Category Archives: Definitions

Definitions

Prayer: Union with God

04 Tuesday Aug 2015

Posted by in Definitions, God's Will, Prayer

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Prayer is nothing else than union with God.

From A Catechism on Prayer, by St. John Mary Vianney

Before today, if someone had asked me “what is prayer” or “why is prayer important,” I would have had a difficult time answering the question. More than likely it would have taken a discussion of 5-10 minutes for me to explain what prayer is. And I suspect that many other people would have a difficult time explaining prayer because it is so mysterious. And yet in just a few words St. John Mary Vianney has given a perfect definition for what prayer is – union with God.

There are many different prayers the Church uses and many different types of prayer, but union with God is at the heart of them all. As an example let us consider the prayer that is most often used by people: petitionary prayer. People ask God for all sorts of things – everything from winning lottery numbers, to a favorite sports team winning the game, to curing a loved one of cancer. And then, when we don’t get what we want we so often say, “Why didn’t God give me what I asked for?!” Perhaps we do not receive what we desire because it was a foolish request, like winning the lottery. But ultimately there is a problem with petitionary prayer because people forget that God does not give us what we want; instead, He gives us what we need.

But this problem would never arise if people kept in mind that prayer is union with God. If in our prayer life we are seeking that union, then when we pray it will naturally be in tune with God’s will for us. There may still be times when we ask for something that is not beneficial for us and therefore God will not give it to us. But if we are always seeking union with God in our prayer, then we will more readily accept not receiving what we desired with the understanding that it was not what we needed. Our Lord teaches this to us with the following words:

For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

St. Matthew 7:8-11, RSV-CE

Too often, without knowing it, we ask for stones instead of bread! If only we would remember that the ultimate reason for prayer is union with God, then we would come to see that that which we receive, even if it is not what we asked for, is exactly what we needed all along.

 

God’s Will and Man’s Prayer

30 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in Definitions, Free Will, God's Will, Liturgy of the Hours, Prayer, Submission to God, The Fall

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The quote below is from the Office of Readings appointed for Friday, November 28, 2014. The first line and how he connects it to prayer is what really caught my attention.

Our obligation is to do God’s will, and not our own. We must remember this if the prayer that our Lord commanded us to say daily is to have any meaning on our lips. How unreasonable it is to pray that God’s will be done, and then not promptly obey it when he calls us from this world! Instead we struggle and resist like self-willed slaves and are brought into the Lord’s presence with sorrow and lamentation, not freely consenting to our departure, but constrained by necessity. And yet we expect to be rewarded with heavenly honours by him to whom we come against our will! Why then do we pray for the kingdom of heaven to come if this earthly bondage pleases us? What is the point of praying so often for its early arrival if we would rather serve the devil here than reign with Christ.

From the Treatise of St Cyprian on Mortality

Specifically, St. Cyprian is here referring to the Lord’s Prayer and the petition within it that states, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” He is trying to show how absurd it is to pray this prayer daily and yet to try to resist God who is constantly calling us to Himself. But this passage has much broader implications.

First of all, let us consider mankind’s obligation of doing God’s will and not our own. Let us go back to the beginning before Adam and Eve turned against God. At the moment of their creation Adam and Eve were absolutely perfect, they were in a state of Original Justice. The Catechism describes Original Justice in the following way:

As long as (mankind) remained in the divine intimacy, man would not have to suffer or die. The inner harmony of the human person, the harmony between man and woman, and finally the harmony between the first couple and all creation comprised the state called ‘original justice.’

CCC §376 (for more information see CCC §374-384)

In addition, in §377 it goes on to say that mankind’s mastery over the world was most importantly his mastery of self.

The first man was unimpaired and ordered in his whole being because he was free from the triple concupiscence that subjugates him to the pleasures of the senses, covetousness for earthly goods, and self-assertion, contrary to the dictates of reason.

In short, this means that man’s will was perfectly aligned to the will of God who had created him. This is how God had designed it to be and intended it to stay. But then, sin entered into God’s perfect creation through the disobedience of Adam and Eve. What the sin was does not matter as much as the fact that Adam and Eve, who had been made in God’s image, did sin. What this means is that instead of keeping their wills in alignment with the will of God, they choose to go their own way, trying to assert their own wills above the will of the One who had created them. They, being finite, were trying to tell the infinite where to get off, which is an absolute absurdity.

Now, how does this fit with our prayer to God? When considering our prayers, and that maybe we are not ‘getting what we ask for’, we must remember that prayer is not primarily about getting what we want. Perhaps this is the reason that people do not pray as they ought to, because they don’t see the results they want and, therefore, think that it doesn’t work. But we need to remember that prayer is not about imposing our will on God but about submitting our will to His. As St. James tells us, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly.” (James 4:3a, RSV-CE)

What it all really comes down to is this: for anything to work properly in our lives, whether it be prayer or anything else, then our lives must be properly ordered. And what is the proper order for our lives? It begins by realizing that our wills are subordinate to the will of God and then, through the grace of Christ, fulfilling our obligation to God by subordinating our wills to His.

