"For surely anyone's love will grow feebler and cooler towards one whom, as he supposes, he will have to leave, whose truth and wisdom he will have to reject, and that after he has come to the full knowledge of them, according to his capacity, in the perfection of felicity. No one can love a human friend with loyalty if he knows that in the future he will be his enemy" (City of God, Book XII, Chapter 21).

The last couple of weeks, I've been discussing happiness as it relates to the good, and the good as it relates to love. This week, I would like to discuss love is it relates to God. So far, I've given a basic definition for happiness—namely that our lives are only truly happy if we spend them in pursuit of the Good, meaning that we pursue our greatest goods first and our other lesser goods only when these do not hinder our pursuit of the greater goods. Moreover, to love somebody means to desire that person's greatest happiness, which in turn means desiring that that person pursue and acquire or attain his highest goods. As for these goods, the highest goods of man are to know (or understand) and to love, but the greatest, perfect, and supreme Good is God. In other words, man should aspire to final union with God, even though this is achieved only after this life; but he should also attempt to love others, and to pursue not only knowledge about God, but also the so-called "secular" knowledge (e.g. Natural philosophy, science, etc).

Saint Anselm, in formulating his famous ontological argument, noted that God is defined as "that than which greater cannot be thought" ("GCNBT"). As I mentioned in the first part of this series,
In other words, this is what (or Who) God is, by definition (and regardless of whether or not St Anselm's proof itself holds), and it can be nicely combined with Divine Simplicity (the two seem to be naturally intertwined in the thought of St Augustine, for example), which is a tenet of Classical Theism and of the Catholic Faith. In other words, when a faithful Catholic refers to God, he is referring to GCNBT, whether or not St Anselm's argument works. In other words, whether He exists or not, God is the greatest Good of which we can conceive.

"For surely anyone's love will grow feebler and cooler towards one whom, as he supposes, he will have to leave, whose truth and wisdom he will have to reject, and that after he has come to the full knowledge of them, according to his capacity, in the perfection of felicity. No one can love a human friend with loyalty if he knows that in the future he will be his enemy" (City of God, Book XII, Chapter 21).

Last week, I discussed this passage from Saint Augustine's City of God in the context of happiness and God as the total, supreme, and perfect good--the Ultimate Good. Today I want to explore a little more about what this means with regard to love.

What does it mean to love? This needs to be answered before much else can be discussed. There are a great many opinions about what it means to love, and most of them are wrong. This should not be surprising, since these mistaken opinions are I believe related to the various mistaken opinions about what constitutes happiness and what constitutes good. The three things--the good, happiness, and love--are, after all, related to each other.

Note: This post is meant as a sort of "bridge" piece which ties together a few loose ends from other previous posts. Thus, it is in part a review of previous posts both here and on my other sites, in preparation for a series of three posts on a related subject.

In his book Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law, Professor J Budziszewski discusses happiness as understood by Aristotle and his disciples, and also by other philosophers. He begins by suggesting a few "wrong" answers, each of which has been held out as "true" happiness by one school of thought or another. Thus, happiness is not pleasure, it is not honor, it is not the acquisition of bodily or material goods (that is, health and wealth), nor is it even excellence of mind, body, or moral character (e.g. Knowledge [1], strength, or virtue). That is not to say that a happy person must eschew all of these things, but only that none of them lead to ultimate happiness. Rather, ultimate happiness is tied to the ultimate Good.

"We have been asking in what the good of the human soul lies; maybe we should make better progress by first asking in what we think the good of anything lies—the good of a racehorse, the good of a knife, the good of an eye or what have you. The good of a racehorse lies in racing, the good of a knife lies in cutting and the good of an eye lies in seeing; that’s easy. But do you see what we’ve done here? In each case we have defined the good of a thing as an activity; not as any old activity but as its proper work or function....the function of a human soul will be whatever a human soul can do that nothing else can do, or at least that nothing else can do as well...Christianity points out that the human soul seems designed for at least two things, not one—at least two activities are unique to it and belong to its proper work. One is to understand, the other is to love; the former employs the reason, the latter employs the will. Both are directed to God and neighbor. To the extent that love and understanding are connected, any defect in one implies a defect in the other, and any defect in the comprehension of one also implies a defect in the comprehension of the other."

Note: This is the third installment on a long-dormant series of posts in which I reflect upon various heresies. Today's subject is cynicism; the modern cynic often tends to combine one or more formal heresies, or more broadly to reject three important ideas: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. I should add as a final note that I am here reflecting upon modern cynics, which are loosely based on the cynics described by Fr George Rutler in his essay for Disorientation: How to Go to College without Losing Your Mind, and not necessarily as the Greek philosophers such as Diogenes and Antisthenes (though these do have some things in common).
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"Jesus answered: My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would certainly strive that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now my kingdom is not from hence. Pilate therefore said to him: Art thou a king then? Jesus answered: Thou sayest that I am a king. For this was I born, and for this came I into the world; that I should give testimony to the truth. Every one that is of the truth, heareth my voice. Pilate saith to him: What is truth? And when he said this, he went out again to the Jews, and saith to them: I find no cause in him" (John 18:36-38).

As a general rule, heresy involves taken a single true doctrine or set of true doctrines and either rejecting them or overemphasizing them to the detriment of all other doctrines. Today's heresy, however, is not a heresy in the proper and particular sense, but rather is a type of attitude which lends itself to heresy, and indeed is a more vague kind of heresy. In fact, in a certain sense, it is an attitude adopted along with certain other attitudes or heresies, upon whose shoulders it stands. Cynicism might be described as the combinations of modernity (and post-modernity), moral relativism, and iconoclasm with a decided--indeed even and intentional--lack of charity.

