Just Thomism

Take free will as the power of not letting circumstances control whether you are happy. Orthogonal to this, not letting moods that are wholly determined by circumstances control your words or actions. Eventually, not letting circumstances control your mood.

This is a bona fide freedom or free will on anyone’s account, as it is defined by the absence of exterior control over your actions.

This is not far from what Aristotle would define simply as virtue in general, habitual rational control of that part of which is not rational but can obey reason – which is above all one’s mood.

This is not the Vulcan life or the emotionally obtuse life. One is dominated by circumstances when he stays saturnine and aloof when engagement or controntation is called for.

If all the Salvadoran inmates in a prison were rioting, it’s hard to argue against the justice of temporarily but intentionally segregating all inmates from El Salvador. True, the circumstance is so atypical and contrived that a rational person wouldn’t include it in his concept of racial discrimination, but let’s take it as a justification for racial discrimination, by which I’ll mean a policy opposed to colorblind law. Are there other justifications?

Since the 1978 Bakke decision which was confirmed in 2003’s Grutter, the answer was yes, namely one could set aside colorblindness to achieve diversity. Though the case concerned setting aside colorblindness in college admissions, whatever could be labeled diverse gained access to the levers of civil rights law and other constitutional protections, and became a fifth column against the constitutional demands for colorblindness in law.

For all those who just came out from under a rock, the Supreme Court today reversed Grutter, marking the first time in many decades that the prospect colorblind law seemed viable. I’m old enough to remember when everyone held colorblindness as a self-evident truth, but by the mid 80s there were well-known if marginal diversity movements attempting to dismantle colorblindness. In the last ten years, the diversity movement advanced to the point of stigmatizing colorblindness as unjust, even if the stigma arose more from taboo than argument. Still, the force and irrationality of the stigma caused more than one person to abandon the hope of colorblind law and (often grudgingly) try to adjust to an inevitable prison-gang model of civic life, where everyone is sorted on day one into a white, brown or black dictatorship as his only hope of surviving the next riot.

Whatever case could be made for the diversity’s dismissal of colorblindness, it is incapable of integrating itself into the best elements of the American tradition. The point is uncontroversial since, if anything, they celebrate of their rejection of that tradition. One has to pick a side: in rejecting colorblindness the logic of diversity opposes itself to the logic and beauty of the Declaration, or in Lincoln’s speech at Ottawa or the Gettysburg Address, or the 1866 Civil Right Act, or the Fourteenth Amendment, or Harlan’s dissent in Plessy and its reversal in Brown. It takes a distant and suspicious look at MLK’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial. It takes Uncle Tom only a slur, not a monument in racial sympathy. For this and similar childish motives, it would cancel Huck Finn. 

The reversal of Grutter won’t change the world, and perhaps won’t even diminish the stigma of colorblind law. It could, I suppose, or it could be the decisive catalyst to killing off colorblind law once and for all. I can’t tell. My crystal ball’s broken. But nothing in the future can change what we just received today: a new monument in the best elements of the American tradition. Glory Hallelujah. 

It’s hard not to end up treating heaven or eternity as spacetime beyond spacetime, and attempts to get beyond this risk understanding it simply as a vague and confused temporality. We used to pose the question whether heaven was a place or a state of being, but “being in space” is a way of being, so what was the point of the question? The distinction only amounted to the difference between a concrete and general account, rather like asking whether spaghetti was pasta or food.

In the Dantean vision of things heaven is up there, though even Dante refuses to be pinned down to this, insisting early on in Paradiso that the distinctions and orders one sees in heaven are in some sense overcome or metaphorical. So while Dantean Purgatory is literally a seven-story mountain, heaven is not literally ascending spheres. We detect a similar way the Gospels explain Christ’s corporeity as somehow true corporeity without its limits: Christ ascends into heaven, but only after resurrection appearances make it clear that the resurrected body is not subordinated to spatiotemporality (by his appearing in locked rooms, hiding himself in plain sight on the road to Emmaus and then dematerializing at dinner, etc.)

