Just Thomism

-If I act upon what is given in reality is the fundamental limit on my being within it. The divine creative act  does not presuppose the reality of the created, and so removes the impediment that reality poses to the interiority of the creative act.

-If a substance is not given before creative activity, then, given the substance, the creative activity arises within it.

-The foundational is intrinsic, and the creative act is foundational.

-Foundations are material causes only when agents presuppose the reality of potential; when the agent does not do so, the agent cause is foundational properly speaking.

-For the same reason, the creative act is super-foundational, or a foundation that is prior to foundations as knowable to us through material causality. Creation like a material cause, creation is both intrinsic and prior to the substance, while being more fundamental than material causality.

–Objection: if creation is intrinsic, it enters into the definition, but the creative act does not enter into the definition, so it is not intrinsic.

Response: Whatever enters into the definition of something is in the essential order, but creation is in the existential order.

Causes in series are either

a.) Only causes.

b.) Caused causes, or causes that are also effects.

Science, or any investigation, reduces (b) to (a.) So, for example, conserved quantities in physics are (a.) In a murder investigation the weapon is (b) and the perpetrator – or whoever hired him – is (a.)

If there is a science of being, or even an investigation of it, there is a being that is only cause and not in any way an effect. This is not controversial or even a theism- the prospect of theism or atheism arises from our answer to whether “being” is larger than “mobile/metrical being” only logically (which demands some sort of atheism) or by containing more real beings (which demands some sort of godlike things.)

The assertion that there can be an infinite series of (b) things is often taken as simply stopping a cosmological argument, but in fact it is a much broader claim that would do away with science or investigation altogether. Even if one defines science as nothing but the ordering of measurements, these measurements as such relate caused measurements (my height/ weight) to uncaused measurements (the meter or gram as defined.) This is, in fact, just what measurement is. 

But in fact it is impossible for all causes to be (b.) Since then the series would be simultaneously caused (since whatever was passed on would have to come from outside the series) and uncaused (since, by hypothesis, all causes were given.) So even if there were an infinite series of (b), such a series could not be all. This is the charter not just for cosmological arguments, but for any science or systematic investigation.

Whether linear or circular, a causal series can be indefinite but is necessarily finite.

A causal series is circular any time an initial state is also a final state, e.g. the water cycle. This also applies to times when the same subject is both from which and to which, even if in different ways, e.g. creatures proceed from God and return to him.

Many causal series in nature are indefinite, whether circular or linear. Seasons return, the plant reproduces the plant, blood leaves the heart and returns to it.

In proving God’s existence, Thomas says that every series of causes has some first (call it G). It’s easy to assume that this is the same thing as saying G is a member of the series, but the whole theory of causality he is working from demands that G is not a member of the series.

A series of homogeneous causes has a first by having a cause that is not homogeneous. For a cause to be homogeneous means that, in itself, it might just as soon be cause as effect, and what might just as soon be cause as effect is not formally a cause. That this fire lit that one, or this dog sired that one is only essential on the side of the matter, but nothing formal makes it so; in fact, it’s precisely the unity of form that makes causes homogenous.

Thomas’s speaking of a series of causes with a first is a particularly important time to remember that Thomas speaks formaliter. If he’s talking about a series of causes with a first, he means a first cause formally, and so a cause that is formally distinct from (or nonhomogeneous with) the series of causes one starts with.

This distinction or nonhomogeneity of the cause formally is also the foundation of the different ways of speaking about the cause, that is, it founds the reason why formal causes are called causes analogously. This is not just true about God and creatures but any other such causes, so, for example, If I own a semi-automatic gun then “load” is said analogously of “I load the gun” and “the gun’s recoil loads the gun.” The two share something in common – both chamber a round. This does not make the first instance of chambering the same sort of action as the second.

1.) Motion is a subject going from terminus a quo to terminus ad quem. A mover is what achieves the terminus ad quem.

2.) A mover that depends on the subject is a moved mover. Though I move the saw, my doing so nevertheless depends on my seeing it, i.e. on its acting on my visual system; and certainly on my touching it, or its acting on the palm of my hand. In the inorganic world, this dependence is so total that the difference between mover and moved is largely arbitrary. If two things floating in space collide, it is probably impossibile, even in principle, to determine whether A hits B, B hits A, or even whether both remain at rest while the space between them shrinks.

3.) Contrapositively, the unmoved mover moves without dependence on the subject. This means whatever term the unmoved mover achieves does not require the reality of the subject at its terminus a quo. 

4.) This in turn means whenever the unmoved mover causes, it produces an effect which suffices in itself to be the first effect. God’s action now is an effect has all that is necessary to make it God’s first effect. It should go without saying that though this moment suffices to be God’s first effect, it need not be so in fact.

5.) In speaking of the reality of time, we can either say all temporal relations are homogenous (the B-Theory) or that there is a certain primacy to the present moment (A-Theory) nevertheless, this primacy of the present must be balanced against the fact that, given divine causality, what exists now suffices in itself to not be later; and any future moment will have this same property, which affects the reality of what we call now. 

