Month: December 2018
On Corporate Prayer and Institutionalized Religion
Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of P. B., vol. 12, part 2, p. 34, #68:
A public place is an unnatural environment in which to place oneself mentally or physically in the attitude of true prayer. It is far too intimate, emotional, and personal to be satisfactorily tried anywhere except in solitude. What passes for prayer in temples, churches, and synagogues is therefore a compromise dictated by the physical necessity of an institution. It may be quite good but too often alas! it is only the dressed-up double of true prayer.
Where would we be without institutions? We need them, but only up to a point. We are what we are because of the institutions in which we grew up, and natural piety dictates that we be appropriately grateful. But their negative aspects cannot be ignored and all further personal development requires those who can, to go it alone.
We need society and its institutions to socialize us, to raise us from the level of the animal to that of the human. But this human is all-too-human, and to take the next step we must tread the solitary path. Better to be a social animal than a mere animal, but better than both is to become an individual, as I am sure Kierkegaard would agree. To achieve true individuality is one of the main tasks of human life. Spiritual individuation is indeed a task, not a given. In pursuit of this task institutions are often more hindrance than help.
For some, churches and related institutions will always be necessary to provide guidance, discipline, and community. But for others they will prove stifling and second-best, a transitional phase in their development.
For any church to claim that outside it there is no salvation — extra ecclesiam salus non est — is intolerable dogmatism, and indeed a form of idolatry in which something finite, a human institution contingent both in its existence and configuration, is elevated to the status of the Absolute.
But now, having given voice to the opinion to which I strongly incline, I ought to consider, if only briefly, the other side of the question.
What if there is a church with a divine charter, one founded by God himself in the person of Christ? If there is such a church, then my charges of intolerable dogmatism and idolatry collapse. Such a church would not be just a help to salvation but a means necessary thereto. Such a church, with respect to soteriological essentials, would teach with true, because divine, authority.
But is there such a divinely instituted and guided church? To believe this one would first have to accept the Incarnation. And therein lies the stumbling block.
If the Incarnation is actual, then it is possible whether or not we can explain or understand how it is possible. Esse ad posse valet illatio. Necessarily, what is, is really possible, whether or not conceivable by us. It is not for our paltry minds to dictate what is actual and what is possible. On the other hand, if the best and the brightest of our admittedly wretched kind cannot see how a state of affairs is possible, then that is evidence that it is not possible. If, after protracted and sincere effort motivated by a love of truth, the Incarnation keeps coming before the mind as contradictory, and the attempts at defusing the apparent contradiction as so much fancy footwork, then here we have (admittedly non-demonstrative) evidence that the Incarnation really is impossible.
And then there is the ethical matter of intellectual integrity. (Beliefs and not only actions are subject to ethical evaluation.) One can easily feel that there is something morally shabby about believing what is favorable to one when what one is believing is hard to square with elementary canons of logic.
This then is the predicament of someone with one foot in Athens and the other in Jerusalem. The autonomy of reason demands insight lest it affirm beyond what it is justified in affirming. At the same time, reason in us realizes its infirmity and helplessness in the face of the great questions that bear upon our ultimate fate and felicity; reason in us is therefore inclined in its misery to embrace the heteronomy of faith.
How are we to resolve this problem? Are to accept a revelation that our finite intellects cannot validate? Or are we to stand fast on the autonomy of finite reason and refuse to accept what we cannot, by our own lights, validate? (By 'validate' I do not mean 'show to be true' but only 'show to be rationally acceptable.')
My answer, interim and tentative, is this. The ultimate resolution involves the will, not the intellect. One decides to accept the Incarnation or one decides not to accept it. That is to say: the final step must be taken by the will, freely; which is not to say that the intellect is not involved up to the final step. The decision is free, but not 'arbitrary' in the sense of thoughtless or perfunctory. No proof is possible, which should not be surprising since we are in the precincts of faith not knowledge. One who accepts as true only what he can know or come to know has simply rejected faith as a mode of access to truth.
