The ideas of all things are in God

I would like this to be a serious blog.  I admire blogs that are about something, that are focused.

Or at least a blog that provides kind of a record of my reading, or thoughts, or something like that.  

But in fact, I think I will have to settle for a blog that is like my other past blogs -- a sort of series of freeze-frames, some out of focus, some related to others and some not.   Maybe it will end up making a mosaic -- aren't there those mosaics that when you dive down to granular level are actually individual photos made into tiles?  

That actually brings to mind what I was reading this morning -- St Thomas Aquinas on Ideas -- this is from Msr Glenn's Tour of the Summa, which is available online.    He says:

An idea or concept is the mind's grasp of an essence. It is the understanding of what a definition means. Thus the idea human being is the mind's grasp of human being as such. It is the mind's grasp in one act of understanding of an essence that may be found in many individuals, and indeed is found in every man, woman, and child. Thus an idea or concept represents in universal an essence that may exist really in individuals. The idea or concept is called the species (or, more completely, the expressed intelligible species) in which things are understood. Now, since God perfectly understands all essences, we say that the ideas of all things are in God.

We see things in particular -- we know through our senses.   But our mind lets us form what used to be called universals.  I wrote about this before a bit, so I won't write it out again.    Here is the equivalent section on Ideas from the Summa itself.  

I don't know if this is the same as what modern neuroscientists call "pattern recognition".    It seems experientially true that though our senses as such do not deceive us (except when interfered with by illness or other such things), our conclusions or understanding can be faulty or incomplete.

Neuroscience, appropriately enough, starts from the ground, what we as humans can come to know.  Aquinas deals with this part of it, but also emphasizes the divine aspect that is more the field of philosophy and theology.   In other words, God doesn't need pattern recognition.  He doesn't start with the particular and move to the universal through cognition.    The ideas are "in God", as the Tour says.

In so far as the divine ideas are concepts of things that can be created, they are called exemplars. In so far as these ideas are concepts of things simply knowable rather than creatable, they are called types or archetypes. Thus we say: in God are the exemplar-ideas and archetypal-ideas of all things.

That part, I quoted because I like it.   Exemplars and archetypes!  Those are good words.     They seem to relate to what Aquinas says earlier about theology -- sacred doctrine -- as being both a speculative and a practical science.  

Now I am leaving the topic as it stands for the moment, to write a freeze-frame of what's going on at the moment, the day and week before Palm Sunday and Holy Week.  

I mentioned tearing several ligaments in my foot just before Ash Wednesday.   Add to this our ancient but functional car suddenly dying as my son was on the way to a job interview.   And then, last week, extreme weather including winds and floods; and this week, my disabled son getting food lodged in his esophagus, which apparently happens sometimes even to non-disabled people, and having to ambulance to the nearby big city hospital to get it removed.    And then there are the medical insurance difficulties, and dental issues.    One does not even have to go doomscrolling for tariff news or Vatican turmoil, in order to feel that one is living in the apocalypse.    Did I mention the extreme weather?  Let's not even think of the deportations and world conflicts and so on.  

Of course, the liturgy reminds us annually, seasonally, daily, hourly, that reversals and trials are not the end of the story.   They are the loci from which eucatastrophe can emerge.     My foot is getting better, though walking through hospital corridors beside my son's rolling bed did not help.   And he is fine.   And we have a second car.   Next week is Holy Week, and then the Easter Triduum.    

As well as the Lent reading I already mentioned here and here, I have just finished two books:   The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day, and Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton.    It turned out that they fit well thematically with Diary of a Country Priest.    They are all in their ways depictions of poverty and injustice.

I don't have much more to say about poverty at the moment -- but if I did say something it would be in terms of the Psalms of the Divine Office, because those are the songs, the soundtrack, of all three of these books.  

Poverty is very particular -- somewhat as Tolstoy famously said:  All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  I've often argued in my head with this epigram, because of course dysfunction is always very tropey and stereotypical, while the saints are all sort of a new pattern unto themselves, in the image of Christ, but very personally and uniquely.

But in context with what I know about Tolstoy's own concern for the poor and suffering, perhaps his opening line makes sense.   Because involuntary poverty is uniquely particularizing.     

I just recently read a Communio article by Larry Chapp called The Precarity of Love:  Dorothy Day on Poverty.    Dorothy Day identifies features of poverty, like precarity and destitution.    Poverty is not just about not having enough money or goods.    It is that, in a world where money and goods matter, you do not have them.   The world then humiliates, scorns and despises you because of what you do not have.    

If you have a community, this does not matter so much.   And community of course extends to the Communion of Saints.   But poverty is often isolating; that's one of the features implied by destitution.   Say you are not only poor, but handicapped, or struggling with addiction, or the child of someone living as a criminal or addict.     Even your own community may set you aside, despise you.    Each poor person is poor in his own way.   

Those three books were all very different, and that is part of it too -- there is a universality in the particularity.   Again referring to the Psalms and the Divine Office -- all those who pray it, say the same readings, but in different voices.   Each particular thing relates to a universal thing.

Literature -- including memoirs like Dorothy Day's in that broad field -- focus on the particular to show the universal.    And though I've been generalizing here, reflecting on the common ground between those various depictions of poverty, it's not meant to be a kind of bland overlay on human misery.   

Perhaps it is a kind of naming -- an archetype or exemplar.   I remember when my disabled son had just come out of the hospital after spending many months fighting for his life.  He was almost a year old, but had never seen a dog, and when our dogs were first reunited with our family, his eyes passed over them.  He could not "see" them because they were too much outside his experience of lights, hospital walls, blinking and beeping machines, human faces above him, tubes and wires.

Over time he could see them -- he could name them as individuals, and as a group.  He could roll around with them on the floor, and run away from strange ones.    He could bury his hands in their fur.

We too learned much about how to care for a medically fragile child, learning from the particulars, yes, but generalizing in order to know better.

The paradigm of this process is Mary, who lived through immense events and pondered them in her heart.

So it seems to me that generalization can descend into sterile theorizing, yes, but it can also ascend into a comprehension of meaning -- participating more in the thing as it is permitted or co-endured by the Triune God.