Category: Christian Doctrine

Five Attitudes Toward the Christian Dogmas

Original Sin, Trinity, and Incarnation are three Christian dogmas.  There are others as well.  Here is an off-the-cuff taxonomy of possible attitudes towards such dogmas. 

1. They are just nonsense to be ignored or even a sign of deep mental dysfunction.  When I first started blogging about the Trinity, John Jay Ray commented (6 January 2005):

The blogosphere is an amazing place. Over at Maverick Philosopher there has been an extensive discussion going on about the doctrine of the holy Trinity! Generally sympathetic to Christianity though I am, I cannot see that particular doctrine as anything but the most awful load of codswallop. It is a self-contradictory formulation that arose out of the controversy among early Christians about whether Christ was God or not. [. . .] It is conventional to describe the doctrine as a mystery but it is no such thing. It is just a theological compromise that sacrifices logic for the sake of keeping all parties to the debate happy. How anybody can take it seriously is beyond me.

And then there is that other Australian, the neo-positivist David Stove, who thinks that something has gone dreadfully and fatally wrong with the thoughts of anyone who takes Trinitarian speculation seriously, in particular the debate over the filioque clause.  See The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, Basil Backwell, 1991, p. 179.

2. They are false and/or incoherent, but worthy of study as concrete points of entry into various logical, metaphysical, and ethical questions that are salient for all, including atheists and materialists. What is identity?  Is it absolute or sortal-relative?  What is personhood?  Can guilt be inherited?  Scores of such questions arise when these dogmas are carefully thought through.

3.  They are false and/or incoherent but worth studying as part of the history of ideas, or the sociology of knowledge, or the psychology of belief.  Ideas have consequences, whether true or false, coherent or incoherent, sane or insane.

4.  The are false and/or incoherent in many of their formulations, but hide nuggets of truth that can excavated and refined and reformulated in ways that are rationally acceptable.  An example of this is Kant's project in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.

5.   The dogmas are coherent and indeed true as formulated and promulgated by some particular church such as the Roman Catholic church or the Eastern Orthodox church.

I reject the extremes of this spectrum of opinion.  Thus I reject #1 and #5.  My approach is closest to #4, though I feel no particular commitment to the Kantian variant.  Although the main reason to take seriously Original Sin, for example, is that it expresses something deep and true about the human predicament,  the reasons supplied in #2 and #3 are also good ones.  The notion that blacks are owed reparations for slavery, for example, is one that is closely related to the notion that guilt is transmissible from the perpetrator of a crime to his descendants.  This gives rise to the suspicion that the demand for reparations is a secularization of certain Christian dogmatic themes.  How then can the evaluation of the reparations demand proceed without any consideration of the theological doctrine?

Notes on Mortality and Christian Doctrine

1. Let's start with the word 'mortal' and remind ourselves of some obvious points. 'Mortal' is from the Latin mors, mortis meaning death. That which is mortal is either subject to death, or conducive to death, or in some way expressive of death. Thus when we say of a human being that he is mortal we do not mean that he is dead, but that he is subject to death. My being mortal is consistent with my being alive and kicking. Indeed, if I weren't alive I could not be said to be either mortal or immortal. Spark plugs are neither mortal nor immortal. Some will say of a car that it has 'died.' But that is a loose and metaphorical way of talking. Only that which was once alive can properly be said to have died.

Kant on Peccatum Originale Originans and Peccatum Originale Originatum

1. An important distinction for understanding the doctrine of original sin is that between originating original sin (peccatum originale originans) and originated original sin (peccatum originale originatum).  This post will explain the distinction and then consider Immanuel Kant's reasons for rejecting originated original sin.  It is important to realize that Kant does accept something like original sin under the rubric 'radical evil,' a topic to be explored in subsequent posts.  It is also important to realize that Kierkegaard's seminal thoughts about original sin as expressed in The Concept of Dread were influenced by Kant, and that Reinhold Niebuhr's influential treatment is in turn derivative from Kierkegaard.

