RedStateEclectic

Regulating Alcohol

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In Germany, alcohol is freely available; it can be bought virtually round-the clock (with petrol stations serving as 24/7 supermarkets, and ordinary supermarkets being open until at least 9 PM). There is an age limit, but it is easily circumvented. Why is the kind of special interest opportunism identified by the Coyote below not happening in the German market?

Living in AZ, I have come to expect that I can buy some tequila at my grocery store, but apparently this is a very limited freedom in the US: There are two reasons.  First, this is where you get one of those left-right coalitions, with Republican social conservatives wanting to limit liquor availability and Democratic big government types wanting to keep sales to a small group that can be tightly regulated (and strip-mined for campaign donations), or even better, to state-run liquor stores.  The second reason is that once any regulation is in place that restricts sales, the beneficiaries of those restrictions (e.g. liquor stores or unionized employees at state-run stores) fight any liberalization tooth and nail to protect their crony rents.

The source.

What makes the difference, I suspect, are inertia and US-specific tradition. By inertia I mean: it may be that impeded access to alcohol is a nuisance for many US citizens, but not one significant enough to take serious action against. By tradition I mean: substantial strands of the American society tolerate or support the extant alcohol regulation. The Coyote is probably right in suggesting that religious paternalism ("the right") and statist paternalism ("the left") are mighty forces that buttress the status quo.

My main point, however, is that we seem to be facing a political situation analogous to a(n economic) market that is dominated by a leading player while being open to new entrants, which latter condition is what matters most.

I see no insurmountable impediments to those who would like to change the present situation of alcohol regulation in the US by political means. In the meantime, we ought to appreciate the status quo as a reflection of broad public support, being a legitimate expression of the social conventions supported by our political order.

Indeed, the variety of regulatory regimes in the US, even on the local level, does seem to point to the possibility of competition and change in alcohol regulation. I cannot make out a conspiracy against freedom. In a free society, special interests will organise themselves to succeed politically, some of whom will prevail with policies unpalatable to the classical liberal, without however destroying society's framework of freedom.

There is (a) no prohibition of alcohol in the US, (b) only purchasing of it is restricted for certain age groups and (c) vending is subject to hindrances and privileges. Personally, I am in favour of getting rid of restrictions under (c) and support the creation of an open market for the production and sale of alcohol. In addition, I would favour a reduction of the age limit to 18 or even 16 years, emphasising socialisation of responsible conduct in an age group effectively exposed to alcohol consumption. Especially regarding the last point, I am not sure that I am right; conservatives and progressives opposing my preference may take the more convincing and more responsible stance.

In a future post, I shall try to explain more fully why unfortunately classical liberals or libertarians suffer chronic alienation from democratic processes and outcomes and the pluralist variety in which the public manifests itself under conditions of freedom. Freedom is all about making possible countless things that we do not like at all.

PS

Incidentally, my sense is that religious fervour takes different forms in Germany than in the US. It is almost hilarious to listen to educated, well-situated Germans ripping the Christian faith and churches to pieces, only to turn in the next minute to soulful contemplation of a persons karma and the fateful presence in our lives of our remotest ancestors, not to mention their devotion to green myths and a belief in the miraculous powers of the state.

I may be wrong, but I seem to detect that Germans lacking a firm rootedness in Christianity and the attendant church communities and relying instead on a woolly and wonky multicultural mysticism (based on vulgarised fragments of exotic creeds, not unlike the mumbo jumbo of Nazism, in some respects), have a strong preference for state regulation. In the absence of firm moral convictions, public/civic courage is not their strength; they prefer to look the other way (say, when youngsters buy alcohol illicitly), but come back with a vengeance when the state has ruled on what may have plagued them as a wrong or a nuisance, or begin to perceive such a wrong or nuisance because the state has decreed it into existence.

Related articles

Freedom - A Force of Creative Destruction in the Moral Realm

Catholicism to Atheism and Back

 

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As isn't unusual for me, I'm sending our readers off into the weekend with a large package of philosophy.

A fascinating story of a philosophical conversion.

The substantive arguments offered by Edward Feser (spelled out more fully in the below video) don't convince me. But that's my problem.

Not only does his round trip story offer an intriguing read, I also think, his arguments ought to be appreciated by anyone concerning herself with the debates surrounding attempts at proving God's existence.

