘Theological Conclusions regarding the Hypostatic Union’—conclusions drawn from the scriptural data reviewed in section 1 (thesis 1) and the conciliar unfolding of Christological dogma in section 2 (theses 2 to 5). The other four theological conclusions are:

‘What the Word assumed from the Virgin—flesh animated by a rational soul—is neither a person, nor a real supposit, nor a subsistent, nor a being pure and simple, but only a real, individual human essence lacking a proportionate act of existence’ (thesis 6);

‘This is why the incarnate Word is one, purely and simply: because by his divine act of existence he is, not only as God, but also as human. This is to be understood, not on the analogy of finite, composite being, but on the analogy of what is contingently predicated of God’ (thesis 7);

‘Therefore, the principles of the hypostatic union are: (1) the blessed Trinity, as [the principle] from which the Word is human; (2) the person of the Word, as [the principle] which is God and human; (3) the Word’s divine act of existence, as [the principle] by which the incarnate Word is a being pure and simple and one, purely and simply; and (4) the divine and the human natures, as [the principles] by which he is both God and human’ (assertion 8); and

‘From the completed hypostatic union there results, in the assumed nature, a substantial act, absolutely supernatural, which regards only the Word as the one who formally assumes’ (assertion 9).

Such conclusions are theological doctrines. They are not systematic theology. They provide material for systematic understanding. Lonergan clearly distinguishes systematics, faith seeking understanding, from the drawing of theological conclusions. ⁴ The conclusion that there are in Christ two consciousnesses, divine and human, stands to the systematic understanding of the consciousness of Christ as a theological doctrine stands to the systematic understanding of the doctrine. Thus, in the present instance, part 6, section 4, of The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ, ‘The Psychological Unity of Christ, God and Human,’ does not answer the systematic question but affirms a theological doctrine, namely, that there is not only an ontological but also a psychological connection between the psychological subject of divine consciousness and the psychological subject of human consciousness. It does not present a hypothetical understanding of just what that connection is. Such hypotheses are the stuff of systematics, not of doctrines, whether ecclesial or theological. My question all along has been systematic, not doctrinal. I want to understand that connection. What is it?

Lonergan made a comment in a question-and-answer session at the 1974 Lonergan Workshop at Boston College that supports this interpretation. ⁵ The comment was to the effect that the Jungian position on the development of the ego ‘is something that is quite interesting from the viewpoint of the consciousness of Christ, for example, for theologians.’ Obviously he is speaking of the human consciousness of Christ, since the divine consciousness did not develop. From this remark I began to wonder whether the systematic understanding of the psychological unity of the one subject of two consciousnesses in Christ might be formulated on an analogy with something like Jung’s notions of the self and the ego. This is a systematic question. I am still not prepared to answer it. But what Lonergan’s remark revealed is that he recognized the validity of the question that I had been asking, namely, the systematic question, How are we to understand what we have already affirmed as theological doctrines, namely, that there are two consciousnesses in Christ and that there is a psychological unity to the one subject of these two consciousnesses?

My suggestion in the present paper is thus hypothetical. It is intended as a systematic suggestion. It does not phrase the issue yet in the analogical terms that Lonergan’s remark led me to wonder about, but it also does not rule out the possibility of pursuing that analogy. It might be the beginning of something that would lead in that direction. As someone who spent a number of years wrestling with Jung’s thought, I am fascinated by the suggestion. But what I wish to insist on here is that the theological-doctrinal affirmations of The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ and The Incarnate Word with regard to the two consciousnesses of Christ do not answer the systematic question, nor were they intended to.

The second question has a shorter lifespan but has been equally intense: How are we to transpose into categories derived from interiorly and religiously differentiated consciousness the Thomist notion of esse secundarium, the secondary act of existence ⁶ that, on Lonergan’s interpretation, is a created consequent condition ad extra for the contingent truth of the proposition ‘The eternal Word of God is this man Jesus of Nazareth’? ⁷ The question presupposes an interpretation of Lonergan’s statement on the transpositions required in a contemporary systematic theology: ‘For every term and relation there will exist a corresponding element in intentional consciousness.’ ⁸ My interpretation of Lonergan on this point has sparked some controversy. ⁹ The issue, however, is not new to Method in Theology. There is a consistent position from Insight to Method in Theology on this issue, and it marks, in my view, one of the key challenges presented by Lonergan’s thought. Compare the following statements:

‘[E]very statement in philosophy and metaphysics can be shown to imply statements regarding cognitional fact.’ ¹⁰

‘[A]ll theological questions and answers have to be matched by the transcendental questions and answers that reveal in the human subject the conditions of the possibility of the theological answers.’ ¹¹

‘[T]he basic terms and relations of systematic theology will be not metaphysical, as in medieval theology, but psychological … [G]eneral basic terms name conscious and intentional operations. General basic relations name elements in the dynamic structure linking operations and generating states. Special basic terms name God’s gift of his love and Christian witness. Derived terms and relations name the objects known in operations and correlative to states … For every term and relation there will exist a corresponding element in intentional consciousness.’ ¹²

‘… if modern theologians were to transpose medieval theory into the categories derived from contemporary interiority and its real correlatives, they would be doing for our age what the greater Scholastics did for theirs.’ ¹³

I have recently discovered that answering my second question holds the key to answering the first. I came upon the answer to both questions as I was writing the fifth chapter in the second volume of The Trinity in History (Missions, Relations, and Persons). This chapter begins to discuss the relation between divine persons and divine missions. Obviously, in addressing that issue I had to engage the Christology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, and in particular Balthasar’s contention that in Christ person and mission are identical. Balthasar’s statement is true, but only if a qualification is made regarding the relation between person and mission that is similar to the qualifications that have to be made about the identity of divine processions and divine missions or about the identity of divine relations and divine missions. That qualification relies on Lonergan’s position regarding contingent predication in statements about God. ¹⁴ That qualification is the key to answering both of my questions. Balthasar’s correlation of person and mission needs to be qualified by a distinction that affects its Christological base. The result will be that the divine person of the incarnate Word is a psychological subject of two distinct consciousnesses, and that something may be said about precisely what is the defining characteristic of each consciousness.

