Category: Trinity and Incarnation

De Trinitate: The Statue/Lump Analogy and the ‘Is’ of Composition

Thanks to Bill Clinton, it is now widely appreciated that much rides on what the meaning of ‘is’ is. Time was, when only philosophers were aware of this. The fact that Clinton made the point to save his hide rather than to advance philosophical logic is irrelevant.  Credit where credit is due.  But enough joking around.

In our recent Trinitarian explorations we have thus far discussed the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication. We saw that ‘The Father is God’ could be construed as

1. The Father is identical to God

or as

2. The Father is divine.

Both construals left us with logical trouble. If each of the Persons is identical to God, and there is exactly one God, then (given the transitivity and symmetry of identity) there is exactly one Person.  On the other hand, if each of the Persons is divine, where ‘is’ is the 'is' of predication,  then there are three Gods and tri-theism is the upshot. Either way, we end up contradicting a central Trinitarian tenet.

We explored the mereological way out and we found it wanting, or at least I found it wanting.  God is not a whole whose proper parts are the Persons.

But there is also the ‘is’ of composition as when we say, ‘This countertop is marble,’ or in my house, ‘This countertop is faux marble.’ ‘Is’ here is elliptical for ‘is composed of.’ Compare: ‘That jacket is leather,’ and ‘This beverage is whisky.’ To say that a jacket is leather is not to say that it is identical to leather – otherwise it would be an extremely large jacket – or that it has leather as a property: leather is not a property. A jacket is leather by being made out of leather.

Suppose you have a statue S made out for some lump L of material, whether marble, bronze, clay, or whatever. How is S related to L? It seems clear that L can exist without S existing. Thus one could melt the bronze down, or re-shape the clay. In either case, the statue would cease to exist, while the quantity of matter would continue to exist.  If S ceases to exist while L continues to exist, then S is not identical to L. They are not identical because something is true of L that is not true of S: it is true of L that it can exist without S existing, but it is not true of S that it can exist without S existing.   I am relying upon the following principle, one that seems utterly beyond reproach:

(InId)  If x = y, whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa.

(This is a rough formulation of the Indiscenibility of Identicals.  A more careful formulation would block 
such apparent counterexamples  as:  Maynard G. Krebs believes that the morning star is a planet but does not believe that the evening star is a planet.)

Returning to the statue and the lump, although S is not identical to L, S is not wholly distinct, or wholly
diverse, from L either. This is because S cannot exist unless L exists. Note also that while S exists it occupies exactly the same space as does L.  As long as S exists, S and L are spatiotemporally coincident.  What's more, they are composed of exactly the same matter arranged in exactly the same way.  And yet they are not identical!  Very curious.  How could there be two physical things in the same place at the same time?  But I have just shown that they cannot be identical.  Suppose that the statue and the lump come into existence at the same time t and pass out of existence at the same later time t*.  At all times they share the same matter, and at no time are they not spatiotemporally coincident. And yet they are not identical because modally discernible.  In our world, L composes S now, but there are possible worlds at which L does not not compose S now.

The fact that there are bronze statues and that the statue and its matter are neither strictly identical nor strictly distinct  suggests the following analogy: The Father is to God as the statue is to the lump of matter out of which it is sculpted. And the same goes for the other Persons. Each Person is to God as the statue is to the lump.  Schematically, P is to G as S to L. The Persons are like hylomorphic compounds where the hyle in question is the divine substance.

Thus the Persons are not each identical to God, which would have the consequence that they are identical to one another. Nor are the persons instances of divinity which would entail tri-theism. It is rather that the persons are composed of God as of a common  substance. Thus we avoid a unitarianism in which there is no room for distinctness of Persons, and we avoid tri-theism. So far, so good.

Something like this approach is advocated by Jeffrey Brower and Michael Rea, here.

But does the statue/lump analogy avoid the problems we faced with the water analogy? Aren’t the two analogies so closely analogous that they share the same problems?   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. On the water analogy, the Persons are to God as the three states of water are to water. 

