Christian Doctrine – Page 7 – Maverick Philosopher

Thomas Joseph White on the Hypostatic Union: Questions

Vito Caiati writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cross Won, but the Battle Never Ends

I ended my European tour in June at Rome where all roads are said to lead. After hours of prayer and meditation in Santa Maria Maggiore, I spent a long time in the vicinity of the Coliseum where I noticed something I had missed on previous visits:

The brutal Romans contributed mightily to civilization, but it took Christianity to civilize us truly. But now the Church of Rome is collapsing under the weight of its own decadence. It will most likely survive as a remnant, stripped down to essentials and purified by suffering and worldly losses. Such losses will do it good. The Church needs to spend a generation or two in the desert, there to examine its collective conscience and to ponder the mission it has abandoned.

All institutions require reform and renewal from time to time, as do their members. But it is not reform or renewal when an institution is diverted from its founding purpose. It is rather destruction. The whole point of the church founded by Christ was to stand against the world and point us, and indeed lead us, beyond it. "My kingdom is not of this world." (John 18:36) Betraying its mandate, the Roman church has become just another piece of cultural junk. Cozying up to secularity, the Church seeks to maintain itself as an organizational hustle for the clerics it serves while abandoning the deposit of faith it is supposed to be preserving.

The vast, ancient edifice needs fumigation. The termites, from Bergoglio on down, need to be sent scurrying. The rotten hierarchy needs to be defunded. My trenchant but obviously figurative talk of termites and fumigation will elicit howls of protest from some. "Eliminationist rhetoric!" But consider this report from a correspondent, Dr. Vito Caiati:

In its October 7th edition, Corriere della Sera offered excepts from Pope Bergoglio’s just released book on the Virgin Mary , including the following paragraph, which well reveals his insidious method of undermining dogma and tradition. I provide the first paragraph of this longer reflection, followed by my translation.

Da quando è nata fino all’Annunciazione, al momento dell’incontro con l’angelo di Dio, me l’immagino come una ragazza normale, una ragazza di oggi, una ragazza non posso dire di città, perché Lei è di un paesino, ma normale, normale, educata normalmente, aperta a sposarsi, a fare una famiglia. Una cosa che immagino è che amasse le Scritture: conosceva le Scritture, aveva fatto la catechesi ma familiare, dal cuore. Poi, dopo il concepimento di Gesù, ancora una donna normale: Maria è la normalità, è una donna che qualsiasi donna di questo mondo può dire di poter imitare. Niente cose strane nella vita, una madre normale: anche nel suo matrimonio verginale, casto in quella cornice della verginità, Maria è stata normale. Lavorava, faceva la spesa, aiutava il Figlio, aiutava il marito: normale.

From her birth until the Annunciation, at the moment of the encounter with the angel of God, I imagine her [the Virgin Mary] as a normal girl, a girl of today, I cannot say a girl of the city, because she is from a hamlet, but normal, normal, educated normally, open to marrying, to having a family. One thing that I imagine is that she loved the Scriptures: she knew the Scriptures; she had carried out catechesis but informally, from the heart. Then, after the conception of Jesus, she was still a normal woman. Mary is normality, is a woman that almost any women in this world is able to imitate. No strange things in life, a normal mother: even in her virginal matrimony, chaste in that frame of virginity, Mary was normal. She worked, shopped, helped her Son, helped her husband: normal.

Leaving aside the triteness of these reflections, they constitute, first, a masked assault on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which proclaims that “The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 494). While we cannot know the intimate effects of such “singular grace and privilege” on Mary’s being and consciousness, we are certainly bound to hold that she was no “normal girl.” Moreover, Bergoglio’s words can be taken to deny the perpetual virginity of Mary, in that while he speaks of her being “chaste in the frame of virginity,” he simultaneously regards her “after the birth of Jesus” as “a normal woman” since there are “no strange things in life.” Again, the Church affirms that although Jesus emerged from the body of the Theotokos, her virginity was not in any way altered. Now, if this is not a “strange thing,” that is, an absolutely unique miracle, what is? Bergoglio is constantly at work undermining the foundations of the faith to the benefit of post-modern skepticism and relativism.

Una ragazza normale? One could try to read this as an emphasis on Mary's humanity, or one might say that Bergoglio is a foolish man who doesn't understand the dogmas of the Church of which he is pope; but in the end I believe my learned correspondent is right: this is an insidious undermining of dogma and tradition. How could Bergoglio not know the doctrinal content in the Catechism?

For a man like me there are two main problems with the RCC, or rather two main impediments to my returning to it, as I would like to do, being a cradle Catholic. One is at the philosophical level: how is it possible that the dogmas including the Mariological dogmas (Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception, Assumption) be true? Suppose I solve this problem to my own satisfaction. Then the second problem, that of the corruption of the institution, jumps out at me. The church hierarchy and the rank-and-file priests are filled with unbelievers who apparently believe in the Church in precisely the way mafiosi believe in the mafia: it's their thing, a hustle that keeps them fat and happy in a worldly sense and allows free play to their concupiscence. I am alluding, of course, to priestly pederasty, pedophilia, and ephebophilia. How can I in good conscience support such a church by attendance or monetary contributions? If the Church is now just another pile of secular-leftist junk, and a haven for homosexuals, then it ought to be defunded.

Am I suggesting that for every priest the Church is a fraud and a hustle? Of course not. But as Rod Dreher has forcefully documented over many, many entries at the American Conservative, the rot resides in the hierarchy itself from Bergoglio on down. This fact makes the problem very serious indeed.

Is Ora et Labora Enough? Or do Christians Need Leisure Too?

Paul J. Griffiths maintains a strikingly wrong-headed thesis in an article entitled, Ora et Labora: Christians Don't Need Leisure. The Latin translates as "Pray and Work.' The thesis is in the second paragraph:

The deleterious effects of narcissism are evident in the work of many, Christian and otherwise, who advocate leisure as good for us, appropriate to us, necessary for us, a blessing to us, an aid to contemplation, the foundation of culture, and so on. Christianity is more bracing than this: we Christians think, when we are thinking clearly, that between conception and death in this cataclysmically damaged world we should neither expect nor seek leisure. What we should expect, and will certainly find, is the double curse of death and work. Each of those involves pain, so we should expect a lot of that as well. Our task as Christians is not to look for islands of leisure-for-contemplation exempt from the eddy [ebb] and flow of work and suffering and death; were we to do that . . . we would become fascinated by phantasms, especially those of our own inner life . . . and would, too quickly, learn to close our eyes to the pressure of pain and the imminence of death—our own, that is, and all else’s, too.

The main thesis is the one I bolded above, namely, that Christians should not seek leisure. A subsidiary thesis is that the pursuit of leisure is an effect of narcissism.

Upon reading this, the philosophically literate will immediately think of Josef Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture (Pantheon, New York, 1964, tr. Alexander Dru, with an introduction by T. S. Eliot.) This book contains two essays, "Leisure: The Basis of Culture," and "The Philosophical Act." Griffiths appears to be alluding to the first of the essays in this wonderful old book with his phrases "an aid to contemplation" and "the foundation or culture." I would be very surprised if Griffiths was not at least aware of Pieper's book. But if he has read it how could he write the article before us? How could he maintain something so absurd as that the pursuit of leisure is an effect of narcissism?

