Category: Theology

Aquinas and Hylomorphism Again

Over lunch on Sunday, Brian B asked me to explain my disagreement with Ed Feser and others over Aquinas’ hylomorphism.  Here is a pithier statement than the ones I’ve already posted.

I will assume with Aquinas that human beings after death continue to exist as disembodied souls until the general resurrection. The question I and others have posed is how the persistence of individual  souls after death is conceivable on the Aristotelian hylomorphic principles to which Thomas subscribes.  Why should this be a problem?  The problem is that the following propositions, each of which is a doctrinal commitment of Thomas, are collectively logically inconsistent: they cannot all be true.

a) Designated matter in material substances both individuates their forms and accounts for the substances’ numerical difference. Thus Peter and Paul are two and not one because of the difference in their designated matter.  And their forms are individuated by designated matter as well.  This implies that (i) Peter’s substantial form is numerically different from Paul’s, and that (ii) neither form is an individual form without the matter that individuates it.

b) The souls of living things are substantial forms of their bodies: anima forma corporis. Peter and Paul are living things; hence their souls are individual substantial forms of their bodies. To put it more precisely, Peter and Paul are  form-matter composites.  The psychic or soulic component in each is the individual substantial form, and the material component in each is the parcel of designated matter.  Each component needs the other to be what it is: the psychic-formal component needs the material component for its individuation, and the material component needs the psychic component for its animation.  And neither component can exist without the other: each exists only together with the other. Thus the whole of which they are proper parts is not a whole compounded of parts that can exist on their own,  as substances in their own right, but a whole the parts of which are mere ‘principles’ in scholastic jargon and thus not substances in their own right. This implies that the hylomorphic whole, which is a substance in its own right,  is ontologically prior to the morphic and hyletic parts which are not substances in their own right.  Bear in mind that a primary substance, by definition, is a basic entity that is metaphysically capable of independent existence.

c) The souls of humans, unlike those of non-human animals, are subsistent: they are metaphysically capable of independent existence. So the souls of Peter and Paul will continue to exist after their bodily death in a disembodied intermediate state  prior to their re-embodiment in the general resurrection.

The triad is inconsistent because (a) and (b) taken together entail the negation of (c). Indeed any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one.

In a nutshell: it cannot be the case that souls depend on material bodies for their existence and individuation but continue to exist as individual souls after bodily death in a bodiless state.

What Thomists want to say is that SOMEHOW a substantial form that achieves individuation ‘here below’ pre-mortem by marriage with a hunk of matter, thereby animating said hunk of matter, continues to exist as a disembodied individual soul  ‘up yonder’ post-mortem AFTER the individuating factor has been removed. That makes no sense. What would make sense is that the individual soul cease to exist after the death of the body. Bear in mind that the soul on an Aristotelian hylomorphic mereological analysis is a mere ‘principle’ of the hylomorphic composite entity and not itself a substance.

The conclusion to be drawn from this is that despite the Angelic Doctor’s  noble attempt to stay as close as possible to The Philosopher (philosophus), he is in the end a substance dualist of sorts, though not quite along Platonic, Augustinian, or Cartesian lines.

There was a time when I thought that, with respect to the soul, Thomas was an Aristotelian ‘on earth,’ but a Platonist ‘in heaven.’ (I may have picked up that line from Anthony Kenny.) But then the problem of the SOMEHOW,  the problem of how a human soul can go from a mere non-subsistent ‘principle’ to a  subsistent upon the removal of the soul’s individuating factor, becomes insoluble.  I now think that it would be better to say that, with respect to the soul, the doctor angelicus was a Platonist in both the sublunary and superlunary spheres, both ‘on earth’ and ‘in heaven,’ and this in consequence of his Christian theological commitments which exercise ‘veto power’ over his philosophical assertions.

