On July 27th, 2011 we published a notification on a new critical edition of Aquinas’ De unione verbi incarnati, edited with substantial commentary (500+ pages) by Dr. Klaus Obenauer. Dr. Obenauer has just released a new study on the theology of the hypostatic union, Hypostatische Union und Subjekt (Bonn: Nova et Vetera, 2012). This is a focused work (109 pages) engaging what the Germans call “Konstitutionschristologie.” Enjoy!
T H E A M E R I C A N M A R I T A I N A S S O C I A T I O N
Announces Its
36th Annual International Meeting
Thursday – Saturday, October 11-13, 2012 – PHILADELPHIA, PA.
“ART & FAITH”
SPONSORED BY: LA SALLE UNIVERSITY
AMA president: John G. Trapani, Jr.
Program Committee: Cornelia Tsakiridou (Local Chair), Gavin Colvert (Program Chair), Bill Haggerty, John Hittinger, and John G. Trapani, Jr.
The American Maritain Association issues a “Call for Papers” for its 36th annual international conference to be held in Philadelphia, PA. Thursday, October 11 – Saturday, October 13, 2012.
This year’s conference theme is “Art and Faith,” a reference to Jacques Maritain’s book of the same name (English translation edition, 1948; originally published in 1926). This little book is a treasury of insights on the broad and interrelated topics of art and faith revealed in the correspondence of letters between Jacques Maritain and Jean Cocteau. About these two topics Maritain writes, “We merely claim that these two can love each other and remain free.” Well, be free then … and check out this rich little volume – the letters are stimulating, and they suggest a variety of topics and themes for very provocative papers and discussions. Submitted abstracts/papers on any topic of philosophical merit are most welcome.
Paper presentations at the conference should be limited to 25 minutes reading time, with 15 minutes for discussion. To submit an electronic proposal abstract of approximately 500 words, please visit:http://maritain.veritasprima.org. In order to receive full consideration, proposals should be completed online by no later than Friday, July 6th 2012. Questions regarding the submission of proposals should be directed to the Program Chair: Dr. Gavin Colvert, Associate Professor, Philosophy Department, Assumption College, 500 Salisbury St., Worcester, MA 01609. His email address is: gcolvert@assumption.edu. In addition, the AMA extends an invitation to societies or individuals interested in organizing a satellite session for the 2012 conference. Complete details regarding the submission of satellite session proposals are available at the web address indicated above.
A special invitation is extended to graduate students. A stipend of $250.00 will be awarded to the outstanding graduate student paper selected by the Program Committee. In order to be considered for this award, please indicate your interest when you submit your completed paper. The award recipient must be present at the conference; the stipend will be awarded at the AMA Awards Banquet.
The conference location is in Philadelphia, PA., and at LaSalle University. We have very comfortable and convenient accommodations at the Sheraton Society Hill hotel. Philadelphia, PA is accessible from numerous highways and at the Philadelphia International Airport (PHL). Full conference details, including our special conference registration price, hotel information, and details of our exciting line-up of Plenary Speakers, will be announced in the summer. In the meantime, mark your calendar now!
Prof. Mark Henninger, S.J., Director of the Center for Medieval Philosophy of Georgetown University is pleased to announce the establishment of the Edward A. Martin Prize for the Most Outstanding Undergraduate Paper in Medieval Philosophy. The purpose of this prize is to recognize the best work currently being done in undergraduate medieval philosophy as well as to foster potential undergraduate scholars in the discipline of medieval philosophy.
Criteria
A paper or honors thesis focused on Western medieval philosophy from Augustine to Suarez of between 3,000 – 5,000 words, double-spaced, exclusive of bibliography or endnotes. The paper should have been written for an undergraduate course or as an honors thesis during the academic year 2011- 2012 and must not have been published in professional fora or student journals. Papers will be judged based on their quality of research, depth of philosophic inquiry and clarity.
