Summary

In this article, Aquinas argues that man should not restrict his intellectual inquiry to philosophy alone.

He offers these objections to his position:

1. Man should not try to know anything beyond reason.  Philosophy’s domain includes everything subject to reason.  Therefore man should restrict his inquiry to philosophy.
2. Philosophy’s domain is everything that is true, including God himself.  Therefore theology is already a part of philosophy and any further knowledge is unnecessary.

He begins his reply with 2 Tim 3:16: “All scripture, inspired of God, is profitable to teach, to reprove, to correct, to instruct in justice.”  Philosophy comes from human reason, not from God; therefore there is useful knowledge (in Scripture) which is not from philosophy.

Further, Aquinas argues, knowledge from outside philosophy is necessary for man’s salvation.  First, man’s end is God, who is higher than human reason; therefore humans need to know truths about God which human reason cannot discover.  Second, even for truths about God which human reason could discover, special revelation is necessary to prevent those truths from being known only by a few and with many errors.  Such a state of affairs would be inadmissible because the knowledge of God is essential for man’s salvation.

Aquinas replies to the objections thus:

1. Although it is true that man should not try to know anything beyond reason, God may still reveal things beyond reason. Whatever God reveals must be accepted by faith.  What God reveals is the subject matter of “sacred science.”
2. Different disciplines are distinguished not by the conclusions they reach but by their manner of reaching them.  Philosophy may teach us truths about God by using human reason, but theology may teach us those same truths (and more) through revelation.

Analysis

This introductory section of the First Part (which contains only one Question, “The Nature and Extent of Sacred Doctrine”) provides a rationale for the entire work.  This particular article seems to be a formality: none of his original readers would likely disagree that theology is a separate discipline from philosophy and legitimate in its own right.

As for the body of his argument, I question the assumption that theology is necessary even for the truths about God which natural reasons could discover.  Paul’s argument in Romans 1 seems to imply that humans are still held responsible for general revelation regardless of their exposure to special revelation.  I agree, however, that knowledge of God gained by human reason can be the subject of theology insofar as those truths are also known through special revelation.

His replies to the objections are sound.  Reading this article in the 21st century, however, it’s hard not to think of all the additional objections which most people would raise at the very beginning — “It’s irrational to believe propositions which can’t be proved by reason,” for example.

The only way  properly to assimilate a philosophical text is by writing a summary and a critique of it.  The summary is an attempt to understand exactly what the author’s thesis or theses are, and (just as important) what his arguments are.  Having done that, one advances to critical evaluation, the attempt to sort out  which theses and arguments you consider true/valid and which false/invalid.  Blogging can be very useful for this purpose and can lead to worthwhile exchanges and the refinement and testing of one’s ideas.

I’ve decided to adopt this approach for nothing less than the Summa Theologica.  My plan is to blog through the work sequentially, article by article.  Don’t worry, I don’t expect to finish.  I also don’t know how long I’ll last.  And I’m sure I’ll frequently expose my ignorance along the way.  But no matter how far I get, it’ll be a profitable exercise. This semester, I’ve spent most of my time studying questions that, although fascinating, simply don’t  have the same significance that philosophical and theological questions do.  Having a thorough knowledge of English phonology or being able to perfectly articulate the failings of pure audiolingualism is well and good, but such things are inherently myopic compared to questions like, “Is there a God?” or “How has he revealed himself to his creatures, if at all?”  The latter type, unlike the former, is essential to the intellectual life; and we are intellectual beings before we are language-teaching beings (as it were).

Unfortunately, I cannot read Aquinas’s Latin with any profit, so I’ll have to stick to a translation.

A quick introduction to the structure of the work: the Summa is divided into Parts (highest level), Questions, and Articles (lowest level).  Each article consists of a title (in the form of a question), one or more objections to Aquinas’s position, Aquinas’s statement of his position, and then Aquinas’s replies to the objections raised at the beginning of the article.

The Obama administration made the right call in August when it issued new standards requiring all insurers to cover contraceptives without a deductible or a co-payment, starting next year.

Fair enough.  At least we know where this is headed.

The new rules already exempt churches and other religious institutions from having to provide contraceptive coverage for their employees.

So what more could they ask for, right?

Nevertheless, church leaders are calling for an expansive exemption for all employees of Catholic hospitals, charitable organizations, elementary and secondary schools, and colleges and universities. That would, in effect, deny coverage for contraceptives for millions of women who may not be Catholic and may disagree with the church’s stance on birth control.

But those women chose to work for a Catholic institution which makes no secret of its opposition to artificial contraceptives.  To suddenly refuse a religious institution to operate according to its beliefs is a blatant violation of religious freedom.

Some opponents of contraceptives are pushing to allow all employers to opt out of providing contraceptives coverage if it offends their conscience.

How dare they!  Since when should “conscience” be an important objection to anything?

At a House subcommittee hearing last week,

 Jon O’Brien, the president of Catholics for Choice, testified that 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women in the United States have used a form of contraception banned by the Vatican.