Klima on Intellective Soul and Living Body in Aquinas and the Immortality of the Human Soul

Gyula Klima:

The composition from intellective soul and living body, and the natural immortality of the human soul (a section of a long paper)
. . . given the immateriality of the intellect, which I will not attempt to prove now, but let us just assume for the sake of the argument, the activity of the intellect cannot have as its subject the composite of body and soul, or as Aquinas would put it, this activity does not communicate with matter. What this means is that its acts are not acts of any parts of the body, in the way in which, say, my acts of sight are obviously the acts of my visual apparatus enformed [informed] by my sensitive soul.
BV:  The first sentence above strikes me as obviously true. For example, when I contemplate the theorem of Pythagoras, what in me thinks that thought?  No part of my living body, not even my brain or any part of my brain.  Nor is it the soul-body composite that thinks the thought. In the schema ego-cogito-cogitatum, where the cogitatum is the theorem in question, the ego cannot be any material thing, and thus no proper or improper part of my material body.  As for the act of thinking, the cogitatio, it cannot be any state of, or process in, any part of my material body.  In particular, it cannot be a brain state or process. So far, I agree with Klima and Thomas.  But suppose  I am having a coherent, ongoing, visual experience as of a tree. Is it obvious that this act of visual experiencing requires eyes, optic nerves, visual cortex, etc. , which is what I take Klima to be referring to with “visual apparatus”? No, it is not obvious, but to explain why would take us too far afield.
The point of agreement so far is that intellective acts do not “communicate with matter.” But if sensory acts do so communicate, then are there two souls involved in my cognitive life, an intellective soul and a sensitive soul?  Or is there only one soul? Only one according to Klima.
But the same sensitive soul also has intellective acts, which Aquinas argues cannot be the acts of any bodily organ, or to put it simply, I am not thinking with my brain (or any other organ for that matter): my brain merely provides, so to speak, “food for my thought”, in the form of phantasms, the singular representations of sensible singulars, which then my intellect further processes in its own acts of abstraction, concept formation, judgment formation and reasoning, all of which are acts of the intellect alone, which therefore cannot have the body and soul composite as their subject, but the soul alone.
BV: Right, we don’t think with our brains.  But we live in a world of concrete material particulars or singulars many of which are also sensible, i.e., able to be sensed.   My knowledge that the tree is green is sensory not intellective.  Phantasms are singular representations of singular sensibles. But it is quite unclear to me how the brain can “provide” or  “serve up” these representations for the intellect to “feast on” and intellectively process.  Are  the phantasms  located in the brain where the intellect gets hold of them for “processing”?  A representation is a representation of something (genitivus obiectivus) and it is is difficult to understand how any part of a hunk of meat can represent anything.  What gives bits of brain matter representational power?  But I won’t pursue this question further here. I pursue it elsewhere. We now come to the gravamen of my complaint against the hylomorphic attempt to explain personal survival of bodily death.
We are told that the soul-body composite cannot be the subject of sensory knowledge any more than it can be the subject of intellective knowledge. This, however, has the consequence that the intellective soul is not only a form, enforming [informing] the body, but is also a subject of its own power, the intellect, and its acts. But then, it exists not only as that by which the living body is, but also as that which is the underlying subject of its own acts which it does not communicate with the body. Therefore, upon the death of a human person, when the soul gets separated from the body, the soul ceases to be the form of the body, but that does not mean that it also has to cease to be. Since its own operations are not acts of the body, they can continue without its union with the body. But to operate, it must exist; so, it can naturally go on existing, as the underlying subject of its own intellectual operations. So, when a person dies, the person ceases to exist, but the person’s soul merely ceases to be a form of their body, which can persist in its being, naturally continuing the life that used to be the life of the person, as a separate soul, until the same person will be miraculously restituted in the resurrection, resuming the same life, now as a whole person again.
