DSPT: The 22nd Annual Aquinas Lecture - vimeo

The Evidence of the Precepts of Natural Law

Is the Natural Law Persuasive? by R.J. Snell

The theory of natural law, not the precepts of natural law.

One can try to persuade not through demonstration of the principles (i.e. human goods), but through dialectic.

The first-person aspect of natural law explains also the appeals to the self-evident. As John Finnis articulates in Fundamentals of Ethics, “ethics is not deduced or inferred from metaphysics or anthropology,” and principles are self-evident precisely in that they are not deduced from previous principles, but in no way is ethics merely intuited or asserted or mystically known. Rather, by adverting to the object(ive)s of human action—the for-the-sake-of-which rendering action intelligible—we can attend “to precisely those aspects of our experience . . . in which human good(s) became or can now become intelligible to us.” In other words, we can understand human goods rather than deduce human goods, but while understanding is not an inference it nonetheless involves insight into our experience, and without the experience and insight we would not understand. Basic goods are not deduced or derived, for they are self-evident, but there are conditions for our understanding of the goods.

The condition of coming to understand basic human goods, which serve as grounds for reasonable action, is a first-person understanding of our own reasons for acting. That is, we have to understand why we act and what we seek when we act. If an action is intelligible, that action will have some grounds which are understood as worth seeking in themselves, not requiring justification or demonstration on the basis of some other good(s). Understanding this entails self-understanding, adverting to the reasons for acting always operative in our knowing and choosing. Such self-understanding, Finnis explains, is not simply “opening one’s eyes” to take a look at oneself, nor is it an “intuition”; it is an “insight” gained by “reflecting on one’s own wanting, deciding and acting,” which occurs not by “peer[ing] inside oneself” but by noticing and understanding one’s own reasons for acting.

While these goods are assumed in ethics, they can be shown to be such in metaphysics? What about the precepts dealing with the means to these goods? Can they be demonstrated (through moral science)? Even so, would such demonstrations be persuasive to the man of vice(s)? Probably not.

[We have a natural inclination to know truth. But moral truth is not the same "truth" as speculative truth.]

Lefebvriani, la risposta positiva è arrivata (via Fr. Z) - Rorate Caeli

A different take: St. Pius X Society gives mixed response to Vatican

The Interior Life by Fr. Kenneth Baker, S.J (ia Insight Scoop)

Logos Bringing Aquinas’ Other Works into English

James Chastek, Two answers to “why do we form political associations?”

Plato says that the city arises from an individual’s inability to meet his own physical needs; Aristotle says that it arises because men are political by nature. At first glace, it seems like Aristotle’s account is facile, or even that it is no explanation at all: “men are naturally political because they are political by nature! What an insight!” But Aristotle’s explanation is the better one. In effect, he is insisting that political life is irreducible. It is not the result of a more fundamental drive or desire – political life itself is the fundamental desire, and it would remain so even if it was not as good at meeting physical needs. This is why his Politics doesn’t begin by considering the individual (and his needs) as the principle of a society, but takes communal life as irreducible.

How many modern political theories start with the good of the individual and the myth that society originates in the need of individuals to cooperate for survival?

But if political life is a basic and irreducible need, then just regimes must at least strive to make the regime a place in which the citizens can be truly politically active. Again, where political order reduces to physical need, the Leviathan-state is possible and perhaps even desirable; but where an individual’s political life is an irreducible reality, the Leviathan-state is in flagrant contradiction with the first principle of politics, since no one can lead a political life in the Leviathan state. The Leviathan might meet all the individual’s physical needs, but it does not allow his political actions to make anything beyond a negligible difference.

Political friendship, by the nature of friendship, is ordered to some measure of equality? (Or that constitution known as republic/polity?)

St. Thomas and the Keeping of Pets

Might some pets (e.g. dogs) be more suited to be companions for man than others?

OP: Initial formation: between postmodernity and new evangelisation

PASCHA "As Smoke Vanishes...let them vanish" St. Elias Church

Rome Reports: Benedict XVI: Celebrating his birthday and election as Pope




My Brother the Pope by Georg Ratzinger and Michael Hesemann

Cardinal Raymond Burke Discussing Religious Freedom (video)

Some beautiful iconostases

Paschal troparion | Russian Patriarchate Choir | Anatoly Grindenko direction


Haven't decided if I will attend Russian Pasha vigil liturgy tonight or not.

