Redeem the Time

There is a notion of the contemplative life that one could draw from modern undergraduate and graduate schools that is cartoonish and false. The implication is that contemplation looks down upon the active life and consists in scholarship that draws solely from a lifetime of quiet reception to wisdom. To be contemplative is defined in an extreme and negative way: it is seen as a life that is not active, whereas the so-called active life is seen to consist in politics, business, or the usual life of human beings in which they have to do lots of things other than study or navel gaze.

Part of the reason for this is that young people go to college and graduate school—young people who haven’t yet figured out exactly what they want to do with their lives—and thus they read what they perceive to be the various distinctions and differences of vocations and careers (that they are also ignorant of) into what the words “active” and “contemplative” mean. This is similar to the opinion of some of those who were against the early Dominican order.

According to Russell Hittinger, on page 270 of The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in the Post-Christian World (read a review here):

William of Saint-Amour, a doctor of the Sorbonne, charged that the “double spirit” of action and contemplation embodied by the mendicants was a novel way of life that perverted the principles of both civil and ecclesiastical society. The mendicants, he asserted: violate the principle of a society of contemplatives by seeking to act on others rather than being purely receptive of divine grace . . .

It is hardly ever appreciated that St. Thomas Aquinas lived and breathed in an order unlike most others. The more “contemplative orders” would not have allowed him to travel, teach, preach and write as he did. Hittinger continues on page 271 with a paragraph I wish every student of St. Thomas was required to understand:

Thomas contends that the “active life” consists of more than political rule and mercantile pursuits. Granted that religious are neither magistrates or businessmen, they are “active” in other ways, including the communication of knowledge and wisdom by teaching and preaching. The active life, generically understood, is the communication of gifts. In this, all agents imitate God. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a society that is in every aspect receptive. Although societas is an analogous term, every society, he argues, is constituted by “communications” whereby goods are given and received. In Thomas’s works, every analogous use of the word societas is mirrored by uses of the word communicatio: communicatio oeconomica, communicatio spiritualis, communicatio civilis, and so forth. The word communicatio simply means making something common, one rational agent participating in the life of another. Society, for Aquinas, is not a thing, but an activity.

Think about what St. Thomas actually did: he defended his order from those inside and outside the Church who hated it, wrote advice to political leaders, wrote a lengthy work of apologetics to convert Muslims, wrote commentaries about a philosopher almost completely new to the western world, wrote a “textbook” for beginning theology students, and generally sought and fought to answer the most pressing, cutting-edge theological and philosophical issues of his time. He did all this mostly by drawing on his vast knowledge of the Church Fathers and Sacred Scripture and employing the power of prayerful reasoning.

Again, when he wrote about Aristotle, and incorporated Aristotle’s thought into his own thinking, he was writing about something that was largely new to the western world. He made Aristotle part of the tradition again, because he dove headlong into the rancorous issues of his time and argued that Aristotle was largely right. To think we should imitate him in all ways is presumptous of both our abilities and our knowlege of our own time, but as he is one of the Saints and the Doctor of the Church his life and works ought to be taken as a sort of exemplar—particularly for those of us who wish to focus our lives on studying and teaching truth.

Go read o.c.’s sermon on these verses.

Siris has some thoughts about Alanyzer’s thoughts concerning St. Thomas Aquinas and “Pure Act.” (Siris found this via Fides Quaerens Intellectum).

The Shulamite is already in action in the comments sections.

See—just like I said in the post directly below. The Pope must be reading Redeem the Time.

[Forgive me, Father: I joke, I keed with you. . .]

Go read the marvelous quotations in the article.

Here’s another draft written long ago and left unfinished, which I will lazily toss out now in the midst of other busy-ness and blatantly change and revise in fits and starts:

“Dawn at Creation”

The reason I originally started this blog was to freely scribble away as the muse dictated for the sake of some sort of cartharsis; to release and relax the mind from daily meditations. This is my diversion from both personal and structured studies that will (hopefully) only end on account of death. Yet sometimes, one can’t help but bring such bi’ ness into the bloggysphere.