Liquid, solid, and gaseous are states of water. Similarly, a statue is a state of a lump of matter.  The main problem with both analogies is as follows.  God is not a substance in the sense in which clay and water are substances. Thus God is not a stuff or hyle, but a substance in the sense of a hypostasis or hypokeimenon.  Beware of equivocating on 'substance.'  And it does no good to say that God is an immaterial or nonphysical stuff.  God is an immaterila being, but he cannot be or be composed of an immaterial stuff.  Besides, 'immaterial stuff' smacks of a contradictio in adjecto.  It sounds like 'immaterial matter.'  Furthermore, the divine unity must be accommodated. The ground of divine unity cannot be amorphous matter whether physical or nonphysical.

In addition, one and the same quantity of H20 cannot be simultaneously and throughout liquid, solid, and gaseous. Similarly, one and the same quantity of bronze cannot be simultaneously and throughout three different statues. Connected with this is how God could be a hylomorphic compound, or any sort of compound, given the divine simplicity which rules out all composition in God.

In sum, the statue/lump analogy is not better than the water/state analogy. Neither explains how we can secure both unity of the divine nature and distinctness of Persons.

Related articles
A Survey of Responses to the Three-In-One Paradox
Is the Skeleton of a Cat Feline in the Same Sense as a Cat is Feline?
Mereology and Trinity: Response to Wong
A Question About Predication and Identity
Aquinas amongst the analytics

A Survey of Responses to the Three-In-One Paradox


Three-in-onePhilosophers love a paradox, but hate a contradiction. Paradoxes drive inquiry while contradictions stop it dead in its tracks. The doctrine of the Trinity is a paradox threatening to collapse into one  or more contradictions. Put starkly, and abstracting from the complexity of the creedal formulations, the doctrine says that God is one, and yet God is three. Now this is, or rather entails, an apparent contradiction since if God is three, then God is not one, which contradicts God's being one. But not every apparent contradiction is a real one. Hence it is a mistake to reject the doctrine due to its  initial appearance of being self-contradictory. To put it another way, the doctrine is not obviously self-contradictory as some appear to believe. It is not obviously self-contradictory since it is not obvious that God is one and three in the same respect. To see contradictions that are not there is just as much of an intellectual mistake as to fail to see ones that are there.

I should say that I am interested in the general problem of apparent contradictions both in philosophy and out, what contradictions signify, and how we ought to deal with them. My interest in the Trinity is a special case of this general interest. Herewith, a preliminary attempt at cataloging some ways of dealing with apparent contradictions, taking the Trinity as my chief example.

The following catalog divides into two parts. The first five entries treat the three-in-one contradiction as merely apparent, unreal, unproblematic, while the remaining entries treat it as real or unavoidable. But what do I mean when I say that a contradiction is  unavoidable? Let us say that a contradiction has limbs. For example, I am sitting now and I am not sitting now is a contradiction assuming that 'now'  denotes the same time in both of its occurrences. I am sitting now is the first limb; I am not sitting now is the second  limb. A contradiction is unavoidable (avoidable) if we have (do not have) good reasons for accepting both limbs. The example just cited is an example of an avoidable contradiction since there is no good reason to accept both limbs.

But some contradictions seem unavoidable. For example, there is reason to think that a set exists if and only if it has members. But there is  also reason to think that a set — the null set – can exist without members. This apparent contradiction is quite different from the one concerning my being seated/unseated. It is not obviously avoidable if it is avoidable at all. I am not saying that this is genuine contradiction; I am saying that it is a plausible candidate for such status.

The Contradiction as Merely Apparent

1. Deny the first limb. In God is one and God is three, God is one is  the first limb. The contradiction is easily dismissed if we simply  deny this limb and embrace tri-theism. This is of course unacceptable to the Christian and indeed to any sophisticated theist. A defensible theism must be a monotheism.

2. Deny the second limb, and embrace radical monotheism along Jewish or Islamic lines.

3. Reject both limbs by rejecting the presupposition on which both rest, namely, that God exists, or that 'God' has a referent. If this presupposition is not satisfied, then the question lapses.

