Hi Dr. Feser! (Reposted)

Hi Dr. Feser!

Before I respond to some aspects of your articles concerning F.S., I want to say at the outset that I'm a huge fan of yours. Your philosophical presence, online and in print, has been a tremendous blessing to and influence on me. It’s taught me to at least try to think critically about things at a level I'd simply never done before I entered the Church. And some comments you've made in interviews on the importance of peace rooted in prayer and detachment from world events have deeply enriched my spiritual life. If you conclude there’s even a faint glimmer of anything good within my comment, I hope you won’t discard it with the rest. If not, then I hope I won’t make you slap your forehead too many times, and that me writing this comment can either be for my own edification (as I’m undoubtedly much much less learned than you are) or we can disagree with a peaceful spirit.

P.S. The Longest Prelude Known to Man (Or Some Prefatory Notes Before I Begin)

1. Alas, I couldn’t help injecting some cringeworthy attempts at humor here and there, but this response is sincere at heart. In some places I go way out there. The “out there-ness” of these bits is for my own amusement, and isn’t meant to ridicule, nor is anything else in here meant to ridicule.

2. Although this response is written in the second person, it’s written for everyone who is struggling with the questions I’ll try to address. I’m all too aware that I’m basically some guy off the street trying to argue about mathematics with Godel, but the above is partly why, though at the same time I think going into these things is unavoidable if I want to flesh out my arguments at all.

3. While I’m aware that you’re making a larger point about ambiguity, I’m not sure if the specific questions I’m addressing are your questions exactly, or if they’re only situated in a larger point about ambiguity. If these questions aren’t your questions, then please take them as being aimed at those who are uncertain about these questions.

4. I really hope this response’s depressing length and my unfortunate verbosity won’t obscure my intellectual sincerity. The things I’m trying to describe more or less immediately struck me as true when I read the document. But often the things that strike each and every one of us as obviously, logically, or even intuitively true require a LOT of explanation and reasoning to those who disagree with us if the disagreements are wide enough, without denying the great intelligence or sincerity of those who disagree with us. Yes, there are many cases where these things don’t require much explanation, but there are also many cases where they require a LOT of explanation.

For example, when I was a child it was plain as day to me that God was real. But if I wanted to convince my atheistic friend of that truth, and if my atheistic friend just happened to have the experience, inquisitiveness, and intelligence of an atheistic philosophy professor, then for me to convince him of the plain truth of God, I would have had to either write entire tomes on Thomistic-Aristotelian philosophical concepts like substance, accidents, causation, etc. or pointed him to entire tomes on those topics. The same principle applies to this discussion, which will inevitably involve some talk on the nature of distinctions, as well as how words relate to reality: something may be simply true to me, but require lengthy and even incredibly complicated explanations.

Unfortunately, the sameness of the underlying principle can be obscured by the subject matter.

5. This comment is going to involve me discussing some linguistic concepts, and I’m worried many will accuse my arguments of being nothing more than semantics, but the problem with that is this whole issue IS to a great extent a semantic issue. For example, distinguishing between “couple” and “union,” and looking at uses of “couple” and “union” will inevitably involve looking at standard or common definitions of those words and how those words mean, which is semantic. So to those who distrust talk of this sort of thing, please understand that it’s impossible for arguments on either side of this not to heavily involve semantics or to be semantic if they want to address the core issue, and so these arguments should not be dismissed on that basis alone.

In fact, while arguing about F.S. with someone online, the person I was arguing with quipped that examining grammar, as I was, was not giving a “plain reading of the document,” and I quipped “well, if examining that stuff isn’t giving a plain reading, then NOT examining that stuff certainly isn’t.” After I typed that message I had the hugest, most self-satisfied grin on my face, and patted myself on the back, shortly before a red-eyed mugger at the train station I was waiting at kicked me in the groin and put a pistol up to my-

6. This was originally going to be, believe it or not, a much longer write-up, one that would’ve addressed the points about implicature and ambiguity as well, but after writing an entire novella on the first two or three sections alone, I’m content with just tackling these two or three key pieces of the puzzle, and leaving the rest to God.

7. Please take what’s good (if there’s anything good), leave what’s bad (hopefully not everything), and if God moves you to do so and only if God moves you to do so, please “bridge the gap” when it comes to areas where I fail to make the landing with your significantly greater knowledge. I normally wouldn’t be writing this at all, as I normally wouldn’t presume to try to argue about anything with someone of your breadth of learning, and I’m all too painfully aware that I’m a nobody. The only reason I’m writing this is that one morning, during mental prayer, I had the warm and gentle sense that it would be good for me to do so, if only for me to be healthily humiliated.