One of the claims of materialistic scientism scientism is that the greatest works of man are reducible to mere chance. Thus, there is a popular bit of scientistic folklore which has long claimed that if we had a thousand monkeys and could provided them each with a typewriter and allow them to bang indefinitely, one or all would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. I contend that not only would these monkeys fail to do so, but that they could potentially fail to even begin to do so.

I've started reading through Mortimer J Adler's How to Think About the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization (edited by Mr Max Weismann), and I am struck by his insights into ideas which ought to be almost common-sense, and yet which are largely overlooked, ignored, or forgotten today. The book itself is not necessarily meant to be read in any broad order*--there are some chapters which are clearly sequels to each other--but Mr Weismann did a good job in arranging it so that the first topic addressed is Truth and the Second is Opinion.

A lively if somewhat off-topic discussion has ensued in comments section of Mrs Stacy Trascanco's recent post about the existence of space as opposed to God. Is space nothing? Or is it something? I argue that space is not nothing, because it is something. I will give a few quick reasons for this--that is, "ways" for knowing that this is true--and will attempt to address the objections to these reasons.

Before I can do that, I need to lay out some definitions and distinctions. The first definition is of “nothing.” There are quite a few common definitions (and other usages) of this most pregnant word, but the relevant ones are 1) no thing, not anything, naught; 2) nonexistence, nothingness. Thus, for example, the idea of creating something out of nothing means literally bringing into existence something which did not exist with no raw materials (including energy), etc; of of imparting existence where previously there was none.

I really don't have a lot to say about Intelligent Design. They've brought up some interesting critiques of evolution as a purely natural phenomenon, but I don't think that theirs conclusions necessarily follow. That is to say, I do not think that just because a theory has some holes in it now does not mean those holes will never be filled, even filled with purely natural evidence and theory. In any case, I basically agree with Professor Stephen Barr when he says (with my emphases):
The self-styled Intelligent Design (or "ID") movement says that while evolution may have happened the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random genetic mutations is not adequate to explain it. In particular, the ID people point to the great complexity of life, especially at the cellular level. If they are right, that would be very interesting, as it would almost force one to invoke miraculous intervention by God to explain many of the facts of biology. It would give us a slam-dunk proof for the existence of God. I, for one, would be very happy about that.

But are they right in saying that the Darwinian mechanism is inadequate to explain biological complexity? Most biologists, including most of those who are devout Christian believers, doubt it very strongly. And even if the ID people are right, it will be virtually impossible to prove that they are right because they are asserting a negative. They are saying that no Darwinian explanation of certain complex structures will ever be forthcoming. Well, there may not exist such an explanation now, but there might exist one later. So, in practice, I don't see a slam-dunk proof for miraculous intervention in evolution as coming out of this movement.

"If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to observe it, did it really happen?" This is the age-old question posed by the arm-chair philosopher, a sort of brain-tease "prove-it-to-me" question which can be difficult to resolve using formal logic and reasoning (especially for the average untrained or amateur philosopher), but which finds a rather simple resolution in common-sense experiences. That resolution is the insistence that solipsism is false, that there is a world outside of my own immediate senses and perceptions; and that this solipsism is equally false even if extended to cover the whole of the human race, or any other finite observers for that matter.

"[Some, especially the Platonist,] philosophers agree that the world was created by God, but they go on to ask us how we reply to questions about the date of creation. So let us find out what they themselves would reply to questions about the position of the creation. For the question, 'Why this time and not previously?' is on the same footing as 'Why this place rather than that?' For if they imagine that there were infinite stretches of time before the world existed, and infinity in which they cannot conceive of God's being inactive, they will, on the same showing, imagine infinite stretches of space; and if anyone says that the Omnipotent could have been inoperative anywhere in that infinity, it will follow that they are compelled to share the Epicurean fantasy of inumerable worlds [cf. Lucr. 2, 1048 f.]. The only difference would be that while Epicurus asserts these worlds come into being and then disintegrate through the fortuitous movements of atoms, the Platonists will say they are created by the action of God. The infinite number of worlds must follow, if they refuse to allow God to be inactive throughout the boundless immensity of space which stretches everywhere around the world, and if they hold that nothing can cause the destruction of those worlds, which is what they believe about this world of ours....Now if they assert that it is idle for men's imagination to conceive of infinite tracts of space, since there is no space beyond this world, then the reply is: it is idle for men to imagine previous ages of God's inactivity, since there is no time before the world began" (City of God Book XI, Chapter 5.

This is one of those myriad "philosophically pregnant" passages to be found in the writings of Saint Augustine. Quite a few interesting philosophy of science ideas jump out at me from this: the prescient linking of time and space, the point that there is no space of time outside of the world (that is, the universe), his dismissal of the many worlds theory (or, alternatively, of the oscillating universes theory). Since I am not particularly well-versed in all of the philosophies which were floating around in Saint Augustine's day, I don't know the exact shape that many of these things took: for example, this linking of space and time together probably didn't resemble, say, Einstein's relativity theories. I do suspect that he wasn't intentionally addressing these philosophies as we understand them today--yet at the same time, he does this (think, for example, of how Epicurean the idea of multiple universes becomes, especially if used by and atheist like Professor Stephen Weinberg as a "proof" that our own universe is not created).