Trinity and Incarnation – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

Footnote 190 in Vlastimil Vohánka, Modality, Logical Probability, and the Trinity: A Defence of Weak Skepticism

To put it oxymoronically, I am seriously toying with taking a mysterian line with respect to such Christian dogmas as Trinity and Incarnation. To this end, I need to come to grips with our Czech friend Vlastimil Vohánka's footnote 190 on pp. 79-80 of his 2011 dissertation. This subject-matter is difficult, so put on your thinking caps. I will first quote the entire footnote, and then report on what I make of it.

190 WMST [Weak Modal Skepticism about the Trinity Doctrine] is rather a (part of a) meta-theory of the Trinity than a (part of a) theory of the Trinity. It‘s a position in the epistemology of the belief in the Trinity. According to WMST, the Trinity doctrine is a mystery, in a sense. In which sense?

Dale Tuggy distinguishes the following senses: (i) a proposition not known before divine revelation of it, but which has now been revealed by God and is known to some; (ii) a proposition which cannot be known independently of divine revelation, but which has now been revealed by God and is known to some; (iii) a proposition we don‘t completely understand; (iv) a true proposition we can‘t explain; (v) a true proposition we can‘t fully or adequately explain; (vi) an unintelligible proposition, the meaning of which can‘t be grasped; (vii) a true proposition which one should believe even though it seems, even after careful reflection, to be logically and/or otherwise impossible and thus false. See D. Tuggy ―The Unfinished Business of Trinitarian Theorizing,‖ Religious Studies 39, No. 2 (2003), pp. 175-176; and D. Tuggy, ―Trinity,‖ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), E. N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/trinity (accessed October 14, 2011), # 4.

Tuggy does not specify the modality of his 'cannot.' Taking it as psychological impossibility, we may plausibly say that if the Trinity doctrine is logically possible, WMST implies the doctrine is a mystery in the sense (iii). WMST leaves the issue of other senses of 'mystery' open even under the assumption of logical possibility of the doctrine. Under the assumption that the Trinity doctrine is true, WMST implies the doctrine is a mystery in the senses (iii) and (v).

Further, WMST implies mysterianism about the Trinity, in Tuggy‘s sense of the word. Mysterianism about the Trinity says that the true theory of the Trinity must, given our present epistemic limitations, to some degree lack meaning which we can understand or lack meaning which seems to us logically possible. Cf. D. Tuggy, ―Trinity,‖ op. cit., # 4. The implication by WMST of what Tuggy (ibid.) calls as positive mysterianism is much less clear. By this sort of mysterianism, he means the claim that the true theory of the Trinity must seem to us logically impossible. But there‘s some distance between (psychologically) necessary absence of evident (logical) possibility and (psychologically) necessary appearance of (logical) impossibility. WMST also does not seem to imply the position labeled by Tuggy as negative mysterianism: the claim that the true theory of the Trinity cannot seem logically possible and cannot seem logically impossible. (Ibid.) If the Trinity doctrine, in my sense, exhausted the true theory of the Trinity, then negative mysterianism would imply WMST. But it still would be contentious to assert that the converse holds, too, because the appearance of logical impossibility might be (psychologically)possible under WMST. Finally, it‘s worth noting that although positive mysterianism and negative mysterianism are incompatible, there‘s still a middle ground between them. A mysterian could hold – against both of the two contraries – that the Trinity doctrine need not, but can seem logically impossible; or that the Trinity doctrine need not seem logically impossible, but can seem logically possible.

Let's see if I can clarify this in my own terms.

Positive mysterianism (PM): this is the epistemological meta-thesis that the Trinity doctrine, given our present cognitive limitations, must appear to us as logically impossible.

Negative mysterianism:(NM): this is the epistemological meta-thesis that the Trinity doctrine, given our present cognitive limitations, cannot seem to us logically possible and cannot seem to us logically impossible.

What is the force of the 'must' and the 'cannot' in (PM) and (NM)? Following Vohanka, we can take the modal terms as referring to psychological necessity and psychological impossibility, respectively. Thus on PM we can't help but find the doctrine to be logically impossible. In this sense it must appear to us as logically impossible. This is due to the actual constitution of our minds, a constitution which may be metaphysically contingent.

But who are we? You could say human animals, but I prefer to say discursive intellects or ectypal intellects whether biologically human or not. There may be some extraterrestrial non-human mysterians out there.

And what is meant by 'present' cognitive limitations'? I take 'present' wide open so as to cover our entire embodied existence or perhaps our entire embodied fallen existence. Our present cognitive limitations are our limitations 'here below' to use an old-fashioned religious phrase or our limitations 'here and now.' We should hold open the possibility that in our prelapsarian state we did not suffer from our present cognitive limitations.

Disjunctive Mysterianism (DM): "[Disjunctive] mysterianism about the Trinity says that the true theory of the Trinity must, given our present epistemic limitations, to some degree lack meaning which we can understand or lack meaning which seems to us logically possible.

Vlastimil tells us that according to WMST, the Trinity doctrine is a mystery, in a sense. In what sense? In a sense that implies (DM). It seems to me that Vlastimil's attitude toward the Trinity doctrine is not one of skepticism or doubt; what he is doing is making a non-skeptical claim about the intelligibility to us of the Trinity doctrine. (Needless to say, the doctrine and the Trinity itself, the reality behind the doctrine if there is one, must be distinguished.)

It may help to distinguish five possible attitudes towards a proposition:

1) Accept as true.
2) Reject as false.
3) Reject as meaningless.
4) Suspend judgment as to whether either true or false.
5) Suspend judgment as to whether either meaningful or meaningless. (The epoche of the Pyrrhonists.)

(5), when applied to the Trinitarian proposition, is the attitude according to which one suspends judgment on the question as to whether or not one even has a (Fregean) proposition before one's mind when one intones or hears the Trinitarian formula or verbalism, "There is one God in three divine persons."

The last two, (4) and (5), are forms of skepticism.

Let the proposition be: There is one God in three divine persons.

It seems to me that my and V's attitude to the Trinitarian proposition is none of the above five.

I am inclined to accept (PM) while V. is apparently accepting (DM). Both of us are making non-skeptical claims about the intelligibility to us (not in itself) of the Trinitarian proposition.

Does this seem right?

The Logic of the Trinity Revisited

Our question concerns the logical consistency of the following septad, each limb of which seems entailed by the dogma of the Trinity as set forth in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. How can the following propositions all be true? My concern is whether the dogma in its Roman Catholic form can be expressed in such a way as to satisfy the exigencies of the discursive intellect. The prime exigency or requirement is that it not violate the Law of Non-Contradiction. The question is not whether the dogma can be known to be true by reason unaided by revelation; it can't. The question is whether the dogma can be rendered rationally acceptable to intellects of our sort. Can it be expressed in such a way as to make logical sense to us?

