Just Thomism

Arguendo, let’s grant that both Christians* and naturalists have conclusions P which follow from something essential those world views, and which are described like this: “Given P, my picture of the world is extremely implausible, or morally hideous. Still, I see that drawing P isn’t logically necessary, and I can come up with reasons for why it might be false to draw that conclusion, though I never would have entertained these reasons if I were not committed to my system. Therefore, I deny that I should draw conclusion P.”

For a Christian, some plausible candidates for things that would give rise to such P conclusions are puzzles about scriptural inerrancy (like the ones that caused Ehrman to abandon the idea), or the perpetuity of hellfire. For Naturalists, some plausible candidates are well-attested miracles, the specter of eliminativism, or the universal evidence for spiritual phenomena and religious experience.

One might suspect epistemic parity here, but there is a crucial inequality: the Christian believes the essence of his religion is revealed to him by a mind higher than his own, whereas naturalism believes there are no minds higher than our own. The Christian has a rationally compelling case for holding to his beliefs all the way up to the point where they prove logically impossible, but it’s hard to see how naturalism could justify doing the same thing. If God demanded that I believe in Russell’s teapot, I would be within my epistemic rights to believe one was there; but if Russell asks me to believe in the same thing, I can’t very well do so just because it’s logically possible for one to be there.** If God asked me to believe something implausible or that violated parsimony, I am justified in doing so, but the parallel problem for naturalism consists in asking us to believe something that conflicts with our best human sense of how things are, even while there are no truths outside of our best human sense of how things are.

Though I’m generally skeptical about the idea of a burden of proof outside of courtrooms or the more or less arbitrary decision of who get to be the house in a debate, we have a principled reason to say that a Christian has to meet a much higher burden of proof for abandoning Christianity than a naturalist has to meet for abandoning naturalism.

*Throughout the post “Christian” is shorthand for anyone who believes in a revealed religion. The epistemic disparity now discussed would not be found between Christians and Muslims.

**Seen from this angle, we have a certain inversion of Sagan’s “extraordinary claims” slogan. If I believe a proposition is told to me by God, it is reasonable for me to demand less evidence for it than even for a much more initially plausible proposition that I believe is told to me only by a man. As Thomas puts it, the appeal to authority is the weakest proof, except when your authority is God, in which case it is the strongest possible proof. Notice I call it a certain inversion since, being revealed by God is extraordinary evidence, which speaks not just to the importance of the thing revealed, but the power of the evidence involved.

Living things are entities that seek ends by themselves.

The simplest way to do this is to be only distinct in ratio from one’s own end, i.e. one’s own being is the end sought. Only God has life that is this simple. Everything else seeks its end by an operation, by something added to its being.

Among intellectual life, ends are first objects, and objects are either proper or adequate. The proper object is for everything underneath or equal to one’s degree of intellectual being. Since humans are at the bottom of the intellects, our proper object is mixed with the inherently irrational, or that which participated in divinity by its irrationality, sc. the world not of form, but of the desire for form. Whatever is above this order is known by causality, negation, and eminence over our proper object.

Since any two angels divide as a higher and lower species, and the distinction in species is from the simplicity of their intellect, any two angels have different proper objects. When a higher angel speaks to a lower one, it must divide up its concept to accommodate the greater complexity of the lower, and so even though the lower angel and higher angel know the same res significanca, each has a different modus significandi. The higher angel has a lower’s concept as a proper object, or at least things of that complexity as proper objects, while the lower angel has a higher angel’s concept by analogy. Though there can be no intellect below man, it is possible that the angelic species are actually infinite, so that every angel knows an angel higher than himself, or even infinite angels by analogy. I lean toward this opinion since it seems unfitting that there be some angel immediately under God, as if God were the last digit of a countdown. Nevertheless, it creates problems for angelic duration.

