BURRELL’S CRITICAL THOMISM: AQUINAS AND KANT REVISITED

David Burrell’s version of Aquinas was written with Kantian parallels in mind. This is the accusation of John Milbank that was questioned by Nicholas Lash and Paul DeHart in a series of articles. ‘Burrell’s Critical Thomism’ shows beyond doubt that Milbank’s claim is correct: Burrell cites Kant throughout his oeuvre and finds parallels between Aquinas and Kant’s philosophies. However, this article also shows that the form of Kantianism promulgated by Burrell is not as dogmatic as Milbank argues, especially in Burrell’s later writings. If Milbank’s critique holds, it follows that a properly negative theology must be denied. Finally, the relationship between Milbank’s participatory theology and Burrell’s emphasis on divine simpleness is examined in order to critically evaluate the status of participation in God, arguing that, for Aquinas, it does not make sense to say we participate in the divine essence, only in its likeness. Direct participation in God’s essence is rendered incoherent by divine simpleness.


Introduction
David Burrell's contrast between Aquinas and the revolutionaries is hardly revolutionary, but it brings with it a normative claim that penetrates Burrell's Thomism.Kant's 'lesser' revolution refers to the 'critical' awareness that 'things as we know them bear traces of the manner in which we know them.' 1 The claim that our knowledge shapes the known itself shapes all subsequent philosophies.This has two consequences.Strictly speaking, to be taken seriously as a philosopher one must account for Kant's critical philosophy. 2 Less strictly, this grants Kant's thought The res/modus distinction amounts to a bland Kantianism that is little more than negative theology.
However, Burrell removes the 'hard' Kantianism from his subsequent readings of Aquinas in Knowing the Unknowable God and Faith and Freedom, while still finding a parallel between Aquinas and Kant.This I take as key evidence that one can hold to the 'soft' Kantianism that shows the awareness of how we shape the ways by which we know a transcendent God such that our knowledge involves an unknowing that is mysterious and dialectical rather than simply confirmatory.'Soft' Kantianism is content to remain 'transcategorical' rather than 'transcendental'.
Finally, I turn to a fundamental difference between Burrell's emphasis on divine simpleness and Milbank's stress on a theological ontology of participation.I will tentatively suggest that Milbank's characterisation of creation's direct participation in the divine essence is a poor rendering of Aquinas' position that upends divine simpleness.Instead, I will show how simpleness provides an important grammatical rule for a better articulation of participation.

Milbank's Critique
The literature generated in response to Milbank's articles 'A Critique of Theology of the Right' and 'Intensities' vastly outstrips the texts themselves. 11Since the appearance of these two articles, much has been written to discredit Milbank's Aquinas, both textually and theologically. 12Interrogating the way Milbank co-opts the thirteenth-century Dominican is beyond the scope of this article.The issue at hand, rather, is how good a reader Milbank is of Burrell.
Milbank's presentation moves quickly and relies on scant citation but nevertheless shows an acute grasp of Burrell's thought.His two deconstructions of grammatical readings of analogy can be hard to follow as a single narrative, since 'A Critique of Theology of Right' takes direct aim at Burrell whereas 'Intensities' focuses on Lash.This is notable since the reading of Aquinas in Lash's essay, 'Ideology, Metaphor, and Analogy' is based on Burrell's Aquinas. 13Such a re-direction should be seen as geo-political, rather than as a comment on the genealogy of Thomism.This is explained by the explicit critique-though given 'within a much vaster context of agreement and respect' 14 -Milbank received from Lash, first orally then later literarily, 15 and the very sympathetic account of Milbank's work given by Burrell in the early 1990s. 16While Lash might offer a more spatio-temporally immediate target for Milbank, Burrell's Aquinas represents the original hunting ground for the form of Thomism and is my present focus.
Kant features as a prominent thinker, lurking throughout Milbank's genealogy of modernity.While Milbank criticises Kant's philosophy in various guises, it is the way in which Kantian thought promotes a negative agnosticism concerning both things-in-themselves and God-in-himself, that is self-defeating and parallels certain moves made by Burrell in his Aquinas and followed by other Thomists. 17Kant's strictures on the limits of human knowledge, and especially his rejection of the idea that categories can 'be applied outside the range of their possible schematisation', is not the same as the Thomist account of our modus significandi.There is a dogmatism in Kant's refusal to allow us to extrapolate our categories beyond their finite application in this world.Such a claim is a sleight of hand, for this requires a direct knowledge of the immaterial and atemporal to which we know negatively that our categories do not apply. 18or Milbank, such Kantian agnosticism parallels the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal.To know that there is such an unknown noumena that lies beyond our understanding requires some sort of knowledge or intuition of the unknown: 'one can only define, once for all, the limits of human understanding, and so "exclude metaphysics", if one is standing, as it were, on the boundary, with one eye on the other side, giving a glimpse of the sublime.' 19 Thus, there is a paradox at the heart of (Kant's explication of) the distinction between the known phenomenal world and the unknown noumenal that lurks beyond it.To deny that we can extend our knowledge of the phenomenal into the noumenal is implicitly to know something about the noumenal.To know there is an unknown is to encounter in some way and to know the unknown.'Wittgenstein put it very well: "in so far as people think they can see 'the limits of human understanding', they believe of course that they can see beyond these".' 20ilbank finds kinship with a Kantian position as well as Burrell's claim that grammar offers a range of possible meanings from which we can discern by virtue of our finitude and on whose grounds we can continue to talk about an infinite and unknown God. 21Exploiting Aquinas' distinction between the mode in which our words signify 15 For a, perhaps slightly dramatized, account of the disagreement between Milbank and Lash see 'On Being Seen But Not Heard' in DeHart, Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy.DeHart thinks that the critique of Burrell is in fact aimed at Lash (41), and this is based on the parallel between Lash giving his paper 'Analogy, Metaphor, and Ideology' in a conference honouring Donald McKinnon, and Milbank giving his critique of Burrell (and thus Lash) in a later conference also honouring McKinnon (40).
16 For Burrell's general sympathy to Milbank's project at the time of the Milbank/Lash controversy, see David Burrell, 'An Introduction to Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason', Modern Theology 8, no. 4 (October 1992): 319-29; also see Burrell's chapter 'Radical Orthodoxy in a North American Context' in Laurence Hemming, Radical Orthodoxy: A Catholic Enquiry (Aldershot: Aldgate, 2000). 17See Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 280: 'Before Kant, as Foucault well explains, the classical era still understood finite limitation in terms of its relationship to the infinite.Our knowledge of the infinite was considered to be imperfect, but, by the same token, our knowledge of the finite to be limited also'. 18John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 11. 19 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 105; See also, 'A Critique of the Theology of Right' in Milbank, The Word Made Strange, 9ff. 20Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 105. 21Milbank, The Word Made Strange, 13.