1) There is only one God.
2) The Father is God.
3) The Son is God.
4) The Holy Spirit is God.
5) The Father is not the Son.
6) The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
7) The Father is not the Holy Spirit.

If we assume that in (2)-(7), the 'is' expresses absolute numerical identity, then it is clear that the septad is inconsistent. (Identity has the following properties: it is reflexive, symmetric, transitive, and governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals). For example, from (2) and (3) taken together it follows that the Father is the Son by Transitivity of Identity. But this contradicts (5).

To spell it out: if the Father is God, and the Son is God, and these are identity statements, and identity is symmetric and transitive, then the Father is the Son, which contradicts (5).

So what we have above is an inconsistent septad each limb of which appears to be a commitment of orthodoxy. The task is to remove the contradiction without abandoning orthodoxy. There are different ways to proceed.

One way is to invoke the standard distinction between the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication, and construe (2), (3), and (4) as predications rather than as statements of identity. Well, suppose we do this. We get:

1)There is only one God.
2*) The Father is divine.
3*) The Son is divine.
4*) The Holy Spirit is divine.
5) The Father is not the Son.
6) The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
7) The Father is not the Holy Spirit.

But this implies that there are three Gods, which contradicts (1). The trick is to retain real distinctness of Persons while avoiding tritheism.

Matthew Kirby in correspondence suggests the following:

1K) There is only one Divine Nature.
2K) The Father hypostasises the fullness of that Divine Nature (as Source/Lover).
3K) The Son hypostasises the fullness of that Divine Nature (as Logos/Form/Image/Beloved).
4K) The Holy Ghost hypostasises the fullness of that Divine Nature (as Spirit/Gift/Loving).
5K) The Father is not the Son, but gives him fully his essence.
6K) The Son is not the Holy Spirit, but shares with him fully the very same essence.
7K) The Father is not the Holy Spirit, but gives him fully his essence.

Unfortunately, Fr. Kirby does not explain what he means by 'hypostasises,' but I think I know what he means. He means that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are each subjects of the divine nature. One nature, three hypostases/persons. Compare the Incarnation: One hypostasis, two natures. Thus the Son has two natures, one human, the other divine. In the Trinity, however, we have one divine nature in three divine persons.

Well, are we in the clear now? I can't see that we are. For Fr. Kirby's septad is just a variation on the second one we examined. If the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are each subjects of the divine nature, then we have three Gods, when the dogma clearly implies that there is exactly one God in three divine persons.

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.

Incarnation, Resurrection, and Rational Acceptability

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

A. The Rational Acceptability of Christ's Resurrection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I agree with Hutchinson.

B. The Rational Acceptability of the Incarnation?

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

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

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

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

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

Are mysterian moves kosher ploys for showing rational acceptability?

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

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.

Physicalist Christology? Notes on Merricks

"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us . . . . (John 1:14)

Physicalism is popular among philosophers these days. So it is no surprise that Christian philosophers are drawn to it as well, including those who subscribe to the central teaching that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the Logos or Word, became man in Jesus of Nazareth.

Incarnation, whatever else it involves, involves embodiment. How is God the Son during his earthly tenure related to his body? Trenton Merricks assumes that "God the Son . . . is related to his body just as you and I are related to our respective bodies." ("The Word Made Flesh," 261.) One might have thought that the embodiment relation that connects the Son to his body would have to be very special or even sui generis; after all, the Logos is sui generis and so it might naturally be thought that any relation into which it enters would inherit that sui-generic quality. Merricks, however, assumes that divine and human cases of embodiment are cases of one and the same embodiment relation. The divine case is just a special case. Call this the Same Relation assumption. (My tag, not Merrick's).

And what relation is that? On physicalism, "You have a body if and only if you are identical with that body." (294) So the Same Relation assumption in conjunction with physicalism yields the conclusion that the Incarnate Son is "identical with the body of Jesus." (294) So in becoming human, the Incarnate Son "became [numerically identical to] a body."

This does not make much sense to me and I find it more worthy of rejection than of acceptance. My problems begin with physicalism itself.

Physicalism

The physicalism in question is not physicalism about everything, but about beings like us, minded organisms, if you will, which include all human animals. (If there are so-called 'abstract objects,' then they are not physical, and presumably before the Incarnation, no member of the Trinity was a physical object.) Physicalism is "the claim that each of us is a physical object." (294). Now there is a sense in which it is obviously true that each of us is a physical object, and that is the sense in which it is obviously true that each of us has a body; but one quits the precincts of the obvious and the datanic and enters the space of philosophical theories when one claims that one has a body by being numerically identical to a body, or that the the 'is' in 'Each of us is a body' is the 'is' of identity.

For this is not obvious. How do you know that the 'is' in 'Each of us is a body' is not the 'is' of composition? (Compare: 'Each of these statues is bronze.' That can't mean that each of the statues is identical to bronze or to a particular hunk of bronze. A statue and its proximate matter have different persistence conditions both temporally and modally.)

But we are discussing physicalism. I am not asserting that we are composite beings. And I am not espousing substance dualism either. I am merely considering whether physicalism about minded organisms is an intellectually satisfying position. Does it command our assent? Merricks thinks it is "pretty obvious" that physicalism is true. (294) I don't find it obvious at all. And as Hilary Putnam once quipped, "It ain't obvious what's obvious."

On physicalism, I am identical to the living, breathing, sweating animal wearing my clothes. Of course, I am not always sweating and not always wearing clothes; but if I cease breathing, I cease living and, on physicalism, I cease existing. (The physicalist claim is obviously not that I am identical to a corpse or an inanimate hunk of human-looking flesh and bones wearing my clothes.) To underscore the obvious, when I speak of identity I mean numerical identity.

One might find physicalism hard to swallow. If x and y are identical, then whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa. That is necessarily so, and part of what we mean by 'identity.' But it is true of me that I am a "spectator of all time and existence," (Plato, Republic VI) whereas that is not true of my body. So I can't be identical to my living body. To take a less grand example, I am now thinking of a girl I used to know. So is my body thinking of her? The whole body? Some proper part or parts thereof? Presumably not the plantar fascia in my left foot. My brain? The whole brain? Some proper part thereof? How could any portion of the brain be the subject of acts of thinking? That doesn't make much sense. In fact, it does not make any sense. A bit of highly organized meat is the subject of acts of thinking in the broad Cartesian sense of 'thinking' which includes memorial acts? Are you serious?