My conclusion is the following. The divine consciousness of the incarnate Word is the consciousness of the one who eternally proceeds as Son from the Father, Word from the Speaker, and who with the Father eternally breathes the Holy Spirit. ¹⁵ Lonergan’s statement about divine consciousness (not knowledge) according to notional acts is helpful here:

Without doubt, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit alike know on the side of the object that the Father consciously generates the Son, and that the Son is consciously generated by the Father, and that the Father and the Son consciously spirate the Spirit, and that the Spirit is consciously spirated by the Father and the Son. But what the Father, the Son, and the Spirit know on the side of the object, theologians conclude to on the side of the object. But the very same reality that is known by the divine persons and concluded to from faith by theologians is not only known or concluded to, but also exists. And as to existence, it is on the side of the subject, namely, on the side of the subject that is the Father in consciously generating the Son, on the side of the subject that is the Son in being consciously generated by the Father, on the side of the subject that is the Father and the Son in consciously spirating the Spirit, and on the side of the subject that is the Spirit in being consciously spirated by the Father and the Son. ¹⁶

The divine consciousness of the incarnate Word, then, would be the consciousness ‘on the side of the subject that is the Son in being consciously generated by the Father’ as well as ‘on the side of the subject that is the Son who with the Father consciously spirates the Spirit.’ The incarnate Word is present to himself through divine consciousness in this way, conscious as well of the Father from whom he proceeds and of the Holy Spirit whom, together with the Father, he spirates.

His human consciousness, on the other hand, is ontologically grounded in the secondary act of existence that makes it true to affirm that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity is this man Jesus of Nazareth. This human consciousness is the mission consciousness of the Eternal Word become flesh. It is the consciousness on the side of the subject that is the Son in being consciously sent by the Father. It is consciousness, not knowledge, in a manner that is similar to that in which the divine consciousness ‘on the side of the subject that is the Son in being consciously generated by the Father’ is consciousness. His divine consciousness is procession consciousness, and his human consciousness is mission consciousness. This affirmation is rooted in the position common to Aquinas, Lonergan, and Balthasar that the divine missions are the divine processions joined to created terms that are consequent conditions of the processions being also missions.

The two consciousnesses—procession consciousness and mission consciousness—are continuous, connected, and communicating, but also distinct. The divine consciousness is eternal, uncreated, and necessary. The human consciousness is temporal, historical, created, and contingent. They are united both ontologically and psychologically in the person of the eternal Word become flesh, who is the subject of both a divine procession consciousness and a human mission consciousness. That is my thesis. The remainder of this paper spells it out in greater detail. What relation it may (or may not) have to Lonergan’s casual suggestion of a possible analogy with Jung’s distinction of self and ego is a further question to be studied later.

2. Lonergan and Balthasar on the History of the Notion of Person

I came to this position by reviewing, first, what Lonergan and Balthasar have to say about the history of the notion of person, and then by qualifying each of their positions, by attempting a mutual self-mediation between them. ¹⁷

Lonergan reviews the history of the notion of person from Augustine to 20th-century personalism. ¹⁸ He concludes from this review that five components have been differentiated in Western thought, all of which must enter in one way or another not only into the contemporary notion of person but also into the notion that will be employed in a contemporary Trinitarian theology and Christology. Moreover, none of these five components is sufficient on its own or in isolation from the others. All must be accounted for and related to one another.

Despite his admission of the insufficiency of any of the components on its own, however, Lonergan claims that Aquinas’s definition of person as ‘subsistens distinctum in natura intellectuali,’ ‘a distinct subsistent in an intellectual nature,’ is indeed sufficient to account for all five components, even those that emerged into the discussion after Thomas. I question this claim, but only in the form in which Lonergan defends it in his systematics of the Trinity. It is a claim that was made before Lonergan acknowledged a distinct fourth level of intentional consciousness, a level whose operations are not simply an extension of intellectual and rational activity. For the Lonergan of Insight, ‘deliberation and decision, choice and will’ are an ‘extension of intellectual activity.’ ¹⁹ That position obtains also in his working out of the meaning of ‘distinct subsistent in an intellectual nature’ in both The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ and The Triune God: Systematics. The emergence of the transcendental notion of value and the distinction of a new set of operations often involved in existential issues took some time to unfold in Lonergan’s development. From my experience of editing most of his Collected Works, I am not sure that the position that is clearly set forth in Method in Theology was firmly in place until around 1967 or 1968. However that might be, Lonergan admits the development: ‘In Insight the good was the intelligent and reasonable. In Method the good is a distinct notion. It is intended in questions for deliberation: Is this worthwhile? Is it truly or only apparently good? It is aspired to in the intentional response of feeling to values. It is known in judgments of value made by a virtuous or authentic person with a good conscience. It is brought about by deciding and living up to one’s decisions. Just as intelligence sublates sense, just as reasonableness sublates intelligence, so deliberation sublates and thereby unifies knowing and feeling.’ ²⁰ In Insight, on the other hand, existential issues, issues that are aesthetic and dramatic, ethical and religious, are sometimes constrained to fit into the narrower confines of strictly cognitional operations.

