God’s predicates in the discourse of transcendental Thomism

Is it possible within the framework of transcendentalist epistemology to speak about the knowability and knowledge of metaphysical reality, to name God in some way and to articulate His attributes? The article analyses the methodological and conceptual efforts of the most prominent representatives of the so-called transcendental Thomism, the philosophical and theological movement of catholic thought of the 20th century, to positively resolve these questions in a debating dialogue with Kantianism and existential-phenomenological forms of modern philosophical thinking. The author begins by briefly outlining the general principles of the transcendental approach, centred primarily on the a priori conditions of the subject’s cognition and on the spontaneous intentional activity of his consciousness. At the same time, the possibility of justified theological discourse on these grounds is considered, although the problematics of its affiliation with classical Thomism is pointed out. As one of the first significant attempts, the concept of J. Maréchal is presented, in which the epistemological and metaphysical aspects are combined through the identification of the intellect’s incessant striving towards the infinite horizon of being and the analytics of the acts of judgment by analogia entis about the true being. The development of this configuration in theological terms is then examined in the teachings of K. Rahner and B. Lonergan, who sought to justify in a cognitive-anthropological way the admissibility and possibility of a categorical, objectified speech about God, to present ways of creating divine predicates relevant to the transcendental paradigm. At the same time, the article highlights the difficulties of this kind of predication, connected both with the fundamental inaccessibility of transcendental reality for full rational comprehension and with the variety of names given to it by people in analogical correlation with the particularities of religious and life experience. This circumstance determines the dialectic of expressibility and inexpressibility: on the one hand, God’s predicates are considered as metaphysical fulfillment of transcendental ideas and aspirations of the human mind; on the other hand, they are derivative and have an antinomian character. Although the formation of divine predicates in transcendental Thomism cannot be completely reduced to psychological and rational extrapolation, since they have a metaphysical origin in the person’s a priori knowledge of the sacred Mystery, their metaphysical nature is nevertheless correlative.