Prize
$700.00 (US) for the winner and two $150.00 awards for Honorable Mentions
Requirements for Submission
Surveying the recent literature on analogy, I am curious about why so few people consult Santiago Ramirez’ four-volume De analogia. I think that it is by far the best work on the subject.
The neglect of Ramirez is not new. I just this morning noticed that although Klubertanz, in St. Thomas on Analogy, mentions Ramirez’ earlier articles (Ramirez’ book was published later), he cites him as J (Iacobus) Ramirez for the 1921-1922 article, and S.M. (Santiago Maria) Ramirez for the 1953 article. This 1953 article is reprinted at the end of vol. 4 of De analogia. Ramirez never fully finished the De analogia, since he suffered from health problems.
For those intersted in the citations: Ramirez is listed on Klubertanz, p. 10, note 11, as someone who argues that Cajetan’s interpretation is that of Thomas. On pp. 14-15, he is mentioned as supporting a position that “deprives the position of Cajetan and his followers of its claim to a textual basis in St. Thomas.” In fairness to Klubertanz, it is the 1953 article in which Ramirez - to my mind convincingly but not conclusively - argues that the threefold division in I Sent, d. 19 is merely between inequality, intrinsic, and extrinsic attribution, and does not map on to the De Veritate, q. 2, art. 11.
I don’t know if there is a clearer listing of Thomas’ texts than in Appendix One of Klubertanz. But Ramirez mentions all of the texts, I think, and puts them in a more helpful order.
Some deny that there are any objectively first principles; all so-called objectively first principles are in fact only imperatives.
Others attempt to draw us out of such mire, holding that the first principles are twofold, some are manifest to all and some are manifest only to the wise. As they say, none of those manifest to all have substantive content. Either they are simply logical relations - if A, then A; if A, not not A - or rather empty statements regarding generic concepts - every whole is greater than its part. Then, they say, no non-substantive first principle suffice to constitute a science. In order to have a science, one needs substantive first principles. But no substantive first principles are manifest to all. They can be known only to the wise.
The further claim is that all principles that can be known only to the wise are ‘first’ in the sense that their partial (the sense of ‘partial’ to be gathered below) and initial affirmation is required for the science to get off the ground. The inquiry that gets off the ground on the basis of this initial affirmation is then that by which they will be in the end finally verified. But even their status as finally verified is always hypothetical. Hence, it may be that in fact better principles can be discovered or hypothesized whereby the data is more adequately explained. Hence the verification of these first principles is logically the affirmation of the consequent: If these principles are true, the data of this science will adequately be explained; the data are so explained; therefore, the principles are true. They are true, it is said, but possibly false. They would be shown to be false if seen in the light of principles that actually explain the data - ever new and ever to be revisited - better than the previously held first principles. Thus, they are first in one sense but not absolutely indubitable to whoever knows their meaning.
If we grant that all first principles known only to the wise can only be of this sort, we render all philosophical concepts of any substance to be possibly ‘without target’, and we render all philosophical statements of any substantive value to be possibly false.
Now, dogmatic statements are theological statements with the authority of infallibility. If the theological statements dogmatically affirmed depend materially upon philosophical concepts and statements of any substance, then how could such dogmatic statements not be merely hypothetically true? For instance, someone will contend: It would be the case – as ecclesial dogma asserts – that original sin must be passed on by heredity were the human essence (of any man) an isolable principle of existence not affected by co-existence with others. But if it is not the case that the human essence is that, then original sin need not be passed on by heredity. Hence, someone contends, the dogma need not be maintained. Again, someone will say, it would be the case that Christ is homoousios with the Father if ‘substance’ were a concept that targeted anything. But if ‘substance’ is a misbegotten concept, a concept not about reality as it primordially shows itself, a concept due but to a technological outlook, really a ‘false’ concept, then one need not and could not affirm that Christ is ‘homoousios’ with the Father.