Here's a mini-glossary of some of the terms I had to look up to be sure of their meaning: sola scriptura, the Five Ways, naturalism.

The source.

 

See also Ed Feser's excellent paper on natural law theory in Natural Ends and Prudential Judgement, which shows, to my taste, the elegance and beauty of Thomistic natural law theory, irrespective of how one might judge its ulitmate credibility.

Green Metamorphosis

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If the greens or those with a green agenda (which most political parties have) were truly interested in ecological issues, they would jump on insights like the below one (explaining how global climate operates as a viable self-creating order) - insights that require a veritably ecological way of thinking, and hence the ability to appreciate that ecological orders cannot be comprehended by ordinary deductive reasoning.

Ecological causality is complex and cyclical - the comfortable idea that an effect is always preceded by a cause does not hold. Complicated, constantly emerging feedback loops create a type of orderly system very different from simple causal mechanisms.

This, however, is beyond the green mind.

Ironically most liberals (European sense of the word) don't get it either. Worst are the anarcho-capitalists, who are given to the most naive rationalism, trying to reduce freedom to first principles, instead of understanding her as an emergent order, an evolutionary product that waxes and wanes with no need of an axiomatic origin to please the vanity of rationalistic control freaks.

Modern green thinking is simplistic, mechanistic, relying on causal relations simple enough to make command-and-control solutions appear credible. Nature is a machine, with the greens at the operating desk. For nature to be in a healthy state, she must obey the schemes that the green planners deem right. The communist penchant for command and control has been transposed by the green movement from the (hoped for but unsustainable socialist) economy to what they call nature (which is suffering at their hands as she did under outright socialism). In both efforts they are bound to fail for the same reason: neither do the greens understand the ecological nature of an economy nor of nature. They just want to be right - so as to be powerful. Intricate stories - as told by the genuine ecologist - are of little help on the march toward power.

If we lived in a truly ecological age (which politically we don't), the below story would be all the rage - and soon people would begin to realise that a free society and a free economy are ecological environments deserving to be respected and protected by us.

Ironically, we seem instead to marshall increasing amounts of societal wealth to uphold and cover-up anti-ecological untruths.

The Mann-made global warming believers continue their crusade to convince us that the 'missing' heat 'trapped' by CO2 is hiding somewhere, anywhere, other than having been lost forever to space. 

 

The inconvenient truth is that satellite and radiosonde observations show outgoing infrared radiation to space has increased over the past 62 years, the opposite of AGW model predictions of "heat trapping" by greenhouse gases causing a decrease of outgoing radiation. The NASA ERBE and Terra satellites alone show that for 26 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly 'trapped' far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.

The fact that this has occurred is obvious from the 'basic physics' of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, which states outgoing radiation from the Earth increases to the fourth power of temperature. This serves as a very strong negative feedback and acts as an automatic thermostat regulating Earth's temperature, relegating 'tipping points' and the 'runaway greenhouse' theory to the dust bin.

[...]

This may sound to some like an abstract question of scientific research. It is not. There are many, including the President’s science czar, who would like to make fundamental changes in our way of life — even dictating how many children we can have — in order to combat the threat of “man-made global warming.”

To such anti-people ideologues we may add the profiteers. The United Nations, joined by dozens of nonprofits, has literally raised billions of dollars by frightening both politicians and ordinary people with the specter of the planet overheating. It is safe to say that there are thousands of people who, one way or another, profit from climate alarmism.

 

In a sane world, the Spencer-Braswell study should sound the death knell for the theory that, by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we are making the planet unlivable.

 

Unfortunately, radical environmentalist and population control groups are largely immune to facts. For example, they continue to propagate the myth of overpopulation even as the populations of country after country age and die. Why should the myth of man-made global warming be any different?

 

Then, too, the Global Warming establishment has built up considerable forward momentum by this point. Movements with millions of adherents and billions of dollars in resources simply do not go quietly into their graves.

 

Still, while Global Warming alarmists like Al Gore continue to hyperventilate over the supposed danger of increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and call for increased funding for abortion and fertility reduction programs — the rest of us can breathe easier.

 

It’s becoming abundantly clear that the only thing “man-made” about Global Warming is the hoax itself.