Not all students of Lonergan are ready to admit this, despite Lonergan’s own qualifications on his earlier position. In an effort to meet their objections, I have tried to reconcile his two statements by relating the position of Insight to Ignatius of Loyola’s third time of election and the position of Method to Ignatius’s first and especially second times. ²¹ As for Ignatius the third time is under certain circumstances a valid method for making a decision, so the position of Insight on these issues remains one satisfactory mode of ‘being responsible,’ precisely when one is not being moved in various directions by the pulls and counterpulls of affective movements. Whether the so-called ‘later Lonergan’ would even want to hold onto the validity under certain circumstances of the method of decision proposed in Insight is not clear. Because of its correspondence with Ignatius’s third way, I want to affirm its validity. But I do not think ‘distinct subsistent in an intellectual nature,’ as the meaning of this expression is articulated in Lonergan’s Latin theology, most of which was written before his acknowledgment of a distinct fourth level of consciousness, is sufficient. ‘Distinct subsistent in a spiritual nature,’ where ‘spiritual’ includes distinct operations that are not simply ‘an extension of intellectual activity,’ would be far better.

At any rate, in the first chapter of Method in Theology, in outlining the basic pattern of operations, Lonergan states that it is in fourth-level operations that we emerge as persons. ²² The enrichment begins to take place in The Triune God: Systematics (1) in the insistence in chapter 2, however brief, that the analogy for understanding divine procession is from the subject not as speculative nor as practical in some narrow sense, but as existential, self-constituting autonomy, ²³ (2) in the one comment in the same chapter that the analogue for the divine Word is found in a judgment of value, ²⁴ and (3) in the development in chapter 5 of the analogy of eternal and temporal subjects in response to the question of how an existential notion of person can be acknowledged in God. ²⁵ It remains that his development of the notion of judgments of value was still incomplete in 1964, when judgment of value appears as the analogue for the Word. But by the time he wrote his description of ‘personal value’ in Method in Theology, he had sublated ‘distinct subsistent in an intellectual nature’ into something more complete, without any denial of the positive contribution that his own cognitional theory makes to the fuller notion: ‘Personal value is the person in his self-transcendence, as loving and being loved, as originator of values in himself and in his milieu, as an inspiration and invitation to others to do likewise.’ ²⁶

I use this description to move to a notion of the human person that will approximate a more theological set of concerns. A human person is a distinct subsistent potentially oriented to commitment to the integral scale of values, and an authentic human person is a distinct subsistent actually oriented to the same commitment. This notion, which defines what is meant by ‘personal value’ in the scale of values, takes into account the developments on the notion of person reached by the turn to the subject in modernity, by the turn to the other in post-modernity, and by the expansions of consciousness beyond cognitional levels in Lonergan’s own work. By analogy, it can be expanded further to accommodate Balthasar’s theological notion of person as mission and provide as well an analogue for understanding the divine persons that begins from love rather than from knowledge. For the Lonergan of 1974, ‘The psychological analogy … has its starting point in that higher synthesis of intellectual, rational, and moral consciousness that is the dynamic state of being in love. Such love manifests itself in its judgments of value. And the judgments are carried out in decisions that are acts of loving.’ ²⁷ Here ‘distinct subsistent in an intellectual nature’ is not abandoned but sublated into a more inclusive notion, which we might phrase as ‘distinct subsistent in a spiritual nature,’ ²⁸ a phrase that can be applied analogically to human, angelic, and divine persons.

The five components treated by Lonergan in the history of reflections on person are (1) Augustine’s heuristic notion of person; (2) the medieval definitions of person, among which Thomas’s ‘distinct subsistent in an intellectual nature’ is, says Lonergan, to be preferred; (3) various accounts by Scholastic theologians of the ontological constitution of a person; (4) the modern turn to the subject and consequent accounts of the person from the standpoint of consciousness; and (5) a more contemporary insistence on the person as interpersonal.

For Augustine ‘person’ is what there are three of in God. ‘Person’ is a common name: what singly we call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit commonly we name persons. What are there three of in God? Augustine proposed the generic term ‘person’ as signifying neither diversity of essence nor singularity of distinction. His intention was that, as the divine unity would be understood by speaking of one essence, so also the Trinity would be understood by speaking of three persons. The notion of divine person is the very question—Three what? With as simple a question as that, a heuristic structure is established. But little more than perplexity occurs if one seeks a more specific term. ²⁹

As for Scholastic definitions, the best known are those of Boethius, Richard of St Victor, and Thomas Aquinas. For Boethius a person is an individual substance of a rational nature (‘rationalis naturae substantia individua’). For Richard of St Victor a divine person is an incommunicable existence of the divine nature (‘divinae naturae existentia incommunicabilis’). And for Aquinas, a person is a distinct subsistent in an intellectual nature (‘subsistens distinctum in natura intellectuali’). For Lonergan, the definitions of Boethius and Richard are steps along the way to that of Aquinas.

