Don't Use a Broken Instrument

F. X. Maquart, "De la causalité du signe: Réflexions sur la valeur philosophique d'une explication théologique."  Revue Thomiste 32 (1927): 40-60.  (My translation.)

"Divine in its principles, sacred theology remains human in its methods.  It makes use of reasoning just as the exclusively natural sciences do.  It even uses these latter sciences as instruments.  In particular, metaphysics is its normal servant—it has its place marked on each one of theology's pages.  Indeed, theology is addressed to men, and it therefore must speak to them in a human manner.  With the assistance of this instrument, made to its measure, our mind endeavors to penetrate (however little that it can, in a manner that is wholly deficient and analogical) into the inner mystery of dogmas, which will ever evade being fully understood while we live in this world.

Still, it is the case that these theological explanations, however imperfect one may suppose them to be, cannot be just anything whatsoever.  It is necessary that they have a solid base, and only a true philosophy can give them such a solid base.  Given that a theological explanation has its value only by the rational principles upon which it is based, the examination of this value must therefore look fully into the explanation's philosophical supports."  (40)

Reflecting on the Church

Fenton, Joseph C.  The Church of Christ: A Collection of Essays by Monsignor Joseph C. Fenton.  Edited by Christian D. Washburn.  Takoma, WA: Cluny Media, 2016.

Really just a quick note about this.  Cluny media has brought us a very wonderful selection of texts.  I recently became aware of Fr. Fenton while trying to understand the nature of theological science according to the old Dominican way of seeing things.  He was a student of Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange.  Somewhat lionized by the world of traditionalists today, he was indeed conservative.  Indeed, indeed, he even seems to have had some problems against my dear Jacques Maritain on political matters.  Such were things, I guess.  I should like to read the correspondence related to that.

In any case, he was a lucid writer.  It is sad that the quality of theology fell to the lows that it did later on in the American Church.  For whatever technical gains we had, it lacked the faithful soul that one found in a Fenton.  This is a wonderful little volume that I am reading in a kind of intellectual quasi-devotion.

Early Deely

John N. Deely.  "Toward an Ontology of the Intersubjective."  Unpublished work from 1968.

I have had the distinguished pleasure of spending time with Dr. John Deely personally.  Though recent illness has somewhat diminished his capacities, his vigor remains quite impressive.  We combed through some early correspondence of his with Mortimer Adler, for whom he worked for several years at the end of the 1960s and at the beginning of the 1970s. 

This little essay doesn't seem to have been published in whole.  However, it certainly shows all the bearings of Deely's later works.  I think more people should read his early work on Heidegger, which clearly is throughout his later works in semiotics.  He was a man enchanted with esse intentionale.  That is why signs are important, why relation is important, etc.  As Simon once noted (in the Metaphysics of Knowledge and in private correspondence with Maritain) the order of intentional being is massive—and generally despised by Scholastics who, actually, have the only means of giving a full and realistic account of these matters.

But let us extract some wisdom from Deely:

"Without pretending to complete confidence here, it nonetheless seems to me that on this score a meditation on the phenomena of intersubjectivity as such (and including the phenomena relating to the preconscious and unconscious life of the mind) may provide a deciding factor.  As I have written elsewhere, 'The insistence that the basic reality is "primary substance," that whatever exists depends upon primary substance, that basic existence has essential unity that can only be achieved by form, and that the life of the mind modifies accidentally the soul of the knower—all these propositions have worked together to (needlessly) blind traditional philosophy to the decisively intersubjective, formally constitutive features of cultural, social, and personal—in a word, historical—realities which are the preoccupation of contemporary reflections.  What traditional philosophizing has failed to take sufficient account of, and what Heidegger demonstrates the need for considering thematically, is the possibility of understanding the irreducibility of the order of esse intentionale strictly and consistently as the sphere and level wherein man's historical existence is worked out and his "self-identity" in the properly human sense consequently maintains itself.'  [A footnote references his then-unpublished The Tradition via Heidegger.]

It is impossible for me to see how, on Adler's accounting, the subjectivistic, if not the constructivistic standpoint does not again come to the fore.  To consider, as Adler seems to tend to do, that intentional being is something which would make a thing known because it resembles it, rather than by being it, amounts to a throwback to one of those alterations of scholasticism which prepared for and, in a sense, made unavoidable the Cartesian theory of ideas and subsequently the modern idealistic noetic.  At the same time, by suppressing the formal distinction between esse-in and esse-ad, or, if that be too strong, by refusing to treat the latter in what is proper and formal to it, Adler makes it impossible to understand the category of relation—and therewith the essence of intentionality."

