Aquinas and Thomism – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

Would Heaven be Boring?

Maybe not. (HT: V. Vohanka)

My post concludes as follows:

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."

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.

On the Status of Thomistic Common Natures

Aquinas says that any given nature can be considered in three ways: in respect of the esse it has in concrete singulars; in respect of the esse it has in minds; absolutely, in the abstract, without reference to either material singulars or minds, and thus without reference to either mode of esse. The two modes are esse naturale (esse reale) and esse intentionale. We can speak of these in English as real existence (being) and intentional existence (being). Real existence is existence 'outside' the (finite) mind. Intentional existence is existence 'in' or 'before' the mind. The mentioned words are obviously not to be taken spatially. Esse is the Latin infinitive, to be. Every human mind is a finite mind, but don't assume the converse.

According to Schopenhauer, the medievals employed but three examples: Socrates, Plato, and an ass. Who am I to deviate from a tradition at once so hoary and noble? So take Socrates. Socrates is human. The nature humanity exists really in him, and in Plato, but not in the ass. The same nature exists intentionally in a mind that thinks about or knows Socrates. For Aquinas, there are no epistemic deputies standing between mind and thing: thought reaches right up to and grasps the thing itself. There is an isomorphism between knowing mind and thing known. The ground of this isomorphism is the natura absoluta, the nature considered absolutely. Call it the common nature (CN). It is so-called because it is common to both the knower and the known, informing both, albeit in different ways. It is also common to all the singulars of the same nature and all the thoughts directed to the same sort of thing. So caninity is common to all doggy thoughts, to all dogs, besides linking the doggy thoughts to the dogs.

Pause to appreciate how attractive this conception is. It secures the intrinsic intelligibility of the world while avoiding the 'gap problem' that bedevils post-Cartesian thought.

I need to know more, however, about the exact ontological status of the common nature (CN) which is, as it were, amphibious as between knowing mind and thing known.

With the help of Anthony Kenny, I realized that there are four possible views, not three as I stated in earlier forays:

A. The CN really exists as a separate, self-subsistent item.

B. The CN exists only intentionally in the mind of one who abstracts it from concrete extramental singulars and mental acts. (Note: a mental act is a concrete singular because in time, though not in space.)

C. The CN has Meinongian Aussersein status: it has no mode of being whatsoever, and yet is is something, not nothing. It actually has properties, it does not merely possibly have them, but is property-incomplete (and therefore in violation of the Law of Excluded Middle) in that it is neither one nor many, neither universal nor particular, neither intentionally existent nor really existent.

D. The CN exists intentionally in the mind of God, the creator.

(A) is a nonstarter and is rejected by both me and Lukas Novak. (B) appears to be Novak's view. (C) is the interpretation I was tentatively suggesting in earlier entries.. My thesis was that the CN must have Aussersein status, but then it inherits — to put it anachronistically — all the problems of Meinongianism. The doctor angelicus ends up in the jungle with a Meinongian monkey on his back.

Let me now try to explain why I reject (B), Novak's view, and incline toward (C), given that (A) cannot possibly be what Aquinas had in mind.

Consider a time t before there were any human animals and any finite minds, and ask yourself: did the nature humanity exist at t? The answer has to be in the negative if there are only two modes of existence, real existence in concrete extramental singulars and intentional existence in finite (creaturely) minds. For at t there were no humans and no finite minds. But surely it is true at t that man is rational, that humanity includes rationality. This implies that humanity at t cannot be just nothing at all. For if it were nothing at all at t, then 'Man is rational'' at t would lack a truth-maker. Furthermore, we surely don't want to say that 'Man is rational' first becomes true when the first human being exists. In some sense, the common nature must be prior to its existential realization in concrete singulars and in minds. The common nature cannot depend on these modes of realization. Kenny quotes Aquinas (Aquinas on Being, Oxford 2002, p. 73):

Socrates is rational, because man is rational, and not vice versa; so that even if Socrates and Plato did not exist, rationality would still be a characteristic of human nature.

Socrates est rationalis, quia homo est rationalis, et non e converso; unde dato quod Socrates et Plato non essent, adhuc humanae naturae rationalitas competeret. (Quodl. VIII, I, c, 108-110)

Aquinas' point could be put like this. (i) At times and in possible worlds in which humans do not exist, it is nevertheless the case that rationality is included in humanity, and (ii) the metaphysical ground of humans' being rational is the circumstance that rationality is included in humanity, and not vice versa.

