Christian Doctrine – Page 7 – Maverick Philosopher

Van Til and Romans 1:18-20

I tip my hat to David Bagwill for recommending that I read Cornelius Van Til. So I sprang for the fourth edition of The Defense of the Faith, with Oliphint's annotations, P & R Publishing, 2008. Van Til's presuppositionalism is intriguing even if in places preposterous. Having discussed Romans 1:18 a couple of time before in these pages, I looked to see what Van Til had to say about it. But first my take, one that Van Til & Co. might dismiss as 'Romanist' or worse.

Rather than quote the whole of the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20, I'll summarize it. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . ."

Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the truth. There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork. Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is planted firmly in Athens. It therefore strikes me that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism. It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.

But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident. It is simply not objectively evident to the senses or the intellect or the heart that the natural world is a divine artifact. If it were objectively evident, then there would be no explanation of the existence of so many intellectually penetrating, morally upright, and sincere atheists. Even if the atheisms of Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, and Hitchens could be dismissed as originating in pride, stubborness, and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as may well be the case with the foregoing luminaries, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.

I am moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me." This was one of two things that filled Kant with wonder, the other being "the moral law within me." But seeing as is not seeing. If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework. But the datum seen can just as easily be given a non-theistic interpretation.

It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The fact of evil being perhaps the best excuse. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.

Or so I tend to think. But I am open to a change of view and a change of heart (metanoia).

I suppose I will be told that I am falsely assuming that there are some neutral data that we can access via reason unaided by revelation, data that will supply premises for arguments to the existence of God, arguments that would constitute a philosophically neutral, theologically uncommitted preambulum fidei in Thomas's sense, when such a neutral method can only in the end issue in the conclusion that Christian theism is not true. The correct method, I will be told, is to start with and adhere to the presupposition that Christianity is true, lock, stock, and barrel, and to see everything in its light:

Roman Catholics and Arminians, appealing to the 'reason' of the natural man as the natural man himself interprets his reason, namely as autonomous, are bound to use the direct method of approach to the natural man, the method that assumes the essential correctness of a non-Christian and nontheistic conception of reality. The Reformed apologist, on the other hand, appealing to that knowledge of the true God in the natural man which the natural man suppresses by means of his assumption of ultimacy, will also appeal to the knowledge of the true method which the natural man knows but suppresses. The natural man at bottom knows that he is the creature of God. He knows also that he is responsible to God. He knows that he should live to the glory of God. He knows that in all that he does he should stress that the field of reality which he investigates has the stamp of God's ownership upon it. But he suppresses his knowledge of himself as he truly is. (123-124)

At this point in the text comes a footnote referencing Romans 1: 18 ff.

Above I suggested that Paul begs the question. Now to beg a question is to assume what one needs to prove. But there is no need to prove what one presupposes. So one who presupposes the truth of Christian theism cannot be accused of begging the question. There just is no question that can be neutrally engaged by the reason of the natural man if the truth of Christian theism is presupposed.

The ultimate principle of all proof is the Law of Non-Contradiction. It therefore cannot be proved, but only presupposed. One who affirms it cannot therefore be reasonably accused of begging the question: there simply is no question here that can reasonably be disputed.

But this leaves unanswered the question why we ought to presuppose the truth of Christian theism. For the latter, with all of its very specific claims about Trinity, Incarnation, etc. is rather unlike the logical law just mentioned — to put it in the form of an understatement. Why not presuppose atheism as many today do? They too can and do make claims about what we 'know' and what we 'suppress.' We all know deep down that we are nothing but clever land mammals slated for extinction, with no higher origin or higher destiny, but we suppress this ugly truth because we are unwilling to face the dreadful facts.

If a gratuitous assertion can be met with a gratuitous counter assertion, the same goes for a gratuitous presupposition.

More later.

“And the Word Was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us” (John 1:14)

Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible . . . . Read the rest here.

