Aquinas and Thomism – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

This weekend I had the pleasure of a visit from Dale Tuggy, noted philosopher of religion. We discussed a number of topics at table and on trail including imago dei, the nature of forgiveness, the role of Platonism in Christianity, and death and afterlife. His position on the latter topic I would characterize as 'Life 2.0,' the essentials of which I set forth below in a slightly revised version of an entry from 2013. I see Dale as a sort of spiritual materialist whereas he probably sees me as a kind of gnostic or Platonizer whose conception of the afterlife is so hopelessly abstract as to be devoid of any human meaning. I recently wrote in Soteriology for Brutes?

. . . 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, but 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.

On our long ramble over desert trails on Saturday morning, Dale eloquently defended his view, one I respect while respectfully rejecting. I have no illusions about dissuading him from it any more than I expect ever to get him to see that God cannot be a being among beings, a topic we have vigorously discussed on several occasions, see here, for example. Agreement here as elsewhere is out of reach, and perhaps not even reasonably pursued; mutual clarification of differences, however, is well within reach, and worth pursuing. That is my aim below.

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As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' Muslims get to do there, in a quasi-physical hinterworld, what they are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s. You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, strikes me as a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, as I am sure Dale Tuggy does not, they think of it as a prolongation of the concerns of this life including the petty ones. They think of it, in other words, as Life 2.0, an improved version of life here below. This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

. . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the 'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan 1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)

A. E. Taylor is no longer much read, but he is 'old school' in the depth of his erudition, unlike most contemporary academics, and is thus well-worth reading. In the passage quoted he makes a penetrating observation: the true Christian is not only unworldly in this world, but also unworldly in his expectations of the next. This by contrast with one who is worldly in this world and desires his worldliness prolonged into the next.

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation. Do you really desire direct contact with the divine Spirit? Why would you suddenly love there what you don't love here?

In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive, at least schematically, of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than adolescent concerns, you would not get through to them. For what they need are not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it: it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books; we read trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons; we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City. We are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is 'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or collective.

These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them, then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able, employing analogies such as the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said, it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine initiative and our cooperation with it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage. Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,' the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable to entertain the hope of eternal life.

But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0 and is something like the visio beata of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'? Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise. But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view. You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude. You want, finally, to be happy.

Would the happy vision be boring? Well, when you were in love, was it boring? When your love was requited, was it boring? Was it not bliss? Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless. We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite. Why then should participation in it be boring? Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos. Were you bored in those moments? Quite the opposite. You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.

What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below. God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls. So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same. If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."

Kenny, Geach, and the Perils of Reading Frege into Aquinas

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical.

Possible Worlds Again: Thomist versus ‘Analyst’

Fr. Matthew Kirby by e-mail:

By the way, in thinking about my comments on the [your] SEP entry I realised that I had used the term "possible worlds" in an idiosyncratic way, one non-standard within the analytical school, applying a Thomist twist to it. Unlike standard usage, I do not include a hypothetical transcendent First Cause as an element within any "possible world", but instead define possible worlds in that context as potential concrete totalities that may result from God's choice with respect to creation. Thus God Himself is not an element of any possible world (though His supernatural actions ad extra can be) on this construal, as possible worlds are each a sum of finitised, dependent, created being/s considered across their development.

What Fr. Kirby says certainly make sense. Talk of God existing in every possible world comes naturally to analytical theists who are concerned to affirm the divine necessity. Such talk, however, is bound to sound strange to those of a traditional bent who quite naturally think of God as the transcendent creator of the world, a creator who could have created some other world or no world at all, and its therefore 'outside of' every possible world.

Herewith, some comments in clarification.

Let's start with the obvious point that 'world' supports a multitude of meanings. (I once cataloged a dozen or so distinct uses of the term.) If we use 'world' to refer to the totality of what exists, then, if God exists, he is in the world: he is a member of that all-inclusive totality of entities. If, on the other hand, we use 'world' to refer to the totality of creatures, where a creature is anything at all that is created by God, then God is not in the world. God, after all, does not create himself: he is the uncreated creator of everything distinct from himself. So God does not count as a creature.