(modus significandi) things and the thing that we are trying to signify (res significata), Burrell presents a grammatical Thomas who knows which words he can use to theologise, but does not know what we mean when we use them to speak of God.Burrell's Aquinas must have straddled 'the boundary of the sublime in a way different from, but not wholly dissimilar to, that of Kant.' 22 It is impossible, 'as transcendentalists claim to have surmounted finitude, to be able to catalogue its categorical conditions, delimit their relevance and pronounce upon the foundationally formal conditions of the realm beyond finitude.' 23We can, according to Burrell's Aquinas, talk of God using words we do not understand (the God that is spoken could be anything) and yet there are still words that we can and cannot use of this empty God, thereby revealing that this God is not so empty as first seems.There is a tension, however, between this purely negative stream in Burrell's Aquinas towards 'the unknown beyond the known,' and Burrell's attempt to give 'the specific "grammar" of creation ex nihilo in which the "unknown" and the "known" are specified together according to a particular religious assumption about ultimate reality.' 24 Milbank's discussion of the technicalities in differentiating between thing signified and mode of signification can be found in a very long endnote in which Aquinas' use naturally contrasts with that of Scotus.The distinction between res and modus is an attempt to say how we can direct our intention towards an object while our modus remains non-homologous with that object.The contrast is 'between a mode of being and comprehension of the knower not fully commensurate with the mode of being and sense of the thing known, which, none the less, in the case of God, constitutes the existence of, and meaning available to, the knowing subject.' 25 For Milbank, Burrell's position is both incoherent and alien to Aquinas' own emphatically disclosive language.For our words follow our ideas in reflecting reality, and thus speaking analogically of God presupposes a prior metaphysics.'It is things themselves which declare to us their relationship to God.' 26 According to Milbank, the metaphysics that Aquinas' theory of analogy requires is as follows: The limits or unlimits of grammar only reflect the limits or unlimits of the created order.But things can only be signs of God if the divine perfections are remotely visible in created perfections-or rather, if to see a created thing as possessing any perfection is to grasp its faint conveying of a plenitude of perfection beyond its scope. 2722 Ibid., 13. 23 Ibid., 16. 24 Ibid., 13. 25 Ibid., 33 n. 15. 26 Ibid., 15. 27 Milbank, 'Intensities', 473.Notably, Milbank does not ground the key point here-that to see a created perfection conveys something beyond the perfection itself and is thus to see the divine-in any text of Aquinas.It is, in fact, quite a big jump to say that the only way things can signify God (even imperfectly) is to show us what can only be taken as a vision of God especially when Aquinas denies this throughout his oeuvre.This can be seen in ST Ia q. 12 a.11: 'the Divine essence cannot be known through the nature of material things.'Milbank's leap here excludes-without justification-the possibility of Burrell's more 'promissory' account of theological language in which words can mean more than we understand.This will be outlined later in this article.
Analogy requires a grounding in ontology.Indeed, it requires a particular ontology of participated perfections in which the excess implied in all created things surround them with a 'halo'. 28Without this grounding, the possible range our words can be extended to might be a form of equivocity, and we would be left with 'a radically unknown Kantian sublime horizon, or a good entirely absconded.' 29Thomas refuses a purely linguistic form of analogy in which words are predicated of God and creation because they are 'preiminently precontained in God in an exemplary and more "excellent" fashion.' 30 When we think and reflect about creation, we remotely anticipate the vision of God. 31 The form of agnosticism espoused by Burrell and repeated by Lash misses the fact that the divine good can be seen despite the origins of our knowledge in creation.Crudely, this all makes complete sense as part of Milbank's grander narrative.If Scotus marks the shift that brings about secularism, and this secular was not latent in earlier thought, one would not expect Aquinas to resemble the central Kantian distinction between phenomenal and noumenal.
For Milbank, grammatical versions of Aquinas might attempt to maintain the 'insight' of the linguistic turn, but a purely linguistic philosophy undoes the good that comes from attention to language.A non-disclosive linguistic turn 'pre-constrains language within an a priori framework itself independent of linguistic contingencies.' 32 In contrast, 'if we take it on trust that language does disclose, we can remain within radical linguisticality, since if language (or any pattern of symbolic mediation) discloses as well as articulates, we do not require in addition another disclosure.' 33 Hence, according to Milbank, a grammatical Thomas is exposed as a charlatan whose words are empty, a preacher whose God fades away into nothing, no matter how much he talks.

Burrell's Defenders
Milbank's anti-grammatical Thomism has elicited a wide response.The first critique is found in a paper given by Nicholas Lash to the Cambridge D-Society in 1997, and later published in Modern Theology, which in turn was given a riposte by Milbank in 'Intensities'. 34Since then, others have intervened, notably Paul DeHart in 'On Being Seen But not Heard'.I start with this intervention since it offers a sustained defence of Burrell and Lash.I will later turn to Lash's more impressionistic interpretation. 28Milbank, The Word Made Strange, 10. 29 Milbank, 'Intensities', 474. 30Ibid., 474.Milbank's grounding of analogy in ontology is in turn grounded in the reference to analogical causation in ST Ia q. 4 a. 3. To claim that Aquinas might here speak of analogy in a more ontological voice, but to accord primacy to the causal meaning of analogy over the linguistic, would be to swim against the tide of Aquinas' use, given that the term is relatively rarely used with regard to causality, but very consistently used to describe the way predications can relate.It does not follow that using a term to speak ontologically means that its use in all other contexts is primarily or necessarily ontological, for the term could be used analogically between the two.A far more reasonable reading would say that analogy applies primarily to the way words relate to one another, and only, by extension, to the way causes can relate to effects.This distinction is not decisive in the way Milbank implies. 31Milbank, 'Intensities', 478. 32Milbank, 'Intensities', 474-75. 33Ibid., 475. 34Lash, 'Where Does Holy Teaching Leave Philosophy?'; Milbank, 'Intensities'.
DeHart's essay interrogates Milbank's critique and finds no warrant for the claim that a linguistic analogy makes Aquinas and Kant bedfellows.This is both a fact of history-there is no explicit parallel made by grammatical readings of analogy and the divine unknowability to Kantian metaphysics-and a fact of analysis, for the similarities Milbank sees between Burrell's, Lash's, and McCabe's Aquinas and Kant are not reflective of their thought but are forced.Vitally, DeHart makes the following claim: In their interpretations of Aquinas on analogy, neither McCabe nor Burrell nor Lash makes appeal to Kant, or shows much interest in drawing parallels between Kant's limits to cognition and those of Aquinas. 35 This could not be clearer.Kant is brought into bed with Thomas not by Burrell, but by Milbank.Why this might be problematic DeHart does not explicitly say.Later, he analyses the grammatical agnosticisms and finds Milbank's critique wanting.For Aquinas rejects the equivocal position of Maimonides, and instead claims that our names 'do indeed signify God's very essence, even as they fail to represent him.' 36The price we must pay to make sense of our signification is to accept that we only have a limited creaturely understanding of perfection terms, since God is always more eminent than we can understand. 37ccording to DeHart, while Kant and Aquinas might be uncomfortable bedfellows, analogy and participation are happy campers in grammatical readings of Aquinas.McCabe, Lash, and Burrell 'all readily affirm that analogical reference to God in Aquinas only works because of just this creaturely participation.' 38 DeHart interestingly does not cite a text to support this claim, and I struggle to find a reference to participation as underlying analogical predication in any of their works that predate Milbank's critique (Burrell does address the matter in papers published in 1999 and 2000, and even then participation is minimised as a 'metaphor'). 39It is striking that, in a book that is so invested in showing the paucity of textual grounding of Milbank's Aquinas, DeHart is not more careful to find references for all his counter claims.