Third, a number of more or less metaphysical theories were put forward—by Scotus, Capreolus, Cajetan, Suárez, Tiphanus, and others—in an effort to compare these definitions clearly and distinctly with one another. These theories proceeded by clarifying such metaphysical questions as: What is an intellectual nature? a substance? an individual? existence? incommunicable? a subsistent? something distinct? While Lonergan will find difficulties with each of these theories, he does not deny the need for an account of the ontological constitution of a person.

Fourth, in modern times a person was said to be defined in terms of consciousness, as conscious individuality, as a distinct center of consciousness, or in some other psychological way. This was all part of a general modern movement that was concerned with more than simply the notion of person. It was an effort to treat matters epistemologically and psychologically rather than or prior to treating them metaphysically. ‘Person’ also had to be treated in this way.

Finally, because the epistemological theories proved to be as many as the metaphysical, ‘person’ came to be explained in a way that would enable it to be apprehended concretely: a person is one with whom one enters into interpersonal relationships, one to whom one says ‘thou,’ one simply distinct from ‘things,’ one naturally ordained to communication with other persons, and so on. There is a movement away from all speculation and a return to concrete life, where one who says ‘I’ and one to whom one says ‘thou’ are persons, and something of which one says ‘it’ is not a person but a thing. Internal relationality is a dimension in the constitution of a person. ³⁰

The unity to be found in this manifold of approaches derives from the question itself ‘What is a person?’ and even more basically from Augustine’s question ‘Three what?’ The dynamic orientation of the wondering and inquiring mind constitutes heuristic structures that preserve a unity grounded in the original question even as different responses are offered. So it is with the history of the meaning of ‘person.’ But this one heuristic structure also evolves in the course of time, and the evolution enables us to see how the five approaches can be related to one another.

It is interesting to observe, and characteristic of Lonergan in general, that before he cautions against certain distortions that might enter into some of these phases, he accepts the basic thrust of each phase: the heuristic structure, the need to define, the desire for metaphysical clarity, the turn to the subject, and the insistence on the internal relationality constitutive of persons. Without distinguishing these phases as carefully as Lonergan does, Balthasar approaches each of them except the final phase more with a hermeneutic of suspicion than with a hermeneutic of recovery.

So let us see what Balthasar has to say about the history of the notion of person. I ask the reader to recall that I am going into these details because I want to incorporate into my own position a qualified version of Balthasar’s theological identification of person and mission, which he presents at the end of his tracing of the history.

Balthasar’s presentation of the history of the notion of person is more complex than Lonergan’s, but it also omits some important ingredients that Lonergan emphasizes, and it does not grant any significance either to Augustine’s heuristic notion or to Aquinas’s early definition of person, the definition that Lonergan prefers.

Balthasar speaks not of a heuristic structure governed by a question but of a string that might guide us through the ‘mazelike garden’ of complexity in the use of the word ‘person.’ The two major features of the string are more than a question originating a heuristic structure. They consist in content that is more than heuristic: (1) the distinction between individual and person, and (2) the vacillation of the meaning of the word ‘person’ between a commonsense meaning that was already operative before the theological enrichment and the subsequent Christian theological meaning. ³¹

Balthasar thus stresses, quite correctly I believe, that the theological question already had a content that presumably—even though Balthasar does not address Augustine’s question—would have encouraged Augustine in the first place to use the word ‘person’ rather than some other term for what there are three of in God. ‘Person’ already had a content that made it a worthy candidate for designating what there are three of in God. What that might have been is at least suggested by Balthasar’s use of a study by Carl Andresen in which the literary method of allotting parts of a text to several characters or roles is applied to the doctrine of the Trinity. ‘In Justin, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Clement and Origen, we frequently find that a passage of Scripture is said to be uttered “ex persona Patris” or “Filii” or “Spiritus”; this comes from the Stoic interpretation of Homer, later adopted by Platonists in order to denote the “characters” who, in the Platonic dialogues, put forward Plato’s own views … what we have here is the prelude not only to the concept of “person” but also to that of a person-in-dialogue.’ ³²

On individual and person (the first part of Balthasar’s ‘string’), he writes, ‘… a special dignity is ascribed to the person, which the individual as such does not possess … [W]e will speak … of “individuals” when primarily concerned with the identity of human nature, to which, of course, a certain dignity cannot be denied insofar as all human beings are spiritual subjects. We will speak of a “person,” however, when considering the uniqueness, the incomparability and therefore irreplaceability of the individual.’ ³³ Balthasar uses ‘individual’ to refer to ‘the conscious subject’ who ‘knows that he is such … that he is human in a unique and incommunicable way,’ but who does not ‘also know who he is,’ how he is ‘not only quantitatively but also qualitatively different from all other conscious subjects.’ ³⁴

Now for Balthasar this qualitative difference cannot be provided ‘either by the nonpersonal, empirical world nor by our fellow men’ but can only be given ‘by the absolute Subject, God.’ ³⁵ Balthasar’s history of the notion of ‘person,’ while it starts with pre-theological sources, begins ‘at the point in mankind’s development when the human being himself stands in the tension between the individual and the person.’ ³⁶ But, Balthasar writes, ‘the concept of person acquires a completely new sense first in trinitarian doctrine and then in christology.’ ³⁷ Thus, ‘the word person in the sense of a human being, and in contradistinction to mere individuality, receives its special dignity in history when it is illuminated by the unique theological meaning. When this is not the case, … the human person sinks back into the sphere of mere individuality.’ ³⁸

