Woody Allen vs. Garrigou

See Bill Vallicella's recent post at Maverick Philosopher.

Thomism and the death penalty

Edward Feser and Joseph Bessette's new book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of the Death Penalty and the Pope's recent remarks on the death penalty have revived the Catholic debate on the topic.

The death penalty has been discussed in several posts here at Thomistica over the years: here, here, here, here, and here. Most of these posts were authored by Steve Long.

On Friday Catholic World Report published an essay of mine entitled "Is opposition to the death penalty Thomistic?" In it I compare Pope Francis's remarks with St. Thomas's teaching. I think the Holy Father's defense of Amoris laetitia as Thomistic encourages this sort of exercise. I also assume that my discussion may be of interest to some of our readers.

A Franciscan and Pope Francis

Last week Thomas Weinandy, OFM, Cap., made public a letter that he had written Pope Francis at the end of July. In the letter Weinandy expresses his concerns over various aspects of Francis’s pontificate. Here’s how Weinandy sums up his concerns toward the beginning of the letter:

Your Holiness, a chronic confusion seems to mark your pontificate.  The light of faith, hope, and love is not absent, but too often it is obscured by the ambiguity of your words and actions.  This fosters within the faithful a growing unease.  It compromises their capacity for love, joy and peace.

Weinandy then goes on to offer some examples of the words and actions of Francis that have troubled him. You can find the complete letter here together with Weinandy’s explanation of his motivations.

Weinandy has written a number of books on theological topics. Does God Suffer? and Does God Change? The Word's Becoming in the Incarnation, both published in 2000, are perhaps his best known. He has taught at a number of Catholic academic institutions in the US and from 1991 to 2005 taught at the University of Oxford. From 2005 to 2013 he was the Executive Director of the Secretariat for Doctrine and Pastoral Practices of the USCCB. In 2013 Pope Francis awarded him the Pro Pontifice et Ecclesiae medal. Weinandy is also a member of the International Theological Commission.

After he made his letter to the Pope public, the USCCB asked Weinandy to resign from his position as a consultant to the Committee on Doctrine. (The USCCB statements on the matter are here and here.) I think that this was an unfortunate move. Weinandy is obviously an accomplished theologian and a true vir ecclesiasticus. I hope that the bishops will reconsider.

Dignitatis humanae: contradiction or continuity?

I've discussed Thomistic and Catholic political thought on Thomistica several times in the past. The posts I can remember are here, here, here, and here.

For our readers who are interested in such discussions, in this post I offer not my own reflections again but information about a discussion at another website. The Regensburg Forum is hosting an exchange between Thomas Pink and Steven Wedgeworth on the relationship between the Vatican II declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatis humanae, and past Church teaching. Here's the first paragraph of the editors' introduction to the exchange:

The editors of The Regensburg Forum are pleased to host an exchange between Dr. Thomas Pink and Pastor Steven Wedgeworth on the coherence and historical context of the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings on the state’s obligations to facilitate true religion, specifically as expressed in the most comprehensive and authoritative of its modern documents, Dignitatis Humanae. Wedgeworth recently wrote a series for the online forum The Calvinist International, in which he argued that Dignitatis Humanae, rather than crystallizing the Catholic Church’s teaching on religious freedom and coercion, exacerbates the problem of Roman interpretation and ultimately reveals a contradiction at the heart of Roman claims to unbroken doctrinal development. Dignitatis Humanae, on Wedgeworth’s account, contradicts historic Roman teaching on Church and state. Consequently, we ought not view the current conflicts between so-called progressive and conservative factions under Francis’ papacy as aberrant, but rather as another reflex caused by the inherent contradiction in Roman teaching on conscience, coercion, Church, and state.

I think this will prove to be an interesting exchange.

The Regensburg Forum went online a year ago. If you haven't heard of it, here's an excerpt from their "about" page:

The Regensburg Forum is a public online forum that exists to promote informed and scholarly dialogue between the Roman Catholic and Reformed Protestant traditions. Special attention is paid to the importance of the Augustinian legacy of Western Christianity, which both traditions inherit and develop. Recognizing that the proliferation of early and late medieval theology and the original protest of the Reformers relied heavily upon creative deployments of Augustinian thought in philosophy and theology, we take the Augustinian tradition to be a primary point of departure for study and research. We are convinced that careful research in an Augustinian key will help to bring Roman Catholic scholarship closer to the orthodox and scholastic heart of Reformed thought, while also allowing the discontinuities of Reformation thought with Roman Catholicism to be studied in light of remarkable and overarching continuities.

I encourage you to pay The Regensburg Forum a visit!

Descartes vs. Aquinas (and other scholastics) on the senses, the imagination, God, and the soul

In Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 75, a. 1, Aquinas writes:

[A]d inquirendum de natura animae, oportet praesupponere quod anima dicitur esse primum principium vitae in his quae apud nos vivunt animata enim viventia dicimus, res vero inanimatas vita carentes. Vita autem maxime manifestatur duplici opere, scilicet cognitionis et motus. Horum autem principium antiqui philosophi, imaginationem transcendere non valentes, aliquod corpus ponebant; sola corpora res esse dicentes, et quod non est corpus, nihil esse. Et secundum hoc, animam aliquod corpus esse dicebant.

In Discours de la méthode, AT, 37, Descartes writes:

Mais ce qui fait qu'il y en a plusieurs qui se persuadent qu'il y a de la difficulté à le connaître [i.e., God], et même aussi à connaître ce que c'est que leur âme, c'est qu'ils n'élèvent jamais leur esprit au delà des choses sensibles, et qu'ils sont tellement accoutumés à ne rien considérer qu'en l'imaginant, qui est une façon de penser particulière pour les choses matérielles, que tout ce qui n’est pas imaginable leur semble n'être pas intelligible.