So, if all first principles known only to the wise can be only hypothetically true, then any dogma that is indebted to such principles is only hypothetically true, true as a contingent proposition. Now, as all admit, many rather crucial dogmas are indebted to substantive philosophical concepts and principles. This thesis that dogma is only conditionally true is none other than historicism. The doom of many a dogma looms if we hold it.
Now, without rejecting the important insight, and the crucial contemporary defense in the face of despairing relativism, of the kind of first principles just described - substantive first principles that are known only to the wise and also possibly false - and of the possibility of a progressive assimilation of the mind to the real in the revolutionary breakthroughs of the science, may we not affirm also another set of first principles? Might we not also affirm that some first principles known only to the wise are certain and necessarily true? That such first principles, although no one who did not follow the line of inquiry in which they are disclosed could affirm them, are nevertheless affirmable as certainly true and also substantive? Let these be those principles that have long been considered the patrimony of the perennial philosophy. Such would be based on the genuine grasp of, for instance, substance, form, efficient cause, act, potency, nature, etc. and of the properties thereof; the first principles of which I speak would be those deducible from understanding of these realities and their properties. These principles so held might be said to be in substantive content midway between the robust and precise set that remains by and large not impossibly false and the set that is manifest to all who think at all. Yet with that little but sufficient content they can undergird the ecclesial dogma that is to be perennially and not only hypothetically valid.
Two important texts of Pierre Mandonnet are available for free in digital form via the Internet Archive: Des écrits authentiques de S. Thomas d’Aquin (1910) and Bibliographie thomiste (1921). Obviously, these texts have been surpassed in many ways by more up-to-date scholarship but they still have their uses. Some evidence for this is the fact that Des écrits authentiques de S. Thomas d’Aquin has been downloaded 157 times and Bibliographie thomiste has been downloaded 292 times.
The texts are available in several formats, including PDF and Kindle.
I thought that I would try out blogging by drawing attention to one of the newly updated moral theologians on the PRDL Website, namely Gregory Sayer, OSB (1560-1602): http://www.prdl.org/author_view.php?a_id=2051. He is probably the only famous Catholic English moral theologian and Thomist of the 16th-17th centuries. Was Thomas Stapleton a Thomist? You can read about Sayer in an article by EJ Mahoney:
Now in its second year, the Medieval Latin Summer Program at Ohio Dominican University is accepting applications. There are three courses:
Beginner/Review CourseJune 18 - July 13, Monday-Friday, 9:00 -10:20 AMThe Beginner/Review course provides an intensive introduction to the basics of Latin grammar and requires no previous preparation in the Latin language.Intermediate Medieval LatinJune 18- July 13, Monday-Friday, 10:30 AM -12:00 PMStudents who have completed the Beginner/Review course or who have taken at least one year of Latin instruction at the university level may enroll in Intermediate Medieval Latin. The Intermediate course introduces students to the reading of medieval Latin texts. Selections are typically drawn from the Vulgate Bible, Church Fathers, medieval chronicles, letters, hagiography, scholastic treatises, and poetry.Advanced Medieval LatinJuly 16- August 10, Monday-Friday, 12:00-1:30 PMThe Advanced Medieval Latin course is intended for students who have completed Intermediate Medieval Latin or those who have who have some experience reading Medieval Latin texts. Students will be expected to read advanced texts in varying genres of medieval Latin writing.
The program website is here, and a flyer can be downloaded here. For more information, contact Dr. Matthew Ponesse.
It is becoming difficult to read good books on Aquinas’ theology as rapidly as Dr. Matthew Levering of the University of Dayton is able to compose them. In addition to being the founder and editor of Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Levering is perhaps the most prolific English language author writing on Aquinas’ theology.
