I hereby nominate this entry for an Extremely Long Comment Thread. I certainly can’t think of a better subject for one than the use of dialogue in Calvin and Hobbes.

Great, you just killed it.

I’ve been meaning to comment on this post but doing so would involve me scanning in a couple pages of Tezuka and trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to say about them, and both of those are a little more than I feel up to doing right about now, so I haven’t. Maybe a comment on how I mean to comment will remind me to do later what I won’t do now? (At least I found the pages I wanted to scan, that’s something.)

(More like this, please.)

Please do, Mr Findler.

Also thanks for the request. I’ll do my best. But, if you don’t mind, what do you mean by “like this”? Calvin and Hobbes? Comics? Pop culture? The arts?

I think I was thinking comics when I wrote that. But I don’t know that I’d limit it to that, I seem to like your posts in general, or wish I could understand them enough to like them properly, as in the case of your recent post on Bonaventure.

Speaking of difficult-to-understand aspects of Catholicism, I thought you might be interested in this little gem from Scott Carson. My initial feeling is that I’m not convinced by Scotus’s argument, but I’m not entirely sure that I correctly understand it.

Mr Prejean,

thanks for pointing this out. I made the following reply on Dr Carson’s site, but in case you look here and not there, here it is:

If my memory serves, Scotus makes this argument as a stage in a much larger and very complicated argument about God’s existence and attributes. I believe that by the time he gets to unicity he’s already demonstrated that the First Cause has intellect and will. Does that help any?

I’m not sure that I get your objection to saying “infinite will”. What about “infinite intellect”? Thomas would admit that God knows infinitely many objects. But then I’ve never adequately grasped your problem with infinity in Scotus in the first place. I don’t see how analogy clears up any problems in this arena either. If we say that God has will, call that an analogous or a univocal predication, we’re still not saying that his will is finite, are we?

A lot of things do boil down the the formal distinction in Scotus. It’s hard to know what to say about it to someone who both understands and rejects it (a small percentage of those who talk about it). Once the issues are grasped and it becomes clear what Scotus’ position really is (e.g. that it’s a variety of real distinction, not a variety of notional distinction), it seems like a completely necessary conclusion. You can every theologian from Bonaventure up till Scotus trying to reach something like it and not quite getting there.

seems troublingly close to asserting the existence of the Trinity as a logical necessity, when it is necessarily a revealed truth

I’m not sure why it’s necessarily a revealed truth. To say that in fact we can’t know the Trinity without revelation is another story. But as you know more than one Doctor of the Church thought that perhaps one could know that God was a Trinity. Were they wrong to look for confirmatory arguments in principle or only in fact?