4. Make a distinction between the respect in which God is one and the respect in which God is three. Alphonse Gratry, for example,  distinguishing between nature and person says that God is one nature
 in three persons. (Logic, p. 336) Drawing a distinction between respects is the standard way to defuse a contradiction. But in the case of the Trinity it accomplishes little unless one can explain how the distinguished items are related. Suppose one is told that a certain ball is both red and green at the same time. This is easily  seen to be true if the ball is red in one hemisphere and green in the other. In this case it is clear without further ado how the two  hemispheres are related. Not so in the case of the Trinity.

5. A more sophisticated strategy is to locate an uncontroversial phenomenon in nature that exhibits a trinitarian or binitarian structure. Suppose there is a two-in-one ( binity) in nature. If   uncontroversially actual, then uncontroversially possible, even if we cannot understand how exactly it is possible. The possibility of a binitarian or trinitarian phenomenon in nature could then be used as a model to show, or begin to show, the possibility of the Trinity.

A putative example of a two-in-one is a statue. The statue S and the lump L of matter it is composed of are two things in that L can exist  without S. If S is made of bronze, and the bronze is melted down, then  L will exist without S existing. Even if the lump of bronze and the statue come into existence at the same time, and pass out of existence at the same later time, they are two.  For they are modally discernible: the lump has a property the statue lacks, the property of being possibly such as not to be a statue.  So, for both temporal and modal reasons, lump and statue are not strictly identical.  They are two.

But they are also one thing in that S  just is formed matter. If S and L come into existence at the same time, and pass out of existence at the same later time, then they are spatiotemporally coincident and composed of exactly the same matter arranged in exactly the same way.  That strongly suggests that S and L are the same. 

On the one hand, it seems we must say that S and L are two and not one.  On the other, it seems we must say that they are one and not two.

Perhaps we can say that what we have here is a binity, a two-in-one.  If binities are actual, then they are possible, even if it is not wholly clear how they are possible.  Assuming that the real cannot be contradictory, then the apparent contradiction of a two-in-one must be merely apparent.  If this fifth strategy works, one will come to see that the Trinitarian contradiction is merely apparent, even if one does not achieve full clarity as to how the Trinity is possible. (But of course the transcendence of God ought to insure that much about him will remain beyond the ken of our finite intellects both here below and in  the life to come, if there is one.)

The Contradiction as Unavoidable

6. Take the contradiction to be real or unavoidable — since both limbs are justifiable – and as proof that the triune God is impossible and hence   necessarily nonexistent. In other words, adopt the following stance:   (i) there is excellent reason to say that God must be one; (ii) there   is excellent reason to say that God must be three; (iii) it is a   contradiction to maintain that God is both one and three; (iv) therefore, God is impossible, hence nonexistent.

7. Take the contradiction to be unavoidable as in #6 and as proof that God is logically impossible. But instead of inferring from logical impossibility to necessary nonexistence, draw the conclusion that God  exists despite the contradiction. One is reminded of the phrase  attributed to Tertullian: Credo quia absurdum, I believe because it is absurd (logically contradictory). This also appears to be the position  of Kierkegaard. What distinguishes strategy #6 from #7 is that in the former one takes logic as having veto power over reality: one takes the logically impossible, that which cannot be thought without  contradiction, to be really impossible, impossible in reality apart from thought. That is, one takes the finite discursive intellect to be  at least negatively related to extramental reality: nothing can be  real unless it is thinkable by us without contradiction. Strategy #7, however, rests on the assumption that there can be a reality — the  divine reality – which is not subject to logical laws which, if this strategy is correct, can only be our laws. What is necessarily false for us can nonetheless be true in reality.

8. Take the contradiction to be real or unavoidable, but also to be true. In both #6 and #7, the contradiction is taken to to be false, indeed necessarily false, but on this dialetheist option, it is a true contradiction.  Accordingly, the Trinity doctrine is a true contradiction!

Are there any other options? Note that the relative identity approach falls under #4.

UPDATE.  Chad comments:

Regarding "are there any other options?" on approaches to the Trinity paradox.

Another option that falls under the 'apparent contradiction' category is mysterianism: the contradiction is apparent only, but the resolution is a mystery, either heretofore or in principle.

