Thomistic.net: Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas at Toulouse


And there are these posts, Brian Mullady’s website, and Albert the Great news: Alberti magni e-corpus . (Fr. Mullady's website. Alberti Magni e-corpus.)

Pertinacious Papist: Aquinas Institute in the Year of St. Paul. Website for the institute.

Uniting Faith and Culture: Hans Urs von BalthasarJohn-Peter Pham (from Modern Age 42:2, Spring 2000)

There are a number of reasons why it could be said, albeit from different perspectives, that the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) occupies a unique place among the great thinkers of the twentieth century. From the point of view of sheer literary volume, he is almost alone in the sheer monumental proportions of his written corpus. . . .

Thought experiments

Just a quick note on the problem of using thought experiments in philosophy: there is a danger of using the imagination without understanding. One is often held captive to the reality present in the thinker's mind, as it is elaborated in the thought experiment, not to actual reality. Without a grasp of the natures involved, one could imagine all sorts of causal relationships.

SEP: Thought Experiments

Fulvio Di Blasi has set up blogs for three recently published books (in Italian): Conoscenza pratica, teoria dell'azione e bene politico, a book on John Finnis ,and a collection of essays, La vitalità del diritto naturale, which was co-edited with Paolo Heritier.

HDS - Events Online - 2007-08 Dudleian Lecture - Paul Rorem

"Negative Theologies and the Cross"

Edward Feser, The Newspeak of the moderns

T. David Curp, A Necessary Bondage? When the Church Endorsed Slavery (via Mark Shea)

A good companion for this post over at Per Caritatem: Augustine and Scotus on Slavery

Ms. Nielsen writes:

I often hear the claim made that convictions such as (1) human beings should not be considered the “property” of another human being and (2) slavery per se is morally reprehensible are simply modern/postmodern sensibilities created and propagated by political liberalism (which is not a jab at political liberalism). I have to admit that I am deeply suspicious of this claim and find it rather unconvincing. After all, there were at least two premoderns (Augustine and Scotus and imagine many others of which I am unaware) who claimed that slavery was un-natural (contra Aristotle) and that it violated natural law. (Augustine does, however, seem to offer more of a justification for the institution that might not be in the end very helpful for seeking to abolish slavery. Scotus’s position, in contrast, might provide a stronger argument for the injustice and moral wrongness of all forms of slavery wherein one human “owns” another as property).

Do the ancients and medievals speak of slaves being "property"? Is the concept of property equivalent to that of dominion?

Paul Gottfried, Understanding Nietzsche

Just Thomism: Belief in its proper sense

A formulation of the Incommensurability Thesis

From Morality and the Human Goods, by Alfonso Gómez-Lobo:

Incommensurability and Hierarchy of Goods

The good life is a conceptual ideal (there is nothing of basic value excluded from it), but our lives are far from perfect. Yet we can lead better or worse lives, depending fundamentally on our choices. Is there a fixed hierarchy of goods such that if A is higher than B, and if we always choose A, then our lives will be better than if we choose B? As far as I know, none of the philosophical efforts to set up a fixed hierarchy of basic goods has been successful. Aristotle, for example, argues that excellence in the exercise of theoretical knowledge is the main ingredient in the best life, but it also is clear that in many particular circumstances exclusive pursuit of theoretical knowledge--at the cost, say, of neglecting or harming friends, family and one's communities--is foolish and wrong. Someone who does that surely is not a good person in the Aristotelian sense of being a virtuous or excellent man.

We often have to choose among competing goods. What we do in such cases is engage in broad prudential comparisons about what goods are more important in general as well as in particular circumstances. It is less important to lose one's job than to lose one's life, but in a given case keeping a risky job to support one's family could be the prudent thing to do.