I agree with the first three sentences up to ‘therefore’ the bolding of which I have added.  Klima appreciates that the human soul for Aquinas has a dual function. It not only animates the body of which it is the soul, thereby making it a living body, but it is also that which thinks when a human being engages in intellective acts. The human soul is not only that by which the living body is alive; it is also “the underlying subject of its own [intellective] acts,” acts which do not “communicate with matter” and are therefore not the acts of the soul-body composite, the unitary psychophysical complex. So it is not Socrates qua soul-body composite who ponders whether virtue is teachable or whether there is more to knowledge than true belief; it is the intellect alone in Socrates that is the subject of these acts. That sounds right to me.
But we are then told, in the sentences  after therefore, that this individual (not universal) intellective soul will survive the death of its body.  But this is very hard to make sense of for several reasons.  Indeed, it smacks of a blatant non sequitur.  I will present only one reason in this entry. “Brevity is the soul of blog,” as some wit once observed.
 It is in virtue of forms that things are intelligible. If what thinks in a human being post-mortem is a form, however, then that form is not only intelligible but also intelligent.  It is not only intelligible, but intelligible to itself, which is to say that it is at once both intelligible and intelligent.  I find it hard to understand how a pure immaterial form, a form that does not inform anything, a form that is not a form of anything, can be both intelligible and intelligent. I find it hard to understand how  the subject and the object of acts of intellection could be one and the same.  I don’t intend this as a merely autobiographical comment. I am suggesting that anyone ought to find it hard to understand, indeed impossible to understand, and therefore intrinsically  unintelligible.  But in philosophy we are not allowed to make bare or gratuitous assertions. Quod gratis asseritur gratis negatur. So I need to argue this out. I will begin by giving two examples of intrinsically unintelligible notions.
a) The first example of intrinsic unintelligibility is the notion of a thing that causes its own existence. Since nothing can exercise causality unless it exists, nothing can cause its own existence. Not even God in his omnipotence could cause his own existence. For there cannot be an exercise of (efficient) causality unless there exists something or someone that/who exercises it. Necessarily, no action without an agent. But more than that: no action without an agent the being of which is not exhausted in its acting on a given occasion. What that means is that the agent cannot be identical to his action.  If Guido makes a meatball, there has to be more to Guido than that particular act of making that particular meatball, which is to say: no agent is identical to any of its actions, or the sum of them.   Suppose, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, that agent S performs action A. Even in a case like this the agent is not identical to any of his actions or the sum of them.
b) A second example of intrinsic unintelligibility is the notion of an open sentence that has a truth value. ‘___ is wise’ is an example of an open sentence. It can also be depicted using the free variable ‘x’ thusly: ‘x is wise.’ This open sentence, which picks out what Russell calls a propositional function, is neither true nor false: it lacks a truth value. A (closed) sentence results if we either substitute a name for the variable ‘x’ or bind the variable with a quantifier. Both ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘For all x, x is wise’ are closed sentences which attract a truth value. That is a philosopher’s way of saying that they can be evaluated as either true or false. The first is true, the second false. The claim that ‘x is wise’ has a truth value, however, is intrinsically unintelligible: it makes no sense and cannot be understood, by me or anyone.
A pure immaterial form that is both intelligible and intelligent is like an open sentence that has a truth value.  Why? Well, consider the sentences ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Socrates is human.’  The first predicates an accidental form of a substance, the second a substantial form of a substance. Those sentences are both meaningful and true. What makes them meaningful is that they express complete thoughts or propositions: each has a subject-term, a copula, and a predicate-term. What makes them true is the inherence of the forms picked out by the predicates in what the subject-terms name,  something that is not a form.   Socrates is not a form.  He is a composite entity, a hylomorphic compound.  Just as it is unintelligible to suppose that there could be an action that was not the action of an agent distinct from the action, it is unintelligible to suppose that there could be a form that was not the form of something (genitivus subiectivus) that was not itself a form.
More  tomorrow.