It is a 'sermon' you will not likely hear in any Catholic Church. What you will hear in the decadent Catholic churches of the present day is all manner of diversionary pablum as if designed to keep one from confronting the Christian narrative in its full strength. The few exceptions will prove the rule.

A Christian Koan

Man is godlike and therefore proud. He becomes even more godlike when he humbles himself.

The central thought of Christianity, true or not, is one so repellent to the natural human pride of life that one ought at least to entertain the unlikelihood of its having a merely human origin. The thought is that God humbled himself to the point of entering the world in the miserably helpless and indigent way we in fact do, inter faeces et urinam, and to the point of leaving it in the most horrendous, shameful, and excruciating way the brutal Romans could devise, and from a most undistinguished spot, a hill in an obscure desert outpost of their empire.

A Christological and Mariological Query That Leads into the Philosophy of Language

Theme music: What If God Was One of Us (just a slob like one of us)?

My favorite Oregonian luthier, Dave Bagwill, checks in:

Karl White wrote in your post of 12-6-18: "If Jesus is a person of the Godhead then it must hold that his essence is immutable and above contingent change, particularly in response to human actions." In what way COULD "Jesus" be a 'person of the Godhead'? If I understand the classic narrative correctly, Mary, his mother, was a virgin who was made pregnant by the "overshadowing" of the Holy Spirit. So: there was an egg! A contingent egg, with DNA. And something fertilized it, supernaturally.

That's right. On the classical narrative, Jesus was born of a virgin without a natural father. The fertilization of the ovum in Mary was by a supernatural, miraculous, process. So while Jesus came into the world the way the rest of us poor schleps do, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born between feces and urine, the pregnancy that eventuated in his birth was caused by the third person of the Trinity acting supernaturally upon natural material, namely the contingent ovum in contingent Mary, who is of course a creature who wouldn't have existed at all if nothing material had been created.

That was the moment of Jesus' conception. An eternal, pre-existent entity named 'Jesus' could not have existed before that conception, unless of course Mary's DNA contribution was of no account - but in that case, we were not given 'the man Jesus Christ, made in every way like his brothers so that He might be merciful and faithful as High Priest'. Heb. 2.27. Also see 1 Tim. 2.5,6. Because – to be made like us 'in every way' either means just that, or it doesn't. He was made in every way like us. If Mary made a DNA contribution at the moment of conception, then her son 'the man Jesus Christ ' did not pre-exist. Am I at all thinking clearly here?

Yes, Dave, you are thinking quite clearly, and I agree with you. But there are some nuances that give rise to questions that lead us into the philosophy of language and metaphysics.

You and I take 'Jesus' to refer to a particular man, a composite of human soul and human body, born of a woman at a particular place at a particular time. And I take it that we understand 'born' to imply that an entity that is born first comes into existence when it is born and did not exist before it was born. To be born, then, is not for an immaterial Platonic soul-substance to acquire a material body, but for a soul-body composite to come into existence. On this 'Aristotelian' conception of being born, nothing that is born pre-existed its being born. Being born is not an alterational (accidental) change, a change in an already-existing substratum/subject of change, but an existential (substantial) change, whereby something first comes into existence.

But couldn't someone who accepts the Chalcedonian one person-two natures view say that 'Jesus' refers to the Son, the second person of the Trinity? In the earlier thread, Fr. Kirby says, "The man Jesus is a person of the Godhead, if we understand 'the man Jesus' to be denominative rather than descriptive." I take it that a denominative term is one whose reference is not determined by the descriptive content, if any, that the term bears or suggests. Such a term refers directly as opposed to a descriptive term that refers via a description that an entity must satisfy in order to count as the referent of that term. If we take 'the man Jesus' to be denominative, then 'man' plays no role in determining the term's reference. The reference can succeed even if the referent is not a man. (And of course the Son, taken in himself and apart from the Incarnation, is not a man, i.e., does not have a human nature, but only a divine nature.) If so, then the following identities hold and hold necessarily:

The Son = the man Jesus.

The Son = Jesus.

It then follows that Jesus or the man Jesus is a person of the Godhead. To clarify this further we need to dip into the philosophy of language.

