Hi AJ. I’m a psychiatrist who is a coach in Knowland’s marriage group.
Two points you could fact check.
1. I am told that Aquinas believed the first act of drunkenness to not be a sin since there is no way to know the threshold for amount of beer, other than empirically by going over it at first. This seems consistent with his thought. And it seems true. But I have no idea where he wrote it.
2. If we sleep through Mass, we are sinning even though we are asleep. This shows how much St. Thomas believed in the idea of the unconscious mind. Or at least an unconscious ‘will’ that is always active, even while asleep, always able to act on even *previously* known info… like the start time for mass. Freud and other analysts have supported the idea that the psyche retains its time-keeping ability even while asleep…
RE Sleep: if you go to my chart from St. Thomas in the article, you'll see under "Weakness" > "Excluding Knoweldge" > "Involuntary" the example of "sleep". This is technically sleep that you don't have voluntary responsibility for... It's talking about things like a "wet dream" (what the scholastics call "nocturnal pollution", lol) not being morally culpable acts; or somnambulance ("sleep walking".. i.e. into some crime, etc.). It actually highlights in the De Malo that sleeping through something you're obligated to do, like Mass, because you're tired from staying out all night, is not "involuntary" but "voluntary", and therefore a culpable version of sleep with regards to sin. My chart doesn't highlight that bc technicalities aren't well represented in charts... they make charts less clear and more confusing.
wet dreams aren’t sinful in themselves but are still sinful “by their cause”, correct?
since entertaining any amount of lust before sleep, sets to a kind of inertia, which persists after sleep.
it seems the sleeping mind retains an inclination from waking events, the way objects retain momentum after a driving force is removed.
as far as whether you wake up spontaneous of for Mass at 6 AM or not, it may not be from staying out all night. you might just not wake up… and Aquinas (I am told) thinks this is reprehensible. Thus he seems to think that, even while asleep, there is a culpability in neglecting to wake up…
but this necessitates the idea that some faculties of the soul are very much active during sleep.
Josef Pieper in “Divine Madness” says that Aquinas says that during sleep the “receptive power” of the mind is even more active than during waking hours, as if better able to receive divine inspiration
ST II-II:Q154:A5 is about nocturnal pollution ("wet dreams").
- Not sinful in itself, but can be in its cause. (Just as you're saying)
- 3 ways of "causing" nocturnal pollution:
1. bc of buildup of semen, and here St. Thomas says if the buildup is due to excessive eating and drinking, then there's culpability, otherwise no.
2. bc of previous thoughts while awake. Then, if thoughts were speculative or with abhorrence while awake, then no sin. If thoughts were concupiscible while awake, then sin.
3. bc of spiritual warfare. Then, if one neglected to guard against spiritual warfare while awake, the neglect is a sin. If they did guard against spiritual warfare while awake, then no sin.
RE 6am. You're not obligated to go to Mass at 6am... nor do I think, even in previous generations, where they only had one Sunday Mass in the morning, was the one Mass at 6am...
I have never come across anything in St. Thomas that talks about a culpability in neglecting to wake up, and it doesn't align with any principles I've learned from his works either. If you can track down a reference that's in St. Thomas's works, not Joseph Pieper, I'd certainly adjust accordingly.
More likely, my take is that someone in the field of psychiatry probably loosely associated something in St. Thomas's work that they felt stretched to modern Freudian notions of sleeping mechanics, dream analysis, etc., and concluded these things about culpability in sleep.
The most pernicious part of this idea in my mind (and I'm not saying you do this, but maybe you do) is that it would be very easy to use that notion (the notion that you're culpable in sleep) to either dismiss moral philosophy, or excessively bind the conscience of a person to trivial obsessiveness over their sinfulness. Psychology is given to minimize moral culpability at every turn, so it's more likely the first reason; but even the second reason, if it is the case in some small subset of population of psychologists/psychiatrists, is no good either.
Freudian psychology is essentially a Jewish discipline rooted in Jewish and patristic voluntarism.
If you ignore Freud’s ultimate philosophy about the appetites/drives being irrational, and if you consider the fact that he, better than most theologians apart from perhaps St. John Newman, detailed all the ways the Will can be devious, by suppressing knowledge (repression, denial), you can see he was preoccupied with a sort of moral theology.
Perfect knowledge is not enough to prevent sin and is even a risk factor. Eve used a rational possible intellect, precisely to sin.
What Freud did, was expand the notion of culpability… to areas beyond conscious intent and conscious ‘duty’ to the areas of the ‘hidden person of the heart’ 1 PET 3:4. Which is a Jewish or early desert father (voluntarist) view… At any rate, sharply disagrees with Socrates’ intellectualism (a fault I find with >75% of trad Catholic men I am coaching.)
Steven Jensen, a Thomist professor in Houston has a book on Thomistic action theory ‘Sin: A Thomistic Psychology’ and in the first chapter he mentions Aquinas’s view on sleeping in through mass being a sin. But I don’t know where in Aquinas it occurs. I could find out Tuesday when I’m in the office.
1. Your use of "rational possible intellect" in Eve is totally incoherent. The possible intellect is a division in the rational intellect from the agent/active intellect because the rational intellect must generate an intelligible species before it can receive the intelligible species in the possible/passive intellect (vs. a "pure" (angelic) intellect that possesses its intelligible species in its nature--they don't need to generate an intelligible species, and they can't generate them). Eve didn't "use a rational possible intellect, precisely to sin". That is an incoherent proposition... The rational appetite (will) is the principle source of every sin; the possible/passive intellect is just the intellect under the aspect of how it receives intelligible species. If you act based on a false understanding in your intellect, you sin out of ignorance--and then the ignorance is either culpable (voluntary) or inculpable. I don't know what you think the "rational possible intellect" is but if you tried to describe what you thought I might be able to reconcile what you're getting at with something else in the Aristo-Thomist framework......
