Conviction and love as "motives of Faith"

"That Divine Revelation is infallible, is an acknowledg'd Principle by all Men: for natural Reason dictates that unerring Wisdom, and infinite Goodness, are essential perfections of God; so that he cannot be deceived, nor deceive those that trust in his Word.  The proofs of the truth of Christian Religion are of a moral nature; and though not of equal clearness with the testimonies of Sense, or a Mathematical Demonstration, yet are so pregnant and convincing, that the considering dispassionate spirit fully acquiesces in them.  A Mathematical Demonstration brings so strong a Light that the Mind cannot suspend its assent, but is presently overcome by the naked propounding of the Object:  And hence it is that in Mathematical matters, there are neither Infidels nor Hereticks.  But the motives of Faith are such, that although the Object be most certain, yet the Evidence is not so clear and irresistible, as that which flows from Sense, or a Demonstration.  And 'tis the excellent observation of Grotius, God has wisely appointed this way of perswading Men the truth of the Gospel, that Faith might be accepted as an act of Obedience from the reasonable Creature.  For the Arguments to induce belief, though of sufficient certainty, yet do not so constrain the mind to give its assent, but there is prudence and choice in it.  Not that the Will can make a direct impression upon the Mind, that it should comply with its desire, and see what it does not see. It cannot make an obscure Object to be clear to its perception, no more than it can change the colour of visible things, and make what appears green to the Eye to seem red. But the mind enlightned by sufficient Reasons that the Christian Religion is from God, represents it so to the Will, and the Will, if sincere and unbiast by carnal affections, commands the Mind not to disguise the Truth, to make it less credible, nor to palliate with specions colours the pretences of Infidelity. And thus the belief of it results from conviction and love."

     William Bates, The divinity of the Christian religion (London:  JD, 1677), 41-43, as quoted by David Wootton, The invention of science:  a new history of the scientific revolution (New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, 2015), 422, and supplemented on both ends by the TCP, above.

Intellectual vice

"There are some men, who have sufficient abilities to discern betwixt the true difference of things; but what through their vicious affections and voluntary prejudices, making them unwilling that some things should be true; what through their inadvertency or neglect to consider and compare things together, they are not to be convinced by plain Arguments; not through any insufficiency in the evidence, but by reason of some defect or corruption in the faculty that should judg of it.  Now the neglect of keeping our minds in such an equal frame, the not applying of our thoughts to consider of such matters of moment, as do highly concern a man to be rightly informed in, must needs be a vice."

     John Wilkins, Of the principles and duties of natural religion (London:  T. Basset, 1675), 35-36 (5th ed., 1704), as quoted by David Wootton, The invention of science:  a new history of the scientific revolution (New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, 2015), 423.

Caught in the act

     "Freedwoman Martha Hendricks found herself in a similar situation when she fled her husband's attackers, baby in arms, to take shelter in the home of her white neighbors, the Grogans.  Mrs. Grogan at first discouraged Hendricks from entering, but when Hendricks plead that it was cold and there was nowhere else to go, Mrs. Grogan begrudgingly offered hospitality.  Hendricks and her baby sat in a room with Mrs. Grogan and her toddler son to await news.  The cause of Mrs. Grogan's reluctance to admit Hendricks became apparent when her son inadvertently revealed to Hendricks that Mr. Grogan was among her husband's attackers.  Both women pretended not to have noticed the slip and continued to spend what must have been an unimaginably painful evening.  When Grogan returned, after a hushed conversation with his wife, he assumed a casual and protective role to Hendricks, assuring her that he had heard that her husband had escaped his pursuers (as indeed he had).  Perhaps Mrs. Grogan and Jeter's attacker's wife acted more kindly than their husbands would have wanted.  Perhaps the white men had joined the attacks reluctantly, or even intervened to spare Hendricks's and Jeter's lives.  It seems most likely, however, that the white men were attempting, through their use of disguise, to have two parallel relationships with Hendricks and Jeter."

     Elaine Frantz Parsons, Ku-Klux:  the birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (Chapel Hll:  The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 98.  "The Ku-Klux's performance enabled southern men to shed the antebellum manhood they had come to idealize for a more starkly, explicitly violent postbellum version.  The Ku-Klux's brief reign marked a transition space between distinct regimes of violence:  the threshold between the patriarchal violence of the antebellum years and the chivalric violence of the war, on the one hand, and the public lynchings of the Progressive Era.  If performance is a way of figuring loss, representing that which is passing away and may be forgotten, the Ku-Klux's histrionics marked and mourned the fall of antebellum white southern manhood and erected a new modern southern manhood in its place" (100-101).

Rusty Reno on public theology

"We should speak boldly in the prophetic mode, trenchantly in the critic mode, but tentatively in the political.  And we should speak with generosity to those who draw different conclusions about what course of action, here and now, in our always compromised circumstances, best serve God's purposes in public life."