Another option, which might stand between the 'apparent contradiction' and 'contradiction' categories, is van Inwagen's relative identity approach: The Trinity is contradictory if the standard logic of identity is correct, apparently contradictory if not.

Yet another option that falls under the 'contradiction' category: To say that a father can beget a son without a mother is a parent [patent?] contradiction.

Chad is right about mysterianism.  That  is a further option under the first category.  I'm surprised I overlooked it.  As for the relative identity approach, this was Peter Geach's before it was van Inwagen's.  But doesn't this approach fall under #4?  I'm not sure why Chad calls his third point a third option.  Furthermore , isn't 'beget' a technical term in Trinitarian theology?  The Son is said to be "begotten not made."  The idea, I take it, is to avoid saying that the Son is created.  If created, then a creature, then not God.  If 'beget' has a technical meaning, why should it be a contradiction to say that the Father begets the Son?

Related articles
The Logical Problem of the Trinity

Is the Skeleton of a Cat Feline in the Same Sense as a Cat is Feline?

IMG_0867I put the question to Manny K. Black, brother of Max Black, but all I got was a yawn for my trouble.  The title question surfaced in the context of a discussion of mereological models of the Trinity.  Each of the three Persons is God.  But we saw that the 'is' cannot be read as the 'is' of identity on pain of contradiction.  So it was construed as the 'is' of predication.  Accordingly, 'The Father (Son, etc.) is God' was taken to express that the Father (Son, etc.) is divine.  But that has the unwelcome consequence that there are three Gods unless it can be shown that something can be F without being an F.  At this point the cat strolls into the picture.  Could something be feline without being a feline?  The skeleton of a cat, though not a cat,  is a proper part of a cat.  And similarly for other cat parts. As a proper part of a cat the skeleton of a cat is feline.  And it is supposed to be feline in the same sense of 'feline' as the cat itself is feline.

Now if the proper parts of a cat can be feline in the very same sense in which the cat is feline, without themselves being cats, then we have an analogy that renders intelligible the claim that the Persons of the Trinity are divine without being Gods.  The picture is this:  God or the Godhead or the Trinity is a whole the proper parts of which are exactly the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  The Persons are distinct among themselves, but each is divine in virtue of being a proper part of God.  There is one God in three divine Persons.  The mereological model allows us to avoid tritheism and to affirm that God is one and three without contradiction.

I have already expressed my doubt whether the mereological model can accommodate the divine unity.  But now I raise a different question.  Is 'feline' being used univocally – in the very same sense – when applied to a cat and when applied to a proper part of a cat such as a cat's skeleton?

This is not obvious.  It appears to be being used analogically.  We can exclude equivocity of the sort illustrated by the equivocity of 'bank' as between 'money bank' and 'river bank.'  Clearly, we are not simply equivocating when we apply 'feline' to both cat and skeleton.  But can we exclude analogicity?

To cop an example from Aristotle, consider 'healthy.'  The cat is healthy.  Is its food healthy?   In one sense 'no' since it is not even alive.  In another sense 'yes'  insofar as 'healthy' food  conduces to health in the cat.  Similarly with the cat's urine, blood, exercise, and coat.  Urine cannot be healthy in exactly the same sense in which the cat is healthy, but it is healthy in an analogical sense inasmuch as its indicates health in the animal.

Since a skeleton is called feline only by reference to an animal whose skeleton it is, I suggest 'feline' in application to a cat skeleton is being used analogically.  If this is right,then the Persons are divine in only an analogical sense, a result that does not comport well with orthodoxy.

Mereology and Trinity: Response to Wong

Kevin Wong offers some astute criticisms:

You wrote: "For one thing, wholes depend on their parts for their existence, and not vice versa.  (Unless you thought of parts as abstractions from the whole, which the Persons could not be.)  Parts are ontologically prior to the wholes of which they are the parts.This holds even in the cases in which the whole is a necessary being and each part is as well." Chad M. seems to be following William Lane Craig. Craig's partner-in-crime is J. P. Moreland, who argues that with substances, the whole is metaphysically prior to its parts. For example, a heart has its identity only because it is a constituent of the human person. Removed from a human person,  it ceases to be a heart.