DeHart finds various justifications for Burrell's Aquinas and the orientation this work shows towards language in Aquinas' own writings.He finds ample examples of Aquinas explicating our (lack of) knowledge of God's essence in this life and distinguishing between God in Godself and God as we know him.Likewise, the distinction between the thing signified and the mode of signification was a way of talking literally and truly about a reality 'where adequate knowledge of that reality is lacking.' 40 Since some words are not tied to particular contexts, there is the possibility of 35 DeHart, Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy, 42. 36 Ibid., 62. 37 Ibid., 62-63. 38 using them without understanding their context.Likewise, DeHart is convincing in his rejection of the idea that Aquinas thinks we can have some kind of vision of God in this life.While Lash's 'Where does Holy Teaching Leave Philosophy?' is more an interrogation of Milbank's Aquinas than a defence of himself and Burrell's readings of Aquinas, it does offer some glimpses into reasons why one might trust Burrell's Aquinas over Milbank's.In general, it finds Milbank's critique of the grammatical Thomas wanting.Yet Lash passes over in near silence the specific claim that Burrell's Aquinas colludes with Kant, merely describing Milbank as a 'bent detective' but offering no evidence for this charge. 41Instead, Lash asserts that Burrell's grammatical alertness is not an attempt to straddle the boundary that separates us from the sublime but is simply 'a matter of scrutinizing our use of certain concepts.' 42

Burrell's Kantian Aquinas
Passing over in silence where one cannot speak is a tradition for which Burrell might have sympathy, but Lash's and DeHart's (supposedly textually based) refutations of Milbank keep in the dark a swath of Burrell's writings that integrate Kantian commitments to the limits of knowledge with Aquinas' (lack of a) theory of analogy.With the Lash of the 1980s, Burrell was not covertly or unwittingly Kantian, but openly colluded with his critical philosophy-McCabe was, as far as I can tell, unperturbed with comparing Aquinas and Kant.Milbank's detective work is not bent, and the evidence is not fabricated.One can see Burrell drawing parallels between Kant and Aquinas in various works: We shall sample what he [Kant] has to say about the knowledge man can have of God, and discover how close his remarks about and use of analogy brings him … to the actual teaching of Aquinas. 43 It seems possible to do justice to both aspects of the intellectual movement involved here if we are permitted an interpretation of Aquinas that is inspired by Kant. 44 it will simply not do to identify the former conception of philosophy with a 'classical' outlook and refuse to see instances of the latter until after Kant.The thesis of this book is that Aquinas deserves to be placed among the 'critical' philosophers if we scrutinize how he employs philosophical grammar to circumscribe discourse about God. 45 41 Lash, 'Where Does Holy Teaching Leave Philosophy?', 436.The closest Lash comes to dealing with Milbank's claim that Burrell's Aquinas is Kantian is the following passage: 'It is not the malign influence of Kant, but the excellence of twentieth-century medieval scholarship, that has enabled us to discover the gulf which separates Aquinas from (for example) Suarez or Cajetan.' Ibid.,  If modern readers find anticipations of Kant in this treatment, they will be correct, but they should note that Aquinas also finds a way through the ceiling which Kant puts on transcendent use: one which … turns on Aquinas' explicit avowal of a creator. 46 is relatively unequivocal that, pace DeHart, Burrell details similarities between Aquinas and Kant on our knowledge of God, and on analogical predication.It is striking that Lash also saw this parallel in his earlier essay 'Ideology, Metaphor and Analogy': If Burrell is justified in thus interpreting Aquinas' insistence that he is concerned, by reflecting grammatically on the limits of language, to elucidate what cannot be said of God, then the gulf between Aquinas and Kant is perhaps not so wide, at this point, as has usually been supposed. 47at a grammatical approach to religious language is not far removed from Kantian philosophy has been consistently stated throughout Burrell's oeuvre, and was supported by Lash in the 1980s, even if he disowned-without clear justification-such a position by the late 1990s.It is ironic that, on this matter, Milbank's critique represents a more accurate reading of Burrell than his defenders, at least with regard to the charge of Kantianism, since these same writers are so critical of the lack of textual support evident in Milbank's Aquinas. 48

Knowing and Unknowing in Burrell's Aquinas
In his most recent writing on the topic, Burrell confirms Milbank's suspicion that the res/modus distinction in analogy anticipates Kant, even if Aquinas 'finds a way through the ceiling which Kant puts on transcendent use.' 49 A close reading of Burrell's Aquinas will show two 'versions' of Kantianism that Burrell adopts.The 'hard' Kantianism explicitly invokes imagery of seeing the boundary between the known and the unknown in order to point beyond to an unknown that we can recognise as a mysterious, yet simple, presence. 50The 'soft' Kantianism, on the other hand, is essentially a form of negative theology whereby we accept the limitations of our mode of knowing when applied to God, and distinguishes between God in Godself and our knowledge of God.That this position is described as Kantian is in many ways a comment on Burrell's 46 David Burrell, 'Analogy, Creation, and Theological Language', in The Theology of Thomas Aquinas, ed.Joseph Wawrykow (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 83.It is notable that this section of the article was substantially rewritten to include the reference to Kant, and a few other points, from the version published in 2000 in the Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.
47 Nicholas Lash, Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM Press, 1986), 109. 48'The result of my fascinated exploration of Aquinas in conversation with Milbank was, however, a growing perplexity.The more I compared Milbank's claims about Aquinas with my own readings of the texts, at first guided especially by Milbank's own citations, the more I began to balk.Why could I not get these texts to say to me what they seemed to say to him?' DeHart, Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy, x; Likewise, Lash refers to Milbank's 'cavalier disdain for evidence' in 'Where Does Holy Teaching Leave Philosophy?', 436. 49Burrell, 'Analogy, Creation, and Theological Language', 2010, 83. 50Burrell uses the terminology of 'limits' in the same way Milbank (and Kant, in translation) uses the term 'boundary'.For clarity's sake, I have adopted Milbank's use, since Burrell does not distinguish between limits, limitations, and boundaries in the way that contemporary receptions of Kant tend to.history, since many of those who influenced him were in some ways Kantian (Sellars, Lonergan, and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, at least in some readings). 51Yet it is also called Kantian because Burrell consistently claims that it was Kant who made us aware of these limitations in our knowing.They were operative in Aquinas, but a reader after Kant can realise a proper awareness of the limits of our knowledge, and readers after Wittgenstein are aware of the synonymity of the limits of our knowledge with the limits of our language.The 'hard' Kantianism is manifest only in Aquinas and comes at a lacuna that is at odds with the rest of the work, whereas the 'soft' Kantianism can be found throughout Burrell's oeuvre.