2. So what's the distinction?  According to the Genesis story, the Fall of Man was precipitated by specific sinful acts, acts of disobedience, by Adam and Eve.  The sins of Adam and Eve were originating original sins. They were the first sins for the first human beings, but also the first sins for the human race.  Their sin somehow got transmitted to their descendants inducing in them a state of sinfulness.  The sinfulness of the descendants is originated original sin. This originated original sin is hereitary sin:  it is inherited and innate for postlapsarians and so does not depend on any specific sin of a person who inherits it.     Nevertheless it brings with it guilt and desert of punishment.  Socrates, then, or any post-Adamic man, is guilty and deserving of punishment whether or not he commits any actual sins of his own.  And so  a man who was perfectly sinless in the sense that he committed no actual sin of his own would nonetheless stand condemned in virtue of what an earlier man had one.  This doctrine has the consequence that an infant, who as an infant is of course innocent of any actual sin, and who dies unbaptized, is justly excluded from the kingdom of heaven.  Such an infant, on Catholic doctrine at least, ends up in limbo, or to be precise, in limbus infantium.  A cognate consequence is that a perfectly sinless adult who lives and dies before Christ's redemptive act is also excluded from heaven.  Such a person lands in limbus patrum.  (See here for the Catholic doctrine.)

3.  The stumbling block is obvious:  How can one justly be held morally accountable for what someone else has done or left undone?  How can one be guilty and deserving of punishment without having committed any specific transgression?  How can guilt be inherited?  Aren't these moral absurdities? Aren't we morally distinct  as persons, each responsible only for what he does and leaves undone?  There might well be originating original sin, but how could there be originated original sin?  It is worth noting that to reject originated original sin is not to reject originating original sin, or original sin as such.  There could be a deep structural flaw in humans as humans, universal and unameliorable by human effort, which deserves the title 'original sin/sinfulness' without it being the case that sin is inheritable.

Again I revert to my distinction between the putative fact of our fallenness and the various theories about it.  To refute a theory is not to refute a fact.

4.  Kant rejects the Augustinian notion of inherited sin.  Sinfulness, guilt, desert of punishment — these cannot be inherited.  So for Kant there is no originated original  sin.  Of the various explanations of the spread of moral evil through the members and generations of the human race, "the most inept is that which describes it as descending to us as an inheritance from our first parents." (Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trs. Greene and Hudson, Harper 1960, p. 35)  But this is not to say that Kant rejects the notion of original sin.  He himself speaks of peccatum originarium, which he distinguishes from peccatum derivatum.  (26)  For Kant, original sin is a propensity in us toward moral evil which is universal and logically prior to specific immoral acts.  I hope to say more about this in a subsequent post.

5.  But what is Kant's argument against hereditary guilt and originated original sin? Kant as I read him accepts it as a fact that in all human beings there is radical moral evil, a peccatum originarium that lies deeper than, and makes possible, specific peccata derivata.  What he objects to is the explanation of this fact in terms of a propagation of guilt from the original parents.  The main point is that a temporal explanation in terms of antecedent causes cannot account for something for which we are morally responsible.  If we are morally responsible, then we are free; but free actions cannot be explained in terms of temporally prior causes.  For if an action is caused, it is necessitated, and what is necessitated by its causes cannot be free. 

What is true of actions is true of moral character insofar as moral character is something for which one is morally responsible.  Therefore our radically evil moral character which predisposes us to specific acts of wrongdoing  cannot be explained in terms of temporally antececent causes.  Hence it cannot be explained by any propagation of guilt from the original parents to us.  Thus there is no originated guilt.  Our being guilty must be viewed "as though  the individual had fallen into it directly from a state of innocence." (36)  Thus all actions which make us guilty are original employments of the will. All original sin is originating original sin.