Could it nonetheless be true that what thinks in me when I think is the brain or some portion thereof? I suppose, but then it would be a mystery how it is true. The Incarnation may be a mystery, but if we are trying to understand the Incarnation physicalistically, then physicalism had better not be a mystery too. I'll come back to this point below.

The obviousness of physicalism seems to have vanished. Merrick does not give the following invalid argument, but what he says on 294 ff. suggests it:

Whatever has physical properties is a physical object.
Socrates has physical properties.
Therefore
Socrates is a physical object.
Therefore
Physicalism is true.

The argument is rendered invalid by an equivocation on 'is' as between the 'is' of class inclusion and the 'is' of identity.

What I have said does not refute physicalism, but it does show that physicalism is far from obvious and does not follow from such Moorean facts as that you and I have shape and mass. So I balk at Merricks' "it seems pretty obvious that physicalism . . . is true." (294) It is not obvious at all.

Property Dualism

Can these objections be met by adopting property dualism? Merricks' view is that while we are physical objects having physical properties, we are not merely physical objects: we also have mental properties. "Persons also have mental properties." (295) Furthermore, these mental properties are irreducible to physical properties. Merricks tells us that his physicalism is consistent with property dualism. (295) I think it is fair to say that with respect to beings like us, he is a substance monist and a property dualist.

The idea is that the human individual having properties is a physical object, but that it has two different mutually irreducible sorts of properties, physical properties and mental properties. But how does this help? I am thinking about a girl I used to know, a particular girl, Darci. Is there a mental property corresponding to the predicate '___ is thinking about Darci'? I doubt it, for reasons I don't have ther space to go into, but suppose there is this strange property. Call it 'D.' Presumably it is an abstract object unfit to do any thinking. So it is not the subject of the thinking, that in me which thinks when I think.

Should we say that I am thinking about Darci in virtue of my instantiating of D? But who am I? On physicalism, I am identically this living body. So this animal body instantiates the mental property. But this brings us right back to our earlier question as to which part of the animal body does the thinking. Introducing a dualism of properties does not answer this question.

How Could a Non-Physical Object Become a Physical Object?

But even if physicalism is true, how could it, in tandem with the Same Relation assumption mentioned above, be used to make sense of the Incarnation, or rather the embodiment the Incarnation implies? How could the second person of the Trinity, a purely spiritual, nonphysical person, at a certain point in history become numerically identical to the body of Jesus? How could an immaterial being become a material being? I should think that an item's categorial status is essential to it. So if an abstract object such as the number 7 or the set of primes is nonphysical, then this object is nonphysical in all possible worlds in which it exists, and indeed in all possible worlds, full stop, given that 7 and the number of primes are necessary beings. If so, then in no possible world could the number 7 or the set of primes become a concrete item sporting causal properties and spatiotemporal locations.

Something similar holds for that necessary being which is the second person of the Trinity. Its purely spiritual, wholly nonphysical nature is essential to it. So, on the face of it, its embodiment in a particular human being cannot be understood as its becoming numerically identical to that human being. For then, per impossibile, it would have to quit its kind and become another kind of thing.

Rejecting Kind-Essentialism

Now the above is an obvious and obviously powerful objection to which Merricks makes a daring response. He recommends rejecting the kind-essentialism that is at the back of it:

Believers in the Incarnation must reject kind-essentialism. Once kind-essentialism is rejected, it is hard to see why the non-physical God the Son could not become [numerically identical to] a human organism. Perhaps this is the sort of thing that might not seem possible merely upon reflection, given no relevant revelation. But the same thing goes for God the Son's becoming human. This is the mystery. (296)

I don't follow the reasoning here. Let us assume that we accept as revealed truth that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. And let us assume that the Incarnation is, as Merricks says, a mystery. Now faith seeks understanding. Fides quarens intellectum. In this case we want to understand how God became man. How is understanding helped by the rejection of what appears to the unaided intellect as obviously true, namely, kind-essentialism? Is its falsity supposed to be a mystery too?

If I want to understand the Incarnation, I have to use principles that to the unaided discursive intellect appear secure. If I use the Incarnation to reject kind-essentialism, which is one of the principles that appear secure to the finite intellect, then I haven't made sense of the Incarnation; I have wreaked havoc on the discursive intellect. Would it not be better simply to rest with the Incarnation as mystery and forgo desperate attempts to make sense of it that violate very secure principles that are arguably definitive of finite understanding?

Why Not Reject the 'Same Relation' Assumption?

Suppose one wants to retain one's physicalism about humans at all costs and to accept the Incarnation as well. Would it not be better to jettison the 'same relation' assumption? Would it not be better to say that embodiment in the divine case is a different relation from embodiment in (merely) human cases? Suppose that in the merely human cases, to have a body, i. e., to be embodied, is just to be a body, i.e., to be identical to a (living) body, while in the divine case to have a body is something else, something perhaps incomprehensible to us in our present state. One could then be a physicalist without rejecting kind-essentialism.

Note that Merricks is not a physicalist about God or any of the persons of the Trinity prior to the Incarnation. He does not hold that every mind is physical. He makes an exception for the divine mind. Well, then he can make an exception in the way a divine mind becomes embodied should such a mind become embodied.

There seems to be two ways to go for one who aims to accept the Incarnation while also accepting physicalism about minded organisms. Accept either package A or package B:

Package A

Incarnation; physicalism; 'same relation' assumption; rejection of kind-essentialism.

Package B

Incarnation; physicalism; 'different embodiment relation' assumption; acceptance of kind-essentialism.

I should think that Package B is the more attractive of the two.

Merricks' paper is here. Many thanks to Professor Andrew M. Bailey for uploading it! Ditto to Kevin Wong for drawing my attention to it and for supplying me with a bibliography of recent work on physicalist Christology. Mr. Wong is a gentleman and a scholar!

Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is then that of privation. This stage has to be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

We are spiritual beings, participants in the infinite and the absolute. But we are also, undeniably, animals. Our human condition is thus a predicament, that of a spiritual animal. As spirits we enjoy freedom of the will and the ability to encompass the whole universe in our thought. As spirits we participate in the infinity and absoluteness of truth. As animals, however, we are but indigent bits of the world's fauna exposed to and compromised by its vicissitudes. As animals we are susceptible to pains and torments that swamp the spirit and obliterate the infinite in us reducing us in an instant to mere screaming animals.

Now if God were to become one of us, fully 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 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. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all, define being human.

The Crucifixion is the Incarnation in extremis. His spirit, 'nailed' to the flesh, is the spirit of flesh now nailed to the wood of the cross. At this extreme point of the Incarnation, doubly nailed to matter, Christ experiences utter abandonment. 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.

