There's Much Afoot in Heaven and Earth This Year

 The Rainy Summer
by Alice Meynell 

There’s much afoot in heaven and earth this year;
The winds hunt up the sun, hunt up the moon,
Trouble the dubious dawn, hasten the drear
Height of a threatening noon. 

No breath of boughs, no breath of leaves, of fronds,
May linger or grow warm; the trees are loud;
The forest, rooted, tosses in her bonds,
And strains against the cloud. 

No scents may pause within the garden-fold;
The rifled flowers are cold as ocean-shells;
Bees, humming in the storm, carry their cold
Wild honey to cold cells.

Doctor Evangelicus

 Today is the feast of St. Anthony of Padua, Doctor of the Church. Here is a re-post from 2016, on one of the most famous legends about him, the Sermon of the Fishes.

*****

Today is the feast of St. Anthony of Padua, Doctor of the Church. He was born Fernando Martins de Bulhões in Lisbon in about 1195, and died in Padua in 1231; he was canonized within a year of his death. He joined the Franciscan order, and soon became renowned as a homilist. His sermons, which are typically concerned with tracing concordantiae or parallels and analogies between different parts of Scripture, are the reason for his liturgical status as Doctor of the Church, but he is perhaps most famous for being the patron saint of lost articles, and the primary association of him with his preaching in the popular mind is the hagiographical legend of his preaching to the fish:

St Anthony being at one time at Rimini, where there were a great number of heretics, and wishing to lead them by the light of faith into the way of truth, preached to them for several days, and reasoned with them on the faith of Christ and on the Holy Scriptures. They not only resisted his words, but were hardened and obstinate, refusing to listen to him.

At last St Anthony, inspired by God, went down to the sea-shore, where the river runs into the sea, and having placed himself on a bank between the river and the sea, he began to speak to the fishes as if the Lord had sent him to preach to them, and said: "Listen to the word of God, O ye fishes of the sea and of the river, seeing that the faithless heretics refuse to do so."

No sooner had he spoken these words than suddenly so great a multitude of fishes, both small and great, approached the bank on which he stood, that never before had so many been seen in the sea or the river. All kept their heads out of the water, and seemed to be looking attentively on St Anthony's face; all were ranged in perfect order and most peacefully, the smaller ones in front near the bank, after them came those a little bigger, and last of all, where the water was deeper, the largest.

When they had placed themselves in this order, St Anthony began to preach to them most solemnly, saying: "My brothers the fishes, you are bound, as much as is in your power, to return thanks to your Creator, who has given you so noble an element for your dwelling; for you have at your choice both sweet water and salt; you have many places of refuge from the tempest; you have likewise a pure and transparent element for your nourishment. God, your bountiful and kind Creator, when he made you, ordered you to increase and multiply, and gave you his blessing. In the universal deluge, all other creatures perished; you alone did God preserve from all harm. He has given you fins to enable you to go where you will. To you was it granted, according to the commandment of God, to keep the prophet Jonas, and after three days to throw him safe and sound on dry land. You it was who gave the tribute-money to our Saviour Jesus Christ, when, through his poverty, he had not wherewith to pay. By a singular mystery you were the nourishment of the eternal King, Jesus Christ, before and after his resurrection. Because of all these things you are bound to praise and bless the Lord, who has given you blessings so many and so much greater than to other creatures."

At these words the fish began to open their mouths, and bow their heads, endeavouring as much as was in their power to express their reverence and show forth their praise. St Anthony, seeing the reverence of the fish towards their Creator, rejoiced greatly in spirit, and said with a loud voice: "Blessed be the eternal God; for the fishes of the sea honour him more than men without faith, and animals without reason listen to his word with greater attention than sinful heretics."

And whilst St Anthony was preaching, the number of fishes increased, and none of them left the place that he had chosen. And the people of the city hearing of the miracle, made haste to go and witness it. With them also came the heretics of whom we have spoken above, who, seeing so wonderful and manifest a miracle, were touched in their hearts; and threw themselves at the feet of St Anthony to hear his words. The saint then began to expound to them the Catholic faith. He preached so eloquently, that all those heretics were converted, and returned to the true faith of Christ; the faithful also were filled with joy, and greatly comforted, being strengthened in the faith. After this St Anthony sent away the fishes, with the blessing of God; and they all departed, rejoicing as they went, and the people returned to the city.

The Little Flowers of St. Francis, Part I, Chapter XL.

Because of the tale, Anthony is often pictured with fish: a reminder that the gospel must be proclaimed even if there is no one to hear but the fish.

Dashed Off XIV

 hylomeric quasi-substances
(1) supersubstantial systems (society, ecosystem, cosmos)
(2) subsubstantial aggregates

Systems are unified in terms of the relation of the whole system to substance.

taste and emotional interpretants

emotional interpretant
Diamond: sense-of
True: actual feel
Box: taste qua perception (perceptive taste)
energetic interpretant
-- theoretical
-- -- Diamond: judgment
-- -- True: judging
-- -- Box: judicative taste
-- practical
-- -- Diamond: endeavor/tendency
-- -- True: trial
-- -- Box: practical hope

the differences of signs in each category of being

The category of habitus presupposes all the other categories.