Now this obviously implies that the common nature humanity has some sort of status independent of real and intentional existence. So we either go the Meinongian route or we say that comon natures exist in the mind of God. Kenny:

Aquinas' solution is to invoke the divine mind. There are really four, not three ways of considering natures: first, as they are in the mind of the creator; second, as they are in the abstract; third, as they are in individuals; and finally, as they are in the human mind. (p. 74)

This may seem to solve the problem I raised. Common natures are not nothing because they are divine accusatives. And they are not nothing in virtue of being ausserseiend. This solution avoids the three options of Platonism, subjectivism (according to which CNs exist only as products of abstraction), and Meinongianism.

The problem with the solution is that it smacks of deus ex machina: God is brought in to solve the problem similarly as Descartes had recourse to the divine veracity to solve the problem of the external world. Solutions to the problems of universals, predication, and intentionality ought to be possible without bringing God into the picture.

I think about deus ex machina objections in philosophy in Deus ex Machina: Leibniz Contra Malebranche.

But if we don't bring God into the picture then we may face a trilemma: either Platonism, or subjectivism, or Meinongianism.

Do Aquinas and Spinoza Refer to the Same God?

I put the following question to Francis Beckwith via e-mail:

Thomas Aquinas and Spinoza both hold that there is exactly one God. Would you say that when they use Deus they succeed in referring to one and the same God, but just have contradictory beliefs about this one and the same God? When I put this question to Dale Tuggy in his podcast discussion with me, he bit the bullet and said Yes to my great surprise.

Professor Beckwith responded:

. . . I am accepting what each faith tradition (at least in its orthodox formulations) believes about God: he is the self-existent subsistent source of all that receives its being from another. Does that include Spinoza’s God? Yes, with a caveat. He has the right God but the wrong universe. He gets the self-existent subsistent source right, but he gets that which receive its being from another wrong. It’s the univocal predication of the theistic personalists–God and nature are of the same order of being–except in reverse. This is why St. Thomas is the bomb. :-)

Before I reply to Beckwith, let us make sure we understand how the Spinozistic conception of God differs from, while partially overlapping with, the traditional conception we find in Augustine, Aquinas, et al. Steven Nadler in SEP writes,

According to the traditional Judeo-Christian conception of divinity, God is a transcendent creator, a being who causes a world distinct from himself to come into being by creating it out of nothing. God produces that world by a spontaneous act of free will, and could just as easily have not created anything outside himself. By contrast, Spinoza's God is the cause of all things because all things follow causally and necessarily from the divine nature. Or, as he puts it, from God's infinite power or nature “all things have necessarily flowed, or always followed, by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles” (Ip17s1). The existence of the world is, thus, mathematically necessary. It is impossible that God should exist but not the world. This does not mean that God does not cause the world to come into being freely, since nothing outside of God constrains him to bring it into existence. But Spinoza does deny that God creates the world by some arbitrary and undetermined act of free will. God could not have done otherwise. There are no possible alternatives to the actual world, and absolutely no contingency or spontaneity within that world. Everything is absolutely and necessarily determined.

The two conceptions overlap in that for both the traditionalist and the Spinozist, there is exactly one God who is the necessarily existent, uncreated, and the ground of the existence of everything distinct from itself. But there are important differences. For Spinoza, God is immanent, not transcendent; not libertarianly free; not capable of existing on his own apart from nature. There are other differences as well.

Beckwith's response implies that the orthodox Thomist and the orthodox Spinozist refer to the same God, but that the Spinozist harbors some false beliefs about God, among them, that God is not a libertarianly free agent who could have created some other world or no world at all. On the traditional conception, God does things for reasons or purposes while for Spinoza, "All talk of God's purposes, intentions, goals, preferences or aims is just an anthropomorphizing fiction." (Nadler)

As I see it, there is no one God that both the Thomist and the Spinozist succeed in referring to. If the God of Aquinas exists, then the God of Spinoza does not exist. And contrapositively: if the God of Spinoza does exist, then the God of Aquinas does not. This strikes me as evident even if we don't bring in the point that for Aquinas God is ipsum esse subsistens. If we do bring it in it is even more evident.

From my point of view, Beckwith makes the following mistake. He apparently thinks that the overlap of the Thomistic and the Spinozistic God concepts suffices to show that in reality there is exactly one God to which both Thomists and Spinozists refer. It does not.

Suppose the common concept is instantiated. Then it is instantiated by something that exists. But existence entails completeness:

EX –> COMP: Necessarily, for any existent x, and for any non-intentional property P, either x instantiates P or x instantiates the complement of P.