Perhaps we can put it this way.  Adam has nothing over Socrates.  It is not as if Adam went directly from a state of innocence into a state of sin while Socrates inherited sinfulness and was never in a state of innocence.  If there is such a thing as original sin then both are equally originative of it.

The Genesis account gives us a temporal representation of a logical and thus atemporal relationship.  The state of innocence is set at the temporal beginning of humanity, and the fall from innocence is depicted as an event in time.  But then we get the problems raised in #3 above.  The mistake is to "look for an origin in time of a moral character for which we are to be held responsible . . . ." (38)  We make this mistake because we want an explanation of the contingent existence of our radically evil moral predisposition.  An explanation, however, is not to be had.  The rational origin of the perversion of our will "remains inscrutable to us." (38)

6.  Kant thus does accept something like original sin.  We have within us a deep propensity to moral evil that makes us guilty and deserving of punishment.  But there is no deterministic causal explanation for it.  So while there is a sense in which our fallenness is innate, it is not inherited.  For it is morally absurd to suppose that I could be guilty of being in a state that I am caused to be in.  Each one of us is originally guilty but by a free atemporal choice.  This makes the presence of the radical flaw in each of us inscrutable and inexplicable.  The mystery of radical evil points us to the mystery of free will.  On Kant's view, then, there is only originating original sin.  Each of us by his own free noumenal agency plunges from innocence into guilt!

We shall have to continue these ruminations later.  Some questions on the menu of rumination:

Q1.  Is Kant's account with its appeal to atemporal noumenal agency really any better than Augustine's biological propagation account?

Q2.   How can guilt be innate but not inherited, as Kant maintains?

Q3.   Why believe in radical evil in the first place?  If the evidence for it is empirical, how can such evidence  show that radical evil is both universal (and thus inscribed in man's very nature) and ineradicable by human effort?

What’s Wrong with Pelagianism?

You will be forgiven (by me, anyway) for finding the doctrine of Original Sin (OS) in its Augustinian form  absurd.  For it seems to entail a logical contradiction.  The originality of OS seems to conflict with its sinfulnness. 

To start with the sinfulness part. If my having done (or having failed to do) X is a sin, then my having done (or having failed to do) X is something for which I am morally responsible.  But I am morally responsible for an act or omission only if I could have done otherwise.  But if I could have done otherwise, then it cannot be essential to me (part of my nature as a human being) that I sin (or be in a sinful condition, or be guilty).  Whatever guilt accrued to someone in the past (Adam or anyone else) in virtue of his misdeeds is his affair alone and is not chargeable to my moral bank account.

To put it anachronistically, there was a Kantian follower of Pelagius by the name of Coelestius who maintained that man cannot be held responsible for keeping a law or achieving an ideal if he lacks the capacity to do so.  As Reinhold Niebuhr (The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1941, p. 247) writes:

Thus the Kantian "I ought therefore I can"  is neatly anticipated in the argument of Coelestius:  "We have to inquire whether whether a man is commanded to be without sin; for either he is unable so to live and then there is no such commandment; or else if there be such a commandment he has the ability."

On the other hand, if there is such a thing as original sin, then sinfulness is essential to me, 'inscribed into my very essence' as a French writer might put it. For original sin is not the sin of Adam and Eve only, but the sin of all of us.  Adam is just as much Man as a man; Eve is just as much Woman as a woman.  We are all guilty of original sin.

And so OS seems to entail that sinfulness both is and is not essential to me.  And that is a contradiction.

We might essay a Pelagian escape route by modifying our understanding of the doctrine in the following way.  OS is not, strictly speaking, a sin but refers to a sort of structural flaw or weakness, one to be found in each and every human being, which predisposes us to actual sin but is not itself a sin or a state of sinfulness for a postlapsarian man or woman. This predisposition might be ascribed to the hebetude of the flesh or the inertia of nature.  Whatever its source, it is not in our power.  Hence we are not responsible for it and not guilty in virtue of it.  It does not interfere with our free will or make impossible self-perfection.  There is no inherited guilt.  Perhaps the structural flaw under which we all labor is the result of someone's sin in the past; but if it is we are not morally responsible for it.

