Call for papers: Thomas Instituut Utrecht (Netherlands)

From 11 until 14 december 2013 the ‘Thomas Instituut Utrecht’ will organize its fourth international conference. Previous conferences were devoted to the themes ‘Divine Transcendence and Immanence in Aquinas, 2005), ‘Aquinas as authority, 2000) and ‘Aquinas on Guilt and Forgiveness, 1995), the proceedings of which are are published by Peeters, Leuven.

The 2013 Conference is entitled: “Faith, Hope and Love. Thomas Aquinas on living by the infused virtues”.

Check out their call for papers here.

Proposals should be send to the director Prof. Henk Schoot (h.j.m.schoot[AT]uvt.nl) before March 1, 2013.

OHIO DOMINICAN UNIVERSITY; COLUMBUS, OHIO; ENDOWED CHAIR

Ohio Dominican University is seeking applications and nominations for the Sr. Ruth Caspar Chair in Philosophy, beginning fall 2013. The successful candidate will be at full professor rank, and a nationally recognized scholar with a proven record of scholarly publications and excellence in teaching. The successful candidate will also demonstrate a willingness and ability to support the university’s Catholic and Dominican mission. The position includes a reduced teaching load, with the expectation of leading colloquia or delivering lectures. Applications from women and underrepresented minority candidates are welcomed. Ohio Dominican is located in Columbus, Ohio, a vibrant metropolitan area with an affordable cost of living. Applications should be submitted to http://www.ohiodominican.edu/jobs/ and should include a letter of interest, a CV, and a list of references. Review of applications will begin December 1.

Weisheipl's Commentary on the Posterior Analytics Online

I was just looking again at my poorly reproduced copy of Weisheipl’s notes on Aristotelian Methodology, and decided to look for a cleaner copy online.  There is a redone copy here, with clearer marks and divisions: http://pvspade.com/Logic/docs/Weisheipl.pdf.  The formatting is improved so that it is easier to read. 

There are a few ways in which it is still helpful to look at the old versions that circulate around.  The schematic representations do not seem to be reproduced.  For example, in the old version there is a schematic representation of the “principia immediata syllogismi” which is not reproduced in the online version.  The online version lacks the Appendices.  I wonder if Weisheipl made different versions of this, and would like to know more about what the history is. 

de lege naturae

Question:  Suppose you do a search in St. Thomas’ works for the phrase, “de lege naturae,” on the grounds that you want to see, outside the discussion of ST I-II.94.2, and the Treatise on Law in ST, how St. Thomas decides whether or not a precept, perhaps found in positive law, should be assigned to the law of nature?  Then: where are the main places where that sort of discussion is found?

One reason for looking for such texts would be that we would want to examine the actual considerations that St. Thomas uses in deciding whether a precept belongs to the natural law or not.  For example, if the NNL theorists were right, then there would be only one way that he could establish this, namely, by identifying a fundamental good, and a precept based upon it, which either simply was the precept in question, or from which the precept in question could be deduced.

Suprisingly, the answer to that question (at least, according to a simple search) seems to be that there are two main places: (i) the discussion of whether the exclusivity and inseparability of matrimony belong to the law of nature in the Sentences Commentary, and (ii) the discussion of sacrifices and vows under the virtue of religion in ST II-II.85, 88. 

In neither place does St. Thomas proceed as he should, if the NNL theorists were even vaguely right.  But that is not a point I wish to establish here today.   Rather, I want to draw attention to this interesting text which I came upon from the Sentences Commentary, on the inseparability of marrige:

Respondeo dicendum, quod matrimonium ex intentione naturae ordinatur ad educationem prolis non solum per aliquod tempus, sed per totam vitam prolis. Unde de lege naturae est quod parentes filiis thesaurizent, et filii parentum heredes sint; et ideo, cum proles sit commune bonum viri et uxoris, oportet eorum societatem perpetuo permanere indivisam secundum legis naturae dictamen; et sic inseparabilitas matrimonii est de lege naturae

I reply that it should be said that matrimony, from the intention of nature, is ordered to the education of the children, not for a certain time only, but rather for the entire life of the children (which is the reason why, by the law of nature, parents are to lay up wealth for their children, and children should inherit from their parents).  For that reason, since children are a common good of husband and wife, it is necessary according to the dictum of the law of nature that that association remain perpetually undivided. Thus, the inseparability of matrimony is based on the law of nature.—Super Sent., lib. 4 d. 33 q. 2 a. 1 co.

