Category: Trinity and Incarnation

Crucifixion as Incarnation in extremis

In an earlier thread, Vito Caiati  states:

Thus, while Christ’s physical suffering is comparable to ours, his emotional suffering is not: He is in a unique and privileged existential position, one that derives from his absolute knowledge of all things, which permits him to die [in horrific] pain but without the terrors of the unknown that plague us ordinary human beings.

I responded:

But then Christ is not fully human. The orthodox line is that he is fully human and fully divine. To be fully human, however, he has to experience the horror of abandonment which is worse than physical suffering. The scripture indicates that he does: "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" On the cross, Christ experiences the terrifying doubt that he was deluded in thinking himself the Son of God or perhaps even that there is a God in the first place. If he didn't experience at least the first of these, then the Incarnation is not 'serious' and he didn't become one of us in full measure.

And then this Good Friday morning it occurred to me that I may have gotten this idea from Simone Weil, an idea that I discuss in At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron which I uploaded to Substack on Good Friday three years ago.  There I wrote:

The Crucifixion is the Incarnation in extremis.  Christ’s spirit, 'nailed' to the flesh, is the spirit of flesh nailed to the wood of the cross. At this extreme point of the Incarnation, doubly nailed  to matter, Christ experiences utter abandonment and the full horror of the human predicament.  He experiences and accepts utter failure and the terrifying thought that his whole life and ministry were utterly delusional. 

The darkest hour.  And then dawn. 

The reason?

If God were to become one of us, fully one of us, a slob like one of us, would he not have to accept the full measure of the spirit's hostage to the flesh?  Would he not have to empty himself fully into our misery?  That is Weil's point.  The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated experience the worst of embodiment and be tortured to death.  For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation possible to a human. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all human beings,  define being human. 

But Vito has a response:

I would suggest that when we speak of Christ’s humanity, we are referring to a human nature that is not deformed by original sin. Thus, the human nature that he shares with us is the prelapsarian one intended by God [for us before the Fall].

But this complicates the theological picture. For not only is the man Jesus born of a virgin, supernaturally impregnated by the Holy Spirit, the virgin Mary cannot be a transmitter of Original Sin. Hence the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception: the BVM had to be conceived without Original Sin.  The further theological 'epicycle,' even though it does not render the whole narrative incredible, does make it more difficult to believe.

But even if it is all true, Original Sin, Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception, Weil's point would seem to retain its merit. Perhaps it could be put like this. For the redemption of such wretches as we are, God, or rather the Second Person of the Trinity, would have to enter in full measure into our miserable animal predicament if he is to be fully and really human.

It is almost as if there is a whiff of docetism in Vito's suggestion.   It would be instructive to work through all of the Christological 'heresies.'

The Two Natures and the Real Presence: A Note on Frithjof Schuon

 Schuon FrithjofI have been reading Frithjof Schuon off and on since the mid-'70s.  But this is my first weblog entry that mentions him. I don't expect it will be my last.

The orthodox, Chalcedonian, view of Christ is that he is at once fully divine and fully human, true God and true man, and thus one substance (hypokeimenon, suppositum) in two natures. The doctrine presents quite the challenge to the discursive intellect: how can one thing have two natures, when each nature includes attributes logically incompatible with attributes included in the other nature? For example, how could one individual substance be both omnipotent and not omnipotent, impassible and passible, immortal and mortal, necessary and contingent, and so on?

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that on the underlying Aristotelian general-metaphysical framework, the natures in question are individual natures; they are not universals.  This has to be the case with respect to the divine nature since this nature cannot be multiply exemplified. (A universal, by definition, is multiply exemplifiable.) God cannot possibly be an instance of the universal, Godhood, or a Platonic participant in Godhood.  If he were, then God would be dependent on something other than himself to be what he is, contrary to the divine aseity. The divine substance is (identically) his nature. Something analogous holds for Socrates and  Plato as well, despite their non-aseity. Neither exemplifies or participates in a universal Manhood; each is in some sense identical to his individual nature.  When we come to Christ we have two radically different individual natures that are somehow both one with each other and one with the substance of which they are the two natures. How make sense of the double duality in this unity and the unity in this double duality?  

