Aristotle on Usury
Published on September 3rd, 2011.
There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former is necessary and honourable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. That is why of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.
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Aristotle, Politics I.10 (1258a39-b7)
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Why we believe
Published on May 24th, 2011.
If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, “For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity.” I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts. The secularist is not to be blamed because his objections are scrappy; it is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind. I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend. The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion.
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G. K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy,” in G. K. Chesterton: Collected Works, Vol. I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 348.
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On a Calvinistic Characterization of God
Published on May 17th, 2011.
From this same work [Some Dogmas of Religion by McTaggart] I learned valuable lessons about what may be called the ethics of belief and about criteria that may be applied to discredit alleged revelations. Later, we shall be considering cautions that are needed in ascribing human moral virtues to the Divine Nature. It is another matter where theologians ascribe to the Divine Nature attributes modelled on human vices. Such a God would be capable de tout; one could not even trust him, let alone worship him. For example, an early English Calvinist held that God consigns some of us to everlasting damnation for his mere good pleasure–quia voluit. At that rate we could not be sure that God will not damn the whole human race for his mere good pleasure; as McTaggart point out, allegedly revealed promises to the contrary could give no assurance, for the character of such a God might not exclude the will to fool us. Happily, there can be no reason to trust the alleged revelation of such a God; if he can lie, still more may those who claim to speak in his name.
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Peter Geach, Truth and Hope (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), p. 5.
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A Bitter Obedience
Published on May 11th, 2011.
While we may regard this application of the parable of the two brothers [i.e., the prodigal son] to Israel and the Gentiles as one dimension of the text, there are other dimensions as well. After all, what Jesus says about the older brother is aimed not simply at Israel (the sinners who came to him were Jews, too), but at the specific temptation of the righteous, of those who are “en regle,” at rights with God, as Grelot puts it (p. 229). In this connection, Grelot places emphasis on the sentence “I never disobeyed one of your commandments.” For them, more than anything else God is Law; they see themselves in a juridical relationship with God and in that relationship they are at rights with him. But God is greater: They need to convert from the Law-God to the greater God, the God of love. This will not mean giving up their obedience, but rather that this obedience will flow from deeper wellsprings and will therefore be bigger, more open, and purer, but above all more humble.
Let us add a further aspect that has already been touched upon: Their bitterness toward God’s goodness reveals an inward bitterness regarding their own obedience, a bitterness that indicates the limitations of this obedience. In their heart of hearts, they would have gladly journeyed out into that great “freedom” as well. There is an unspoken envy of what others have been able to get away with. They have not gone through the pilgrimage that purified the younger brother and made him realize what it means to be free and what it means to be a son. They actually carry their freedom as if it were slavery and they have not matured to real sonship. They, too, are still in need of a path; they can find it if they simply admit that God is right and accept his feast as their own. In this parable, then, the Father through Christ is addressing us, the ones who never left home, encouraging us too to convert truly and to find joy in our faith.
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Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Vol. I: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 210-11.
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Virtue and True Philosophy
Published on March 22nd, 2011.
Actions, then, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.
But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy.
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Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.4 (1105b5-17)
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Orwell on Writing
Published on February 25th, 2011.
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.
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George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)
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Free Will, Paradoxes and Happy-Face Solutions
Published on February 9th, 2011.
A paradox is a set of mutually inconsistent propositions each of which enjoys some plausibility when considered apart from the others. A happy-face solution to a paradox simply identifies one of the propositions as the false member of the set, the odd-guy-out. Typically, this odd-guy-out is identified on the basis of a meaning analysis of the crucial concept generating the paradox. It’s claimed that once we get clear about the meaning of that concept, we’ll see that such-and-such particular proposition is false. Compatibilism, for example, is a happy-face solution to the paradox of free will. There the paradox consists of the following set of mutually inconsistent propositions: (i) we have free will; (ii) everything we do was caused by events that occurred even before we were born; (iii) (i) and (ii) are incompatible. The compatibilist rejects (iii). He says that once we appreciate that to say that an action was done of one’s free will is just to say that it was caused by one’s desires and beliefs in a certain way, then we’ll see that it’s plainly consistent with one’s having free will that one’s beliefs and desires have causes that antedate one’s birth. The typical trouble with happy-face solutions, a trouble well illustrated by the compatibilist’s solution to the problem of free will, is that it leaves one wondering, ‘If that’s the solution, then what the hell was the problem?’ The happy-face solution makes it a mystery why one was ever deceived by the false proposition in the first place. If ‘x acted freely’ simply means, say, that x would have acted differently if x had decided to, then why would anyone ever have thought that determinism threatened free will? Are fluent and intelligent speakers of English confused about what their own words mean in their own mouths? (pp. 328-9)
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Stephen Schiffer, “Contextualist Solutions to Scepticism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 96 (1996), pp. 317-333.
