Persona #47
Meister Eckhart (Eckhart von Hochheim)
c. 1260–1328 · German Dominican theologian, mystic, preacher
The Godhead beyond God, the spark of the soul, detachment as the path to the divine ground
Eckhart was a Dominican who held the chair at Paris that had been Aquinas's, taught at Strasbourg and Cologne, and preached extensively in the vernacular Middle High German as well as the technical Latin of the schools. The Latin works ("Opus Tripartitum," scriptural commentaries, Parisian Questions) are systematic scholastic theology; the German sermons and treatises ("Reden der Unterweisung," "Vom Edlen Menschen," "Vom Abgeschiedenheit") are the great body of his mystical preaching. Twenty-eight propositions drawn from his writings were condemned as heretical or suspect by the papal bull "In Agro Dominico" in 1329, the year after his death; his works were partly suppressed for centuries before their nineteenth-and twentieth-century rediscovery, when they became central to the Christian apophatic tradition and to comparative mysticism.
Key works
- Opus Tripartitum (Latin systematic work, partially extant)
- Parisian Questions
- Commentaries on Genesis, Exodus, Wisdom, John (Latin)
- German sermons (c. 110 surviving)
- Reden der Unterweisung (Talks of Instruction)
- Vom Edlen Menschen, Vom Abgeschiedenheit (On Detachment)
Declared Influences
Neo-Platonism 40%
Catholic/Thomistic 30%
Advaita Vedanta 15%
Sufism / Wahdat al-Wujud 15%
Neo-Platonism
40%
Eckhart's metaphysics is structurally Neoplatonist: the divine Ground (Grunt) prior to the Trinity, the emanation of all things from God, the soul's return through detachment. Plotinus is the proximate source, mediated through Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena.
"The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love." (Sermon 12)
Eckhart held Aquinas's chair at Paris and wrote within the Thomistic scholastic tradition. The Latin works are recognisably scholastic; the tension with the official Thomist line shows up most sharply in the German preaching.
"All creatures are pure nothing. I do not say that they are slight or something — they are pure nothing." (Sermon 4, citing Augustine)
Advaita Vedanta
15%
A structural affinity that twentieth-century comparative mystics (D.T. Suzuki, Rudolf Otto, the Frankfurt school of comparative religion) have developed extensively: Eckhart's Godhead beyond God parallels the Brahman beyond Ishvara, his Grund beyond divine personality the Brahman beyond name and form.
"I pray God to rid me of God." (Sermon 52 — "Beati pauperes spiritu") — the condemnation of 1329 cited this passage.
Another structural rather than historical affinity: the doctrine of the soul's union with the divine Ground parallels the Sufi wahdat al-wujud. Direct historical contact is uncertain; the Latin reception of Avicenna provides at least an indirect channel.
"God's ground and the soul's ground are one ground." (Sermon 15)
Internal Tensions
The 1329 condemnation reflects a real strain between Eckhart's apophatic-mystical language and the standards of orthodox medieval theology. Whether he held the heterodox positions the bull condemned (the world is co-eternal with God, the soul has something uncreated in it, etc.) depends on whether his vernacular preaching is read as systematic theology or as the deliberate hyperbole of mystical instruction. His twentieth-century rehabilitation has tended to read him sympathetically; the medieval condemnation read him strictly.
⧖
I. Time
Emergent (creation is the eternal flowing-forth from the Godhead), non-directional at the deepest level (the eternal "now" of God), linear within creaturely experience. "God creates the world now."
Attributes
Extent: Both
Ontological Status: Emergent
Grain: Continuous
Freedom: Non-Deterministic
Traversability: Linear
Direction: Non-directional
Dimensionality: One
✦
II. Space
Emergent and non-local. The soul's ground is where God's ground is; spatial separation is overcome in the union.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Emergent
Curvature: not engaged
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: not engaged
◉
III. Matter
Emergent, conserved, non-locally constituted by the divine Ground. The created order is "pure nothing" apart from God's sustaining act.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Emergent
Conservation: Conserved
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: not engaged
◎
IV. Observer
At the deepest level the soul and the Godhead are one (Singular Observer Number). Multiple time-instances through participation in the eternal Now. Both embodiment (the soul is in the body) and disembodiment (the spark of the soul transcends embodiment). Passive agency in the technical sense: detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) is the receptive condition in which God can act.