How does 'Jesus' refer? Does it refer via a description that the name abbreviates, or does it refer directly? Suppose by 'Jesus' we mean the Jewish carpenter born in Bethlehem to the virgin Mary by the agency of the Holy Spirit. The italicized phrase is what Russell calls a definite description, and his thesis about ordinary proper names is that they are definite descriptions in disguise. On this theory, 'Jesus' refers to whomever satisfies the description we associate with the name. It follows that the referent of the name must have the properties mentioned in the description. For example, 'Jesus' cannot refer to anything that was not born of a woman. Now the second person of the Trinity, necessary, co-eternal with the Father, etc., was not born of a woman, or born at all, nor was he from all eternity a carpenter, etc. Recall how I explained 'born' above: an entity that is born first comes into existence when it is born and did not exist before it was born. If this is what is meant by 'born,' then the Son (second person of the Trinity, Word, Logos) cannot be born. But then how are we to understand the Incarnation? The idea, of course, is that God the Son came into the material world by being born of a virginal human female. But how is this possible if nothing that is born pre-exists its being born?

We seem faced with an aporetic triad:

Jesus was born;

The Son of God was not born;

Jesus is the Son of God.

What's the solution? There is no problem if two different senses of 'born' are in play. I suppose I will be told that the Son is born in the following sense: the pre-existent Son which has prior to the Incarnation a divine nature only, acquires at the Incarnation a human nature in addition to the divine nature. Thus there is one person (suppositum, hypostasis), and that person is the second person of the Trinity, God the Son who, before the Incarnation has exactly one nature, the divine nature, and after the Incarnation exactly two natures, one divine the other human. Being born, for the Son, is then an alterational change in the Son: the pre-existent Son acquires a second nature.

The trouble with this answer is that it implies that Jesus is not "made in every way like his brothers." He is born in a different way. He is born in a Platonic or rather quasi-Platonic way whereas we are born in the 'Aristotelian' way. Dave and I did not exist before we were born/conceived. Jesus did exist before he was born/conceived assuming that 'Jesus' is used denominatively as opposed to descriptively. When we were born/conceived, we didn't acquire something that we lacked before, human nature; we were nothing at all before. But when Jesus was born he acquired something he did not have before, human nature.

My interim conclusion is that it is deeply problematic to take 'Jesus' as referring to God the Son. Insofar forth, Dave is vindicated against Karl. Jesus is no member of the Godhead.

Is Everything in the Bible Literally True?

Of course not.

If everything in the Bible is literally true, then every sentence in oratio obliqua in the Bible is literally true. Now the sentence 'There is no God' occurs in the oblique context, "The fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'" (Psalm 14:1) So if everything in the Bible is literally true, then 'There is no God' is literally true and the Bible proves that it is not the word of God! Again, at Genesis 3:4 the Bible reports the Serpent saying to the woman (Eve), "You surely shall not die!" So if everything in the Bible is true, then this falsehood is true. Ergo, not everything in the Bible is literally true.

Someone who concedes the foregoing may go on to say, "OK, wise guy, everything in the Bible in oratio recta is literally true." But this can't be right either. For the Bible tells us in oratio recta that light was created before sources of light (sun, moon, stars) were created. The creation of light is reported at Genesis 1:3, but the creation of sources of light occurs later as reported at Genesis 1: 14-17. Obviously, light cannot exist before sources of light exist. So what the Bible reports on this head is false, if taken literally. Furthermore, if the sun does not come into existence until the fourth day, how can there be days before the fourth day? In one sense of 'day,' it is the period of time from the rising of the sun to its setting. In a second sense of 'day,' one that embraces the first, a day is the period of time from the rising of the sun to its next rising. In either of these senses there cannot be a day without a sun. So again, these passages cannot be taken literally.