If a concrete particular such as book counts as an Aristotelian primary substance, and it does, then I should think that the book as a whole is not metaphysically/ontologically prior to its (proper) parts.  In cases like this the whole depends for its existence on the prior existence of the parts.  First (both temporally and logically) you have the pages, glue, covers, etc., and then (both temporally and logically) you have the book.  If, per impossibile, there were a book that always existed, it would still be dependent for its existence on the existence of its proper parts logically, though not temporally.  So it is not true in general that "with substances, the whole is metaphysically prior to the parts."

But a book is an artifact whereas Kevin brings up the case of living primary substances such as living animals.  The heart of a living animal is a proper part of it.  Now does it depend for its existence on the whole animal of which it is a proper part?  Is it true, as Kevin says, that the heart is identity-dependent on the animal whose heart it is?

I don't think so.  Otherwise, there couldn't be heart transplants.  Suppose Tom, whose heart is healthy, dies in a car crash.  Tom's heart is transplanted into Jerry whose diseased heart has been removed.  Clearly, one and the same heart passes from Tom to Jerry.  Therefore, the heart in question is not identity-dependent on being Tom's heart.  In principle if not in practice, every part of an animal can be transplanted.  So it seems as if the whole is not metaphysically prior to its parts in the case of animals.

Accidents and Parts

Tom's smile cannot 'migrate' from Tom to Jerry, but his heart can (with a little help from the cardiologists).  This is the difference between an accident of a substance and a proper part of a substance.  If A is an accident of substance S, then not only is A dependent for its existence on a substance, it is dependent for its existence on the very substance S of which it is an accident.  This is why an accident cannot pass from one substance to another. The accidents of S cannot exist apart from S, but S can exist without those very accidents (though presumably it must have some accidents or other).  So we can say that a substance is metaphysically prior to its accidents.  But I don't think it is true that a substance is metaphysically/ontologically prior to its parts.  The part-whole relation is different from the accident-substance relation.

So as far as I can see what I originally said is correct.

Further, you wrote, "The divine aseity, however, rules out God's being dependent on anything." Would it not be more accurate to say that divine aseity is the thesis that God's being is not dependent upon anything external and distinct from himself? If that is the case, the dependence of God (proper) upon his members (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) would be a dependence upon nothing external to himself (unlike a Platonic rendition of God which postulates that God is dependent upon the properties he instantiates, these properties being external to himself). There is a strong strand in Christian tradition that states that the Son is God of God, that he is begotten of the Father and yet retains full divinity. If his divinity is not in jeopardy because of dependence upon the Father, why should the one God's divinity be in jeopardy because he depends upon the members of the
Trinity?

The reason I said what I said is because it makes no sense to say that God is dependent on God.  God can no more be dependent on himself than he can cause himself to exist.  I read causa sui privatively, not positively.  To say that God is causa sui is to say that he is not caused by another; it is not to say that he causes himself.  'Self-caused' is like 'self-employed': one who is self-employed does not employ himself; he is not employed by another.

For you, however, God can be said to depend on God in the sense that God as a whole depends on his proper parts, the Persons of the Trinity.   The problem, however,  is that you are assuming the mereological model that I am questioning.  You are assuming that the one God is a whole of parts and the each of the Persons (F, S, HS) is a proper part of the whole.   

And isn't your second criticism inconsistent with your first?  Your first point was that a whole is prior to its parts.  But now you are saying that God can depend on God by depending in his proper parts.

The Logical Problem of the Trinity

Our question concerns the logical consistency of the following septad, each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy.  See here for details.  How can the following propositions all be
true?

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, 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).

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

In a paper he sent me, Chad M. seems to adopt the following approach.  Distinguish between the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication, and construe (2), (3), and (4) as predications.  Well, suppose we do this.  We get:

2*. The Father is divine
3*. The Son is divine
4*. The Holy Spirit is divine.

