Thomistic Summer Conference 2024 Lecture: Anthony L. Hernandez

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“The Moral Wisdom of Charles de Koninck in Ego Sapientia and The Primacy of the Common Good against the Personalists”

by Anthony L. Hernandez
Ave Maria University
Thomistic Summer Conference 2024

Introduction

In his 1943 essays on the metaphysics of Marian devotion^[1] and of the necessity of prioritizing the common good over one’s private good, the Canadian Thomist Charles de Koninck articulated a strong moral theology. In Ego Sapientia, de Koninck is concerned with showing that, far from being alien to the discussion of the common good as a locus for moral theological reflection, the figure of the Blessed Mother is in fact key to understanding how a Catholic ought to actualize the priority of the common good in his or her own life, insofar as no other creature has ever embodied being ordered to the common good over the private good more than the Mother of Wisdom.^[2] In The Primacy of the Common Good against the Personalists, de Koninck cuts the legs out from under the supposition that human fulfillment can only come about by the exaltation of one’s private, personal good over against any shared and perceived ‘alien’ common good, locating such an exaltation at the core of the sin of the angels and Lucifer’s fall from grace, and thus demonstrating its inadmissibility as a move authentically in accord with Catholic moral thought. Taken together, de Koninck’s work in these two essays represents a thoroughly Marian and a thoroughly metaphysico-theological defense of the primacy of the common good; he does so in an entirely unique way, by setting up a contrast between the Blessed Mother and the fallen angels on the point of their success or failure to allow themselves to be ordered towards the common good over any private or singular good. It will be the project of this essay to unpack the manner in which de Koninck marshals this defense and sets up such a contrast.

Part I: Virgin Wisdom and Lucifer’s Rebellion in Ego Sapientia

De Koninck opens Ego Sapientia^[3] with a motivating question that will guide his analysis: how is it that the Church predicates^[4] of the Virgin Mary the words of Sirach 24:40, Ego sapientia, ‘I, Wisdom,’ rather than simply ‘I am wise’?^[5] Citing John of St. Thomas, de Koninck points out that in two cases only can something abstract (i.e. being Wisdom itself) be predicated of something concrete (i.e. a person): when it is a question of God Himself or of one of the transcendentals (properties of being). But the Virgin Mary is not God - and it is not clear if and/or how she is a transcendental with “sovereign affinity to God,”^[6] as she is but a human being, a creature. So how can the Church properly put on her lips the words of Sirach, ‘I, Wisdom…,’ a self-identification as Wisdom? In the following paragraphs, de Koninck identifies what must be true of the attribution ‘Mary is Wisdom’ if it is to be valid (and not understood heretically). First and foremost, to be Wisdom is to have the status of first principle of all things; so, the Virgin Mary as Wisdom must be a first principle in herself, in her being and substance, and not merely in her intellect and will, and she must be aware of her status as first principle.^[7] Additionally, somehow, the Virgin’s status as first principle must be understood not to be in competition with God (Who is the “‘principle without principle’”),^[8] but rather as a participation in God’s own status as first Principle, and beyond even that, in a qualified sense, as the principle from which God Himself proceeds, “the origin and genetrix of God.”^[9] That last point is a hermeneutical key to de Koninck’s essay.^[10] If we want to understand how the Virgin is herself Wisdom, the one who supremely orders all things well, insofar as all things (in a certain sense) originate from her in due order,^[11] then we must look to the manner in which, by God’s supreme condescension, she was permitted to attain the status of first principle with regard to God Himself, in His human nature, in the Incarnation.^[12] De Koninck explains that Mary is truly Dei genetrix because she participates in an active manner in God the Son’s taking on of a human nature from her through vital assimilation;^[13] her status as genetrix of God, Mother of God, makes her an authentic “cause and origin of God,” which in turn makes her the Mother of all things made by the Son (all of creation), which in turn marks her as a universal cause, by which, according to de Koninck, citing Cornelius a Lapide, we can know that just as Christ is Wisdom made flesh, so His Mother is the Wisdom that makes flesh,^[14] “‘the Wisdom which engenders and incarnates.’”^[15] If the latter is true, then the implications for the moral life are manifest: a Christian who wants to order his life according to the eternal pattern of the Incarnate Wisdom must needs look to the engendering and incarnating Wisdom which bore the Incarnate Wisdom, and which is capable of engendering and incarnating still more sons and daughters who seek to conform their lives to the divine Wisdom.