In definitions of sign which have the structure of 'something signifying something to something', the 'to something' is often ambiguous -- the to-ness is sometimes treated as purely cognitive and sometimes as causally determinative (cf. Peirce's 'determining the interpretant to conformity with the object').

In creation, God extrinsically constitutes Himself as an object, e.g., as Lord.

waiting, assessing, and contextualizing interpretants

the existence of a cosmos as a presupposition of nomological necessity

It is an essential part of being a human person to have the potential to become a human person.

precedent for imitation vs precedent for extrapolation

successful idealization as a sign of final causes

Truth does not lie in a mean, but reasonableness does.

One thing is needed in a church, absolutely speaking, and that is Christ; and a church succeeds best when it most truly -- not necessarily most comfortably -- guides to Christ.

subsidiarity as aiding citizens in developing political prudence (Budziszewksi)

In creating the world, God creates it not only in its being and its order, but in its moral, jural, and sacral status, as with Him, under Him, and about Him. The created world has functionality and function with respect to its Lord and Creator.

Reading of historical texts is always an attempt at co-reading of some kind -- with the author, or the original audience, or the traditionary audience, or one's contemporaries

All evidence we have indicates that the 'Johannine Community' or the 'Markan Community' are diffuse, corresponding and often traveling, dynamic personal networks rather than geographically constrained communities.

Mark's translations indicate that it is a bridging text across different communities (differing, e.g., by at least principal language).

Petros as moral, jural, and sacral office and title

'beloved son' in Mark: Mk 1:11 (Baptism), Mk 9:7 (Transfiguration), Mk 12:6 (Parable of Talents)
'God's son': Mark 1:1 (Opening of Gospel), Mk 3:11 (impure spirit), Mk 5:7 (demoniac), Mk 15:29 (Centurion's Exclamation); cf. Mk 14:61-62, 'the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One' (High Priest's Interrogation)
'the Holy One of God': Mk 1:24 (impure spirit)
'Son of Man': (1) role clarifications (authority, Lord, Servant): Mk 2:10 (Healing of Paralytic), Mk 2:28 (Lord of Sabbath), Mk 10:45 (not to be served but to serve); (2) Prophetic Predictions: Mk 8:31 (prediction of Passion), Mk 8:38 (shame of Son of Man), Mk 9:9,12 (Transfiguration -- prediction of Passion and Resurrection), Mk 9:31 (Prediction of Betrayal), Mk 10:33 (prediction of Betrayal, Death, and Resurrection), Mk 13;26 (coming in clouds), Mk 14:21 (sop), Mk 14:41-42 (Son of Man betrayed), Mk 14:62 (right hand and coming in clouds)
'Christ': Mk 1:1 (Opening of Gospel), Mk 8:29 (Confession of Peter), Mk9:41 (cup of water), Mk 12:35 (Is Christ the Son of David or David's Lord?), Mk 14:61-62 (High Priest's Interrogation), Mk 15:32 (mockery of priests)
Mark puts 'Son of David' and 'King of the Jews' into a state of ambiguity

Mk 1:1 -- The author regards Jesus as Christ.
Mk 8:29 -- The disciples regard Jesus as Christ.
Mk 9:41 -- Jesus implicitly identifies Himself as Christ.
Mk 14:62 -- Jesus explicitly identifies Himself as Christ.
Mk 15:32 -- Priests and scribes regard Jesus as having claimed to be Christ.

The phenomenal expresses and symbolizes the noumenal.

'the right hand of the Father' as a moral, jural, and liturgical office

If we use Daniel 7:13 to interpret Mark's 'Son of Man', we have to take the latter as a short form of 'One like/as a son of man' (hos huios anthropou).

Patience is handmaiden to prudence.

Mark explicitly links the interpretation of the walking on water to the miracle of the loaves (Mk 6:52).

the cry from the cross in Mark as part of the Gospel's arc of interpreting the 'Son of David' title

Even fools carry a wisdom beyond their capacity.

For X to resist Y in a strict and proper sense requires that X and Y both act and Y have some sort of passive capacity. (Mutual interaction is required for resistance.)

"Since God became Man, all human attempts to create gods in the image of man or mankind in the image of God, have appeared comically prosaic, doomed to signal failure." Sigrid Undset

For Christ is a sewing-needle
and He pulls a Spirit-thread
that stitches in and out
through the living and the dead.

Many political views founder on a refusal to recognize one of two counterbalancing truths: tribal loyalties are inadequate to man as a civil being and sometimes tribal leaders are absolutely necessary for survival or resistance to evil.

Irenaeus has a text with Acts 8:37 (Adv Haer Bk 3, ch. 12, sect. 8).