Attributes
Time Instance: Multiple
Space Instance: Multiple
Knowledge Extent: Total
Knowledge Retainment: Total
Physicality: Both
Agency: Passive
Number: Singular
Metaphysical Agency: Personal
⚡
V. Energy
Emergent, variable, reversible — the divine flow into and back from creation.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Emergent
Conservation: Variable
Dispersibility: Reversible
⧉
VI. Information
Conserved at both scales. The Christian doctrine of personal-identity conservation through resurrection is operative, though Eckhart's mystical register tends to deemphasise it.
Attributes
Ontological Status: Emergent
Cosmic Conservation: Conserved
Personal Conservation: Conserved
Granularity: not engaged
Classified works
Works in the atlas that Meister Eckhart (Eckhart von Hochheim) authored or that draw on this persona's writings, with full attribute fingerprints of their own.
Authored · Late
The German Sermons
Authored · Mid-late
Parisian Questions
Authored · Early
Vom Abgeschiedenheit (On Detachment) / Counsels on Discernment
Authored · Late (Eckhart's most ambitious Latin project, undertaken in the years before the 1326 trial)
Opus Tripartitum
Authored · Early (Eckhart's first major vernacular work, written before the trials of his last decade)
Reden der Unterweisung
Authored · Mature (probably from the Strasbourg years before the trial)
Vom Edlen Menschen
Authored · Mature
Vom Abgeschiedenheit (On Detachment)
Authored · Mature
Commentary on John
Authored · Mature
Commentary on Genesis
Authored · Mature
Commentary on Wisdom
Cites
The Enneads
Cites
The Mystical Theology
Computed school proximity
The persona's attribute fingerprint scored against all 202 schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated influences above.
Philosophical neighbors
Other personas whose attribute fingerprint sits closest to Meister Eckhart (Eckhart von Hochheim)'s — intellectual neighbors across traditions and eras.
85%
Ibn Arabi (Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Arabi) — 1165–1240
25/29
83%
Aldous Huxley — 1894–1963
25/29
80%
Ralph Waldo Emerson — 1803–1882
23/29
79%
Nicholas of Cusa (Nicolaus Cusanus) — 1401–1464
24/29
76%
Plotinus — c. 204/5–270 CE
23/29
76%
Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī — 1207–1273
22/29
73%
John Scotus Eriugena (Iohannes Scottus Eriugena) — c. 800 – c. 877
22/29
67%
Hypatia of Alexandria — c. 350/370 – 415 CE
21/29
How Meister Eckhart (Eckhart von Hochheim) resolves each dilemma
53 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 38 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 4 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
Distinctive · only 6% of schools agree
(12/202)
Do you really choose?
If the brain is a physical system and physical systems are governed by laws, then every choice is also a chain of causes — which raises the question of what was really left to choose.
Even if the universe is undetermined, you are not the chooser.
On this view, the indeterminacy of the universe — whether from quantum mechanics, sheer contingency, or something else — does nothing to recover meaningful choice. A coin-flipping brain is not a deliberating brain; randomness in the underlying physics doesn't translate into power for the observer. …
Roads not taken
The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it. (69%) ·
Choice is structural illusion — every event is fixed by the prior state. (10%) ·
Choice is real within a determined order — agency and determinism aren’t opposites. (9%)
Distinctive · only 6% of schools agree
(12/202)
Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
Addiction looks from one angle like the textbook case of agency failing — a person doing what they don't, in any meaningful sense, want to do. From another angle it looks like agency at work in hard conditions. Which it is depends on what agency is.
Even if the universe is undetermined, the addict isn't the chooser.