The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation

Substack latest.

This entry continues the line of thought in Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?

God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God’s creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God’s free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite yet autonomous free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality. God creates potential rebels. He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source himself even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway. He creates Lucifer who became the father of all perversity. The “Father of lights” (James 1:17) creates the father of lies.

God creates and sustains, moment by moment, other minds, like unto his own, made in his image, who are yet radically other in their inwardness and freedom. He creates subjects who exist in their own right and not merely as objects of divine thought. How is this conceivable?

Who’s Hell Bound?

Just over the transom from Derwood:

Help me understand something. When Jesus died, the vast percentage of humanity had and would never hear of the Jewish messiah/god.
True.  And that would seem to include all sorts of righteous Old Testament individuals, including Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Surely, the latter three are not in hell. As I understand traditional RCC theology, Abraham & Co. upon their deaths were sent to the "limbo of the fathers" (limbus patrum), a 'place' distinct from both hell and purgatory wherein the Old Testament righteous enjoyed a natural happiness, but did not partake of the Beatific Vision (visio beata).  This, I take it, is the 'place' Christ visited after his crucifixion when he "descended into hell' (as we read in the NT) before rising on the third day.  He went there to release the OT saints from their 'holding pen' and bring them to the Father in heaven.  It follows that the hell into which Christ descended is not hell as a 'place' of everlasting/eternal damnation and torment. 
Does that mean that the vast majority of humanity, men, women and children, were hell-bound heathens?
The problem of unbaptized children motivated a nuancing of the limbo concept by Albertus Magnus: there is not only the limbus patrum but also the limbus infantium/limbus puerorum, the limbo of children.  Surely a just and benevolent deity would not send them to hell, sensu stricto.
How does a just and benevolent deity allow that? That persists today, doesn't it? How much of the world knows about, much less worships, Jesus? All hell-bound?
The topic of limbo is not currently discussed.  If I'm not mistaken, the 1992 RCC catechism makes no reference to it. Theology ain't what it used to be  What a degeneration from Ratzinger to Bergoglio! The German has a first-rate theological head. I recommend his books.  It should noted, however, that Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) considered limbo a doctrine it was not necessary for a Catholic to believe. See our friend Michael Liccione's First Things article on the topic, A Doctrine in Limbo.
 
I am just scratching the surface, and in any case I am not a theologian.  This fact does not dissuade me from 'pontificating' on this and plenty of other theological matters! Here are three good sources for anyone interested in this topic: an article from The Thomist; a Britannica article; and one from the Catholic Encyclopedia. 
 
At some point I want to discuss purgatory.  Calvin rejects the notion. Surely that is a theological error of major proportions! (I'm baiting my Calvinist friends.)

The Theological Virtue of Hope

RCC Catechism: 

1817. Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Now listen to Pope Leo:

The pontiff [Leo] said that the Jubilee Year of Hope “encourages the universal Church and indeed the entire world to reflect on this essential virtue, which Pope Francis described as the desire and expectation of good things to come despite or not knowing what the future may bring.”

I am no theologian, but Pope Francis's description of the theological virtue of hope leaves something to be desired. Compare it to the quotation immediately preceding. Is Leo, who seems to be uncritically accepting Francis's description, much of an improvement over his predecessor?

“My Kingdom is not of this World”

Thus Jesus to Pilate at John 18:36. 

What does 'this world' refer to?  In the "Our Father"  we pray: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Reading these two texts side-by-side one might conclude that God's kingdom is to be realized on earth and not in a purely spiritual realm, and that therefore  'this world' at John 18:36 refers to this age of the earthly realm and not to the earthly realm as such.

Yes or no?

Back to Inerrancy: A Note on Vanhoozer

I have been doing my level best as time permits to get up to speed on inerrancy as understood by evangelical Protestants. I have a long way to go. Today I preach on a text from Kevin J. Vanhoozer.  I will examine just one sentence of his in his contribution to Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013, p. 202, "God does not contradict himself, despite surface textual appearances to the contrary (Isa. 45:19)."

This compound sentence conveys two thoughts:

a) God does not contradict himself.

and 

b) Some Biblical texts appear to show that God does contradict himself, but in every case this is a mere appearance.

Ad (a). This is true, and presumably true by definition. Nevertheless, there is a question one could raise, but pursuing it here would lead us off track. The  question concerns God's relation to the law of noncontradiction (LNC).  Is he subject to it as to a norm external to himself? Must he abide by it? If yes, that would appear to limit God's sovereignty and his power. If he is all-powerful, does he have the power to make LNC false? See here. I raise this issue only to set it aside (for now); so please no comments on this issue. For present purposes, (a) stands fast.