 

The source.

 

See also Cost-Benefit Analysis - CO2 and Government, Science Sick From Too Much Bad Politics, Man-Made CO2 Does Not Drive Climate Change.

Theistic Evolutionists vs Creationists

Giants causeway is one of the nicest places I ever visited, maybe because the weather was felicifically sun-drenched, and I had a lovely trip on a warm September day from beautiful Donegal, through martially fortified Strabane, on the world's best roads, oddly to be found in Northern Ireland, to the lushly verdant, surprisingly small world wonder.

Kevin Vallier has a readable piece on a debate between an atheistic evolutionist and a creationist.

I tried to resist, but I must admit to having watched the “Ham on Nye” debate in full. I find debates between creationists and atheist evolutionists tiring and deeply upsetting because I, as a theistic evolutionist, feel completely excluded and silenced while two groups of people I regard as deeply misinformed about the nature of the world beat up on each other. I argue here that the debate reinforces this dichotomy, one which pretty much everyone has reason to resist. I will also score the debate (Nye won, big time – and 92% of voters at Christian Today thought so too).

[...]

Despite being a Christian, I find the creationists far more off-putting, in part because they frequently imply that theistic evolutionists are imperfect Christians and that they’re the real Christians.

Make sure to read the entire article at the source.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez, one of the greatest writers ever, explains in the below clip:

...the women who were ruled over by my grandmother were living in a supernatural world, a fantastic world, where everything was possible. The most unbelievable things were part of everyday life.

This is exactly what a good friend of mine told me about the years that she spent (in the 1990s) as a senior US diplomat in a Central American country.

 

See also Best Novels, and A Shout for Inclusion.

Politics of Faith and Scepticism (2/2)

Continued from Politics of Faith and Scepticism (1/2):

Quick reminder to those who have not had an opportunity to read the first part of the post: in the present context, faith does not refer to religious faith but to a style of politics that looks at and tries to instrumentalise politics as if it were capable of keeping the redeeming promise of a religious faith. Faith basically stands for statism, and scepticism roughly stands for (classical) liberalism.

Michael Oakeshott explains in his work something that has become exceedingly dear to my liberal heart:

For I believe, liberty consists of contributions to an open system, a system that is permeated with elements other than those constituting liberty, including elements contrary to and destructive of liberty. The progress of liberty is not driven by an absolute decrease in unfreedom and a corresponding absolute increase in liberty, it is rather brought about by the ongoing tug-of-war between these two extreme opposites, both of which can never exist in pure form. Unfortunately (classically) liberal and libertarian attitudes and (classically) liberal and libertarian literature, including some of the venerable and classic works, are not devoid of assumptions contrary to this fundamental aspect of freedom. Part of this is the perennial ambition to come up with some sort of infallible mathematics of the good society by dint of which it is deemed possible to calculate with unequivocal precision the type of conclusions that alone are in conformity with freedom.

Notes Oakeshott:

But rather than the occasional triumphs of scepticism, what reveals the character of this type of politics more fully is its failures; not its periodic displacement by the politics of faith, but the occasions when it has behaved out of character. The chief of these, in modern times, was its mésalliance with the politics of Natural Rights [...]

It was, perhaps, unavoidable that a style of governing in which the office of government is understood as the maintenance of appropriate order, the preservation of rights and duties and the redress of wrongs should be ambitious to establish itself on a firm foundation. The impulse to assure ourselves that our arrangements and authorized manners of behaviour represent not merely fact and habit, but 'justice' and 'truth', and that they have a 'certainty' which is out of reach of the vicissitudes of time and place, has always been strong.

But it is an impulse which belongs properly to faith. Historically, so far as scepticism is concerned, it must be regarded as an infection caught from faith, a temporary desertion of its own character induced by the plausible triumph of faith. And that such a foundation should be sought in the notion that the rights and duties to be protected are 'natural' and to be defended on account of their naturalness was an enterprise given in the climate of the seventeenth-century opinion.

The writer who led Europe in this respect was John Locke, the most ambiguous of all political writers of modern times; a political sceptic who inadvertently imposed the idiom of faith upon the sceptical understanding of government.