The various Christological heresies may be viewed as good-faith attempts to make sense of the two natures conundrum. Fides quarens intellectum, and intellectum, understanding, does not abide logical contradictions or what appear to be such. Eager to avoid contradiction, theologians fell into heresy. The monophysites solved the problem by maintaining that Christ has only one nature, the divine nature.  And now we come to a brilliant observation of Schuon that had never occurred to me:

The justification of the monophysites appears, quite paradoxically, in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: it seems to us that it would be appropriate to apply to the Eucharistic elements what is affirmed dogmatically of Christ, namely, that he is "true man and true God"; if this is so, one could equally admit that the Eucharist is "true bread and true Body" or "true wine and true Blood" without compromising its divinity. To say that the bread is but an appearance is to apply to the Eucharist the doctrine —- judged heretical—of the monophysites, for whom Christ is, precisely, only apparently a man since he is really God; now just as the quality of “true man” in Catholic and Orthodox doctrine does not preclude Christ from being “true God”, so should the quality of “true bread” not preclude the host from being “true Body” in the minds of theologians, all the more so as both things — the created and the Uncreated — are incommensurable, which means that the physical reality of the elements does not exclude their divine content, any more than the real corporeality of Christ prevents the presence of the divine nature. ("The Mystery of the Two Natures" in The Fullness of God, 145-146)

What Schuon is telling us is that the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is structurally similar to the monophysite heresy.  Now what the monophysites actually maintained is a matter of debate among scholars; so to keep this discussion manageable I will just assume that monophysitism is the doctrine Schuon says it is, namely the doctrine that (i) there is one physis, one nature, in Christ and that this nature is the divine nature, and that consequently (ii)  Christ is only apparently a man.  The orthodox consider this view heretical because the orthodox line is that Christ is true God and true man. He is really divine and really a man, as opposed to really divine and only apparently a man.

What Schuon is telling us, then, is that if you reject the monophysite Christology, then "it would be appropriate to" also reject the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist,  and if you accept the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, then "it would be appropriate to" also accept the monophysite Christology.  I now turn to the details.

The Eucharistic elements are bread and wine.   If the bread at the moment of consecration in the mass becomes the body of Christ, what happens to the bread? And if the wine becomes the blood of Christ, what becomes of the wine? According to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the bit of bread and the quantity of wine cease to exist: they are converted into the body and blood of Christ. The conversion is a substantial, not an accidental, change. A substantial change occurs when a thing, an individual or primary substance (prote ousia), either comes into or passes out of existence. An accidental change occurs when a substance, self-same over time,  alters in respect of one or more accidents.  Transubstantiation is so-called because one substance (a bit of bread) is converted into and replaced by a numerically different substance, a bit of flesh.  The accidents, however, remain the same through the conversion: what was bread and is now, after the consecration, the body of Christ,  continues to look, smell, taste, etc. like ordinary bread, and similarly for the wine. The sensible qualities, the accidents, remain the same while the underlying substances are different. 

Transubstantiation is a difficult doctrine, to put it mildly, and I may in subsequent entries set forth some of the perplexities. For now I am merely reporting on Schuon's suggestion.  I take him to be saying that if the real presence of Christ in the Eucharistic elements is understood in terms of transubstantiation, according to which the Eucharistic elements after the consecration merely appear to be ordinary bread and wine, then one may and perhaps should say the same thing about the real presence of God the Son in the flesh-and-blood man, Jesus Christ: he is really of only one nature, the divine, and he is only apparently a man. 

Corrigendum (6/3)  I wrote above, "Transubstantiation is so-called because one substance (a bit of bread) is converted into and replaced by a numerically different substance, a bit of flesh." But that's not quite the right way to put it. The numerically different substance that replaces the bit of bread is not a bit of flesh, but the glorified body of Christ in heaven.  And as emerged in the comment thread, this glorified body of Christ possesses a human soul and is one with the Second Person of the Trinity.  But of course this correction only adds to our difficulties in understanding the Transubstantiation doctrine. What the doctrine implies is that the process of transubstantiation is not the transmutation of a physical primary substance, the communion wafer, into a numerically different physical primary substance, but into a meta-physical, super-natural substance  which is, nonetheless, not wholly spiritual because Christ in heaven retains his earthly body, but in a glorified, spiritualized form!

Can a Necessary Being Depend for its Existence on a Necessary Being?

Brian Bosse raised this question over the phone the other day. This re-post from February 2010 answers it.

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According to the Athanasian Creed, the Persons of the Trinity, though each of them uncreated and eternal and necessary, are related as follows. The Father is unbegotten.  The Son is begotten by the Father, but not made by the Father.  The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.  Let us focus on the relation of the Father to the Son.  When I tried to explain this to Peter the atheist, he balked at the idea of one necessary being begetting another, claiming that the idea makes no sense.  One of his arguments was as follows.  If x begets y, then x causes y to begin to exist.  But no necessary being begins to exist.  So, no necessary being is begotten.  A second argument went like this.  Begetting is a causal notion.  But causes are temporally precedent to their effects.  No two necessary beings are related as before to after.  Therefore, no necessary being begets another.

