Responsibilities of a migrant. And who owes land?

The right to migrate is not the same as the right to join a political community. I've speculated before that the right to migrate is joined in part to land and other natural resources being common goods. One has the right to move elsewhere in order to supply for their physical needs. As a consequence, they can settle there and establish some sort of community. Because of man by nature is ordered to living in community, he should first of all move in a group, not individually or with a family. If he seeks to join another group, then he should find one with which he already has some social ties and shares a common culture, and while his request to be with them should probably be granted out of hospitality (guest-hospitality of the Greeks or what not), it is nonetheless provisional. His acceptance does not mean that he is entitled to the full rights and benefits of citizenship.

I have also mentioned the responsibilities of a migrant in passing elsewhere. Off the top of my head, I am thinking primarily of the responsibility to adopt the culture of the host community (in so far as it is not forbidden by the natural law), and to embrace its mores and language, and to offer one's loyalty to the people and devotion to the common good. If his heart does not lie first of all with his host community, at the very least he should not expect to be considered one of its own, but to remain an outsider. If he desires to be a member of the host community, he owes out of justice complete participation in its economy, as the the network of economic exchanges from which he seeks to benefit is ordered to the good of the community (of the members who make up that community), and not to the good of another community. (Hence there is a moral dilemma for those who leave family behind in their native community and are obligated to provide them with financial support, plus whatever other obligations he owes to other members of his native community.)

If he remains an outsider, he may be morally free to send money home. And it may be that he is owed a family wage for his work, and not merely a wage that will support him individually. Still, does the host community have a right to decline him the right to participate in the economy? (So long as it provides him with some means to work and sustain himself?)

A tentative response to the question I raised here, "If secular governments are unwilling to part with the territory they control, even though land is a common good, then how can the right to move (for the sake of improving life) not be transformed into the right to immigrate?" It seems to me that the claim to land and so on should first be pressed in their native country, not in a foreign country. We can look at a concrete example, Mexico, and ask how many in Mexico are forced to leave and look for work elsewhere because of the lack of social justice in that country? Isn't it incumbent upon the Mexican government to satisfy the claim to land and such, before any other political community? And if the Mexican government fails to meet its obligation, forcing another political community to do so, then does that political community have the right to seek redress/compensation from the Mexican government?

(I ignore at the moment the complicity of U.S. companies, and by extension the Federal Government, in promoting social injustice in Mexico.)

Ite ad Thomam: "Any Ideas on How to Reconcile These? (John Paul II's Fides et ratio & the Pre-Conciliar Popes)"

My preliminary thoughts, which I posted over there:
I'm working on a more extended response at my blog, but here are some beginning reflections:

John Paul wishes to claim that there is a legitimate plurality of philosophical systems, and it is not the task or competence of the Magisterium to rectify deficiences in a system, only to judge what is compatible with the Faith and what is not.

Nonetheless, there is a core of truths that can be called implicit philosophy, which is shared by all systems to one degree or another. (This is similar to the perennial philosophy of apologists for Thomism?)

(Hence, John Paul II is able to talk about philosophy, human reason, and knowledege, and other fundamental truths.)

Although he does not say that the implicit philosophy is the philosophy of the Church, I don't think that it would be a stretch to claim that it functions as such, and provides the basis for judging the soundness and coherence of philosophical systems.

(Not that I think agree with his terminology or with the claims he makes about philosophical systems, but I'm attempting to explain his position on his own terms first.)

The question is, then, whether this implicit philosophy "large" enough that it encompasses "our philosophy" of which previous popes speak?

Fermat's Last Theorem (abridged)

(via Steve Sailer)

More info:
Andrew Wiles (Mathematics Department, Princeton University)
Fermat's Last Theorem
Fermat Corner
NOVA Online|The Proof
Fermat's Last Theorem
wiki
pdf

A Short-Form Proof

John Zizioulas on Baptism and the Eucharist

Experiencing the Sacrament/Mystery of the Church through Baptism and the Eucharist
Metropolitan of Pergamus, fr. John Zizioulas

An excerpt from the exceptional book “Eucharistic Exemplarium”. Megara 2006. “Evergetis” Publications. Pages 64-73.

(source of link: The Byzantine Anglo-Catholic)


One Single Source by His Grace John Zizioulas, Metropolitan of Pergamon

George Weigel, In Praise of Father Schall

Brian Tierney, "The Idea of Natural Rights - Origins and Persistence"

I believe the issue in which this article appears may have another article or two about rights, but I'm too lazy to check at the moment.

Ian Shapiro has an evaluation of J. G. A. Pocock: J. G. A. Pocock's republicanism and political theory: A critique and reinterpretation. Unfortunately I can't access it. The abstract:

A growing sense of the exhaustion of both liberalism and Marxism has fueled a revival of interest in civic republicanism among historians, political theorists, and social commentators. This turn is evaluated via an examination of the normative implications off. G. A. Pocock's account of civic republicanism. Arguing that what is at issue between liberals and republicans has been misunderstood by both sides in the debate, the author shows that the turn to republicanism fails to address the most vexing problems liberalism confronts in the modern world, and that it is and has been compatible with much of what critics of liberalism dislike. He argues, further, that the civic republican view involves an instrumental attitude to outsiders that cannot be justified in today's world and has other unattractive dimensions of which too little account has been taken by defenders and detractors alike.

The article was published in 1990. I should see if Pocock has written anything on civic republicanism recently. I can't recall if Shapiro is a Straussian.

Interview with John F. Crosby, Part 2

Dietrich von Hildebrand: Giving the Heart Its Due (Part 2)

An Interview with Hildebrand Legacy Project Director

By Andrea Kirk Assaf

ROME, JULY 23, 2010 (Zenit.org).- When searching for a way to dialogue with modernists, Catholic philosophers would be wise to study and utilize the thought of phenomenologist Dietrich von Hildebrand, says John Henry Crosby, the founder and president of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy project.

Last month, phenomenologists and other academics related to von Hildebrand's work converged in Rome to take part in a conference live-streamed on the Internet, organized by the legacy project.

In the wake of that event, ZENIT sat down with Crosby to discuss the continuing and even growing contribution of von Hildebrand’s thought within the Church and secular culture.

In Part 2 of this interview, Crosby explains how von Hildebrand restores the heart to its rightful place as the greatest among equals.

Part 1 of this interview appeared Thursday.

ZENIT: Why should we read Von Hildebrand and phenomenology today?

Crosby: Von Hildebrand is a great thinker to know because he is distinctly modern in many ways. He made traditionalists a little nervous because on the one hand he was one of their greatest proponents when it came to the Latin Mass; he wrote passionately in defense of the Tridentine Mass and grieved its loss yet at the same time, while the typical traditionalist was a strict Thomist, he was a cutting edge philosopher out of this modern movement of phenomenology. It’s also useful that he’s got all the right credentials -- you can go to Harvard or Princeton or Yale and they have to accept that with von Hildebrand you’ve got a really serious person. Aquinas is a blip in their weak sense of history but here’s a person whose colleagues were Edith Stein and Heidegger. And you have the witness of his life -- philosophical beliefs sealed in heroic living.

Adolf Reinach, whom Edith Stein and von Hildebrand saw as their true master while Edmund Husserl is known as the father of the phenomenology movement, wrote an essay on phenomenology in which he says that phenomenology is a certain way of doing philosophy -- a willingness to look deep into experiences, to take concrete cases seriously. Von Hildebrand defined it as the systematic unveiling of one’s prejudices, so that one went into a subject by cleansing oneself not just of moral prejudices but of intellectual prejudices, of assumptions and inclinations. What that expresses is an ardor for truth that defined every other aspect of his work, a readiness to make any sacrifice for it, whether personal or giving up his career.

That radical pursuit of truth at all costs defines the man and his character as a thinker. One of the extraordinary things about him is the unity of thought and life -- the great intellect and the heroic witness, especially at that time in history. The idea that you have to put your life on the line for your philosophical beliefs is nobody’s preference, it wasn’t his either, but he didn’t think twice about doing it. When he was at Vienna all his Catholic colleagues opposed him, they all wanted to find ways to make it work with Hitler -- "building bridges" they called it. He had a willingness to go alone out of this dedication to truth, and a trust that God would honor that. He once said he could never justify a physical risk for adventure but the moment it involved a possible assassination for what he thought was right, the consequences could never be too high.