Before delving into the unknown, Burrell gives a foretaste of his use of the distinction between the thing signified and our manner of signification-an analysis Milbank saw as culpably Kantian.This distinction 'reminds us that we can consider something from many different angles,' each functioning within our manner of signifying. 52The diverse ways by which things can be signified show us something about the thing signified.Burrell is especially concerned with how this governs perfection terms, which are fundamentally dependent on what they are 'perfecting'.The meaning of 'good' depends on what we are describing as good.The form of expression does not change in different contexts, and it functions meaningfully even though there is a radically different implication dependent on contexts.There is thus a scope latent within perfection terms that transcends any context, since there is no one meaning that does not depend on context. 53urrell's examination of the 'Unknown' in his Aquinas begins with the designation of God as the beginning and end of all things.As the beginning and end of all things, God is not counted as anything.There was nothing prior to God, no 'parts' of God to preexist divinity, so God must be utterly simple.Divine simpleness goes hand in hand with divine unknowability since all our modes of knowing involve composites-as is evident in any act of predication-and our categories cannot describe something simple, thus 'even appropriate discourse must fail by misleading.' 54 Divine simpleness is the driving force that makes sense of Aquinas' statement that we do not know what God is.This negative theology is not just lip service. 55While Aquinas' account might look like an Aristotelian and scientific investigation into the essence of its object, the grammar of divinity consistently subverts this kind of inquiry.For all statements attach subjects and predicate, yet this form 'will falsify the reality which God is.… So, properly speaking, nothing can be said of God.' 56 This 'austere' account of simpleness goes hand in hand with Burrell's use of the distinction between the thing signified and the manner by which we signify.When we speak of God, we know that we are using our own manner of signification.Yet we also know that the attributions we make of God are to One who surpasses all created things.Our manner of signification is always operative in our understanding of something, and we cannot know the thing signified without this manner. 57In addition, the meaning of some words can change depending on context, while the words remain meaningful without a fixed (or univocal) meaning. 58As such, our predications can have a higher perfection in God about which we do not know, yet we know that we can apply it.We can speak of something that transcends our knowledge without leaving behind our mode of knowing so long as we are aware that our categories do not apply properly.
Simpleness is the 'grammatical analogue' for transcendence. 59All the claims Aquinas seems to make about God are coloured by simpleness, a 'formal feature' that dictates the way in which predications about God (do not) apply. 60There is no progress and no new knowledge gained after the treatment of divine simpleness.Rather, Aquinas is dealing in tautologies and going in circles around an unknowable God. 61This might sound futile but is in fact 'precisely what we need to push on in the dark.' 62 However, there is one formally positive statement found in Aquinas' account of divine simpleness that Burrell's Aquinas privileges, namely, the enigmatic claim that 'to be God is to be to-be'.For Aquinas, existence and essence are one in God.The second formally positive statement Aquinas makes about God is that we can say nothing properly about God. 63The statement 'to be God is to be to-be' does not, however, contradict the unknowability of God, but characterises it.Burrell is careful, at least for the most part, to maintain that esse (to-be) is not something that can be described.It is something that can be shown, rather than said.A proposition that is merely entertained and a proposition that is asserted share the same linguistic form. 64ecause existence is not a linguistic predicate properly speaking, it is not something through which we can understand God.We have no metaphysical organ that encounters esse itself; put another way, being is not intuited.To be sure, there are analogues and metaphors we can use to clarify what we might mean by esse, and Aquinas might turn to poetic idiom to describe this, yet taking this straightforwardly would be to breach the bounds of language and logic. 65Aquinas does not deliver us beyond the impasse of unknowability.
logic.Again and again, he is clear: esse is not something we can know, it is not something that we can speak of God, except ironically.To say that if we knew what it was like for something to exist, then we would know God 'can only be taken as a joke.A useful joke, no doubt … but a joke nonetheless.' 66Then, after all this, at the very end of his discussion of 'esse', Burrell makes a second-and only second, not an alternativesuggestion concerning a kind of resemblance that might obtain between God and creation through the matrix of esse.But Burrell introduces it tentatively, with a stutter, yet he still finds some sense for 'resemblance' insofar as things are beings.The created categories might have a resemblance in their esse 'relating' to God, even if God does not resemble creatures in any straightforward sense.This is the start of Burrell looking to overcome the limits of our knowledge.
For if we think therapeutically, rather than doctrinally, we might come to some telling of the unmannered source of being.We can be aware of how we relate our language to the world and we can come to an awareness of the way our lives bear out this relation.This awareness has come to be called (since Kant) a critical or transcendental attitude: it consists in becoming aware of how things as we know them bear traces of the manner in which we know them.… The awareness itself can finally be exploited to acknowledge an unknown which bears no traces at all of our manner of knowing.We would then realize that we cannot conceive this unknown, yet we could state that realization by affirming the unknown to be altogether simple. 67te there are two claims here: the first is of our critical awareness of how our knowledge always shows our mode of knowing, and that we can exploit this awareness to intimate into the beyond.The manner of this 'affirmation' is 'highly reflective.'It 'at least fares better than postulating an intuition of what we know to be inexpressible' and does not presume 'that we know how to use this substantival form of "to be".' 68 Once we realise that we do not know what we mean when we speak of esse, 'we are nevertheless possessed of the capacity-the awareness and the tools-to use language as a pointer beyond that state by carefully ascertaining its limits.' 69This exploitation of the unknown beyond is a better example than the res/modus distinction of how Burrell breaks through the bounds of knowability and is the selfdestructive form of Kantianism that Milbank critiques.Burrell will eventually develop a reading of analogy so 'austere' that it is almost as if the exploited 'awareness' of the unknown has itself receded into darkness.Indeed, Burrell begins his chapter on 'Analogical Predication' with a manifesto against the neo-scholastic doctrine of analogy: what many have taken to be Aquinas' theory of analogy are, according to Burrell, but 'vague remarks' in Aquinas' oeuvre that display a certain 'grammatical astuteness'.Indeed, Aquinas never professes an intuition of being, especially not one that grounds the analogy between God and creation. 7066 Ibid., 58. 67Ibid., 59-60. 68Ibid., 60. 69 Ibid., 61. 70Ibid., 62.