I first pointed out in response to Peter that the begetting in question is not the begetting of one animal by another, but a begetting in a different sense, and that whatever else this idea involves, it involves the idea of one necessary being depending for its existence on another.  Peter balked at this idea as well.  "How can a necessary being depend for its existence on a necessary being?"  To soften him up, I looked for a non-Trinitarian case in which a necessary being stands in the asymmetrical relation of existential dependency to a necessary being. Note that I did not dismiss his problem the way a dogmatist might; I admitted that it is a genuine difficulty, one that needs to be solved.

So I said to Peter:  Look, you accept the existence of Fregean propositions, items which Frege viewed as the senses of sentences in the indicative mood from which indexical elements (including the tenses of verbs) have been removed and have been replaced with non-indexical elements.  You also accept that at least some of these Fregean propositions, if not all,  are necessary beings.  For example, you accept that the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12' is necessarily true, and you see that this requires that the proposition be necessarily existent.  Peter agreed to that.

You also, I said to him, have no objection to the idea of the God of classical theism who exists necessarily if he is so much as possible.  He admitted that despite his being an atheist, he has no problem with the idea of a necessarily existent God.

So I said to Peter:  Think of the necessarily existent Fregean propositions as divine thoughts.  (I note en passant that Frege referred to his propositions as Gedanken, thoughts.)  More precisely, think of them as the accusatives or objects of divine acts of thinking, as the noemata of divine noeses.  That is, think of the propositions as existing precisely as the  accusatives of divine thinking.  Thus, their esse is their concipi by God.  They don't exist a se the way God does; they exist in a mind-dependent manner without prejudice to their existing in all possible worlds.  To cop a phrase from the doctor angelicus, they have their necessity from another, unlike God, who has his necessity from himself.

So I said to Peter:  Well, is it not now clear that we  have a non-Trinitarian example in which a necessary being, the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12,' depends for its existence on a necessary being, namely God, and not vice versa?  Is this not an example of a relation that is neither merely logical (like entailment) nor empirically-causal?  Does this not get you at least part of the way towards an understand of how the Father can be said to beget the Son?

To these three questions, Peter gave a resounding 'No!' looked at his watch and announced that he had to leave right away in order to be able to teach his 5:40 class at the other end of the Valle del Sol.

Another Theological Conundrum: Hypostatic Union and the Contingency of the Incarnation

In the immediately preceding theological thread, Dr. Caiati reminded me of Fr. Thomas Joseph White's The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology (CUA Press, 2017). So I cracked open my copy and found some notes from October 2018, one batch of which I will now turn into a weblog entry.

'Hypostatic Union' ". . . refers to the divine person of the Word uniting a human nature to himself  in his own person." (113, emphasis in original) This is the familiar one person (hypostasis)- two natures doctrine.  The one person is the Word (Logos), the second person of the Trinity.  The union is called hypostatic because it is the union of two natures in one hypostasis. The two natures are divine nature and human nature. Both natures are to be understood as individualized, not as universals. They are natures of one and the same self-subsistent individual, the Word. There is no "confusion of natures," which is to say that the  two natures are really distinct, distinct in reality and not merely in our thought, though not separable in reality.  These two natures are nonetheless essentially together: neither can exist without the other.  It is not as if there is "merely an accidental association of two beings, the man Jesus and the Word of God." (113) There is only one being, the Word, which possesses two distinct but really inseparable natures.  Fr. White then concludes:

Consequently, Jesus's concrete body and soul are the subsistent body and soul of the person of the Word. The person of Jesus simply is the person of the Son [the Word or Logos or second person of the Trinity] existing as man.

I have two questions.

First, is human nature conjoined to the Word at every time? It would have to be given that the two natures are essentially, and not merely accidentally, united. The Word is essentially divine. So if the two natures are essentially united, then the Word is essentially human: it possesses essentially a human nature.  That implies that at no time is the Word not in possession of a human nature. Now the Incarnation is the acquisition by the Word of a human nature. The Incarnation is an event — call it the Christ event — that occurred at a particular time in a particular place.  Before that time, the Incarnation was at best prophesied.  A contradiction would seem to ensue:

1) The Word possesses human nature at every time;

2) It is not the case that the Word possesses human nature at every time.

How do we negotiate this aporetic dyad? More simply, how remove the contradiction? Can it be removed without adding 'epicycles' to the theory that raise problems of their own?

My second question is a modal counterpart of the first. The Incarnation is a contingent event. There was no necessity that it occur.   Had Adam not sinned there would have been no need for a Redeemer. Man would have continued blissfully in his paradisiacal, prelapsarian state. The soteriological significance of the Incarnation is that only by the Son's becoming man and suffering the ultimate penalty could man be restored to fellowship with God.  For the offense against God was so great that only God could expiate it. But if the divine and human natures are united essentially in one person, the Word, then, given that the Word is a necessary being, it follows that the Incarnation is a necessary event. A second contradiction seems to ensue:

3) The Word possesses human nature in every possible world;

4) It is not the case that the Word possesses human nature in every possible world.