Prudential weighing of goods according to their importance is quite different, however, from the model of quantitative calculation of goods. Basic goods cannot be reduced to units that it would then make sense to maximize. Are there more units of friendship in having fifty relatively distant friends than in having a few close friends? How many units of work are balanced by how many units of inner harmony? I trust you will agree that the quantitative approach (which is perfectly clear--e.g., for the maximization of yearly profits of a manufacturing company) hardly makes sense for basic human goods.

Even if one grants the Aristotelian doctrine that theoretical knowledge should be valued highly, one can still see that a "lower" good (by comparison) may be the good worth pursuing. In light of my talents (or lack thereof), and given what might follow from a purely theoretical pursuit (I may not find a job as a pure theoretician!), it would be best for me to choose a less glamorous profession.

At times it might seem as if the grounding good--life itself--shoudl always take precedence over everything else. Indeed, it is so basic that in most cases it is clear that aiming at other goods at the cost of life would be irrational. Yet there may be circumstances inw hich not even life should be preserved at all costs. It may be rational to give up one's life (which is not the same as taking one's life) so that others may live.

No human good is absolute in the sense that, regardless of circumstances, its pursuit and protection should always and everywhere take precedence over other basic goods. There is no overriding good. Because the order of precedence is not fixed and therefore is far from being obvious to human agents before they face particular choices, we are well advised to develop certain strategies for the pursuit of the human goods.

But does not God take precedence over everything else? Is He not an 'absolute' good in that way? Could the martyrs protect both their lives and the love of God? It seems not.

iirc, this problem with the New Natural Law Theory was brought to the fore when Germain Grisez argued that God could not be the object of human happiness--his paper, and various responses to it, were published in volume 46 of The American Journal of Jurisprudence. Can it be shown that his position is heretical? Or at least contrary to sound reason? (Can one show that God is not only the ultimate end for all creation, but also the object of love as well? I would think so.)

Fr. Brian Harrison: Explicit Faith Necessary for Salvation [pdf] (via Cornell Society for a Good Time)

Zenit: Awaiting Benedict XVI's 3rd Encyclical

Awaiting Benedict XVI's 3rd Encyclical

Comments of Bishop Crepaldi on Church

VERONA, Italy, FEB. 1, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is a statement written by Bishop Giampaolo Crepaldi, the secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and president of the Cardinal Van Thuân International Observatory, ahead of the publication of Benedict XVI's third encyclical, to be titled "Caritas in Veritate." The encyclical will likely be published in April.

The statement was published this week on the observatory's Web site.

* * *

What does it mean to say the social doctrine of the Church is timely?

We all await the heralded third encyclical of Benedict XVI, which will evoke the publication of "Populorum Progressio" by Paul VI 20 years ago, and will be entitled "Caritas in Veritate."

Our time is therefore a propitious time for us to ponder the sense of the "timeliness" of the social doctrine of the Church (SDC). The Holy Father is going to publish a new social encyclical precisely in order for a teaching dating back centuries to continue to be ever timely, alive and at work in history. What, therefore, is the source of this "timeliness"? On what basis can we say the social doctrine is "timely"?

We know the social doctrine of the Church has a permanent value and a changing value at one and the same time. In paragraphs 2, 3 and 5 of "Centesimus Annus" John Paul II asserted his wish to "re-read" "Rerum Novarum" by looking "back," looking "around" and looking "to the future." These three expressions indicate the historicity of the Church's social doctrine, which is always an updating of tradition in order to render it once again fecund and hence timely and present.

The three moments of yesterday, today and tomorrow indicate the change and the simultaneous permanence of the selfsame truth in the sense that the SDC is historical, and not just "history," insofar as it is the announcement of Christ, who is the same yesterday, today and forever. The "permanent" features of the social doctrine of the Church also stem from apostolic tradition as an essential component of the "depositum fidei" and as a point of observation -- or "theological place" as theologians say -- to look upon the world and history.

