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Edward Feser’s Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature may well be the best compendium of Thomist philosophical anthropology presently available. I strongly recommend it. I wish I could accept its central claims. This entry discusses one of several problems I have.
The problem I discuss in this installment is whether an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) hylomorphic analysis of human beings can make sense of our post-mortem existence as numerically distinct persons.
Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, views the soul as the form of the body. Anima forma corporis. Roughly, soul is to body as form is to matter. So to understand the soul-body relation, we must first understand the form-matter relation. Henry Veatch points out that "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are principles of being." (Henry B. Veatch, "To Gustav Bergmann: A Humble Petition and Advice" in M. S. Gram and E. D. Klemke, eds. The Ontological Turn: Studies in the Philosophy of Gustav Bergmann , University of Iowa Press, 1974, pp. 65-85, p. 80) 'Principles' in this scholastic usage are not propositions. They are ontological factors (as I would put it) invoked in the analysis of primary substances, but they are not themselves primary substances. They cannot exist on their own. Let me explain.
An ordinary 'sublunary' particular such as a man, a horse, a tree, a statue, a 'primary substance' in Aristotelian nomenclature, is a this-such. The thisness in a this-such is the determinable element while the suchness is the determination or conjunction of determinations that determines (delimits, characterizes, and informs) the determinable element. Veatch's point is that the determinable element cannot be an ontological atom, an entity more basic than the composite into which it enters; it is not an ontological building block out of which, together with other such 'blocks,' the this-such is constructed. The determinable element cannot be a basic existent; it must be a principle of a basic existent, where the basic existent is the this-such. And the same holds for the determining element, the form.
This implies that what is ontologically primary is the individual substance, the this-such, which entails that matter and form in an individual substance cannot exist apart from each other. They are in some sense 'abstractions' from the individual substance. They are nonetheless real ontological factors, as opposed to theoretical posits having a merely mental being; they cannot, however, exist on their own. They are not themselves substances. That is what I mean by my use of 'abstractions.'
But what exactly is a (primary) substance?
A substance is a thing to which it belongs to be not in a subject. The name 'thing' (res) takes its origin from the quiddity [quidditas = whatness], just as the name 'being' (ens) comes from 'to be' (esse). [Ens is the present participle of the infinitive esse.] In this way, the definition of substance is understood as that which has a quiddity to which it belongs not to be in another . (Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk 1, Ch 25)
The form and the matter of a material substance, then, are are not themselves substances because it does belong to them to be in another, namely, in the substance of which they are the form and the matter. Hylomorphic dualism is not a dualism of substances. Here we appear to have an important difference between Aquinate and Cartesian dualism. But the difference may be less than at first appears.
Now the form in a material this-such is not merely tied to matter in general, in the way that Bergmannian first-order universals are tied to Bergmannian bare particulars in general; the form is tied to the matter of the very this-such in question. This is because Aristotelian forms are not universals. And the same goes for the matter: the designated matter (materia signata) of Socrates is tied to the very form that is found in Socrates: that parcel of matter cannot exist apart from Socrates' substantial form. The two ontological factors (as I call them) are necessarily co-implicative. Neither can exist without the other. The two together constitute the individual substance, which is being in its most basic sense. For Aristotle, "being is said in many ways," to on legetai pollachos, and the most basic sense is being as substance (ousia). Aristotelian ontology is ousiology. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1028b4)
I said that hylomorphic dualism is not a dualism of substances, and thus that it appears that soul-body dualism in Aquinas is very different from soul-body dualism in Descartes. But the picture is complicated by the Thomist doctrine that the souls of rational animals, unlike the souls of non-rational animals, are subsistent. What this means is that human souls are capable of existing in a disembodied state. This capacity is exercised at death when we humans shed our bodies. We continue to exist as disembodied souls and thus as matter-less forms. But now a tension, if not a contradiction, comes into view. It is not clear how all of the following propositions can be true:
a) The form of a material substance is not itself a substance, but a principle that cannot exist on its own, but only in tandem with a material factor together with which it constitutes a substance. A form-matter composite is not constructed from pre-existing 'building blocks.'
b) The souls of humans are not substances along Platonic-Augustinian-Cartesian lines, but forms of the bodies whose souls they are.
c) The souls of humans are subsistent forms that can exist on their own after the deaths of the bodies whose forms they are.
Can someone explain how all three propositions could be true? On the face of it, the first two, taken together, entail the negation of the third. What we have here is an inconsistent triad. Although collectively inconsistent, the members of the triad are individually plausible. Why plausible?
(a) is plausible given that (i) there is such a thing as ontological analysis and (ii) its style is hylomorphic. The authority of philosophus, The Philosopher, as Aquinas calls him, stands behind (a). The authority of Aristotle may also be invoked in support of (b) if the soul (anima, psyche) of a living thing is its life-principle. (The soul animates the material body of an animal, making it alive.) As for (c), it is a Christian commitment of the doctor angelicus that he cannot abandon.
