Publishers of books for Catholics

Sheed & Ward has been part of Rowman & Littlefield for a while. While some "classic" texts like Jacques Maritain's introduction to philosophy are in print, its more recent titles are a mixed bag. Looking through its catalog, I found several titles by James Keenan, S.J., along with books opposing the legal prohibition of abortion and supporting stem cell research. At the "opposite" end of the spectrum are a defense of Pope Pius XII and books by Alasdair MacIntyre on the Catholic University and Edith Stein. Of course there is also a book that condemns the Vatican for its failure to prevent the Holocaust. I suppose that is what happens when the publisher and its editors do not act as judges of orthodoxy, but are interested in "promoting discussion" among those who call themselves Catholics.

Academics and other authors may not be motivated by money to write, but spreading falsehoods, dissent, and attacks on the Church  is a serious sin as they intend to communicate this to others and to influence them. And they do benefit from this by being able to pad the publications portion of their CVs. And what about associating with those responsible for allowing this to happen by directly facilitating the books' publication? Should Catholics have no interest in what sort of publishers they pick? It's just business isn't an excuse. "They may publish some bad books, but they are willing to publish good ones (like mine) as well," may sound self-serving.

If the authority of the imprimatur were restored (instead of being a rubber stamp in the many cases when it is actually sought instead of just being ignored) we could also do something to limit consumerism and the waste of resources. How's that for a social sin, by publishing bad books one contributes to the wastefulness endemic to Western political economies?

Still, there may be one or two others titles that might be of interest: Byzantine Rome and the Greek Popes.

Zenit: Adoption Isn't a "Right" for Gays or Others
Interview With Mexican Jurist, Historian

ZENIT: The result now is that law becomes an instrument of tyranny, when law theory states altogether the contrary?
 
Traslosheros: The term "tyranny of rights" should be an oxymoron as, in theory, rights exist to protect the citizen against the authoritarian tendencies of those who hold power.

However, it has been proper to the culture of Mexican politicians to create special support groups, which they later adorn with privileges in detriment to the whole of society. It is a very old Mexican experience of which, for example, the corrupt union boss is a typical example, and the reason why the health and education systems languish in mediocrity.
 
Now, by decision of the Legislative Assembly of the Federal District, dominated by the Democratic Revolution Party [...], by the government of [Mexico] City and the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, a further step has been taken in deepening this pernicious tendency that has nothing to do with democracy and which has found in the so-called gender and gay ideology a significant stimulus.
 
ZENIT: They say that equity, equality and justice are being protected; that pure law is being applied. Do you believe this?
 
Traslosheros: In theory, law should create an ensemble of rights for the whole population, in order to guarantee conditions of equality, justice and liberty for any person based on two principles: that we are all equal in dignity and that the strong have the obligation to help the weak. By the same token, when someone finds himself in a vulnerable situation, special juridical conditions of equity must be created for the time necessary, even if they become permanent. Classic examples are the pregnant woman and the woman in labor, refugees, the handicapped, the sick and, especially, children.
 
The raison d'etre of this juridical culture is the person. Juridical culture centered on the person, as is easy to see, is the very opposite of one that creates privileged groups and which is proper to authoritarian regimes without distinction, no matter their color.
 
ZENIT: Isn't the centrality of the person being protected when the rights of homosexuals are protected? This is an argument often used today.
 
Traslosheros: When the centrality of the person is abandoned, then law is used to create statutes of privilege that, in turn, favor specific groups above the whole of society generating situations of injustice and, consequently, of violence. Obviously what is abandoned with this is the obligation to protect the weak, while confirmed is the law of the strongest. Such is what is now happening with the so-called right of adoption created allegedly to protect the principle of non-discrimination of homosexuals. The right of adoption, by this combination with non-discrimination, becomes an obligation to give children in adoption to homosexual couples who so request.

ZENIT: Let's return to the underlying topic, that a right is "being created" in Mexico.
 
Traslosheros: It is very important to keep in mind that the so-called right to adoption never existed in Mexico because it was well understood that children don't exist to satisfy the desires or needs of adults, no matter how legitimate or justified they might seem.
 
Because of the higher interests of the child, the adoption processes were governed by the logic that adults must be subjected to rigorous aptitude tests, where the factors of emotional, social, economic, marital or personal stability have played a very important role, among many other things.

