Angels

I was standing in the harsh Texan T shirt winter of a Walmart car park and looked up at the sun. It glowed with incandescent light through the high clouds, like an angel on its flight path down to the rigs and shopping carts parked right there on the asphalt. 

What are angels? The Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, teaches us that they're purely spiritual, intellectual beings and therefore incorporeal, necessitated by the "perfection of the universe" and the nature of divine creation.

A Typical Angel

Angels, we learn, are without form and matter and exist fully actualized, beings of almost pure act. They are, however, inferior to God because they are contingent upon Him. Good stuff and you can read all about it here. But maybe this is all a bit highbrow, form and matter, species and genus, essence and existence and all of that. Let's bring the definition down to earth by reflecting on what angels aren't. 

Here's a helpful infographic:

These aren't angels, at least they're not the good kind. Don't ask for their help.

Vicious rumors that top Democrat Party operatives practice ritual magic and commune with demons are entirely with foundation.

Moral of the story? If you're going to get into it with angels, choose the right sort.

God bless,

LSP

Listen Up, Heathen

I'd say this was especially appropriate to the way we live now. St. Thomas Aquinas, via Dom Garrigou Lagrange:

St. Thomas, who was exceedingly humble and magnanimous, established very well the exact definition of these two virtues, which should be united, and that of the defects opposed to them. He defined pride as the inordinate love of our own excellence. The proud man wishes, in fact, to appear superior to what he really is: there is falsity in his life. When this inordinate love of our own excellence is concerned with sensible goods, for example, pride in our physical strength, it belongs to that part of the sensibility called the irascible appetite. It is in the will when it is concerned with goods of the spiritual order, such as intellectual pride and spiritual pride. This defect of the will presupposes that our intellect considers our own merits and the insufficiencies of our neighbors more than it ought, and that it exaggerates in order to raise us above them.

Love of our own excellence is said to be inordinate as it is contrary to right reason and divine law. It is directly opposed to the humble submission of the defectible and deficient creature before the majesty of God.

Inordinate love of our own excellence. Dodge the flying monkey.

Salve,

LSP 

Charity, Brethren

A big part of the famous LSP lifestyle involves getting into the rig, driving out into the countryside, and visiting the sick. Sometimes I take Blue Caritas; he can play with his dog pals while I look after pastoralia. But here's a serious thought, as you bite into your refreshing Obamka ice cream treat.

Yum

You can, and should, be as orthodox as the day is long. Go right ahead, memorize the Summa, have Gilson and Maritain at your fingertips, be able to parse scripture like Farrer and take on the error of our times like the fabled Chesterbelloc. 

Bad Deacon!

Good job, well done. But without love, it amounts to nothing and worse. The Apostle shoots in the X Ring, in his Epistle to the Corinthians:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

A clanging cymbal. There's a warning in that and while you finish off your delicious Obamka, say a prayer that priests and pastors are given the grace to live into the precepts of charity.

That doesn't mean, by the way, that Hillary shouldn't go to jail.

God bless,

LSP

Trinity Sunday

My philosopher sportsman friend, GWB, sent me this picture. He's proud of his Bass and who can blame him; makes me want to buy/borrow a Jon Boat and get out on the lake...

But in the meanwhile, it's the Feast of the Trinity today, so here's some Aquinas on "The Trinity of divine persons and the unity of the divine essence":

"We must conclude from all we have said that in the Godhead there is something threefold which is not opposed to the unity and simplicity of the divine essence. We must acknowledge that God is, as existing in His nature, and that He is known and loved by Himself.

But this occurs otherwise in God than in us. Man, to be sure, is a substance in his nature, but his actions of knowing and loving are not his substance. Considered in his nature, man is indeed a subsisting thing; as he exists in his mind, however, he is not a subsisting thing, but a certain representation of a subsisting thing; and similarly with regard to his existence in himself as beloved in lover. Thus man may be regarded under three aspects: that is, man existing in his nature, man existing in his intellect, and man existing in his love. Yet these three are not one, for man's knowing is not his existing, and the same is true of his loving. Only one of these three is a subsisting thing, namely, man existing in his nature.

In God, on the contrary, to be, to know, and to love are identical. Therefore God existing in His natural being and God existing in the divine intellect and God existing in the divine love are me thing. Yet each of them is subsistent. And, as things subsisting in intellectual nature are usually called persons in Latin, or hypostases in Greek, the Latins say that there are three persons in God, and the Greeks say that there are three hypostases, namely, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."

You can read the whole thing here if you like, or have a gaze at a nicely restored and ready to fire LMG (Bren) over at Boomers. Great weapon.

Cheers,

LSP

Don't Be Shallow, Read Aquinas.