(4) is true because there are worlds in which there is no Fall and thus no need for Incarnation. For those who don't understand Leibnizian 'possible worlds' jargon, the contradiction amounts  to saying both that the Word is and is not human necessarily. Bear in mind that if x has a property essentially, and x is a necessary being, then x has the property necessarily.

There is a third question the 'exfoliation' (unwrapping) of which I will save for later, namely, if the Word has a human soul in virtue of having human nature, how does that human soul integrate with the conscious and self-conscious life of the second divine person? A person is not merely an hypostasis or substratum, but one that is conscious and self-conscious.  A person is not an object but a subject or a subject-object. A number of further difficult questions spin off from here. Time to hit 'post.'

A Christian Koan for Christmas Eve

From my Facebook page, three years ago, today. My writing is uneven in quality. But the Muse was with me below.
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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.
 
Addenda (24 December 2021)
 
1) "Pride of life" above alludes to 1 John 2:16:
For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. (KJV)
2) Goethe considered the cross "the most disgusting thing under the sun." See Walter Kaufmann's  essay, Goethe's Faith and Faust's Redemption. A similar attitude in Nietzsche. That the central Christian symbol is a Roman torture device shows that Christianity is a slander upon life, the only life there is.  That, in a sentence, is what I take to be Nietzsche's attitude toward the Christian cross.

3) How did we get to be so proud? Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?

In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." 

So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

4) The Islamic hate for the Christian cross.  Raymond Ibrahim details the ongoing murder of Christians by Muslims.  But didn't George W. Bush tells us that Islam is the religion of peace?  What a know-nothing that pseudo-con Dubwa was and is. Living proof that being a nice, regular guy is not enough. Patriots owe a lot to Donald Trump for having put paid to both the Clinton and Bush dynasties.

5) On the other hand, Daniel Pipes reports that Muslims are converting to Christianity like never before. But a word of caution. Some of the converters are pious frauds:

Some Muslims convert tactically for practical reasons, especially to facilitate emigration to the West. A Church of God pastor, Said Deeb, quotes desperate Muslims telling him, “Just baptize me, I will believe in whoever just to leave here.” National Public Radio paraphrases Şebnem Köşer Akçapar of Koç University in Istanbul to the effect that “only some of the refugees are genuine converts. Others are using religious persecution as a way to get to the West.” Aiman Mazyek, head of the Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland, reacts with acute skepticism about growing numbers of Muslim converts to Christianity.

6) Vito Caiati sends this excerpt from W. H. Auden's For the Time Being:

Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.

The Characteristic Attitude of the Pyrrhonists

Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 5: ". . . the characteristic attitude of the Pyrrhonists is one of aporia, of being at a a loss, puzzled, stumped, stymied."  Aporia is not doubt.  Doubt implies understanding, but aporia is a lack of understanding.  The modern skeptic may doubt, but not the ancient skeptic.

Connected with this is a distinction between epoché as the withholding of assent to the meaningfulness of a claim and suspension of judgment as to the truth or falsity of a claim.  (Meaningfulness is a necessary condition of a claims's being either true or false.) One can withhold assent from an assertion without granting that it makes sense; but if one suspends judgment then one has a clear propositional sense before one's mind which one neither affirms nor denies.  See Mates, p. 32.  A good distinction!  Add it to the list.

Trinity diagramConsider, for example, this statement of the doctrine of the Trinity: "There is one God in three divine persons." The epochist, to give him a name, takes no stand on the question whether the doctrinal formulation makes sense.  He neither affirms nor denies that there is a proposition that the formula expresses.  Propositions are the vehicles of  the truth-values; so by practicing epoché our epochist takes no stand on the question whether the doctrinal sentence expresses anything that is either true or false.  The suspender of judgment, by contrast, grants that the sentence expresses a proposition but takes no stand on its truth or falsity.

So, strictly speaking, aporia is not doubt and epoché is not suspension of judgment.  Close but not the same.  One in the psychological state of aporia may or may not go on to practice epoché. Suppose I am stumped by what you say. I might just leave it at that and not take the further step of performing epoché.

The aporia Mates describes is an attitude. But there is another  sense of the term, a non-attitudinal sense, and I use it in this other propositional sense: an aporia is a propositional polyad, a set of two or more propositions that are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent. 