What Balthasar calls incomparability and irreplaceability is also the condition of possibility of interpersonal relations. It is persons, not individuals, who relate to one another. Thus, ‘[p]hilosophy can in some way appropriate for the human person the dignity bestowed on person by trinitarian doctrine and Christology, whether the concept of the human person as such then influences theology or seeks to make itself completely independent.’ ³⁹

After a brief presentation of the derivation of the word persona from the Etruscan phersu, which had connotations of mask and role, Balthasar emphasizes that by the middle of the fifth century, under theological influences that he locates in Tertullian, Ambrose, and Augustine, ‘the Latin meaning of persona’ came to designate ‘a real spiritual subject (and not only [a] “role”).’ But then he raises a very significant question: to what extent did ‘real spiritual subject’ include relationality in a sufficiently explicit fashion? In particular, he asks, very incisively I believe, did Chalcedon’s ‘establishing that in Christ two natures, the divine and the human, are united in one (divine) person … [pay] sufficient attention to the fact that this divine person can, as such, exist only in a (trinitarian) relation?’ ⁴⁰ Most importantly for Balthasar, this inattention, if indeed it existed, might have been ‘the prelude to the famous first philosophical definition of person by Boethius (480–524): persona est naturae rationalis individua substantia.’ ⁴¹

Balthasar’s question is sound, if it is taken as referring to the Wirkungsgeschichte of Chalcedon, to its effective history: did the reception of Chalcedon’s definition of two natures in one person sufficiently stress that the one person of Christ is himself a subsistent relation? And if not, is the neglect responsible for the Boethian definition (with which both Lonergan and Balthasar have difficulties, and which Aquinas himself had to qualify in order to make its meaning meet his own ‘subsistens distinctum in natural intellectuali’)?

But the next step Balthasar takes is one that I do not trust and that I believe must be strongly challenged (however much I may be in a minority position on this issue in contemporary Catholic theology). For this question leads Balthasar to relate his discussion to Joseph Ratzinger’s description of Augustine’s ‘unfortunately decisive abbreviation’ of the concept of person, an ‘abbreviation’ that occurs when Augustine places the image of the Trinity in ‘the single individual’ (memory, knowledge, and will). Note the language: ‘the single individual,’ not the person. While applying the term ‘psychological analogy’ to Augustine’s intentions may be anachronistic, Aquinas’s transposition of memory, understanding, and will to understanding, word, and love, and his positing of ‘intelligible emanation’ as constituting processions of word and love in human consciousness that may be analogically employed to gain some extremely remote understanding of how there can be processions in God, need to be revisited and renewed in the light of Balthasar’s and Ratzinger’s criticisms.

Even Balthasar seems to applaud ‘the Latin meaning of persona as a real spiritual subject (and not only as “role”).’ ⁴² But the efforts that begin with Augustine emphasize this much more than Ratzinger seems to be willing to admit and much more that what his alternative would supply. Far from being an ‘unfortunately decisive abbreviation,’ Augustine’s move is a decisive advance toward maturity. It does not exclude relationality from the notion of person but rather grounds authentic relationality. Nobody who has read Lonergan’s mature appropriation and development on Aquinas could make this charge, but I also do not believe it can be made against Augustine himself or against Aquinas. Augustine’s ‘memoria’ is itself intersubjective. Aquinas’s position in article 4 of question 29 in the first part of the Summa theologiae stresses the interpersonal component even in his appropriation of the Boethian definition. All that Balthasar will concede to Augustine is that he ‘certainly understood the relational and dialogical character of the persons in God,’ even as ‘he placed the image of the Trinity in created man completely in the single individual.’ ⁴³ But let us listen again to the later Lonergan, who is writing in the tradition begun by Augustine and is arguably bringing that tradition to a new plateau: ‘The psychological analogy, then, has its starting point in that higher synthesis of intellectual, rational, and moral consciousness that is the dynamic state of being in love. Such love manifests itself in its judgments of value. And the judgments are carried out in decisions that are acts of loving. Such is the analogy found in the creature.’ ⁴⁴ Nobody can call this ‘non-relational’ or ‘individualistic,’ even if it is based in the spiritual subject, who alone can make such judgments and decisions. It is the effective history originated by Augustine’s De Trinitate that renders possible the appropriation of the legitimate autonomy of authentic persons.

The expression ‘who alone can make such judgments and decisions’ is the heart of the matter. Aquinas is aware of yet another characteristic of person, one that is not opposed to relationality—all one need do is read Summa theologiae, 1, q. 29, a. 4—but is rather the source of authentic relationality. True, in article 1 of question 29 Aquinas defends Boethius’s definition, perhaps reinterpreting it in light of his own earlier subsistens distinctum in natura intellectuali. But he does so because individual substances of a rational nature, as understood by Aquinas, ‘habent dominium sui actus et non solum aguntur, sicut alia, sed per se agunt,’ ‘exercise dominion over their own acts and not only are acted upon, as are other beings, but also act on the basis of their own resources.’ This is precisely the emphasis I tried to convey in using the expression ‘autonomous spiritual processions’ in Missions and Processions, and in defending existential autonomy under God as the proper sphere of the analogy, in contradistinction to the lack of self-possession acknowledged in Girardian mimetic theory, where individuals ‘aguntur,’ are acted upon, and do not ‘per se agunt,’ act on the basis of their own resources. ⁴⁵ ‘Non solum aguntur sed per se agunt’ is an attribute of irreplaceable persons, not of replaceable individuals. Having ‘dominium sui actus’ is a condition of the possibility of authentic interpersonal relations, not a denial of them.