But then, after seeming to express the same insight as Aquinas, Descartes goes on to suggest that people who accept the dictum according to which “n'y a rien dans l'entendement qui n'ait premièrement été dans le sens” (“nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu”) have the same problem. Indeed, the dictum itself is an indicator of that problem!

Ce qui est assez manifeste de ce que même les philosophes tiennent pour maxime, dans les écoles, qu'il n'y a rien dans l'entendement qui n'ait premièrement été dans le sens, où toutefois il est certain que les idées de Dieu et de l'âme n'ont jamais été. Et il me semble que ceux qui veulent user de leur imagination, pour les comprendre, font tout de même que si, pour ouïr les sons, ou sentir les odeurs, ils se voulaient servir de leurs yeux : sinon qu'il y a encore cette différence, que le sens de la vue ne nous assure pas moins de la vérité de ses objets, que font ceux de l'odorat ou de l'ouïe; au lieu que ni notre imagination ni nos sens ne nous sauraient jamais assurer d'aucune chose, si notre entendement n'y intervient.

Descartes is either unaware of the scholastic explanation of the dictum (cf. e.g., De veritate, q. 2, a. 3, ad 19) or doesn’t accept it. My hunch is that it’s the latter. But not being an expert on Descartes, I would be glad for help on this.

Happy feast of St. Thomas Aquinas again!

January 28 is Aquinas’s liturgical feast according to the calendar of Paul VI. On that date in 1369 Aquinas’s relics were translated to the Dominican church in Toulouse.

March 7 is Aquinas's liturgical feast according to the pre-Pauline calendar of the Roman Rite. Aquinas died on that date in 1274 at the abbey of Fossanova, where he had stopped after taking ill on his way with Reginald of Piperno to the second Council of Lyons.

Both calendars are still in force in the Roman Rite.

Happy feast of St. Thomas Aquinas!

Ditto!

Aquinas's use of the lex parsimoniae

We all know that Ockham's razor wasn't really Ockham's razor. He got the shaving device second hand from his predecessors, among them, Aquinas.

Below are some instances of Aquinas's use of it, which I have shamelessly lifted from Schütz's Lexikon. Schütz lists them in the entry for fieri (and you'll see why). I came across them last week and I thought it would be handy to gather them here for anyone who is interested in the topic.

Three things to note: (1) Of the instances from the Contra gentiles and the Summa theologiae below (which are all the instances save one), almost all are found in objections. The only one that isn't from an objection is the one from CG, I, 42 (the first one). (2) The instance from the commentary on the Physics (the last one) is used in explicating Aristotle's argument. (3) I made minor changes to the wording and punctuation of the second and last ones since I noticed discrepancies with the Leonine text.

Don't cut yourself!

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quod sufficienter fit uno posito, melius est per unum fieri, quam per multa (CG, I, 42)  

quod potest sufficienter fieri per unum, superfluum est si per multa fiat (CG, III, 70)

quod potest compleri per pauciora principia, non fit per plura (ST, I, a. 2, arg. 2)

quod potest sufficienter fieri per unum, superfluum est, quod fiat per multa (ST, I, q. 108, a. 3, arg. 2)

quod sufficienter potest fieri per unum, non oportet, quod per aliquid aliud inducatur (ST, II-II, q. 22, q. 1, arg. 1)

quod potest fieri per unum, superfluum est plura ponere (ST, II-II, q. 45, a. 2, arg. 3)

quod potest fieri per unum, superflue fit per multos (ST, III, q. 82, a. 2, arg. 2)

Quod potest fieri per pauciora, superfluum est si fiat per plura (In Physic., I, l. 11, n. 14)

Save the unicorn!

This has almost nothing to do with Aquinas. But I invite you to consider my defense of the unicorn and examine your conscience. Perhaps unicorns would be an appropriate topic for a synod of bishops in Rome. I wonder what Walter Kasper thinks about them.

How bad was scholastic manualism?

Perhaps not all that bad. See my brief post on this at the AMU philosophy department blog.

Dare I say that Aquinas was the first "textbook Thomist"?

Thomism and travel bans

Occasionally here at Thomistica we discuss current events. I'm not going to do that in this post but shall rather direct you to where I've just done that elsewhere. I have an essay at Public Discourse today in which I try to apply Aquinas's moral theory to GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump's proposal to ban Muslim travel to the US.

The irreformability of Catholic teaching on the death penalty

Ed Feser and Joseph Bessette have a book forthcoming from Ignatius Press entitled By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of the Death Penalty. In an essay at Catholic World Report, they summarize some of the book's key points. The essay is in two parts. The second part will be published later this week. I'll update this post with a link to the second part when it comes out.

Here's how Feser and Bessette formulate one of the claims they defend:

[I]t is the irreformable teaching of the Church that capital punishment can in principle be legitimate, not merely to ensure the physical safety of others when an offender poses an immediate danger (a case where even John Paul II was willing to allow for the death penalty), but even for purposes such as securing retributive justice and deterring serious crime.

To this Feser and Bessette add:

What is open to debate is merely whether recourse to the death penalty is in practice the best option given particular historical and cultural circumstances. That is a “prudential” matter about which popes have no special expertise.

If you are interested in this topic, I recommend Feser and Bessette's essay. I'm sure their forthcoming book will be quite good too.

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UPDATE: Here's the link to the second part of Feser and Bessette's essay.