Further on, de Koninck asserts that Mary’s elevation in grace surpasses that of any other elevation of any other creature,^[16] actual or possible: “she exhausts, so to speak, the very possibility of a higher elevation.”^[17] On the surface, this is simply in accord with common sense. She who was to be the Mother of God had to have been the greatest recipient of God’s graces. But if we probe the implications of this statement, we ought to be startled. For if it is true that Mary’s elevation is the greatest elevation conceivable for a mere creature, then it is consequently true that we who strive to order our lives rightly, and who desire the elevation of our nature from grace to glory, have not only to learn from Mary, it is Mary herself that we must learn. She is the pattern of the Christian life which every Christian must learn if he wants to be perfectly conformed to Christ her Son. The moral life is a matter of the right ordering of our will and of formation in the virtues, the latter of which, because only possible in its integrity through habitual grace, elevates us. We need to commit our own elevation to follow after an established pattern or type. Christ’s human nature, first and foremost, is that type. But He took His human nature from somewhere and from someone; He took it from her who, as a mere creature, provides for us an exemplar of elevation in grace that is in a certain sense even more connatural to us than the deified humanity of her Son. If there were any doubt about this, de Koninck resolutely declares that, as Wisdom, Mary sows the seed of the Christian moral life in us, in an utterly singular way: “To her in her quality of Wisdom it has been confided to place in the elect the principle of their conversion to God, to place in them the divine roots” (emphasis added).^[18] What a profound turn of phrase. De Koninck connects this ‘planting’ to Mary’s status as Dei genetrix, according to which she can do the work of guiding her children in grace back to the Principle without principle, through her Son and in the Spirit Who suffuses her.^[19]

A still further moral consideration of de Koninck’s treatment of the Blessed Mother lies in the opposition that he draws between the respective natures of Mary’s elevation and Lucifer’s deformation. To understand this further consideration, we first have to lay some groundwork. Prior to a rectification of will and the development of a habitus of virtue, the moral life is first and foremost a response to gratia sanens, healing grace: without grace our appetite is not rectified, and no virtue in its integrity can be developed. To put it as bluntly as possible: to be moral is to respond to grace. In de Koninck’s account, Mary consented to the unique grace offered her by God to become the principle of all grace, inasmuch as Christ came to us through her, and Christ gives us all grace, and so all grace comes to us through her. A human creature, free from the instant of her conception from all stain of original sin - and thus perfected in grace already - was offered a superabundant, in fact utterly singular, grace by God: to become the Mother of the whole order of grace.

De Koninck spends section 19 of Ego Sapientia detailing a resume of the natural inferiority of human nature: “In order to gauge the height and depth of what God has chosen to make manifest outside Himself, we must see the baseness of the nature He has elevated above all other creatures.”^[20] He begins by reviewing the sublimity of the angels as separated intellectual substances, whose natural knowledge is so perfect that even in the lowest stratum of the angelic hierarchy, the angel “constitutes by himself a universe incommensurably more perfect than the cosmos and humanity combined.”^[21] The human being, when considering the ‘other’ myriads upon myriads of species of rational creatures which he cannot see, but which are in some sense his only brethren in creation likewise possessing a rational intellect and free will, becomes intensely conscious of his own place “at the confines of being,”^[22] where his cognition is discursive and imperfect, about as far as possible from the sublimity of the angels’ natural knowledge. Indeed, in the hierarchy of creatures possessing a rational intellect and free will, the human being is truly of the lowest tier.^[23] Furthermore, man has within his being, as a result of original sin, a “contrariety” that St. Paul familiarly describes as the rebellion of flesh against spirit, where “he is principally drawn toward the sensible good against the good of intelligence.”^[24] By filling out this portrait of the human being in his naturally inferior condition (both in his integral nature and sub conditione peccati) to the pure spirits, de Koninck establishes a legitimate lens through which to understand the otherwise baffling statement of the Song of Songs, applied mystically to the Virgin, that “I am black, but beautiful” (1:4).^[25] In de Koninck’s words, “considering ourselves in our natural condition…we are already black enough.”^[26]