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Aristotle on Individual Education
Published on January 25th, 2011.
Further, individual education has an advantage over education in common, as individual medical treatment has; for while in general rest and abstinence from food are good for a man in a fever, for a particular man they may not be; and a boxer presumably does not prescribe the same style of fighting to all his pupils. It would seem, then, that the detail is worked out with more precision if the care is particular to individuals; for each person is more likely to get what suits his case.
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Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. X, 1180b7-13.
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The Way to Faith
Published on December 3rd, 2010.
“When Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, He said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.” — Mark xii. 34.
. . . .In these words, then, we are taught, first, that the Christian’s faith and obedience are not the same religion as that of natural conscience, as being some way beyond it; secondly, that this way is “not far,” not far in the case of those who try to act up to their conscience; in other words, that obedience to conscience leads to obedience to the Gospel, which, instead of being something different altogether, is but the completion and perfection of that religion which natural conscience teaches. . . . .
Yet though this is so plain, both from our own moral sense, and the declarations of Scripture, still for many reasons it is necessary to insist upon it; chiefly, because, it being very hard to keep God’s commandments, men would willing persuade themselves, if they could, that strict obedience is not necessary under the Gospel, and that something else will be taken, for Christ’s sake, in the stead of it. Instead of labouring, under God’s grace, to change their wills, to purify their hearts, and so prepare themselves for the kingdom of God, they imagine that in that kingdom they may be saved by something short of this, by their baptism, or by their ceremonial observances (the burnt offerings and sacrifices which the scribe disparages), or by their correct knowledge of the truth, or by their knowledge of their own sinfulness, or by some past act of faith which is to last them during their lives, or by some strong habitual persuasion that they are safe; or, again, by the performance of some one part of their duty, though they neglect the rest, as if God said a thing to us in nature, and Christ unsaid it; and, when men wish a thing, it is not hard to find texts in Scripture which may be ingeniously perverted to suit their purpose. The error then being so common in practice, of believing that Christ came to gain for us easier terms of admittance into heaven than we had before (whereas, in fact, instead of making obedience less strict, He has enabled us to obey God more strictly; and instead of gaining easier terms of admittance, He has gained us altogether our admittance into heaven, which before was closed against us); this error, I say, being so common, it may be right to insist on the opposite truth, however obvious, that obedience to God is the way to know and believe in Christ. . . .
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John Henry Cardinal Newman, “Obedience to God the Way Way to Faith in Christ,” in Apologia Pro Vita Sua, & Six Sermons, edited, annotated, and introduced by Frank Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 449-50.
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Fate in Calvinistic Clothing
Published on November 27th, 2010.
What Calvin did was this. He took what is one of the oldest and most perilous directives of mankind, the sense of Fate. He isolated it, and he made it supreme, by fitting it, with the kneading of a powerful mind, into the scheme which Christian men still traditionally associated with the holiness and authority of their ancestral religion.
God had become Man, and God had become Man to redeem mankind. That was no part of the old idea of Inevitable Fate. On the contrary, it was a relief from that pagan nightmare. We of the Faith say that the Incarnation was intended to release us from such a pagan nightmare. Well, Calvin accepted the Incarnation, but he forced it to fit in with the old pagan horror of compulsion: “Ananke.” He reintroduced the Inexorable.
Yes, God had become Man and had died to save mankind; but only mankind in such numbers and persons as He had chosen to act for. The idea of the Inexorable remained. The merits of Christ were imputed, and no more. God was Causation, and Causation is one immutable whole. A man was damned or saved; and it was not of his doing. The recognition of evil as equal with good, which rapidly becomes the worship of evil (the great Manichean heresy, which has roots as old as mankind; the permanent motive of Fear) was put forward by Calvin in a strange new form. He did not indeed oppose, as had the Manichean, two equal principles of Good and of Evil. He put forward only one principle, God. But to that One Principle he ascribed all our suffering, and, for must of us, necessary and eternal suffering.
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Hilaire Belloc, How the Reformation Happened (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1975 [1928]), 77-8.
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