Get Real!

The Sacrifice of Elijah Before the Priests of Baal c.1621-22 | Domenico Fetti

God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity ... down to the very roots and sea-bed of the nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him. - C. S. Lewis

The first role of Catholic philosophers is to articulate the Catholic faith (or, better, Catholic wisdom) in a comprehensive, systematic, and intellectually rigorous manner and to transmit this articulation at appropriate levels of sophistication to other members of the Church--especially, but not only, to those who themselves aspire to be Catholic philosophical inquirers. [...] The second role of Catholic philosophers is to engage non-believing philosophers in intellectual exchanges, and to do so with charity, courage, and integrity, both in order to learn and in order to teach.(15) This claim, taken generally and in the abstract, is very nearly uncontroversial, since sympathetic and intellectually rigorous interaction with philosophically sophisticated non-believers has been a staple of the Catholic tradition from the very beginning, despite periodic protests from those who see the Gospel as a wholesale replacement for, rather than the perfection and completion of, the philosophical inquiry of non-believers. - Alfred J. Freddoso

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Is it too obvious to state that we are living in an era saturated with distractions when people, for whatever reason or reasons, are dissatisfied with reality and so they adopt any number of questionable tactics to reinvent themselves and their circumstances? Instead of adopting strategies that allow them to embrace reality, people readily sacrifice their minds to various ideologies that, like drugs that distract for a moment but often exact a very high and tragically fatal cost on the user, imprison people in a fantasy that terminates in acute or gradual misery. Misery, that is, for all. When the convict enamoured of his self-constructed prison is confronted with the incredulity of others unwilling to embrace his lie, the warden attempts to lock up any resisters along with the inmate(s) running the prison.

The Church has among her many priceless treasures to offer seekers a glorious alternative to the suicidal ideologies that plague the young and rob them of the opportunity to achieve their true potential. That treasure is her experience of ontology.

The following snippets (keys) are intended to incite conversation and provoke others to finding ways to disseminate the Church's teaching to inoculate souls against the pandemic of ideologies that do anything but help individuals find their way to love, authentic identity, acceptance, hope, freedom, resilience and eternal salvation.

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Ontology (Catholic Encyclopedia)

(on, ontos, being, and logos, science, the science or philosophy of being).

Though the term is used in this literal meaning by Clauberg (1625-1665) (Opp., p. 281), its special application to the first department of metaphysics was made by Christian von Wolff (1679-1754) (Philos. nat., sec. 73). Prior to this time "the science of being" had retained the titles given it by its founder Aristotle: "first philosophy", "theology", "wisdom". The term "metaphysics" (q.v.) was given a wider extension by Wolff, who divided "real philosophy" into general metaphysics, which he called ontology, and special, under which he included cosmology, psychology, and theodicy. This programme has been adopted with little variation by most Catholic philosophers. The subject-matter of ontology is usually arranged thus:

1. The objective concept of being in its widest range, as embracing the actual and potential, is first analyzed, the problems concerned with essence (nature) and existence, "act" and "potency" are discussed, and the primary principles — contradiction, identity, etc. — are shown to emerge from the concept of entity.
2. The properties coextensive with being — unity, truth, and goodness, and their immediately associated concepts, order and beauty — are next explained.
3. The fundamental divisions of being into the finite and the infinite, the contingent and the necessary, etc., and the subdivisions of the finite into the categories (q.v.) substance and its accidents (quantity, quality, etc.) follow in turn — the objective — reality of substance, the meaning of personality, the relation of accidents to substance being the most prominent topics.
4. The concluding portion of ontology is usually devoted to the concept of cause and its primary divisions — efficient and final, material and formal --the objectivity and analytical character of the principle of causality receiving most attention.