Griffiths doesn't have a clue as to the classical conception of leisure found in Aristotle and Aquinas and explicated by Pieper. Griffiths writes,

Suppose we understand leisure as otium, which is to say the state or condition of doing nothing, of being otiose, of occupying a place in which nothing is expected and there is nothing to do but . . . what? If there were a place of otium for human creatures, it would be hell: a no-place capable of occupation only by the solipsist who has reached the end of narcissism, which is to be the only thing there is, to live in a world in which relation with others, animate and inanimate, is impossible because they have been abolished.

Otium liberale in the classical sense has nothing to do with narcissism or doing nothing or being idle or indolent or lazy or sunk in acedia (cf. Pieper, p. 24 ff.) or otiose in the wholly pejorative sense that this word has in contemporary usage. Leisure in the classical sense is disciplined activity in pursuit of non-utilitarian ends. It issues in contemplation which is an end in itself and the basis of culture. It was the contemplative monastic orders that preserved and transmitted the culture of the ancients to the moderns. On the classical view, the servile arts subserve the liberal arts. The vita activa is for the sake of the vita contemplativa. We neg-otiate the world to secure a space within it to pursue otium iberale. The worldly hustle is for the sake of contemplative repose.

The non-utilitarian is not eo ipso worthless. On the contrary, the truly and finally worthwhile is precisely the non-utilitarian. Griffiths needs to read Pieper.

Related: Why I Resigned from Duke. Curiously, I agree entirely with Griffiths' explanation of his resignation.

Classical leisure is this:

Not this:

The Philosopher and the Christian

For Vito Caiati

…………………..

George W. Bush once referred to Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher, thereby betraying both a failure to grasp what a philosopher is and who Jesus claimed to be.

Jesus Christ is not a philosopher. The philosopher is a mere lover of wisdom. His love is desirous and needy; it is eros, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks. But Jesus Christ lacks nothing; he is is the fullness of wisdom, the Word and Wisdom of God embodied. So Christ is no lover of wisdom in the strict sense in which Socrates is a lover of wisdom. Divine love is not erotic but agapic.

If a sage is a possessor of wisdom, no philosopher qua philosopher is a sage. If a philosopher were to become a sage, he would thereby cease to be a philosopher: one does not seek what one possesses. Socrates is the embodiment of philosophy but not of wisdom. Socrates, then, is not a sage.

The wisdom of Socrates was largely the wisdom of nescience: he knew that he did not know what he did not know. In stark contrast, Christ claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth as recounted in the via, veritas, vita passage at John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me." Ego sum via et veritas et vita; nemo venit ad Patrem nisi per me.

Suppose a philosopher comes to accept Christian doctrine. Does he remain a philosopher in his acceptance of Christian doctrine or does he move beyond philosophy? I say that a philosopher who accepts the revealed truths characteristic of Christianity has moved beyond philosophy in this acceptance. Why?

A philosopher is not only one who, lacking wisdom and desiring it, seeks it, but also one who seeks the truth in a certain way, by a certain method. It is characteristic of philosophy that it is the pursuit of truth by unaided reason. 'Unaided' means: not aided by divine revelation. (It does not mean that the philosopher does not consult the senses.) The philosopher operates by reason and seeks reasons for what he believes. The philosopher relies on discursive reason as he encounters it in himself and accepts only what he can validate by his autonomous use of reason. Qua philosopher, he accepts no testimony but must verify matters for himself. The philosopher is like Doubting Thomas Didymus at John 20:25: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe."

That is the attitude of the philosopher. The philosopher is an inquirer into ultimate matters, and doubt is the engine of inquiry. The philosopher qua philosopher asks: Where's the evidence? What's the argument? What you say may be true, my brothers, but how do you know? What's your justification?

You say our rabbi rose from the dead? That sort of thing doesn't happen! I want knowledge, which is not just true belief but justified true belief. You expect me to believe that Jesus rose on no evidence but your testimony from probably hallucinatory experiences fueled by your fear and hunger and weakness? Prove it! W. K. Clifford takes it to the limit and gives it a moral twist: "It is wrong always and everywhere to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Presumably the testimony of a bunch of scared, unlettered, credulous fisherman would not count as sufficient evidence for Thomas Didymus or Clifford.

The Christian, however, operates by faith. If Reason is the faculty of philosophy, Faith is the faculty of religion. The philosopher may reason his way to the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, but he cannot qua philosopher arrive at the saving truth that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) by the use of reason. The saving truths are 'known' by faith and not by reason. It is also clear that faith for the Christian ranks higher than reason. As Jesus says to Thomas at John 20:29: "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed."

The attitude of the believer who is also a philosopher is fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. But what if no understanding is found? Does the believer reject or suspend his belief? No. If he is a genuine believer, he continues to believe whether or not he achieves understanding. This shows that for the believer, reason has no veto power. The apparent logical impossibility of the Incarnation does not cause him to reject or suspend his belief in Jesus as his Lord and Savior. If he finds a way to show the rational acceptability of the Incarnation, well and good; if he fails, no matter. The Incarnation is a fact 'known' by Revelation; as an actual fact it is possible, and what is possible is possible whether or not we frail reeds can understand how it is possible. The believer in the end will announce that the saving truths are mysteries impenetrable to us here below even if he does not go to the extreme of a Tertullian, a Kierkegaard, or a Shestov and condemn reason wholesale.

The attitude of the philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation is different. He feels duty-bound by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept. This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl. On his death bed, attended by nuns, open to the Catholic faith, he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation.

There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality. As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:

To put it very very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is is the life of autonomous understanding. The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love. The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)

So is the Christian the true philosopher? Only in the sense that philosophy points beyond itself to something that is no longer philosophy but that completes philosophy while cancelling it. I am tempted to reach for an Hegelian trope while turning it on its head: if Christianity is true, then philosophy is aufgehoben, sublated, in it. If Christianity is true, then the Christian arrives at the truth that the philosopher at best aims at but cannot arrive at by his method and way of life, the life of autonomous understanding. To achieve what he aims at, the philosopher would have to be "as a little child" and accept in obedient love the gift of Revelation. But it is precisely that which he cannot do if he is to remain a philosopher in the strict sense, one who lives the life of autonomous understanding.

That is tension some of us live. The life of autonomous understanding and critical examination? Or the life of child-like trust and obedient love?

The problem in what is perhaps its sharpest form is presented in the story of Abraham and Isaac.

The Christian life is not the philosophical life. It lies beyond the philosophical life and, if true, is superior to it.

But is it true?

In the end, you have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.

The Logic of the Incarnation: Response to Fr. Kirby

I presented the following argument in a response to Dr. Vito Caiati:

a. The Second Person of the Trinity and the man Jesus differ property-wise.
b. Necessarily, for any x, y, if x, y differ property-wise, i.e., differ in respect of even one property, then x, y are numerically different, i.e., not numerically identical. (Indiscernibility of Identicals)
Therefore
c. The Second Person of the Trinity and Jesus are not numerically identical, i.e., are not one and the same.

I went on to say that the argument is valid and the premises are true.

