Pope Francis on decadent/bankrupt forms of Thomism

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inocente said:
Not sure how you got that impression, I never thought his remarks had anything to do with secular governments.?
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This is how:
You wrote:
That seems to be a shot across the bows, for instance at all those who believe the Church is a right wing branch of the Republican Party.

A parsing of this statement reveals the following:
  1. “That” is a pronoun referring to the pope’s comment:
Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists *- -they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies".
  1. You use a simile to explicate your understanding of the quote to which you have just referred.
“seems to be a shot across the bows”
  1. You qualify the noun “bows” with an adjective phrase which explains whose bows the pope’s quote is being “shot across”
all those who believe the Church is a right wing branch of the Republican Party
  1. This adjective phrase states that these people, across whose bows the pope’s quote is shooting, believe:
    That the church is a right wing branch of the Republican Party.
  2. There must be a reason why, up to now, these people, whose bows are being shot across by the pope’s quote, believe that the church has been subsumed by the Republican Party.
My response was based on an assumption of why “these people” have up to now been able to believe that the church is part of the Republican Party.

I postulated that these people were able to believe the church was part of the Republican Party because of past actions of the church which either:
  1. Enabled this belief, or
  2. Failed to disabuse them of this belief
The above assumption is that to which I aimed my reply.

I stated that:

Nobody spoke out more against the second Iraqi war than Pope John Paul II.

And then supported that argument with references.

Thereby, invalidating your statement that Pope Francis’ comments were meant to disabuse people of the belief that the church is part of the Republican Party, because these people, if they exist, would have come to that opinion based on a total disregard of the actions of past popes. Therefore, why would the pope aim his comments at those who:
  1. May not exist (because you failed to give evidence of any such people)
  2. Imply by this targeted audience that his predecessors had not acted in such a way as to already have made it clear that the church has ever supported the views of the Republican Party.
Your reply, to my reply, negates all of the the above:

“Not sure how you got that impression, I never thought his remarks had anything to do with secular governments”

The above stated sequence of ideas is how I was able to achieve the impression that you thought the pope’s remarks dealt with secular governments, actually one specific part of a secular government, the Republican Party.

It has taken time and thought to provide you with the above explanation, unless you are willing to provide a clear, logically presented argument don’t bother to reply, because I shall ignore it.
 
**inocente

Don’t need to, he said it, just read it for yourself. Though I will make one prediction, based on having been around a few leaders. The last sentence here: "Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists - -they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies".*

Well now, you have to reconcile “Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions” with the fact that Pope Francis is not afraid to look for a disciplinarian solution when one is needed, as in the case of the priest recently excommunicated for his own disobedience to the Church.

catholicnewsagency.com/news/pope-francis-excommunicates-dissident-priest-in-australia/

In other words, the Pope is not afraid of traditional principles and doctrines carved in stone, and is willing to carve a priest out of the Church to prove that. 😉
 
Thanks everyone for your (name removed by moderator)ut.

In looking through an old textbook of mine (Chervin/Kevane Christian Wisdom (1988), I think I found at least part of the answer!

In the introduction to Part 3 (“Modern Pholosophy: A Challenging Problem”), there is a section on “The Decadence of Scholasticism”. The first sentence reads:

“Metaphysics, the central and fundamental discipline of philosophy, suffered a definite decline after St. Thomas.”

The section goes on for 4 pages outlining the history of the decadence, starting a bit with Duns Scotus, then progressing with William of Ockam, then Suarez, who is described as being the last major figure in the period of decadence. The period spanned in the outline is from St. Thomas to Descartes!

It mentions that Suarez’s Metaphysical Disputations became the standard textbook of metaphysics in Jesuit colleges, and that the fact that there is no distinction made between essence and existence (paving the way for Descartes and the problems of modern philosophy).

Suarez wrote this in the 16th-17th century! Would that text still be in use in the Jesuit order when Pope Francis was in seminary?!

If not, it might still have influenced certain types of problems with ontology.
 
opus101 said:
Thanks everyone for your (name removed by moderator)ut.

In looking through an old textbook of mine (Chervin/Kevane Christian Wisdom (1988), I think I found at least part of the answer!

In the introduction to Part 3 (“Modern Pholosophy: A Challenging Problem”), there is a section on “The Decadence of Scholasticism”. The first sentence reads:

“Metaphysics, the central and fundamental discipline of philosophy, suffered a definite decline after St. Thomas.”

The section goes on for 4 pages outlining the history of the decadence, starting a bit with Duns Scotus, then progressing with William of Ockam, then Suarez, who is described as being the last major figure in the period of decadence. The period spanned in the outline is from St. Thomas to Descartes!