The three propositions are collectively inconsistent but individually plausible. We've got ourselves a problem. Something has to give.
It has been said that Aquinas is a Platonist in heaven, but an Aristotelian on earth. These super- and sub-lunary tendencies comport none too well. One solution is to drop the Aristotelianism with its combined commitment to (i) hylomorphic ontological analysis and (ii) soul-as-life-principle and go the Platonic-Augustinian-Cartesian substance-dualist route. Richard Swinburne exemplifies this approach in Are We Bodies or Souls? (Oxford UP, 2019) A second solution would be to drop the Christian commitment to the immortality of the soul and embrace a form of materialism about the human person. A third solution would be to somehow uphold Christianity while accepting materialism about the human person. (See my Could a Classical Theist be a Physicalist?)
What other solutions are there?
August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy. She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher in her own right, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.
In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.
Read the rest at Substack.
The piece concludes:
So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, and with it the exclusively internal validation of all knowledge claims, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason or subjectively validated but which are provided by faith in revelation, a revelation that must simply be accepted in humility and obedience. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and accept that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.
Addenda (8/9/2025)
Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, Chapter 1, C. J. O'Neill, tr., University of Notre Dame Press, 1975, p. 35, para. 2, emphasis added:
. . . since causes are more noble than their effects, the very first caused things are lower than the First Cause, which is God, and still stand out above their effects. And so it goes until one arrives at the lowest of things. And because in the highest summit of things, God, one finds the most perfect unity — and because everything, the more it is one, is the more powerful and the more worthy – – it follows that the farther one gets from the first principle, the greater is the diversity and variation one one finds in things. The process of emanation from God, must, then be unified in the principle itself, but multiplied in the lower things which are its terms.
Key ideas in and suggested by the above passage:
1) Unity admits of degrees. Some unities are 'tighter' than others.
2) The supreme unity is the divine unity. It is the 'tightest' of all, so tight in fact, that God is devoid of all complexity or internal diversity and is therefore ontologically simple, as I explain in my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on divine simplicity. God is pure unity, Unity itself in its highest instance.
3) At the other extreme is pure diversity, a mere collection of items that cannot even be called a collection in that that there is nothing real that collects them, nothing real that they share and that makes them that collection as opposed to some other actual or possible collection. Such a collection is so 'loose' that it does not deserve to be called a collection. We could aptly refer to it as a mere manifold, a mere many-ness. Think of the membership or extension of a mereological sum of utterly disparate items. That would be a pure diversity or mere many-ness.
4) Perfection comes in degrees, and so the divine unity is maximally perfect. A mere many-ness is maximally imperfect.
5) The notion of perfection in Aquinas and thinkers of his stripe blends the ontic with the axiological/normative. To be is to be good. A being is good in the measure that it is, and in the measure that it is, it is good. That, I take it, is the meaning of ens et bonum convertuntur. The terms 'a being' and 'a good thing' are convertible terms, which is to say, in Carnapian material mode: necessarily, for any x, x is or exists if and only if x is good, valuable, pursuit-worthy. (That I reference Carnap in this context should have the old positivist rolling in his grave.)
'In the measure that' conveys the idea that there are degrees of being, an idea anathema to most contemporary analytic philosophers. Divine unity is maximally perfect unity, and thus the unsurpassably best unity and the unsurpassably most real unity. God is really real, ontos on; at the other extreme, non-being, me on, or an approach thereto as in the limit concept (Grenzbegriff), material prima.
6) God's unity is the unity of the transcendent One which does not and cannot form with the Many a super-manifold in which God is just one member among the others. The One and the Many do not, taken together, form a many of which the One is just one more item among the others. Why not? Well, the One is other than or different from the Many both in its nature and in its way of existing. God, for Aquinas, is One to the Many of creatures, but is neither a creature, nor a member of a super-manifold of beings each of which is or exists in the same sense and the same way.
7) Aquinas says above that the more unified a thing, the more powerful it is. So God, the maximally unified being — so unified that this being (ens) is (identically) Being or To Be (esse) itself — is the maximally powerful being.
And so, in conclusion, I say to Canadian pretty boy Justin Trudeau, that diversity is precisely not "our strength," and that you and like-minded State-side fools are to be condemned for your willful self-enstupidation.
My point stands whether or not one accepts Thomism.
A Substack meditation for Christmas Day drawing upon Thomas Aquinas, Juan de la Cruz, and Josef Pieper.
Aristotle, and following him Aquinas, thinks of the soul as the life-principle of a living body, that which animates the body's matter. A natural conception, but a dubious one, as it seems to me, one not up to the task of accounting for conscience. We humans are not just alive, we are also conscious both in the mode of sentience and in the object-directed mode as when we are conscious of this or that. The philosophers' term of art for this object-directed type of consciousness is intentionality. A special case of object-directed consciousness is knowledge of things and states of affairs. Beyond this factual knowledge there is presumably also moral knowledge, knowledge of right and wrong. Whether or not conscience is indeed a source of knowledge, it is a faculty of moral discernment and evaluation. An exercise of this faculty results in an occurrent state of consciousness which is a state of conscience.
