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.

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?

Against the American Revolution

Venuleius of Ius Honorarium has posted a mixture of praise and contempt for Christopher Ferrara’s polemics against “Americanism.” I haven’t read Ferrara’s book, but I can guess what it’s like; after all, in my undergraduate days in the USA I was in the business of quoting Diuturnum Illud and Notre Charge Apostolique to bash the founding principles of that proud republic. Venuleius gives Ferrara qualified praise for slamming John Courtney Murray-style attempts at showing that the American founding principles are the cat’s meow, and ought to be adopted root and branch by Catholic social teaching. But Venuleius argues that Ferrara overstates the evils of the American project:

No one has ever seen God

No one has ever seen God; the only begotten God who is into the bosom of the Father,  he has made him known. (Joh 1:18)

Jean Henri Fabre liked to say he did not believe in God, but rather (through long years of observing insects) he saw Him. But to see God in his creatures is not to see Him as He is. To see the reflected and refracted glory of God in creation is not to see the uncreated light of the Divine Essence itself. We can know all kinds of created perfections, but to know the shoreless ocean of perfection itself, the infinite plenitude of all being, we would ourselves have to come to share in the divine nature. St Thomas explains (Ia q12 a4 c) this from the nature of knowledge.

Against C.S. Lewis’s Idea of Hell

Modern theology has become a dreadfully soft, sissyish affair. I suppose the remote causes lie in the Enlightenment reaction to the polemics following the Protestant Reformation, and that more proximate causes can be found in the 20^th century dialectical dance between liberalism and totalitarianism, the rise of pop-psychology etc.

Nowhere does this softness manifest itself more than in modern theologian’s attitude towards Hell.

Bonum Prolis II: Scheeben on the espousal of Our Lady to S. Joseph

One of the texts in which S. Thomas brings up the concept of “bonum prolis” discussed in my last post is in an article of the Commentary on the Sentences [lib. 4, d. 30, q. 2], in which he shows that the marriage between Our Lady and S. Joseph was a perfect marriage. Matthias Joseph Scheeben quotes this passage as part of his proof that not only is the Our Lady’s marriage to S. Joseph a valid marriage, but it is the most perfect marriage, lacking none of the essential goods of marriage, though of course its virginal nature meant that these goods were possessed in a unique way. Here is a rough translation of the key part of Scheeben’s proof:

It is clear […] that this marriage exceeds all other marriages not only in sanctity and dignity, but in its very perfection as marriage, namely in regard to the two principle goods of marriage, the bonum prolis and the bonum sacramenti.

With regard to the bonum prolis: like all marriages this one was ordered by God, and therefore from within and essentially, to bringing about the possibility of a susceptio prolis. So this marriage was more excellent than every other virgin marriage, since it shared with the matrimonium consummatum the blessing of fruitfulness, since in this marriage the spouses were really to be given and entrusted with a fruit. And though this fruit was not generated by the spouses through carnal use of marriage, nevertheless, through the intention of the divine begetter and on account of the spiritual union of the spouses, the fruit belonged to both of them no less than in a natural marriage. Moreover, this marriage is also more excellent than any non-virginal marriage since its fruit is essentially and absolutely holy, and at the same time the two spouses through their common virginal consecration to God cooperate in bringing about this fruit much more than others cooperate through fleshly union in the generation of natural offspring.

The bonum sacramenti is the marriage bond by which a union more lofty and intimate than other human unions is established, in that, through the will of God, one person is so joined to another […] that they form an inseparable whole, and in and through the whole thus formed God takes them into possession as His own organ for the fulfillment of a certain service. Thus the perfection of the bond is by so much higher as the service for which one person is joined to another is holier, and as the belonging-to God (Angehörigkeit an Gott) through which and for which one person takes the other to himself is greater. Now, the bond between Joseph and Mary is in both respects beyond comparison more excellent not only than any natural (pre- or non- Christian) marriages, but also than all Christian marriages. For, the conception and rearing of Christ is an infinitely more excellent purpose than the generation and rearing of mere men, who are to be members of Christ, and Mary is far more an organ of God and a member of Christ than all who are consecrated organs of God and members of Christ through baptism. (Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik, Volume V, Freiburg 1882, §1579-1580)

Bonum Prolis I: De Koninck and Guy Crouchback

During a recent discussion involving James Chastek and Arturo Vasquez, I uploaded  some texts of De Koninck’s on birth control. The most interesting paper is “The Question of Infertility”, which argues that infertility is sometimes intended by nature as part of the “bonum prolis”, the good of offspring. I don’t want address the main argument here (I share James Chastek’s assessment), but the exposition of the meaning of “bonum prolis” at the beginning reminded of what I’ve always thought was wrong with Mr. Goodall’s argument in a famous passage of Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms.