Both Liberalism and Christianity are universalist and call all nations to enter equally into one universal family. Christianity sees this explicitly prophesied the Abrahamic covenant; running through the significant figures of Ruth, Jethro, Naaman, Sheba; announced in Psalm 67 and 117; prophesied in Isaiah 2 and 56, Zechariah 8 and 14 etc. The unity is through God’s call to all persons to worship him, and its acceptance by those who hear. All persons will come to “Jerusalem,” that is, to the presence of God on earth in Jesus. By definitively revealing himself as human, all humans now reveal God, and so are called into full communion. Because this call to equality before God is made to a world in which those with resources have an advantage in gaining access to everything, God specially seeks out, and demands that others seek out, those with fewer resources. This gives rise to the call of the gospels to the poor, which is announced in the Magnificat, preached in the beatitudes, modeled in Christ’s life, and universally proclaimed by the Church. Though some have fewer resources and others more, this is not seen as conferring an essentially higher moral status, at least insofar as all are seen as sinners in need of redemption in the Christ to whom they are called. The parable of Lazarus and Dives, for example, has never been read as proving that one needed Christ less than the other. Humans are equal not only int their dignity and call, but in their debasement and need for repentance.

Liberalism is universalist through taking human equality as self-evident, with the equality understood as a universal distribution of rights. These rights were sometimes thought to trace back to some divine activity, but though God gives the rights, this is the last role he plays in the theory. On this account, those without resources also play a role, but since all have equal access to resources by their innate rights, some other cause explains the manifest inequality in things, which can only be a social structure, whether deliberately intended or just blindly systemic: man is born free and is everywhere in chains. The job of liberal universalism therefore requires identifying some source of evil, i.e. inequality, among social actors, and working to expose, discredit, and dethrone it. As liberalism is a human movement it can make no reasonable claims to see the future, and so it cannot ever know whether the project of purging evil will ever be finished or whether it is just an endless struggle toward the universal brotherhood. That said, one deeply held belief in liberalism concerns progress, or a confidence that the march of purging evil is generally on continual advance, so much so that to go back even a few decades suffices to call the moral judgments of anyone at that time into question. Still, there has never been a widespread sense in liberalism that the end of purging oppression or tyranny, or even that the universal family of peoples was within sight.

Thomas proposes a hypothesis:

[T]here is only one time for temporal things, forasmuch as one number exists for all things numbered; as time is a number, according to the Philosopher (Phys. iv).

This is both common-sensical and what Newton formalized into absolute time. But Thomas attacks the reason:

This, however, is not a sufficient reason; because time is not a number abstracted from the thing numbered, but existing in the thing numbered; otherwise it would not be continuous; for ten ells of cloth are continuous not by reason of the number, but by reason of the thing numbered. Now number as it exists in the thing numbered, is not the same for all; but it is different for different things. 

We here have an explicit repudiation of absolute time. Absolute time would be like what Aristotle could have called “absolute snubness” that is, snubness that wasn’t in a nose; or what we might call “absolute black diamond” meaning a purely mathematical slope of greater than 30 degrees. In fact, however, there is no snubness except snubness in a nose, and no black diamond except being greater than 30 degrees in a ski slope. The unity of the number abstracts from what is essential to the unity of the thing one is speaking about.

To destroy a reason for X is not the same as to prove X is false, of course, and Thomas thought he had good reasons for there to be a unity of time. After all, on the hypothesis that there is some different time in, say, Narnia, then Narnia would be enjoying that time now, and so we are back to the unity of time. Thomas thought he could observe a first motion, and so he appealed to that to preserve the unity of time.

Thomas’s observation was of the heavens, but of course there are no heavens. Describing a place is terrestrial or heavenly is like describing it as on the horizon or not. Einstein found a way to explain how the different nows of time relate to each other, but this was a mathematical formalism without a corresponding observable physical cause.

Monday of this week was the anniversary of the three part secret given to Lucia Dos Santos and the saints of Fatima. The words of the secret begin:

You have seen hell, where the souls of sinners go. It is to save them that God wants to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.

