Just Thomism

Christ is clear that faith is confidence that his word is what determines outcomes. The centurion, for example, is the paradigm of faith by seeing this with particular clarity. But if we don’t see Christ as determining outcomes, what do we see as doing this? An obvious candidate is the regularity or uniformity of nature. If a leper heard that Christ could heal and didn’t seek him out, he probably had the thought that one should have more confidence in the power of a disease to follow its course than in the power of an itinerant rabbi to make it vanish at his word. If the disciples were terrified on the boat before Christ woke up to challenge their faith, it probably included a firm conviction caused by their uniform experience of tempests. I know that I fear to ask Christ for healing simply because my own uniform experience of sickness or disability convinces me I shouldn’t get my hopes up.

Christ’s refrain that “your faith has healed you” means that even though he determines all outcomes whether one believes it or not, our belief that he does so connects us not just to the way things are, but directly to him. In fact, this is what connects us to him first, and in being connected to the source of life, life flows into us.

Without faith in Christ, our confidence shifts to our own predictions, which rest in an essential way on the uniformity of nature. Here, ironically, Hume’s attack on the rationality of the uniformity of nature might serve as an apologetic point in favor of faith in Christ, or at least against its alternative.

Practice seeing with actual vision and potency vision.

Actual vision is first: open you eyes and see what is actual. Make a list:

1.) An actual wooden podium,

2.) a phone actually here, 

3.) a man choosing to sit,

4.) a glass two feet to the left of another glass, etc.

Switch out those lenses for potency vision, and those exact same objects remaining as they are become:

1.) A potential bonfire,

2.) a phone there,

3.) a man choosing to walk.

4.) a glass with a different relative position.

NB: on this account, God is that which, in donning potency vision, disappears utterly as any sort of object. Essences and form thus have a true divine likeness.

Jesus also said to them, “Does anyone bring in a lamp to put it under a basket or under a bed? Doesn’t he set it on a stand? For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be brought to light

Mark 4: 21-22

While in Matthew the point of the parable of the lamp is that truth and virtue deserve to be manifested, in Mark, the point is that all action will be manifested.

The hidden or the concealed is what we strive to keep as our own apart from anyone else’s judgment or use. Human actions by nature, however, exist relative to divine judgment. Finite action is essentially subordinated and instrumental to pure act, and whenever the work of a subordinate agent is complete it stands under judgment. As soon as I’ve used the brush, I’m judging how well it paints; as soon as I’m driving the car, I’m aware of how well it drives. The attempt to keep our actions to ourselves would be like a car trying to hide how well it drives from the driver.

Notice that our acts are not private things that God intrudes by imposing a judgment, nor is judgment God using omniscience to busy himself with my business. Our acts by nature are extensions of pure actuality, even as lamps by nature are placed on lamp stands.

Unlike pure actuality, however, we can be defective causes. We can both do evil and suffer it. That said, a great artist can get striking results from defective instruments, even if they deserve to be thrown away, and even if they are thrown away.

(A theologian describing an episode he wrote for The Twilight Zone called “If I Wanted it Perfect”)

A: So how does the episode go?

Theologian: It’s about a scientist who invents a time machine in order to fix the errors of history, but his fixes always lead to worse outcomes.

A: Like what?

T: He goes back and shoots Hitler at the Beer Hall Putsch, but when he returns to his own time he sees this led to Goering taking over the Party and eventually succeeding in defeating Britain, the Soviets and the US, and pushing the final solution to its completion.

A: That’s it?

T: No, so he goes back, shoots Goering, and things get even worse. After that, we get a montage of his attempts to make history better which only make it worse. At the end, he ends up destroying all life on earth through his attempts to stop the Black Plague. He tells the Europeans it’s caused by fleas on rats, but they end up just using that knowledge to weaponize the virus, and end up killing us all.

A: So what’s the point? We shouldn’t play God or something?

T: No, that’s not it. It’s a modern take on Leibniz’s claim that this is the possible universe.

A: Best possible universe? When the best we can hope for is a Holocaust or civilization-ending plagues?

T: Sure, but if all attempts to make something better in history make it worse, then, in effect, God experiences history as a series of trolley problems that he decides in favor of the lesser of two evils.

A: So what’s the third act? You establish the character with his machine-thingy, then you have him do the fixes that don’t work. Does he just die?

T: No. Since it was the original run of the Twilight Zone I had him meet God after he died, and God explains how the scientist finally wiped out all life on Earth, finally including himself. The scientist starts arguing with him about how God’s universe is a mess, since no matter what anyone does, nothing gets any more perfect.

A: Then what?

T: The closing line is God telling him “If I wanted things perfect, I’d have to stick with myself.”

In explaining how God is one, Meister Eckhart first explains one as not having distinction. Wherever there is opposition to another, there is not one but many.

In imagining the one of number the one is essentially part and distinct, a point located in opposition to a larger spatial whole or the concept of unit as repeatable. The one of number comes with distinction and so is not merely one.

Last week I wrote on Thomas’s account of the the divine permission of evil, namely:

Those responsible for the general welfare allow some evils that those not so responsible cannot allow.

This was a puzzle, but Thomas gives an analogy that speaks directly to this puzzle of divine permission:

[I]f a man’s will wills a thing to be, according as it appears to be good, his will is good: and the will of another man, who wills that thing not to be, according as it appears evil, is also good. Thus a judge has a good will, in willing a thief to be put to death, because this is just: while the will of another—e.g. the thief’s wife or son, who wishes him not to be put to death, inasmuch as killing is a natural evil, is also good.

