One reason I'm not a Thomist is because Thomism is a museum piece. Aquinas was an apologist for medieval Catholic theology. What else would he be?
But no one believes in medieval Catholic theology anymore, (apart from sedevacantists). That theological paradigm is defunct.
That doesn't mean one can't salvage some enduring elements from Thomism, but the success of the salvage operation depends in part on whether you're Catholic or Protestant. There's less continuity between Thomism and evangelicalism than Thomism and modern Catholicism.
It's necessary to dissemble the Thomistic package for spare parts. You can scrounge up some replacement parts in the junkyard, from totaled cars.
That doesn’t stop them, however, from trying to appropriate the whole Thomist cloth, and applying it as if it were useful today.
ReplyDeleteFeser: “But the [modern Thomist] rejects the entire rationalist / empiricist / Kantian dialectic and insists on maintaining an epistemological position that predated these views, and against which they reacted” (“Scholastic Metaphysics”, pg. 29).
Interesting, Paul Helm is something of a Thomist. At least he defends Simplicity, divine atemporality, and calvinismI guess he is basically a sedevacanist?
ReplyDeleteSedevacantism is a synonym for Reformed Thomism!
DeleteDidn’t realize that. 😂 so, what exactly is wrong with Helm’s views?
DeleteSeriously, I’m not sure what the issue is with Thomas’ theology proper. What, in your opinion is the best critique of Thomistic metaphysics?
DeleteI wasn't discussing theology proper but the whole package. He's an apologist for medieval Catholic theology. That's to be expected given his time and place, but not even Catholics believe in medieval Catholic theology.
DeleteMy only objection to Helm is his support for Thomistic divine simplicity. And offhand I haven't seen him defend that directly. Rather, he endorses books that do so.
So, would your critique of someone like Dolezal be that he extends the analogy from physical parts to metaphysical parts in his arguments supporting Divine Simplicity? The argument roughly is that anything that has parts has something more fundamental than itself which it depends on. So, in God’s case if he depends on Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Omni-goodness, then those parts are more fundamental than his own God Head and hence he isn’t absolute. So would you think it illegitimate to apply common sense notions of unity and parts to ideas like God?
DeleteAnd I’m inclined to accept simplicity because it does seem correct to me to say that there is nothing more fundamental than God. It also seems that the greatest being would have those attributes.
DeleteWell, not attribute but, the divine being would be such that there was nothing more fundamental that made Him up.
Delete1. Yes, I think the objection overextends the analogy from concrete composition to abstract complexity. That's a category mistake. The rules aren't the same for timeless, spaceless objects.
Delete2. My objection to Thomistic simplicity is that it seems to conflict with divine freedom, the Trinity, and distinct attributes. If each attribute is identical to every other attribute, then God's justice is identical to God's mercy. But that makes them conterminous. Moreover, that makes them equally necessary.
Likewise, Thomistic simplicity seems to implicate a necessitarian scheme where the actual world is the only possible world. Where God has no contingent relations. It collapses the distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact.
3. One problem is that Thomistic simplicity is a catchall for several different, perhaps related or unrelated concepts. They need to be sifted on a case-by-case basis.
Blake, there is a whole lot of room for equivocation when “simplicity” is talked about. What do you mean by “more fundamental”, for example? We are talking about the God of Israel. So, is “absolutely fundamental” just an all-powerful, undifferentiated singularity? A smooth shiny sphere? A big undifferentiated sphere (no “parts”)? That same kind of equivocation can occur at many points innthis discussion.
DeleteSo would you be okay with curtailing certain divine attributes if they conflicted with some other attribute? So, if omnipotence conflicts with omnibebevolence, does one get demoted. Kind of like Yujin Nagasawa’s account (as far as I understand it).
DeleteIs that directed at me or John? Not, I'm not okay with curtailing divine attributes. Mind you, the divine attributes qualify each other. God doesn't have a sheer will. Rather, his will is characterized by wisdom, omniscience, &c.
DeleteBlake, I wouldn’t “curtail” anything. I would be careful to observe a process in which philosophical considerations about what “attributes” should be, are subordinated to what the Scriptures actually tell us about God. There is room for non-scriptural concepts (“homoousious”) but only insofar as that verbiage explicates the scriptural concept.
DeleteSo, by modifying attributes we mean something like the mutually consistent set of all attributes. The mutually consistent set may limit the other attributes but they are only as powerful as they can be while being consistent with one another.
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