Hence, adults have never in any way had the right to adoption. On the contrary, they have had to demonstrate in deeds that, beyond ideologies and any doubt, they are fit to take on a child with full responsibility.
 
Parenthood, as we well know, is a gift and a responsibility, it isn't a right in itself. In any case, it would be a consequence and always subject to the exercise of responsibility. As we can easily see, as the higher interest of the child demands, the right of adoption must not exist for anyone regardless of their quality, condition, religion, race, ethnic group or sexual preference. Children are not things to satisfy the needs of adults.

E Pluribus Unum

Origin and meaning of the motto. (Wiki.) Note that it dates back to 1776, before the ratification of the Constitution. Do we understand the one to be a "national" union or a "federal" union? How do we interpret this? What is the proper hemeneutics? No doubt there are many Americans today who understand it to mean the former and the latter. But we need to look at the motto's historical background to find the right definitions, and this means we need to look to those who first commissioned the motto, the Continental Congress and the American founding fathers, and understand it as they understood it.


This serves to underscore the necessity to inquire and understand how terms are used by the speaker instead of making a guess based on our assumptions. This is a very important lesson of logic, particularly when we are engaged in an  discussion with someone else, but it is also needed for the correct reading of texts. It also underscores the need for a "living tradition" with some sort of authority to explain how texts should be understood when the texts themselves do not supply definitions for the terms that it uses.


Related:
The E Pluribus Unum Project at Assumption College (which seems intent on promoting a national identity, despite a seeming openness to different answers to the questions posed on the homepage).
Bradley Project final report -- an endorsement of the proposition nation.

Courtesy of DG, De Regno (pdf).

Lee Faber critiques Matthew Levering's Participatory Biblical Exegesis

The Fourteenth-Century Metaphysical Shift

Ahappiness

James Chastek, On fact and Ahappiness. From the latter:

The front end of contemporary culture – the part of culture that establishes our ethos or ethics – is a great celebration of personal autonomy and the freedom to choose. This is the glossy, well-known, advertised face of our ethos, which is usually just taken for granted in political and ethical discussions. Like any ethos it reveals some truths and hides others, and so it deserves more than an unqualified up-or-down judgment of its value. But the back end of our ethos, or the fine print on the total autonomy contract, is something for which the contemporary world has no name but which can be called ahappiness. Contemporary persons are not happy or unhappy, they are simply ahappy. Happiness is not taken in earnest or afforded a place in any serious discussion.

One of his comments is interesting:

Full disclosure, I’ve never read a single word of MccIntyre – not even a random article, book jacket, or block quote in someone else’s writing. I just never got around to it. I don’t’ study much ethics anyway because I’m bad at it and I have a terrible tone-deafness to ethical thought. So to your question: while it is superfluous to point out that no one fugure or date will be an absolute turning point, my basic conviction is that the modern world is just shorthand for speaking about the Protestant world, and that in the judgment of history this age will be called the Protestant age (“Modern” is incoherent, since anyone who has ever lived has been modern). What we now call post – modern is is really just post protestantism, and the death of the modern world is largely a recognition that (mainline) protestantism is now just a lesbian in a miter giving a sermon to empty pews. NTTAWWT! (All) Protestantism is now capable of equally celebrating both sodomy and the papacy, which is to say that it’s deader than Nixon and it ain’t coming back. I miss a great deal about it – it was really tolerant, quite good at being a national religion, it founded my country, it promoted the classics (see the original curricula of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc.) it did a great deal to promote liberty and freedom, and it produced some statesmen who are safely immortal. There are some other parts about it that I am giddy to see die – its absolute division of nature and grace, its denigration of nature, its tendency to reduce everything to one order of either God or free will, either reason or revelation, etc. There is also, of course, its congenital antipathy to Scholasticism (yes yes, I know there were Protestant scholastics, and that even now ther are many better at it than I will ever be; and it goes without saying that this is not a judgment on any particular protestant). Nonetheless, the reality of ahappiness – at least in the West and especially in the English speaking world – is, IMO, going to be in large part a commentary or footnote to protestant doctrine.

The Protestant Age? Hmmm... I'll have to think about that.