So life, consciousness, and conscience are all different. Panpsychism aside, something can be alive without being sentient, a unicellular organism, for example, and of course anything sentient is conscious. Now we are not merely sentient, but also conscious of this and that. Beyond this, we command a faculty of moral discernment and evaluation which is what conscience is.
It is clear that to be alive is not the same as to have a conscience. Plants and non-rational animals are living things but have no conscience. My cats, for example, are alive, and moreover they are conscious, but they cannot tell right from wrong. If they think at all, they do not think in moral categories. They do not evaluate their actions or omissions morally. They lack the capacity to do so. Humans have the capacity for moral discernment and evaluation, if not at birth, then later on, whether or not they exercise it, and whether or not their consciences have been well formed.
Now the soul is presumably the seat of conscience: it is in virtue of my having a soul that I have a conscience, not in virtue of my having a body.* But then it would seem to follow that the soul of a man cannot be a mere life-principle. For it is not in virtue of my being alive that I have a conscience. The argument, then, is this:
1) Being alive and having a conscience are different properties. Therefore:
2) It is not in virtue of my being alive that I have a conscience.
3) It is in virtue of my having a soul that I have a conscience. Therefore:
4) The soul cannot be merely the life-principle of my body.
Possible Objection
At best, what you have shown is that the soul cannot be merely a life-principle. But what is to stop this principle from doing other jobs as well? However it is with non-rational animals, in a human being, the soul is not merely (i) a life-principle but also (ii) the locus of conscience, (iii) the subject of intentional states, and (iv) the free agent of one's actions.
In a later entry I will respond to the objection.
__________
*If there is post-mortem judgment, it will be the soul that will be is judged, and judged morally, not the body, which implies that the soul is the seat of conscience and free agency. "What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world but suffer the loss of his immortal body soul?"
Edward Feser's Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature may well be the best compendium of Thomist philosophical anthropology presently available. I strongly recommend it. I wish I could accept its central claims. This entry discusses one of several problems I have.
The problem I want to discuss in this installment is whether an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) hylomorphic analysis of human beings can make sense of our post-mortem existence as distinct persons. Thomas Aquinas maintains that after death the souls of rational animals, but not the souls of non-rational animals, continue to exist as disembodied forms, numerically distinct among themselves. What the following argument seems to show is that the survival of distinct souls is impossible on hylomorphic dualism. I will not be questioning whether in fact we survive our bodily deaths. In question is whether A-T style hylomorphism renders it intelligible.
1) A primary substance (a substance hereafter) is a concrete individual. A man, a horse, a tree, a statue are stock examples of substances. A substance in this technical sense is not to be confused with stuff or material. Substances are individuals in that they have properties but are not themselves properties. Properties are predicable; substances are not. Substances are concrete in that they are causally active/passive.
2) Material substances are analyzable into matter (ὕλη, hyle/hule) and form (μορφή, morphe). A-T ontological analysis is thus hylomorphic analysis.
3) The soul of an animal, whether rational or non-rational, is not a complete substance in its own right, but the (substantial) form of its body. Anima forma corporis. Hylomorphic dualism is not a Cartesian dualism of complete substances, but a dualism of ontological constituents of one and the same complete substance.
4) Substances of the same kind have the same substantial form, where the substantial form of a substance is the conjunction of the essential (as opposed to accidental) properties that make the substance the kind of substance it is. Unlike Platonic Forms, Aristotelian forms cannot exist except as instantiated in matter.
5) There are many numerically different human beings (human substances). I assume that the reader is familiar with the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity and difference. (Comments are enabled if you have questions.)
6) Since these substances of the human kind have the same form, it is not their form that makes them numerically different. (4, 5) What then grounds their numerical difference?
7) It is the matter of their respective bodies that makes numerically different human beings numerically different. (2,6) Matter, then, is the principium individuationis, the principle of individuation, the ontological ground of the numerical difference of material substances, including human beings. It is matter that makes Socrates and Plato numerically different substances, not the substantial form they share.
8) A human being is a person.
9) A person is an individual substance of a rational nature. (Thomas, following Boethius)
10) There are many numerically different persons. (5, 8)
11) Only embodied, 'enmattered,' persons are numerically different from one another: embodiment is thus a necessary condition of difference of persons. (7) It is matter that makes a person the particular person that he is. The matter in question is not materia prima, but what Thomas refers to as materia signata (designated matter, signate matter) in his De Ente et Essentia. As Feser puts it in his Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (2014, p. 199): "The matter that is the principle of individuation is, in Aquinas's view, matter as made distinct by quantity or dimension — designated matter . . . .
12) At death a person suffers the loss of embodiment, which implies that after death, a person survives, if at all, as a disembodied form (until the general resurrection, at which time the disembodied soul/form acquires a resurrection body).