Ad (b). What I write here is not verbatim the same as what Vanhoozer wrote in his second clause.  What justifies my "in every case"?  It is justified by Vanhoozer's definition of inerrancy on p. 202:

. . . inerrancy means that God's authoritative word is wholly true and trustworthy in everything  it claims about what was, what is, and what will be. (emphasis in original)

Vanhoozer appears to be reasoning along the following lines. Since God does not contradict himself, and since God is wholly truthful and trustworthy in everything he communicates to us in the Scripture, the Scripture cannot contain any contradictory passages or any false claims.  From this follows that any appearance of contradiction is a mere or false appearance, and any appearance of falsehood is a mere or false appearance.  And so what some of us see as errors, are not really errors, but mere "difficulties." (202)

Thus the Bible is wholly inerrant, inerrant in everything it claims, and not merely in its soteriological claims, that is, its claims regarding what is needed for salvation!

Now why don't I accept this? 

Well, Vanhoozer appears to be confusing the Word of God = the Logos = the Second Person of the Trinity with the Word of God in a second sense of the term, namely, the Scripture. I argued in an earlier post that they cannot be one and the same, and this for a very simple reason: the Word in the first sense is co-eternal with the Father and thus eternal. The Word in the second sense is not eternal inasmuch as it had an origin in time.  So at best it is sempiternal. 

What's more, the Word in the first sense is metaphysically necessary; it is as metaphysically necessary as the First Person of the Trinity. But the Scripture is metaphysically contingent, which is to say: there is no necessity that it exists. It would not have existed had God not created anything.  The divine aseity ensures that God has no need to create. Had he not created us humans, we would not have fallen, and would be in no need of 'salvific info.'  God revealed himself to us in Scripture. No 'us,' no revelation to us. It takes two to tango, as Trump recently reminded us, echoing Ronnie Raygun (as lefties call him).

If you disagree with what I have just argued, then you would be saying that the Scripture pre-exists its being written down.  That may be so in Islam (I am not quite sure), but it is surely not so in Christianity.

But there is more to my argument, namely, that communication from God to man is via ancient human authors, who are finite and fallible and riven with tribal and cultural biases, even if they are our superiors in wisdom and discernment.  This is why one cannot validly infer the inerrancy of Scripture from the inerrancy of God. No doubt God is wholly veracious, infallible, omniscient, and inerrant. But how do you get from that proposition to the proposition that the Scripture contains no errors about anything soteriological or non-soteriological? You need an auxiliary premise to the effect that the authors of the scriptural texts,  who received the divine messages, were somehow able to put them into the words of ancient languages and in such a way that the divine meaning was perfectly captured and expressed. I see no reason to believe that. In fact, given  what we know about human beings, I see every reason not to believe it.

Vito Caiati correctly pointed out that in Christianity God reveals himself in the man Jesus of Nazareth. True. But that is irrelevant to the inerrancy question. Here's why.  The doctrine of inerrancy states that the Bible, the whole Bible, OT and NT, is inerrant, either in all its claims or in all its soteriological claims. So the fact, if it is a fact, that "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us," — the Second Person of the Trinity, mind you, not the Bible! — and that the Incarnate Word was encountered by the apostles and disciples of Jesus and written about by them, is irrelevant to the question whether the Bible as a whole is inerrant.

Lonergan, Sproul, Bahnsen

A tip of the hat to Tony Flood for supplying me with the following important documents:

Bernard Lonergan, Religion: The Answer is the Question

R. C. Sproul and Greg Bahnsen Debate (full transcript)

I had asked Tony whether he had a copy of Lonergan's Method in Theology he was willing to part with.  Here is his reply:

I don't think you asked, Bill, but the answer is yes. Since, however, he signed it when I visited him at a Jesuit infirmary in 1983 (you might enjoy my account of that meeting here), it is priceless. (You are free to test that claim. (:^D)) Should I sense that the end is near, I'll donate it to the Lonergan Institute as I did so much Lonergania a couple of years ago. The April 20, 1970 issue of Time covered what he was up to in theology; here's a link to the text. It will help contextualize him. (I know where I was that month.) 

