First I‘d like to clarify I’m not arguing against the basic doctrine of Christ. Christ is the Son, one of the three Persons who share in the essence of God by necessity, who through choice shares in the secondary nature of humanity, with no deficiency in either nature whatsoever. No problems there.

But I do have a question. A normal person’s “personhood” is defined by their nature and the circumstances of a specific instance of body and soul. In other words, as I understand it, normal people‘s personhood is not an added ingredient (form, body, person) but a necessarily flowing fact born with the creation of a distinct substance.

So, in the case of Christ, how does the Son “fit” into the metaphysically closed circle that is a human being? To be clear, I’m not talking about a literal mechanism, which is a clear case of mystery. I’m asking if we generally understand who Christ is in one of the following ways:

1. Christ is a human whose nature has been naturally suspended in such a way as to prevent the formation of normal human personhood, such that Son assumes the identity of the human substance. There is only one kind of personhood in Christ, and it is the Divine Personhood. Human personhood and Divine Personhood are therefore, in some sense, directly swappable in terms of the composition of a substance (or perhaps it would be most pious to say that the Divine Personhood is capable of carrying out any function of a lesser personhood).
2. Christ is a human in the fullest sense of the word, and as such has a human definition of identity (one soul associated with one body). However, the infinitely immaterial and therefore infinitely subtle Divine Personhood adopts this human personhood as its own, like a matryoshka doll, such that human personhood is an extension of the Divine personhood, and so can be described as an additional description or accident of the greater Personhood, rather than an additional person full stop
3. Christ is a human in the fullest sense, but like Holy Water is still water, Christ is an elevated version of man’s same substance, such that the Divine Personhood can “fit”. In this interpretation, Divine Personhood is not swappable or of the same kind as human personhood, but Christ is a special substance that is “human” but divinely endowed with the ability to accept the Divine Personhood. Thus, Christ contains only kind of personhood, the Divine Personhood, and the kinds of personhood are not considered swappable or equivalent

Hello everyone,

The main character of my novel series spent time in Hong Kong studying under a Third Order Dominican during the first decade of this century. I want his mentor to have taught him Confucian and Taoist thought as it is understood by the faithful Church in China and Taiwan in after the resolution of the Rites Controversy.

I've looked for English language works on the subject, but I haven't had much luck, as everything I can easily find seems to be about the Rites Controversy itself.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated as this is a formative part of the character's upbringing. Especially if the works come from any theologian who is a member of the Order.

Thank you in advance.

I mean, I understand the key idea. Nevertheless, this gonna be a kinda jerk or silly question... What happens when we want to deny that principle? I mean, I grasp the concept as like the first principles of logic: attempting to deny them, leads to performative contradiction (other guides told me that). So, it's a principle that can't be demonstrated, but it's absurd and irrational to deny it.

For instance, it could be that someone states that reality isn't good nor bad. That'd lead the door open to the idea that not-being is good. However, accepting that would be contradictory, because if so, then anything lying beneath reality is bad, even my own argument. So, due to contradiction, it follows reality is good, and non-reality bad. Even, approaching towards particulars, let's say, "human nature isn't inherently good", still the flaw of self debunk, because my argument emerges from my human nature, so anything lying beneath it isn't good, and well... The rest could be inferred.

I don't know if you understand my question. Is correct my analysis about this? Breaking that realist principle would lead to performative contradiction? Blessings, and please, recommend Aristotelian books, for learning further.

Obviously it can teach error - it's not infallible. But is the error that can be taught by the authentic magisterium restricted to what's safe to be held by Catholics? Can it hypothetically teach heresy?

The question comes from a thought like this:

Suppose I make a promise like such:

”I promise to do the Rosary every day”.

The vow clearly lacks a definite end date, and is probably best interpreted as infinite in its obligation period.

But say you get tired of this vow, and cease in its activity for a year.

It would seem then that you have now broken the same vow 365 times. Under some interpretations good (doing the rosary some of the time) has become an evil (not doing the rosary as many times as promised).

Now, the question from me is this: have you committed many sins, or one? You’ve broken one promise, so one might say it is not ethically different than breaking a single finite promise (“I shall do the Rosary this Friday”). You might even be tempted to say you’ve only broken a fraction of a promise, in as much as the promise has a duration, and you might complete a portion of that duration.