Perhaps Pelagianism has its own difficulties? 

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

Mr Vallicella,
 
I want to give you a heads up on the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil". The phrase is probably an idiom that means something like 'universal wisdom' or 'all knowledge'. A better translation may be 'The Tree of the Knowledge of Everything From A to Z'. There is, in fact, nothing in the story that indicates that Adam and Eve had no free will before the eating of the fruit. God, in fact, gives them orders that presuppose the freedom to disobey…to tend the garden, to refrain from eating some fruit, etc. The eating of the Tree was literally to eat of the fruit that gives one the wisdom of God, to overcome the limits God had placed on them and become more like Him. And the result is the clothing of the self, and later the tilling of soil and animal husbandry and after Cain the building of cities. It is not 'moral' knowledge they are coming to but the knowledge of what it takes to enact their own wills to 'get what they want…things like technology and the building of cities.
 
Peace and Blessings,
Joshua Orsak
 
1. The crux of the matter is indeed the interpretation of 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.'  So one question for Mr Orsak is how he would support his interpretation.  After all, the phrase speaks of the knowledge of good and evil, not the knowledge of all things.
 
2.  In yesterday's post I did not say that Adam and Eve did not have freedom of the will before eating the forbidden fruit; I said that they were not moral agents before eating it.  I specified two individually necessary conditions of moral agency (and I left open the question whether they are jointly sufficient).  The one is free will and the other is knowledge of the difference between good and evil.  Since both conditions are necessary, absence of either prevents a being from being a moral agent.  So what I was arguing is consistent with Adam's and Eve's possession of free will prior to their eating of the forbidden fruit.
 
3. The point I was making (and I got this from Peter Lupu, to give credit where credit is due) was that there is something prima facie puzzling about Genesis 2 & 3.  Roughly:  How can God justly banish Adam and Eve from paradise for disobedience prior to their knowing the difference between good and evil?
 
4. Orsak's solution is to interpret 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' as referring to a tree the eating of the fruit of which confers all knowledge.  I agree that if this interpretation is defensible, then the puzzle collapses.  But what considerations speak for Orsak's interpretation?  After all, the most natural way to interpret 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' is to interpret it as referring to a tree the eating of the fruit of which confers either (i) the knowledge that there is an objective difference between good and evil, or (ii) the knowledge of which actions/omissions are good and which evil, or (iii) both.

Fall of Man or Rise of Man? The Aporetics of Genesis 2 and 3

At Genesis 2,17 the Lord forbids Adam from eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, on pain of death.  In the next chapter, however, Eve is tempted by the serpent, succumbs, eats of the tree, and persuades Adam to eat of it too.  As punishment for their disobedience, Adam and Eve are banished from the garden of Eden  and put under sentence of death.  Thus mortality is one of the wages of Original Sin.

The story has a puzzling feature that Peter Lupu made me see.  Let us agree that a moral agent is a being that (i) possesses free will, and (ii) possesses knowledge of the difference between good and evil, right and wrong.  Clearly, both conditions are necessary for moral agency.  And let us agree that no agent can be justly punished unless he is a moral agent and does something wrong.  But before eating from the tree, Adam and Eve are not moral agents.  For it is only by eating from the tree that they acquire the knowledge of good and evil, one of the necessary conditions of moral agency.   And yet God punishes them.  How then can his punishment be just?  My problem concerns not the truth of the story, but its coherence and meaning.  The problem can be set forth as an aporetic pentad:

1. If God punishes, God punishes justly.
2. If God punishes an agent justly, then that agent is a moral agent that deliberately does something wrong.
3. A moral agent possesses the knowledge of good and evil.
4. God punishes Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit.
5. Adam and Eve did not possess the knowledge of good and evil prior to eating the forbidden fruit.

