Month: August 2011

Original Sin and Eastern Orthodoxy

There was another point I wanted to make re: John Farrell's Forbes piece, Can Theology Evolve?  Farrell writes, "The Eastern Orthodox Churches, for example, do not accept the doctrine of Original Sin . . . ." I think this claim needs some nuancing.   (Here is my first Farrell post.)

First of all, Eastern Orthodoxy certainly accepts the doctrine of the Fall, and so accepts the doctrine of Original Sin, unless there is some reason to distinguish the two.  Timothy Ware, expounding the Orthodox doctrine, writes, "Adam's fall consisted essentially in his disobedience of the will of God; he set up his own will against the divine will, and so by his own act he separated himself from God." (The Orthodox Church, Penguin 1964, p. 227.)  If anything counts as Original Sin, this act of disobedience does.  So, at first blush, the Fall and Original Sin are the same 'event.'  Accepting the first, Orthodoxy accepts the second.

But both 'events' are also 'states' in which post-Adamic, postlapsarian man finds himself.  He is in the state or condition of original sinfulness and in the state or condition of fallenness.  This fallen state is one of moral corruption and mortality.  This belief  is common to the Romans, the Protestants, and the Orthodox.  But it could be maintained that while we  inherit Adam's corruption and mortality, we don't inherit his guilt.  And here is where there is an important difference between the Romans and the Protestants, on the one hand, and the Eastern Orthodox, on the other.  The latter subscribe to Original Sin but not to Original Guilt.  Timothy Ware:  "Men (Orthodox usually teach) automatically inherit Adam's corruption and mortality, but not his guilt:  they are only guilty in so far as by their own free choice they imitate Adam." (229)

I conclude that Farrell should have said, not that the Orthodox do not accept Original Sin, but that they do not accept Original Guilt.  Or he could have said that the Orthodox do not accept the Roman Catholic doctrine of Original Sin which includes the fomer idea.  Actually, given the context this is probably what he meant.

There is something repugnant to reason about the doctrine of Original Guilt.  How can I be held morally responsible for what someone else has done?  That is a morally obnoxious notion, as obnoxious as the notion behind calls for reparations for blacks.  Surely I am not morally responsible for crimes committed in the 19th century.  The more I think about it, the more appealing the Orthodox doctrine becomes. 

Modern Genetics and the Fall: Science and Religion in Collision?

John Farrell, a long-time friend of Maverick Philosopher, has an article in Forbes Magazine entitled Can Theology Evolve?  Early in his piece Farrell quotes biologist Jerry Coyne:

I’ve always maintained that this piece of the Old Testament, which is easily falsified by modern genetics (modern humans descended from a group of no fewer than 10,000 individuals), shows more than anything else the incompatibility between science and faith. For if you reject the Adam and Eve tale as literal truth, you reject two central tenets of Christianity: the Fall of Man and human specialness.

Commenting on this quotation, Farrell writes, "I don’t know about human specialness, but on the Fall he [Coyne] is correct."

Let's think about this.  If one rejects the literal truth of the Adam and Eve story, must one also reject the doctrine of the Fall?  We can and should raise this question just as theists while prescinding from the specifics of Christianity, whether Roman, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant.  For if the issue is, as Coyne puts it above, one of the compatibility/incompatibility of "science and faith,"  then it won't matter which particular theistic faith we adopt so long as it includes a doctrine of the Fall of Man.

The question, then, is whether the rejection of the literal truth of the Adam and Eve story entails the rejection of the Fall of Man.  Coyne and Farrell say 'yes'; I say 'no.'  My reason for saying this is that man can be a fallen being whether or not  there were any original parents.  I will assume (and I believe it to be true) that evolutionary biology gives us the truth about the origins of the human species.  So I will assume that the Genesis account of human origins is literally false.  But what is literally false may, when taken allegorically, express profound truths.  One of these truths is that man is made in the image and likeness of God.  I explain the easily-misunderstood sense of imago Dei here.

But how can God create man in his image and likeness without interfering in the evolutionary processes which most of us believe are responsible for man's existence as an animal? As follows.

Man as an animal is one thing, man as a spiritual, rational, and moral being is another. The origin of man as an animal came about not through any special divine acts but through the evolutionary processes common to the origination of all animal species. But man as spirit, as a self-conscious, rational being who distinguishes between good and evil cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms. (This can be argued with great rigor, but not now!)

