Friars of the Immaculate: A Primer on the Absolute Primacy of Christ

I still haven't read The Universal Primacy of Christ. Aquinas argues from Sacred Scripture that the motive of the Incarnation was for the restoration of human nature. He does not say that it is impossible that the Word would have become incarnate even if there had been no sin, but that we have not been told that this is the case.

Why are mathematicians prone to explaining everything through math?

His official website.
Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science
Wolfram Research: Mathematica, Technical and Scientific Software
Wolfram Blog



Reflections on Stephen Wolfram's 'A New Kind of Science'

Edward Feser, ID, A-T, and Duns Scotus: A further reply to Torley

James Chastek, An interpretation of “all I have written is straw compared to what I have seen”

The most well-known story of St. Thomas’s life is that he stopped writing a few months before he died, saying that “all that I have written was like straw compared to what I have seen”. The experience is difficult to judge for several reasons: the reference to “straw” commands most of the attention, but it’s not clear exactly what this means; but also- and more simply- we don’t know what he saw. It’s hard to understand something being “straw” in comparison to X without knowing what X is.

We do, however, know the modes of the things he is comparing, and this is significant. “What is written” is a certain mode of knowledge; “what is seen” is another. What is the nature of each of these modes, and what might they tell us about why the things in the mode of writing were “straw”?

Writing sets the role of making in knowledge in bold relief. Words are human artifacts, as are the letters one creates to record them, and the author himself must make the order among the words. All this making is to communicate the primordial making of the human agent intellect, which makes a concept in conjunction with the object as an exterior principle. By way of contrast, angels don’t need to make the word (or species) by which they know, since the word is simply innate to them (and thus it can’t be called a concept); and God need not make the word he knows since he simply is that word.

All this making of that which is known is opposed to pure intuition, which is most of all manifest to us in sight. The sensible object requires no cognitive act to make it sensible. This absence of making in knowledge is called intuition, and in the measure that our understanding is less the product of making it is more intuitive. Thus, the higher the intellect, the more intuitive it is, and the less it is characterized by the need to make that by which it sees. All this making of our intellect, therefore, is really just a shadow of intellectual non-making, that is, of the pure intuition of higher intellects and disembodied souls. It is this pure intuition that most deserves the name “see”; and taken in this sense, human beings see only in a very roundabout and shadowy way. What we long for is the effortless intuition of the in corporeal or disembodied intellects, which can simply see science as opposed to having to make it after a very long initiation process. This making process is most of all manifest in”writing”; and in this sense we all long to throw aside our writing and simply see. St. Thomas’s desire to stop writing, in other words, is natural and common to all of us. St. Thomas, however, had that desire fulfilled in this life, while the rest of us have to wait.

Zenit: Archbishop Speaks on Aquinas and Universities
"We Must Reaffirm the Passion for Truth That Animated St. Thomas"

The Treasonous Clerk: “See, I Am Doing Something New”: John Paul II’s Summons to Secular Being, by James Matthew Wilson

The pope’s summons proves extremely daunting: he wants a philosophy attentive to metaphysics in order to reground modern theology in a concern with reality—with objective and absolute truth. But, in 1998, he finds no one (or few) in contemporary philosophy turned toward the questions of being. Who any longer treats philosophy as founded in its sapiential dimension—that is, in its drive to explore the foundational human questions all persons need answered if they are to live fully (§81)? And who endeavors to arrive at philosophy’s “genuinely metaphysical range” (§83), its concern with being, with what is real? And so Fides et Ratio makes an intervention in philosophy in hopes of building up a population of philosophers who might, someday and in turn, help to rebuild modern theology as a discipline attentive to the foundations of reality rather than merely the phenomena of history or experience. Beyond analytic and Continental philosophy, we need, as it were, a renewal of “plain old-fashioned philosophy.”
Emblem of the Papacy