I also distinguish broad and narrow sub-senses of aporia in the second, the propositional, sense.  What I just described is a propositional aporia in the broad sense. In the narrow, balls-to-the-wall sense, an aporia is an absolutely insoluble problem set forth as a set of collectively inconsistent propositions each of which makes such a strong claim on our acceptance that it cannot be given up.

Alles klar? No way!

Notes on the Introduction to Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh

I have Steven Nemes to thank for introducing me to the thought of Michel Henry. I recall as a graduate student in the 'seventies  having seen a big fat tome published in 1973 by Martinus Nijhoff entitled The Essence of Manifestation by one Michel Henry. I may have paged through parts of it back then, but I recall nothing about it now except its author, title, physical bulk, and publisher.

Henry MichelI now own three of Henry's books, not including the Manifestation tome for which Amazon is asking a paltry sum in the range of 300-400 semolians.  (I could easily afford it, but my Italian frugality which got me to the place where I can buy any and all books I want, is protesting as we speak; she is one tight-pursed task mistress.)

I have worked through a bit of Henry's  Material Phenomenology, but it is heavy-going due to the awful  French Continental style in which it is written.  The above-captioned Incarnation book is much clearer though still replete with the typical faults of French Continental writing: the overuse of rhetorical questions, the pseudo-literary  pretentiousness and portentousness, the lack of clarity, the misuse of universal quantifiers, the historicist lust to outdo one's predecessors in radicality of questioning and to go beyond, always beyond.  I could go on, and you hope I don't.  But bad style can hide good substance. The ideas are fascinating, and as an old Husserl and Heidegger man I am well-equipped to follow the twists and turns of Henry's meandering through a deep and dark Gallicized Schwarzwald. My credentials also include having thought long and hard about the Incarnation and  having published an article on it.*

Alright. Time to get to work. I am only up to p. 40 of Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh, tr. Karl Hefty, Northwestern UP, 2015, orig. publ. in French in 2000, two years before Henry's death in 2000.  So what follows are preliminary notes and queries and solicitations of help from Nemes and anyone else who knows this subject.  This is an interpretive critical summary: I will put matters in my own way, sympathetically, but with an eye toward separating the sound from the dubious or outright unsound. 

This book is about incarnation in two senses of the term and their relation.  It is about incarnation and the Incarnation of Christian theology.

Like all living beings, we human beings  are incarnate beings, beings of flesh. Most of us are apt to say that all living beings have bodies in a sense of 'body' that does not distinguish between living and non-living embodied beings.  To illustrate with an example of my own, suppose that a rock, a plant, an animal, and a man fall from a cliff at the same time. Apart from wind resistance, the four will fall at the same rate, 32 ft. per sec2 in Earth's gravitational field and arrive at the ground at the same time.  From the point of view of physics, the four are bodies in same sense of the term.   And this despite their deep and undeniable differences. There is, therefore, a univocal sense of 'body' in which living and nonliving embodied beings are bodies.

So while it true that animals, and humans in particular, have lived bodies, this important fact does not exclude their having bodies in the sense of physics and the natural sciences built upon physics. By lived body, I don't just mean a living body, an object that is alive in the sense of biology, but a subject of a life, a body that feels, enjoys, and suffers its embodiment.  For Henry, however, 

. . . an abyss separates forever the material bodies that fill the universe, on the one hand, and the body of an "incarnate" being such as man [a man!], on the other. (3)

By "material bodies," H. means the bodies of non-living things.  Now if two things are separated by an abyss, that is naturally taken to mean that the two are mutually exclusive.  So consider a stone and a man. Are they abysmally different? Granted, a stone unlike a man "does not sense itself or feel its own feeling . . . ."(3) Nor does it sense or feel or love or desire anything outside itself.   Henry brings up Heidegger's point about touching in Being and Time. (3-4) We say that a table up against a wall, making physical contact with it, 'touches' the wall. But of course this is quite unlike my touching the table, or my touching a cat, or two cats touching each other, or my touching  myself.  I sense the table by touching it; the table does not sense the wall when it 'touches' the wall. 

What I have just written about touching in agreement with Heidegger is true, but I fear that Henry will push it too far.  I would say that there is something common between the table's touching the wall and my touching the table.  What is common is physical contact. In both cases we have two material bodies (in the sense of physics) in physical/material contact.  My tactile sensing of the table is not possible unless my material finger comes in contact with the table.  The physical contact is necessary, though not sufficient, for the sensing. From the phenomenological fact that there is much more to sentient touching or tactile sensing than there is to non-sentient physical contact, it does not follow that the two are toto caelo different, or abysmally different, i.e., have nothing to do with each other. I hesitate to impute such a blatant non sequitur to Henry. Yet he appears to be denying the common element. He seems to be making a mistake opposite to the one the materialist makes.  The materialist tries to reduce sentient touching to merely physical contact and the causal processes it initiates,; our phenomenologist tries to reduce sentient touching to something wholly non-physical.