I thought it interesting that St. Thomas argues that the parents’ education of their children continues throughout the adult life of the children, and his appeal to practices of inheritance in this connection is ingenious.  (I am aware that some Catholics wonder why marriage should not be indissoluble only so long as the children are immature.) 

Mammon, Catholic Options, and the Contraceptive Mandate

Employer Options that are certainly licit are:

1) not complying with the mandate

2) dumping insurance altogether

The debate has been whether compliance under protest can be licit. I think Long and Pakaluk have made the case that it cannot. 

But if someone cannot come to certainty one way or another, if the matter seems opinionable, perhaps the following is worth consideration. A totally centralized system of insurance.

Individuals would pay taxes and have access to those benefits determined solely by governing officials. If any of the benefits were in fact evils, financial cooperation by paying taxes would be merely material and would, it seems, be entirely justified. 

Of course, the costs would increase, quality of care could well decrease…. In short, all or many of the arguments conservatives love to use against centralization may well be on target. And radical centralization is by NO means a necessary conclusion from Catholic Social Doctrine. On the contrary, both Obamacare as it is and a totally centralized system require to justify themselves before the scrutiny of Catholic Social Teaching on Subsidiarity. Nevertheless, application of the doctrine of subsidiarity proves rather elusive of common agreement.

But with regard to the specific issue of intrinsic evil: Would not such centralization be preferable to the risk of moral compromise - not to mention the risk of grave scandal! - established by the contraceptive mandate… and by the threat of any number of further mandates to come? 

We should not confuse political and economic prudence with moral evaluation. It is in service of the latter that I make this suggestion. Suffering hardship is better than committing evil; death, rather than sin.

So, if our minds are swaying back and forth over the issue of the moral object, we should not let the desire for Mammon determine our judgment.

The American conservative criticism of European financial stupidity may well be entirely justified. That is not the point. The point is this: If the individual taxpayer in such a system is freed from any necessarily formal cooperation, then, would not such a clumsy system be preferable to one of possible moral compromise? of certain moral compromise, if Long and Pakaluk are, as I think they are, right?

Giovanni Benedetto Perazzo, O.P. (ca. 1631-1705)

We have just added Ioannes Benedictus Perazzo to the PRDL:  http://www.rester.us/prdl/author_view.php?a_id=4977.  Online I can only so far find vol. 1 of his Thomisticus Ecclesiastes, which has  interesting essays on various words or topics having to do with moral theology.  Vol. 1 begins with Abstinentia and ends with Hypocrisis.  We have a hardcopy here at the Center for Thomistic Studies  Enjoy! 

Dewan Project in Spanish produces more publications

Under the editorship of Liliana Irizar, the “Dewan Project in Spanish” has borne fruit in the form of two distinct books.

1. Santo Tomás y la Forma como algo Divino en las Cosas is a Spanish translation of Fr Dewan’s 2007 Saint Thomas and Form as Something Divine (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2007). Ilizar’s volume is a coedition between Sergio Arboleda University (Bogatà) and Dominican University College (Ottawa). See the volume’s cover here.
2. Lecciones de Metafísica II Tomo I: Sobre la Existencia de Dios is also a Spanish translation of many of Dewan’s articles concerning God. This volume is a coedition of the Sergio Arboleda University (Bogotá) and Universidad del Norte Santo Tomás de Aquino (Argentina). See its cover here.

The latter carries an Introduction that I wrote, mirroring its predecessor, for which Fr Stephen L. Brock wrote the Introduction.

¡Get your Spanish on! Big things are happening in South American Thomism.

Dartmouth Dante Project

If you are not aware of it, I would direct your attention to the Dartmouth Dante Project, which has online many commentaries on the Divine Comedy: http://dante.dartmouth.edu/search.php .  You can review the commentaries by author, text, and passage.  Thankfully, many of these commentaries are in Latin.  For instance, you might like the commentaries by Benvenuto da Imola or the third commentary by Pietro Alighieri.

