Cosmos Liturgy Sex: Not to Beat a Dead Theologian, But…

Fr. Guy Mansini on 5 theses of Henri De Lubac, S.J.

Thesis One: Attention to the order of pure nature, which began in the 16th century, has had a malign impact on the Church both speculatively and practically. This is so because of the way that the doctrine of pure nature has developed historically. Either a) nature was conceived of in such a way that it needed grace (as with the theologian Baius) or b) it was supernaturalized. This latter way of thinking about pure nature postulated a natural intuition of God or a natural friendship with God. This latter position is the cause of “extrinsicist” accounts of grace, for which it is thought that human nature can have perfect contentment in its own order.

Thesis Two: God has never ordained for man anything more than a supernatural end. There is an intrinsic unity to the economy of salvation, and modern theology was not always sufficiently attentive to this fact.

Thesis Three: Human nature is what it is because it is ordered to a supernatural end, and would not be what it is if it were otherwise ordered.

Thesis Four: The fourth thesis, as Mansini presents it, is complex. It is a thesis in three parts. First, the natural desire to see God must be foremost in our attention in speculative theology, otherwise we do not recognize the unity of the economy of salvation, and we get mixed up on the relationship between philosophical anthropology and theological anthropology, between knowledge and faith, and between philosophy and theology. Second, the natural desire to see God is both sign and effect of our being ordered to possession of beatific vision. Third, because the human “natural desire to see God” is inherently of the supernatural order, it must be understood to be a necessary and absolute ordination and not conditioned – yet, we must not deny that grace is truly gratuitous.

Thesis 5: There follows from theses 1-3 a prohibition: it is useless to consider in the speculative order the condition of our nature aside from its supernatural ordination.

“Henri de Lubac, the Natural Desire to See God, and Pure Nature” from the 2002 Gregorianum (vol. 83, 1): 89-109.

See also these other posts at the same blog:
Nova et Vetera Contra Henri De Lubac
An Essential Difference Between Thomism and Augustinianism

Magister, From the "New World" Symphony of Benedict XVI. An Anthology

From the "New World" Symphony of Benedict XVI. An Anthology

In Sydney, at World Youth Day, Joseph Ratzinger preaches a "new age" of the Spirit to renew the face of the earth. Three years ago, to the young people gathered in Germany, he had proposed a "revolution." The historic hope of the pope theologian

IEP entry on St. Thomas's moral philosophy

I could write an evaluation after I've finished my own work, but what would the point be? How many people consult the IEP entries?

Zenit: Water More Than an Economic Good, Says Pope

Water More Than an Economic Good, Says Pope

Sends Message to International Expo Under Way in Spain

VATICAN CITY, JULY 15, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI is calling for solidarity and responsibility in national and international policies on water, saying water is a right and profit should not be the only reason to protect it.

There is a "right to water," based on the dignity of the human person, and it is not simply an "economic good" the Pope affirmed in a message to the international exposition on "Water and Sustainable Development," under way in Zaragoza, Spain.

The Holy Father sent his message through Cardinal Renato Martino, the Holy See's representative at the expo.

"Because of the […] pressure of multiple social and economic factors, we must be conscious of the fact" that today "water must be considered " a good that must be especially protected through clear national and international policies, and used according to sensible criteria of solidarity and responsibility," the Pontiff exhorted.

"The use of water, which is regarded as a universal and inalienable right, is related to the growing and urgent needs of people who live in destitution, taking into account the fact that limited access to potable water has repercussions on the wellbeing of an enormous number of people and is often the cause of illnesses, sufferings, conflicts, poverty and even death," the message added.

In regard to the right to water, the Holy Father also stressed that it is "a right that is based on the dignity of the human person." It is "from this perspective that positions of those who consider and treat water only as an economic good must be carefully examined," Benedict XVI continued. "Its use must be rational and solidary, fruit of a balanced synergy between the public and private sector."