"But if the doctrine is apparently contradictory and an offense to discursive reason, then one's decision in favor of the Incarnation is irrational."
I think this objection can be met. What is apparently contradictory may or may not be really contradictory, and it is not unreasonable to think that there are truths, non-contradictory in themselves, that must appear contradictory to us in our present state. This is a form of mysterianism, but it is a reasoned mysterianism. Human reason can come to understand that human reason cannot validate all that it accepts as true.
How to Grow Old and the Question of an Immortality Worth Wanting
Sage advice from Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) who grew old indeed. The best part of his short essay follows:
I think that a successful old age is easiest for those who have strong impersonal interests involving appropriate activities. It is in this sphere that long experience is really fruitful, and it is in this sphere that the wisdom born of experience can be exercised without being oppressive. It is no use telling grownup children not to make mistakes, both because they will not believe you, and because mistakes are an essential part of education. But if you are one of those who are incapable of impersonal interests, you may find that your life will be empty unless you concern yourself with your children and grandchildren. In that case you must realise that while you can still render them material services, such as making them an allowance or knitting them jumpers, you must not expect that they will enjoy your company.
Without a doubt, "strong impersonal interests involving appropriate activities" is the key.
Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have been cheated of the best things that life has to offer. But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it -so at least it seems to me- is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.
[from “Portraits From Memory And Other Essays”]
The second paragraph raises deep and difficult questions. The philosopher in me has often entertained, with considerable hospitality, the thought that an immortality worth wanting must involve a transcending of the petty and personal ego, the self that separates us from other selves and the world. An immortality worth wanting must involve a sloughing off of the petty self and a merging into an impersonal, universal, transcendental awareness of impersonal Platonica including eternal truths, changeless essences, absolute values, and noble ideals. Those philosophers of a predominantly theoretical bent will be attracted to this conception reminiscent as it is of Aristotle's bios theoretikos as exemplified in its highest instance, noesis noeseos.
"But then you would no longer exist! You would be swallowed up in death, the greatest calamity of them all." To this objection I had a ready reply: "It all depends on who I am in the innermost core of my selfhood; if I am in truth the eternal Atman, and not this indigent and limited psychophysical complex; if I am the transcendental witness self, then I will not cease to exist. In the measure that I identify with that deathless, impersonal awareness of eide and Wahrheiten an sich, I am proof against extinction by the body's death. I will merge at last with the sea of transcendental awareness which is my true self and give up my false petty individuality for a greater individuality, that of the Absolute.
That is one strand, the monistic strand, in my thinking about selfhood and immortality. It dominated my thinking in my twenties and thirties.
But another is the personalist strand which takes very seriously the reality of persons in the plural and the possibility of deep I-Thou (as opposed to I-It) relations between persons and between a finite person and the ultimate person, the First Person, if you will, God.
On both conceptions there is a distinction between the true self and the false self. Controversy erupts over the nature of the true self. Is it trans-individual, or is it individuated? Is there one true self or many? Are we to aspire to an obliteration of the individual self or to its transformation? On neither conception is survival the schlepping on of the crass and carnal earthly self. Is the death of the individual a great calamity or is it a benign release into true selfhood? The controversy is ancient. Ramanuja to Shankara: I don't want to become sugar; I want to taste sugar!
As for Lord Russell, he would not have spoken of the eternal Atman, but he was a convinced atheist and mortalist. He was sure his individual consciousness would cease at death. But this did not bother him because the objects of his ultimate concern were impersonal. "The things I care for will continue, and others will carry on what I can no longer do."
