Early Modern Aristotle

This looks fabulous. @GenofMod https://t.co/zo4Z5Mly82

— John Buchmann (@John_W_Buchmann) October 9, 2020

Penn Press

Luther and the Natural Law

Law, Liberalism, and Luther: Beyond the Myths by Korey D. Maas

Contrary to the popular, tidy narrative repeated by Robert Reilly and others, neither Luther nor his colleagues and heirs “abandoned” natural law. Nor did they recast it in a voluntarist mold. They embraced and defended it along entirely traditional lines.

Conceding Too Much to Galileo

Galileo was Right—But So Were His Critics | Kevin Schmiesing | CWR

An interview with Dr. Christopher M. Graney, author of "Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo"

A review by David Abulafia of ‘Inventing the Individual’, by Larry Siedentop

Holy Resurrection Monastery Divine Liturgy at IRL Event Mundelein, Illinois

Bright Friday


The homily has sparked some controversy on FB.

My comment on the use of intellectual history:

"Too often intellectual history is used (poorly) as a substitute for real philosophy/theology - and in the case of theology, what is needed is an engagement with the sources and authorities so that these are understood well. Undoubtedly a good Latin theologian familiar with the various schools or traditions in Western Christendom will dispute the points made in Abbot Nicholas's homily, and I personally think it might have been better if he had refrained from attempting a comparison within the homily, and just focused on the "positive." But as someone who seeks to bring healing, he may have felt justified in making this correction, though we would disagree with his diagnosis."

Medievalists.net: Ordering the medieval past : England and the continent compared

The Debate on Logic

The Difference between Traditional and Modern Logic and the Difference it Makes (via First Thoughts, which refers on a recent Peter Kreeft article - William Randolph Brafford's first post responding to Kreeft - see the comments posted there)

Related:
Henry Babcock Veatch's Two Logics

Mark Lilla reviews Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation

Mark Lilla, Blame it on the Reformation (via Michael B. Dougherty and Lee Faber)

James Hannam lecture

James Hannam, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution

Related:
Walter Pannenberg, The Historicity of Nature: Essays on Science and Theology
Alexei V. Nesteruk, Light from the East: Theology, Science, and the Eastern Orthodox Tradition

Zenit: Archbishop Nichols: What Does Human Dignity Really Mean?
London Prelate Considers History, Present Relevance of Key Concept

Archbishop Nichols observed that the idea of human dignity has a long history, going back to Cicero, Augustine and Aquinas. It was further developed by the Salamanca school of Dominicans in Spain at the time of the colonization of America. Subsequently, during the last century or so, it has been the topic of the social encyclicals of the Church.


Human dignity also has great importance outside the Church, he added. The UN Declaration of Human Rights, in Article 1 states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”


He also noted that Article 1 (1) of the German Basic law, also drafted in 1948, states that “human dignity is inviolable. To respect it and protect it is the duty of all state power”.

Cicero, Augustine, and Aquinas? Aquinas distinguishes between various sorts of dignity. What of Cicero and Augustine?

Brad Gregory "Against Nostalgia: Catholicism, History, and Modernity."

Brad Gregory "Against Nostalgia: Catholicism, History, and Modernity." from The Lumen Christi Institute on Vimeo.

The Theological Origin and, Hopefully, End of Modernity by Thaddeus J. Kozinski

Voluntarism, an indifferent will as primary moral agent; nominalism, the rejection of any real reference for universal concepts; disenchantment, the default existential mode of a buffered, self-sufficient “individual”; and desacralization, the “immanent frame” surrounding and conditioning modern social and intellectual life—these were the background assumptions of the Enlightenment, but they seem now foregrounded social, cultural, and political dogmas. The “Regensburg Address” of the Pope, with his account of the three waves of dehellenization, is, I think, a key text for grasping this development. Dehellenized reason closed to intelligible being, a voluntarist God beyond good and evil, a non-participatory cosmos mechanically construed, and a univocal, flattened concept of being supplanting Aquinas’ precarious but precious metaphysics of analogy—these are the metaphysical, epistemological, and theological roots of modernity, and they are deeply planted. As the Pope suggests, these roots have nourished a misshapen cultural tree, nay, a forest; and it cannot be simply cut down and replanted—for it is our home, whether we like our home or not, for, at least for the time being, there is no other domestic domicile into which to move, it would seem.


Now, great fruits came via their heroic attempts: the progress of medicine and human rights; what Taylor calls the “affirmation of ordinary life”; the dignity of persons seen as ends and never means (Casanova); the autonomy of politics, science, and economics from ecclesial control. This represents, as in the words of Maritain, a maturation of the political order and the Gospel seed coming to fruition. This is the true message of Gaudium et spes, when interpreted correctly–that is, not as a replacement of the Syllabus of Errors, but its complement. After Vatican II, no Catholic can interpret the prior social teaching and theology as simply a rejection of modernity, but neither can they reject or dismiss the prior teaching as outdated or simply mistaken.

The question of modernity, again. Kozinski offers a couple of scenarios as to how this all plays out, but I think maybe the analysis starts off on the wrong foot. Was there a rebellion against the authority of the Church? Undoubtedly. Did that rebellion provide the intellectual roots for liberalism? Or merely the occasion for it to develop as a reaction against the wars of religion?

Maybe it is not "modernity" that is the problem, but the power of earthly rulers vying against God; they are the ones who have made of liberalism and a host of other idealogies in order to take power for themselves in the name of liberating the masses.

Showing respect for a tradition

Lee Faber has two pertaining to the insertion of Scotus into a genealogical narrative and using of sources (or the lack of proper sources): MacIntyre on Scotus and Alexander Broadie's Gifford Lecture

One should attempt to understand the arguments of a medieval on their own terms instead of relying on secondary sources in intellectual history or even philosophy, making use of followers of that tradition and contemporary scholars. This should not be so hard to understand. Even though I can respect MacIntyre for the philosophical and rhetorical value of some of his arguments pertaining to moral philosophy, it is unfortunate that much of his work is tied to intellectual history. (Alas this is because of his theses concerning moral epistemology and tradition.)

Better to understand one tradition well and argue accordingly -- leave the understanding of history to the Beatific Vision.

Debating the philosophical roots of Protestantism

Matthew Milliner, The Late Middle Ages Rightly Blamed

Edit. Lee Faber comments.

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.

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."

The Smithy: Robert Prentice and Illuminationism

The Smithy: Richard Rufus of Cornwall (copy at medievalists.net)

The Richard Rufus of Cornwall Project

I think he was one of Dr. Brown's favorites...

Some recommendations from "JA":

Sovereignty: God, State, and Self by Jean Bethke Elshtain

This may be the most relevant to your interests. Elshtain, a political theorist, considers modern understandings of sovereignty in regard to the state and individual as derivative of certain late scholastic that abandoned Neoplatonic and Aristotelian metaphysics for nominalism/voluntarism.


The Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie

Gillespie, a political theorist and philosopher, covers the same general trends as Elshtain, but his focus is not on sovereignty in particular, but broader.

Some rights theorists make a big deal about medieval theological discussions of sovereignty, but does the modern concept of sovereignty really have roots in nominalism/voluntarism?

Medievalists.net: Adelard of Bath and Roger Bacon: early English natural philosophers and scientists