Therefore
13) After death a human person ceases to exist as the particular person that it is. But that is to say that the particular person, Socrates say, ceases to exist, full stop. What survives is at best a form which is common to all persons. That form, however, cannot be me or you. Thus the particularity, individuality, haecceity, ipseity of persons, which is essential to persons, is lost. (11, 12)
Aquinas says No but his argument is inconclusive.
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Reader Zacary writes,
I am just a layman who likes studying Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy, and recently I haven’t been studying the issue of animals in the afterlife. I stumbled across your post from many, many years ago (all the way back in 2009!) that was about the unity of consciousness argument and the subsistence of animal souls.
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UPDATE (5/8/2024). This from Kai Frederick Lorentzen:
You write:
" . . . It does annoy me, however, that Kainz doesn't supply any references. For example, we read:
Hegel was critical of Catholicism at times, in his writings and lectures. For example, he once made a scurrilous remark about the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist . . . .
Very interesting, but what exactly does he say and where does he say it? Inquiring minds want to know . . . . "
That's from § 552 of the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften where it says in context of the thought that religion is for the Selbstbewußtsein [self-consciousness] the basis of ethics and the state:
Es kann aber das Verhältnis der Unfreiheit [of the Selbstbewußtsein on the one and the content of truth on the other side – kfl] der Form nach stattfinden, obgleich der an sich seiende Inhalt der Religion der absolute Geist ist. Dieser große Unterschied, um das Bestimmtere anzugeben, findet sich innerhalb der christlichen Religion selbst, in welcher nicht das Naturelement den Inhalt des Gottes macht, noch auch ein solches in den Gehalt desselben als Moment eintritt, sondern Gott, der im Geist und in der Wahrheit gewußt wird, der Inhalt ist. Und doch wird in der katholischen Religion dieser Geist in der Wirklichkeit dem selbstbewußten Geist starr gegenübergestellt. Zunächst wird in der Hostie Gott als äußerliches Ding der religiösen Anbetung präsentiert (wogegen in der lutherischen Kirche die Hostie als solche erst und nur allein im Genusse, d.i. in der Vernichtung der Äußerlichkeit derselben, und im Glauben, d.i. in dem zugleich freien, seiner selbst gewissen Geiste, konsekriert und zum gegenwärtigen Gotte erhoben wird). Aus jenem ersten und höchsten Verhältnis der Äußerlichkeit fließen alle die anderen äußerlichen, damit unfreien, ungeistigen und abergläubischen Verhältnisse; namentlich ein Laienstand, der das Wissen der göttlichen Wahrheit wie die Direktion des Willens und Gewissens von außen her und von einem anderen Stande empfängt, welcher selbst zum Besitze jenes Wissens nicht auf geistige Weise allein gelangt, sondern wesentlich dafür einer äußerlichen Konsekration bedarf. Weiteres, die teils nur für sich die Lippen bewegende, teils darin geistlose Weise des Betens, daß das Subjekt auf die direkte Richtung zu Gott Verzicht leistet und andere um das Beten bittet, – die Richtung der Andacht an wundertätige Bilder, ja selbst an Knochen, und die Erwartung von Wundern durch sie, – überhaupt, die Gerechtigkeit durch äußerliche Werke, ein Verdienst, das durch die Handlungen soll erworben, ja sogar auf andere übertragen werden können, usf., – alles dieses bindet den Geist unter ein Außersichsein, wodurch sein Begriff im Innersten verkannt und verkehrt und Recht und Gerechtigkeit, Sittlichkeit und Gewissen, Zurechnungsfähigkeit und Pflicht in ihrer Wurzel verdorben sind.
(G.W.F. Hegel, Werke 10, Frankfurt a.M. 1986, pp. 356-357)
Here it is in English:
As the inseparability of the two sides has been indicated, it may be worth while to note the separation as it appears on the side of religion. It is primarily a point of form: the attitude which self-consciousness takes to the body of truth. So long as this body of truth is the very substance or indwelling spirit of self-consciousness in its actuality, then self-consciousness in this content has the certainty of itself and is free. But if this present self-consciousness is lacking, then there may be created, in point of form, a condition of spiritual slavery, even though the implicit content of religion is absolute spirit. This great difference (to cite a specific case) comes out within the Christian religion itself, even though here it is not the nature-element in which the idea of God is embodied, and though nothing of the sort even enters as a factor into its central dogma and sole theme of a God who is known in spirit and in truth. And yet in Catholicism this spirit of all truth is in actuality set in rigid opposition to the self-conscious spirit. And, first of all, God is in the ‘host’ presented to religious adoration as an external thing. (In the Lutheran Church, on the contrary, the host as such is not at first consecrated, but in the moment of enjoyment, i.e. in the annihilation of its externality. and in the act of faith, i.e. in the free self-certain spirit: only then is it consecrated and exalted to be present God.) From that first and supreme status of externalization flows every other phase of externality – of bondage, non-spirituality, and superstition. It leads to a laity, receiving its knowledge of divine truth, as well as the direction of its will and conscience from without and from another order – which order again does not get possession of that knowledge in a spiritual way only, but to that end essentially requires an external consecration. It leads to the non-spiritual style of praying – partly as mere moving of the lips, partly in the way that the subject foregoes his right of directly addressing God, and prays others to pray – addressing his devotion to miracle- working images, even to bones, and expecting miracles from them. It leads, generally, to justification by external works, a merit which is supposed to be gained by acts, and even to be capable of being transferred to others. All this binds the spirit under an externalism by which the very meaning of spirit is perverted and misconceived at its source, and law and justice, morality and conscience, responsibility and duty are corrupted at their root.
