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Part of Nature: 1. Philosophical and Theological 2. Naturalism 3. Nature and Grace A. The Philosophical Concept The word “nature”, strictly speaking, means birth, going forth ( nasci, φύεσθαι). It is used to designate both the constant rise of the individual being in its reality (the essence as actively realized) or the totality of all beings in its constant course. This totality is understood either as self-explanatory (in the Greek notion of φύσις or in a pantheistic concept of natura naturans) or as creation. In the latter case, nature is understood as evolving in a proc…

1. History. The idea, throughout all its changes of meaning, whether accepted or rejected, is one of the basic terms of Western thought, whose Unity and differentiation it displays in the most concentrated form. ’Ιδέα means first of all appearance, form, character. Plato uses it for the essence, first for that of the virtues in contrast to their distinctive modes of realization in the concrete, then for virtue as such and for the good in itself and the true reality of all beings. These essences (…

A concept is the representation of an object (a thing or a state of things) in a general way. The general character is not due to a certain obscurity and vagueness, as in “general” sensible representations. It is due to the drawing out (abstraction) by the intellect of something that is common as such to several objects — a “whatness” or essence about the existence of which no affirmation at all is immediately made. Abstraction takes place in the “light” of the “active” intellect ( intellectus agens) which manifests the intelligible element in the sensible thing present. Thus the concept li…

By immortality is meant, in general, endless life. It is said absolutely of a being who cannot die (gods, God) and then of a being who survives in a changed form after death. This survival can be thought of as personal or impersonal (supra-personal), as bodiless or in some way bodily, as a lower or a higher plane of existence. 1. Comparative religion. Belief in life after death is attested, even before the funeral rites and the cult of the dead in primitive religions, by the burial procedures of the earliest cultures. In view of the burial gifts, the “book…

A. Introduction In the exercise of its freedom and knowledge, the human spirit stands in the light of what is unconditional, yet attains the plenitude of this latter only in and through the finite. By its very nature, therefore, it is subject to the law of analogy. Hence analogy is decisively located in the ontological relation between God and finite being and in the cognitive relation between the finite mind and each of these. In all this, analogy must not be regarded from the start as a derivative compromise and half-way house between univocity and equivocity. It mu…

1. Introduction. Freedom is the self-determination nation which stems from the transcendental openness of the spirit for the absolute and unconditional. Hence it appears essentially as freedom from outside coercion and thus as freedom or indifference with regard to possibilities that are open to it. It is liberum arbitrium, the power of choosing. This does not mean that the possibilities of choice are always of equal value. In the most important choice to be made by finite freedom, the choice between good and evil, one particular course is comman…

Part of Anthropomorphism: 1. Philosophical 2. Biblical To think of God with human form and qualities (anthropomorphism) appears at first sight merely as an instance of the general structure of knowledge, which is to assimilate the thing known to the knower (“quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur”), with all the attendant risks and benefits. The advantage is that man draws closer to God, whom be knows not just as a vague and unattainable being or perhaps as the silence or demonic strangeness…