John Rist, Cardinal Kasper, the Fathers, and Nicaea

I assume that there are a decent number of Catholic academics, especially those working in sacramental and moral theology, who have been following the official and unofficial discussions of the possibility of permitting divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion.

Some of those in favor of such a provision have tried to support their view by an appeal to Patristic authors and the Council of Nicaea. This is the approach of Cardinal Walter Kasper, for example. Here is the speech he delivered to the consistory at the Vatican in February.

John Rist, professor at the Augustinianum and the Catholic University of America, has recently criticized Kapser's appeal to early Christian sources in a short piece carried by several Catholic news outlets.

Here is Rist's quite devastating conclusion:

To conclude, upon examination the Cardinal’s case depends on misinterpreting a tiny number of texts while neglecting numerous others which contradict them. How can this have happened? To my mind we have here an example of a procedure all too frequent in academia, more especially when work may be motivated by convenience or ideology: there is an overwhelming amount of evidence in one direction and one or two texts which might conceivably be read otherwise; from which is derived the desired conclusion, or at least that the matter is open.

Follow the links above to read Kasper's speech and the rest of Rist's response.

Happy feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (bis)!

January 28 is Aquinas’s liturgical feast according to the calendar of Paul VI. On that date in 1369 Aquinas’s relics were translated to the Dominican church in Toulouse.

March 7 is Aquinas's liturgical feast according to the pre-Pauline calendar of the Roman Rite. Aquinas died on that date in 1274 at the abbey of Fossanova, where he had stopped after taking ill on his way with Reginald of Piperno to the second Council of Lyons.

Both calendars are still in force in the Roman Rite. So, we (or I, at least) celebrate Aquinas's feast twice.

Happy Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas

I usually like to allow new posts on Thomistica room to breathe. So, I try not to post on the same day as another new post. But I hope my colleague Tom Osborne will not mind if I too put up a post today. I don't think we can let the day pass without wishing our readers a happy feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. 

Today, January 28, is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas in the Roman Rite according to the calendar of Paul VI. This is the collect from the Mass for the feast:

Deus, qui beátum Thomam sanctitátis zelo ac sacræ doctrínæ stúdio conspícuum effecísti, da nobis, qu æsumus, et quæ dócuit intelléctu conspícere, et quæ gessit imitatióne complére.

Of course, as usual, we will also wish you a happy feast day again on March 7, St. Thomas's feast day according to the calendar of the Vetus Ordo Missae.

Teaching Phil Mind: Madden, Jaworski, Feser

I will be teaching Philosophy of Mind in the Fall and am wondering whether anyone has had a good or bad experience using the introductory texts by Madden, Feser, or Jaworski.  I was inclined just to use Kim and then supplement it, but then there are these three more or less Thomistic introductory texts.  I actually haven't fully read any of the three.  What are the major differences?

Thomistic political philosophy and religious freedom

Two years ago I published a two-part interview on this blog with Raymond Dennehy on Maritain's political philosophy (here and here). In particular it was about a couple books by Maritain that were being reissued, Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and the Natural Law. I had entitled the interview "The return of Thomistic political philosophy." In the comments box John Lamont wrote: "Reprinting Maritain's work is in no way a revival of Thomistic political philosophy, because Maritain's thought was completely different from that of St. Thomas in this area." I tend to think that Dr. Lamont's criticism was justified. I posted twice more on this topic (here and here), taking a rather harsh line toward Maritain's political thought -- not that I had not been skeptical of it prior to considering Dr. Lamont's objection. Quite the contrary is true. The issue was not whether Maritain's political thought had problems but whether it could properly be called "Thomistic."

In this present post I ask what an authentically Thomistic approach would be to the problem of religious freedom. Religious freedom is especially on the minds of many Catholics in the U.S. now as Catholic institutions fight against the H.H.S. mandate. But it seems to be a topic of perennial importance.

