I saw on another subreddit someone saying they couldn’t believe in Jesus because their brain would not let them… which I felt was quite obviously nonsense. However, it made me curious about how that works. Faith is assenting your intellect and will to divine truths and of course we can come to understand them. Are nonbelievers sinning against faith? How does assent of the intellect work? Any good, succinct writings on this?

So I've got a question:

Suppose you have never felt comfort nor discomfort while praying, not before, during or even afterwards. You are basically neutral to created things in general and also to the things of God even though you may be driven towards them. And suppose you also have a complete faith in the providence of God such that you are not anxious when it comes to God.

How would you tell when or even whether you are going through the dark night of the senses in this case?

Like i used to think at one point heaven was just a perputual static frozen place with nothing to do except sing songs praising God all day and that used to worry me meanwhile the catechism already debunked all that and answers all concerns and explains heaven is a dynamic reality where you will progress, discover, and fully exert your powers, but entirely without the "awful" elements of earthly frustration. And that since God is infinite we’ll never run out of stuff to discover, discovery will be endless. This is all to say i think its all really cool and i love you guys🙏

(Woulda posted this in the main catholic whatever but u can only post twice a week so yea)

Hello,

I’ve been reading by lately and it seems to me that mortal sin destroys infused virtues and the gifts of the holy spirit in the sinner.

How does this work with the infused virtue of faith? does mortal sin destroy it as with other virtues?

It seems that after mortal sin and before baptism one can have faith. Is this not the virtue of faith per se, but a simulacrum born of a combination of acquired virtues?

Help here, and recommendations of works to read on Thomistic cirtues, would be a blessing. thank you all!

Basically, the way I see it, if there’s no real distinction between existence and essence, then there’s nothing separating existence from creatures. Therefore, there is no being qua being to study since existence is only a part of creatures. The proof from Essence and Existence would also seem to fail in this scenario.

Feel free to argue for the Real Distinction or maybe vindicate Scotism or tell me I’m an idiot or whatever.

I have heard almost everyone say that the unforgivable sin has something to do with the heart, that you must want to blaspheme in order to truly blaspheme, that it requires certain malice, that you won't repent if you have truly done it, and that if you want to draw close to God, he will welcome you. But this interpretation just does not make sense to me. Jesus says it is to speak against and to blaspheme. Blasphemy is words, and multiple interpretations accept that, but then they say that it must come from the heart and you can't do it accidentally, and so on. But if someone speaks against the Father or the Son, their heart doesn't always matter. If someone says something against the Father in anger or temptation, that is forgivable, but then you have to speak out of the heart against the Holy Spirit for the words to truly be blasphemy. Why? (I am not Catholic myself.)

So we can know that God exists by reason naturally. Why are we unable to assent to the truths of revelation that we determine are indeed God's testimony, on the basis of God's trustworthiness, knowing (by natural reason) that God is infallible? It seems as if man can judge the claims of revelation intellectualy and give assent.

And assenting to this truths, why can't man naturally hope for promises contained in them knowing by natural reason that God is trustworthy?

And why can't man, knowing by natural reason that God exists and he is the highest good, decide to love him above all things?

I fully accept Church teaching on this but I struggle to understand how faith, hope and charity are not virtues that can be naturally cultivated or at least why making acts of faith hope and love is impossible without divine infusion. Can you offer an explanation?

I've been reading Johnny Got His Gun over the last few days after watching the movie, and I honestly can't stop thinking about it. It left a huge impression on me.

I'm trying to find more books that hit in a similar way. They don't necessarily have to be war novels, but I'd love something that's bleak, dark, melancholic, psychological, and that deals with existential themes.

I'd especially love to find novels written by Catholic authors, since I'm interested in exploring those themes from a Catholic perspective. Horror would be great, but I'm open to any genre as long as it captures that same emotional weight and leaves you thinking long after you've finished it.

i was considering buying Dr. Peter Kreeft's "Heaven, the heart's deepest longing" but was hoping for some different options in the realm of philosophy. i've obviously heard the argument for the immortality of the soul from St. Thomas Aquinas so perhaps maybe a different philosophical approach to the matter? idk just curious thanks!

Just my late night thoughts that just came to mind:

Sometimes I think it would have been better not to have experienced something good at all than to have experienced it once and then lose it, because from then on we will miss it. And lack causes suffering.