Henry seems to be endorsing a flesh-body dualism.  The matter of beings like us he calls flesh, while the matter of stones and such he calls body. And he seems to think of them as mutually exclusive. "To be incarnate is not to have a body . . . . To be incarnate is to have flesh . . . ." (4) Flesh is the "exact opposite" of body. (4) "This difference is so radical that . . . it is is very difficult, even impossible, actually to think it." We are told that the matter of bodies "ultimately escapes us."  (4) The flesh-body dualism would thus appear to be epistemological as well as ontological. We have an "absolute and unbroken knowledge" of flesh but we are "in complete ignorance" "of the inert bodies of material nature." (5)

An obvious objection to this is that if we were in complete ignorance of the bodies of material nature, then we would not have been able to put a man on the moon.  Our technological feats prove that we understand a great deal about material nature.  But long before there was rocketry there was carpentry.  Jesus was a carpenter. He knew how to nail wooden items together in effective and sturdy ways.  The brutal Romans knew how to nail men like Jesus to wooden crosses.  To nail flesh to wood is to nail  the physically material to the physically material and to know what one is doing and to know the nature of the materials with which one is working.  Finally, to speak of the material bodies as "inert," as Henry does, is certainly strange given their causal powers and liabilities.  Chemical reagents in non-living substances and solutions are surely not 'inert.'

But I think I know where Henry is headed: toward a transcendental theory of sentience. Roughly, it is our transcendental auto-affectivity that is a condition of the possibility of our 'sensational' encounter with bodies. When I touch my table, the tactile sensation I experience cannot be explained by the physical contact of fingers and table, or at least it cannot be wholly explained in this way.  For there is not just physical contact, there is also consciousness of physical contact. To be precise, there is conscious physical contact. The difference will emerge in a moment.  Without consciousness there would be no sensing or feeling.  An example of mine: a chocolate bar melting in a hot car does not feel the heat that causes it to melt. But a baby expiring in a hot car does feel the heat that causes it to expire. The baby's horrendous suffering cannot be explained (or not wholly explained) in physical, chemical, electrochemical . . . neuroscientific terms.  I am alluding to what is called the Hard Problem in the philosophy of mind: the problem of integrating sensory qualia into a metaphysically naturalist worldview. It can't be done.  The qualia cannot be denied, pace Danny Dennett the Sophist, but neither can they be identified with anything naturalistically respectable.

Without consciousness, which can neither be eliminated nor naturalistically reduced, there can be no sensation or feeling.  But what about this consciousness? Is it object-directed? Is it intentional consciousness?  Or is it non-intentional consciousness? If every consciousness is a consciousness of something, then, for me to be conscious of my felt sensations, my felt sensations would have to be objects of intentional states, objects to which outward-bound consciousness directs itself.  But this is not phenomenologically the case: I feel my sensations by living through them: they are not objects of awareness but states of awareness, Erlebnisse, lived experiencings.  It is true that I can reflect on my knee pain, say, and objectify it, but it is only because I have pre-reflectively lived though the felt pain that I can reflect on it.  Felt (knee) pain is not felt the way a knee is perceived in outer perception.  The knee is an intentional object of an act of visual perception; the pain as pre-reflectively felt and suffered is not an object of inner objectifying perception.

So where is Henry headed? Toward a transcendentalization of the lived body. (Cf. p. 110) Intentionality by its very nature as consciousness of objects (genitivus objectivus) 'expels' all bodies from the subjective sphere which, for a transcendental philosopher such as Husserl, is a transcendental, not a psychological, sphere.  (The psychic is an intra-mundane region of beings; the transcendental is pre-mundane and pre-regional.)  All bodies including human and animal bodies end up on the side of the object.  But bodies so externalized cannot be sensing bodies. And without sensing bodies no body could be sensed.  So the lived body must sense itself or affect itself. This auto-affection is the transcendental condition of the possibility of  any merely material body's being sensed.  My tactile sensing of my table is possible only because of my transcendentally prior sensing of myself as transcendental flesh.  And so my pre-mundane self is not a mere transcendental I but also a transcendental body.

……………………………….

* Vallicella, William F. (2002). Incarnation and Identity. Philo 5 (1):84-93.

A Mystical Approach to the Incarnation

I have been, and will continue,  discussing Trinity and Incarnation objectively, that is, in an objectifying manner.  Now what do I mean by that?  Well, with respect to the Trinity, the central conundrum, to put it in a very crude and quick way is this:  How can three things be one thing?  With respect to the Incarnation, how can the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal and impassible Logos, be identical to a particular mortal man?  These puzzles get us thinking about identity and difference and set us hunting for analogies and models from the domain of  ordinary experience.  We seek intelligibility by an objective route.   We ought to consider that this objectifying approach might be wrongheaded and that we ought to examine a mystical and subjective approach, a 'Platonic' approach as opposed to an 'Aristotelian' one.  See my earlier quotation of Heinrich Heine.