8. When I was in elementary school, I found that when I wrote a super small, barely legible note at the top of my essays saying “Please imagine that this essay is well written,” the teachers would return the essay to me with better grades than usual. This wasn’t them indulging me. This worked with teachers who hated me as much as with teachers who didn’t. Meaning the psychological trick was actually working. I’m going to do something similar to that, but more particular. Since I’m on THIS side of THIS discussion, people may unconsciously view me a certain way, so I’m gonna ask that when you read what follows, please imagine Clint Eastwood is reading it.

I. How can you coherently distinguish between “couples” and “unions?”

The more crucial section is section II, which deals with the question “how can you bless a couple without blessing the union?” But I’m starting here because here I define terms, and these definitions also play a big part, I think, in section two.

A. Looking at and arriving at definitions of “couple” and “union.”

Let’s first look at some standard or commonly used definitions of “couple” in an explicitly romantic context, as well as the word “union” both in romantic contexts and generally, before I synthesize these meanings into relevant definitions for both terms that I hope most will agree are actually relevant to this discussion. Here are the definitions. Please pay attention to the subject words, as they will be crucial for my arguments later:

“Two persons engaged, married, or otherwise romantically paired.” (Merriam Webster)

(There is an implied parenthetical “who or that are” after the word “persons,” like when we excise our “whos” and “thats” from our sentences for style or conciseness or in my case, passionate bigotry.)

“Two people who are married, engaged, or otherwise closely associated romantically or sexually” (Google; Oxford Languages)

(I didn’t add the who in this definition. It was already there. I’ll say where the implied whos are without adding them in directly.)

“Two persons considered as joined together, as a married or engaged pair, lovers, or dance partners” (Dictionary.com)

“Two people who are married or in a romantic or sexual relationship, or two people who are together for a particular purpose:” (Cambridge Dictionary)

Now the following are the closest I could personally find for standard or commonly used definitions of “union” in a romantic context:

“A uniting in marriage (See sexual intercourse)” (Merriam Webster)

(Meaning this definition is essentially ‘the sexual act’ within the context of a ‘marriage.’ I’m going to try to address the meaning of ‘union’ in the sense of ‘romantic/sexual’ relationship, since objections based on that definition seem to be the main objections.)

“A marriage.” (Google; Oxford Languages)

The following are standard and common definitions for “union” in a general sense:

“An act or instance of uniting or joining two or more things into one.” (Merriam Webster)

“The act or the state of being joined together.” (Cambridge Dictionary)

“The act of uniting two or more things.” (Dictionary.com)

“The action of joining together or the fact of being joined together, especially in a political context.” (Google; Oxford Languages)

It’s important to note that these dictionaries don’t define “marriage” the same way that Catholics do, as they don’t limit the word to its sacramental meaning, or even mention that meaning. Therefore when these dictionaries refer to “marriages” within their definitions of romantic “unions”, they’re not necessarily referring to the same THING that Catholics are when the latter use “marriage” in the proper sense, but are referring to any contractual relationship recognized by secular laws, which can include but isn’t limited to true marriage.

And when Catholics in general use the term “same sex union” or “same sex marriage” with this much broader sense of “marriage” in mind, they mean something different from the thing that is objectively true marriage, which is between a man and a woman. Now here are the definitions of “marriage” these dictionaries provide, and which we should ‘swap into’ the above romantic definitions of “union”:

“The state of being united as spouses in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law” (Merriam Websters)

“The legally or formally recognized union of two people as partners in a personal relationship (historically and in some jurisdictions specifically a union between a man and a woman)” (Google; Oxford Languages)

“A legally accepted relationship between two people in which they live together, or the official ceremony that results in this” (Cambridge Dictionary)

“(Broadly) any of the diverse forms of interpersonal union established in various parts of the world to form a familial bond that is recognized legally, religiously, or socially, granting the participating partners mutual conjugal rights and responsibilities and including.” (Dictionary.com)

Please keep all the subjects of these definitions in mind, as that will be crucial to everything that follows.

Now, since Fiducia Supplicans is speaking of the use of pastoral blessings for same-sex couples that aren’t legally recognized as “married” as much as for same-sex couples that are, and yet speaks of “not legitimizing anything” through these blessings, I think it’s reasonably fair to say that the phrase “same-sex union,” when it comes to the F.S. discussion, is used in a broader sense than “civilly recognized, contractual romantic or sexual relationship.”