How Christian is the Doctrine of Hell?

The traditional doctrine of hell appears to be a consequence of two assumptions, the first  of which is arguably unbiblical.

Geddes MacGregor: ". . . the doctrine of hell, with its attendant horrors, is intended as the logical development of the notion that, since man is intrinsically immortal, and some men turn out badly, they cannot enjoy the presence of God." (Reincarnation in Christianity, Quest Books, 1978, 121)

1) We are naturally, and intrinsically, immortal.

2) Some of us, by our evil behavior, have freely and forever excluded  ourselves from the divine presence.

MacGregor: "Having permanently deprived themselves of the capacity to enjoy that presence [the presence of God] , they must forever endure the sense of its loss, the poena damni, as the medieval theologians called it." (Ibid.)

Therefore

3) There must be some state or condition, some 'place,' for these immortal souls, and that 'place' is hell. They will remain there either for all eternity or else everlastingly.

According to MacGregor, premise (1) is false because it has no foundation in biblical teaching. (Ibid.) St. Paul, says MacGregor, subscribes to conditional immortality.  This is "immortality that is dependent on one's being 'raised up' to victory over death through the resurrection of Christ." (op. cit., 119)   It follows that the medieval doctrine of hell  is un-Christian.

The choice we face is not between heaven and hell but between heaven and utter extinction which, for MacGregor, is worse than everlasting torment.

Two issues: Would extinction of the  person be worse than everlasting torment? That is not my sense of things. I would prefer extinction, for Epicurean reasons. The other issue is whether the Pauline texts and the rest of the Bible support conditional immortality.  I have no fixed opinion on that question.  

On Anselmian or ‘Perfect Being’ Theology

Tom O. writes,
I was wondering if you have time to weigh in on the following problem. I take it you subscribe to perfect being theology as a constraint on our theorizing about God’s nature. For example, you write, “God is the absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is a contingent being. No absolute just happens to exist. it is built into the divine job description that God be a necessary being…”. Here, it looks to me like you’re endorsing a prior conception of what God must be like (‘absolute’) in order to infer that God must be a necessary being. 
 
Actually, Tom, I do not subscribe to 'perfect being' theology, as I explain below.   I do, however, have a prior conception of what God must be like to be 'worth his salt,' i.e., to satisfy the exigencies built into our concept of God.  God is the Absolute, and nothing could be the Absolute if it merely happened to exist. So God, if he exists, exists of absolute metaphysical necessity, and he has this necessity from himself, and not from another, a se non ab alio. It follows that if God does not exist, then he is impossible. Thus  what we should not say is that God necessarily exists, for this way of putting it implies that he does exist. We should say that God is necessarily non-contingent, i.e. necessarily such that, if he exists, he exists  necessarily (in all possible worlds in the Leibnizian patois), and if he does not exist, then he is impossible (exists in no possible world in the same façon de parler.) 
 
Now, suppose someone endorses a conception of God as a limited being. Maybe God is not all powerful, or he is dependent in some way (and so not a se in a strong sense- think pantheism) or he is contingent in some way. This view of God obviously parts ways with perfect being theology. But I want to know how the proponent of perfect being theology will argue that conceptions of God as a limited being are deficient. The very conception of God (as limited or absolute/perfect) is at issue here. So, the proponent of perfect being theology can’t assume God is the absolute to then argue a limited God is deficient. What criterion could he possibly appeal to in order to sort ‘genuine’ conceptions of God from ‘deficient’ conceptions?
 

In the context of this discussion there are three approaches to God that we ought to distinguish: the limited being approach, the perfect being approach, and  the beyond-perfect-being approach of Aquinas, Barry Miller, and myself, et al.  As for the limited being approach, I will just say for now that there might be one or more limited gods, but that they don't interest me. What interests me is whether there is an unsourced Source of the being, intelligibility, and value of everything other than it, a being of limitless perfection, return to which or fellowship with which, or participation in the being of which, would bring the ultimate in human felicity.  That is my concept of God, and not just mine.  My question then becomes: does anything in reality answer to that concept?  