Language as the expression of spiritual perception and judgment.

the Erotes
Eros: desire-love
Anteros: return of love
Himeros: love without return
Pothos: intoxicating yearning
[Phthonos: jealousy]
Hymen: marriage
Hermaphroditus: union

That is graceful which blooms with shining joy.

In the fullness of love, one experiences the seasons of blossom, growth, and harvest simultaneously; it is this feature that most suggests the timelessness of eternity.

The problem with reading Mark as having a 'low Christology' is that the consistent theme of Mark is that everyone underestimates and underplays what Jesus is, even when right.

"In the Memra the redemption will be found." Targum Zech. 12.5

Markan Christology is primarily a negative Christology, i.e., a Christology by remotion.

"Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is hard." Clausewitz

Kant's natural purposes & the 'sense of cosmos', i.e,. the experience of the world as an order

intrinsic and extrinsic intelligibility

Human purposes are such that we recognize that they presuppose a greater system of purposes, which makes it possible for them to be and to be fulfilled.

From the fact that somethingis in a domain, we can directly conclude that it ought to be appropriately considered in study of that domain.

Oughts are required means to posited ends.

genius/ingenium as a symbol of moral endowments

We are capable of analogizing the universe to a machine or a to an organism only because we already recognize it as an ordered system; and therefore the latter does not derive from the analogies.

Classifiability presupposes stable manifestation.

objective purposiveness as presupposing objective expressiveness

variables that only take ranges of values, not particular values

invariance across all means of measurement

Time is the mathematizability of change relative to other changes.

The only direction of time is the order of before and after, and this is a measurement of incompleteness of change by counting. Without an account of completeness of change, no temporal measurement is possible.

There is no reason to think that temporal measurements can only have one direction; i.e., we have no reason to reject the idea that you can have temporal measurements that are related by a kind of rotation, i.e., befores and afters not related to each other purely by before and after.

the social ontology of play objects

"Play is a way of making an object, for present and personal purposes, *what it might be*; and being for 'personal purposes', it takes on, in a great variety of cases, personal form." J. M. Baldwin

myth as communal intuition

A closed shape one in which every toward-boundary is an away-from boundary and vice versa. (? -- this needs specification for complicated (jagged) boundaries)

argument by organized accumulation of signs

subjective, respective, objective

A faculty is a natural power susceptible of use by will.

"If two physicists A and B agree to discuss a physical experiment, their agreement implies that they admit, in some sense, a common world in which the experiment is supposed to take place." A. A. Robb

reciprocity as a general regulative principle of human rights

A state is always limited in what it can 'know', i.e., in the information its apparatus can process. But proposed policies often fail to take this into account. There is perhaps a need for a 'critical epistemology for the state'.

better-not permissions

When nations do not use weapons, and in particular allow them to be banned for use in war, this is always because they are seen as being of little tactical use or as being of negative strategic or operational value given the nation's particular military structure. Nations ban weapons for themselves for which they no long have definite use. And jsut as large corporations lobby for regulations thatye rather than their competitors can easily accommodate, so teh bans are generally for limiting the options and creating hurdles for otehr nations. The West, for instance, supports restriction of certain weapons so that enforcement mechanisms for apparent violations can be used to keep other nations in line. It also forces other, less wealthy nations, either to defer in military matters or use more expensive options rather than trying to use tactics and strategies with cheaper means.

The tendency of post-medieval nations is to develop systems that, while more consistently effective, are also massively more expensive in time, money, and effort to maintain and sustain.

Actuality is known by the fact that it perfects the intellect.

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right V: Rights in Domestic Society

 IV: Rights in Theocratic Society

Universal social right applied to the household or family, as with other societies, yields seignorial right, governmental right, and communal right. For discussing the family, Rosmini sets seignorial right aside; seignorial right does structure the family, despite not itself being social, but unlike with theocratic society, which has a very distinctive seignorial structure due to God having the seignory, domestic society doesn't have a distinctive seignory structure; if the household has a servant, this is not really different (from the perspective of rights) from an individual doing so. It's just individual right; it just happens to be something that the household can sometimes incorporate as part of its structure. So Rosmini will mostly focus on governmental right and communal right. As always, these depend on the nature of the society, and the household or family is structured by two kinds of social relationship, in such a way as to be able to be, in a sense, two societies at once: the conjugal society, between spouses, and the parental society, between parents and children. 

Both of these are natural societies pre-existing in one form or another any civil society. As such, both of them have a distinctive relation to natural theocratic society, that is, the universal society of all human beings, in that they contribute to the enrichment and completion of the latter. In the case of conjugal society, this means that husband and wife have a double union, one as human beings and another, richer relationship, as man and woman capable in principle of reproducing. The result is that conjugal society has a peculiar character of maximizing the extent to which two people can be united with each other. Conjugal society is, on the part of humanity, a friendship of common good which is furthered by cultivating affections of humanity toward each other: "...if conjgual union must be the maximum union resulting from all possible unions between two human beings, the spouses must also be united by teh affection and virtue of humanity throughout the trunk and branches; each must love in their consort human nature and its endowments whether these are already in the consort or in order that they may be there" (p. 19). But spouses also have union as distinct in sex; this union, properly developed, is an act of soul (rather than merely physical affection) in mutual communication of life in such a way that generation could be a natural effect of the union. This union is at least that to which conjugal society is ordered or directed; it is that in which it achieves its full character. The spouses, without their persons being confused, are united in nature.

