Dr. Holmes, Author at New Song

St. Joshua

People often think that Old Testament characters are not saints, or at least, they don’t have feasts in the Church’s calendar. Not so! The Church’s definitive list of feast days, a prayer book called the Martyrology, has lots of names from both the Old and New Testaments. I want to promote these biblical saints through this blog, and I’ve decided to kick it off with an affectionate nod to my older brother, Josh. Happy nameday, Josh!

Normally the Martyrology for a given day is prayed the day before, so here’s the entry for tomorrow:

September 1.

The commemoration of Saint Joshua, the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, who, when Moses had imposed hands on him, was filled with the spirit of wisdom and after Moses’ death miraculously led Israel through the Jordan River into the promised land.

***

May Holy Mary and all the saints intercede to the Lord for us, that we may merit to be helped and saved by him who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

V. Precious in the sight of the Lord

R. Is the death of his holy ones.

V. May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life. And may the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in pace.

R. Amen

V. Go in peace.

R. Thanks be to God.

[To learn about praying this and other Martyrology entries, see this page.]

ST II-II.3

Question 3 is a short piece on the exterior act of faith, “confession.” My comments will also be brief.

In Article 2, St. Thomas indicates that every believer would be obliged to speak his faith in certain circumstances, namely when the honor of God or a neighbor’s need require it. This, he says, is because the act of faith should be directed by the double love of God and neighbor. But he also comments that not everyone is equally obliged: those who are by office teachers of the faith are more often obliged to speak their faith—to “confess.”

This seems to show that, in St. Thomas’s mind, “doing theology” in the classroom or in the lecture hall is in fact an exterior act of faith, a “confession.” And this conclusion fits with his reasoning in Article 1, where he says that confession is an act of faith because speech is intended to express outwardly our interior concepts; the same can be said of teaching or writing theology.

Of course, I’m sure one could do a falsely academic kind of theology in which the teacher divorces what he is saying from his interior convictions, but the trend of these blog posts would be to question whether that activity is “theology” in any but a remote sense of the word.

ST II-II.2.10

In Article 10, St. Thomas explains, to the great relief of the theologian, that learning about the reasons behind our faith does not diminish faith’s merit—not necessarily, that is. But I want to pull out one point from his argument:

Cum enim homo habet promptam voluntatem ad credendum, diligit veritatem creditam, et super ea excogitat et amplectitur si quas rationes ad hoc invenire potest. Et quantum ad hoc ratio humana non excludit meritum fidei, sed est signum maioris meriti, sicut etiam passio consequens in virtutibus moralibus est signum promptioris voluntatis, ut supra dictum est.

Here St. Thomas asserts the experience of every real theologian, namely that when you have a particularly powerful faith, when you desire nothing more than to submit your mind to God’s truth, precisely then do you love the truth you believe and therefore desire to delve into it. This seems to mean that when faith follows the impulse that is precisely its own, then people “do theology”—seeking the reasons for what is believed, the connections between articles, and so on.

ST II-II.2.8

Article 9, on whether the act of faith is meritorious, has a particular consolation for the theologian. St. Thomas says that not only the assent of faith but also the very decision to consider the things of faith can be meritorious: “doing theology” can be a saving deed!

But in this post I want to focus on St. Thomas’s reply to the third objection. He says this:

Ad tertium dicendum quod ille qui credit habet sufficiens inductivum ad credendum, inducitur enim auctoritate divinae doctrinae miraculis confirmatae, et, quod plus est, interiori instinctu Dei invitantis. Unde non leviter credit. Tamen non habet sufficiens inductivum ad sciendum. Et ideo non tollitur ratio meriti.

In other words, the one who believes does so reasonably, because there are legitimate reasons to believe, including miracles, and he is urged on by the “interior instinct of God inviting.” And yet the one who believes does not have the kind of evidence that would allow him to see the truth for himself.

There are two sides to note here. On the one hand, faith brings reason along to the conclusion that is most reasonable, and this is so true that failure to believe is blameworthy. The evidence in favor of faith is so probable that it becomes in fact unreasonable not to believe. To put it another way, faith perfects reason by carrying it further in its own direction than it was capable of going by itself.

On the other hand, the evidence in favor of faith is never more than probable, and so the act of faith is one that closes the gap between mere probability and certitude: what I can see for myself gets me to probability, and then a graced decision of my will leads me to hold these things with absolute certainty. It can be frustrating that faith is never a “light” in the sense of offering deductive vision. But precisely because it requires this decision, the act of faith is something beautiful and good—something meritorious, something of eternal worth.

