Dr. Holmes, Author at New Song

What Is Theology – ST II-II.1, Part 1

In St. Thomas’s treatment of faith in the Secunda secundae of the Summa theologiae, the first question he takes up is “Whether the object of faith is the first truth.” Before I walk through the text of the article, I want to point out that this article is almost point by point parallel to Question 1 Article 3 of the Prima pars, which asks “whether Sacred Doctrine is one science.” Article 7 of that same question, “Whether God is the subject of Sacred Doctrine,” follows the exact same set of ideas. These parallels seem to support my initial intuition that a careful account of faith will lead directly to a careful account of theology:

ST II-II.1.1 – On the object of faith	ST I.1.3 – On the unity of Sacred Doctrine
Videtur quod obiectum fidei non sit veritas prima. Illud enim videtur esse obiectum fidei quod nobis proponitur ad credendum. Sed non solum proponuntur nobis ad credendum ea quae pertinent ad divinitatem, quae est veritas prima; sed etiam ea quae pertinent ad humanitatem Christi et Ecclesiae sacramenta et creaturarum conditionem. Ergo non solum veritas prima est fidei obiectum.	Videtur quod sacra doctrina non sit una scientia. Quia secundum philosophum in I Poster., una scientia est quae est unius generis subiecti. Creator autem et creatura, de quibus in sacra doctrina tractatur, non continentur sub uno genere subiecti. Ergo sacra doctrina non est una scientia.
Praeterea, fides et infidelitas sunt circa idem, cum sint opposita. Sed circa omnia quae in sacra Scriptura continentur potest esse infidelitas, quidquid enim horum homo negaverit, infidelis reputatur. Ergo etiam fides est circa omnia quae in sacra Scriptura continentur. Sed ibi multa continentur de hominibus et de aliis rebus creatis. Ergo obiectum fidei non solum est veritas prima, sed etiam veritas creata.	Praeterea, in sacra doctrina tractatur de Angelis, de creaturis corporalibus, de moribus hominum. Huiusmodi autem ad diversas scientias philosophicas pertinent. Igitur sacra doctrina non est una scientia.
Praeterea, fides caritati condividitur, ut supra dictum est. Sed caritate non solum diligimus Deum, qui est summa bonitas, sed etiam diligimus proximum. Ergo fidei obiectum non est solum veritas prima.
Sed contra est quod Dionysius dicit, VII cap. de Div. Nom., quod fides est circa simplicem et semper existentem veritatem. Haec autem est veritas prima. Ergo obiectum fidei est veritas prima.	Sed contra est quod sacra Scriptura de ea loquitur sicut de una scientia, dicitur enim Sap. X, dedit illi scientiam sanctorum.
Respondeo dicendum quod cuiuslibet cognoscitivi habitus obiectum duo habet, scilicet id quod materialiter cognoscitur, quod est sicut materiale obiectum; et id per quod cognoscitur, quod est formalis ratio obiecti. Sicut in scientia geometriae materialiter scita sunt conclusiones; formalis vero ratio sciendi sunt media demonstrationis, per quae conclusiones cognoscuntur.	Respondeo dicendum sacram doctrinam unam scientiam esse. Est enim unitas potentiae et habitus consideranda secundum obiectum, non quidem materialiter, sed secundum rationem formalem obiecti, puta homo, asinus et lapis conveniunt in una formali ratione colorati, quod est obiectum visus.
Sic igitur in fide, si consideremus formalem rationem obiecti, nihil est aliud quam veritas prima, non enim fides de qua loquimur assentit alicui nisi quia est a Deo revelatum; unde ipsi veritati divinae innititur tanquam medio. Si vero consideremus materialiter ea quibus fides assentit, non solum est ipse Deus, sed etiam multa alia. Quae tamen sub assensu fidei non cadunt nisi secundum quod habent aliquem ordinem ad Deum, prout scilicet per aliquos divinitatis effectus homo adiuvatur ad tendendum in divinam fruitionem. Et ideo etiam ex hac parte obiectum fidei est quodammodo veritas prima, inquantum nihil cadit sub fide nisi in ordine ad Deum, sicut etiam obiectum medicinae est sanitas, quia nihil medicina considerat nisi in ordine ad sanitatem.	Quia igitur sacra Scriptura considerat aliqua secundum quod sunt divinitus revelata, secundum quod dictum est, omnia quaecumque sunt divinitus revelabilia, communicant in una ratione formali obiecti huius scientiae. Et ideo comprehenduntur sub sacra doctrina sicut sub scientia una.
Ad primum ergo dicendum quod ea quae pertinent ad humanitatem Christi et ad sacramenta Ecclesiae vel ad quascumque creaturas cadunt sub fide inquantum per haec ordinamur ad Deum. Et eis etiam assentimus propter divinam veritatem.	Ad primum ergo dicendum quod sacra doctrina non determinat de Deo et de creaturis ex aequo, sed de Deo principaliter, et de creaturis secundum quod referuntur ad Deum, ut ad principium vel finem. Unde unitas scientiae non impeditur.
Et similiter dicendum est ad secundum, de omnibus illis quae in sacra Scriptura traduntur.	Ad secundum dicendum quod nihil prohibet inferiores potentias vel habitus diversificari circa illas materias, quae communiter cadunt sub una potentia vel habitu superiori, quia superior potentia vel habitus respicit obiectum sub universaliori ratione formali. Sicut obiectum sensus communis est sensibile, quod comprehendit sub se visibile et audibile, unde sensus communis, cum sit una potentia, extendit se ad omnia obiecta quinque sensuum. Et similiter ea quae in diversis scientiis philosophicis tractantur, potest sacra doctrina, una existens, considerare sub una ratione, inquantum scilicet sunt divinitus revelabilia, ut sic sacra doctrina sit velut quaedam impressio divinae scientiae, quae est una et simplex omnium.
Ad tertium dicendum quod etiam caritas diligit proximum propter Deum; et sic obiectum eius proprie est ipse Deus, ut infra dicetur.