As animals, we are descended from lower forms. As animals, we are part of the natural world and have the same general type of origin as any other animal species. Hence there was no Adam and Eve as first biological parents of the human race who came into existence directly by divine intervention without animal progenitors. But although we are animals, we are also spiritual beings, spiritual selves. I am an I, an ego, and this I-ness or egoity cannot be explained naturalistically. I am a person possessing free will and conscience neither of which can be explained naturalistically.

What 'Adam' refers to is not a man qua member of a zoological species, but the first man to become a spiritual self. This spiritual selfhood came into existence through a spiritual encounter with the divine self. In this I-Thou encounter, the divine self elicited or triggered man's latent spiritual self. This spiritual self did not  emerge naturally; what emerged naturally was the potentiality to hear a divine call which called man to his vocation, his higher destiny, namely, a sharing in the divine life. The divine call is from beyond the human horizon.

But in the encounter with the divine self which first triggered man's personhood or spiritual selfhood, there arose man's freedom and his sense of being a separate self, an ego distinct from God and from other egos. Thus was born pride and self-assertion and egotism. Sensing his quasi-divine status, man asserted himself against the One who had revealed himself, the One who simultaneously called him to a Higher Life but also imposed restrictions and made demands. Man in his pride then made a fateful choice, drunk with the sense of his own power: he decided to go it alone.

This rebellion was the Fall of man, which has nothing to do with a serpent or an apple or the being expelled from a physical garden located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Original Sin was a
spiritual event, and its transmission is not by semen, pace certain  Pauline passages, but by socio-cultural-linguistic means.

If we take some such tack as the above, then we can reconcile what we know to be true from natural science with the Biblical message.  Religion and science needn't compete; they can complement each other — but only if each sticks to its own province. In this way we can avoid both the extremes of the fundamentalists and literalists and the extremes of the 'Dawkins gang' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, et al.)

Our question was whether rejecting the literal truth of the Adam and Eve story entails rejecting the doctrine of the Fall.  The answer to this is in the negative since the mere possibility of an account such as the one  just given shows that the entailment fails.  Man's fallenness is a spiritual condition that can only be understood in a spiritual way.  It does not require that the whole human race have sprung from exactly two animal progenitors that miraculously came into physical existence by divine agency and thus without animal progenitors.  Nor does it require that the transmission of the fallen condition be biological in nature.

Can What Is Impossible to Achieve be an Ideal for Us?

In The Stoic Ideal, I stated that the Stoic ideal is "is for us impossible, and so no ideal at all."   The ideal of the Stoic sage is the attainment of a state of god-like impassibility by means of a retreat into the inner citadel of the self, a retreat  of such a nature that one is no longer affected — unless the sage wants to be affected — by anything not in his power.  My double-barreled thesis, aphoristically put, is that (i) Stoic impassibility is for us humans an impossibility, and thus (ii)  cannot be an ideal for beings of our constitution. In illustration of my thesis I adduced Jesus on the cross:  Jesus died in agony like a man, even though, if he was God, he could have realized the Stoic ideal.  Of course my argument was not the following:

1. Christianity is true and Jesus is our Exemplar
2. Jesus did not exhibit on the cross or elsewhere the behavior of a Stoic sage
Therefore
3. The Stoic ideal cannot be our ideal.

I did not argue this way because this is not the way philosophers qua philosophers argue. They argue from premises that do not rest on faith.  My argument was this:

4. What is not in our power to achieve cannot be an ideal for us.
5. Stoic impassibiity is not in our power to achieve.
Therefore
3. The Stoic ideal cannot be our ideal. 

The evidence for (5) is overwhelming.  I have never met a Stoic sage, and neither have you.  Some people are more stoic than others, and there are some Stoic philosophers about; but a philosopher is not the same as a sage.  A philosopher is a mere aspirant, a seeker of wisdom; a sage has reached the goal.

The background assumption, (4), is open to question. I have deployed this principle in other contexts, and it seems to me to be a sound one.  It is a generalization of the 'ought' implies 'can' principle:  if I morally ought to do X, then it must be in my power to do X.  Contrapositively, if it is not in my power to do X, then I have no moral obligation to do X.   My principle is a generalization of the familiar Kantian principle because it covers not only the obligatory but also the supererogatory.  So I call it the Generalized 'Ought' Implies 'Can' Principle.  Roughly, an action or state is supererogatory if it is good to do or achieve but not bad to leave undone or unachieved.   But an astute  reader took issue with my principle that genuine ideals must be achievable: 

I wonder, do you really want to discriminate against ideals that may be practically impossible for us to achieve?