How do we explain why so many are on anti-depressants? And what of those happiness surveys whose results are cited from time to time to remind us that not all is well in the United States? I think we do have a sense that happiness is tied to our actions. The problem is that happiness is too often reduced to an emotion linked to a quasi-Boethian understanding of happiness as the possession of all the goods that we want. We may have some understanding that how we get these goods is governed by a set of rules, but it is a set that has been whittled down in accordance with liberalism, social fragmentation, bad education, and other trends and in reaction to Christianity.

Was authority (and tradition) discredited by the Enlightenment? How many truly deceive themselves into thinking they are self-made men, with respect to their use of reason?

On meditation and contemplation

Inner Explorations has a chapter dealing with the "spiritual" theology of Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.: Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange and the Renewal of the Contemplative Life.

At first glance, these assertions may appear as subtle points of interest only to historians of Western Christian spirituality, or theologians of mystical theology. They are not. They give a very definite answer to the question of just what contemplation is. The universal call to contemplation, and this identification of contemplation with infused contemplation are the twin pillars that support Garrigou-LaGrange’s mystical theology, and instead of being forgotten, they ought to remain in the forefront of our minds when we look at the contemporary attempts to renew the contemplative life.

When a new interest in the contemplative life arose after the Second Vatican Council, these battles, when they were remembered at all, were remembered with distaste, and while Garrigou-LaGrange’s idea of the universal call to contemplation had gone mainstream, and thus survived, his insistence on contemplation as infused contemplation was forgotten.

Today movements to renew the Christian contemplative life, like centering prayer and the Christian meditation movement based on the teaching of John Main, OSB, have had the great merit of introducing people to the serious practice of the life of prayer.

How should we evaluate them in the light of the two foundational principles of Garrigou-LaGrange’s mystical theology? They both have clearly accepted the first one, that is, the call of all people to contemplation. In fact, it may even be wondered if they have overdone their acceptance of it and forgotten the nuances it had in the days when it was first formulated. They seem to invite everyone, even those at the beginning of their life of prayer, to practice contemplative prayer without inquiring how well they are grounded in the more discursive forms of prayer like meditation and affective prayer.

But how else can people be rather indiscriminately invited to practice contemplative prayer unless contemplation is understood as something within our power to do? But if it is something that we can do, then it is a matter of the exercise of the human faculties, however subtly we are urged to exercise them, and it is not the infused contemplation which Garrigou-LaGrange accepts at being at the heart of the Christian mystical tradition. In centering prayer, for example, which claims John of the Cross as part of its inspiration, the clear distinction in St. John between meditation and infused contemplation, that is, between the kinds of prayer we can do whenever we want, and the gracious gift on God’s part of contemplation, is blurred. Contemplation becomes something more akin to the kinds of acquired or active contemplation that flourished for a time in the 17th century.

Both centering prayer and the Christian meditation movement operate in a kind of historical and theological vacuum that prevents them from examining not only what happened in the first half of the 20th century, but what transpired in the centuries before that time. This is regrettable. The unresolved crisis in mystical theology that led to the dark night of the mystics in the 17th century came to light in the first years of the 20th century where Garrigou-LaGrange played a major role in unsuccessfully trying to resolve it. Will the now popular interest in contemplative spirituality lead to a similar crisis when it collides with this still unresolved question of the nature of contemplation?

The failure of centering prayer and the Christian meditation movement to come to grips with Garrigou-LaGrange’s ideas on the nature of contemplation, and through him with the debates of those times is a fitting symbol of a wider failure of contemporary Christian spirituality which is curiously blind to its own history when it comes to the question of the nature of contemplation. Contemplation is promoted as a way of praying accessible to all, while contemplation in the sense of the gift of infused contemplation and the goal and summit of the spiritual life is forgotten.

What is the heart of Christian spirituality? Does G-L claim that infused contemplation is the heart of Christian spirituality? Or is he looking instead at the goal in which the Christian spiritual life culminates? Or is it both? It depends on the stage of the Christian. What we do in the spiritual life is always in tandem with grace. All are called to holiness, and infused spirituality is a gift that God intends to make available to all who follow Him.