So far, then, two senses of 'world.' World as totality of entities and world as totality of creatures. God is in the first totality, but not in the second. But a Thomistic theist such as Fr. Kirby might balk at my placing God in the totality of entities. If God exists or is, however, then God is an entity. (I define an entity as anything that is or exists.) To put it in Latin, even if God is esse, he is nevertheless ens, something that is. God is at once both Being (esse) and ens (being). Note my careful distinction between the majuscule and miniscule 'B/b.' In fact, if God is ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsistent Being, then he can't be other than every being; he must be both Being and being. God is Being in its prime instance, which is to say: God is both esse and ens, Being and being. More on this later, since Fr. Kirby seems to disagree.

Unless one is treading the via negativa with Dionysius the Areopagite and Co., one must admit that God is.

I hasten to add that, while God is both esse and ens, and therefore is, he is not an ens among entia, a being among beings. So I grant that God fits somewhat uneasily within the totality of entities. For while he is an entity, he is the one being that is also identical to Being. (How is this possible? Well, that is the problem or perhaps mystery of divine simplicity.) Still, God is.

I have distinguished two senses of 'world.' World as totality of entities and world as totality of creatures. But there is a third sense: world as a maximal state of affairs. "The world is all that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things." (These are the first two propositions of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.) This is pretty close to the main (not the only) analytic understanding of 'world' in talk of possible worlds.

Here, then, is one 'analytic' approach. The actual world is the total way things are. A merely possible world is a total way things could have been or could be. The actual world is the total way things are, but not the things that are that way. Thus the actual world is not the same as the universe, whether physical or physical plus any nonphysical items there are. Why not?

The plausible line to take is abstractist. Worlds are maximal (Fregean) propositions and thus abstract entities or maximal (abstract) states of affairs, as on A. Plantinga's scheme in The Nature of Necessity. They are not maximal mereological sums of concreta, pace that mad dog extreme modal realist, David Lewis, may his atheist bones rest in peace. If worlds are propositions, then actuality is truth. That is one interesting consequence. Another is that worlds are abstract objects which implies that the actual world must not be confused either with the physical universe (the space-time-matter system) or with that plus whatever nonphysical concreta (minds) that there might be. And if worlds are abstract objects then they are necessary beings. So every possible world exists in every possible world.

More on the Hypostatic Union

I am very impressed with Thomas Joseph White, OP, The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology, The Catholic University of America Press, 2017, xiv + 534 pp. It deserves to be called magisterial, the work of a magister, a master. I am presently working through Chapter One, "The Ontology of the Hypostatic Union."

White and I are concerned with the intelligibility of the one person, two natures doctrine. (See yesterday's entry for background.) Fr. White of course considers the doctrine to be intelligible while I have my doubts. This entry presents one of the problems I am having.

Christ is one person in two distinct individual natures, the one divine, the other human. The one person is the Word (Logos), the Second Person of the Trinity. The Word is eternal, impassible, and necessary. In the patois of possible worlds, the Word exists in every metaphysically possible world. The hypostatic union is the union of the Word with the individual human nature (body and soul) of Jesus where the hypostasis or suppositum is the Word. It is that which has the nature or exists in the nature. White tells us that this union is not

. . . merely an accidental association of two beings, the man Jesus and the Word of God. Rather the Word subsists personally as man in a human nature. Consequently, Jesus's concrete body and soul are the subsistent body and soul of person of the Word. The person of Jesus simply is the person of the Son existing as man. (113)

We are being told that the person of Jesus is the eternal Word, the Son, not a human person. There is human nature in Jesus, but no human person in Jesus. So it not as if there are two persons, the person of the Word and the person of Jesus. There is only one person, the person of the Word. To think otherwise is the Nestorian heresy.

This raises the following question.

If the Word is a necessary being, and the union of the Word with human nature is not accidental, but essential, are we to conclude that the Word has a concrete human body and human soul in every possible world, and thus at every time? It would seem so. If x is united with N essentially, then x is united with N in every possible world in which x exists. So if x is a necessary being, then x is united with N in every possible world, period, which is to say that there is no possible world in which x is not united with N. Therefore,

1) If the Word is united to a human nature essentially, then there is no possible world in which the Word is not united to a human nature.

But then how is this consistent with the belief that the Incarnation was an historical event that occurred at a particular time and whose occurrence was contingent, not necessary? God became man to save man from the sin he incurred with Adam's fall, a fall that was itself contingent upon Adam's free choice to violate the divine command. That is,

2) There are possible worlds in which God does not create at all, and possible worlds in which God creates humans but there is no Fall, no need for Redemption, and thus no need for Incarnation.

Therefore

3) There are possible worlds in which the Word is not united to a human nature.

