Philosophical Musings

My dear brothers; this afternoon it seemed appropriate to speak on a topic I have been looking into during this liturgical period where we meditate upon the four last things. In recent reading, I was introduced to a position I was previously unfamiliar with on the topic of the fires of damnation and purgatory. A position which attempts to understand these fires as the divine love. The initial thought many of you may have is the same as the first thought that I myself had. How could the tormenting fire of hell and the purifying fire of purgatory be divine love? For is it not divine love which the saints enjoy in the beatific vision? How could this same love be that which torments the damned and which purifies the not yet beatified? An old maxim of the Theologians appears to be relevant here. “ That which is received is received according to the mode of the receiver”. The damned receive this perfect and infinite love as torment because they reject it. The souls undergoing their puri...

Much time has been spent attacking the critiques of Natural Theology and the chief arguments for the existence of God from contemporary analytical philosophy. So this post will not be spent with those critiques. There is a charge made within continental philosophy which is not often responded to nor addressed within contemporary Anglophone philosophy. The charge of “ ontotheology” . This has its roots within the critiques of philosophy by Luther, in the Critique of Pure Reason by Kant, and most recently in the work of Martin Heidegger. The principle work in English responding to this charge in contemporary is Thomas Joseph White’s “Wisdom in the Face of Modernity”. This post will proceed in three stages. The first will be laying out what exactly is the charge of ontotheology and why it is a problem for philosophical theism. The second will be in explaining some forms of philosophical theism that this charge does hit its mark against and how devastating the blow is. The thi...