Farrer on "theistic semi-naturalism"

"The transcendentalist may hope to have refuted the rash claim that the relation of created activities to the Creative Act can be made closely analogous to a natural relation, and in so far intelligible. He has not in so doing shown the absolute untenability of what he would call half-theologies, or removed their attractiveness for minds whose religious attitude they fit or form. It often becomes evident to the orthodox student of such systems that their authors are simply articulating a strange religion. The God of Professor Hartshorne, for example, must be human enough to have a natural need of his creatures. It is apparently a matter of no concern that he should be divine enough to save their souls alive. Here is a rival doctrine about that divine charity which is the heart of our religion. The fervour of the faith behind the teaching is unmistakable; it claims to be judged as a new revelation, not as a rational conclusion."

Austin Farrer, Faith and speculation: an essay in philosophical theology (New York: New York University Press, 1967), 169-170.

Farrer on "the anti-scholastic revolt"

"if we attribute to God a life of creative volition we shall see his acts under the temporal form, not only in their effect, but in God's living of them. But it is absurd to say that we in this world have got all the time there is, and if God wants any of it, he will have to come in and have a bit of ours. There is no such thing as time; there is activity, which viewed objectively, may be called process; and there are relations of before and after within it, which for various purposes may be abstracted, described and diagrammatised in various ways. The time-relations to be found within process are determined by the structure of the process, not vice versa; if we knew what it was like to be God, or to live the life of God, we should know what there is in his existence analogous to the temporal forms which characterise ours. But perhaps we shall not be so rash as to claim that knowledge. . . .
"Nothing can be in our time-order without being a natural constituent of our world."

Austin Farrer, Faith and speculation: an essay in philosophical theology (New York: New York University Press, 1967), 164.

Farrer on an important distinction

"No element of theological analogy is involved in the statement of what God intends, when he intends what I should do; but analogy is involved in the statement that God intends it. God's act of intending is not identical with my act of intending, how could it be? The whole mode of divine being and action is other than the human. So in the whole statement 'God wills that . . .' analogy is involved; but attention will commonly be focussed on the part of the statement which does not involve it--the part which expresses what we have to do."

     Austin Farrer, Faith and speculation: an essay in philosophical theology (New York: New York University Press, 1967), 106-107. Meanwhile, I'm trying to determine whether Burrell disagrees: "If the only alternatives are univocity or equivocity, Scotus would be right; but ordinary language use displays terms used evaluatively (and therefore analogously), which we learn how to use in practical reasoning, as Jesus did in reminding univocally minded Pharisees that he 'came to save not the just but sinners'. So the initial step into the kingdom he announced will involve foregoing any empirical way of identifying either group, thereby suggesting quite different norms governing self-knowledge and practice, but ones intelligible to any practised agent" (David Burrell, CSC, "Maimonides, Aquinas and Ghazali: distinguishing God from the world," Scottish journal of theology 61, no. 3 (2008): 286.

Farrer on just "what it is to think theistically"

"'But who made God?' was the question of someone who had not yet emerged from the nursery."

Austin Farrer, Finite and infinite: a philosophical essay (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1959 [1943]), 15.

Cf. McCabe: "what we mean by 'God' is just whatever answers the question ['Why anything instead of nothing?'']. Apart from knowing this, says Aquinas most insistently, all we can do is point, as systematically as we can, to several kinds or categories of things that the answer could not be. For one thing, whatever would answer our question could not itself be subject to the question--otherwise we are left as we are, with the same question still to answer. Whatever we mean by 'God' cannot be whatever it is that causes us to ask the question in the first place" (Herbert McCabe, O.P., "The involvement of God," God matters (London: Continuum, 2005 (1987)), 41).