Therefore

4) It is not the case that the Word is united to a human nature essentially. (From 1, 3 by modus tollens)

Therefore

5) The Word is united to a human nature accidentally.

But this is contrary to the orthodox view at least as explained by Fr. White who draws upon Thomas. White tells us that "the humanity of Jesus is united to the Word as an intrinsic, 'conjoined instrument.' The being of the man Jesus is the being of the Word." (83) We are also told that the unity is "substantial not accidental." (83)

Why does Aquinas think that the Word must be united to the humanity of Jesus intrinsicaly and essentially as opposed to extrinsically and accidentally? Because he thinks that this is the only way to avoid the Nestorian heresy according to which there are two persons, the person of the Word and the person of Jesus.

The reasoning seems to go like this. In an ordinary man, body and soul form a substantial unity. If in Jesus body and soul formed a substantial unity, then Jesus would be a different substance and a different suppositum (hypostasis) from the Word, and Nestorianism would be the upshot. To avoid this, the proposal was made that body and soul in Christ do not form a substantial unity as they do in ordinary human beings. Thus on the so-called habitus theory, the third theory of the hypostatic union mentioned in Peter Lombard's Sentences, ". . . both the body and the soul are said to accrue to the person of the Word 'accidentally' as qualities or properties of the Word, but without subsistence in the Word." (85) This implies that body and soul are accidental to each other, which of course is unacceptable given the background Aristotelian commitments of Thomas.

So while the habitus theory aims to be anti-Nestorian, it ends up in an implicit Nestorianism according to White's Aquinas. You've got the Word and over against it the body of Jesus and the soul of Jesus as an accidental, not a substantial, unity. On this scheme the individual humanity (body and soul) of Jesus is accidental to the Word.

My point is that, on the one hand, this is how it should be given the contingency of the Fall and the contingency of the Incarnation. The Word is not essentially incarnated; it is accidentally incarnated. The humanity of the Word is accidental, not essential. That would seem to fit nicely with the Christian narrative. But on the other hand, if it is not the substance of the Son who dies on the cross, if it is not God himself who enters history and dies on the cross, if it is a man who is only accidentally and for a time united with the Word, then the debt that only God himslef can pay has not been paid in full.

So I think we can understand why the one person, two natures doctrine was deemed orthodox. But if I am right in my reasoning above, the orthodox doctrine entails the absurdity that the Word has a "concrete body and soul" (113) at every time and in every possible world.

To put it another way, the Incarnation makes no sense unless it is a contingent event, but it cannot be on the radically anti-Nestorian view of White's Aquinas.

Thomas Joseph White on the Hypostatic Union: Questions

Vito Caiati writes,

I am struggling, in particular, to understand what [Thomas Joseph] White is proposing with regard to the hypostatic union on pages 82-84 [of The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology, The Catholic University of America Press, 2017]. He follows Aquinas in affirming “a substantial union of God and man. . . . [in which] the two natures remain distinct, without mixture or confusion, and [in which] the union must not occur in the nature of Christ” (82). In this substantial union, “The hypothesis [hypostasis] of the Word does not replace the human soul of Christ. . . . However, just as in man the body is the instrument of the soul, so in the incarnate Word, the human nature of Jesus is the instrument of the Word. . . . [in that] the humanity of Jesus is united to the Word as an intrinsic, ‘conjoined instrument. . .“ (83).

I do not understand what is being affirmed here. If the Word is “united” to the humanity of Jesus “as an intrinsic ‘conjoined instrument’” has not something been done to this humanity that renders it more than human? In other words, can one really hold that in this process of union, the natures remain distinct? I am particularly confused because White appears to argue for precisely this position in affirming that “in Christ there is no autonomous human personhood or human personality. He is the person of the Son and Word made human, subsisting in human nature” (83). Well, if this is so, what import does his human soul have on his thoughts and actions?

The Word (Logos) is the Second Person of the Trinity. It is the one person (hypostasis) that has the two natures, the divine nature and the human nature. Thus there are not two persons, the Second Person and the human person of Jesus; there is only one person, the Second Person of the Trinity. This latter person is the person of Jesus. If there were two persons, a divine person and a human person, then that would be the Nestorian heresy. (I could explain later, if you want, why this heresy is a heresy.) In other words, the person of Jesus is the eternal Word, not a human person. There is human nature in Jesus, but no human person in Jesus.