But there is a deeper problem. The Genesis account implies that the creation of the heavens and the earth took time, six days to be exact. But the creation of the entire system of space-time-matter cannot be something that occurs in time. And so again Genesis cannot be taken literally, but figuratively as expressing the truth that, as St. Augustine puts it, "the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time." (City of God, XI, 6)

And then there is the business about God resting on the seventh day. What? He got fagged out after all the heavy lifting and had to take a rest? As Augustine remarks, that would be a childish way of reading Genesis 2:3. The passage must be taken figuratively: ". . . the sacred narrative states that God rested, meaning thereby that those rest who are in Him, and whom He makes to rest." (City of God, XI, 8)

What is to be taken literally and what figuratively? ". . . a method of determining whether a locution is literal or figurative must be established. And generally this method consists in this: that whatever appears in the divine Word that literally does not pertain to virtuous behavior or to the truth of faith you must take to be figurative." (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book Three, Chapter 10)

This method consigns a lot to the figurative. So it is not literally true that God caused the Red Sea to part, letting the Isrelites through, and then caused the waters to come together to drown the Pharaoh's men?

I'm just asking.

Was the Fall Necessary?

Karl White inquires,

Doesn't the classical doctrine of Theism as applied to Christianity require that the temptation in Eden and subsequent Fall were predestined and inescapable? I say this because if Jesus is a person of the Godhead then it must hold that his essence is immutable and above contingent change, particularly in response to human actions. So if Adam had never sinned, then Jesus's salvific role would have been redundant, and an 'unemployable' Jesus makes no sense whatsoever. Or am I missing something?

The reasoning seems to be as follows. (1) The man Jesus is a person of the Godhead; (2) the man Jesus is essentially the savior; (3) the persons of the Godhead are necessary beings; ergo, (4) the salvific role is necessarily instantiated; (5) the salvific role is instantiated iff the Fall occurs; ergo, (6) the Fall had to happen and was therefore "inescapable."

I deny (6) by denying (1).

As I understand the classical Christian narrative, the lapsus and subsequent ejection from paradise were contingent 'events,' ones that would not have occurred had it not been for Adam's disobedience. Adam sinned, and he sinned freely. There was no necessity that he sin and thus no necessity that the Fall occur. Of course, God foreknew what Adam would do; but divine foreknowledge is presumably compatible with human freedom in the libertarian 'could have done otherwise' sense.

That Adam possessed free will before the Fall follows, I think, from his having been created in the divine image. (So he had free will before eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.) The imago dei is of course to be taken in a spiritual, not a physical sense. It means that man, though an animal, is a spiritual animal unlike all the other animals. God, a free Spirit, created in Adam a little free spirit, a reflection of himself, although reflection is not quite the word.

So the Fall need not have occurred. But it did, and man fell out of right relation to God and into his present miserable predicament which includes of course the death sentence under which man now lives as punishment for his primordial act of rebellion. The current predicament is one from which man cannot save himself by his own efforts. So God, having mercy on man, decides to send a Redeemer and Savior.

But the enormity of the Original Offense against God is such that only a divine being can make it good and restore man to God's good graces. So God sends his own divine Son ("begotten not made") to suffer and die for our sins. This is God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the Word of God, the Logos, co-eternal with the Father, a purely spiritual necessary being like the Father. He enters the material world by being born of the virgin Mary. This is the Incarnation.

Now just as the Fall was contingent, so is the Incarnation. It need not have occurred. It is doubly contingent: contingent on Adam's free sin and God's free decision to save humanity.

So my answer to my reader is as follows. The salvific role need never have been instantiated. God need never have become man. Humanity might still be in he prelapsarian, paradisical state, living forever with subtle indestructible bodies unlike the gross bodies we are presently equipped with. The man Jesus is not a person of the Godhead. There was no necessity that the Fall occur.

Catholicism as a Literary Affair?

William Giraldi in Commonweal:

Because I want nothing to do with hocus-pocus, because dogma and decrees are closed to real contest, and because corporations make me glum (the Vatican is, among other things, a corporation), Catholicism is for me a literary affair: drama, poetry, myth, tradition. Homilies and hymnals, liturgies and sermons done right, the Benedictus, the Magnificat, the Gloria in Excelsis Deo: these are literature no less than The Iliad is.

