Subsistit in as a Specific Determination of Substantial Being in Lumen Gentium 8

Ἐπειδὴ τοίνυν ἡμεῖς ἠπορήκαμεν, ὑμεῖς αὐτὰ ἡμῖν ἐμφανίζετε ἱκανῶς τί ποτε βούλεσθε σημαίνειν ὁπόταν ὂν φθέγγησθε. δῆλον γὰρ ὡς ὑμεῖς μὲν ταῦτα πάλαι γιγνώσκετε, ἡμεῖς δὲ πρὸ τοῦ μὲν ᾠόμεθα, νῦν δ᾿ ἠπορήκαμεν…

“Tell us plainly, then, since we are in perplexity, what you wish to indicate when you say ‘being.’ For it is clear that you have been aware of this all along, whereas we formerly thought we knew, but are now perplexed.”

Plato, Sophist 244a

I. Introduction

The perplexity of Plato's Stranger over this most basic metaphysical question is almost certainly shared by anyone who has tried to follow the many and varied post-conciliar efforts to determine the precise meaning of subsistit in as it is used in Lumen Gentium no. 8.¹ Surveying the literature on the subject, one might reasonably conclude that the expression can mean so many things that for all intents and purposes it means nothing in particular. The scholarly controversy centers on how much—if any—technical or metaphysical weight the term is intended to bear in Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. Despite the fact that subsistere carries a demonstrably technical metaphysical meaning in the Church's dogmatic and theological tradition, scholars continue to disagree over whether Lumen Gentium 8 intends to convey anything ontologically specific by it. This situation is extraordinary inasmuch as we have a dogmatic constitution, whose very nature it is to clarify points of doctrine by way of definitive formulations, appearing to stand in need of clarification by the theologians whose speculative work it was presumably intended to guide.

Happily, authoritative amplifications of subsistit in have by no means been wanting. In fact the magisterium has repeatedly affirmed the technical and metaphysical character of subsistit in.² Be that as it may, these affirmations seem to have had remarkably little effect on those scholars who perseveringly insist that Lumen Gentium’s framers had no intention of situating the Church within an explicit order of being.³ And while the debate has necessarily raised countless ancillary questions, the guiding, if not always explicitly stated, concern has remained largely the same: Is the Church of Christ to be identified simpliciter with the Catholic Church, or is the Church of Christ somehow more universal—more catholic—than the Catholic Church? The question has proven to be as vexed as it is important. For, if we grant as an article of faith that the Church is one, is not Lumen Gentium rightly charged either (in the best case) with excessive and culpable subtlety or (in the worst) with arrant nonsense in declaring the Church is somehow in the Church?

This article will conclusively demonstrate that Lumen Gentium cannot escape either of these charges if subsistit in does not convey a real ontological specificity. In other words, if this expression communicates only that the Church of Christ is somehow in, but not coextensive with, the Catholic Church, then we are left with neither a genuine development of doctrine, nor a radically new ecclesiology, but with a tautological non-explanation. This largely negative conclusion is necessarily related to the more positive or constructive task of establishing not only the identity of the Church of Christ with the Catholic Church, but also the quite specific metaphysical sense in which subsistit in must be taken. So far from representing a shift away from a strict identification of Christ's Church with the Catholic Church, subsistit in gives that identification an even more definitive ontological signification.⁴ Simply put, subsistit in is not “weaker” than est, but rather discloses the precise way in which the Church of Christ is the Catholic Church.

II. Quid sit “Haec Ecclesia?”

From the time of the Council until the present there has been a considerable number of influential theologians who understand subsistit in to mean something less determinative than est. Francis A. Sullivan, to take a prime example, maintains that subsistere denotes nothing more technical or precise than “continues to exist in”⁵—a perfectly serviceable translation if the word is considered in itself. And, indeed, if the unica Christi Ecclesia that subsists in the Catholic Church were described only in terms of abstract qualities, notes, or characteristics, then surely there would be nothing less controversial than to say that these “continue to exist in” the Catholic Church, for any such qualities are either essential attributes or proper accidents of the Church. In other words, if the unica Christi Ecclesia were either a spiritual reality or a constellation of essential attributes that finds concrete expression in the Catholic Church (as well, presumably, in any genuinely ecclesial communion), then there could be no difficulty over the meaning of subsistere. But the immediate context of Lumen Gentium 8 simply does not allow for any such quasi-Platonist reading.

In fact, the unica Christi Ecclesia is identified less by its theological marks than by the historical events and persons that constitute its appearance in history: “This is the single Church of Christ, which in the Creed is professed as one, holy, catholic and apostolic, which our Savior, after his resurrection, commissioned Peter to shepherd (Jn 21:17), and him and the other apostles to extend and direct with authority (cf. Mt 28:18 f.), which he erected for all ages as ‘the pillar and mainstay of the truth’ (1 Tm 3:15).” It is impossible to overlook the fact that the historical details cannot be identified with just any ecclesial body or communion. The Church, as it is described here, is not reducible to a koinonia centered on Christ, formed by scriptural preaching, and vivified by valid sacraments. The first church-founding act of the risen Christ is, by this account, the commissioning of Peter. Peter's office, along with those of the apostles, appears as a sine qua non of the Church's existence and identity as “the pillar and mainstay of the truth.”