I am going to use the above table as the basis for the next several blog posts. If you intend to follow this series of posts and you need me to switch to using an English translation of Aquinas, please let me know. I don’t habitually look at English texts or translate Thomas’s Latin, so I won’t make the effort if no one out there needs it.

If April showers bring may flowers….

What do May snowstorms bring?

What Is Theology? – Introduction

Over the past two years, I have grown increasingly dissatisfied with my own inability to articulate clearly what theology is. In conversation with colleagues, I find that I give various accounts depending on the context, and that I have never sat down to the hard labor of unifying all my thoughts into a single, coherent view. For the sake of my friends who have been or intend to be my partners in exploring the question, I would like to keep notes on this blog along the way to finding clarity.

I enter the question with two basic intuitions. First, I think that theology is what happens when faith gets to follow its inclinations. That is to say, fides quarens intellectum—“faith seeking understanding”—is a pretty good nominal definition of theology, and corresponds to what faith wants: faith is by its nature not at rest but seeking, and by the very nature of faith the object it seeks is understanding. So the key to arriving at a careful account of theology is to begin with a careful account of faith.

The second intuition is that “theology” has more than one meaning. In general, one never finds “the” meaning of a word: any given word has multiple, analogous meanings. So the goal should not be to find the one true meaning of “theology,” but to discover the various meanings of the word “theology” and put them in order. Some meaning of “theology” will be primary, another secondary, and so on, each being a true and legitimate meaning of the word.

Because I have not had an occasion to read it before, I would like to begin by walking through St. Thomas Aquinas’s account of faith in the Secunda secundae of the Summa theologiae. But that will be its own post.

Arvo Part and John’s Gospel

Today I listened through Arvo Part’s musical setting of the passion of Christ according to John. It’s a good way to walk slowly and meditatively through the text, and random thoughts occurred to me:

In John’s Gospel, Christ is strongly portrayed as Wisdom itself. So when he said, “I have always preached openly,” it reminded me of the description of Lady Wisdom in Proverbs, who preaches at every street corner and cries out as people go by.
In the same scene, it suddenly occurred to me that it’s not just a clever rhetorical defense for Jesus to say, “Ask those who heard me.” In fact, that is the approach he has favored in the end: he wants us to learn what he said by asking those who heard him.
When the soldiers take Jesus’ garments and cast lots for them, I suddenly wondered: what are the garments of wisdom? In my imagination, wisdom is the object of theology, while the garments of wisdom are all the other disciplines: mathematics, philosophy, and so on. These have indeed been divided among the conquerors as theology was removed from the schools. For some reason, in my imagination literature is the seamless garment.
Why is it that everyone says tenors have the most pleasing voices, the famous soloists are all tenors, the tenors make block-buster recordings, and so on and so forth—and yet every musical setting of the passion casts Jesus as a baritone? I think the world may have a guilty conscience about us baritones.

While all this passed through my mind, I couldn’t help comparing Arvo Part’s passion rendering with Bach’s famous passion settings. Part’s approach has ups and downs. The pros:

You can actually listen to it in one sitting before the baby wakes up. Bach’s versions are all massive.
It stays close to the text—there is no text but John’s text.
It has a restrained, minimalist feel that evokes the mood of the passion story perhaps better than a moody soprano chirping about how her heart bleeds.
It establishes a consistent characterization for each voice: Jesus, the crowds, the enemies, and so on.
It’s cooler: if you’re a Bach fan—well, who’s not? But if you’re all into Arvo Part, you’re hip, you know?

The cons:

No melody or rhythm, nothing that will stick in your mind. You will not read a line from John’s Gospel later and have a bit of Part’s passion suddenly replay in your head.
No musical value apart from the text. That is, you can listen to Bach not knowing what the German says and it’s still really beautiful, but Part is just boring if you don’t know what the Latin text is saying at that point. (I understand the Latin text when I hear it, so I have not had and could not actually have the experience of following along with an English rendering—not sure what that would be like.)
The music does not interpret particular sentences or phrases; melody and mood are disconnected from the details of the text.
Pontius Pilate comes across as languishing and effeminate. It’s as though he can’t attend to Jesus because he’s still letting his nail polish dry.

