Lying and the Incarnation

Whenever I defend St Thomas’s teaching that lying is always wrong people give me the “Nazis…Jew-in-the-basement-objection.” Nollie Tan Boom faced with that actual situation didn’t see it as warranting lies, but this doesn’t persuade the objectors one bit. The argument from the proper end of speech seems to them abstract and irrelevant. Just recently I had two hour long argument with someone which got us absolutely no-where. Then I listened to John Francis Nieto’s defense of St Thomas’s position in this lecture, and was absolutely moved to tears by its beauty and persuasive power. I urge you, gentle reader: listen to that lecture; it is Moral Theology as it should be. The power of Nieto’s argument comes from the way in which he shows how St Thomas’s teaching on lying is integrated into his whole theology of the Christian life. Janet Smith recently criticized St Thomas’s teaching on lying as being based on a pre-lapsarian view of the nature of signification, but what Nieto shows is that, while St Thomas’s view is perfectly intelligible at the level of the proper principles of natural action, it can be understood much more fully in the light of the Incarnate Word, who is Truth itself. It’s not a pre-lapsarian view; it’s a fullness of time view.

David Foster Wallace, Dante, and the Stars

At one point in his Kenyon College Commencement Speech (embedded above; transcript here) David Foster Wallace describes in brilliantly vivid detail the frustrations of standing in line in a supermarket. Our default setting, he says is to burn with impotent rage against the dreariness, misery, and stupidity of the situation. But this is not the only option:

Jamie Smith’s Incomplete Counter-Reformation

The Calvinist philosopher James K.A. Smith has written a clever blogpost on N.T. Wright’s  How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels. Smith’s main frustration with Wright is the following:

Surrexit Dominus

Friedrich Wessely on Confession IV (4)

 

(See: introductory post, static page)

(Examination of Conscience continued:)

The Invocation of the Holy Spirit

All instructions on Confession agree that one ought to begin the examination of conscience by calling the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete to one’s aid. This helps us to see the vital point that we must examine our consciences with our hearts full of faith. We must try to look on ourselves as it were with God’s eyes. God knows the graces that He has abundantly sowed in our hearts that they might bear fruit, that they might conform us every more clearly to the image of His Son. The Son of God desires to be able to recognize in us friends and brothers. The Holy Spirit has filled us with His gifts that in our daily work we might ever more become instruments of His love. If one realizes this then one will see how far short of the ideal one falls. Even if one confesses regularly one will see how numerous were the sins of omissions one committed, how many graces one squandered, how bitterly (in human terms) one’s conduct must have disappointed God. The saints wept bitter tears over their sinfulness. They did not do so out of unhealthy exaggeration, but out of a deep knowledge of their souls, a bright light helped them to see their own unworthiness. If we ask Him, God will give this light to us as well.

(to be continued)

Everywhere That Mary Went

If you consider of whom she is the mother, how great will be your admiration of her exalted dignity! Do you feel as if you can never sufficiently praise it? Do you not judge, and rightly, that she who has the God-man for her Son is exalted in greatness above all the choirs of angels? Did not Mary confidently call the God and Lord of Angels her Son, saying: “Son, why hast thou done so to us” Which of the angels would have presumed thus to speak? It is sufficient for them and something great, that while by nature they are spirits by grace they are made and called angels, as David says: “Who maketh his angels spirits.” In confidently calling God her Son, Mary acknowledges herself mother of that Majesty Whom those angels serve with reverential awe. Neither does God disdain to be called what He vouchsafed to be. For the Evangelist adds shortly after, “And he was subject to them.” Who was subject? God, to man. God to Whom the angels are subject. God, Whom the powers and principalities obey, was subject to Mary. And not only to Mary, but to Joseph also for Mary s sake. Consider, then, and choose which you will most admire, the gracious condescension of the Son, or the surpassing dignity of the mother. Both are amazing; both are miraculous. That a God should obey a woman is humility without example; that a woman should command the Son of God is a dignity without parallel. In the praise of virgins we hear that wonderful verse: “They shall follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.” But what praise, think you, is worthy of her who leads the way before Him ?