Not only does SDC have its own tradition, which began back in 1891 with "Rerum Novarum," but it also falls within the mainstream of the living tradition of the Church from which it draws nourishment. One of the reasons explaining a certain degree of slowness or even delays in the awareness of Christians with respect to assuming personal and collective responsibility for SDC may be seen in that fact it is not considered part of ecclesial tradition.

On the basis of what has been said above it could be surmised that the updating of SDC stems from changes and developments in the course of history, which constitute challenges for humanity. This is undoubtedly true. Since "the Church's social teaching is born of the encounter of the Gospel message and of its demands […]with the problems emanating from the life of society" ("Libertatis Conscientia," 72) it may be argued that it "develops in accordance with the changing circumstances of history" (ibid) and "is subject to the necessary and opportune adaptations suggested by the unceasing flow of the events which are the setting of the life of people and society" ("Sollicitudo Rei Socialis," 3). This is true, as I said, but it has to be understood in a theological sense, not a sociological one. The "timeliness" of an encyclical does not merely depend on the new social problems or issues it addresses. Were this the case, establishing the timeliness of Benedict XVI's upcoming social encyclical would merely be a question of listing the social issues it tackles and then checking which and how many of them were not touched upon in previous encyclicals. That, however, is not the way it is, for the simple reason that a social encyclical is not a sociological investigation.

It therefore becomes clear that the "timeliness" of SDC stems not only from the new facts humanity has to deal with, but from the Gospel itself, which, insofar as Word incarnate, is always new. New facts and developments in history can act as a stimulus for a re-reading of everlasting truth, because everlasting truth is essentially open to such an endeavor. Were this not true, each encyclical would speak only to the men and women of its time.

Present in the Church's social doctrine is an inexhaustible and irreducible element of prophecy bestowed upon it by the Gospel. Christ is ever timely, and let us not forget that the social doctrine of the Church is "announcement of Christ."

Rt. Rev. Giampaolo Crepaldi
President of the Observatory

Just Thomism: What is unique to and distinctive of man in St. Thomas’s ethics

Some notes:

Dominion sets man apart from brute beasts. Dominion is exercised through (the tools) of reason and will. Aquinas does use Aristotle's definition of man as rational animal. "Rationality" does not exclude rational appetite, or the will, but includes it. Both reason and will set men apart from animals, but it is the distinct form of agency proper to man, dominion, that is of interest in ethics, since ethics is concerned with human action. (With respect to Aquinas' (and Aristotle's) understanding of voluntary, 'voluntariness' is not enough to distinguish human agency from that of animals, even though "the voluntary in its perfection belongs to none but the rational nature."

What would the personalists add to this understanding of the distinctiveness of man? Does Aquinas's definition of person really satisfy them? Does personalism fail to pay sufficient attention to man's animality? Can an ethics be founded solely upon persons being relational beings by definition?

Zenit: Ratzinger Foundation on Key Aspects of Pope's Theology

Ratzinger Foundation on Key Aspects of Pope's Theology

"Not a Theology for All Times ... But Rather a Theology for This Time"



MUNICH, Germany, JAN. 29, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the introduction Siegfried Wiedenhofer, one of Benedict XVI's former assistants, gave Nov. 12 at the launch in Munich of the Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI Foundation. The foundation is the project of a group of Joseph Ratzinger's former doctoral and postdoctoral students, known as the Schülerkreis (Circle of Students).

His address was titled "Key Aspects of the Theology of Professor Joseph Ratzinger."

* * *

In seeking to give a brief overview of the theology of Joseph Ratzinger, one is of course first confronted by the problem of its range. Joseph Ratzinger is among the most prolific theologians of our time, and probably of the history of theology as a whole. His published work to date is contained in the bibliography that has been produced by the Schülerkreis, and in particular by Vinzenz Pfnür, and which will soon be published: 130 books and writings, numerous of which have been translated into many languages, and over 1300 articles, many of which are also available in translation.