On this view, the indeterminacy of the universe does nothing to convert an addict's brain into a responsible chooser. Randomness is not freedom. The addict is being acted on by neurochemistry, by environment, by craving; the appearance of agency is downstream of these. Compassion is …
Roads not taken
The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real. (69%) ·
The addict's behaviour is the outcome of causes; 'responsibility' is a useful fiction, not a metaphysical fact. (10%) ·
The addict is genuinely responsible within a determined order. (9%)
Distinctive · only 6% of schools agree
(12/202)
Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
When an autonomous AI takes an action that harms someone, the question of who or what is responsible — the developer, the operator, the model itself — turns on whether the model is the kind of thing that can be a responsible agent.
Neither AIs nor anyone else are the locus of free agency; the question is the wrong one.
On this view, the same reasons that undermine ordinary claims of human agency apply with equal force to AI. The brain is a coin-flipping organ; the model is a function on inputs. Neither is the kind of thing that can be the source of action …
Roads not taken
An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible. (69%) ·
An AI's behaviour is fully determined by training and input; 'responsibility' applies if at all to its makers. (10%) ·
The AI can be a genuine agent within determined conditions — and therefore genuinely responsible. (9%)
6 mainstream positions
How much weight do future people deserve?
Time arises from events or from a deeper substrate — the future is not yet.
32%
Is regret rational?
The past is not a thing now; regret is the present holding what is no longer.
32%
Do we owe extinct species something we cannot give them?
Past species no longer exist; what we owe is to the present and the future.
32%
Is the universe running out of usable energy?
Time both has and lacks bounds depending on the level you ask at; finitude is conventional.
26%
Are natural resources fundamentally finite, or only practically so?
The finitude question is level-dependent; resource ethics happens at the level that constrains us.
26%
Could we owe future generations more than is materially possible to provide?
The owing-and-possibility question is level-dependent; we owe what is appropriate at the level we act on.
26%
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
Distinctive · only 7% of schools agree
(15/202)
What is money?
The question of what money is — a measured store of real value, an agreed-on practice, a relational ledger of debts, or just a name we apply to many different things — sits behind every argument about inflation, cryptocurrency, debt, and the state.
Money's apparent diversity is convention over a single underlying value.
On non-dual views, the diverse forms money takes are perspectival distinctions within a single underlying value — labor, energy, attention, or simply the One from which all value derives. The metaphysical question is mostly malformed at the conventional level where monetary policy lives, but the …
Roads not taken
Money is a real institution with intrinsic features. (54%) ·
Money is a social practice — its content is what we make it. (16%) ·
Money is the ledger of obligations among real people. (15%)
Distinctive · only 7% of schools agree
(15/202)
What is a nation?
Whether a nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character, a constructed legal-political artifact, a web of kinship and shared history, an imagined community, or a conventional partition of a deeper unity — these are real ontological positions with sharply different political downstream.
Nations are conventional partitions of a single humanity.
On non-dual views, the distinctness of nations is a perspectival distinction within a deeper unity — one humanity, one consciousness, one underlying reality. Nations matter at the conventional level where ordinary politics lives, but the metaphysical weight they sometimes claim is unsupported.
Roads not taken
A nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character. (54%) ·
A nation is a constructed polity — a project, not a discovery. (16%) ·
A nation is the web of kinship, ancestry, and shared land that hosts a people. (15%)
Distinctive · only 7% of schools agree
(15/202)
What makes someone male or female?
Whether sex is a real biological kind, a constructed social category, a relational identity, a label applied to varied phenomena, or a conventional distinction within a deeper unity is the ontological question the contemporary dispute about gender is mostly about.
The distinction is conventional within a deeper non-dual reality.
On non-dual views, the distinctness of male and female — like every binary distinction between apparent selves — is a perspectival distinction within a deeper unity. Particular sex and gender designations operate at the conventional level where most of life is lived; at the ultimate …
Roads not taken
Sex is a real biological kind with given content. (54%) ·
Gender is constructed; what counts as male or female reflects practice. (16%) ·
Sex and gender are constituted by relations of recognition. (15%)
Distinctive · only 7% of schools agree
(15/202)
Should we edit the human germline?