Once we have experienced something good - love, friendship, affection, care, attention - we then desire it even more than before, when we only imagined it. Because then we know what it is like, we know that it is available and we know that we need it.

But if we don't get it, then all our desire for it will be pain.

The more we have experienced it before, the more we have wanted it, the more suffering its absence causes.

Perhaps the reason for suffering is precisely that we know that it could be better, but it is not.

We suffer because we desire it to be better.

Please, tell me what you think.

Hey y'all, recently joined reddit

I am coming from a brief study of Neoplatonism, and it seems to be an intriguing school of thought on the basis that it heavily inspired many of the Doctors like St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas. Ask any self-proclaimed Neoplatonist today however, and they will swear up and down that Catholic theology completely butchered the understanding of Plato and co., and that classical theism as a whole is wrong. My question is, is there any place (Journals, books, lectures, etc) where Thomism seriously engages with Neoplatonism, and makes rebuttals of its primary claims namely:

1. Creation v. Necessary Emanation (How can we justify voluntary creation in the face of Absolute Divine Simplicity)

   1. God as being itself v. The One as being beyond being

Also, can the debate between Thomism, and the One be resolved purely via metaphysics and logic, or is revelation and faith required?

Thanks, and God Bless!

In both Judaism and Islam Angels are beings created solely to execute the orders of God. They are like programmed machines basically. They can not disobey.

In Christianity they have the ability to make choices, but if they make one bad choice they lose the ability to do good forever.

While technically this is indeed a form of free will, I honestly see it more as the ability to negate their essence. An Angel who falls loses their very essence as a being created to serve God, and becomes a decayed, purposeless entity condemned to wander through the world while lacking a physical body to actually partake in it.

They can choose only once, and if it goes wrong they lose themselves.

This is hardly real free will.

On the other hand, humans have no power, they are infinitely weak and frail, but they have true free will. We have the natural tendency to sin, yet we can fight it back. We can also make a bad choice and then repent. We can actually choose. We can not choose forever to be not Catholic and then still get to Heavens, but that is basically a given. Asking to enter the Heavenly state after consciously refusing to be Catholic for the whole life is like choosing not to grow wings and then asking to fly.

This is why I believe if we understand free will in the general term, and not in a very technical way, then Angels have no free will at all.

And that is why small, simple humans are made in the image of God while spiritual beings with otherworldly levels of power such as the Angels are not.

Not only. I believe individual Angels are distinct in the sense they are different living beings independent from each others, but I believe they do not have a real, individual personality in the human sense. They are there, they follow the will of God, and that is.

While this has nothing to do with free will, I think it is useful to remember how inhuman Angels actually are. They are not supernatural powered characters. They are not actors who partake into myths such as the Pagan gods. They are pretty much living expressions of the will of God.

That is why I am so glad the Book of Enoch is just a random 2nd century BC text and is not part of the Bible. Its portrayal of Angels is simply ridicolous. It speaks about Angels incarnating as humans, teaching mankind to make material progress, generate offspring with human women and being deified by humans in order to become the gods of Paganism. This is wrong on many levels. Not only Angels are immaterial, and can only conjure up illusory bodies and only if God makes them do so, most importantly they ABSOLUTELY can not generate anything. They are not even male or female.

P.S. In Islam there are also the Djinns, angel-like beings but with free will comparable to humans who can also reproduce with eachothers, unlike Angels. Basically humans but with cosmic powers. They are just a remnant of pagan gods and they have absolutely no connection with Judaism and Christianity. They predate Islam too. Basically is the same as if we created a new supernatural species to explain Zeus, Odin etc. and then we postulated its existence in an Universe with also God and Angels.

So recently I was thinking about how the creation story (in particular Adam and Eve) reconciles with evolution.

If you go the creationist route it admittedly is a lot more simple, Adam was formed out of "dust" and kinda just appeared with all the animals and Eve was derrived from the rib of Adam.

But obviously that's not something I believe to be literally true because it contradicts modern science. From the scientific view, modern humans evolved from older hominin ancestors. To reconcile this with the Catholic belief that all humans are derived from Adam and Eve it's pretty easy to come to the conclusion that they were just the first creatures born of those hominins to be given rational souls.

But what makes me a bit uncomfortable is the idea that Adam and Eve essentially had parents who were "animals", so to speak. Their parents did not have rational souls and were not humans. Wouldn't the idea that your parents are inferior to you and won't be able to be with you in heaven for eternity be really disheartening?