Two Different Christmas Day Meditations on the Incarnation

Last Year's:

"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, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born between feces and urine, entering between the legs of a poor girl in a stable. Just like one of us, a slob like one of us. The notion is so mind-boggling that one is tempted to credit it for this very reason, for its affront to Reason, and to the natural man, accepting it because it is absurd, or else dismissing it as the height of absurdity. A third possibility is to accept it despite its being absurd, and a fourth is to argue that rational sense can be made of it. The conflict of these approaches, and of the positions within each, only serves to underscore the mind-boggling quality of the notion, a notion that to the eye and mind of faith is FACT.

The Most High freely lowers himself, accepting the indigence and misery of material existence, including a short temporal career that ends with the ultimate worldly failure: execution by the political authorities. And not a civilized Athenian execution by hemlock as was the fate of that other great teacher of humanity, but execution by the worst method the brutal Romans could devise, crucifixion.

Read the rest.

And here is one first posted in 2010 and re-posted on Christmas Day, 2014:

Incarnation Approached Subjectively: The Mystical Birth of God in the Soul

[. . .]

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.

3. But it may be that the objective approach is radically mistaken. Is it an objective fact that God (or rather the second person of the Trinity) is identical to a particular man in the way it is an objective fact that the morning star is identical to the planet Venus?

Perhaps we need to explore a subjective approach. One such is the mystical approach illustrated in a surprising and presumably 'heretical' passage from St. John of the Cross' The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Collected Works, p. 149, tr. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, emphasis added):

. . . when a person has finished purifying and voiding himself of all forms and apprehensible images, he will abide in this pure and simple light, and be perfectly transformed into it. This light is never lacking to the soul, but because of creature forms and veils weighing upon and covering it, the light is never infused. If a person will eliminate these impediments and veils, and live in pure nakedness and poverty of spirit . . . his soul in its simplicity and purity will then be immediately transformed into simple and pure Wisdom, the Son of God.

The Son of God, the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, is 'born,' 'enters the world,' is 'incarnated,' in the soul of any man who attains the mystic vision of the divine light. This is the plain meaning of the passage. The problem, of course, is to reconcile this mystical subjectivism with the doctrinal objectivism according to which the Logos literally became man, uniquely, in Jesus of Nazareth when a certain baby was born in a manger in Bethlehem some 2000 years ago.

Read the rest.

Michael Gorman on Christological Coherence

On classical Christology, as defined at the Council of Chalcedon in anno domini 451, Christ is one person with two natures, a divine nature and a human nature. 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.

There are several ways to remove contradictions like these. One way is by using reduplicative constructions, another invokes relative identity theory, and a third is mereological. This entry will examine Michael Gorman's version of a fourth approach, the restriction strategy. (See Michael Gorman, "Classical Theism, Classical Anthropology, and the Christological Coherence Problem" in Faith and Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 3, July 2016, pp. 278-292.) Glance back at the first example of putative contradiction. The argument requires for its validity two unstated premises:

Necessarily, every divine being is immaterial

and

Necessarily, every human being is material.

If so, and if Christ is both divine and human as orthodoxy maintains, then Christ is both immaterial and material. We can defuse the contradiction if we follow Gorman and replace the first of these with a restricted version:

R. Necessarily, every solely divine being is immaterial.

From this restricted premise, a contradiction cannot be derived. Christ, though divine, is not solely divine because he is also human. "Saying that every solely divine being is immaterial does not imply that Christ is immaterial, because Christ is not solely divine; therefore, it leaves open the door to saying that Christ is material." (283) In this way, 'Christ is divine' and 'Christ is human' can be shown to be a non-contradictory pair of propositions.

Now there is more to Gorman's article than this, but the above restriction is the central move he makes. Unfortunately, I cannot see how this is satisfactory as a defense of the Chalcedonian definition.

For even if Christ is unproblematically both divine and human, how is he unproblematically both immaterial and material? Clearly he must be both. Gorman removes contradiction at one level only to have it re-appear at a lower level. He shows how something can be coherently conceived to be both divine and human, but not how it can be coherently conceived to be both immaterial and material.

Can Gorman's move be iterated? Can we say that an immaterial entity need not be solely immaterial? Can we say, coherently, that while Christ is immaterial he is also material? I don't see how. It is a contradiction to say that one and the same x is both F and not F at the same time, in the same respect, and in the same sense of 'F.' If you say that Christ is immaterial qua God but material qua man, then you have abandoned the restriction strategy and are back with reduplication.

So what am I missing?

(Comments enabled.)

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

In the Incarnation the Word nailed itself to the flesh in anticipation of later being nailed to the wood of the cross to suffer the ultimate fate of everything material and composite: dissolution. Christ dies like each of us will die, utterly, alone, abandoned. But then the mystery: He rises again. Is this the central conundrum of Christianity? He rises, but not as a pure spirit. He rises body and soul.

God is the Word ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God"); the Word becomes flesh; the flesh nailed to wood becomes dead matter and nothing Wordly or Verbal or Logical or Spiritual or Sense Bearing, and so next-to-nothing; but then the next-to-nothing rises and ascends body and soul to the Father by the power of the Father. Christ rises bodily and ascends bodily. A strange idea: bodily ascension out of the entire spatio-temporal-bodily matrix! He ascends to the Father who is pure spirit. So, in ascending, Christ brings matter, albeit a transformed or transfigured matter, into the spiritual realm which must therefore be amenable to such materialization. It must permit it, be patient of it. The divine spiritual milieu cannot be essentially impervious to material penetration.

Before the creation and before the Incarnation of the Creator into the created order divine spirit had the power to manifest itself materially, and in the Incarnation the power not only to manifest itself materially but to become material. The divine Word becomes flesh; the Word does not merely manifest itself in a fleshly vehicle. It becomes that vehicle and comes to suffer the fate of all such vehicles, dissolution. The divine spirit was always already apt for materialization: it bore this possibility within it from the beginning. It was always already in some way disposed toward materialization. On the other hand, matter was always already apt for spiritualization.

We humans know from experience that we can in some measure spiritualize ourselves and indeed freely and by our own power. We know ourselves to be spiritual beings while also knowing ourselves to be animals, animated matter, necessarily dependent on inanimate matter including air, water, dead plants and dead meat. (When an animal eats another animal alive, the first is after the matter of the second, not after its being animated.)

Whether or not we exercise our severely limited power of self-spiritualization, we are spiritual animals whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not: we think. Each one of us is a hunk of thinking meat. We are meaning meat. How is this possible? The matter of physics cannot think. But we are thinking matter. This is the mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in us. We live it and we experience it.

