A LC Thinks He Could Do Better

From First Things:
"Grant’s translation is both literal and lucid, allowing an educated novice to learn at the feet of the man Bl. Pope Pius IX declared Doctor zelantissimus (most zealous doctor). Those better versed in theological history and even Latin will also benefit from[1] pic.twitter.com/yTn1SniIij

— Ryan Grant 🚬🥃 Mostly Peaceful Anarchist (@chesterbelloc3) August 26, 2021

Another Western Saint in Need of an Icon Depiction?

Quote for March 24th"He who trusts himself is lost. He who trusts in God can do all things."- St Alphonsus Liguori

Posted by Zenit News Agency on Tuesday, March 24, 2015

General Audience: The Pope explains St. Alphonsus Liguori and importance of prayer


Zenit: On Prayer According to St. Alphonsus Liguori

Pope's personal secretary Monsignor Georg Gänswein turns 56

Les oeuvres de Saint Alphonse-Marie de Liguori

Zenit: On St. Alphonsus Liguori
"Priests Are a Visible Sign of the Infinite Mercy of God"

St. Alphonsus Liguori on the Order of Charity?

Found what I was looking for. From Volume 1 of Theologia Moralis.

I've been looking for an outline of St. Alphonsus Liguori's Theologia Moralis so I can search the contents of his multivolume work more easily, but no luck so far.

How does this work compare?
Compendium theologiae moralis Sancti Alphonsi Mariae de Liguori

Ite ad Thomam: Scholasticism as Modern Philosophy

In general outline, this division of the history of philosophy is convenient insofar as it accurately represents six general trends in doing philosophy. For example, the way in which the 'ancients' did philosophy is quite distinct from that of the medievals, and medieval philosophy is quite different from the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, and Kant.


But this division also has its problems, particularly in its understanding of the relationship between Scholasticism and Modern Philosophy. It gives the impression that Scholasticism lasted only from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It excludes Scholasticism altogether from Modern Philosophy... as if Scholasticism were an obsolete medieval thing that was only revived by some right-wing papists of the Twentieth Century. It makes you believe that the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites and Jesuits were happily doing their scholastic disputations until they ran out of gas, and then came Descartes and ended the whole thing with his cogito... as if Modern Philosophy got started and Scholasticism completely disappeared. Hence, Modern Philosophy is portrayed as essentially non-scholastic (or anti-scholastic).


This conception of Modern Philosophy is utterly flawed. This is a case where history is completely written by the victors. The philosophy that was taught during this period in the universities was Scholasticism. Hence the name: 'scholas-tic', the philosophy of the schools (of the scholas). Descartes did not end Scholasticism. At no point during his life did Descartes change or even affect the way philosophy was done in the universities. In fact, none of the Empiricists and almost none of the Rationalists (with the sole exception of Wolff, who was himself a Scholastic Leibnitzian) ever taught at a university. They were literally amateurs. What we are being taught today as mainstream Early Modern Philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, etc.) is really an afterthought of the Early Modern Period, a movement completely peripheral to what the professional scholars of the time were doing. No one at that time saw the thought of these men as being part of the mainstream academic philosophical thinking.

So who were the mainstream, professional scholars--the Scholastics--during the Early Modern Period? There were thousands, but the best known are: Báñez, Molina, John of St. Thomas, Suárez, Contenson, Gonet, De Lugo, the Salmanticenses and Complutenses, etc., etc. Although some of authors place these figures within the Renaissance period, nonetheless John of St. Thomas and Suárez were contemporaries of Descartes; and, in fact, De Lugo, Contenson, Gonet, the Salmanticenses (and the Salamanca school of economics) together with the Complutenses came a generation later. These men rightly belong to Descartes' period but they are typically either completely ignored by historians or dismissed as medieval remnants that do not deserve to be considered 'modern'.


And even much later, after the new philosophy of the Rationalists, Empiricists and Idealists made its way into secular and Protestant academia (Kant was the first to bring this amateur philosophy into the universities), Scholasticism was still being practiced and taught in Catholic universities. Billuart, De Rubeis, St. Alphonsus de Liguori, San Severino, Cornoldi, Kleutgen, etc. were all within a generation of Kant and thus rightly belong to the Later Modern Period.