Robert Spaemann Dies at 91
Professor Robert Spaemann, Philosopher and Advocate of the Traditional Mass, Dies at 91. (HT: Kai Frederik Lorentzen)
See also, Philosophie und Glaube: Vom Tod von Robert Spaemann. Excerpt:
Gott als Grundlage aller Wahrheitsansprüche
Gottesglaube ist weder Bedingung für wahre Urteile noch für Gewissensüberzeugungen. Aber da die Existenz Gottes der ontologische Grund beider und in ihnen impliziert ist, beseitigt die Leugnung Gottes die Grundlage aller Wahrheitsansprüche und aller sittlicher Überzeugungen und damit tendenziell diese Ansprüche selbst.
God as Foundation of all Truth Claims
Belief in God is a condition neither of true judgments nor of convictions of conscience. But because the existence of God is implied by both and is the ontological ground of both, the denial of God does away with the foundation of all truth claims and all moral convictions, and thereby tends to do away with these claims and convictions themselves. (tr. BV)
You don't need to believe in God to make true statements. Atheists make many true statements. And you don't need to believe in God to have correct moral convictions. Atheists have many correct moral convictions. But if there is no God, then there is no truth including moral truth. If there is no God, there are no truths to state. Atheists don't need to know that God exists to make true statements, but if there is no God, then they cannot make true statements.
But is it obvious that: no God, no truth? It is not obvious but it can be persuasively argued. Here is a rough sketch of one such argument. The laws of logic are not only true, they are necessarily true. As we say in the trade, they are true in all possible worlds. Now finite minds are not to be found in every possible world: there are possible worlds in which there are no finite minds, Furthermore, truth cannot exist outside of a mind: truth resides in minds to the extent that said minds are in contact with extramental reality. Since the laws of logic are necessarily true, there must be a necessary mind. And this all men call God.
Now that was quick and dirty. I present the argument with considerably more rigor and intellectual cleanliness here.
Go to my Facebook page for linkage and commentary on the passing scene.
A Christological and Mariological Query That Leads into the Philosophy of Language
Theme music: What If God Was One of Us (just a slob like one of us)?
My favorite Oregonian luthier, Dave Bagwill, checks in:
Karl White wrote in your post of 12-6-18: "If Jesus is a person of the Godhead then it must hold that his essence is immutable and above contingent change, particularly in response to human actions." In what way COULD "Jesus" be a 'person of the Godhead'? If I understand the classic narrative correctly, Mary, his mother, was a virgin who was made pregnant by the "overshadowing" of the Holy Spirit. So: there was an egg! A contingent egg, with DNA. And something fertilized it, supernaturally.
That's right. On the classical narrative, Jesus was born of a virgin without a natural father. The fertilization of the ovum in Mary was by a supernatural, miraculous, process. So while Jesus came into the world the way the rest of us poor schleps do, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born between feces and urine, the pregnancy that eventuated in his birth was caused by the third person of the Trinity acting supernaturally upon natural material, namely the contingent ovum in contingent Mary, who is of course a creature who wouldn't have existed at all if nothing material had been created.
That was the moment of Jesus' conception. An eternal, pre-existent entity named 'Jesus' could not have existed before that conception, unless of course Mary's DNA contribution was of no account - but in that case, we were not given 'the man Jesus Christ, made in every way like his brothers so that He might be merciful and faithful as High Priest'. Heb. 2.27. Also see 1 Tim. 2.5,6. Because – to be made like us 'in every way' either means just that, or it doesn't. He was made in every way like us. If Mary made a DNA contribution at the moment of conception, then her son 'the man Jesus Christ ' did not pre-exist. Am I at all thinking clearly here?
Yes, Dave, you are thinking quite clearly, and I agree with you. But there are some nuances that give rise to questions that lead us into the philosophy of language and metaphysics.
You and I take 'Jesus' to refer to a particular man, a composite of human soul and human body, born of a woman at a particular place at a particular time. And I take it that we understand 'born' to imply that an entity that is born first comes into existence when it is born and did not exist before it was born. To be born, then, is not for an immaterial Platonic soul-substance to acquire a material body, but for a soul-body composite to come into existence. On this 'Aristotelian' conception of being born, nothing that is born pre-existed its being born. Being born is not an alterational (accidental) change, a change in an already-existing substratum/subject of change, but an existential (substantial) change, whereby something first comes into existence.
