Perfect Particularity
Regular readers of this blog might remember some years back, I wrote a number of pieces riffing off RJ Snell’s excellent book, Acedia & Its Discontents. I have and still regard it as one of those intellectually compelling and also life-changing books that everyone must read.
This year, I am going through his latest offering Lost in the Chaos. The first two parts was an excellent engagement of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age in light of the reduction of our life world from that of creation to mere nature. Most intriguing was a segment on tradition that I hope to tease out in a later post.
What is relevant for this post was the third part of the book sought to provide a metaphysically (that is Thomistically) thick account of hope. While I am still in the early stages of that section, what stood out for me was the relation Thomas gives between being on the one hand and particularity on the other.
Contra the tendency of those who, following Plato (though Plato himself does not do this), tend towards a turning away from particulars in order to find perfection in transcendent forms, Snell suggests an approach in which perfection is found precisely in the things that we find imperfect, though with a couple of important nuances.
First, Snell draws our attention to two passages from Thomas, one from his Summa Theologica and the other from his Summa Contra Gentiles. In the first, Thomas writes that as natural beings we have:
…a natural inclination not only toward their own proper good, to acquire it…but also to diffuse their own goodness among others as far as possible (ST I.19.2).
In the second, Thomas speaks about perfection in this way:
It follows upon the superabundance proper to perfection as such that the perfection which something has it can communicate to another. Communication follows upon the very intelligibility of actuality (SCG III.64).
What Snell helpfully deduces from these two passages from Thomas is twofold.
The first is that the telos of the perfection of all things does not lie in the turning away from things as they are given. Rather, Snell says, perfection is something that is implied within the universal, but is communicated to and manifested in the particular. Snell uses the language of genus and species to denote respectively the universal and particular, saying that what is implied in the genus is then inclined towards and activated in the species. More than that, Snell says that the genus awaits the species and
…seeks it out, and does so by seeking itself out and communicating its own perfection to further specifications of perfection, and it seeks to communicate itself wholly and entirely to those specifications (137).
Moreover, Snell suggests (though not explicitly states) that the dynamic between the universal and the particular is one of kenotically donating itself over to the other. If the proper orientation of being is such that, as Snell says “to be is to act and to act is to give”, then the logic of kenotic self-emptying constitutes the DNA of perfection, thereby explaining why Christ’s own act of kenotic self-emptying is the perfection of human being. It is also why, as I mentioned in a previous article, that it is possible to conceive why at the eschatological end of all things, things themselves to not come to and end.
It is also why, as I implied in an article in a 2021 edition of Religions, that one’s identity is properly found when it is engaged in kenotic self-donation rather than egotistical self-imposition.
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