Just Thomism

(From a conclusion drawn in Phaedrus and Laws)

Some action is everlasting or for all time, and causes all other action. This is clear from physics.

Every action is for an end.

The end of the everlasting action cannot be some product arising after the action is complete.

If the end of an action is not a product arising after the action is complete, the end is the action itself.

When the end of an action is the action itself, it is vital action.

There is an everlasting vital action that causes all other action.

[I]n everything the pleasant or pleasure is most to be guarded against; for we do not judge it impartially. We ought, then, to feel towards pleasure as the elders of the people felt towards Helen

Nic. Eth. Bk. II c. 9

All of Aristotle’s examples are particularly apt, but this one is especially well-suited to teaching virtue to males. Pleasure is Helen, that is, the young, attractive woman. When the young attractive woman asks you to do something, you drop whatever your plan is and rejoice to meet her needs. When virtue consists in following a rational plan of life, however, anything that makes you rejoice to drop your plan is something to be very careful about.

In discussing this example with girls, they expressed an analogous desire to drop their plans to meet the needs of super-cute babies or needy and agreeable children.

Natures are ordered to operations or proper acts, and acts get perfections from ends.

The end of an act is either some product apart from the action (a house following the act of building) or the action itself (Thought following the act of thinking, life following the act of living.) cf. Nic. Eth. 1:1.

The latter kind of action is perfect in itself, the former by another. So the former action, as action, is more perfect.

So the nature of what acts immanently is higher than the what has no immanence. This is the first sense of Thomas’s axiom:

To the degree that a nature is higher, that which emanates from it (i.e. its proper operation) is more interior.

[Q]uanto aliqua natura est altior, tanto id quod ex ea emanat, magis ei est intimum.

IV SCG, c. 11.

Any discussion of lying either is about the problem of Nazis at the door or is some minutes away from it. As a rule, the problem places us immediately at the door, facing the commandant, having just heard the question. But obviously, for us in the Nazi-less world of abstract moral contemplation, the moral discussion imposes the obligation to prepare for a relevantly similar moment. So how do we prepare?

If we resolve that the lie is the right thing to tell, we are going to have to prepare ourselves for that. Humans have difficulty telling convincing lies, and so we should practice lying in small things to prepare ourselves. To be sure, we’ll lie in times when it assists life or at least causes no great harm to it. In addition, we’ll have to train ourselves to judge whether persons have a right to the truth or not. It’s probably the case that there is a presumptive right to it, but we’ll have to develop our criterion of when it applies and when it doesn’t.

Most significantly, however, we’ll have to order the mind’s orientation to reception and manifestation of truth to some higher goal. If lies are not evil when they preserve life, then manifesting truth is subordinated to preserving life. One has to recognize trickster figures as ideals, and see Odysseus as one paradigm of virtue (as he clearly was for pre-Christians.)

This whole discussion probably reeks of the tendentious, however. Say I resolve all lies are at least venial sins. How do I prepare to be faithful to that? Do I have to practice sacrificing any good to avoiding even venial sin? Do people have to die so that I can avoid any stain on my conscience? It’s in this context that Newman’s repeated remark about sin arises to give offense in a particularly intolerable way: it is better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul… should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth…

Again, however, this also seems to some extent to place us at the door facing the commandant. It’s better to raise the question of what our obligations would be if we found ourselves in such a regime that made lies such an irrefusable temptation. Seen from this angle, it’s better to take the Nazis at the door as a justification, not of lying, but of revolution and martyrdom.

Hell, or

1.) The decisive loss of the beatific vision, a superabundant good. A good analogous to Oprah giving everyone in her audience a car. Even if the audience members needed a car, even if they were confident in Oprah’s goodness to give them one, they could in no way accuse Oprah of being unjust if she didn’t give them one.

2.) The proportionate punishment for any sins one deliberately chose in this life, or should have known to avoid.

I know what I mean when I say that the thermostat senses the temperature in the room, but its easy for me to overlook that thermostats obviously aren’t sense organs. I mean the same thing when I say that my pancreas senses the need to release insulin, but this doesn’t make the pancreas a sense organ or its activity a sixth sense. Sensation in the thermostat or the pancreas is just teleology, which is itself just form, and this in turn can be said of even the inanimate, like in the truism that water seeks its own level.

We have always related to teleology or form as if it were something that cognition adds to activity (it’s an objection Aristotle even brings up in Physics.) But things don’t have ends because they are cognitive, but simply because they are acting at all. The night of most activity is difficult  to keep in mind. Even walking on paving stones I imagine their harness as resistance, or unreflectively think the stone sees itself as part of a sidewalk like a Floridian sees himself as part of Florida.

Objects are known when they are co-principles of operation with a knower.

Every principle of operation is being in act as opposed to being in potency.

So actuality is the principle of knowledge; or everything known is being in act.

Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.

Acts 4 :12

The first biblical use of salvation in this sense is Genesis 49 :18, when almost as an interruption in the prophesy to Dan, Jacob says three words “wait/salvation/Lord” where the last two translate yeshua YHWH. 

To save is to liberate from evil, and so in one sense salvation takes evil as given, in another sense raises the question of where exactly the evil of human life lies. Peter and John in Acts recognize and treat salvation as a fundamental human desire, but they do so within a controversy over who liberates, and thus in the context of a disagreement over where evil lies.

The Apostolic and biblical message uncompromisingly asserts the sole salvation in Christ, not Christ  the liberator who gives heaven but concedes liberation in other domains to other saviors. The temptation is to limit Christ to being savior from evils to come. This seems like enough – hell is certainly at the limit of evils one can be saved from. Still, the limitation sets up some “other name in which we are saved” in the evils that press on us more immediately.

In physics, the subject of inertia is what can move or not move, so the subject of existential inertia is what can be or not be. Any such subject is either actual or potential. It can’t be actual, however, since there is no real subject of non-being; and it can’t be potential, since no potential subject continues in actual existence (cf. potential heat doesn’t continue as actually hot.)

Divine conservation denies any subject of the conserving act, which is precisely why it asserts that in the absence of the conserving act, the conserved being instantaneously disappears. In fact, this is just another way of considering creation ex nihilo.

Aristotle’s mean of virtue is helpfully called golden because looking for the mean is like looking for gold. You need someone to point you in the right direction, but even after you get there you’ll spend a lot of time looking around and gathering up flakes of the stuff. In fact, if you can’t get excited about flakes you probably won’t ever be successful. Occasional nuggets get found, but you expect most days to be where little or no perceptible growth happens. There are days when you’ll have to get by on sheer trust of whoever directed you to the place.