ZENIT: What is distinctive about his thought?

Crosby: In terms of his thought, it’s not as if there are things he says that no one else has said because with philosophy all thinkers build on and borrow from one another, but von Hildebrand, certainly more than any medieval thinker and even more than most modern Christian thinkers, was very intent on giving the heart its due in the understanding of love, the subject of our Rome conference. He thought the traditional focus on the will was totally inadequate, that love is ultimately an expression of the heart, and the traditional distinction of man between intellect and will just doesn’t hold true to experience. In literature, in poetry, even in biblical faith, the heart is always used as a way to express the deepest in man but in philosophy it has a kind of "stepson status." From a philosophical point of view it starts to look irascible, unreliable, fleeting…Von Hildebrand said we have to think of man as having three different centers -- intellect, will, and the heart, with the heart being the deepest of them. Then he has some very beautiful things to say about how, when we think of it this way, the heart expresses our nature the most deeply because the deepest experiences we have, whether they be joy, freedom, or peace, are expressions of the heart, not experiences of the will. They are states of being that are expressed in a felt way and they are all gifts -- you can’t seek joy as an object and have joy, it just won’t be granted in that way. You can’t love someone simply to be happy, you won’t find happiness that way. The fact that all the deepest experiences are fundamentally received is very telling, it reflects our status as finite, dependent beings. Rather than complaining about that, he sees all the experiences of the heart fundamentally as gifts and a philosophy of the gift arises from that. Some people have done research on how this links up with the thought of John Paul II and his writings on the philosophy of gift.

You could say that, as a matter of principle, von Hildebrand sees the human person as fundamentally oriented to being fulfilled only by receiving all of what is most essential to human fulfillment as a gift. So in that sense it goes against the naturalism of Aristotle that says if you know the right goods you can pursue them and therefore reach a state of flourishing. With von Hildebrand it’s a little bit more complicated -- we have to live in right order to the good but our happiness in one sense is super added, it’s not directly in our control. I would say that the retrieval of the heart is one of his greatest contributions.

ZENIT: Contemporary culture seeks to appeal immediately to our emotions. Can the work of von Hildebrand engage the emotions-based secular philosophy that is so predominant today?

Crosby: I recently spoke to a Catholic man who was very upset with the Church for its lack of attention to the heart in its preaching and presentation of the Gospel. He said there are Catholics in California who will go to the Catholic Mass on Saturday evening and then to the mega churches for their emotional sustenance on Sundays -- they meet the requirement one day and then get their nourishment the next day. He said this is a failure of the Church to meet the affectivity of the person. I think von Hildebrand would agree in principle with this because the heart has to be engaged. He had none of the distrust of the emotions that we sometimes find in certain cultural traditions in which we stifle emotions or at least think that what is really serious is what is in our heads, not our hearts.

Von Hildebrand is trustful of the heart but also seems to understand all the different deformations of the heart; you can see in his writings that he’s trying to understand that we have to form the habits of discernment to know when we are being swayed by our concupiscence. As a Christian he didn’t at all think that we should trust any impulse. He’s not saying that anything we want we should have because the heart is good, rather he’s observing that most of the really important, deep experiences we have in life are precisely in the heart.

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On ZENIT's Web page:

Part 1: www.zenit.org/article-29971?l=english

On the Net:

www.hildebrandlegacy.org

Interview with John F. Crosby, Part 1

Dietrich von Hildebrand: Giving the Heart Its Due (Part 1)

An Interview with Hildebrand Legacy Project Director

By Andrea Kirk Assaf

ROME, JULY 22, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Despite Benedict XVI's prediction in 2000 that Dietrich von Hildebrand would become one of the "most prominent" intellectual figures of modern times, the German-born Catholic philosopher was at the time in danger of being relegated to obscurity.

But because of the work of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project to translate, publish, and disseminate his books, essays, and anti-Nazi tracts, the Christian personalism of von Hildebrand (1880-1977), a large number of whose works still must be translated from the original German, is enjoying something of a revival.

A significant step forward in the organization’s goals occurred in May when phenomenologists and other academics related to von Hildebrand's work converged in Rome to take part in a conference live-streamed on the Internet.

ZENIT sat down with the project's young founder and director to discuss the continuing and even growing contribution of von Hildebrand’s thought within the Church and secular culture.

Here is part 1 of the interview. Part 2 will appear Friday.

ZENIT: How did you come to devote yourself full time to preserving and promoting the legacy of Dietrich von Hildebrand?

Crosby: I founded the project in 2004, rather unintentionally, which is probably how some of the best projects get off the ground. I had wanted to translate some work of von Hildebrand and then write a dissertation on it. So I called our old family friend, Alice von Hildebrand, and said I wasn’t really sure about going to graduate school, but what did she think about helping me to raise support to do a one-year privately funded fellowship to translate von Hildebrand’s work.

She and I had talked about translation work over the years but it never got off the ground, so she said fine and gave me 10 names who might be interested in this project. One of them was Mike Doherty who was the chairman of the board of the Franciscan University of Steubenville at the time and he told me, “This sounds great, what do we need to do to get going?”

He helped me start my own 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization and then we started to put together an advisory board. In about October 2004, less than a year into the project, then-Cardinal Ratzinger accepted an honorary position on our board. Now we have a wonderful advisory council of 20 people including Cardinal Schönborn, Rocco Buttiglione, several individuals known in the Catholic world, several of von Hildebrand’s students; I tried to select them according to the different areas of von Hildebrand’s thought -- the philosophers, the theologians, the political figures, those who represent the artistic and cultural side.

ZENIT: Why did you choose von Hildebrand in particular?

Crosby: The reason I was even able to do this is that there are links to von Hildebrand on both sides of my family. My father was one of his students and got to know him as a 22 year old at Georgetown. He invited von Hildebrand to speak, he had read some of his works, and this talk that he gave at Georgetown made a huge impression on my dad.

Then von Hildebrand in turn essentially directed where my dad studied and so he went to study with one of von Hildebrand’s students, but every free moment he studied in Austria with von Hildebrand or back in the U.S. in New York. My mother is Austrian and she was already a second-generation friend of von Hildebrand.

My grandfather got swept up in the Hitler youth when very young in Austria. When von Hildebrand left Germany for Austria to set up his anti-Nazi newspaper, he had to give an opening lecture at the University of Vienna where he had a small appointment. Von Hildebrand was so known as an outspoken anti-Nazi that the talk was somewhat violently protested by Communists on the left and National Socialists on the right, and my grandfather was on the right with the Nationalist Socialists yelling “Down with von Hildebrand!”

My grandfather had a conversion during the war when he lost a lung and spent some time in the hospital. He became a Catholic -- he had been Lutheran -- and then after the war found his way back to von Hildebrand and they became friends.

Alice von Hildebrand remembers a moving episode where my grandfather approached von Hildebrand sometime in the 1950s and knelt down in front of him and asked his forgiveness. My grandfather was a historian by trade by then, in fact he was the archivist of the Diocese of Salzburg where my mother was born and raised. My mother knew him as a young girl and kept up a correspondence with him. She came to the United States to study in 1977 just before his death. Without getting too much into it, von Hildebrand had a lot to do with my parents’ marriage because my father was a philosopher with his head in the clouds and von Hildebrand was a great promoter of relationships. My mother told him that she was interested in my father, so von Hildebrand pulled some strings and my father eventually woke up.

ZENIT: What is the mission of your organization?

Crosby: It was a much smaller initiative initially without seeing the full potential of what was there. The mission now is twofold -- on the one hand to promote von Hildebrand’s legacy through translating his work and make his writings known; a lot of his work hasn’t yet been translated from the German and a lot of books are out of print. We also aim to have an audience for these books, so we started having an annual moderate-sized conference, less frequently if it is a large conference like this year's in Rome. The public side has largely been in the form of these conferences, but we will also have a robust Web presence as a place for the international community of scholars to meet and share their research.

When you're promoting a thinker, I think it's important that the issues [that] the thinker was engaging are not lost. So in that sense part of our mission is to promote an authentically philosophical approach to these perennial questions of life and offering von Hildebrand as a great guide, but not the only guide.