But couldn't someone who accepts the Chalcedonian one person-two natures view say that 'Jesus' refers to the Son, the second person of the Trinity? In the earlier thread, Fr. Kirby says, "The man Jesus is a person of the Godhead, if we understand 'the man Jesus' to be denominative rather than descriptive." I take it that a denominative term is one whose reference is not determined by the descriptive content, if any, that the term bears or suggests. Such a term refers directly as opposed to a descriptive term that refers via a description that an entity must satisfy in order to count as the referent of that term. If we take 'the man Jesus' to be denominative, then 'man' plays no role in determining the term's reference. The reference can succeed even if the referent is not a man. (And of course the Son, taken in himself and apart from the Incarnation, is not a man, i.e., does not have a human nature, but only a divine nature.) If so, then the following identities hold and hold necessarily:
The Son = the man Jesus.The Son = Jesus.
It then follows that Jesus or the man Jesus is a person of the Godhead. To clarify this further we need to dip into the philosophy of language.
How does 'Jesus' refer? Does it refer via a description that the name abbreviates, or does it refer directly? Suppose by 'Jesus' we mean the Jewish carpenter born in Bethlehem to the virgin Mary by the agency of the Holy Spirit. The italicized phrase is what Russell calls a definite description, and his thesis about ordinary proper names is that they are definite descriptions in disguise. On this theory, 'Jesus' refers to whomever satisfies the description we associate with the name. It follows that the referent of the name must have the properties mentioned in the description. For example, 'Jesus' cannot refer to anything that was not born of a woman. Now the second person of the Trinity, necessary, co-eternal with the Father, etc., was not born of a woman, or born at all, nor was he from all eternity a carpenter, etc. Recall how I explained 'born' above: an entity that is born first comes into existence when it is born and did not exist before it was born. If this is what is meant by 'born,' then the Son (second person of the Trinity, Word, Logos) cannot be born. But then how are we to understand the Incarnation? The idea, of course, is that God the Son came into the material world by being born of a virginal human female. But how is this possible if nothing that is born pre-exists its being born?
We seem faced with an aporetic triad:
Jesus was born;The Son of God was not born;Jesus is the Son of God.
What's the solution? There is no problem if two different senses of 'born' are in play. I suppose I will be told that the Son is born in the following sense: the pre-existent Son which has prior to the Incarnation a divine nature only, acquires at the Incarnation a human nature in addition to the divine nature. Thus there is one person (suppositum, hypostasis), and that person is the second person of the Trinity, God the Son who, before the Incarnation has exactly one nature, the divine nature, and after the Incarnation exactly two natures, one divine the other human. Being born, for the Son, is then an alterational change in the Son: the pre-existent Son acquires a second nature.
The trouble with this answer is that it implies that Jesus is not "made in every way like his brothers." He is born in a different way. He is born in a Platonic or rather quasi-Platonic way whereas we are born in the 'Aristotelian' way. Dave and I did not exist before we were born/conceived. Jesus did exist before he was born/conceived assuming that 'Jesus' is used denominatively as opposed to descriptively. When we were born/conceived, we didn't acquire something that we lacked before, human nature; we were nothing at all before. But when Jesus was born he acquired something he did not have before, human nature.
My interim conclusion is that it is deeply problematic to take 'Jesus' as referring to God the Son. Insofar forth, Dave is vindicated against Karl. Jesus is no member of the Godhead.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia
I link to what I like, and I like to what I link. And my taste is decidedly catholic.