What the principle states is that every real item, everything that exists, satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle. Nothing in reality is incomplete. So if the common God concept is instantiated, then it is instantiated by something that is either libertarianly free or not libertarianly free. A concept of God can abstract from this alternative. But God in reality must be one or the other. Since successful reference is reference to what exists, Thomist and Spinozist cannot be referring to one and the same God.

Objection. "Why not? if Thomism is true, they are both referring to the Thomist God, and if Spinozism is true, they are both referring to the Spinozist God."

Reply. There are two conditions on successful reference. First, the referent must exist. Second, the referent must satisfy the understanding of the one who is referring. As I said in an earlier post, successful reference requires the cooperation of mind and world. The second condition is not satisfied for the Spinozist if Thomism is true. The Spinozist intends to refer to a being that is not libertarianly free. His reference cannot be called successful if, willy-nilly, he happens to get hold of the Thomist God.

Shooting analogy. A sniper has a Muslim man in his sights, a man whom the sniper believes is a jihadi he must kill. Next to the man is a Muslim woman whom the sniper believes is not a jihadi and whom he endeavors not to harm. Unbeknownst to the sniper, it is the woman who is the jihadi and not the man. The sniper, aiming at the man, gets off his shot, but misses him while hitting the woman and killing her. Question: has the sniper made a successful shot? No doubt he hit and destroyed a jihadi. That's the good news. The bad news is that he missed the target he was aiming at. He failed to hit the target he intended to hit.

So I say the sniper failed to get off a successful shot. He just happened to hit a jihadi. He satisfied only one of the conditions of a successful shot. You must not only hit a target; you must hit the right target. Suppose I score a bull's eye at the shooting range, but the bull's eye belongs to the target of the shooter to my right. Did I get off a successful shot? Of course not: I failed to hit what I was aiming at.

Same with successful reference: You must not only hit something; you must hit the right thing. Now what makes a thing the right thing is the intention of the one who refers. When a jihadi screams, Allahu akbar! he intends to refer to the voluntaristic, radically unitarian, God of Islam, not the triune God. If he happens to latch on to the triune God, then he has failed in his reference. He has failed just as surely as if there is no God to refer to.

Traditional Theism and Reductive Pantheism: Same God?

Suppose we define a reductive pantheist as one who identifies God with the natural world — the space-time system and its contents — where this identification is taken as a reduction of God to nature, and thus as a naturalization of God, as opposed to a divinization of nature. In short, for the reductive pantheist, God reduces to the physical universe. God just is the physical universe. (I take no position on whether Spinoza is a reductive pantheist; I suspect he is not, but this is a question for the Spinoza scholars.)

Now do the traditional theist and the reductive pantheist believe in, worship, and refer to the same God, except that one or the other has false beliefs about this same God? The traditional theist holds that God is not identical to the physical universe, while the reductive pantheist holds that God is identical to the physical universe. Does it make sense to say that one of them has a false belief about the same God that the other has a true belief about?

This makes no sense. To maintain that God just is the physical universe is tantamount to a denial of the existence of God. Either that, or 'God' is being used in some idiosyncratic way.

What we should say in this case is that the respective senses of of 'God' are so different that they rule out sameness of referent.

Someone who worships the physical universe is not worshiping God under a false description; he is not worshiping God at all. He is worshiping an idol.

Now Spinoza, as I read him, is not a reductive pantheist. But if you can see why the reductive pantheist does not worship the same God as the traditional theist, then perhaps you will be able to appreciate why it is reasonable to hold the same of the Spinozist.

And if I can get you to appreciate that, then perhaps I can get you to appreciate that it is scarcely obvious that Christian and Muslim worship the same God.

The Euthyphro Problem, Islam, and Thomism

Peter Lupu called me last night to report that it had occurred to him that the famous Euthyphro Dilemma, first bruited in the eponymous early Platonic dialog, reflects a difference between two conceptions of God. One is the God-as-Being-itself conception; the other is the God-as-supreme-being conception. After he hung up, I recalled that in June, 2009 I had written a substantial entry on the Euthyphro Problem. I reproduce it here with some edits and additions in the expectation that it will help Peter think the matter through. I look forward to his comments. The ComBox is open.

The Euthyphro Problem

The locus classicus is Stephanus 9-10 in the early Platonic dialog, Euthyphro. This aporetic dialog is about the nature of piety, and Socrates, as usual, is in quest of a definition. Euthyphro proposes three definitions, with each of which Socrates has no trouble finding fault. According to the second, "piety is what all the gods love, and impiety is what all the gods hate." To this Socrates famously responds, "Do the gods love piety because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it?" In clearer terms, do the gods love pious acts because they are pious, or are pious acts pious because the gods love them?