But how out of character this enterprise was soon became apparent. To turn 'rights' and 'duties' which were known as historic achievements, elicited by patient and judicial inquest from the manner in which men were accustomed to behave, into 'natural' rights and duties was to deny them just that contingency of character which was the heart of the sceptical interpretation, and was to attribute to them an absoluteness and a permanence which in the sceptical understanding of them they could not possess.

(M. Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, p. 82/83)

For a case in point, see my post on Rothbard's Elementary Errors of Anarchism (1/2) and (2/2). Of interest, too: Alchian on Politics, and Property Rights.

On Locke see Natural Ends and Prudential Judgement.

Politics of Faith and Scepticism (1/2)

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The work of Michael Oakeshott is a real treasure for anyone interested in the history and the meaning of freedom.

Oakeshott draws a distinction between the politics of faith and the politics of scepticism which is roughly analogous to the perhaps cruder dichotomy of statism and (classical) liberalism.

The word faith in "politics of faith" does not refer to any particular religious faith but rather to the practice of looking at and trying to instrumentalise politics as if it were capable of keeping the redeeming promise of a religious faith. What the politics of scepticism is sceptical about is the hubris of the grand meddler, the totalitarian system builder, and hence it stands for

a rejection of the belief that governing is the imposition of a comprehensive pattern of activity upon a community and a consequent suspicion of government invested with overwhelming power, and a recognition of the contingency of every political arrangement and the unavoidable arbitrariness of most. (The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, p. 80).

Most interestingly Oakeshott relates (the fundamental attitude inherent in) the politics of scepticism to the Augustinian interpretation of Christianity (whose theological vision places original sin at its centre), while speaking of the politics of faith as political Pelagianism.

Very roughly, Pelagius, in contradistinction to Augustine, believed that human beings are capable of redemption by virtue of leading a holy life, a life agreeable to God. Thus they were capable of redemption of their own accord, which notion was utterly anathema to Augustine.

Referring to the second coming of Christ not having taken place as soon as originally expected, Oakeshott says of Pelagianism that

there appeared a doctrine that the current course of historical happenings and the current strivings of human beings (so far from being merely filling in time before the redemption of mankind) should be understood as themselves the events and the strivings in which that redemption was being achieved. In its simplest form this was the doctrine of Pelagius; in a more complicated form, in which human history was understood as human beings gradually acquiring the ultimate truth about the universe, it was the belief of a set of Christian heretics known as the Gnostics. (Lectures in the History of Political Thought, p.325)

In his lectures, Oakeshott beautifully traces the medieval roots of liberalism, which in turn are strongly influenced by the image of man inherent in Augustinian Christianity. From this standpoint, men, including men of power, cannot possibly be conceived as being capable of achieving redemption of their own accord and building their own paradise. All this implies a strong scepeticism inherited by liberalism with respect to man as a self-creating being, a builder of his own fate.

With the rise of the incomparably powerful nation state, however, Pelagianism takes a political turn and begins to override the humility that is proper for man according to the Augustinian vision.

The earliest triumph of the politics of scepticism was the recognition of the distinction between politics and religion. This distinction was, of course, implicit in early Christianity, and it had been theorized with profound insight by St. Augustine. But circumstances made it necessary to reestablish it both in theory and practice in the modern world, where the politics of faith had removed the boundary. [...] The politics of faith is, from one point of view, the continuous reassertion of the unity of politics and religion; and from this point of view it is the comprehensive task of scepticism perpetually to be recalling political activity from the frontier of religion, and to be always drawing attention to the values of civil order and tranquillitas whenever the vision of a total pattern of activity, imposed because it is believed to represent 'truth' and 'justice', threatens to obliterate everything else. (The Politics of Faith ..., p.81)

Via the 5th century of Augustinian humility and the 16th century when the formation of the modern national state and its attendant politics of faith begin in earnest, we arrive at the heyday of liberalism along one consecutive train of political scepticism:

In England during some part of the eighteenth century the political style of scepticism my be said, for that moment, both to have won a great victory and to have revealed itself for the first time in modern dress [...]. It was the achievement of Whig politicians and of writers such as Halifax, Hume and Burke to have modernized its political devices and restated its principles in a manner appropriate to the times. What had hitherto remained an inheritance from the Middle Ages became a style and understanding of political activity practiced and expressed in a modern idiom. (The Politics of Faith ..., p.81/82)

Continued at Politics of Faith and Scpeticism (2/2), where we will see that modern libertarianism, in so far as it follows the anarcho-capitalist path, does not belong to the politics of scepticism, i.e. the liberal tradition, but to the politics of faith, the realm of grand total visions of society.