Our mission statement says we are inspired by the need to recover and reinterpret and translate our intellectual patrimony, and at the same time we operate with a great spirit of gratitude toward contemporary thinkers. Phenomenology has classical roots, but it's also a modern movement within philosophy. We're often assumed that new insights can't be had; that sometimes happens with traditionalists who think that the last word on an issue has been said. I don't want to single them out, but you get that with Thomists sometimes because there is a system with Aquinas.

Von Hildebrand reminds that we can always move forward; it doesn’t mean that we are throwing everything else out but there are questions that are distinctive to a period in time, just as there are questions that arise in every generation. I don't think John Paul II built his papacy on the idea that nothing had changed since 1100. Sometimes we don't like to use the expression "the history of ethics," but there has been a slow-growing, and in some ways relentless, process of greater illumination. I think personalism is built around the idea that historically there is a new and deeper understanding and appreciation for what it means to be a person.

I happen to also think that personalism is a very useful way to engage modern issues because personalists love notions such as freedom, which puts them in a strong position to talk to people who are perhaps confused about freedom, like with the gay rights movement. A personalist has a great language to use, you can understand their intuition, but you are also rooted in fundamental concepts like human nature, which they don’t have; the general liberal problem is the belief that the human is just an atomized individual who doesn’t want to accept any limitation. Human nature is a limitation so you don’t want it, you want everything to be subject to your freedom. Personalists understand that intuition but they also understand that our freedom is finite.
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On the Net:

www.hildebrandlegacy.org

Wright On: Moral Reasoning and Natural Law | Big Questions Online

Wright On: Moral Reasoning and Natural Law | Big Questions Online
A "diavlog" with Robert P. George.

Dennis McInerny, Politics and Virtue

Alice von Hildebrand on Christopher West

Dietrich von Hildebrand, Catholic Philosopher, and Christopher West, Modern Enthusiast:Two Very Different Approaches to Love, Marriage and Sex
By Alice von Hildebrand

(h/t to The Western Confucian and Dawn Eden)

Ite Ad Thomam: Garrigou on Passionate Thomists

James Chastek, The Modern problem as a denial of categorical relation

There are widespread beliefs that a.) William of Ockham was a Nominalist and b.) The school of Ockham consisted in a denial of universals. One doesn’t need to get very far into the lit to figure out that both beliefs are false: “Nominalism” was a term invented by those who wanted to discredit a school and which Ockham never self-applied; and Ockham himself insists that there are veritable universals in the human mind. One is tempted to let Ockham off the hook in the celebrated controversy of the objectivity of thought, but in fact all that we have done is forgotten the original reason why the Ockhamist school was blamed for denying objectivity: its denial of categorical relations. All of the same lit that absolves Ockham of Nominalism and denial of universals confirms that he denied the real relations outside of the mind, and that everyone in his school held to this. But this is what the Thomists who fought against Ockham objected to, and they saw in his denial of real relations a denial of the objectivity of thought. As John of St. Thomas says:

[H]ow does the understanding form pure respects, if it has only absolute things or relations secundum dici as the pattern on which to form them? Relations formed by the understanding therefore will be mere figments, because they do not have in the order of being independent of cognition pure and true relations on whose pattern they are formed.

A note first: a relation secundum dici is something that is properly in the category of substance, quantity, quality, action or passion, but which is spoken of and understood with a certain relation to another. Man has an essential relation to society- even qua man- but man is not a relation, but a substance; a number has a relation to a unit, but a number is not a relation but a quantity, etc. In other words, if there were only relations secundum dici all relations would reduce to a category other than relation. Considered objectively and entitatively, therefore, all being would either be 1.) a subject, or 2.) something whose whole reality was being in a subject. For St. Thomas and the Thomists, there is a third possibility: there is an accident whose very existence is to be to another. The whole reality of this accident is not its being in a subject (this belongs to it only as an accident) but in its being towards another. Indeed, this “being to another” is exactly what is formal to it.

Notice that, if one denies the reality for this third sort of being, then all being is either subject X or something wholly existing to subject X. The sort of existence that is now called “intentional” is simply impossible. All reality either is a subject or points inward to its subject, and so we are left utterly befuddled how one would get to an object, or how any of our concepts or signs could refer to an object. All this sort of existence clearly points outward to another. Note carefully- and this is absolutely critical- signs need not be in the category of relation. This is why John of St. Thomas does not say that the signs or concepts are relations but that they are formed on the pattern of relation. But when we recognize the reality of categorical relation, the “problem of objectivity” becomes a non-sequitur, for it simply is not the case that all reality is exhausted either by subjects (like a mind) or things that wholly point inwards to that subject as modifications of it. Once we recognize the reality of relation as something we could use as a pattern to form a concept, asking how a mind gets to an object is like asking how a father gets to a son. Some reality is simply to another- and we do not invent this reality ad hoc to explain knowledge, rather we come to the problem of knowledge knowing that there is more to reality than a subject and its modifications.

Thus, while Ockham is not a Nominalist, nor does he deny that the mind has true universals, we Thomists still argue that his teaching on relations, if followed to its logical conclusion, leads directly (and almost immediately) to the celebrated modern problem of objectivity, and ultimately to the post-modern denial of the possibility of any non-arbitrary connection between signs and concepts on the one hand and reality on the other.

When we notice the significance of Ockham denying universals, we see more clearly why he is the father of the via moderna. After all, the soul of modern thought is not so much an explicit teaching on universals, but a struggling with the “problem of objectivity”. For we Thomists, this problem is not a pseudo-problem, or a “Cartesian turn” that caught everyone unaware with a deadly objection, or a mental illness that needs to get purged by backgammon, kicking a stone. Most of all, it’s not a problem that we explain away by saying that the objectivity of thought is just obvious or proved by some mysterious intuition of objectivity. Rather, the problem of objectivity is simply the inevitable consequence of the (usually tacit) belief that all that exists is either a subject, or something whose whole being is a modification of that subject. Sad anther way, it is a consequence of the (usually unproven) denial of the reality of categorical relations.

Some titles of interest

From Transaction:
Sketching Theoretical Biology, Toward a Theoretical Biology, Volume 2; C. H. Waddington, editor (Google Books)

Vol. 1 The Origin of Life
KLI Theory Lab

Urbanization in a Federalist Context, Roscoe C. Martin (Google Books)

Power, Authority, Justice and Rights, Anthony de Crespigny and Alan Wertheimer, editors (Google Books)

This might be useful for the diss, something from Rowman & Littlefield:
Rethinking Justice by Richard H. Bell (Google Books)

Hmm... a quick look at the foreward... maybe it isn't as useful as the recommendation led me to believe. "Bell argues quite persuasively that a rights-based conception of justice is intrinsically deficient because it decouples the rights of self-regarding individuals from any prior moral obligations they owe each other." -- Choice

Also from R&L: The Problem of Natural Law by Douglas Kries and Excellence Unleashed by Paul J. Rasmussen

James Chastek, The Neo-Parmenidean Analytics

N. A. BERDYAEV (BERDIAEV), ORTODOKSIA AND HUMANNESS

thomistica.net: Thomistic Scholarship and Plagiarism

Orthodox Constructions of the West

Eirenikon:
“Orthodox Constructions of the West”: Report (1)
“Orthodox Constructions of the West”: Report (2)
“Orthodox Constructions of the West”: Report (3)

De unione ecclesiarum:
Notes from the Fordham Conference, Part One
Notes from the Fordham Conference, Part Two

conference page

Jesuit Calls on Catholic and Orthodox Churches to Restore Communion

Federalism and Subsidiarity

The Prudent Case for Robust Federalism and Limited Subsidiarity
By Peter Haworth

Federalism and subsidiarity are, indeed, different concepts, even though they often dictate similar applications. Federalism is a rigid notion; it now frequently connotes the making of strong demarcations of power between the multiple local associations and the single central government within a political union. Subsidiarity, however, enjoins leaving a function with the lowest level of association (i.e., not allowing a higher-level association to assume power over the function) to the extent that the lower-level association can perform it efficiently.*

The difference between the two principles can be further illustrated through considering the different ways that each might dictate handling the scenario of a rogue state or polity within a larger political union that possesses a federal government to help manage the common affairs of this union.