The Sperm of Sea Urchins and the Directedness of Natural Processes by William Carroll

Urgent/For the record:Le Figaro - "Rome and Écône on the verge of reaching an agreement" (Rorate Caeli)

The Remnant: The Ides of April by Stephen Dupuy
Some thoughts on the Society's Imminent Response to Rome

James Chastek, Re-evaluation of First Matter

Sandro Magister: That Strange Mass the Pope Doesn't Like
It is the Mass according to the rite of the Neocatechumenal Way. Benedict XVI has ordered the congregation for the doctrine of the faith to examine it thoroughly. Its condemnation appears to be sealed

For the Lefebvrists, It's the Last Call to the Sheepfold
Otherwise it's schism. But Rome will do everything possible to avoid the irreparable. From Australia, the theologian John Lamont shows that reconciliation is possible

Was Robert Bellarmine Ahead of His Time? (via Insight Scoop)

Reviewed: Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth. By Stefania Tutino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 416 pp. ISBN 978-0-19974-053-6.

On Temporal and Spiritual Authority. By Robert Bellarmine. Edited, translated and with an introduction by Stefania Tutino (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2012), 500 pp. PB: ISBN 978-0-86597-717-4.

Jimmy Akin: A Day of Shame in Christian History

Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False
Thomas Nagel


Thomistic Circles Symposium on Creation and Modern Science (via Edward Feser)

Eileen Sweeney has a new book out: Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for the Word.

Recently uploaded - Living Tradition No. 150: Father Feeney and the Implicitum Votum Ecclesiae Part B. Reading Cantate Domino, Unam Sanctam, and the 1949 Letter in a Hermeneutic of Continuity

How many issues of RT were there last year? No. 150 is dated January 2011.

It's been a while since I've looked at Amy Welborn's blog. She recently wrote a post on Fr. Augustine Thompson's new biography of St. Francis of Assisi.

Nicolas Gombert: Regina Coeli - Marian Antiphon for 12 voices

Alexander Agricola: Regina Caeli

Ethiopian Iconography (Photo Report)

CUA Press: Select philosophy titles on sale

Details

More from Valaam

(alt)

A blessed and Holy Pascha to all!

Julia Annas has written a book, another in the project of recovering virtue ethics for "the modern age": Intelligent Virtue. A review here.


More:
Virtue Ethics: what kind of naturalism?
The Phenomenology of Virtue
Virtue as a Skill
Being Virtuous and Doing the Right Thing
Virtue Ethics and Social Psychology

An essay in philosophy in biology referencing her.
Aristotle on human nature and political virtue

(see this comment)

Morality and Virtue: An Assessment of Some Recent Work in Virtue Ethics by David Copp and David Sobel

Aristotelian ethical and political naturalism

Confusion About Discrimination by Richard W. Garnett

Mystagogy: The Tragedy of Russia's Abandoned Wooden Churches

Another John Behr lecture (via MB).

Sandro Magister, Vatican Diary / The focolarini's conquest of the curia
Vatican Diary / The Holy Office at the click of a mouse

The Lamentations For The Lord (Romanian Orthodox Church Music)

Byzantine, Texas: NBC to air Orthodox Paschal service

It will not be shown in the SF Bay Area. But it will be shown in SLO.

More links for Fr. Ramirez

Santiago Ramírez, O.P., su vida y su obra
Edicion de las obras completas de Santiago Ramírez, O.P.
A bio (in Spanish).

Éditeur Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas CSIC / Instituto «Luis Vives» de Filosofía
CSIC

Klubertanz and Ramirez by Tom Osborne

I used to have a bookmark at BAC? for books by Fr. Ramirez, but his books appear out of print now? The bookmark is on another hard drive, so I can't look it up now. Maybe someone over at the Thomism YG or Ite Ad Thomam would have more info.

Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, edited by Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung (via 8th Day Books)

The frailties of men

Could Byzantium have been saved?