2. Freud did not pioneer an understanding of voluntary / involuntary culpability and its distinctions--that's "vincible" vs. "invincible" ignorance and was thoroughly developed by scholastic theologians; is present in practice and detail in Catholic confession manuals of the 10th-19th centuries; and was introduced in great detail by the Church Fathers.
3. Action Theory is a legal theory for prosecuting culpability in human courts, requiring a mens rea (guilty mind) AND an actus reus (guilty act) to prosecute. In my opinion it's application to moral philosophy/theology has been an absolute disaster precisely because before God, sin (moral evil) is any disintegral act, whether via mens rea OR actus reus... That means that you don't need both (guilty mind AND guilty act) to commit a moral evil, only one of them suffices to make an act evil.. But you need both to be prosecuted in a courtroom (which is appropriate).
That being said, even from a "Thomist professor" (many modern Thomists are "Action Theorists" and I disagree with their action-theory framework categorically), it's not a surprise to me that a book on Thomistic action theory produces examples that I can't reconcile with what I read in St. Thomas.
Sleeping in through Mass is a sin if you have voluntary culpability for why you're sleeping in--*not* because you can keep track of time when you sleep.
I don't know what to tell you--I'll try to keep responding to your objections...it's tough navigating all that you're saying--it's good practice for me though. Forces me to try to remember to stay humble: speak with clarity, cite what I can, explain my terms as best and as succinctly as I can, etc.. I don't know that I'm convincing you of anything--but I appreciate your engagement with my work. It's a tacit form of respect and I'm grateful.
Aquinas writes somewhere (probably in questions on prophecy) that during sleep, cognition "as regards receptivity" is *more* powerful than during wakefulness.
This is interesting, and it accords well with an idea in Aristotle's De Anima, that the lower animal senses are uniquely infallible. Prophecy is a higher-- but still a passive-- form of sense experience, with the same quality of infallibility as the lower senses. But if this can occur during sleep (dream prophecy) then the intellect is active during sleep. (Empirically, you can have conversations with someone while they’re asleep… so the simplistic Thomist idea that sleepwalkers are inculpable imbeciles… is really not very empirically honest.)
And correct me if I'm wrong, but Aquinas considered infused contemplation, rather than any intellectual 'thinking', to be the highest form of thought… again, passive, just like sleep.
Aristotle said that the human soul was "more like knowledge than like thinking...." setting up the whole basis for the Unconscious. For it is knowledge, (not ratiocination ) that is mostly unconscious. E.g. how do you empirically explain that you can recall an apropos quote/reference during a debate?
There must be an area of your mind outside your conscious awareness, always active…
Unconscious does not necessarily mean outside free-will.. Freud didn’t believe in free will, however, "my drives made me do it" is a misappropriation of Freud. His method was to expand what falls under free will and responsibility. As such, Freud was solidly within the voluntarist, Jewish, and also some of the patristic tradition.
If you allow for an unconscious it solves the problems of sins of omission and vincible ignorance, problems that you're tackling now. And that's why I originally messaged you.
If a sinner must be a) ignorant enough to pursue a false good, and yet b) knowledgeable enough to be culpable. This is a perplexity that is solved by the Unconscious, which is mostly innocent. (If you can’t sin while you’re asleep, then why would it be reprehensible?)
It is only the conscious Intellect that is reprehensible, in my opinion. Satan is hyper-conscious… he never sleeps, as Scripture tells us. BTW when I said Eve used her “possible intellect” to sin, I meant, the part that Aristotle said can be utterly false. The part that makes judgments, and puts sentences together. “Maybe God doesn’t want me to eat the apple to be like him…”. This was a thought of a prideful self sufficient, possible intellect. Eve considered this as a possibility. She had no logical proof of God’s commands, and was free to sin intellectually through intellectual conjecture, pride, the sort of thing described by St. Bernard in his twelve steps of pride…
(Re. these terms: I don’t identify the passive intellect with the possible intellect. The passive intellect is to me the reception of sense forms into phantasms, which then are parsed, sorted, and turned into terms, or universals, by the agent intellect (cogitation). It is only after that point… that the possible intellect becomes active, taking abstractions prepared for it by the cogitative power, making possibilities, i.e., propositions, sentences, and reasoning with them. This is fundamentally not a passive process, but an active one.)
Navigating "drinking" and "drunkenness" is not easy in St. Thomas, but it can be done.
Take, for example, the Summa Theologia, where he says (ST II-II:150:2resp) that Drinking, under the third type (for the sake of intoxication) makes one a drunkard and is a mortal sin. "Thirdly, it may happen that a man is well aware that the drink is immoderate and intoxicating, and yet he would rather be drunk than abstain from drink. Such a man is a drunkard properly speaking, because morals take their species not from things that occur accidentally and beside the intention, but from that which is directly intended. On this way drunkenness is a mortal sin, because then a man willingly and knowingly deprives himself of the use of reason, whereby he performs virtuous deeds and avoids sin, and thus he sins mortally by running the risk of falling into sin."