Let us assume, for example, that a state gravely mistreated a minority portion of its residents. What would each of the above principles direct as being the correct action? If the political union were organized such that the states had full police powers and this was not a power assigned to the federal government, then federalism would demand maintaining such demarcation of powers regardless of the fact that the rogue state is failing to protect and is even willfully mistreating its residents. In fact, other than during the initial stage of deciding how power is to be demarcated between lower and higher (or more centralized) levels, the effective performance of a function is not even considered in determining applications of the principle of federalism.

Subsidiarity, on the other hand, is more flexible, in that it is theoretically open to transferring a function (i.e., power over the function) to higher levels if it becomes clear that a lower-level association cannot perform the function efficiently. Thus, if it were found that a state or polity within our hypothetical union could not efficiently perform the function of protecting a certain minority of people within its borders, then subsidiarity would direct us to transfer this function and the corresponding power over such function to a higher level, by whose agency performance of that function could be performed more efficiently.

For many, the pursuit of such applications of the subsidiarity principle (and not federalism) just seems like utter common sense. Subsidiarity is a principle that allows for continual re-evaluation about which levels of government can most efficiently perform various functions and, hence, should have the relevant powers over such functions. Federalism, on the other hand, does not entail this evaluation within its concept; it refers merely to the maintenance of an already determined division of functions and the powers to implement them.

Here is a short post I wrote on subsidiarity, speculating on its role in contemporary CST. A longer post.

We have to remember that what may be ideal or in accordance with reason is different from what obtains in reality. While the civitas is the perfect community and should be of a certain size, because of the loss of autarky what used to be a perfect community may no longer be such, and what originated as a union of civitates may now have the character proper to a perfect community, instead of being some sort of alliance or confederation.

How does the authority of the father differ from that of the head of a guild? How does the authority of the government of the civitas compare?

Temporal Happiness

Returning to an old post, I ask once again: What is temporal happiness? Is it identical to what might be called imperfect participation in happiness by Aquinas? Or is it the imperfect happiness that we can attain by our natural powers alone?* I suppose "temporal happiness" could be used to refer to either, depending on the speaker.

However, some authors, such as Henri Grenier (see the comments to that post), use "temporal happiness" to name the end of civil society. Was the use of temporal happiness in this way begun by neo-Thomists? Or can it be found in earlier Thomistic commentators? I need a Dominican Thomist to be my personal reference librarian.

For the neo-Thomists, does one's temporal good consist of the necessities of life, as well as health/life? Or are these understood as instruments for the sake of activity? I would suspect the latter --these instruments would then be necessary conditions for virtuous activity, but not sufficient conditions, obviously. I think the listing of  habits  (e.g. knowledge) and quasi-habits (e.g. family) as a good constitutive of happiness is a recent "development" (perhaps most prominent among New Natural Law theorists?) and involves a certain confusion about the meanings of the word "good" and how the analogous use of good is related to desire and practical reason. Are the NNL theorists just following the example of Aquinas? If happiness is convertible with both ends and goods, and it is defined as an activity by those who follow Aristotle, then can a habit or quasi-habit said to be an end or good in the same way an activity can? Is what Aquinas writes about how the precepts of the Natural Law are derived incorrect or in need of clarification? More on that later.

If temporal happiness is identified in this way, it can then be distinguished from the supernatural end or good (spiritual good?) of man. I suppose calling the supernatural good a "spiritual" good is misleading, as virtue and the temporal good are primarily goods of the soul. A related question then: Why shouldn't the Church have care of the temporal good as well as the "supernatural good"?


*I cannot say that this imperfect happiness is identical to the natural end/good of the neo-thomists. I don't understand the controversy over nature/supernature, the natural desire of man to see God, etc. well enough to say anything at this point. I do plan on getting a copy of Feingold's The Natural Desire to see God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters. (Sapientia Press has also published that collection of essays, Surnaturel: A Controversy at the Heart of the Twentieth-Century Thomistic Thought.)

I still have to finish reading Dennis Bradley's Aquinas on the Two-Fold Human Good (a review; Google Books).

Related:

Richard Kraut's article on Aristotle's Ethics

entelechy, energeia, eudaimonia

James Chastek on moral knowledge and the social sciences.

The practice of excellence: Human flourishing means seeing what is and acting accordingly.
By Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.

Zenit: Father Cessario's Lecture at Psychological Institute

Father Cessario's Lecture at Psychological Institute

"Seek Out the Harmonies Between Faith and Reason"

WASHINGTON, D.C., JULY 12, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Here is the lecture Dominican Father Romanus Cessario delivered May 25 at the commencement exercises of the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, held at the Crypt Chapel in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

* * *

I express my gratitude, Father President, to the Institute for the Psychological Sciences. You award me a degree honoris causa. Of course, Aristotle warns about making much of honors. He considered that "since it seems to depend more on those who honour than on the one honoured," receiving honors would not make a man happy.[1] Thus the Latin adage, Honor est honoranti, non honorato. Let me assure you of one thing. Today, I am very happy. Aristotle notwithstanding. In fact, I am happy precisely because of the honorans, the Institute for the Psychological Sciences. I am happy because those honoring me labor to make others happy. I am happy because your Alma Mater and now mine locates the psychological sciences within the context of the Highest Happiness: The Happy God who wants us to share his happiness.

The achievement of Dr Gladys Sweeney merits recognition and acclaim. During the past decade under her leadership, the Institute for the Psychological Sciences has prepared its students and others to discover a happiness that conforms to the divinely established "plan of sheer goodness."[2] Our Alma Mater has raised and sought to answer a question others leave unanswered: How do the psychological sciences relate to the divine science, the science of God? She has addressed topics others prefer to ignore: For example, how can the psychological sciences, while observing their specific methods and objectives, truthfully assist distressed persons to enjoy the blessed life that God wills for all men? She has stood firm and encouraged others to stand firm before the elites of the psychological establishment on issues where Catholic truth and prevailing secular values dramatically collide. In short, our dear, dear, Alma Mater has sustained with boldness a project of enormous significance for the Church of Christ.

Her fortitude has paid off. The Institute for the Psychological Sciences, on the one hand, does not attempt to reduce the psychological sciences to a sub-specialty of Catholic theology. Those who animate the Institute do not mistake devotion for therapy. The graduates of 2010 do not leave IPS furnished only with pious answers to real problems. The Institute, on the other hand, does not endorse the absolute autonomy of the psychological sciences. Dr Sweeney and her established colleagues know that therapeutic practices no matter how successful cannot replace the sacramental mediations that conduce to the Highest Happiness. Those who are graduated from the Institute do not study by the Potomac River and dream of the Charles. They are not secular counselors who go to Mass. Neither the option for reduction or for autonomy would make the Institute for the Psychological Sciences the kind of Catholic institution that Gladys-Maria Sweeney consecrates herself to ensuring that it remains. Instead, she and her colleagues search to identify the harmonies that exist between the postulates of the psychological sciences and the tenets of the Catholic faith.[3] To seek out the harmonies between faith and reason remains, as Pope John Paul II has reminded us, a very Catholic thing to do.[4]

What Dr Sweeney began in 1997 marked a new moment in the dialogue between psychology and Catholic thought. In the United States, nationally publicized controversies between the Church and psychology erupted as recently as the late 1940s. Post-World War II Catholic outlooks on psychology, at least as they existed among Americans, find an apt summary in a brief notice that appeared in the "People" rubric of the 28 July 1947 issue of Time Magazine. The national news weekly reported an exchange between the then-Monsignor Fulton Sheen and an ousted chief psychiatrist at the now closed St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City.