And so for our present purposes, taking all the above definitions of “union” in mind, and using the same type of subject as the subjects of the above definitions while keeping the broader context of the F.S. discussion in mind, we can define a “union” as “a romantic and/or sexual relationship between two or more persons.” With that meaning of “union” in mind, with the definitions of “couple” above in mind, and using the same type of subject as the subjects of the above definitions of “couple”, we can most relevantly for this discussion define “couple” as “two persons who are in a romantic or sexual relationship.”

Couple – Two persons who are in a romantic or sexual relationship.

Union – A romantic or sexual relationship between two persons.

I hope most will agree these definitions are reasonable enough for our present purposes, as the one for “couple” is essentially just the ones from the dictionaries, and the one for “union” is essentially a mix of all the relational definitions above (as we’re not just talking about sexual acts) but with the relational aspect broadened to include romantic or sexual relationships that aren’t formally recognized by secular laws, since the F.S. discussion is about all romantic/sexual same-sex couples, including those who may currently be chaste (in which case I guess you can take the ‘sexual’ out of the adjectives, but the union would still be sinful if it is meant to be romantic and not merely a friendship, in which case it would be a sexually chaste romantic relationship.) With all that said, here is the issue we’re currently considering:

B. The issue we’re currently considering

From the article I’m responding to:

Now, the cardinal also goes on to say: “Couples are blessed.  The union is not blessed.”  This confirms that he intends to distinguish “couples” from “unions,” as many defenders of the Declaration have tried to do.  However, the cardinal says nothing to explain how there can be such a distinction – that is to say, he does not explain how this distinction is not merely verbal, a distinction without a difference like the distinction between “bachelors” and “unmarried men.”

Am I correct in thinking you’re referring to a “virtual” or “logical” distinction when you say “verbal distinction”, since you also refer to those as a “verbal” distinction in your book Scholastic Metaphysics? Or are you using “verbal distinction” in a less “technical” and non-philosophical sense, or nevertheless in some other way?

At any rate, if I can at least show in Section II that the same kind of distinction exists between “couple” and “union” as between another example of “thing X” and “the qualifying ‘property’ or ‘trait’ that makes thing X thing X”, and show it doesn’t logically follow that blessing “thing X” means you’re blessing “the qualifying ‘property’ or ‘trait’ that makes thing X thing X”, then that distinction is distinction enough. If I can show there is definitely a real distinction, that should prove there’s more than a verbal distinction in any sense, including a non-technical one, and that is most definitely distinction enough. If this or that part of an argument is bad, please keep what is good. If X number of arguments are bad, please keep the arguments that are good. If all my arguments are bad, please don’t kick me.

C. On Definitions

(I use “bachelor” for some illustrative examples here. These examples aren’t addressing your bachelor example, which I’ll respond to in the next lettered subsection.)

Every definition of a word is a modified or unmodified subject in a fragment. The subject is the “what” that the word is pointing to, and the rest of the definition (if there’s anything else) is an adjective, preposition, etc. that answer the question “Which ‘what’ are you talking about?” or “Which ‘type’ of that ‘what’ are you talking about?” The subject or “what” of “couple” is “two persons” and the subject or “what” of “union” is “a romantic or sexual relationship.” And the rest of the respective definitions answer the question “Which two people” and “Which kind of relationship?”

The “what” that the word is objectively pointing to is not changed by the syntactical use of the word itself, which is a merely linguistic convention rather than a linguistic convention meant to reflect a reality, because again, the word is its definition. It’s not the meta-grammatical rules that govern the word’s use as a linguistic tool. In the cases where the definition of the word and the syntactical rules governing its use aren’t 1:1 mirror images of each other, the definition, which is what the word is or is signifying, is the thing that reflects the reality, and you read the resulting syntactical unit in light of the definition. For example, on another definition of “couple:”

“Two people or things of the same sort considered together.

e.g. ‘a couple of girls were playing marbles’” (Google; Oxford languages)

(An implied parenthetical “who or that are” after sort)

If you literally swap this definition into the example sentence, you’ll get: “A two people or things of the same sort girls were playing marbles.” This doesn’t make any sense, but only because you’re not following the syntactical use of this particular sense of “couple,” but the syntactical unit that results from that use “A couple of girls” would mean something that lines up with the definition’s subject “two people or things of the same sort” which in this context is “two girls.”

This sense of couple has the same sort of subject as the other senses I’ve cited, but the meta rules around its use resemble that of the word “pair,” but like the word pair, the actual definition can, depending on the sense you use, refer to the set, or it can refer to the things within the set even if the syntactical rules are the same, and the latter is the more common definition I’ve personally found for “couple,” at least when it comes to standard, online dictionaries. This doesn’t mean you can’t use “couple” in the sense of referring to a “set,” or that this other use of couple isn’t common or numerous. The point is that “romantic couple” as referring to “two persons” as its subject IS a real sense of “romantic couple,” and this sense isn’t changed even when using the syntactical convention “as a couple.”