(a) is true as a matter of orthodox — miniscule 'o' — Christian teaching. (b) is the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle whose intellectual luminosity is as great as any. But the conclusion contradicts orthodox Christian teaching according to which God, or rather the Second Person of the Trinity, became man, i.e., became identical to a flesh and blood man with a body and a soul, in Jesus of Nazareth at a particular time in an obscure outpost of the Roman empire.

Yesterday morning's mail brought a formidable response from Down Under by Fr. Matthew Kirby:

You posit as a purportedly orthodox premise in a recent post: "The Second Person of the Trinity and the man Jesus differ property-wise."

However, this is not orthodox, but implicitly Nestorian if taken strictly literally. To put it simply, it assays to distinguish between two personal subjects, the SPT and Jesus, in terms of their properties, but the unity and identity of subject is in fact the dogmatic requirement. It is equivalent to unity of the Person. Putting the word "man" in front of Jesus does not change this, because the man Jesus is in fact the person Jesus who has two natures, divine and human. Jesus is not the name of a nature, of that Person's manhood, it is a proper name belonging to the Person as a whole, on orthodox premises. If you want to change the second "subject" to "Jesus' humanity only", then you will be comparing a Person to an ontological component of that same person, and would only "differ" in the way a subset differs from that set of which it is a subset. (This talk of components does not contradict Divine Simplicity because that simplicity refers to the Divine Nature only.) The SPT has the property of, for example, physical extension, via his human nature, but not via his divine nature. But he really possesses that property, in precisely that sense.

Fr. Kirby clearly knows his theology. I write these weblog entries quickly and I unaccountably blundered by saying that (a) is orthodox Christian teaching. The premise is nonetheless defensible, though surely not anything an orthodox Christian would say in explanation of his doctrine. I won't insist on the truth of premise (a), however, but approach the question from a different angle. Putting myself on Kirby's ground, I grant that "the unity and identity of subject is in fact the dogmatic requirement."

On classical Christology, as defined at the Council of Chalcedon in anno domini 451, Christ is one person with two distinct natures, a divine nature and a human nature. Thus Christ is fully divine and fully human. But isn't this just logically impossible inasmuch as it entails a contradiction? If Christ is divine, then he is immaterial; but if he is human, then he is material. So one and the same person is both material and not material.

Again, if Christ is divine, then he is a necessary being; but if he is human, then he is a contingent being. So one and the same person is both necessary and not necessary. Furthermore, if Christ is divine, and everything divine is impassible, then Christ is impassible; but surely no human being is impassible. So if Christ is human, then Christ is not impassible. The upshot, once again, is a contradiction: Christ is impassible and Christ is not impassible.

One way to try to evade these sorts of objection is by way of reduplicative constructions. Instead of saying that Christ is both all-powerful and not all-powerful, which is a bare-faced contradiction, one could say that Christ qua God is all-powerful, but Christ qua man is not all-powerful. But does this really help? There is still only one subject, one person, one hypostasis, one suppositum, that has contradictory attributes.

For it is not the divine nature that has the property of being all-powerful, and it is not the human nature that has the property of being limited in power, but the bearer of these natures. The bearer of a nature is obviously distinct from nature whose bearer it is. So the bearer of these two natures is both unlimited in power and limited in power, which is a contradiction.

Here is an analogy to help you see my point. Suppose we have a sphere the northern hemisphere of which is green, and the southern hemisphere of which is red, hence non-green. Is such a sphere logically possible? Of course. There is no violation of the Law of Non-Contradiction, the central principle of the discursive intellect (whether or not it is the central principle of all reality.) This is because the predicates 'green' and 'red' do not attach to one and the same item, the sphere, but to two different mutually exclusive proper parts of the sphere, the northern and southern hemispheres respectively.

But Christ, or rather Christ as depicted in Chalcedonian orthodoxy, is not like the sphere that is both green and red. The northern and southern hemispheres instantiate being green and being red, respectively. But the divine and human natures of Christ do not instantiate the properties of being unlimited in power and limited in power, respectively. It is Christ himself who instantiates the properties. But then the contradiction is upon us.

So as I see it the reduplicative strategy doesn't work. It is that strategy that Fr. Kirby relies on when he writes, "The SPT has the property of, for example, physical extension, via his human nature, but not via his divine nature." This is equivalent to saying that the Second Person is physically extended qua human, but not physically extended qua divine. But that boils down to saying that the Second Person is physically extended and not physically extended.

This is because a mark of a nature is not a property of that nature but a property of the subject that bears the nature. Human nature, for example, includes the mark being an animal. This mark is included within human nature but is not a property of human nature, and this for the simple reason that no nature is an animal. Socrates is an animal, but his nature is not.

Now Christ is said to have two natures. Human nature includes among its marks being susceptible to suffering, and divine nature includes among its marks being insusceptible to suffering. Since the bearer (subject) of a nature has the marks included in its nature(s), it follows that Christ is both susceptible to suffering and insusceptible to suffering. And that is a contradiction.

Fr. Kirby also writes,

It is thus orthodox to call Mary the Mother of God (even though she was only the source of Jesus' humanity and only physically enclosed in her womb the human nature) and say God died on the Cross (even though the Divine Nature is absolutely impassible and immortal and only God the Son's humanity could be killed.) Why? Because motherhood is an inter-personal relation, and because all of Christ's human actions are personal acts of a Divine (as well as human) Subject.

Mariology is fascinating but I won't comment on that now. But if Christ is (identically) God the Son, and Christ died on the Cross, then God the Son died on the Cross. But no divine being can literally die, and God the Son is a divine being. It follows that Christ is not God the Son.

Fr. Kirby will resist the conclusion by saying that it was not God the Son who died on the Cross, but God the Son's humanity or human nature. But by my lights this make no sense. A flesh and blood human being died, not the nature of a human being. It makes no sense to say that a nature lives or dies, breathes or sheds blood.

"But what if the nature is identical to its bearer?" That is ruled out in this case because Christ has two distinct natures. Now if N1 is not identical to N2, then neither can be identical to their common bearer B. For if N1 = B, and N2 = B, then N1 = N2, contrary to hypothesis.

From here the dialectic plunges deeper and deeper into the connundra and obscurities of Aristotelian metaphysics, but it is time to punch the clock.

Concluding Aporetic Postscript

I should note that I have not refuted the Incarnation; at best I have given good reasons for doubting the logical coherence of a certain dogmatic conceptualization of the Incarnation. Maybe there is an alternative conceptualization that fares better; or maybe we should go mysterian.

Presentism and Bodily Resurrection

Are presentism and bodily resurrection logically compatible? Edward Buckner wonders about this. He got me wondering about it. So let me take a stab at sorting it out.

The Resurrection of the Body

I will assume the traditional doctrine of the resurrection according to which (i) resurrection is resurrection of the (human) body, and (ii) this resurrected body will be numerically identical to the body that lived and died on Earth. In other words, the pre-mortem and post-mortem bodies of a person are one and the same. After the resurrection you will have the very same body that have now. This is compatible with the resurrected body being property-wise different from the earthly body. I take this same-body view to be the traditional view. We find it, for example, in Aquinas:

For we cannot call it resurrection unless the soul return to the same body, since resurrection is a second rising, and the same thing rises that falls; therefore resurrection regards the body which after death falls, rather than the soul which after death lives. And consequently if it is not the same body which the soul resumes, it will not be a resurrection, but rather the assuming of a new body. (1952, 952, quoted from here)

For the sake of concretion, let's assume the hylomorphic dualism of Aquinas according to which a human being is a composite of soul and body where the soul is the form of the body. For Aquinas, the soul continues to exist after the body ceases to exist, and resurrection is the uniting of that soul with its body, not some body or other, but its body, the same one it had on Earth.