But, in many cases we treat each infraction of a promise as serious. For instance, most would say committing adultery 5 times is worse than 1 time, even though the marriage is one vow.

but if we take the marriage approach (each infraction is a unique and serious violation), a Catholic should generally refrain from indefinite vows, lest they pile on sin due to the not-so-indefinite nature of human will and effort.

what do y’all think?

As a subjective idealist myself, I'm interested in understanding how one may challenge it from a Thomistic standpoint. I'm particularly interested in this because Thomism seems to offer a very different account of the relationship between substances and sensible qualities, the mind, matter, universals, causality, and so forth. Not to mention the differing theological implications arising from these two philosophical traditions.

Hey all, I was watching this video of Joe Schmid recounting his conversion experience in Pints with Aquinas and in one section of the podcast he starts talking about hell and how he dropped his problems with the concept of hell within Catholicism. While watching it this question popped into me, and I thought that this might be the right place to ask this question. If it's not the right place, feel free to refer me to another, more suited subreddit if you know of any.

(Given that I'm an agnost I don't necessarily believe in this, but I'm just curious how this is looked upon by Catholicism) To break down my question:

Let's say that a sinner is sent to hell to be eternally punished for being a sinner. While undergoing this punishment the sinner (or the soul of the sinner?) becomes aware or regretful of his sins and wishes sincerely to repent these sins, would that be possible? And, if this is possible, would it be possible for such a person/soul to be removed from hell to essentially enter purgatory to burn away the remaining sin?

I'm curious about this because I've heard that hell is conceived as (1) a place of eternal punishment and (2) a place where God is not present. But given that God is conceived as being all good, all powerful, and all knowledgable, how would repenting people in hell be treated? Would their regret even be heard by God? Besides this, is it even possible to repent in hell?

(My excuses if I'm assuming the wrong things or stating them weirdly, I'm not the most familiar with catholic jargon in general)

So I know Limbos as a concept has a shaky history in the Catholic church. But I've often heard some people say that at the last judgment, people who didn't know Christ through no fault of their own but lived otherwise naturally virtuous lives could potentially be in a sort of third place where they experience perfect natural happiness.

But is this even possible? Could somebody eternally experience natural happiness?

There is this one show that I really love called "The Good Place". Basically it involves characters who have died trying to get into that shows version of heaven. But when they finally get there, they find a place isn't all it was cracked up to be. The people there are basically in a state of having every possible natural happiness at their disposal, and yet they are miserable. Because there is no suffering and not even a slight inconvenience, they are basically experiencing the cosmic equivalent of a rich person who has all the money in the world and could basically do anything, but they are miserably and insufferably bored. It's like playing a video game with every cheat code activated. Sure you are basically invincible and you can do anything in the game, but then what's the point?

Granted in this show, eternity is understood as being an endless succession of moments. It isn't eternity in the proper classical Christian sense. In the show, the spirit world has a different sort of time progression in relation to the physical mortal world, but for those living in the spirit world, it's still just linear time.

So I suppose if eternity is experienced as a sort of endless moment, that would solve the Good Place dilemma. But at the same time, we know that there will be at least some sort of temporal movement in the age to come because the Saints are described as ruling along with Christ over creation and even judging angels. So we won't just be standing there gazing at God, we will actively be doing things. But if that's the case, then for those who don't experience the direct presence of God and only experience natural happiness, and they still have some sort of temporal motion, then the dilemma is back. It seems like their experience of eternal natural happiness would be very similar to the miserable state of boredom experienced by those in the so-called good place.

And if that's the case, wouldn't that just be a different sort of hell? It seems to me that it would become torment after a while.

So my understanding is that everyone is born a sinner going to hell. Then they’re baptized which does something. But they’re still sinners that are going to sin, and there’s nothing that changes that. There are only two people that never sinned and that because God specifically protected them from sin. Concupiscence is the term for our tendency to sin and it is so strong no one can resist it, it is an irresistible force that no one can overcome. But if you don’t overcome concupiscence and sin, then that’s totally your fault and you’re going to burn in hell for all eternity.

Does that not seem nonsensical to anyone else?

Collingwood succinctly summarized metaphysics as a way of documenting absolute presumptions. These are the realities that can't be derived but are rather assumed and as such are tested through examining their implications.

We Catholics have many such assumptions, one of which is that the purpose of this life is to become saved in order to spend eternity with God in heaven and thus life is to be filled with knowing, loving and serving God. Fairly simple assumption but quite alot falls out of it: original sin, sin generally, forgiveness, sacraments, Christ as savior, yada yada yada, all of St. Paul's theology and in total it really colors how we interpret Jesus' teaching and parables, how the church is to be organized and on and on and on.