Conjugal society is created by promissory contract or pact in which each has to be treat the other specifically as a person and not a mere means. The consent for this contract has to have all the standard features of consent for contracts, but the consent has to be not merely legal but natural, and it must be consistent with the union mentioned above, although it only requires that that union be at least potential. All of this is complicated slightly by the fact that the marital contract is sacramental within the Church, which intensifies some of the features of marriage. Possible impediments to the conjugal contract are those that interfere with the union, those that interfere with the contract as such, and those that interfere with the sacrament. (Strictly speaking these are diriment impediments; other impediments, prohibitive impediments, do not prevent the contract but simply make it immoral in some way.) Rosmini discusses these, but I will pass on.

As with every other society, conjugal society presupposes the natural theocratic society, i.e., the universal society of humankind, and therefore includes as part of its implicated obligations the obligation to recognize this society and the rights associated with it. Within this context, the conjugal society is a unified moral person consisting of two individual natural human persons, and therefore the spouses have both individual rights and common rights. Spouses have a duty to preserve and bring to fruition the fullness of union to which marriage is directed, which as a fullness of union requires indissolubility, uniqueness of spouse, community of life, and community of goods, and the duties and therefore rights of psouses can be organized in terms of these. Each spouse has the right to the indissoluble commitment of the other, that is, indissoluble as long as the title of the right remains. In the most basic and natural case, the title is just "the human being's upright nature subsisting in both sexes" (p. 89), but within supernatural theocratic society, there are also further legal and sacramental titles, giving an even greater force and durability to the indissolubility. Violations of the right to indissolubility include concubinage (sexual cohabitation without regard for full conjugal union) and divorce (attempt to dissolve the indissoluble union). Each spouse likewise has a right to be the unique sexual partner of the other; we see one sign of this in the fact that jealousy, in the context of violations of this unicity, has the features of jural resentment, i.e., reasonable people regard themselves as injured by such violations, but we also see this in the requirements of fidelity in a full conjugal union. Each spouse has a right to community of life, that is, "a ceaseless exercise and perpetual exchange of beneficence that the spouses carry out between them" (p. 130). Likewise, each spouse has a right to community of goods, although this does not destroy their individual rights involving possessions.

Further, there are rights and duties associated more indirectly with these features of conjugal union, as contributing to the order required for them. Insofar as the conjugal society is an actuation of the natural theocratic society, i.e., the universal society of humanity, each spouse has the duties to avoid what would diminish esteem and mutual affection, to strive for what increases esteem and mutual affection, to avoid what would diminish concord, and to pursue what will contribute to mutual help and harmony. Both together have the duty "to further their common moral perfection" (p. 135). With respect to their specific sexual union, the spouses each have the right to request, and the duty to provide, what is due to the sexual union, the right and the duty to maintain the sexual union in a way consistent with human dignity, the right and duty "to respect the conceived foetus so that it experiences no harm from the behaviour of the woman or her husband", and "the duties and rights of raising and educating offspring in the world" (p. 136). (Rosmini also holds the view, not uncommon in his day, that the behavior of the parents leaves an impression on the children they conceive, and so naturally takes there to be a duty to act virtuously in such a way as will not interfere with proper development of the child. Obviously, we would not see things quite the same way, but in fact there are behaviors that can badly influence the development of a child -- drug use being an obvious case -- and so the duty would be essentially the same for us, although the facts, and thus the way the duty applies, might not always be so.)

As individual members of the conjugal society, they have both connatural and acquired rights. The connatural rights are such as have already been discussed elsewhere, but they have distinctive roles within the conjugal society, e.g., "Each spouse is an end, not simply a means, and as such must be respected by the other" (p. 142), marriage must be mutually consensual, the wife cannot be treated as a bondservant, and so forth. Individual rights can differ within conjugal society due to (1) the difference in titles that result from the facts of the society, and (2) the difference in modalities that arises from the spouses acting in a way that respects each other's rights. The most significant of the latter are the occasional differences in how the same rights work for a husband or a wife. Rosmini argues that one of these modifications is that, while husband and wife have the same rights, the husband generally has them as head of household (i.e., with the special responsibility to oversee the common rights and duties of the conjugal society as a whole), the titles of which Rosmini takes to be different characteristics associated with men and women. (He holds elsewhere, however, that there are particular circumstances in which a woman may need to exercise the role of head of the household, when her husband either permanently or temporarily cannot do it.) A properly just conjugal society will avoid giving the husband seignory over the wife (making the wife merely the servant of the husband) but also avoid treating the conjugal society as if it were nothing but a loose democracy of two individuals rather than a unified distinctive society with moral personhood and proprietà of its own; he takes the first extreme to be what often has vitiated pagan marriages, and the second to be a pathology that especially tends to develop in Christian marriages that deviate from Catholic principles. As with all rights, all of the rights of husband and wife can be modified by situations so as to create rights of defense or reparation, as appropriate.