One problem with cleaving to the aesthetics of Catholicism while dumping the metaphysics is that, post-Vatican II, there is not much to cleave to: the pageantry and liturgy have devolved in the direction of the insipid and ugly. There is no need to rehearse the litany of complaints. But that is not the main problem.

Even as a boy, I never believed in an Iron Age Hebrew deity who gives a damn about our mammalian plight. When Orwell, writing about Waugh, remarked that one really can’t be Catholic and grown-up at the same time, he was getting at the wild implausibility at the hub of Christianity. But “God” and “Christ” are, above all, terms of poetry, of allegory and metaphor and myth. Flannery O’Connor once famously snapped at Mary McCarthy when McCarthy said that the Eucharist is only a symbol: “Well, if it’s only a symbol, to hell with it.” Reluctant as I normally am to dissent from O’Connor, I have to side with McCarthy there. Religion not only traffics in symbols, it survives by them, and to mistake the figurative for the factual or allegory for history is to mistake much indeed. But mouthy unbelievers who find, say, Original Sin barbaric and absurd are missing the point on purpose: whatever else it is, Original Sin is most potently a metaphor for the inherent psychological wackiness of our kind, all those pesky hormonal urges that make us batty. Of course we are born blighted: evolution by natural selection is a malfunctioning process. Never mind your soul: just look at all those problems with your teeth, your back, your knees.

Giraldi makes it clear that he is an atheist. In this respect he is on the side of the "mouthy unbelievers." But he thinks that the latter deliberately (!?) miss the point of the doctrine of Original Sin. But how could that doctrine have any point if there is no God? Sin, by definition, is an offense against God; if there is no God, then there is no sin either, and, a fortiori, no Original Sin. The Doctrine has a point only if man, a creature made in the image and likeness of God, offended God and lost his prelapsarian right relation to God. Otherwise the Doctrine refers to nothing real. The Doctrine refers to something real only if (i) God exists as the supreme moral authority of the universe, (ii) man exists as a spiritual being possessing free will and thus not as a mere animal, and (iii) man freely rejects divine moral authority in a doomed quest to become like God.

It is difficult to see how 'Original Sin' could be plausibly taken to be a metaphor for a blighted human condition brought about by evolution gone wrong. The blight Giraldi mentions consists in factual defects in our mammalian constitution: teeth subject to rot, hormones prone to run riot, etc. Now while the Doctrine as interpreted by many theologians does imply a certain fallenness in nature herself, the main point of it is moral and thus normative, not factual. Man is morally messed up, not merely messed up in his empirical psychology and in his knees and joints. He is intellectually defective to boot, living as he does in deep ignorance of God, himself, and the ultimate why and wherefore. This deep ignorance is a spiritual condition, not one explainable in terms of neurons and hormones.

Note also that it make no sense to speak of evolution by natural selection as MALfunctioning, when interpreted in the light of metaphysical naturalism, to which mast Girladi nails his colors. Evolution is just a natural process driven by natural selection operating upon random variations. No providential Intelligence directs it, and no internal teleology animates it. To say that evolution malfunctioned in the case of h. sapiens presupposes a normative point of view external to it which is incompatible with a hard-nosed naturalism.

Another reason why Original-Sin-as-metaphor is at best a very bad metaphor is that the Fall stands at the beginning of human history or at a time just before human history. Our mammalian miseries, however, come not at the start of evolution but near the end.

Catholicism as a literary affair? Why bother?

In any case, what seems really to interest Giraldi judging by the Commonweal piece are not so much the aesthetics of the rites, rituals, prayers and such of Catholicism, watered-down as they have become, but the aesthetic values of the products of Catholic writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O'Connor.

More on the Hypostatic Union

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

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

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

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

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

This raises the following question.

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

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

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

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

Therefore

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

Therefore

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

Therefore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Joseph White on the Hypostatic Union: Questions

Vito Caiati writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.