Contrast this, however, with his clear statement in the De Malo that drinking is a venial sin. (De Malo Question 2, Article 8, Reply to Objection 3) "To get drunk often is not a circumstance constituting a species of sin. And therefore just as getting drunk once is a venial sin, so too, strictly speaking, is getting drunk often[.]" He goes on to explain how "drunkenness" can be considered "mortal" accidentally, in that it disposes us to treat the commandments with contempt.
For us, then, the question becomes, first: is drinking a mortal or a venial sin?
Well my answer is that properly, it's a venial sin. What he says in the Summa Theologia is his brief treatment of questions (believe it or not); what he says in the De Malo is where he really fleshes out all the principles and explains them in detail. Further, the DM is written at the end stretch of time where he was finishing up the Summa, so it seems to be one of his last, and most mature works. What he describes in the De Malo is the principles that can be applied to understand what he says generally in the Summa: namely, that drunkenness is mortal accidentally, because it disposes us to treat God with contempt--and this is the exact way he describes drunkenness as a mortal sin in the Summa, quoted above. That makes us confident we can go with his De Malo rendering.
Ok, that being said, our next barrier to overcome is the question of culpability due to amount drank. What I think is that your question, #1, becomes an amalgam of a few things in St. Thomas, though actually inverted to create a sort of "free pass" for drinking that does not exist in the teachings of St. Thomas.
Namely, First, the unexpected strength of the alcohol can be a reason for not sinning in getting drunk. St. Thomas: "And then if an illicit cause should be responsible for preventing the use of reason, the person is not altogether excused from sin. For example, such was evidently the case with Lot, who committed incest because he was drunk, unless perhaps his drunkenness happened without him sinning, as happened to Noah because he did not know the strength of wine." (De Malo Question 15, Article 2, Reply to Objection 9) Here St. Thomas relates that a person who is intoxicated by something they didn't expect to intoxicate them is excused from sinning.
We shouldn't stop there, however, when it comes to the *first time someone gets drunk* because in another place he makes clear that the first time is precisely the place where the choice is MOST voluntary: (De Malo Question 3, Article 10, response) "For example, we impute homicide committed due to drunkenness to a human being as a moral fault, since the initial drunkenness was voluntary." Now here we don't take this only as the initial drunkenness of that specific time being drunk, but also the initial drunkenness of the drunkard the first time they ever drank (I don't say this randomly but because it applies equally to both situations).
And further, your comment, "that we can't know the threshold without empirically going over it" would suggest that we have to find out the threshold--whereas we don't. To be virtuous doesn't mean you drink a little, it means you do not ever strive to be intoxicated... Or, another argument against that position could even be put that the formal quality of "drunkenness" is precisely a desire to be drunk, not whether you achieve that or not--so that any person who is drinking alcohol for the sake of drinking alcohol (as opposed to it being a form of making undrinkable water drinkable through the brewing process in the middle ages) is already in sin.
Either of those objections works...
So I'd say #1 is wrong and sounds like something a Jesuit Thomist would propose, probably drawing on a circumstance where knowledge is hindered in a way that conflates voluntary ignorance (vincible ignorance) with invincible ignorance and produces a "pass" for someone who ends up a drunkard due to genetic disposition and writing off the "first time" as the place where their culpability would be diminished. Usually the motive for these conflations is wanting the world to see them as merciful because of their "easy teachings" on this or that hot-button issue.
I'd reject it. (But of course, as in anything, I'd concede the position to someone if they were able to demonstrate a deeper understanding of the principles and weave even more disparate threads together that I don't have weaved together myself.)
RE: #2
As to #2, we sin if we sleep through mass not because we're unconsciously actually aware of time when we're asleep like you're saying Freud says, but because we have an obligation to observe Mass, and so anything we do that can be attributed to a voluntary choice (whether we're tired because we stayed up too late doing something that was trivial, or we're high on drugs and that makes us sleepy) will be cause for us being responsible for the sin of sleeping through mass. But if we have narcolepsy, or we're so tired because we had to save a strangers life who was in a tragic accident and we had to take care of them all night, etc., then the falling asleep would be excused.
Thank you for your responses AJ. And I hope you’re doing well raising money for your school which Will told me about.
In your response about drunkenness I don’t see where you consider accidental first time drunkenness. I remember being 21 in Chicago in college and not knowing whether 3 or 4 beers was okay.
I learned 4 beers was not okay, but i don’t think i was at all intending to be a little drunk for a few hours.
The line about Noah not knowing the strength of the wine is what refers to accidental drunkenness..... **"as happened to Noah because he did not know the strength of wine." (De Malo Question 15, Article 2, Reply to Objection 9)
The real thrust of my response, though, comes from the fact that I think it's clear (as I laid out above) that drinking and drunkenness is a venial sin, not a mortal sin. Thus whether you have culpability or not there, the sin, if there even is a sin, first off, is venial. (A "venial" sin means it is pardonable "in itself", and many things remit venial sins: holy water, saying an Our Father, going to Mass, etc.)...
I say that bc if you realize it's a venial sin, you can better gauge everything thereafter. It may be that you venially sinned from even having 3 beers in the first place (regardless of whether you went over your intoxication threshold). But even if going over your threshold is the problem, even if that weren't accidental, you'd still only have a venial sin. And then, yeah, like you said, if that "accidental-ness" holds up, then there'd be reduced culpability... so either a venial sin to an even less serious venial sin (which, who cares, really? you're good); or a venial sin to no sin...