The author of this piece agrees with G-L that authentic meditation is not the same as infused contemplation. G-L discusses how mental prayer is important for beginners; he also teaches that meditation or acquired contemplation can develop into mental prayer and lead to the act of caritas, while contemplation follows it. I do not know if there is a more thorough critique of centering prayer and modern "meditation" practices at Inner Explorations, but for those interested in the history of Catholic spirituality, this might be interesting: From St. John of the Cross to Us: The Story of a 400 Year Long Misunderstanding and what it means for the Future of Christian Mysticism. However, the author seems to be too accepting of the claims of depth psychology? (The author has also written this book: St. John of the Cross and Dr. C.G. Jung.)

30 Giorni interview with Fr. Charles Morerod, O.P.

30 Giorni: Il non protagonismo aiuta l’ecumenismo

Intervista con il domenicano Charles Morerod, segretario generale della Commissione teologica internazionale e rettore della Pontificia Università San Tommaso

"Some conversations have only beginnings and middles"

That was the catch-phrase for a Blackberry ad I saw today. But if there is no end, can there really be a middle?

Christopher Tollefsen on the New Natural Law Theory

In a previous post I mentioned that Christopher Tollefsen can be considered to be a disciple of Germain Grisez. From this I concluded that he is probably an advocate of the New Natural Law Theory. It turns out that I surmised correctly. I also noted in another post that the Philosophy Department at St. Anselm College has a blog. Today I discovered that there is a journal of philosophy associated with the college as well--Lyceum. There is also a blog dedicated to the discussion of articles from the journal. Browsing through the archive, I find that Dr. Tollefsen has written an article discussing the New Natural Law Theory (pdf). This article is recent, so it should provide a good overview of the state of the controversies raging between adherents of the NNLT and traditional Thomists (or neo-Thomists, as some NNLT proponents label some of them--let's set aside the question of whether neo-Thomism is rightly used as a pejorative or not). It also seems to me that the introduction by Tollefsen could serve as a basis for an "informal" (i.e. not published in an academic journal) response (or a formal, published response) by traditional Thomists to the assertions of New Natural Law theorists.

I wish to concentrate solely on what Dr. Tollefsen says about the common good and to make some notes.

4. Political Authority and the Political Common Good
In 1979, Grisez and Boyle published Life and Death with Liberty and Justice; in 1980, Finnis published Natural Law and Natural Rights. Together the two books marked the beginnings of a “discussion of political theory” carried on between the three thinkers.[30] Grisez and Boyle describe their early part in this discussion as conceding “somewhat too much to political theories that are prevalent in the United States.”[31] By this, they refer to an indebtedness to John Rawls’s antiperfectionism. In Life and Liberty Boyle and Grisez allowed that it would be wrong for the state to incorporate substantive moral values, such as the good of life, into its governing principles, and hence into its conception of the common good of the state. In part this was motivated by a need to find a principled limit on the state’s sovereignty over the lives, including the moral and religious lives, of its subjects.

Finnis’ work in Natural Law and Natural Rights, by contrast, argued for a perfectionist account of the state: the basic goods of human persons were not to be ruled out of the practical considerations at the heart of political rule, as in Rawls’s work. Yet Finnis too, like Grisez and Boyle, has been sensitive to the need for liberty in the state, and the limits of state sovereignty over individuals; all three oppose the view, encouraged by what Finnis calls a “quick” reading of Aquinas, according to which “government should command whatever leads people towards their ultimate (heavenly) end, forbid whatever deflects them from it, and coercively deter people from evil-doing and induce them to morally decent conduct.”[32]

Accordingly, Grisez, Finnis and Boyle have converged on an account of political authority and the common good that, while rooted in the basic goods, nevertheless sees the state as a “community co-operating in the service of a common good which is instrumental, not itself basic.”[33] Political authority is necessary because individuals, families, and groups, while sufficient in one sense for the pursuit of all the basic goods, including the goods of marriage and religion, are nevertheless thwarted in their pursuit of these goods by (a) lack of social coordination; (b) the hostility of outsiders; (c) the predatory behavior of some insiders; and (d) circumstances beyond the control of individuals that leave them in conditions of more than usual dependence but without the usual personal and social aids, as, for example, widows, orphans, the sick, and the disabled.