But this is not to say that the man Jesus merely embodies the Word, i.e., it is not to say that the Word is to Jesus as soul to body. That would be the Apollinarian heresy. The Word in Jesus does not merely assume a body; The Word assumes (the nature of) a fully human man, body and soul. So while there is no human person in Jesus, there is a human soul in Jesus. Here, perhaps, we have the makings of trouble for the Incarnation doctrine on White's Thomistic construal thereof, as we shall see in a minute.

In sum, one person, two distinct natures, one divine, the other human. The person is divine. The natures are individual natures. They are not multiply realizable or multiply instantiable like rational animal which is found in Socrates and Plato equally but not in an ass. (Schopenhauer somewhere quips that the medievals employed only three examples, Socrates, Plato, and an ass. Who am I to run athwart a tradition so hoary and noble?) And yet the individual natures are not themselves self-subsistent individuals. They need a support, something that has the natures. This is part of the meaning of hypostasis. There has to be something that stands under or underlies the natures. The hypostatic union is the union of the two natures in one subsistent individual, the Word. (White, p. 113)

Now this one divine person is united to the (individual) nature of Jesus as to an essential, not accidental, instrument. But this union is not identity. There is no identity of natures or confusion of natures. The divine and human natures remain distinct. They are united, but they are united essentially, not accidentally.

Caiati asks, " Can one really hold that in this process of union, the natures remain distinct?" Yes, if union is not identity. So I don't see a problem here.

Caiati also asks, "what import does his human soul have on his thoughts and actions?" This is a much more vexing question, and I rather doubt that we are going to find a satisfying answer to it within the Aristotelian-Thomistic scheme that Fr. White employs.

Who is it that is thinking when Jesus thinks? Suppose he is debating some rabbis. He hears and understands their objections and thoughtfully replies. Is it the Word who is the subject of these mental acts? Is the Word thinking when Jesus thinks? If yes, then his human soul is not the 'seat' of his intellectual operations. Suppose Jesus feels hunger or thirst or the excruciating pains of his passion. Does the Word feel these pains? How could it if it is impassible? If it is not impassible and does the feel Jesus' pains, then what role does the human soul in Jesus have to play? How can Christ be fully human, body and soul, if his human soul plays no role either intellectually or sensorially?

There is also the will to consider. If Jesus is obedient to the end, and does the will of the Father, then he wills what the Father wills. "Thy will be done." He would rather not undergo the Passion, but "not my will but thine be done." This makes sense only if Jesus has his own will, distinct from the Father's will, a will 'seated' in his human soul. That is, the faculties of willing have to be different, even if the contents of willing are the same. But then it is not the Word that wills in Jesus.

On the other hand, if the human soul in Jesus is indeed the 'seat' of his intellectual and voluntative and sensitive and affective functions, then the person in him, the Word, is severed from his soul. But this drains 'person' of its usual meaning which includes soulic functions. The one person in two natures threatens to become a mere substratum or support of the two natures.

White's view is that the Incarnation, although ultimately a mystery, can be rendered intelligible to the discursive intellect in the Thomistic way. I doubt it. But there are other ways, and they need to be examined.

Would Heaven be Boring?

Maybe not. (HT: V. Vohanka)

My post concludes as follows:

Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos. Were you bored in those moments? Quite the opposite. You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.

Why Did Thomas Aquinas Leave his Summa Theologiae Unfinished?

Our frenetic and hyperkinetic way of life these days makes it difficult to take seriously religion and what is essential to it, namely, the belief in what William James calls an Unseen Order. Our communications technology in particular is binding us ever tighter within the human horizon so much so that the sense of Transcendence is becoming weaker and weaker. So it comes as no surprise that someone would point to 'burnout' as the explanation of Aquinas' failure to finish his sum of theology when the traditional explanation was that he was vouchsafed mystical insight into the Unseen Order:

Aquinas’s ultimate act of apparent humility occurred on December 6, 1273, St. Nicholas’s Day, when he was forty-eight or forty-nine years old. Aquinas was celebrating Mass in the chapel of St. Nicholas, and he again had a vision. What exactly he saw is unknown. But afterward, he did not resume his dictation as he usually would. Reginald prodded him to get back to work, but Aquinas responded, “I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw.” He stopped writing altogether, leaving his Summa Theologiae—the summary of theology, and his masterwork—incomplete.