We could call it the 'The Little Incarnation.' Mind is incarnated, enfleshed, in us. The Little Word, the Little Logos, has always already been incarnated is us, separating us as by an abyss from the rest of the animals. Here, in us, we have an ANALOGY to the Incarnation proper. In the latter, the Second Person of the Trinity does not take on a human body merely, but an individual human nature body and soul. So I speak of an analogy. Incarnation in the case of Christ is not a mere enfleshment or embodiment. The Little Incarnation in us is the apparently necessary enfleshment of our spiritual acts in animal flesh.

The mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in us reflects the mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in God. Divine spirit is pregnant with matter, and accepting of the risen matter of Christ, but matter is also pregnant with divine spirit. Mary is the mother of God. A material being gives birth to God. This is how the Word, who is God, is made flesh to dwell among us for our salvation from meaninglessness and abandonment to a material world that is merely material.

Matter in Mary is mater Dei. Matter in Mary is mother and matrix of the birth of God.

For a different take on the meaning of Christmas, see my Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?

Peter Kreeft on the Trinity

This from reader D. B.:

The doctrine of the Trinity does not say there is one God and three Gods, or that God is one Person and three Persons, or that God has one nature and three natures. Those would indeed be self-contradictory ideas. But the doctrine of the Trinity says that there is only one God and only one divine nature but that this one God exists in three Persons. That is a great mystery, but it is not a logical self-contradiction.

Peter Kreeft, Fundamentals of the Faith, (Ignatius, 1988), p.42.

I don't think that the doctrine as so stated (above) rises to a level of clarity that allows for Kreeft's last sentence. Do you?

I agree with you, Dave.

First sentence: Exactly right.

Second sentence: Right again.

Third sentence: Also correct.

Fourth sentence: this is a bare assertion sired by confusion. The confusion is between the explicitly or manifestly contradictory and the implicitly or latently contradictory. The following are all explicitly self-contradictory:

a. There is only one God and there are three Gods.
b. God is one person and God is three persons.
c. God has one nature and God has three natures.

To be precise, the above are self-contradictory in the logical presence of the proposition that nothing can be both numerically one and numerically three. To be totally precise, then, I should say that the above three are near-explicitly self-contradictory to distinguish then from, say, 'God is one person and it is not the case that God is one person,' which is an explicitly formal-logical contradiction, i.e., a contradiction whose contradictoriness is rooted in logical form alone: *p & ~p.* Such contradictions I call narrowly-logical to distinguish them from (wait for it) broadly-logical contradictions such as *Some colors are sounds.* But

d. There is exactly one God in three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit

though not explicitly or near-explicitly contradictory as are the above three examples, is nonetheless contradictory in that it entails (in the logical presence of other orthodox doctrinal claims and self-evident truths) contradictions. How? Well, consider this aporetic septad:

1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4. The Holy Spirit is God.
5. The Father is not the Son.
6. The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
7. The Father is not the Holy Spirit.

So we have an inconsistent septad each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy.

What this shows is that (d) above, while not explicitly and manifestly contradictory as are (a)-(c), is nonetheless contradictory in that it entails three explicit formal-logical contradictions, one of them being *The Father is the Son and the Father is not the Son.*

Of course, there are various ways one might try to evade the inconsistency of the above septad. But this is not the present topic. The present topic is whether Kreeft's fourth sentence is justified. Clearly it is not. The mere fact that (d) is not obviously contradictory as are (a)-(c) does not show that it is not contradictory. I have just argued that it is.

Kreeft says in effect that (d) is a "great mystery." Why does he say that it is a mystery if not because it expresses a proposition that we find contradictory? If we didn't find (d) contradictory we would have no reason to call it mysterious. So Kreeft is in effect admitting that we cannot make coherent logical sense of (d). This suggests that Kreeft may be waffling between two views:

V1: The doctrine of the Trinity, though of course not rationally provable by us (because known by revelation alone) is yet rationally acceptable by us, i.e., free of logical contradiction, and can be see by our unaided reason to be free of logical contradiction

and

V2: The doctrine of the Trinity cannot be seen by us to be rationally acceptable in the present life, and so must remain a mystery to us here below, but is nonetheless both true and free of contradiction in itself.

(V1) and (V2) are clearly distinct, the latter being a form of mysterianism. I raised some doubts about Trinitarian mysterianism yesterday.

Mysterian Materialism and Mysterian Trinitarianism

Here are some thoughts that may provoke a fruitful discussion with Vlastimil Vohanka on the topic of mysterianism in the philosophy of mind and in theology. He kindly sent me his rich and stimulating paper, "Mysterianism about Consciousness and the Trinity." The paper is available here along with other works of his. His view is that a mysterian line is defensible in both the philosophy of mind and in Trinitarian theology. I have some doubts.

……………..

There are different sorts of materialism about the mind, among them eliminative materialism, identity-materialism, and functionalism. There is also mysterian materialism. Here is a little speech by a mysterian materialist:

Look, we are just complex physical systems, nothing more. And yet we think and are conscious. Therefore, we are wholly material beings who think and are conscious. We cannot understand how this is possible. But what is actual is possible whether or we we are able to understand how it is possible. So the fact that we cannot understand how it is possible that thinking and consciousness are nothing more than brain activity does not show that they are not brain activity. It shows that the how is beyond our understanding. What we have here, then, is a mystery: a proposition that is true and non-contradictory despite our inability to understand how it could be true.

What motivates this mysterian materialism? Two things. There is first of all the deep conviction shared by many today that there is exactly one world, this mind-independent physical world, that we are parts of it, that nothing in us is not part of it, and that it and us are wholly natural and in no respect supernatural. This naturalist conviction implies that there is nothing special about us, that we are continuous with the rest of nature. We are nothing special in that we have no higher origin or higher destiny. There is no God who created us in his image and likeness. And there is no higher happiness other than the transient and fitful happiness that some of us can eke out, if we are lucky, here below. We are irremediably mortal and natural, like everything else that lives, and anything (conscience, consciousness, self-consciousness, ability to reason, love and longing, sensus divinitatis, etc.) that suggests otherwise is susceptible of a wholly naturalistic explanation. Part of why people embrace the naturalist conviction is that it puts paid to central tenets of old-time religion: God, the soul, post-mortem rewards and punishments, the libertarian freedom of the will, man's being an image and likeness of God, etc. So hostility to religion is certainly, for some, part of the psychological (if not logical) motivation for the acceptance of the naturalist conviction.