Political authority, and optimally, a political authority itself subject to law, is necessary to efficiently and fairly pursue these goals; but together, these goals comprise a set of conditions instrumentally necessary for individuals and groups to directly pursue the basic goods, individually and cooperatively. The political common good is thus described by Finnis as “the whole ensemble of material and other conditions, including forms of collaboration, that tend to favor, facilitate, and foster the realization by each individual [in that community] of his or her personal development.”[34]

In putting forth this account of political authority and the common good, Finnis has criticized the idea, mentioned above, that the common good includes the complete well-being, including the moral well-being, of the state’s citizens. In contrasting this Aristotelian idea with what he takes to be the true Thomistic view, Finnis has drawn criticism from some Thomists, who read St. Thomas as more similar to Aristotle than does Finnis. He has also generated some debate internal to the New Natural Law theory concerning the proper limits of political authority.[35]

Finnis holds that recognition of the instrumental nature of the state means that, as George summarizes his position, “law and the state exceed their just authority – thus violating a principle of justice – when they go beyond the protection of the public moral environment and criminalize 'even secret and truly consensual adult acts of vice.’”[36] But, says George in response, “it does not follow, or so it seems to me, from the instrumental nature of the political common good that moral paternalism, where it can be effective, is beyond the scope of that good.”[37] And so George, unlike Finnis, holds that the legitimate limits on legislation where morality is concerned are prudential, not principled.

Please refer to the on-line article for the footnote references.

1. Why is political authority necessary? It is not made necessary by the good involved (being common as opposed to private or singular), but for the reasons listed above, which cover interpersonal conflict. The presence of social coordination would facilitate individuals and families attaining the basic goods. But otherwise, individuals and families are sufficient to attain the basic goods. In contrast, Aquinas maintains that political authority is necessary because the good to which it is ordered is not the same as the private good of the individual. This is the holistic good, the good of the community as a whole.

(Something must adjudicate between competing desires and plans?)

2. "Yet Finnis too, like Grisez and Boyle, has been sensitive to the need for liberty in the state, and the limits of state sovereignty over individuals; all three oppose the view, encouraged by what Finnis calls a “quick” reading of Aquinas, according to which “government should command whatever leads people towards their ultimate (heavenly) end, forbid whatever deflects them from it, and coercively deter people from evil-doing and induce them to morally decent conduct.”[32] "

Aquinas recognizes that there are limits to human law. And yet if we take him seriously as an intellectual, we would gather that he thinks this is compatible with the common good being the good of the community as a whole.

"Finnis has criticized the idea, mentioned above, that the common good includes the complete well-being, including the moral well-being, of the state’s citizens. In contrasting this Aristotelian idea with what he takes to be the true Thomistic view, Finnis has drawn criticism from some Thomists, who read St. Thomas as more similar to Aristotle than does Finnis. He has also generated some debate internal to the New Natural Law theory concerning the proper limits of political authority.[35]"

What is the "complete" well-being? Can government bring about complete virtue? Probably not. But can it prohibit those actions which harm others or lead to bad moral states? Aquinas would agree that enforcement of the "no-harm principle" is important for the well-being of any community. But should law should be limited to this or not?

While Aquinas argues that law should not prohibit all vices, he does not give as a reason the question of enforceability. He focuses more on the question of observance. Would the lack of enforceability be a reason acceptable to Aquinas? Or would he reject this reason on other grounds?

Even if it is the case that law should be mostly limited to enforcing the no-harm principle, that does not mean that there is not a communal good distinct from the basic goods listed under the New Natural Law Theory. Is the complete well-being of the state's citizens the same as citizens living well with one another? I do not think so. And this is the problem, if Tollefsen is correct in his summary. (I'll have to double-check Finnis's Aquinas eventually.) The common good of the political community is not the complete well-being of its citizens. Rather, it is their life in common. It is not surprising that we who live as atomists or liberals fail to recognize this good, since for the most part we do not aim to achieve it in our own lives.

The dissertation by M. Therrien on the pedagogical nature of law should help one understand how law trains people in virtue.

*No-harm principle: No one can harm or injure (commit an act of injustice, not just physically hurt) another.