“Bonum prolis” includes three things, De Koninck points out: 1) the simple existence of the child, 2) the feeding and clothing of the child, and 3) the education and upbringing of the child. The first two are ordered to the third:

Marriage was instituted chiefly for the good of the offspring, not only as to its begetting—since this can be effected even without marriage—but also as to its advancement to a perfect state, because everything intends naturally to bring its effect to perfection. (S. Th., Suppl., q.59, a. 2, c)

S. Thomas uses this understanding of “bonum prolis” to prove that fornication is contrary to the natural law:

Since fornication is an indeterminate union of the sexes, as something incompatible with matrimony, it is opposed to the good of the child’s upbringing [bonum prolis educandae], and consequently it is a mortal sin. (IIa IIae, q. 154, a. 2, c)

And this is precisely what Mr. Goodall fails to see. Waugh readers will recall that Guy Crouchback, protagonist of the Sword of Honour trilogy, is a Catholic whose Protestant wife has left him and obtained a divorce. Mr. Goodall, an eccentric old Catholic, and he have the following conversation:

[Goodall] spoke of the extinction (in the male line) some fifty years back, of a historic Catholic family.
“..They were a connection of yours through the Wrottmans of Garesby. [...] They had two daughters and then the wretched girl eloped with a neighbour. It made a terrible ado at the time. It was before before divorce was common. Anyway they were divorced. [...] Then ten years later your kinsman met this woman alone, abroad. A kind of rapprochement occurred but she went back to her so-called husband and in due time bore a son. It was in fact your kinsman’s. It was by law the so-called husband’s who recognized it as his. That boy is alive to-day and in the eyes of God the rightful heir to all his father’s quarterings.”
Guy was less interested in the quarterings than in the morality.
“You to say that theologically the original husband committed no sin in resuming sexual relations with his former wife?”
“Certainly nor. The wretched girl of course was guilty in every other way and is no doubt paying for it now. But the husband was entirely blameless.” (pp. 159-160)

Guy proceeds to act on this dubious morality, and later in the novel makes a pass at his former wife, Virginia. That is certainly contrary to the bonum prolis, and thus (in way) Virginia is right in her extraordinary outburst of indignation when she realizes what is going on, though she doesn’t give the proper ratio:

Tears of rage and humiliation were flowing unresisted. “I though you’d taken a fancy for me again [...] I thought you’d chosen me specially, and by God you had. Because I was the only woman in the whole world your priests would let you go to bed with. That was my attraction. You wet, smug, obscene, pompous, sexless lunatic pig.” (p. 178)

The Prince and the State in the Third Millennium

His Serene Highness Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein, was in these parts a few weeks ago giving a lecture at the International Theological Institute in Trumau. The basic idea of the lecture (which was based on His Highness’s book, The State in the Third Millenium, and is pretty well summarized in the interview embedded above) was that the state in the third millennium should be a service company providing certain useful goods to its citizens. His Highness explained that he was lead to this rather prosaic vision by the problem of religious freedom as it is understood today. The traditional legitimation of the monarchy had of course been Divine Right, but once Enlightenment style religious pluralism become accepted as the norm, such a legitimation became problematic. The Prince went in search of another model, and, living in Liechtenstein, it was perhaps not altogether surprising that he came up with a pretty boring shop-keeperish, paleo-capitalist, democratic legitimation: one which sees the ruling family as a sort of old and trusted family business (as Aelianus put it in the Q&A). The purpose of his book is to propose his model as the model for the state in the third millennium.