The second society that composes domestic society is parental society, which is generated within conjugal society. Parental society creates new jural relationsips between parents, between parents and children, and among children. Every person involved of course has their own individual rights, and gets distinctive rights as these are modified by the nature of domestic society to work consistently with the rights of others in the society, but there are also rights specifically arising from government and membership within the society itself.

The fundamental title of all rights in parental society is generation or procreation, which creates a new juridical person out of mother, father, and children. This title is the title specifically for patria potestas, the general parental power, which both mother and father have (although each as modified by their role in conjugal society). Generation forms the mother and father as a collective person capable of being a subject of rights; this collective person is marked by perpetuity, equality, headship (generally of the husband), and priority to the existence of the child. The priority of the union of mother and father implies that the child's principal duties are first to the parents as a solidary unit, and that the first basic parental rights of both mother and father are something they share as a solidary unit. The parents have seignorial right (dominion, lordship) over the child arising from the fact that the child begins literally dependent upon them, which title changes, thus modifying the right, as the child grows, but of course the child has at all times individual right and personal dignity. Part of the purpose within parental society of the seignorial right of the parents, in fact, is to look after and protect the child's rights and dignity. Patria potestas cannot violate the formal rights of the child as a person, nor take the child's life, nor give the child into slavery, nor inflict any punishment on the child except insfoar as it is necessary for the good of the domestic society. It does, however, extend to anything that can contribute to the common good of the domestic society. (As the parents further this common good, the child develops a duty of gratitude to the parents; this creates parental rights in a loose sense, but not usually in a strictly juridical sense.) The essential rights involved in patria potestas are (pp. 184-185):

(1) To occupy the child, i.e., to treat the child as one's own child;
(2) To make use of the child in ways that do not harm the child;
(3) To raise the child in body;
(4) To educate the child in mind;
(5) To keep the child in their society until the child leaves (e.g., by marrying and starting a new household).

As Rosmini puts it, patria potestas involves a small amount of dominion, making the parental society useful to the parents, and a large amount of beneficent government, making the parental society useful for the children. Parental right is quite substantive, but it is also in some ways quite limited. Most of parenting has only a very general connection to parental right in particular, for instance; most of it is about living morally within the framework of rights of parents and children, rather than focusing entirely on the framework itself. All the decisions made in the family have to be consistent with the rights of its members, but most of the decisions are not specifically about the rights of its members. A very good family will be one in which the rights of its members are respected, but you can have a family that respects the rights of its members that is nonetheless quite mediocre or even poor, because much of the moral activity in the family is not juridical. A parent could be quite bad as a parent (cold, foolish, inconsiderate, dismissive, neglectful, etc.), giving the child plenty of moral ground for complaint, without the child having any specifically jural ground for complaint. Not all moral duties directly correspond to rights; a jural duty is "that which obligates a person to leave intact and free any activity proper TO ANOTHER PERSON" (pp. 192-193), so any moral failing that does not harm one's free activity or that does not directly concern another person will not be a juridical or jural failing.

Thus domestic society in itself. Domestic is one of the societies necessary for human fulfillment. Domestic society, of course, also exists in the Church (supernatural theocratic society), which gives it additional features; theocratic society, of which the Church is the consummation, is the second society necessary for human fulfillment. It's also the case that households band together to form civil society, which is the third kind of society necessary for human fulfillment. Within civil society, domestic society also gains certain features arising from positive law. While civil society cannot violate the rights of domestic society, civil society exists to provide modifications of rights so that all the rights of everyone "may co-exist and be exercised in the most free, convenient and advantageous way possible" (p. 204). Thus, for instance, in respecting the rights belonging to parental society, civil society may activate in different ways the inheritance functions inherent in parental society; it may also provide a certain amount of recourse for extreme cases in which the domestic rights of family members are being violated; it may give families claims on other families where this is necessary for the rights of all; and so forth.

All of this, however, can only be properly understand when we understand how rights work with respect to civil society, which is the next thing to which we turn.

to be contined

*****

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right, Volume 5: Rights in the Family, Cleary and Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham, UK: 1995).

Links of Note

* Stephen Mackereth, The Philosophical Significance of Godel's Dialectica Interpretation (PDF) 

* Natasha Burge, Fantasy Literature as Rebellion, at "The Undercurrent"

* Scott Vitkovic, Hamidreza Shariatmadari, and Sayed Jamaleddin Mirsharafoddin, The Thomistic Theological Synthesis of Islamic and Jewish Philosophy: Analysis of Aquinas’ Arguments Based on Direct References to Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides and Avicebron in Summa Theologiæ (PDF). The potential value of this kind of quantitative study is generally underestimated, I think.

