Wesley within the Augustinian Thomist Tradition

Michael Lodahl’s analysis of the Wesleys’ grace before meal grace before meal rightfully highlights the relationship between creation and sanctification in Wesley’s thought. Lodahl recognizes that an extrinsic understanding of grace to creation fundamentally distorts Wesley’s teaching. Yet Lodahl seems to place the Wesleyan text into a univocal system of signs in which, like Plotinus, “earth and all its creatures, while remaining what they truly are as particular, unique, material creatures, become at the same time ladders and pointers toward the Creator and Goal of all” (p. 164). Lodahl reads Wesley as speaking to “wondrous picture of creation’s possibilities . . . at the heart of a Wesleyan reading of the world” (p. 165). Nature becomes that which is given, that which God, the One at the head of the univocal ontological system, uses to interact with humanity to take us to God through a mutual “in-fluence for what it is: the presence of a fellow creature, gifted to us by God for us to love, through whom God draws near to us and through whom we may draw near to God” (p. 165). Ironically, Lodahl therefore provides an inversion of the ontological system that he rightfully criticizes. Nature still operates as “an autonomous sphere which does not need to turn to theology for its self-understanding, and yet it is already a grace imbued sphere, and therefore it is upon pre-theological [science] . . . that theology must be founded.” Lodahl reads Wesley to embrace the givenness of creation that God then utilizes through the hierarchical flow amongst creation to bring humanity to God on the “’road’ of trafficking between Creator and creation” (p. 164).

Wesley’s commitment to the classically Augustinian ontology, presupposed by his use of the concepts of “use” and “enjoy” embraces creation, but never as autonomous in any fashion (which as Wesley recognizes, serves as a “practical atheism”). Ironically, the Augustinian ontology that Wesley presupposes is much more radically “relational” than the relational theologians within the Wesleyan tradition. Only God’s Being is necessary; creation is always radically contingent for Wesley. There is no “road” to God; one may “use” creation, but only by accepting it as gift, never given, in order to “enjoy” God because of all creations presence “in” God. God’s relationality with creation is established in the eternal, unchangeable God, not in the mutable creation; God’s unchangeable, constant relation of Love to creation as Creator, the distinction without a difference, allows humans to use the creation to enjoy the Creator. Given the reality of human fallenness, creation demands the moral therapy grounded in the condescension of God in the fully divine, fully human hypostatic union that is Jesus Christ so that humans might learn its proper role in witnessing to the glories of God.

To argue that Wesley has a fundamental Augustinian framework is not to remove him from the tradition of moral theology represented in Thomas Aquinas as argued by D. Steven Long. Wesley wrote long before Tillich argued that Augustine and Thomas represent two fundamentally different “philosophies of religion.” Once the influence of modernist categories had been extracted from the neo-Thomist readings of Thomas, scholars such as Henri de Lubac and Alasdair MacIntrye have more adequately read Thomas within, rather than against, the Augustine tradition. Wesley also wrote before Eastern Orthodox thinkers sought to define themselves distinct from the West by reading Thomas against, rather than in profoundly impacted by the Eastern tradition as a result of Leo X’s recommendation of Thomas in Vatican I. Yet Thomas “read widely and sympathetically in the Greek Fathers (albeit in Latin translations), and drew on them extensively in the Summa theologiae and other synthetic works (where Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus get the most attention), and also in his biblical commentaries (where John Chrysostom assumes particular importance).”

Ironically, the place where the confluence of the Augustinian and Eastern impact on Thomas comes precisely in his soteriology as deification, i.e., the necessary healing of humanity so that humanity might learn to use creation in order to enjoy God in the human being return to God. In language that mediates between Wesley and Augustine, Aquinas writes:

For we must bear in mind that everlasting life consists in the enjoyment of God. Now the human mind's movement to the fruition [enjoyment] of the Divine good is the proper act of charity, whereby all the acts of the other virtues are ordained to this end, since all the other virtues are commanded by charity. Hence the merit of life everlasting pertains first to charity, and secondly, to the other virtues, inasmuch as their acts are commanded by charity. So, likewise, is it manifest that what we do out of love we do most willingly. Hence, even inasmuch as merit depends on voluntariness, merit is chiefly attributed to charity (I-II Q. 114 a.4c.; www.newadvent.org/summa/2114.htm).

Aquinas’ discussion of the final end of humanity presupposes the Augustinian framework of use and enjoy conjoined to an Aristotelian virtue ethics (cf. Summan Theologica I-II). Wesley stands deeply within such a tradition of theological reasoning, an Augustinian Thomist moral theologian as the head of a “new religious movement” within the church catholic. It is thus not an accident that if Methodism and its heir are “’an ecclesial renewal movement in search of a Church’ . . . One could perhaps equally refer to the Roman Catholic Church as a church searching for ecclesial renewal movements.”

If the above argument holds, to be true to Wesley we must move the Wesley text out of the modernist, univocal relational ontology that seeks to mediate the Christian faith to the contemporary world, an apologetic move to make a “John Wesley for today.” Wesley emerges as a not particularly sophisticated early exemplar of important retrievals of the evangelical, catholic, and orthodox faith found in 20th century Roman Catholicism in the Nouvelle Theologie, developed and continued in post-Vatican II “Augustinian Thomism.” In more academic, less ecclesial circles, Wesley’s Augustinian Thomism brings the Wesleyan tradition into conversation with aspects of so-called “Radical Orthodoxy,” and analytic Thomism as represented in both theological and philosophical manifestations. Even Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVIth bears important affinities to the fundamental theological structures and concerns within the Wesley text. To place the Wesley text into these fundamentally catholic texts would require a fundamental shift in the textual networks in which and by which Wesleyan theologians understand themselves today. In the end, however, it may result in readings of Wesley that are much truer to Wesley’s text, allow more coherent and truthful overcoming of problems, intellectual, ecclesial, and practical, within the Wesleyan tradition, and provide a resource to help the church catholic work towards a visible unity. All the while, such a re-positioning of the Wesleyan tradition would put its intellectuals and academic institutions into some of the most important, profound, significant intellectual conversations in the Western world today – given, of course, the marginalization of theological discourse within the Western academy per se.

Most importantly, however, reading Wesley amidst these textual networks returns the Wesley text to its origin intent – a renewal of the church catholic through exhorting human beings to a “faith that works by love” in order to experience “holiness and happiness,” i.e., the enjoyment of God in this age and forever in life everlasting. The Augustinian Thomist Wesley places him accurately exactly where he was – one to renew the church catholic from the center of the evangelical, catholic, and orthodox tradition. Wesley never saw himself as a founder of a distinct tradition within the church catholic, especially one that eventually see him as the founder of an ecclesial brand name to support various franchises of ecclesial institutions. Wesley as an Augustinian Thomist opens the Wesleyan tradition to old/new vistas that intellectuals that consciously work within it have only begun to realize.