I have no interest in limited gods. I have no interest in affirming them or denying them. There might even be one or more in addition to the unlimited God; they might serve as emissaries between the unlimited God and us.  But they would not be worthy of worship or worthy of my ultimate concern because my ultimate beatitude and need for final meaning could not be secured  by them.

My interest is whether we need to go beyond perfect being theology.  I say we do and that PBT is a limited approach to the divine.

The anthropomorphism of perfect being (Anselmian) theology

One approach to God and his attributes is Anselmian: God is "that that which no greater can be conceived."  God is the greatest conceivable being, the most perfect of all beings, the being possessing all perfections.  But what is a perfection?  A perfection is not just any old (positive, non-Cambridge) property, but a great-making property. Some of these properties admit of degrees while some do not. To say of God that he is the ens perfectissimum, the most perfect of all beings, is to say that he possesses all great- making properties, and of those that admit of degrees, he possesses them to the highest degree.

For example, power admits of degrees; so while Socrates and God are both powerful, only God is maximally powerful.  Wisdom too admits of degrees; so while both Socrates and God are both wise, only God is maximally wise.  And the same holds for love and mercy and moral goodness.  Many of the divine attributes, then, are maxima of attributes possessed by humans.

Are Socrates and God wise in the same sense of 'wise'?  This follows if wisdom in God is just the highest degree of the same attribute that is found in some humans.  Accordingly, the predicate 'wise' is being used univocally in 'Socrates is wise' and 'God is wise' despite the fact that God but not Socrates is all-wise.  Bear in mind that the sense of a predicate is not to be confused with the property (attribute) the predicate is used to express. Suppose we distinguish three 'planes': the linguistic, the semantic, and the ontic. Predicates inhabit the linguistic plane, senses the semantic plane, and properties the ontic plane. 

Thus a commitment to univocity appears to be entailed by the Anselmian or perfect-being approach.  The predicate 'wise' is being used in the very same sense when applied to Socrates and when applied to God. 

The polar opposite of univocity is equivocity.  The phenomenon of equivocity is illustrated by this pair of sentences: 'Socrates is wise,' 'Kamala is in no wise fit to be president.'  The meaning or sense of 'wise' is totally different across the two sentences.  Midway between univocity and equivocity there is analogicity.  Perhaps an example of an analogical use of 'wise' would be in application to Guido the mafioso.  He's a wise guy; he knows the score; but he is not a wise man like Socrates, though he is like the latter in being knowledgeable about some things.   But I mention analogy only to set it aside.

My thesis: an Anselmian approach to God and his attributes such as we find in Alvin Plantinga and T. V. Morris and the rest of the 'perfect being' theists is anthropomorphic. One takes God to have the very same great-making attributes or properties that (some) humans have, but to the maximal degree.  Socrates is benevolent and merciful; God is omnibenevolent and all-merciful.  And so on.  We could say that God is omni-qualified or omni-propertied with respect to the great-making properties. If we take this tack, we approach God from the side of man, assimilating God to man.  God is 'made' (conceptualized) in the image and likeness of man, as a sort of superman, but with defects removed and attributes maximized. 

This anthropomorphism is very different from the God-is-an-anthropomorphic-projection thesis of Ludwig Feuerbach.  Feuerbach's thesis entails the nonexistence of God. Perfect being anthropomorphism does not. 

Well, what is wrong with anthropomorphism?  The problem with it is that it fails to do justice to God's absolute transcendence and ineffability.  If the difference between creatures and God is only a matter of degree, then God would not be worthy of worship. He would be "the greatest thing around" and no doubt an object of wonder and admiration, but not an appropriate object of worship. (See Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God, U. of  Notre Dame Press, 1996, p. 3)