Significantly, paragraph 8 twice uses the demonstrative pronoun, haec. It is this Church that is more than the sum of its elementa, but is instead an organic unity that is identifiable by its special dominical establishment as a society in history (in hoc mundo ut societas constituta et ordinata.) The repetition of the demonstrative underscores the fact that what Christ established is indistinguishable from the historical existence of this particular society organized according to this particular polity. The only Christian communion that could be identified with this description of the unica Christi is the Roman Catholic Church. By their own doctrinal standards, no other ecclesial communion would even wish to be so identified. And even though all Christians accept on the authority of Scripture that the Church is the “pillar and mainstay of the truth,” apart from the Catholic Church, no particular society of Christians—in hoc mundo ut societas constituta et ordinata—has ever supposed it referred unambiguously to themselves. The fear, therefore, that the exclusive identity of the “one Church of Christ” and the Catholic Church threatens the bond of charity between Christians of differing communions is, therefore, wholly unfounded. This is because in both principle and practice no organized body of Christians could recognize itself in this description of the Church.

The Reformed creeds and confessions, to take but a single instance, confirm the point. The Belgic Confession (1566), the oldest doctrinal standard of the Christian Reformed Church, says nothing at all about those characteristics or founding acts by which the unica Christi Ecclesia is identified in Lumen Gentium 8.⁶ Peter's commission as shepherd of the universal Church, to say nothing of a dominically established apostleship, has no bearing on a classically Reformed ecclesiology. In other words, by the standard of their own confessional statements, no Reformed Christian ought to feel slighted by the exclusive identity of the Church of Christ as it is described in Lumen Gentium 8 and the Catholic Church. It appears the only Christians taking umbrage at exclusive identity are Roman Catholic theologians. And while this continues to have unhappy repercussions within the Catholic Church, it is typically regarded as a “tempest in a teapot” to Christians of other confessions.

III. Subsistere: a Determination of Esse

If, given the immediate context of Lumen Gentium 8, there are incontrovertible reasons to suppose that the unica Christi Ecclesia has a relation of identity to the Catholic Church, then it may well be asked why the council fathers did not simply put est where we find subsistit in. This question is, of course, the subject of more scholarly debate and magisterial teaching than any other single expression found in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. To rehearse here the history of those debates and the consequent magisterial clarifications would be to no purpose when excellent accounts already abound. Prescinding from the metaphysical questions, I endeavored to show in the section above the absurdity of proposing that the Church which Christ, following his resurrection, established as a concrete and particular society with Peter as its shepherd and the apostles as its authoritative teachers, subsists in, say, the Dutch Reformed Church. This much, at least, it certain: whatever subsistit in might mean, it cannot mean something less than est. It cannot refer to something that is both in the Catholic Church and mysteriously beyond it, since the description of the Church of Christ is concrete and historical and therefore empirically impossible to identify with any other ecclesial communions. No other Christian society answers to this description.

While the elementa outside the Catholic Church are not a thematic concern of this article, their existence is frequently advanced as an argument against the relation of identity. The commonness of this line of thinking is itself reason enough to treat it briefly here, if only to provide (with apologies to John Calvin) an “external help” to my principal arguments. That these elementa should somehow be an embarrassment to claims of identity reveals a profoundly mistaken view of what an element actually is. While an aggregate may be the sum of its parts, an organic unity is by definition irreducible to its constitutive elements. The elements of an organic whole may be found outside the thing itself, but insofar as they are separate they have lost their organic character. At best, they may be combined into new aggregates, but they can never re-form themselves into a genuine whole. Were that possible, we could discern no formal difference between an aggregate and an organic unity. An element is ipso facto a constitutive part a substance, that is, of an actually and independently existing unity. The elements of the Catholic Church which exist outside her visible boundaries cannot, qua elementa, constitute an ever-expanding number independent “churches,” but only communicate an imperfect participation in that organic whole of which they are properly elements.

To return to the meaning of subsistit in, the question at this juncture is not so much whether the unica Christi Ecclesia as it is identified in Lumen Gentium 8 is the Catholic Church, for it is manifest that that description cannot plausibly be taken to refer to any other Christian communion—nor does any such communion identify itself in this way. Rather, given the identity of the unica Christi Ecclesia and the Catholic Church, there remains only the matter of what subsistit in communicates that the simple est does not. According to a recent article by Christian Washburn, “many scholars on both sides of the subsistit in controversy assert the term is used in its ordinary sense of ‘to exist’ or ‘to continue to exist…”⁷ The problem with this is that subsistere does not seem ever to have had an “ordinary” sense at all. The closest we can get to subsistere in “the state of nature” is in a military context. In representative classical authors, subsistere, never denotes simple existence. Vergil, Caesar, and Livy (to name the more important authors) typically use it in its literal sense of “taking a stand, “standing fast,” or even “making a stand against.”⁸ If there were an “ordinary sense” in which subsistere meant simple existence⁹ one would expect to find it used by the writers in whose works the Latin language took its classical form. Yet that expectation must be disappointed, as it seems never to have been meant in some more general sense. Subsistere does indeed include the notion of existence, but it is the concrete existence of particular things, like nations, anchors, and cables—things that have substantial existence and stand firm against other substantial things which threaten them.