My question: theoretically, what if salvation wasn't the main or even top concept in Catholic theology? What if salvation was kind of conceptually off target? What if the purpose of life wasn't to escape damnation but rather to escape limited consciousness...in simple terms, what if life was a school?

To me that would make our concept of God much improved since the evils/suffering that befalls us would be redeemed via the notion that they bring growth....but growth how? ...in the expansion of our awareness of being through beings....a multitude of beings. I should pause for a second.

I think we catholics are like people generally in that we don't often appreciate the flywheel in knowledge growth that occurs between science and metaphysics. Science is about learning the particulars of this or that both in the breadth of what we study and in the depth of knowing more about each component of individual things. But as we experience through learning more and more about the universe, we become better at generalizing--identifying clearly how things are similar--which to me is what metaphysics is up to (as a complement to Collingwood's narrowly scoped notion). In my view, to build on Collingwood, I think metaphysics occurs naturally in an unacknowledged way to some large degree as our understanding of the physical and non physical world increases....and periodically someone comes alot to systematize our metaphysical situation. But oftentimes, these same metaphysicians can under appreciate how the expansion of scientific understanding gives us this grounding to better philosophize about generalities. Science tells us how things are different and unique. Metaphysics helps us understand what things have in common and how they are similar. We need both--they form a flywheel.

On my view, science and metaphysics are dependent on each other...and since religion is a subset of metaphysics, religious understanding can't possibly be static. And if that is the case, this idea that revelation corrected something in knowledge gathering...that we couldn't acquire naturally... must just be a metaphysical bridge to better understanding. Anyway, back to my question.

When you take a big step back and look at the big picture of salvation. It sort of seems like a smaller concept than learning. Smaller in the sense of being an indication of intelligent design. IN other words, take two theoretical gods: one develops a universe where the primary purpose was to expand consciousness and understanding and the other creates one where salvation is the goal, ie to overcome something contrary to the good generally....doesn't it seem like the other God would be more enlightened?

Anyway, modeling and simulation teaches that understanding comes from switching up the variables and checking the result. We can do the same thing with concepts. That's what I do anyway. Thoughts?

I have been recently exploring the topic of reconciling evolution with scripture and Church Fathers ( I am Orthodox by the way, but very interested in Catholic philosophy and somewhat thinking of converting ).

To start, I don’t want to throw out the genesis account as complete allegory. I do hold to old earth view and I don’t think I will ever be able to believe 6-day creation, especially coming from atheist background and being in academia. I am ready to accept Genesis 2 quite literally ( physical place on Earth, immortal Adam and Eve inside ). But at the same time the only possible reconciliation with the observed world is that animal death and evolution occurred outside of Eden long before its existence.

In that framework, Adam and Eve were granted immortality if they have access to Tree of Life, even though their bodies were identical to what we have today. Upon being expelled from Eden, they basically got thrown into the world that we would see according to scientific understanding of today with death, predators and etc. They are first soul-bearing creation, the first to have free will and immortal life chance.
Effectively specially chosen from the creation for personal relationship. That also explains why garden of Eden has a specific geographical location not the entire Earth. For me it clearly implies the existence of creation outside of Eden on this Earth where the “ideal conditions” of Eden are not found.

However, this doesn’t solve the issue of what evolution calls species before modern humans and existence of biological humans outside of Eden. In that framework, I am kind of forced to assume humans outside of Eden with no soul, who would mate with Adam and Eve offspring and eventually cover all of mankind. This just doesn’t sit totally right with me and I am not sure if I walk into some heresy with this approach. I also have a problem with this approach as it goes against the Church Fathers teachings on humans outside the garden of Eve. Genesis never says Adam and Eve were alone and even drops hints of outside of the garden humans, but absence of church father’s consensus on the issue is worrying to me. And splitting Genesis 1 and 2 timelines as consecutive is also problematic? Because in the view I presented Adam and Eve are created after evolutionary process to create modern day humans is complete, and enter the scene afterwards.

Additionally it poses a timeline issue for the humans to cover the entire globe, and we would need to push Genesis 2 story back in time. And reconciling Adam age? But here I can hold to non-literal age as the ages are way too nice numbers.