God is the Absolute.  I take that to be axiomatic. That God is the Absolute is built into the very concept of God whether or not anything in reality answers to that concept.  Starting from the concept, one cannot prove (demonstrate) that God exists. Kant is surely right that the ontological argument "from mere concepts" (aus blosser Begriffen) is not valid. To understand what I just wrote you must understand that the concept of X is not to be confused with the nature of X. Natures (quiddities, essences) are situated on the ontic plane mentioned above; concepts are either finite-mind-dependent in which case they cannot exist in themselves but only in minds, or else,they exist in themselves on the semantic plane, which I distinguished above from the ontic plane. One could say that  the nature of God entails (or rather is) the existence of God.  That, I believe, is true. But that truth does not help us prove the existence of God unless we have a rationally coercive reason to think that our concept of God is an adequate concept, i.e., one that captures the essence or nature of God. But we have no such concept. The doctor angelicus will back me up on this.  In God, essence and existence are one. To capture God's essence in a concept, therefore, would require squeezing God himself into a concept. That would be like emptying the Pacific Ocean, or any ocean, into a hole in the sand at the seashore.

God is radically other than creatures.  His attributes cannot be 'in series' with human degreed attributes even if at the limits of these series.  God is not just another thing that exists  and possesses properties in the way creatures possess properties.   

The One Man Who Pre-Exists his Birth

Christianity is curiously Platonistic about Christ: he is the one man who pre-exists his conception and birth. "Before Abraham was, I am."  (John 8:58) But no such Platonism about any other human, not even Mary, Theotokos (God-bearer).

If, as Chalcedonian orthodoxy has it, Jesus Christ is fully man and fully God, then he is man and a man.  (There is a riddle here respecting  man and a man, both in Christ and in Adam, which I won't pursue here.)

What tense is the 'exists' in 'pre-exists' and the 'am' in the Johannine verse?  What should we call it? The eternally present tense?

Reading Now: Karl Barth, Henri Bouillard, Erich Przywara

'Now' above refers to March 2003. Tempus fugit! This unfinished post has been languishing in storage and now wants to see the light of day. Fiat lux!

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I'm on a bit of theological jag at present. The updating of my SEP divine simplicity entry has occasioned my review of recent literature on modal collapse arguments against DDS, some of it by theologians. See the final section for the modal collapse arguments.

Henri Bouillard's The Knowledge of God (Herder and Herder, 1968) introduced me to Karl Barth.  Bouillard is a philosopher, Barth a theologian.  Both are in quest of the Absolute but in different ways. But completeness demands a tripartite distinction between philosopher, theologian, and mystic.

Thomas Aquinas, the Great Synthesizer, is all three at different times and in different texts. The natural theology of the praeambula fidei is philosophy, not theology strictly speaking. To argue from the mundus sensibilis to an extra-mundane causa prima is to do natural theology, which is a branch of philosophy.  No use is made by the philosopher qua philosopher of divine revelation. There is no appeal to the supernatural. Recourse is only to (discursive/dianoetic) reason and the deliverances of the senses.  Properly theological topics, on the other hand, among them  Trinity and Incarnation, are knowable only via revelation, which presupposes faith. They are not knowable by philosophical methods. Whether cognitio fidei (knowledge by faith) should be called knowledge is an important but vexing question, especially for those of us who toil in the shadow of the great Descartes. I have something to say about it here in connection with Edith Stein and her first and second 'masters,' the neo-Cartesian Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas, respectively.

A third source of insight into the Absolute is via mysticism which promises direct access to God as opposed to access via discursive operations from the side of the finite subject and/or access via divine communication from God to man via Scripture. As I understand Barth so far in my study of him, he denies that God reveals himself in the created world or via the teaching authority of any church, let alone the church of Rome. On his account we know God only from God. Revelation is confined to Scripture and to God Incarnate, Jesus Christ. So there is no access to God via natural theology nor through direct mystical insight. 

Erich Przywara (1889-1972) somewhere in his stupendous Analogia  Entis (orig. publ. in German in 1962, English tr. by Betz and Hart, Eerdmans 2014) adds a fourth category, that of the theological philosopher. But I have forgotten what exactly he means by 'theological philosopher.'

He who quests for the Absolute may therefore wear one or more of four hats: philosopher, theologian (narrow or proper sense), mystic, or theological philosopher. Might there be other 'hats'? That of the moral reformer? That of the the beauty-seeker?