[It said,]: "Four months after Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen delivered a sermon on psychoanalysis, the news slipped out that Roman Catholic Dr. Frank J. Curran had resigned in protest as chief psychiatrist of Manhattan's St. Vincent's Hospital. Dr. Curran explained that he had vainly sought a clarification from Monsignor Sheen. Cardinal Spellman's office promptly announced that 'Dr. Curran's services are not required in any institution of the Archdiocese of New York. However, he will not be refused admittance as a patient. . . .' And Monsignor Sheen made a lengthy statement to the press: there had been 'grave distortion' of his meaning; he had not attacked psychiatry, 'a perfectly valid science,' nor 'psychoanalysis in general'; he had attacked Freudianism, 'and this only to the extent that it denies sin, and would supplant confession.'"[5]

Fulton Sheen's clarifications did not suffice to stop other Catholic psychologists from joining the fray. Catholic laity in the United States were emerging, and they had to face the challenge of maintaining their bona fides in the learned professions. The growth of the magazine, The Commonweal, characterizes this period of pre-conciliar effervescence.[6]

A onetime Fordham University lay professor came to the defense of psychology in the very pages of The Commonweal. The next week, 4 August 1947, the following account appeared in Time Magazine: "Is Freudian psychiatry a natural enemy of Roman Catholicism? The question was still warm last week, thanks to the set-to between Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen and Psychiatrist Frank J. Curran (TIME, July 28). Not likely to quench the flames of controversy was an article in the Catholic weekly Commonweal by Catholic Psychologist Dr. Harry McNeill, prewar teacher at Fordham University, now a clinical psychologist in the Veterans Administration. Gist of the article: the Church has much to learn from Freud -- and vice versa.[7]

There followed a long series of excerpts from the article by Dr. Harry McNeill that had appeared in the aforementioned Catholic weekly, The Commonweal.[8]

Today's graduates of the Institute know that Freud no longer represents the dominant outlook among psychologists. The evolution of the psychological sciences, however, only makes the task of harmonizing them with Catholic doctrine more demanding now than it was in 1947. The Institute for the Psychological Sciences aims to carry on this discussion in many ways, including at the speculative level. In order to account for the de facto practice of many Church authorities to turn to psychologists for help, one must distinguish between the speculative level and the practical level. For counsel and evaluation both can and do proceed without the purveyors possessing the theoretical premises that justify the cooperation between psychological specialists and the Church's mission of sanctification. In other words, a psychologist may help a distressed person achieve virtuous stability without either one fully understanding the interplay of divine and human dynamics at work. It happens more often than not. No wonder. The 1950s and early 60s did not witness great progress toward clarifying the relationship of Catholic thought to psychology.

Within twenty years of Monsignor Sheen's critique of Freud as an enemy of moral order and sacramental practice, the Catholic world and Catholic theology had entered the post-conciliar period. Confusion reigned. Pope Benedict XVI has referred to the "hermeneutics of discontinuity" as a way of reproving those theologians who treated the Second Vatican Council as a moment of complete rupture with the past.[9] As a matter of fact, the rapid decline in the practice of sound Catholic theology left open the door for much popularized psychology to find its way into religious institutions.[10] The late 1960s, 70s, and 80s witnessed an unprecedented period of random reorganization of just about everything Catholic. Few worried in those heady days of "renewal" whether Freudian analysis made the practice of confession go away. The theologians themselves were quite successful in their efforts to marginalize the sacraments of healing. To the best of my knowledge, no agreement was reached on how clinical psychology and spiritual counseling work together to assist a Catholic believer achieve psychological and spiritual excellence. Then came 1997, and a petite Chilean woman, who rented a basement conference room in a downtown Bethesda hotel....

If we return to the excerpts that the 1947 Time Magazine presented its readers from the article by Dr Harry McNeill published in The Commonweal, we discover that McNeill knew his Aquinas: "In connection with Freud's capital concept of repression," McNeill wrote, "which consists of the violent submergence of undesirable stimuli in the unconscious, they [theologians] might look into its conscious counterpart, a defect of prudence which the classic moralists called inconsideratio. . . ."[11] That was 1947 during the heyday in the United States of Leonine Thomism. How many psychologists today could pick an obscure vice from the secunda pars and identify it as a starting point for sounding the harmonies between faith and psychology?

In his Summa theologiae IIa-IIae, q.53, a.4, Aquinas examines "inconsideratio" under the heading of imprudence. The English translation by Father Thomas Gilby translates the Latin term as "thoughtlessness."[12] Aquinas makes the following point: "Consideration signifies an act of the mind attentively looking at the truth of something... [it] concerns judgment above all. Accordingly, the defect of right judgment goes with the vice of thoughtlessness ("inconsiderationis"), inasmuch as a person fails to come to a sound judgment out of scorn or neglect to attend to the evidences on which to base it."[13] McNeill took this vice to represent a conscious expression of what psychologists of his day sought to discover in the patient suffering from "repression."

Dear Graduates, I realize that even a Woody Allen can dismantle the Freudian myths. No need now for Catholics to take up the task. You, however, face challenges more difficult than exposing the comically ironic in Freud. Even serious critiques of Freud, such as those by Professor Paul Vitz, will not equip you adequately to confront the deformations of culture that destroy Catholics before they have had the chance to learn about the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation.[14] In short, you will encounter difficulties that Harry McNeill could not have imagined in 1947. Would that, in order to establish harmony between Catholic faith and psychological practice, it were as easy as identifying a common ethical insight in Aquinas and Freud, or in Aquinas and other founding figures of modern psychology. It is not. In my mind, then, today's graduation resembles more the completion of a formation program than it does the everyday baccalaureate. You leave, it is true, the institution on the Potomac. You, at the same time, must remain attentive to the ongoing research that, God willing, will continue to flourish at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences.

I refer especially to the Integrative Studies component of the curriculum, originally worked out and taught by Father Benedict Ashley, O.P. The public record of completed research appears in publications produced at the Institute. Professor Craig Steven Titus edits both the respected John Henry Cardinal Newman Lecture Series and the IPS Monograph Series. The latter presently includes volumes by two leading Catholic thinkers, Father Fergus Kerr, O.P., and Professor Kenneth Schmitz. I would like also to point out the international significance of the IPS Centre for Philosophical Psychology at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. The work there tests the harmonies between the reason developed by the psychological sciences and the faith proclaimed by the Catholic Church. "Fides et ratio" -- the Encyclical -- demands commitment to this kind of research, whether done in Oxford, Rome, or Virginia.

Allow me a concluding remark that addresses the ongoing challenges that face the Institute for the Psychological Sciences. Given some of the issues that I have addressed and others that I have not, there is no reason to promise Dr Sweeney a rose garden.[15] To persevere in the high mission that she has set for IPS requires fortitude put at the service of the feminine genius -- to borrow another phrase from Pope John Paul II.[16] Even this thought makes me happy. For under the intellectual leadership of Gladys-Maria Sweeney, one can say confidently of the Institute for the Psychological Sciences and its Dean what is engraved on the tomb of another Catholic hero, "Magnus in prosperis, in adversis maior."[17] Great in good times; in adversity, greater. Thank you.

Notes

[1] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk 1, chap. 5, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, 1985), p. 7.

[2] See Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1: "God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life."

[3] For background to this discussion, see Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1966).

[4] Encyclical Letter of Pope John Paul II, Fides et ratio, no. 42: "Both the light of reason and the light of faith come from God, [Aquinas] argued; hence there can be no contradiction between them." To reference this claim, the 1998 Encyclical Letter Fides et ratio refers to Aquinas's Summa contra Gentiles, Book 1, chapter 7. In his General Audience of 2 June 2010, Pope Benedict repeated this endorsement of the harmony between reason and Christian faith: "Thomas Aquinas, at St. Albert the Great's school, carried out a task of fundamental importance in the history of philosophy and theology as well as for history and culture,' the Pope said. "He studied Aristotle and his interpreters in depth" and "commented on a great part of Aristotle's works, discerning what was valid in it from what was doubtful or refutable, demonstrating its consonance with the facts of Christian revelation, using Aristotelian thought with great breadth and intelligence in presenting the theological writings he composed. In short, Thomas Aquinas demonstrated that a natural harmony exists between reason and the Christian faith."

[5] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,887440-2,00.html (14 April 2010).

[6] The Commonweal (shortened to Commonweal in 1965) is the oldest independent lay Catholic journal of opinion in the United States. Founded in 1924 by Michael Williams (1877-1950) and the Calvert Associates, it reflected a growing sense of self-confidence among American Catholics as they emerged from a largely immigrant status to become highly successful members of the American mainstream. Modeled on the New Republic and the Nation, the magazine's goal was to be a weekly review "expressive of the Catholic note" in covering literature, the arts, religion, society, and politics.

[7] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,855857-1,00.html (14 April 2010).

[8] Harry McNeill with a Louvain Ph.D., Ag. arrived at Fordham Graduate School in 1934. In the fall of 1938, he moves to the Teachers College to teach philosophy.

