Replies

In my alleged life, I read Aristotle before I read any Catholic stuff. All the philosophy I read before college was modern —Sartre and Sidney Hook, etc.

I think Aristotle is too readily dismissed as being “mechanical” or something like that. And his clarity and organization makes it possible to “work” his system without really soaking in it.

MY take on an accessible aspect of his thought is that at least once there is a more or less triangular thing there is the “form” of “triangle.” And that form really exists, somehow, objectively. And that's why geometry is an effort in discovery rather than creation. The things of the intellect, things intellectually perceived are not products of the intellect.

(And this is why I balk at the question of “physical or spiritual” as though that exhausted the possibilities. I think that “triangle” exists and is neither physical nor spiritual.)
...

Now here's a thing. Which more completely expresses the complete reality (in this Realist sense) of Fatherhood, God or me? MY current account is like this: FIRST my having and then being a father teach me something about God. But THEN, my contemplation of God's and my fatherhood teaches me that I am ALMOST an ersatz father. I could choose, with uncertain effects and results, to have A child. But I did not choose the child got, until she arrived. Then, when I saw her, I said, “YEAH! THAT one!”

So, I am mostly kinda sorta LIKE a father, while God is a sho’ ‘nuff father. My instantiation taught me about the form, but contemplation of God and the form taught me about the vast imperfections of my particular instantiantion of it.
...

Now I turn to “food indeed”. The carnal man, your humble servant, thinks, basically, pizza and beer = true food. It satisfies hunger, tastes great, makes me feel good, strengthens me, and when eaten with friends creates joviality.

But then I get hungry again, and fat, and my doctor tuts at me. And the friends go home. And, well, it's not really everything I need food to be, just as I am not everything my daughter needs a father to be.
...

At then end of the Paradiso, a wonderful transformation happens. In Dante's scheme, heaven is beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, beyond the sphere that powers the rest. So it is FIRST envisioned as a glorious periphery. But then there's a kind of reversal — and Dante begins to admit that his poetry is not up to the task — and what SEEMED to be the periphery is TRULY seen as the TRUE Center.

I am talking about this kind of reversal. And, at some mean, which Aquinas designates as “sacramental,” between Pizza and the Son of God, there is the Holy Eucharist.

My daughter as she grows ought to become more (lovingly, I hope) aware of my inadequacies as a father because she grows closer, through the Son, to the father of all. And that closeness will, I hope lead her to a greater love and appreciation of me AS she realizes my role as an almost fake imitation of fatherhood.

My enjoyment of pizza and beer is refined and ordered because there is another meal, the Mass, which is truer food. In heaven, we can say both that there is no longer any Mass or that it is ALL Mass, as that which is promised in today's Mass is finally fulfilled.

I suspect some of my Orthodox friends might find something congenial in this. But to me this sort of thinking is far more to the purpose than being picky about substance. Except that when The Philosopher says the soul is “the form of the body” ( and he doesn't mean the ‘shape’) we can see that under the shell of metaphysical technicalities he perceives a lambent and dynamic ousia which beckons to all who hunger for Reality and Truth, that ousia of which we say that the Son is homo-ousion with the Father.