See also Blaise Pascal and the Politics of Scepticism, and Michael Oakeshott (1901 - 1990) ...

The Gregorian Revolutions and the Divisibility of Freedom

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Increasingly, I come to believe it important for supporters of freedom to understand not only that liberty is divisible, but that it can only exist, grow and progress in this form.

Interesting in their own right, the below stories go to show just how interwoven freedom is with unfreedom, how she grows with and out of unfreedom and creates structures both of freedom and of unfreedom. Reality is too complex to accommodate visions and hopes of a neat ultimate separation of freedom and unfreedom. This inevitable amalgamation of the opposite forces makes it harder to understand, promote, and defend freedom, for it makes the state, story, and truth of freedom more intricate and a lot harder to grasp and to convey. Yet, if her emulsive quality is ignored freedom will be even more disadvantaged by an insufficient sense of reality in its adherents.

Friends of liberty ought to admit something akin to the marginal revolution, that they so benefit from in their economic reasoning, into their perception of liberty in the real world, and hence replace the crude habit of thinking in categorical dichotomies with the skill of incremental analysis. 

(Specifically on this last point, see also Politically Correct Nourishment - Too Much and Too Little Economics.)

In the books appearing below with Amazon links, Deepak Lal argues that two papal revolutions were pivotal for the development of the West, the first giving rise to individualism, and the second producing the legal instruments that made modern free and capitalist societies possible.

In 1075, Pope Gregory VII, in what Lal calls the second papal revolution, put the church above the state and through the resulting church-state created the whole legal and administrative infrastructure required by a full-fledged market economy.

Before that, in the sixth century, pope Gregory I, aka Saint Gregory the Great, launched the first papal revolution that was to change the face of the western world, emancipating the individual from the extended kinship nexus:

These twin papal revolutions arose because of the unintended consequences of the Church's search for bequests - a trait that goes back to its earliest days. From its inception it had grown as a temporal power through gifts and donations - particularly from rich widows. So much so that, in July 370, the Emperor Valentinian had addressed a ruling to the Pope that male clerics and unmarried ascetics should not hang around the houses of women and widows, and try to worm themselves and their churches into their bequests at the expense of the women's families and blood relations. Thus, from its very beginnings the Church was in the race for inheritances. In this respect, the early Church's extolling of virginity and preventing second marriages helped it to create more single women who would leave bequests to the Church.

This process, of inhibiting a family from retaining its property and promoting its alienation accelerated [ ... when in 597] Pope Gregory I [...] overturned the traditional Mediterranean and Middle Eastern pattern of legal and customary practices in the domestic domain.

The traditional system was concerned with the provision of an heir to inherit family property, and allowed marriage to close kin, marriages to close affines or widows of close kin, the transfer of children by adoption, and finally concubinage, which is a form of secondary union. Gregory banned all four practices. [...]

This papal revolution made the Church unbelievably rich. Demographers have estimated that the net effect of the prohibitions on traditional methods to deal with childlessness was to leave 40 percent of families with no immediate male heirs. The Church became the chief beneficiary of the resulting bequests. [...]

But this accumulation also drew predators from within and without the Church to deprive it of its acquired property. It was to deal with this denudation that Pope Gregory VII instigated his papal revolution in 1075, by putting the power of God - through the spiritual weapon of excommunication - above that of Caesar's. With the Church then entering into the realm of the world, the new church-state also created the whole administrative and legal paraphernalia which we associate with a modern economy." (Reviving the Invisible Hand, pp. 155-156)

Do not forget, in those days, the Church is the only all encompassing, truly ubiquitous organisation in Europe, secular powers being strongly localised, fragmentary or of an itinerant kind, as well as far less powerful and hence less comprehensively invasive than modern government.