Devotion is a promptitude of the will to serve someone arising from (a.) a recognition of the goodness of that person and (b.) a recognition of how our own faults compel us to seek help from him.

The heart is a metaphor for the fixity of the habits of our will, throughout the whole of life, with respect to taking God as our ultimate end, which is present whenever we will anything at all. Mary’s heart is immaculate, which means that for her entire life the fixed habits of her will were such that she never failed to take God as her ultimate end whenever she willed anything at all. If some habit were not in place, God would infallibly supply whatever help was necessary for her to take God as her end in anything she willed. Moreover, this cannot be a merely negative charism, as if God simply kept her from offending him, but a positive charism that whatever she did was the maximal thing that one could do to manifest the extrinsic glory of God, not just objectively in the action, but subjectively in her enjoyment of it. According to the first she says My soul magnifies the Lord, and according to the second the says my spirit rejoices in God my savior.

Obviously, the immaculate heart is the paradigm for action. The message of Fatima is to become devoted to Mary, which means not just recognizing her goodness, but recognizing our own wretchedness as occasion to trust her for healing. Mere knowledge of wretchedness is compatible with everything from despair to navel-gazing, but it is a source of devotion when we take it as an occasion to trust in another for healing, as if we secretly loved a doctor and therefore took a certain enjoyment in feeling sick since it was an opportunity to schedule an appointment. To be sure, being sick isn’t inherently enjoyable, and the cure might be difficult, but when our devotion starts with an appreciation of the goodness of the healer, the journey to be with them can’t be nothing but dread.

Mary is not a technology or a book and so we don’t turn to her like an AI or by searching for our problem in an index. The miracles at Fatima command us to turn to a heart, and turning to the heart is not like exercising a technique. It’s a sort of attunement or connaturality of one’s own heart to another, and to do this in a mystical key is going to involve a fair amount of interiority and darkness. But the Church supplies any number of exterior helps. Do what you can, pray for what you can’t.

Form or act is intrinsic source of perfection both in reality and in knowledge. This has been clear since Plato discovered formal causes, and it remains in the Aristotelian tradition.

Form is either part of a subject, or the whole subject

Where form is the whole, the existing subject is the same as what causes knowledge of it.

Where form is whole, to actively cause the whole is to actively cause knowledge, and so the form, as subject, knows itself

Objection: It would suffice for the form to be known by another. Therefore it is not necessary that the form as subject knows itself.

Response: If some other is necessary, it is a cause, but we here talk about a form only as existent and as cause, but in no way as an effect. Therefore we cannot necessarily conclude to some other, but we necessarily require some active knower whenever the cause of the whole is a cause of knowledge. Therefore the active knower must be the form itself.

Objection: sense forms can be without being known. Therefore a form can be without causing knowledge.

Response: Sense forms have form only as a part. In a sense form, the whole is not the form, so if only sensible wholes existed, it would not be necessary that there be any whole in which knowledge is caused.

If the active source of esse is the same as knowledge in full act or consideration, then the being is pure act in every way. Such a being is clearly an Anselmian that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought, and so is divine.

If the active source of esse is not the same as knowledge in full act or consideration, something must be added to it. What is added is called species.

If the species is inherent to the nature of the knower, this is angelic.

If it is not inherent to the knower, then the knower is empowered to make it, and it must make it from something other than itself. This is humanity insofar as it knows by a form generated by agent intellect from a sensible form other than itself.

1.) Those who hear the logos of the kingdom, but do not put it together (συνίημι).

2.) Those who hear the logos, but who fall away after a suffering caused by natural or moral evil (a “tribulation” or “persecution”)

3.) Those who hear the logos but bear no fruit, either because of the cares of the age, or the deceit of wealth.

Note first that the logos is seed, that is, what goes forth from a being with the power to make another like himself.