Now take the naturalist conviction and conjoin it to the intellectually honest admission that we have no idea at all how it is so much as possible for a wholly material being to think and enjoy conscious states. The conjunction of the Conviction and the Admission generates a mysterian position according to which one affirms as true a proposition that one cannot understand as possibly true, a proposition that for us is and most likely will remain unintelligible, namely, the proposition that we are wholly material beings susceptible of exhaustive natural-scientific explanation who nonetheless think, feel, love, make moral demands, feel subject to them, etc.

This mysterianism is an epistemological position according to which our contingent but unalterable make-up makes it impossible for us ever to understand how it is possible for us to think and be conscious. The claim is not that thought and consciousness are mysterious because they are non-natural phenomena; the claim is that they are wholly natural but not understandable by us. Our cognitive architecture (a phrase I believe Colin McGinn employs) blocks our epistemic access to those properties the understanding of which would render intelligible to us how we can be both wholly material and yet the subjects of intentional and non-intentional mental states.

Well, this mysterianism is certainly to be preferred to an eliminativism which argues from the unintelligibility of a material thing's thinking to the nonexistence of its thinking. But eliminativism is a lunatic position best left to the exceedingly intelligent lunatics who dreamt it up. I won't waste any words here refuting this mindless doctrine; I have wasted words elsewhere.

We should note that one could be a mysterian in the philosophy of mind without being a mysterian materialist. One could be a mysterian substance dualist. Some maintain that the interaction problem dooms substance dualism. A mysterian might hold that substance dualism is true, that mind-body interaction is unintelligible, that interaction occurs, and that our inability to understand how mind-body interaction occurs merely shows a cognitive limitation on our part. It seems obvious that there is nothing in the nature of mysterianism in the philosophy of mind to require that one be a mysterian materialist/physicalist/naturalist.

We should also note that one could be a mysterian in areas other than the philosophy of mind, in theology, for example.

Mysterianism as a general strategy rests on a fairly solid foundation. First of all, it is a self-evident modal axiom that actuality entails possiblity. It is also self-evident that if x is possible, then it does not follow that we are in a position to understand how it is possible. So it may well be that there are certain objects and states of affairs and phenomena whose internal possibility we cannot discern due to our irremediable cognitive limitations. Apparent contradictoriness would then not argue unreality.

But surely there is something very strange about maintaining that there are true mysteries. A true mystery is a true proposition that is unintelligible to us, though not unintelligible in itself. Now here is my difficulty in a nutshell. If a proposition either is or entails a broadly-logical contradiction, then I wouldn't know what I had before my mind if I had such a proposition before my mind. And if I didn't know exactly which proposition I had before my mind, I wouldn't know exactly which proposition I was claiming was both true and mysterious.

Bear with me as I try to clarify my objection.

Before I can take a position with respect to a proposition I must know what that proposition is. I must know the identity of the proposition. But a proposition that strikes my mind as unintelligible is not one about whose identity I can be sure.

I count four positions or attitudes one can take toward a proposition: accept as true, reject as false, suspend judgment as to truth-value, practice epoché , ἐποχή. Pithier still: Accept, Reject, Suspend, Withdraw. The first three are self-explanatory. By Withdraw I mean: take no position on whether or not there is even a proposition (ein Gedanke, a complete thought) before one's mind. (The notion of Withdrawal is derived via Benson Mates from Sextus Empiricus.) Withdrawal goes farther than Suspension. To suspend is to refuse to accept or reject a well-defined proposition while accepting that there is such a proposition before one's mind. In the state of Withdrawal I take no position on whether or not there is a well-defined proposition before my mind. In the state of Withdrawal I have before my mind a verbal formulation, and the senses of its constituent words, but I take no position on the question whether the verbal formulation expresses a proposition.

Example. A Trinitarian says, 'There is exactly one God in three divine persons.' Studying the doctrine I come to the conclusion that I can attach no definite sense to it on the ground that it seems to me to entail one or more logical contradictions. That is not a case of rejection or of suspension; it is a case of epoché. I 'bracket' (to borrow a term from Husserl) two questions: the question as to truth-value, and the more fundamental question as to whether or not there is even a proposition (a unified, coherent, sense-structure) before my mind as opposed to an incoherent, un-unified bunch of word-senses.

Suppose you say to me, "Snow is white and snow is not white." Being the charitable fellow that I am known to be, I would not churlishly impute to you the assertion of a formal-logical contradiction. I would take you to be using a contradictory form of words to express a non-contradictory proposition, perhaps, the proposition that snow is white where I didn't relieve myself, but not white where I did. Or something like that. The time-honored method of showing an apparent contradiction to be merely apparent is by making a distinction in respect of time, or respect, or word sense.

But if someone insists that he means literally that snow is white and snow is not white where there is no distinction in respect of time, respect, or sense of the word 'white,' then I wouldn't know what the content of the assertion was. I wouldn't know which proposition my interlocutor was trying get across to me. For if my interlocutor was otherwise rational, the Principle of Charity would forbid me from imputing a contradiction to him. I would have to practice withdrawal.

If you say with a straight face "Snow is white and snow is not white" and you are neither equivocating on any term, nor making any distinction with respect to time or respect, and I charitably refuse to impute to you the assertion of a formal-logical contradiction of the form *p & ~p,* then I must say that I have no idea at all which proposition you are trying to convey to me. And so I naturally practice epoché with respect to your utterance.

(I grant that there is a sense in which a self-contradictory proposition — *No dog is a dog* for example — is intelligible (understandable): for if I did not understand the proposition I would not understand it to be self-contradictory and thus necessarily false. What I mean by 'intelligible' here is 'understandable as broadly-logically possibly true.' On this narrow use of 'intelligible,' a claim to the effect that no dog is a dog or that snow both is and is not white is unintelligible.)

Back to the mysterian materialist. I must put his asseverations within the Husserlian brackets. He bids me accept propositions that as far as I can tell are not propositions at all. A proposition is a sense, but the 'propositions' he bids me accept make no sense. For example, he wants me to accept that my present memories of Boston are all identical to states of my brain. That makes no sense. Memory states are intentional states: they have content. No physical state has content, or could have content. So no intentional state could be a physical state. The very idea is unintelligible. To be precise: it is unintelligible as something broadly logically possible. The vocabularies we use when speaking of brain states and mental states respectively are radically incommensurable. Axon, dendrite, synapse, etc. on the one hand, qualia, intentionality, content, etc. on the other. Even if one were to know everything there is to know about the electro-chemistry and neuro-anatomy of the brain one would still have no clue as to how consciousness arises from it. By consciousness, I mean not only qualia but intentional (object-directed) states.

But where there are no thoughts one can always mouth words. So one can mouth the words, 'Memories are in the head' or 'Thoughts are literally brain states.' But one cannot attach a non-contradictory thought to the words.