Ontology is not a subjective science as Kant describes it (Ub. d. Fortschr. d. Met., 98) nor "an inferential Psychology", as Hamilton regards it (Metaphysics, Lect. VII); nor yet a knowledge of the absolute (theology); nor of some ultimate reality whether conceived as matter or as spirit, which Monists suppose to underlie and produce individual real beings and their manifestations. Ontology is a fundamental interpretation of the ultimate constituents of the world of experience. All these constituents — individuals with their attributes — have factors or aspects in common. The atom and the molecule of matter, the plant, the animal, man, and God agree in this that each is a being, has a characteristic essence, an individual unity, truth, goodness, is a substance and (God excepted) has accidents, and is or may be a cause. All these common attributes demand definition and explanation — definition not of their mere names, but analysis of the real object which the mind abstracts and reflectively considers. Ontology is therefore the fundamental science since it studies the basal constituents and the principles presupposed by the special sciences. All the other parts of philosophy, cosmology, psychology, theodicy, ethics, even logic, rest on the foundation laid by ontology. The physical sciences — physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics likewise, presuppose the same foundations. Nevertheless ontology is dependent in the order of analysis, though not in the order of synthesis, on these departments of knowledge; it starts from their data and uses their information in clarifying their presuppositions and principles. Ontology is accused of dealing with the merely abstract. But all science is of the abstract, the universal, not of the concrete and individual. The physical sciences abstract the various phenomena from their individual subjects; the mathematical sciences abstract the quantity — number and dimensions — from its setting. Ontology finally abstracts what is left — the essence, existence, substance, causality, etc. It is idle to say that of these ultimate abstractions we can have no distinct knowledge. The very negation of their knowableness shows that the mind has some knowledge of that which it attempts to deny. Ontology simply endeavours to make that rudimentary knowledge more distinct and complete. There is a thoroughly developed ontology in every course of Catholic philosophy; and to its ontology that philosophy owes its definiteness and stability, while the lack of an ontology in other systems explains their vagueness and instability.

Being (Leithart, First Things)

Thus, from the viewpoint of Trinitarian ontology, Being itself has to be reimagined. Ancient ontology assumed that Being is what persists in a world of change. Trinitarian ontology insists instead on the primacy of love; love endures. Love is action, an out-going from the self to the Other. Within a Trinitarian ontology, the verb becomes the “new substantive.” Things aren’t most fully themselves when they’re at rest, unchanging, alone. Being isn’t isolated stasis. Beings exist and fulfill themselves not by holding back, but by giving. For created things as for God, “self-having [is] self-giving.” Things are what they are, they possess themselves, in action, in motion, and in relation, in the movement of love. Love is the very “rhythm of Being.”

The Absolute (Catholic Encyclopedia)

A term employed in modern philosophy with various meanings, but applied generally speaking to the Supreme Being. It signifies (1) that which is complete and perfect; (2) that which exists by its own nature and is consequently independent of everything else; (3) that which is related to no other being; (4) the sum of all being, actual and potential (Hegel).

In the first and the second of these significations the Absolute is a name for God which Christian philosophy may readily accept. Though the term was not current in the Middle Ages, equivalent expressions were used by the Scholastic writers in speaking, e.g. of God as Pure Actuality (Actus Purus), as uncaused Being, or as containing pre-eminently every perfection. St. Thomas, in particular, emphasizes the absoluteness of God by, showing that he cannot be classed under any genus or species, and that His essence is identical with His existence. Aquinas also anticipates the difficulties which arise from the use of the term Absolute in the sense of unrelated being, and which are brought out quite clearly in modern discussions, notably in that between Mill, as critic of Sir William Hamilton's philosophy, and Mansel as its defender. It was urged that the Absolute could not consistently be thought of or spoken of as First Cause, for the reason that causation implies relation, and the Absolute is outside of all relation; it cannot, therefore, be conceived as producing effects. St. Thomas, however, offered a solution. He holds that God and created things are related, but that the relation is real in the effects only. It implies no conditioning or modification of the Divine Being; it is in its application to, God merely conceptual. The fashion of our thought obliges us to conceive God as one term of a relation, but not to infer that the relation affects Him as it affects the created thing which is the other term. This distinction, moreover, is based on experience. The process of knowledge involves a relation between the known object and, the knowing subject, but the character of the relation is not the same in both terms. In the mind it is real because perception and thought imply the exercise of mental faculties, and consequently a modification of the mind itself. No such modification, however, reaches the object; this is the same whether we perceive it or not.

being (Catholic Culture)

Whatever in any way is, whether it exists or is possible, whether in the mind, in the imagination, or in a statement. Philosophically being is the real, and corresponds to essence or thing. Its opposite is the unreal and finally that which implies an inner contradiction.