Jonathan Malesic, from whose Commonweal article the above quotation is taken, finds the traditional explanation "suspiciously pious." (My inclination is to say that his rejection of the traditional explanation is suspiciously post-modern.) What Malesic sees in the final days of the doctor angelicus is "burnout." Malesic builds on a suggestion of Joseph Weishepl:

The most down-to-earth account of Aquinas’s final winter that I have come across is by someone you might expect to play up Aquinas’s sanctity: Joseph Weisheipl, a Dominican writing to commemorate the seven-hundredth anniversary of his confrere’s death. But Weisheipl is interested less in hagiography than in empathy. Sensitive to the rigors of Aquinas’s schedule as a professor and member of a religious order, he argues not for a theological or mystical explanation for Aquinas’s silence, but a physiological one. In his view, “the physical basis for the experience of December 6 was a breakdown of his constitution after so many years of driving himself ceaselessly in the work he loved.”

Burnout or visio mystica? An 'immanent' explanation in terms of physiology, or a 'transcendent' explanation in terms of supernatural insight?

Or is this a false alternative? It could be that the physiological breakdown triggered the noetic event. It could be that the breakdown, while disabling Thomas from such exertions as writing, also occasioned an insight into the inadequacy of the discursive intellect for the knowledge of such a lofty Object as was his ultimate concern.

Of course Aquinas knew all along about the inadequacy of the discursive intellect in respect of God, but I conjecture that it took a mystical experience for him to appreciate the fact so fully that he saw no point in grinding out more sentences. When the meal is served, the menu is set aside.

It seems to me that Malesic is opting for the 'burnout' explanation as opposed to the mystical one. If so, then I disagree, and I suggest that he is right in step with the post-modern enclosure with the human horizon mentioned at the outset. Caught as far too many are these days in a web of 24-7 connectivity, it is hard for them to credit the possibility of any realm of the real beyond the human horizon. So any explanation of religious phenomena just has to be an 'immanent' one.

So while Malesic finds that traditional explanation "suspiciously pious," I am inclined to suggest that he may be too much a product of his age and that we ought to be suspicious of his suspicion. As I quipped above, his approach seems suspiciously post-modern.

Our age, influenced by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, to name the Big Three among the hermeneuticians of suspicion, is indeed one of deep suspicion, indications of which are the currently pejorative connotations of such words as 'pious,' 'reverence,' and 'hagiography.'

Religion too is under suspicion along with its supposed saints and prophets and mystics. Some of this suspicion is good: it is just Athens keeping Jerusalem in line and chastening her excesses. But it goes too far when religion's essence is denied. And what might that be? Here is my answer in seven theses. I think Aquinas would agree with all seven. I am negotiable on (4) and (6) but only on those if one cares to insist that Buddhism is a religion as opposed to a sort of philosophical therapeutics.

The Essence of Religion

1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53) This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions. It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection. It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents. So in its full reality it lies beyond the discursive intellect. It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience. An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out. Should that occur it is called revelation.

2. The belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order. Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order. His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences.

4. The conviction that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5. The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative. It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.

Aquinas Falls from the Pedestal

Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. 5 (1963-1965), p. 295:

In the refectory the other day articles on the Council [Vatican II, 1962-1965] were being read and a lot was said about St. Thomas [Aquinas] — he is no longer on an official pedestal — he is no longer the one to be followed as chief authority in seminary teaching. This is the best thing that could happen to St. Thomas and to Catholic Truth, if we consider that he himself would never have consented to be the kind of authority the textbooks have made of him (and as a matter of fact the Church did not really constitute him an authority — but rather a model.)

It would be interesting to hear Ed Feser's take on this.

An Aristotelian on Earth, a Platonist in Heaven

It's been said of Aquinas.

On Aristotle's hylomorphic ontology, form and matter are 'principles' or ontological factors involved in the analysis of sublunary primary substances. These factors are not substances in their own right. Now Thomas is an Aristotelian in ontology. But when it comes to God and the soul he goes Platonist. God is forma formarum, the form of all forms, and yet self-subsistent. The soul after death is capable of existing in separation from matter while it awaits the resurrection of the body. Anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body. But in the human case the soulic form is more than a principle invoked in hylomorphic analysis. It is capable of existence independent of matter.

The sublunary Aristotelianism and the superlunary Platonism exist together in a certain tension. Whether this tension gets the length of a contradiction is a further question.

"Get the length of" is a classy phrase which has long languished in desuetude. I resurrect it from the writings of F. H. Bradley.

