Just Thomism

The universe is so big, it must certainly contain more________

a.) Cephalopods

b.) Intelligent life

c.) Mexican Revolutions

Why is (b) experienced as plausible while (a) and (c) are a joke?

One option, I guess, is to bite the bullet and say that (a)- (c) all have extraterrestrial instances. Perhaps we make a Lucretian argument that chance and infinity give us infinite everything, and then tune it up by saying that even though in fact everything is infinitely likely, we’re most interested in other forms of intelligent life. But this changes the given. If we leave it in place, we can go two ways:

1.) Take this as a reductio ad absurdum against this sort of argument for extraterrestrial intelligence. This was the sense I had when the argument came to me. I still think there is something to it, but it dismisses too quickly the depth and extent of the conviction that there must be more of us out there. I suppose one could say that science fiction is behind the force and extent of the conviction, but even if this plays a role it seems more likely that sci-fi tapped into a widespread feeling rather than causing it out of whole cloth.

2.) Insist that there must be something about intelligence that makes it seem probable.  This account points in the direction of saying that there is a tendency in the universe to bring about intelligence, and that everything else not essential to it is radically contingent. Embodied intelligence almost certainly evolves from animal life, but the particular species of animal life (a squid or whatever) doesn’t matter. Again, while some form of intelligent activity would be necessary (representation, mathematics) particular acts might not be (like Communist Revolutions.)

In explaining abstraction from matter, Thomas gives an analogy to sensation: Just as the eyes see the color of the apple without the taste, the human intellect sees the intelligible form of a sense object without the matter. For a long time, I understood this to mean that intellectual abstraction leaves something behind, or that we abstract only a sliver of being, in the same way that the eyes see a single accident out of thousands possible. If this were true, abstraction would terminate in a part of being, and not the whole.

In abstracting from matter, however, the intellect abstracts from the object insofar as it is ordered to being something else. To abstract the form of a man is to know that which could not cease being a man without ceasing to be itself. The abstraction is from matter in the sense of indetermination in being, or as order to being another.

We have to go further than this, in fact, because insofar as matter enters into the intelligible character of form, it is the object of abstraction. Man in one sense has an order to being crocodile food, which is exactly what I suppose crocodiles see when they see us. To consider a man in this way is to see him as matter. The power I have to be assimilated to a crocodile, however, certainly arises out of things essential to my being human, which is again why crocodiles expend so much effort hunting things like me as opposed to engaging in the objectively much simpler task of eating unresistant tree bark.

Since being is act simpliciter, and the form in the intellect is only its act while the form in matter is potential, the form in intellect is a higher manner of being than form in material. Abstraction elevates form’s mode of being. If abstraction took only a part of the object, it would be less though the axiom that the whole is greater than the part. As it stands, however, intellection elevates. It does not degrade.

Taking the universe as I find it, I find

a.) Some of my actions are free, and

b.) All of my actions arise from (at least one) antecedent agent.

I could pit the truth of (b) against (a) and deny free will out of some sense of determinism, or pit the truth of (a) against (b) and imagine that my free acts literally prove that I am God (through, for example, Thomas’s Second Way) but I’d rather just take the universe as it is and move on to the question of what sort of antecedent agent could be responsible for my own genuinely free action.

I’ll take it as given that if either you or some other mechanico-natural process sufficed to explain my doing an action, I should conclude my action wasn’t free, and that any judgment or feeling I had of doing the act freely would not be genuine, but illusory. So it looks like it doesn’t matter whether the antecedent cause is voluntary or mechanico-natural: either way I’m not free.

Taking a closer look, however, one notices the unspoken assumption that I consider antecedent causes only in a qualified sense, since I take something of the effect as given in being, apart from the antecedent cause. The picture I’m assuming is “given A, and some B for which A is not responsible, A proceeds to do C using B” Since this is the only way that either we or a natural-mechanical cause can be antecedent agents, we have to start by looking at antecedent agents in this way, but this takes “antecedent agent” secundum quid, or with a qualification. An antecedent agent cause simpliciter suffices to explain B simpliciter, meaning there is nothing about B, or at least nothing existent and actual about B, that fails to arise from the agency of A.*

Seen in this way, asserting the incompatibility of free choice and antecedent divine agency commits the fallacy of secundum quid and simpliciter. When one reduces my action to a previous agent secundum quid, he has to account for whatever reality such causes take for granted in the effects they act upon. When one reduces my action to an antecedent agent simpliciter, by contrast, there is no reality at all apart from an act already accomplished. Relative to divine agency in its full extension,** I don’t have to say that what feels like free will is actually illusory, or that my brain process tricks me, since there is neither a “what it feels like” or a brain process apart from such agency. Said another way, as soon as I take anything about my reality as given, the work of the antecedent cause simpliciter is already done. This is not true when the agent is a mechanico-natural process, which requires accounting for the being that such agents are not responsible for, and leads one to conclude that what appeared to be given as self-causality must in fact be an illusion, perhaps an illusion that conveyed a reproductive advantage or whatever. On this account, notice, reproductive advantage is thoroughly objective and real, entirely apart from the antecedent agent, and it is necessary for it to be so. I have to say something about the reality that an antecedent cause secundum quid does not explain, and “illusion conveying reproductive advantage” is the best anyone has been able to come up with, at least under the assumptions that