Presentism

I should also say something about presentism. The formulation of presentism is fraught with difficulties, but for present (!) purposes presentism is an ontological thesis about temporal entities and says nothing about any atemporal or timeless entities that there might be. An ontological thesis is a thesis about what fundamentally exists, and the ontological thesis of presentism is that only present items exist. This is of course not the tautological claim that only present items are present or that only present items presently exist. It is the claim that only present items exist in the sense of belonging to the ontological inventory. It is the claim that only present items exist in the sense of 'exist' that the presentist shares with the eternalist when the latter claims that past and future items also exist. (This is admittedly not quite satisfactory, but I must move on, brevity being the soul of blog.)

The claim, then, is that for any x in time, x exists if and only x is present. This is a biconditional formulation. More common is the 'only if' formulation: x exists only if x is present. It is presumably taken to be self-evident and not worth pointing out that all that is present exists.

Presentism implies that what no longer exists, does not exist at all, and that what does not yet exist, does not exist at all. Please note that it is trivial to say that the wholly past no longer exists. For that is but Moorean fallout from ordinary language and no controversial ontological thesis. The presentist is saying something controversial, namely, that temporal reality is restricted to what exists at present. What no longer exists, does not exist at all. This is far from obvious, which allows so-called eternalists to deny it. Steven D. Hales puts it like this:

Presentists agree that there may be things that do not exist in time, like abstract objects or God, but the root presentist idea is that everything that exists in time is simultaneous. You can’t have (tenselessly) existing things at
different places in time. Everything that [tenselessly] exists, exists at once.

Presentism is rejected by those who hold that both past and present items exist, and by so-called eternalists who maintain the unrestricted ontological thesis that all temporal items (individuals, events, times) exist, whether past, present, or future.

Buckner's Question

Suppose all that exists is present. So Socrates, no longer present, no longer exists. But at some point in the future, Socrates will be resurrected and come to be judged. So Socrates no longer exists, yet will exist, assuming the possibility of bodily resurrection.

Does this mean presentism is inconsistent with bodily resurrection?

The question is better formulated in terms of Socrates' body. It doesn't exist at present, obviously, and on presentism it does not exist in the past or in the future either. But if it doesn't exist in the future, how can Socrates' earthly body and resurrected body be numerically the same body? Buckner smells a contradiction:

p. Socrates' body does not exist at all: not in the past, not in the present, and not in the future. (presentism)

~p. Socrates' body exists in the future. (resurrection doctrine)

The conclusion would then be that presentism and the traditional resurrection doctrine are logically incompatible.

If this is what Buckner is driving at, the presentist could answer as follows. It is true now that Socrates' body does not exist. It is also true now that Socrates' body WILL exist. Where's the contradiction? There is none. The following propositional forms are logically consistent:

It is the case that ~p

It will be the case that p.

A Fly in the Ointment?

If it is true, and true at present, that Socrates' soul will, in the fullness of time, be re-united with his body, what is the truth-maker of this proposition? Contingent propositions need truth-makers. On presentism, the truth-maker must be a presently existing entity of some sort. Obviously, it cannot be a future entity. So what, in the present, makes true the future-tensed proposition?

Since questions about bodily resurrection presuppose the existence of God, we are entitled to invoke God as truth-maker. We can perhaps say that it is God's present willing to resurrect Socrates' body that makes true the future-tensed proposition that Socrates will get his body back.

But then it seems that our presentism cannot be of the open future sort.

Meditation on the Third Commandment

A 1941 article by C. S. Lewis. (HT: Victor Reppert)

The Third Commandment in the ordering preferred by Protestants of Lewis' stripe is the one about taking the Lord's name in vain:

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

Lewis meditates on the difficulties that must beset attempts to form a political party animated by Christian principles.

Christians may be expected to agree on the general ends of good government, but that agreement does not suffice for a political party. What one needs for a political party, which by its very nature is oriented toward concrete actions in the here and now, is the championship of very specific means. But then bitter contention over these means is unavoidable and our incipient Christian party breaks apart into competing factions.

The cynosure of Lewis' disapprobation, I take it, is the invocation of God to justify one's very specific political means. One who does that takes the name of the Lord in vain.

One is put in mind of Dylan's With God On Its Side.

Miracles and Resurrection

Thomas Beale writes,

Quoting from your quote of Ian Hutchison:

…Miracles are, by definition, abnormal and non-reproducible, so they cannot be proved by science’s methods.

Today’s widespread materialist view that events contrary to the laws of science just can’t happen is a metaphysical doctrine, not a scientific fact. What’s more, the doctrine that the laws of nature are “inviolable” is not necessary for science to function. Science offers natural explanations of natural events. It has no power or need to assert that only natural events happen.

I think this is pretty hard to swallow from a scientific perspective – the first statement more or less says that miracles are by definition 'abnormal' and thus unprovable, but in fact science does pretty well with all kinds of abnormal. He really means 'law-breaking', and is thus saying that miracles by definition must confound science. But science isn't generally confounded by having its current set of laws broken; its usual way of responding (at least in the modern era) is to try to find new paradigms or at least theories that accommodate the new evidence, just as we had to wait for Einstein to explain the lensing of starlight around heavy bodies. If his statement still holds, then all it means is that completely arbitrary things can happen.

BV: Hutchison may be confusing laws of science with laws of nature.

There is a distinction between a law of nature and a law of science. If there are laws of nature, they have nothing to do with us or our theorizing. They are 'out there in the world.' For example, if we adopt a regularity theory of laws, and I am not saying we should, the regularities, and thus the laws, exist independently of our theorizing. Surely, if there are physical laws at all, and whatever their exact nature, their existence antedates ours. Laws of science, on the other hand, are our attempts at formulating and expressing the laws of nature. They are human creations. Since physics is a human activity, there were no laws of physics before human beings came on the scene; but there were physical laws before we came on the scene. Physics is not the same as nature; physics is the study of nature, our study of nature. It is obvious that physics cannot exist without nature, for it would then have no object, but nature can get on quite well without physics.

The laws of science are subject to qualification, revision, and outright rejection; the laws of nature are not. For example, the Additivity of Velocities was once thought to hold universally, but now the qualification is added: at pre-relativistic speeds. Nature didn't change, but our understanding of nature did.

The concept of miracle is very difficult. Here is a conundrum for you. John Earman, Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (Oxford 2000), p. 8:

. . . if a miracle is a violation of a law of nature, then whether or not the violation is due to the intervention of the Deity, a miracle is logically impossible since, whatever else a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity.

Now consider:

1. A miracle is an exception to a law of nature.
2. Every law of nature is an exceptionless regularity (though not conversely).
Therefore
3. A miracle is an exception to an exceptionless regularity.
Therefore
4. Miracles are logically impossible.

