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”Footnote 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.Footnote 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…”Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁸ If there were an “ordinary sense” in which subsistere meant simple existenceFootnote ⁹ 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.”Footnote 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:

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.