Elizabeth Anscome on Just War theory and the atomic bombings

Elizabeth Anscombe, "War and Murder" (pdf) and "Mr. Truman's Degree"

Fribourg Dissertations

Not sure if I've posted this link before -- here are some dissertations done at Fribourg. This looks interesting: Law, Liberty and Virtue: A Thomistic Defense for the Pedagogical Character of Law, by Michel Therrien. (Written under the direction of Fr. Sherwin, O.P.)

Theology must be Christocentric

From Sandro Magister's latest:

AN INFALLIBLE METHOD FOR RENEWING THEOLOGY

by Inos Biffi


If the Christian mystery stands at the origin of theology, and this can be defined as "understanding of the faith," it is unthinkable that at any point in time remaking it from scratch can be contemplated. In the diversity of the times, it is nourished by an uninterrupted tradition of content and also of language, which does not admit drastic and revolutionary discontinuities, on pain of losing its identity. It is permissible at least to harbor some perplexity before a theology convinced that it is presenting unusual and singular theological doctrines, never before taught.

Nevertheless, this does not doom theology to pure repetition. The history of theology itself shows how much, without breaking continuity, it has been variously and profoundly renewed: but not by somehow obscuring or ignoring the mystery; on the contrary, by allowing it to emerge with greater power and consistency.

Theology does not let itself be unsettled and influenced by the myth of becoming and progress, aware that it was born and is continually reborn from the inexhaustible and unchangeable resources of divine revelation, which is complete and does not wear out, from communion with the Word of God, ancient and always new.

It is also true that the renewal of theology can be accompanied by a new philosophy, but on the condition that it offer, so to speak, a space more open to the predominance and understanding of the mystery, and that it be exercised within the "understanding of the faith."

It is significant that the brilliant historian of medieval theology Marie-Dominique Chenu should affirm that "it is not the introduction of Aristotle that determines the thought of Saint Thomas, just as it is not the rebirth of Antiquity that constitutes the theology of the thirteenth century." The rebirth represents only one component of renewal: its impulse and its advance are attributed to "evangelism," as he calls it.

It goes without saying that it can never be philosophy that judges the validity of a theology: this judgment belongs only to the Word of God, while the same theology can judge the pertinence or lack thereof of a philosophy in contributing to the understanding of the faith.

*

Here, however, we are not interested in illustrating the relationship between philosophy and Christian theology, but in indicating the decision through which theology could and should receive a profound renewal or new arrangement: a decision that is unavoidable, because it is founded on the event from which emerges the faith, and therefore the "understanding of the faith."

This way is Christocentrism.

Truly, this is by no means a novelty. Christian theology has always had Jesus Christ at its center; it was born and developed from the event that is him.

But perhaps this original centrality requires a more rigorous, more consistent, and more complete translation. Above all beginning with the very definition of Christocentrism.

This does not signify only the excellence of Christ with respect to all the rest, but his predestination to be the unconditional reason for all that which God has called and calls into existence.

But other indispensable and essential clarifications are required. When one speaks of Christocentrism, one intends to affirm not only the primacy of the Word, but also the primacy or "precedence" in God's plan of the incarnate Word, who died and was raised, through whom, in whom, and in view of whom "were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible" (Colossians 1:15-17). Obviously, as a complement rather than an alternative to the Johannine perspective, according to which there is nothing that has not been made through the Word (John 1:3).

The "Preeminent over all things" (Colossians 1:18) is, precisely, the glorified Crucified One, who comes before everything and from whom everything departs. It is as if to say that Jesus the redeemer, with the grace of his forgiveness, is the ontological foundation and the historical motive of all things (cf. Colossians 1:17), the Object of God's eternal "purpose."

The first letter of Peter speaks of the "the precious blood of Christ as of a spotless unblemished lamb," "known before the foundation of the world," revealed in the final time" (1:19-20). And as for the prophets, it says that they were "investigating the time and circumstances that the Spirit of Christ within them indicated when it testified in advance to the sufferings destined for Christ and the glories to follow them" (1:11).

But if Jesus risen from the dead is the Predestined One, this means the figure of humanity originally conceived and "preferred" by God is the glorified humanity of the Son, the achievement to which all of history is oriented.

In it, all humanity finds its rationale and model: all men are predestined, created "in grace," or "predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he might be the firstborn among many brothers" (Romans 8:29).

We can define everything that we have described in the words of Paul: "the mystery of God that is Christ" (Colossians 2:2), or more precisely: "the wise mystery of God" that is "Christ crucified" (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:21,23).

