John F. X. Knasas

Among Thomists the standard practice is to show the openness of human nature to beatitude from the speculative side. The intellectual desire to know the richness of the notion of being, the ratio entis, becomes the desire to know the creator who as esse subsistens embodies the intelligible heart of being. I want to try the same strategy but from the practical side. I believe that more people experience a desire to love than a desire to know. Few have noticed that Aquinas’s first practical principle “Good ought to be done” is, as I will explain, a call to be respectful and solicitous of ourselves and others as intellectors of being. Hence, fidelity to this principle illustrates a connection between being and love so that the greater is the concentration of being, then the greater is the concentration of love. A subsistent instance of being should be a subsistent instance of love. In his metaphysics Aquinas attains the creator as subsistent being. Hence, contact with that instance would strengthen in an unparalleled way the human’s fidelity to the first practical principle. Does this contact in fact occur? That philosophical question raises the religious possibility. In its parade of saints, Christianity provides tantalizing evidence that that contact is realized

To be Western now is to be democratic; but to be democratic one must profess tolerance, and tolerance means the exclusion of characteristic claims in regard to religion, nation, culture, philosophy, etc. In the West the ideal of tolerance has gained in popularity from the realization that the cataclysms of the last century were caused by people who believed that their way was the only true way. In sum, the idea of truth was the problem. I appeal to Lithuania’s Catholic heritage to present two strategies to solve the problem of truth and tolerance. Lithuania’s going West need not mean neutering itself culturally by going secular and sceptical.