And Scholasticism kept being taught in Catholic universities throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries. So how do anti-scholastic histories of philosophy deal with this point? They have interpreted the so-called Neo-Scholastic / Neo-Thomist movement as bearing a discontinuity with what they disparagingly call 'Barroque Thomism' (or Second Thomism). They portray it as a resurrection of Thomism, passing strictly from a completely defunct state to a vibrant Catholic trend in the late 19th Century thanks to Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris, long after Descartes has put the last nail on the coffin of 'Barroque Scholasticism'. But in fact, 'Neo-Scholasticism' (which is really a misnomer because it was not really discontinuous with traditional scholasticism) was a 'revival' in the sense of giving Scholasticism more life, not in the sense of giving life to something that was dead. Pope Leo XIII's Aeterni Patris does not call for a resurrection of something that had been long defunct, but rather, for greater efforts to keep it going. "Neo-Scholasticism," then, is nothing other than Scholasticism as it regained vigor in the 19th-20th centuries. But it is given that name to make us think that it is something new. As the Catholic Encyclopedia's article on Thomas Zigliara states, "in some universities and seminaries, the teaching of St. Thomas had never been interrupted...." Even today, Scholasticism is not entirely dead, although we must fight to revive it once again.


It is due time for someone to write a history of philosophy that portrays things the way they really are: Scholasticism as a continuous whole that throughout modern times represented the mainstream mode of Catholic thought and that lasted from the time of St. Anselm up until today.

Fr. Pinckaers on St. Thomas and St. Alphonsus Liguori

"Dominican Moral Theology in the 20th Century," The Pinckaers Reader, 77-8.

Father Deman, who succeeded Father Ramirez from 1945 to 1954, is of special interest to us because of his lengthy and excellent article on probabilism, which appeared in 1936.(1) There he makes a penetrating critical and systematic study of moral casuistry. He describes the controversy which had centered on probabilism since the seventeenth century in response to the problem of a doubtful conscience in the application of the law, and which ended in the recommendation of the teachings of St. Alphonsus Liguori. The latter became the patron saint of moral theologians because of his balance, which avoids the laxity of the casuists and the rigor of the Jansenists. However, Father Deman concludes his study on St. Alphonsus and on the concept of moral theology, of which he is the eminent representative, in these words:

Between St. Alphonsus and St. Thomas there remains the lack of harmony of two irreconcilable systems. Every attempt at reconciliation is doomed to concordism, that is to say, to artifice, that is to say, to failure. The historical reality of their misunderstanding cannot be denied.(2)

This judgement seems to me entirely justified. Between St. Thomas and St. Alphonsus and the authors of the manuals, even when they follow the Thomistic school, it is certainly possible to find some partial agreements, but there is always a fundamental lack of harmony at the level of systematization, all the more difficult to resolve when it is not perceived. In St. Thomas we are dealing with a morality of beatitude and the virtues, centering around charity and prudence, and with our modern moralists, with commandments and legal obligations, focusing on conscience and sins.

1. "Probabilisme," Dictionnaire de la theologie catholique, vol. 13 (1936), col. 417-619.
2. Ibid., col. 590.

Can the two systems of moral theology be harmonized? Not fully, according to Fr. Pinckaers. The precepts of the modern moralists, the casuistry and development of conscience, might be able to be integrated into a more "classical" system of moral theology, but its foundations or presuppositions about the Christian moral life cannot be.

Conscience, as it is understood by moderns, is not the same as prudence, and it cannot replace prudence, but is it a "part" of prudence? Does the development of conscience in accordance with the modern manuals truncate the development of prudence, and by extension, the Christian spiritual life? It seems to me that Fr. Pinckaers would agree with this conclusion, though I have to read what he writes about "modern" conscience.

Fr. Pinckaers on St. Alphonsus Liguori

After all the shifts and variations of ethicists through two centuries--and they were at times extreme--St. Alphonsus' system established a certain balance by its return to considered reason. There followed a measure of calm in regard to the probabilist dispute, and in 1831 the Church confirmed this by declaring that the moral theology of Blessed Alphonsus might be safely taught and used in the confessional. Withotu going so far as to assert explicitly that his 'theory of equal probability' was the best system for moral theology, the Church declared him a Doctor in 1871. Thus Alphonsus became the patron of moralists.