Billie Holliday, The Way You Looked Tonight. An uncommonly long intro. I first heard this old tune in the The Lettermen version in 1961. YouTuber comment:
Suzanne, the world did get cold after we parted. I got drafted to the other side of it and never could come home again. You eventually married a less adventuresome boy. I haven't seen you in over fifty years, and never will again, but I still feel a glow just thinking of you and the way you looked that night.Your laugh that wrinkles your nose still touches my foolish heart. I still love you, just the way you looked that night.
Mose Allison, The Song is Ended
Arlo Guthrie, Percy's Song
Ry Cooder, Christmas in Southgate
(Last night I had) A Wonderful Dream, The Majors. The trick is to find in the flesh one of those dream girls. Some of us got lucky.
Gary U. S. Bonds, From a Buick 6. Wow! Undoubtedly the best cover of the Dylan number. And better than the original. Sorry, Bob. Bonds had a number of hits in the early '60s such as Twist, Twist, Senora. Cute video. The girls look like they stepped out of the '40s. They remind me of my aunts.
Beach Boys, 409. With a four-speed manual tranny, dual quad carburetors (before fuel injection), positraction (limited slip differential), and 409 cubic inches of engine displacement. Gas was cheap in those days.
A U. K. reader/listener recommends Junior Brown's cover of 409 in which the aging Beach Boys sing backup. Brown wields a curious hybrid axe, half steel guitar and half 'regular' guitar. An amazing, and very satisfying shitkicker redneck version. Check it out! Amazing the stuff the Dark Ostrich digs up from the vasty deeps of the Internet.
Ludwig van Beethoven, Moonlight Sonata. A part of it anyway with scenes from the great Coen Bros. film, "The Man Who Wasn't There."
Tex Williams, Smoke, Smoke, Smoke that Cigarette, 1947
Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails. "If the ladies was squirrels with high bushy tails/I'd fill up my shotgun with rock salt and nails." This is undoubtedly (!) the best version of this great Utah Phillips song.
Doc and Merle Watson's version
Atheists and Immaculate Conception
Atheists accept it too, except that they, like Richard Dawkins in a different but related connection, take it further: they hold that all are born free of Original Sin.
Is Everything in the Bible Literally True?
Of course not.
If everything in the Bible is literally true, then every sentence in oratio obliqua in the Bible is literally true. Now the sentence 'There is no God' occurs in the oblique context, "The fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'" (Psalm 14:1) So if everything in the Bible is literally true, then 'There is no God' is literally true and the Bible proves that it is not the word of God! Again, at Genesis 3:4 the Bible reports the Serpent saying to the woman (Eve), "You surely shall not die!" So if everything in the Bible is true, then this falsehood is true. Ergo, not everything in the Bible is literally true.
Someone who concedes the foregoing may go on to say, "OK, wise guy, everything in the Bible in oratio recta is literally true." But this can't be right either. For the Bible tells us in oratio recta that light was created before sources of light (sun, moon, stars) were created. The creation of light is reported at Genesis 1:3, but the creation of sources of light occurs later as reported at Genesis 1: 14-17. Obviously, light cannot exist before sources of light exist. So what the Bible reports on this head is false, if taken literally. Furthermore, if the sun does not come into existence until the fourth day, how can there be days before the fourth day? In one sense of 'day,' it is the period of time from the rising of the sun to its setting. In a second sense of 'day,' one that embraces the first, a day is the period of time from the rising of the sun to its next rising. In either of these senses there cannot be a day without a sun. So again, these passages cannot be taken literally.
But there is a deeper problem. The Genesis account implies that the creation of the heavens and the earth took time, six days to be exact. But the creation of the entire system of space-time-matter cannot be something that occurs in time. And so again Genesis cannot be taken literally, but figuratively as expressing the truth that, as St. Augustine puts it, "the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time." (City of God, XI, 6)
And then there is the business about God resting on the seventh day. What? He got fagged out after all the heavy lifting and had to take a rest? As Augustine remarks, that would be a childish way of reading Genesis 2:3. The passage must be taken figuratively: ". . . the sacred narrative states that God rested, meaning thereby that those rest who are in Him, and whom He makes to rest." (City of God, XI, 8)
What is to be taken literally and what figuratively? ". . . a method of determining whether a locution is literal or figurative must be established. And generally this method consists in this: that whatever appears in the divine Word that literally does not pertain to virtuous behavior or to the truth of faith you must take to be figurative." (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book Three, Chapter 10)
This method consigns a lot to the figurative. So it is not literally true that God caused the Red Sea to part, letting the Isrelites through, and then caused the waters to come together to drown the Pharaoh's men?
