Historical hypothesis

-Thesis worth investigating: The Enlightenment praise of reason drew its energy from a desire to make reason the unifying sacred cult in the wake of the division arising from the wars of religion. Reason was in one sense understood in opposition to the Christian cult, which was judged to have failed to give a sacred foundation to social order; but in another sense presents itself as the fulfillment of sacred order.

-Enlightenment reason is therefore dynamically conflicted about the sacred, making it the overturning or progressing beyond the sacred or, in a word, revolution. Insofar as the sacred is the traditional, dating itself to some heroic, now lost age, the revolution sets itself against that; insofar as the sacred is the supreme value to which all human effort is subordinated, reason or revolution is now sacred. Again, reason rejects the sacred as it comes through sacred order – the hier-archy – but in rejecting this it sees a fundamental human equality as the venerable and timeless reality that has suffered under oppression, false consciousness, and class interest until the revolution. Equality thus becomes the venerable eternal order of things.

-At our Enlightenment heart is the desire to locate the most fixed orders and expose them to the force of the revolution. As Hegel noted long ago against Kant, reason recognizes limits only in going beyond them, and this is revolutionary consciousness.

-Liberté, égalité, fraternité: There is now liberty as opposed to fixed social relationships of family, tribe, etc; equality as opposed to kings; brotherhood as opposed to the fatherhood of God and his priests.

 

 

Two cities

Christian eschatology suggests that the only possible ends of a human story are a divine mercy that forgives all debts, or an insistence that they be repaid by a justice demanding the infliction of unending pain.

Our wedding vow

In proving the necessity of the Annunciation, Thomas gives as his last reason:

[T]o show that there is a certain spiritual wedlock between the Son of God and human nature. Wherefore in the Annunciation the Virgin’s consent was besought in lieu of that of the entire human nature.

ST III. 30. 1

Divine interiority

I am free and cause things by being in motion, so I am an instrument contributing his freedom to the activity of the unmoved mover, who moves all with infinite rejoicing.

My freedom is interior to me, but divinity is the font of interiority and freedom. If he were not, my freedom would not be subject to his law. Divine interiority is verified most intimately of action in our soul by the human nature of Christ, who moves all of us as if we were members of his own body. In fact, Christ moves us even more intimately than this, since he not only moves us from within as parts of himself, but parts of himself whose consciousness he has experienced as if it were his own. In his passion he has already felt within himself all we have suffered from the sins of others or the disorder of nature, along with all we have lost by our own sins. Our own life is infinitely more obscure and poorly felt by us than by him.  I do not know who I am or what I am about, but Christ knows both that and the pain of my own confusion, and both by his experience of them.

Christ moves us by grace, and grace is an even more intimate interior principle than nature, since the divine life is more interior to what is natural than nature, and grace is the divine life. Of itself nature is only a sort of openness to being moved in a certain way by the divine mind, but grace draws us through the hole of that openness into the divine life moving beneath it. By my freedom I am subject to God’s law, by grace I enter into his life. In looking at Christ God sees the face of his spouse; in looking at his Church he sees his spouse’s body.

 

Causal series

In Thomas’s cosmological arguments, the crucial point to see is that he’s starting with a cause that is intermediate and therefore part of a causal series. Any cause has an effect, but Thomas starts with causes that bring about effects as part of a larger series.

A causal series isn’t formed by a childish series of “and-what-caused-thats?” it’s formed when you show that a series is necessary to cause something, that is, when you show that the thing you’re looking at is arising because a first cause is achieving an end by using a subordinated cause. Thomas proves this by proving that some cause is instrumental or subordinated.

In the First way, for example, Thomas starts with the insight that nature is a principle of motion and that natural science studies moving causes. From there, the logic of his proof is:

1.) Natural causes are in motion

2.) Everything in motion is an instrumental cause.

3.) Instrumental causes are moved by some first, non-instrumental cause.

Therefore, natural causes are moved by some first, non-natural (i.e. supernatural) cause.

(1) and (3) are axiomatic; (2) is omne quod movetur ab alio movetur, which follows from potency being the per se subject of motion.

To get the other cosmological arguments:

Second Way: Start with premise (2) replace it with “every agent cause with an agent cause is…”

Third Way: Start at (2) and replace it with “both what is contingent and necessary by another are…” Most object to the part of the proof showing that the contingent is subordinate or instrumental. It’s self-evident that what is necessary by another is instrumental.

Fourth Way: Thomas seems to start from what is lower in being. Since for him this means being lower in act, and act is lower only by potency, he might have mixed acts in mind.

Fifth Way: Premise (1) is “What reliably achieves an end is directed to it by intelligence” and (2) is “what is directed to an end by an intelligence other than its own is…”

 

Biblical inerrancy

For the moment, let’s call something inerrant when we judge it has no errors. As a teacher, I do this all the time. Read the assignment, look for errors, find none, give 100%. This is consequent inerrancy, i.e. a judgment formed about errors in some text after we read it.

Christians reading the Bible or Muslims reading the Koran are not judging their texts inerrant in this way. Rather, the Christian approaches the text as antecedently inerrant, i.e. judged to be inerrant before it is read. 

In other words, the BASIS of a judgment of biblical inerrancy is NOT

1a.) Be given a Bible and told, in effect, “these are words written by an omniscient being”

2a.) Read text. Conclude that nothing in it deserves to be called an error.

3a.) Declare this consistent with the hypothesis that an omniscient being wrote the Bible.

Rather, the basis of biblical inerrancy is

1b.) Be given a Bible and told, in effect, “these are words written by an omniscient being”

2b.) Before opening the text, form the (very reasonable) belief that omniscient beings make no errors.

