| > Did you see the magisterial quotes I linked to? Do you think they're wrong? The very recent official Vatican document I referred to elsewhere here explained that, while the Church has utilized Aristotelian explanations of Catholic theology, especially as used by St. Thomas Aquinas, even in official Church documents such as the Council of Trent, this in no way officialized this theology, but was only used as a convenience. > If you don't hold to a classical metaphysics, your understanding of transubstantiation will be different from the Church's. (The word only makes sense in an Aristotelian context.) Right, the Catholic Church says that if you use St. Thomas Aquinas's explanations of Catholic theology through the framework of Aristotle, then yes, his explanations are correct. However, it also says you do not need to use his framework, and in fact new ways of explaining Catholic theology should be sought out, in much the same way the Early Church Fathers did. > And so on and so on. Metaphysics affects everything. > because persons and facts would be mere artifacts of the mind. These two things you said are clearly showing me that you're not understanding me. You're thinking of everything I'm saying through the eyes of some metaphysics. You're presuming it. I'm not. I'm looking at reality in a common, everyday way, experientially, in the same way practically every person does all the time in their daily lives. The difference is depth. When we examine any aspect of reality, you seem to take it as far down as you concretely can. (I wonder if it's all just turtles for you.) You go depth first. Whereas I myself go breadth first, and only as deep as needed to resolve a given question. So when we talk about the multiplying of the loaves, you've already brought metaphysics in. You've presumed some kind of framework. Whereas when I think about it, there is a point A and a point B. The point A is the historical facts as laid out by the gospel authors. The point B is some question, such as "how did they end up with more bread?" or "where did the new bread come from?" For me, I don't need to go beyond answering the concrete questions. I draw in whatever external questions and answers are needed to answer the question I'm faced with. That may result in me pulling in a framework. For St. Thomas Aquinas, it did. He pulled in Aristotle, patched it up, married it to Catholic theology, and used that. I don't have to. I go through this process much more shallowly. The best analogy is that I use lazy evaluation of such questions, and you seem to think with fully eager evaluation. Almost as if it were an inherent necessity. |