But the breadth of the themes is also stunning. Most of these writings are from the field of dogmatic theology and take up the exposition of the main tenets of the Christian faith. However, he began as a fundamental theologian and has continually dealt with particular foundational questions, such as the question of faith and reason, questions of theological method, and especially questions of ecumenical theology. But this is also a theology that understands itself to be particularly in the service of the ecclesial praxis of the faith.

Thus there are also many writings such as homilies and meditations that emerged directly from pastoral tasks, and writings that pertain to ecclesial praxis and would ordinarily be considered to belong to the field of practical theology: writings about spirituality, about the liturgy, but also about ethics, particularly political ethics. In addition, his interpretations of dogma almost always have a strong exegetical dimension, and he has also contributed several recognized works of theological and dogmatic history. A final characteristic that makes an overview of Joseph Ratzinger's theology difficult is the fact that his theology is a dialogical theology through and through -- a theology that develops not only through a listening to what the sources have to say, but also through a critical conversation with other perspectives, a conversation that is not afraid to identify errors and sometimes to argue quite polemically. What Joseph Ratzinger said in his first book, his dissertation on Augustine, surely applies to his own work as well: "Like every great theology, Augustine's grew out of polemics against error, which here too showed itself to be the fruitful power without which living intellectual movement is hardly imaginable."

On the other hand, like probably every other great theology, Joseph Ratzinger's is marked by a great inner unity. By this I mean not only a deep integration of thought and belief, reflection and meditation, but also the unity of his fundamental theological vision. It is true that the theology of Joseph Ratzinger has in fact been read, criticized, and taken up in quite different ways, but the decisive aspect of this basic vision can be fairly clearly identified, in my opinion.

1. The theology of Joseph Ratzinger is not a theology for all times or a theology about history, but rather a theology for this time, and this time is for him above all the time of a fundamental crisis.

In the first place, there is the crisis of the Catholic Church, out of which the Second Vatican Council --prepared for and accompanied by a broad stream of Catholic reform theology -- sought to lead us. The theology of Joseph Ratzinger is a part of this theology of reform. Nonetheless, it differs from the work of the other theologians of reform, in the main, in that the question of the identity of faith and Church soon found its way to the fore in his theology. This came about because for Joseph Ratzinger after the Council, the ecclesial and theological situation in the Catholic Church increasingly emerged as a crisis such as had not been seen since the 13th century, as he once said. In addition to this first diagnosis of crisis, there is -- in connection with the great departure from tradition in the last third of the 20th century, and also in connection with the collapse of communism -- his diagnosis of a fundamental crisis in morality and meaning in modern culture and society, which finds increasingly decisive expression in the charge of relativism. Finally, toward the end of the second millennium and in the beginning of the third, in light of the new sense of globalization, he also diagnoses and reflects upon a fundamental crisis of Christianity and its truth-claim.

2. A theology in such a time of crisis and transition must concentrate upon what is essential in Christian faith, its identity and specificity, as these are recognizable in the basic structure and constitution of the faith.

This essence of the faith can be summarized in three decisive aspects of Ratzinger's understanding of Christian faith: the rationality of faith, faith's historicity as centered in the revelation of Jesus Christ, and the personal nature of faith as summed up in love.

The rationality of faith as a claim to truth, a claim of knowledge

The theology of Joseph Ratzinger had developed above all in conversation with the Fathers of the Church and with the theology of the High Middle Ages, especially in conversation with Augustine, then also in conversation with Bonaventure -- thus on the whole much more strongly in dialogue with the tradition of Christian Platonism than with Christian Aristotelianism. It is from the ancient Church's constitution of Christian theology, to which he continually makes reference, that 1) the epistemological claim of Christian faith, its truth claim, and 2) a dialectical relationship of faith to reason, philosophy, and science, come to be a dominant strain of his own theology.

On the one hand, the truth of God has, according to the witness of Christian faith, entered history definitively with the final revelation in Jesus Christ. But this knowledge of faith necessarily requires thought, requires philosophy, because it claims to be a knowledge of all of reality, and because, in any case, it has to make its witness to the truth comprehensible. On the other hand, thinking needs the challenge of faith's recognition of truth, so that it can remain on the right path in the search for the real, one, whole truth, amid the intensifying Western dichotomization of faith and reason, theology and philosophy.

