Category: Articles

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Our Contraceptive Speech

Master Adamo lies a bloated mass of “watery rot.” His amorphous frame bears his diseased paunch and distended limbs, as his lips curl and crack under his parching fever—despite being a waterlogged waste. He lies before Dante the Pilgrim and Virgil and explains how King Minos poured him into the last ditch of the eighth circle of hell. He was a counterfeiter of Florentine florins. He blurred the lines of reality in life and now he lays blurred—a poor counterfeit of his former self.

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A Brief Introduction to the Common Good

The common good is an uncommon concept today, and the genuine article is often confused with counterfeits. It may, therefore, be helpful to set out clearly and simply some definitions and distinctions, to explain what ‘the common good’ means to the integralist, as opposed to what it means to the totalitarian, the utilitarian, or the liberal. These notes are mostly gathered from other Josias posts; follow the links and footnotes for more in-depth treatments.

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Ecology and the Theology of Creation

On April 22, the St. Basil Institute for the Theology of Creation will be hosting an online conference on ecology and the theology of creation. Pope Francis has spoken about the importance of the current ecological crisis throughout his pontificate. While the Holy Father discussed the need for a uniquely Catholic approach to this crisis in Laudato Si, unfortunately most Catholics who engage with these issues continue to do so from a secular perspective. Why is a uniquely Catholic approach so important?

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Friendship and Politics

The Nature of Friendship

Aristotle discusses friendship near the end of his Nicomachean Ethics, immediately after a discussion of pleasure, and before the final discussion of true happiness. This order is appropriate, because friendship is both man’s greatest pleasure and necessary for the happiness of man’s earthly life. True happiness is to know the good and to have it, and friendship is among the greatest goods a person can have.

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Uncommon Confusion: The New Natural Law Theory’s Confusion of Predication and Causality Destroys the Natural Order

The following lecture was delivered to the faculty of Thomas Aquinas College in the fall of 2020.

When Aquinas presents his understanding of the natural law, he unifies it under a single precept, “Good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be shunned.”[1] This precept forms the basis for every other natural law precept—which is why it is a unifying principle for the natural law as a whole[2]—because it expresses the first principle of any action whatsoever. We do not commit a fully human act except insofar as an act seems to be good or to be aimed at a good (or away from its opposite). The precept is universal; it grounds any and every pursuit of goods. But there is a question: What, precisely, is meant by “good” in this precept?

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The Child as a Common Good

by Michael Berndt

For my wife.

The title of this essay is “The Child as a Common Good,” which would seem to be an unfortunate topic to defend, for at least two reasons. The first is that the notion of a common good requires a degree of universality that the child, as a particular subject, apparently fails to attain. The second reason follows from the principle that because a common good is more universal than a singular good, it is also more communicable. As Charles De Koninck has put it, the common good “reaches the singular more than the singular good: it is the greater good of the singular” (16). Now if the child as a good is held in common by anyone, then it is certainly by the child’s parents; but in practice it is perhaps rare to hear parents echoing De Koninck’s words with respect to their children. The reality, in fact, seems closer to the opposite: many parents would describe the relationship between their own singular goods and their children in sacrificial terms—and every sacrifice, however willing, must imply some opposition between goods. The child as a good, therefore, seems not to “reach the singular more than the singular good,” and so the child appears not to fit the definition of a common good for his or her parents.

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Integralism and the Hermeneutic of Reform

The term integralism does not describe a movement or a philosophical school. It is simply a word coined in the nineteenth century to describe the opposite of a grievous error condemned by the Church— liberalism. It is thus analogous to terms such as dyophysite, iconodule or transubstantiationist. It names orthodoxy in a particular area of Catholic teaching.

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God’s Knowledge of Future Contingents: A Response to Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre—one of greatest Catholic thinkers of his generation, and one of the most formative influences on my own intellectual development—has unfortunately capped his career by denying divine omniscience. At this weekend’s fall conference for the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, MacIntyre delivered a keynote lecture entitled “The Apparent Oddness of the Universe: How to Account for It?” In this lecture, he argues that the Catholic tradition has been excessive in its praise for our All-Knowing God. For when it comes to future contingents—or at least the kind of creative and unpredictable future contingents that MacIntyre calls “singularities”—MacIntyre claims that God cannot know them any more than you or I can. “Until [a free created] agent finally makes her or his decision,” MacIntyre explains,

her or his future action is undetermined. There is no fact of the matter about what she or he is going to decide or to do, nothing to make any statement about, true or false. Not only does she or he not know what she or he is going to do, no one else can be said to know this either, including God. . . . So, even if an omniscient God does exist, there have been and will be numerous occasions on which he cannot be said to know what will be done or happen, until it is done or happens.

I think MacIntyre is horribly mistaken. In this essay, I will proceed in three parts: First, I will explain the orthodox tradition concerning God’s knowledge of future contingents, proceeding through Aristotle and St. Boethius and St. Thomas Aquinas. Second, I will say something about where Duns Scotus and William of Ockham fit into all of this, two thinkers whose accounts I do not accept, but who nevertheless agree with the conclusion of the orthodox tradition that God knows all things—including future contingents. Third, I will critique another modern Catholic philosopher who denied God’s omniscience in this regard, namely Peter Geach, whom MacIntyre cited in his replies to the objections in the Q&A, to justify his own imposition of limits on God’s knowledge.

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Rights and the Common Good

1. Beginning with the obvious[1]

Some things are difficult to understand because they are very abstract, separated from the concrete and sensible realities surrounding us—this is a difficulty that we experience, for example, in the consideration of the most universal predicates. Other things are difficult to understand because they are so exalted, existing on a higher level of perfection than us—this is the difficulty we find, for example in understanding the hierarchy of the angels. Yet other matters are difficult to understand because they are so complicated, involving so many parts and elements and influences that it is difficult to keep them all in our minds at once—for example, the politics of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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