Thus, as I have criticized Lonergan’s explicit treatment of ‘person’ in his Latin theological works as too exclusively intellectualistic, so I would subject to similar criticism Balthasar’s suspicion of any authentic ascribing of existential autonomy to persons, and so his exclusively relational account of what is meant by ‘person.’ This is my first criticism of his account. Another will emerge shortly.

However, let me pursue this first criticism a bit further. For it may lie behind what seems a questionable interpretation by Balthasar of Richard of St Victor’s notion of person as well. Lonergan mentions without much comment Richard’s definition of a divine person as ‘divinae naturae existentia incommunicabilis,’ an incommunicable existence of a divine nature, but he does not note that Richard also gives a more generic definition of person: incommunicable existence—period. ‘… nihil aliud est persona quam incommunicabilis existentia.’ ⁴⁶ On Balthasar’s interpretation, Richard is attempting to go beyond Boethius’s purely philosophical definition to emphasize that a person is ‘a spiritual subject that earns the name person only by going out beyond itself (ex), and that when this is applied analogously to God the going out beyond itself is purely relative.’ Balthasar cites Richard: ‘per adjunctam “ex” prepositionem notari potest quod (persona) pertinet ad aliam’ (‘through the preposition ex in ex-sistentia let it be noted that person refers to, is ordered to, another)’. ⁴⁷

Another interpretation of that ordering to another has been given, however. ⁴⁸ According to it, the ‘ex’ means ‘to be out from,’ to be with regard to the origin of one’s being. One is a distinct divine person solely by the way in which one can be considered to be ‘out from’ another. This is precisely what is meant by divine personhood. A divine person is an incommunicable ‘being out from.’ Or more precisely, a divine person is defined in relation to the manner in which that person is ‘out from.’ The Father is ‘being out from’ no other. The Son is ‘being out from’ the Father. The Holy Spirit is ‘being out from’ the Father and the Son. Precisely because the way of standing in relation to ‘being out from’ is different for each of the three, a divine person is an incommunicable ‘being out from’ in the divine nature or substance. And each person exercises the one divine consciousness in a distinct manner depending on that person’s relation to ‘being out from another.’ ⁴⁹

This interpretation of Richard, of course, supports my own contention that Jesus’ divine consciousness is the consciousness of the One who is eternally ‘from’ the Father, and his human consciousness is the ‘mission consciousness’ of the Word become flesh and contingently ‘sent’ by the Father, a consciousness grounded in the created external term, the secondary act of existence, that is the consequent created condition of this procession being also a mission. This is why I have introduced Richard into the conversation. There are other riches in Richard’s expression that I regret I have to omit here. But I do wish to indicate that this interpretation of Richard bears a great deal of similarity with Lonergan’s efforts to formulate a new expression of the analogy in an aborted seventh chapter of De Deo Trino: Pars Systematica. ⁵⁰

Balthasar’s history continues by stressing that the option for the Boethian definition simply shows what was lost in so-called High Scholasticism. Thus his reading of what for Lonergan was the fourth step in the history, namely, the turn to consciousness, is far less benign than Lonergan’s:

… the philosophical ‘independence’ of the person sought first to define itself as subjective self-consciousness (Descartes), and this independence then absolutized itself very soon (Spinoza, Hegel) so that the individuals had to give themselves up to this Absolute. Kant’s attempt to save the dignity of the person could not halt this drift. For even though it was demanded that the other person be respected, the absoluteness of the person was anchored simply in his ethical freedom. Thus there was nothing preserved of a fundamental interrelatedness of persons—as a meaningfully understood imago Trinitatis would have demanded. ⁵¹

Moreover, how the evolving notion of person moved to what Lonergan would have called its fifth stage—interpersonal relations—was, says Balthasar, ‘paradoxical’: ‘… after a personless idealism met its end in Hegel, the popular atheistic materialism of a Feuerbach had to rediscover the elementary fact that there simply cannot be a single person, existing within himself, but that existence as a person comes about only in the relationship between the I and Thou.’ So strong is Balthasar’s opposition to the Augustinian framework and the subsequent psychological analogy that he proposes that ‘the atheistic materialist was the one who reached beyond Augustine to the insight about what man is, in Christian terms, as the personal imago Trinitatis.’ ⁵² After a century of Jewish and Christian attempts to draw from the biblical heritage with regard to the meaning of ‘person,’ ‘[f]irst with Guardini, then more strongly with Mounier, Gabriel Marcel, and Denis de Rougemont does something of a true image of the Trinity appear—in any case, the connection of the I, which is open to the Thou and the We and which realizes itself only in self-giving, with the image of man in Scripture, and above all in the New Testament.’ ⁵³ While for de Rougemont person is ‘concrete obedience to a transcendent vocation,’ what de Rougemont calls ‘vocation’ Balthasar names ‘mission.’ The meaning is explicitly Trinitarian, as the citation of John 20.21 shows: ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ In a statement entirely in agreement with what we find in Lonergan and Thomas, Balthasar writes, ‘in a trinitarian sense missio is the economic form of the eternal processio that constitutes the persons of the Son and of the Spirit in God.’ But then he goes on to say, ‘Participation in the mission of Christ (or that which in the building up of the church Paul calls “charisma” and which is given to each as his eternal idea with God and his social task)—that would be the actual core of the reality of the person.’ ⁵⁴ Here we come to the aspect of Balthasar’s thought from which I will attempt to distill a real and genuine position that, once it is subjected to needed qualifications, can be integrated into a higher unity with Lonergan’s view.