I have added the bold emphasis.  I assure the reader that Scholastics like Hervaeus Natalis and Scotus, let alone Aquinas (as Regis shows at length) quite clearly see the essence of intentionality ex parte obiecti (and not the limited perspective often focused on by post-Brentano thinkers, ex parte intelligentis) is nothing other than the relation of measure to measured in the act of cognition.  Of course, much more must be discussed here to accommodate all domains of culture—not merely scientific order (i.e. of objects as speculatively known) but also as regards moral and techncial creations.

The Causality of the Phantasm in Knowing—Or, Yves Simon will Rock Your World

Readers, beware!  This is a dense bit coming up.  However, it is one of the greatest of all passages on this issue written by a Thomist.

"Now, if we conceive of the image [i.e. phantasm] acting on the understanding as moved by the divine mind as principal cause, can we attribute to the image any efficient causal power of its own?  [Yes!] This condition is absolutely essential to the notion of the instrument, and if it is lacking, then properly speaking, the role of the image in the production of the idea is not really an instrumental role.  We call the image an instrument, writes an author who has sounded these problems in their depths, because in dealing with these mysteries, we speak as best as we can.  [Cf. Cajetan, In Ia q.85 a.1; John of St. Thomas, Phil. Nat. IV, q.10 a.2 (Reiser III 306A11); St. Thomas, Quodlibet VIII a.3.]"

"Accordingly, we must conclude that although the instrumental function very closely resembles the function performed by the image with respect to the mind, they are not exactly the same.  Trying to be more positive and precise, we may, first of all, observe that although an instrumental function has to do more with the order of efficient causality, the actual function of the image is more in the order of specification and objective causality.  An instrument, as happens in the examples we have given, may play a specifying role.  But such a role is not of the essence of the instrumental function; in the supremely typical—and supremely pure—case of the instrument taken in hand by the divine Omnipotence, this specifying role may disappear completely.  Thus, rather than its possible specifying role, what defines an instrument properly so-called is an effective quality of its own for which it is used by the principal agent.  The case of the image, however, is different.  Its primary function is to contribute to the specification of the intellect, to put the intellect in touch with its object, and if in doing this the image has to exercise a certain efficiency on the mind, the sole reason for it is to specify the minds own action."

"This primacy of the specifying role goes hand in hand with a reduction of its efficient role, since the image has, with regard to the intellect, no active power distinct from what the mind confers on it.  And so, while for an instrument properly so-called efficiency comes first and specification comes second, for the image it is the other way around.  In matters of knowledge, the main thing is not to produce an effect but to exist with a particular specification; efficient causality is regularly subordinated here [i.e. in intellection] to specification, which it serves as a condition and means.  A more precise understanding, then, of the causal function of the image in the production of the idea could perhaps be worked out with the notion of a formal or objective instrument, in which the principle of instrumentality would be transferred from the order of efficient causality to the order of formal causality and in which efficiency would remain only as a connotation."

"[In a footnote: ] This interpretation is suggested, we think, by John of St. Thomas in Phil. nat. I, q.26 a.2 (Reiser, II, 529A12); IV, q.10 a.22 (Reiser, III, 308A and 312B).  Though these texts offer useful directives for research, they do not contain a satisfactory definition of an 'objective instrument.'  In the form in which John of St. Thomas presents it, this notion retains unresolved obscurities."

Yves R. Simon, An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Knowledge, trans. Vukan Kuick and Richard J. Thompson (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 124-126.

The Dazzling Night Sky of Faith

Faith, as the theologians say, is a supernatural habitus of the soul, all at once certain and obscure.  The reason for its obscurity is that it inclines us to believe truths revealed by God Himself, truths that exceed the natural light [of our intellect] and exceed the scope of the entirety of human understanding. . . .  The brilliance of the sun sometimes dazzles us and blinds us.  Thus is it with the light of faith, which by its intensity infinitely surpasses the light of our own understanding. . . .  It is precisely because faith produces an obscure night in the soul that it illuminates, “Et nox illuminatio me in deliciis meis. [And the night will be my illumination in my delights” (Ps. 139:11, Vulgate 138:11).  The night of faith ought thus to be our guide in the delights of contemplation and of union with God.  The object that it manifests to us here below is the Holy Trinity whom wewill contemplate without veil in eternity.

