Just Thomism

‘The jar of flour shall not go empty,
nor the jug of oil run dry,
until the day when the LORD sends rain upon the earth.’”

So the measure of Israel’s famine becomes the measure of God’s miraculous work among the Gentiles in Sidon.

-God sends the one starving to be fed by one starving even more severely.

-[F]irst make me a little cake and bring it to me.
Then you can prepare something for yourself and your son.

Seek first the Kingdom, etc.

Call it the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled in hagiography: you read the story of the saint or the miracle and, without ever fully articulating the thought out loud, you get the sense that you’ve missed your chance. I hear the miracles of Padre Pio and think, again without saying it, that I’ve missed my chance to encounter the holy, to see a miracle, to have confidence that a prayer would be answered. To believe in miracles at all, however, means believing their whole point is to point to something infinitely more holy, whose presence I can’t escape.

Call it also one of the more wretched and deep-seated wounds of sin and concupiscence, that we can’t help having more confidence in the passing sign than in the ever-present reality it signifies.

Obj: If there is an ordinary means of grace to incorporate unborn children into the church, then it will be very common for children to be conceived without original sin. But this is an extraordinary privilege, not a common occurrence.

Resp: Vicarious desire is provisional, and so is absolutely distinguished from the Immaculate Conception. Baptism of vicarious desire stands to baptism by water, desire and blood like mass battlefield absolution stands to absolution in sacramental confession. Battlefield absolution is not a species of sacramental confession but a concession in the face of practical impediments that would be unreasonable to take as blocking access to the res of the sacrament.

1.) Legitimate vows before God give access to the ordinary grace to accomplish them.

2.) Legitimate Catholic matrimonial vows include the vow to make one’s children members of the Church.

So as soon as one has a child, one has access to an ordinary grace to make it a member of the Church, but

3.) Before the child is born, the only possible access to an ordinary grace that can make it a member of the Church is the intention of the parent (as expressed, for example, in their marital vows.)

Therefore the intention of the parent, as expressed in marital vows, is the ordinary means of the unborn child becoming a member of the Church.

(This argument applies only to unborn children and so is necessarily a provisional incorporation into the Church. Once born, the ordinary grace of incorporation of persons before the age of reason is water baptism, or sometimes martyrdom. For this reason, baptism of vicarious desire should be distinguished not just from water baptism but also from baptism of desire and of blood, precisely because all of these are not provisional.)

-The Protestant tendency to hear “All Scripture is inspired by God” as meaning “What is not Scripture is not inspired by God.”

-Chapter 3 contains an extensive discourse on Paul himself as a rule of life

-The whole text is an epistle, or the Church speaking to itself; the exhortation of Jesus within the previously existing one Christ.

Philia is a Greek term for any union of hearts in a shared life. The English friendship is one mode of philia, but so is reciprocated erotic love, the love of a parent for a child, patriotic feeling between citizens, and even caring affection between non-human animals. I take the list just given from Ethics VIII. 1, where Aristotle also notes that philia is a (and in some sense the) highest good of life.

Philia is a divine perfection, so the unity of the one God is not the solitariness of one person. There is a transcendental multiplicity negating the imperfection that attaches to our notion of unity insofar as unity involves isolation.

The perfection of divine philia is founded on generation. The Son is born from the heart of the Father. In this mode of philia we see the foundation of the many incompatible modes of philia among us. There is a model for all friendship and citizenship in the perfect equality of the persons, a model for all erotic love in the fruitfulness of the desire of the Father, and an obvious model for the warm affection of all parenthood.*

To leave it as this, however, would more leave us with the sense of having given the principles if philia and not philia itself. Philia is the gift of philia to the other, and any gift exchanged between friends derives its whole value as participating in the gift that philia is. The Father gives himself to the Son even as the Son gives himself to the Father, and this mutual self giving, is itself the subsistent philia of the Holy Spirit. In one sense, the whole existence of divine philia is the Father and the Son; in another sense it is the Holy Spirit, just as what blooms is in one way the blooming, and in another way the flower. In one sense God is the Father alone, for everything divine is from his heart as a principle, in another sense God is in the Son alone, for the Father holds nothing back in handing over to his Son. In another sense God is the Holy Spirit alone, for the Father and Son subsist entirely in the philia they have for each other, and the Holy Spirit is that philia.