To those who may disagree with me on my previous point about definitions vs. syntactical rules: Let’s call the current version of the word “bachelor” Bachelor Number One. What do you look at in order to know what Bachelor Number One means or is pointing to? Its definition? Or the fact that we use and conjugate it the same way we use and conjugate other singular nouns? If the latter changed, and we instead conjugated this second version of Bachelor Number One the same way we did nouns referring to plural things, using words like “are” or “have” next to it in its default form, but the definition remained exactly the same (“An unmarried man”), would this second version of Bachelor Number One, which we’ll call Bachelor Number Two, mean or point to something different? Now what if we changed the definition of Bachelor Number One to “Paul Dano’s Incredibly Bewildered Face” but kept the grammatical rules of use the same? Let’s call this third version of Bachelor Number One, where the definition changes to “Paul Dano’s Bewildered Face” but the rules remain the same, Bachelor Number Three.

Bachelor Number One – An unmarried man. (You use the word like a normal, singular noun.)

Bachelor Number Two – An unmarried man. (You use the word like a noun that refers to plural things.)

Bachelor Number Three – Paul Dano’s Bewildered Face. (You use the word like a normal, singular noun.)

Now, I’m going to speak to any lady readers who may be here. If you meet Bachelor Number Two and find that he fills you with a feeling that’s not all that different from the one you get from Bachelor Number One, the only difference being that he’s a slightly different kind of tool from Bachelor Number One, but then meet Bachelor Number Three and find that there’s just something different about him, and find that the feeling you get from Bachelor Number Three is just nothing like what you’ve felt about any other bachelor prior to this point, then I think you have the answers to my questions above. Because the awful truth that I’m going to uncover to you, the dark secret this hypothetical reality show (and Canada) tried to hide from ALL my readers, is this: Bachelors One and Two are the same man; he’s a cheating rat son of a gun who applied to the same show twice, because he wanted to get the one very desirable thing that all men want and have wanted from women since the dawn of time. It’s not company, it’s not love, it’s not psychological validation (also it’s not sex, though that's pretty great too.) It’s the satisfaction of knowing he made a TV show that women like look incredibly stupid, and it’s the ability to belly laugh about that, his mouth fully open in the shape of a sh-t-eating “HA!”, his finger pointed at his mother and sister and aunts and female cousins’ unamused eyes, all as he receives the guffawing applause of his gloriously sexist drunk Irish grandpa as the two of them join forces against the world of women from now until the Apocalypse.

On the other hand, the feeling you get from Bachelor Number Three is not the feeling you get from Bachelors One and Two. It’s not the same feeling at all. Nor is it something only men feel or women feel. For men and women alike, the feeling Bachelor Number Three inspires can only be described as a childlike sense of delight at the wonderfully bizarre things that exist within this world, paradoxically mixed with a strange desire to punch the ever-living sh-t out of whatever Bachelor Number Three is, and that’s because Bachelor Number Three is NOT Bachelors Number One and Two. Bachelor Number Three is NOT “an unmarried man,” or any being even remotely like man. Bachelor Number Three is simply Paul Dano’s Bewildered, Magnificently Funny, and Endlessly Punchable face.

To those who may disagree with me on the “subject” being the “what” of a definition, let me ask this: if you made two new definitions of bachelor, one that said “an unmarried cat” and another that said “a married man,” which new definition would be closer in kind to the thing that the current meaning of “bachelor” is pointing to, which is an “unmarried man”? The answer is “the married man,” because two men in different situations or even opposite situations are closer in kinship than a man and something that is not a man. When the subject of a word’s definition points to a true substance, the word IS or is signifying that substance, but in a specific context. And a true substance has more kinship with another truly substantial instance of its essence than it does with something that isn’t that, even if you can somehow modify that other thing with the same word, like with “a strong man” vs. “a strong tree.”

When the subject of a word’s definition is not pointing to a true substance, but to an accident or category, or some other more abstract thing, then the word itself is pointing to that accident, category, etc. and the rest of the definition is pointing to a contextual specification or subtype within that broader thing. A “set of two dollars” has more in common with “a set of a million dollars” than it does with “a man of two dollars.” Because sets aren’t men, and men aren’t sets, despite what we tell ourselves at the gym.

