Summary of text [comment] page 79
Schoonenberg wrote, “By his nature, man is for himself a chaotic datum in need of integration through love.”
If we cannot love, we cannot pull ourselves together.
Summary of text [comment] page 79
The inability to love brings about the inability for complete goodness.
Our bodies and our materiality produce diverse tendencies, each striving for a partial good. These diverse tendencies contradict one another. If there is to be harmony, then the contradictions eventually resolve. This, in itself, is not evil.
We personally mold ourselves by ordering, integrating and unifying our drives and powers. Love facilitates this. Any other attitude facilitates the promotion of some partial goods at the expense of others.
Summary of text [comment] page 79
Without love, we (humans) cannot integrate our many disparate dispositions.
Sinful acts lead to the inability to love. They deprive us of grace.
Without grace, the sinner cannot integrate his dispositions. The sinner cannot pull himself together.
The sinner is always missing the mark. Plus, he is cruelly depriving himself of participation in a drama that is ultimately far more interesting than the inevitable narcissism of fixating on one’s own dispositions.
[This drama plays out in the person’s movement in the field of ‘the object that brings us all into relation’].
Summary of text [comment] pages 78 and 79
The limited goods of ‘loving your family’ and ‘loving your tribe’ are closed moralities. They do not extend beyond their limits. Jesus pointed that out in Matthew 5:43. The inability to love brings about an inability for complete goodness.
[Consider the unity of human thought and human action.
Seek pleasure. I mean, seek the pleasure that is offered by the thinkgroup. Belonging may be one of those pleasures. If the mob is doing it, I can do it too.
Avoid pain. I mean, avoid the pain that is threatened by the thinkgroup. Perhaps, a thinkgroup may offer ways to shift pain to others. Don’t be the scapegoat. Scapegoat others to shift blame from yourself.
Sinful behavior, emerging from and situating consciencelacking, plus one’s disposition to seek pleasure and avoid pain, has consequences.
These consequences, of course, are unintended.
They are ignored in lawdenial.
The great tradition of natural law, lawessential, remembers ‘those unintended consequences’.
Lawacceptance serves to keep those memories alive. Their maxims constitute the laws of nature that Schoonenberg refers to.
Thus sinful ‘man’ is unable to keep commandments of the natural law.]
Summary of text [comment] page 78
[Sin and virtue in this model label the single actuality composed of two nested forms; one pertaining to human actions and one pertaining to human thoughts.
Schoonenberg conflates ‘the commandments of the natural law’ with ‘the divine way’?
How does this work?
The sinner develops or adopts a thinkgroup that deviates from thinkdivine. It is easy to do because thinkgroups belong to the Zeitgeist.
Many thinkgroups bring sinful acts into relation with the conscience. In doing so, thinkgroup justifies sin in a way that favors certain pleasures or avoids certain pains.
What body would resist?
Consciencelacking is directly trained by the normal context of thinkgroup.
The dispositions are indirectly habituated through each transgression.]
Summary of text [comment] page 78
The limited goods (that a sinful person chooses) have a tendency to slip away. A sinful person may cling to a shred of virtue. But only for so long.
Schoonenberg wrote that fallen man is unable, without grace, to keep the commandments of the natural law for a long time.
[Why did Schoonenberg refer to ‘the commandments of the natural law’ and not ‘the divine law’?
Does Schoonenberg conflate thinkdivine and lawessential?
Or does his intuition implicitly comply with the explicit model of the intersection of virtue and sin?]
[The hero stands for Progressive television producers (whose way of talk exploits the viewers, since they cannot talk back). The victim stands for the viewer (who cannot talk back to the television, therefore is a victim).
The expectation is that the victim-viewer will join the television producer-exploiter in a mutual hatred of the one designated as the anti-object. ‘The bad one’, in many these shows, stands in for those who do not watch TV and mind their own business.
Thus, in contradiction to Jesus’ words in John 15:5, the so-called Progressive mainstream American TV portrays a world where both producer and viewer love one another while both hating their fellow “man” (the stock character accused of the projector’s moral failures).]
[Watch American television in 7816 U0′ in that regard.
The stock American TV show goes like this:
A hero and a victim appear to join together in order to identify and destroy the victimizing bad person.
Televisionary moral good foils a third party; a stock character who is responsible for making the victim who “he” is.]