The recent translation of Fr Ernest Fortin’s book on Dante has led me to think about what a strange figure Dante is, and his relation to Thomas.  I recently read an older (1977) book on Dante by Kennelm Foster called, The Two Dantes.  There is an interesting essay about “Dante and St. Thomas.”   The title essay is partially on Dante’s original invention of a Limbo for seemingly fully virtuous adult pagans, and what it means for Dante’s understanding of nature and grace.

Novel Format for Disputed Questions: Richard Regan's Translation of Thomas's "De potentia dei"

As somewhat of a purist when it comes to the form of the Disputed Questions, I always warn students away from editions of Thomas’s works that condense or eliminate the objections and replies from the original Articles in the Summa Theologiae or in a set of Disputed Questions. I consider the very setting-forth of the contrary arguments on either side of a given issue to be the essential, and indeed distinctive, starting-point to the medieval scholastic method.

Yet I recognize the limits of time and energy of my students. I counsel them that if they are in a pinch for time and are unfamiliar with the topic of an Article, that they should first start by reading Thomas’s response. Once they have an idea about what Thomas is arguing, then they should go back to each objection and see how Thomas applies the distinctions and clarification from the response in the corresponding reply to that objection. I also note that sometimes Thomas will make his most significant point in a reply to an objection, so they should pay special attention to the longer replies.

I am thus somewhat intrigued by Richard Regan’s new edition of Thomas’s De potentia dei (The Power of God by Thomas Aquinas. Oxford, 2012). In this edition, Regan has condensed each article, noting that the text would be double in size if he were to include each and every objection and reply. Instead, Regan has included only the more significant objections and replies to those objections.

Regan has also reformatted the sequence of elements, placing Thomas’s response first, followed by the selected objections, each coupled immediately with the corresponding reply.

This is intended to suit the purpose of this edition, which is aimed at students and more general readers looking to “comprehend the basic questions and answers” at play.

Since this format follows exactly the procedure I counsel for my own students, I should be very pleased, especially since the text is thereby affordable. I have yet to teach from it, so the jury is out as to how my students will fare with it.

Yet there is a part of me that longs for the opportunity that would come with the ideal situation I envision for my students, who would truly immerse themselves in the issue at stake by taking the arguments on all sides of a question seriously, and thus appreciating why it is a genuine question to begin with, and further appreciating Thomas’s own resolution.

I guess I will have to teach from it before I render a decision on this novel format.

The Object of the Act of Institutional Compliance with the HHS Mandate

     Another simple yet valid way of considering the object of the act of institutional compliance with the HHS Mandate, is as follows.  By way of context:  compliance involves the institution contracting to provide insurance for health care; compliance also involves the institution contracting to provide insurance for vice (e.g., purchasing abortifacient contraceptives).  It is one contract that is assented to, but what the Catholic institution only intends as an end from such a contract is genuine health care benefits.  However, it must contract to accept the other coverage, the coverage for vice, for it to be permitted by the government to provide health benefits.   

     Viewed as one complex object, compliance with the HHS mandate includes a malum in the essential definition of the complex object.  But one may also proceed further with analysis to realize that the complex object is a per accidens combination of two distinct objects: contracting for the provision of health care benefits, and contracting for the provision of benefits for vice.  That is to say, one may proceed further to resolve analysis into two genuinely different objects, only one of which is good.  Is contracting to obtain vice benefits such by its nature as to tend per se toward contracting for health care benefits?  Obviously no:  by nature contracting to obtain insurance coverage for vice does not tend to provide health care benefits.  Are genuine health care benefits such that by nature they can only be achieved through contracting for vice benefits?  Again, the answer is no.  Thus, it is clear that contracting for insurance for vice is not per se ordained to contracting for the provision of health care benefits.  This means that there are two different moral species:  one is the species of the act of contracting for genuine health care benefits, and that clearly is in itself moral; the other is the species of contracting (under coercion, it is true) to provide insurance coverage for vice, and that is evil and so may not rightly be done.  Given the truth that providing insurance for vice is evil, and because the government requires that all institutional contracting for genuine health care benefits must also include contracting for vice benefits,  clearly one cannot do the evil.  Ergo, compliance is morally unreasonable.