*

So then, the task of theology is the exploration of this mystery. Those who dedicate themselves to it have the mission of "speaking God's wisdom, mysterious, hidden, which God predetermined before the ages" (1 Corinthians 2:7).

It is on this realism that Christian theology is built, with no interest in watering itself down in the world of hypothetical divine plans or designs. Only God knows what he could have done. Everything has been created in the grace of Jesus crucified and risen.

In particular, the nature of man was grounded on that grace. A "pure nature," for a "pure" and "natural" end, has never existed, and we can know nothing about it.

In fact, the "Original" that sacred doctrine intends to know above all, and therefore, the first object of theological interest, is the glorious Crucified One predestined from all time, and therefore, his life with its events, among which takes place the particularized manifestation of the eternal plan generated and motivated by the divine mercy.

In this sense, Christian theology is originally Christic: Christ risen from the dead describes and exhaustively offers all of his object. He is the Object that is to be understood, as the concrete and historical "narration" of the plan (cf. John 1:18). He is the dimension that Christology must take on.

But Christ does not stop at himself: he is the Son, and thus he refers to the Father, whom no one has seen and of whom he is the epiphany, and he is the attestation of the Spirit. In him is found the Trinity, which reveals itself as the creating and merciful Trinity, which stands at the origin of an order intended as an initiative of mercy.

This is the order that the theologian is called to study, which in particular concerns man, although he appears to be preceded, before his creation, by an angelic world already marked by Christ and by the decisions related to him: of acceptance, but also of rejection, or sin.

In particular, Christ unveils for us a God who, in his merciful love, gives the Son, predetermined as forgiveness for the sin of man, who in this way finds his advantage not in coming into the world, but in being redeemed. As Saint Ambrose writes, "Non prodesset nasci, nisi redimi profuisset" (Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam, II, 41-42).

Sacred doctrine, then, deals with anthropology, meaning man as existing solely as disposed in the grace and glory of the Cross: a grace and a glory at work in the sacraments, which Thomas Aquinas sees entirely suspended in the "energy of the passion of Christ" (Summa Theologiae, III, 62, 5, c).

So it is easy to see what ecclesiology deals with: precisely with the humanity that emerges from the Passover of Christ and finds itself configured and intimately associated with the Lord risen from the dead.

As for eschatology, this is the exploration of the glory and therefore of the achievement of the Crucified One: a glory that transcends and attracts history and is the end for which man and together with him all things were created and desired from eternity.

If it is true that Christian theology has always done this, I would in any case maintain that is is possible, even necessary, to refocus this in an even more consistent and profound way on Christocentrism. It is only from here that a strong, admirable impulse of renewal could come, which would be sought in vain elsewhere.

Ite ad Thomam: Hermeneutics of Discontinuity? JP2 vs. Florence on the Revocation of the Mosaic Covenant

Catholic Dualists

Original posted at The New Beginning. I'm reposting it here, with some small changes.

To deny that there are differences between men and women in how they think, materialists and feminsits must be "subtle" in attacking the data. (One strategem is to argue that since not all of one sex exhibit a trait to the nth degree that therefore this trait is not more exemplary of one sex than another. That is to say, a distribution curve is insufficient--one is needed is two distinct and sharp peaks.) In contrast, it is likely that Catholic egalitariansno matter how much they may criticize Descartes for being a father of modernity, must partially embrace a form of dualism that is similar to his if they are to dismiss the generalizations that have been made about the cognitive differences between men and women. They may claim to accept the hylomorphic account of the relation of soul to body, but on this point they become a dualists. They have to argue that because the soul is equal in all that all reason equally or in the same way.

They may acknowledge that there are differences in the exercise of the intellect or intellectual performance, as some are clearly more intelligent than others, but the power is the same in all. Now I think some distinctions need to be made. While the intellectual power may be the same in all, it is not exercised, in this life, by itself, but in conjunction with the sense powers. It is also influenced by other factors, such as one's emotions. The conjunction of body and soul is not something that is accidental to our way of reasoning in this life. That the body may have a regular (and not necessarily determintal) influence on how we reason may be part of God's design--sex differences in reasoning are "natural."