Religious meanings

The Pope went on to mention that water is not just a material good, as it also has "religious meanings that believing humanity, especially Christianity, have developed, assigning it great value as a precious immaterial good, which always enriches man's life on this earth."

"How can one not recall in this circumstance the thought-provoking message that has come to us from sacred Scriptures, treating water as a symbol of purification -- cf. Psalm 50,4; John 13:8; and of life -- cf. John 3:5; Galatians 3:27," he noted. "The full recovery of this spiritual dimension is the guarantee and implication for an adequate approach to the ethical, political and economic problems that affect the complex management of water on the part of so many interested individuals, both in the national and international realm."

A concert was held in homage to the Pope on Monday night in the Mozart Hall of the expo auditorium, which was attended by some 1,000 people.

Proceeds from the sale of tickets will be allocated by "Manos Unidas," a Catholic charitable institution, to water management projects for agricultural purposes in India.

Eirenikon: Zizioulas on Love for Unity and the Russian Church

The Ecumenical Patriarch on the Eastern Fathers and Theology

The lecture by the Ecumenical Patriarch at the Pontifical Oriental Institute.

Chiesa: The Encyclical on Hope Commented by Two Non-believing Thinkers
They are the professors Aldo Schiavone and Ernesto Galli della Loggia, on the front page of the newspaper of the Holy See. Pope Joseph Ratzinger knows them, and has read them. Will he respond?

A new puzzle

Regarding equality and justice--just when I thought I was making progress, I find that I need to find the basis for making a return or requital--the precept to make a return or requital when one receives a benefit seems to be more than just the precept to love others, no? But does Aquinas explicitly discuss how the former is derived from the latter?

Just when I thought I had gone as far as I needed, something pops up that I had not considered before. While this may be good philosophically, it's not so good for getting a dissertation done as soon as possible...

More stuff on the Filioque

John Paul II: The Spirit and the Filioque Debate
Fr. Z: Benedict XVI and Bartholomew I: together the Creed in Greek
The Clarification: The Father as the Source of the Whole Trinity: The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Greek and Latin Traditions
Nicene Truth: The Vatican Clarification on the Filioque

One Single Source: An Orthodox Response to the Clarification on the Filioque
(by Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon)

De unione ecclesiarum: On Anastasius the Librarian

Eirenikon: Filioquextravaganza

From First Things:

N.T. Wright Responds to Richard John Neuhaus

The Anglican bishop of Durham takes issue with the editor in chief of First Things—and vice versa.

Philosophy is not intellectual history

Even if some departments seem to have reduced the philosophical enterprise to it, usually to avoid inter-departmental debate and to adopt a liberal/PC/or relativist attitude towards what thinkers actually hold. As I have written before, inquiring into reality is not the same as doing intellectual history, even if intellectual history may be a useful way to gather the opinions of others. But in the end, one must still evalute those opinions and judge them by what one knows of reality.

Also, what philosophers sometimes forget is that arguments about the origins of ideas need to be framed (and evaluated) not as philosophical arguments but as historical arguments. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was reading through Kirkpatrick Sale's The Human Scale--he does not put forth any genealogy, but I could see some enthusistic undergraduate or even graduate student jump in and say, "The desire to dominate nature has its origins in Descartes" or Francis Bacon. But is it not part of the fallen human condition to assume a wrongful dominion over creation, making it serve man's disordered appetites and without any regard for the consequences or the future? It is one thing to say that the writings of Descartes or Bacon reflects this disordered desire; it's another to say that they are the intellectual progenitors of this desire, which could be named some appropriate '-ism'.

Too often philosophers try to establish their intellectual credibility by looking for the origin of ideas and locating it in some supposed focal figure in the past. While the texts may show that the author did indeed share such ideas, this is not conclusive in itself--what must be done is to show that the ideas were desseminated through him, and had an impact on society at large. This is rarely done, and usually cannot be done.

