Mention is rarely made of the fact that the teaching about God in the Summa Theologica begins with this sentence: “We are not capable of knowing what God is, but we can know what he is not.” I know of no textbook of Thomistic thought which contains the notion expressed by St. Thomas in his commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius, namely that there are three degrees in our knowledge of God: the lowest, the knowledge of God as he is active in creation; the second, the recognition of God as mirrored in spiritual beings; the third and loftiest, the recognition of God as Unknown, tamquam ignotum. Or consider this sentence from the Questiones Disputatae: “This is what is ultimate in the human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God.”
Back to Bloggery
It has been quiet around the place. But my summer teaching is drawing to a close and I expect to be able to get back to the blog this week. I hope everyone is enjoying some time off and some nice weather. Thanks for watching over the blog while I was out.
McCabe on the Trinity
Think for a moment of a group of three or four intelligent adults relaxing together in one of those conversations that have really taken off. They are being witty and responding quickly to each other—what in Ireland they call ‘the Crack’. Serious ideas may be at issue, but no one is being serious. Nobody is being pompous or solemn (nobody is preaching). There are flights of fancy. There are jokes and puns and irony and mimicry and disrespect and self-parody. Now a 7-year old is in the room, completely baffled by it all…Now this child is like us when we hear about the Trinity.
Hats Off
Commenting on Emerson’s late-life aphasia, West writes:
…In his aphasia he often turned to action to supplement failing speech. Some of his gestures attained an uncanny purity of expression beyond anything in the language of nature dreamed of by Condillac. One morning Mrs. Emerson and his doctor led him into the garden to see the roses. Struck by one unusually fine specimen, the doctor repeated a line from George Herbert’s “Vertue,” which Emerson had recited to him at length many years before. Emerson gazed at the rose in admiration, then as if on impulse gently lifted his hat and said with a low bow, “I take my hat off to it”. That was the heroic act of a very great orator, who, as words failed him, still contrived with diminished vocabulary to match the eloquence of his prose.
Michael West, Transcendental Wordplay
Taking it Personally
(A piece of protreptic for my Seven Deadly Sins students.)
I know some of you are struggling with the Aquinas. That is to be expected; it is hard. But too many of you have, I worry, lost sight of something that can make the reading easier and more gripping–namely, many of you have lost sight of the fact that Aquinas is telling you about your life. All that he says may sound academic, in the pejorative sense, with all his complicated talk of potency, act, complements and mastery–but it is not academic: it is existential. What he is telling you about are what we might call the necessities of human action, about its general structure, and about the ways in which understanding that structure makes you better at concerted, focused and responsible action, about the understanding necessary to become a virtuoso at living itself. Since that is what he is doing, your own life plays the role of touchstone for and testifier to the claims he makes. That is, your own day-to-day living needs to be responsive, and properly responsive, to the claims he is making. You should be able to see whether he is right or wrong, on to something or whistling in the dark, by examining what he says in the light of your own living. True, what he says sounds unfamiliar, but he is talking about familiarities, about general structures that are often closer to you than you are to yourself. Paradoxically, it is the very familiarity of what he is talking about, its closeness to you, that accounts for it seeming unfamiliar and distant. You do not want, and unfortunately show no tendency to want, to suffuse your own life with reflection, to explicitate what is implicit in your days, day in and day out, day after day. But today is the day of explicitation; tomorrow may be too late. Take what he says personally, not in the sense of an affront to you, but as aimed at who and what you are and understand yourself to be. If you can’t take Aquinas personally, you may as well leave him alone.
Hell Hath No Fury…
Hell hath no fury like a romantically oriented reader of the Tractatus who has thought of the early Wittgenstein as an enchanting mystagogue, but gone on to read the later one and realized subconsciously that the project of the thaumaturgic Tractatus is fundamentally the same as that of the quotidian Investigations. — T. P. Uschanov, “The Strange Death of Ordinary Language Philosophy“
Language and Bewitchment: PI 109
A footnote from an old essay of mine:
Think of the instructive amphiboly in the (translation of the) concluding line of PI 109: “Philosophy is the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” How is this to be understood? Is it (1) “Philosophy is the battle against the-bewitchment-of-our-intelligence-by-means-of-language” or (2) “Philosophy is the battle against the-bewitchment-of-our-intelligence by means of language”?
And then in the text proper:
The very thing which is to free us from confusion is the very thing which confused us to begin with. The poison is also the antidote.
Abbot Theodore and Thoreau
Another brother asked the same elder, Abbot Theodore, and began to question him and to inquire about things he had never yet put into practice himself. The elder said to him: As yet you have not found a ship, and you have not put your baggage aboard, and you have not started to cross the sea: can you talk as if you had already arrived in that city to which you planned to go? When you have put into practice the things you are talking about, then speak from knowledge of the thing itself!
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.
George Oppen, To C. T. (Poem)
One imagines himself
addressing his peers
I suppose. Surely
that might be the definition
of ‘seriousness’? I would like,
as you see,
to convince
myself
that my pleasure in your response
is not
plain vanity
but the pleasure of being heard,
the pleasure
of companionship, which seems
more honorable.
Paget on Sloth (from The Spirit of Discipline)
Yes, let us put together in thought the traits which meet in the picture of accidie; let us think of it in its contrast with that brightness of spiritual joy which plays around some lives, and makes the nameless, winning beauty of some souls, aye, and even of some faces; and we may recognize it, perhaps, as a cloud that has sometimes lowered near our own lives; as a storm that we have seen sweeping across the sky and hiding the horizon, even though, it may be, by God’s grace only the edge of it reached to us, only a few drops fell where we were. Heaviness, gloom, coldness, sullenness, distaste and desultory sloth in work and prayer, joylessness and thanklessness, do we not know something of the threatenings, at least, of a mood in which these meet? The mood of days on which it seems as though we cannot genuinely laugh, as though we cannot get rid of a dull or acrid tone in our voice; when it seems impossible frankly to rejoice with them that do rejoice, and equally impossible to go freely out in any true, unselfish sympathy with sorrow; days when, as one has said, everything that everybody does seems inopportune and out of good taste; days when the things that are true and honest, just and pure, lovely and of good report, seem to have lost all loveliness and glow and charm of hue, and look as dismal as a flat country in the drizzling mist of an east wind; days when we might be cynical if we had a little more energy in us; when all enthusiasm and confidence of hope, all sense of a Divine impulse, flags out of our work; when the schemes which we have begun look stale and poor and unattractive as the scenery of an empty stage by daylight; days when there is nothing that we like to do; when, without anything to complain of, nothing stirs so readily in us as complaint. Oh, if we know anything at all of such a mood as this, let us be careful how we think of it, how we deal with it; for perhaps it may not be far from that sorrow of the world which, in those who willingly indulge and welcome and invite its presence, worketh death.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 