Analogy is a linguistic discipline, and it is simply the middle between univocity and equivocity.In this context, the difference between the thing signified and the manner of signification returns.It is perhaps best seen in the perfection terms that can be literally predicated of God, but which nevertheless fail properly to represent God.The meaning of perfection terms changes, according to Aquinas, depending on the context in which they are used.We can therefore come to many understandings of a perfection, yet there is always more to any perfection than any of its given instantiations.Since our understanding is always necessarily mannered, we cannot claim an understanding that totally encapsulates the perfection itself.Rather, our understanding can always be extended into new contexts and thereby we recognise that this extendibility is characteristic of perfections.Thus is the case with theological attribution.'We need not know how to use the term of God, therefore, to know that it could be so used by someone who did know how.' 71 One need not be a visionary to see Christology and eschatology latent in the background of Burrell's point here; the science of God and the blessed lurks luminously, inaccessibly, behind such a new context.Although we can use perfection terms of God, Burrell notes that these are in God 'not as a possession' but in accordance with God's simpleness. 72Again, 'existence and attributes cognate to it … [are such] that no one could propose a proper account.For existence is precisely what escapes scientific explanation.' 73In this way, according to Burrell, 'Aquinas … is able to endure so unknown a God.' 74 It is almost as if the stuttering 'second' account of esse has been passed over in silence.
It is worthy pausing at the 'almost' in the last sentence.Aquinas asks a further question: can we speak truthfully of such an unknown divinity?At first, Burrell seems unsure.Any understanding of God that claims to be adequate must be a pretender since we only know what God is not.Literal predications of God will be approached, yet they will always outreach us. 75Thus 'an authentic religion will need not try to explain what must be left mysterious.' 76 Instead, Aquinas' treatment of analogical language of God is an exercise in grasping limits.The philosopher can say what is sense and what is nonsense, but '[t]he skills of the philosopher do not place him in a position to determine whether what can properly be said is in fact the case.' 77 So far, so limited.Yet, at the end of this reflective chapter the limit is once again crossed, and we return to what appears to be his 'second' resemblance: Because incapacity to formulate a terminus for our quest cannot cancel out the original impulse to find out if there is one.And a sign of that is the logical acumen which allows us to go on even when we have reached the limits of descriptive discourse.… By exercising these logical powers to elucidate the limits of our understanding, we gain some intimation of a region beyond those limits, even though we cannot envision it or tell about it.This highly intellectual awareness confirms the original impulse, giving that precedence over our continued failure to answer the question which propels it. 78is provides 'just enough light … to keep us from abandoning a task which proves so strange,' and 'through the rational idiom of logic, is the presence of that mysterious power.' 79 Once more we are returned to our limit, yet this limit is one we overcome.Burrell describes it as an 'intimation,' and is 'highly intellectual' while simultaneously alerting us to 'the presence of that mysterious power.' 80 There are thus two points at which Burrell's Aquinas attempts to go beyond the limits he is so careful to ascertain.This is Burrell at his most transcendental.One might grumble that this is not a purely Kantian position, since there are strong traces of Wittgenstein's Tractatus present as well, especially in Burrell's use of the saying/showing distinction and the relationship between the limits of our language and the mystical.But this complaint will not suffice to undermine Burrell's position, as I will show below.In Aquinas, Burrell is not quite able to pass over in silence whereof he could not speak.What is it to 'realize', 'acknowledge', to have a 'capacity' or 'awareness' of a simple unknown?And how does this fit with Burrell's claim that language 'transcribes' our present state?And, indeed, how does this fit with the aforementioned comments that if we know what it is for anything to exist then we would know what God is, even though '[w]e have no way of expressing the kind of fact that existence is.' 81 Or the more striking claim: 'This statement can only be taken as a joke'? 82his 'second' account of esse is not quite the intuition of being Burrell is so keen to reject-that is more a starting point than a conclusion-which at least demands pause before accusations of contradiction are adjudged.But it does sound like a privileged perspective of metaphysical knowledge which Burrell readily denies.The second account goes against many of Burrell's explicit statements, such as: 'Aquinas deliberately eschewed any attempt to tell us what God is like.He did not feel himself or anyone else to be in a position to do that.' 83The fundamental question I have is why does Burrell do this?Is it to safeguard religious experience or some form of God-consciousness?Unfortunately, Burrell does not explicate any more than I have described.Perhaps the only clue as to what this might be comes on the final page of Aquinas where Burrell distinguishes contemplation from 'act': A contemplative moment not only can free us from space and time; it can also resolve impasses by allowing hitherto incompatible horizons to merge.… The activity itself bears no resemblance to our attempts to sort things out, yet many confusions come unravelled in its wake. 84 this is the way to resolve the tension in Burrell's second account of esse as intimated somehow, then it is a cryptic response.Nevertheless, this second account of esse goes more toward confirming Burrell's Aquinas than exposing his theology as just so much straw.For 78 Ibid., 84-85. 79Ibid., 85. 80 Ibid. 81Burrell, Aquinas, 58. 82Ibid. 83Ibid., 22. 84 Ibid., 196.
Burrell's attempts to 'not describe' end up intimating and even validating the 'unknowing' that he delimits.If this second account of esse truly makes sense, then there is a vision, there is a knowing, that surpasses the limit.Here, Milbank is right: Burrell is dangerously Kantian.
There is, however, something more broadly Kantian that Milbank sees in Burrell's Aquinas.Milbank finds a tension between a purely negative stream in Burrell's Aquinas towards 'the unknown beyond the known', and his narration of another stream of 'the specific "grammar" of creation ex nihilo in which the "unknown" and the "known" are specified together according to a particular religious assumption about ultimate reality.' 85 Milbank's reading is in fact plausible insofar as Burrell's beginning with the fact of God as the beginning and end of all things does not imply that God is anything we can understand.There could be a sleight of hand here, for one could object that once God is said not to be part of creation, then all we have is a pure negation of creation.Indeed, one could argue further, using the 'hard' Kantianism outlined above, and suggest that Burrell's Aquinas claims a certain privileged access into the divine that guides the non-application of our categories in a way that is not so unknowing but as dogmatic as Milbank's Kant.
Yet I do not think this is the only way to read Burrell.For the two poles Milbank finds in Burrell makes Milbank's position almost invulnerable.Since any evidence that could be found of the more ambiguous, and less dogmatic, form of negative theology whereby the apophatic and cataphatic are disclosed together could simply be discounted as part of the particularly Christian grammar.Hence, no counterevidence can be found that could disprove Milbank's claim.For any counter would be seen merely as part of the 'good' aspects of Aquinas for which Milbank expresses admiration; they would not touch upon the problematically Kantian elements.On the other hand, one could read the second 'stream' as qualifying the first so that the extreme negation is not simply a dogmatic unknowing but is itself made stranger and more negative by the intertwining of the negative and positive predications with which Burrell is comfortable.This is most naturally found in Burrell's focus on perfections as the locus of theological analogy.Our access to perfections is never purely to the perfection itself, the recognition of which always brings with it a manner of knowing that exposes the limitations in our understanding.We cannot leave the intimations of our limitations behind.Instead, when we ascribe perfections to God (such as 'the living God'), 'we are licensed to make the statement once we have become aware that we can use "living" to express many ways of being alive, without thereby exhausting the range of this term.If we couple that awareness with Aquinas' formula that God is the source and goal of all things, his observations become more compatible.' 86Thus, to affirm the primacy of God's perfections is to claim that they exist in him most perfectly and primordially.Note, however, that Burrell couples the indeterminate range with the claim that God is the creator of all as a way of pointing to Aquinas's conviction that these claims be held together.What at first seems to be a potentially dogmatic kind of knowing unknowing, of the Kantian sort that Milbank objected to, turns out upon closer inspection to be in direct contact with a more intertwined negative theology where affirmation and negation are disclosed together.To transcribe the apophatic/kataphatic into the modus/res distinction, which is but another way of describing the combination of known and unknown, one may say that 85 Milbank, The Word Made Strange, 13. 86 Burrell, Aquinas, 72-73.there is no way of knowing which aspects of our knowledge are affirmed and which denied, given that we cannot in our finite, contingent existence leave behind the manner in which we know.