     Rusty Reno, "Public theology," First things no. 268 (December 2016): 6 (4-6).

"If only we had one example in the Bible of God creating a faith out of nothing in this way!"

"Wenn wir nur in der biblischen Literatur irgend ein Beispiel eines solchen von Gott aus dem Nichts geschaffenen Glaubens hätten!"

     Karl Barth, CD IV/1, 340 =KD IV/1, 375, on the belief in a "parthenogenesis of faith without any external cause" (339) required of those who would deny that the subjective faith of the disciples was grounded in an objective Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

Pity for "the blindness of those who advance authority alone as proof in physics instead of reason or experiment, and . . . horror at the wickedness of others who use reason alone in theology instead of the authority of Scripture and the Fathers."

"Authority alone can give us light on such matters.  But it is in theology that authority has its chief weight because there it is inseparable from truth, which we know only through it; so that to give absolute certainty to things which reason can least grasp, it is sufficient to point them out in Holy Scripture (as, to show the uncertainty of the most probable things, we need only point out that they are not included there); because the principles of theology are above nature and reason, and the mind of man, too feeble to reach them by its own efforts, can arrive at this highest knowledge only if carried there by an all-powerful and supernatural force.
     "It is quite otherwise with subjects accessible to sense or reasoning:  here authority is useless, only reason can know them.  Authority and reason have their separate rights:  a moment ago one had all the advantage; here the other is queen in her turn.  But since subjects of this kind are suited to the mind's reach, it has perfect freedom to concern itself with them; its inexhaustible fertility produces continually, and its discoveries can be at once without end and without interruption...

     "The clearing up of this difference should make us pity the blindness of those who advance authority alone as proof in physics instead of reason or experiment, and should fill us with horror at the wickedness of others who use reason alone in theology instead of the authority of Scripture and the Fathers.  We must strengthen the courage of those timid souls who dare to discover nothing in physics, and confound the insolence of that temerity which introduces novelty into theology.  Meanwhile the misfortune of the age is such that we see many new opinions in theology altogether unknown to antiquity maintained with obstinacy and received with applause; whereas those put forward in physics, though few in number, must be convicted of error, it seems, as soon as they shock, however little, received opinions. . . ."

     "C'est l'autorité seule qui nous en peut éclaircir. Mais où cette autorité a la principale force, c'est dans la théologie, parce qu'elle y est inséparable de la vérité, et que nous ne la connaissons que par elle : de sorte que pour donner la certitude entière des matières les plus incompréhensibles à la raison, il suffit de les faire voir dans les livres sacrés, comme pour montrer l'incertitude des choses les plus vraisemblables, il faut seulement faire voir qu'elles n'y sont pas comprises; parce que ses principes sont au-dessus de la nature et de la raison, et que, l'esprit de l'homme étant trop faible pour y arriver par ses propres efforts, il ne peut parvenir à ces hautes intelligences s'il n'y est porté par une force toute-puissante et surnaturelle.
     "Il n'en est pas de même des sujets qui tombent sous le sens ou sous le raisonnement: l'autorité y est inutile; la raison seule a lieu d'en connaître. Elles ont leurs droits séparés:  l'une avait tantôt tout l'avantage; ici l'autre règne à son tour. Mais comme les sujets de cette sorte sont proportionnés à la portée de l'esprit, il trouve une liberté tout entière de s'y étendre:  sa fécondité inépuisable produit continuellement, et ses inventions peuvent être tout ensemble sans fin et sans interruption...


     "L'éclaircissement de cette différence doit nous faire plaindre l'aveuglement de ceux qui apportent la seule autorité pour preuve dans les matières physiques, au lieu du raisonnement ou des expériences, et nous donner de l'horreur pour la malice des autres, qui emploient le raisonnement seul dans la théologie au lieu de l'autorité de l'Écriture et des Pères. Il faut relever le courage de ces timides qui n'osent rien inventer en physique, et confondre l'insolence de ces téméraires qui produisent des nouveautés en théologie. Cependant le malheur du siècle est tel, qu'on voit beaucoup d'opinions nouvelles en théologie, inconnues à toute l'Antiquité, soutenues avec obstination et reçues avec applaudissement; au lieu que celles qu'on produit dans la physique, quoique en petit nombre, semblent devoir être convaincues de fausseté dès qu'elles choquent tant soit peu les opinions reçues. . . ."

     Blaise Pascal, Preface to the treatise on the vacuum, trans. Richard Scofield.  GBWW, 2nd ed. (1990), vol. 30, p. 355-356.  French from here, as checked against pp. 453-454 (452-458) of the Pléiade edition of the complete works ed. Michel le Guern (Paris, Gallimard, 1998).