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

Chad also blends the above strategy wth a mereological one. Following W. L. Craig, he thinks of the Persons as (proper) parts of God/Godhead.  Each is God in that each is a (proper) part of God/Godhead.  The idea, I take it, is that Persons are really distinct in virtue of being really distinct proper parts of God, but that there is only one God because there is only one whole of these parts.  Each Person is divine in that each is a part of the one God.  The parts of God are divine but not God in the way that the proper parts of a cat are not cats but are feline.  Thus the skeleton of a cat is not a cat but is feline.  The skeleton is feline without being a feline.

But I have a question for Chad.  On orthodoxy as I understand it, God is one, not merely in number, but in a deeper metaphysical sense.  Roughly, God is a unity whose unity is 'tighter' than the unity of other sorts of unity.  Indeed, as befits an absolute, his unity is that than which no tighter can be conceived.  The unity of mathematical sets and mereological sums is fairly loose, and the same goes for such concrete aggregates as Kerouac holding his cat.  Although we are not forced to take the whole-part relation in the strict sense of classical mereology, I think it remains the case that the unity of anything that could be called a  whole of parts will be too loose to capture the divine unity. 

For one thing, wholes depend on their parts for their existence, and not vice versa.  (Unless you thought of parts as abstractions from the whole, which the Persons could not be.)  Parts are ontologically prior to the wholes of which they are the parts.  This holds even in the cases in which the whole is a necessary being and each part is as well.  The mathematical set of all primes greater than 1 and less than 8 is a necessary being, but so is each element of this set: 3, 5, and 7 are each necessary beings.  Still, the existence of the set is metaphysically grounded in the existence of the elements, and not vice versa.  The divine aseity, however, rules out God's being dependent on anything.

So my question for Chad is this: does the view that God is a whole of parts do justice to the divine unity?

 

Related articles
A Question About Predication and Identity

Notes on Mortality and Christian Doctrine

1. Let's start with the word 'mortal' and remind ourselves of some obvious points. 'Mortal' is from the Latin mors, mortis meaning death. That which is mortal is either subject to death, or conducive to death, or in some way expressive of death. Thus when we say of a human being that he is mortal we do not mean that he is dead, but that he is subject to death. My being mortal is consistent with my being alive and kicking. Indeed, if I weren't alive I could not be said to be either mortal or immortal. Spark plugs are neither mortal nor immortal. Some will say of a car that it has 'died.' But that is a loose and metaphorical way of talking. Only that which was once alive can properly be said to have died.

‘Frege’ on the Trinity

Peter Lupu writes,

The following are some recent thoughts about the Trinity. Let me know what you think.

The three expressions of the Trinity: ‘The Father’, ‘The Son’, and ‘The Holy Spirit’ all refer to the same divine being namely God. Thus, with respect to reference, each pair of expressions forms a true identity. However, they have different senses in Frege’s sense. The three senses are as follows:

1) The sense of ‘The Father’ is the will of the divine being to love, atone, and forgive. Call this the divine-will.  

2) The sense of ‘The Holy Spirit’ is the will of a non-divine being when and only when it genuinely aspires to be like the divine with respect to its moral identity and worth. Call this the inspired-will.

3) The sense of ‘The Son’ (i.e., the person of Jesus) is when the divine-will and the inspired-will coincide in a human person such as Jesus. Thus, Jesus is a moral-exemplar (Steven’s term) of a case when the divine-will and the inspired-will seamlessly coincide.

The senses of the three expressions of the Trinity are different. Therefore, while identities among each pair with respect to their senses are false, identities with respect to their referents are true.

It warms my heart that  a Jew should speculate on the Trinity on Good Friday.   Rather than comment specifically on the senses that Peter  attaches to 'the Father,' 'the Son,' and 'the Holy Spirit,' I will  address the deeper question of whether the logical problem of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity can be solved by means of Gottlob Frege's distinction between the sense and the reference of expressions.

The Logical Problem of the Trinity

Our question concerns the logical consistency of the following septad, each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy.  See here for details.  How can the following propositions all be true?

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, governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals and by the Necessity of Identity).  For example, from (2) and (3) taken together it follows that the Father is the Son by Transitivity of Identity.  But this contradicts (5).