As such, Burrell can introduce divine simpleness in various ways.One way that makes it sound like a pure negation comes at the start of the chapter, 'the Unknown', where Burrell argues that since God is the beginning and end of all, God must be distinct from the universe-which means that we can only consider ways in which God is not. 87Yet Burrell also gives an earlier description of simpleness as a philosophical expression of divine transcendence that is not a description of God but more 'a shorthand way of establishing a set of grammatical priorities designed to locate the subject matter as precisely as possible.'Burrell illustrates this need for precision with the claim that God is both wise, and God is wisdom itself.Both of these claims must be used to 'express something else that we know but cannot otherwise state.The need for two shows that neither form is adequate, since we know that "we do not know him as he is in himself".' 88This way of introducing the matter seems to integrate the two streams that Milbank sees as disparate.It might be that they can be isolated, but they need not be.

After Aquinas: Burrell's 'Soft Kantianism'
In addition to his book Aquinas, we can also see Burrell come to the limits of our language in his Knowing the Unknowable God and in Faith and Freedom.In these latter works, however, he does not attempt to look beyond human limitations and intimate an awareness of the divine mystery.
Knowing the Unknowable God presses at the limits of our understanding.From the outset, Burrell describes his primary aim as one of securing '… the distinction of God from the world, and to do so in such a way as to display how such a One, who must be unknowable, may also be known.' 89Of pressing relevance to this article are the points where Burrell comes to the limit of the unknown without at the same time succumbing to the temptation to transgress these limits by invoking an 'awareness' of the beyond.
Burrell contends that we need 'to shift our perspectives', by which he means that we need to set aside the project of trying to understand being in terms of an essence, and instead use analogies and metaphors to make sense of our unknowing. 90The distinction between existence and essence is again key for divine unknowability and simpleness.But in Knowing the Unknowable God, Burrell does not mention the 'second' way of knowing being in terms of a kind of awareness or intimation that we journey towards.Instead of … considering God's essence in the line of properties, [we are] invite [d] to recognize the limits of our conceptual powers.The affirmation of God's simpleness, then, is not an ordinary statement about God, so much as an assertion showing where 'the distinction' is to be drawn, and in what directions we should look to overcome our endemic 'essentialism'. 9187 Ibid., 14. 88 Ibid., 6. 89 Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God, 3. 90 Ibid., 44-46. 91Ibid., 49.
What must be overcome, in other words, is not our unknowing, but rather our expectations of existence as but another essence.We come to the point from which Burrell's Aquinas looks for a beyond that we can intimate only to arrive at a negative judgment regarding our knowledge and the unknown.We are, in short, called to be self-reflective.We simply know that we can extend our words meaningfully into new contexts, without having to intimate what this might be like.
The same implicit refusal to look beyond the limits of our knowledge comes in Burrell's expansive homage to Ralph McInerny on analogy. 92Here, Burrell comes once more to the limits of our knowing, and how we can speak in divinis while still claiming God to be unknown.This passage comes at the end of this essay, mirroring the way in which Burrell reached the 'hard' Kantian attempts to come to the boundary between known and unknown and to intimate, in some respects, the beyond.He argues that Aquinas' key move is to offer the distinction between the 'thing signified' and 'our manner of signification', which allows us to use terms expansively.Having reintroduced Aquinas' programmatic remark that we can 'only know what God is not', Burrell comments: One could not, it seems, engage in 'negative theology' so gracefully without having some other access to the One whose nature remains unknown to us … And that other access must be such that it does not reduce the 'unknowing' but rather offers a way of living with it.In the terms which we have been using from Aquinas' treatment of discourse in divinis, we need not be able to articulate the res significata [thing signified] to assure ourselves that there is such.What we need to be able to do, however, is to recognize that the very terms we use have a reach beyond the modus significandi [manner of signification] that is accessible to us. 93id his attempt to engage in negative theology, Burrell comes again to the limits of knowledge.The key move is the distinction between what words signify and the manner in which they signify, which makes possible the recognition that words can be extended into various contexts.Such extendibility can be exploited to say that these words could be used in contexts that we do not understand without pretending to understand these contexts.Words can 'reach beyond' our meaning for them.Since we cannot, however, come to a firm understanding of the 'thing signified' the creator God remains inaccessible to us.
These texts-excerpted from Knowing the Unknowable God and in Faith and Freedomare examples of where Burrell comes closest to the limits of the unknown after Aquinas.Whereas these texts speak to how we arrive at the limits of our knowledge of God and the world, they do not, as in Aquinas, offer a second way intimating what lies beyond those limits.In these latter works, Burrell underscores the way we can talk about the unknown by virtue of the fact that our language can be extended into new contexts without disclosing ahead of time what these new contexts are.Burrell does not try to describe what the unknown is like and resists intimating esse or making it into another essence, and instead relies on the way in which terms can be meaningful in various contexts to show that they could function meaningfully in a context we did not know, as is the case when we talk of a 'simple' God.There is a gap between our knowledge of 92 Burrell, 'From Analogy of "Being" to the Analogy of Being'; Republished in David Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 113-26. 93Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 124-25.
God and God in Godself, but Burrell (at his best) refuses to transgress the boundary between known and unknown, but focuses instead on showing how language functions contextually, and exploits this phenomenon.
Burrell himself describes the difference between his earlier and later writings as stemming from his encounter with Robert Sokolowski's notion of 'the distinction'. 94This 'distinction' is between God and creation, with an emphasis on the utter transcendence of the divine.For Burrell, 'the distinction' becomes keen from the early 1980s onwards, which means that maintaining rather than overcoming the boundary between the known and the unknown gains in utmost importance.That said, this attention to the distinction between God and creation does not stand in fundamental discontinuity with Burrell's earlier work.It is better seen as a re-focusing.One can find reference to the importance of creation for Aquinas' philosophy throughout Burrell's oeuvre, and this goes hand in hand with his formulation of the distinction. 95Indeed, attempting to overcome the boundary goes against the fundamental flow of Burrell's Aquinas, which attempts to map out the appropriate grammar in divinis and navigate amid such an unknown God.Remember, it was only a 'second' account of esse and never an alternative to the unknowability; even this 'second' is clearly in tension with the earlier claims Burrell makes in Aquinas.That it swims against the stream should be a mark against Milbank's critique of Burrell insofar as this 'second' has nothing to do with the res/ modus distinction.It is more an added extra-a strategic transcendentalism not an essential one.In later works, one can see Burrell come to the same point regarding the unknowability of esse, and instead of seeking to overcome the limits of our knowledge and intimate the beyond, he realises that to do so risks making esse into another essence.
