New Post: Safety, Human Flourishing, and God’s Providence: A Catholic Perspective
Which is safer the difficulty in pursuing health and virtue or evils of giving oneself over to vice?
Post for the Week
New Post: Safety, Human Flourishing, and God’s Providence: A Catholic Perspective - Which is safer the difficulty in pursuing health and virtue or evils of giving oneself over to vice?:
Featured Faith Fragment
Thomas Aquinas on Beatitude (Compendium Theologiae, Part I, Chapter 172)
If there is a definite way of reaching a fixed end, they who travel along a road leading in the opposite direction or who turn aside from the right road cannot reach the goal. A sick man is not cured by using the wrong medicines, forbidden by the doctor, except, perhaps, quite by accident. Now, there is a definite way of arriving at happiness: namely, through the practice of virtue. Nothing will reach its end unless it performs well the operations proper to it. A plant will not bear fruit if its natural manner of operation is not preserved. A runner will not win a trophy or a soldier an award, unless each of them works rightly in accord with his proper function. To say that a man rightly carries out his proper work is to say that he acts in accord with virtue; for the virtue of any being is that which makes its possessor good and also makes his work good. Accordingly, since the ultimate end of man is eternal life, of which we spoke previously, not all attain it, but only those who act in accord with virtue. Besides, we showed above that, not just natural things but also human affairs are contained under divine providence, and this not only in general but in particular. But it belongs to one who has care of individual men to bestow awards for virtue and the punishments for sin, for punishment has a medicinal value with regard to sin and restores right order when violated by sin, as we stated above. Now, the reward of virtue is happiness, which is granted to man by God’s goodness. Therefore, it belongs to God not to grant happiness to those who act against virtue, but to assign as punishment the opposite of happiness, namely, extreme misery.
Website Updates from this Week (1/12/25-1/18/25, in the course of 7.1 hours):
We would like to announce that we are working on and praying about writing a book. Please keep us in your prayers that we would be attentive to God’s will and if it is God’s will that He would make the way clear.