BV: I see no reason to think that Kainz is to referring to the above passage from Hegel's Encyclopedia. In a later article I just now found, Corpus Christi and Reality, Kainz writes,
My reference was to one of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion, in which he criticized the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, causing a Catholic student to report him to the authorities. Hegel had attempted what we might call a sick joke: he asked whether, if a mouse had come across a consecrated Host and eaten it, Catholics might be obliged to act worshipfully to the mouse, and so forth.
But again Kainz gives no reference! So I consulted Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827), but found no reference to any host-eating mouse in the passage in which Hegel refers to communion, which he calls Genuss which means enjoyment but also partaking of as in the eating or drinking of something. (In some contexts, geniesßar has the connotation, edible.)
Back to Lorentzen:
Heavy stuff, no? Well, with a little stretch you could say that Hegel is more Lutheran here than Martin Luther himself. Luther's theological approach, as I recently learned from Volker Leppin's brilliant study Die fremde Reformation: Luthers mystische Wurzeln (München 2016: C.H. Beck), was rooted in medieval mysticism in the line of Johannes Tauler and Meister Eckhart, whose idea to give birth to an inner divine child was strongly appreciated by Luther. Regarding extensive philosophical framing of the religious practice he became more and more critical. Here Luther's negative view of the traditional doctrine of the Eucharist finds its place: It's the Scholastics with their detailed Aristotelian understanding of the Eucharist that Luther has a problem with. The flesh and the blood of Christ is absolutely real, but no philosopher can prove how! Instead, the affection of the baptized members of the community validates the ritual. Same problem in the other direction with the merely symbolic understanding of bread and wine, as we find it expressed by Zwingli and his successors like Calvin. Here Luther suspects Neo-Platonist hubris against God.
Lorentzen's take strikes me as basically correct. Here is a little under four minutes of Volker Leppin.
In his 1827 lectures on the philosophy of religion Hegel mentions three views about the host or communion wafer:
According to the first, the host — this external, sensible thing — becomes by consecration the present God, God as a thing in the manner of an empirical 'thing.' The second view is the Lutheran one . . . here there is no transubstantiation . . . the presence of God is utterly a spiritual presence — the consecration takes place in the faith of the subject. The third view is that the present God exists only in representation, in memory, and to this extent he does not have this immediate subjective presence. (Hodgson one-volume edition, U. of Cal Press, 1988, 480-481.)
Alles klar?
This may help: Transubstantion, Consubstantiation, or Something Else?
Also of interest: Must Catholics Hate Hegel?
Herr Lorentzen signs off:
With best wishes!
Ex toto cordeKai (who likes your recent Sunday meditation - Hyperkinetic and Hyperconnected - a lot!)
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The bliss of the bios theoretikos as described by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics is the model for the Beatific Vision as described by Thomas Aquinas. The ultimate salvific state is a contemplative state. Monasticism is an institutional expression of this root commitment. The monk's life is decidedly biased toward the intellectual and the theoretical. As opposed to what? As opposed to a life in which praxis is paramount.
Question: Is the life of the monk the highest life for the Christian? Is the monastic life the highest form of imitatio Christi? Christ was no anchorite. He did not flee from the agitation of the cities and from the people except for relatively short periods. He associated with the canaille, with publicans and prostitutes. His ministry was among them where he risked everything and in human terms lost everything.
Despite their drastic differences, Socrates too moved among the people and met a predictable fate. He lived in no ivory tower where he could think and write in peace and in leisurely retirement. He wrote nothing. His academy was the agora. His was the dialectic of the streets, not that of the learned essay. A battle-hardened soldier, he knew how to translate military valor into civil courage. Among his interlocutors were powerful and vicious men. He took risks, offended them, and was executed by the State. But back to Christ. Let us hear St. Neilos the Ascetic. This is from his Ascetic Discourse in the Philokalia, that marvellous compendium of Patristic teachings.
For philosophy is a state of moral integrity combined with a doctrine of true knowledge concerning reality. Both Jews and Greeks fell short of this, for they rejected the Wisdom that is from heaven and tried to philosophize without Christ, who alone has revealed the true philosophy in both His life and His teaching. For by the purity of His life He was the first to establish the way of true philosophy. He always held His soul above the passions of the body, and in the end, when His death was required by His design for man's salvation. He laid down even His soul. In this He taught us that the true philosopher must renounce all life's pleasures, mastering pains and passions, and paying scant attention to the body: he must not overvalue even his soul, but must readily lay it down when holiness demands.