The pentad is logically inconsistent: the first four limbs entail the negation of the fifth.  To rescue the coherence of the story one of the limbs must be rejected.  But which one?

(1), (3), and (4) are undeniable.  This leaves (2) and (5).   One might think to deny (2).  My dog is not a moral agent, but I can justly punish it for some behavior.  But punishment in this sense is mere behavior-modification and not relevant to the case at hand.  So it appears that the only way out is by denying (5).  Adam and Eve did possess the knowledge of good and evil prior to eating the forbidden fruit.  If so, the so-called 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil' is not a tree the eating of the fruit of which is necessary for becoming a moral agent.

Support for this way out can be found at Genesis 1, 26: "Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness . . . ."  This image, I argue, is a spiritual image.  You would have to be quite the lunkheaded atheist/materialist to think that the image is a physical one.  Now if God created man in his spiritual image, then presumably that means that God created man to be a moral agent, a free being who is alive to the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong. So before receiving the command not to eat of the tree of good and evil, Adam and Eve were already moral agents.  On this interpretation, whereby (5) is rejected, the coherence of the story is upheld.

"But then why is the tree in question called 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'?"  I have no idea.

Another intriguing suggestion that Peter Lupu made to me in conversation was that the Genesis story recounts not the Fall of man, but his rise or ascent from a pre-human condition of animal innocence to the status of a moral being possessing the knowledge of good and evil.  This makes sense if if it is by eating the forbidden fruit that man first become man in the full theomorphic sense.  And so, to put it quite pointedly, it is only by disobeying the divine command that Adam becomes a son of God! Before that he wallows in a state of animal-like, pre-human inocence.  Now surely a God worth his salt would not want mere pets; what he would want are sons and daughters capable of participating in the divine life. He wants his 'children' to be moral agents.  Indeed, one might go so far as to suppose — and this I think is the direction in which Peter is headed — that God wants them to be autonomous moral agents, agents who are not merely (libertarianly) free, and awake to the distinction between good and evil, but who in addition are morally self-legislative, i.e., who give the law to themselves, as opposed to existing heteronomously in a condition where the law is imposed on them by God.

The trajectory of this interpretation is towards secular humanism.  God fades out and Man comes into his own.  I don't buy it, but that's another post. 

Two Opposite Mistakes Concerning Original Sin

One mistake is to think that the doctrine of Original Sin is empirically verifiable.  I have seen this thought attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr.  (If someone can supply a reference for me with exact bibliographical data, I would be much obliged.)  I could easily be mistaken, but I believe I have encountered the thought in Kierkegaard as well. (Anyone have a reference?)  G. K. Chesterton says essentially the same thing.  See my post, Is Sin a Fact?  A Passage from Chesterton Examined.  Chesterton thinks that sin, and indeed original sin, is a plain fact for all to see.  That is simply not the case as I argue.

The opposite mistake is to think that Original Sin is obviously false and empirically refutable by evolutionary biology.  Thus: no Fall because no original biologically human parents.  As if the doctrine of the Fall 'stands or falls' with the truth of a passage in Genesis literally interpreted.  I lately explained why I think that is a mistake, and indeed a rather stupid one, though my explanation left something to be desired.  (I am working on a longer post on the Fall as we speak.)

So on the one hand we have those who maintain that the doctrine of Original Sin is true as a matter of empirical fact, and on the other we have those who maintain that it is false as a matter of empirical fact.  On both sides we find very intelligent people.  I take this disagreement as further evidence that we are indeed fallen beings, 'noetically wretched,' to coin a phrase, beings whose reason is so infirm and befouled that we can even argue about such a thing.  And of course my own view, according to which OS is neither empirically true nor empirically false, is just another voice added to the cacophony of conflicting voices, though, as it seems to me, it has more merit than the other two.

