“For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”[1] Here, Mary Oliver is making an assertion rich with significance. Her attending contemplatively to the natural world is a genuinely prayerful experience, an experience of something seemingly transcendent. … Read More [article] Nature as the “Door to the Temple”
In the second book of his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sententiae, Thomas Aquinas considers three opinions regarding the creation of the material universe through intermediaries. The first is the opinion of the Neoplatonic emanationists of the School of Baghdad who held that God created the material world through the creative power of intermediate intelligences. The second position is that of the Parisian masters of theology who denied Islamic emanationism on the grounds that the infinite power required by creation ex nihilo cannot be communicated to a creature. The final opinion is that of the Lombard himself who denied the actual communication of creative power to intermediaries, but considered it philosophically possible. While Thomas is in full agreement with the Parisian masters in their complete rejection of emanationism, he nonetheless here expresses sympathy for Lombard’s position on the philosophical, if not doctrinal, possibility of God’s creation of the world through instruments.… Read More [article] Thomas Aquinas on Instrumental Creation, the Cosmogonical Fallacy, and the Intelligibility of Nature
How do we confront evil? There is no easy solution to this problem; but we learn much from a literary investigation, if we have the eyes to see what great thinkers like Jacques Maritain and Fyodor Dostoevsky have to tell us.… Read More [essay] Dostoevsky and the Cry of Rachel
How does truth admit of more or less? The same applies to nobility and being. One might also ask, just what does Thomas means by nobility? How is it distinct from goodness? How is the maximum in any genus supposed to cause everything else in that genus? Is this formal or efficient causality? Is this a Neo-Platonic argument from participation? Is the argument undermined by the Angelic Doctor’s outdated and erroneous example of fire as cause of all heat? Each issue is likely deserving of its own paper. Yet behind all these questions (except, perhaps, the meaning of nobility), lies a more primary difficulty: the meanings of “more or less” and the “maximum” by which they are denominated. How we answer the above questions depends on our understanding of these two key features of the argument.… Read More [essay] Participation and the Divine
Reality 