(i) my actions arise from antecedent agents and

(ii) the only such agents are mechanico-natural ones.***

My claim is that (ii) is the fallacy of secundum quid and simpliciter. In fact, immaterial agents transcend material ones, meaning that the mechanico-natural is only matter and object for my choice, and not agent; and that the manner in which my choice itself demands divine actualization is not in a way that requires explaining my own given reality as illusory, since whether I take my objective reality as self-caused or an illusion befitting reproductive fitness, God’s causality would already be accomplished, and just as necessary to explain either.

Again, recall that the thesis here is to take freedom and antecedent causality as given, and to figure out what sort of agent could do this. I am not trying to prove that if God exists, we are free. God would exist and cause us whether we were free or not. But I do think the converse follows from the above, and that the truth of (a) and (b) given at the outset demand a divine antecedent agent.

*Causality is priority in being, but insofar as A presupposes B as given, the two are simultaneous or equivalent in being. To include such equivalence in the account of causality is to add a qualification to the causality.

**Divine causality can be taken either as creative or as governing. As governing, it takes the natures it deals with as given, causing them to move in certain ways. Governance, however, obviously presupposes creation, and so when we consider the full ambit of divine causality, there can be, by definition, no created reality outside of it.

***If our minds were controlled by CIA brain-rays or aliens or any created thing at all, these would be relevantly the same thing, i.e. antecedent agents secundum quid, or antecedent agents that presuppose some reality in their effects that they are not responsible for, and which must be explained given the hypothesis that the antecedent cause causes an action.

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; 

and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: 

and whatever Adam called every living creature, that was its name.

Gen 2:19

Of all the activities God could have us do, why was this the first one?

The animals are made from the ground, that is, from what on the one hand is beneath us, and on the other hand supports us and provides us a home. In the presence of this, we naturally (or justly) start to call it something, that is, to say what it means and how it should be interpreted.

What is true about the animals is for the same reason true about the irrational or merely given parts of our own life. This clearly includes our passions and emotions, but also all the brute facts that impose themselves on our life. God brings them to us and we’re entrusted with the power to say what they mean and how others should interpret them. Whatsoever we call them, that is their name.

In other words, the first human act is exactly what was later called ethike, or the act of imposing habits on the parts of our lives whose meaning and interpretation must be given by reason. Fear is a passion or emotion beneath reason, but whether it is the material of bravery, cowardice, or rash bravado is something a human being decides and habituates. Suffering or pain is beneath reason, but whether it is an occasion to curse God and deny providence, or to recognize the ineffable extent of the providence of a loving Father, is a meaning imposed on it and, taken as true, proposed to others. One can multiply examples like this to get the whole moral life: whether money is entirely for ourselves or essentially for the good of a whole that includes us first; whether sexual desire is a search for communal familial life or an urge for individualistic self-expression; whether the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit or a locus of infinitely varied individuated identities; whether a desire for jokes is for social unity and cohesion or personal display and glory, etc.

To be sure, our power to name things is conditioned, since we name what is below us, but our very power of doing so is itself below another. This process can only be done by one who receives what he names as brought to him by God, that is, as divine gift.* Nevertheless, our giving of meanings and interpretations is not play-acting, since God himself wills and certifies the result of the action. Whatsoever we call it, that is its name.

Set within its larger context, the naming of what is beneath is part of a larger project God has in response to seeing that it is not good for man to be alone.** The moral life of giving proper meaning and interpretation to the passions is ordered to the higher-order transcendent good of friendship, which the man comes to know first through sexual desire: this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

—

*One can also mention that before the pageant of animals, Adam also receives a vast ambit of freedom and an absolute minimum of prohibitions (namely, one) supported by obviously probative reasons: You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.

**The point generalizes: Any relation we have to a lower good occurs within the context of God calling us to a higher one.

-To what extent can one divide the historical event from what it developed into?

-History differs from journalism or analysis of current events as an attempt to reconstruct an event starting from (one of?) the future(s) of that event. Or is this accidental, meaning that the historian is nothing but someone’s attempt to role-play at being a journalist? The latter seems silly, as if one could make himself ignorant of what happened so as to better tell the story of what happened.

-We can’t help relating to historical events as if they were both seeds and fruit, though the puzzles in this are disquieting. The living organism just continues for its own sake, and the fish is a sort of fish-preservation machine. So how does the organism account differ from one random thing after another account?