So we have an inconsistent septad each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy.  The task is to remove the contradiction without abandoning orthodoxy.  There are different ways to proceed.  Here I consider only one, the Fregean way.  (Of course, Frege himself did not address the Trinity; but we may address it using his nomenclature and conceptuality.) 

The Fregean solution is to say that 'Father,' 'Son,' and 'Holy Spirit, are expressions that differ in sense (Sinn) but coincide in reference (Bedeutung).  Frege famously gave the example of 'The morning star is the evening star.'  This is an identity statement that is both true and informative.  But how, Frege asked, could it be both?  If it says of one thing that it is identical to itself, then it is true but not informative because tautological.  If it says of two things that they  are one thing, then it is false, and uninformative for this reason.  How can it be both true and nontautological? 

Frege solved his puzzle by distinguishing between sense and reference and by maintaining that reference is not direct but routed through sense.  'Morning star' and 'evening star' differ in sense, but coincide in reference.  The terms flanking the identity sign refer to the same entity, the planet Venus, but the reference is mediated by two numerically distinct senses.  The distinction allows us to account for both the truth and the informativeness of the identity statement.  The statement is true because the two terms have the same referent; the statement is informative because the two terms have different senses.  They are different modes of presentation of the same object.

Now let's apply this basic idea to the Trinity.  To keep the discussion simple we can restrict ourselves to the Father and the Son.  If we can figure out the Binity, then we can figure out the Trinity.  And if we restrict ourselves to the Binity, then we get a nice neat parallel to the Fregean example.  The Frege puzzle can be put like this:

a. The Morning Star is Venus
b. The Evening Star is Venus
c. The Morning Star is not the Evening Star. 

This parallels

2. The Father is God
3. The Son is God
5. The Father is not the Son.

Both triads are inconsistent.  The solution to the Fregean triad is to replace (c) with
c'.  The sense Morning Star is not the sense Evening Star.

The suggestion, then, is to solve the Binity triad by replacing (5) with
5'. The sense Father is not the sense Son.

The idea, then, is that the persons of the Trinity are Fregean senses.  To say that the three persons are one God is to say that the three senses, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, are three distinct modes of presentation (Darstellungsweisen) of the same entity, God.

Why the Fregean Solution Doesn't Work

Bear in mind that we are laboring under the constraint of preserving orthodoxy.  So, while the Fregan approach is not incoherent, it fails to preserve the orthodox doctrine.  One reason is this.  Senses are abstract (causally inert) objects while the persons of the Trinity are concrete (causally efficacious).  Thus the Holy Spirit inspires people, causing them to to be in this or that state of mind.  The Father begets the Son.  Begetting is a kind of causing, though unlike empirical causing.  The Son loves the Father, etc.  Therefore, the persons cannot be Fregean senses.

Furthermore, senses reside in Frege's World 3 which houses all the Platonica necessary for the semantic mediation of mental contents (ideas, Vorstellungen, etc.) in World 2 and primary referents in World 1.  Now God is in World 1.  But if the persons are senses, then they are in World 3.  But this entails the shattering of the divine unity.  God is one, three-in-one, yet still one.  But on the Fregean approach what we have is a disjointed quaternity: God in World 1, and the three persons in World 3.  That won't do, if the task is to preserve orthodoxy.

At this point, someone might suggest the following.  "Suppose we think of senses, not as semantic intermediaries, but as constituents of the entity in World 1.  Thus the morning star and the evening star are ontological parts of Venus somewhat along the lines of Hector Castaneda's Guise Theory.   To say that a sense S is of its referent R is to say  that S is an ontologcal part or constitutent of R.  And then we can interpret 'The Morning Star is the Evening Star' to mean that the MS-sense is 'consubstantiated' (to borrow a term from Castaneda) with the ES-sense.  Thus we would not have the chorismos, separation, of senses in Worldf3 from the primary referents in World 1: the senses would be where the primary referents are, as ontological parts of them. 

But this suggestion also violates orthodoxy.  The persons of the Trinity are not parts of God; each is (identically) God.  No proper part of a whole is identical to the whole.  But each person is identical to God.