Take anamartia. Errorlessness. Every time I go out on the tennis court I aim for an errorless set & match. Never gotten close. Every time I write a long document (under time pressure) I try for an errorless document, but there are always some mistakes & typos. I don't want to back off and accept a certain error rate as OK. It isn't OK. In principle and ideally I could be errorless and that's what I want to be. That ideal motivates me. I keep trying. I am not discouraged.

It is not clear that this is a counterexample to my principle.  The reader says that he "could be errorless" in his slinging of words or hitting of balls.  If that means that he has the ability to be errorless, then I say that errorlessness is a genuine ideal for him, even if he has never yet achieved errorlessness.  (Something can be achievable by a person even if it has never been achieved by that person.)  Surely my man ought to strive to perform to the very best of his abilities.  If 'ought'  is too strong, then I say his striving to perform to the best of his abilities is better than his not so striving.  Either way, errorlessness is a genuine ideal for him.  It is a genuine ideal for him because it is achievable by him.  But he said, "in principle and ideally."  Those are vague phrases in need of analysis.

To be errorless in principle could mean that a) there is no narrowly-logical or broadly-logical bar to his being errorless; b) there is no nomological bar to his being errorless; c) both (a) and (b).  Clearly, errorlessness is possible for my reader  in either or both of these senses.  Neither the laws of logic nor the laws of physics rule out his being errorless.  But satisfying the logical and nomological conditions  does not suffice to make errorlessness a genuine ideal for him.  For that more is needed: he must have the ability to be errorless and be in circumstances in which his abilities can be exercised.

So I stick to my claim that nothing can be a genuine ideal for a person unless it is concretely achievable by that person given his actual abilities and circumstances and not merely achievable 'in principle' by that person.

It may help if we distinguish two senses of 'ideal.'  In one sense of the term, any desirable goal that one sets for himself is an ideal.   But that is a use of 'ideal' so loose as to be useless.  Suppose I desire to slice two hours off my marathon time the next time I run that distance.  In one sense, that would be an 'ideal' time for me.  But in the strict sense in which I am using the word, such an accomplishment is not achievable by me and so no ideal for me at all.  But it may be an ideal for you.

I am tempted to insist  that (4) is a self-evident practical principle, as self-evident as the principle of which it is the generalization. I rather doubt that I can prove it using premises more evident than it, but talking around it a bit may help. 

Ideals must be realizable if they are to be ideals.  The ideal 'points' to a possible realization.  If that be denied then it is being denied that the ideal stands in relation to the real when the ideal has its very sense in contradistinction to the real.  At this point I could bring in analogies, though analogies seldom convince.  The possible is possibly actual.  If you say X is possible but not possibly actual, then I say you don't understand the notion of possibility.  Or consider dispositions.  If a glass is disposed to shatter if suitably struck, then it must be possible for it to shatter.  Analogously, if such-and-such is an ideal for a person, then it must be possible  — and not just logically or nomologically — for the person to realize that ideal.

I believe this is an important topic because having the wrong ideals is worse than having no ideals at all.  Many think that to be idealistic is good.  But surely it is not good without qualification.  Think of Nazi ideals, Communist ideals, leftist ideals and of their youthful and and earnest and sincere proponents.  Those are wrongheaded ideals, and some of them are wrongheaded because not realizable.  The classless society; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the racially pure society; the society in which everyone is made materially equal by the power of the state.  Ideals like these cannot be achieved, and if the attempt is made terrible evils will be the upshot.  The Commies broke a lot of eggs in the 20th century (100 million by some estimates) but still didn't achieve their fabulous and impossible omelet. 

Their ideals were not realizable, not warranted by the actual facts of human nature.

I suggest the same is true of the ideal of Stoic impassibility:  it is not warranted by the actual facts of human nature.  This is not to say that most of us would not be a lot better if we were more stoic and detached in our responses to what is not in our control.

We Romantics

We are enticed by what is hidden, out of reach, around the corner, over the horizon. It is the lost mine lost, not the lost mine found, that inspires and focuses our energies. Our metaphysics is visionary and revisionary, not descriptive. We study the world to see what is beyond the world. We study the Cave to find an exit, not to inventory the paltry stuff found within it, or even the categories of paltry stuff found within it. Our speleology is transcendental, not empirical: we would know what makes the Cave possible and actual, and what is its point and purpose.