It mentions that Suarez’s Metaphysical Disputations became the standard textbook of metaphysics in Jesuit colleges, and that the fact that there is no distinction made between essence and existence (paving the way for Descartes and the problems of modern philosophy).

Suarez wrote this in the 16th-17th century! Would that text still be in use in the Jesuit order when Pope Francis was in seminary?!

If not, it might still have influenced certain types of problems with ontology.
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The decadence of Scholasticism in general is different, I’d imagine, from what the Pope spoke of as “decadent Thomist commentaries” (unless the Pope was speaking very loosely). Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez were Scholastics but they were not Thomists (Thomism is the best known branch of Scholasticism, but Scholasticism is much broader - and its deterioration by the 16th-17th century certainly did pave the way for the Protestant Reformation and development of modern philosophy).
 
polytropos said:
The decadence of Scholasticism in general is different, I’d imagine, from what the Pope spoke of as “decadent Thomist commentaries” (unless the Pope was speaking very loosely). Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez were Scholastics but they were not Thomists (Thomism is the best known branch of Scholasticism, but Scholasticism is much broader - and its deterioration by the 16th-17th century certainly did pave the way for the Protestant Reformation and development of modern philosophy).
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Thanks polytropos.
 
It would have helped immensely if Pope Francis had mention a couple of names or titles of these “decadent Thomist commentaries.” However, hiss seminary days were fifty years earlier and if he has the memory I have, he cannot remember any of the decadent works he might have been asked to read fifty years ago while at the same time being able to remember they were certainly decadent. ;).
 
polytropos said:
As I’ve noted several times, that quote is from another section of the interview. If we are to apply it to the section where he mentioned Thomism, we would need specific reasons for doing so. You are acting as though the quote is a unilateral condemnation of people who take traditions from the past seriously. The problem with this interpretation is that it flies in the face of what he actually says when he discusses Thomism. The problem with decadent Thomism is with commentaries that did not reflect Thomas Aquinas’s genius, not with thinkers who still take Thomas Aquinas seriously. Again, he speaks of Thomas Aquinas’s time as one of “brilliance” and “genius,” and he never qualifies those characterizations by saying that, though brilliant and genius, Thomas Aquinas is no longer relevant.
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To try and sort this out I found the original interview in Italian (pdf). Below is the section where he talks about what I called the carved in stone approach. I don’t speak Italian so this is a machine translation with some tweaking where I could get the gist from similarities to Spanish. It’s still a pretty terrible translation but I think it bears out my assertion.

*"Yes, in searching and finding God in all things there is always a zone of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says he has met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of doubt then it’s not good. For me this is a major key. If someone has the answers to all the questions, that’s proof that God is not with him. It means he is a false prophet, who uses religion for himself. The great guides of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You have to leave room for the Lord, not to our certainties; you have to be humble. In uncertainty there is in every true discernment that is open to the confirmation of spiritual consolation.

“The risk in seeking and finding God in all things is therefore the willingness to explain too much, to say with arrogant human certainty “God is here”. We would find only a god in our image. The correct attitude is in St. Augustine: search for God to find him, and find him by always searching. And we seek by groping, as we read in the Bible. This is the experience of great fathers of faith, who are our model. You need to re-read chapter 11 in the letter to the Hebrews. Abraham started without knowing where it would lead, by faith. All of our ancestors in the faith died seeing the promised goods, but from afar … Our lives are given as an opera libretto in which everything has been written, but you go, walking, doing, trying, seeing … you must enter into the adventure of searching and encounting God”.

"Because God is first, God is first always, Dio primerea. It’s a bit like the flower of the almond tree in your Sicily, Antonio, which always flowers first. I read in the prophets. Therefore, God you meet walking, on the journey. And at this point someone may say that this is relativism. Is it relativism? Yes, if it is intended as evil, as a kind of indistinct Pantheism. No, if understood in the biblical sense, by which God is always a surprise, and therefore we never know where and how we’ll find him, we can’t fix the time and place for meeting with him. We must therefore discern the meeting. For this discernment is critical. "

“If the Christian is legalistic, restorationist, if you want everything clear and certain, then you’ll find nothing. The tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open new spaces to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists - they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies. I have one dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life, God is in the life of each. Even if a person’s life has been a disaster, if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else, God is in his life. You can and should seek in every human life. Even if a person’s life is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a place where the good seed can grow. You have to trust God”.*
 
Origen52 said:
This is how:
You wrote:
That seems to be a shot across the bows, for instance at all those who believe the Church is a right wing branch of the Republican Party.