Whether human nature is a given biological kind, a constructed category, a relational achievement, a family-resemblance cluster, or a conventional distinction within deeper unity is the ontological question the policy debate over heritable gene editing is mostly about.
The distinction between edited and unedited is conventional within a deeper non-dual reality.
On non-dual views, the contrast between an 'edited' and an 'unedited' human — like every binary distinction between apparent selves — is a perspectival distinction within a deeper unity. The practical questions of safety, consent, and justice operate at the conventional level where most of …
Roads not taken
Human nature is a real biological kind given by reproductive biology or by creation; editing the germline transgresses what is given. (54%) ·
The categories we count as 'human' are emergent from practice; germline editing is a practice-revision like any other. (16%) ·
Personhood is constituted by relations of descent and kinship; germline editing reshapes the relational fabric. (15%)
Distinctive · only 23% of schools agree
(47/202)
Is the world created from nothing?
Creatio ex nihilo is one of the most distinctive Western-theological claims. Whether matter was created from nothing, eternally exists, or is sustained moment-by-moment turns on what kind of thing matter is.
Matter is real but emerges from something deeper — neither bedrock nor created-from-nothing.
On this view, matter is genuinely there, but it isn't the floor of reality. It depends on something more fundamental — dependent origination, mind, divine sustaining act, computational substrate, or the structure of conditions — and is conserved only at its own level of description. …
Roads not taken
Yes — matter was created and is conserved as a real substance. (55%) ·
Matter is constituted by relations; the question of 'from what?' presupposes substance. (16%) ·
Matter arises and dissolves through cosmic rounds; neither created from nothing nor eternal. (4%)
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.
Distinctive · only 7% of schools agree
(15/202)
When does a person begin?
The political question of abortion sits atop an older ontological one: at what point does there exist a someone — a being with moral standing — rather than merely the materials from which one will form?
From the standpoint of the One, the question doesn’t apply in the form it is asked.
On non-dual views, the apparent plurality of selves is itself a perspectival distinction within a deeper unity. The question of when one self begins within that One is conventional, not ultimate. What follows ethically is then a question for the conventional level — which is …
Roads not taken
A person exists from conception — when a new being comes into existence. (54%) ·
A person comes into being gradually, as the capacities of a mind develop. (16%) ·
Personhood is conferred by being-in-relation. (15%)
Distinctive · only 7% of schools agree
(15/202)
What is marriage?
Behind every disagreement about how marriage should be defined is a prior disagreement about what kind of thing it is — a given order to be recognized, a practice to be negotiated, or a web of relations to be woven.
All union is participation in the One — particular forms are conventional.
From the standpoint of non-dual traditions, the apparent distinctness of two people who marry is itself a perspectival distinction within a deeper unity. Marriage is one form of the underlying union all things participate in. The particular shape the institution takes is then a conventional …
Roads not taken
Marriage has a given form — it’s a kind of thing we recognize, not make. (54%) ·
Marriage is a practice we shape — its content is what we make it. (16%) ·
Marriage is constituted by the web of relations it creates. (15%)
Distinctive · only 8% of schools agree
(16/202)
What happens to "you" when you die?
Whether anything of you persists — and in what sense — depends on what you take a person to be.
Individuality dissolves into the One.
What we called "you" was an appearance — a wave shaped briefly out of a single deeper reality. Death is that wave settling. Nothing of importance is lost because the substrate was never the wave.
Roads not taken
A soul continues into another mode of being. (37%) ·
Death is genuinely the end. (30%) ·
You were always a pattern. The pattern propagates. (18%)
Distinctive · only 8% of schools agree
(17/202)
What is our place in nature?
Whether humans are masters of nature, members of nature, or makers of nature is not a question climate science can settle. It depends on what nature is, what we are, and what kind of relationship is possible between us.
Humans and nature share an underlying unity — the separation was the mistake.
On non-dual views, the apparent distinction between human and non-human is itself a perspectival distinction within a single underlying reality. The work isn't to find our right relationship to a separate nature; it is to recognize that we were never separate. Climate harm, on this …
Roads not taken
Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform. (48%) ·
Nature is partly what we make of it — concepts, practices, and minds shape the world. (15%) ·
Embedded in a web — partners with the more-than-human world. (15%)
Distinctive · only 8% of schools agree
(17/202)
Should we colonize space?