The apostles received this way of life from Christ and made it their own, renouncing the world in response to His call, disregarding fatherland, relatives and possessions. At once they adopted a harsh and strenuous way of life, facing every kind of adversity, afflicted, tormented, harassed, naked, lacking even necessities; and finally they met death boldly, imitating their Teacher faithfully in all things. Thus through their actions they left behind a true image of the highest way of life.
Although all Christians should have modeled their own life on this image, most of them either lacked the will to do so or else made only feeble efforts. There were, however, a few who had the Strength to rise above the turmoil of the world and to flee from the agitation of cities. Having escaped from this turbulence, they embraced the monastic life and reproduced in themselves the pattern of apostolic virtue. They preferred voluntary poverty to possessions, because this freed them from distraction, and so as to control the passions, they satisfied their bodily needs with food that was readily available and simply prepared, rather than with richly dressed dishes. Soft and unnecessary clothing they rejected as an invention of human luxury, and they wore only such plain garments as are required for the body. It seemed to them a betrayal of philosophy to turn their attention from heavenly things to earthly concerns more appropriate to animals. They ignored the world, being above human passions.
I draw your attention to the third paragraph. Christ did not flee from the agitation of the cities. He did not ignore the world and its turmoil. He was not above human passions. The God-Man was fully human. He did not die like a Stoic sage. He experienced to the full the brutality of the brutal Romans, dying like a man in utter agony of body and in despair of spirit, abandoned.
So the question is: Is the monastic way a way to evade true imitation of Christ? I myself am of the monkish disposition and not at all inclined to go into the agora like Socrates or into the temple with its moneychangers like Christ. Luther I find repellent; the anti-rational but also anti-mystical Kierkegaard fascinating but wrongheaded; the Roman church wishy-washy despite its deep depths of mysticism; it is the East and the mystical depths of Orthodox Christianity that attract me. Athens is closer to Constantinople than to Rome.
And so I ask my question in the spirit of Socratic self-examination. I do not have an answer. The unexamined life is not worth living, and the highest examination is the examination of one's own life.
Related:
Kierkegaard: "To Hell with the Pope!" and Monkishness. The Highest Life
In the immediately preceding theological thread, Dr. Caiati reminded me of Fr. Thomas Joseph White's The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology (CUA Press, 2017). So I cracked open my copy and found some notes from October 2018, one batch of which I will now turn into a weblog entry.
'Hypostatic Union' ". . . refers to the divine person of the Word uniting a human nature to himself in his own person." (113, emphasis in original) This is the familiar one person (hypostasis)- two natures doctrine. The one person is the Word (Logos), the second person of the Trinity. The union is called hypostatic because it is the union of two natures in one hypostasis. The two natures are divine nature and human nature. Both natures are to be understood as individualized, not as universals. They are natures of one and the same self-subsistent individual, the Word. There is no "confusion of natures," which is to say that the two natures are really distinct, distinct in reality and not merely in our thought, though not separable in reality. These two natures are nonetheless essentially together: neither can exist without the other. It is not as if there is "merely an accidental association of two beings, the man Jesus and the Word of God." (113) There is only one being, the Word, which possesses two distinct but really inseparable natures. Fr. White then concludes:
Consequently, Jesus's concrete body and soul are the subsistent body and soul of the person of the Word. The person of Jesus simply is the person of the Son [the Word or Logos or second person of the Trinity] existing as man.
I have two questions.
First, is human nature conjoined to the Word at every time? It would have to be given that the two natures are essentially, and not merely accidentally, united. The Word is essentially divine. So if the two natures are essentially united, then the Word is essentially human: it possesses essentially a human nature. That implies that at no time is the Word not in possession of a human nature. Now the Incarnation is the acquisition by the Word of a human nature. The Incarnation is an event — call it the Christ event — that occurred at a particular time in a particular place. Before that time, the Incarnation was at best prophesied. A contradiction would seem to ensue:
1) The Word possesses human nature at every time;
2) It is not the case that the Word possesses human nature at every time.
How do we negotiate this aporetic dyad? More simply, how remove the contradiction? Can it be removed without adding 'epicycles' to the theory that raise problems of their own?
My second question is a modal counterpart of the first. The Incarnation is a contingent event. There was no necessity that it occur. Had Adam not sinned there would have been no need for a Redeemer. Man would have continued blissfully in his paradisiacal, prelapsarian state. The soteriological significance of the Incarnation is that only by the Son's becoming man and suffering the ultimate penalty could man be restored to fellowship with God. For the offense against God was so great that only God could expiate it. But if the divine and human natures are united essentially in one person, the Word, then, given that the Word is a necessary being, it follows that the Incarnation is a necessary event. A second contradiction seems to ensue:
3) The Word possesses human nature in every possible world;
4) It is not the case that the Word possesses human nature in every possible world.