So, to subsist is not just “to be,” but rather to be in a determinate manner, or according to a particular mode. Again, this is the way it is used in its least philosophical sense. Yet its later and more technical employment in metaphysics and theology is in complete continuity with its pre-philosophical signification. This is not surprising, for, at least in classical philosophical realism, metaphysics purports to offer an explanatory account of the being of things. Metaphysics, in other words, is not noetically independent of ordinary experience, but is the science by which the ontic grounds of that experience are disclosed. When Caesar tells us that in the midst of the tempest, “neither the anchors nor the cables could hold fast (subsisterent),” he is not saying that these things could not go on merely existing, but that they were unable to hold fast in their proper tasks of anchoring and binding. To hold fast or to stand firm is not any sort of existing, but the kind of existing that things as such “go on doing.”¹⁰

This means that the supposed conflict between subsistere in its “ordinary” and metaphysical senses appears to have no foundation in the actual history of the word. Its use in metaphysics remains rooted in its commonsense and poetic signification. The primary and literal meaning of any word must always be the very ground of its further differentiation by philosophy and theology if these disciplines intend to say anything at all about being or beings.

It is necessary at this point to be explicit about the way in which subsistere signifies a determinate mode of existence in properly philosophical and theological contexts. Rather than looking yet again to the older scholastic writers, it may be useful to look to a more contemporary work by an emphatically modern Catholic thinker to see what philosophers and theologians typically mean by subsistent being. In 1964, the very year Lumen Gentium was promulgated, the Jesuit theologian, Bernard Lonergan wrote a Latin treatise on the Trinity which he used for his classes at the Pontifical Gregorian University. In the Pars Systematica of his De Deo Trino, Lonergan devotes an entire section to the meaning of subsistere. Thanks to the formal or stylistic economy imposed on him by the Gregorian's still-scholastic methodology, Lonergan's explanation is uncharacteristically lucid:

Many things are said to be, but they do not exist in the same way. There are chimeras, but these are only in the mind, and thus are conceptual beings. There are possible beings, but they are only in the potency of an agent or even of matter, and are therefore what can be rather than what are. There are accidents, but their mode of being is to be in something else, and therefore they “are in” rather than simply are. There are the constitutive principles of being, such as essence and existence, matter and form, substance and accident, potency and act; none of these themselves are, but by them something is. But besides all of the above, which are in a qualified way, namely, in the mind, or in the potency of something else, or in another, or as that by which another is, there are those things that are first and foremost said to be—minerals, plants, animals, humans, angels, God, the Father, the Son, the Spirit. Since all of these simply are and truly are, they are rightly given the special designation “subsistent.”

A subsistent, then, is that which is, it is distinguished from conceptual beings, possibles, accidents, and the constitutive principles of being.¹¹

If the unica Christi Ecclesia of Lumen Gentium 8 indeed subsists, it either has a per se existence ontologically independent of the Catholic Church, or it is the Catholic Church. Because orthodox Christianity knows but a single Church, only the latter alternative is conceivable. In other words, the “One Church of Christ” cannot be a constitutive principle of the Catholic Church or of any ecclesial communion.

III. Conclusion

At this point, the significance of subsistit in for the ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium comes into full view. If initially est was tried and found wanting for the purposes of the dogmatic constitution, it could not have been because there was predominant intention to break with the Church's traditional self-understanding, especially as it had been most recently set down in Pius XII's Mystici Corporis Christi.¹² As we have already seen, it makes no sense to suppose that the term was employed because it was more ecumenically open. It is also clear that the literal and pre-philosophical meaning of subsistere cannot be taken to mean simply “to exist,” but “to stand,” “stand firm,” etc.—essentially to stand or be as this individual thing, or substance. It is a “that which is” in an unqualified way, unlike the modes of being found in conceptual beings, possible beings, accidents, and the constitutive principles of being. So rather than attenuating the est of Mystici Corporis Christi, subsistit in intensifies it by identifying a precise way in which being is predicated of the unica Christi Ecclesia. Put simply, Pius's est is further determined as an “est qua…” The Church of Christ has no existence other than its concrete and subsistent existence in the Catholic Church. The notion that Christ's Church “continues to exist in,” or is constitutive of, any number of churches or communions leaves us finally with a chimerical being which no actual body of Christians could recognize as the Church.