6.) We see in this a harmony of all the Scholastic schools. Though we used Thomist terms, we can express them as an Ockhamist first principle: the action of the primary cause can achieve all the secondary cause does without any contribution from the secondary cause. Assuming there were no creatures existing or acting before now, the divine cause is in fact now giving to this present moment all it needs to exist just as it now does.

Secondary cause:  (a) Moves another, which other must have a terminus a quo in reality. (b) Moves another by itself being in motion.

Primary: Moves another, which other need not have a terminus a quo in reality but only in thought. Moves another while being itself immobile.

What moral duties attach to a pornography user who becomes aware that many pornographic materials are records of actual sex crimes? Leave aside the depiction of such crimes, we’re here talking about material where a performer was actually raped, trafficked, abused (RTA), etc. but was not depicted as such. Also, consider only the arousal of the user, not whatever co-operation he has with the production of the material.

Question: does such a user’s arousal bear comparable moral guilt to being intentionally aroused by watching actual RTA?

It is inarguable that the user is intentionally risking the possibility of enjoying RTA, that is, once one is aware of RTA in pornography, at least to the extent that any reasonable person ought to know it is present, his arousal demands an indifference to the possibility being aroused by RTA.

Perhaps there is a double-effect case to be made here. Arguendo, assume arousal by depiction of a sex act is good or at least neutral. Can the user say that his intention is for the act as depicted as consensual, and not for the act as actually RTA?

While the argument does capture the truth that many porn users would be horrified and turned off by being told they were watching an actual rape, the act under discussion is the indifference to being aroused by RTA or the willingness to risk being so. This decision affects the character of the later arousal, just as the indifference of a driver to his drunkenness affects the character of his later hitting a pedestrian.

So the indifference is comparable to being deliberately aroused by RTA because it stands to such deliberate arousal in the same way that a drunk driver killing someone stands to a deliberate murderer. Just as the latter two are broadly murderers, the former persons aroused by RTA, broadly speaking. The drunk is responsible for his unjust killing of another human being – murder –  by an indifference that risks such killing; and so the person in question is responsible for his arousal by rape.

One Mariology takes its point of departure from the legal account of the relation of Mary to Christ qua king. While a perhaps more familiar regime of monarchy locates the dignity of queenship in the wife of the king, the Hebrew tradition gives primacy to the mother of the king, as is clear from 1 Kings 2:19, where Solomon bows before his mother.

If Christ’s received his everlasting kingship in a hebraic manner, there is a corresponding everlasting marian queenship. What is proper to Christ as king and head cannot be denied to the queen mother, since both enter into the constitution of the regime as principal and sovereign. Christ’s headship demands his sinlessness and the corresponding freedom from corruption. All the marian doctrines fall out from this more or less immediately.

When I was around seven years old I heard the adults talking about how to help my uncle stop smoking. I thought about it for a while, and then came up with a foolproof plan: since my uncle kept his smokes on top of his dresser, we’d wait till he wasn’t around, go up to the dresser, and throw them away. The plan seemed foolproof to me, so I couldn’t understand why the adults blew me off when I told them about it. I still remember understanding something, however, when my mom told me “he’d just buy more.”

So began my theories for saving the world and eliminating its evils. But give my plan it’s due: it would have worked just fine if not for rational desire. Among irrational things, you often can solve their problems by just removing the object of desire. If your dog has an unhealthy tendency to gorge himself on an entire stick of butter when you leave it on the counter, you can usually solve the problem by just remembering not to leave the butter out.

-In the United States one can’t gain access to civil rights law except for congenital traits, which provides an incentive to claim that sexual minorities were “born this way.” Perhaps they in fact are born that way, but the claim could be true (or false) in more than one way.

-Presumably the alternative to being born some way is to be molded by social pressures. But it is possible for sexual desires to arise apart from societies, as happens in non-social animals that reproduce sexually. So it is possible for sexual desire to be for an object apart from any social pressures.

-The account of sexual desire common to humans and animals is the same as what one gives of anger, hunger or pain as common. But non-human animals get angry without desiring justice, they get hungry or feel pain without an anxiety arising from an awareness of death or mortality, etc. In humans, the “merely biological” homogenizes with truth and immateriality. The “merely biological” is not just tied to truth but is measured by truth.

-The “merely biological” in humanity as common to animals, or even common to non-living matter, if we imagine biology as physics. There are truths in both abstractions, but they abstract from the biological as human, since in us reason has entered into the definition of non-rational stuff. Through grace, both in us and the hypostatic union, divinity itself enters into the essence of the non-rational stuff, even the human body.

-Say I were a homosexual male and I was convinced I was born this way. Could I tell the difference between a desire to have sex with men and the desire to worship the salvific male body of Christ? Could I tell the difference between a desire to unify with the masculine essence through sex and through the physical reality of sacrament, ritual, religious ecstasy, etc?

-Say I’m a heterosexual male and am convinced I was born this way. Very well. Was I given a power to exercise or to sacrifice? Innateness does not solve the problem of sublimation. In fact, it raises that problem, just as hunger raises the problem of fasting or anger the question of forgiveness.

-Perhaps I look at both of the above alternatives and notice I’m thrilled by one and disgusted by the other. Very well. Should I gauge how natural something is by how it feels now or by its ultimate fruits? We don’t know the tree by its seedling or its buds.