* Gregory B. Sadler, A Few Memories of Alasdair MacIntyre

* Charles Mathewes, Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre, at "The Hedgehog Review"

* Eric Wilkinson, Anscombe's Philosophy of Law (PDF)

* Patrick Flynn, Most Philosophies Are Obviously False, at "The Journal of Absolute Truth"

* Chris Tillman, The Matter of Serial Fiction (PDF)

* Laura Thompson, Harriet and Lord Peter

* Steven Diggin, Ethical Presuppositions in Narrative Art (PDF)

* John Plaice, The Self-Similar Nature of Cosmic Plasma, at "Fiat Lux"

* Melissa McBay Merritt, Kant and Group Agency (PDF)

* Arthur Hamilton, most famous for writing "Cry Me a River", recently died at age 98.

* Joel David Hamkins, Structuralism, at "Infinitely More"

* Diane Proudfoot, Sylvan's Bottle and Other Problems (PDF)

* Christian B. Wagner, The Logical Problem of the Trinity: Brief Considerations, at "Scholastic Answers"

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right IV: Rights in Theocratic Society

 III: Universal Social Right

There are many different kinds of society, and in each one, we apply the general principles from Universal Social Right to the particular facts of the society's organization. Three societies are of particular importance, however, in that they are, in themselves, necessary for the complete organization of humanity, and all other societies have reference to them in some way. The three necessary societies are theocratic, domestic, and civil, and Rosmini begins with the theocratic society, or Church. Rosmini recognizes that people of liberal background get twitchy when the word 'theocratic' shows up, but he notes that it is strictly accurate, and common meanings of 'theocracy' are not what is in view; theocratic society is literally society organized around what is due to God, the society formed by the relationship between God and human beings.  And Rosmini holds that without considering this theocratic society, one can never have more than a defective account of rights. Nonetheless, the philosophy of right is not theology; it only considers the matter in its own terms, based on moral duties and what Rosmini calls "humanitarian-religious facts" (p. 22). Applying the principles of universal social right to this particular society, we need to consider three things: seignorial right, governmental right, and communal right.

The first and most obvious fact of any society involving God and man is that God is Lord, and indeed, is the Lord in an absolute sense. "There is no seigniory except God's, which is essential and fully absolute" (p. 24). God, of course, has de facto dominion over everything else, but He also has de jure dominion. De jure dominion, of course, has to have title, and there are several titles under which God has seignorial rights with respect to all other things. First, God is subsistent truth, and truth is that by virtue of which anything can be a title for rights at all. Second, God is the Creator, or the principle of being for all creatures, and thus all creatures are part of the proprietà that he forms by the act of creation. Third, God is absolute good, and thus all intelligent creatures are dependent on God. In other words, God has seignorial title by ideality, reality, and morality; these three notions connect Rosmini's philosophy of right to his moral philosophy. The divine Lordship is reasonable, natural, and beneficial (cf. p. 32) and requires from us morality, worship, and obedience (cf. p. 36). The divine right is also, of course, inalienable. God exercises His rights both immediately and through ministers; greatest of these ministers is Christ, who has six particular features as minister of the divine Lordship: "...he is 1. supreme Lord (God); 2. servant of God; 3. the human being who is Lord over other human beings; 4. God's minister for the salvation of the world; 5. judge of the world; and 6. head of the Church" (p. 41).

Thus seignorial right in theocratic society. With respect to governmental right, we need first to assess the nature and most basic structure of such a society. The first general element of this is the universal society of humanity, a society which exists by nature, and is constituted by the three human goods of truth, virtue, and bliss, which are the common good for us all. On the basis of this, the natural human society has three characteristics: unity, because truth and justice are one; universality, because truth, virtue, and bliss are universal goods; and justice, because the society is structured by its direction toward justice (cf. p. 53). Every other society presupposes this society, and it is theocratic in nature, because of the seignorial right of God. However, it is also just the theocratic society in germ, based on reason alone; its rough outline requires completion and fulfillment, based on actual relationship, which requires communication or revelation between God and man, and this gets greater fulfillment in the Church, which is based on actual grace, but has its greatest completion and fulfillment in the Incarnation, in which God and man are perfectly united, and into which the Church is incorporated. In the Church, the characteristics of natural human society (unity, universality, and justice) take the form of unity, catholicity, and sanctity.

The de facto power of theocratic society is divine, but it is also de jure power, because the de facto power serves as title for divine right, which is exercised in a legitimately social way. This social exercise of divine power is sevenfold:

(1) Constitutive Power. "The first way consists in the aggregation of human creatures to the society, and in the ordained constitution of the society" (p. 78). In the Church, this is exercised through the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and holy orders.

(2) Liturgical Power. "...[B]ecause aggregation demands unlimited submission of the creature to the Creator, the second branch is concerned with sacrifice" (p. 80). This also is associated with holy orders in the Church.