The First Crusade, the true story

Why was there a sudden need to recover the city where Jesus Christ lived and was crucified? The answer, writes Peter Frankopan, lies in the imperial capital of Constantinople.
By Peter Frankopan *

Harvard University Press & Random House UK

A review in The Tablet.

Tristis est anima mea - University of Utah Singers

Catholicism Producer Speaks About the Friars

Catholicism Project: Filmmaker Mike Leonard from Province of Saint Joseph on Vimeo.

Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ: Creation and the New Cosmology
(via this link)

The Shocking Truth about Christian Orthodoxy - John Behr

Thomistica.net: Hypothetical Disqualification of Dogma? by Christopher J. Malloy

Metaphysics, the Middle Ages and the Birth of Protestantism - a review of Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation (via The Smith)

One might think that a committed Protestant would have a stake in showing that the Protestant Reformers were not determined in their teachings by their acceptance of bad medieval metaphysics, but I think that the claim in the critique that the metaphysical views of the Reformers were widely divergent (not all were followers of Ockham or Soctus) is something we should attend.

A new book on the way from Dr. Rao

An interview with Dr. John Rao - The Remnant: Black Legends and the Light of the World (New Blockbuster History Book on the Horizon)

For Palm Sunday...

Alleluia: O Pimenon - Ensemble Organum

Has Wolfgang Smith gone too far?

I only noticed that he had written this book today: Christian Gnosis

From the description:

Smith maintains that Eckhart has not in fact transgressed a single Trinitarian or Christological dogma; what he does deny implicitly, he shows, is none other than the creatio ex nihilo, which in effect Eckhart replaces with the Kabbalistic creatio ex Deo. In this shift, moreover, Smith perceives the transition from ‘exoteric’ to ‘esoteric’ within the integral domain of Christian doctrine.

Pope's Homily at Mass for the 400th anniversary of Our Lady of Charity

More notes on the virtue of religion

You can see evidence for the evolution of my answer to the question of whether the virtue of religion is possible if one is not in the state of grace and in possession of the virtue of charity on the blog. In my most recent post addressing this question I maintain that one cannot have the virtue of religion without charity. Now it is clear that Aquinas maintains religion is a moral virtue and not a theological one. Is it also an infused virtue? (It seems that this ordering is required both respect to the will and practical reason. One must first know and will the end [God] before one can will the means [the acts of religion] to that end .)

If religion is not an infused virtue, but an acquired virtue, can one not still have the acquired virtue even if the infused virtue of charity is lost? Yes, but I would maintain it would not be exercised (or strengthened) when one is ostensibly performing the acts proper to it. One can perform those acts out of a sense of duty, but it is motivated by his concern with what is right/fitting (and ultimately self-love), and not out of the supernatural love of God. There would be something missing in the ratio of those acts to render them something than true acts of religion. I hesitate to call them acts of some counterfeit habit. Quasi-acts of religion?  "Paying lip service." Rendering what is due to God without the proper spirit seems futile, since acts of religion are not required for God's benefit but ours. This realization would be a reminder to us, if we are in a state of sin, that we should be converted unto Him instead of resisting.

Still, maybe I will switch back to my previous position after some more thought.

It reminds me that I should peruse Anscombe's Intention. (IEP entry on that topic)

An Anscombe bibliography.

Rome excommunicates four bishops in Ukraine- Constantinople deposes two bishops in America

Doctrinal Congregation Statement on "Greek-Catholic Bishops of Pidhirci"
"These priests continue to challenge ecclesiastical authority, causing moral and spiritual damage"

Catholic Culture
CNA
Fr. Z

Would there be any Orthodox objections to this action or to the ecclesiology it represents?

wiki

Zenit: Vatican Approves Blessing for Child in the Womb

Iraq: Our land Is a Land of Abraham
Chaldean Archbishop of Erbil Speaks About His Suffering Church

Does the Rhine Flow into the Tiber, Bosphorus, or Both? An Interview with 2 Former Lutherans

Edward Feser, What is a soul?

I usually wouldn't post a Michael Voris video, but this may be of interest --



There are probably some valid criticisms of traditionalists, but the fact that often their community is weak is not due to their fault alone, especially with the issue of Summorum Pontificum. (And given the homeschooling networks that exist, traditionalist parishes may be as strong or stronger than your typical American NO-only parish.) If bishops were concerned to foster communities of traditionalists Catholics, they should make the extraordinary form of the Roman rite more readily available in their parishes, so that traditionalists would not have to travel so far in order to attend a liturgy in the rite to which they are legitimately attached.