In all those situations, ultimately, you're good... keep fighting the good fight; strive to cooperate with God's grace; pray, study your faith, form & examine your conscience, etc....
I'm going to lay out the objective distinction between mortal and venial sin as best as I can in in my forthcoming book, drawing from St. Thomas's works on the question. I think you (along with many others!) will be able to draw a ton from that! I know it really helped me in my moral formation; forming my conscience; etc..
I checked the Summa and Aquinas does not say moderate drinking is a venial sin. He says it’s not a sin at all.
And on accidental drunkenness, I think I found the quote.
“On one way, through the wine being too strong, without the drinker being cognizant of this: and in this way too, drunkenness may occur without sin.” Q150.article.1
So, he seems to say accidental drunkenness is not venial either. Am I Correct ?
Also how could the Church condone Irish pubs, or communion wine, or the miracle at Cana, if 2-3 beers was a venial sin?
You just put a period in your quote where there isn't one.
…”and in this way too, drunkenness may occur without sin, especially if it is not through his negligence, and thus we believe that Noah was made drunk as related in Genesis 9.” (ST II-II:150:1resp)
*"Especially if it is not through his negligence"... That does not mean that ~not being cognizant of how strong the wine is excuses drinking~, it means that if you are not cognizant of how strong the wine is, *without negligence*, it excuses drinking.
And right after that it says the proper mode of understanding drunkenness: "On another way drunkenness may result from inordinate concupiscence and use of wine: in this way it is accounted a sin, and is comprised under gluttony as a species under its genus."
*Inordinate* concupiscence is qualified as a desire that is not using a thing according to its teleological purpose: thus the concupiscence of lust is inordinate use of the sexual faculty (not for/open-to procreation) and the concupiscence of gluttony of food is inordinate use of food (not for the nourishment of the body). To use drink for intoxication is always inordinate, and it's always a sin. Thus, as I said, "it may (note, "may") be that you venially sinned from having 3 beers in the first place." Because drinking alcohol for the sake of drinking alcohol is an inordinate use of drinking anything (its purpose: hydration)...
Cf. "For example, eating is disordered if it be not properly related to bodily health, for which as end eating is ordained." (De Malo, Q 15, A 1 response)
You don't have to optimally hydrate yourself with what you drink, or optimally nourish yourself with what you eat--pleasure can come along with those things, but if you don't do them for those sakes, then it's a venial sin. And it's venial according to its object not because it's randomly just "minor", but because the object does not directly contravene against God or your neighbor. (I will be elaborating this principle at length in my forthcoming book.)
The Church can condone alcohol because alcohol doesn't have to be used for intoxication, or "alcohol as alcohol", as I'm phrasing it. There are other qualities included in alcoholic drinks and those ends can suffice for its liceity. On the contrary, the Church can't, and doesn't, condone drunkenness in any form.
The virtue of temperance ("moderation") in regards to alcohol is sobriety--which is the absence of intoxication. Thus "moderate drinking" means drinking without the *object of the will* being intoxication... Being "tipsy" is a version of intoxication--so drinking to get *tipsy*, or only a little intoxicated, does not qualify as moderation. But again, it's a venial sin.
And you asked where St. Thomas says drinking is a venial sin--I quoted it above: "To get drunk often is not a circumstance constituting a species of sin. And therefore just as getting drunk once is a venial sin, so too, strictly speaking, is getting drunk often".... (DM 2:8ad3)
*"just as getting drunk once is a venial sin"... This means getting drunk is a venial sin.
And *"getting drunk often is not a circumstance constituting a species of sin"... This means that getting drunk often, in not constituting a new species of sin, retains the same objective quality (non-grave; venial) as getting drunk once, confirming that getting drunk is a venial sin according to its species.
Pardon my ambiguous language, AJ, I was typing on my phone late at night. Thank you for the long response.
Also, AJ, I respect you, I was playing dumb at first. If you are benefiting from our messages, continue, otherwise please let me know to stop.
1. Re. accidental first-time drunkenness,
I understand Aquinas to be (as an empiricist), defending the possibility of unassumingly not knowing your brain physiology, which cannot be known a-priori, and is a particular, not a universal... "without negligence" can become circular and sort of angry, suspicious/Puritanical, if we also forget that any examination of intent is ultimately an empirical test of looking inward, and inward is both subjective and empirical.
Both Jesuit liberals and hardline-moralists can commit 'casuistry'... the former by playing psychological games and hiding their true intent from themselves, the latter by *telling* someone else what their intent was. We saw this when Lila Rose was called a sinner (liar) for saving babies. It is all too easy for moralists to lost the immediate intuitive moral vision of an action (Aquinas calls it "synderesis", I think) and replace it with thinking that loses its empirical common sense.
2. re. a "buzz" being a venial sin:
It seems to me "as an ice-breaker" or a social lubricant seems teleological enough to me to avoid venial sin... If hylomorphism is true, and prior to intoxication, there is a relaxed (buzzed) state that seems to push along the vagus nerve and digestion, rest the mind after hard labor, it seems exceedingly difficult to tease apart these effects from what is more purely 'teleological.' This is the problem IMO also with St. Augustine's condemnation of the sinfulness of marital sex during menstruation, for bonding/pleasure. St. Augustine's weakness was Plato, and as a non-empiricist, he tried to tease things apart which come to us as irreducible wholes...
Hi AJ. I’m a psychiatrist who is a coach in Knowland’s marriage group.
Two points you could fact check.