The patronage of St. Alphonsus, which merits our respect and esteem for his achievements, still leaves ethicists free in regard to following his reasoning. They retain this freedom as long as no definite law constrains them. This freedom is all the more necessary as the limitations of casuist morality, of which St. Alphonsus was teh most highly authorized representative, have become more apparent in our day. We can now better perceive the fundamental differences in organization and structure as well as in problematics that separate it from the moral theology of St. Thomas and the Fathers of the Church. Incontestably, post-Tridentine moral theology, in concentrating on cases of conscience and the dispute over probabilism, narrowed its horizon. We see now how it contrasts with the breadth fo the views on human action and on God that we find in the Fathers and the great scholastics. The link has not been broken, but there has been a shrinkage and a slight distortion.

The Sources of Christian Ethics, 277

Moral Choices: The Moral Theology of St. Alphonsus Liguori, by Theodule Rey-Mermet

Worth getting? It seems that St. Alphonsus' Theologia Moralis is not easy to come by. I should review what Fr. Pinckaers says about St. Alphonsus and the debates over probabilism. Dr. Fleming esteems St. Alphonsus highly.

CE
Doctors of the Church
A Short History of Moral Theology
Redemptorists USA

Defending Probabilism: The Moral Theology of Juan Caramuel by Julia Fleming (Google Books)

In defense of casuistry

I recall reading an article by a traditionalist (not sure where--was it online? I can't find anything through yahoo and google, and I'm not sure if I've saved it somewhere...). It was a defense of the 19th century moral theology manuals and of casuistry. I think it would be uncontroversial to claim that there is a place for moral casuistry today, whether it be by the confessor or by someone whose advice is being sought. What else is the dealing of difficult (or not-so-difficult) particular cases than casuistry? Is the problem primarily the reduction of moral theology to casuistry? Can the art be integrated into the larger schema of a virtues-based moral theology?

Dr. Thomas Fleming has studied the ethics of St. Alphonsus Liguori and recommends it for those wishing to learn Catholic moral theology.

Edit. Ite ad Thomam
Edit. (9/1/11) The Ite ad Thomam post is no longer available, but has been copied elsewhere. And, more recently, St. Alphonsus's Theologia Moralis: The Magisterially-Guaranteed Manual of Casuistry.

Raphael Gallagher, CSsR.(Religion and in the Social and Cultural Development of Ireland)

Casuistry--A Summary by Jeramy Townsley
The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning

Misc Links:
Servais Pinckaers, "The Place of Philosophy in Moral Theology"
Livio Melina. Christ and the Dynamism of Action. Communio Spring, 2001
Philokalia Republic
Peter Kwasniewski CV ("William of Ockham and the Metaphysical Roots of Natural Law")
Michael Waldstein CV ("The Common Good in St. Thomas and John Paul II," "Dietrich von Hildebrand and St. Thomas Aquinas on Goodness and Happiness," interview)
Stephen Long, "Charity and Justice: Christian Economy and the Just Ordering of the Commandments" (alt)
Cardinal Ratzinger, "Relativism: The Central Problem for Faith Today"
Alfred J. Freddoso's site
Christopher Kaczor's review of Moral Theology in an Age of Renewal
Anthony Kelly, CssR, A Trinitarian Moral Theology
Augustine DiNoia, O.P., "Imago Dei-Imago Christi"
Michael Hull, "Schools of Thought in Contemporary Moral Theology"
Notes, Analysis of the Moral Act, A Proposal

Eutopia

Note to self:
Ralph McInerny, "On natural law and natural rights"
(see also McInerny, Ralph. "Natural Law and Human Rights." American Journal of Jurisprudence 36 (1991): 1–14)
His review of What We Can't Know
(Found through search results at Claremont.org for natural law morality)


Pinckaers, "The Recovery of the New Law in Moral Theology," Irish Theological Quarterly 64.1 (Spring 1999).