Just Thomism

Pinker’s morality sacrifices the goods that persons seek to preserve at all costs to the goods that all persons seek. The one who takes union with God or struggles against oppression as the standard for flourishing must be sacrificed to the one who takes it as a stable economy, fewer wars, less infant mortality, etc. So long as one takes this sacrifice as rational, Enlightenment secularity is eminently rational and the best way to flourish.

Ask everyone on earth if they want fewer wars or more grain, you’ll get an all but universal yes. Ask them whether they would be willing to sacrifice union with God, saving the planet, ending oppression, or converting the infidel to this, and the responses are very different.

We can assume a priori that there is no place where the goods we would save at all costs would need to be sacrificed to the goods all persons seek, but what actually happens – and I’m not accusing Pinker of knowing this – is that the goods all persons seek will take on the character of absolutes, even while they are presented as the alternative to them. It’s just this performative contradiction that accounts for the comfortable shallowness of our enjoyment of things that are, in themselves, both very high goods and very poor replacements for absolute ones.

A proportionate good corresponds to every evil (otherwise, evil would not be a privation.)

Some evil is infinite (i.e. because it contradicts an unlimited good)

Some good is infinite. 

The minor premise is the key one, but it arises by definition, since any unconditioned good defines what is contrary to it as an infinite evil: Charity in catholicism, for example, is an infinite good and what destroys charity causes an infinite evil; but overcoming oppression is the same sort of infinite good in Socialism, as is the preservation of the planet in (some forms of) environmentalism, or freedom in Libertarianism, etc. If a Catholic finds what contradicts charity, a socialist what contradicts overcoming oppression, etc. they have found the evil that must be resisted at all costs, but anything that must be resisted at all costs is an infinite evil, which in turn opens the possibilities of infinite violence – the only question is on whom and by whom it will be exercised.

In the face of this, there is a temptation to do away with anything unconditioned, and posit a moral skepticism that sees all claims as true up to a point, but which must be cast out when they contradict “moral intuitions”. And so the argument goes that the wars of religion prove that Catholicism was (at best) a conditioned good; as the gulags prove the same about communism. The willingness to sacrifice persons to the planet is in turn what proves environmentalism is only true up to a point, and any vaccine mandate proves the same thing for libertarianism.

The most popular argument for this moral skepticism is the reductio ad religionem or the decrying of some belief as “a religion.” As soon as we recognize that, say, environmentalism has absolute commitments defining some beliefs as unconditioned evils, we say that it is not based on “science” or “evidence” but is “a religion.” The argument of course defines science and evidence as the sorts of things never commit us to defining some things as unconditioned evils, and so can never lead to violence. So long as we follow evidence, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. This of course just sets up science and evidence as the unconditioned good, and so, by its own terms, just another “religion.”

I’m fine if we want to define the word “religion” as “the bad unconditioned” and “science” or “evidence” as “the good unconditioned” but this only makes both terms labels in search of something to be stuck on. Karl Marx could define communism as “science” (he did, in fact) and Thomas Aquinas could define the logical deductions of the dogmatic definitions of the Catholic Church as “science” (ditto.)

Humans need unconditioned goods, and these are, in some ways but not all, beyond “evidence” or “science,” not because they are irrational, but because they are the first measures of true and false in the practical order. If something accords with these unconditioned beliefs, it is true, even if it looks absolutely bizarre or crazy. In fact, far from disproving the unconditioned, the performance of the bizarre or crazy more proves one’s dedication to it. The unconditioned has a logic pressing it to the extreme: the monk doing six lents a year, the revolutionary in the throes of the festival of reason, the climate activist advocating to classify ecocide as an international crime, the socialist who sees oppression and racism everywhere, the rationalist believing that St. Thomas’s arguments are sufficiently refuted by noting the year he died, the believer in biblical inspiration saying there are no errors in the Bible, the imperialist believing that subjugation is for the good of the subjugated, etc. From outside the unconditioned good, all of these are crazy; from within it they are all rational and necessary.