- St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel

Movement for rest; reasoning for insight

"As the point of arrival is no longer movement but the final result of movement, so knowledge acquired by means of discourse is no longer discourse, but the final result of discourse. And this final result of discourse is the act of the intellect through which, in a final judgment, we take possession of the object. Discourse is only for this act of intellectual apprehension, as moving is for attaining the goal and as seeking is for finding."

- Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism

On the Study Methods of Our Time

Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, NY: Cornelll University Press, 1990).

I recall a conversation with aphilosophical acquaintance.  A man of much wisdom and much social grace, he was aware that a poor, young scholastic such as myself might not know of Vico.  I think I surprised him that I had a sliver—truly, only a molecule—of awareness of VicoI knew of him from a remark in Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity, giving a generally negative remark regarding his outlook on truth, namely the semi-famed expression that that truth is made.

Well, without worrying about questions of relativism or pan-social-construction, I knew the time had come to read some Vico.  Eventually, I'll trudge through his New Science.  For now, I just am trying to get into a mind who has considered matters of truth that are more "practical" (in the Aristotelian sense).

Law / moral thought is primary here.  Important points, given the nature of practical truth.  Of course, much is spotty, as one expects from a work such as this. 

Some very interesting remarks early on (and occasionaly later) regarding the ars topica.  I suspect that a renaissance of a more traditional form of logic would arise from a good treatment of topical matters.  Recall Vincent Edward Smith's remarks about the search for definitions and modern thought.  We spend most of our time searching for middle terms.  A good definition, searched for in the midst of dialectics, is a true work of the mind.

Good counterpoint to the geometric manner of modernity.

One is struck by the fact that Thomism—because of its theological bent—doesn't present a robust and detailed theory of law (no matter what one might say in protest).  Law and moral thought are interwoven in some important ways—creations of and reflections on prudential reasoning.

One senses Vico's own bent of mind: "There is only one 'art' of prudence, and this art is philosophy" (48).  And again: "But the greatest drawback of our educational methods is that we pay an excessive amount of attention to the natural sciences and not enough to ethics" (33).  This is true today; it is true, in another way, of traditional Thomistic bents.  We are a people of the speculative intellect, we Thomists (and for many good reasons).  Yet, I remember a very thoughtful person once saying to me, "Yes, well, I haven't really thought very much about ethics."  It should give one pause!  A careful reflection must be given to the nature of Thomistic "intellectualism" so that it does not, however, end up in this sort of outlook.  The whole order of things is turned upside down in modernity—practical intellect rules.  While ultimately wrong, it does help to reorient one's mind to issues that the Thomist may overlook.  In any case, note the moral focus of Vico.  If he is a constructionist, his legal training bends his mind to the moral order, not the technical.

If understood aright—but only if understood aright—there is truth in the expression: "Therefore, it is an error to apply to the prudent conduct of life the abstract criterion of reasoning that obtains in the domain of science" (35).

What joy!  A shout-out to Cajetan: "Similarly, today the jejune and aridly deductive reasoning in which the Stoics specialized is followed by the moderns, whereas the Aristotelians of the recent past are characterized by the varied and multiform style of their utterance.  An argument presented by Pico della Mirandola, which a learned modern would contract into a single sorites, is rebutted by Cajetan in a string of one hundred syllogisms" (17).

He sees it to be an advantage for law to be at once theoretical and practical.  See the whole latter half, though he says this at p.60.  His vocabulary differs from the peripatetic, but one senses that a resonance regarding the nature of practical-moral knowledge of any kind whatsoever.  Recall what Aristotle states about the kinds of arguments made in moral philosophy.  Counsel is not the same as moral philosophy.  However, it is also true that a speculative practical "science" is a science in a very different manner from a purely speculative one.

See his remarks on imitation, genius, etc. on p.70 and following.  While not the deepest of reflections, it is important to recall that all making and doing is in fact making and doing something new in the world that need not be, were it not for us.  Here, so many Thomists fall short, not knowing the meaning and implications of ars et prudentia.

A good counterpoint to others in modernity: "The Ancients should be read first, since they are of proved reliability and authority.  Let us take them as standards by which to gauge the quality and validity of the moderns"  (74).