John Finnis is a Catholic egalitarian, and as far as I know, he has not written specifically about the soul or Descartes. But perhaps his egalitarianism is tied to his understanding of human dignity, and human dignity upon the spiritual nature of man.

Dropping “Patriarch of the West” and changing titles of Roman Basilicas to “Papal”

See the comments for what some think the implications of these acts for Catholic ecclesiology are.

Thomistica.net: Call for papers: Fordham conference on the Metaphysics of Aquinas (March 26-27, 2011)

Edward Feser comments on the Prop. 8 decision

Some thoughts on the Prop 8 decision (entry at his own blog)

The Catholic Thing: Tradition, Continuity, and Vatican II By David G. Bonagura, Jr

Yet an effort to avoid polemics is a mere surface reason for Benedict’s choice of the word. By insisting that Vatican II be interpreted in continuity with the Church of all ages, the pope is saying that the council is part of the Church’s Tradition (with a capital “T”), that is, part of the Church’s authoritative interpretation of divine revelation. Vatican II, therefore, is not a “rupture” in the Church’s Tradition (interpretation of God’s word) or traditions (ecclesial practices descended from the Apostles) resulting in a completely new way of believing, as Professor Hans Küng on the Left and the followers of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre on the Right maintain. For Benedict, Vatican II is a legitimate development in the Church’s ongoing understanding of Christ and His saving message for the world.

With respect to the sentences in bold -- I don't see how the second necessarily follows from the first.

Thomistica.net: Thomistic commentators online and Thomistic commentators online

Public Discourse: The Abiding Significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by Christopher O. Tollefsen

Americans must still wrestle with what it means to take the lives of innocent civilians intentionally.

There are, finally, some problem areas, puzzles regarding which we have not yet determined how the lessons of World War Two are to be brought to bear. As I noted, military ethics now take for granted that civilians are not to be targeted. Perhaps, however, that has simply made our leaders more scrupulous about calling civilian casualties “collateral damage,” even when they are willing to accept many more such casualties than they would harm to our own troops. But the original precept against killing the innocent no matter what the consequences is based on an even deeper truth: the fundamental and radical equality of all human beings as persons, as free and rational beings whose lives are each loci of intrinsic and incommensurable value. The West’s willingness to bomb at a distance, engage in drone attacks, and tolerate, in Iraq and Afghanistan, wildly disproportionate numbers of civilian casualties, suggests that our soldiers do indeed count more than their wives, children, and elderly. While this may be an understandable viewpoint in any society, it is not, for all that, a correct one.

I find it odd that someone who has studied MacIntyre would employ a modern notion of justice to explain the precept against murder. But as Grisez was very influential on Professor Tollefsen, it is not unexpected. This sort of explanation is employed by other contemporary Catholic intellectuals and by a few bishops as well. The explanation is serviceable, but it fails to distinguish the difference between justice from charity. (Since Grisez is not interested in keeping the Thomistic account of the virtues, it may not seem important, but if there is going to be more than a verbal difference between charity and justice then... )

A Prayer Rule by St. Theophan the Recluse

here

Other resources
Orthodox Information Center

Did Cardinal Ratzinger think that Vatican I is non-negotiable?

It would seem so, with respect to its teachings on the office of the pope. From the CDF's Doctrinal Commentary on Ad Tuendam Fidem:

With respect to the truths of the second paragraph, with reference to those connected with revelation by a logical necessity, one can consider, for example, the development in the understanding of the doctrine connected with the definition of papal infallibility, prior to the dogmatic definition of the First Vatican Council. The primacy of the Successor of Peter was always believed as a revealed fact, although until Vatican I the discussion remained open as to whether the conceptual elaboration of what is understood by the terms 'jurisdiction' and 'infallibility' was to be considered an intrinsic part of revelation or only a logical consequence. On the other hand, although its character as a divinely revealed truth was defined in the First Vatican Council, the doctrine on the infallibility and primacy of jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff was already recognized as definitive in the period before the council. History clearly shows, therefore, that what was accepted into the consciousness of the Church was considered a true doctrine from the beginning, and was subsequently held to be definitive; however, only in the final stage - the definition of Vatican I - was it also accepted as a divinely revealed truth.

I don't see why he would have changed his mind once become pope.

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