This argument seems to show that if miracles are to be logically possible they cannot be understood as violations of laws of nature. How then are they to be understood? Please note that (2) merely states that whatever a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity. Thus (2) does not commit one to a regularity theory of laws according to which laws are identified with exceptionless regularities. The idea is that any theory of (deterministic) laws would include the idea that a law is an exceptionless regularity.

The second part gets into the debate about whether laws are natural, or human inventions. One such law that does appear to be part of the universe's functioning is the second law of thermodynamics, which happens to be the one that ultimately prevents biological cells reversing their death state, and thus dead organisms reviving. For those who believe that God directly created the universe the way it is, i.e. with its law-like behaviours, quarks weighing what they do, the speed of light being what it is, and Planck's constant as we know it, it seems hard to claim that arbitrary abnormalities can occur without disturbing the space-time fabric so to speak, because everything is so strongly interrelated (try changing c …). Reversing the arrow of time in order to resurrect someone is likely to have catastrophic consequences for a patch of the universe around it.

BV: Yes, there is a problem here. Augustine was on to it. See Augustine and the Epistemic Theory of Miracles.

Another way of looking at the whole thing for the scientifically oriented might be to think more in terms of inference to the best explanation (admittedly dodgy territory). If we thought that no natural laws could be broken, we might theorise that Christ had not really died (undoubtedly he looked as if he had), and that therefore he could rise again three days later, with good care. Alternatively we might believe that he really died, and that the person presented as the risen Christ was someone else; from there, numerous variations on a theme become possible.

BV: The first theory is called the Swoon Hypothesis.

I have often wondered if the first theory would really harm Christianity. The idea that a man (at least connected to the divine, if not incarnating it) sacrificed himself for humanity, was crucified by the Romans, nearly died from his injuries and pain, but survived just long enough for friends to take him down in the storm, was cared for and then 'rose' again three days later. That takes nothing away from the heroic act, and perhaps showed that even the Roman empire couldn't kill this man. Would this Christ be any less than the one we are taught today?

BV: Would he be any less? I should think so. No orthodox Christian can gainsay what Saul/Paul of Tarsus writes at 1 Corinthians 15:14: "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." (KJV) See Is Christianity Vain if not Historically True?

Incarnation, Resurrection, and Rational Acceptability

A while back I was talking with my young theological friend Steven about Christianity. I had remarked that its essence lies in the Incarnation. Without disagreeing with me, he offered the bodily resurrection of Christ as the essential pivot on which Christian belief and practice turns. This raises a number of questions. One is this: Can, or rather may, a scientifically-trained mind accept the literal truth of Christ's bodily resurrection? I don't think that there is an insurmountable problem here. But there may be an insurmountable problem when it comes to accepting the literal truth of the Incarnation. This entry, then, falls into two parts.

A. The Rational Acceptability of Christ's Resurrection

Ian Hutchinson, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, writes:

We really believe in the bodily resurrection of the first century Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth. My Christian colleagues at MIT – and millions of other scientists worldwide – somehow think that a literal miracle like the resurrection of Jesus is possible. And we are following a long tradition. The founders of the scientific revolution and many of the greatest scientists of the intervening centuries were serious Christian believers. For Robert Boyle (of the ideal gas law, co-founder in 1660 of the Royal Society) the resurrection was a fact. For James Clerk Maxwell (whose Maxwell equations of 1862 govern electromagnetism) a deep philosophical analysis undergirded his belief in the resurrection. And for William Phillips (Nobel prize-winner in 1997 for methods to trap atoms with laser light) the resurrection is not discredited by science.

To explain how a scientist can be a Christian is actually quite simple. Science cannot and does not disprove the resurrection. Natural science describes the normal reproducible working of the world of nature. Indeed, the key meaning of “nature”, as Boyle emphasized, is “the normal course of events.” Miracles like the resurrection are inherently abnormal. It does not take modern science to tell us that humans don’t rise from the dead. People knew that perfectly well in the first century; just as they knew that the blind from birth don’t as adults regain their sight, or water doesn’t instantly turn into wine.

Maybe science has made the world seem more comprehensible – although in some respects it seems more wonderful and mysterious. Maybe superstition was more widespread in the first century than it is today – although the dreams of today’s sports fans and the widespread interest in the astrology pages sometimes make me wonder. Maybe people were more open then to the possibility of miracles than we are today. Still, the fact that the resurrection was impossible in the normal course of events was as obvious in the first century as it is for us. Indeed that is why it was seen as a great demonstration of God’s power.

To be sure, while science can’t logically rule miracles in or out of consideration, it can be a helpful tool for investigating contemporary miraculous claims. It may be able to reveal self-deception, trickery, or misperception. If someone has been seen levitating on a supposed flying carpet in their living room, then the discovery of powerful electromagnets in their basement might well render such claims implausible. But if science fails to find defeating evidence then it is unable to say one way or the other whether some reported inexplicable event happened, or to prove that it is miraculous. Science functions by reproducible experiments and observations. Miracles are, by definition, abnormal and non-reproducible, so they cannot be proved by science’s methods.

Today’s widespread materialist view that events contrary to the laws of science just can’t happen is a metaphysical doctrine, not a scientific fact. What’s more, the doctrine that the laws of nature are “inviolable” is not necessary for science to function. Science offers natural explanations of natural events. It has no power or need to assert that only natural events happen.

So if science is not able to adjudicate whether Jesus’ resurrection happened or not, are we completely unable to assess the plausibility of the claim? No. Contrary to increasingly popular opinion, science is not our only means for accessing truth. In the case of Jesus’ resurrection, we must consider the historical evidence, and the historical evidence for the resurrection is as good as for almost any event of ancient history. The extraordinary character of the event, and its significance, provide a unique context, and ancient history is necessarily hard to establish. But a bare presumption that science has shown the resurrection to be impossible is an intellectual cop-out. Science shows no such thing.

I agree with Hutchinson.

B. The Rational Acceptability of the Incarnation?

Please note that if a man was raised from the dead by the power of God, it does not follow that the man so raised was God. So if Jesus was raised bodily by the power of God it does not follow that Jesus was or is God. The orthodox Christian narrative, however, requires the doctrine of the Incarnation codified at Chalcedon according to which God, or rather the Second Person of the Trinity, became fully human, body and soul, in Jesus of Nazareth while remaining fully divine. Given the identity of the Second Person and the man Jesus, if a man was raised bodily from the dead by the power of God, and this man is God, then God raises himself.

This doctrine violates our ordinary canons of reasoning. It is, to put it bluntly, absurd in the logical sense of the term: logically contradictory. (Tertullian, Kierkegaard, and Shestov would agree.) Or so it seems to me and Dale Tuggy and many others. But others, equally sharp and serious and committed to the truth, think that if one makes the right distinctions the Incarnation doctrine can be shown not to be in violation of the ordinary canons. I think their fancy footwork avails nothing. Tuggy thinks the same.

Well, suppose Tuggy and I are right. Then it seems there are two ways to go, the Tuggy way and the way of mystery. Tuggy, if I undertand him, rejects the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus. Standing firm within what I call the Discursive Framework he argues cogently that the doctrines in question are logically impossible.

But there is this 'possibility.' There are true propositions that appear to our intellects as either logically self-contradictory or as issuing by valid inferences in logical contradictions. They are not contradictory in themselves, but they must appear contradictory to our fallen intellects here below. It is not just that these propositions are true, but we cannot understand how they could be true; it is that they seem to us as evidently not true. And yet they are true, and contradiction-free in themselves.