But leaving piety and its definition aside, let us grapple with the deepest underlying issue as it affects the foundations of morality. As I see it, the Euthyphro problem assumes its full trenchancy and interest in the following generalized form of an aporetic dyad:

1. The obligatory is obligatory in virtue of its being commanded by an entity with the power to enforce its commands.

2. The obligatoriness of the obligatory cannot derive from some powerful entity's commanding of it.

It is clear that these propositions are inconsistent: they cannot both be true. What's more, they are contradictories: each entails the negation of the other. And yet each limb of the dyad is quite reasonably accepted, or so I shall argue. Thus the problem is an aporia: a set of propositions that are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent. Specifically, the problem is an antinomy: the limbs are logical contradictories and yet each limb make a strong claim on our acceptance.

Ad (1). The obligatory comprises what one ought to do, what one must, morally speaking, do. Now one might think that (1) is obviously false. If I am obliged to do X or refrain from doing Y, then one might think that the obligatoriness would be independent of any command, and thus independent of any person or group of persons who issues a command. The obligatory might be commanded, but being commanded is not what makes it obligatory on this way of thinking; it is rightly commanded because it is obligatory, rather than obligatory because it is commanded. And if one acts in accordance with a command to do something obligatory the obligatoriness of which does not derive from its being commanded, then, strictly speaking, one has not obeyed the command. To obey a command to do X is to do X because one is so commanded; to act in accordance with a command need not be to obey it. So if I obey a divine command to do X, I do X precisely and only because God has commanded it, and not because I discern X to be in itself obligatory, or both in itself obligatory and commanded by God.

There is a difference between obeying a command and acting in accordance with one. One can do the latter without doing the former, but not vice versa. Or if you insist, 'obey' is ambiguous: it has a strict and a loose sense. I propose using the term in the strict sense. Accordingly, I have not obeyed a command simply because I have acted in accordance with it; I have obeyed it only if I have so acted because it was commanded.

Consider an example. If one is obliged to feed one's children, if this is what one ought to do, there is a strong tendency to say that one ought to do it whether anyone or anything (God, the law, the state) commands it, and regardless of any consequences that might accrue if one were to fail to do it. One ought to do it because it is the right thing to do, the morally obligatory thing to do, something one (morally) must do. Thinking along these lines, one supposes that the oughtness or obligatoriness of what we are obliged to do as it were 'hangs in the air' unsupported by a conscious being such as God or some non-divine commander. Or to change the metaphor, the obligatory is 'laid up in Plato's heaven.' William James, however, reckons this a superstition:

But the moment we take a steady look at the question, we see not only that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a claim. Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; they cover each other exactly. Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true "in themselves," is therefore either an out‑and‑out superstition, or else it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real Thinker in whose actual demand upon us to think as he does our obligation must be ultimately based. In a theistic ethical philosophy that thinker in question is, of course, the Deity to whom the existence of the universe is due. "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" in The Will to Believe, p. 194.

James' point is that there is no abstract moral 'nature of things' existing independently of conscious beings. Thus the obligatoriness of an action we deem obligatory is not a property it has intrinsically apart from any relation to a subject who has desires and makes demands. The obligatoriness of an act must be traced back to the "de facto constitution of some existing consciousness."

Building on James' point, one could argue persuasively that if there is anything objectively obligatory, obligatory for all moral agents, then obligatoriness must be derivable from the will of an existing consciousness possessing the power to enforce its commands with respect to all who are commanded. A theist will naturally identify this existing consciousness with God.

Ad (2). In contradiction to the foregoing, however, it seems that (2) is true. To derive the obligatoriness of acts we deem obligatory from the actual commands of some de facto existing consciousness involves deriving the normative from the non-normative — and this seems clearly to be a mistake. If X commands Y, that is just a fact; how can X's commanding Y establish that Y ought to be done? Suppose I command you to do something. (Suppose further that you have not entered into a prior agreement with me to do as I say.) How can the mere fact of my issuing a command induce in you any obligation to act as commanded? Of course, I may threaten you with dire consequences if you fail to do as I say. If you then act in accordance with my command, you have simply submitted to my will in order to avoid the dire consequences — and not because you have perceived any obligation to act as commanded.