1. I am told that Aquinas believed the first act of drunkenness to not be a sin since there is no way to know the threshold for amount of beer, other than empirically by going over it at first. This seems consistent with his thought. And it seems true. But I have no idea where he wrote it.
2. If we sleep through Mass, we are sinning even though we are asleep. This shows how much St. Thomas believed in the idea of the unconscious mind. Or at least an unconscious ‘will’ that is always active, even while asleep, always able to act on even *previously* known info… like the start time for mass. Freud and other analysts have supported the idea that the psyche retains its time-keeping ability even while asleep…
RE Sleep: if you go to my chart from St. Thomas in the article, you'll see under "Weakness" > "Excluding Knoweldge" > "Involuntary" the example of "sleep". This is technically sleep that you don't have voluntary responsibility for... It's talking about things like a "wet dream" (what the scholastics call "nocturnal pollution", lol) not being morally culpable acts; or somnambulance ("sleep walking".. i.e. into some crime, etc.). It actually highlights in the De Malo that sleeping through something you're obligated to do, like Mass, because you're tired from staying out all night, is not "involuntary" but "voluntary", and therefore a culpable version of sleep with regards to sin. My chart doesn't highlight that bc technicalities aren't well represented in charts... they make charts less clear and more confusing.
Hopefully this helps clarify!
wet dreams aren’t sinful in themselves but are still sinful “by their cause”, correct?
since entertaining any amount of lust before sleep, sets to a kind of inertia, which persists after sleep.
it seems the sleeping mind retains an inclination from waking events, the way objects retain momentum after a driving force is removed.
as far as whether you wake up spontaneous of for Mass at 6 AM or not, it may not be from staying out all night. you might just not wake up… and Aquinas (I am told) thinks this is reprehensible. Thus he seems to think that, even while asleep, there is a culpability in neglecting to wake up…
but this necessitates the idea that some faculties of the soul are very much active during sleep.
Josef Pieper in “Divine Madness” says that Aquinas says that during sleep the “receptive power” of the mind is even more active than during waking hours, as if better able to receive divine inspiration
RE Nocturnal Pollution ("Wet Dreams")
Yes! They can be.
ST II-II:Q154:A5 is about nocturnal pollution ("wet dreams").
- Not sinful in itself, but can be in its cause. (Just as you're saying)
- 3 ways of "causing" nocturnal pollution:
1. bc of buildup of semen, and here St. Thomas says if the buildup is due to excessive eating and drinking, then there's culpability, otherwise no.
2. bc of previous thoughts while awake. Then, if thoughts were speculative or with abhorrence while awake, then no sin. If thoughts were concupiscible while awake, then sin.
3. bc of spiritual warfare. Then, if one neglected to guard against spiritual warfare while awake, the neglect is a sin. If they did guard against spiritual warfare while awake, then no sin.
RE 6am. You're not obligated to go to Mass at 6am... nor do I think, even in previous generations, where they only had one Sunday Mass in the morning, was the one Mass at 6am...
I have never come across anything in St. Thomas that talks about a culpability in neglecting to wake up, and it doesn't align with any principles I've learned from his works either. If you can track down a reference that's in St. Thomas's works, not Joseph Pieper, I'd certainly adjust accordingly.
More likely, my take is that someone in the field of psychiatry probably loosely associated something in St. Thomas's work that they felt stretched to modern Freudian notions of sleeping mechanics, dream analysis, etc., and concluded these things about culpability in sleep.
The most pernicious part of this idea in my mind (and I'm not saying you do this, but maybe you do) is that it would be very easy to use that notion (the notion that you're culpable in sleep) to either dismiss moral philosophy, or excessively bind the conscience of a person to trivial obsessiveness over their sinfulness. Psychology is given to minimize moral culpability at every turn, so it's more likely the first reason; but even the second reason, if it is the case in some small subset of population of psychologists/psychiatrists, is no good either.
Freudian psychology is essentially a Jewish discipline rooted in Jewish and patristic voluntarism.
If you ignore Freud’s ultimate philosophy about the appetites/drives being irrational, and if you consider the fact that he, better than most theologians apart from perhaps St. John Newman, detailed all the ways the Will can be devious, by suppressing knowledge (repression, denial), you can see he was preoccupied with a sort of moral theology.
Perfect knowledge is not enough to prevent sin and is even a risk factor. Eve used a rational possible intellect, precisely to sin.
What Freud did, was expand the notion of culpability… to areas beyond conscious intent and conscious ‘duty’ to the areas of the ‘hidden person of the heart’ 1 PET 3:4. Which is a Jewish or early desert father (voluntarist) view… At any rate, sharply disagrees with Socrates’ intellectualism (a fault I find with >75% of trad Catholic men I am coaching.)
Steven Jensen, a Thomist professor in Houston has a book on Thomistic action theory ‘Sin: A Thomistic Psychology’ and in the first chapter he mentions Aquinas’s view on sleeping in through mass being a sin. But I don’t know where in Aquinas it occurs. I could find out Tuesday when I’m in the office.
1. Your use of "rational possible intellect" in Eve is totally incoherent. The possible intellect is a division in the rational intellect from the agent/active intellect because the rational intellect must generate an intelligible species before it can receive the intelligible species in the possible/passive intellect (vs. a "pure" (angelic) intellect that possesses its intelligible species in its nature--they don't need to generate an intelligible species, and they can't generate them). Eve didn't "use a rational possible intellect, precisely to sin". That is an incoherent proposition... The rational appetite (will) is the principle source of every sin; the possible/passive intellect is just the intellect under the aspect of how it receives intelligible species. If you act based on a false understanding in your intellect, you sin out of ignorance--and then the ignorance is either culpable (voluntary) or inculpable. I don't know what you think the "rational possible intellect" is but if you tried to describe what you thought I might be able to reconcile what you're getting at with something else in the Aristo-Thomist framework......