[9] See the essays, especially the "Introduction" by the editors, in Vatican II. Renewal Within Tradition, eds. Matthew L. Lamb & Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

[10] See the interview with Dr William Coulson, "We overcame their traditions, we overcame their faith," The Latin Mass (Ft. Collins, CO, Special Edition), pp. 12-17.

[11] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,855857-1,00.html (14 April 2010).

[12] Summa theologiae, Blackfriars edition, vol 36, trans. Thomas Gilby, (New York, 1973), p. 131.

[13] Summa theologiae II-II q. 53, art. 4.

[14] Paul C. Vitz, Sigmund Freud's Christian Unconscious (New York: The Guilford Press,1988). See also, Michael Stock, Freud: A Thomistic appraisal (Washington, DC: The Thomist Press, 1963).

[15] The reference is to the 1965 I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, an autobiographical novel by Joanne Greenberg, written under the pen name of Hannah Green.

[16] Letter of Pope John Paul II to Women, no. 10: "It is thus my hope, dear sisters, that you will reflect carefully on what it means to speak of the 'genius of women', not only in order to be able to see in this phrase a specific part of God's plan which needs to be accepted and appreciated, but also in order to let this genius be more fully expressed in the life of society as a whole, as well as in the life of the Church."

[17] Epitaph on the tomb of the last Stuart King to reign in England, James II, located in the Church of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, outside Paris.

Sandro Magister, The Defenders of Tradition Want the Infallible Church Back

The Defenders of Tradition Want the Infallible Church Back (h/t to the Pertinacious Papist)

But it was Amerio's conviction – and Radaelli explains this well in his extensive afterword to "Zibaldone" – that this protection guaranteed to the Church by Christ applies only to "ex cathedra" dogmatic definitions of the magisterium, not to the uncertain, fleeting, debatable "pastoral" teachings of Vatican Council II and of the following decades.

I suspect Amerio does not think infallibility is limited to ex cathedra definitions.

The result, according to Amerio and Radaelli, is that Vatican Council II is full of vague, equivocal assertions that can be interpreted in different ways, some of them even in definite contrast with the previous magisterium of the Church.

And this ambiguous pastoral language is believed to have paved the way for a Church that today is "overrun by thousands of doctrines and hundreds of thousands of nefarious customs." Including in art, music, liturgy.

What should be done to remedy this disaster? Radaelli's proposal goes beyond the one made recently – on the basis of equally harsh critical judgments – by another respected scholar of the Catholic tradition, Thomist theologian Brunero Gherardini, 85, canon of the basilica of Saint Peter, professor emeritus of the Pontifical Lateran University, and director of the magazine "Divinitas."

*

Monsignor Gherardini advanced his proposal in a book released in Rome last year, entitled: "Concilio Ecumenico Vaticano II. Un discorso da fare."

The book concludes with a "Plea to the Holy Father." He is asked to have the documents of the Council reexamined, in order to clarify once and for all "if, in what sense, and to what extent" Vatican II is or is not in continuity with the previous magisterium of the Church.

Gherardini's book is introduced by two prefaces: one by Albert Malcolm Ranjith, archbishop of Colombo and former secretary of the Vatican congregation for divine worship, and the other by Mario Olivieri, bishop of Savona. The latter writes that he joins "toto corde" in the plea to the Holy Father.

So then, in his afterword to "Zibaldone" by Romano Amerio, Professor Radaelli welcomes Monsignor Gherardini's proposal, but "only as a helpful first step in purifying the air from many, too many misunderstandings."

Clarifying the meaning of the conciliar documents, in fact, is not enough in Radaelli's judgment, if such a clarification is then offered to the Church with the same ineffective style of pastoral "teaching" that entered into use with the council, suggestive rather than imperative.

If the abandoning of the principle of authority and "discussionism" are the illness of the conciliar and postconciliar Church, getting out of it – Radaelli writes – requires doing the opposite. The upper hierarchy of the Church must close the discussion with a dogmatic proclamation "ex cathedra," infallible and obligatory. It must strike with anathema those who do not obey, and bless those who obey.

And what does Radaelli expect the supreme cathedra of the Church to decree? Just like Amerio, he is convinced that in at least three cases there has been "an abysmal rupture of continuity" between Vatican II and the previous magisterium: where the council affirms that the Church of Christ "subsists in" the Catholic Church instead of saying that it "is" the Catholic Church; where it asserts that "Christians worship the same God worshiped by the Jews and Muslims"; and in the declaration on religious freedom "Dignitatis Humanae."

*?
In Benedict XVI, both Gherardini and Amerio-Radaelli see a friendly pope. But there is no chance that he will grant their requests.

On the contrary, both on the whole and on some controversial points pope Joseph Ratzinger has already made it known that he does not at all share their positions.

For example, in the summer of 2007 the congregation for the doctrine of the faith made a statement on the continuity of meaning between the formulas "is" and "subsists in," affirming that "the Second Vatican Council neither changed nor intended to change [the previous doctrine on the Church], rather it developed, deepened and more fully explained it."

As for the declaration on religious freedom "Dignitatis Humanae," Benedict XVI himself has explained that, if it departed from previous "contingent" indications of the magisterium, it did so precisely to "recover the deepest patrimony of the Church."

ISI Lecture:

Economic Freedom and Moral Virtue: Does the Free Market Produce Captive Souls?
Doug Bandow
Former Senior Fellow, Cato Institute

David L. Schindler
Georgetown University, Washington, DC

4/1/2009

From ISI's Cicero's Podium: A Great Issues Debate Series.

• Listen to Audio

(You can also find the video for the lecture here, at least for now.)

Joseph Ratzinger on GS and conscience

Robert Araujo, SJ, Relativism, Subjectivity, Conscience, and the Church

Medieval political theory: a reader : the quest for the body politic, 1100-1400 By Cary J. Nederman, Kate Langdon Forhan - Google Books

An alert from Edward Feser on his blog:

Two recent pieces on ethics from David Oderberg: “The Doctrine of Double Effect,” from T. O'Connor and C. Sandis, eds., A Companion to the Philosophy of Action; and a popular lecture, “Why I am not a Consequentialist.” (Warning: PDF files)

Is De Koninck himself a personalist?

Or does he think that society is instrumental to the flourishing of the individual? Last year I had posted this letter written by Dr. De Koninck to Sister Margaret Ann without comment. It's time to revisit it. In the letter CDK writes:

I wrote that little work to defend Aristotle and St. Thomas when they say that, within a given genus, the common good is always more divine than the proper or personal good. This proposition had been under attack for some time. The reasoning behind this open attack even by well-known Thomists assumed that "common good" is a univocal expression, i.e. with one single meaning, and that one can therefore pass from one genus to the other. Yet in fact the common good of the family (namely, the offspring) and that of the political community (the well-being of the citizens, which, in the end, consists in virtuous activity) are one only in proportion.

[The children are a common good; but family life, the domestic good is also a common good.] The common good of the political community is "the well-being of the citizens, which, in the end, consists in virtuous activity."

He also writes:

It is one thing to compare the member of a society to the society as a whole. The society is for the sake of the common good of its members who are individual persons. Hence society is for man, not man for society. But it does not follow from this that the common good of society must be broken down into individual goods, the way a loaf of bread is shared at the table.

It is much easier to ask questions and obtain clarification from a living person than it is from a "dead" book. Is society separate from its members? Is it the same as the modern "state"? (Is this the identification that CDK is making here?) Is "society" different in meaning from "community"?

My reading:
A community is made up of its members, but these members are not taken in isolation from one another. Rather, these individuals have ordered relations to one another. Living in society is for the sake of man--because men by their nature are social, living with one another is a true good.

(Being in) Society (or community) is for the sake of its members' living together (well).

One of these days I'll try to find some proof texts from On the Primacy of the Common Good Against the Personalists to confirm this interpretation. I think the rest of the letter supports it, though, if one is able to make the comparison between the political community and the Church.

Michael A. Smith's Human Dignity and the Common Good in the Aristotelian-Thomistic Tradition. An ok introduction, but not without its problems when directly addressing the philosophical questions.

Michael Sweeney, O.P. responds to those who have left comments

You can read those comments here. From The person and the common good:

Several took exception to my contention that there is no cause greater than a person; that a soldier, for example, does not give his life for a cause that is greater than he is. Four objections were raised. I will state them as I have understood them; please correct me if I have not caught the force of the arguments:

(1) If there is no cause greater than the individual person, then the result will be nihilism. If we can state the argument more formally: Proper order in society demands that individuals subordinate themselves to some cause or purpose that is greater than themselves.