There are numerous objections that one could raise against His Highness’s model. If there is one thing that Marxist economics has shown, it is that the internal contradictions of capitalism are such that stability in one place can only be bought at the price of instability in another place. The stable prosperity of Liechtenstein and Switzerland can only be maintained because other places pay the price for their usury. Sometime I shall explore that theme in more detail (it basically follows from what Chesterton says about the capitalist wanting the same man to be rich and poor at the same time), but now I want to focus on another objection.

The most obvious objection is that this model is too boring. In the Q&A I asked His Highness what he thought of the future of a rival model: the model which Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has developed in Russia. I quoted a Russian friend of mine who says that he doesn’t care about the lack of civil rights or any of that kind of stuff; what he cares about is that under Putin Russia is again trying to assert her power. He cares about the glory of Russia. This is the sort of timocratic vision of a state that one can rally armies around. And that is why I don’t think a paleo-capitalist, cuckoo-clock democratic model of the state is really going to be the wave of the future. I rather tend to agree with Slavoj Žižek’s oft repeated prediction that the state in the third millennium is likely to follow the late-capitalist authoritarian model of Putin and Berlusconi.

His Serene Highness gave an interesting reply. He said that man is a strange creature. On the one hand he is an individualist who looks out for his private interest, but on the other hand he also has a “herd instinct”, which leads him to seek group-inclusion and to massacre those who are not part of his group. The herd instinct (said His Serene Highness) is best satisfied by the communal satisfactions of religion, but when religion is weak it finds an outlet in destructive ideologies such as nationalism.

This is a rather pessimistic view of man: divided between selfish greed and irrational mob ecstasy. St. Thomas would argue that there is another side of man that is the proper principle of political community: his ability to participate in common goods. The common good, properly speaking, appeals both to man’s natural love of his own fulfillment–since it is the good of those who participate in it–but also to his communal nature–for it is a good superior to his own singular good. But, as I have argued before, to be ordered to the common good in the proper sense it is necessary that a political community order its common good explicitly to God. Thus we see that it follows from the acceptance of the  “enlightened” separation of Church and state that the only models of the state left are Prince Hans-Adam’s boring model, Vladimir Putin’s oppressive one, or some mixture of the two.

The Three Stages of Philosophy in Miniature

A teacher of mine likes to warn me against making the history of thought a system. The hap-hazard currents of the thoughts of men do not really follow the simplistic patterns that lazy generalization likes to see in them. This is all true enough, and yet I am sure that the patterns are not altogether imaginary. So it is always a delightful surprise to me when I find a a kind of microcosm of the history of philosophy, a single thinker who manifests a general pattern in the development of his own thought. When Arturo Vasquez commented on a post of mine I took him to be just one more boring Lefebvrist, but when I then took a look at his blog, from which it at first seemed that he was a Neoplatonist, I was astonished. It was like meeting someone whom one at first takes to be a Thackeray character only to find that he is really a Dickens character. (Was es alles gibt, I said to myself). But it was when I found that he had first tried to be a Thomist and that he is presently moving from Neoplatonism back to his original dialectical materialism that I really began to wonder (Das auch noch! I exclaimed to myself), for this is precisely the pattern that Charles De Koninck describes in his Letter to Mortimer Adler:

Greek philosophy started from naive materialism (Thales . . .), pass through a stage of mathematism (Pythag.-Plato), and finally reached metaphysics with Aristotle.  These phases are of course statistical rather than clear-cut.  Thanks to Christianity exerting a profound extrinsic influence on metaphysics, philosophy reached metaphysical maturity in s.Thomas.  From that very moment we shift back into mathematism with Scotus, Suarez, Descartes, Leibniz etc.  Kant is again definitely a scientist (I take “scientist” in its french meaning).  The only solution to Hegel is Marx.  We have rejoined materialism, but this time no naive materialism: but a perfectly conscious and mature materialism which defines the absolute just as we define prime matter.

What really made me laugh out loud though (no offense, Mr. Vasquez), was Vasquez’s characterization of Thomism:

It is also ironic that something that started out as a means to dialogue with the pagans and heretics (Thomist philosophy) itself became a doctrine foundational to Counter-Reformation Catholicism and a measure of orthodoxy itself. That is sort of the Zizekian vulgar core of Thomism: it is meant to convince only those who believe it that it it can convince the Other who does not believe it, all the while knowing that this isn’t really the case.

