William Richard OConnor - Natural Desire for God: Aquinas Lectures (Aquinas Lecture 13)
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Natural Desire for God: Aquinas Lectures (Aquinas Lecture 13)
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Under the Auspices of the Aristotelian Society of Marquette University
By The Rev. William R. O'Connor Professor of Dogmatic Theology St. Joseph's Seminary Dunwoodie, New York
MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY PRESS MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN 1948
Page iv
Nihil Obstat Gerard Smith, S.J., censor deputatus Milwaukiae, die 3 mensis Septembris, 1948
Imprimatur Moyses E. Kiley Archiepiscopus Milwaukiensis Milwaukiae, die 17 mensis Septembris, 1948
COPYRIGHT, 1948 BY THE ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY OF MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY
Page v
Prefatory
The Aristotelian Society of Marquette University each year invites a scholar to deliver a lecture in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas. Customarily delivered on the Sunday nearest March 7th, the feast day of the Society's patron saint, these lectures are called the Aquinas Lectures.
In 1948 the Society had the pleasure of recording the lecture of Reverend William R. O'Connor, S.T.L., Ph.D. It was delivered in the Marquette University High School Auditorium Sunday afternoon, March 7.
Father O'Connor was born in New York City in 1897. He attended the Cathedral College of that city before entering St. Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie, where he received his A.B. in 1920. Two years later, Father O'Connor was awarded the degree of S.T.L. at the North American College, University of Propaganda, Rome. He received his Ph.D. from Fordham University in 1943.
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Father O'Connor was ordained on December 3, 1922. After returning to the United States he served as a curate at Monticello, New York in 1923, and then spent eight years at Liberty, New York, in the same capacity. He became professor of dogmatic theology at St. Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie, in 1931, where he is stationed at present. He was appointed prosynodal judge of the Archdiocese of New York in 1936 and in 1940 was made vice-official.
Father O'Connor is a member of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the Catholic Biblical Association, and a director of the Catholic Theological society.
He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Nelson's Encyclopedia, Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, Thought, Theological Studies, The Jurist, The New Scholasticism, The American Ecclesiastical Review, The Homiletic and Pastoral Review, The Commonweal, The English Clergy Review, The Irish Ecclesiastical Record. Besides contributing to scholarly journals and periodicals, Father O'Connor has published three books:
Page vii
The Layman's Call, P. J. Kennedy and Sons, New York, 1942.
The Eternal Quest, Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 1947.
To these the Aristotelian Society takes pleasure in adding The Natural Desire for God.
Page 1
The Natural Desire for God
The doctrine of a natural desire for God has had an interesting history. It is important, however, not to get off to a false start in telling the story. We may, if we choose, go back to the dawn of philosophy and seek the origin of the doctrine in the efforts men made to discover a principle or source to account for the universe. Invariably accompanying these efforts was a doctrine of a natural tendency in things to return to the source from which they came. Are we dealing here with a doctrine of a natural desire for God?
I
After God and Philosophy we must be cautious about using the term God to designate a first philosophical principle. It is Gilson's
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contention that the Greeks before Aristotle did not identify God with highest reality.1 Water, air, fire, the indeterminate, may be first philosophical principles for the pre-Socratics, but they are not gods. The gods are "living powers, or forces, endowed with a will of their own, operating on human lives and swaying human destinies from above."2 Greek gods are never inanimate; they are always living and immortal beings that are related more to man than to the world at large. A first cause or principle, on the other hand, is a "universally valid explanation for all that is, has ever been, or ever shall be."3 No Greek before Aristotle ever thought of his God or gods in terms of such a principle.
This seems certainly to be the case with Plato, for whom highest reality lay in the realm of the forms, especially in the form of the Good. These forms, including the form of the Good, are not God; they are above the gods, and the form of the Good is even beyond being or essence.4 The gods of Plato are not forms but souls, living divine souls
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that differ in degree but not in kind from human souls. Plato's God is not the form of the Good but a soul that perfectly imitates the forms.5 As Demiurge he creates the world by putting order into pre-existing chaos.6 Because he is a living being, he can serve as a model for other living beings to imitate, but he is not the ultimate goal of their striving. Occupying a midway position between the forms and the sensible world, Plato's God is in a much better position to act as a model for living and even non-living beings than the far-off, static forms. He himself participates in the forms by way of imitation and exhibits in himself a perfect copy for the sensible world to copy in its turn.7
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