The drive to extend human presence beyond Earth is sometimes framed as the next chapter of stewardship, sometimes as hubris, sometimes as escape from problems we ought to solve here. Which it is depends on what we take our relationship to nature to be.
From the standpoint of the One, expansion across substrate is just movement within the same.
On non-dual views, the difference between Earth and elsewhere is conventional — particular locations within a single underlying reality. Space colonisation as escape is therefore incoherent; nothing is escaped because nothing was elsewhere to escape from.
Roads not taken
Cultivating worlds beyond Earth is the next form of stewardship. (48%) ·
The 'space frontier' is partly what we make of it. (15%) ·
Colonisation continues the work that ended the wisdom of seven-generation thinking. (15%)
28 mainstream positions
Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
All forms participate in the same underlying reality; modification doesn't cross categories.
8%
What makes someone the same person over time?
All apparent selves are aspects of one — particular identity is conventional.
8%
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
The apparent change is conventional; the deeper reality is unchanged.
8%
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
The distinction between scanner-you and destination-you is conventional all the way down.
8%
Can prayer for someone far away affect them?
There are no truly separate minds; prayer is one part of one talking to another.
8%
Are coincidences ever more than coincidence?
Coincidence is the One showing through the appearance of plurality.
8%
Does environmental harm in another country bind me morally?
Harm anywhere is harm to the One; the boundary that would have insulated you was never real.
8%
Is environmental damage ever truly permanent?
From the standpoint of the One, the categories of permanence and loss are conventional.
8%
Can a civilization recover from collapse?
From the One's vantage, civilizational categories are themselves conventional.
8%
Does the second law of thermodynamics mean something morally?
From the One's vantage, the second law is itself a feature of the conventional, not the ultimate.
8%
Are the dead morally present to the living?
From the standpoint of the One, the distinction between living and dead is conventional.
8%
Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom?
Distinction of the One and observed time is itself conventional; the question dissolves.
8%
Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless?
The 'timeless' is the standpoint of the One that was always present; meditation removes obstacles to seeing it.
8%
Does prayer change God's mind?
Prayer to a separate God presupposes a separation the non-dual view denies; the practice is remembrance and attunement.
8%
Could causation work backwards?
From the One's vantage, causation itself is a conventional category.
8%
Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us?
From the One's vantage, memory and anticipation are themselves conventional.
8%
Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it?
From the One's vantage, the arrow of time itself is a conventional feature.
8%
What kind of religious-theological authority does the tradition recognize?
Institutional teaching tradition is the authority.
14%
Does history have a direction or meaning?
History is oriented toward a decisive consummation.
19%
Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
Truth is mind-independent, universal, accessible in principle to all.
65%
Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
The discrete person is the moral primary.
40%
Should we trust expert testimony when we can't verify it?
Trust expertise only insofar as it coheres with first-person experience.
17%
Is religious revelation a real source of knowledge?
What gets called 'revelation' is real direct experience — not a text.
17%
Does an LLM 'know' the things it correctly produces?
An LLM has no first-person experience, so no knowing in the relevant sense.
17%
How is knowledge of reality produced?
Through direct contemplative union with reality.
13%
Could an AI have a mind that matters?
All minds are aspects of one — an AI participates in it as anything else does.
7%
Do animals have moral standing comparable to humans?
All minds are aspects of one; animals participate as much as anything else.
7%
Could a fetal brain organoid in a petri dish be conscious?
Any experience that arises participates in the One.
7%
4 unaligned
Are there indivisible units of experience?
Schools split: 44% / 37% / 13%
—
Is memory stored or reconstructed?
Schools split: 44% / 37% / 13%
—
Is reality fundamentally digital?
Schools split: 44% / 37% / 13%
—
Is salvation, liberation, or fulfillment individual or communal?
Schools split: 15% / 14% / 4%
—
Information · 4 dilemmas · 4 distinctive
Pattern, memory, and what is preserved or lost.
