Commonplaces

Policies

The family will matter legally and economically.

A parish will be more than the building you visit on Sunday morning.

Monasteries will be ordinary, visible parts of society.

Buildings will become beautiful again.

Children will know Homer and Aristotle, Virgil and Cicero, Scripture and the Fathers, the saints and chroniclers of East and West, and the literature, laws, customs, and history of their own people.

The year will have a rhythm beyond tax season, school years and shopping seasons. Feasts and fasts will mean something.

The political system will produce justice, public order and enough prosperity for ordinary families to live well.

We don`t inherit from our ancestors. We borrow from our children.

Metaphysics

Divine conceptualism. Universals, logic, mathematics, and other necessary truths are neither inventions of the human mind nor inhabitants of some realm independent of God. Their ultimate ground is the divine intellect.

The One and the Many. Ultimate reality is neither solitary unity nor irreducible multiplicity. In the Trinity, the one divine essence and the three divine Persons are equally primordial.

Morality. God neither obeys nor invents the Good. God is Good. Evil is not a thing, but the corruption of the Good.

Teleology. God has a purpose for creation. If your worldview has no grounding for purpose or meaning, it cannot account for why thought is about anything, why reason is directed toward truth, or why an argument ought to mean anything at all.

Knowledge. The interesting question is not only whether a particular belief can be justified, but what kind of reality must exist for justification, inference, predication, and knowledge to be possible at all.

The limits of empiricism. None of these questions can be settled by observation alone. We do not observe the laws of logic through a microscope, measure universals with a ruler, or discover the justification for induction by performing another experiment. The senses give us particular experiences; they do not, by themselves, establish necessary truths, universals, moral obligations, or the conditions that make knowledge possible.

Nor can the claim that all knowledge must ultimately come from sensory experience itself be established through sensory experience.

Empirical investigation is extraordinarily useful within its proper domain. But it already presupposes an intelligible world, reliable inference, the validity of logic, the meaningfulness of predication, and sufficient regularity in nature for past observation to tell us something about what we have not yet observed. These are not conclusions produced by empiricism. They are among the conditions that make empirical inquiry possible in the first place.

The deeper question, then, is not merely what have we observed? but what must reality be like for observation, reason, and knowledge to be possible at all?