To further His glory, God has chosen to elevate the rational, free intellectual creature (both men and angels) to the vision and enjoyment of Himself. De Koninck specifies that God could have done this in two ways: via an immediate and direct offer of glory needing only an assent on the part of the creature (this is how God interacted with the angels), or, by entering Himself into His creation in a divine mission, and assuming a created nature into His own person. The latter is the object of a more glorious manifestation of “the mercy of His omnipotence,” because the abasement of God in such a mission is all the more worthy of our thanksgiving.^[27] Having chosen from all eternity to send Himself into His creation in a hypostatic union, God chose to assume the human nature rather than the angelic nature, once again because the abasement of God displayed in the assumption of a nature almost infinitely inferior to that of the pure spirit is praised to greater glory.^[28] God could have assumed the lesser human nature either by direct creation (a la the creation of Adam), or, He could have entered the world in the natural way: through a human mother. De Koninck strikingly points out that by choosing the latter, God rendered His mother to be a true principle of Himself.^[29] God could never have proceeded from an angelic nature in the kenotic manner in which He chose to proceed from the Virgin Mary, both because the angel has a perfection surpassing the ‘meanness’ of human generation—and yet it was God’s will to assume human nature in its entirety—and because the angel lacks the supreme perfection of eternal generation within the Godhead, which would be the only true alternative to Incarnation by human generation.^[30] So then, in the Virgin Mary, we find God willing to bind the sublimity of His own substance to the meagerness of human nature as a fitting term for His mercy, accenting the incomparable humility which would be required of the Virgin Mother who would bear Him.

The depths of de Koninck’s sublime penetration into the unfathomable mystery of the fall of the angels departs in counterpoint to the pattern of Mary as Principle of the Incarnate God and Queen of Mercy. Lucifer was shown the depths of the order of grace, the features of the new order in which he would find himself if elevated to the vision of the divinity. In his pride he came to believe that this supremely gratuitous order of grace which he was being invited to submit himself to would usurp his natural rights as the highest of pure spirits and as a true “first principle.”^[31] Because he, by nature, could compass the whole creation in the excellence of his own being, “reach[ing] from one end of the universe to the other,”^[32] he blinded himself from the wisdom of the divine providence, which would in the course of time, in a still more excellent way (1 Cor. 12:31) compass not only the known universe, but every possible universe, by bridging the gap between creation and Creator in the hypostatic union of the divine with the base human nature, so that the Mother of God would herself, by the offer of supreme grace, become that Wisdom “which extends from one end to the other [Wis. 8:1]”.^[33] Lucifer beheld his own natural beauty, as a perfect intellectual creature of the highest order, governing and ordering all the other pure spirits beneath him. When he looked at the order of grace which the Lord had promulgated and shown him, he saw in it nothing but a threat and an insult to his own beauty, which he falsely understood in an utterly individualistic manner, as his “singularity,” his natural portion due to him and him alone. For Lucifer, if elevation to the visio entailed subsuming his perfect natural excellence to the good of a higher order, then he did not want such elevation.