Distasteful Slang

A Battle of Titans: Plato Versus Aristotle

Potentiality and the Substance View of Persons

Is God Beyond All Being?

John Peterson’s Thomist Analysis of Change

1. The Riddle of Change. Change is ubiquitous. It is perhaps the most pervasive feature of our experience and of the objects of our experience. But is it intelligible? Change could be a fact without being intelligible. But the mind seeks intelligibility; hence it seeks to render change intelligible to it.

There is something puzzling about change inasmuch as it seems to imply a contradiction. When a thing changes, it becomes different than what it was. But unless it also remains the same, we cannot speak, as we do, of one thing changing. But how can this one thing be both the same and different? We ought not assume that there is an insoluble problem here. But we also ought not assume that a simple solution is at hand, or that some simple fallacy has been committed. We must investigate. We do well to begin with some mundane, Moorean fact.

This is because alteration (accidental change) is neither destruction nor duplication. The ripening of an avocado does not cause it to cease to exist. And it is clear that one cannot speak of change if there are two avocados, A and B, indiscernible except in respect of ripeness/unripeness, such that A is unripe at time t while B is ripe at time t* (t*> t). Alteration requires that one and the same thing have incompatible properties at different times. This is necessary for alteration; whether it is sufficient is a further question.

Thus there is an apparent contradiction: the ripe avocado is both the same and not the same as the unripe avocado. If you think this puzzle is easily solved, then you haven't understood it. You cannot understand philosophy unless you understand the problems to which its theories and theses are the responses. Philosophy may be more than aporetics, but it is at least aporetics. If you lack the 'aporetic sense' then you lack the "feeling of the philosopher" Plato describes at Theaetetus 155.

2. Reality is contradiction-free. There are no contradictions in reality, but only in our thoughts about reality. That there are no contradictions in reality is not perfectly obvious, but it is very reasonably assumed to be true, and we have to start somewhere. Now if it is true, and if, as is obvious, changes occur, then the apparent contradiction has to be removed. If the apparent contradiction cannot be removed, that is, shown to be merely apparent, then change, which obviously exists in some sense, will have to be demoted to the status of a Bradleyan appearance. (See F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Book I, Chapter 5.)

The task, then, is to remove the apparent contradiction.

3. Avocado A, having altered, is both the same and different. How is that possible? One solution involves a distinction between numerical and qualitative sameness. A is numerically the same over the interval during which it goes from unripe to ripe, but not qualitatively the same over that interval. The sense in which A is the same is not the same as the sense in which A is not the same: A is numerically the same over the interval but not qualitatively the same over the interval. I will say no more about this solution in this post.

4. Instead of distinguishing two senses of 'same,' one can distinguish two senses of 'individual.' On an Aristotelian-Thomistic analysis, as presented by John Peterson ("Persons and the Problem of Interaction," The Modern Schoolman LXIII, January 1985, 131-137), the individual₁ is the primary substance, the avocado in our example. This primary substance is the individual substance, the individual this-such, together with its accidents. The primary substance at time t (when the ripening process begins) is the unripe avocado, and the primary substance at t* (when the process is completed) is a numerically different primary substance. It follows that the primary substance is not the substratum of change!

The substratum of change — that which stays the same throughout the change — is the individual₂, the secondary substance 'in' the individual₁. The secondary substance 'in' a primary substance is its individuated essence. Primary substances are capable of independent existence. Secondary substances, as constituents of primary substances, are not capable of independent existence. Yet these secondary substances are what ground diachronic identity. So what grounds identity over time and underlies the change and persists through it is the individuated essence.

One can see how this distinction between two senses of 'individual' removes the contradiction. It is the individual₂ (the individuated essence) that is the same over time, and the individual₁ that is different over time. There is no one concretum that is the same and different. There are two 'things' in the changing concretum.

It follows that the unripe avocado I saw on my counter a week ago is not numerically the same ripe avocado that I see on my counter today. It is a numerically different avocado.

5. The scholastic analysis can be applied to persons and the problem of their identity over time and through change. Persons are individuals₂. Thus they are individuated essences or secondary substances. Elliot drunk and Elliot sober are the same person because the same individuated essence, the same instance of humanity, underlies the change in accidents. But they are numerically different primary substances and thus numerically different human animals.