However, in defending Burrell against Milbank's accusation, this does not totally dismiss the charge of Kantianism.As I have argued throughout, Burrell's thought shows two different kinds of Kantianism: the 'hard' one, which looks to overcome the limits of our knowledge in order to intimate what lies beyond, and a 'soft' Kantianism in which our conditions of knowledge always already affect everything we know so that there is a (coherent) conception of God in Godself that is distinct from the way in which we know God.
For Milbank, however, there is still a questionable version found in my 'soft' presentation of Burrell.It comes from his use of the distinction between the thing signified and the manner of signification.That vestiges of Kantianism are present in this position is confirmed by Burrell.As noted above, a 'gap' is posited between God in Godself and our knowledge of God (albeit with the implication that we nevertheless have some direct knowledge to which our categories do not apply). 96However while this position is Kantian in a broad sense of the term, it is not aligned by Burrell with a seeing or intimating beyond the limits of our knowledge.Rather, it is a way to note the parallels between Kant's critical awareness and negative theology.
The distinction between the modus significandi and the res significata is evidently present in Aquinas.Notable for its centrality in Aquinas' reception (including for Milbank and Burrell) and its reflective location in the Summa Theologiae where Aquinas examines how God does (not) exist.Aquinas introduces the modus/res distinction, arguing that the intellect apprehends perfections 'as they are in creatures, and as it apprehends them it signifies them by names.' 97 These perfections might come from God (and exist 94  more perfectly in God), but our understanding and naming depends on our encounter with them in creation.As Burrell points out, this implies that all our knowledge is mannered and everything we know is unavoidably considered from our particular, created, and therefore limited perspective. 98Already, a gap appears between exactly how we understand things and what these things are. 99If this claim seems Kantian, it is nevertheless grounded in Aquinas' theology and not alien to it. 100Notably, Aquinas goes on to write that when it comes to God our use of words like wise (i.e.perfection terms) 'leaves the thing signified as incomprehended, and as exceeding the signification of the name.' 101 As Burrell reminds us, we must always be aware that we cannot help but consider things from within the perspective of our mode of signification.There is indeed a 'gap' between the way we know God and the way God is, and it is this gap that Burrell emphasises in his interpretation of the res/modus distinction.However, this distinction does not give us permission or the ability to see into the beyond of the divine perfections in itself: 'The answer is that we cannot.' 102 Another telling account of the thing signified and manner of signifying distinction comes in Burrell's short essay 'Beyond Idolatry'.Here again, Burrell places Aquinas' account of the divine names in the context of both creation and divine simpleness, which (for Burrell) already points to the inadequacy of language to describe a transcendent God.Not only does creation ground God's transcendence, it also gives us some warrant to trust that the perfections we find in this world can lead us to an imperfect understanding of the perfect Creator, given that the world is patterned on divine wisdom. 103As Burrell says, this way we can show that the difference between Aquinas and Kant turns on the doctrine of creation as warranting our talk about God, 104 or, as Milbank puts it, 'we take it on trust that language does disclose.' 105Characterising the world as 'creation' brings with it a 'promissory' form. 106Or, in more Thomistic parlance, since 'whatever perfection exists in an effect must be found in the effective cause … the perfections of all things must pre-exist in God in a more eminent way.' 107 Yet, our un-derstandings of perfections can only lead us to an improper knowledge of God because we are informed by various perfections as we apprehend them, which comes from their existence in a different, less eminent, manner in creation than they do in God.All our understandings of perfections bring with them our manner of signification, which depends on the world we inhabit.There is always some 'operative space' between how we apprehend a perfection and their potential to be used in any condition we can find them in.We have multiple manners of signification inasmuch as we use perfections in various contexts, which is precisely what opens the door to the distinction between res and modus.This distinction grounds the 'gap' that Burrell exploits, whether the distinction is parsed in terms of an ontology of creation or in terms of grammatical analysis; either way, the one does not exclude the other.
We can therefore understand that perfection terms can be used in various, related contexts; we can moreover understand that they originate in God and thus can be used of God; and, finally, we can understand that we do not know their manner of being in God. 108Indeed, as Burrell phrases it, 'knowing that such terms express something of what God is as the source of the perfection at issue does not supply us with a transcendent use of the expression.' 109 Here again we see Burrell's implicit rejection of the idea that we can see beyond our limits.In short, Burrell calls us to recognise the 'transcontextual' nature of perfections110 without at the same time attempting to transcend our created vantage point.
This might well open up the 'soft' Kantian distinction between God in Godself and the way we understand God, but it is hard to fathom a negative theology that does not do this.The contrary is simply absurd.Burrell, following Aquinas, refuses to identify the way in which our understandings of perfections apply to the simple God with what God is in Godself.Indeed, how could he without straddling the boundary Milbank astutely identifies?To be sure, the res/modus distinction allows Burrell to extend our concepts from the finite to the beyond of our finitude; however, the real issue for Burrell is a 'retraction' as well as an 'expansion'.Here Milbank is very close to Burrell insofar as they both espouse a form of negative theology in which negation and affirmation are given together, indistinguishably.All our concepts must be denied because they all exist in a simple manner in a way than we cannot understand.There might be some kind of dialectic between affirmation and negation, but we can never know what is affirmed in our understanding. 111Surpassing our finitude does not even get a mention in Burrell's Aquinas, and this is not accidental because he is more concerned there to emphasise the qualitative difference between God and creation than he is to press the quantitative difference implied in the finite/infinite distinction.This is described as softly Kantian since it exploits our awareness of how our mode of knowing shapes the known without trying to intimate what this is like.
As soon as one says that God is simple, one must always already be aware that every single idea applied to the divine, every name we give to God, formally fails to name the God who is.Steadfastly holding to divine simpleness is what really drives Burrell's 'soft' Kantianism inasmuch as it implies a failure of our words and ideas to quantify the thing itself (i.e.God).Moreover, his 'soft' Kantianism enables Burrell to show the 'critical' nature of Aquinas' theology but also Burrell's openness to modern philosophy insofar as our mode of knowing always affects how one theologises.One might also construe Burrell's 'soft' Kantianism as just a form of negative theology encountering a pre-modern epistemology, which leads him to this 'critical' grammar of divinity.