D. On the Bachelor Example in Your Article

This is what separates the distinction between “couple” and “union” from the lack of distinction between “bachelor” and “unmarried man” in your example: in the latter case there isn’t any kind of difference between the subjects of the definition of “bachelor” and of the isolated phrase “unmarried man”, which is “a man.” Not to mention, the same attributes qualify the same subject in both the definition and the phrase. In order for the “Bachelor” example to work, you have to compare the subject with the modifying trait or property, and not with itself.

A more accurate example involving “Bachelor” would be asking for a distinction between “bachelor” and “the state of being unmarried.” ARE bachelors the fact that they’re not married? Can you go up to a bachelor and say to him “You ARE your state of not being married?” Distinguishing the subject from the modifying “trait” or “property” much more closely parallels what Cardinal Fernandez is doing.

Another example is asking for a distinction between “leper” and the “suffering of the skin condition known as leprosy.” Without the latter modifying property, a “leper” isn’t a leper. But ARE lepers the same thing as their suffering from leprosy or having leprosy or even leprosy itself? Can you go up to a leper and say to him “You ARE your condition of suffering from leprosy” or “You ARE your leprosy?”

But in the original case of “couple” and “union”, the subject of the former, the “what” it’s pointing to, is the people, whereas the subject of the latter, the “what” it’s pointing to, is the specifically romantic or sexual kind of connection between those people. Except in a Saturday Morning cartoon kind of sense, we are not our romantic relationships, friendships, or connections. If you ask (as I like to do on weekends) random, unmarried heterosexual couples walking along the street “Are you the romantic or sexual way that you’re connected” they’re gonna answer no, assuming you didn’t ask the question while they were in an herbally induced, transcendental psychological state (as I did to seven such couples last weekend.) If you ask a same-sex couple walking down the street “Are you the romantic or the sexual gay I mean way you’re connected” they’re gonna say no because they’re ALL, every single one of them, and someone in the Church really needs to look into this, Scotists.

E. I’m gonna argue for real distinctions between “couples” and “unions.”

If there is no real distinction between a couple and a union, then the claim “There is no real distinction between ‘couple’ and ‘union’” should be true if you replace the terms “couple” and “union” with their definitions, with the syntactical rules governing those specific senses of the words in mind.

But when you do that, you get this sentence: “There is no real distinction between two people who are in a romantic or sexual relationship and a romantic and sexual relationship between two persons.”

I think a reasonable person’s intuition would tell him that the resulting sentence is patently false. I also think that a relationship of this kind, metaphysically speaking, would be what in Thomism is called a “relation,” which is a kind of accidental property. And of the three kinds of relation, mutual or real (father and son), mixed or non mutual (God and Creature), and logical, it would fall under the mutual category. Whether “two persons” or three or four, persons are true substances, and relations within the created order, including what are called mutual or real relations between persons, are accidents. Real distinctions include those between substances and their accidents.

Feel free to correct me on this, though. Again, even writing this comment makes me self-conscious and painfully aware that I’m the guy off the street trying to argue about mathematics with Godel, and if you or anyone else who’s familiar with Thomistic philosophy (as unlike me you’re an actual academic with an actual life and kids I mean wife and kids) can set me straight on the “relation” between relation and the nature of the distinctions-

Okay I have a headache. The point is this sort of thing seems to be more obscure than concepts like substance, accidents, essences, etc.

At any rate, I’m going to move on from philosophical distinctions to whether there’s “distinction enough,” and if there’s distinction enough, that should be enough, even if I can’t explain it in a technical philosophical way.

II. How can one bless a couple qua couple without blessing the relationship that makes it the case that they’re a couple?

This is an important question. To be clear, I’m using “couple” in the real sense of two people qualified by something, and not in the sense of objectively being intended to refer to a “set,” beyond simply using the same syntactical form of “set” as a linguistic convention. I’m also using union in the sense of “romantic/sexual relationship dot dot dot.”

All I needed to show up till now was that this sense is out there. That this sense is something like a standard understanding is a bonus. Because, to use the Trinity as an example, in the Pagan world, and in the Jewish World especially, it seemed like utter nonsense to say you believed that God was Three and One if you used the relevant terms in common and commonly intuitive ways outside the Christian world. And I want to ask everyone reading this if they really believe that the Thomistic meanings of relation, simplicity, and so on and so forth are common both in academic philosophy as well as on the street.