(2) Colloquially understood, the statement "they have died for a cause greater than they are" means that immediate self-interest has been sacrificed for the sake of the common good. The common good is held to be greater than the self-interest of the individual. Note, however, that in this case the President's reference was to those who gave their lives for liberty. Might we therefore put the objection in this way: liberty is a common good that is of greater dignity than the life of an individual person.

(3) There is a cause greater than the individual person, which is the good of the many: the good of the many is a cause that is greater than the good of the individual person.

(4) The fourth objection might be stated thus: if there is no cause greater than the individual person, then there is no reason for sacrifice for the sake of another; the best that we can achieve is self-interest. Yet it would appear that people do sacrifice for the sake of others (e.g. soldiers in WWII). Therefore, we should say that there is a cause or purpose greater than the individual person.

Certainly, the tradition of the West (not just the Catholic tradition) asserts that there is a common good, and that the purpose of the political community is to advance the common good. Does this not mean, therefore, that the common good is a greater good than that of the individual person? I hold that it does not, and that the answer to each of the objections lies in what we understand by “common.”

If something is “common” it means that it applies first to all and then and therefore of necessity to each, and in essentially the same way. So, for example, to breathe is truly common to people: it applies to all of us insofar as we are human, and therefore and necessarily to each of us, and in the same way. (True, athletes will have trained themselves to breathe more effectively, but they nonetheless are participating in the same activity.) Similarly, everyone would acknowledge certain fundamental necessities for life - water, food, shelter and the like. These things are truly common.

Common in predication only. See the account given by Mike Augros. (This is developed at length by Charles De Koninck in his book on the primacy of the common good.)

There has also, in the past, been a broad consensus concerning goods that are not merely physical requirements for human life but that are also common. Rather than being necessary for sustaining our physical life, they are things that conduce to happiness, or to the flourishing of the person. So, every person requires an education, a measure of freedom, insofar as we have real agency in our relationships to others, recognition as a subject of relationship, and not merely an object, and so on. The particular manner in which these goods are expressed differs from person to person and from culture to culture, but the goods are common, in that they are first true of all and, necessarily therefore, of each.

What is the measure, then, of these common goods? Clearly, it is the human person. What constitutes something as “good?” Simply, that it is sought as conducive to the life or the happiness of the person. The person is the measure of the common good.This assertion - which is founded upon reason, and was taught by the pagan philosophers of the ancient world– is confirmed and amplified in the Catholic tradition:

…There is a growing awareness of the sublime dignity of the human person, who stands above all things and whose rights and duties are universal and inviolable. …The social order and its development must constantly yield to the good of the person, since the order of things must be subordinate to the order of persons, and not the other way around…. (Vatican Council II, Gaudium et Spes, 26)

The common good for society is therefore described as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily” (Gaudium et Spes, 26.) The person is the measure of the social order, and there is no such thing as a cause that is greater than a person.

The goods listed above are still common by predication, but not by causation. Fr. Sweeney then jumps to the definition of the common good given in GS and adopted in contemporary CST. What is the common good for De Koninck, St. Thomas, and Aristotle? The end which all members of a political community pursue, the good of the community as a whole. This is the "holistic" common good, as distinguished from the "aggregate" common good of Mark Murphy and the "instrumental" common good of John Finnis (and apparently of contemporary CST as well). The classical or traditional common good is the members of a community living together well. (De Koninck discusses at length how this good is both proper to the individual and yet a shared good.) The instrumental common good is arguably common by predication, as all benefit from that set of social conditions, but is it also common by causation? Do all seek to establish and preserve those social conditions necessary for the flourishing of individuals? It depends on what these social conditions are, but my guess is that if we come up with a complete list that it will be difficult to say that all are aiming to bring all of these conditions about.

Who is primarily responsible for ensuring these social conditions? The government. The citizenry may contribute money and follow the laws to bring these conditions about, but do they do so for all of the conditions? And do they seek to bring these conditions about at all times and places? Temporal discontinuity and a lack of complete attribution seem to invalidate the claim that the instrumental common good is common by causation. [In the order of final causality.]

Fr. Sweeney continues:

With this in mind, let us address each of the objections:

(1) Society is ordered to the common good, which is the good of the person. To say that this good is “common” means that, to the degree that one pursues one’s own good -- his or her own genuine fulfillment as a person -- one will simultaneously seek a society that is ordered to the good of all. What orders society is not some cause that is greater than the person, but the genuine good of the person.

The instrumental common good, taken from CST. Without a reference to others (and the virtues that govern one's behavior towards others), such a belief, that "to the degree that one pursues one's own good -- his or her own genuine fulfillment as a person -- one will simultaneously seek a society that is ordered to the good of all" echoes liberalism. As such, this response is not fully developed. Hence Fr. Sweeney adds:

(2) Certainly, one can pursue apparent (rather than genuine) goods to the detriment of others, and to seek what is truly good requires sacrificing such immediate self-interests for the sake of the common good. I think, however, that we must be careful about how we speak about this. Subordination of immediate self-gratification to the common good does not imply a cause greater than oneself, but the seeking of goods that are more proper to one’s own fulfillment. Freedom, for example, is either an attribute of a person (demonstrated, as Chesterton has it, by the mystical ability to get off a bus one stop early) or a social condition in which one is at liberty to pursue genuine personal fulfillment. No one should surrender one’s freedom, for to do so is contrary to one of the goods that we all hold in common. The soldier who dies in the cause of freedom is dying in the cause of the person, and should be honored for that reason.

[The soldier who dies in the cause of freedom is not dying for his own good, if we understand that narrowly to mean his physical life, which is a private good. Even a private act of virtue (for the sake of honor, etc.) would still be a private good. But the good as intended as an act of love, or an act for the benefit of others or the community? That would be different.]

(3) The good of the many cannot be greater than the good of each one, in that the good of the many is common, and is therefore the good also of each one.

(4) The common good, because common, is indeed the good of each one, and therefore might be correctly termed a matter of self interest: to pursue the common good is, perforce, to pursue one’s own good. However, such a pursuit does not obviate sacrifice for the sake of others, in fact quite the contrary. When a person or a regime (e.g. Hitler or Nazi Germany) acts to enslave whole peoples, the good of all is placed in peril. When my father fought overseas in WWII he was acting to protect the life and liberty of those he loved, and risked his life to do so, precisely because he had is heart set upon the common good.

It is not greater numerically, but we may use "greater" equivocally, as a synonym of "higher" -- that is to say, the political common good is prior to the private good of the individual in importance.

(3) and (4) could also be said by someone like De Koninck (setting aside what Fr. Sweeney says about World War II and the "Good Cause") -- the common good is both the good of all and also the good of the individual member. The difference between De Koninck and Sweeney lies, then, in what they identify as being the proper good.

Even if it is said that the instrumental common good is for the sake of the individuals, the good of these individuals is not attained through living in isolation from one another. Even having a family life is not sufficient. Rather, the good is attained if they live well with one another. So one could say that the instrumental common good is ordered to the members of a community living well with one another, but that is the common good of which the Thomistic tradition speaks -- a virtuous life in community, and this is the common good which should be emphasized in an age of individualism and social atomization. Perhaps Fr. Sweeney would assent to this; it is a necessary addition that is missing from his admittedly brief exposition of the common good.

[If there is no true community, does this common good really exist?]

It appears to me that Fr. Sweeney has attempted to combine the words of the Thomistic tradition with contemporary CST and perhaps other strands, but his account of the common good will be problematic in so far as contemporary CST is influenced by "systems of thought" other than "the perennial philosophy" in its explication of politics. But I will have to take a look at the Compendium before I write some more about contemporary CST and liberalism.

The Smithy: Response to Benedict XVI Audience on Scotus

The Smithy: Response to Benedict XVI Audience on Scotus:

Lee Faber responds to Pope Benedict's recent address on Duns Scotus.

I changed the template, and tweaked the color settings so that there would be some superficial resemblance to the old template. If the colors make the text difficult to read, please leave some feedback.