Brief thoughts from so much that could be said on the following sentence quoted from Charles De Koninck here:

Creationism, which from all angles opens the world directly on God, passing to one side of the universal hierarchy, implicitly rejects what is essential to the universe: unity of order.

Creationism, in the sense De Koninck means it, is a bypass—it wants direct knowledge of God rather than knowledge of him through things. By skipping over the “universal hierarchy” of nature (and all that is) this error denies the wondrous beauty of the myriad layers of cascading causality in the universe. (1) This ultimately denies or limits God. This ultimately means putting God in a box—the creationist implies that God does not have the power to impart causality to things, and this sort of simplification is really another way of limiting God. One reason this is dangerous is because it strengthens the notion that our relation to God, or what unites us to him, is primarily based on will.

I hold that a cause and effect of creationism for many is likely the notion that the will is prior to intellect. For misunderstanding the rational argument for the existence of “pure spirits” is to misunderstand form or/and reason in things.

The creationist holds that the universe is based on the will of God—he willed it to be so, and it was so directly by means of his bright-light, omnipresent power. The creationist in this sense does not allow for reason to be in things: note that he only rarely or confusedly speaks of the reason of God, but he speaks about the will of God often. The Word, or the Logos, becomes merely an expression of what God wants (whether it be haphazardly or necessarily) rather than a Person of the Blessed Trinity. If God’s relation to the universe is simply to will it directly into existence, without imparting causality, or any actual, integral, and dynamic order in things, his relation with man will likely be understood in the same fashion.

Thus, the creationist says that God’s will gives us law (e.g., the Decalogue). Now any law derived solely from will is to be followed merely on the basis of power. (This is because will is indeterminate and arbitrary devoid of the determination of reason or form—absent reason, power is the only source of one’s obligation to another’s will. The persuasion of reason is replaced by the force of will for the creationist, although we must be clear that law is always held between these two concepts.) We must obey God’s law in the creationist universe on the basis of God’s power, which directly and simply made everything. He is a tyrant, our ruler simply because of His mighty power, and we must relate to him as slaves.(2)

Of course, much, much more that is helpful and clearer on will and reason and their relation could be said that would be worthwhile, and everything above needs to be sharpened and played out.

William Blake
“Urizen as the Creator of the Material World”
from Europe, A Prophecy
Library of Congress: Creation Accounts and Depictions
____________________________________________________
(1) To deny Beauty is not to deny pretty pictures or mere aesthetics, but to ultimately to deny being as knowable, or the truth, as it is desirable, or good; and this is to deny the human being the full possession of what we are ordered to and the delight which necessarily follows and is part of achieving the perfection of what we are. To consider order is to consider the beautiful. One knows the beautiful to whatever extent one knows a whole, and this is to say that one knows not just parts, but parts as they constitute the whole, which means knowing the “unity of order.”

(2) Note: I am not here denying that there is a way in which will must be taken into account, or that some of what the creationist says about these matters isn’t in a way true—I am simply denying that this is a complete account of reality. There is a way in which will is a cause of law, more profoundly, there is way that will must be a part of our consideration of God as cause (lest we start thinking that God acts under some kind of necessity, or in accordance with “reason” as a separate principle outside himself). See St. Thomas Aquinas here. The mistake is in thinking that will is prior to reason—this is what so many Protestants have fallen into these last two centuries, along with many a Catholic (in fact, De Koninck is condemning prominent Catholic theologians from well before what most of us would call the “modern” era.) The notion that will is prior to reason really starts to really smell rotten when the person who thinks will is prior to reason starts to say that will is simply, and denies reason altogether. This notion of faith, as a mere assertion of will, if taken seriously, turns into pure nihilism of the worst sort.

The Lord Answering Job Out Of The Whirlwind
William Blake, 1826

Continued from this post. Again, mostly from the cutting room floor of a paper:

Consider the example of a student looking for a teacher and the basic problem of discipleship. In order to learn anything, at some level a student must have faith in those who he decides to try to learn from—and although the student’s faith might be misplaced, it is not necessarily irrational even if the student makes this decision solely on the basis of the opinion of another trusted authority. Even though the student is relying on what is likely the weakest form of argument, he every well might be taking the most rational course of action possible. (Note, however, that St. Thomas says, “although the argument from authority based on human reason is the weakest, yet the argument from authority based on divine revelation is the strongest.”)

