My Reply to Ed Feser in Anamnesis Journal

Anamnesis Journal has posted my reply to Edward Feser, "Turning Wine into Water: A Reply to Edward Feser".

The errors in Feser’s reply are legion. He did not follow the line of argument, discern the influences that lay behind it, or state the position he identifies with correctly. When a readers’ interpretation varies so wildly from what was actually written, it is often the fault of the author. And I will admit the essay drew on a fairly broad range of intellectual disciplines—from the philosophy of history to theological anthropology—and presupposed familiarity with a wide array of thinkers—from St. Irenaeus to R.G. Collingwood to Hans urs von Balthasar....

Even with this proviso, Feser’s reply systematically misses and misrepresents a number of points that were plainly set forth. Feser obfuscates a distinction that was made quite clearly in the original essay: namely, the distinction between presenting natural law theories without explicit appeal to religious tradition, and declaring natural law completely independent from any religious tradition.

Read the rest here. 

Edward Feser on Nietzsche and Neo-Scholasticism

Ed Feser has responded to my Anamnesis essay. Here is an excerpt:

One thing’s for sure, the religious critics of natural theology and natural law seem chronically unable to provide any good arguments for their misgivings. I’ve had reason to consider several woolly attacks on natural law theory in recent months (e.g. here, here, and here), and another, by Thomas M. Cothran, has recently been posted at the website of the journal Anamnesis. It’s hysterical, in every sense of the word. Cothran assures his readers that we Neo-Scholastic natural law theorists, our Thomism and Catholicism notwithstanding, arereally implicitly beholden to… wait for it… wait for it… “a Nietzschean overcoming of Christianity.” The point of Garrigou-Lagrange’s Reality, it seems, was to provide a deceptively pious dust jacket within which to hide your copy of The Antichrist. Who knew? No doubt Henri de Lubac, who is (as the bylaws of Catholic anti-natural law polemic require), the hero of Cothran’s piece. Nouvelle theologie repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as a half-baked rant on the interwebs....

Would that everyone could have such discerning and well-tempered critics. 

There is a lot that puzzling about his response. He believes that the article is an "attack on natural law," when it actually champions natural law. I am not sure how he read an article touting natural law as a viable and underutilized alternative to secularism as an assault on natural law. Or how he asserts that Aristotle did not define the natural in contradistinction with the supernatural. (Hasn't every good Thomist read Metaphysics 6?)

One more bit:

What explains this mindset? Constitutional impatience with (or simple incapacity for) conceptual precision and argumentative rigor? A Pharisaical repugnance at the notion that non-Christian thinkers might have had something of importance to say about God or morality? Resentment of the suggestion that a mere philosophical argument could succeed where Bible thumping or rhetorical eloquence has failed?

Ed Feser's criticisms know no bounds but his imagination. I'll have a response out soon.

Nietzsche and Neo-Scholasticism

My new essay, "Nietzsche and Neo-Scholasticism: The Dangers and Promise of Natural Law," has been published on Anamnesis Journal's site. An excerpt:

To conceive of a natura pura (i.e., a human nature devoid of reference to the supernatural and transparent to reason) we would need to rid our traditions of thought of the vestiges of Christian revelation—and our model, at least in this respect, would be Nietzsche. Nietzsche recognized the degree to which Christianity had shaped the world, its refusal to stay within designated boundaries, the sheer saturation of God (at least the idea of God) into our thought, institutions, practices, laws, language, art, and so on. (Nietzsche even went so far as to declare, “We cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar.”) ...

A “pure nature,” a limpid sphere of human existence enclosed within the confines of created finitude, is therefore not simply given. In neither theory nor practice is a secular humanity given at the start and a religious dimension later added. But a pure nature can perhaps be achieved by a labor of thought that clips the wings of the human spirit.

Read the whole thing here. 

Taking the Literal Sense Literally

The error of fundamentalist approaches to Scripture is not that it overemphasizes the literal sense. It is, rather, that it impoverishes the letter.

The distinction between the literal sense and spiritual sense has nothing to do with degrees of truth. In the literal sense, meaning is had through words ("literal" comes from the Latin word for letters); in the spiritual sense meaning is had through the things spoken of. The former has to do, that is, with the manner of presentation in Scripture (the words that signify), and the latter with what is signified.

The literal sense includes metaphor and parables. Metaphorical truth, one might say, is even more purely literal than straightforward historical narrative, because it has more to do (proportionally) with what the author intends to convey by his expression and the latter more to do with the meaning of what is expressed.

Literalism of the fundamentalist sort is that spoken of by Paul, when he said "the letter kills, but the spirit gives life."

Gridlock in Heaven

Adam Kotsko--comic theologian.

With the Son and the Holy Spirit still deadlocked on key issues, God the Father announced today that divine providence would be shutting down, effective immediately. This is the first providence shutdown since the Filioque controversy that famously led to the East-West schism in 1054, nearly a milennium ago.

Read the rest here.