I’m Thomist so my unconditioned goods should be manifest. I fully confess that they are above human reason, comparable to how the rationality of the K9 trainer is above the German Shepard or the rationality of the teacher is above the first-grader. The value of my system – and here I mean most generally theism-with-revelation – is that it allows for there to be goods above human reason that we can nevertheless pursue as rational, specifically things known to be true by God and the blessed, and shared with us that we might participate in divinity.

-To speak ill of sinners runs the risk of divine wrath, drunk as he is on his own mercy.

-For Descartes, the known is a quality of the knower. After Ockham, there was nothing else for it to be.

-Known is to knower what person is to human nature or what esse is to essentia. Each are acts not ordered to constituting a composite as tertium quid or as more perfect than its principles, but are higher acts that more transform than inform.

-Knowledge in the beatific vision is supremely and paradigmatically knowledge, and is not so much informing as transforming, since the form imparted integrates the whole nature of a lower, upward into itself. That said, part of this knowledge presupposes that the known is higher than the knower, which is not true of abstractive knowledge, that is in another way paradigmatic for us.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. 

We mourn mortal things loved, and so the breaking of an attachment to what passes away. The application to asceticism is clear.

That said, some attachments are reasonable and others not, and one must flesh out if or how the beatitude is meant to apply to both.

So that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.

John 15:17.

This and other statements like it about the name of Jesus suggest to many a sort of Christian magic. Ask for anything, so the logic goes, and God must grant it so long as you end with “IN JESUS’S NAME!” On this account, the name of Jesus becomes a spell one casts, an abracadabra commanding the powers of heaven. Put like this, of course, the claim is silly. So what, in fact,  does it mean to invoke the divine name?

The answer is clear from the context of the very quotation we began with:

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 

ibid.

Our asking “in Christ’s name” presupposes that Christ has already willed what we ask for, that is, to ask in his name means to ask for something precisely as already willed. We see in this the absolute contrariety of magic and prayer: magic seeks spells that conform the will of the god or the genie to our own, but invoking divine name seeks to conform our will to what God has already willed.

So we ask in God’s name not as a sorcerer casting a spell, but as a representative defending the interests of one in power. So how do we defend divine interests? Christ answers this question in the very next sentence:

This is my command: Love one other.

ibid

We know what to love another means: to will his highest good, even at a cost to yourself. So what will make us bear the cost? Only this: the desire for our neighbor to know the divine good we have already glimpsed in our own contemplation. If we haven’t already seen the highest good, how can we will it to another? What value is our love for someone if the good we will them is less than God, or if the “love of god” we will them to experience is, for us, like eating our peas?

So what we see in John 15: 17 is a rejection of magic and an insistence that, we rather desire to conform our desires to the divine. This desire, however,  arises only to the extent we have already experienced the sweetness and ineffable goodness of divine love, which alone sets us on fire for others to know about it.  Our love of neighbor is for the neighbor to experience the same truth and joy that we ourselves received. We share the faith like we would share a movie we loved.

All this deeply convicts my heart. Looking at the weakness of my own contemplation, I worry Christ might judge me in the same way as the Pharisees: Woe to you, blind guides! If I haven’t experienced the joy and ecstasy of Christ, how could I ever love my neighbor, i.e. lead him to his highest good, even at a cost to myself? How would I even know what it is to love him? How blind am I when, in the face of the wicked, I want to “score” converts, or when I pray for them to be silenced by divine power! All these desires arise out of wanting christianity to be magic, and this desire for magic itself arises from my love of lower goods, like physical pleasures or my own will.  Let’s pray for a spirit of ecstatic prayer and contemplation, so we might enjoy the supreme good, and, from our desire to enjoy it, desire that others share in it. And we pray this in JESUS’S NAME! AMEN!

The same irresolvable dialectic between idealism and materialism is repeated in a dialectic between pantheism and atheism. Like idealism, pantheism fell out of fashion after the World Wars, but the logic of monism diverts any turning away from materialism or toward religion into doctrines that predicate divine properties of the planet or cosmos, like consciousness or being worthy of the sacrifice of human life.

