Insight Scoop: Moyra Doorly and Aidan Nichols, OP, discuss ecumenism, "hierarchy of truths"

Don’t let Catholic ecumenism down

Papal Message to Ecumenical Congress in Germany

Papal Message to Ecumenical Congress in Germany

"We Cannot Ourselves Achieve the Great Things in Life"

VATICAN CITY, MAY 16, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the German-language message sent by Benedict XVI to participants in an ecumenical congress that ended today in Munich, Germany.

* * *

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

From Rome I greet all those who are gathered at the "Theresienwiese" in Munich for the liturgical celebration to open the second ecumenical "Kirchehntag." I remember with joy the days when I lived in the beautiful capital of Bavaria as the archbishop of Munich and Freising. I thus address a special greeting to the Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Reinhard Marx, and to the Lutheran regional bishop, Johannes Friedrich. I greet all the German bishops and of many countries of the world, and in a special way, also the representatives of the other Churches and ecclesial communities and all the Christians who are participating in this ecumenical event. I greet the representatives of public life too and all those who are present through radio and television. May the peace of the risen Lord be with all of you!

"So That You Might have Hope:" with this motto you are gathered in Munich. You want to send a signal of hope to the Church and to society at a difficult time. I thank you very much for this. In fact, our world has need of hope, our time has need of hope. But is the Church a place of hope? In recent months we have had to be repeatedly confronted with news that could take away the Church's joy, that darkened it as a place of hope. Like the servants of the householder in the Gospel parable about the kingdom of God, we too want to ask the Lord: "Lord, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where did the weeds come from?" (Matthew 13:27). Yes, with his Word and with the sacrifice of his life the Lord has truly sown good seed in the field of this earth. It has grown and is growing. We need not think only of the great luminous figures of history, whom the Church has recognized with the title "saints," who have been completely permeated by God, who gave them their splendor. Each of us also knows ordinary persons, not mentioned in any newspaper or told of in any history book, who grew through the faith achieving great humanity and goodness.

In his impassioned dispute with God over sparing the city of Sodom, Abraham obtained assurance from the Lord of the Universe that if there were ten just people there he would not destroy the city (cf. Genesis 18: 22-33). Thanks be to God, in our cities there are many more than ten just people! If we are more attentive today, if we do not see only darkness, but also the light and good in our time, we see how faith has made men pure and generous and educates them in love. Again, the weeds are also present within in the Church and among those whom the Lord has welcomed into his service in a special way. But God's light has not been extinguished, the good seed has not been destroyed by the bad seed.

"So that You Might have Hope:" This phrase intends first of all to invite us not to lose sight of the good and good people. It intends to invite us to be good ourselves and to become good always, it intends to invite us to dispute with God for the good of the world, like Abraham, trying to live from God's justice ourselves.

Is the Church a place of hope? Yes, since from it the Word of God comes to us again and again and always, the Word that purifies us and shows us the path of faith. It is because in it the Lord continues to give us himself, in the grace of the sacraments, in the word of reconciliation, in the many gifts of his contemplation. Nothing can obscure or destroy all of that. We must be joyful for this in the midst of all tribulations. If we speak of the Church as the place of the hope that comes from God, then that also entails an examination of conscience: What do I do with the hope that the Lord has granted us? Do I really let myself be formed by his Word? Do I let myself be changed and healed by him? How many weeds are in fact growing in me? Am I disposed to pull them up? Am I grateful for the gift of forgiveness and ready to forgive and heal in turn instead of condemning?

Let us ask once more: What is "hope," truly? The things that we can do by ourselves are not the object of hope but rather a task that we must do with the power of our reason, our will and our heart. But if we reflect on all that we can and must do, then we see that we cannot do the greater things that come to us only as a gift: friendship, love, joy, happiness. I would like to note one more thing: We all want to live, and life too we alone cannot give to ourselves. Almost no one today, however, still speaks of eternal life, which in the past was the true object of hope. Because one does not dare to hope in it, one must hope to obtain everything from the present life. Setting aside hope in eternal life leads to a greediness for life here and now, which almost inevitably becomes egoistic and, in the end, remains unrealizable. Precisely when we want to take control of life as a kind of good, it slips away.