Peterson thinks this solution superior to the Cartesian view according to which a person is identified with a res cogitans. On the Cartesian view, the person is a primary as opposed to a secondary substance. As a primary substance, the person on the Cartesian view is capable of independent existence. Given that a person remains self-same through change, the res cogitans must remain self-same though change. But then how can Elliot drunk and Elliot sober be the same person? "For individuals₁, as was said, are not substrates through any change but are rather the termini in any change, that is, the terminus ad quem [endpoint toward which] and terminus a quo [endpoint from which] of a change." (p. 135)

6. Let us now consider existential or substantial change. When an avocado ripens, it acquires the property of being ripe and loses the property of being unripe. It seems as obvious as anything that alterational or accidental change requires a substratum. But when the ripe avocado becomes the stuff of guacamole, it suffers a much more radical change. The avocado ceases to exist. Can one speak here too of a substratum of change, something in the thing that remains the same through the change?

There is likewise a difference between Elliot's sobering up and Elliot's dying. When he sobers up, the substratum of the change on the Thomistic view is his individuated essence. But what is the substratum of the radical existential change which occurs when he dies? Peterson writes, "The substrate of this change, of course, cannot be a particular human essence since it is just this which has passed away." (135) The particular human essence is subject to passing away since it is a compound of form and matter. So Peterson proposes the Aristotelian view according to which "The substrate of change in the case of essential change is simply the potentiality on the part of any individual to become something essentially different from what it is." (135) This potentiality is matter. Since it is that which individuates the form, matter is an individual in a third sense. There are then three senses of 'individual':

Individual₁ = primary substance
Individual₂ = secondary substance = substrate of accidental change
Individual₃ = matter = substrate of essential or existential change

7. Possible Lines of Critique

A. Peterson's theory implies that the unripe avocado and the ripe avocado are two primary substances, not one. (Likewise for Elliot sober and Elliot drunk.) But since now there is only one, the ripe one, the unripe one must have passed out of existence. This consequence of Peterson's theory seems to collide with the Moorean fact mentioned above, namely, that alterational or accidental change does not involve the destruction of the thing that changes. If the thing that changes is the unripe avocado one sees and touches, then that thing does not remain self-same over time: it passes out of existence. What remains the same over time is the individuated essence which one does not see and which is not a substance in its own right.

B. Matter, as the substrate of essential change, is prime matter. It is very difficult to see how the notion of materia prima can be rendered intelligible.

Thomas Aquinas Against Open Borders

Thomas D. Williams:

In a surprisingly contemporary passage of his Summa Theologica, Aquinas noted that the Jewish people of Old Testament times did not admit visitors from all nations equally, since those peoples closer to them were more quickly integrated into the population than those who were not as close.

Edith Stein on Cognitio Fidei: Is Faith a Kind of Knowledge?

One finds the phrase cognitio fidei in Thomas Aquinas and in such Thomist writers as Josef Pieper. It translates as 'knowledge of faith.' The genitive is to be interpreted subjectively, not objectively: faith is not the object of knowledge; faith is a form or type of knowledge. But how can faith be a type of knowledge? One ought to find this puzzling.

On a standard analysis of 'knows,' where propositional knowledge is at issue, subject S knows that p just in case (i) S believes that p; (ii) S is justified in believing that p; and (iii) p is true. This piece of epistemological boilerplate is the starting point for much of the arcana (Gettier counterexamples, etc.) of contemporary epistemology. But its pedigree is ancient, to be found in Plato's Theaetetus.

A Righteous Form of Schadenfreude?

I posed the question in the aftermath of the election and because of the pleasure many of us are feeling at the Left's comeuppance:

Is there a righteous form of Schadenfreude or is it in every one of its forms as morally objectionable as I make it out to be here?

Edward Feser supplies an affirmative Thomistic answer. Ed concludes:

Putting the question of hell to one side, though, we can note that if schadenfreude can be legitimate even in that case, then a fortiori it can be legitimate in the case of lesser instances of someone getting his just deserts, in this life rather than the afterlife. For example – and to take the case Bill has in mind — suppose someone’s suffering is a consequence of anti-Catholic bigotry, brazen corruption, unbearable smugness, a sense of entitlement, groupthink, and in general from hubris virtually begging nemesis to pay a visit. When you’re really asking for it, you can’t blame others for enjoying seeing you get it.

