SACRAMENTS OF THE INCARNATE WORD - ETD - University of ...

hierarchies in Thomas’s thought, as a principled imitation of God’s own wise formation
of the faithful. At one level, Jordan identifies the pattern in Thomas’s situation of the
various disciplines of human learning vis à vis theology; that, for instance, beginning
students rightly start with “logic, then mathematics, then natural philosophy, then moral
matters,” all of which precede “the things of wisdom, divine things,” which are meant to
be experienced. 51 In this view, “the members of the hierarchy of scientiae” may be said to
function as “discourses in their own right” that nonetheless “participate finally in the first
member of their hierarchy,” namely, God’s own knowledge or scientia, the “ground
and... completion” of all others. 52 And Jordan is not shy about drawing a polemical
consequence of the foregoing: that “philosophy” names “the unfulfilled condition of
wisdom under paganism,” so that “a Christian can only conceive living philosophically as
a prelude to the life of grace.” 53
Jordan also identifies the pattern of textual hierarchy as an organizing feature
within Thomas’s theology. In the first question of the Summa, for instance, Thomas
assumes the possibility and the fittingness of organizing “inherited theological languages
into a unified rhetorical structure that points,” and more particularly guides, the student
51 “Writing Secrets,” Rewritten Theology, p. 175.
52 Ordering Wisdom: The Hierarchy of Philosophical Discourses in Aquinas (Notre Dame:
UNDP, 1986), p. 83. Cf. ST I 1, 1 ad 2 for a characteristic prooftext for the point: “nothing prohibits
discussing the same thing both as the philosophical disciplines understand it, i.e. by the light of natural
reason, and as another science understands it, i.e. by the light of divine revelation.” Or again: “that which is
treated among the different philosophical sciences can, by this one sacred doctrine, be considered under one
order (sub una ratione), as these various matters are taken as ‘revealable’ of divinity (divinitus revelabilia)”
(ST I 1, 3 ad 2).
53
“Writing Secrets,” p. 177. Jordan draws this particular consequence in nearly every essay in
Rewritten Theology.
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