Thus, the provisional nature of this encyclical. It makes insightful arguments about the history of religions and intellectual inquiry in general; it recovers a reading or narrative of history often dismissed as the alibi of an anti-modern Church; but in doing so it primarily makes the case for others to begin a new work: the rediscovery of human life as an intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage whose terrain is always what is real (being) and whose horizons are the specific historical revelation of God’s Word and the “infinite mystery” of God Himself (§14). We are asked to rediscover that the reason of “separate philosophy” leads finally to despair of reason. If, on the contrary, we recognize that reason is preceded by faith (as we experience, for instance, in the already present desire to know the truth about ourselves) and that reason is completed by faith (reason opens onto truths that, finally, surpass it and that it can see in only fragmented fashion) (§13)—we discover something grand. Reason participates in the human being’s circular journey from the gift of being and the gift of revelation toward a theological understanding of those gifts. It is man’s natural means of searching for a truth that ultimately transcends human life and reason alike and brings all searching to an end (§73).

Fr. Benedict Ashley has written that Thomism has neglected the historical dimension of being, but it is not clear to me how this can be the case if philosophy is to attain to the Aristotelian ideal of episteme and sophia. The contingent may be helpful in helping us understand natures and causes, but there cannot be a science of the contingent as such. While Pope John Paul II is correct that we are in need of metaphysics, Fr. Ashley rightly reminds those who desire to know that we must first have an adequate physics.

Edward Feser: Dembski rolls snake eyes and the actual response.

Edward Feser, Cudworth and Fuller respond

One of the comments at WWWTW:

30. In order to maintain the unity of body and soul clearly taught in revelation, the Magisterium adopted the definition of the human soul as forma substantialis (cf. Council of Vienne and the Fifth Lateran Council). Here the Magisterium relied on Thomistic anthropology which, drawing upon the philosophy of Aristotle, understands body and soul as the material and spiritual principles of a single human being. It may be noted that this account is not incompatible with present-day scientific insights. Modern physics has demonstrated that matter in its most elementary particles is purely potential and possesses no tendency toward organization. But the level of organization in the universe, which contains highly organized forms of living and non-living entities, implies the presence of some "information." This line of reasoning suggests a partial analogy between the Aristotelian concept of substantial form and the modern scientific notion of "information." Thus, for example, the DNA of the chromosomes contains the information necessary for matter to be organized according to what is typical of a certain species or individual. Analogically, the substantial form provides to prime matter the information it needs to be organized in a particular way. This analogy should be taken with due caution because metaphysical and spiritual concepts cannot be simply compared with material, biological data.

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20040723_communion-stewardship_en.html

Which reveals two things, to a Thomist -- a Catholic theologian cannot do without adequate training in philosophy, especially physics, if he is to speak of natural things. Secondly, one must look at the causes of natural things in order to judge what others speak of them. While it may be easy for those of some intelligence to look for corresponding concepts, it is unfortunate that they do not see the problem with saying DNA is the formal cause of a human body, which can lend support to a dualistic understanding of human nature. Catholic intellectuals have lost much in the last century.

James Chastek, Notes on Thomism and ID

Wolfgang Smith has a new book out from Sophia Perennis, according to Amazon, but it is not listed on the Sophia Perennis website yet -- Science and Myth: What We Are Never Told.

NLM: R.I.P. Cardinal Tomas Spidlik

Public Discourse: Free Will and Biology, by William Carroll

Biological reductionism doesn’t disprove the notion of free will.

Edward Feser, ID theory, Aquinas, and the origin of life: A reply to Torley
(via WWWTW)

