Q5 cont'd

So, yeah, about a week's work just went down the tubes due to a Blogger script malfunction.  This is why I code in Notepad2.  grrr.

having stalled out for a moment

I thought I'd suggest that this article is incidentally an exploration of the Thomist recognition of the goodness of being--both what it does and what it does not imply.

 Update:  This passage in another The Catholic Thing article is similarly explicit:

Yet, what does it mean to “read a book with complete impartiality”? It means that we can read the book without our protective mind interfering to prevent us from admitting the truth of what opposes what we want to do. Our society is full of a hatred rooted in envy, in the refusal to acknowledge the truth of our being. We are thus in a revolutionary situation, something similar to what Burke described in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. We have now freely chosen principles of polity that deny elements of goodness in our being. We do not bind ourselves by what is. We withhold praise from any truth that we choose not to live by.

Q5A1 & 2 -- Whether goodness differs really from being? Whether goodness is prior in idea to being?

OK, so this is actually one of those interesting questions.  The form it might take in another conversation--the one that got the generation of Ockham into all sorts of difficulties--could be something like, "Is whatever God creates, good?  Or does God choose good things to create?"  But Thomas is going to spare us the conflation of two quite different matters that lie hidden in that question, by carefully abstracting one set of differences from another.

So, then, saying something is, and is good, is not repetitive, because to the idea of actually being we now add the idea of being desireable:

a thing is desirable only in so far as it is perfect; for all desire their own perfection. But everything is perfect so far as it is actual. Therefore it is clear that a thing is perfect so far as it exists; for it is existence that makes all things actual [. . .]. Hence it is clear that goodness and being are the same really. But goodness presents the aspect of desirableness, which being does not present.  (Q5A1)

So our craftsman with the insight and skill to realize the potential table in a block of wood is only likely to make the table if he thinks the table will be desireable. 

Q1-4 cont'd (Q4)

OK, so the simple version for all of Question 4 would be something like this:  Everyone agree with Thomas because the alternative is a theological muddle that looks like this and this.  But of course this isn't sporting.

Question. 4 - THE PERFECTION OF GOD (THREE ARTICLES)

Article. 1 - Whether God is perfect?

This is really reducible to the act/potential distinction, again.  If we regard God as we regard a block of wood, then we say He is less perfect than a table, a chair, a bedstead made from the wood.  But it is our narrowing of the question, and our inapposite treatment of God as among the things of the universe, that leads us to err.  Realizing that a craftsman capable of realizing a table from a block of wood is more actual than wood or table, so that the craftsman in some way constitutes the block's potential and the actuality of the table, we realize that it is incorrect to conclude that actuality necessarily results from "being made" or that perfection (full actualization) must be the result of a perfecting process.

Q1-4 cont'd (Q3)

I truly do laugh every time I read the heading "Of the Simplicity of God," because in colloquial terms there is nothing remotely simple about God's "simplicity."  This is where most of us start to lose interest, and where pejorative and anachronistic uses of "scholastic" and even "obscurantist" start to be heard in mutters from the fringe.  And, honestly, as someone who spent most of my adult life convinced of a non-substantialist metaphysics (an "anti-realist" position), I'm cautious myself about wading in too confidently, here.  Wade in we should, though.  It's really interesting stuff, and turns out to be really important--every one of these questions can also be found in various debates around the time the Nicene Creed was worked out, and many of them have spawned heresies all by themselves.

Still, I really don't feel too bad about hearing Wallace Shawn's "Vizzini" voice when I read sentences like "Now it has been already proved that God is the First Being. It is therefore impossible that in God there should be any potentiality. But every body is in potentiality because the continuous, as such, is divisible to infinity; it is therefore impossible that God should be a body."  Incon-THEEV-able!

Q1-4 cont'd (Q2)

I'll have one main comment on all of Question 2, but I may interject a couple remarks on each of Articles 1-3.

It would actually be very difficult to overstate the contemporary importance of Thomas's having taken ten articles to arrive at the question of God's existence, and then taking two steps before broaching directly that question itself.  One of the luminaries in the Communio circle, albeit not wholly uncontroversial, has actually published (and, after criticism, republished in a revised second edition) a book which I found terribly helpful in the middle of my crisis of faith and literary theory:  Dieu sans l'etre:  hors-texte (God Without Being by Jean-Luc Marion).

Now, I'm not even 100% sure I still track with some of the philosophical premises that I seemed to share with Marion's approach when I read him back in 2008, but I keep meaning to re-read him to find out.  What I am sure of is that since Modernism has identified "realist" knowledge with a totalitarian vision of reality comprehended and controlled by technical means in service of an unknowable unity between the most extremely individual, inarticulate "gooey center" of each person and the most unknowably sublime "outer limits" of collective aspiration, it has become increasingly difficult to articulate what a thinker like Aquinas means by seeing revelation as God's having given us in part what He has in whole:  an identity (not a mere resemblance) between truth and reality.

Catching Up: Q1-4 (well, really Q1)

I didn't actually notice the blog was up during most of the time y'all were active, but now that you've slowed down a bit, I can jump in.  I'm going to make some comments on the Questions y'all have already gone through, to warm up a bit.

I should be able to get through Question 1 tonight (I originally planned to do Q1-4, but then I started to get verbose).

Q8A3-4:  After reading that I have to wonder where I am. 

Q8A1-2:  This reminds me of a crack by N.T. Wright that he is not a panentheist, but rather a theenpanist.  The use of the term esse is quite challenging in each of these questions.  What really is essence?  What really is existence for that matter?  As is the case when you are learning your first language (and to an extent with a second), the answer lies not in a dictionary definition, but rather in continuous usage.  I believe I have a better handle on those terms the further I go in this work and hope that the trend continues.

On a related note, it is interesting the degree to which St. Thomas anticipates the concept of space-time.  Of course, I would not be surprised if the Greeks did as well.  It seems like just about everything the modern world prizes itself on discovering were found long ago in a village hugging a mountain in the Peloponnese or in a tent beside the Jordan River.

Vale,

JR