Conclusion: Simpleness and Participation
If Burrell's 'second' interpretation of God and esse can be separated from his reading of Aquinas-as I have here argued-then the 'soft' form of Kantianism that remains is relatively bland.Indeed, one may say-to borrow Chris Insole's contrast between the twoworld and one-world interpretations of how the phenomenal and the noumenal are related-that for Burrell the former is 'radical' whereas the latter borders on trivial. 112lthough there is clearly a Kantian stream running through Burrell's interpretations of Aquinas, this is not, contra Milbank, a fatal flaw.Moreover, despite a number of similarities there is a contrast between Burrell and Milbank's versions of Aquinas that allows us to think of the differences between them in an alternative light.Both show a hermeneutic that tends to centralise one aspect of Aquinas' thought, and they use this as a lens to re-interpret Aquinas' theology more broadly. 113For Burrell, the feature is a grammar of divine simpleness while for Milbank it is an ontology of participation. 114Burrell brings up simpleness time and time again as that which makes strange Aquinas' theology of God.Indeed, it is God's simpleness that drives Burrell's Aquinas into theological unknowing, and round in circles.For Milbank, on the other hand, the idea that creation participates in the divine plays a similarly central tenet of his reading of Aquinas. 115 detailed examination of the relationship between simpleness and participation is clearly beyond the scope of this article; however, a few musings on the matter can show the way in which Burrell's emphasis on simpleness can unsettle the notion of 'participation', which does a lot of legwork in Milbank's theology. 116Essentially, if God is utterly simple, and there is no divide between God's being, goodness, ideas, or anything else in God, then created perfections cannot, straightforwardly, participate in any divine perfections because there is no such thing as a divine attribute apart from the divine essence.Created good cannot be said to really participate in the divine good, while created being is said to really participate in the divine being, since there is no divine being or divine good per se, only the divine essence which is imitated by creation.
Milbank adamantly insists that there is a real and direct participation of creation in the divine essence itself.Aquinas 'does not say that we participate only in a "similitude" of God that is secondary to the divine essence: rather, the similitudes are likenesses of the essence and these likenesses are the created beings.' 117 Creatures directly participate in the divine essence, and thus, the ultimate shares itself without reserve, while nonetheless entirely reserving itself in its unsoundable mystery.What it gives in a measure is the ungivable, and it is only the ungivable that can be given.Hence it is precisely the imparticipable that can be participated and actually, because it is imparticipable, an inexhaustible fountain. 118ch an account of participation is what, ultimately, grounds Milbank's stronger claims of our actual knowledge of the divine essence in this life.With such a high account of participation, it is unclear how much sense it makes even to talk about 'boundaries' between God and creation in the first place, since all things are, in some sense, 'in' God.
However, the line between paradox and contradiction is rather thin at this point.It seems more plausible that a text which Milbank uses to justify his position as pointing to a paradox is more straightforwardly read as the denial of this position. 119Thus Milbank translates: inquantum participat quandum similitudinem divini esse as 'insofar as it participates of the divine essence [through] a certain similitude.' 120 But this is an esoteric and un-scholastic rendering of the Latin.Every other translator I am aware of renders the text along the lines of 'participates in a similitude of the divine essence'. 121ikewise, one can find very similar phrases to Milbank's aforementioned citation from the Tertia Pars throughout Thomas' oeuvre.A clear example is in Aquinas' commentary on The Divine Names, where he uses the same phrase, normally taken to mean that creation is not a sharing in the divine essence, but a participation in the likeness thereof. 122This rendering is preferred and explicated by Rudi te Velde, who holds that it is only the similitude of the divine essence that is participated in, not the essence itself, and that our participated likeness to the divine essence is best understood as referring 117 John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 101 n.197. 118Ibid., 101 n.197. 119Milbank makes the same point in his essay 'Christianity and Platonism in East and West'.Creation's participation is in the divine essence the way in which creation is like God; it does not participate 'in' the similitude (149-50).This is a sharing through reflection, 'not a portioning out of the indivisible God' (150).John Milbank, 'Christianity and Platonism in East and West', in A Celebration of Living Theology: A Festschrift in Honour of Andrew Louth, edited by Justin Mihoc and Leonard Aldea (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 107-60. 120Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 101 n.197.The Latin comes from ST IIIa q. 62 a. 2. 121 Thanks to Michael Barbazat, Ben DeSpain, and Dawn LaValle Norman for their confirmatory translations.
to our reception of being from God. 123 Similarly, Doolan emphasises that a creature's 'being' is a participated likeness to the divine essence insofar as creatures' individual act of existence participates in its own essence, and as this gestures to its relation to God, as the principle and exemplar of created being. 124eturning to the commentary on The Divine Names, Aquinas goes on to claim that God's essence 'remains uncommunicated or unparticipated.' 125This should be taken to mean exactly what it says: the divine essence remains uncommunicated or unparticipated.It is not a rhetorical or real use of paradox, but a straightforwardly literal predication. 126Aquinas gestures to this in the Summa Contra Gentiles, where he argues that God is not the formal being of all things, since if this were so then all things would be one, 127 for the divine being is the divine nature. 128If all creation participated directly in the divine nature, either creation would not be diverse or God would not be simple since God would have to enter into composition with their various natures. 129Aquinas' Aquinas that cannot simply be reconciled.Rather, Burrell's grammar of simpleness shows the flaws in an un-nuanced theology of participation.To say that we participate in a similitude of the divine essence is also to say that we do not participate in the essence itself.Burrell's emphasis on simpleness provides a challenge through which we might better articulate creation's participation 'in' God in a more indirect manner.When Aquinas says that creation participates in the divine similitude, we are referred to God as both source and end of all things, and the various creatures as mimetic communications of the divine.Language of participation should be understood as such in order to uphold the distinction between God and creation while at the same time emphasising the causal dependence of creation on God.
It is not a coincidence that Milbank picks up on a lack of a language and ontology of participation in the Thomisms of Burrell and McCabe (and the 1980s Lash too, though he may have denied it), for this goes hand in hand with their emphasis on divine simpleness and transcendence.Likewise, it is not a coincidence that Milbank totally centralises participation which deflates divine transcendence to the extent that we have some 'inchoate' vision of God in this life when we understand any created perfection.These claims are natural companions.Too high an account of participation collapses the distinction between God and creation-a distinction Burrell is so keen to hold to.In order to maintain 'the distinction', one need not have a quite so deflationary (Aristotelian) view of participation as Burrell implies when he calls it a 'metaphor'. 139One can articulate participation in the divine similitude to preserve participation's important place in Aquinas' metaphysics without collapsing his account of divine simpleness into pantheism or trying to move beyond his negative theology.
Simpleness is not opposed to participation; Milbank's Aquinas is not entirely unlike Burrell's.Bringing these two versions of Thomism into dialogue with one another shows a need to be careful, even austere, with our language when we speak of the divine.For 'nothing strains the resources available to human language so completely as our attempts to speak of God.' 140 139 Burrell, Faith and Freedom, xvi, xx; Burrell, 'Analogy, Creation, and Theological Language', 87. 140Burrell, Aquinas, 65.
Ibid., 46. 39David Burrell, 'From Analogy of "Being" to the Analogy of Being', in Recovering Nature: Essays in Natural Philosophy, Ethics and Metaphysics in Honor of Ralph McInerny, edited by Thomas Hibbs and John O'Callaghan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999); David Burrell, 'Analogy, Creation, and Theological Language', Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 74 (2000): 35-52.There are references to participation in Aquinas (33 and 154) but these have no relation to analogical predication.
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