Chance and Absolute Chance

19 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Definitions, Philosophy

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I have a sermon to write for Sunday, which prevented my posting yesterday and which leaves me no time to write anything original today. But in order to continue with our topic I am posting the definitions for ‘chance’ and ‘absolute chance’. I will have to leave any further explanation until after my sermon is written.

chance, n. and adj. 1. the unforeseen, the unintended. 2. the seeming absence of cause or design. 3. that which is said to happen without a deliberate purpose. 4. the accidental, the irregular, or the unusual in nature’s course. 5. that whose cause is indeterminable. Chance is not properly ascribed to the absence of efficient cause. Antonym – end, intention.

absolute chance, that which is not planned nor foreseen and permitted by any agent. Scholasticism denies this kind of chance occurence.

Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy, Bernard Wuellner, S.J.

Definition of ‘Final Cause’

17 Monday Nov 2014

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Today’s post is part 2 to yesterday’s post: Lewis on Chance. In that post I mentioned a second opinion by a Catholic philosopher but that will have to wait until tomorrow because there is a term that must be defined before we move on to his opinion. Although, I will be quoting him today because that is where we encounter the term in question.

We frequently use such expressions as, ‘A game of chance,’ ‘This happened by chance,’ etc., to refer to various types of situations in our experience. This seems at first glance to deny the above thesis on the need of final causality to explain all action, as we have just established.

The One and the Many, W. Norris Clarke, S.J.

The term we need to understand here is ‘final cause’. St. Thomas, in his Summa Theologiæ, said “the first of all causes is the final cause.” I know that sounds counter-intuitive and it took me a while to understand it. What helped with my understanding of this term centers on the proper understanding of how St. Thomas is using the word ‘final’. To us it sounds like he is saying that the last in a series of events (the final cause) is actually the first, which makes no sense whatsoever. But that is not how the word final is being used. Instead, final means the end or purpose for something happening. And the final cause is linked to the efficient cause, although they answer different questions. (And here we need another definition: an efficient cause is that which causes an effect.) Fr. Clarke puts it thusly,

The efficient cause answers the question: Which being is responsible for this effect’s coming to be? The final cause answers the question: Why did this efficient cause produce this effect rather than that? For in many cases the same efficient cause can produce several different possible effects. (p. 202)

I suppose you could say that the final cause gives direction to the efficient cause so that there is actually an effect that takes place. Because, if there is more than one possible effect there must be something there to choose from all the options so that this effect happens rather than that one. Therefore, without a final cause – a purpose – would there be anything that ever happened at all?

Tomorrow (maybe), we will see how this applies to Fr. Clarke’s understanding of chance, and then later compare that with what Lewis had to say on the matter.

The Definition of Definition

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

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Sorry I disappeared for about two weeks. Last week was Fall Break for the Atonement Academy and even though my family and I did not go anywhere it was nice not to have to do anything in particular. The week before that was just busy.

I’ve decided to begin this re-start of blogging with a new category of posts – that being ‘Definitions’. The primary thing that has prompted this is the fact that, due to my increased reading of philosophy, I have had to look up very many terms in order to understand what I am reading. Some of them are terms that I never knew before and some are terms I only thought I knew before I discovered their true meanings.

It may be asked – why bother with such an endeavor? Because if we do not have a common understanding of the meaning behind the words we use then we cannot communicate with one another. If I say something is red in color then the listener, if he speaks English, understands what I am talking about. But when I am reading St. Thomas Aquinas there are many times I do not understand what he is saying because I do not understand what he means by this or that word (or any of them at all sometimes). By writing about these words and what they mean I hope to gain a better understanding for myself and perhaps someone else will as well.

To begin this category off it seems that the most logical place to start is with the definition of the word definition itself. I am taking my meaning from a book I recently purchased: The Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy by Bernard Wuellner, S.J. The section for the word ‘definition’ contains seven different senses in which it can be defined. Therefore, so this post does not get too convoluted, I have chosen just one of those senses to list here.

definition, n. 1. logical and philosophical senses. a proposition either stating the meaning of a term or explaining what an essence is.

But of course this definition leads to the necessity of another definition for the word ‘essence’. In the same book it describes essence as “what a thing is” (and I will stop there because this word deserves its own post). Therefore, when we are defining some particular thing, we are trying to describe what that thing is. I suppose many people would respond to this by saying “Yeah, duh!” Even though this definition of definition may seem obvious but it is not insignificant. The fact that we can define things so that others can understand what we are talking about shows us what kind of universe we live in: that being a universe where we can know what something truly is and are able to communicate that to others. The reason this is so important is because there are other philosophies that would say that we cannot really know anything at all. But if that were true then those who hold such philosophies would not be able to communicate what they mean to anyone else because no one would be able to understand what it was that they were trying to define. In fact, if we could not know things and define them then no one would be able to understand anything at all.