The monism of thought and things makes things represented and their representations beings in the same sense, allowing the one to replace the other. This can be known by comparing intellectual knowledge to sense: qua visual, the movie replaces the actor; qua audible the recording replaces the performance; and so if intellect knows being, and being is said in one sense of thoughts and things, like “audible” is said equally of performance and recording, then intellectual representation replaces  the represented absolutely. Just as there is nothing to the object qua visual that isn’t reproduced in the visual representation, there is nothing about the object absolutely that isn’t reproduced in the mind. If both are beings in the same sense, the one replaces the other.

The alternative to this is the Platonic and Aristotelian via antiqua that made actuality (as real) apt to be actual in another (as known.) The actual simply speaking was actual in itself, and this was in one sense identified with, and in another sense divided from, what is actual in another.

Descartes’ Meditations is a drama of existential monism.

Descartes writes a drama – who isn’t moved by Meditations? – where the first catharsis is when the thinking self breaks into the world of real beings in the cogito. Thinking things gain the respectable objective existence once naively attributed to the stone of Johnson’s “I refute it thus!” They are, in fact, the first citizens of that once naively believed exterior world, which Descartes later hopes to additionally populate with real beings, after establishing that divine benevolence requires them.

So while Descartes gets charged with dualism there is in him a more fundamental and structural monism, namely the metaphysical project of making only one level of objective reality, on which he first recognizes thinking things and later recognizes the rest of the exterior world founded on God’s benevolence and inability to deceive.

Seen from this angle, the reason why the Cartesian project could not arise in the via antiqua is because that older way, in both its Platonic and Aristotelian forms, denied monism. Mental being and real being were not two equal citizens of one metaphysical domain but different modes of esse, distinguished as the simpliciter and secundum quid. Asking “Do thoughts exist? YES or NO!” was, in the Aristotelian tradition, like asking “Do merchants want to throw goods off the ship? YES or NO!” or “Do you ever choose to do things you would never choose to do? YES or NO!” By definition, merchants preserve their goods, but they might choose to overboard them if the ship is sinking; and, by definition, I don’t want to do something undesirable, but I might choose to do it if extorted. In the same way, the via antiqua denies that thoughts of apples exist if “exists” is the same predicate said about the apples themselves, but they conclude from this that exists is a predicate said simpliciter (about apples) and secundum quid (with a qualification, sc. that one is describing them as known or represented.) The Meditations is an alternative to this, where exists means one thing, and the constructive project first predicates it of the thinking self, then God, then the exterior world. Including substance and accident in this triptych of God-thought-world gives the four most significant ways the via antiqua said being in many ways.

The dialectical ying-yang of idealism and materialism arise inevitably from Cartesian monism. Bracketing for the moment the God which we view as outside the world, to say “I think, therefore I am (an object of the exterior world)” is irresolvably ambivalent: Does the one and only one possible meaning of “exists” assimilate the thinking thing to the exterior world, making us materialists, or does it assimilate the exterior world to consciousness and the mental, making us idealists? If the gods grant our Cartesian monism, the only answer they can give to the question is “Yes.”

A: Christ’s righteousness is imputed to you. It doesn’t cause something to arise in your soul.

B: But then won’t his beatitude be imputed to me, as opposed to arising in my soul?

A: No. The righteousness is imputed but the reward is real, the way an adopted son has imputed sonship but a real inheritance.

B: Your example of a reward doesn’t involve the father’s own life arising in another. But doesn’t beatitude consist in human nature receiving God’s own life?

A: NO! What a horrid blasphemy! You’d be making yourself equal to God!

-For us, “witch trial” means a cautionary tale of the dangers of religious extremism; but historically it’s better viewed as the danger of sacrificing the legal procedures and protections of the accused out of zeal to rid the world of evil.

-Caesar divorced his wife after an accusation, even though there was some reason to believe the accusation was untrue, saying that “Caesar’s wife ought to be beyond suspicion.” As brilliant as he was, the quip was foolish. Anyone beyond suspicion is beyond accusation, but being beyond accusation demands the wicked be rendered magically incapable of even speaking your name.

-The danger in the witch trial is that accusation becomes evidence. Even if accusation and testimony are the same words, this is only unity in matter. The form of the two is utterly different, and only the latter is evidence;  the former is at best hypothesis.