1.) The first fault is to hear the logos, but not put it together (“understand”.) At the lower end of the spectrum, this describes all of us insofar as we have no spiritual discernment whether temporarily or habitually; and whether in certain areas or generally. We hear the logos and eye-roll, scoff, or perhaps brush it off after feeling convicted or uncomfortable.

At the middle, we might fail to see the logos in which the parts of the kingdom fit together. Perhaps we love some parts of the kingdom, but are completely unable to accept other parts. The kingdom is a multitude of things with no unity connecting what we approve of, and what we despise.

But at the higher end, we might even get so far as being devoted to some parts of the kingdom while overlooking their ground and center, namely the logos in which they all cohere. We might even get to the point of basing whole religions on things essential to the logos while failing to see the logos of the kingdom underneath them.

2.) Here the logos is challenged by suffering under either natural or moral evil which are experienced as challenges to the faith as opposed to suffering to be offered. Evil not offered or forgiven embitters the heart, and the embittered heart is tempted toward a sort of wrath against God. This wrath undoes all without a deep connection that exists largely unseen (what Christ compares to a root.) The danger in this challenge is falling away.

3.) Christ describes the cares of the age elsewhere as including sexual desire,* but they probably include all comparable desires. The deceit of money is perhaps mammon, or a willingness to succeed in life at the expense of others (like the wicked steward who endears himself to others and secures his future by cheating and defrauding his boss.) Notice that the danger here is not falling away, but not bearing fruit. One might keep up membership in the church and even be active in it, but with a religious life that never makes one holy.

-Cf. Luke 20 “The children of this age marry and are given in marriage.” Though not explicitly called “cares of the word” Christ seems to discourse on them generally in Mt. 6: 25-34.

There are lots of theological problems of the form Why did God create X, given he knew X would Y? Where Y is some evil outcome.

The question presupposes a theory of God’s knowledge of future contingent things (what would happen), though the theory is assumed to be unproblematic and known to all. We’re all supposed to assume that there is no important epistemological difference between God seeing the future in his mind and us seeing it in a crystal ball, and since we have no problem imagining the use of a crystal ball, we assume that’s exactly what God does.

One could probably respond to the problems by taking the description just given arguendo, but something important is being missed in the assumption. But the puzzle of divine knowledge of creatures is tough, and it’s hard to avoid strong conclusions when one charges straight at it.

When I look at a crystal ball, I’m passive to information, and my knowledge has a real relation to the object while the object has only a rational relation to me. In God this description reverses, so that the created object is passive to his noetic act, and therefore also the object has a real relation to the divine mind while the divine mind has only a relation of reason to the created object.

What difference does any of this make? When I am deciding between X and ~X, my intellect has real relations to both contrary possibilities, and then acts freely after being passive to both. In elevating this to the divine level, there is something crucial in the contrary objects that corresponds to divinity (in fact, God in creating, that is, as pure act, is more comparable to the object than to the knower) The attempt to adopt the divine perspective on creating one of two contrary possibilities before one possibility is given in reality is therefore analogous to trying to give an account of any two objects precisely as objects before a knower is given in reality.

The upshot is that whenever we ask about any relation God has to a creature, we are taking the creature in some sense as given in reality. If we talk about how God stands in himself to a creature before thing the creature as given, it is like asking about the left and right in a column before there is any animal standing before it with a left and right. Given a creature, of course, God made it and willed it, just as given an animal in front of the column, the column has a right and left side.

Or does this all prove too much? Don’t we need some sense where God knows the future? Sure. But one thing this could mean is that we posit the future to have not just a noetic presence, but a physically given presence to God. On this account, it is still possible to have the creature be physically given, though future to us.

There is a long history of reading John 6:63 as a refutation of the real presence:

It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life

The sense of the argument seems to be

The real presence is the claim that the Eucharist is Jesus’s own life-giving flesh

Christ denies there is any such thing as life giving flesh

Christ denies the real presence.