A similar sort of 'possibility' is invoked by materialist mysterians. If a non-eliminativist materialist tells me that a sensory quale is real but identical to a brain state I will say that that is logically impossible since the two items differ property-wise. (These items are in the same logical boat with the man Jesus and the Second Person of the Trinity: they cannot be numerically identical since they differ property-wise.) The materialist might just insist: quale and brain state are identical — it is just that we don't know enough about matter to understand how the identity could hold despite the discernibility. It's a mystery!

Are mysterian moves kosher ploys for showing rational acceptability?

I don't know. But I do know it is Saturday Night, time for a drink, and my oldies show.

The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom

It is a plain fact that humans are not empirically equal either as individuals or as groups. Why then is there so much politically correct resistance to this truth? It is because it flies in the face of a central dogma of the Left, namely, that deep down we are all the same, want the same things, have the same abilities, share the same values, and so on. So if women are 'under-represented' among the engineers, for example, then the only way to explain this, given the leftist equality dogma, is in terms of something nefarious such as sexism. For if we are all equal empirically, then the 'under-representation' — a word I enclose in sneer quotes because of its conflation of the factual and the normative — cannot be explained in terms of a difference in interests and values or a difference in mathematical aptitude. (Remember what happened to Lawrence Summers of Harvard?)

The dogma is false, yet widely and fervently believed. Anyone who dares offend against it faces severe consequences. Amy Wax, for example:

A University of Pennsylvania law school professor will no longer teach required courses following outcry over a video in which she suggested — falsely, according to the school — that black students seldom graduated high in their class.

Amy Wax, a tenured professor, will continue to teach electives in her areas of expertise but will be removed from teaching first-year curriculum courses, Penn Law Dean Theodore Ruger said in a statement Wednesday.

Ruger said Wax spoke “disparagingly and inaccurately” when she claimed last year that she had “rarely, rarely” seen a black student finish in the top half of their class.

Professor Wax spoke the truth, but the truth is no defense in the court of the politically correct. In present-day academe, all must toe the party line and woe to him who doesn't. The universities have become leftist seminaries.

What explains the fervor and fanaticism with which the Left's equality dogma is upheld? Could we explain it as a secularization of the Judeo-Christian belief that all men are created equal? Long before I read Carl Schmitt, I had this thought. But then I found this provocative assertion by Schmitt:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development . . . but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. (Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. G. Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 36.)

The idea that all humans are equal in virtue of having been created by God in the image and likeness of God is a purely theological notion consistent with deep and wide empirical differences among humans. Its secularization, I suggest, involves several steps. (These are my ideas, not Schmitt's.)

The first step is to transform the metaphysical concept of equality of persons into an empirical concept of equality of measurable attributes.

The second step is to explain away the manifest empirical inequality of human groups and individuals in terms of sexism or racism or ageism or some other 'ism.' This involves a turn toward social constructivism and a reality-denying turn away from the mind-independent reality of biological differences between the sexes and the races. Sex becomes 'gender' and the latter a social construct. Similarly with race. The absurdities that result are foolishly embraced rather than taken as so many reductiones ad absurdum of the original mistake of making sex and race social constructs. Thus one foolishly embraces the notion that one can change one's race. For a calm and thorough critique of this notion as represented by a contemporary academic, see my Can One Change One's Race?

The third step is to jettison the theological underpinning of the original equality conception.

In this way a true, non-empirical claim of Christian metaphysics about persons as rights-bearers is transformed into a false empirical claim about human animals. At the same time the ground of the non-empirical claim is denied.

It is easy to see how unstable this all is. Reject God, and you no longer have a basis for belief in equality of persons. Man reverts to being an animal among animals with all the empirical inequality that that brings with it.

So the Left has a problem. It is virulently anti-theistic and anti-religious and yet it wants to uphold a notion of equality that makes sense only within a theistic framework. The Left, blind to this inconsistency, is running on the fumes of an evaporating Christian worldview. Equality of persons and rights secularizes itself right out of existence once the theological support is kicked away.

Nietzsche understood this long ago. The death of God has consequences. One is that the brotherhood of man becomes a joke. If my tribe can enslave yours, then it has all the justification it needs and can have for doing so. Why should I treat you as my brother if I have the power to make you my servant and I have freed my mind of Christian fictions?

For those of us who oppose both the Left and the Alt-Right faction that is anti-Christian and Nietzschean, the only option seems to be a return to our Judeo-Christian heritage.

Here is an example of an argument from the Alt Right faction I am referring to:

There is a strong anti-Christian tendency in contemporary White Nationalism.

The argument goes something like this: Christianity is one of the primary causes of the decline of the white race for two reasons. First, it gives the Jews a privileged place in the sacred history of mankind, a role that they have used to gain their enormous power over us today. Second, Christian moral teachings—inborn collective guilt, magical redemption, universalism, altruism, humility, meekness, turning the other cheek, etc.—are the primary cause of the white race’s ongoing suicide and the main impediment to turning the tide. These values are no less Christian in origin just because secular liberals and socialists discard their supernatural trappings. The usual conclusion is that the white race will not be able to save itself unless it rejects Christianity.

I agree entirely with the sentence I have bolded. Leftist secularization is essentially a suppression of the supernatural with a concomitant maintenance of virtues and precepts that make sense only within a supernatural framework. But 'trappings' is not the right word; 'supports' is better. The Left is engaged in the absurd project of kicking away the support of universal rights, the dignity and equality of persons, and all the rest while trying to hold on to these commitments.

The deeper question, though, is whether Christianity weakens us and makes us unfit to live and flourish as the animals we are in the only world there is, this world of space, time, matter and change, or whether Alles Vergaengliche ist nur ein Gleichnis (Goethe), time is a moving image of eternity (Plato), and this world is a fleeting vale of tears that veils an Unseen Order.

Kant on Suicide

Is suicide ever morally permissible?

Cutting against the Enlightenment grain, Kant delivers a resoundingly negative verdict. Suicide is always and everywhere morally wrong. This entry is part of an effort to understand his position. Unfortunately, Kant's treatment is exceedingly murky and one of his arguments is hard to square with what he says elsewhere. In his Lectures on Ethics (tr. Infield, Hackett Publishing, no date), the great champion of autonomy seems to recommend abject heteronomy:

God is our owner; we are His property; His providence works for our good. A bondsman in the case of a beneficent master deserves punishment if he opposes his master's wishes. (154)

It is hard to see how this coheres with Kant's talk of persons as ends in themselves in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (AA 428). For Kant, rational beings, whether biologically human or not, are persons. Persons, unlike things, are ends in themselves. As such, they may not be used as mere means. I may not treat another person as a mere means nor may I so treat myself. For Kant there are duties to oneself and they take precedence over duties to others since "nothing can be expected from a man who dishonours his own person." (118) The highest duty to oneself is that of self-preservation. Suicide is contrary to this highest duty and is therefore morally impermissible in all circumstances. The prohibition against suicide is exceptionless.