Anyhow, I would say that it is obvious that no ostensibly Thomistic political thought would accept the notion that all religions have an equal right publicly to teach and practice their beliefs. This would not mean that it would not be prudent in many circumstances to tolerate false religions nor does it take a stand on what would be permissible in private. Recently, I have tried to articulate my thoughts on these questions in a short essay. The essay focuses on Dignitatis Humanae but also incorporates Aquinas on a key point. Here are some relevant excerpts from the essay:

In the Catholic tradition religion is considered a moral virtue falling under justice. This understanding of religion can be found, for instance, in Aquinas and, more recently, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. For Aquinas, religion is fundamentally rendering the true God the honor that is due him. The Catechism sees the moral virtue of religion in a similar way.

As with all virtues, religion has corresponding vices. According to Aquinas, the opposite of religion is superstition, the offering of worship to whomever or whatever does not deserve it. Idolatry, for Aquinas, is a species of superstition. The Catechism too treats the vices of superstition and idolatry, although what Aquinas says about these appears to be dealt with in the Catechism solely under the heading of idolatry. Idolaters, the Catechism tells us, “venerate other divinities than the one true God.”

If religion as a moral virtue honors the one true God, then religions that do not are not truly religions or could justly be called false or defective religions. This is not to say that they contain no elements of truth. It is rather to say that their orthodox practice and teaching, taken as a whole and objectively considered, do not lead to God. To follow or promote religions of this sort would be to act against the moral law. This consideration evidently raises more and deeper problems for religious freedom.

[...]

But if false religions run contrary to objective moral order—as they must if they are moral vices, as we have observed—then, in principle, only prudent toleration could prevent legislation against them. In other words, there is no absolute right to follow and teach a false religion. By “absolute right” I mean one that cannot in any circumstances be legitimately violated. An “absolute right” would be a right that accrues to us simply by virtue of being human persons. You could call it a “human” or “natural right.” Such a right would transcend all cultures and political communities, requiring recognition by all. That can not be true for adherents of false religion.

If false religion is a moral vice, plainly no one has any natural right to practice it, for no one can have a right to do evil. Were there a natural right to do evil, there could not be a natural moral law that bound us to do good. We certainly are not naturally bound to do good if we have a natural right to do evil.

I would be grateful for feedback on my essay from readers.

Of course, you may query whether the "authentically Thomistic approach" to religious freedom is also the right approach. I would argue that it is and would be happy to pursue a discussion of its validity at some point in the future. No doubt there are also some who would wonder whether what I am calling the authentically Thomistic approach to religious freedom really is just that. I would welcome that discussion too.

Balthasar's interpretation of Aquinas

A few years ago I translated Angelo Campodonico's essay “Il pensiero filosofico di Tommaso d’Aquino nell’interpretazione di H.U. Von Balthasar” for the English edition of Nova et Vetera . It was published as "Hans Urs von Balthasar's Interpretation of the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas" in vol. 8 of Nova et Vetera on pp. 33-53. I recently uploaded it to my Academia.edu page. You can find it here.

Since Thomists and Balthasarians often find themselves at odds, this makes Campodonico's essay all the more interesting, or so it seems to me. In fact, Campodonico argues that Aquinas had a profound influence on Balthasar's thought. He even makes the (in my view) provocative claim that...

[t]he influence of Thomas Aquinas on the formulation of Balthasar’s theology and philosophy is clear and shows that Balthasar regarded him with perhaps more esteem than any other theologian in history (33-34).

Balthasar the Thomist? Well, certainly not a Thomist of the strict observance. If he is a Thomist at all, he is probably what Fr. Weisheipl would call an "eclectic Thomist." (Perhaps some of my fellow Thomists would say that even that is going too far!)

A word about Campodonico. He teaches in the philosophy department at the University of Genova. To date Campodonico has written three books on Aquinas:  Alla scoperta dell'essere. Saggio sul pensiero di Tommaso d'Aquino (Milan: Jaca Book, 1986), Integritas: Metafisica ed etica in San Tommaso (Florence: Nardini, 1996), and La pretesa del bene. Etica e teoria dell'azione in Tommaso d'Aquino (Naples: Orthotes 2012). The last book was written with Maria Silvia Vaccarezza. You can find Campodonico's faculty page at the University of Genova here.