To clarify faith further, Thomas says we give our assent for two reasons. The first is “one of external inducement, such as seeing a miracle, or being persuaded by someone to embrace the faith.” Again, although faith is not known by the way of a scientific (demonstrable) proof, still something simply seen or understood by the mind points, leads or stimulates human beings into assenting to faith and accepting the unseen or unknown: “Faith has not that research of natural reason which demonstrates what is believed, but a research into those things whereby a man is induced [my emphasis] to believe, for instance that such things have been uttered by God and confirmed by miracles.” In fact, something must be offered to the mind or reason in order for it to assent: “[the believer] would not believe unless, on the evidence of signs, or of something similar, he saw that they ought to be believed.” One cannot will without knowing to some degree what one wills, and therefore one cannot have faith simply, but one must have faith in something. That something will be something one knows—something that one understands or grasps by means of one’s reason in some way, however limited one’s knowledge might be. Still, even miracles, sermons and whatever else leads to faith is not the sufficient cause of that assent, “since [this is only one of several reasons given] of those who see the same miracle, or who hear the same sermon, some believe, and some do not. Hence we must assert another internal cause, which moves man inwardly to assent to matters of faith.”

For Aquinas, as for likely any Christian, the second and essential cause of faith is this internal gift of God called “grace.” Since man, “by assenting to matters of faith, is raised above his nature, this must needs accrue to him from some supernatural principle moving him inwardly; and this is God. Therefore faith, as regards the assent which is the chief act of faith, is from God moving man inwardly by grace.” The fact that Aquinas thinks that by faith man “is raised above his nature,” and hence requires the help of God in the form of grace, hints at why he thinks that revelation is necessary.

Human beings’ need for grace to move their will so that they accept revelation—the necessity of revelation rather than reasoned proof when it comes to divine things—makes logical sense for Aquinas in part because of the weakness of man’s intelligence or reason as compared to God’s. After all, if God exists, and is truly a God, he is by definition beyond man’s ken:

Of two minds, one of which has a keener insight into truth than the other, the higher mind understands much that the other cannot grasp at all, as is clear in the ‘plain man’ (in rustico), who can in no way grasp the subtle theories of philosophy . . . As therefore it would be the height of madness in a ‘plain man’ to declare a philosopher’s propositions false, because he could not understand them, so and much more would a man show exceeding folly if he suspected of falsehood a divine revelation given by the ministry of angels, on the mere ground that it was beyond the investigation of reason.

The same thing manifestly appears from the incapacity which we daily experience in the observation of nature. We are ignorant of very many properties of the things of sense; and of the properties that our senses do apprehend, in most cases we cannot perfectly discover the reason. Much more is it beyond the competence of human reason to investigate all the points of intelligibility in that supreme excellent and transcendent substance of God. Consonant with this is the saying of the Philosopher, that “as the eyes of bats are to the light of the sun, so is the intelligence of our soul to the things most manifest by nature” (Aristotle, Metaphysics I, min. i). To this truth Holy Scripture also bears testimony.

Thomas says that left with unaided human reason as their sole guide, few human beings could know any truths about God—some people are not capable, some are too busy with other things, and others are too lazy. Of those with enough talent, time, and discipline, there are other factors to consider—they must learn the right things at the right time of life, and even then it would take them the better part of a lifetime to get to the most basic tenets of faith (that God exists, that God is Good, that God governs everything in the universe, etc., etc.). Those few human beings who managed to get this far would still make many mistakes, both on account of the weakness of our reason and by way of blindness caused by sin. Given the error that would inevitably be mixed in with the truths they had finally gained after so much time and effort, they would justifiably not always be confident in the certainty of their conclusions. Further, they would still not have a religious creed, sacraments, or the grace that allows one to attain eternal blessedness—all of which comes through faith and according to religion is necessary in order for man to achieve his ultimate, supernatural end. The only way that human beings could know their final end and how to get there with certainty, then, is through accepting the revelation offered by God in a way that their intellect can grasp. These issues could be explained in other ways, with other causes, but the conclusion for Thomas could be put something like this: if there is a God, revelation is reasonable.