The Problem Applied to Islam

Now it seems clear that there is nothing meritorious in mere obedience, in mere submission to the will of another, even if the Other is the omnipotent lord of the universe. Surely, the mere fact that the most powerful person in existence commands me to do something does not morally oblige me to do it. Not even unlimited Might makes Right. It is no different from the situation in which a totalitarian state such as the Evil Empire of recent memory commands one to do something. Surely Uncle Joe's command to do X on pain of the gulag if one refuses to submit does not confer moral obligatoriness on the action commanded. In fact, mere obedience is the opposite of meritorious: it is a contemptible abdication of one's autonomy and grovelling acceptance of heteronomy.

And here is where Islam comes into the picture. The root meaning of 'Islam' is not 'peace' but submission to the will of Allah. But a rational, self-respecting, autonomous agent cannot submit to the will of Allah, or to the will of any power, unless the commands of said power are as it were 'independently certifiable.' In other words, only if Allah commands what is intrinsically morally obligatory could a self-respecting, autonomous agent act in accordance with his commands. In fact, one could take it a step further: a self-respecting, autonomous agent is morally obliged to act in accordance with Allah's commands only if what is commanded is intrinsically obligatory.

Of course, this way of thinking makes God or Allah subject to the moral law, as to something beyond divine control. But if there is anything beyond divine control, whether the laws of morality or the laws of logic, then it would seem that the divine aseity and sovereignty is compromised. For perhaps the best recent defense of absolute divine sovereignty, see Hugh J. McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God, Indiana UP, 2012. For my critique, see "Hugh McCann and the Implications of Divine Sovereignty," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 1, Winter 2014, pp. 149-161.

God is the absolute, and no absolute can be subject to anything 'outside' it. (If you say that God is not the absolute, then there is something greater than God, namely the absolute, and we should worship THAT. Presumably this is one of Anselm's reasons for describing God as "that than which no greater can be conceived.") Otherwise it would be relative to this 'outside' factor and hence not be ab solus and a se.

The antinomy, therefore, seems quite real and is not easily evaded. The divine aseity demands that God or Allah not be subject to anything external to him. A god so subject would not be God. On the other hand, the unlimited voluntarism of the Muslim view (see Professor Horace Jeffery Hodges for documentation here and here) is also unacceptable. A god who, at ontological bottom, was Absolute Whim and Arbitrary Power, would not be worthy of our worship but of our defiance. I am reminded of the late Christopher Hitchens who thought of God as an all-seeing, absolute despot.

The Muslim view is quite 'chilling' if one thinks about it. If God is not constrained by anything, not logic, not morality, then to use the words but reverse the sense of the famous Brothers Karamazov passage, "everything is permitted." In other words, if the Muslim god exists then "everything is permitted" just as surely as "everything is permitted" if the Christian god does not exist. In the former case, everything is permitted because morality has no foundation. In the former case, everything is permitted because morality's foundation is in Absolute Whim.

To put it in another way, a foundation of morality in unconstrained and unlimited will is no foundation at all.

To 'feel the chill,' couple the Muslim doctrine about God with the Muslim literalist/fundamentalist doctrine that his will is plain to discern in the pages of the Koran. Now murder can easily be justified, the murder of 'infidels' namely, on the ground that it is the will of God.

In the West, however, we have a safeguard absent in the Islamic world, namely reason. (That there is little or no reason in the Islamic world is proven by the fact that there is little or no genuine philosophy there, with the possible slight exception of Turkey; all genuine philosophy — not to be confused with historical scholarship — in the last 400 or so years comes from the West including Israel; I am being only slightly tendentious.) God is not above logic, nor is he above morality. It simply cannot be the case that God commands what is obviously evil. We in the West don't allow any credibility to such a god. In the West, reason acts as a 'check' and a 'balance' on the usurpatious claims of faith and inspiration.

A Thomist Solution?

But this still leaves us with the Euthyphro Problem. (1) and (2) are contradictories, and yet there are reasons to accept both. The unconditionally obligatory cannot exist in an ontological void: the 'ought' must be grounded in an 'is.' The only 'is' available is the will of an existing conscious being. But how can the actual commands of any being, even God, the supreme being, ground the obligatoriness of an act we deem obligatory?

Suppose God exists and God commands in accordance with a moral code that is logically antecedent to the divine will. Then the obligatory would not be obligatory because God commands it; it would be obligatory independently of divine commands. But that would leave us with the problem of explaining what makes the obligatory obligatory. It would leave us with prescriptions and proscriptions 'hanging in the air.' If, on the other hand, the obligatory is obligatory precisely because God commands it, then we have the illicit slide from 'is' to 'ought.' Surely the oughtness of what one ought to do cannot be inferred from the mere factuality of some command.