The body of Christ is necessary for the working of the sacraments and so must exist and be alive, but we can’t place it in some spacetime beyond spacetime, which is at least superfluous and contradictory. It makes no difference if we want some straightforward spacetime of the Dantean up there or if we work out a more exotic modern physical theory. Putting Christ in a larger universe in which our universe is a membrane is as unsatisfying as putting him in orbit, and looking for Christ with a quirky and brilliant algebra is really no different than trying to get to him on a ship or, more fittingly, to build a ziggurat that reaches the divine realm. For all that, what do we do with our need for the body of Christ to be the causal foundation of sacramental life?

All analogies for the Incarnation hide more than they reveal, but the best one we have is the union between the human soul and body. Though soul is intrinsically spiritual and so in itself of a different essence than matter, the substantial unity of soul to body allows matter to perform a properly spiritual action. Thought is immaterial, but brains think. The union of the Word and Christ’s body is also of things as forever distinct in essence as spirit and matter, but the union nonetheless allows his body to perform a properly divine action. The body of Christ is joined ontologically to the Word, and the Word is everywhere.

The obvious objection to all this is that it asserts a bodily non-bodiliness, which is perhaps the only option worse than simply imagining Christ in orbit somewhere. But this might suffer from an account of bodies too dominated by imagination. Whatever affects physical entities according to a principle intrinsic to it is a body, and through the Incarnation the Word acts on bodies not only by spiritual agency, but according to a physical principle he has made intrinsic to himself. Again, the body with a human soul is both body and yet does not share in all the limitations of body; and the corporeity of Christ, at once truly corporeal and yet ubiquitous, is the limit case of this.

So perhaps the right approach to Christ’s corporeality is not seeking some spacetime beyond spacetime, whether in a Dantean heaven or a modern theory of multiple dimensions, but to rather to see his corporeality perfected by its incorporation into the ubiquity of the Word. In fact, this is the same sort of incorporation that the Christian himself hopes for, and which can be enjoyed at least psychically in the time before the resurrection, which is why imagining that one divides the attention of the saints when multiple persons ask for intercession is absurd and impious.

One prominent but easily unnoticed thing that the Sexual Revolution values about human sexuality is the promise it holds to infinitely upend, scandalize, or flout the normative. Societies will always have more than one sexual taboo, and the trick is to find one that, though still taboo, is close enough to the last one overthrown to tantalize with the desire to destroy it. If the taboo is close enough to the last one broken it is attractive or at least in some way sympathetic, even in part because of the (relatively weak) taboo that cordons it off. The force of the taboo has faded enough to make it seem like an arbitrary restriction, so the desire to overturn it is in one sense the thrill of a transgression, in another sense the desire to be rational and do away with mere taboo “thou shalt nots”, in another sense the feeling of liberation that comes from having one less significant but arbitrary rule to observe.

But again, the thrill of sexual liberation comes from its promise to always provide some next taboo, making it capable of providing an infinite curriculum in the advance of transgression/rationality/liberation. People simply care deeply about sex and so will always have strong feelings about what is appropriate and inappropriate, with the sphere of the appropriate reliably getting smaller whenever one’s kids or spouse are concerned. This last point is a crucial element to the dynamic, as the the transgression/rationality/liberation war can always be run by the hip and unaffiliated persons against the prudes with spouses and children, cf.  Catullus’s opening salvo in his famous poem 5: rumoresque senum severiorum omnes unius aestimemus assis.

Mozart claimed he wrote his music by taking a walk, seeing it all at once, then going home and writing it down. The whole piece was conceived as complete, and all he had to do was record it, as though taking dictation. It seems what we are getting here is a view of essence as whole and complete prior to existence, with existence being nothing more than the realization of this already complete entity. This seems to be the view of existence one gets from late scholasticism as what is extra causas et extra nihil, or from the phoenix argument that Thomas gives in De ente et essentia. 

But the Mozart case even seems more adapted to a different interpretation. He took the walk, presumably, in the hope that something would come to exist in him mentally; and if any of us wanted to appreciate how different we were from him we could contemplate all the things that don’t come to exist in us when we take walks. So the Mozart example isn’t showing that we go from having a bare essence of something (the music when he is walking) to having an essence + existence (the music when he comes home) rather, there are essences in different modes of existence which share important notes of likeness.