(4) is true because there are worlds in which there is no Fall and thus no need for Incarnation. For those who don't understand Leibnizian 'possible worlds' jargon, the contradiction amounts to saying both that the Word is and is not human necessarily. Bear in mind that if x has a property essentially, and x is a necessary being, then x has the property necessarily.
There is a third question the 'exfoliation' (unwrapping) of which I will save for later, namely, if the Word has a human soul in virtue of having human nature, how does that human soul integrate with the conscious and self-conscious life of the second divine person? A person is not merely an hypostasis or substratum, but one that is conscious and self-conscious. A person is not an object but a subject or a subject-object. A number of further difficult questions spin off from here. Time to hit 'post.'
Vito Caiati raises an interesting theological question.
This week, I again read your post of 08/24/2019 On the Specificity of Traditional Catholic Claims, in which you question the certainty assumed by the Catholic doctrine of the [moral] immutability of the soul, and hence its fate, after death. My interest in your thoughts on this matter arises from my pondering the question of the doctrine of immutability in relation to those of salvation, either immediate (Heaven) or eventual (Purgatory) or damnation (Hell) as these concern the loved ones of departed persons. Specifically, I am thinking, for example, of the deep love of a mother for her children. If it is the case that the soul of a loving mother finds, through the meritorious life that she has led, immediate salvation in Heaven after death, but that of her child, lacking in such virtue, ends up in Hell, is it rational to belief that the former soul is happy or at peace? In following up this question, I turned to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has an entry on “Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought,” which, assuming the inclusive nature of love, “especially in the form of wishing the best for another” (Section 4.1), poses the question in the following way: “How could anyone remain happy knowing that a genuine loved one, however corrupted, is destined to be miserable forever”? (Section 5.2) More generally, how is it just to allow souls to become embodied and to form loving relationships if such an end awaits so many of those who are loved?
One answer could be along the lines of what I say in Soteriology for Brutes? which ends as follows:
[Edward] Feser makes a good point, however, when he says that the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, and I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.
One might speculate that the saintly loving mother who goes straight to heaven upon death will be so swept up in the ecstasy of the Beatific Vision as to give her children no thought at all. All sublunary concerns will fall away in the presence of the infinite reality of the divine life. She will no more think of her children than I will think of my cats after I have served my 'time' in purgatory. Ed Feser, however, would not and could not give this answer given his strict Thomism. Thomas famously states that “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them.” So we get the curious and indeed horrifying result that the saintly loving mother who loved her child in time will experience schadenfreude at the child's unending torment in eternity.
Part of the problem here is that we quite naturally tend to waffle between two very different conceptions of the afterlife. I call them Life 2.0 and Beatific Vision. I explore the difference in considerable detail in Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?
Thomas himself may be waffling. If the souls of the blessed in heaven are wholly absorbed in the infinitely rich and endlessly variegated, and thus not possibly boring, absolute life of the Supreme Reality, how could they continue to be distracted by finite concerns? How could they continue to care about other finite persons, whether in heaven, hell, purgatory, or on earth? How could the blessed take satisfaction in the torment of the damned? But insofar as we think of survival of bodily death as personal survival, as opposed to an absorption into the Absolute that effaces personal individuality, we will tend to think of finite persons as preserved in their individuality together with their sublunary interests.
This sort of attitude which disallows a clean break with the finite and an ascent to the Absolute is reflected in the popular song from 1941, I Remember You. The version I remember from my boyhood is Frank Ifield's 1962 effort which features the lines (written by Johnny Mercer):
When my life is through
And the angels ask me
To recall the thrill of them all
Then I will tell them I remember you.
The singer goes on to remember two distant bells and stars that fell like the rain from the blue. So the singer in heaven, presumably in the divine presence, is thinking about bells, shooting stars, and a woman! Now a woman for a (heterosexual) man is the highest finite object, but still a rather paltry bit of finitude as compared to to the stupendous transcendent reality that is the Godhead. The things of finitude and flesh are next-to-nothing in comparison, and one's ultimate felicity could not possibly be thought of as attainable by way of loving and being loved by a mere mortal. One wants to love and be loved by eternal Love Itself. This is the sort of attitude one finds in Aquinas and such first-rate expositors as Pierre Rousselot and Etienne Gilson. I quote Gilson in World + God = God? See also Again on 'God + World = God.'
The sort of heavenly retrospective on one's earthly tenure found in the sentimental old tune from the '40s can also be found in serious religious writers such as Kierkegaard and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. See the latter's Halakhic Man, tr. Lawrence Kaplan, Jewish Publication Society, 1983, pp. 38-39:
When the righteous sit in the world to come, where there is neither eating nor drinking, with their crowns on their heads, and enjoy the radiance of the divine presence . . . they occupy themselves with the study of the Torah, which treats of bodily life in our lowly world.
[. . .]