Even if they are, what if they weren’t? Would the Trinity simply just be contradictory and would all the subtle arguments of Catholic/Christian theologians and philosophers just be examples of people arguing for the inarguable? If even just one Christian philosopher used the relevant definitions of terms and understanding of concepts the way that Thomas Aquinas did in our timeline, would his philosophical understanding of the Trinity be logically untenable? The same underlying principle applies here: even if only one person held Aquinas’s notions on the relevant terms and concepts, that is all that I’d need to show that the Trinity and Divine Simplicity aren’t simply at odds with each other. All I’ve needed to do thus far was show that this sense of “couple” is out there. Please don’t be distracted by the fact that instead of talking about the Trinity, whose very word “Trinity” has the atmosphere of something mysterious, otherworldly, ethereal, and awe-inspiring, we are, again, talking about gay dudes. The same principle underlies the subject, even if that subject’s a very homo subject. I pray all our intellects won’t be thrown off by homo-ness of the subject matter.

First we need to define “qua couple.” If you mean that the priest blesses the same-sex couple and says “I, the priest, approve of you being a same-sex couple” (Shakespearean level writing, I know) then that’s a very different thing from them going up to the priest “qua couple” in the sense of “informing him that they’re in a sinful relationship,” and saying “Father, we’re currently in a sinful relationship, and it’s VERY gay. We know this is wrong, please bless us (not our relationship), not in the sense of approving of our relationship, but so we can have the strength to no longer be in it and abandon sin.” (I don’t even know what writer I’m channeling there) It’s also different from the priest merely being aware that they’re a couple. Let’s say the couple says nothing to the priest but only informs him that they’re in that specific type of sinful relationship, and nothing more. Then “qua couple” here can mean anything from “proud declaration” to “going up to the priest in tandem and sharing something about themselves and the nature of their sin.”

Giving the blessing in the “proud declaration/approval/validation” is irreconcilable with Church teaching and also with F.S.’s statement that these blessings shouldn’t “legitimize anything”, so I won’t talk about that any further, but the second sense isn’t irreconcilable, so that’s how I’m going to use “qua couple,” more specifically in the sense of “in tandem and with an openness about their sin.” And when I use “qua ___” going forward, I’m going to use it in the sense of “informing the priest that I’m a ______.” (Insert non-insult word here.)

My answer is it’s true that “a romantic/sexual relationship” is the thing that makes a couple a couple, but I’ll use an example that hopefully shows it doesn’t logically follow that when you bless a couple you’re blessing the “romantic/sexual relationship” that makes the couple a couple.

This issue boils down to the following question: when you bless a “thing”, are you blessing the thing (qualifying or modifying “trait” or “property”) that makes that thing that thing?

I’m going to use the word you used in your example, “Bachelor,”

which is “an unmarried man.” The state of being “unmarried” IS what makes a bachelor a bachelor. Without that, a bachelor is not a bachelor. But when a priest blesses a bachelor, it doesn’t logically follow that he’s blessing his “unmarried-ness.” He can. But it doesn’t logically follow from the act of blessing, even if the bachelor goes up to the priest and says “I’m a handsome bachelor.” (There I’m channeling Dorothy “Harriet Vane totally isn’t my self insert” Sayers, whose fiction I sadly admire enough to be repeatedly bored by.)

Now I’m going to use a pretty stark word, “slave,” which we can define as “a person in the state of being someone else’s property, forced to work for no pay.” The “state of being someone else’s property, forced to work for no pay” is the thing that makes a slave a slave. Without that, the slave is not a slave. Yet when a slave presents himself qua slave and you bless him qua slave, you’re blessing the slave but by doing so it doesn’t logically follow that you’re blessing the thing that makes him a slave, which is the “the state of being someone else’s property, forced to work for no pay.” Nor does your claim that you’re excluding his “state of being someone else’s property” rob your claim that you’re “blessing a slave” of coherent meaning, even if you’re asking for his state of being someone else’s property to change in some positive way.

Next up is the word “murderer.” Let’s say there’s a serial killer whose gimmick is killing kiosk salesmen at malls, and this is his M.O: 1) he walks up to a kiosk at a mall, 2) he very warmly says “Hey can I have a sample?”, 3) he grabs the approaching salesman by the arm and says “Just kidding butthead,” then shoots the salesman with his sleeve-pistol King Schultz style. Let’s say he comes to recognize the gravity of his tragically understandable sins and says “I know this is wrong. But I’m not sure I have the strength to stop killing kiosk salesmen. At the same time, I know, rationally speaking, though not emotionally, that killing kiosk salesmen is wrong, objectively.”

If a priest blesses him when he approaches the priest as a murderer and informs him “I’m a murderer,” and if the priest asks God to conform him more to His will, it doesn’t logically follow that the priest is blessing the act of murdering or the fact that the murderer is a murderer.