Cf. Hart:  "In truth, though, there could hardly be a weaker argument.  To use a feeble analogy, it is rather like asserting that it is inadequate to say that light is the cause of illumination because one is then obliged to say what it is that illuminates the light, and so on ad infinitum."
"But such reasoning is also certainly not subject to the objection from infinite regress.  It is not logically requisite for anyone, on observing that contingent reality must depend on absolute reality, to say then what the absolute depends on or, on asserting the participation of finite beings in infinite being, further to explain what it is that makes being to be.  Other arguments are called for, as Hume knew.  And only a complete failure to grasp the most basic philosophical terms of the conversation could prompt this strange inversion of logic, by which the argument from infinite regress--traditionally and correctly regarded as the most powerful objection to pure materialism--is now treated as an irrefutable argument against belief in God" (David Bentley Hart, "Believe it or not," First things (May 2010):  37-38.

Aquinas on an important second subalternation of theology

"theology . . . has no direct evidence of the realities about which it speaks. The existence of God in his trinitarian mystery and all that he has accomplished for humankind in the history of salvation are evident to the eyes of God himself alone; if the blessed who see him face-to-face participate in the évidence of all of this [to God], we who are still on the way can have access to it only by and in faith. The subalternation of theology to the knowledge [1] that God has of himself and [2] that the blessed have of God is nothing other than a translation into technical language of the necessity of faith to the practice of theology."

     Jean-Pierre Torrell, "Théologien et mystique: les cas de Thomas d'Aquin," Revue des sciences religieuses 77, no. 3 (2003): 352-353.

Aquinas on the subalternation of theology

"a science can be higher than another in two ways, either by reason of its subject, . . . or by reason of its mode of knowing, and thus theology is below the knowledge that is God's. For we imperfectly know what he knows perfectly, and just as a science subalternated to a higher presupposes certain things and proceeds from these as from principles, so theology presupposes the articles of faith which are proved infallibly in God's knowledge, believes them and through them proceeds to prove what follows from the articles. Thus theology is as it were a science subalternated to the divine science from which it receives its principles."

Pretty basic Aquinas, but always a breath of fresh air wherever re-encountered. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences, q. 1 a. 3 qc. 2 ad 1 (Vivès edition); Thomas Aquinas: selected writings, ed. and trans. Ralph McInerny (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 61-62. According to Enrique Alarcón, who cites pp. 106 ff., 139 ff., and 159 of the authoritative new Leonine edition edited by Oliva (Les débuts de l'enseignement de Thomas d'Aquin et sa conception de la 'sacra doctrina': édition du prologue de son 'Commentaire des Sentences' de Pierre Lombard (Paris: J. Vrin, 2006)), to which I don't have immediate access, this is part of a later, optional addition to ad 2 that some thirty manuscripts (and the Vivès edition) inserted mistakenly after ad 1. Because it doesn't yet have permission to use the superior new Leonine edition, Corpus Thomisticum (http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/snp0001.html#37) follows for now the Parma edition. (All of that in a gracious reply to me dated 29 July 2008.)

Hill on the metaphysical significance of inaccuracy

"'One must, however barely, hope to be taken seriously'": "'The perpetration of "howlers", grammatical solecisms, misstatements of fact, misquotations, improper attributions': these may seem like petty errors, but [Geoffrey] Hill labours in th[e] essay ['Poetry as "menace" and "atonement"'] to bring home to the reader their metaphysical significance. They are not technical infractions but the stigmata of human and linguistic fallenness, the cracks in the tea cup that open a lane to the land of the dead. That is why he admires Simone Weil's proposal that 'anybody, no matter who, discovering an avoidable error in a printed text or radio broadcast, would be entitled to bring an action before [special] courts', which would be 'empowered to condemn a convicted offender to prison or hard labour'."

     Adam Kirsch, reviewing the Collected critical writings of Geoffrey Hill; "The poetry of ethics," Times literary supplement no. 5494 (July 18, 2008): 11. Not surprisingly, Kirsch is not convinced. Hill is one of those who "'after the ethical has manifested itself to him [sinfully] chooses the aesthetical'" (Kierkegaard): "Has 'the ethical' manifested itself to him, that is, does he believe in the absolute authority of the Christian tradition to which he stands in such a close but ambiguous relation? Or are the writers to whom he pays homage in his criticism . . . primarily just that, writers, in whose works Hill finds the tones of authority with which he himself longs to speak?" (12). (I for my part am a competent judge of precisely none of this.)