In his conversation with Jürgen Habermas on April 19, 2004, here in the Katholische Akademie Bayern in Munich, Cardinal Ratzinger could speak, in the face of dangerous pathologies of both religion and reason that cannot be ignored today, “of a necessary correlationality of reason and faith, reason and religion, which are called to mutual purification and healing, and which need one another and must each acknowledge this” (Habermas/Ratzinger 2005, 57). It is only through a prolonged struggle with the present intellectual situation that it became evident to him that the question of truth must become a basic question for theology and philosophy: as he says, we do not dispose over truth -- rather, only in acknowledging ourselves to be claimed together by the truth can we escape the dictatorship of arbitrariness and relativism and rescue the true humanity and human dignity.

Against this backdrop, the doctrine of creation, for instance, which J. Ratzinger has continually taken up since his early lectures in dogmatics, acquires an elevated theological significance. Ethical questions, too (regarding education, culture, politics, the state, democracy, and so on) are increasingly discussed. On the other hand, the thought of modernity finds itself the object of a radical critique (explicit for the first time in Introduction to Christianity): While in the metaphysics of antiquity and the Middle Ages the world, as an expression of the (creative) divine reason, was meaningful, comprehensible, reasonable, and transparent to its finality, the dominant modern notion of reason restricts itself to the knowledge of phenomena and the bare facts of history and to the cultural and technical production of goods in the service of man's self-realization. In this reconfiguration of values, according to Ratzinger, reason becomes blind not only with respect to the truth of God, but also -- and in connection with this -- with respect to the difference between bare human existence and truly being human, a distinction essential for man's humanity.

The historicity of faith and its christological center

According to the Christian confession of faith, the truth of God, the subject matter of theology, has appeared definitively in history in the person and history of Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh, the decisive sign of God's revelation and salvation in the world -- a revelation which, by the power of the Holy Spirit in the Church, is ever made newly present and effective. God has really bridged the abyss of infinity and has become approachable in a wholly human way, in Jesus Christ and in the witness of the ecclesial community of faith immersed in history. And here we find not only that Christian faith bears a certain claim to absoluteness, but also the importance of the Church as a theme in the theology of J. Ratzinger. The significance of this historical positivity of Christian faith can be seen also in J. Ratzinger's important historical works, in his lectures on dogma, which interpreted faith as a living path through history, and in his dogmatics, which, like few others, rests upon an intensive personal exegetical study of the biblical sources.

The personal nature of faith

According to the logic of Christian faith, the question of truth is, in the final analysis, the quest for a truth that is really humane, that is, the truth of love, which permits the person to realize himself precisely in what most fully characterizes him: his being a person. In this emphasis on personhood as entailed in being human and in faith, we certainly see resonances of the personalist thinking of the period between the World Wars (Scheler, Guardini), which greatly influenced the theological development of Joseph Ratzinger in his early years. For it was possible to show, from this perspective, that the Christian message of the truth of God does not reach man as a foreign message that imposes itself from the outside, but rather that it is a message of life that permits him to live in the full and proper sense. And it is this precisely because it is a message of love. For man lives, finally, from the love that he receives and passes on, first and finally from the love that God is and that has become visible in the history of Jesus Christ. No one can live if he is not able to accept himself. But no one is able to accept himself if he has not already been accepted and loved by another. Truly being human is dependent upon being loved -- but of course what we mean here is true love. For love, in its own concrete expression, is no less multifarious and ambivalent than faith and hope. Thus it is only where love is identical with truth that love is able to offer the salvation of man. And, of course, the inverse is also true: Only where truth is connected with love does truth become a possibility that does not need to be forced upon a person, but rather one that he can take up in freedom. Love is thus the true center of Christianity.