But let us return. We cannot ourselves achieve the great things in life, we can only hope for them. The glad tidings of the faith consist precisely in this: The One who can give them to us exists. We will not be left alone. God lives. God loves us. In Jesus Christ he has become one of us. I can speak to him and he listens to me. Because of this, like Peter, in the confusion of our times, that try to persuade us to believe in many other ways, we say: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life and we have believed and know that you are the Holy One of God" (John 6:68-69).

Dear Friends, I wish for all of you who are gathered at the "Theresienwiese" in Munich to be again overcome by the joy of being able to know God, to know Christ and to know that he knows us. This is our hope and our joy in the midst of the confusions of the present time.

From the Vatican, May 10, 2010

[Translation by Joseph G. Trabbic]

© Copyright 2010 -- Libreria Editrice Vaticana

James Chastek, A-T axioms on possibility

Edward Feser, God, Man, and Masculinity (WWWTW)


Father, Glorify Thy Name!
The Patriarchal Shape of Trinitarian Theology
by Patrick Henry Reardon

Alasdair MacIntyre has a couple of essays (republished in the collection Ethics and Politics) that explain how Renaissance Aristotelians, in their misinterpretation of Aristotle, caused academic moral philosophers to be discredited. Does he give conclusive evidence for his historical thesis? I don't think so, but it is some sort of evidence nonetheless.

James Chatsek, Why act is essentially transcendent (or, Act as St. Thomas uses it, UPDATED)

Michael Sullivan, Gender Equality

Ah, but what does St. Bonaventure say about the headship of the family?

James Chastek, Why framing laws in terms of obligation to some extent misses the point

The Anglo-Catholic: Introducing Father Louis Bouyer

Fordham: Orthodox Constructions of the West (via Eirenikon)

Assault and murder?

I'm re-watching Public Enemies, and early in the movie, FBI agent Melvin Purvis warns Pretty Boy Floyd to stop. Floyd continues running, firing his Tommy gun to no use, since his pursuers are out of range. Purvis takes aim with his rifle and shots Floyd, mortally wounding him. Is what Purvis did licit? Or is it a sin? It could be argued that since he was out of range and fleeing, Floyd was not a threat to the lives of Purvis and the police officers. Even if a LEO is more like a soldier and has broader powers than that of a normal citizen, and is not only able to kill in self-defense, but is allowed to kill in defense of the community, even when his own life is not threatened, is it permitted for soldiers to shoot and kill the enemy when it is in retreat? This has happened frequently during war, especially if one believes the historical studies cited by Col. Grossman, but is it right?

A defense: Purvis is allowed to shoot in order to stop and prevent Floyd from committing another crime? But Floyd was not about to commit another crime, though he might do so in the future. How about stopping Floyd in order to apprehend him? Are any means acceptable in order to catch a fugitive? Or must the fugitive's "right to life" be respected, unless he poses an immediate danger to those seeking to catch him?

Can extrajudicial capital punishment be tolerated, for the sake of justice?

James Chastek, Reasons for the claim “Morality requires God”

The most important way God and morality are connected is God being our ultimate end and the primary object of our love. No one can be completely moral unless he love God.

The Useless Tree: In Honor of D. C. Lau

More:
In Memory of D. C. Lau | China blog | ChinaGeeks
D. C. Lau, 1921-2010

D.C. Lau D.C. Lau was born in Hong Kong in 1921
short profile

Zenit: Papal Address to Social Science Academy
"Economic Life Should Properly Be Seen as an Exercise of Human Responsibility"

Friars of the Immaculate: A Primer on the Absolute Primacy of Christ

I still haven't read The Universal Primacy of Christ. Aquinas argues from Sacred Scripture that the motive of the Incarnation was for the restoration of human nature. He does not say that it is impossible that the Word would have become incarnate even if there had been no sin, but that we have not been told that this is the case.

Why are mathematicians prone to explaining everything through math?

His official website.
Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science
Wolfram Research: Mathematica, Technical and Scientific Software
Wolfram Blog



Reflections on Stephen Wolfram's 'A New Kind of Science'

Edward Feser, ID, A-T, and Duns Scotus: A further reply to Torley

James Chastek, An interpretation of “all I have written is straw compared to what I have seen”

The most well-known story of St. Thomas’s life is that he stopped writing a few months before he died, saying that “all that I have written was like straw compared to what I have seen”. The experience is difficult to judge for several reasons: the reference to “straw” commands most of the attention, but it’s not clear exactly what this means; but also- and more simply- we don’t know what he saw. It’s hard to understand something being “straw” in comparison to X without knowing what X is.

