tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12897315.post8953223122309816008..comments2024-03-28T09:54:55.115-05:00Comments on Dad29: The Realities of Catholic Moral TeachingDad29http://www.blogger.com/profile/08554276286736923821noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12897315.post-17586797428840395752016-02-19T22:09:21.303-06:002016-02-19T22:09:21.303-06:00Sanctifying grace is an act of God, though, is it ...Sanctifying grace is an act of God, though, is it not? It is a justification of man's act, which is to say (or at least, Aquinas says) it is a remission of sin. But then the sin to be remitted is in the act of the man, or in the man. <br /><br />http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2111.htm<br /><br />Indeed, justification of the ungodly is supposed to be God's greatest work (or at least maybe so -- Augustine is less convinced than Aquinas):<br /><br />http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2113.htm#article9<br /><br />I don't have a good warrant for the particular example of self-sacrifice. Clearly the saints are often saints just because of self-sacrifice in the cause of faith, but I'm not sure how the philosophy treats the act. Metaphysically, I had understood the sense of these passages to be that only God can act in a way that is good in the fullest sense -- the equivocal sense in which 'good' is applied to God, as opposed to everything else. The rest of us, so I had thought, are just doing the best we can. Grimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07543082562999855432noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12897315.post-25023327127509400122016-02-19T21:34:06.423-06:002016-02-19T21:34:06.423-06:00No.
That line of thinking is akin to that of the ...No.<br /><br />That line of thinking is akin to that of the Bogomil/Cathar heresy.<br /><br />To take a somewhat extreme example, self-sacrifice is an unalloyed good when taken in defense of another.<br /><br />What you're missing there is the element of sanctifying (and actual) grace.<br /><br />Dad29https://www.blogger.com/profile/08554276286736923821noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12897315.post-900519784953167832016-02-19T19:39:20.213-06:002016-02-19T19:39:20.213-06:00...There is no legitimate “principle” by which a “...<i>...There is no legitimate “principle” by which a “lesser of two evils” may ever be licitly engaged in.</i><br /><br />Hm, I'm not sure about that. Let me run through the argument as I understand it.<br /><br />According to Augustine, in a position endorsed by Aquinas, evil is a kind of privation. This has to be the right way to think about evil because goodness and existence end up being the same thing. God's essence is to exist. Goodness is what all things desire, and the end of action is the desired; so if we look at what all living things do, even plants, it is to strive for continued existence (both as individuals and through reproduction). So, goodness ultimately equals existence, which is to say that God is essentially good (because God exists essentially).<br /><br />Now, there's a problem about all created things not being able to 'be good' in the same way that God is good (nor to 'exist' in the same way). But that just means that all things fail to exist as perfectly as God, i.e., they don't exist essentially. Yet since all created things -- even evil things -- exist in some sense, they must all be good to some degree. <br /><br />http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1048.htm<br /><br />It sounds to me like the philosophical argument needs to turn that principle around. The 'lesser of two evils' is the best we can ever do, because evil is a privation of the fullness of goodness. Since we can never be fully good, we can only strive to be as good as possible -- which means that we will always be doing the lesser of evils. That's just the inverse of saying that evil is a privation of good, and even our best act cannot attain the fullness of good that is possible only in the divine nature. <br /><br />The problem as I understand it comes when you get an act that is so inherently disordered that it can't be described as <i>anywhere near</i> good. But even a good mortal action is going to involve some privation from the good per se, right?Grimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07543082562999855432noreply@blogger.com