-History is always a series of causes, but often not a causal series. The former is non-transitive, the latter is a remote cause bringing about an effect through an intermediary. If A—>B—>C is a series of causes, it’s false that A caused C; if it is a casual series, then A causes C (or tries to) by willingly choosing B.

-We extend the possibility of history being a causal series further when we remember that an agent not only causes an evil he intends, but also evils he should have known would happen. If historical agent A should have known that evil result C could arise from his doing B, then he could be guilty of doing C because he did of B. Even here, however, problems arise. What if C could be more or less probable, and was very improbable when he did B, only to become far more probable afterward?

-One great way to extend the causal sense of history is to see it as a moral story, and to then focus on what agents should have known.

-Say we conclude that Nicea and Chalcedon understand Christ in terms that would be totally surprising and even alien to the New Testament; or that the same might be said about the post Vatican II Church post Tridentine Church, or the Reformation Church and the Christianity it arose out of. I think anyone can admit that there is a problematic underdetermination in historical evidence. Even if we stick with the organic development theory (picture?) it’s hard to see, the the case of such admittedly striking differences, how one distinguishes caterpillar-to-butterfly from a cuckoo’s egg. In the light of Catholicism, this might be exactly what one would need the Church for, though Protestantism sees it as ensured enough by the Holy Spirit working through a devout Bible-reader.

-If anyone wants to defend St. John Henry Newman against David Bentley Hart, please get to it.

Following Thomas, anxiety is sorrow caused by an evil one judges impossible to escape. All paths forward seem to lead to doom and there is no option for joy or even hope. The Gospels frequently just call this fear.

The consistent witness of the gospels is that anxiety is weakness or deficiency in faith. If you’re worried that you will die in a storm with Christ on the boat, or you’re worried that you can’t walk on water if Christ tells you to, or if you’re worried that your dead daughter who Christ is coming to help will, well, stay dead… Christ’s universal response is to relate to you as one of little faith.

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, so since anxiety rules out hope it rules out faith. This element of the gospel message was central to the witness of the two great mystics of the last century, Saints Padre Pio and Faustina Kowalska both counseled that the great impediment to growing in grace, was the worry or lack of trust in merciful action of Jesus, or conversely that the great fount of grace is trust in divine mercy.

In response to an attempt to save him from the passion, Christ tells Peter

Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?

Mt. 26: 52-53

On the one hand, Christ recognizes that divine omnipotence could easily stop any evil from happening. On the other hand, the evil has a role to play within the fulfillment of revealed divine testimony. In John, Christ will be more clear that the role evil plays is not principally a response to human action, but a manifestation of divine glory: neither because of his sin nor the sin of his parents, but that the works of God might be manifest in him. The works of God can include justice, but they will always be fundamentally based on mercy.

Applied to our own sufferings, what scriptures would be fulfilled? Perhaps take up your cross and follow me or, put in its fuller context:

[N]o one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for My sake and for the gospel will fail to receive a hundredfold in the present age—houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and fields, along with persecutions—and in the age to come, eternal life.

Mk. 10: 30

There is on the one hand the sacrifice to enter into the Christian life (the leaving of what one values in his old life) and on the other hand the taking up of evils in the Christian life of enters, but Christ refuses to see it as losing out, whether in this life or the life to come. One must suffer evils that God could easily take away, but whatever evils the believer suffers have no power to make either this life nor the next a loss, and every evil is is part of a story where the scripture might be fulfilled.

One benefit of at-fault divorce is that the public gets reasons for why a marriage failed. There are public records attesting to cruelty or adultery or emotional abuse or whatever, and the records are compiled after careful investigation, from sworn testimony, delivered in a forum allowing for cross-examination. The public gets as close as it can get to a definitive answer to why the divorce happened.

Absent this, we get, by definition, something less than the closest we can get to a definitive answer to why the divorce happened. This leaves us with two options:

1.) Try to figure out what one happened with far less than what one should ideally have. This usually involves getting one half of the story, and hearing even that in a forum that won’t lend itself to critical examination (your buddy drinks too much and breaks down crying while you’re fishing with him, your wife is texting supporting words late at night with a girlfriend about what went wrong in their marriage…) The results of one’s own ad hoc investigations into why a marriage failed can be predicted to be about as successful as his investigation into any other tragedy or crime scene that one might wander into.

2.) Find a reason justifying why you don’t need to know why the divorce happened. What are the options?

(a.) I have no right to know why their marriage failed. That’s their business. This seems beside the point. When choices get made that traumatize me, I don’t seek reasons why they happened in pursuance to some constitutional right to do so. What’s my business or not is almost certainly not a bright yellow line in all cases, but I’d suspect any tragedy that a reasonable man would find traumatizing is something he at least has a prima facie claim to have some explanation for, and there are many possible divorces I would be traumatized to find out about.