* * *

Naturally one might ask in closing, in light of all this: Why establish a foundation? Do we not have before us a very attractive understanding of Christian faith without the need for such a thing? And don't the unbelievable book sales ("Jesus of Nazareth" alone, for instance, began by selling 200,000 copies just in the first edition of the German) show that this message has in many ways arrived -- that this theology has already generated a strong response?

But in order to remain alive and effective, every great intellectual impulse needs cultivation, elaboration, interpretation, application, concretization, defense against misunderstanding and false criticism, but also expansion, debate, and critique. It was never the goal of Joseph Ratzinger, the theology teacher, to found a school in which every member would be bound to his own theological conceptions. His purpose was always, in the first place, to understand and articulate for the present day the liberating and redeeming claim of the truth of faith -- most often through dialogue but also not infrequently through quite polemical disputation for the sake of this truth.

A foundation that wishes not only to promote the study of his theology but also to foster a theology in his spirit might be aided by a word of guidance from the Council. The Second Vatican Council's constitution on revelation summarizes its fidelity to the previous councils in the expression "vestigiis inhaerens": cleaving to the paths of these councils. To which, however, we ought to add Karl Barth's suggested translation (which, incidentally, Joseph Ratzinger affirmed in his commentary): “going forward along the paths of these councils.” For this foundation is not merely dedicated to the study and cultivation of the powerful theological work that we find before us, but is still more committed to its living future -- in the various modes of reception, continuance, debate, and also criticism -- as an effective orientation along the path of faith.

[Translation by Lesley Rice]

Links:
Ratzinger Foundation - wiki
Insight Scoop The Ignatius Press Blog: Establishment of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI Foundation

Ratzinger Schülerkreis
Maior autem his est caritas: Der Ratzinger-Schülerkreis
Ratzinger the Professor, as Recounted by His Former Students
ZENIT - Der Joseph-Ratzinger-Schülerkreis: P. Vincent Twomey SVD
Vatikan: Ratzinger-Schülerkreis in Castel Gandolfo
PAPA RATZINGER FORUM - Vatikan: Ratzinger-Schülerkreis
Ratzinger Schülerkreis Dal mondo Rassegna stampa cattolica
Ratzinger-Schülerkreis-Publikationen

Calling Science's Bluff: A Review of 'The Devil's Delusion' by David Berlinsky

via Stephen Hand

A thought on the incommensurability thesis

of the New Natural Law Theory.

To support the incommensurability thesis, the proponents of the New Natural Law theory (John Finnis, Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, William May, Robert George, Alfonso Gomez-Lobo and others) point out that "good" is not used univocally. In order to be commensurable, the various goods with which ethics (or politics) is concerned must share the same ratio.

I don't have access to an introductory logic text to clean this part up--but would the NNLT defenders agree that good is not being used randomly and therefore purely equivocally? That there is a reason why the same word is being used? That good is being used analogically? And therefore there is some sort of order that grounds the analogy? (Moreover, if they make a distinction between a logical order and a moral order, would the logical order grounding the use of the name "good" in ethics/politics be either identical to or dependent upon the ordering of the goods within ethics/politics?) And would not the relation of before and after between the various goods permit a comparison of them to be made?

If this reasoning is sound, would something in the analytic philosophy background of some of the proponents prevent them from admitting this point?

"Good" is said of both ends and means, but in different ways, and it is said of the different ends analogously as well. If there is an order among ends, then is there not, as a result, an order among 'goods' as well?

Miscellaneous:
Alfonso Gomez-Lobo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The President's Council on Bioethics: Alfonso Gómez-Lobo, Ph.D.

Mary, Mystery of Mercy, by Marie-Dominique Philippe, O.P.

Google Books: Retracing Reality: A Philosophical Itinerary, by Marie-Dominique Philippe, O.P.

Ralph McInerny, Implicit Philosophy

His articles at The Catholic Thing.