In speaking of a mode or manner of existing I’m talking about a measure or rule of perfection of what counts as complete in a supremely large domain. There are times when we are working on an idea – I’ll assume most of us work harder than Mozart –  and it can take a good deal of time, asking advice, meditating on things, rummaging around in texts, talking with friends, writing drafts etc before the idea takes perfect form. But the perfect existence it has as thought is still a mode of perfection, very different from the measure of perfection it will have to have when we express it. Nevertheless, to exist in thought is a domain with its own measure of completeness, which is divided from the domain of being complete outside of thought. That there are obvious notes of identity between the two domains does not require a single existent that goes from one mode to another: the unity of traits arises simply from the likeness of effects to causes.

So existence is not added to a somehow pre-existent essence, but is rather different modes or measures of perfection that, because they relate to each other as cause and effect, share various notes of likeness.

1.) Compare and contrast an examination of conscience with a list of one’s sins over some period of time. There might be times when the two are equivalent, like preparing for confession, but in general there is a good deal more in conscience than on the list.

2.) Distinguish a list of sins over some period of time as a Christian compiles it from the way Satan or The Accuser is compiling it. Presumably the lists are materially equivalent, even if Satan’s is a good deal more complete, but Satan is not compiling the list as material for mercy or forgiveness, nor does he relate to the things on the list as what one brings with confidence to the cross of Jesus. He is happy to have the list be something one wallows in or feels hopeless about, but he’s all but oblivious to the possibility that one might take the list of sins, as St. Faustina often put it, as something giving one even more of a right to the mercy of Christ’s passion.

Light is the vigor of intellection (JOST) Given that the object of intellection is truth, it is a degree of penetration into truth.

The degree stands to some measure of perfection, and such measure is either in itself or by participation.

The light of reason, of faith, of glory.

The light of reason is a participation or taking part in eternal law, but the light of faith demands more than this, namely taking part in God’s own knowledge of himself, shared with us for the sake of union with him. The light of faith, therefore, by definition cannot be the union for whose sake it is shared.

Although now the center of Orthodox spirituality, Mount Athos predates the Catholic/Orthodox split, and the story of its founding even stands as a sort of judgment on that split. At the center of that founding is Peter of Athos, whose feast day is today.

Peter was born in Constantinople, a city whose existence is already a critique of an West/East split, as it was founded from Rome to be itself a new Rome. Again, both East and West agree that Peter came from what is now the heart of Byzantium to the city of Rome to receive his monastic habit and training from the Pope, after which he returned to what became the East to settle on Athos. It’s hard to get past the irony that at the center of Eastern spirituality one finds St. Peter whose mission itself is papal, a fact which can be taken just as soon as expressing a sort of papal or “Western” authority over “Eastern” spirituality as for the need for the papal or “Western” principle to develop both from the East and return back to the East.

At the heart of Peter’s story one finds the synergy and unity of the Church, and our failure to live up to this is hard to think about without shame and regret over the fact that for over a thousand years none of us have managed to channel enough grace into the world to heal the wound at the center of the people with access to all Christ’s sacraments. Peter of Athos, pray for us.

The First Way concludes to what causes motion without being in motion; what has effects in space and time without being in space and time. Considered as outside of space and time, God is an extrinsic cause, but though a natural extrinsic cause, while causing, makes its effect incomplete or incapable in the natural order, the divine extrinsic cause, even while causing, does not make the effect incomplete in the natural order. Said another way, a natural efficient cause has a complete natural effect only having caused, but not while causing (effectum non efficiens) but divine causality, even while causing, has a whole effect in the natural order. This difference between natural and divine extrinsic causes is the same as noticing that divinity causes nature from outside nature, which is the first look one gets of God, indeed it’s what gets called God in the First Way. In fact, the difference follows from the the notion of supernatural agent.

The deist view of divine causality, or the idea of a divine start that would allow for existential inertia, conflates this difference.

The difference also gets conflated in the belief that God “leaves us to our free will”, or somehow retreats to leave room for freedom or natural action.

Hate the sin because it is an impediment to your unity with the sinner.

The universal desire for unity is fundamental and to be kept inviolate. It is impermissible relate to anyone as someone you are unwilling to share eternity; and the eternity you are called to share is total identity in the actuality of life, for the actuality of eternal life is God, and God is one.