Oh, night that guided me, Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,

Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!

John of the Cross (Dark Night of the Soul, 1585)

Living Trinity (Rev. Fr. Charles Fox)

Our belief in the Holy Trinity, that there are three distinct yet equal Persons in the one true God, is such a lofty and such an all-encompassing truth that it can be difficult to see clearly the connection to our practical lives. And yet, the fact that God is a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — even though it is a truth above all things — is also a truth at the heart of everything: everything we know, everything we think or do, and everything that happens to us.

But among all of the experiences of the Holy Trinity we have in this life, there is none so powerful as the experience we have at Mass. Every time we celebrate the Eucharist, we encounter God in the most direct, deepest, most intimate, most powerful way possible on earth. The Mass is a foretaste — you might say a “sneak preview” — of the total and perfect union with God we will have in heaven.

In order to understand how we encounter God in the Mass, we need to know something about God’s inner life, meaning, the life shared between the three Persons of the Trinity. To put it briefly, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not just sitting up there in heaven. There are between the three Persons of the Trinity dynamic relationships, relationships of love that are the root and foundation of our experience of love here on earth.

This life of God’s love is the life that awaits us in heaven. Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John that one of the reasons for His Ascension is to prepare a place for us in heaven. This is the same passage in which Jesus tells us that in His Father’s house, “there are many dwelling places.” We are called not just to live somewhere in heaven, but to live with God, sharing in His very life.

Again, the Mass is a foretaste of this life, and so we need to see that each time we come to Mass God wants to draw us more and more deeply into His life, in large measure so that He can prepare us for heaven.

We begin and end each Mass by invoking the names of the three Persons of the Trinity — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — as we make the Sign of the Cross and as the priest gives the final blessing. [...]

The basic theme — and perhaps the one thing to remember from this article if you don’t remember anything else — is that generally speaking in the Mass we are praying to the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit. [...]

In the Mass we are caught up in something infinitely greater than our own private prayer: we participate in the worship that Jesus gives to His Father right now in heaven. We could never do this without the divine power of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit making it possible.

Sermon 24. The Mystery of the Holy Trinity (Saint John Henry Newman)

https://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume6/sermon24.html

And this Mystery, which the Old Testament obscurely signifies, is in the New clearly declared; and it is this,—that the God of all, who is revealed in the Old Testament, is the Father of a Son from everlasting, called also His Word and Image, of His substance and partaker of all His perfections, and equal to Himself, yet without being separate from Him, but one with Him; and that from the Father and the Son proceeds eternally the Holy Spirit, who also is of one substance, Divinity, and majesty with Father and Son. Moreover we learn that the Son or Word is a Person,—that is, is to be spoken of as "He," not "it," and can be addressed; and that the Holy Ghost also is a Person. Thus God subsists in Three Persons, from everlasting to everlasting; first, God is the Father, next God is the Son, next God is the Holy Ghost; and the Father is not the Son, nor the Son the Holy Ghost, nor the Holy Ghost the Father. And God is Each of these Three, and nothing else; that is, He is either the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Ghost. Moreover, God is as wholly and entirely God in the Person of the {358} Father, as though there were no Son and Spirit; as entirely in that of the Son, as though there were no Spirit and Father; as entirely in that of the Spirit, as though there were no Father and Son. And the Father is God, the Son God, and the Holy Ghost God, while there is but one God; and that without any inequality, because there is but One God, and He is without parts or degrees; though how it is that that same Adorable Essence, indivisible, and numerically One, should subsist perfectly and wholly in Each of Three Persons, no words of man can explain, nor earthly illustration typify.

Love empties; love fills.

Love trusts; love thrills.

Love builds; love sustains.

Love endures; love reigns.

- G.N.

MMXXI