I'm just asking.
Was the Fall Necessary?
Karl White inquires,
Doesn't the classical doctrine of Theism as applied to Christianity require that the temptation in Eden and subsequent Fall were predestined and inescapable? I say this because if Jesus is a person of the Godhead then it must hold that his essence is immutable and above contingent change, particularly in response to human actions. So if Adam had never sinned, then Jesus's salvific role would have been redundant, and an 'unemployable' Jesus makes no sense whatsoever. Or am I missing something?
The reasoning seems to be as follows. (1) The man Jesus is a person of the Godhead; (2) the man Jesus is essentially the savior; (3) the persons of the Godhead are necessary beings; ergo, (4) the salvific role is necessarily instantiated; (5) the salvific role is instantiated iff the Fall occurs; ergo, (6) the Fall had to happen and was therefore "inescapable."
I deny (6) by denying (1).
As I understand the classical Christian narrative, the lapsus and subsequent ejection from paradise were contingent 'events,' ones that would not have occurred had it not been for Adam's disobedience. Adam sinned, and he sinned freely. There was no necessity that he sin and thus no necessity that the Fall occur. Of course, God foreknew what Adam would do; but divine foreknowledge is presumably compatible with human freedom in the libertarian 'could have done otherwise' sense.
That Adam possessed free will before the Fall follows, I think, from his having been created in the divine image. (So he had free will before eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.) The imago dei is of course to be taken in a spiritual, not a physical sense. It means that man, though an animal, is a spiritual animal unlike all the other animals. God, a free Spirit, created in Adam a little free spirit, a reflection of himself, although reflection is not quite the word.
So the Fall need not have occurred. But it did, and man fell out of right relation to God and into his present miserable predicament which includes of course the death sentence under which man now lives as punishment for his primordial act of rebellion. The current predicament is one from which man cannot save himself by his own efforts. So God, having mercy on man, decides to send a Redeemer and Savior.
But the enormity of the Original Offense against God is such that only a divine being can make it good and restore man to God's good graces. So God sends his own divine Son ("begotten not made") to suffer and die for our sins. This is God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the Word of God, the Logos, co-eternal with the Father, a purely spiritual necessary being like the Father. He enters the material world by being born of the virgin Mary. This is the Incarnation.
Now just as the Fall was contingent, so is the Incarnation. It need not have occurred. It is doubly contingent: contingent on Adam's free sin and God's free decision to save humanity.
So my answer to my reader is as follows. The salvific role need never have been instantiated. God need never have become man. Humanity might still be in he prelapsarian, paradisical state, living forever with subtle indestructible bodies unlike the gross bodies we are presently equipped with. The man Jesus is not a person of the Godhead. There was no necessity that the Fall occur.
The Last Chess Shop in New York City
Adapted from Teilhard de Chardin
We are not human beings on a spiritual journey; we are spiritual beings on a human journey.
Adapted from Pascal
There is light enough for those who wish to see, and darkness enough for those who don't.
Do Our Ideals Make Hypocrites of Us?
Perhaps only unrealizable ideals do. But such 'ideals' are not ideals in the first place. Only that which is realizable by us counts as an ideal for us. Or so say I. This is a quick and dirty formulation of my Generalized Ought-Implies-Can principle.
Take celibacy. Can any healthy man in the full flood of his manhood adhere to it? St. Augustine in his Confessions somewhere remarks (I paraphrase from memory) that no man can get a grip on his concupiscence without divine assistance.
