Weekly update 11

The view from atop the coffee bus (is that a thing?) in the patio
of the High Line Hotel, Chelsea

Despite the best efforts of General Seminary to thwart me by randomly changing the library's opening hours, not to mention my own occasional late nights (late for me, anyway) catching up with dear friends, I have managed to settle into a productive routine. It's nothing fancy: just breakfast, about four hours of writing (interrupted by lunch if I got a late start), nap, gym, miscellaneous stuff.

That last part could use some refining.

Still, I got Chapter 5, "How things went wrong," drafted from start to finish over the course of five days. I'll take it.

Serendipitously, I stumbled across this post about how one can't consistently do focused mental work for more than three or four hours a day. I'm finding this guy's writing useful.

*****

This week's excerpt summarizes the philosophical issues at play in Anselm's account of the fall of the angels and highlights the quietly radical departure Anselm makes from the broad Augustinian tradition concerning God as the source of all good things.

So it does turn out after all that the angels can answer St Paul’s question, “What do you have that you did not receive?” with “Our free choice of justice over advantage” (or vice versa) rather than the “Nothing” that Paul expects. Anselm sees as clearly as anyone before or since, and much more clearly than most, that if the answer really is “Nothing”—if absolutely everything belonging to a creature, including every choice, is received from God—there will be no real responsibility or agency on the part of any creature. All creaturely choices will be “the work and gift of God.”
            Anselm is here making a radical break with the Augustinian tradition, which insisted that everything that is good, including our own good choices, is from God; we can mar the good we receive, but we cannot bring about any good in ourselves by our own powers. Anselm says otherwise: good choices are things, and the good angels bring about those good things. Still, we can rightly say (by way of placating Paul and Augustine) that God brought about the choice of the good angels, provided that we understand that to mean that God brought about the angels’ power of choice and left them free to exercise it. But in a similar way we can rightly say (by way of exasperating Paul and Augustine) that the good angels gave themselves justice, provided that we understand that to mean that the good angels had the power to abandon justice but did not. Our causal language has to be stretched a bit so as to accommodate both the tradition and Anselm’s radical modification of that tradition.