*I think particularly here of the Madonna and nursing child.

Matter is a way of standing to contradictory forms, and contradictory forms can’t be in anything, so matter stands to what is outside of itself, demanding it be the finite part of some larger whole. This generalizes a point Cajetan makes in summarizing why ipsum esse cannot be in a genus, since genus (corresponding to matter) stands to differences extra se, but esse has no differences outside of itself (cf. comm. no. II, In Primam 3.5)

It’s thus the material of things makes them parts of larger wholes. In seeing the whole of spacetime, for example, we conceptualize the totality of termini of local motions. As Aristotle put it, we only come to know place from change of place. Newton was right that there is something formal and prior about spacetime, but not because there is absolute space or time – i.e. a mathematical ghost somehow behind the visible world – but because, given local motion, the totality of here-there stand to the magnitude of any locally movable substance like rational-irrational stand to animal or prime-composite stand to number.

When we speak of the immateriality of cognition, we mean that, by cognition, forms made distinct by matter now constitute a single whole, namely, the world. Contrary to the stock philosophical example, you don’t open your eyes and see a tree, you open your eyes and see a whole visible world, within which you might focus on a tree, the grass, the sky, the bird, etc. Any sense gives us this cognitive whole, for example, even if wood ticks only detect a few chemical scents of living bodies, those scents constitute an entire world of possible hosts. The tick sees me, the squirrel, the deer, etc as islands of habitation drifting through vast empty spaces.

When Thomas describes the justice of the infinitude of hellfire, he seems to mean something like this:

Some bad decisions have permanent outcomes for which there is no remedy.

Allowing the bad outcome of a bad decision can be a just punishment.

Some just punishments allow permanent outcomes for which there is no remedy.

While Thomas sometimes uses the language of infinite guilt, he reduces it to a permanent outcome, i.e. if, in the time you have to accept it, you reject the one thing that can save, you have, well, rejected the one thing that saves in the one time you could have accepted it. The justice of hell is more a logical inference than a declaration of positive law.

As always with discussions of Hell as divine punishment, the insight into God is relatively superficial. We don’t have as deep an insight into God by meditating on his justice than by meditating on his mercy. The damned manifest something of divine glory, but the relatively swallower and less proper parts of it.

Aspirationally, political revolution is an upward movement toward an ideal. One kills off all those keeping things down, and everything naturally floats upwards. The people see that Louis XVI, or the Romanovs or Franz Ferdinand or Charles or whoever stands in the way of a better and nobler (or even a livable) state, so killing our way to a better state seems attractively reasonable.

That this aspirational killing came to be called revolution is probably a divine punishment working through the collective unconscious. As is clear from the rotation of of a tire or the earth, a revolution is literally setting out on a path guaranteed to take you back to precisely where you started. We even see the reason why a revolution or rotation dones this, namely that one’s movement is governed by a center. One seeks to distance himself from the old guard while being governed by the same things as the old guard, and the common center is of course aspirational violence. I fantasize about successful revolutions and roll my eyes at the folly of those benighted societies that can’t escape the “cycle of violence,” while failing to notice that I’m forming contrary judgments about synonyms.

The aspirational desire of revolution has to be governed by a point outside and above oneself, not from a fixed center perpetually beneath the self.

Thomists argue for matter as a principle of individuation, Scotists object that God and angels are individuated, but not by matter. One response might be that God and angels are not individuated by a principle, but by themselves. The whole reason we have to distinguish a principle from what is from a principle is because of matter. What is its form, simply is; whereas material things don’t exist simply, but in matter, i.e. in contrast to form which is being that seeks to continue as itself, material being has an intrinsic desire to be something else.