(3) Eucharistic Power. "The third way in which God exercises theocratic power consists in the manner by which he nourishes the members of the society with himself" (p. 79). Unsurprisingly, in the Church this is associated with the sacrament of the eucharist. "The third branch bestows upon members in the fullest manner the good they are to enjoy as a society of fruition. This enjoyment generates action, that is, the strength to act" (p. 80).

(4) Medicinal Power. "The fourth way consists in removing obstacles to participation in the common good that spring form the sins of the members" (p. 79). This is associated in the Church with the sacraments of penance and extreme unction.

(5) Hierogenetic Power. "The fifth branch fuses the natural longings of humanity with the longing of theocratic society by consecrating to theocratic society not only the individual human being, but the human species" (p. 80). "The fifth way consists in the grace by which God disposes the natural society between spouses to the service due to theocratic society" (p. 79). In the Church, of course, this is exercised through the sacrament of matrimony.

(6) Didactic Power. "The sixth way consists in an infallible treaching of supernatural truths" (p. 79) and "has various modes of activity such as defining the truths to be believed, interpreting holy Scripture, preaching, teaching, and so on" (p. 80). This is the ministry of the divine word.

(7) Ordinative Power. "Finally, the seventh way consists in the prudential, disciplinary and external order amongst members living here on earth" (p. 79) and "regulates external means wisely so that the attainment of the end may not be harmed by outward disorder" (p. 80). It is associated with the episcopal power of jurisdiction, and has several "modes of activity", "such as legislative, judicial, executive, and penal or sanctioning power" (p. 80).

It's important in all of this to keep in mind that we are considering the Church entirely socially here, looking at its organization as a society so as to understand how governmental right would be exercised within it. Christ is God and minister of God, and organizes the Church, exercising all seven branches of social power noted above, and at His Ascension invested the Apostles with the same social power, in such a way that He is still the principal agent. This establishes the hierarchy, which is the principal way in which the Church as theocratic society is juridically organized, and this is the reason why apostolicity is also a Note of the Church, alongside unity, sanctity, and universality. All governance in the Church has to be consistent with these four Notes.

Having the outlines of the structure of the Church as a society, we can then look at its connatural and acquired rights. The connatural rights of the Church are either those with respect to all human beings or with respect to the members of the Church itself. With respect to all human beings, the Church as a morally licit human society consistent with justice has the connatural rights of a human society, that is, individual right applied to the society. "The rights of the Church relative to all human beings ar ethose which bring her into existence and maintain her power to act" (p. 94). There are many, but there are five principal rights: "the right: 1. to existence; 2. to recognition; 3. to freedom; 4. to propagation; 5. to ownership [proprietà]" (p. 83). Note that all five of these require only rational right; they do not require making any ecclesiological assumption beyond the Church being a human society consistent with regard for truth, virtue, and bliss. (They are also, it should be noted, rights that were regularly violated by states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.) The Church has an acquired divine right to exist, for instance, in the sense that it has positive authorization from God, but it also has a connatural human right to exist just by being an actual human society capable of contributing to humanitarian ends. And so on with the other rights. The Church being the Church cannot make it have fewer or more limited rights than other societies. In terms of governmental right, all of these are primarily exercised and protected by the Church through its didactic and ordinative power, although in some cases (like the right of the Church to be accommodated in preserving the secret of the confessional, which, as a necessary duty intrinsic to the Church falls under its right to be recognized) other social powers may also be involved. From these connatural rights, of course, the Church also has the secondary modifications of these rights, like the right of sanction or defense. Human beings in general also have rights with respect to the Church, arising from these connatural rights (the right to know the Church, so that it can be recognized properly; the right to join the Church under its relevant conditions; the right to protect the rights of the Church, which follows from our more general right to protect the connatural right of others).

With respect to its own members, the Church also has the right to exercise any of its seven social powers, and this is the foundation of many of the offices (each of which is a particular alienable right) and procedures by which the Church is governed. Since sanction is a function of every right (cf. p. 93), each of the social powers has a form of sanction appropriate to it, by which the rights connected with that social power are protected. These can be combined with each other and interact with each other in various ways. These include powers to impose penance, powers to exclude from actions and benefits of the Church, power to exercise coercive force where someone is actively interfering with its functions, and so forth.

The fact that the Church has a right of relative freedom and a right of proprietà guarantees that it also has acquired rights. Every morally licit human society capable of contributing to humanitarian ends has the right to make things its own, as long as it does so by means of appropriate and recognizable titles, and the Church is no different. This gives the Church a right to temporalities, i.e., temporal goods appropriate to the work of the hierarchy or to pious works of the faithful; the clergy in the hierarchy, and occasionally laity, can have offices giving them authority to supervise and administer these temporal goods. Where there is just title, the Church cannot be stripped of these things even by the state; that is, because it is based on individual right applied to societies, it is as unjust if the state does it to the Church as it would be if the state did it to an individual or any other society. (It is worth noting that nationalization of temporal goods by anti-clericalist states was still very common in Rosmini's day, although he is optimistic about people increasingly rejecting the underlying "revolutionary, anarchical and totalitarian principles of public utility and reasons of State" (p. 106).) As with all other rights, the rights of the Church with regard to temporal goods allow for a right of sanction to protect them, and the Church has the same right to defend its property that any other human society or human individual does.

