End of the Road

While this is a good name for a blog, I am hereby leaving it to lie fallow. Sayonara.

Study and Blog Neglect

I confess to almighty God, and to you blog-readers, that I have neglected this blog through my own fault. This is related to the fact that I've been neglecting serious study since February. Instead I was doing a lot of preaching; funny, these are supposed to go together!

More on physical premotion shortly....

Idea for a play

Good help is hard to find. 

Theology, Queen of the Sciences, has a new servant, eager to become her handmaid. The Queen has not asked faithful Philosophy to retire, though Philosophy is older than the Queen herself, but she has reposed more and more responsibility upon the new domestic’s narrow shoulders. This new servant is, in truth, still a chit of a discipline. Her name is History. She is not wicked, but Theology (and everyone else) is enchanted with her. And this is the tale of her childhood, royal hiring, and mischief to date. The story’s dramatic tension can only be resolved if History grows up. And here she needs not only the Queen’s help, but that of Philosophy to realize she is not a science and wrongly aspires to membership in the Queen's scientific inner circle. Cue overture.

What's so hot about Thomism?

Whether Thomism is really so hot.

Objection 1. It seems that Thomism is not so hot. For hotness in a theological system consists in giving the right answers to questions. But if asked “Was Mary immaculately conceived?” (or certain other questions) Thomism gives the wrong answer, while another system gives the right one. So Thomism is not so hot.

Objection 2. Thomism—indeed much theology—claims to be a science, yet to answer all questions correctly it needs to know the answers in advance. But this makes Thomism (and much theology) inconsequential, for we need not resort to it if we have our answers in advance. Insofar as hotness consists in answering questions of consequence, then, Thomism, and much theology with it, is not so hot.

Objection 3. Thomists, the devotees of Thomism, are often narrow-minded, ignorant, stubborn, and otherwise annoying. Since this practically amounts to a pathological syndrome, we speak of the Dominican disease, which consists in knowing Aquinas but nothing else. Were Thomism so hot, it would either prevent or cure this disease; and, since it does neither, it is not so hot.

Objection 4. After an extraordinary supernatural experience Thomas Aquinas stopped writing and likened his works to a quantity of straw, which is not so hot. Since the works of Aquinas are essential to Thomism, Thomism is, according to Aquinas, not so hot.

But on the contrary is the authority of Pope Bl. John XXIII, who said of Aquinas’s teaching that it is, more than any other, fully in keeping with the truths that God has revealed, with the writings of the Holy Fathers, and with the principles of right reason, and therefore Holy Church has adopted it as her own, and has given the name of common or universal teacher to its author.

I answer that being so hot it predicated of one thing in relation to another. Compared with divine Truth, divine Charity, and the sacred Scriptures, Thomism is not so hot, for these are either God (who is a consuming fire) or inspired of God, whereas Thomism is a school of sapiential science elaborated by human authors only. Yet Thomism is justifiably said to be so hot, and for four reasons.

First, Thomism—and all theological science—depends on the revelation of the divine understanding for its principles. But no other science does this. So Thomism, and all theological science, is relatively hot by reason of its share in the divine hotness.

Second, Thomism—and all theological science—is hot both by reason of its scientific certainty (in which it is hotter than the inductive and positive sciences, but no hotter than the deductive sciences of mathematics, philosophy, and the like) and by reason of its inculcating wisdom about divine things. For while philosophy imparts wisdom about divine things in a purely natural manner, for his divine attributes, namely his power and deity, have been known since the creation of the world by the things that have been made, theology, including Thomism, does so more fully, surely, and fruitfully on account of its drawing on the scientia divina, as we have shown (cf. STh 1a, q1, a1). Accordingly Thomism, and all theology, is, by believers, reckoned way, way hotter than all purely natural understanding.

Third, Thomism is so hot because it is in two respects unrivalled by any comparable theological school. First, has not departed from the demonstrable faith of the ancient church. Second, it accommodates doctrinal development, non-theological science, and its own positive mistakes. 

Fourth, hotness is predicated of Thomism because it is, for certain purposes, pedagogically unsurpassed. On one hand, Thomism is more extensive, sophisticated, well-organized, and deliberately adapted to the study of divinity in a contemplative setting than the other major theological pedagogy, namely the Sentences of Peter Lombard. On the other hand, as stated above, Thomism keeps traditional dogma without ignoring development, secularity, or its own fallibility. Thomism is so hot because other pedagogical theologies are either even more academic or even more doctrinaire.

Reply to objection 1. Being so hot is a matter of relative quality, and relative to other theological schools Thomism is far and away the most consistently correct. That there are exceptions that concern matters of fact or newly-defined dogmas is neither surprising nor inconsistent with being so hot. In the example given and others, the virtue of Thomism is shown in its asking the right questions and facilitating clear thought about the topic.

Reply to objection 2. Theology is not a positive science but rather is a sapiential doctrine subalternated to the divine understanding. That it needs some answers (revelation, the Creed) to do its explanatory work does not detract from its hotness.