3 Person and Mission

Balthasar’s notion of person and its correlation with the notion of mission are based in his Christology, especially as this is found in Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ. ⁵⁵ The first task in substantiating his claims lies in the Christology that forms 200-plus pages of Dramatis Personae, since it is primarily in Jesus that the correlation between person and mission becomes clear. Jesus possessed a sense of mission that was eschatological and universal. His mission was unique because the One sent, who he was, was equally unique. His mission is caught in the tension between the present reality of the kingdom and his looking ahead to a fuller reality that will inevitably come precisely because of his fidelity to a mission with which his person is identified. Person becomes identified with a mission to inaugurate the reign of God.

But it is at this point that Balthasar takes a bold step, one that I do not think he was quite ready to make. If we begin from mission, he says, we may construct ‘a portrayal of the person of Christ that neither preempts the action undertaken by him nor falls back into the kind of purely extrahistorical, static, “essence” Christology that sees itself as a complete and rounded “part one,” smoothly unfolding into a soteriological “part two.”’ ⁵⁶ Now it must be said that Lonergan’s Christology, while it is anything but extrahistorical, static, or essentialist, is nonetheless constructed along the latter lines, beginning with an ontology of Christ and leading, through highly original and in my view permanently valid contributions on both the consciousness and knowledge of Christ, to a soteriology. I have proposed that we can now begin systematics with mission, and that proposal will eventually move beyond the impasse that Balthasar criticizes. But ‘eventually’ means that the ontology has first of all to be correct. This is as true in Christology as it is in Trinitarian theology. In Christology, the positions on the consciousness and knowledge of Christ must flow from the ontological constitution of a divine person endowed with both a divine and a human nature. Because Balthasar’s option to begin his Christology with Christ’s consciousness/knowledge—and he does not adequately distinguish consciousness and knowledge—does not flow from such an ontology, what he has to say at this point is premature. Only when one has passed through that crucible of determining the actual and formal ontological constitutives of such a unique person can one successfully propose a position on that person’s consciousness and knowledge. And at that point one will be forced to come to grips with the fact if there are two natures, and two sets of operations, in that one person, as has been dogmatically defined, there must be two consciousnesses in that same person. Furthermore, if one has indeed distinguished consciousness from knowledge, one will also have to attempt to understand how there can be both divine and human knowledge in that one person, where knowledge is not the same as consciousness. Balthasar does not seem to have negotiated the transition that would be required if he were going to begin his Christology successfully with mission as the basic concept for understanding Jesus. He begins prematurely the Christology of consciousness before fully coming to terms with the question of the ontological constitution of Christ.

I have to admit that my principal source of evidence for this statement is found in a long, complex footnote on pp. 228–30 of Dramatis Personae. There, Aquinas’s position that there is ‘“only a single being [esse]” in Jesus, i.e., that of his divine nature, activating his creaturely existence’ is called an ‘extreme theory’ that, notwithstanding the one reference in Aquinas to esse secundarium, which Balthasar seems to regard as ‘a temporary change of mind,’ ‘unwittingly comes close to monophysitism’ and is also ‘the application to Christology of the philosophical (Neo-Thomist) doctrine of the real distinction between esse and essentia, importing into Christology all its inherited problems.’ (How Aquinas could have applied a Neo-Thomist doctrine to anything is not explained!) While Balthasar certainly is far more sympathetic to the ‘real distinction’ than this citation would indicate, his attempts in the same footnote to draw on de la Taille, Malmberg, and others to help him get beyond the impasses he discovers in Thomas’s expressions are not satisfactory. In contrast, Lonergan’s assertion, with Aquinas, of the unicum esse of the incarnate Word as the eternal Word’s divine act of existence, ⁵⁷ his clarification regarding Thomas’s suggestion of a supernatural esse secundarium as the created consequent condition of the divine Word assuming a human nature, ⁵⁸ and even his autobiographical admission that he discovered that there could not be a hypostatic union without the real distinction between essence and existence ⁵⁹ —all these unambiguous ontological statements provide a foundation for a clear position that would ground both a distinction between person and mission even in Jesus and also an understanding of how there can be two consciousnesses in Jesus. The secondary act of existence is the created consequent condition of the necessary procession of the Word being also a contingent mission of the Word. And, while Lonergan does not say it in so many words, it is precisely here that we can ‘flesh out’ the distinction of the two consciousnesses: the divine consciousness is the eternal, uncreated, necessary consciousness of the one who proceeds as Son from the Father and with the Father breathes the Holy Spirit, and the human consciousness is the temporal and historical, created, contingent ‘mission consciousness’ of the same Son sent by the Father as the man Jesus of Nazareth. Not only is ‘his being sent (missio) by the Father … a modality of his proceeding (processio) from the Father.’ ⁶⁰ More emphatically, and in greater agreement with Aquinas, we must say that mission is procession, relation, person joined to a created external term, and that the mission is not understood theologically without understanding the created external term. In the case of the incarnation, that created external term is the secondary act of existence that is the consequent condition of the truth of the proposition that the eternal Word of God is this man Jesus of Nazareth.