ST II-II-2-6 and 7: Blog delay

I have delayed blogging for a while now because I did not know how to approach ST II-II.2.7-8. These articles pose a question (“Is explicit faith in the Trinity and the Incarnation necessary for salvation?”) with an obvious answer (“Yes, but there are odd situations to account for) and then get into distinctions (man before the fall, man after the fall, heathen in the remote isles, etc., etc.).

My difficult has been that I disagree with St. Thomas’s position on people before the Incarnation. He follows St. Augustine in saying that the maiores in Old Testament times had explicit knowledge about the Incarnation and the Trinity. He reasons that you can’t understand the Incarnation without understanding the Trinity, and the Old Testament saints must have known about the Incarnation or else they wouldn’t have prefigured Christ’s passion by certain sacrifices. Now that last statement is just false: the spiritual meaning of things in the Old Testament does not depend on any human being intending it; this is in fact how the spiritual meaning of Scripture differs from the literal sense according to St. Thomas’s own account.

Of course, there are other interesting reasons why someone might say that Moses or David had explicit knowledge of the Incarnation or the Trinity, and I have complex reasons for denying it, but it’s a kind of tar baby: once I begin writing on that, I don’t know when I’ll stop. So after turning it over, I decided not to begin.

ST II-II.2.6

In Article 6, St. Thomas asks whether everyone is equally bound to have explicit faith to the same extent. His response reminds me of the opening verses of the Revelation:

The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place; and he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw. Blessed is he who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written therein; for the time is near.

The revelation is handed down through a chain of messengers: God to Jesus to an angel to John to the one reading aloud to the one who hears. (It drives me CRAZY that there are six and not seven members of this chain—but I digress.) St. Thomas takes this as true of revelation in general, that it comes from God through angels to men and through them to other men, as though flowing down from the mountaintop to the plains—St. Thomas’s own metaphor for revelation in his inaugural homily Rigans montes.

This way of seeing revelation makes faith a necessarily ecclesial thing. It can never just be simply private, because if I am one of the minores then I am bound to others by my need of their instruction, while if I am one of the maiores then I am bound to others by a duty of teaching them. And as St. Thomas makes clear in his reply to the third objection, my teaching of others can never just be my own thing, a promulgation of my own ideas, because those I instruct should find in me a reliable witness to the word of God; the stream toward the bottom of the mountain must get its waters from higher up the slopes.

In his parallel treatment in the commentary on the Sentences 3.25.1.3, St. Thomas makes clear that the maiores include priests, prophets, teachers, and preachers. For the purposes of our present project, I want to emphasize that this list includes theologians, whose work is therefore necessarily ecclesial. There is no such thing as a merely private theologian. This seems significant in our quest to define theology.

ST II-II.2.5

Having argued that faith is necessary for salvation, in Article 5 St. Thomas asks whether it is necessary to have explicit faith in something. Could you just be ready and willing to believe? To put the question another way, is it enough to embrace the formal object of faith or do you have to have a material object as well?

Either way you put the question, the answer is obvious. As I observed in an earlier post, you can’t actually separate out the formal and material objects, as though they were actually different objects: they are formal and material principles of one reality. You only hear the Voice of Truth when he says something. And the evidence of Scripture is overwhelming that belief in something concrete is needed.

But St. Thomas uses the occasion of the question to rehearse a distinction he made before. He says that the object of faith per se is that which makes one blessed. He hearkens back to ST II-II.1.1, where he first made the formal/material object distinction: in that Article, he argued that God is not only the formal but also the material object of faith, because all the other things we believe “only fall under faith’s assent insofar as they are ordered to God, namely insofar as certain effects of the divinity aid man in tending toward the enjoyment of God.” And he made the same distinction again in ST II-II.1.6: “Faith principally concerns those things which we hope to see in our heavenly home, in accordance with Hebrews 11:1, ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for”; for this reason, those things which directly order us to eternal life pertain per se to faith, such as the three persons of the omnipotent God, the Incarnation of Christ, and things like this.”

Faith, St. Thomas seem to be saying, really is the life of heaven begun here on earth, the beatific vision in seed. God speaks only to draw us to himself and give himself to us, and anything else is secondary.

With this distinction, St. Thomas lays out a hierarchy in the objects of faith. The very central object of faith is the Trinity, the vision of which will make us blessed in heaven. Closely tied to this central object are those things that directly bring us to it, such as the Incarnation. And then on the periphery are all those things that in some way manifest the central objects of faith, like the fact that Abraham had two sons or that Israel came out of Egypt.

These reflections on faith undergird St. Thomas’s famous claim that theology is a science. In ST I.1.2, he distinguishes between sciences that proceed from principles known by the light of reason, such as geometry, and sciences that proceed from principles that they get from a higher science, like the way the science of perspective proceeds from principles that it gets from geometry. He concludes that theology is a science in the second sense, “because it proceeds from the principles known by the light of a higher science, which is the science of God and of the blessed.” The first principles of theology, which are the revealed mysteries of faith, are a sharing in what the blessed know in heaven. This is the same claim as the one made in ST II-II.1.2, ST II-II.1.6, and ST II-II.2.5, and it has the same implications about a hierarchy of topics.