1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.

2. The doctrine of the Trinity spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are numerically distinct from one another. According to the doctrine of the Incarnation, the second person of the Trinity, the Son or Logos, became man in Jesus of Nazareth. There is a strong temptation to think of the doctrinal statements as recording (putative) objective facts and then to wonder how they are possible. I have touched upon some of the logical problems the objective approach encounters in previous posts.  The logical problems are thorny indeed and seem to require for their solution questionable logical innovations such as the notion (championed by Peter Geach) that identity is sortal-relative, or an equally dubious mysterianism which leaves us incapable of saying just what we would be accepting were we to accept the theological propositions in question.  The reader should review those problems in order to understand the motivation of what follows.

Divine Simplicity and Incarnation

This from a reader:

Jordan Daniel Wood . . . affirms that God does not have possibilities within himself to actualize and thus the Incarnation—God becoming a human being—must in some way [be] actual prior to its historical event; God does not become a human being but in some way already is a human being . . . .

Very interesting.

The simple God is actus purus. Purely actual, he embodies no unrealized powers or unactualized potentialities.  He is, eternally, all that he can be.  We think of the Incarnation, however, as a contingent event.  In the patois of 'possible worlds':  The triune God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds, but the Second Person of the Trinity becomes human in only some of them. The following argument suggests itself:

1) The Word became flesh and dwellt among us.

2) The Word's becoming flesh is a contingent event.

3) There is no contingency and no becoming in any of the three divine persons: the Word cannot become flesh, that is, assume human nature.

Therefore

4) The Word (Logos, Second Person) had a divine and human nature from all eternity.

How could a classical Christian trinitarian theist rebut this argument? (Part of being a classical Christian theist is accepting the divine simplicity.)

If God is Uniquely Unique, How could He be Addressed in Prayer?

My entry God as Uniquely Unique ended on an aporetic note. I acknowledged the following sort of objection, but had nothing to say in response to it. How could the ontologically simple God be of any religious use to the suffering creature wandering in the desert of the world?

"Such an utterly transcendent God as you are describing is ineffable!  He is the God of the philosophers, not the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. I want a God with a face, a God that can be addressed in petitionary prayer, a God that is a Thou to my I."

The problem can be put like this. The exigencies of the intellect drive us toward the simple God, a God so utterly transcendent as to be inconceivable to us.  The exigencies of the heart, however, move us toward a personal God with whom one could enter an I-Thou relation. Is it possible to mediate this opposition? 

Is it possible to stand astride Athens and Jerusalem, with a foot in each, and not topple over or be torn apart?

A letter from Robert Deinhammer, S. J., of Innsbruck, Austria suggests a way.  Here is his letter followed by my translation:

Ich bin gerade wieder einmal nach längerer Zeit auf ihrem Blog gewesen und finde Ihren jüngsten Eintrag über die einzigartige Einzigartikeit Gottes sehr wichtig.

Ich würde mit P. Knauer sagen: Gott fällt nicht unter Begriffe, er ist absolut unbegreiflich. Wie kann man dann von ihm reden? Antwort: Wir begreifen von Gott immer nur das von ihm Verschiedene, nämlich die geschaffene Welt, die aber auf ihn hinweist und ohne ihn überhaupt nicht sein kann. Geschaffensein bedeutet im Rahmen einer relationalen Ontologie ein "restloses Bezogensein auf …/ in restloser Verschiedenheit von …". Dies ermöglicht auch "hinweisende" Rede von Gott: Die Welt ist Gott ähnlich und unähnlich zugleich; Gott seinerseits ist der Welt gegenüber aber nur unähnlich. Die Relation der Welt auf Gott ist vollkommen einseitig. In diesem Sinne führt natürliche Theologie nur zur Einsicht, dass Gott in "unzugänglichem Licht wohnt" (1 Tim) und wir als bloße Geschöpfe keinerlei Gemeinschaft mit ihm haben können.