So I note an ambiguity. 'Realizable by us' is ambiguous as between 'realizable by us without outside help' and 'realizable by us with or without outside help.'
Moral Failure and Moral Capacity
Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. So I had the thought: we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as much as we are capable of. So James 'Whitey' Bulger and I are equal in that we both sin, when we do, only to the limit of our capacity. It is just that his capacity is vastly greater than mine. I am a slacker when it comes to sin. I have never murdered anyone because he knew too much, dismembered and disposed of the body, enjoyed a fine dinner, and then slept like a baby. Bulger did this to a beautiful young woman, the girlfriend of one of his pals when girl and pal broke up. "You're going to a better place," said the pal to the girl right before Bulger did the deed.
A while back I re-viewed* portions of the 1967 cinematic adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Can I take credit for not being a thief and a murderer when I simply don't have it in me to do such things? Instead I do things so paltry it seems absurd to confess them, the confessing of which is possibly indicative of an ego-enhancing moral scrupulosity, a peccadillo if a sin at all.
On the other hand, the harder you strive for a high standard, the more of a moral wretch you perceive yourself to be.
The moral life is no easy life either morally or intellectually. That is to say: it is hard to live it and hard to think clearly and truly about it and what it entails.
________________
*The pedant in me would have you note the difference between review and re-view.
I want to thank the perspicacious Lukas Novak for helping me in my endless quest to know myself. Professor Novak comments:
4.4 Stump's Quantum Metaphysics
Like Dolezal, Eleonore Stump thinks of God as self-subsistent Being (esse). If God is absolutely simple, and not just simple in the uncontroversial sense of lacking material parts, then God must be self-subsistent Being. God is at once both Being and something that is. He has to be both. If he were Being (esse) but not a being (id quod est), he could not enter into causal relations. He could not do anything such as create the world, intervene in its operations, or interact with human persons. Such a God would be "religiously pernicious." (Stump 2016, 199) Indeed, if God were Being but not a being, then one could not sensibly maintain that God exists. For if Being is other than every being, then Being is not. (It is instructive to note that Martin Heidegger, the famous critic of onto-theology, who holds to the "ontological difference" of Being (Sein) from every being (Seiendes) ends up assimilating Being to Nothing (Nichts).) On the other hand, if God were a being among beings who merely has Being but is not (identically) Being, then he would not be absolutely transcendent, worthy of worship, or ineffable. Such a God would be "comfortingly familiar" but "discomfiting anthropomorphic." (Miller 1996, 3)
The problem, of course, is to explain how God can be both Being and something that is. This is unintelligible to the discursive intellect. Either Being is other than beings or it is not. If Being is other than beings, then Being cannot be. If Being just is beings taken collectively, then God is a being among beings and not the absolute reality. To the discursive intellect the notion of self-subsistent Being is contradictory. One response to the contradiction is simply to deny divine simplicity. That is a reasonable response, no doubt. But might it not also be reasonable to admit that there are things that human reason cannot understand, and that one of these things is the divine nature? "Human reason can see that human reason cannot comprehend the quid est of God." (Stump 2016, 205) As I read Stump, she, like Dolezal, makes a mysterian move, and she, like Dolezal (2011, 210, fn 55), invokes wave-particle duality. We cannot understand how light can be both a wave phenomenon and also particulate in nature, and yet it is both:
Stump, E., 2016, “Simplicity and Aquinas's Quantum Metaphysics” in Gerhard Krieger, ed. Die Metaphysik des Aristoteles im Mittelalter: Rezeption und Transformation, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 191–210.
Dolezal, J. E., 2011, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness, Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications.
Miller, B., 1996, A Most Unlikely God, Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press.
Now for my apologia.
