Regarding the Sed Contra episode “NFP and the Supposed Contraceptive Mentality,” a listener asks when it is permissible for a married couple to take recourse to infertile periods so as to be able to have sex while avoiding conception. Dr. Matthew Dugandzic replies
Read MoreDo you ever teach material involving St. Thomas Aquinas? Do you have an insightful way of presenting St. Thomas on virtue? the soul? the First Way? Is there an “Introduction to Aquinas” class that you have found actually works?
As we near the end of another semester, looking back, have you finally found a way to convince your students of time-honored Thomistic wisdom?
Thomistica invites you to send an essay on your pedagogical approach to teaching the Angelic Doctor on any subject. Your fellow Thomistic teachers look forward to the benefit and discussion.
THE TRIUMPH OF ST. THOMAS (BENOZZO GOZZOLI)
The submission portal is always open at Thomistica. For any just returning home from the recent ACPA Conference, for instance, consider submitting:
Your satellite session presentation
A written summary of your poster-session presentation
Reflections or reactions to papers given at the conference
For more details, see here: https://thomistica.net/submit.
For anyone who is interested in improving his or her spoken Latin while reading Thomas, the Veterum Sapientia Institute is offering a great opportunity to do so while going through the text of the Summa Contra Gentiles.
The course, “Reading and Discussing the Summa Contra Gentiles in Latin,” will take place on Fridays at 8:00 a.m. from April 16-June 18, and will be taught by Daniel Gallagher (Cornell University). Each class will consist of reading, summarizing, and discussing select passages from Book I of the SCG in Latin, as well as exercising grammar through oral drills. Although no prior experience in spoken Latin is necessary, participants should have a solid grasp of Latin grammar. They should also be relatively comfortable reading Aquinas in the original Latin and be willing to speak Latin during class. Most of the course will be conducted in Latin with segments in English as necessary. More information: https://veterumsapientia.org/courses/tsl225-reading-and-discussing-the-summa-contra-gentiles-in-latin/
March 7 is St. Thomas's liturgical feast according to the pre-1969 General Roman Calendars. St. Thomas died on that date in 1274 at the abbey of Fossanova, where he had stopped after taking ill on his way with Reginald da Piperno to the second Council of Lyons.
January 28 is St. Thomas’s liturgical feast according to the General Roman Calendar of 1969. On that date in 1369 St. Thomas’s relics were translated to the Dominican church in Toulouse.
January 28 is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas in the 1969 General Roman Calendar. Happy feast day!
This would be the perfect day to listen to Ēriks Ešenvalds truly heavenly setting of St. Thomas’s eucharistic hymn O salutaris hostia. Here’s a performance of it by the choir of Trinity College Cambridge conducted by Stephen Layton.
When Descartes’s friend Marin Marsenne read the Discourse on Method he pointed out the similarity between Descartes’s cogito argument and an argument of St. Augustine’s in the City of God, XI, 26. Against the suggestion that he might be mistaken about his own existence, Augustine writes:
Quid si falleris? Si enim fallor, sum. Nam qui non est, utique nec falli potest; ac per hoc sum, si fallor. Quia ergo sum si fallor, quomodo esse me fallor, quando certum est me esse, si fallor? Quia igitur essem qui fallerer, etiamsi fallerer, procul dubio in eo, quod me novi esse, non fallor. Consequens est autem, ut etiam in eo, quod me novi nosse, non fallar.
It has now become standard to note the similarity between Descartes’s argument and Augustine’s.
But no one seems ever to note the similarity between the cogito argument and certain arguments proposed by St. Thomas. Consider De veritate, q. 10, a. 12, for example. In this article Thomas asks whether God’s existence is per se notum. In the seventh objection we read this:
…verius esse habet Deus quam anima humana. Sed anima non potest se cogitare non esse. Ergo multo minus potest cogitare Deum non esse.
Thomas replies in the following way:
[C]ogitari aliquid non esse, potest intelligi dupliciter. Uno modo ut haec duo simul in apprehensione cadant; et sic nihil prohibet quod aliquis cogitet se non esse, sicut cogitat se quandoque non fuisse. Sic autem non potest simul in apprehensione cadere aliquid esse totum et minus parte, quia unum eorum excludit alterum. Alio modo ita quod huic apprehensioni assensus adhibeatur; et sic nullus potest cogitare se non esse cum assensu: in hoc enim quod cogitat aliquid, percipit se esse.
So, no one can assent to the thought that he does not exist because in the very act of thinking he perceives that he exists. (The same pattern of argument can be found in De veritate, q. 10, a. 8, ad 5 and Summa contra gentiles, III, c. 46.) Unlike Descartes, however, Thomas does not make this truth into a first principle. For Thomas, being (ens) is the first principle because, he says, it is the first thing that is “most evident” (notissimum) to us (De veritate, q. 1, a. 1).
(I originally posted this on the AMU Philosophy Department blog last month. I believe in recycling. It’s good for our planet.)
The Josias just posted a short essay of mine on analogy. It is written for an educated but non-specialist audience. However, non-specialists might find it interesting too.
Naturally, there is a significant amount of incommensurability. Consider this bit from the Catechism, §2257:
Every society's judgments and conduct reflect a vision of man and his destiny.
From Amiguum 20. “The grace of divinization is completely unconditioned, because it finds no faculty or capacity of any sort within nature that could receive it, for if it did, it would no longer be grace but the manifestation of a natural activity latent within the potentiality of nature. And thus, again, what takes place would no longer be marvelous if divizination occurred simply in accordance with the receptive capacity of nature. Indeed it would rightly be a work of nature, and not a gift of God, and a person so divinized would be God by nature and would have to be called so in the proper sense. For natural potential in each and every being is nothing other than the unalterable movement of nature toward complete actuality. how, then, divinization could make the divinized person go out of himself, I fail to see, if it was something that lay within the bounds of his nature.”
What a slave to Aristotle.
It has a name and a definition. We’ve been experiencing it for about a decade (or more?) but I never knew what to call it (at least I never hit on anything pithy) or how to define it. Check out NY Times opinion editor Bari Weiss’s informative explanation:
What do Thomists think of safetyism? If you’re an American academic, safetyism isn’t something you can ignore. It has also become a major force in our politics; but that isn’t news to anyone. Are we now beyond liberalism or is this a creature of liberalism?
In February I gave a talk for the Thomistic Institute at Mississippi State University entitled “Is Postmodernism a Problem for Religion?” In the first half of the talk I pack in a discussion of truth, reason, fideism, constructivism, and skepticism. This is meant to set up what comes next. In the second half I discuss Jean-François Lyotard and Thomistic philosophical theology with the aim of showing that the latter is unscathed by Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives in The Postmodern Condition. Inspired by Wittgenstein, Lyotard argues (more or less) that truth is language game dependent (hence, l’incrédulité à l’égard des métarécits). I counter that this can’t be the case for all truths and that it is, in any event, self-refuting in an obvious way. The talk was pitched to a general audience, so I did my best to put things simply and non-technically. You can find an audio recording of it here.
Under the direction of the Sacra Doctrina Project
