G
G.Frege
Guest
From Fr. Herbert McCabe, OP (God Matters. London: Geoffrey Chapman), pp. 147-148:
“Now we might make bogus sense of the notion of creation by saying as, in a moment of inadvertence, Mr. Sheed does: God made it (the universe). And he made it out of nothing. What else was there for him to make it of?.. if God, having made the universe, left it, the universe would have to rely for its continuance upon the material it was made of: namely nothing’ *(Theology and Sanity, pp. 105-106). *This is to invoke a mythological stuff called
Now to Scott Hahn
Aquinas:
“Dicendum quod signa dantur hominibus, quorum est per nota ad ignota pervenire. Et ideo proprie dicitur sacramentum quod est signum alicujus rei sacr?ad homines pertinentis: ut scilicet proprie dicatur sacramentum, secundum quod nunc de sacramentis loquimur, quod est signum rei sacr?inquantum est sanctificans homines.” (ST IIIa, 60, )
Linguistic philosopher Simon Blackburn (Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge University) gives a clear definition of sign and symbol:
**sign/symbol
**“A sign of a thing or state of affairs is any symptom or trace or portent of it that can be used to infer that it is present. Symbols are not used to infer the presence of what they symbolize, but to represent them in their absence, or to express intentions or to conjure up thoughts and emotions centred upon them. The theory of this difference lies at the heart of the philosophy of language.”
(Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford Univ. Press, 199, p. 165)
From a bound gallery copy of Swear to God by Scott Hahn (Doubleday, 2004):
From pg. 18:
Into the Mysteries
*
“For sacraments are symbols, but they are not merely symbols. They are symbols that genuinely convey the reality they signify.”
*
Sacraments are symbols? Is the referent actually present (or does quantum non-locality apply to God and his grace in the sacraments)? Hahn’s second sentence is merely a truism and unhelpful.
From pp. 16-17:
***Science of Signs
**"Why did Jesus choose to communicate His salvation through signs? Because that is the way humans express themselves. A sign is something used to represent something else. All words are signs, but words are not the only signs. A flag, for example, represents a country. Our respect for the flag does not arise from the value of the cloth. The honor we show the flag symbolizes our respect for the country. When protesters want to show their disrespect for a country, they sometimes will deface or destroy its flag.
A sign is a visible symbol of something that’s invisible at the moment. We can see a flag, but we cannot see the entire country, much less the ideals embodied by the nation’s government. The flag is the symbol of the country, its people, and its principles.
A sign reveals something about the object it represents. A United States flag shows, by its fifty stars, that there are fifty states in the union; the red stripes memorialize those who died in serving their country; the white stripes stand for purity; and blue symbolizes heaven.
Yet a sign also conceals much about the object it represents. For signs and things remain distinct. A flag is not a country; and even though we might spend years studying the flag, the nation itself will elude definition. The nation, in a sense, is a mysterious reality-- a mystery."
*
America is not present in, or proximate to, an American flag. The American flag is not a sign, but a symbol. Given this analogue the referent is not present. Now, it is the very nature of the sacraments that God and His grace must be present necessarily and immediately (i.e., coextensive).
For an excellent and simple description of the sacraments read Peter Kreeft’s Fundamentals of the Faith.
“Now we might make bogus sense of the notion of creation by saying as, in a moment of inadvertence, Mr. Sheed does: God made it (the universe). And he made it out of nothing. What else was there for him to make it of?.. if God, having made the universe, left it, the universe would have to rely for its continuance upon the material it was made of: namely nothing’ *(Theology and Sanity, pp. 105-106). *This is to invoke a mythological stuff called
nothing', it is to do the kind of thing that Egner rightly stigmatises as armchair physics’. Nothing' here has the same sort of function as the mythological mysterious kernel’ that lies underneath the accidents of things. Aquinas himself was fully aware of the dangers of such a reification of nothing' and he is careful to point out (la, 45, 1, ad 3) that God made the world out of nothing’ does not mean that `nothing’ was what he made the world out of, it means that God did not make the world out of anything.”Now to Scott Hahn
Aquinas:
“Dicendum quod signa dantur hominibus, quorum est per nota ad ignota pervenire. Et ideo proprie dicitur sacramentum quod est signum alicujus rei sacr?ad homines pertinentis: ut scilicet proprie dicatur sacramentum, secundum quod nunc de sacramentis loquimur, quod est signum rei sacr?inquantum est sanctificans homines.” (ST IIIa, 60, )
Linguistic philosopher Simon Blackburn (Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge University) gives a clear definition of sign and symbol:
**sign/symbol
**“A sign of a thing or state of affairs is any symptom or trace or portent of it that can be used to infer that it is present. Symbols are not used to infer the presence of what they symbolize, but to represent them in their absence, or to express intentions or to conjure up thoughts and emotions centred upon them. The theory of this difference lies at the heart of the philosophy of language.”
(Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford Univ. Press, 199, p. 165)
From a bound gallery copy of Swear to God by Scott Hahn (Doubleday, 2004):
From pg. 18:
Into the Mysteries
*
“For sacraments are symbols, but they are not merely symbols. They are symbols that genuinely convey the reality they signify.”
*
Sacraments are symbols? Is the referent actually present (or does quantum non-locality apply to God and his grace in the sacraments)? Hahn’s second sentence is merely a truism and unhelpful.
From pp. 16-17:
***Science of Signs
**"Why did Jesus choose to communicate His salvation through signs? Because that is the way humans express themselves. A sign is something used to represent something else. All words are signs, but words are not the only signs. A flag, for example, represents a country. Our respect for the flag does not arise from the value of the cloth. The honor we show the flag symbolizes our respect for the country. When protesters want to show their disrespect for a country, they sometimes will deface or destroy its flag.
A sign is a visible symbol of something that’s invisible at the moment. We can see a flag, but we cannot see the entire country, much less the ideals embodied by the nation’s government. The flag is the symbol of the country, its people, and its principles.
A sign reveals something about the object it represents. A United States flag shows, by its fifty stars, that there are fifty states in the union; the red stripes memorialize those who died in serving their country; the white stripes stand for purity; and blue symbolizes heaven.
Yet a sign also conceals much about the object it represents. For signs and things remain distinct. A flag is not a country; and even though we might spend years studying the flag, the nation itself will elude definition. The nation, in a sense, is a mysterious reality-- a mystery."
*
America is not present in, or proximate to, an American flag. The American flag is not a sign, but a symbol. Given this analogue the referent is not present. Now, it is the very nature of the sacraments that God and His grace must be present necessarily and immediately (i.e., coextensive).
For an excellent and simple description of the sacraments read Peter Kreeft’s Fundamentals of the Faith.