Vor diesem überaus dunklen Hintergrund erläutert allein der Inhalt der christlichen Botschaft, wie dennoch Gemeinschaft mit Gott ausgesagt werden kann: Wir sind von vornherein aufgenommen in eine göttliche Relation, nämlich in die ewige Liebe des Vaters zum Sohn, die der Heilige Geist ist. So kann Gott auf die Welt real bezogen sein, ohne dadurch von der Welt abhängig zu werden. Aber gerade weil diese göttliche Liebe nicht ihr Maß an der Welt hat und deshalb auch keine Macht der Welt dagegen ankommen kann, kann man sie auch nicht einfach an der Welt "ablesen" oder durch meditative Versenkung erkennen. Sie ist nur erkennbar im Glauben an die Botschaft Jesu: Der Sohn hat eine menschliche Natur angenommen, um uns in einem menschlichen Wort sagen zu können, das wir an seinem Verhältnis zum Vater Anteil haben. In diesem Sinne wird dann auch Gebet erst möglich: Jesus Christus nimmt uns hinein in sein Sprechen zum Vater.

………………………..

I have just now visited your blog again after a long while and I find your most recent entry on the unique uniqueness of God to be very important.

I would say, with P. Knauer, that God does not fall under concepts; he is absolutely inconceivable or unconceptualizable.  But then how can one speak of him? Answer: We conceive of God always only by way of that which is different from him, namely, the created world which points to him and which without him cannot be at all.  In the context of a relational ontology, creaturehood means 'a total relatedness  to . . . / in total difference from . . . .'  This makes possible 'pointing' talk of God: the world is both like and unlike God; God on his side, however, is only unlike the world . The relation of the world to God is completely one-sided or unilateral.  In this sense natural theology leads to the insight that God "dwelleth in inaccessible light" (1 Timothy 6:16) and we mere creatures can have no kind of community with him.

But if God so dwells and is unapproachable by us, and we can enjoy no community with him, how are we to explain the Christian message that we nevertheless can have community with God? As follows. We are from the outset taken up in a divine relation, namely, in the eternal love of the Father for the Son, which relation is the Holy Spirit. In this way God can be really related to the world without thereby becoming dependent on the world.  But precisely because this divine love has no worldly measure and also cannot be opposed by any worldly power, one cannot simply 'read it off' from the world or know it by non-discursive meditation.  Divine love is knowable only by faith in the message of Jesus: The Son has assumed a human nature in order to be able to say to us in human words that we share in his relation to the Father.  In this sense prayer is first possible: Jesus Christ takes us into his speaking with the Father.

How is community with God possible given his absolute transcendence? That is the problem. If I understand the above, the solution requires both Trinity and Incarnation. Within the Godhead, the Son loves the Father and the Father the Son. This eternal relation of love is the Holy Spirit. God, in the person of the Son, becomes man. "And the Word became flesh and dwellt among us."  Fully human and fully divine, Jesus Christ brings the divine into the creaturely realm.  The transcendent becomes immanent without ceasing to be transcendent. God acquires a human face and speaks saving words within the range of human hearing.

The question cannot be suppressed: Is not the solution as problematic as the original problem?   The exigencies of the discursive intellect drive us beyond it to the simple God who lies beyond the discursive intellect and is devoid of human meaning. The restoration of such meaning, however, via Trinity and Incarnation, also involves inconceivabilities, as any good Unitarian will be quick to point out.

Water Analogies for the Trinity

T.O. suggests the following:

‘Divine’ is a mass term, and so when we say “the father the son and the spirit are God”, we are really saying that all three are equally divine or participate in divinity. 

I don't quite know what my reader is driving at, but perhaps he has a water analogy in mind. The following is based partially on H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, Volume One: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation (Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 359-363.

Hippolytus: The Logos comes from the Father as water from a fountain.

Tertullian: The Father is to the Logos as fountain is to river. One substance assumes two forms.

Lactantius: The Father is an overflowing fountain, the Son a stream flowing from it.

Zeno of Verona: Father and Son are two seas filled with the same water which, though two, are yet one.

Vallicella of Arizona: Water occurs in three distinct states, the gaseous, the liquid, and the solid. One and and the same quantity of water can assume any of these three states. Distinctness of states is compatible with oneness of substance.

Of the water analogies, I like the last one best (!) despite its being as worthless as the others. All four involve an equivocation on ‘substance.’ The sense in which water is a substance is not the sense in which God is a substance. Water is a substance in the sense of a stuff; God is a substance in the sense of a hypostasis (that which stands under) or hypokeimenon (that which is placed under), or as I prefer to say, an individual. Note also that a quantity of H2O can be in the three states only successively not simultaneously whereas God is 'simultaneously' the three Persons. (I leave open the question whether God is omnitemporal or eternal.)

Of course, there are better physical analogies, light for example, and also nonphysical analogies such as the soul (Augustine). Something on this later. My only point is that these water analogies do nothing to render the Trinity doctrine intelligible, hence no one should be convinced by them.

It is better to accept mystery than to be taken in by pseudo-intelligibility.

How could there be a mundane model for the Absolutely Unique?