A parsing of this statement reveals the following:
  1. “That” is a pronoun referring to the pope’s comment:
Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists *- -they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies".
  1. You use a simile to explicate your understanding of the quote to which you have just referred.
“seems to be a shot across the bows”
  1. You qualify the noun “bows” with an adjective phrase which explains whose bows the pope’s quote is being “shot across”
all those who believe the Church is a right wing branch of the Republican Party
  1. This adjective phrase states that these people, across whose bows the pope’s quote is shooting, believe:
    That the church is a right wing branch of the Republican Party.
  2. There must be a reason why, up to now, these people, whose bows are being shot across by the pope’s quote, believe that the church has been subsumed by the Republican Party.
My response was based on an assumption of why “these people” have up to now been able to believe that the church is part of the Republican Party.

I postulated that these people were able to believe the church was part of the Republican Party because of past actions of the church which either:
  1. Enabled this belief, or
  2. Failed to disabuse them of this belief
The above assumption is that to which I aimed my reply.

I stated that:

Nobody spoke out more against the second Iraqi war than Pope John Paul II.

And then supported that argument with references.

Thereby, invalidating your statement that Pope Francis’ comments were meant to disabuse people of the belief that the church is part of the Republican Party, because these people, if they exist, would have come to that opinion based on a total disregard of the actions of past popes. Therefore, why would the pope aim his comments at those who:
  1. May not exist (because you failed to give evidence of any such people)
  2. Imply by this targeted audience that his predecessors had not acted in such a way as to already have made it clear that the church has ever supported the views of the Republican Party.
Your reply, to my reply, negates all of the the above:

“Not sure how you got that impression, I never thought his remarks had anything to do with secular governments”

The above stated sequence of ideas is how I was able to achieve the impression that you thought the pope’s remarks dealt with secular governments, actually one specific part of a secular government, the Republican Party.

It has taken time and thought to provide you with the above explanation, unless you are willing to provide a clear, logically presented argument don’t bother to reply, because I shall ignore it.
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I’m amazed you would spend so much time doing a literary deconstruction of a sentence which took me a couple of seconds to invent and write. All I did was give a real life “for instance” of when “faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies” and somehow you end up talking about secular governments, Iraq and JPII. It’s surreal!
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Well now, you have to reconcile “Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions” with the fact that Pope Francis is not afraid to look for a disciplinarian solution when one is needed, as in the case of the priest recently excommunicated for his own disobedience to the Church.
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Errr… the Pope referred to those who “always look for disciplinarian solutions”. He was not referring to people such as himself who sometimes look for disciplinarian solutions. Surely you can see that difference, between the Pope and those who in the Pope’s words “always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists”?

Have a look at post #106, it’s crystal clear who and what the Pope has in mind.
 
inocente said:
I’m amazed you would spend so much time doing a literary deconstruction of a sentence which took me a couple of seconds to invent and write. All I did was give a real life “for instance” of when “faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies” and somehow you end up talking about secular governments, Iraq and JPII. It’s surreal!
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Bless!
 
inocente said:
To try and sort this out I found “Yes, in searching and finding God in all things there is always a zone of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says he has met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of doubt then it’s not good.”

You can see this exact same concern expressed in the book On Heaven and Earth about fundamentalism or religious extremism. They are discussing how it arises. Again it is concerned about religion being reduced to an ideology. At that point a living faith and obedience vanishes. Basically we have to make room for God’s action in our lives and allow Him to lead us. Faith involves trust and putting ourselves aside and allowing God to shape and make us.
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inocente said:
To try and sort this out I found the original interview in Italian (pdf). Below is the section where he talks about what I called the carved in stone approach. I don’t speak Italian so this is a machine translation with some tweaking where I could get the gist from similarities to Spanish. It’s still a pretty terrible translation but I think it bears out my assertion.
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OK, but to be true to St. Thomas is not to assert that one has total certainty. St. Thomas’s is not “a past that no longer exists,” nor is his past no longer relevant. St. Thomas is rather clear and consistent about the limitations of his (or any) method of enquiry toward the nature of God (as are his best contemporary commentators).
 
**inocente

Errr… the Pope referred to those who “always look for disciplinarian solutions”. He was not referring to people such as himself who sometimes look for disciplinarian solutions. Surely you can see that difference, between the Pope and those who in the Pope’s words “always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists”?**

At least you concede that the Pope sometimes has to look for disciplinarian solutions. Surely you don’t believe the doctrine of papal infallibility is what he was talking about when he talks about those who long for “an exaggerated doctrinal 'security.” And surely you are not talking about the Pope’s desire to recover the Christian unity of “a past that no longer exists.” 😉

So what, then, is the Pope talking about? Whom do you think he is talking about when he talks about people who always look for disciplinarian solutions? Whom do you think he is talking about when he talks about those who “long for an exaggerated doctrinal security”? And whom do you think he is talking about when he talks about “those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists”?

Could you be specific as to all three answers?