On the other hand, perhaps some notiosn of rights can be traced back in history to certain people, but the introductory texts that I have read so far have not persuaded me of this--precisely because they have not discussed the educational system of the time--what books were being read and studied in universities and law schools, and what was being cited in other texts, and so on.

At this point in time I think that ius as a subjective active right can be found not inly during the medieval period, but before, in Roman law. But this does not mean all medievals or all Romans held to a conception of right as a manifestation of dominion or property. For the medievals at least it seems clear that there were several theories of subjective active rights, not just one.

It is better to look at the purpose that subjective active rights served within law, and to draw up an undnerstanding of rights based on that, rather than creating an a priori theory about what rights are (within ethics or politics), and then reading this into legal texts.

LT: A Neo-Patristic Approach to Biblical Inerrancy
by John F. McCarthy

WWWTW: Not the Common Good

See also Southern Appeal, Heller in a nutshell

Fr. Z: For students of St. Augustine, a great tool in paperback

Wow!

The Writings of Charles De Koninck
Volume One
Charles De Koninck
Edited and translated by Ralph McInerny

The Writings of Charles De Koninck, Volume 1, introduces a projected three-volume series that presents the first English edition of the collected works of the Catholic Thomist philosopher Charles De Koninck (1906–1965). Ralph McInerny is the project editor and has prepared the excellent translations.

The first volume contains writings ranging from De Koninck’s 1934 dissertation at the University of Louvain on the philosophy of Sir Arthur Eddington, to two remarkable early essays on indeterminism and the unpublished book “The Cosmos.” The short essay “Are the Experimental Sciences Distinct from the Philosophy of Nature?” is also included and demonstrates for the first time De Koninck’s distinctive view on the relation between philosophy of nature and the experimental sciences. A comprehensive introductory essay by Leslie Armour outlines the structure and themes of De Koninck’s philosophy. The volume begins with a biographical essay by De Koninck’s son, Thomas.

Charles De Koninck was on the faculty of Québec’s Université de Laval and was Director of Laval’s philosophy faculty from 1939 to 1956. He determined the course of philosophy at Laval and in much of French Canada through his publications and his connections with the Roman Catholic Church. He lectured frequently in the United States, as well as in Latin America, Europe, and Canada.

“Charles De Koninck, perhaps because of his untimely death, is not as well known to English-speaking readers as Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, but his work belongs to that same world-class scholarship as his notable contemporaries. It is almost an understatement to say that his contribution to the philosophy of science remains timely. Readers are fortunate that his former student, Ralph McInerny, has seen fit to collect and to translate, where necessary, some of De Koninck’s most important work for this volume.” —Jude P. Dougherty, The Catholic University of America

Amazon

A problem with saying rights are "God-given"?

In connection with the Declaration of Independence. For the moment I am ignoring the rights themselves that are enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, and the question of whether they are subjective passive rights or subjective active rights or both.)

It isn't the case that these rights have been Divinely Revealed to us, not in the form of Christian Tradition at any rate. They must then be discoverable by human reason alone, but nonetheless connected to God in some way. That is, rights [may] have their origin in Divine Law, in the form of the Natural Law, if they can be said to be "God-given."

If rights correlate to duties, then we can say that "God-given" rights correspond to "God-given" duties incumbent upon the individual or the government. But what are these duties, and of which virtues are they precepts? It is not enough to say that they are in some way derived from human nature (like the Natural Law is derived in some way from human nature -- which can be a very questionable way to explain the Natural Law)--one must talk about what goods are involved.

If the precept that is involved is one of charity, love of God and neighbor, then how can one possibly legislate concerning God-given rights, when one cannot legislate charity, which requires grace and cannot be induced through human law? One the other hand, if the rights that are spoken of are connected to justice (and thus can be an object of human legislation), is it not a bit misleading to connect them directly with God? Do we need to have the virtue of charity in order to have the virtue of justice? Perfect justice, yes, but not imperfect justice.