So even Catholics don’t obey the bastion of medieval backwardness known as the Vatican!  Why should anyone else listen, then?

He criticized the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for doing the very thing that it wrongly accuses the administration of doing: trying to impede “the religious freedom of millions of Americans” by “taking reproductive health care options away from everybody.”

[Insert cheers and applause here.]  Yeah, that’ll show ‘em!

Sarcasm aside, the implication here is an insidious one.  It is disingenuous to suggest, as O’Brien does, that this is merely a question of the Catholic Church violating women’s religious freedom.  The logical consequence of his position is that a woman’s right to affordable contraception should trump a religious organization’s right to act according to its beliefs.  And this, in turn, is a logical consequence of the idea that one’s religion should never have any measurable effect on anyone else’s life.  Believe whatever you wish to believe — in Jesus, in Allah, or in the Flying Spaghetti Monster — but never let it stray into the public square.  If people are not free to act according to the ethical implications of their beliefs, then religious freedom has become devoid of meaning.  So, in reality, the Bishops’ Conference is absolutely correct that the responsibility for violating religious freedom lies with the administration.

Finally,

The administration’s policy on birth control coverage follows the recommendation of the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine, which studied the medical facts, including high rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion largely caused by lack of access to birth control. President Obama should stand by the policy.

 So.  If the above careful and thorough argumentation were insufficient to convince you, here’s some science.  But this merely sidesteps the issue: the Catholic objection to contraceptives is not practical but moral.  Hence the whole “religious freedom” thing.

If the New York Times is genuinely concerned about the availability of contraceptives, then it should advocate more funding for those organizations which do provide them.  That would be a productive contribution to the debate.  This editorial, however, oversimplifies the issue, implicitly misrepresents the Catholic position, and thereby short-circuits useful discussion.

The intended response to this picture is a laugh and “Haha, those corrupt and theologically incorrect Catholics with their unbiblical indulgences and Mariolatry, Luther sure showed them!”  Or something like that.  And that response is probably what it most often gets — which has the unfortunate result of confirming Protestants in their ignorance of Catholicism and of alienating Catholics who happen to see this dumbed-down polemical icon shared by their Protestant friends.  Now, I realize that the picture is not intended to replace serious evangelical-Catholic dialogue, but on the other hand, serious evangelical-Catholic dialogue is not something that its creator was ever interested in.

“But come on, it’s just supposed to be funny!”  Of course it was.  That does not mean that it might not be one example of a problematic cultural trend.  In politics and in popular culture (sorry, not to repeat myself), we tend to treat big ideas with witty slogans that often do nothing to help opposite sides understand each other.  Witness the presidential debates: the candidates “debate” hugely important ideas which will affect ourselves, our children, and their children by using soundbites designed to draw cheers from their supporters and jeers from their opponents.  If you want a careful articulation of a candidate’s position on something important, like, oh, I don’t know, immigration policy or abortion, television is not the place to find it.  This is a far cry from the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, when Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated for hours on end over multiple days — and that was just for a Senate race.  Obviously our national attention span has diminished somewhat.

But my point is not to advocate a return to the glory days of the 1800s, where candidates actually had enough time to say why they believed what they did and weren’t shouted down by detractors and pundits.  My point is that we cannot reduce big ideas to soundbites, much less soundbites in lolspeak.  It doesn’t matter which side of the Tiber you’re on, or even if you’re across the Mediterranean in Constantinople– Luther’s break with the Catholic Church was a tragic thing and resulted in the destruction of Western Christendom’s unity.  Unity was important to Jesus.  He talks a lot about it in the Bible: “Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one” (Jn 17.11).  By any standard, Protestantism is not “one”; and Protestantism and Catholicism are certainly not “one.”  This is a state of affairs which is directly contrary to the will of God as expressed in Scripture.  And we Protestants address it by posting pictures of Luther saying “O hai guise, I fixed ur doctrine”?

Reformation Day is not something that Protestants should exult over.  It is a tragic reminder that Christ’s prayer remains yet unanswered — Christianity is not one.  Reformation Day should be the occasion of prayers for unity — even if the best that Protestants can muster is that Catholics would see the error of their ways.

I am not directing my ire solely at this picture.  It is a symptom of a larger problem that pervades our culture.  But do remember: Luther is not a lolcat, folks.  And making him talk like one only cheapens the great, ambiguous, and misunderstood project that was the Protestant Reformation.

Addendum:  Saying that Luther “fixed” the Catholic Church’s doctrine with the 95 theses is hardly accurate, since those theses contain many things that Protestants today would have significant problems with.  See the first link below.

Further reference:

From a Catholic: Three Reformation Day Ironies
From a Protestant: Letting Some of the Air Out of the Reformation Day Balloon

HT: BikeBubba.

This advice is quite similar to Christophe Rico’s method, which I’ve written about before.