Readers of thomistica.net are likely aware of, inter alia, Levering’s Christ’ Fulfillment of Torah and Temple: Salvation According to St. Thomas Aquinas (University of Notre Press, 2002); Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology (Blackwell Publishing, 2004); and Biblical Natural Law: A Theocentric and Teleological Approach (Oxford University Press, 2008). Adding to these works of enduring value, Levering has recently published the following volumes:
Enjoy—if you can keep up! And…congratulations to Dr. Levering on his many important contributions to Thomism and the renewal of Catholic Theology. Ad multos annos!
Here is the second part of our interview with Raymond Dennehy about two recently re-issued works of Jacques Maritain’s political philosophy, Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and Natural Law. You can read the first part of the interview here.
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Thomistica.net: What is the relevance of these books to the political and cultural scene in the US and Europe and elsewhere in the world?
Dr. Dennehy: Again, permit me to recall what I wrote in the book’s foreword:
The decision to reissue the single-volume edition of Jacques Maritain’s Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and Natural Law could hardly have come at a more urgent time, a time when, perhaps as never before, the future of democracy hangs in the balance. That Maritain wrote them back in the 1940s, in answer to the Fascist and Communist attacks on democracy, human rights, and Christianity, does nothing to diminish their timeliness. Yes, Fascism and Communism have been defeated, but the secularization of the West that fuels the treats to Christianity and human freedom continue unabated. Consider, for example, the absence of any reference to God in the European Union’s constitution; the legal challenges to the phrases ‘under God’ in our Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” on our currency; the British law that forbids teachers in Catholic schools from teaching that homosexuality is immoral; the astonishing success of the homosexual agenda in the United States, Europe, and Latin America in legalizing same-sex “marriage”; and (to borrow then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s characterization) the “atomic bomb” that was dropped on democracy in 1973 – the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision and its logical consequences: laboratory reproduction and human embryo stem-cell research. The right to life is the most fundamental and important of all rights. The other rights of speech, worship, assembly, etc., are important because there can be no political society worthy of human beings without them; however, the primacy of the right to life comes down to this: if one does not have life, one does not have anything, let alone rights. A government that fails to respect the right to life can hardly be expected to respect any other rights and certainly cannot be accused of inconsistency for failing to do so.
In the long run, the most devastating of these assaults on human dignity and freedom is the movement now underway to relegate Christianity to a backwater subculture of crosses and candles. To be sure, these other assaults directly attack the pillars of democracy: freedom of religion and speech, the right to life, the meaning of marriage and family life. But, as Maritain argues in both Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and Natural Law the ideals of modern democracy are Christian in origin and the values of Christianity energize its institutions. Thereby hangs a tale. Attempts to establish religion without God do not succeed. John Dewey’s A Common Faith is a case in point. If there can be no religion without God, it follows that there can be no Christianity without God; and if there can thus be no Christianity, can there be democracy?
Thomistica.net: Some Catholic thinkers have criticized the notion of human rights, Alasdair MacIntyre for instance. How do you think Maritain would respond to critiques like MacIntyre’s?
Dr. Dennehy: I have not read MacIntyre in some years, but my initial thought is that Maritain would respond to the communitarian argument in two ways. First, he would point out that the “society of free men” that he describes and defends is not individualist in the way that advocates of the laisssez faire conceived of society as a kind of heap of individuals struggling to ascend to the top and whose obligations to society were negatively conceived as not harming others by force, fraud, or intimidation. Maritain argues, on the contrary, that a society of free men has four characteristics; it is personalist, communal rather than individualistic, pluralist, and Christian or at least Theist. Thus for Maritain a society worthy of free persons must not only be just but also commit itself to “civic friendship.” The second way that Maritain would reply to the communitarians is to call attention to the rights of the person as ontologically grounded in human nature in virtue of what it means to be a human being. The exigencies of the human person arise from that ontological fact: each human being is not simply a part of society but a whole as well. Unlike animal groups, human society has a common good, which Maritain describes as a moral good that pertains to society as a whole and yet flows over each of its members. If I am qualified to teach philosophy, society can compel me to teach the subject, but it cannot compel me to teach a particular philosophy as true. The reason is that each of us is a whole in himself has been created by God to exist by his own free will. Maritain borrows here from Aquinas who argues that just as the runner strives to win the race but cannot put all that he is and has in the effort to win (he knowledge of astronomy and the Bible, e.g.), so the person cannot put all that he is and has into serving society (his knowledge of God, the desire to know the truth, and to increase his “freedom of personal expansion,” e.g.). Thus, for Maritain, the rights of the person follow from the nature of the person.