And if there is no exit? And no ultimate condition of possibility? Then we want to know that and why the Cave exhausts the cartography of being.

Another Reader Who Prefers Comments Disabled

Yesterday I mentioned that I have received e-mail from readers who prefer blogs that do not allow comments. Here is another just over the transom from a reader in Lincoln, England:

One of the reasons, but not the most important consideration, why I read your blog is because you don't permit comments. There is a surfeit, which includes me now and then, of inane commenters on the internet – enough to satisfy anyone addicted to the puerile opinions of strangers.

Blogs, or some of them anyway, are a form of vanity publishing. After all, a first rate mind with something original to say could write a book and have it published in the regular way. So why bother blogging?  But commenting on someone's blog is even more vain. The commenter desires to disseminate his second-hand views and inflict his opinions on a blog’s readership without the trouble of producing a thoughtful discourse in the first place.

Commenters are parasites in the blogosphere. If I had anything original and sagacious to say, and I could say it eloquently, then I could inform the attentive world on my own blog. Regarding the impact of eloquence: Not many  bloggers can retain a discriminating audience by repeatedly exploring serious topics with stylish felicity. 

I would qualify the "Commenters are parasites" remark with a 'most' or a 'many.'  I have received excellent comments over the years that have helped me improve my thinking.  As for vanity, I admit that there is something vain about blogging, mine included.  But is not all self-presentation and self-expression vain when measured by monkish standards? 

There is a Greek orthodox monastery in the desert not far from here.  The monks there are allowed no internet access.  And that is as it should be.  Whatever the value of monasticism and world-renunciation, internet access is incompatible with it.  Or so say I.  I would expect The Blogging Monk to disagree.

Why I Don’t Allow Comments

Why don't I allow comments on most of my posts?  Part of the reason is the 'high level' of discussion that tends to occur in threads attached to posts that address 'hot button' issues.  A good example is the 'commentary' elicited by Why Sexism is Obsolete over at Victor Reppert's place.  Not an edifying spectacle. 

Curiously, the lack of comments does not seem adversely to affect my traffic.  In fact, I have e-mails from people who positively like the paucity of comments.

Augustine Against the Stoics

Today, August 28th, is the Feast of St. Augustine on the Catholic calendar.  In honor of the Bishop of Hippo I pull a quotation from his magisterial City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 4:

And I am at a loss to understand how the Stoic philosophers can presume to say that these are no ills, though at the same time they allow the wise man to commit suicide and pass out of this life if they become so grievous that he cannot or ought not to endure them. But such is the stupid pride of these men who fancy that the supreme good can be found in this life, and that they can become happy by their own resources, that their wise man, or at least the man whom they fancifully depict as such, is always happy, even though he become blind, deaf, dumb, mutilated, racked with pains, or suffer any conceivable calamity such as may compel him to make away with himself; and they are not ashamed to call the life that is beset with these evils happy. O happy life, which seeks the aid of death to end it? If it is happy, let the wise man remain in it; but if these ills drive him out of it, in what sense is it happy? Or how can they say that these are not evils which conquer the virtue of fortitude, and force it not only to yield, but so to rave that it in one breath calls life happy and recommends it to be given up? For who is so blind as not to see that if it were happy it would not be fled from? And if they say we should flee from it on account of the infirmities that beset it, why then do they not lower their pride and acknowledge that it is miserable?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Outer Space

1960's psychedelia explored inner space, but there were a few songs from the '60s about outer space themes.  Telstar, an instrumental by the British band, The Tornados, 1962, was presumably in celebration of Telstar, the first communications satellite which also got high up in '62. (Telstar the song made it to the #1 slot on both the U. S. and British charts.)

Speaking of high, the Byrd's Eight Miles High, 1966,  tells of a trip into the outer or perhaps into the 'inner' or both.  I never paid much attention to the obscure lyrics.  The Coltranish riffs executed on a 12-string Rickenbacker were what got my attention.

Also by the Byrds, 1966, is the playful Mr. Spaceman.  And we can't omit Elton John, Rocket Man from 1972.

Off topic, but appropriate given current East Coast weather conditions: Good Night, Irene, 1950, the Weavers. 

Finally,  a tip of the hat this Saturday night to Victor Reppert who pointed me to this incredible oldies site.