But how can a person be an end in itself if finite persons are created by God for his purposes? How can persons be ends in themselves if God owns us and we are his property? Is suicide wrong because it violates God's property rights? If anyone has property rights in my body, it would have to be me wouldn't it? Is man God's slave? So man is both free and enslaved?

Furthermore, if it is morally permissible for God to use finite persons as mere means to his end, self-glorification, say, then how could it be wrong for a person to treat himself as a mere means when he commits suicide?

We can put the underlying puzzle as a aporetic dyad:

1) My dignity, worth, autonomy, freedom, and irreplaceable uniqueness as a person derive from my having been created in the image and likeness of an absolutely unique free being who is the eminently personal source of all Being, truth, and value. My higher origin and destiny elevate me infinitely far above the rest of creation. I am animal, but also a spirit, and thus not merely an animal. I cannot be understood naturalistically as merely a more highly evolved animal.

2) If I am created by God both as a material being and as a person, then I cannot be an end in myself possessing autonomy and the other attributes mentioned. For if God creates and sustains me moment by moment in every aspect of my being, then also in my being a subject, a self-determining person.

What I have just sketched is a form of the ultimate paradox of divine creation.

Note that the freedom mentioned in (1) is not the compatibilist "freedom of the turnspit" as Kant derisively calls it, but the freedom of a (noumenal) agent who has the power to initiate a causal chain ex nihilo by performing an act that he could have refrained from performing, and is therefore morally responsible for performing. This rich non-compatibilist notion of freedom implies a god-like power in man that no merely natural (phenomenal) being possesses or could possess. This freedom points to a divine origin and is the respect in which we bear the image of God within us. The freedom of the human creature mirrors the freedom of the creator.

But how is this freedom and dignity and personal uniqueness, which we cannot possess except as God's creatures, logically compatible with our creature status? Presupposed is a robust conception of creation as creatio continuans according to which the entire being of the creature is sustained ongoingly by divine power (Any less robust a conception would injure the divine sovereignty.) How can the inviolable interiority of a person maintain itself in the face of God's creative omniscience?

Some will say that the paradox is a contradiction and both limbs cannot be true. Other will say that the paradox is a mystery: both limbs are true, but we cannot in this life understand how they could both be true.

The paradox is at the root of Kant's uncompromising attitude toward the morality of suicide. He prohibits it without exception despite man's freedom and autonomy because of their derivation from God. We are ends in ourselves, which implies that it is wrong for anyone, including God, to treat us as mere means; yet we are God's property and for this reason not morally justified in disposing of ourselves.

Kant's Exceptionless Prohibition of Suicide as Essentially Christian and Unjustifiable Otherwise

Christianity too issues a total and exceptionless prohibition against suicide. The classical (philosophical as opposed to theological) arguments of Augustine and Aquinas against suicide are, however, uncompelling, as the Christian Paul Ludwig Landsberg shows. Thus he maintains that

. . . the total prohibition of suicide can only be justified or even understood in relation to the scandal and the paradox of the cross. It is true that we belong to God, as Christ belonged to God. It is true that we should subordinate our will to His, as Christ did. It is true that we should leave the decision as to our life or death to Him. If we wish to die, we have indeed the right to pray to God to let us die. Yet we must always add: Thy will, not mine, be done. But this God is not our master as if we were slaves. He is our Father. He is the Christian God who loves us with infinite love and infinite wisdom. If He makes us suffer, it is for our salvation and purification. We must recall the spirit in which Christ suffered the most horrible death.

Here, perhaps, is the key to our puzzle. The puzzle, again, is how the Sage of Koenigsberg, the Enlightenment champion of human freedom and autonomy, can maintain that, no matter how horrific the circumstances, one may never justifiably take one's own life. The key is the need to suffer for purification. The fallen world is as it were a penal colony and we must serve our time. Suicide is jailbreak and for that reason never justified.

What I am suggesting is that if we read Kant's suicide doctrine in the light of Christianity it makes a certain amount of (paradoxical) sense, and that if one refuses to do this and reads it in a wholly secular light, then there is no justification for its exceptionless prohibition of suicide. I hope to test this thesis in further posts.

Landsberg again:

All that we can say to the suffering man who is tempted to commit suicide, is this “Remember the suffering of Christ and the martyrs. You must carry your cross, as they did. You will not cease to suffer, but the cross of suffering itself will grow sweet by virtue of an unknown strength proceeding from the heart of divine love. You must not kill yourself, because you must not throw away your cross. You need it. And enquire of your conscience if you are really innocent. You will find that if you are perhaps innocent of one thing for which the world reproaches you, you are guilty in a thousand other ways. You are a sinner. If Christ, who was innocent, suffered for others and, as Pascal said, has also shed a drop of blood for you, how shall you, a sinner, be entitled to refuse suffering? Perhaps it is a form of punishment. But divine punishment has this specific and incomparable quality, that it is not revenge and that its very nature is purification. Whoever revolts against it, revolts in fact against the inner meaning of his own life.”

Paul Ludwig Landsberg, geboren 1901 in Bonn, wurde 1927 Ordinarius für Philosophie und emigrierte 1933 zunächst nach Spanien, dann nach Frankreich. Der Schüler von Max Scheler und Edmund Husserl war während der französischen Emigration eng mit dem Collège de Sociologie verbunden und starb 1944 im Konzentrationslager Oranienburg.

“Lead Us Not into Temptation”

I have said some rather unkind things about Pope Francis, but when he called for a modification of the traditional English rendering of the Greek, I felt some sympathy for him. For it has long struck me as very strange that we should ask God not to lead us into temptation. For what the request implies is that God is disposed to tempt us. But a good God would harbor no such evil disposition . . . .

On the other hand, as a good solid conservative on all fronts (social, political, economic, linguistic . . .) I hold that that there is a defeasible presumption in favor of the traditional and the time-tested. Note the word 'defeasible.' Conservatives are not opposed to change; we are opposed to change for the sake of change. We understand that 'change' and 'change for the better' are not coextensive terms. Obama and his acolytes take note.

So I would prefer to retain the traditional formulation if possible. Anthony Esolen explains how in a First Things article. Roughly, what we are praying for is that we be spared moral tests that we might not pass. We are praying, not that God not tempt us, but that we be spared entrance into situations where we will be tempted.

UPDATE (1/4). Claude Boisson comments:

For me (I was born in 1942), the real “traditional” rendering in my native language, French, is in fact “Ne nous laissez pas succomber à la tentation”.

Even as a child, not very sophisticated theologically and ignorant of Aramaic grammar, it was clear to me that God did not “lead us into temptation”. I asked God to help me resist temptation, certainly not to refrain from directly tempting me.

In the post-conciliar period, this was then changed to a highly problematic innovation, which has been recently modified again by the French bishops, even before the pope’s call, in order to revert to a more satisfactory version.

God, Pronouns, and Anthropomorphism

I was delighted to hear from an old student of mine from 35 years ago. He writes,

In your writings, you often refer to God in pronouns bearing gender. Does such language result in God’s anthropomorphism?

I would reformulate the question as follows:

In your writings, whenever you refer to God using a third-person pronoun, you use the masculine pronoun 'he.' Does this use of 'he' promote an anthropomorphic conception of God?

I would say No. It is true that the pronoun I use in reference to God is 'he.' And because I write almost always as a philosopher, I do not write upper-case 'He' in reference to God except at the beginning of a sentence. This is not a sign of disrespect; it arises from a desire not to mix the strictly philosophical with the pious.