But if God is ontologically simple in the manner explained in my SEP article, then perhaps we can avoid both horns of the dilemma. For if God is simple, as Sts. Augustine and Aquinas maintained, then it is neither the case that God legislates morality, nor the case that he commands a moral code that exists independently of him. It is neither the case that obligatoriness derives from commands or that commands are in accordance with a pre-existing obligatoriness. The two are somehow one. God is neither an arbitrary despot, nor a set of abstract prescriptions. He is not a good being, but Goodness itself. He is self-existent concrete normativity as such.

But as you can see, the doctrine of divine simplicity tapers of into the mystical. You will be forgiven if you take my last formulations as gobbledy-gook. Perhaps they are and must remain nonsensical to the discursive intellect. But then we have reason to think the problem intractable. (1) and (2) cannot both be true, and yet we have good reason to accept both. To relieve the tension via the simplicity doctrine involves a shift into the transdiscursive — which is to say that the problem cannot be solved discursively.

One thing does seem very clear to me: the Muslim solution in terms of unlimited divine voluntarism is a disaster, and dangerous to boot. It would be better to accept a Platonic solution in which normativity 'floats free' of "the de facto constitution of some existing consciousness," to revert to the formulation of William James.

Peter's Insight

My friend Peter Lupu sees clearly that there is a connection between the horns of the Euthyphro Dilemma and the competing conceptions of God. The first horn – The obligatory is obligatory in virtue of its being commanded by an entity with the power to enforce its commands — aligns naturally with the conception of God as Being itself, as ipsum esse subsistens, as self-subsistent Being. God is not a norm enforcer, but ethical Normativity Itself. The second horn – The obligatoriness of the obligatory cannot derive from some powerful entity's commanding of it — aligns naturally with the conception of God as a being among beings, albeit a being supreme among beings. Supreme, but still subject to the moral order.

But of course there is trouble, and the alignment is not as smooth as we schematizers would like. For on either horn, God is a supreme commander, and this makes little sense if God is self-subsistent Being itself. One feels tempted to say that on either horn God is a being among beings.

Concluding Aporetic Postscript

We cannot genuinely solve the Euthyphro Dilemma by affirming either limb. Our only hope is to make an ascensive move to a higher standpoint, that of the divine simplicity according to which God is self-subsistent Being and Ethical Requiredness Itself. But this ascension is into the Transdiscursive, a region in which all our propositions are nonsensical in Wittgenstein's Tractarian sense. We are in the Tractarian predicament of trying to say the Unsayable.

So I submit that the problem is a genuine a-poria. There is no way forward, leastways, not here below. Both horns are impasses, to mix some metaphors. But here below is where we languish. The problem is absolutely insoluble for the Cave dweller.

Philosophers who simply must, at any cost, have a solution to every problem will of course disagree. These 'aporetically challenged' individuals need to take care they don't end up as ideologues.

Again on ‘God + World = God’

The thesis under examination as expressed by Diogenes Allen: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone." Is this a defensible position? Let's consider both sides of the question.

A. First, a crisp little argument against the view.

Consider two possible scenarios. In the first, God alone exists. In the second, God exists and creates a world. On a classical view of God, according to which he is libertarianly free, both scenarios are indeed possible. There is no necessity that God create; his creating is free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense. Clearly, the scenarios are different. But if God + World = God, then there is no difference between the two scenarios. For on that supposition, God alone exists in both scenarios. Therefore,it is not the case that God + World = God.

To extend the argument:

If God is Being itself, ipsum esse subsistens, Being in its plenitude and infinity, then how could there be anything else? If God is Being itself, and thus not a being among beings, how could there be any 'ontological room' for anything else? How is creation so much as possible if God is Being itself? Isn't the Thomist line, as articulated by Diogenes Allen and Etienne Gilson (quoted previously) just obviously mistaken?

After all, it is evident to the senses (though not self-evident, cf. Descartes' Dream Argument) that this material world of time and change exists: it is not nothing. Nor it is a dream or an illusion. Clearly, it is 'better known' that this material world of multiplicity exists than that God exists. But suppose God does exist. Then both the world (creatures) and God exist. Is it not perfectly obvious that the totality of reality is greater with both God and creation than with God alone?