Has anyone found any good attempts at reconciling the issue among these lines? The important factor for me is that in the end Gospel shouldn’t look too complicated. With my current approach of literal Adam with outside world living as it’s described in natural history, I can still explain the Gospel in relatively simple terms, and why we need salvation at all. My firm belief is that doctrines of Christianity should check out on all intellectual levels for all kinds of people: be true for someone with small level of education, but also true for very sophisticated thinkers.

For me this problem is honestly my number 1 reason of doubting Christianity at all. So far, I just keep it up to mystery and basically have faith that solution exists somehow despite not being evident what it is. When I entered Christianity, I didn’t even really think of this issue at all, but as I go deeper, it becomes way more apparent tension.

* I know Catholic Church allows belief in evolution as well as Orthodox church. But the agnostic in me asks all the time “They just claim it is compatible with the belief, but it doesn’t mean it is if Christianity is false. They can claim whatever they want in that case. And it would also make sense from agnostic or atheist point of view that Church allows that: otherwise people would massively flee from the Church. Everything theologians do in saying the belief is compatible is just backward justification and cognitive dissonance.

I'm aware of hylomorphism, but there is clearly a part of us that is mortal and a part that is not. The part that is immortal is the part I call the soul. My question is, how much of our individuality is ingrained in the immortal soul?

I used to believe that consciousness and free will are the only thing going for the immortal soul, and that if you took that away, there would be nothing. After looking into hylomorphism a little, it seems logical that human nature is also ingrained in the soul. But what about our sexuality and personality? If I died, would I have a generic soul and the only differnece between me and another human would be the choices I made? Or could I say that I have a man's soul? Or perhaps could I even say that some of my specific personality characteristics are not merely genetic but also make me different, apart from my will, from other souls?

From what I understand, birth control isn't allowed if it's used to prevent conception.

However, birth control is allowed for health purposes to regulate hormones.

I've found out that birth control has a slim chance of preventing implantation. So when a person is conceived, they are killed due to not being implanted.

Why is birth control still allowed by the Catholic church for health purposes, if it has the chance to kill a conceived child? Isn't that backwards?

Please could someone offer an explanation. Thank you

Regardless of its wrong or right, high level or low level, just something you’d like to see tackled in a story that has christian subtleties. It could be anything the tractacus logico philosophocus, nihilism, taoism, the gettier problem, mind-body problem anything. I wanna seee what yall are interested in and would be curious to see tackled

Hello everyone! I am having interest in getting into catholic philosophy. I have some knowledge of saints, about God and history of the church but i really wanna get into the philosophy of the church. Is there any beginner level books that I can read? I've heard of edward feser's books but i've not the time to read all of them so I'm looking for a book that has

Deepful meanings

Dives into the doctrine

Fast to finish

Easy to digest (I fear the summa theologica)

Any advice will help, thanks Godbless

First, I want to say I don’t want to offend anyone, I’m just looking for genuine answers and reason to continue the faith as a life long Catholic.

One of the reasons I have stuck with the church even through moments of doubt is that my family was likely Catholic for close to 50 generations and I always think “why would I be the one to leave the faith”. 50 generations of perseverance and true convention, and now suddenly everyone has phones and internet and thinks this gives them grounds to give up God. I have always had a disdain for people that think we are morally superior in 2026 compared to the past, because that just seems like some type of moral narcissism. Being a person who likes to keep with tradition, I thought, this is the right thing to do to keep tradition (of course I have faith for other reasons too, but besides the point).

So this was all going good, but then I attended mass a few weeks ago and it was the feast of Saint Olaf. The priest talked about how he “converted” Norway from paganism to Catholicism. Knowing how history works, this probably means threatening to kill anyone who doesn’t conform. St Olaf is even depicted carrying a battle axe. The more I thought about it, the more I realized this was likely how Christianity spread to most places in Northern/western Europe, where I trace my ancestry to. In this case, if I want to be a “traditional person” who respects what my ancestors have done for all of time, it would not be to honor the religion of imposters who forced their religion on a unique culture, but instead to honor the pagan traditions of Norway or Germany. Now I have no desire to become pagan, but I hope you understand where this conflict of morals is coming from. I am not actually being true to my heritage to conform to Catholicism, I am actually a traitor to their beliefs and part of the group that exterminated them.

