Just Thomism

(turning his example into an analogy)

As the sleeping geometer knows the theorem, the structure of the living eye is vision.

Descriptions of the Mafia, whether documentary or semi-documentary, are attractive for any number of reasons (glamor, the “American Dream” immigrant story, the high stakes of the conflict) but one very attractive moral theme is the essential goodness of friendship, which the mob movie shows negatively in its attempt to organize friendships  around evil. The mobster wants crime to form a family, or to have blood relations of real affection and love to be the foundation of defrauding, exploiting, and betraying others. The drama of the mob life is manifesting the performative contradiction in all this, since something in the structure of their relationships inevitably demands that they kill, defraud, and betray each other.

This is clear in both the central conflicts of The Godfather, where Vito’s love for his son makes him want to keep him out of the mafia, but only ends up being the principle that draws his son into it (Michael knows he can only get close enough to kill Sollozzo because Sollozzo perceives him as outside the gangster life.) Once he becomes Godfather himself, Michael’s attempt to firewall business from family concludes with him sending an assassin to betray and murder his own brother.

The same drama played out in the real Mafia by their betrayals of each other, which were continuous throughout their history and ultimately fatal. The code of omertá or silence out of love of family ended up being seen as for suckers who want to sit in prison when they could just as soon escape it.  The mafia’s imperative to make money by any means drove its members use means – famously, by selling narcotics – that they had to keep hidden from others, which infused their relationships with an insincerity and infidelity contrary to familial love, or even the lowest forms of friendship.

The moral logic of the story of the mob is that evil destroys friendship, even where the evil goes unperceived. Sin is ultimately contrary to even the lowest forms of solidarity, and is always a worm at the heart of the love between persons.

0.) Finite activity or motion is always the act of some potential.

1.) The inanimate: the act and potential are in different substances.

2.) The living: the act and potential are one substance made of an actual and potential principle.

3.) The sentient: The object and sentient being are one act, but the sense object in potency is really different from the sentient being in potency.

4.) The intellective: Like all knowledge, the act of the knower and known are one, but for the intellective, even the potential knowable is the knowing power in potency. The object and power are made by the same principle: separation from matter.

Energy necessarily explains motion insofar as the mover and moved are distinct substances.

By the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle has proven that the ultimate end of human life* has three parts to its essence:

1.) Virtue (Books II-VII)

2.) Friendship (Books VIII-IX)

3.) Contemplation of truth, and above all immortal and eternal truth (Book X).

There is no more complete fulfillment of all three of these than the beatific vision, seeing all things in light of the first cause, as the virtue of charity, which consists in divine friendship.

*Explained in Book I.

There are lots of Protestant apologetics for the resurrection being historically credible by rational standards. One large Protestant handicap is the cessasionist theology that its magisterial traditions have advocated since the Sixteenth Century, since it commits them to having to prove a miracle in a relatively difficult case. Claiming that miracles stopped almost two millennia ago, but that you can still prove one occurred, seems like trying to hit a jump shot from the upper deck. One imagines it would be a lot easier to point to a continuous history of miracles, which like all document-based history could be expected to get better as it got closer in time and space to the historian, and then to defend the strength of the biblical narrative as a principle for a continuing line of thaumaturgical saints.

The more basic problem is that no matter how much evidence you can marshal for the resurrection, it won’t come anywhere close to the miracle evidence for the miracles of the Twentieth Century, like the miracle of the sun or Our Lady of Zeitoun. It probably can’t even rise to the level of the contested evidence of the Shroud of Turin. From the protestant perspective, all this will of course end up proving too much. The “minimal facts” approach to the resurrection, for example, is a criteria that could far more easily prove that Joseph of Cupertino flew, that Joan of Arc had visions that allowed her to lead armies and win battles as a seventeen year-old girl, that John Traynor was instantly cured at Lourdes, that Padre Pio read souls/ bilocated/ had the stigmata, that the Fatima visionaries predicted a miracle three months in advance, etc. So how can one prove the resurrection and keep the Reformed commitment to cessationism that traces all the way back to Calvin?

God made us in his likeness because he made us to be his friends.

The Platonic tradition won’t help us see the arguments for the existence of spiritual things until we see matter as

a.) That which, when participating in form, is more than that form. So ✌ participates in the form of “the number two” but it also participates in “peace” and “victory” and “bunny.” Matter is thus that which, while one, is undetermined to that one.

b.) Because matter is undetermined to one, it is that which is intrinsically temporary and changeable.

c.) Because temporary and unchangeable, it is also what belongs to objects of opinion as opposed to objects of knowledge.

The Aristotelian tradition won’t be able to help us see the arguments for the immateriality (or spirituality) of mind until we see matter either as

1.) The per se subject of motion or

2.) The subject making a form exist as particular.

Our notion of matter as “the smallest, simplest part of an extended body” or “thing whose existence is confirmed by meter-readings on various instruments” or even “thing that might well be a wave made of nothing” can’t do much work to prove anything is non-material. If anything is non-material like that, it would probably be of no interest to anyone.