[T]he more universal the apprehended good, the more universal the good to which the will tends. This is evident in the example just given: because the judge has care of the common good, which is justice, and therefore he wishes the thief’s death… whereas the thief’s wife has to consider the private, the good of the family, and from this point of view she wishes her husband, the thief, not to be put to death.

ST 1-2.19.10 (italics mine)

Those who struggle with the argument from evil are, at their best, analogous to the wife or the son of the thief. We can recognize that God allowed some evil and that God had his reasons, but there is still nothing wrong in our sorrow over the event happening. To press the point, there is something good in feeling irrepressible aversion to some acts that God allows to occur. There is something grotesque and certainly unloving in the wife of a thief sitting in court while he is condemned and thinking dispassionately that, after all, her husband’s death will serve the good of The Party.

This doesn’t mean the wife’s aversion can never go bad: if she comes to hate the judge or the law she’s clearly gone too far. But the wife can recognize that the judge had his reasons without being obliged to abandon the sorrow that is appropriate to one whose sphere of care is more particular. To apply this to a particular theological problem, there is no contradiction in Mary having absolute, unwavering confidence in the providential goodness of the death of her Son, while also standing at the cross as the Mater Dolorosa. 

It’s uncontroversial to claim that force or energy are necessary active causes of motion, or perhaps immediate effects of motion (the causal order between kinetic energy and motion is not clear, as clarification is not necessary for the math to work.) Analogously, Aristotle proved that body or magnitude was also necessary for motion, though he is very clear about the causal order: given motion, it is necessary for the mobile to be a whole made of integral parts. Said another way, we can explain the the existence of bodies from the givenness of motion. Since things that have no parts – Euclidean points – are principles of being in mathematical construction, when we impose math on the physical world it’s easy to mistakenly assume points can be real principles in the natural world. Under pain of contradiction, however, they cannot.

Motion connects contrary states, most simply “being here” and “being there.” The two states can’t wholly coincide, since they would not be contrary, but they also can’t be wholly separate without first being something else, since if you were first wholly in A and then wholly in B without being something else, then by definition A is immediately B, and so you are in A and B at once, and contraries can’t exist wholly at once. Whatever Jeannie in I Dream of Jeannie is doing when she crosses her arms and blinks in the kitchen and (twinkle sound) is next in a public park, can’t be explained by positing a moment when she wholly coexists in both. This constrains explanations to saying that either the parts of Jeannie or the parts of space were first overlapping before being wholly coincident, and either way motion requires overlapping parts of magnitude.

The physical world thus differs from the math world by demanding that things that have place in a larger whole, and which thus have degrees of freedom to move about it, demand extended parts as preconditions for movement. Insofar as relativity makes space itself mobile object, it is possible that at least some motions are entirely explained by the motion of space, which allows the theoretical possibility of a partless entity being here and then being there, though this still requires that the point “move” as the part of some larger spatial-whole, in the same way that the axle of the car moves when the car is driving. In other words, even if partless things did exist in the physical world, they could only move per accidens.

Matter first enters the study of nature as the per se principle of motion. In responding to the problem of Parmenides, Aristotle recognizes an intrinsically mobile subject that loses the form it possesses in motion to another. Motion is the loss of subject’s form in gaining an act. The mercury in a thermostat loses the height when it rises in response to the temperature in the room.

The cognitive subject, by contrast, perfects its form in moving to act. The change of the visual system in opening the eyes and coming to see is not the loss of form. There is a loss of form in the organs no different from what happens in the thermostat, but cognition is not such a change. But why not say that the physical change just is cognition? In one sense you certainly can: if you paint a message on the wall it makes perfect sense to say that “the thing that is drying just is the message” but this doesn’t mean that drying belongs to a message as message.

Fine, the distinction makes it possible for there to be different physical and cognitive orders, but why complicate things? Cognition is just what some physical changes feel like. Doesn’t electricity perfect circuits like vision perfects eyes? Being brought to perfection has organic and mechanical manifestations.

This misses that cognition forces on us a distinction in being, in a way no mechanical change does. The first fact that any theory of cognition needs to explain is why this…

X

is both the X on a screen and the X that you see. Given cognition, reality is a single res entirely present in different rationes. Mechanical accounts of nature seek to leave nature exactly as it is, only now manifest in its workings, while cognition demands nature be a point of departure for two different termini, one flowing into reality, another into cognition. And so there is a categorical difference between the mechanical and the cognitive, just as there is between drying and a message, even where the latter terms might be spoken of as related to the former ones.

1.) The Ontological Argument allows for the possibility that divine existence is a form conceptually necessary to a divine potency receiving it.

As far as the OA is concerned, “God” could mean a subject having the necessary property of existence. This is John of St. Thomas’s critique of the OA

2.) Thomas’s Cosmological arguments, especially the First and Fourth Ways, mean by “God” precisely an existent excluding all potentials, i.e. pure act. 

3.) Therefore, Thomas’s Cosmological arguments cannot presuppose God as understood in the Ontological Argument.

You were in one state up to time t and in another after t. What are you at t? 

Here’s one answer that won’t work, sc. “I was in contrary states at once.” If you were alive till t and dead afterward, you can’t say that at t you were simultaneously living and dead. What can’t happen at all can’t happen for a moment.

If this is right, then there is no last moment of one state, or first moment of another. In going from living to dead, whatever is alive will be alive at a later time, whatever is dead was already dead at a previous time. The existing states stand to their limit as to an idealized electric fence: as close as you are, you can go closer, as near as you are, you were already nearer.

Notice that this is true about motion as such, not motion as measurable. Planck gave a meaningful sense to a minimum measurement, but this has nothing to do with a minimum quantum of space, to say nothing of some supposed co-existence of contraries. (NB this serves as an important way to distinguish the study of motion as such from motion qua measurable.)