So we are in deep caca, intellectually, morally, and in every which way — which is why I believe in 'something like'  Original Sin. Our condition is a fallen one, and indeed one that is (i) universal in that it applies to everyone, and (ii) unameliorable by anything we can do, individually or collectively.  You say I need to justify these bold claims?  I agree! But it's Saturday night, the sun is setting, and it's time to close up shop for the day.  So, invoking the blogospheric privilege deriving from the truth that brevity is the soul of blog,  I simply punch the clock.

Original Sin and Eastern Orthodoxy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Stoic Ideal

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

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

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

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

On Temptation and the Perfection of Jesus

Joshua Orsak e-mails: 
Your recent posts on temptation got me thinking (again) about a problem I've wrestled with a long time. I'm a Christian minister and I've long thought about a tension between Jesus Christ's focus on intentions and sin in the internal life of man and the Christian conviction summed up in Hebrews 4:15 that Jesus was tempted in all the ways that we are but did not sin. I accept Jesus' injunction against (for instance) lusting after a person in one's heart and being angry at a person as sinful mental states or attitudes. I know from many of your past posts that you, too, are sympathetic with such a view. I believe that attitudes and intentions can be sinful as well as actions, and no doubt I get that from my Christianity.
 
But it seems to me that to be tempted is at least in part to (for instance) 'lust after a woman in your heart'. To be angry at someone is to be tempted to act against them. To be attracted to a woman and think about (say) cheating on my wife is to be tempted to cheat. But isn't that lusting after her in my heart? This creates a problem with the view that Jesus was sinless and indeed has often made me question that particular doctrine. How could Jesus be tempted 'in all ways' that we are and yet not sin, since it seems that to be tempted is to adopt, if only for a moment, the attitudes he labels as sinful? I've never come up with a satisfactory answer to this question, so I was wondering what you might think of it.
I had actually never thought of this.  The problem seems genuine and worth discussing for anyone who takes Christian orthodoxy seriously.  To throw the problem into sharp relief, I will formulate it as an inconsistent pentad:
 
1. Being fully human, Jesus was subject to every manner of temptation and was actually tempted.
2. To be tempted to do X is to harbor the thought of doing X.
3. Thoughts are morally evaluable: there are such things as evil (sinful) thoughts.
4.  If a person habitually harbors evil (sinful) thoughts,  then the person is sinful.
5. Being fully divine, Jesus was wholly sinless.
 
This quintet of propositions is logically inconsistent as is obvious from the fact that if  the first four are true, then the fifth must be false.
 
To solve the problem we must reject one of the pentad's limbs.  (1) and (5) are clear commitments of orthodox Christian theology and so cannot be abandoned by anyone who wishes to remain orthodox.  (3) has a NT basis, and so it cannot be abandoned either.  But (2) and (4) are rejectable.
 
As for (2), I can be tempted to do something like cheating my inexperienced customers without harboring the thought of doing so: I might just have the thought but then suppress it or dismiss it.
 
As for (4), even if  a married person dwells on the sinful thought of a trip to Las Vegas (where, we are told, "what happens there, stays there") to hook up (in the contemporary sexual sense) with an old flame, that by itself does not make the person a sinful person.  To be a sinful person one must habitually sin in thought, word, or deed.  Going on a drunk or two does not make one a drunkard; lying a few times does not make one a liar, etc. 
 
Note that (2) and (4) are necessary to derive a contradiction.  The problem can thus be solved by rejecting one or both of these propositions.  Rejecting (2) suffices to solve the problem.
 
In sum, Jesus' being tempted and his being perfectly sinless are consistent because, while Jesus had tempting thoughts, he did not entertain them with hospitality but rejected them.  "Get behind me, Satan, etc."
 

Pee Cee Christians

Do some Christians have a death wish?  Campus Crusade for Christ has changed its name, dropping 'crusade' and 'Christ.' 

And then they have the chutzpah to say they are not bowing to political correctness.