The second book in this volume, The Rights of Man and the Natural Law, contain seminal references to the human person that Maritain will develop more fully in his book, The Person and the Common Good, which appeared in print about 1948.
Thomistica.net When did you become interested in Maritain? What has been the focus of your research in Maritain?
Dr. Dennehy: I first read Maritain while an undergraduate at the University of San Francisco, having been taught philosophy by a series of Thomists there. While in my doctoral studies at the University of Toronto, I read Jacques Maritain, mainly his Degrees of Knowledge. I was searching for a philosophical basis for human rights, which basis I stumbled upon on in The Person and the Common Good. That was his notion of subsistence, which served as the foundation of my doctoral dissertation, The Subject as the Metaphysical Ground of Maritain’s Personalism.
I am a founding member of the American Maritain Association and served as its president for seven years.
Two volumes of Jacques Maritain’s political philosophy are being re-issued by Ignatius Press. The books in question, Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and the Natural Law, are being released as a single volume. We spoke with Raymond Dennehy, professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco and author of the foreword to the re-issue. Below is the first part of that interview. Part two of the interview will appear shortly.
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Thomistica.net: When were Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and the Natural Law originally published?
Dr. Dennehy: Both works were published in French in New York by Editions de la Maison Francaise, Les Droits de l’ Homme et la Loi Naturelle in 1942 and Christianisme et Democratie in 1943.
Thomistica.net: Could you tell us something about the context of these books? Why did Maritain write them? How do they relate to his other work, including his other work in political theory?
Dr. Dennehy: When the outbreak of World War II made it impossible for Maritain and his wife to return to France from his lecture tour in Canada and the United States, he continued to support his countrymen by working with the Free French in New York City. Through radio addresses and publications, he called the attention of Americans to the condition of the French people, appealing for food and money for French relief. Throughout the war, Maritain also worked with the New School in New York City, producing works of a more philosophical and scholarly nature on the subjects of democracy, totalitarianism, and human rights, such as Les Droits de l ‘Homme et la Loi Naturelle; miniature editions of Christianisme et Democratie were dropped by British Royal Air Force planes over occupied France in 1944.
One way that these works relate to other of Maritain’s works is that the theme of the relation between philosophy and faith constitutes an idee fixe in his writings. Consider, for example, his Integral Humanism, the chapter in his Man and the State entitled “The Democratic Charter,” Scholasticism and Politics, and An Essay on Christian Philosophy. Maritain was convinced that the ideals of modern democracy are Christian in origin and that the values of Christianity energize its institutions. (See my foreword in the Ignatius Press edition of Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and the Natural Law for an account of how Maritain sees the relation between faith and speculative philosophy and faith and practical philosophy and thus for what he understands the term “Christian philosophy” to mean.)
None of which diminishes Maritain’s personal drama in reconciling faith and reason. Despairing of ever finding truth (their teachers at the Sorbonne were skeptics and materialists), Maritain and his wife, Raissa, entered into a suicide pact: if they could not find meaning in materialism within one year, they would kill themselves. Fortunately, their discovery of the lectures of Henri Bergson at the College de France showed them that the human mind could transcend the physic-mathematical symbols of mechanistic science and know reality as it is in itself. Bergson’s doctrine, seemed to Maritain and his circle, to promise a new metaphysics: “…Bergson revived the worth and dignity of metaphysics in the minds of his listners, minds engaged in their sorrow by agnosticism or materialism, when he said, with an unforgettable emphasis, to those minds brought up in the most depressing pseudo-scientific relativism, ‘it is in the absolute that we live and move and have our being.’”