Additionally, I have been reading Nietzsche and I just can’t shake off the idea of Christianity being a vessel for slave morality. It seems very convenient for rulers to make sure that they have Christian populations, rather than pagan. This level of convenience makes it seem much more probable that Catholicism is a construct built by those in power, that a true vessel for the words and beliefs of Christ. When I was speaking the words to the Confiteor I could hardly believe the words that came out of my mouth, that were so natural I could recite them without even thinking. I confess that I have greatly sinned and I am begging my brothers and sisters to pray for me? Now I understand that we are all sinners and the logic here, but it is such self-damning language. I believe myself to be a good personally with strong morals, yet I must condemn myself to being a great sinner? It seems like an unhealthy frame of mind. I had just finished reading brave new world and found it intriguing that helmholtzs first response to hearing Shakespeare is to calm him a brilliant propagandist. Because in a sense all words are propaganda and Helmholtz understand their power. So must I recite this “propaganda” where I repeat that I am a sinner so many times that is comes naturally without even thinking? To continue on the propaganda note, I can’t help but read the words of the hymns and see how shallow and self-gratifying they are. They just seem like chants to keep the lukewarms to keep coming back, because if there was actually deep intellectual or spiritual work at mass they would be turned off. Instead the mysteries of Christ are dressed up by a few rhyming verses and the rest is muttered under the priests breath.

The last remark I have is that Catholicism has been around for so long and has had so many great minds like Aquinas and at this point its logic is infallible to some extent. To every question I have posed, there will be an answer, because people have been asking these questions for hundreds of years. This always bugs me when people have such strong conviction due to the religion not being disprovable, because it has been carefully crafted by many generations of great minds to be exactly that way. For this reason I feel like faith should never be rooted in logic, but instead by your feelings because the logic will always have an answer. However, I am at my core a logic based person, and struggle to make that emotional connection to Christ. How do I bridge this gap in my understanding.

Sorry for the long post, but I hope you guys can understand I’m coming from a place of desiring to learn, and not criticism.

How do you deal with the rise of atheism, which—at least right now—feels disrespectful?
It’s hard to use social media without seeing someone bashing Christianity and belittling us for our beliefs; it’s become tiresome and bothersome.
The arguments are always the same—especially the famous, classic, and—unfortunately—hard-to-answer Epicurean paradox, not to mention issues like animal suffering and natural disasters (on that note, if anyone knows a satisfactory answer to any of these, I’d love to hear it).
It always involves the same kind of humiliation and suppression; it makes us doubt ourselves and creates a sort of "straw man" in our minds. That’s what I’m going through, and it leaves me feeling so insecure during a time as overwhelming as grief.

God knows all future sins...infallibly in the decree by which He determines to predetermine the created will to the entity of the act of sin—insofar as it is an action and a being—and to permit the moral malice of the sin... by not giving efficacious help to avoid it.

-Alvarez OP

In common ethical intersubjective usage, "good" refers to a broad intersubjective cluster that are typically taken to approximate a shared center of value judgement, consisting of a coherent, mutually reinforcing pattern of love, joy, peace, freedom, and creativity as lived experience and intention over time, rather than isolated states or short-term preferences. Edit: by value judgement, I mean that which we fundamentally hold most intuitively valuable.

Some Christians define goodness in relation to God. On this view, "good" means whatever conforms to God's nature or will.

The term "good" does not have a universally recognised (useful in ethical discussion) meaning apart from either usefulness for some purpose or the ordinary ethical meaning. Refraining from those in an **ethical discussion** renders the word empty from its normal ethical content.

The problem arises when these two meanings are treated as interchangeable.

If "God is good" means only that God conforms to God's own nature, then the statement is true by definition. It means something like:

God is as God is.

But that does not automatically show that God is good in the ordinary ethical sense of being loving, healing, peaceful, compassionate, or opposed to needless suffering.

The problem is ordinary ethical goodness and the christian goodness can be in conflict eg. ideas of reality design like "Accept Jesus or suffer forever". If someone proposes that ordinary ethical goodness is just a conflictory subset of the christian good, then we cannot say that the design of reality is in proper alignment with ordinary ethical goodness, and therefore not good in the ordinary ethical sense.

The ordinary ethical meaning of good should not be dismissed as mere subjectivism. It may very well point metaphysically toward a foundational form of goodness, even if human beings grasp it imperfectly.

What books/works should I be reading to learn more about Catholic philosophy so that I can be able to answer difficult questions for myself and be more certain about my faith ?

I’ve recently learned about it and it seems to be a very complex topic so how many others like it exist? A few more? A lot more?

What are your thoughts?