Norris Clarke on PSR, Thomism, Gilson, and Leibniz

I would like to thank Dr. Osborne and Dr. Long for bringing the principle of sufficient reason up for discussion on Thomistica. I think it is a worthwhile discussion. My personal view is that some version of PSR is compatible with Thomism and can be "read back into" Aquinas's texts.

I am not going to defend that view now or get into the debate about whether the Leibnizian version of PSR is tenable or compatible with Thomism or how far Garrigou-Lagrange's concept of PSR is Leibnizian (or Spirian). I do not have the time for any of that at the moment but I hope to be able to have the time in the not too distant future.

For the nonce l would simply like to present and briefly comment on Norris Clarke's defense of a Thomistic version of PSR in The One and the Many  (p. 181):

Some contemporary Thomists, like Gilson, insist it is against the spirit of Thomas to appeal to any general principle of sufficient reason. The reason they give is the danger of confusing it with the rationalist Principle of Sufficient Reason first explicitly introduced into modern philosophy by Leibniz, the great rationalist.  But the Principle [as I understand it] is quite different from the Leibnizian rationalist one. The latter interprets the sufficient reason as some reason from which we can deduce by rational necessity the existence of the effect. It looks forward: given an adequate cause we can deduce the effect as flowing necessarily from it. It follows, of course, that no efficient cause can be free, and that God creates the world out of necessity, not freely, i.e., that to be rational God must create the best possible world. Our Thomistic interpretation is quite different. It does not try to deduce anything; it looks backward , i.e., given this effect, it needs such and such a cause to explain it. The cause must be adequate to produce it, be able to explain it once this is there. But in no way does this require that the cause has to produce it; in a word, our world needs an infinite Creator to explain it. But this in no way implies that such a Creator had to create it. It is not, like that of Leibniz, a deductive principle, deducing the effect from the cause, but as St. Thomas expresses it [sic!], like most other metaphysical explanations, it is a "reductive explanation," tracing a given effect back to its sufficient reason in an adequate cause. Given this key difference from any rationalist principle like Leibniz's. it seems to me that this general Principle of Sufficient Reason is a quite legitimate development of Thomism, with the advantage of summing up in one basic formula the principle of intelligibility of being that is implied in all of Thomas's specialized formulas of the Principle of Causality.

How does Clarke formulate PSR? Thus: "Every being has the sufficient reason for its existence (i.e., the adequate ground or basis in existence for its intelligibility) either in itself or in another" (p. 21).

I find nothing immediately to object to in what Clarke says. In fact, I am inclined to agree with his take on a Thomistic PSR although I do not know that I am prepared to endorse it definitively. I do also have to confess that I know very little about Leibniz's understanding of PSR, so for the present I will hold off on pronouncing on the validity of Clarke's interpretation of Leibniz.

I would be very happy for readers' comments on what Clarke says about PSR.

Garrigou-Lagrange & Leibnitz?

Thomas Osborne in an earlier post (Oct. 25, 2013) regarding Garrigou-Lagrange and Africanus Spir raises interesting questions regarding the relation of Garrigou-Lagrange and Leibnitz.  This calls to mind Gilson's imputations about GL's thought--the slur of a Wolff-like rationalism in GL kindred with the thought of Leibnitz.  These suggestions of Gilson appear to be founded in political animosity (of the kind depicted by Shook in his biography of Gilson), not in any genuine correspondence of doctrine between GL and Leibnitz. GL expressly argues--with Thomas--against the view that there is a "best of all possible worlds"; against the view that all truths are analytic in the sense that they would be (as they are for Leibnitz) genuine entailments of the divine essence such that all created reality in its particularity could be deductively drawn from the vision of God. GL expressly says that sufficient reason is "analytic" only in the sense that it may be defended by an indirect demonstration or reductio ad absurdum. What can one say? There is only the word "analytic" between them, no common teaching. Moreover, Thomas does say, e.g., in Book II, Chapter 15 of the Summa contra gentiles, that “that which has no cause is something first and immediate; hence it is necessary that it be by reason of itself and in consequence of what it is” (“Quod causam non habet, primum et immediatum est; unde necesse est ut sit per se et secundum quod ipsum.”) This is an analogical not univocal principle of sufficient reason.  One recalls that Humani Generis also refers to sufficient reason, clearly not designating by that language the doctrine of Leibnitz.