The third general element of universal social right is communal right, which concerns the rights of the members of the society in relation to the society itself. Some such communal right are the natural rights of the members, given further support, sanction, and title by the Church. However, other communal rights are specifically tied to the Church as a society. These fall into three groups: rights concerning admission, rights concerning membership, and accessory rights.

The most important right concerning admission, of course, is that every person deciding to accept the teaching of the Church has the right to join it; every person repenting of a prior rejection also has a right to readmission.

Rights of membership are quite a bit more involved, because all faithful in the Church have rights associated with all of the seven social powers of the Church. Baptism gives the faithful a share in the constitutive power; it consecrates the individual and unites him to the Church, and in so doing it establishes a contractual state involving God, the Church, and the individual, with relevant contractual rights. In addition, baptism confers a sacramental character, which gives the individual rights appropriate to the priesthood of all believers. The sacramental character elevates the member to a supernatural order as part of the Church, it brings the member into the proprietà of the Lord, and it grants "the faculty to carry out certain acts of supernatural worship, and to receive and exercise certain offices in the Church" (p. 124). This faculty, Rosmini says, is the essential right of every member, and the first and originating connatural right of membership in the Church. It is the baptismal character that gives a share in all seven social powers of the Church, and therefore acquired rights associated with them. The baptized have a share in the constitutive power by being able to baptize others when necessary; they have a share in litugical power by being participants in the liturgy and to use sacramentals; as the eucharist is such a holy sacrament that the very reception of it is priestly, they share in the eucharistic power by being able to receive it; they participate in the medicinal power by being able to receive the sacrament of penance and perform satisfactions; they participate in the hierogenetic power by being able actively to administer the sacrament of matrimony; they share in the didactic power by confessing Jesus Christ, by communicating the teachings of the Church and instructing others in the faith when appropriate, and by comparing the teaching of an individual pastor or preacher to the teaching of the whole Church in order to accept or reject it (which Rosmini notes can be a considerable power and right, and much of the historical involvement of Christian princes in the Church has been based on it); and they share in the ordinative power by having various rights to influence, through advice, petition, and the like, the persons, laws, and temporalities of the Church, and by being able to receive various offices of administration and assistance in the Church. Rosmini doesn't spend any time on it, but it follows from his argument that the sacramental character in ordination (certainly) and that in confirmation (most probably) also give further rights by giving a greater share in the social powers of the Church. And all of these rights, of course, have associated rights of sanction and reparation, just as other rights do.

Other rights, which Rosmini calls accessory and occasional rights, result from the fact that the Church Militant (i.e., the Church on earth), while one, also has many very diverse members and subsocieties, each of which is capable of being a subject of right. Thus the Church has a whole has rights specifically insofar as it is headed by the pope; the clergy, as a subsociety within the Church arising from its nature, has rights; the faithful as a whole have rights; the various bodies of clergy (e.g., dioceses, parishes, and clerical societies) have rights; the various bodies of the faithful (e.g., parishes and nations) have rights; the individuals of all of these have rights; and every corporate body considered as faithful members of the Catholic Church has rights. Each of these subjects has individual right, and of course can acquire right were it has just title. These can vary quite a bit depending on the society, the age, and past history; for instance, rights that arise because of donations or grants can be occasional, incidental, and limited in time and space.

The Church can be regarded as a supernatural domestic society (cf. p. 148), and therefore it makes sense to move from the Church to discuss the natural domestic society, i.e., the family or household.

to be continued

****

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right, Volume 4: Rights in God's Church, Cleary and Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham, UK: 1995.

Harp of the Spirit, Sun of the Syrians

 Today is the memorial of St. Ephrem the Syrian, Deacon and Doctor of the Church. From his Hymn 4 on the Epiphany (sections 18 to 25):

In Eden and in the world, are parables of our Lord;— and what tongue can gather, the similitudes of His mysteries?— for He is figured all of Him in all things. 

In the Scriptures He is written of; on Nature He is impressed — His crown is figured in kings, in prophets His truth, His atonement in priests.  

In the rod was He of Moses, and in the hyssops of Aaron — and in the crown of David: to the prophets pertains His similitude, to the Apostles His Gospel. 

Revelations beheld You, proverbs looked for You —mysteries expected You, similitudes saluted You, parables showed types of You. 

The Covenant of Moses looked forward to the Gospel:— all things of old time, flew on and alighted thereon, in the new Covenant. 

Lo! The prophets have poured out on Him, their glorious mysteries — the priests and kings have poured out upon Him, their wonderful types: — they all have poured them out on all of Him. 

Christ overcame and surpassed, by His teachings the mysteries — by His interpretations the parables; as the sea into its midst — receives all streams. 

For Christ is the sea, and He can receive — the fountains and brooks, the rivers and streams, that flow from the midst of the Scriptures.