The creator of worlds, revealed and unrevealed, the heavenly hosts, the souls of the righteous all grapple with halakhic problems that are bound up with the empirical world — the red cow, the heifer whose neck is to be broken, leprosy, and similar issues. They do not concern themselves with transcendence, with questions that are above space and time, but with the problems of earthly life in all its details and particulars.
[. . .]
The universal homo religiosus proclaims: The lower yearns for the higher. But halakhic man, with his unique mode of understanding, declares: The higher longs and pines for the lower.
Thus the waffling may be inevitable, even for the doctor angelicus, given the ineluctably discursive nature of finite mind. We think in opposites and cannot do otherwise. So we think: either the individual soul is extinguished in the Godhead thereby losing its individuality — which would make hash of the notion of personal immortality — or individuality is retained together with finite concerns for other persons and things from one's sublunary tenure.
Back to Vito's question. He asked how it could be rational to view the saintly mother in heaven as happy or at peace given the mother's loving concern for her child who she knows is in hell. The problem is exacerbated by the Aquinate asseveration, “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them.” My suggested answer was that the blessed, wholly absorbed by the visio beata, will have lost all memory of the finite, including the persons they loved in the sublunary. The trouble with this suggestion is that it does not comport well with the orthodox view that individual souls are never wholly absorbed into the Godhead, but retain their individuality. But if so, the deepest sublunary loves could nor be wholly effaced or forgotten in the way the old man forgets the toys he fooled with as a young boy. So I have no good answer for Vito.
One again we see that the philosopher's forte is not the answering of questions but the questioning of answers.
Burnout or visio mystica? Substack latest.
I composed this entry with Lukáš Novák in mind. I hope to secure his comments.
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Marco Santambrogio, "Meinongian Theories of Generality," Nous, December 1990, p. 662:
. . . I take existence to mean just this: an entity, i, exists iff there is a determinate answer to every question concerning it or in other words, for every F(x) either F[x/i] or ~F[x/i] holds. The Tertium Non Datur is the hallmark of existence or reality. This is entirely in the Meinong-Twardowski tradition.
In other words, existence is complete determinateness or completeness: Necessarily, for any x, x exists if and only if x is complete, i.e., satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle (tertium non datur). Now I have long maintained that whatever exists is complete, but I have never been tempted by the thesis that whatever is complete exists. My intuitions on this matter are Thomistic rather than Scotistic.
According to Etienne Gilson, Duns Scotus held that actually to exist in reality = to be complete:
. . . actual existence appears only when an essence is, so to speak, bedecked with the complete series of its determinations. (Being and Some Philosophers, Pontifical Institute, Toronto, 1952, 2nd ed. , 89)
Actual existence thus appears as inseparable from the essence when essence is taken in its complete determination. (88)
An actually existing essence is, meaning by "is" that it exists, as soon as it is fully constituted by its genus, its species, its own individual "thisness," as well as all the accidents which go to make up its being. (86)
It follows that an actually existing thing is not the result of the superaddition of existence to a complete essence, but is just an essence in its completeness. This implies that there is no distinctio realis. For if an actually existing individual essence exists in virtue of being completely determinate, then there cannot be any distinction in reality between that complete essence and its existence. If Socrates is a wholly determinate essence, then, on the Scotist view as glossed by Gilson, there is no need for anything more to make him exist: nothing needs to be added ab extra.
What we have here are two very different theories of existence. For the Scotist, existence belong in the order of essence as the maximal determinateness of essence. For the Thomist, existence does not belong in the order of essence but is situated 'perpendicular' to it. Is there any way rationally to decide between these views? Could there be complete nonexistent objects? If yes, then the Scotist view would stand refuted. If no, then the Thomist view would stand refuted.
Well, why can't there be complete nonexistent objects? Imagine the God of Leibniz, before the creation, contemplating an infinity of possible worlds, each of them determinate down to the last detail. None of them exists or is actual. But each of them is complete. One of them God calls 'Charley.' God says, Fiat Charley! And Charley exists. It is exactly the same world which 'before' was merely possible, but 'now' is actual. The difference is not one of essence, but one of existence.
So, while existence entails completeness, why should completeness entail existence?
(Other questions arise at this point which are off-topic, for example, why Charley over Barley? Why Charley over any other world? Must God have a reason? And what would it be? Would it be because Charley is the best of all possible worlds? Is there such a things as the BEST of all possible worlds? Why some world rather than no world? And so on. But these questions are off-topic. Focus like a laser on the question about the 'nature' of existence.)
The theological imagery is supposed to help you understand the ontological point. But we needn't bring God into it. It would also not be to the point to protest that God creates out of nothing, not out of mere possibles. My concern here is with the nature of existence, not with the nature of God or of divine creation. All I need for my argument is the possibility that there be maximally determinate individual essences that do not exist. If there are, then existence is not completeness. But one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. Can either side refute the other?
In the end the dispute may come down to a profound and irresolvable difference in intuitions.
What say you, Dr. Novak?