Dawkins

I know this blog's been a frivolous mix of aliens, guns, boots and horses recently, so here's a bit on St. Thomas Aquinas to even things out. It's from the Chicago Daily Observer and argues against the widespread notion that God is a superstitious idea that's been explained away by 'science'. I've never understood how physics, chemistry and assorted technics could disprove a necessary being, and it seems strange to me that Dawkins & Co. would get so worked up about something they see as so absurd. Surely they're not threatened in any way? Regardless, I think Fr. Barron's take on Thomas is good:

"Secondly, Thomas knew that the Creator God of the Bible is the only finally satisfying explanation for the existence of the contingent things of the world. He was deeply impressed by the actual existence of those things that do not contain within themselves the reason for their being. Clouds, trees, plants, animals, human beings, buildings, planets, and stars certainly exist, but they don’t have to exist. This means, he saw, that their being is not self-explanatory, that it depends, finally, on some primordial reality which does exist through the power of its own essence. This “necessary” being is what Thomas called “God.” He was moved by the correspondence between this philosophical sense of God and the self-designation that God gives in Exodus 3:14: “I am who I am.” How significant this is in our time when “new” atheists have raised their voices to dismiss belief in God as a holdover from a pre-scientific time. Thomas would remind the Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins of the world that no scientific advance could ever, even in principle, eliminate the properly metaphysical question to which God is the only satisfying answer. God is not a superstitious projection of human need; rather, God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing.

Thirdly, Thomas Aquinas was a deep humanist, precisely because he was a Christian. He saw that since God became human in Christ, the destiny of the human being is divinization, participation in the inner life of God. No other religion or philosophy or social theory has ever held out so exalted a sense of human dignity and purpose. And this is why, Aquinas intuited, there is something inviolable about the human person. How indispensably important that teaching is in our era of stem-cell research, euthanasia, legalized abortion, and pre-emptive war, practices that turn persons into means." You can read the whole thing here.

"How indispensably important..." well said, Barron.

Just heard that one of my old friends from England has been made a Bishop. Quite remarkable.

God bless,

LSP

Episcopalien

Image of Boy Bishop from NY Times Magazine

Back in Texas after journalistic foray to California and TEC's triennial General Convention. So what was it all about? Something called "gender identity expression" apparently, which means:

Lifting a self-imposed ban on consecrating "LGBT" persons as bishops

"Developing" same sex blessing rituals

Suing any Episcopalians who disagree and want to get out

Telling the rest of the Anglican world to get with the program or get lost

At least that's the way the world's media saw it, which prompted Jefferts Schori, pictured above, to accuse the press of "so much misinformation". Perhaps she didn't like headlines such as "House of Deputies Goes Gay", or "Retired Bishop Denies Sacrament of Marriage". Maybe she didn't appreciate attention being drawn to the fact that TEC's new budget earmarks $4 million for lawyers to sue parishes and dioceses that are busy leaving her pansexual union - at a rate of around a thousand people a week.

Anyway, as a simple country priest who likes horses and guns I don't think you have to be a genius like St. Thomas Aquinas to work out the fact that some changes in doctrine are valid developments and some aren't. The criterion, I suppose, is consistency and what TEC's been up to in Anaheim is the opposite of around 2000 years worth of teaching and scriptural warrant on Faith and Morals.

Except for a minority of Provinces on TEC's declining payroll, the vast majority of the Anglican Communion knows this and looks set to break off an already tenuous relationship with Jefferts Schori's denomination. My feeling is that she knows this and simply doesn't care.

Why? I'll stick with earlier thoughts about aliens - some say they have a large base on the dark side of the moon, I'd recommend looking a little closer to home, at 815 2nd Ave. NYC and The Episcopal Church Center.

Cheers,

LSP

PS. Here's a link to the famous fighting monkey, Jacco Macacco.

Theology, innit.

I know this isn't about guns, horses, dogs, the failed modernist liberal humanist secular project et al., but it is about God, or rather one of His followers - St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor. Maritain has this to say:

"Between Aristotle as viewed in himself and Aristotle viewed in the writings of St. Thomas is the difference which exists between a city seen by the flare of a torchlight procession and the same city bathed in the light of the morning sun."

Maritain, Introduction to Philosophy

Here's an excerpt from one of Thomas' hymns, the Pange Lingua, which he wrote for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, in the 13th C. Some believe that the rythm of the hymn comes down from a marching song of Caesar's Legions: "Ecce, Caesar nunc triumphat qui subegit Gallias."

PANGE, lingua, gloriosi

Corporis mysterium,

Sanguinisque pretiosi,

quem in mundi pretium

fructus ventris generosi

Rex effudit Gentium.

The translation doesn't do justice, but...

SING, my tongue, the Savior's glory,

of His flesh the mystery sing;

of the Blood, all price exceeding,

shed by our immortal King,

destined, for the world's redemption,

from a noble womb to spring.

As the legend has it, "Thomas, you have written well on the Sacrament of my Body."

Have a blessed (late) Feast of Corpus Christi.

LSP