Reading is listed:
Yesterday I found myself at a standstill, not knowing what to read next, and eventually settled on Josef Pieper, The Silence of St Thomas. It is a collection of three essays:
On Thomas Aquinas -- The negative element in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas -- The timeliness of Thomism
I finished the first essay last night. Basically it reprised his life and his main contributions to 13th century thought. The material overlaps with that in the other Pieper book I am reading -- A Guide to Thomas Aquinas -- but the second book is written as an introduction to Aquinas's life, times, and thought, while the essays assume more background knowledge.
One interesting point brought out was that we learn from gaps in a philosopher's thought -- perhaps, their "silence", though I do not remember Pieper saying it quite that way. What he is saying is that their presuppositions sometimes come out in what their arguments are implicitly founded upon, the turtle they are resting their feet upon, and that can be revealing in itself. Not necessarily revealing in a gotcha way -- it could very well be that their assumptions are valid -- but just indicative of their whole subsequent schema of thought.
Pieper writes:
Did not Thomas develop fully and explicitly a doctrine of creation? That naturally is true and quite well known. None the less it is true, though not so well known, that the notion of creation determines and characterizes the interior structure of nearly all the basic concepts in St Thomas's philosophy of Being. And this fact is NOT evident; it is scarcely ever put forward explicitly; it belongs to the unexpressed in St Thomas's doctrine of Being (p. 48)
He goes on to mention that this is hardly ever noted in textbook commentaries on St Thomas's thought, and therefore his teachings are often passed through a filter of Rationalism, which leads to grave misunderstandings.
This is a very interesting thought, and fits in with my project of retro-discerning what goes on under the surface of things that seem either true or false to my intuition.
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I also started reading some Communio essays that I had downloaded, mostly on Natural Law. The one I was reading had a lot of footnotes, and I was writing them down in my notebook, but I think this is a waste of time. For the first reading I should just be getting the main idea and perhaps asking questions about how the argument is grounded. In the second reading, I can research further by means of the footnotes, if indicated.
I read an article by Ratzinger on the notion of "communio", or "koinania", as used in the history of the founding of the journal. He mostly gives credit to Balthasar for spearheading the communio project. He also mentions the important distinction between their idea of communion and that of the concilium progressives. The progressives think of communio in a horizontal way, where the "People of God" is something like "The People's Government" and is proposed as a kind of ground-up commonwealth but actually turns into a deceptive oligarchy, with the "experts" manipulating the laity and filtering the transmission of information from both sides. The latter part, he did not say -- those are my thoughts -- he just talked about the lack of recognition of God, the lack of verticality, the flattening out of God's will as the will of the people. I added the devious part because of what's happened since he was writing -- the progressives have become even more open about their intentions, which is one reason for the embattliing of the synodality thing.
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