The book frames evangelicals becoming Roman Catholic as a kind of “paradigm shift” involving the buildup of anomalies about evangelicalism, a crisis of the evangelical paradigm, a paradigm revolution, and the consolidation of the new Catholic paradigm.

The language obviously comes from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I’ve mentioned before: anomalies, crisis, revolution, and paradigm.  The problem with applying Kuhn’s language to ecclesiology is that Kuhn’s philosophy of science is largely, if not completely, relativistic.  For Kuhn, paradigms shift not because the new paradigm is more true than its predecessor, but because problems with the old paradigm cause it to be thrown out when a passable replacement comes along.  Scientific theories get results, but they do not necessarily correspond to any underlying reality.  (Kuhn tried to escape the utter relativism which his views lead to, but without success.)

This instrumentalist view of science does not play nicely with ecclesiology.  All conservative Catholic apologetics I’ve ever heard presuppose realism — the ecclesiology they describe is purportedly superior to Protestant ecclesiology because it corresponds to the reality set forth in Scripture and which actually exists in the external world.  No Catholic apologist, including Christian Smith (I presume), would concede that Catholic ecclesiology and Protestant ecclesiology are paradigms in Kuhn’s sense, neither one better or worse than the other, neither one true or false.  No, both Catholic and Protestant apologists argue that their view is the correct one, the one that corresponds to reality.

It’s common enough for people in every disciplne to bandy about Kuhn’s terminology.  But the description in the publisher’s blurb is precise enough that it implies a more careful use of Kuhn than is often the case.  I suppose I’ll just have to buy the book.

For Greek, the beginning class runs from 9 to 1 and the intermediate class from 11 to 1.  Rico teaches the beginning class from 9 to 11 and then leaves to teach the intermediate class, when his two assistants take over and teach the beginners from 11 to 1.  Though I was placed in the intermediate class, I and several others in the same situation attend the beginning class from 9 to 11 and then the intermediate class from 11 to 1.  Four hours of input per day is much better for language learning than only 2.  Even with sixteen total hours so far, I’m just barely beginning to express myself in Greek.  My listening ability, of course, is improving much more quickly.

Rico’s instruction has been mostly what I expected — a communicative approach, including total physical response and explicit grammar instruction.  Everything is in Greek, partly to maximize language acquisition and partly out of necessity, since not everyone shares a common language.  One thing I did not expect: a dearth of opportunities for production.  I assume he’s doing it this way because we have very little productive skill — but the only way to correct that is to make us produce!  I hope more productive exercises will come later.

That notwithstanding, the course is excellent.  I wish it were two, three, or six months long instead of one — but then, of course, I couldn’t take it and almost everyone else probably couldn’t either.

On novels:

“The writer of stories must please, or he will be nothing. And he must teach whether he wish to teach or no.”

“No novel is anything, for the purposes either of comedy or tragedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the characters whose names he finds upon the pages.”

“I have always desired to ‘hew out some lump of the earth,’ and to make men and women walk upon it just as they do walk here among us,—with not more of excellence, nor with exaggerated baseness,—so that my readers might recognise human beings like to themselves, and not feel themselves to be carried away among gods or demons. If I could do this, then I thought I might succeed in impregnating the mind of the novel-reader with a feeling that honesty is the best policy; that truth prevails while falsehood fails; that a girl will be loved as she is pure; and sweet, and unselfish; that a man will be honoured as he is true, and honest, and brave of heart; that things meanly done are ugly and odious, and things nobly done beautiful and gracious.”

A very British (and European) view:

“It seems to me that intimate friendship admits of no standing but that of equality. I cannot be the Sovereign’s friend, nor probably the friend of many very much beneath the Sovereign, because such equality is impossible.”

On composition:

“Any writer who has read even a little will know what is meant by the word intelligible. It is not sufficient that there be a meaning that may be hammered out of the sentence, but that the language should be so pellucid that the meaning should be rendered without an effort of the reader;—and not only some proposition of meaning, but the very sense, no more and no less, which the writer has intended to put into his words. [. . .] The language used should be as ready and as efficient a conductor of the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader as is the electric spark which passes from one battery to another battery.

On writing dialogue:

“The ordinary talk of ordinary people is carried on in short, sharp, expressive sentences, which very frequently are never completed,—the language of which even among educated people is often incorrect. The novel-writer in constructing his dialogue must so steer between absolute accuracy of language—which would give to his conversation an air of pedantry, and the slovenly inaccuracy of ordinary talkers, which if closely followed would offend by an appearance of grimace—as to produce upon the ear of his readers a sense of reality.”

On proofreading:

“It has been my practice to read everything four times at least—thrice in manuscript and once in print. Very much of my work I have read twice in print. In spite of this I know that inaccuracies have crept through,—not single spies, but in battalions. From this I gather that the supervision has been insufficient, not that the work itself has been done too fast. I am quite sure that those passages which have been written with the greatest stress of labour, and consequently with the greatest haste, have been the most effective and by no means the most inaccurate.”