The argument against Hume is actually quite interesting. It is that every real relation requires a foundation in the real, because a non-existent foundation cannot sustain a real relation. This is per se nota. So, for a thing to be related to existence, there must be some real foundation for that relation either in the thing or outside the thing.  Without such a foundation, the thing is not related since relation as such requires foundation. Thus when Hume says that a thing can come into being--and thus have a relation to existence--but that nonetheless it is neither its own reason for being nor is there a reason for being outside itself, he is saying that there is a thing that has a real relation to existence and does not have a real relation to existence.  This is because for Hume nothing about it relates it to existence since the foundation of the relation is neither in it nor is it outside it, which is simply to say that there is no foundation whatsoever for such a relation.  GL expressly deals with the claim that this is simply a petitio principii in explaining it as an indirect argument.  His argument against Hume amounts to saying that nonbeing is not the foundation for a relation to existence--which is evident--and that since real foundation is required for the claim for real relation, this means that a thing cannot intelligibly be affirmed to have a real relation to existence if it is neither its own reason for being nor is there a reason for being extrinsic to it.  

A similar but in some ways simpler way to respond to Hume is simply to observe Hume's failure to distinguish real and conceptual possibility.  That something may be conceived or even only imagined does not suffice to indicate that it is really possible:  the latter requires real evidence.  What is not in the premises cannot be in the conclusion.  So, if we are to conclude to real possibility, we must do so from real evidence.  Now, when it is said something could come from nothing without any cause, one wishes then to know what the real evidence is for this proposition.  But it is impossible that there be real evidence for this proposition: because one could never really distinguish between a thing having no real cause for being, and its having one of which one were merely contingently ignorant.  Since there could never then be real evidence that something coming from nothing without a cause is really possible, the proposition that it is really possible for something to come from nothing without a cause is one that there could never be a reason to hold:  a point analogous to GL's observation that where there is no foundation for a claim of real relation to existence such a claim is an absurd impossibility.  It is, as it were, a bad cognitive check, more pathology than proposition.  But this, too, is an indirect argument or demonstration.

Garrigou-Lagrange and Africanus Spir

I have been confused about why the principle of sufficient reason plays the role it does in Garrigou-Lagrange's work, especially on why and how he reduces it to the principles of contradiction and then identity.  I was speaking with Fr. Lawrence Dewan at the P.A.S.T.A. Conference in Houston and he mentioned to me that Gilson's students had some sort of record or notes about the similarities between G-L and Afrikan Spir's work on Leibniz.  I haven't found Spir's work on Leibniz, but you can find interesting connections with G-L's discussion of sufficient reason in Spir's Pensee et realite:  https://archive.org/details/penseetralitess00spirgoog .  Compare this not just with G-L's God His Existence and Nature, vol. 1, but also https://archive.org/details/lesenscommunlaph00garr.  Incidentally, Spir was a great influence on Nietzsche as well!

A Couple Comments on William Lane Craig on the God of the Five Ways

I have some comments on William Lane Craig’s take on the God of the Five Ways at the AMU philosophy department blog. The comments are not really for specialists in Aquinas. They are aimed at those who have just a general knowledge of Aquinas.

New Encyclical on Faith

I just read the new encyclical on faith.  Although it is not aimed at a philosophically or theologically sophisticated audience, it has some material that is worth thinking about in the light of St. Thomas and Thomism.  For instance, there is some discussion of the “light of faith” and the rationality of religious belief.  For more on this issue, a good place to look is Romanus Cessario’s Christian Faith and Theological Life, Chapter 2.  For more detailed treatments, Santiago Ramirez’ commentary on the discussion of faith in the Secunda Secundae (De Fide Divina) is one of the best presentations of faith written in the twentieth century.  You can get it here: http://www.sanestebaneditorial.com/coleccion.aspx?id=11.  Furthermore, in my view Garrigou-Lagrange’s De Revelatione is in some ways more important than Garrigou-Lagrange’s own commentary on faith in the Secundae Secundae.