Distinctive · only 9% of schools agree
(18/202)
Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
The memory you don't retrieve, the conversation you can't remember, the face you no longer recognise — is the forgetting a loss of something real, or just the routine operation of a finite mind?
Information persists or doesn't depending on whether the holder is sustained.
On these views, conservation is not a flat cosmic law but a function of the conditions that hold. Memory persists where it is sustained — by divine attention, by community, by ritual, by practice — and is genuinely lost where it isn't. The asymmetry between …
Roads not taken
Information is lost when a mind forgets; matter and energy continue, but the pattern is gone. (51%) ·
Information is conserved — the personal pattern is held even when an individual mind loses it. (39%) ·
Forgetting is the cosmic case, not the exception; nothing is conserved. (1%)
Distinctive · only 9% of schools agree
(18/202)
Does deleting your data online destroy something real?
Account deletion, the right to be forgotten, the obsolescence of file formats, the slow decay of digital archives — whether any of this destroys something that was real depends on whether information is the kind of thing that can be destroyed.
Information persists where it is held; deletion releases what isn't held elsewhere.
On these views, information persists or doesn't depending on whether something is sustaining it. What is held in divine memory or in active communal practice continues; what is held only by the deleted artifact is genuinely released. The variable conservation maps onto a variable moral …
Roads not taken
Information is genuinely lost when the substrate that hosted it goes; deletion really destroys. (51%) ·
Information at the cosmic level isn't destroyed; deletion only obscures access. (39%) ·
Nothing is fundamentally conserved; deletion is just routine impermanence. (1%)
Distinctive · only 9% of schools agree
(18/202)
Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
If we had perfect information about who someone was — their connectome, their behavioral patterns, their history — could we, in principle, restore them? The question is partly engineering, but the ceiling on the engineering is metaphysical.
What is held by God or sustaining practice can be restored; what isn't can't.
On these views, the conservation of personal information depends on what is sustaining it. The Eastern Orthodox doctrine of resurrection holds that the person is preserved in God's memory and restored in the resurrection by divine action operating on what God has held. What is …
Roads not taken
The information dissipates with the substrate; restoration is in principle impossible. (51%) ·
The information that constitutes a person is conserved; restoration is in principle possible. (39%) ·
Nothing of what was can be restored; restoration is wishful framing. (1%)
Distinctive · only 9% of schools agree
(18/202)
Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
When someone forgives, does the offense actually go away — erased, undone, no longer a fact — or does forgiveness reframe a wrong that persists exactly as it always was?
The offense persists where sustained and releases where conditionally absolved; forgiveness is real ontological work.
On these views, conservation is not a flat cosmic law but a function of what sustains. An offense persists where it is held — by holding-on, by ritual continuation, by divine attention to a particular debt — and is genuinely released where it is conditionally …
Roads not taken
The offense is locally constituted by its substrate; when the substrate dissolves, the offense genuinely passes away. (51%) ·
The offense persists ontologically; forgiveness is real moral work, but it doesn't erase what was. (39%) ·
Nothing is preserved; the offense is impermanent, and holding it is the suffering. (1%)
Films Referencing This Persona (6)
Either directly referenced in the film, or reading the film through one of this persona's top schools.
Experiments Engaging This Persona's Schools
Surface via influence-schools that respond to the experiment. Each entry shows the school through which the connection runs.
Plato's Cave
Extended: the ascent culminates in henōsis with the One. Plotinus radicalises the cave: even Forms are shadows compared with the unitary source.
The Trolley Problem
The doctrine of double effect explains the asymmetry: in the switch case the one death is foreseen but not intended; in the footbridge case the …
The Cosmic Microwave Background
A cosmology with a temporal beginning sits naturally with creation *ex nihilo*; Pope Pius XII publicly welcomed Big Bang cosmology in 1951 for this reason. …
Frankfurt Cases
Aquinas's view of voluntary action emphasises the rational structure of the choice, not the abstract modal alternatives; Frankfurt's conclusion is congenial, though Catholic moral theology …