No doubt there is an illusion of sense. There is nothing syntactically wrong with 'Thoughts are brain states' or 'Sensory qualia are physical features of the brain.' And the individual words have meaning. What's more, the words taken together seem to convey a coherent thought in the way in which 'Quadruplicity drinks procrastination' does not seem to convey a coherent thought. But when the meaning is made explicit, the unintelligibility becomes manifest.

To say of a sensory quale q that it is identical to a brain state b is to say something that is unintelligible. For if q = b, then they share all properties, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived. But it is plain that they do not share all properties: the quale but not the brain state has a phenomenological feel, a Nagelian what it-is-like, an element of irreducible subjectivity. Thus the materialist identity claim is seen with a just a tiny bit of reasoning to be utterly unintelligible.

If you tell me that one and the same item in my skull has both physical and phenomenological properties, then I say you have changed the subject: you now have a dual-aspect theory going. I will then press you on what this third item is that has both physical and phenomenological features.

Suppose you stick to the topic but make a mysterian move. You grant me that it is unintelligible for us that q = b, but insist that it is intelligible in itself. You say it is true in reality despite the irremediable appearance of unintelligibility. It is true and non-contradictory in reality that sensory qualia and thoughts are nothing other than events or processes transpiring inside the skull. You say it is true and non-contradictory that when I think about Boston that thinking is just something going on in my head, adding that it is and will remain a mystery how this could be.

My objection can be put as follows. We have a verbal formulation (VF) such as 'Qualia are brain states.' VF expresses the unintelligible-for-us proposition (UFUP) *Qualia are brain states.* We are told that VF is true even though we, with our cognitive limitations, cannot understand how it is true or even how it could be true. So there must be a true intelligible-in-itself proposition (IIIP) distinct from (UFUP) to which we have no access. How is IIIP related to VF? It cannot be that VF expresses IIIP. VF expresses UFUP. So we are supposed to accept a proposition to which we have no access, a proposition that stands in no specifiable relation to VF. But surely that I cannot do. I cannot accept a proposition to which I have no access.

The formulations of the trinitarian theist appear to be in the same logical boat. I am of course assuming that the logical problem of the Trinity cannot be solved on the discursive plane. That is, one cannot solve it in the usual way by making distinctions. If one could solve it in this way, then there would be no need to make a mysterian move. The doctrine would be rationally acceptable as it stands, though not rationally provable since the triunity of God can be known only by revelation.

To sum up my objection. We are offered a verbal formulation, e.g., "There is one God in three divine persons." This verbal formulation expresses a proposition that is unintelligible to us. (It is unintelligible to us because contradictions can be derived from it using given doctrinal elements and unquestionable notions such as the transitivity of identity.) We are assured, however, that while the manifest proposition is unintelligible to us, the verbal formulation expresses a second proposition that is true and intelligible in itself. But since this proposition is inaccessible, one annot accept it, reject it, or suspend judgment with respect to it.

If you tell me that there are not two propositions, but that one and the same proposition is both unintelligible to us but intelligible in itself, then I will ask you which proposition this is.

I suppose what I am saying is that a true proposition that is a mystery is an item so indeterminate that one cannot take up any attitude to it except that of Withdrawal or epoché as I defined this term.

Incarnation Approached Subjectively: The Mystical Birth of God in the Soul

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. A marvellous quotation.

. . . when a person has finished purifying and voiding himself of all forms and apprehensible images, he will abide in this pure and simple light, and be perfectly transformed into it. This light is never lacking to the soul, but because of creature forms and veils weighing upon and covering it, the light is never infused. If a person will eliminate these impediments and veils, and live in pure nakedness and poverty of spirit . . . his soul in its simplicity and purity will then be immediately transformed into simple and pure Wisdom, the Son of God.

4. A somewhat less mystical but also subjective approach is suggested by an analogy that Josef Pieper offers in Belief and Faith, p. 89. I will explore his analogy in my own way. Suppose I sincerely and thoughtfully say 'I love you' to a person who is open and responsive to my address. Saying this, I do not report an objective fact which subsists independently of my verbal avowal and the beloved's reception of the avowal. There may be objective facts in the vicinity, but the I-Thou relation is not an objective fact antecedent to the address and the response. It is a personal relation of subjectivity to subjectivity. The reality of the I-Thou relation is brought about by the sincere verbal avowal and its sincere reception. The lover's speaking is a self-witnessing and "the witnessed subject matter is given reality solely by having been spoken in such a manner." (Pieper, p. 89) The speaking is a doing, a performance, a self-revelation that first establishes the love relationship.

5. The Incarnation is the primary instance of God's self-revelation to us. God reveals himself to us in the life and words of Jesus — but only to those who are open to and accept his words and example. That God reveals himself (whether in Jesus' life and words or in the mystic's consciousness here and now) is not an objective fact independent of a free addressing and a free responding. It depends on a free communicating and a free receiving of a communication just as in the case of the lover avowing his love to the beloved. God speaks to man as lover to beloved. In the case of the Incarnation, God speaks to man though the man Jesus. Jesus is the Word of God spoken to man, which Word subsists only in the free reception of the divine communication. Thus it is not that a flesh and blood man is identical to a fleshless and bloodless person of the Trinity — a putative identity that is hard to square with the discernibility of the identity relations' relata — it is that God's Word to us is embodied in the life and teaching of a man when this life and teaching are apprehended and received as a divine communication. The Incarnation, as the prime instance of divine revelation, is doubly subjective in that subject speaks to subject, and that only in this speaking and hearing is the Incarnation realized.

6. Incarnation is not an objective fact or process by which one thing, the eternal Logos, becomes identical to a second thing, a certain man. Looked at in this objectivizing way, the logical difficulties become insuperable. Incarnation is perhaps better thought of as the prime instance of revelation, where revelation is, as Aquinas says at Summa Contra Gentiles, 3, 154, "accomplished by means of a certain interior and intelligible light, elevating the mind to the perception of things that the understanding cannot reach by its natural light." Revelation, so conceived, is not an objective fact. Incarnation is a mode of revelation. Ergo, the Incarnation is not an objective fact.

7. This is admittedly somewhat murky. More needs to be said about the exact sense of 'subjective' and 'objective.'

Are There Possible Worlds in which the Human Nature of Christ Exists Unassumed?

This entry continues the conversation with Tim Pawl about Chalcedonian Christology.

I set forth the following antilogism:

3. The individual human nature of the Logos is a substance.
4. Every substance is metaphysically capable of independent existence.
5. The individual human nature of the Logos is not metaphysically capable of independent existence.