B. Now let's consider what could be said in favor of the view.

Given the force of the arguments for the thesis that God is not a being among beings, arguments we cannot rehearse again here, it is reasonable to hold that God is Being itself. This leaves us with the task of attaching some tolerably clear meaning to 'God + world = God' in the teeth of the argument contra. This cannot be done if there are no modes of Being. For if everything that exists exists in the same way (mode), and if G exists and W exists, and they are numerically distinct, then it is self-evident that there is a totality of existents and that this totality is greater if G and W both exist than if G alone exists.

So we need to bring in modes of Being or existence. To motivate the modes-of-Being doctrine, consider an analogy. I am standing before a mirror looking at my image. How many men? One, not two. I'm a man; my mirror image is not a man. An image, reflection, picture, drawing, sculpture of a man is not a man. And yet my mirror image is not nothing: it exists. I exist and my image exists. Both exist, but in different ways. I exist whether or not any mirror image of me exists; but no mirror image of me exists unless I exist. Note too that the mirror image is dependent on me for its existence at each moment of its existence, unlike a photograph or a sculpture. (Herein an analogy with creatio continuans.)

It is also worth noting that there is a correspondence between the visual properties of the man and the visual properties displayed in the image. (This fact is what allows a dentist to do precision work on a tooth without looking at it directly.) Now we cannot say that the seen man and his image instantiate the same quidditative properties since, e.g., the man is bearded but his image is not. But we can say that the same visual properties instantiated by the man are displayed in the image. While the image is not bearded, it is an image of a bearded man. There are two different properties, but they are related: being bearded, being of something bearded, where the 'of' is an an objective genitive.

Man and image both exist. Yet there is an important difference. I say it is a difference in mode of existence. The image, unlike the man, exists dependently or derivatively, and it depends existentially on the very original of which it is the image. Existential dependence is not a quidditative property. This mode of existence is no more a quidditative property than existence is.

So I say we need a tripartite distinction: quiddity (nature, essence in the broad sense); general or quantificational existence, the existence expressed by the particular quantifier; mode of existence.

Now it makes a certain amount of sense to say that Man + Mirror Image = Man. This could be explained by saying that there is no totality of independent existents that has both me and my mirror image in it. If we are adding and subtracting over a domain of independent existents, then it is true that Man + Image = Man.

Accordingly, 'God + World = God' could be explained by saying that there is no totality of a se existents that has both God and creatures in it.

C. Aporetic Conclusion

The argument I gave in section A will strike many as compelling. But what I said in section B shows that it is not compelling. If one holds that God exists in a different way than creatures, then there is no totality in reality to which God and creatures all belong. One can of course say that something is (identically) God and that something is (identically) Socrates and that *Something is (identically) ____* has exactly the same sense, no matter what you throw into the gap: no matter what its mode of Being. But that implies only that there is a merely conceptual totality to which God and creatures all belong. In this merely excogitated conceptual totality, however, abstraction is made from the real existence of the things in question, and their different modes of Being.

I grant that God and Socrates both exist in the quantificational sense of 'exists,' a sense univocal across all existential sentences regardless of subject matter; but that is consistent with there being no commonality in reality between God and creatures to warrant talk of a totality in reality containing both.

My interim conclusion is aporetic: both positions on our question are reasonably maintained. They cannot both be true, but they can both be reasonably upheld.

I would be satisfied if Dale Tuggy and the 'supreme (miniscule) being theists' would agree with me and other '(majuscule) Being theists' that it is a stand-off.

World + God = God? The Aporetics of the God-World ‘Relation’

Fr. Aidan Kimel in a recent comment:

I just started reading Philosophy for Understanding Theology by Diogenes Allen. The first chapter is devoted to the doctrine of creation. These two sentences jumped out at me: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone." Do you agree? How would you unpack them?

These are hard sayings indeed. Herewith, some rough notes on the aporetics of the situation.

By 'world' here is meant the totality of creatures, the totality of beings brought into existence by God from nothing. Now if God is a being among beings, it would make no sense at all to say that "The world plus God is not more than God alone." For if we add the uncreated being (God) to the created beings, then we have more beings. We have a totality T that is larger than T minus God. If God is a being among beings, then there is a totality of beings that all exist in the same way and in the same sense, and this totality includes both God and creatures such that subtracting God or subtracting creatures would affect the 'cardinality' of this totality.

