On the disthomism of Doc Angelic of feserismisnotthomism.wordpress infamy, part II

*...a brief comeback from the long hiatus, hopefully to be developed*

As Doc Angelic's comments on Dr. Feser's blog indicate, it is the treatment of the 2nd question Doc turns to on his blog by the latter that provoked Doc to attack.

Quoting the author of the comment (most probably himself), Doc writes:

From an unanswered comment on Edward Feser’s blog: ”In the Modern Biology and Original Sin post on this blog we read that the “…penalty of original sin was a privation, not a positive harm inflicted on human beings but rather the absence of a benefit they never had a right or strict need for in the first place”… “The penalty was the loss of the supernatural gifts they had been given and that their descendants would have been given, and a fall back into their merely natural state, with all its limitations”… “This is the situation Adam, Eve, and their descendants would have been in had God left the human race in its purely natural state”.

However nowhere does St. Thomas Aquinas seem to refer to the consequences of original sin as non-positive damage. Instead he uses the terms wounding, corruption etc. St. Thomas terms it an habitus. 

Doc seems to think that Dr. Feser's account of the consequences of original sin can be fairly characterised as maintaining that these constitute "non-positive damage". With a qualification, I agree that it can. Given that Dr. Feser clearly understands the said consequences to be a worsening of sorts, "damage" seems to be a suitable synonym to "harm" here. So, precisely what does "not a positive harm but rather the absence of a benefit they never had a right or strict need for in the first place" mean? If someone has a benefit that she proceeds to lose, that can be termed "harm" or "damage", alright. In reference to what is it "non-positive", given that absolutely it cannot be denied to be "positive" (that is, real)? Dr. Feser's post is explicit: it is in relation to human nature or essence and the respective entitlements that the harm in question is not positive. His point is very clear:

For Scholastic theology, human beings have, like everything else, a nature or essence, and what is good for them – what they need in order to flourish as the kinds of creatures they are – is determined by that essence.  Hence, for example, because we are by nature rational animals our flourishing requires both bodily goods (food, shelter, and the like) and intellectual goods (such as the acquisition of knowledge).  The point of Scholastic natural law theory is to provide an account of the various human goods and their moral implications. 

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So, human beings in their natural state have only a limited capacity to realize the ends their nature requires them to pursue in order that they might flourish.  They have the raw materials needed for this pursuit, but the finitude of their intellectual, moral, and material endowments entails that there is no guarantee that each and every individual human being will in fact realize the ends in question, or realize them perfectly when they do realize them at all.  Nature has granted us what it “owes” us given what we need in order to flourish as the kind of creatures we are, but no more than that.  This is the situation Adam, Eve, and their descendants would have been in had God left the human race in its purely natural state.

But according to Christian theology, God offered to our first parents more than what was “owed” to us given our nature.  He offered us a supernatural gift.  Here it is crucial to understand what “supernatural” means in this context.  It has nothing to do with ghosts, goblins, and the like.  What is meant is rather that God offered us a good that went above or beyond what our nature required us to have.  In particular, he offered Adam and Eve the beatific vision – a direct, “face to face” knowledge of the divine essence which far transcends the very limited knowledge of God we can have through natural reason, and which would entail unsurpassable bliss of a kind we could never attain given our natural powers.  He also offered special helps that would deliver us from the limitations of our natures – that would free us from the ignorance and error our intellectual limitations open the door to, the moral errors our weak wills lead us into, the sicknesses and injuries our bodily limitations make possible, and so forth.


By definition, none of this was “owed” to us, precisely because it is supernatural.  Hence while God cannot fail to will for us what is good for us given our nature, He would have done us no wrong in refraining from offering these supernatural gifts to us, precisely because they go beyond what our nature requires for our fulfillment.  Still, He offered them to us anyway.  But this offer was conditional. 

There's really no way around this: were Dr. Feser speaking in the absolute sense, he'd be equivocating on the word "harm", a reading that is manifestly against the demands of charity concerning anyone at all who isn't a manifest and pertinacious sinner / a mentally handicapped individual in this regard (to say nothing about fellow Catholics). If the explicit and non-contradictory sense of Dr. Feser's words is not the one Doc is attacking, one is bound to conclude that he simply missed the whole point of the discussion.