Fr. Emery's paper for Dominicans and the Challenge of Thomism

Gilles Emery (Fribourg): «Theologia» et «dispensatio» : la doctrine des missions divines et l’enseignement thomiste de la théologie trinitaire. – «Theologia» and «Dispensatio» : the doctrine of the divine missions, and teaching Thomas’ Trinitarian theology today, Reactions: Simon Gaine (Oxford), Gilles Berceville (Paris)

[download #1][download #2]

(source)

Fr. Bonino's lecture for Dominicans and the Challenge of Thomism

Serge-Thomas Bonino (Toulouse): Y a-t-il une philosophie thomiste?

[download]

(source)

The derivation of the precepts of the Natural Law

According to the New Natural Law Theory -- Robert George gives a brief account in his response to Michael Perry:

Well, I don't want to misunderstand Michael, so let me ask: What about the absolute norm that forbids having sexual intercourse with a woman against her will or without her consent? It seems to me that there are only a couple of ways Michael could go here. One is to affirm the exceptionless norm against rape and say that it is merely a specification of the love commandment of John 13:34. If so, fine with me. I would then want to argue that there are many such specifications, including the exceptionless norm against the direct killing of innocent human beings at any stage or in any condition, and those against adultery, fornication, sodomy, and other intrinsically non-marital sexual acts. Michael might disagree with me about some or all of these, but our debate would not be about whether there is only one exceptionless moral norm. In each case, it would be a debate about whether a particular norm is exceptionless, or a valid norm at all.

James Chastek, The opposition between “strongly held intuitions” and science

William May coming to Oakland

He will be giving a Manhattan Forum lecture on July 27 at 7 P.M. The title of his lecture is "Marriage and Children - Reshaping the Dialog to Reflect the Human Reality." Details.

(Robert George is giving a lecture on August 25. The fee, which will also cover admission for the Manhattan Forum Conference on September 18. Details.)

Zenit: On Duns Scotus
"Defender of the Immaculate Conception"

Insight Scoop: Benedict XVI on Blessed Duns Scotus, "Doctor subtilis"

Mike Augros on the common good. I think he is mistaken to accept the definition of the common good given in contemporary Catholic Social Teaching, instead of using one provided by Aristotle or St. Thomas. His intention might be good (fidelity to the Magisterium), but if it is the case that St. Thomas (and Aristotle) understand the common good to be something else, that is what we should be recovering, in opposition to liberalism and other errors.

Update on M. Augros

So Dr. Mike Augros is now at TAC. I found this website. It's been a while since I've looked at the Society for Aristotelian Studies website. (His father is still at St. Anselm. Saint Anselm Philosophy has a blog! Dr. R. Augros's posts.)

Holy See on Educational Mobility

Holy See on Educational Mobility

"A True Humanism ... Can and Should Allow the Presence of Foreign Students"

ROME, JULY 3, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Here is a greeting sent from the president and secretary of the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Travelers to the members of the Service of European Churches for International Students. The group will meet this week in Namur, Belgium.

* * *

As you gather together once again for your annual meeting, I am delighted to send you my greetings and good wishes for your deliberations.

Today Educational mobility within the world's universities is ever on the increase having grown almost three fold since 1975. The development of funding and scholarships for third world countries, together with the emergences of China and other Asian countries is set to change the patterns of movement of international students and professors hitherto not experienced. In particular the development of a ‘European Higher Education Area' through the Bologna Agreement and an extension of existing exchange schemes and programmes will have effects beyond the borders of Europe itself. These are both interesting and exciting times for the development of tertiary education. Moreover, recent projections put the global number of international students set to rise from 3 million in 2010 to 7.2 million in 2025.

The topic you have chosen for your meeting, "Language of faith and language of Sciences, a challenge for international students in a market driven economy" is an important one that goes to the heart of the Church's pastoral mission within universities. Your particular concentration with the specific pastoral care offered towards foreign students in Europe can help to open up this significant topic between the relationship of faith and reason and a particular vision in the formation of young adults. Indeed, the Second Vatican Council reminds us that the future of humanity "is in the hands of those who are capable of providing the generations to come with reasons for life and optimism".[1]

Pope John Paul II, in his important Encyclical "Fides et Ratio"[2] explains that truth is known through a combination of both faith and reason. The absence of either one will diminish man's ability to know himself, the world and God.[3] Human reason, he wrote, seeks the truth, but the ultimate truth about the meaning of life cannot be found by reason alone.[4] The search for knowledge - the search for the meaning of life - is essentially a search for God. This search, at its best, is inspired by the Holy Spirit, and responds to his calling. The honest searcher learns from others, as for example a philosopher learns from a scientist, taking into account his own point of view. Indeed, the same learning should mark the relations between philosopher and theologian.

Part of the mission of those who have both academic and pastoral responsibility in the student world should be to foster collaboration between not only different disciplines but also cultures. It is in this way that a true ‘humanism' can grow. Pope Benedict XVI knows only too well of this need when he said recently:

"I want to stress the importance of the education of young intellectuals and of scientific and cultural exchanges between universities in order to propose and enliven integral human development....In this context I have entrusted to you in spirit, dear young people, the Encyclical Caritas in Veritate in which we recall the urgent need to shape a new humanistic vision."[5]

In order for there to be ‘love in truth', the Pope asks for an "authentic human development" calling for a new humanism that as a "fruitful dialogue between faith and reason cannot but render the work of charity more effective within society."[6] In fact it is only in a dialogue between ‘the language of science and the language of faith' that we can properly arrive at the truth. Indeed the truth is embedded, waiting to be discovered, so that each human person may come to their fullest potential. For, as Pope John Paul II reminds us,

"The truth and everything that is true represents a great good to which we must turn with love and joy. Science too is a way to truth; for God's gift of reason, which according to its nature is destined not for error, but for the truth of knowledge, is developed in it."[7]

The danger that education can be reduced to a mere functionalism, rather than being in essence a search for the truth, is particularly present for many foreign students, principally if their return is linked to future economic and industrial productivity. A true humanism pervading academic pursuit can and should allow the presence of foreign students - along with students of host countries - to bring a richness and diversity that should be at the heart of the university fostering an education that touches the whole of a person. Moreover, in this search for and the living out of discovered truths and the dialogue between science and faith also has positive repercussions for the mission of the Church as Pope Benedict XVI reminds us:

"The dialogue between faith and reason, religion and science, does not only make it possible to show people of our time the reasonableness of faith in God as effectively and convincingly as possible, but also to demonstrate that the definitive fulfilment of every authentic human aspiration rests in Jesus Christ. In this regard, a serious evangelizing effort cannot ignore the questions that arise also from today's scientific and philosophical discoveries." [8]

I would like also to mention, having now passed this last year which has been dedicated to priests, the work of fostering vocations with university communities. The opening up of individuals, to one another and to God, is part of the process of the vocational search to find the purpose God has for a person in their life. The search for truth must also be one for the truth about ourselves and God's call. The encouragement for all to discover the will of God and, for those for whom it is discerned, a specific call for the priesthood, should never be absent. Moreover it should be a prominent and frequent cause for deliberation and reflection, including those who are foreign students.

As you embark upon your symposium, be assured of our prayers and support. I am confident that your work will bear much fruit, and that aided by the prayers of Mary, Seat of Wisdom, the Lord will bless you abundantly in this encounter.

Antonio Maria Vegliò

President

Agostino Marchetto

Archbishop Secretary

From the Vatican, 1st July 2010

--- --- ---

[NOTES]

[1] Second Ecumenical Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, no. 31: http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html

[2] Cf. Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, September 1998: http://www.vatican.va/edocs/ENG0216/_INDEX.HTM

[3] Ibid., no.16.

[4] Ibid., no.42.

[5] Pope Benedict XVI, Address on the occasion of the Marian Prayer Vigil "with Africa and for Africa", Saturday 10th October 2009: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2009/october/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20091010_rosario-africa_en.html

[6] ID., Encylical Letter "Caritas in Veritate", June 2009, No. 57: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate_en.html

[7] John Paul II, Science and faith in the search for truth, Address to teachers and university students in Cologne Cathedral, November 15, 1980: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~nmcenter/sci-cp/sci80111.html

[8] Pope Benedict XVI, Address to the participants of the Plenary assembly of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, 10th February 2006: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/february/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060210_doctrine-faith_en.html