This is so ironic and funny on so many different levels. No one can read more than a few pages of S. Thomas without seeing how false it is of him. It is so clear that S. Thomas is concentrated on the reality that he is trying to understand. He developes his philosophy principally for the sake of knowing the truth, and it is only a secondary aim of some of his arguments to show how one might “dialogue” with unbelievers. Now, clearly Vasquez has Thomists in mind rather than S. Thomas himself when he says they are trying to convince their own that they can convince the Other, and perhaps this is true of some Thomists; but the great irony is that it is much more true of all the attempts that I know of trying to baptize dialectical materialism. They are all about justifying one’s belief to the Lacanian big Other (in this case “mainstream” philosophy) which doesn’t actually care about them. And thus it is precisely their “Zizekian vulgarity” which leads them to abandon Thomism. For true Thomism must always be hidden, to quote De Koninck again:

I think Thomism triumphs when it lives in our world today.  But I am also convinced that its life must be hidden, because it is immanence in a world that has eyes only for pure extrinsecism.  Thomism is not “foris”.  There is a mass of Thomists today.  But in this, because it is a mass, there is “malum ut in pluribus”: Thomism has reached therein one of its most profound forms of deformation. By this I do not mean that we should hide it: I mean that ipso facto it becomes hidden as we approach it more profoundly.  The purer our Thomism is, and the better we speak of it, the less it is heard. [...] I insist that I am not pessimistic.  I think it is enough that here and there is one who really devotes himself to the object.

The problem with most of those who try to synthesize Christianity with dialectical materialism is that they are not content with devoting themselves to the object, to reality, they cannot stand not to be heard.

The Incarnation and the Revelation of the Trinity

 

In principio et ante saecula Deus erat Verbum: ipse natus est nobis Salvator mundi.

 

 

 

 

The birth of the Eternal Word in time reveals the mystery of His eternal birth from the Father. Creation is an image of God’s essence: in its manifold way it mirrors the perfection which He has in the absolute unity of His essence, but it does not show the most intimate depths of the Divine life; it does not show the procession of Persons. It is this most Divine of all mysteries that the Son came into the world to reveal. S. Thomas explains this in the Proemium to the Commentary on the Sentences:

. . . it belongs to him [the Son] to be the manifestation of the Father who utters [him as Word] and of the whole Trinity. And so it is said, “No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him” (Matthew 11,27), and “No one has ever seen God except the only-begotten who is in the bosom of the Father” (John 1,18). Rightly, therefore, is it said by the person of the Son, “I, wisdom, poured forth the rivers.” Those rivers I understand to be the flows of the eternal procession whereby the Son ineffably proceeds from the Father and the Holy Spirit from both. These rivers were once hidden and in some way poured together, both in the likenesses of creatures and in the enigmas of the Scriptures. . . The Son came and poured out the pent up rivers, as it were, by bringing the name of the Trinity out into the open, “Teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Whence [it also says,] “He searched the depths of the rivers and brought forth what was hidden into the light” (Job 28,11). (Translation by M. Waldstein)

Coming into the world in order to reveal His eternal coming forth from the Father, the Son enters the world in a way which is itself the most perfect temporal image of the eternal procession. De Koninck points out that it is the very lowliness of human condition that enables this imitation:

The assumption of human nature can also be accomplished in two ways: immediately and without any preliminary conditions as would be the case if God immediately formed the assumed nature; or in assuming human nature by way of birth, God would thus place Himself in dependence as it were on man and proceed into the universe by way of origination. And the being itself from which He is born becomes thereby the origin of God. Let us notice right away that this very radical communication would not in any way have been possible in the assumption of an angelic nature. God could not proceed from an angelic nature, since that nature is, on the one hand, too perfect to engender as do natural beings, and on the other hand, too imperfect to engender as does God. “Perfecta imperfecte, imperfecta perfecte.” It is thus thanks to the potentiality of matter, taking matter insofar is it is deprived of form, therefore to the privation which is the weakest reality, that the Son of God can proceed from the very inside of His creation, thus imitating in a very profound manner His generation from the eternal Father. Infixus sum in limo profundi: et non est substantia—I am thrusted in the depth of slime, where there is no point of support (Ps. LXVIII, 3). Happy imperfection of matter which merits such an informing! (Chales De Koninck, Ego Sapientia, ch. 20)