It is true that both human nature and its goods are given by God. Man is made in the image of God, having a spiritual side that other animals lack. But as I have written before, this principle is insufficient to explain the foundation of rights as being in justice, rather than charity. One must show how they are derived from the precepts of particular justice and legal justice. Legal justice is especially important, since it is the virtue that directly pertains to the common good of a political community. In so far as rights can be derived from the precepts of justice, which are a part of the Natural Law (or an extension of it, in human law), then they can be said to be "God-given."

We must then ask, what conception of legal justice and the common good do we find in Jefferson? How about the Anglo-American political tradition in general? Does the Anglo-American political tradition accept a more traditional notion of the common good, or does it get it from the Enlightenment or liberalism? It does not matter so much if the Natural Law in itself is ignored or even denied in this tradition, so long as the precepts and the goods they involved can be reconciled with a proper understanding of the Natural Law.

Human Rights (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Rights (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Jefferson on Politics & Government: Inalienable Rights
John Locke Foundation | John Locke: His American and Carolinian Legacy
Principle 3. Unalienable Rights From God
wiki

What is this? The Princeton Principles on Universal Jurisdiction

Rebuilt 1-22
Princeton - News - Jurists demand end to impunity
Equipo Nizkor - The Princeton Principles on Universal Jurisdiction.
Google Books: Universal Jurisdiction in Modern International Law: Expansion of National Jurisdiction for Prosecuting Serious Crimes under International Law

The International Law of Responsibility for Economic Crimes: Holding State Officials Individually Liable for Acts of Fraudulent Enrichment, by Ndiva Kofele-Kale
(Google Books)

The Orthodox on Remarriage

Some links:
GOArch
De unione ecclesiarum: Mother’s Day reflections
Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in the Orthodox Church: Economia ...

I came upon this old post by Christopher Roach, Where Does the Mind End and the Soul Begin?, in which he questions the adequacy of Thomistic natural philosophy regarding the mind:

The more I study Thomistic philosophy considered in the light of modern psychology and neuroscience, the more troubled I am by the encroachment of science on the traditional idea of the soul. But these insights are real, and the more I understand about them, the more I find the traditional Thomistic and Aristotelian formulae inadequate. Under Aristotelian and Thomistic accounts of the soul dominant in the Catholic Church, the soul is the seat of reason and the intellect, as well as the animating principle of the entire unified person (including the body). The soul is evident and coextensive with the body in this account–it is its “formal cause,” from which any person or thing is by definition inseparable–but the soul is also deemed immaterial, permanent, and the reason we have the potential of eternal life.

Neuroscience has begun to demonstrate that a variety of matters traditionally thought to lay outside the realm of purely material explanation–will, decision-making, personality, moral reasoning, imagination–in fact have strong components in the brain itself, where specific areas “light up” when certain kinds of decisions are made or feelings are felt. Injuries to certain areas of the brain–like the frontal lobes–can yield irrational behavior traditionally thought of as immoral. Finally, the dramatic effects of psychopharmaceuticals in manipulating behavior suggest that we may really be much more determined materially than traditional Christian theology would suggest.

How would you respond to him? I would recommend Dr. Baars treatment of compulsive behavior as start, and perhaps the recent mult-ivolume work by Fr. Ripperger, F.S.S.P. on psychology (I will have to check and see if he deals with these sorts of phenomena, and the semblance of determinism.)

Dom Illtyd Trethowan

Downside Abbey profile

Awareness of God

He wrote some books I'd like to read, including Christ in the Liturgy, The Meaning of Existence, Mysticism and Theology: An Essay in Christian Metaphysics, and The Absolute and the Atonement.

Google Books: Certainty - Philosophical And Theological: Philosophical and ...
Philosophy and Theology in Monastery: The Thought of Dom Illtyd ...
Illtyd Trethowan, monk of Downside and Fergus Kerr

Hmm... Louis Lavelle, The Meaning of Holiness