Let’s come up with a new word and add it to the English lexicon right now: “Escalator-Man.” The Escalator Man is a hypothetical serial killer so famous that his given moniker has made it into standard American Dictionaries. (Fun fact: he’s the murderer from before. He’s decided to stop killing kiosk salesmen – indeed, he’s decided that shooting people in general is immoral – but through his contorted understanding of sin, has also decided it’s okay to kill unhelpful and skillfully evasive Best Buy Assistants instead.) His M.O. is to tail his target through a mall until his target reaches a pair of escalators, one going up, the other going down. This is when he enacts his signature, deadly method of murder: he pushes the Best Buy assistant down the up escalator, runs down past him along the down escalator, hops over to the up escalator, lifts him up and throws him over to the down escalator, runs down after him down the down escalator, carries him up the up escalator, and then shoots him.

If the “Escalator-Man” comes to recognize the gravity of his escalator related sins, and approaches the priest for a blessing, it doesn’t logically follow that the priest’s blessing is blessing what makes the Escalator-Man the Escalator-Man, which is the procedure of pushing Best Buy Assistants down the up escalator, running past them along the down escalator...

Let’s come up with another word or term so incredibly out there it most definitely doesn’t already exist: “David Bentley Hart.” David Bentley Hart is the professional name of a hitherto unknown hitman who rumors only SAY killed people using escalators in the past, and he specializes in killing, for the right price, Sixty Year Old Girl Scout Troop Leaders Who Smile Satanically. The following is his signature method of murder: 1) He tails the designated Old One through a location which may or may not be a mall, 2) he waits for her to order food in the food court, 3) he waits for her to go to the bathroom to recite the ECLA Confession of Faith while applying make-up, as all Old Ones do, 4) he walks by the food and skillfully, almost invisibly slips some poison into it, 5) he walks by the food again and urinates on it, 6) then he watches her from thirty feet away as she returns to her meal, which is when he pushes her over the second story railing.

If the priest blesses “David Bentley Hart,” it doesn’t follow that he’s blessing the thing that makes “David Bentley Hart” “David Bentley Hart,” which is the act of publicly urinating on the food of old girl scout troop leaders, before pushing them over second story mall railings.

Let’s come up with another made-up word: “Shia LeBeouf.” Shia LeBeouf is just “David Bentley Hart” with a new serial killer name, and he’s made his most dramatic bit of moral progress in this entire storyline: he’s decided that instead of murdering Old Girl Scout Troop Leaders for pay, he’ll murder them indiscriminately.

The following is his signature method of murder: he takes on a job as “David Bentley Hart” and tails a designated Old Girl Scout Troop Leader to a food court, poisons her food as she goes to the ladies room in order to do what I imagine all women do in lavatories, which is commune with the Elder gods, and then TAKES the poisoned food away. From there, he anonymously donates the food to a Girl Scout Troop Leader Conference, where innumerable Old Ones convene in some tackily painted Middle American house, the sight of which would make H.L. Mencken screech in Lovecraftian agony. But because no one in their right mind will just pick up some random bit of mall food on their doorstep, Shia LeBeouf hides a Remote Control Bomb IN the food, and hides behind a bush with the remote-control detonator hidden inside the bush itself (remember this because this is important), all while wearing a Disney Mascot Costume so that no one will think there’s anything odd about him hiding behind a bush. Then, when the Girl Scout Troop Leaders step outside the house, he pulls out the bazooka that’s been sitting by his side the entire time and fires a projectile at the house, blowing it up.

If the priest blesses “Shia LeBeouf,” it doesn’t logically follow that he’s blessing the thing that makes “Shia LeBeouf” “Shia LeBeouf,” which is indiscriminately blowing up Old Girl Scout Troop Leaders while wearing a Disney Mascot Costume and hiding behind a bush.

This brings us to ask why doesn’t blessing a “slave” necessarily mean blessing the thing that makes him a “slave”? And I think it’s because the words “slave”, “bachelor,” “murderer,” “Escalator-Man,” and, yes, “couple” are at the end of the day words, tools we may use to point to substances, accidents, conditions, concepts, abstractions, etc. and arrangements of all these things, but not every word whose subject’s subject’s subject’s… subject eventually refers to a true substance signifies its own thing. Some words just point to true substances that are their own thing, some words point not to true substances but to accidental arrangements or accidental substances like computers or crucifixes that you can bless even though they aren’t really their own thing, but other words whose subjects eventually are true substances we simply came up with so we could have a convenient way to quickly refer to recurring arrangements of conditions, accidents, etc. without repeating definitions over and over again. The sound “Bachelor” isn’t its own thing in a true sense. Neither is “slave.” And neither, I think, is “couple.”