I expected Tim to question (4), but he instead questioned (5). That turned the dialectic away from the general-ontological Aristotelian framework, which I was claiming does not allow the coherent conceivability of the Chalcedonian formulation, toward the exact sense of the Chalcedonian theological doctrine of the Incarnation.

As I see it, we are now discussing the following question. Is it metaphysically possible that the individual human being who is the Son of God — and is thus identical to the Second Person of the Trinity — exist as an individual human being but without being the Son of God? I thought I was being orthodox in returning a negative answer. As I understand it, the individual human being who is the Son of God in the actual world, our world, is the Son of God in every possible world in which he exists. This is equivalent to saying that Jesus of Nazareth is essentially (as opposed to accidentally) the Son of God. (X is essentially F =df x is F in every possible world in which x exists.)

If I understand what Tim Pawl is saying, his view is that there are possible worlds in which Jesus of Nazareth exists but is not the Son of God. So the issue between us is as follows:

BV: Every metaphysically possible world in which Jesus exists is a world in which he is identical to the Son (the Logos, the Word, the Second Person).

TP: Some metaphysically possible worlds in which Jesus exists are worlds in which he is not identical to the Son (the Logos, the Word, the Second Person).

In his latest comment, Tim writes,

I do think that there is a merely possible world in which CHN [Christ's human nature] exists as unassumed. In such a world, it fulfills the conditions for being a supposit. And so it fulfills the conditions for being a supposit with a rational nature. So it is a person in that world, [call it W] even though it is not a person in this world [call it A].

I am afraid I find this incoherent. If Jesus is (identical to) the Son of God, then Jesus is (identically) the Son of God in every world in which he exists. To spell out the argument:

1. 'Jesus' and 'Son' are Kripkean rigid designators: they designate the same item in every possible world in which that item exists.

2. Necessity of Identity. For any x, y, if x = y, then necessarily x = y.

3. Jesus = Son.

Therefore,

4. Necessarily, Jesus = Son. (from 2, 3 by Universal Instantiation and Modus Ponens)

Therefore,

5. It is not possible that Jesus not be identical to the Son. (from 4 by the standard modal principle that Nec p is logically equivalent to ~Poss~p.)

Substance, Accidents, Incarnation

This entry is a further installment in a continuing discussion with Tim Pawl, et al., about the Chalcedonian Christological two-natures-one-person doctrine. Professor Pawl put to me the following question:

You ask: “Now if an accident is not the sort of item that can be crucified and bleed, how is it that an individual substance can be the sort of item that is not its own supposit or support, that is not broadly-logically-possibly independent, but is rather dependent for its existence on another substance?”

You then say: “That is tantamount to saying that here we have a substance that is not a substance.”
I don’t see that it is tantamount to . . . . And I don’t see the force of the analogy from accidents to individual substances. Could you spell out the reasoning a bit more, if you are inclined?

With pleasure.

We all agree that the accidentality of the Incarnation cannot be understood as the having by the Logos of an Aristotelian accident. Thus we all agree that

1. The Logos, while existing in every metaphysically possible world, does not have a human nature in every world in which it exists. That is, the Logos is neither essentially nor necessarily human. (X is essentially F =_df x is F in every possible world in which x exists; x is necessarily F =_df x is F in every world in which it exists and x exists in every world. For example, Socrates is essentially human but not necessarily human; the number 7 is both essentially prime and necessarily prime.)

and

2. The Logos' accidentally had humanity (individual human nature) is not an Aristotelian accident of the Logos as Aristotelian substance.

And we all agree why (2) is true. Briefly, an accident is not the sort of item that can be crucified and bleed.

So if the human nature of the Logos is not an accident of any substance, then it is a substance. We now face an antilogism:

3. The individual human nature of the Logos is a substance.
4. Every substance is metaphysically capable of independent existence.
5. The individual human nature of the Logos is not metaphysically capable of independent existence.

The triad is clearly inconsistent: the conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining one.

Limb (4) is a commitment of the Aristotelian framework within which Chalcedonian Christology is articulated, while the other two limbs are commitments of orthodox theology.

So something has to give. One solution is to reject (4) by adding yet another 'epicycle.' One substitutes for (4)

4*. Every self-suppositing substance is metaphysically capable of independent existence.

Under this substitution the triad is consistent. For what (4*) allows are cases in which there are substances with alien supposits. The individual human nature of Christ, though a substance, is not a self-suppositing substance: it is not its own supposit. Its supposit is the Logos. So its being a substance is consistent with its not being capable of independent existence.

If I say to Tim Pawl, "What you are countenancing is a substance that is not a substance," I expect him to reply, "No, I am not countenancing anything self-contradictory; I am countenancing a substance that is not a self-suppositing substance!"

To which my response will be: "You have made an ad hoc modification to the notion of substance for the sole purpose of avoiding a contradiction; but in doing so you have not extended or enriched the notion of substance but have destroyed it. For a substance by definition is an entity that is metaphysically capable of independent existence. A substance whose supposit is a different substance is not an accident but it is not a substance either. For it is not metaphysically capable of independent existence."

Recall what my question has been over this series of posts: Is the one-person-two-natures formulation coherently conceivable within an Aristotelian framework?

My interim answer is in the negative. For within the aforementioned ontological framework, the very concept of a primary substance is the concept of an entity that is broadly-logically capable of independent existence. Any modification of that fundamental concept moves one outside of the Aristotelian framework.

Appendix: The Concept of an Accident

What is an accident and how is it related to a substance of which it is the accident? Let A be an accident of substance S. And let's leave out of consideration what the scholastics call propria, 'accidents' that a substance cannot gain or lose. An example of a proprium would be a cat's being warm in virtue of its internal metabolic processes, as opposed to a cat's being warm because it has been sleeping by a fire.

The following propositions circumscribe the concept of Aristotelian accident.

P1. Necessarily, every accident is the accident of some substance or other. (This assumes that there are no accidents of accidents. If there are, then, necessarily, every accident that is not the accident of an accident is the accident of some substance or other.)

P2. No accident of a substance can exist except by existing in (inhering in) a substance. Substances are broadly-logically capable of independent existence; accidents are not. Substances can exist on their own; accidents cannot.

P3. Accidents are particulars, not universals. They are as particular as the substances of which they are accidents. Thus accidents are not 'repeatable.' If Socrates is seated and Plato is seated, and seatedness is an accident, then there are two seatednesses, not one.

P4. Accidents are non-transferrable. Some particulars are transferrable: I can transfer my pen to you. But accidents are not transferrable. I can give you my coat but not my cold. So not only is every accident the accident of some substance or other; every accident is the accident of the very substance of which it is an accident.