But if God is not a being among beings, but Being itself in its absolute fullness, as per the metaphysics of Exodus 3:14 (Ego sum qui sum, "I am who am") then there is no totality of beings all existing in the same way having both God and creatures as members. When we speak of God and creatures,

. . . we are dealing with two orders of being not to be added together or subtracted; they are, in all rigour, incommensurable, and that is also why they are compossible. God added nothing to Himself by the creation of the world, nor would anything be taken away from Him by its annihilation — events which would be of capital importance for the created things concerned, but null for Being Who would be in no wise concerned qua being. (Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Scribners 1936, p. 96. Gilson's Gifford lectures, 1931-1932.)

Here, I am afraid, I will end up supplying some 'ammo' to Tuggy, Rhoda, and Anderson. For the Gilson passage teeters on the brink of incoherence. We are told that there are two orders of being but that they are incommensurable. This can't be right, at least not without qualification. If there are two orders of being, then they are commensurable in respect of being. There has to be some sense in which God and Socrates both are. Otherwise, God and creatures are totally disconnected, with the consequence that creatures fall away into nothingness. For if God is Being itself, and there is no common measure, no commensurability whatsoever, between God and creatures, then creatures are nothing. God is all in all. God alone is. Gilson is well aware of the dialectical pressure in this monistic direction: "As soon as we identify God with Being it becomes clear that there is a sense in which God alone is." (65) If we emphasize the plenitude and transcendence of God, then this sensible world of matter and change is "banished at one stroke into the penumbra of mere appearance, relegated to the inferior status of a quasi-unreality." (64) But of course Christian metaphysics is not a strict monism; so a way must be found to assign the proper degree of reality to the plural world.

Here is the problem in a nutshell. God cannot be a being among beings. "But if God is Being, how can there be anything other than Himself?" (84) We need to find a way to avoid both radical ontological pluralism and radical ontological monism.

It's a variation on the old problem of the One and the Many.

A. If Being itself alone is, then beings are not. But then the One lacks the many. Not good: the manifold is evident to the senses and the intellect.

B. If beings alone are, then Being is not. But then the many lacks the One. Not good: the many is the many of the One. A sheer manifold with no real unity would not a cosmos make. The world is one, really one.

C. If Being and beings both are in the same way and and the same sense, then either Being is itself just another being among beings and we are back with radical pluralism, or Being alone is and we are back with radical monism.

Gilson's Thomist solution invokes the notions of participation and analogy. God is Being itself in its purity and plenitude and infinity. Creatures exist by participation in the divine Being: they are limited participators in unlimited Being. So both God and creatures exist, but in different ways. God exists simply and 'unparticipatedly.' Creatures exist by participation. God and creatures do not form a totality in which each member exists in the same way. We can thus avoid each of (A), (B), and (C).

But the notion of participation is a difficult one as Gilson realizes. It appears "repugnant to logical thought" (96): ". . . every participation supposes that the participator both is, and is not, that in which it participates." (96) How so?

I exist, but contingently. My Being is not my own, but received from another, from God, who is Being itself. So my Being is God's Being. But I am not God or anything else. So I have my own Being that distinguishes me numerically from everything else. So I am and am not that in which I participate.

Gilson does not show a convincing way around this contradiction.

The One of the many is not one of the many: as the source of the many, the One cannot be just one more member of the many. Nor can the One of the many be the same as the many: it cannot divide without remainder into the many. The One is transcendent of the many. But while transcendent, it cannot be wholly other than the many. For, as Plotinus says, "It is by the One that all beings are beings." The One, as the principle by which each member of the many exists, cannot be something indifferent to the many or external to the many, or other than the many, or merely related to the many. The One is immanent to the many. The One is immanent to the many without being the same as the many. The One is neither the same as the many nor other than the many. The One is both transcendent of the many and immanent in the many. Theologically, God is said to be both transcendent and omnipresent.

What should we conclude from these affronts to the discursive intellect? That there is just nothing to talk about here, or that there is but it is beyond the grasp of our paltry intellects? If what I have written above is logical nonsense, yet it seems to be important, well-motivated, rigorously articulated nonsense.

Aquinas and Why the New Atheists are Right

A recent talk by Fr. Robert Barron delivered at the University of St. Thomas. Serendipitously relevant to the discussion thread directly below on this blog. Fr. Barron is introduced by our friend Tim Pawl. What are the New Atheists right about? That a God who is a being among beings does not exist. Fr. Barron very skillfully presents the Thomist doctrine according to which God is not a summum ens but ipsum esse subsistens, but not in a way that will alleviate the concerns of Dale Tuggy and Alan Rhoda and other theistic personalists.

Fr. Barron refers to Hitchens and Dawkins in a couple of places as 'Ditchkins.' That suggests to me 'Hairnet' as a moniker for the Harris-Dennett tag team.