My thanks to Peter Kwasniewski for putting me onto Part’s piece, which I have enjoyed for a couple of years now. I hope he will put his mind to writing a passion setting some year, because I think he can do Part’s project better than Part did.

Seeing new tracks in Daniel

The first time I went snow tracking, it was amazing. My class drove into the mountains to find a clean snow field, and there, far from urban disturbance, we saw the stories of local wildlife written into the powdery surface: the tiny prints of a mouse, the widely spaced prints of a rabbit, the linear prints of a deer. But the amazing part was when we came back to Lander: the city itself was suddenly full of animal tracks! Had those tracks been there all the time? Had I really been so blind? Our instructor told us we had acquired the appropriate “filter” so as to notice what before had been hidden before our eyes.

I feel like that happened recently with the book of Daniel. Chapter four tells the story of King Nebuchadnezzar, who becomes boastful and ascribes all of his great works to himself instead of giving glory to God, and as a consequence God takes away his rationality for a season. The great king goes on all fours, eating grass and living outside, until God deigns to give his reason back. Then the king publishes an edict praising God and ascribing all of the king’s great works to the Almighty.

And it struck me: Is this not clearly saying that a king or kingdom that fails to acknowledge God will become less than human? That only the king or kingdom who acknowledges God will regain his humanity?

Chapter seven recounts one of Daniel’s most famous visions. He sees three beasts, each more ferocious than the last, and the beasts are strange, monstrous creatures made of parts from different animals. Then he sees “one like a son of man” who comes and supplants all the beasts. The dream is interpreted thus: the three beasts are three kingdoms of the Gentiles, and the “one like a son of man” is the kingdom of God’s people—or the Messiah himself, for later Jewish readers.

And it struck me: Is this not saying that all kingdoms that do not worship God become somehow subhuman and even monstrous? That the kingdom of those who worship God is, in fact, the only fully human kingdom?

I had a new “filter” on as I listened to Daniel this time, because I had just spent the morning on Gaudium et Spes 22: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”

And Gaudium et Spes 36: “But if the expression ‘the independence of temporal affairs’ is taken to mean that created things do not depend on God, and that man can use them without any reference to their Creator, anyone who acknowledges God will see how false such a meaning is. For without the Creator the creature would disappear.”

In retrospect, it seems logical that Daniel would have a strong message about the relation of religion and state. The narrative setting is the exile of Israel, when Israel lost its state but—miraculously—kept its religion, thus introducing a sharp distinction between state and religion for the first time. And if you believe the modern view that Daniel was written around the time of the Macabean revolt—which I do—then we also have the first time of the state setting itself very directly against the people’s religion.

Oh, come on….

April showers….

Not sure what kind of May flowers this is bringing.

The Particularity of Death

Yesterday I went to the hospital for an MRA. I filled out the usual forms–no, I’m not claustrophobic; no I’m not pregnant or breastfeeding; no, I don’t have any metal body parts–and met the usual uber-cheerful nurse. Sure, I’ll lay down on this tray and get sucked into a giant Star Trek device. I had an MRI just a couple of weeks ago, and this is all routine. I know what I’m doing.

So when the nurse casually mentioned that we would need to do an IV, I just about bounced off the tray. “SERIOUSLY?” She was amazed that I had never had an IV before: “How old are you? 37? And you’ve NEVER had an IV?” It felt like high school again, where you find out that everyone is doing it and you are obviously the nerd. I tried to explain that I react really badly to needles, but she couldn’t believe me. “You look scared to death all ready!” she laughed. Me: “That’s because I AM!”

But when they actually put the IV in and watched me reel into unresponsiveness, understanding dawned. “You weren’t kidding, were you?” she smiled. Um, no. I wasn’t. As I lay inside the giant Star Trek device, semi-coherent, with a metal thing sticking into my veins, I meditated on how Jesus was nailed to the cross, and how the metal things just stayed there. Oh God, oh Jesus, help me Mary.

Somehow I survived, and after taking a while to lay in the car I managed to drive away. For some reason, after I got home, I felt in the mood to pick up a book by Richard John Neuhaus called As I Lay Dying. He makes a great point:

Death in the thousands and millions is different. The generality is a buffer against both guilt and sorrow. It is death in the singular that shatters all we thought we knew about death.

That is exactly right: News of multitudinous deaths in a far-away war does little, or news of semi-fictional people who live real lives across town but don’t seem real to me. But when the little Lewis girls died, daughters of my friend, it was like an atom bomb going off in the living room. Death in general, as an idea, can be tolerated; death in the particular, in you, in me, is an abomination the mind refuses to grasp.

But it occurred to me suddenly, reading Neuhaus, that the only answer to death is Jesus. And if we know Jesus as a generality, as an idea, then we will only be able to deal with death as a generality. Only if I know Jesus as a particular, as a this person, will I be prepared for the particularity of my death.