And the attempts of some who discuss the terms on which truth should be accepted, are due to a want of training in logic [lit. ‘a lack of learning of the analytics,’ Gk. ἀπαιδευσίαν τῶν ἀναλυτικῶν]; for they should know these things already when they come to a special study, and not be inquiring into them while they are pursuing it (emphasis added).
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 4.4 (1005b2-5)
Jacques Maritain, Existence and the Existent, trans. Lewis Galantiere and Gerald B. Phelan (New York: Pantheon, 1948), 54-56:
"In the moral problems of which we speak, where we are obliged to reconcile contrasting virtues and duties, choice has to be made not only between good and evil but also, and usually, between the good and the better. It is at such a moment that we enter into the deepest arcana of moral life and that the individuality of the moral act assumes its supreme dimensions. St. Thomas teaches that the standard of the gifts of the Holy Ghost is higher than that of the moral virtues; that of the gift of counsel is higher than that of prudence. The saints always amaze us. Their virtues are freer than those of a merely virtuous man. Now and again, in circumstances outwardly alike, they act quite differently from the way in which a merely virtuous man acts. They are indulgent where he would be severe, severe where he would be indulgent. When a saint deserts her children or exposes them to rebellion in order to enter into religion; when another saint allows her brother to be assassinated at the monastery gate in order that there be no violation of the cloister; when a saint strips himself naked before his bishop out of love of poverty; when another chooses to be a beggar and shocks people by his vermin; when another abandons the duties of his status in society and becomes a galley slave out of love of the captives; when still another allows himself to be unjustly condemned rather than defend himself against a dishonorable accusation—they go beyond the mean. What does that signify? They have their own kind of mean, their own kind of standards. But they are valid only for each one of them. Although their standards are higher than those of reason, it is not because of the object taken in itself that the act measured by their standards is better than an act measured by the mere moral virtues; rather it is so by the inner impetus which the saints receive from the Spirit of God in the depths of their incommunicable subjectivity, which impetus goes beyond the measure of reason to a higher good discerned by them alone, and to which they are called to bear witness. This is why there would be no saintliness in the world if all excess and all that reason judges insensate were removed from the world. This is why we utter something deeper than we realize when we say of such acts that they are admirable but not imitable. They are not generalizable, universalizable. They are good; indeed, they are the best of all moral acts. But they are good only for him who does them. We are here very far from the Kantian universal with its morality defined by the possibliity of making the maxim of an act into a law for all men."
Anscombe, Environment of Child
225
No one could have the concepts corresponding to the words used in teh commandments, if he had not lived in an environment in which he learns the inwardness of all sorts of ways of going on: he must live a specificaly human life with human practices....
Moral action descriptions are not natural event descriptions. But it is part of the natural history of mankind that the human young acquire concepts corresponding to them, or in some cases, at least concepts in which tehy are rooted, as adultery is in that of marriage, or stealing in that of property.
226
In short, a human being of normal intelligence can’t grow up without being able to use a host of descriptions which are either already moral descriptions or the basis for moral descriptions (see above). But he can do so without acquiring the habit of either condemning or exonerating, accusing or exusing himself or anyone else. Usually, he learns to do these things; but he need not. His subjectivity need not be called into play except as that of a being with feelings and objectives.
This division is important. It means that human subjectivity is trained or formed ethically in two different ways. One way is the formation of the will and the education of the emotions. The other is the training in justification, in judgment of good and evil in human action and in what is called “conscience.”
227
The only sort of moral action that can be pretty well guaranteed by training, by upbrining, is such as is counted absolutely obligatory in a society and whose performance or non performance is quite open and visible: like the prayers at fixed times in a strict Muslim town or the supply of small coins for beggars in their shops.
230 The virtues and vices as filling out moral vocabulary; contentless otherwise
From Thomas de Vio Cajetan, De Comparatione auctoritatis papae et concilii, ch. 27, nos. 417-420; cited in Journet, Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 1 (pp. 425-427).
If you tell me that prayer is but a common remedy to be used against all the ills that afflict us, and that for the special evil that troubles us here we need a proper remedy—since every effect comes of a proper cause, not merely form general causes—I reply, in a general way, that the highest causes, although they play the part of common causes in respect to lower effects, play in fact the part of proper causes in respect to higher effects. And that is why prayer, which is to be put among the highest of supernatural second causes, is only a common cause of lower effects; but it is a proper cause and the proper remedy for the highest effects, such as would be—since it is reserved for God—the removal from this world of a still believing but incorrigible Pope….
If then, on the one hand, the means available to human effort, even if superelevated by the authority of the Church, are a force inferior to prayer, appointed as the highest of second causes by God, to whom all creatures, corporeal or spiritual, are subject; and if, on the other hand, a remedy against a bad but still believing Pope is among the highest effects in the Church, it follows that God in His wisdom, must have given the Church for remedy against a bad Pope, not now any of these merely human means which may avail for the rest of the Church, but prayer alone. And can the prayer of the Church, when she perseveringly asks things needful for her salvation, be any less efficacious than merely human means? Is not the fervent prayer of an individual soul who asks such things for himself already efficacious and infallible? (Cf. St. Thomas, SCG, 3.45 and 46.) If then the salvation of the Church demands that such and such a Pope should be removed, then undoubtedly the prayer we have mentioned will remove him. And if it be not necessary, why question the goodness of the Lord who refuses what we wish and gives us what we ought to prefer?...
