Thanks, I will put it on my list.

If you take perfect to mean, “complete”. Well, this syllogism is necessarily true considering none of us has received a fullness and can be described as complete/perfect as our Father in Heaven is.

I think it’s available free online. I bought a used copy on ebay. It’s not canonized, though it used to be published in the same volume as Doctrine and Covenants.

I haven’t gone through the whole thing yet, but I hear that there are some non-doctrinal (or perhaps non-binding doctrine) tripping points, which is why the church stopped printing it with the D&C.

Some of your above analysis reminded me of the LoF, so I thought I’d recommend that you put it on your LDS reading list, for when you get time/inclination. And, yes, I realize that you’re a Mormon-friendly Catholic.

The format of the LoF almost makes it into something of a Mormon catechism.

You write, “That being said, there could be occasional exceptions, as you say, but then its hard to see how those exceptional persons could then communicate perfectly to the rest of us.”

I agree. And if your main point is that *general* revelation cannot be perfect — revelation as it is given to all mankind, and “revelation” defined as not so much the content as the communication of the content — then probably we agree on that too. In other words, because of the way God made us, he cannot communicate perfectly with us as a race; as a general rule, he can’t get his truth through our thick skulls in our natural state. Even within the Church, many people misconstrue his teachings or fail to apply themselves to learning what they are in the first place.

Thomas Aquinas wrote that explicit revelation is necessary, not because we couldn’t know God and morality otherwise, but because in most cases it would take us our whole lives to figure it out, and even then only with an admixture of error. Revelation makes the truths of salvation plain enough that even non-philosophers can understand and begin living the Gospel at a young age.

But as you point out, it takes not only mental capacity to believe the Gospel, but also the ability to make the virtuous choice of placing our faith in it. This is a bit of an insight to me, in that you’ve caused me to think of it specifically in this manner: As St. Augustine wrote, “We don’t understand in order to believe, we believe in order to understand.” Faith itself being a virtue, understanding can’t increase unless virtue increases as well. This may explain why so many modern theologians, for all their scholarly brilliance, as often as not miss the point of the theology they purport to expound, and thereby mislead people.

You write, “My identity objection only applies to discontinuities as experienced by God or as experienced by you, not discontinuities in you as experienced by third parties.”

To be honest I’m not sure whether we’re still disagreeing.

You write, “agreed that the discussion is getting far afield, but continuing it anyway because its interesting”

I agree that it’s interesting, and I have no objection per se to going far afield. My main concern is that I might lose track of why we’re arguing certain points. : )

If I understand you right, what you’re saying now is that being transformed by grace through sacraments, does not constitute a discontinuity in identity (nor a violation of agency?) because it’s a transformation that we choose in advance. But I think a person could also choose in advance to become wiser, more insightful, more intelligent, more virtuous, etc. God’s expansion of someone’s knowledge or intelligence to become capable of perfect communication, could come in response to repeated prayers for knowledge and understanding, rather like Solomon (2 Chron. 1:7-12).

Then again, St. Paul didn’t consent in advance (to his conversion) but was basically hit over the head with a rock. : )

I do think God will add to us, but what He does not want to do, is overwhelm us. He will strengthen us, and add to us in every way, but not in a way that would detract from our agency and freedom. He wants our choices and agency to be maximized, while also helping us to grow.

Let me try to characterize your point and you can let me know if I’ve got it wrong. You seem to be saying, in the context of the overarching discussion, that God would not cause a major transformation in someone’s intellectual (or other) capacities, because that would overwhelm his agency.

Of course I get that. But at the same time, Catholics believe that we are simply incapable of having full and true — i.e. supernatural — faith in the Gospel without God superadding grace to our nature. Faith, hope and charity, for us, are supernatural virtues which, unlike the virtues of, e.g., temperance and fortitude, we can’t develop naturally, but can only acquire by God’s giving them to us.

I don’t consider God’s giving us supernatural virtues as gifts of grace, to constitute a removal of our agency, even though they are things we are enabled to do which otherwise we could not do on our own. And this is simply because he won’t give us supernatural gifts if we don’t want them.

I think Lewis’s point in this passage is not that no Christian may ever expect more than modest and subtle gifts and signs of God’s presence: Surely many Christians have experienced much more than that — St. Paul at his conversion, for instance? But rather that he will not “override [our] will”.

Do you disagree?