     In the hypothetical case of compliance, one of the objects is chosen by the Catholic institution only for the sake of the other (the institution contracts to provide insurance for vice only because the government makes this the condition of the institution contracting to provide insurance for health care).  But these objects are of diverse species, and the one that is (under coercion) chosen only for the sake of the other—contracting to provide insurance for vice benefits—is not choiceworthy. Inasmuch as the one object chosen for the sake of the other is only per accidens ordered to that other, the species remain disjunct rather than unified under the species derived from the end sought by the institution, and in fact the species of contracting for vice benefits is evil.  So, because the institution may never rightly do the former (contract for vice benefits) it may not rightly contract simultaneously both for vice benefits and for health benefits.

The Question of Cooperation

In their recent First Things article Thomas Joseph White, OP, and Rusty Reno intelligently investigate possible responses to the Affordable Care Act. One entertains however a reasonable doubt regarding the proposition that the authors forward (in a passing way, to be sure) as seemingly a “given”.  This is the claim that “providing and paying for the coverage” required by the mandate amounts to no more than “material cooperation”.  Yet, material cooperation ordinarily concerns individuals rather than institutions:  it is institutions that distinctively may proliferate the accessibility of evil as though it were common good. Further, if business institutions—not to mention those juridically Catholic institutions that may be thought of as analogously receiving a missio from the Church—are subject to coercion with respect to the mandate, this does not mitigate the truth that one may not rightly cooperate in certain actions (and such institutions are not legally constrained to provide insurance).  Arranging payment for morally vicious pseudo “services” such as contraception and abortion is an evil action. Nor does providing a basket of licit health services to which vicious alternatives are appended successfully submerge the disorder of paying for intrinsically immoral practices.  Suppose that the basket of health services included a government mandate coercing assistance for the lynching of an innocent person—would such an arrangement be merely “material cooperation” because provided under the false title of “health care”?  If not, surely coerced cooperation in the provision of abortifacients cannot be simply accepted as a cost for doing business in the new secularist order.  Nor, likewise, is cooperation in the provision of contraceptives morally reasonable, given the grave evil of the intrinsic disordering of the conjugal act in contraception. Because what counts is not alone the intention of the end, but the integral nature and per se effects of chosen action; and because provision of monies for contraception and abortion is a grave evil; it follows that for businesses, and all the more for Church institutions, to cooperate in providing such monies is wrongful conduct and not a merely material cooperation.  These conclusions occur even prior to considering the distinctive evil that would ensue were institutions that have their mission from the Church herself to be co-opted to support gravely evil acts through cooperating with the mandate.  The mandate constitutes the use of raw state power to separate the Church’s institutions—through which the Church extends her divine mission in the world—from the Church herself and from Christ, and so to subdue them to evil purpose.  How could the example of the Church offering abortion and contraception services fail to turn souls to ruin?   The Church is necessarily at war with such attempts to subjugate Her institutions, teaching, and mission.  It is a struggle that has been waged against others, most recently the Communists and the Nazis.  For further explanation, I recommend highly the recent remarks of my colleague, Prof. Michael Pakaluk, Chair of the Ave Maria University Department of Philosophy, who has offered kindred observations on this subject on the Department’s blog.  This is not to say that one could not wish that institutional cooperation with the mandate were merely material:  only that in truth it is not (the situation of the extorted individual seems to differ from that of the institution that opts to proliferate access to grave evil as though it were common good).  And so the winter will be deep and dark, and the temptations to immoral compromise great, should there prove to be no timely relief from the edict of the Obama State.

Theological Studies web site updated

The website for the journal, Theological Studies, has been completedly revamped, both for a better look and feel and to be “responsive” (ut dicunt) to various devices. The site renders well on computers, smartphones (like the iPhone or even iPod touch), and tablet devices (such as the iPad or Samsung’s Galaxy Tab).

Most important for viewers here at Thomistica.net is the fact that the entire run of the journal, save for articles published in the last five years, is now fully available for PDF download, via the site’s searchable catalog of past articles (going back to its first year of publication, 1940). As visitors to Thomistica.net will know, Theological Studies is primarily a journal for contemporary academic theology, primarily systematic and moral (with occasional historical appearances, too). But articles on Thomas Aquinas directly do appear, and often articles are written with some invocation of Thomas’s doctrine on this or that. Don’t hesitate to visit the site at http://ts.mu.edu to search by author’s name, or keywords in article titles, to find something that aids your research.

The site also now sports a Twitter account (http://twitter.com/theostudies), as well as an RSS feed (via Feedburner).