I am not satisfied that Balthasar fulfills these conditions for identifying person and mission in Jesus. The resultant confusion, if I may call it that, is already clear, I think, in Balthasar’s statement that in Jesus ‘we are presented with someone who never was, and never could have been anyone other than the One sent.’ ⁶¹ I find it clearer to maintain that the person that Jesus is, the second Person of the Trinity, could never have been anyone other than the One who proceeds as Word and Son from the Father. That is necessary, not contingent. Jesus’ divine consciousness is the one consciousness of the triune God exercised precisely as consciousness of the Word eternally proceeding. His human consciousness is the consciousness of one sent, where the sending, the mission, is identical with the eternal procession contingently joined to the created external term, the secondary act of existence, which is the created consequent condition of the procession being also a mission. That the divine decision behind the Incarnation is eternal does not make it necessary. The Father did not have to send the Son. Balthasar is correct when he writes that ‘Jesus experiences his human consciousness entirely in terms of mission,’ ⁶² even if a more felicitous manner of expressing what he intends would be desirable. But for Balthasar, ‘we cannot ascribe a twofold consciousness to the Logos-made-man.’ ⁶³ On Lonergan’s reading, which I endorse, not only can we do this; we must. For Balthasar, this herald, in contrast to the prophets, is ‘ “sent” … in such an absolute sense that his mission … coincides with his person, so that both together constitute God’s exhaustive self-communication.’ ‘… this is a “role” that cannot be exchanged for any other role, since it is a “mission” that has ultimately fused with the person and become identical with him.’ ⁶⁴ If I am correct in claiming that a theological conclusion from Christological dogma that we must acknowledge entails not one but two consciousnesses in Christ and that the divine consciousness is that of one proceeding while the human consciousness is that of the same one sent, then, while there is complete continuity from one to the other (and not an abyss between them, as Balthasar likes to say), ⁶⁵ we cannot say that his mission has ‘ultimately fused’ with his person and become identical with him. I cannot put that claim together with what Chalcedon said of the two natures, which now we must say as well of the two consciousnesses: not confused, not changed. The created consequent condition, the secondary act of existence of the assumed human nature, is because the Father sent the Son. That the procession, itself necessary, is also a mission is entirely contingent. The consciousness of the one proceeding, which again is the necessary divine consciousness of the Word, must be distinct from even though continuous with, connected to, in communication with, the consciousness of the same one contingently sent, the human consciousness of the same one Person, a created consciousness that is contingent upon divine freedom. ⁶⁶

Lonergan’s later formulation of the mystery of Christ puts the same point in another way. The divine Word is the one subject of two subjectivities. ‘The person of Christ is an identity that eternally is subject of divine consciousness and in time became subject of a human consciousness.’ ⁶⁷ By ‘identity’ is meant the Chalcedonian ‘one and the same,’ who now is called the subject, the single divine identity that is ‘at once subject of divine consciousness and also subject of a human consciousness.’ ⁶⁸ By ‘consciousness’ is meant the presence of the subject to himself as subject, not as object. ‘Though his identity was divine, still Jesus had a truly human subjectivity that grew in wisdom and age and grace before God and men (Luke 2:52) and that was similar to our own in all things save sin (ds 301). Nor is the timeless and unchanging subjectivity proper to the divine identity in conflict with the developing subjectivity of a human life. For as Chalcedon would put it, though the identity is without distinction or separation, still the subjectivities are without modification or confusion (ds 302).’ ⁶⁹ As for the human consciousness or subjectivity being that of one sent, Lonergan writes: ‘Moreover, the human subjectivity of Christ conforms to the divine … [A]s the eternal Word is [proceeds as] the eternally true expression of the value that God as agapē is, so the Word as man by obedience unto death again expressed that value by revealing how much God loved the world (John 3:16).’ ⁷⁰ The person is identical with mission only insofar as that person is the divine subject of a distinct, created, contingent human consciousness. That qualification must be made, I believe, on Balthasar’s less differentiated identification of Jesus’ person with his mission.

Allow me, then, in conclusion, to express very succinctly my answer to the two long-standing questions with which I began. How are we to transpose into categories derived from interiorly and religiously differentiated consciousness Thomas’s notion of esse secundarium, the secondary act of existence that, on Lonergan’s interpretation, is a created consequent condition ad extra for the contingent truth of the proposition ‘The eternal Word of God is this man Jesus of Nazareth?’ The answer is that the human consciousness of the divine subject of the incarnate Word is the mission consciousness of that Eternal Word who, by reason of a free divine decision, is this man Jesus of Nazareth. That ‘is,’ not the eternal esse, is the ‘is’ of mission, of being sent. And so, how are the two consciousnesses of Jesus, divine and human, related to each other precisely as consciousnesses? The divine consciousness of Jesus is the eternal, uncreated, necessary consciousness of the one who proceeds as Son from the Father, while his human consciousness is the historical, temporal, created, contingent consciousness of the same Son sent to reveal to the world the Father’s love through his earthly life, his death, and his rising from the dead. The two consciousnesses are related and joined in the one Person of the incarnate Word, in whom procession becomes mission because of the contingent created condition of that becoming, consequent upon the divine decision, the created secondary act of existence that accrues to the assumed human nature of the Word, making true the proposition that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity is this man Jesus of Nazareth.