So what do we do with words like “slave,” “bachelor,” “killers,” and, in my view, romantic “couple” (in the sense of “two people who...”) when we consider what makes them them? What are we unconsciously doing when we separate them from the qualifying “properties” or “traits” that make “slaves,” “bachelors” and “killers” themselves? We look for the true substances their definitions’ subjects signify, and differentiate between those true substances and the things that make the “slave” and “killer” words themselves. We recognize those things to be really different or different enough.

The true substance in the subject of the definition of “slave” is “person,” which is distinct from the state of being someone else’s property.

The true substance in the subject of the definition of “bachelor” is “person,” which is distinct from liking Weezer.

If a word’s definition doesn’t directly have true substances within their definition’s subject, then we look to see if the subject’s definition refers to true substances in its subject. We repeat that again and again until we arrive at a true substance. If not, then that particular sense of the word is signifying something like an accident, or something else.

So with “couple”, if you mean, as the common definitions I’ve cited do, “two people” modified by something, the true substances they point to are the two persons, and like how the person in “slave” is not synonymous with his state of being in slavery, two persons ARE not synonymous with the fact that they are in a romantic/sexual relationship.

This is important, because some may respond to these examples by distinguishing between individuals who approach the priest individually and couples who approach the priest together.

But the fact that they both approach the priest qua couple doesn’t undo the logic of what I’ve just described. The only way it can is IF the subject of that particular sense of “couple” (the sense of two persons modified by words that answer “which two persons?” or “in what context?” with the subject still being “two persons”) which is the object of the blessing, is synonymous with union, “a romantic or sexual relationship.”

III. Cardinal Fernandez has commented on the purification of friendships, and has said that the priest giving the blessing asks for the friendship to be purified. Does this not contradict his statement that the “union isn’t blessed?”

(This section will be relatively short. I’ve spent all my energy on the first two haha, and I’m beginning to feel the strain, not because of you or anyone else on the other side of this issue from me, but because writing doesn’t come as easily to me as it does to most people. If you wish to respond, which I very much understand you being too busy for because you, unlike me, are a real philosopher and actually have a life I mean a wife, you can definitely have the last word.)

From the article I’m responding to:

Second, the cardinal says that in the blessings that Fiducia Supplicans has in view, “it is… asked that this friendship be purified, matured and lived in fidelity to the Gospel.” In other words, the blessing is not merely on the individuals who make up the couple, but on their friendship itself. And how can that possibly fail to be a blessing on the “union”? True, it doesn’t follow that it is a blessing on the sexual aspect of the union, but that is irrelevant to the point at issue. It still amounts to a blessing on the union itself, despite the cardinal’s claim that “the union is not blessed.”

I’d say that we have to follow the implications of equating “asking for a sinful relationship to be purified” with “blessing the relationship itself.”

If asking for these relationships to be purified is synonymous with or entails blessing a sinful union in a problematic and even sinful sense, then that means an orthodox blessing even for an individual with SSA presenting himself individually should not ask for God to purify large parts of an SSA person’s life, the most important aspects of which are his human relationships, the most urgent relationships of which, from the standpoint of the spiritual life, are the relationships that are most at risk of cutting him off eternally from God, e.g. sinful same-sex relationships. Orthodox blessings, on this standard, are the ones that are silent about these relationships or even ask God not to purify them in order for us not to be guilty of blessing the sinful relationships. Both silence about these relationships and the only other logical alternative of positively asking for God not to purify them is effectively asking for more harm for that person than otherwise because it’s effectively asking God to leave that person’s relationship in its sinful state, as it is, which is effectively asking for more spiritual harm than when you ask for it to be purified. If the response is that this is not what one means, that one wants God to bring that relationship into greater conformity with His will, either by changing it into a non-sinful relationship or by ending it where the former isn’t possible, then one is asking for God to purify these relationships or for these relationships to be purified through some other means, but with different verbiage. The different context of the individual presenting himself alone wouldn’t change that, because one is still effectively asking for that relationship in this individual’s life to be purified. The meaning is still essentially the same, in which case one would desire for these relationships to be “blessed” in a sense that one’s own standard deems problematic and sinful. This dilemma affects blessings for individuals and for couples alike. The only way to resolve this dilemma is to conclude that blessing a sinful relationship directly, specifically in the sense of approval, and asking for the relationship to become less and less sinful, are two different things. And I’d say that the former sense is the thing that’s “on trial” in the whole F.S. discussion. I don’t think you can put the latter sense “on trial” without there being troubling implications for blessings not only for people in SSA relationships, but also generally.