So is it true that St. Thomas never refers to the consequences of original sin as non-positive damage and do his writings indicate his supposed espousal of the opposite proposition, that the damage is positive, i.e. robs us of something proper to us in virtue of our nature or essence?


If the kind reader remembers the quote at the end of Part I, this question might seem merely rhetorical (unless one's prepared to argue that the soldier and his children are naturally entitled to having fiefs), but here's the quote again:

CHAPTER 195

TRANSMISSION OF THESE EVILS TO POSTERITY

The blessing of original justice was conferred by God on the human race in the person of its first parent, in such a way that it was to be transmitted to his posterity through him. But when a cause is removed, the effect cannot follow. Therefore, when the first man stripped himself of this good by his sin, all his descendants were likewise deprived of it. And so for all time, that is, ever since the sin of the first parent, all men come into the world bereft of original justice and burdened with the defects that attend its loss.

This is in no way against the order of justice, as though God were punishing the sons for the crime of their first father. For the punishment in question is no more than the withdrawing of goods that were supernaturally granted by God to the first man for transmission, through him, to others. These others had no right to such goods, except so far as the gifts were to be passed on to them through their first parent. In the same way a king may reward a soldier with the grant of an estate, which is to be handed on by him to his heirs. If the soldier then commits a crime against the king, and so is adjudged to forfeit the estate, it cannot afterwards pass to his heirs. In this case the sons are justly dispossessed in consequence of their father’s crime.

Compendium of theology, St. Thomas Aquinas

This treatment of the question by Aquinas is very similar to Dr. Feser's. Both deal with an objection (preventively dealt with by the saint) - against what the objector considers to be the Catholic doctrine on original sin and its consequences - that appeals to the injustice of punishing the posterity of the criminal innocent of their progenitor's crime by taking away something properly their own. Please note that both (not just Dr. Feser) concede such destitution would be unjust. This shouldn't be surprising as, apart from anything else, this hypothetical destitution would come into direct contradiction with the saint's account of God's justice in the Summa.

In the body of the article we read:

I answer that, There are two kinds of justice. The one consists in mutual giving and receiving, as in buying and selling, and other kinds of intercourse and exchange. This the Philosopher (Ethic. v, 4) calls commutative justice, that directs exchange and intercourse of business. This does not belong to God, since, as the Apostle says: "Who hath first given to Him, and recompense shall be made him?" (Romans 11:35). The other consists in distribution, and is called distributive justice; whereby a ruler or a steward gives to each what his rank deserves. As then the proper order displayed in ruling a family or any kind of multitude evinces justice of this kind in the ruler, so the order of the universe, which is seen both in effects of nature and in effects of will, shows forth the justice of God. Hence Dionysius says (Div. Nom. viii, 4): "We must needs see that God is truly just, in seeing how He gives to all existing things what is proper to the condition of each; and preserves the nature of each in the order and with the powers that properly belong to it."


The problem is solved by identifying the losses incurred by the children in light of their parents' crime as that of gifts and benefits that are not properly theirs, vis-a-vis their nature and hence God as its author.

To finish with the next chapter from the Compendium to indicate how this harmonises perfectly with speaking of corruption:

It does not follow, however, that all other sins, either of the first parent or of other parents, are handed down to posterity. For only the first sin of the first parent extirpated in its entirety the gift that had been supernaturally granted to human nature in the person of the first father. This is the reason why sin is said to have corrupted or infected nature. Subsequent sins do not encounter anything of this sort that they can uproot from the whole of human nature. Such sins do, indeed, take away from man, or at least tarnish, some particular good, namely, a personal good; but they do not corrupt nature except so far as nature pertains to this or that person. Since man begets his like not in person but only in nature, the sin that defiles the person is not handed down from a parent to his descendants. Only the first sin that defiled nature as such, is thus transmitted.