The life of the soul in time of illness

The thought has weighed on me lately that illness often disrupts consciousness. While consciousness vanishes altogether when we are deeply asleep, we normally return upon wakening to a mental awareness which is both a constant interior receiving of the world (experience) and a near-constant inner conversation about this reception (reflection). If you were to ask, “What is it like to be a human?,” the answer would surely be in terms of this interior life.

In his famous work on flow theory, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi concludes that the key to happiness is a well-structured consciousness. He speaks of tennis players, artists, musicians, and others who are able to “lose themselves” in an activity as having achieved a well-structured consciousness and therefore, on his theory, optimal experience. On the other hand, he says that people who do not have the necessary habits for structuring consciousness become dependent on something outside of them to provide structure: television is his favorite example, as it provides an almost entirely passive way of structuring one’s interior awareness.

Illness does not take consciousness away altogether, but in my experience it fragments awareness. It prevents one from seeing everything at a given moment together, that is, from having an entirely coherent experience. This may not be at all visible to outside observers: the sick person’s exterior actions and words may fit quite nicely into the observer’s very coherent experience of the moment, and they cannot see inside the mind of the other how the many aspects of the moment are hanging together only vaguely, with many loose ends and unconnected threads. When a good friend of mine was ill, she described to me the relief she felt at watching movies and television; in my own experience with illness, I have also felt the urge to watch videos as a way of escaping the tedium of an unstructured consciousness. Illness seems to strike directly at what it means to be human, at what makes for happiness.

But this morning as I continued my reading through Garrigou-Lagrange’s Three Ages of the Interior Life, I was reminded to reflect on the role of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Whereas even the theological virtues and the infused moral virtues are directed by faith, which is an act of the mind, the gifts of the Spirit are meant to prepare us for receiving immediate direction from God: if the virtues are like the oars on our ship, by which we propel ourselves forward to heaven, the gifts are like sails that enable us to receive the divine wind’s power own movement. So for example, faith may patiently work out the meaning of a biblical passage, but only a special inspiration of the Holy Spirit will help us answer a sudden an indiscreet question without either telling a lie or betraying a confidence. The Spirit steps in to pick us up, without our own reflection, and move us suddenly to the right place.

Perhaps illness is a special time for beginning to live more and more according to the gifts of the Spirit. When consciousness is fragmented, even faith and prudence have a hard time directing the ship to the opposite shore, because faith and prudence both require an act of reason. But the Spirit, working through his gifts, can direct us there even if our minds are full of fog.

ST II-II.2.3-4

Articles 3 and 4 of Question 2 address the necessity of faith in general. Just to drive home the connection between these questions on faith and the definition of theology, I want to point out the parallel between what St. Thomas does here and what he does in ST I.1.1 on theology.

In that first article of the entire Summa, St. Thomas asks whether it is necessary to have “Sacred Doctrine,” which he later refers to by the name “theology.” He responds that it is necessary because we are ordered an end above our nature, and so we need more than reason can provide, and even we regard to what reason can know about God it was necessary that such knowledge be known more commonly, more quickly, and without error.

In ST II-II.2.3, St. Thomas argues that faith is necessary because we are ordered to an end above our nature. In ST II-II.2.4, he then argues that faith is necessary even with regard to things knowable by reason because that knowledge needs to be gain more quickly, more commonly, and with more certitude than reason offers. In other words, he gives all the same arguments but in more detail.

So here’s the punchline, according to St. Thomas: the reason we need to have theology is the same reason we need faith itself.

ST II-II.2.2

Article 2 of Question 2 is for the most part not a good point to stop and comment. St. Thomas offers an account of St. Augustine’s division of faith into credere Deo, credere Deum, and credere in Deum. As St. Thomas explains it, the first corresponds to the formal object of faith and the second to the material object of faith; we have looked at this distinction already. The third, he says, corresponds to the fact that in the act of faith the intellect is moved by the will, which urges on to God as a goal. This theme is something I want to save for a later point, because so much comes together around it.

But for the moment, I’ll just note that the distinction between credere Deo and credere Deum should be as much a playground for anyone interested in the Latin case system as it is a torment for anyone trying to translate the Summa into English. In general, the dative case (Deo) in Latin indicates a more spiritual object, as when I throw the ball to you, while the accusative case (Deum) indicates a more material object, as when I throw the ball at you. These line up reasonably well, I think, with the idea of formal and material objects.