Lucifer’s infamous Non serviam followed. So it came to pass that at the beginning of time, the perfect, purest, and most worthy creature was foiled by the twin mystery which would, later in salvation history, make possible the greatest elevation of an almost infinitely inferior nature: humility and mercy, the two principles by which Mary herself would give her fiat to the order of grace, and became herself a principle, Dei genetrix. Indeed, Lucifer saw the order of grace not as gift, but as a usurpation of his inheritance. The Virgin, on the other hand, saw the order of grace and responded with active receptivity, with true humility and obedience, questioning only how this should come to pass, for she considered herself supremely unworthy. Lucifer denied the offer of serving a still higher good than his own perfect natural good, so God turned to the greatest negation possible, assuming human nature through a human mother who had denied herself, to foil Lucifer’s negation, which had enchained all creation from the foundation of the world.^[34] This is the unquenchable rivalry that exists between the fallen Morning Star and the Star of the Sea, the Queen of Mercy.

In summary, de Koninck in Ego Sapientia fills out two key moral models for the Catholic, one the model to flee from, the other the model to conform one’s life to. If Aristotle was correct that it truly is the business of the wise man to order well,^[35] then in Lucifer and the Virgin we encounter two diametrically opposed approaches to order.

Part II: The Black Hole of the Private Good and the Big Bang of the Common Good in The Primacy of the Common Good against the Personalists

Turning now to The Primacy of the Common Good against the Personalists, the primary thesis of this essay is that what both grave errors with respect to the ordering of society towards the good have in common—totalitarianism, on the one hand, and personalism/hyper-individualism, on the other—is a fundamental misunderstanding of the common good as some sort of alien good, a good not intrinsically linked to the good of a particular person.^[36] Rightly understood, the common good is the most intrinsic and communicable good there is, a good by its nature more communicable to many, one that is truly good for and intrinsic to the particular person because it is capable of being shared in by a community, including such things as justice, bounty, truth, beauty: “The common good is better for each of the particulars that participate in it insofar as it is communicable to the other particulars: communicability is the very reason of its perfection.”^[37] It is not hard to see from such a definition how and why the common good of the universe forms the basis of the eternal law, the natural law that participates the eternal, and, in an elevated way, the lex novum of grace, the divine law. If God is a Trinity wherein the Father eternally communicates Himself to His Son, and the communication between them is Himself the Divine Person of the Holy Spirit—and the Trinity communicates itself ad extra in the act of creation—how could it be that a good which by its very nature is founded upon communicability be anything other than a divine good? This is the speculative framework underlying St. Thomas’ subversive^[38] assertion that “the common good of the whole universe,...is God” (ST I-II, q. 109, a. 3, Respondeo).

What both totalitarians and personalists get wrong about the common good is that because it is ‘larger’ and presumably ‘other’^[39] than the private, singular good, it is necessarily alien to the particular individual who possesses the private, singular good. The totalitarian will respond by saying that the particular individual must sacrifice his own good for the good of some collective abstractly considered,^[40] in a sham imitation of the common good that perversely claims to act in its name.^[41] The personalist will respond by exalting his individual, singular, private good over the common good, preferring the former to the latter. If we read how de Koninck explains the applicability of the common good to the particular individual—whereby it is better for the individual than the individual’s private good, precisely because it is communicable to many—we can logically reach the conclusion that de Koninck himself explicitly draws: Lucifer and the other fallen angels completely failed to see exactly this. They misapprehended the common good as an alien good and rejected it in preference for their private, singular good, resulting in their caving in upon themselves like dying stars, incurvatus in se. This is why de Koninck can say with all seriousness that “[t]he sin of the angels was a practically personalist error.”^[42] De Koninck recognizes in totalitarianism the diabolical hand of the Enemy at work, deceiving the masses in a misapprehension of the common good that is simultaneously a demonic act of vengeance against God for having executed judgment upon Lucifer’s primordial personalism.^[43]