Responses to this are also very old, but here are mine

1.) Christ only introduces the distinction to speak about his words. The objection does not apply it to his words, or any words.

2.) To make the argument compatible with a spiritual presence, one takes flesh as opposed to spirit to mean the same thing as flesh as opposed to symbol. This is at least equivocating, if it even can be made coherent. Why would Christ introduce a distinction between spirit and flesh in order to make a point about symbolic versus real presence?

3.) Immediately after saying that his words are spirit, there is a conjunction: but some of you will not believe. In other words, the Christ’s point is that his words cause belief in things, even when (and this is the larger context) Christ gives “a hard saying” to accept. His words are “spirit” precisely because of their power to bring about what they say, and not just in the hearts of believers, but also in the bread offered by the Ecclesia.

In keeping with (3,) when we read spirit as meaning “with power to bring about what they say” it fits into a larger biblical picture. The obvious first reference would be Genesis 1, where the spirit of God moves over the waters, God speaks, and what he says comes to be. This is recapitulated in the creation of man, where God breathes into clay and the man becomes a living spirit. Paul picks up on this idea at the end of 1 Corinthians by again recapitulating this scene with Christ as a new Adam: The first Adam is a living soul, the last Adam a life-giving spirit. Paul will reference the same idea in 2 Corinthians as evidence for God’s power to cause freedom, that is, to establish himself both as the definitive God of the first commandment, and Christ as new Moses: Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. In other words, the spirit of the Lord sets free from bondage. What happens to all this if we force spirit to mean symbol?

Last Wednesday I went to a Team USA World Cup watching party. Both the party and my being there were part of a mass public nationalist event, widely anticipated across the nation in the days before and thoroughly enjoyed live. The entire stadium was unapologetically nationalist. There were enthusiastic drunken chants; looks of disbelief and outrage at perceived slights from the obviously-anti-American-refs; sentimental sing-alongs (eighty thousand people loudly singing all three minutes of John Denver’s Country Roads) costumes that required pretty extensive pre planning (George Washington with an asian Wonder-Woman) etc. Even as a guy watched his last soccer game in 2009, I still got swept up in all of it. COUNTRY ROOOOADS! TAKE ME HOOOOME, TO THE PLAAAACE, I BELOOOONG!!! WES(record scratch)

But outside sports all those feelings are fascist.

So we come to today. It’s fair to notice that the day feels more uncomfortable than celebratory. No mass public commemoration was anticipated or enjoyed, and it’s not clear that anyone would know what to do if we had one. I suppose whatever we did would have a speech. Who would give it? The face behind the podium would have to be someone who inspired unity or at least commanded widespread respect and deference. The speaker couldn’t have a face that we knew half the country looked at with disgust and loathing, even if we were in the other half. even if we could solve that problem, what would the speech be about? Why we should love our nation, I suppose. That’s fine if by our nation we mean our soccer team or Olympic athletes, but outside of sports…

More to the point, who would enjoy listening to any of it? I’ve lived in countries that weren’t my own, and I remember looking with detachment and even fear at nationalism in other countries. It’s the sort of thing one either dives into or keeps at a distance, and no one dives into it until his family has been here for three generations or so. Nobody knows how many people in the American crowd haven’t been here that long, but no reasonable person puts the number lower than the high eight-digits. For everyone left who doesn’t fit that description, all were raised to treat their country with a minimum of suspicion, and a default of contempt. You could read that as me sneering at immigration and education, by my feelings in the matter are more ambivalent. The Twentieth Century was a cautionary tale against nationalism, and if we replayed its events over again in our lifetime, we would go through 1914 and 1939 with nuclear weapons. Nationalism was due at least for a major haircut. That said, what we got looks more like a systematic kill-off through educational institutions and immigration policy. If only there were a word for the systematic attempt to wipe out a culture and a people as unified as a nation. Not in the way we might kill them in a soccer game, but outside of sports…