De unione ecclesiarum: Notes on a text by Severian of Gabala

For this reason, I also brought up the point about the Turban and the Tiara. No, I do not possess any special information about threats to Christianity. I do know that the European Union, by its economic policies, has brought about in a few decades a demographic transformation of Western Europe that appears to be irreversible, and that Mehmed the Conqueror and Suleyman the Magnificent would have found very gratifying. How to respond to that transformation in a genuinely Christian manner is obviously a difficult and complex question; but it is one issue among many that raise for me profound concerns about the future of Christianity — indeed, I think that anyone who is informed about the present state of the world ought to be concerned about the future of humanity itself. A healing of the division between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches seems to me a most urgent need if the Church is to give a credible, united witness to its faith before a sceptical and cynical world. I agree with you that the Fourth Crusade was a gross crime (although the murder of some thousands of Venetians in Constantinople a few years earlier was not the work of angels!). I do not agree with you that the policy of unionists like Bekkos had mainly secular motivations, or that it was an abandonment of the faith of the fathers, or that it was in any way to blame for the fall of the Byzantine state. The last Byzantine emperor, who died defending the walls of Constantinople, was a unionist, and an Orthodox saint. And when you say, “there was no Greek nation at that time,” it is clear that you misunderstand what the English word “nation” means: it does not refer chiefly to a political entity, but to an historical, linguistic, and cultural one, to a people. In that sense, there certainly existed a Greek nation at that time, and it certainly became enslaved. I think that men like Joseph Bryennios and Mark of Ephesus bear some share of the responsibility for that catastrophe, by helping to make Christian reconciliation impossible by their polemics. And those who continue those polemics will bear some responsibility before the throne of Christ for the next catastrophe, whenever and wherever it comes.

MB recommended this article: Critical Consideration of The Case for Clerical Celibacy, by Anthony T. Dragani


And I found this: Migne's Patrologia Graeca - emule links.

Alice von Hildebrand on Female Chastity

Laura Wood cites Alice von Hildebrand

But let’s consider female chastity on a spiritual and moral plane. As Alice von Hildebrand has wrote in her essay, “The Privilege of Being a Woman,” the woman is a secret garden. Her sexual organs themselves are veiled and enclosed, which signifies their sacred dimension. Her body is the scene of creation. Even a woman who has never conceived or cannot conceive possesses this physical holiness. If you view the conception of a human being as purely a material event, her body does not resonate with this higher meaning. But even hard-core materialists have a difficult time evading this truth. They too find themselves drawn to the mystery of feminine beauty. They cannot explain what it means or why sex is more spiritual and consequential to women than to men, why it affects them on a deeper level.

Here we arrive at an important point. Sex means more to a woman. She cannot be as casual about it as men without violating her nature. The emphasis on female chastity is not some crude patriarchal imposition, some power play by men, but cultural recognition of this truth and of the highest aspects of femininity. Hildebrand writes:

The union of body and soul is particularly close in a woman’s body. She is “incarnated” in her body in a special way. This is why, when she gives herself, she gives herself completely; when she stains herself, the stain is particularly damaging. (The Privilege of Being a Woman, 2002)

The emphasis on female chastity reflects the moral power of women. This is another essential point. The sphere of conscience and feeling belongs to woman. This is where she reigns. The springs of feminine goodness feed the culture at large; the drought inhibits. This is why it is more serious when a woman commits adultery. (It is very serious in a man too). In giving away her body alone, she betrays the trust that underlies all things and destroys the riches, the vestiges of that long lost Garden, dependent on her love and protection.

I should read Dr. von Hildebrand's book, but I think this is an illustration of phenomenology's weakness, in comparison with philosophical realism. It is proper to the female to be that which is being acted upon (or receiving) in coitus. The natural term (completion) of the sex act is within her. The feeling of bonding that results from the actual bond being achieved is a natural consequence of the act, when oxcytocin is released and so on. The male, on the other hand, brings about the term of the sex act when he ejaculates, or releases his semen into the female. The term of the sex act for the man is a "going out," not the "receivng of." It is only appropriate then that the psychology of sex differs for men and women.

The knowledge, physical reactions, and emotions that a woman has in relation to sex follows upon her role. The belief that sex should be reserved to someone special is not always linked to the awareness that she can get pregnant and must find someone who will stick around. Rather, she would find it offensive to her "dignity" or her "specialness" if she were to share herself with so many men, rendering herself a tool for their pleasure and nothing more. Sexual intimacy should be reserved because of the physical interiority. (Though there are some women who have become some disturbed to think that being promiscuous is ok since women should seek only pleasure from sex, just like certain men.) Women, by instinct (one that follows upon their awareness of their body and role in sex) tend to be sexually reserved, and they invest more meaning into sexually bonding with a man (and we cannot forget that much of this is due to her psychological preparation that leads up to sex). It seems true that men must have a certain spiritual maturity to view sexual intimacy in the same way.