If we take de Koninck’s argument in both essays seriously, we ought to come to the conclusion no creature has more perfectly ordered itself to the uncreated common good, that is God, more perfectly sought to gain the uncreated common good, in the vision of God,^[44] or more perfectly led its fellow creatures to both of the former, than the Virgin Mary. The Blessed Mother is the exact opposite of Lucifer and his foil in the mind of God. She ordered her entire being to the will of the Most High, Who had ‘designs of mercy’ upon her like He had on no other man or angel, so that, despite her lack of knowledge of the means, she consented to the beginning of the order of grace in her womb. Mary spent every moment of her life subsuming her own singular good to the good of the Son Whom she bore, and in Whose face she came as close as humanly possible to the visio this side of heaven. She diffused the Good that was her Son and God to every human person by consenting both to His Incarnation and His self-immolation on the cross. On that latter point, it is on account of that perfect diffusion of her Son that she can be said to be the most perfect created being.^[45] Indeed, the logical upshot of reading these two essays together could very well be the assertion that just as Sirach puts on the Virgin’s lips, ‘I, Wisdom,’ so de Koninck implicitly puts on her lips, ‘I, the Common Good.’ As predicating the former was not to deny, but to affirm, Mary’s dependence upon the eternal, Incarnate Wisdom that is her Son, so predicating the latter is not to deny, but to affirm, that Christ her Son is that universal good most communicable to all. Indeed, it is to her that man must look if he seeks fellowship with her Son. It is at her side only that man can look up to see the Crucified One and receive His mercy. It is she whose personal good was subordinated under that peerless title ‘Woman,’ who became the Mother not of one singular disciple only, but of all those called by the name beloved, interceding for them in order that divine filiation may be communicated to them, through her supremely effectual maternal intercession.^[46] De Koninck gives us ample ground to affirm that the Virgin Mary is, for us, the created exemplar of the common good^[47] which leads us to the uncreated and absolute common good, namely her Son, Whom she “most properly imitates.”^[48]

One could not think of a better foil, in the mind of God, to that being which by nature ought to have been the created exemplar of the common good, but which, because he considered himself God’s gift to men, ceased to be a common good at all, but instead became the barricaded private good of himself alone, and thus an abomination, even to himself.^[49] The great irony of all history, the unexpected twist in this order of providence, is that that being which feared the alienation of his own excellence was, in the order of grace that he so feared, replaced by a being naturally inferior, whose only fear was to alienate herself from God, and who thus made possible the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in her womb. He who should have been most excellent became most detestable, and she who should have been nothing in the eyes of men and angels became most excellent, entirely because she loved the good of her divine Son not as her private good, but as the beatific good of all men, for “[t]he excellence of the rational creature does not consist in the ability to escape order, but in his ability to will that order in which he ought to be.”^[50] By grace, in her Fiat, Mary willed the order in which she ought to be, the order in which we all ought to be: the order of grace, where we enjoy the good that is her Son, Who became bread from heaven that is communicable to all.

Conclusion

Taken together, Ego Sapientia and The Primacy of the Common Good against the Personalists teach us that the end goal of human life is happiness with God, that such happiness calls us up and out of ourselves and only thus truly fulfills us, and that that happiness can be ours if we follow the path of charity, obedience, humility, and wisdom laid down for us by that humble handmaiden of Nazareth, whom God chose from all eternity to be made more capable than the entire created universe (1 Kings 8:27)—and, for that matter, more capable than every possible universe—of housing and co-working with Him Who orders the universe sweetly, and Who thus brings about the greatest happiness of every living creature.^[51] Thank you, God bless you.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Koninck, Charles. Ego Sapientia: The Wisdom That is Mary (1943). In The Writings of Charles De Koninck, vol. 2, edited and translated by Ralph McInerny. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.

—. The Primacy of the Common Good against the Personalists (1943). In The Writings of Charles De Koninck, vol. 2, edited and translated by Ralph McInerny. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.

Emery, O.P., Gilles. The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God. Translated by Matthew Levering. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011.

Hancock, Curtis. Book review. The Writings of Charles De Koninck, vol. 2. International Philosophical Quarterly 50, no, 4 (Dec. 2010). 509-511.

Sheen, Fulton. “Life is Worth Living | Episode 79 | His Last Words | Fulton Sheen.” YouTube video. Uploaded by Vision Video. 36:33-40:29. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdC04lsgdso.

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