3b.) Conclude that, whatever you read upon opening the text, even if it looks like an error it obviously cannot be.

Consider the order of the temptations in Matthew and Luke, the first giving them as bread, temple, worship and the second as bread, worship, temple. To be sure, if we read the Bible like any other text – like two police reports or two newspaper accounts – we’d immediately conclude that some writer made an error somewhere. The conclusion would be so parsimonious we would barely notice making it, in fact, one could prove the error by doing nothing more than pointing to both accounts. But this is not the most parsimonious conclusion if we take the divine authorship of scripture as given,  since it would require a tremendous amount of subtle argumentation to conclude that God wrote something erroneous! Rather, given divine authorship, the most parsimonious conclusion is that Matthew and Luke did not both intend to recount the temptations chronologically.

Christ as necessary for atonement

1.) Christ = the union of divine and human natures in a divine person.

2.) Atonement = bearing with charity all the suffering of all sin.

3.) As divine, Christ cannot suffer, but can only do so as man. As man, however, (a) he has no access to all sins he must die for, nor (b) can he recognize the extent of all suffering due to sin.

(a.) Human intellects can’t know the future, and have mostly conjectural knowledge about the past. Christ, however, dies not for sin in general, but with precise and experiential awareness of sin. This cannot be experiential awareness arising from sinning, since to know sin in this way occludes sin as much as it reveals it. Sinners, for example, cannot sin while identifying with victims, but Christ experienced each sin in particular, even by undergoing the experience of all those violated by it.

(b.) The primary suffering of sin is the loss of the beatific vision, so only one with experience of the beatific vision can experience the full suffering of sin. Christ did not lose beatitude in his passion, since he needed it to appreciate what was being lost in all the actions he was considering in a first-person manner.  Christ needed this awareness not just though another, but in his own person, and only divinity experiences beatitude in virtue of his own person.

4.) If Christ were only God, he could not suffer; if he were only man he could not suffer in the way one needing to atone would need to suffer. Again, God alone could forgive all sins but he could not atone for them; an innocent man could atone for some sins, but not those in the future or by knowing all that was lost by them.

 

Not in different spaces

The act of the thing known and the species or act by which the knower knows it are in different places only for sense knowledge.

I see the fork on the table. The color and shape of the steel are really there and my eyes and central nervous system here. But Divine intellect does not know it from here or there. My intellect knows by abstraction, which is a process with two terms. From the terminus a quo, the form of my eyes is still here and the fork there; from the terminus ad quem, I am not here and it there: there is exactly the same form existing in two different ways. Understanding overcomes spatiotemporal opposition in things; or, cognition that does not overcome spatiotemporal opposition is sub-intellective.

Seen from this angle, the puzzle of the exterior world is limited to sense knowledge; if it extends to intellection, it does so only ex parte the terminus a quo of an abstractive intellect.

 

Goodness

Goodness is what corresponds to or perfects desire, but desire is potency, so goodness is form.

Desire is potency, since it is an emptiness ordered to being filled. Not the emptiness of a cave, but of a room. Again, the flat top of a table is form, the flat tip of a new pencil reveals desire for form.

There is no potency to evil, only loss of form. Potency is defined by having a point, and the point of a car is not to make exhaust, nor is the point of stovetops to burn hands. The point of stoves is to be something that can be safely kept in a house, and they don’t cease to be this even when someone burns himself.

The Anglophone shift to talking about meaning is a way of talking about having a point. The premise it needs to generalize is awareness of potencies ordered to acts, or act being the point of potential. Said differently, it needs to recognize evil as pointless and the pointless as evil.

Negligent empathy

(As I read over this post something seems uncomfortably off about it, and it’s certainly unfinished. My original  attempt was to understand the evil of theft from the perspective of the thief who neglected to have empathy with the feelings he was causing, but I never could quite get there.)

My 12-person van and wallet were stolen this morning. Several Ring cams caught the thief, and he got $69.83 of Door Dash items  before I cancelled my credit cards.

I’ve been a victim of property theft before, but nothing quite this. So today I get a chance to practice forgiveness and meditate on the phenomenology of being a crime victim.

I wasn’t prepared for the shame of the experience. I felt foolish and duped and embarrassed, and found myself wondering what being victimized tells you about yourself or your neighborhood. I know this is objectively false and even silly, but there is still a temptation to blame oneself or feel responsible, if only to regain some sense of control.

I also wasn’t prepared for how alone one feels in this. Even though I’m going through it with seven others in my family, there is an unfamiliar feeling of standing out from the crowd and feeling nobody understands you. One feels like things should stop or at least slow down. The usual velocity of life feels uncaring.

There’s the hollow anxiety and an inability to keep a negative event from being relived in one’s mind, which feels like an animal gnawing at you from under your ribcage. The desire for vindication frequently leads to troubling and unwelcome fantasies of wrath. The assumed trust you had for your neighbors now seems dead, and even naive.

Anyway, all these feelings are at the heart of what makes theft sinful. There are other components to the sin but essential to it is the injustice of inflicting this sort of violation on one’s neighbor. This leads to one of the hardest things to deal with in the experience: If this feeling is at the heart of the evil, how can we expect the vast majority of people to understand the evil of theft? Yesterday I knew why theft was evil and even had pretty decent proofs for it. This was enough to keep me from the act, but the distance between the abstraction and the concrete experience of the evil is immense, comparable to Anscombe’s analogy of the difference between seeing the stained glass from outside and inside the church. There is a real sense in which I had no idea what I was talking about yesterday.

 

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