In Reviving the Invisible Hand, classical liberal Deepak Lal explains how the West came to be - free and capitalist, and thus eventually utterly - different from the Rest:

I have argued in Unintended Consequences that in the High Middle Ages there was also a change in what I have called the cosmological beliefs of the West. Cosmological beliefs concern the world view of a civilization: how people should live. They provide its moral anchor. They are transmitted through the socialization processes in childhood by harnessing the powerful emotions of shame and guilt. Most Eurasian civilizations were shame-based and had similar family values, for agrarian civilizations required stable settled families to operate their settled agriculture. To maintain this stability all these cultures sought to limit the common human but ephemeral passion of love as the basis of marriage. Their values were communalist. It was the first papal revolution of Gregory the Great in the sixth century which changed these hitherto communalist values to the individualist ones which have come to characterize and distinguish the West from the Rest.

This papal revolution, by promoting love as the basis of marriage and advocating the independence of the young, led to the rise of individualism in the West [and produced the calculated effect of dissolving kinship ties and to create a wealth base for the Christian individual, many of whom would bequeath substantial assets to the Church rather than keeping them within the kin, as Lal argues; G.T.].

But to curb the dissolution of family bonds and the resulting instability in family formation this would have caused, the Church created a fierce guilt culture in the Middle Ages. In this guilt culture, sex was sinful and the marriage bond - albeit based on love - was sacrosanct. They thus put a lid on the human passions which their individualism had unleashed.

Reviving the Invisible Hand, pp. 7-8.

See also Roman Church - Pioneer of Liberty and Free Markets, and Prosperity and Violence (1/3).

Blaise Pascal and the Politics of Scepticism

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Among the best books that I've read recently is a short one by Michael Oakeshott, "The Politics of Faith & the Politics of Scepticism".

The Politics of Faith stands for the totalitarian drive to shape man and his world ad libitum - and indeed to even determine what his faith should be - by the means of the state, a machinery of government immeasurably more powerful in its ability to interfere with everyone's life than any form of might known in Europe before the 16th century.

The Politics of Scepticism stands for the liberal disposition, the constrained vision in Sowellian terms, a modesty and even distrust in the face of grand schemes promising change and betterment by the agency of a central power.

Writes Oakeshott, on page 129 of the book referred to above:

And while the writers who belong to the great sceptical tradition (not all of them, of course, unabated sceptics - Augustine, Pascal, Hobbes, Locke, Halifax, Hume, Burke, Paine, Bentham, Coleridge, Burckhardt, de Tocqueville, Acton - though for a season they have been displaced in popular favour by the pundits of faith, wait only to be recalled and reinterpreted. None of these, perhaps, is able to speak directly to this generation [writing in the 1950s, G.T.], but in this respect they are better placed than the apostles of faith, who for two centuries have merely repeated themselves. And in my opinion, there is no better starting place for a renewed attempt to understand and to modernize the principles of the skeptical tradition in our politics than a study of Pascal and Hume.

See also Michael Oakeshott (1901 - 1990) - Teleocracy versus Nomocracy.

 

Saint Thomas Aquinas

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I am reading Saint "Thomas Aquinas - "The Dumb Ox" by G.K. Chesterton, who writes

St. Thomas was a huge heavy bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet; very mild and magananimous but not very sociable; shy, even apart from the humility of holiness; and abstracted, even apart from his occasional and carefully concealed experiences of trance and ecstasy [...]

It was the outstanding fact about St.Thomas that he loved books and lived in books; that he lived the very life of the clerk or scholar in The Canterbury Tales, who would rather have a hundred books of Aristotle and his philosophy than any wealth the world could give him. When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, "I have understood every page I ever read."

Edward Feser is a philosopher whose blog I tend to follow. His latest post brings you in contact with the intellectual world of Aquinas - fascinating.

A reader asks how I would “answer [the] challenge that it appears the Bible suggests our souls in communion with God are better off than those of us here alive in this ‘vale of tears.’”  After all, St. Paul says that “we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord,” and Catholics pray to the saints, who are obviously in a better state than we are.  Isn’t this clearly incompatible with the claim that the soul after death is in a “radically diminished state”?  Furthermore, wouldn’t the conscious experiences that Christian doctrine attributes to the saved and the damned after death be metaphysically impossible on an Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the soul?  Wouldn’t a Cartesian view of the soul be more in harmony with Christianity?  Do we have here a case “where Aristotelian philosophy is just at odds with revealed Christian truth”?

The source.

 

See also Natural Ends and Prudential Judgement.