(b.) It’s not a big deal. This is the worst option, but it’s hard to see how no-fault divorce avoids it. Divorce is a choice, and “fault” just means “blame”. If there is no one to blame, how can it be bad? It certainly can’t be as serious as choices like identity theft or adopting a child.

I’m not utopian about at-fault divorce. It comes with big costs. If we insist on making divorce a big deal, people will be hurt by our making it a big deal. The systems we set up will be abused and can be expected to cause all sorts of trauma to those who have to relive harms or force puzzling emotional states into pre-cut legal pigeonholes. One will have to describe and perhaps even be challenged in the most intimate areas of life. Some number of people will either stay silent or lie just to get the process over with. Is there anything here unique to court inquiries into divorce, though?

To sum up, at-fault divorce might follow from nothing more than the fact that divorce is a big deal of the sort that a reasonable person can find traumatizing enough to expect it be met by a social institution doing the best it can to figure out what happened. If three people are killed in my neighborhood, or even if three cars get stolen, my insistence that it be investigated isn’t just me being a busybody, or even necessarily me looking for ways to protect myself. The break-up of a marriage is, as the news stations say about other tragedies far less traumatizing, the sort of thing that “demands answers.”

1.) No pregnant mother could will to give birth to a part of the baby without the rest. Through grace and the mystical body, however, Christ is substantially and physically one in some way with all persons. So Mary, in willing to bring forth Jesus as her son, wills to bring forth all humanity as her children. Since God never allows one to vow what they cannot achieve, Mary was provided with all illumination and fulness of maternal love to relate to all persons as mother. Her Assumption and Queenship were the full bloom of this illumination and empowerment, awaiting only the general resurrection to allow for an even fuller maternal love.

2.) If a part of four body is in pain, we work to heal it. True, in some cases it can be cut off, but this only with extreme reluctance, and certainly after all other measures were tried (in many cases, amputation is not even possible.) But through Christ’s mystical body and Mary’s supernaturally extended maternal care, we are one body with all persons. This is why Whoever says he loves God, but hates his brother, is a liar is a conclusion drawn from how can one love God whom he has not seen, if he does not love his brother whom he has seen? The tacit premise is the mystical body, through which all persons are the visible part of the body of Christ, and Christ is the form that constitutes the (unseen) physical and substantial unity between all the visible parts of his body.

3.) Ambrose and Gregory Nazianzen say that the point of the baptism of Christ is to sanctify all water and make it holy. A fortiori, the point of the incarnation. If all water is rendered a fit instrument for sanctification just by touching Christ externally, how much more is human nature empowered by touching God intrinsically through the hypostatic union.

4.) Follow Christ’s reasoning:

(a) believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, because of the works I do. (John, 14: 11)

(b) Whoever believes in me, will do even greater works than I. (John, 14 : 12.)

Herod the tetrarch heard of the reputation of Jesus
and said to his servants, “This man is John the Baptist.
He has been raised from the dead;
that is why mighty powers are at work in him

Matthew relates the claim so matter-of-factly that one can miss its objective insanity, or at least that it arises from a dreamlike relation to reality.

John has been raised from the dead. In other words, his death has been overcome and reversed, and even made a part of a larger drama where everything worked out. John is fine and all is well. Herod lives in a dream to avoid confronting that he murdered the innocent simply out of fear of looking foolish after being tricked by a young girl. He abandons the dignity of reason – to live according to the world as it is – all to avoid confronting what he did in reality.

That is why mighty powers are at work in him. On the one hand, this just plays into the previous narrative of all things worked out for John, but it is also the return of what drove him out of reality. Herod only killed John out of fear of looking foolish or weak (Luke is explicit that Herod feared the crowd, and Mark says he was distressed) but his search for solace in unreality becomes the seed of new fears over magical and incomprehensible powers. The desire to flee from shame into unreality simply reconstructs an imaginary world on the model of the world we abandoned, making the horror repeat ad infinitum.

Worst of all Herod can see in Jesus only the projection of his own shame. One might suspect an element of narcissism here, but all that is necessary is Herod’s extreme moral pain over what he did, since pain has a tendency to make us self-absorbed. Jesus is, in fact, the only one who can take away Herod’s sin and return him to the dignity of reason, but all Herod sees in the Lord is a dream-fulfillment (and vengeance) of the innocent man he murdered. The moral pain of such an act is extraordinary, and enough to make anyone want to live in make-believe.

Note also that Herod is saying all this to his servants, that is, to those who are expected to agree with him and play along. The need to live in unreality demands others to play along, and in the case of one in authority, this ends up turning the power of his rule away from its true end and towards insisting that everyone affirm a dream that, in the end, will end up torturing the king with the same evils that drove him into the dream in the first place.