St. Thomas Aquinas on alchemy approximately four centuries before Boyle and Newton were still actively (if somewhat surreptitiously) pursuing it

     The following represents my halting preliminary attempt to follow up on the unfootnoted claim that "The other side [Boyle collaborator George Starkey] refused to hear were those who dismissed alchemy as a deception, a delusion, a fantasy.  Yet among scholastic philosophers these were the majority, from Aquinas and Albertus Magnus on" (David Wootton, The invention of science:  a new history of the scientific revolution (New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, 2015), 354-355).  Below are three of the several hits on lemmas #04023, #04023e, and #04023j in Corpus Thomisticum (which is not to say that passages without these terms are irrelevant).  The passage from the later Summa seems to my inexpert eye more tentative than the one from the much earlier Commentary on the Sentences.  I have not read any of the scholarship on the treatise on alchemy mistakenly (?) attributed to Aquinas, or any of the scholarship on medieval alchemy.

"Demons do not operate except by the mode of art.  But art cannot confer substantial form.  Hence it is said in the chap[ter] on numbers, ‘proponents [(auctores)] of alchemy cannot change the substantial form.’  Therefore neither can demons produce substantial forms."

"Art cannot by its [own] power confer substantial form.  This can [only] be done by the power of a natural agent, as is clear in this, that by art the [substantial] form of fire [(a natural agent)] is introduced into firewood.  But there are certain substantial forms which art can in no way introduce, because it cannot devise active and passive propria, though it can produce something similar in these [substantial forms? active and passive propria?], as [when] alchemists produce something similar to gold with respect to exterior accidents, but yet do not make true gold.  For the substantial form of gold is [induced] not by the heat of the fire which alchemists use, but by the heat of the sun [(a natural agent)] in [that] determinate place in which the mineral power [(a natural agent)] is vigorous.  And therefore such gold lacks the operation consequent upon the species; and similarly in other things which are produced by the operation of [alchemists]."

     Thomas Aquinas, Super Sent. lib. 2, d. 7, q. 3, a. 1, arg and ad 5, trans. Perisho.  (I have not examined Super Sent. lib. 4, d. 11, q. 3, a. 4, qc 3, expos.)  Latin from Corpus Thomisticum:

"Daemones non operantur nisi per modum artis. Sed ars non potest dare formam substantialem; unde dicitur in cap. de numeris: sciant auctores alchimiae, species transformari non posse. Ergo nec Daemones formas substantiales inducere possunt."

"ars virtute sua non potest formam substantialem conferre, quod tamen potest virtute naturalis agentis; sicut patet in hoc quod per artem inducitur forma ignis in lignis. Sed quaedam formae substantiales sunt quas nullo modo ars inducere potest, quia propria activa et passiva invenire non potest, sed in his potest aliquid simile facere; sicut alchimistae faciunt aliquid simile auro quantum ad accidentia exteriora; sed tamen non faciunt verum aurum: quia forma substantialis auri non est per calorem ignis quo utuntur alchimistae, sed per calorem solis in loco determinato, ubi viget virtus mineralis: et ideo tale aurum non habet operationem consequentem speciem; et similiter in aliis quae eorum operatione fiunt."

"Gold and silver are costly not only on account of the usefulness of the vessels and other like things made from them, but also on account of the excellence and purity of their substance. Hence if the gold or silver produced by alchemists has not the true specific nature of gold and silver, the sale thereof is fraudulent and unjust, especially as real gold and silver can produce certain results by their natural action, which the counterfeit gold and silver of alchemists cannot produce. Thus the true metal has the property of making people joyful, and is helpful medicinally against certain maladies. Moreover real gold can be employed more frequently, and lasts longer in its condition of purity than counterfeit gold. If however real gold were to be produced by alchemy, it would not be unlawful to sell it for the genuine article, for nothing prevents art from employing certain natural causes for the production of natural and true effects [(effectus)], as Augustine says (De Trin. iii, 8) of things produced by the art of the demons."

     Thomas Aquinas, ST II-II.77.2.ad 1, trans. FEDP.  Latin from Corpus Thomisticum:

"aurum et argentum non solum cara sunt propter utilitatem vasorum quae ex eis fabricantur, aut aliorum huiusmodi, sed etiam propter dignitatem et puritatem substantiae ipsorum. Et ideo si aurum vel argentum ab alchimicis factum veram speciem non habeat auri et argenti, est fraudulenta et iniusta venditio. Praesertim cum sint aliquae utilitates auri et argenti veri, secundum naturalem operationem ipsorum, quae non conveniunt auro per alchimiam sophisticato, sicut quod habet proprietatem laetificandi, et contra quasdam infirmitates medicinaliter iuvat. Frequentius etiam potest poni in operatione, et diutius in sua puritate permanet aurum verum quam aurum sophisticatum. Si autem per alchimiam fieret aurum verum, non esset illicitum ipsum pro vero vendere, quia nihil prohibet artem uti aliquibus naturalibus causis ad producendum naturales et veros effectus; sicut Augustinus dicit, in III de Trin., de his quae arte Daemonum fiunt."