But alas, it seems that we are come to the days announced by the Son of Man when He asked whether, on His return, He should find faith on the earth. For the promises relating to the highest and most efficacious causes are held to be of no worth. They say that we must depose a bad Pope by human means; that one cannot be content with resort to prayer and to divine providence alone! But why do they say that , if not because they prefer human means to the efficacy of prayer, because the animal man does not perceive the things of God, because they have learnt to trust in man, not in the Lord, and to put their hope in the flesh?
So if a pope hardened by evil ways appears, his subordinates, without leaving their own vices, content themselves with daily murmings against the evil regime; they do not seek to avail themselves, save perhaps in a dream and without faith, of the remedy of prayer; so that what Scripture predicts comes about by their fault, namely that it is due to the sins of the people that a hypocrite reigns over them, holy in respect of his office, but a devil at heart…
We have become blind to the point of refusing to pray as we ought, while yet desiring the fruit of prayer; of refusing to sow, while still wanting to reap. Let us not call ourselves Christians any longer! Or if we do, let us turn to Christ; and the Pope, were he frantic, furious, tyrannical, a render, dilapidator and corrupter of the Church, would be overcome. But if we do not know how to overcome ourselves, what right have we to complain of being unable to break through the evils that surround us by prayers that not only fail to rise through our roofs, but do not even mount as far as our heads? And the worst of all is this: God of old upbraided His people for honoring Him with their lips while their hearts were far from Him; but in the days of the revelation of Grace, God is not even honored with lips, for nothing is less intelligible than the recitation of the divine office, nothing said more quickly than the Mass; the time given to these seems long, too long, but time enough is found for play, business, and worldly pleasures, and for loitering over them endlessly.
"The great things that God works within his creatures naturally happen in silence, in a certain divine movement that suppresses all speech. For what could we say, and what could Mary have said that could have equalled what she felt? Thus God's secret is kept under the seal unless he himself opens the lips and makes the words come forth. Human advantages are nothing if they remain unknown and if the world does not lay hold of them. Those God makes, however, have in themselves an inestimable worth that one wants to share with God alone. Men, how vain you are, and how vain is the ostentation that moves you to make a display of your feeble accomplishments for the eyes of men just as vain as you! 'O men, how long will you love vain words and seek after lies?' (Ps. 4:2). All the goods that one vaunts are nothing in themselves: opinion alone gives them their value. There are no true goods but the ones that can be tasted in silence with God. 'Be still and know that I am God' (Ps. 46:10). 'O taste and see that the Lord is good' (Ps. 34:8). Love solitude and silence. Draw back from the noisy conversation of the world. Stay closed, O my mouth, and do not deafen my heart, for it is listening to God. Stop interrupting and troubling my sweet attentiveness. Vacate et videte, says the psalmist: "live in holy leisure and see." And again: 'Taste and see that the Lord is good.' Allow this celestial taste to speak in you. Gustate et videte, quoniam suavis est Dominus."
-- Jacques Bénigne Bossuet
"To refuse to take part in committing an injustice is not only a moral duty; it is also a basic human right." - St. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, n.74
"We have the strict obligation of obeying God, whose supreme rights found our first duties and every moral obligation properly speaking. What we demand above all else is not freedom for its own sake, as liberalism does; it is the inalienable right to do our duty, or, the right of truth, above all the ultimate truth to be known and loved. We can freely renounce certain rights of ours but not that of doing our duty…
One cannot better affirm the dignity of the human person whose superior duties are founded upon the imprescriptible rights of God, far above all the legitimate demands of the temporal common good that is end of the State. By this, it is evident that the State is subordinated to the intellectual, moral, and spiritual perfection of the human person, whose destiny immensely exceeds the end and temporal duration of political society."
- Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange
"The church, which has been enabled evangelically and sacramentally to see into the heart of marriage—to recognize its covenantal as well as its contractual features, its eschatological as well as its civil consequences—has an obligation to nurture and protect marriage, not only for itself but for its neighbours. It has an obligation to defend the family and civil society from the threat of absorption into the state. It cannot do this, however, if it brackets the problem of homosexuality or fails to address the gnostic temptation inherent in the same-sex movement. Still less can it do so if it insists on bracketing its own problem: the complicity of its members in the culture of sterile sex. For it is only in that culture that same-sex marriage is thinkable."
- Douglas Farrow, "Same-Sex Marriage and the Sublation of Civil Society" in Desiring a Better Country
"Discipline, moderation, chastity, do not in themselves constitute the perfection of man. By preserving and defending order in man himself, temperantia creates the indispensable prerequisite for both the realization of actual god and the actual movement of man toward his goal. Without it, the stream of the innermost human will-to-be would overflow destructively beyond all bounds; it would lose its direction and never reach the sea of perfection. Yet temperantia is not the stream. But it is the shore, the banks, from whose solidity the stream receives the gift of straight unhindered course, of force, descent, and velocity."
- Josef Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 175
"Those who try to make room for sex as mere casual enjoyment pay the penalty: they become shallow."
- Anscombe, "Contraception and Chastity"
Also read on regarding the supra-utilitarian aspects of chastity.
"For we don’t invent marriage, as we may invent the terms of an association or club, any more than we invent human language. It is part of the creation of humanity and if we’re lucky we find it available to us and can enter into it. If we are very unlucky we may live in a society that has wrecked or deformed this human thing."
- Anscombe, "Contraception and Chastity"