Two Kinds of Critical Caution

One person fears loss of contact with reality and is willing to take doxastic risks and believe beyond what he can claim strictly to know. The other, standing firm on the autonomy of human reason, refuses to accept anything that cannot be justified from within his own subjectivity. He fears error, and finds the first person uncritical, gullible, credulous, tender-minded in James' sense.  The first is cautious lest he miss out on the real.  The second is cautious lest he make a mistake.
 
The second, brandishing W. K. Clifford,  criticizes the first  for believing on insufficient evidence, for self-indulgently believing what he wants to believe, for believing what he has no right to believe. The second wants reality-contact only on his own terms: only if he can assure himself of it, perhaps by ‘constituting’ the object via ‘apodictic’ processes within his own consciousness. (Husserl) The first person, however, is willing to accept uncertainty for the sake of a reality-contact otherwise inaccessible.
 
What should we fear more, loss of contact with objective reality, or being wrong?
 
Analogy.  Some are gastronomically timorous: they refuse to eat in restaurants for fear of food poisoning.  Their critical abstention does indeed achieve its prophylactic end — but only at the expense of the  foregoing of a world of prandial delights.
 
Now suppose a man believes in God and afterlife but is mistaken.  He lives his life in the grip of what are in reality, but unbeknownst to him,  life-enhancing illusions.  And of course, since he is ex hypothesi wrong, death cannot set him straight: he is after dying  nothing and so cannot learn that he lived his life in illusion.  But then why is his being wrong such a big deal?  Wouldn't it be a much bigger deal if his fear of being wrong prevented his participation in an unsurpassably great good?
 
"But he lived his life in the grip of illusions!"
 
To this I would respond, first: how do you know that he lived his life in untruth?  You are always demanding evidence, so what is your evidence for this?  Second, in a godless universe could there even be truth? (No truth without mind; no objective truth without objective mind.)  Third, even if there is truth in a godless universe, why would it be a value?  Why care about truth if it has no bearing on human flourishing?  Doesn't your concern for evidence only make sense in the context of a quest for truth? 

Grief: Three Solutions

That we grieve over the loss of a finite good shows our wretchedness. But the cure for grief is not the substitution of attachment to another finite good. We should not distract ourselves from our grief, but experience it and try to grasp the root of it, which is our inner emptiness, rather than the loss of a particular finite good. The proximate cause of my grief, the death of a beloved companion, is not grief’s ultimate cause. The inner emptiness, infinite in that nothing finite can assuage it, has but one anodyne: the infinite good, God.

If God be denied, then either the inner emptiness must be extinguished, or we must learn to fill it with finite goods. The latter, common as it is, is a miserable stop-gap measure and no ultimate solution. But to extinguish the inner emptiness, we must extinguish desire itself. This, the solution of Pali Buddhism, cuts but does not untie the Gordian knot.

So I count three solutions to grief: seek God; Pascalian divertissement; Buddhist extinction.  Perhaps there are others.

The Stoic Ideal

The Stoic sage would be as impassible as God is impassible. But here's something to think about: Jesus on the cross died in agony like a man, even though, if he was God, he could have realized the Stoic ideal.

What is the lesson? Perhaps that to be impassible is for us impossible, and so no ideal at all.

Addendum 8/26:  Leo Mollica supplies this appropriate quotation  from Malebranche's The Search after Truth (Bk. II, Pt. iii, Ch. 4; tr. Lennon and Olscamp):

Epicurus was right in saying that offenses were bearable by a wise man. But Seneca was wrong in saying that wise men cannot even be offended…. Rather, let Christians learn from their Master that the impious are capable of hurting them, and that good men are sometimes subjected to these impious ones by the order of Providence. When one of the officers of the High Priest struck Jesus Christ, this wise man of the Christians, infinitely wise, and even as powerful as He is wise, confessed that this servant was capable of wounding him. He is not angered, He is not vengeful like Cato, He pardons, as having been truly wronged. He could have been vengeful and destroyed His enemies, but He suffered with a humble and modest patience injurious to no one, not even to this servant who had wronged Him.

I Stub My Toe

I just stubbed a bare toe on the oaken leg of my computer table. But it took a second or two after the moment of impact for the pain to 'register.' So I philosophized: if there was no pain at the moment of   impact when the (minor) damage was done, but there is pain now after the fact, then this pain is of no use to me. It's only a sensation. To hell with it. It has nothing to do with me.

"It's only a sensation." This little reminder is a handy addition to the Stoic's pharmacia, though it is admittedly no panacea. It can help us buck up under some of life's stresses and strains.  Stoicism may not take us very far, but where it does take us is a place worth  visiting.