Novak's characterization of me as both a rationalist and a fideist is basically accurate. And yes, the rationalist comes first with exacting requirements. Let me try to illustrate this with DDS. God is the absolute reality, a stupendously rich reality who transcends creatures not only in his properties, but also in his mode of property-possession, mode of existence, mode of necessity, and mode of uniqueness. God is uniquely unique. Such a being cannot be a being among beings. He is uniquely unique in that he alone is self-subsistent Being. Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.
One can reason cogently to this conclusion. Unfortunately, the conclusion is apparently self-contradictory. The verbal formula does not express a proposition that the discursive intellect can 'process' or 'compute.' It is unintelligible to said intellect. For the proposition the formula expresses appears to be self-contradictory. Stump agrees as do the opponents of DDS.
Now there are three ways to proceed.
1) We can conclude, as many distinguished theists do, that the apparent contradictions are real and that God is not absolutely simple, that DDS is a 'mistake.' See Hasker, William, 2016, “Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 699-725. For Hasker, DDS involves category mistakes, logical failures, and a dehumanization of God. (One mistake Hasker himself makes is to think that a defender of DDS can only tread the via negativa and must end up embracing radical agnosticism about the nature of God. Stump has some interesting things to say in rebuttal of this notion. See Stump 2016, 195-198.)
In short: God is not reasonably believed to be simple.
2) A second way is the mysterian way. The conjunction of God is esse and God is id quod est is an apparent contradiction. But it is not a real contradiction. Characteristic of the mysterian of my stripe is the further claim that the structure of the discursive intellect makes it impossible for us to see that the contradiction is merely apparent.
In short: God is reasonably believed to be simple despite the ineliminable apparent contradictions that this entails because, as Stump puts it, "Human reason can see that human reason cannot comprehend the quid est of God." (Stump 2016, 205) To put the point more generally, it is reasonable to confess the infirmity of human reason with respect to certain questions, and unreasonable to place an uncritical faith in its power and reach. This is especially unreasonable for those who accept the Fall of man and the noetic consequences of sin.
Besides, if God is not a being among beings, then one might expect the discursive intellect to entangle itself in contradictions when it tries to think the Absolute Reality. God, as Being itself, cannot be subsumed under any extant category of beings.
3) A third way is by maintaining that the apparent contradictions can be shown to be merely apparent by the resources of the discursive intellect. In short: God is reasonably believed to be simple, and all considerations to the contrary can be shown to rest on errors and failures to make certain distinction.
What is my argument against (3)? Simply that the attempts to defuse the contradictions fail, and not just by my lights. Almost all philosophers, theists and atheists alike, judge the notion of a simple God to be contradictory.
What is my argument against (1)? Essentially that those who take this line do not appreciate the radical transcendence of God. This point has been argued most forcefully by Barry Miller (1996). Theists who reject divine simplicity end up with an anthropomorphic view of God.
As for Novak's charge of misology or hatred of reason and argument, I plead innocent. One who appreciates the limits of reason, and indeed the infirmity of reason as we find it in ourselves here below, cannot be fairly accused of misology. Otherwise, Kant would be a misologist. I will turn the table on my friend by humbly suggesting that his doxastic security needs sometimes get the better of him causing him to affirm as objectively certain what is not at all objectively certain, but certain only to him. For example he thinks it is epistemically certain that there are substances. I disagree.
But I want to confess to one charge. Lukas writes, "It seems to me that Bill is always too eager to conclude that there is an impasse, an insoluble problem, a contradiction, etc." It may be that I am too zealous in my hunt for aporiai. But I am deeply impressed by the deep, protracted, and indeed interminable disagreement of philosophers through the ages over every substantive question. My working hypothesis for the metaphilosophy book I am trying to finish is that the core problems of philosophy are most of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but all of them insoluble by us. And then I try to figure out what philosophy can and should be if that is the case, whether it should end in mystical silence — that is where Aquinas ended up! — or fuel a Pyrrhonian re-insertion into the quotidian and a living of life adoxastos, or give way to religious faith, or something else.