Committed to salvaging the legacy of the council?

Benedict XVI: " The Second Vatican Council is a true sign of God"

Given the lack of new dogmatic definitions in addition to the confusion following the council, the cynic or traditionalist may say that the fact that there hasn't been a complete abandonment by Roman-rite Catholics is a sign of God's presence. The Church is always in need of renewal and purification as its members are burdened by sin and struggle for holiness, but did the council really understand the problems of the Church as it confronted "modernity"? But might not that be part of the problem, the overintellectualizing of a spiritual and moral crisis in the Church? (Bad intellectual history leading to an incorrect assessment of both the problem and its causes?)

Roger Nutt, Recent Books on Aquinas' Theology: Matthew Levering's Contribution

Geach on the Real Distinction I

The new definition of the common good

Repeated here, and which finds support in various documents of the Church after Vatican 2: Why I am Not a Libertarian by Nathan Schlueter

The common good of the political association consists in the ensemble of conditions in which persons and associations can more easily flourish. These are nicely summarized in the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States: “to . . . establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

It seems to be implicitly tied to the modern conception of the (nation-)state, in which associations are not identical to the state. (An implicit recognition that the nation-state is too large?)

Peter Saul: Let’s talk about dying

TEDx

So much to read

Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty is rather useful for someone studying the development of natural law theory and rights?

Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, The Principles of Natural and Politic Law [1747]
Samuel von Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature [1673]
Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace (2005 ed.) 3 vols [1625]

American conservatives are supposed to be familiar with these texts; can they be harmonized with Catholic moral and political theology?

There are some other texts of the Scottish Enlightenment I should read...

Pufendorf condemning anger wholly: "ANGER is the most violent, as well as the most destructive of all the Passions, and is therefore to be resisted with our utmost Strength and Endeavour. It is so far from exciting Men’s Valour, and confirming their Constancy in Dangers, as some alledge, that it has a quite contrary Effect; for it is a Degree of Madness, it renders Men blind and desperate, and runs them headlong into their own Ruin."

Sacred Ambivalence: A Reflection on Remi Brague’s “Are Non-Theocratic Regimes Possible” by Thaddeus Kozinski

Yet, it is not clear that Christians can make complete peace with a thoroughly desacralized political order, though the Catholic Church has come a long way toward rapprochement from the time of Gregory XVI’s Mirari vos and Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors. The question still remains, however, as to the limits an integrally Christian worldview places on full reconciliation with secular modernity and liberal democracy. According to St. Thomas, men cannot adequately understand in theory, let alone fulfill in practice, the detailed precepts of the natural law without the help of its author, God, and its divinely appointed interpreter, the Roman Catholic Church. With regard to a non-sacral foundation for political order, Thomist Joseph May in the 1950s stated: “The only true doctrine is that civil society cannot prescind from the ultimate end [emphasis mine] both because the temporal welfare implies an ordering to the spiritual and supernatural, and because the individual citizens are directly and positively bound to tend to it” And even Dignitatis Humanae insists that it “leaves untouched the traditional Catholic doctrine about the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ” (Sec. 1). As Pope John Paul II often reiterated, the face of Jesus Christ is the only true mirror in which man can fully and accurately contemplate and comprehend his own nature and destiny; thus, only therein can he discern the moral values and goods most perfective of himself and the political order.

How is temporal welfare defined by May? The ultimate end imperfectly realized here in this world, or some good different from the ultimate end but ordered to it? (Is it the same as the intrinsic common good of creation?)

The political common good = living [well] with others --> loving them truly, and not being an obstacle to their attainment of the ultimate end.

Angry Words By Tom Bartlett
Will one researcher's discovery deep in the Amazon destroy the foundation of modern linguistics?

The Dominicans have redesigned the look for their website. (And, another link to that missa cantata video.)