2. Freud did not pioneer an understanding of voluntary / involuntary culpability and its distinctions--that's "vincible" vs. "invincible" ignorance and was thoroughly developed by scholastic theologians; is present in practice and detail in Catholic confession manuals of the 10th-19th centuries; and was introduced in great detail by the Church Fathers.
3. Action Theory is a legal theory for prosecuting culpability in human courts, requiring a mens rea (guilty mind) AND an actus reus (guilty act) to prosecute. In my opinion it's application to moral philosophy/theology has been an absolute disaster precisely because before God, sin (moral evil) is any disintegral act, whether via mens rea OR actus reus... That means that you don't need both (guilty mind AND guilty act) to commit a moral evil, only one of them suffices to make an act evil.. But you need both to be prosecuted in a courtroom (which is appropriate).
That being said, even from a "Thomist professor" (many modern Thomists are "Action Theorists" and I disagree with their action-theory framework categorically), it's not a surprise to me that a book on Thomistic action theory produces examples that I can't reconcile with what I read in St. Thomas.
Sleeping in through Mass is a sin if you have voluntary culpability for why you're sleeping in--*not* because you can keep track of time when you sleep.
I don't know what to tell you--I'll try to keep responding to your objections...it's tough navigating all that you're saying--it's good practice for me though. Forces me to try to remember to stay humble: speak with clarity, cite what I can, explain my terms as best and as succinctly as I can, etc.. I don't know that I'm convincing you of anything--but I appreciate your engagement with my work. It's a tacit form of respect and I'm grateful.
Aquinas writes somewhere (probably in questions on prophecy) that during sleep, cognition "as regards receptivity" is *more* powerful than during wakefulness.
This is interesting, and it accords well with an idea in Aristotle's De Anima, that the lower animal senses are uniquely infallible. Prophecy is a higher-- but still a passive-- form of sense experience, with the same quality of infallibility as the lower senses. But if this can occur during sleep (dream prophecy) then the intellect is active during sleep. (Empirically, you can have conversations with someone while they’re asleep… so the simplistic Thomist idea that sleepwalkers are inculpable imbeciles… is really not very empirically honest.)
And correct me if I'm wrong, but Aquinas considered infused contemplation, rather than any intellectual 'thinking', to be the highest form of thought… again, passive, just like sleep.
Aristotle said that the human soul was "more like knowledge than like thinking...." setting up the whole basis for the Unconscious. For it is knowledge, (not ratiocination ) that is mostly unconscious. E.g. how do you empirically explain that you can recall an apropos quote/reference during a debate?
There must be an area of your mind outside your conscious awareness, always active…
Unconscious does not necessarily mean outside free-will.. Freud didn’t believe in free will, however, "my drives made me do it" is a misappropriation of Freud. His method was to expand what falls under free will and responsibility. As such, Freud was solidly within the voluntarist, Jewish, and also some of the patristic tradition.
If you allow for an unconscious it solves the problems of sins of omission and vincible ignorance, problems that you're tackling now. And that's why I originally messaged you.
If a sinner must be a) ignorant enough to pursue a false good, and yet b) knowledgeable enough to be culpable. This is a perplexity that is solved by the Unconscious, which is mostly innocent. (If you can’t sin while you’re asleep, then why would it be reprehensible?)
It is only the conscious Intellect that is reprehensible, in my opinion. Satan is hyper-conscious… he never sleeps, as Scripture tells us. BTW when I said Eve used her “possible intellect” to sin, I meant, the part that Aristotle said can be utterly false. The part that makes judgments, and puts sentences together. “Maybe God doesn’t want me to eat the apple to be like him…”. This was a thought of a prideful self sufficient, possible intellect. Eve considered this as a possibility. She had no logical proof of God’s commands, and was free to sin intellectually through intellectual conjecture, pride, the sort of thing described by St. Bernard in his twelve steps of pride…
(Re. these terms: I don’t identify the passive intellect with the possible intellect. The passive intellect is to me the reception of sense forms into phantasms, which then are parsed, sorted, and turned into terms, or universals, by the agent intellect (cogitation). It is only after that point… that the possible intellect becomes active, taking abstractions prepared for it by the cogitative power, making possibilities, i.e., propositions, sentences, and reasoning with them. This is fundamentally not a passive process, but an active one.)
St. Thomas Aquinas on Drunkeness & Sleeping:
RE: #1
Navigating "drinking" and "drunkenness" is not easy in St. Thomas, but it can be done.
Take, for example, the Summa Theologia, where he says (ST II-II:150:2resp) that Drinking, under the third type (for the sake of intoxication) makes one a drunkard and is a mortal sin. "Thirdly, it may happen that a man is well aware that the drink is immoderate and intoxicating, and yet he would rather be drunk than abstain from drink. Such a man is a drunkard properly speaking, because morals take their species not from things that occur accidentally and beside the intention, but from that which is directly intended. On this way drunkenness is a mortal sin, because then a man willingly and knowingly deprives himself of the use of reason, whereby he performs virtuous deeds and avoids sin, and thus he sins mortally by running the risk of falling into sin."