There is nothing wrong with unintentionally causing offense to people who take offense inappropriately.  If 'crusade' and 'Christ' are offensive to you, then that is your problem.  This thought is developed in Of Black Holes and Political Correctness.

And besides, Christianity is offensive to the natural man.  It is supposed to be.

Christian Stoicism

Richard Wurmbrand, From Torture to Triumph (Monarch, 1991), p. 5:

     A brother who had been terribly tortured by the Communist police
     shared the same prison cell with me and told the following incident:

     I once saw an impressive scene in a circus. A sharpshooter set out
     to demonstrate his skill. In the arena was his wife with a burning
     candle on her head. From a distance he shot the candle so that it
     fell, leaving his wife unharmed.

     Later I asked her, "Were you afraid?" She replied, "Why should I
     be? He aimed at the candle, not at me."

     I thought about this when I was under torture. Why should I be
     afraid of the torturers? They don't beat me. They beat my body. My
     'me,' my real being, is Christ. I was seated with him in the
     heavenly places. This — my real person — could not be touched by
     them.

From the Mail: Christianity and Judaism

Dear Mr. Vallicella,
 
I want to begin by thanking you yet again for your fantastic blog. Your recent posts on Osama Bin Laden, the correct response to his death, and on evidentialism have been absolutely superb. I have linked to a great many of your posts in recent days on my facebook and I sing your praises regularly.
 
Thank you so much; that explains the uptick in social media traffic.
 
I wanted to bring up a couple of issues on your recent commentary on Prager's reaction to Bin Laden's death, and particularly your comments on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.
 
It is important to remember that Judaism as it is practiced today is NOT the way it has always been practiced. And first century Judaism in particular was very diverse indeed. One of the biggest challenges for Biblical interpreters has been archeological evidence that counters the view of Judaism presented in the Gospels and in Paul's letters as they are normally interpreted. Judaism was far more varied and diverse than what we once believed, at the time of Jesus and Paul. Many issues we think of as settled in Judaism were up for grabs, and arguments about and around them were common. One was the issue of intention verses action.
 
There are many similarities between Jesus' focus on the inner self and some parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance. So thoughts could be sinful or righteous, in some sectors of 1st Century Judaism, at least. Christianity is the triumph of those sectors of Judaism, and not a new religious idea 'superseding' Judaism. I'm just not sure your characterization of Christianity 'superseding' Judaism is correct on the issue you and Peter were arguing about. I certainly do think Christianity and Judaism are possessed of important differences and Christianity gets some things right that Judaism gets wrong. But in the case of whether thoughts can be sinful, I think it is more accurate to say that Christianity is the triumph of a certain sector of Judaism.
 
That's an excellent objection, and you may be right.  So it is not that Christianity supersedes the whole of Judaism on the issue Peter and I were discussing, but that Christianity develops and champions a strand of thought that is already present in Judaism.  Now that I think of it, that is more plausible than what I was suggesting.
 
My main concern, though, was to figure out why Peter and I disagree about the moral evaluability of mere thoughts, and why Prager and I disagree about the moral appropriateness of rejoicing over a man's violent death — even when the man in question is a mass murderer who was justly executed.
 
In light of this concern, I think there is some justification in viewing Judaism as a block and contrasting Christianity with it.
 
I think a criticism that can be leveled at Prager could be that there is a bit of literalism in his view. His proof-texting approach just doesn't make much sense to me, at least in this case. Most Biblical scholars believe, for instance, that the story of the crossing of "The Red Sea" (which is probably not the right translation for the name of the body of water), is several older stories edited together. When those stories are distentangled, some versions don't even include the death of Pharaoh's men. There are a lot of sentiments expressed in the Old Testament that I doubt Rabbis would readily suggest we can rightly hold.
 
So these are just some thoughts that shot through my head when I read that post, which like so much of what you write, really got the juices flowing.
 
Peace and Blessings
Joshua Orsak