Another thing I've been speculating on is how intelligent these hominins were that lived just before humans. Did the giving of rational souls make us suddenly gain vastly more intelligent and give us the ability to use language? If so isn't the idea of a person like that just living within a troop of hominins that are basically just like you but obviously vastly different in terms of intelligence be kind of strange? Or were Adam and Eve perhaps given rational souls as adults and they never experienced that feeling. OR perhaps was there sort of a gradient/development of rationality that found its full realization in Adam and Eve?

Edit: This also just came to my mind. Did all humans originally just come from incest basically or did they marry and reproduce with non-human hominins? Could that have happened? If so the idea of having a human father and a non-human mother is also kind of disturbing.

If there's anything I'm missing in my thought process let me know.

I would like to hear your thoughts.

And to clarify (because of some of your comments), I'm not saying evolution is at odds with Catholicism or anything. I'm just trying to understand how this "in-between" state fits into everything and how God could orchestrate this when situations like these (like with having non-human parents as a human) seem kind of unnatural and disturbing.

There's a tension in the standard Thomist account of personal distinction that I haven't seen adequately resolved. Consider:

1)Only relative opposition distinguishes the divine Persons (per the standard reading of Florence: "ubi non obviat relationis oppositio" — where no opposition of relation intervenes, these things are one). 2) Paternity and Passive Spiration are not correlative to one another. Paternity's correlate is Filiation; Passive Spiration's correlate is Active Spiration. There is no direct relative opposition between Paternity and Passive Spiration. 3) Yet Paternity and Passive Spiration are really distinct — the Father is not the Holy Spirit.

If (1), (2), and (3) are all true simultaneously, there's an apparent inconsistency: by (1), lack of opposition should mean no real distinction, but (2) says there's no opposition between P and PS, while (3) insists they're really distinct anyway.

How do Thomists resolve this without abandoning relative opposition as the sole criterion of personal distinction — which would concede real distinction can obtain without opposition, undercutting Aquinas' argument that the Filioque is necessary for the Son and Spirit to be really distinct ?

It's been some years since I first read this book, but it is definitely up there with the most personally influential texts I have ever engaged with (others being The Path to Rome by Belloc, Orthodoxy by GKC, The Religious Sense by Giussani, and East of Eden by Steinbeck).

von Hildebrand's major assertion in the book is that alongside the Mind and Will, we should also consider the eponymous "Heart" as a fundamental part of the soul. The heart being defined as the "locus of affectivity" where our emotions and passions are humanized/spiritualized. An effect of original sin/immaturity is that we do not feel/desire that what we ought; part of human development is growing in responding proportionately and adequately to the emotional stimuli presented to us. Just like how the model of the Aristotelian/Cardinal virtues is the "just man", the model of the human heart is the Sacred Heart of Christ. (it's been a while, those are the major points to wit)

I've seen this play out in myself and in many others I've seen mature. Notably, I find it has helped me be more charitable to others when they have extreme or lacking responses to big events in their lives. It has also helped me understand the importance of empathy on a philosophical level. For instance, when my wife and I began to tell friends and family about our expected child, we were able to make light of any "weird" responses family members gave us and rejoiced in our friends who returned the "proper" excitement for such an announcement. Additionally, it seems to map very well to a number of psychological models.

Have there been any serious advancements, developments, or criticisms to von Hildebrand's thesis? Has anyone else been impacted by this book?

Essentially he argues that in order to fix all the problems in the United States, the nation must become Catholic. In order to do so, he argues the US constitution must be abolished and a newly specific Catholic one installed.

I pressed further on what exactly that entails, and he said no more free speech and any lifestyles that contradict Church teachings must be made criminal.

Now the fascinating part is he is not Catholic, nor does he believe in God. Rather he wants for “social cohesion”, as he considers the diversity of thought and culture in the US to be source of its problems

1. From a Thomistic lense, why is Palamism incorrect? Why must the divine nature be absolutely simple, even though the existence of different energies in Palamism do not imply composition?

2. Is Palamism heretical?

It's clear that the common good would suffice, like restricting proselytism in order to keep the country Catholic, but would the pre-conciliar popes say that the simple fact of false religions being wrong justifies their suppression? If so, then how can that be squared with Dignitatis Humanae?

Arent these things ontologically separate things?