Reply to objection 3. The Gospel, though supernaturally hot, does not altogether prevent vice or imperfection in Christians, or even their misuse of the Gospel; still less may we expect Thomism to do these things for its students. Moreover, the correlation of Thomism to general ignorance does not imply causation: the Dominican disease is more plausibly explained by pride, sloth, immoderate zeal, and the specialization born of positive or Thomastic studies.

Reply to objection 4. Relative to God, Thomism is not so hot. Hotness may yet be predicated of Thomism—and is rightly so predicated—because of Thomism’s hotness in relation to other theologies and disciplines.

Victor White on Converts

I wonder if there's a good book to read about converts to the Catholic faith. I don't mean a book of conversion stories, or a book about particular converts, but a book about conversion in general, in our time.

Consider the vocabulary of conversion. Sometimes a refined sense of "convert" is used for those who come from outside Christianity, while people baptized outside the Church are not said to convert but to be received into full communion. Sometimes people are said to become Catholic, to convert to Catholicism, to join or enter the Church, and so on. Each expression has a different ring to it.

I recently read two texts about conversion. One turned out to be by someone who left the Church for Orthodoxy: he claimed that nothing upsets and baffles zealous converts like the lack of ecclesial enthusiasm in people who grew up Catholic; and that nothing tires intelligent Catholics-from-infancy like the hey-look-what-I-found excitement of those same converts. These observations hold not just for energetic converts, though, but for anybody excited by faith--how could the believers be so tepid, and how could the new guy be so presumptuous?

The more interesting passage is from the English Dominican (convert) Victor White (1902-1960), quoted in the newly published Jung-White correspondence. White writes:

"The trouble for so many of us converts-in-adolescence is something awfully difficult for you cradle Catholics to understand! The trouble is that, one fine day, we find that we did  (unconsciously) pose when we became RCs. It is more a matter of culture, of our picture-of-the world, than of religion! We revolted from the whole "protestant-materialist" world and values in which we were brought up: probably threw out the baby with the bath-water. For that we substituted a beautiful, romantic "Ages of Faith" medieval world--perhaps helped by Chesterbelloc, Gill, Pepler etc. The Church was central in that pretty picture; and after playing with High Anglicanism of course we became Catholics.... Perhaps we had never had much to do with the "real" Church of the average Catholic, and we never did feel much at home in it. We found "home" in the rather exceptional Catholicism of Blackfriars, Oxford...."

White is grim, and wrote at one point at least that his faith was no longer that of Catholics--though he got over this and persevered. Still, he's got a point: there is a difference between Catholicism and the Catholic Church and faith. Even the word, Catholicism(e), is modern, a reformations-era term of identity.  (Coined, as somebody says, around the same time modern Catholic missionaries gave India's religions the name Hinduism.) 

And, for all this--so what? Is it OK to have a blog of notes and asides? Pretty boring, I guess, for other people. But maybe useful to me. Sorry to disappoint the avid millions who check this page.

From all their afflictions

Since I'm not teaching this spring, I'm going to try to write a book on the Baianist heresy.

Whether I'll finish the Jan 14 posting on Baius remains to be seen!

Michael de Bay

One of my confreres has suggested that I write a book about Baianism, the heresy named for the 16th-century Louvain theologian Michael de Bay (a.k.a., Baius). Nobody, as far as I know, has written about Baianism since the 1800s, and that was in French and German (or Latin).

Baius was a zealous Catholic reformer steeped in the ressourcement of Renaissance classicism--in his case, more a return to patristic sources, of course, than to pagan letters. He was a man without sympathy for medieval theology or philosophy. His proposal, which ought to sound trite to everyone by now but doesn't,  was to recover the pure vigor of patristic Christianity by bypassing scholastic thought and grasping Biblical and patristic Christianity with the tools of critical scholarship. In philosophy he was apparently a less-than-reflective nominalist.

The errors that were condemned as Baianism stand in an uncertain and uneven relationship to what Baius actually wrote and taught. (This makes writing about Baianism easier, since it lets me put aside the quest for the historical Baius.) It seems to me that the 76 propositions rejected by Pope St Pius V in Ex omnibus afflictionibus (1567) can be boiled down to seven errors.

1. Baianism treats moral good and evil exclusively in terms of obedience to the will of God. There's nothing morally intelligible for us to consider in human acts themselves, such that we could conclude that an act is intrinsically or objectively good or evil. The appeal, for Baianists and others, is that this leaves God absolutely free to command whatever He wills; it also rids us of moral theology.

2. Baianism identifies the voluntary with whatever we will without external compulsion. Internal compulsion is not only A-OK, it is inevitable: everyone is a slave, either of charity or concupiscence. If God moves anyone to act in charity, He imposes the necessity of charitable action on the creature. Baius could have used St Thomas's clarification here, to distinguish between the unfailing effectiveness of God's will and it's imposition of necessity.

3. (I'll have to take this up later...)