Does a use of 'he' in reference to God imply that God is of the male sex? Not at all. Otherwise one would have to say that a use of 'she' in reference to a ships and airplanes implies that these things are of the female sex. But ships and airplances, being inanimate material objects, are of no sex.*

God too is of no sex, but for a different reason: he is wholly immaterial. (I will suggest a qualification below.) Still, we need to be able to refer to God. Assuming we don't want to keep repeating 'God,' we need pronouns. 'It' is out. 'He or she' makes no sense. Why not then use 'he'? Note that any argument against 'he' would also work against 'she.'

As a conservative, I of course oppose silly and unnecessary innovations; so I use 'he' to refer to God. For a conservative, there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional practices: the burden of proof is on the innovator.

One must distinguish between grammatical gender, which is a property of words, and sex which is a property of some referents of words. As already noted, if one uses 'she' to refer to something it doesn't follow that the thing referred to is female. That shows that grammatical gender and sex come apart. One ought to bear in mind that gender is first and foremost a grammatical category. Sex is a biological category. I have no objection to talk of gender roles as (in part) socio-cultural constructs, which involves an extended use of 'gender.'

That grammatical gender and sex come apart is also the case with nouns. In English, the nouns 'table' and 'boat' have no gender, but in Italian (and other languages such as German) their counterparts do: tavolo is masculine while barca is feminine. This is reflected in the difference between the appropriate definite articles, il and la, where in English we have the gender-neutral 'the.' But while tavolo and barca are masculine and feminine respectively, their referents are sexless. So again grammatical gender and sex come apart.

So when I use 'he' in reference to God there is no implication that God is of the male sex.

It is also worth pointing out that an anthropomorphic conception of God is not a concept of God as a male, but as a human being. So if I use 'he' in reference to God am I implying that God is a human being? No. But he is more like a human being than he is like any other type of animal or any inanimate object. So 'he' is an appropriate pronoun to use.

But why 'he' rather than 'she'?

Recall that when his disciples asked Jesus how they should pray, he taught them the "Our Father." Was Jesus suggesting that we are all the biological offspring of God? Of course not. Still, he used 'Father' or the equivalent in Aramaic.

Is there a hint of sexism here? If there is, it would seem to be mitigated By God's having a mother, the Virgin Mary: Sancte Maria, mater dei . . . . Mary is not merely the mother of Jesus, but the mother of God:

According to St. John (1:15) Jesus is the Word made flesh, the Word Who assumed human nature in the womb of Mary. As Mary was truly the mother of Jesus, and as Jesus was truly God from the first moment of His conception, Mary is truly the mother of God. (here)

This divine motherhood does not elevate Mary above God, for she remains a creature, even after her Assumption into heaven. She is not worshipped or adored (latria) but she is due a special sort of veneration called hyperdulia, dulia being the name for the veneration appropriate to saints. Or at least that is the Catholic doctrine.

Is God Immaterial?

There is another curious theological wrinkle. Christ is supposed to have ascended into heaven body and soul. The Ascension was therefore not a process of de-materialization or disembodiment. Christ returned to the Godhead body and soul. The Ascension did not undo the Incarnation: returning to the Godhead, Christ did not become disincarnate. After the Word (Logos, Second Person of the Trinity) became flesh and dwelt among us it remained flesh even after it ceased to dwell among us.

This seems to imply that after the Ascension matter was imported into the Godhead, perhaps not the gross matter of the sublunary plane, but matter nonetheless. But not only that: the matter imported into the Godhead, even if appropriately transfigured or spiritualized, was the matter of a male animal. For Jesus was male.

So while we tend to think of God and the Persons of the Trinity as wholly immaterial and sexless when we prescind from the Incarnation and Ascension, God after these events includes a material and indeed sexually male element. This is a further reason to think that 'he' is an appropriate pronoun to apply to God.

But what if God is Being Itself?

According to Aquinas, Deus est ipsum esse subsistens. God is self-subsistent Being. He is not an ens among entia but esse itself. He is Being itself in its primary instance.

Is it appropriate to refer to such a metaphysical absolute as 'he'? Not entirely, but 'he' is better than any other pronoun I can think of. Of course, one could coin a pronoun for use only in reference to God, say 'de.' But as I said, conservatives are chary of innovations, especially when they are unnecessary. Just use 'he' but realize what you are doing.

___________________

* Is 'he' ever used to refer to what is not a male animal? I should think so. Suppose a man gives his primary male characteristic the name 'Max.' He may go on to say: 'Old Max ain't what he used to be.' This use of 'he' refers to the penis of a human being which is a proper part of a male human being. But I should think that no proper part of a human being is a human being.

Is Sin a Fact? A Passage from Chesterton Examined

A correspondent asked me my opinion of the following passage from G. K. Chesterton:

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin — a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument.

What Chesterton is saying is that sin is a fact, an indisputable fact, whether or not there is any cure for it. Not only is sin a fact, original sin is a fact, an observable fact one can "see in the street." Chesterton also appears to be equating sin with positive moral evil.

Is moral evil the same as sin? If yes, then the factuality of moral evil entails the factuality of sin. But it seems to me that moral evil is not the same as sin. It is no doubt true – analytically true as we say in the trade — that sins are morally evil; but the converse is by no means self-evident. It is by no means self-evident that every moral evil is a sin. Let me explain.

More on Christian Anti-Natalism

I wrote in Christian Anti-Natalism?:

Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist.

Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the idea that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus God, or rather the second person of the Trinity, entered into the material world by being born of a woman, entering into it in the most humble manner imaginable, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.

The mystery of the Nativity of God in a humble manger in a second-rate desert outpost of the Roman empire would seem to put paid to the notion that Christianity is anti-natalist.

To sum it up aphoristically: Nativity is natalist. Karl White responds, but without crediting the powerful objection I just raised:

Just a few thoughts: Anti-natalism as a potential component of Christianity works best within the time frame of the Gospels themselves. Most commentators agree that Jesus had a very strong eschatological element to his mission, preaching that the end of the world was nigh and people should prepare for it.

Bear in mind his words about the Apocalypse in Matthew 24:19, Luke 21:23, Mark 13:17 "How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women…"

It's notable that he was single, did not have children and disavowed family relationships: Matthew 12:48, Luke 8:21: "Who is my Mother? Who are my brothers?"

Then we have Paul in I Corinthians 7:8 recommending celibacy as the ideal. Of course if staying single is the optimum course then the inevitable outcome is a natural end to humanity.

Once the early Christians concluded the end of the world didn't seem to be happening anytime soon, and especially once the Church became co-opted withing the Empire then the inevitable compromises were reached and Christianity was obliged to become "respectable": family-friendly, conformist, "life-affirming" etc.

Those are all good points and they do indeed point in an anti-natalist direction. Karl's points can be extended. Think of monasticism and its anti-natalist world-flight. Kierkegaard too, though decidedly anti-monastic, is in the same line with his talk of Christianity as "hetereogeneity to the world."

As I mentioned earlier, Christianity blends probably incompatible themes. So it may be that there is no way of sorting out whether, in the end, historical Christianity is natalist or anti-natalist.