While strongly attracted to Bergson’s doctrine of intuition, Maritain eventually arrived at the point where he could no longer accept Bergson’s critique of the concept and his identification of the real with absolute becoming. It was, interestingly enough, Martain’s conversion to Catholicism that led him to this repudiation. The Maritains were baptized in the Catholic Church in 1906. Leon Bloy was their godfather. With his introduction to Catholic doctrine, Maritain found himself unable to square Bergson’s critique of the concept with the “conceptual pronouncements of the religious faith.” The precise difficulty was this: God presents the transcendent truths of revelation, truths that are “inaccessible to our reason,” in the form of conceptual propositions. Now if, as Bergson contends, the concept is incapable of grasping the real as it is and is only a practical instrument for symbolizing it, then Divine revelation is impossible. Maritain rejected this conclusion, concluding instead that the Bergsonian critique of the concept rests on an error.
This moment in Maritain’s life testifies to his personal integrity. Entering the Church with the conviction that philosophy contained inherent errors that made it incompatible with revealed truth, he was prepared to abandon the intellectual life altogether. What was at stake here was Maritain’s search for absolute truth, and, believing that this was found only in Christian doctrine and that philosophy was essentially incompatible with that doctrine, he would give up his philosophical interests. For two years after his conversion, Maritain gave himself over mainly to the study of theology and religion.
Although his initial reasons for repudiating Bergsonism were theological, there were also philosophical ones. Like Bergson, he wished to defend our direct and veridical knowledge of the real in all its dynamism and diversity; but, unlike him, he sought to defend the conditions of intelligibility, viz., conceptual knowledge, on the ground that otherwise we could have no knowledge at all. His introduction to the writings of Thomas Aquinas in 1908, thanks to Father Clerissac, provided him with metaphysical and epistemological principles that persuaded him that his position on the concept was philosophically defensible and reconcilable with divine revelation.
Thomistica.net: What is Maritain’s thesis in Christianity and Democracy? What is his thesis in The Rights of Man and the Natural Law?
Dr. Dennehy: Maritain’s main thesis in Christianity and Democracy is, as I stated above, that the ideals of modern democracy are Christian in origin and that the values of Christianity energize its institutions. However, as Donald Gallagher points out in his global introduction to the volume, besides offering support for the war effort against Nazi Germany, the two books contain a number of ideas central to Maritain’s philosophy; “ideas whose ramifications extend to every aspect of philosophy and which are inspired by theology.” Among them the reader will find ideas and themes that include “the dignity of the human person, the person and the common good, the rights of the person and natural law, organic and personalist democracy, equality and the free society, the ‘terminal freedom’ of autonomy and fulfillment, the inspiration of the Gospel in the socio-temporal order. All these are expressed trenchantly in Christianity and Democracy and Rights of Man and are developed fully in works published by Jacques Maritain in the 1940s and early 1950s.”
It is often asked why God deprived us of the gift of freedom from concupiscence. Many and various explanations have been offered. These are not contrary one to another but can be complementary.
I’m wondering whether the following has ever been proposed. But first, I will be more precise by what I mean by the preternatural gift of freedom from concupiscence. I mean precisely the having of despotic (or quasi-despotic) control over the passions, such that no passion would arise except at the command of the will and that a passion willed would arise at the will’s command.
Were God not to have deprived us of this gift, then we could have been all the more wicked sinners. The lack of despotic control over passions deprives us of a kind of dominion that, were we to enjoy it while yet being wicked of will, we could sin more greviously and more cleverly than we can when our passions are in some measure unhinged from our wills, so that our own bodies through these passions betray us. They betray our own intentions. They also betray us publicly (think, e.g. of lie detector tests). Just picture wicked sinners with despotic control over their passions.
Under the direction of the Sacra Doctrina Project