The Atlantic: Cheeky Complaints Monks Scribbled in the Margins of Manuscripts

James Chastek, Right and violence

He quotes the CE (the new one?): "Every perfect right, i.e. every right involving in others an obligation in justice a deference thereto, to be efficacious, and consequently a real and not an illusory power, carries with it at the last appeal the subsidiary right of coercion. A perfect right, then, implies the right of physical force…"

What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology

Joseph G. Trabbic interviews Raymond Dennehy on two recently republished books by Jacques Maritain: The Return of Thomistic Political Philosophy, Part I and Part II

Exaltation of youth and technological progress

Taylor Wilson: Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactor

The Conjugal Debt and Medieval Canon Law

What is the author's ultimate point of view on Church teaching on marriage? I hesitate to read what she writes.

New from Eighth Day Books

Orthodoxy: The Cosmos Transfigured by Paul Evdokimov

Sancte Pater Benedicte

Sandro Magister: Vatican Diary / Priests against celibacy. Austria's rerun
Vatican Diary / Resignation of the pope. Theory and practice

Ignorance Is Bliss by Jace Yarbrough

Edward Feser, Natural law and the right to private property

Archdiocese School of Byzantine Music - Arise O Lord

The Archdiocese School of Byzantine Music of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America presents Arise O Lord, from the Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity. Sunday, May 8, 2011.

Princeton Theological Seminary: Theological Commons

The Mystery of Monasticism: History, Spirituality and Vocation

Galileo: Anti-Hero of Science

Discantus - Laetare Jerusalem

More from OUP

The Lost History of the Ninth Amendment by
Kurt T. Lash

Justice: A Reader by Michael J. Sandel

C. Vann Woodward

Politeness and Politics in Cicero's Letters by Jon Hall

New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin by Andrew L Sihler

When Dead Tongues Speak: Teaching Beginning Greek and Latin by John Gruber-Miller

Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises
From Their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period
Eleanor Dickey

From Gibbon to Auden
Essays on the Classical Tradition
G.W. Bowersock

Character Strengths and Virtues
A Handbook and Classification
Christopher Peterson, Martin E. P. Seligman

Psychology? Or ethics?
VIA Character: Welcome to the VIA Institute on Character
VIA Manual Intro
wiki

Byzantine chant - Απεστάλη εξ ουρανού


Byzantine chant - Μη αποστρέψης

James Chastek, Student objections to the Nicomachean Ethics

Sanctorum Exultatio

Old Roman Chant - Terra Tremuit

“Put on the Garments of Christ”: Cyril of Jerusalem and the Origins of Lent
by Carl Sommer (via Insight Scoop)

Hearing the Voice of God in Quietness by Archpriest Alexander Men (+1990)

Celebrating Fr. Buckley's Golden Jubilee: 50 Years in the Priesthood

Rod Dreher, St. Benedict on Mt. Athos (which contains a link to this 2009 post at Logismoi)

Sandro Magister, Gregory the Great Speaks English
The encounter in Rome between Benedict XVI and the primate of the Anglicans has taken place under the banner of the great pope who evangelized Britannia. With Ratzinger and Williams, ecumenism is abandoning tactics and getting to the substance

Christopher Malloy, A sinner free from a key dimension of concupiscence?

Who said the spirit of Latinization was dead?

Rorate Caeli: Are the traditional Eastern liturgies an obstacle to the "New Evangelization"?

When members of ecclesial movements that were formed within the Roman rite enter the East, do they bring a Vatican II chauvinism with them? Do they appeal to the Holy Spirit to claim that their brand of spirituality is superior to what has been sustaining those who have been living under oppression for so long?

Holy Cross Faculty Members Address Students at Kodiak's St. Herman's Seminary

Elder Cleopa on the Eight Sources of Temptation
If You Want to Find out if Someone Loves Christ, Find out if He Loves Monasticism

Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence

TAC: “The Pope’s Theologian”
An Interview with Rev. Wojciech Giertych, O.P., Theologian of the Papal Household

Been wondering if I should buy some Bertrand de Jouvenel. Liberty Fund publishes some of his books, and ISI has an introductory guide.

Bertrand de Jouvenel’s melancholy liberalism by BRIAN C. ANDERSON

CNA: Bishop Aquila receives Pope's praise for reordering sacraments by David Kerr

The beginning of the change in order in which sacraments are received by Roman-rite Catholics?