We do, however, know the modes of the things he is comparing, and this is significant. “What is written” is a certain mode of knowledge; “what is seen” is another. What is the nature of each of these modes, and what might they tell us about why the things in the mode of writing were “straw”?

Writing sets the role of making in knowledge in bold relief. Words are human artifacts, as are the letters one creates to record them, and the author himself must make the order among the words. All this making is to communicate the primordial making of the human agent intellect, which makes a concept in conjunction with the object as an exterior principle. By way of contrast, angels don’t need to make the word (or species) by which they know, since the word is simply innate to them (and thus it can’t be called a concept); and God need not make the word he knows since he simply is that word.

All this making of that which is known is opposed to pure intuition, which is most of all manifest to us in sight. The sensible object requires no cognitive act to make it sensible. This absence of making in knowledge is called intuition, and in the measure that our understanding is less the product of making it is more intuitive. Thus, the higher the intellect, the more intuitive it is, and the less it is characterized by the need to make that by which it sees. All this making of our intellect, therefore, is really just a shadow of intellectual non-making, that is, of the pure intuition of higher intellects and disembodied souls. It is this pure intuition that most deserves the name “see”; and taken in this sense, human beings see only in a very roundabout and shadowy way. What we long for is the effortless intuition of the in corporeal or disembodied intellects, which can simply see science as opposed to having to make it after a very long initiation process. This making process is most of all manifest in”writing”; and in this sense we all long to throw aside our writing and simply see. St. Thomas’s desire to stop writing, in other words, is natural and common to all of us. St. Thomas, however, had that desire fulfilled in this life, while the rest of us have to wait.

Zenit: Archbishop Speaks on Aquinas and Universities
"We Must Reaffirm the Passion for Truth That Animated St. Thomas"

The Treasonous Clerk: “See, I Am Doing Something New”: John Paul II’s Summons to Secular Being, by James Matthew Wilson

The pope’s summons proves extremely daunting: he wants a philosophy attentive to metaphysics in order to reground modern theology in a concern with reality—with objective and absolute truth. But, in 1998, he finds no one (or few) in contemporary philosophy turned toward the questions of being. Who any longer treats philosophy as founded in its sapiential dimension—that is, in its drive to explore the foundational human questions all persons need answered if they are to live fully (§81)? And who endeavors to arrive at philosophy’s “genuinely metaphysical range” (§83), its concern with being, with what is real? And so Fides et Ratio makes an intervention in philosophy in hopes of building up a population of philosophers who might, someday and in turn, help to rebuild modern theology as a discipline attentive to the foundations of reality rather than merely the phenomena of history or experience. Beyond analytic and Continental philosophy, we need, as it were, a renewal of “plain old-fashioned philosophy.”
Emblem of the Papacy

Thus, the provisional nature of this encyclical. It makes insightful arguments about the history of religions and intellectual inquiry in general; it recovers a reading or narrative of history often dismissed as the alibi of an anti-modern Church; but in doing so it primarily makes the case for others to begin a new work: the rediscovery of human life as an intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage whose terrain is always what is real (being) and whose horizons are the specific historical revelation of God’s Word and the “infinite mystery” of God Himself (§14). We are asked to rediscover that the reason of “separate philosophy” leads finally to despair of reason. If, on the contrary, we recognize that reason is preceded by faith (as we experience, for instance, in the already present desire to know the truth about ourselves) and that reason is completed by faith (reason opens onto truths that, finally, surpass it and that it can see in only fragmented fashion) (§13)—we discover something grand. Reason participates in the human being’s circular journey from the gift of being and the gift of revelation toward a theological understanding of those gifts. It is man’s natural means of searching for a truth that ultimately transcends human life and reason alike and brings all searching to an end (§73).

Fr. Benedict Ashley has written that Thomism has neglected the historical dimension of being, but it is not clear to me how this can be the case if philosophy is to attain to the Aristotelian ideal of episteme and sophia. The contingent may be helpful in helping us understand natures and causes, but there cannot be a science of the contingent as such. While Pope John Paul II is correct that we are in need of metaphysics, Fr. Ashley rightly reminds those who desire to know that we must first have an adequate physics.