Contrast this, however, with his clear statement in the De Malo that drinking is a venial sin. (De Malo Question 2, Article 8, Reply to Objection 3) "To get drunk often is not a circumstance constituting a species of sin. And therefore just as getting drunk once is a venial sin, so too, strictly speaking, is getting drunk often[.]" He goes on to explain how "drunkenness" can be considered "mortal" accidentally, in that it disposes us to treat the commandments with contempt.
For us, then, the question becomes, first: is drinking a mortal or a venial sin?
Well my answer is that properly, it's a venial sin. What he says in the Summa Theologia is his brief treatment of questions (believe it or not); what he says in the De Malo is where he really fleshes out all the principles and explains them in detail. Further, the DM is written at the end stretch of time where he was finishing up the Summa, so it seems to be one of his last, and most mature works. What he describes in the De Malo is the principles that can be applied to understand what he says generally in the Summa: namely, that drunkenness is mortal accidentally, because it disposes us to treat God with contempt--and this is the exact way he describes drunkenness as a mortal sin in the Summa, quoted above. That makes us confident we can go with his De Malo rendering.
Ok, that being said, our next barrier to overcome is the question of culpability due to amount drank. What I think is that your question, #1, becomes an amalgam of a few things in St. Thomas, though actually inverted to create a sort of "free pass" for drinking that does not exist in the teachings of St. Thomas.
Namely, First, the unexpected strength of the alcohol can be a reason for not sinning in getting drunk. St. Thomas: "And then if an illicit cause should be responsible for preventing the use of reason, the person is not altogether excused from sin. For example, such was evidently the case with Lot, who committed incest because he was drunk, unless perhaps his drunkenness happened without him sinning, as happened to Noah because he did not know the strength of wine." (De Malo Question 15, Article 2, Reply to Objection 9) Here St. Thomas relates that a person who is intoxicated by something they didn't expect to intoxicate them is excused from sinning.
We shouldn't stop there, however, when it comes to the *first time someone gets drunk* because in another place he makes clear that the first time is precisely the place where the choice is MOST voluntary: (De Malo Question 3, Article 10, response) "For example, we impute homicide committed due to drunkenness to a human being as a moral fault, since the initial drunkenness was voluntary." Now here we don't take this only as the initial drunkenness of that specific time being drunk, but also the initial drunkenness of the drunkard the first time they ever drank (I don't say this randomly but because it applies equally to both situations).
And further, your comment, "that we can't know the threshold without empirically going over it" would suggest that we have to find out the threshold--whereas we don't. To be virtuous doesn't mean you drink a little, it means you do not ever strive to be intoxicated... Or, another argument against that position could even be put that the formal quality of "drunkenness" is precisely a desire to be drunk, not whether you achieve that or not--so that any person who is drinking alcohol for the sake of drinking alcohol (as opposed to it being a form of making undrinkable water drinkable through the brewing process in the middle ages) is already in sin.
Either of those objections works...
So I'd say #1 is wrong and sounds like something a Jesuit Thomist would propose, probably drawing on a circumstance where knowledge is hindered in a way that conflates voluntary ignorance (vincible ignorance) with invincible ignorance and produces a "pass" for someone who ends up a drunkard due to genetic disposition and writing off the "first time" as the place where their culpability would be diminished. Usually the motive for these conflations is wanting the world to see them as merciful because of their "easy teachings" on this or that hot-button issue.
I'd reject it. (But of course, as in anything, I'd concede the position to someone if they were able to demonstrate a deeper understanding of the principles and weave even more disparate threads together that I don't have weaved together myself.)
RE: #2
As to #2, we sin if we sleep through mass not because we're unconsciously actually aware of time when we're asleep like you're saying Freud says, but because we have an obligation to observe Mass, and so anything we do that can be attributed to a voluntary choice (whether we're tired because we stayed up too late doing something that was trivial, or we're high on drugs and that makes us sleepy) will be cause for us being responsible for the sin of sleeping through mass. But if we have narcolepsy, or we're so tired because we had to save a strangers life who was in a tragic accident and we had to take care of them all night, etc., then the falling asleep would be excused.
Thank you for your responses AJ. And I hope you’re doing well raising money for your school which Will told me about.
In your response about drunkenness I don’t see where you consider accidental first time drunkenness. I remember being 21 in Chicago in college and not knowing whether 3 or 4 beers was okay.
I learned 4 beers was not okay, but i don’t think i was at all intending to be a little drunk for a few hours.
The line about Noah not knowing the strength of the wine is what refers to accidental drunkenness..... **"as happened to Noah because he did not know the strength of wine." (De Malo Question 15, Article 2, Reply to Objection 9)
The real thrust of my response, though, comes from the fact that I think it's clear (as I laid out above) that drinking and drunkenness is a venial sin, not a mortal sin. Thus whether you have culpability or not there, the sin, if there even is a sin, first off, is venial. (A "venial" sin means it is pardonable "in itself", and many things remit venial sins: holy water, saying an Our Father, going to Mass, etc.)...
I say that bc if you realize it's a venial sin, you can better gauge everything thereafter. It may be that you venially sinned from even having 3 beers in the first place (regardless of whether you went over your intoxication threshold). But even if going over your threshold is the problem, even if that weren't accidental, you'd still only have a venial sin. And then, yeah, like you said, if that "accidental-ness" holds up, then there'd be reduced culpability... so either a venial sin to an even less serious venial sin (which, who cares, really? you're good); or a venial sin to no sin...