If not, do you really know what or whom the Pope is talking about? :confused:
 
Charlemagne_II said:
So what, then, is the Pope talking about? Whom do you think he is talking about when he talks about people who always look for disciplinarian solutions? Whom do you think he is talking about when he talks about those who “long for an exaggerated doctrinal security”? And whom do you think he is talking about when he talks about “those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists”?

Could you be specific as to all three answers?

If not, do you really know what or whom the Pope is talking about? :confused:
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Oh, I though he was clear. You can get a fairly specific list from him saying “If the Christian is legalistic, restorationist, if you want everything clear and certain, then you’ll find nothing.”

*Christian primitivism, also described as restorationism, is the belief that Christianity should be restored along the lines of what is known about the apostolic early church, which restorationists see as the search for a more pure and more ancient form of the religion. Fundamentally, “this vision seeks to correct faults or deficiencies [in the church] by appealing to the primitive church as a normative model.” - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorationism

Legalism, in Christian theology, is a usually pejorative term referring to an over-emphasis on discipline of conduct, or legal ideas, usually implying an allegation of misguided rigor, pride, superficiality, the neglect of mercy, and ignorance of the grace of God or emphasizing the letter of law at the expense of the spirit. Legalism is alleged against any view that obedience to law, not faith in God’s grace, is the preeminent principle of redemption. - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalism_%28theology%29
*
 
opus101 said:
What school of Thomism was represented in the textbooks that he would have studied about 50ish years ago?
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Opus-- Neo-Thomism is predominant philosophy of US Catholics, based on embellishments of Aquinas’ philosophy by “Late Scholastics” who effectively used it to justify our science and industry. Our Holy Father wants the writings of Aquinas to be put into proper place and perspective e.g. not to surmount the Words of our Lord, or even more recent encyclicals relating to our modern condition, e.g. those since and including Pope Leo’s of 1893, by which time the Church’s authority had already been effectively subjugated by capital and Voltairean/Lockean rationalities.
 
ThomasJMullally said:
Opus-- Neo-Thomism is predominant philosophy of US Catholics, based on embellishments of Aquinas’ philosophy by “Late Scholastics” who effectively used it to justify our science and industry. Our Holy Father wants the writings of Aquinas to be put into proper place and perspective e.g. not to surmount the Words of our Lord, or even more recent encyclicals relating to our modern condition, e.g. those since and including Pope Leo’s of 1893, by which time the Church’s authority had already been effectively subjugated by capital and Voltairean/Lockean rationalities.
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👍
Thanks Thomas!
 
opus101 said:
👍
Thanks Thomas!
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You’re welcome… I was looking around thread for someone who figured it out, but when one’s own philosophy is the one being laid bare and criticized, it is rare that one can even see it! A great awakening is at hand, but seems like most US Catholics are just feeling very covetous of their turf. Such a shame.

God Bless, and Long Live our Glorious Pope!
 
inocente said:
He seemed crystal clear to me. He wants to move away from the carved-in-stone approach of some Thomists, he likens it to an enchantment, to clinging to old ways which seem safe even as they become ever less relevant:

*“Humans are in search of themselves, and, of course, in this search they can also make mistakes. The church has experienced times of brilliance, like that of Thomas Aquinas. But the church has lived also times of decline in its ability to think. For example, we must not confuse the genius of Thomas Aquinas with the age of decadent Thomist commentaries. Unfortunately, I studied philosophy from textbooks that came from decadent or largely bankrupt Thomism. In thinking of the human being, therefore, the church should strive for genius and not for decadence.

“When does a formulation of thought cease to be valid? When it loses sight of the human or even when it is afraid of the human or deluded about itself. The deceived thought can be depicted as Ulysses encountering the song of the Siren, or as Tannhäuser in an orgy surrounded by satyrs and bacchantes, or as Parsifal, in the second act of Wagner’s opera, in the palace of Klingsor. The thinking of the church must recover genius and better understand how human beings understand themselves today, in order to develop and deepen the church’s teaching.”

“Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists *- -they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.”

“Even the other sciences and their development help the church in its growth in understanding. There are ecclesiastical rules and precepts that were once effective, but now they have lost value or meaning. The view of the church’s teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong.”*

americamagazine.org/pope-interview
huffingtonpost.com/quora/is-the-pope-right-that-th_b_3973587.html
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I’m a dummy when it comes to philosophy, and the only Latin I know is pig-Latin and the name of my gout medicine. But I think you got the gist of Pope Francis’s intended meaning here. Now if we could just find that list of Decadent Thomists.
 
billcu1 said:
So this is his opinion? Whew. I’m still confused as to when the pontiff speaks is it opinion or infallible.
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Guess Catholics can disregard all those encyclicals…since there has not been an infallible pronouncement since the 19th century.
 
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