Style, R.L. Stevenson, and the Pauline Epistles

John Bergsma has an excellent post (the comment box of which I can’t seem to get to work) comparing the variations in style in Plato’s works to those in the Pentateuch and the Pauline Epistles. On the later:

Several of Paul’s epistles are dismissed as “deutero-Pauline” because of differences in style. Are these differences more dramatic than the differences between Plato’s compositions? Could Paul’s style have changed with age and circumstance?

I have often thought the same thing with reference to Robert Louis Stevenson; surely there is more variation of style between A Child’s Garden of Verses and the The Master of Ballantrae than between Romans and 2 Timothy.

Sabbath Breaking

The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him.  And this was why the Jews persecuted Jesus, because he did this on the sabbath.  But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working still, and I am working.” (John 5:15-17)

Charity alone is his changeless and eternal rest, his eternal and changeless tranquillity, his eternal and changeless Sabbath [. . .] For his charity is his very will and also his very goodness, and all this is nothing but his being. (St Aelred of Rievaulx, Speculum Caritatis I,19)

It is hard to fathom the enormity of accusing the Eternal Son of breaking the Sabbath. He IS the Sabbath. In Him the Father rests with infinite contentment, and together they breath that eternal sigh of love fulfilled that is the Holy Spirit. All of creation is ordered to entry into that seventh day of the Divine Life. The Son longs to give us a share of His eternal rest, but we have turned against that rest, through our sins we have banished ourselves to a world of toil and trouble. And so He is still at work He comes into the world to create us all over again, to liberate us from the task-masters of Egypt, and bring us into the promised land of the true and eternal Sabbath.

The healing of the cripple in John 5 is a sign of this new creation that God has already begun to make. And for this they accuse Him of breaking the Sabbath! But isn’t the accusation that the Pharisees make one that we make as well? I was thinking of this other day when I was complaining in my heart about some minor bureaucratic frustration; wasn’t I in fact telling Our Lord, ‘stop breaking my Sabbath’? He is at work in our lives; everything that His providence ordains for us is meant to help to create us anew, to destroy the old man and his works and bring the new man to life, so that we may enter ever more into that eternal rest which is the very life of the Triune God.

Bridal Mysticism in Leviticus

When one is doing a lectio continua of the scriptures it starts out being a literary pleasure — Genesis and and the first part of Exodus are as exciting as anything in ancient literature — but then one comes to the tabernacle descriptions in Exodus and then Leviticus. Leviticus! Surely one of the hardest bits of Scripture to plow through. Those long lists of ritual laws. One of the things that makes the laws so boring is that they seem so arbitrary. Why is suet fat never eaten, but always burned entirely? Leviticus doesn’t say. Of all the books of the Bible Leviticus is perhaps the last one that one would least think of reading as belles-lettres, but that is exactly what the anthropologist Mary Douglas does in her book Leviticus as Literature. Leviticus, Douglas argues, is not a random collection of arbitrary rules, but an intricately crafted work of analogical thinking. She shows how the body of the sacrificial animal is a kind of model or map of the tabernacle, each part of the dismembered animal corresponds to a part of the tabernacle, and the tabernacle is itself a model of Mount Sinai, which is a model of the universe. The sacrificial rites thus become an enactment of the cosmic order. So the suet over the entrails is sacred to God not because it corresponds to the curtain before the Holy of Holies. But what corresponds to the Holy of Holies itself. Well, that’s where the bridal symbolism comes in:

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What is Heard About Nature and the Trajectory of Certain Thomists

Father Benedict Ashley, O.P. notes in an autobiographical sketch that his vision of the relation between his Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and the sort of “natural science” that originated with Descartes et. al. changed over time. At first he took “modern natural science” to have basically zero philosophical significance; the task of the Aristotelian was simply to take the empirical discoveries of “modern science” and integrate them into the framework of Aristotelian cosmology: “In my first phase I saw the task mainly as one of filling in the details in a general plan already laid out. This may appear preposterous, but it really is not so difficult.” But then he slowly begins to think that “modern science” supports an insight of “modern philosophy” into the nature of reality itself — namely that reality is “historical.” This change came for him at the time of Vatican II, and it had the same effect on him that the Council had on many others: “This insight was a liberation, because it made it possible for me to see modern thought and modern culture much more sympathetically than before.” I wonder whether Ashley’s sense of liberation did not incline him to assent to what he saw as an insight more readily. Would he have been more hesitant to assent to his new ideas if they had been less in tune with his age?