In all those situations, ultimately, you're good... keep fighting the good fight; strive to cooperate with God's grace; pray, study your faith, form & examine your conscience, etc....
I'm going to lay out the objective distinction between mortal and venial sin as best as I can in in my forthcoming book, drawing from St. Thomas's works on the question. I think you (along with many others!) will be able to draw a ton from that! I know it really helped me in my moral formation; forming my conscience; etc..
Where did you read that drinking is a venial sin?
I checked the Summa and Aquinas does not say moderate drinking is a venial sin. He says it’s not a sin at all.
And on accidental drunkenness, I think I found the quote.
“On one way, through the wine being too strong, without the drinker being cognizant of this: and in this way too, drunkenness may occur without sin.” Q150.article.1
So, he seems to say accidental drunkenness is not venial either. Am I Correct ?
Also how could the Church condone Irish pubs, or communion wine, or the miracle at Cana, if 2-3 beers was a venial sin?
You just put a period in your quote where there isn't one.
…”and in this way too, drunkenness may occur without sin, especially if it is not through his negligence, and thus we believe that Noah was made drunk as related in Genesis 9.” (ST II-II:150:1resp)
*"Especially if it is not through his negligence"... That does not mean that ~not being cognizant of how strong the wine is excuses drinking~, it means that if you are not cognizant of how strong the wine is, *without negligence*, it excuses drinking.
And right after that it says the proper mode of understanding drunkenness: "On another way drunkenness may result from inordinate concupiscence and use of wine: in this way it is accounted a sin, and is comprised under gluttony as a species under its genus."
*Inordinate* concupiscence is qualified as a desire that is not using a thing according to its teleological purpose: thus the concupiscence of lust is inordinate use of the sexual faculty (not for/open-to procreation) and the concupiscence of gluttony of food is inordinate use of food (not for the nourishment of the body). To use drink for intoxication is always inordinate, and it's always a sin. Thus, as I said, "it may (note, "may") be that you venially sinned from having 3 beers in the first place." Because drinking alcohol for the sake of drinking alcohol is an inordinate use of drinking anything (its purpose: hydration)...
Cf. "For example, eating is disordered if it be not properly related to bodily health, for which as end eating is ordained." (De Malo, Q 15, A 1 response)
You don't have to optimally hydrate yourself with what you drink, or optimally nourish yourself with what you eat--pleasure can come along with those things, but if you don't do them for those sakes, then it's a venial sin. And it's venial according to its object not because it's randomly just "minor", but because the object does not directly contravene against God or your neighbor. (I will be elaborating this principle at length in my forthcoming book.)
The Church can condone alcohol because alcohol doesn't have to be used for intoxication, or "alcohol as alcohol", as I'm phrasing it. There are other qualities included in alcoholic drinks and those ends can suffice for its liceity. On the contrary, the Church can't, and doesn't, condone drunkenness in any form.
The virtue of temperance ("moderation") in regards to alcohol is sobriety--which is the absence of intoxication. Thus "moderate drinking" means drinking without the *object of the will* being intoxication... Being "tipsy" is a version of intoxication--so drinking to get *tipsy*, or only a little intoxicated, does not qualify as moderation. But again, it's a venial sin.
And you asked where St. Thomas says drinking is a venial sin--I quoted it above: "To get drunk often is not a circumstance constituting a species of sin. And therefore just as getting drunk once is a venial sin, so too, strictly speaking, is getting drunk often".... (DM 2:8ad3)
*"just as getting drunk once is a venial sin"... This means getting drunk is a venial sin.
And *"getting drunk often is not a circumstance constituting a species of sin"... This means that getting drunk often, in not constituting a new species of sin, retains the same objective quality (non-grave; venial) as getting drunk once, confirming that getting drunk is a venial sin according to its species.
Pardon my ambiguous language, AJ, I was typing on my phone late at night. Thank you for the long response.
Also, AJ, I respect you, I was playing dumb at first. If you are benefiting from our messages, continue, otherwise please let me know to stop.
1. Re. accidental first-time drunkenness,
I understand Aquinas to be (as an empiricist), defending the possibility of unassumingly not knowing your brain physiology, which cannot be known a-priori, and is a particular, not a universal... "without negligence" can become circular and sort of angry, suspicious/Puritanical, if we also forget that any examination of intent is ultimately an empirical test of looking inward, and inward is both subjective and empirical.
Both Jesuit liberals and hardline-moralists can commit 'casuistry'... the former by playing psychological games and hiding their true intent from themselves, the latter by *telling* someone else what their intent was. We saw this when Lila Rose was called a sinner (liar) for saving babies. It is all too easy for moralists to lost the immediate intuitive moral vision of an action (Aquinas calls it "synderesis", I think) and replace it with thinking that loses its empirical common sense.
2. re. a "buzz" being a venial sin:
It seems to me "as an ice-breaker" or a social lubricant seems teleological enough to me to avoid venial sin... If hylomorphism is true, and prior to intoxication, there is a relaxed (buzzed) state that seems to push along the vagus nerve and digestion, rest the mind after hard labor, it seems exceedingly difficult to tease apart these effects from what is more purely 'teleological.' This is the problem IMO also with St. Augustine's condemnation of the sinfulness of marital sex during menstruation, for bonding/pleasure. St. Augustine's weakness was Plato, and as a non-empiricist, he tried to tease things apart which come to us as irreducible wholes...