Contingent Existence Without Cause? Not Possible Says Garrigou-Lagrange

A reader claims that "to affirm that there are contingent beings just is to affirm that they have that whereby they are, namely, a cause." This implies that one can straightaway infer 'x has a cause' from 'x is contingent.' My reader would agree with Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange who, taking the traditional Thomist position, maintains the following Principle of Causality (PC):

. . . every contingent thing, even if it should be ab aeterno, depends on a cause which exists of itself. (Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought, tr. Patrick Cummins, O. S. B., Ex Fontibus 2012, p. 62)

So even if the physical universe always existed, and therefore never came into existence, it would nonetheless require a cause of its existence simply in virtue of its being contingent. I find myself questioning both my reader and Garrigou-Lagrange. For it seems to me to be conceivable that an item be contingent but have no cause or ground of its existence. This is precisely what Garrigou-Lagrange denies: "contingent existence . . . can simply not be conceived without origin, without cause . . . ." (p. 63)

But it all depends on what we mean by 'conceivable' and 'contingent.' Here are my definitions:

D1. An individual or state of affairs x is conceivable =_df x is thinkable without formal-logical contradiction.

Examples. It is conceivable that there be a mountain of gold and a tire iron that floats in (pure or near-pure) water. It is conceivable that I jump straight out of my chair, turn a somersault in the air, and then return to my chair and finish this blog post. It is inconceivable that I light a cigar and not light a cigar at exactly the same time. As for formal-logical contradiction, here is an example: Some cats are not cats. But Some bachelors are married is not a formal-logical contradiction. Why not? Because its logical form has both true and false substitution instances.

D2. An individual or state of affairs x is contingent =_df x is possibly nonexistent/nonobtaining if it exists/obtains, and possibly existent/obtaining if it does not exist/obtain.

The contingent is that which has a certain modal status: it is neither necessary nor impossible. For example, me and my cigar are both contingent beings: neither is necessary and neither is impossible. My smoking the cigar now is an example of a contingent state of affairs: it is neither necessary nor impossible that I smoke a cigar now. The type of modality we are concerned with is broadly logical, not nomological.

Now is it conceivable that something exist contingently without a cause? It seems so! The nonexistence of the physical universe is thinkable without formal-logical contradiction. The physical universe is contingent: it exists, but not necessarily. Its nonexistence is possible. Do I encounter a formal-logical contradiction when I think of the universe as existing without a cause or explanation? No. An uncaused universe is nothing like a non-triangular triangle, or a round square, or a married bachelor, or an uncaused effect. Necessarily, if x is an effect, then x has a cause. It is an analytic truth that every effect has a cause. The negation of this proposition is: Some effects do not have causes. While this is not a formal-logical contradiction, it can be reduced to one by substituting synonyms for synonyms. Thus, Some caused events are not caused.

Contrary to what Garrigou-Lagrange maintains, it is conceivable that the universe exist uncaused, despite its contingency. If one could not conceive the uncaused existing of the universe, then one could not conceive of the universe's being a brute fact. And 'surely' one can conceive of the latter. That is not to say that it is possible. There is a logical gap between the conceivable and the possible. My point is merely that the 'brutality' of the universe's existence is conceivable in the sense of (D1). To put it another way, my point is that one cannot gain a a priori insight into the necessity of the universe's having a cause of its existence. And this is because the Principle of Causality, if true, is not analytically true but synthetically true.

Of course, if one defines 'contingency' in terms of 'existential dependence on a cause' then a thing's being contingent straightaway implies its being caused. But then one has packed causal dependency into the notion of contingency when contingency means only what (D2) says it means. That has all the benefits of theft over honest toil as Russell remarked in a different connection.

Garrigou-Lagrange thinks that one violates the Law of Non-Contradiction if one says of a contingent thing that it is both contingent and uncaused. He thinks this is equivalent to saying:

A thing may exist of itself and simultaneously not exist of itself. Existence of itself would belong to it, both necessarily and impossibly. Existence would be an inseparable predicate of a being which can be separated from existence. All this is absurd, unintelligible. (p. 65)

Suppose that a contingent existent is one that is caused to exist by a self-existent existent. If one then went on to say that such an existent is both contingent and uncaused, then one would embrace a logical contradiction. But this presupposes that contingency implies causal dependency.

And therein lies the rub. That the universe is contingent I grant. But how does one get from contingency in the sense defined by (D2) supra to the universe's causal dependence on a causa prima? If one simply packs dependency into contingency then one begs the question. What is contingent needn't be contingent upon anything.