Union Theories in Catholic Theology (1)

Abstract

Abstract This chapter shows how Scotus’s theory was developed by Jesuits and Scotists in the seventeenth century. Suárez agrees with Fonseca that subsistence should be classified as a mode. But pivotal was Suárez’s claim that the theory of modes might be extended to cover cases in which what needs explaining is the union of one thing with another. Some opponents of Scotus’s view had argued that the presence of an accident (a dependence relation) in the constitution of an object was inconsistent with that object’s being a person. Suárez attempts to salvage Scotus’s view by arguing that what is in fact present in the constitution of the incarnate divine person is a mode of union, something in the category of substance. And Suárez’s account of causation as the efflux of esse into an effect entails that there cannot be any merely unitive action. The chapter shows various ways in which the slightly later Jesuits Gabriel Vázquez and Giuseppe Ragusa proposed marginal alterations to Suárez’s account. The chapter concludes with discussion of two important Scotists: Juan de Rada and Bartholomeo Mastri. These theologians argue that the presence of a categorial accident in the constitution of an item is compatible with that item’s being a person. They reason that the union explains the divine person’s being a human being, and that this is compatible with the tie between the divine person and the human nature being an accident. Mastri attempts to work out which Aristotelian category the relation should be assigned to, and concludes that the appropriate categorization is as a habit (habitus) or vesture.