Still, I find the following to be imprecise, on the par of metaphorical language: "The union of body and soul is particularly close in a woman’s body. She is “incarnated” in her body in a special way." I think that eliciting this sort of "metaphysical" statement from the female sexual perspective is wrong. The emotions and understanding that a woman has of herself and her role follows upon her being a woman. If she "incarnated" in her body in a special way it is because she is a woman, and not a man.


On the Privilege of Being a Woman
Alice Von Hildebrand on Feminism and Femininity - Catholic Online


Started on March 15.

New titles froM CUA Press

The website.

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, (Translated by +Fabian Larcher, O.P., and +James A. Weisheipl, O.P., with introduction and notes by Daniel Keating and Matthew Levering)

Edward Grant, The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages

Steven J. Jensen, Good and Evil Actions: A Journey through Saint Thomas Aquinas

Paul Richard Blum, ed., Philosophers of the Renaissance (translated by Brian McNeil)

Paul J. Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar

Two by Fr. Rhonheimer: Vital Conflicts in Medical Ethics and The Ethics of Procreation and the Defense of Human Life: Contraception, Artificial Fertilization, and Abortion

New titles from UND Press

Forthcoming from University of Notre Dame Press:
1. Joshua P. Hochschild, The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia

2. Thomas F. O’Meara, O.P., Erich Przywara, S.J.: His Theology and His World

Edward Feser, “Intelligent Design” theory and mechanism. (See also the discussion at WWWTW.)

FPR has a precis of Lew Daly's God's Economy.

Mr. Daly writes, concerning subsidiarity:

I needn’t explain here the tendency among American conservatives to interpret subsidiarity as a Catholic version of the Republican Party’s libertarian agenda of dismantling government agencies and privatizing entitlements and services. Of course it means nothing of the kind: subsidiarity is not a theory of local control or minimal government; it is a theory delineating precisely the critical role of central government in assisting natural social structures, beginning with the family, when they are weakened in the order of society. The properly subsidiary role of the state is to support, for example, the family, without distorting or usurping its place in the order of creation or its purposes as given by God. Unlike the liberal welfare state, a subsidiary state recognizes the prior ground of family and other natural spheres and does not encroach on the legal and moral autonomy they derive from God; but unlike liberal anti-statism, the subsidiary state is responsible for protecting and supporting the natural spheres when they are violated within society or otherwise falter. For example, when wages fail to support workers and their families in their proper dignity, the sanctity of the family is violated and the state must intervene, either by strengthening the power of workers to extract higher wages from employers, or by compensating families directly out of the public purse. Against the moral anarchy created by “market laws” that push working families beneath their dignity, a properly subsidiary state delineates “justice” by strengthening the weaker spheres against the stronger, those given by God against those ordered by men. In upholding and protecting such “sphere sovereignty,” as the Kuyperians termed it, the state “brings stability to the land,” and this, Kuyper insists, is called “justice.”

In the background to modern subsidiarity teaching, the opponents of revolutionary liberalism at the dawn of the modern era understood the dialectical relationship between individualism and statism. The latter does not arise without the former’s destruction of all other forms of authority and protection within society. As Nisbet put it, “the state is a refuge for the moral consequences of individualism,” adding, further, that the new “laissez faire individualism” of the nineteenth century was not “the simple heritage of nature,” but rather a calculated, collaborative product of economic interests and centralized power:

It was brought into existence by the planned destruction of old customs, associations, villages, and other securities; by the force of the State throwing the weight of its fast-developing administrative system in favor of new economic elements of the population. And it was brought into existence, hardly less, by reigning systems of economic, political, and psychological thought, systems which neglected altogether the social and cultural unities and settled single-mindedly on the abstract individual as the proper unit of speculation and planning.

Does everyday use of analogy debase a language?

Common expressions that you'll hear in the United States include, "My bad," and "You're good." It's rather easy to decipher the meaning of these expressions and it is usually clear that the speaker is not speaking of a moral quality or attribute, but something else. Certainly these expressions show that the use of analogy is quite common in our language, even if we do not know that we are doing it unless we are prompted to reflection. Still, is this a sign that our language is in decline? Instead of saying, "My bad," or, "You're good," should we not retain more traditional expressions like, "My mistake, " and "You are fine."