If I'm tracking, everything boils down to "it's complicated" or "yes and no." That ambiguity frustrates the part of me that grew up in a more fundamentalist and literal space. I'm growing to settle into the Sic et non ever since I found it through Barth. Your Substack is helping me see how deep rooted that both\and is in Christian tradition.
Reality does not admit of easy or simplistic yes/nos, correct, and thus in that sense it is usually better to say yes and no to simplistic questions.
Of course, this does not mean that in the technicality of an actual contradiction, both the affirmative and the negative are true. Rather, it means that reality admits of two neighboring contraadictions, whose rspective affirmative and then negative are both true.
Someone like Barth, one could argue, is engaging in dialectic which at least claims to work around the complexity of reality by ever-increasing cycles of superseding simplistic answers. Scholasticism doesn't play that game, but rather works more technically and seeks exact answers to exact questions. Sometimes, as in Abelard, we bundle mutliple questions together, so that it seems as though one were working at a broader level; but really, this is just doing two things at once.
I have been noticing this as I have been reading Maximus the Confessor while also reading some contemporary trauma-theology. With the latter, what is written is either straight forward or they lay out their steps quite clearly. With Maximus, I found some comments that I agree with but I have to remember that I disagree with it because of the fact that I disagree with some of the other principles "hidden" inside of the principle I prima facie agree with.
yes, determining more fundamental principles "behind" less fundamental ones is the nature of learning an author's mind, not to mention the nature of reality. It's also why we must be careful what we read, so that we are led to REAL and TRUE first principles, rather than to false and fake ones.
But I remember being a teenager and picking up Aquinas and having no idea what he actually believed because I didn't understand the scholastic way of arguing.
If I'm tracking, everything boils down to "it's complicated" or "yes and no." That ambiguity frustrates the part of me that grew up in a more fundamentalist and literal space. I'm growing to settle into the Sic et non ever since I found it through Barth. Your Substack is helping me see how deep rooted that both\and is in Christian tradition.
Reality does not admit of easy or simplistic yes/nos, correct, and thus in that sense it is usually better to say yes and no to simplistic questions.
Of course, this does not mean that in the technicality of an actual contradiction, both the affirmative and the negative are true. Rather, it means that reality admits of two neighboring contraadictions, whose rspective affirmative and then negative are both true.
Someone like Barth, one could argue, is engaging in dialectic which at least claims to work around the complexity of reality by ever-increasing cycles of superseding simplistic answers. Scholasticism doesn't play that game, but rather works more technically and seeks exact answers to exact questions. Sometimes, as in Abelard, we bundle mutliple questions together, so that it seems as though one were working at a broader level; but really, this is just doing two things at once.
I have been noticing this as I have been reading Maximus the Confessor while also reading some contemporary trauma-theology. With the latter, what is written is either straight forward or they lay out their steps quite clearly. With Maximus, I found some comments that I agree with but I have to remember that I disagree with it because of the fact that I disagree with some of the other principles "hidden" inside of the principle I prima facie agree with.
yes, determining more fundamental principles "behind" less fundamental ones is the nature of learning an author's mind, not to mention the nature of reality. It's also why we must be careful what we read, so that we are led to REAL and TRUE first principles, rather than to false and fake ones.
Moral of the story: read more Thomas ;)
I've read most of his stuff? Even in Latin? ;)
But I remember being a teenager and picking up Aquinas and having no idea what he actually believed because I didn't understand the scholastic way of arguing.
well, not to be obnoxious, but teaching people how to read Thomas and/or scholastics is literally what I do, so ;)
I could have used that like 10 years ago!