The incredulity of Saint Thomas
1601-1602, Neues Palais, Potsdam
Michelangelo Merisi da CARAVAGGIO

The incredulity of Saint Thomas
1601-1602, Neues Palais, Potsdam
Michelangelo Merisi da CARAVAGGIO
From the cutting room floor of a paper in progress to blog-filler:

Many today treat of faith as if it was merely and solely an act of the will. Faith is seen as a personal choice completely separate from reason. Whether we would be justified or not, we could conceivably call this the “Peter Pan” view of faith: “if only everyone closes their eyes, clenches their fists, strains their wills, and believes real hard, little Tinker Bell will come back to life. . .” It is as if wandering human beings plant the flagpole of their will onto a set of values they choose to fit with their specific set of desires or “preferences” and then irrationally—by means of sheer will power and in spite of reason—hold to this sticking post of faith, making it their particular truth.

The notion of this sort of “blind faith” is popular today, at least as a way of characterizing religious people, if not as a characterization they themselves give. One of the reasons for this view’s popularity is the ease with which it corresponds to a general and vague sort of belief in the primacy of the will of the individual—one’s “personal choice”—and a distrust of reason or the human mind’s ability to know anything significant with certainty. For whatever reason, regardless of what views have or have not been similar in the past, these notions are widespread today, and they are applied to more than just religious claims.

Many of the same people who criticize religious faith, along with a growing number of those who “celebrate” some sort of religious faith, think that a sort of faith or act of will is the means by which human beings hold all or most of their ideas: “you have your beliefs and therefore your ‘world view,’ and I have mine.” (The popularity of the phrase “world view” in Judeo-Christian circles is instructive. Whether they mean it or not, the phrase implies that what one holds as true depends on where the individual stands in the world—one’s individual perspective—wherever one decided to hold to one’s own sticking post.)

It is worthwhile to note that an exception is often made for the so-called “hard sciences,” which are even distinguished and opposed to other kinds of knowledge—but most especially the claims of faith—by way of their perceived dependence on reason and proof. In contrast, there is a growing notion that it is intrinsically impossible to argue or speak rationally about the notion of right and wrong, morality, or anything related to the idea that human action can be judged as “good” or “bad.” Although there may be many religious people who themselves hold a related notion of faith, Aquinas, and all manner of other orthodox religious sorts within the western tradition mean something very different.

Aquinas says that “the act of believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth at the command of the will moved by the grace of God.” Of course, faith involves an individual choice, but for Thomas an “act of the intellect” is necessarily involved, and faith is not entirely blind: “. . . the intellect assents to something . . . through an act of choice, whereby it turns voluntarily to one side rather than to the other . . . if there be certainty and no fear of the other side, there will be faith.” Notice that faith entails cognizance of certainty and lack of fear, and is the assent of the intellect through an “act of choice.” It is true that faith involves an acceptance of a Divine truth not fully seen, its causes not fully understood, but this is not purely on account of a willful act by the believer, nor is it irrational: “…the intellect of the believer is convinced by Divine authority, so as to assent to what it sees not. Accordingly . . . ‘faith is a habit of the mind, whereby eternal life is begun in us, making the intellect assent to what is non-apparent.’ ”

For Aquinas, one cannot separate intellect and will—and thus one cannot talk about faith as an act of the will simply speaking. The mind of the believer must go along with faith—faith is the intellect’s assent to divine truth. In other words, faith is not intrinsically opposed to reason, nor can it be. Some things one puts one’s faith into might be rightly considered false or foolish for many reasons, and one could do this irrationally, but acts of faith in themselves are not necessarily irrational.

The modern notion of faith as the will asserting a higher truth over and against the intellect is not the same as the orthodox notion of faith as the intellect assenting to a higher truth through the will’s ability to choose.