I conclude that there is no Fregean way out of the logical difficulties of the orthodox Trinity doctrine.  If so, then Peter's specific suggestion above lapses.

 

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 not  more at least [at last?] than 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)

Christianity is the ultimate in "heterogeneity to the world," to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard.  God becomes man in a miserable outpost of the Roman empire, fully participates in the miseries of human embodiment, is rejected by the religious establishment and is sentenced to death by the political authorities, dying the worst sort of death the brutal Romans could devise.  Humanly absurd but divinely true?

East Versus West on the Trinity: The Filioque Controversy

Filioque Controversy Our meeting with the affable and stimulating  Dale Tuggy on June 20th at St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox monastery a little south of Florence, Arizona, got me thinking about the Trinity again.  So I pulled Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church off the shelf wherein I found a discussion of the differences between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman approaches to the doctrine.  Let's take a look.  Earlier this year, in January and February, we had a stimulating and deep-going discussion of Trinitarian topics which the interested reader can find here.  But there was no discussion of the Orthodox line.  It is high time to fill that lacuna.  (Image credit.)

East and West agree that there is exactly one God in three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  They also agree that the Father is neither born of anything nor proceeds from anything, that the Son is born of the Father but does not proceed from the Father, and that the Holy Spirit proceeds but is not born.  Bear in mind that 'born' and 'proceeds' in this context refer to relations that are internal to the triune Godhead, and are therefore eternal relations.  I hope it is also clear that neither of these relations is one of creation.  Each of the persons is eternal and uncreated.

The main difference between East and West concerns that from which the Holy Spirit proceeds.  The West says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque), whereas the East says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone.  One can of course question whether this dispute has any clear sense, but let's assume that it does for the space of this post.  I don't reckon there are any Stovian or other positivists hanging around this site.  (If there are, I pronounce my anathema upon them.)

The question is whether there is any reason to prefer the one view over the other.  Ware naturally thinks the Orthodox view superior (pp. 219-222).  He thinks it is superior because it is able to account for the unity of the three persons without making of this unity something impersonal.  His reasoning is as follows.  The tripersonal God is one God, not three Gods.  So the question arises as to the unity of the Godhead.  What is the ground of God's unity?  There is one God because there is one Father, the Father being the 'cause' or 'source' of Godhead, the principle (arche) of unity among the three.  The Orthodox speak of the "monarchy of the Father."  The other two persons originate from the Father.  Because the principle of unity is the Father, and the Father is one of the divine persons, the principle of unity is personal in nature.  So although there are three persons in one God, the unity of these three persons is itself a person, namely, the Father.

The Western view, however, issues in the result that the principle of unity is impersonal.  The reasoning is along the following lines.  If the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son, then "the Father ceases to be the unique source of Godhead, since the Son is also a source." (219)  Consequently, "…Rome finds its principle of unity in the substance or essence which all three persons share." (219)  This implies that, on the Roman Catholic view, the principle of unity is impersonal.  (I am merely reporting Ware's reasoning here, not endorsing it.)

And that, Ware maintains, is not good.  "Late Scholastic theology, emphasizing as it does the essence at the expense of the persons, comes near to turning God into an abstract idea."  (222)  The concrete and personal God with whom one can have a direct and living encounter gets transmogrified into a God of the philosophers (as opposed to the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), an impersonal being whose existence needs to be proved by metaphysical arguments.

And so the Orthodox "regard the filioque as dangerous and heretical. Filioquism confuses the persons, and destroys the proper balance between unity and diversity in the Godhead." (222) God is stripped of concrete personality and made into an abstract essence.  And that's not all. The Roman view gives the Holy Spirit short shrift with the result that his role in the church and in the lives of believers is downplayed.  What's more, this subordination of the Holy Spirit, together with an overemphasis on the divine unity, has deleterious consequences for ecclesiology.  As a result of filioquism, the church in the West has become too worldly an institution, and the excessive emphasis on divine unity has led to too much centralization and too great an emphasis on papal authority.  It is worth noting in this connection that the Orthodox reject papal infallibility while accepting the infallibility of the church.

You can see, then, that for the Orthodox  the filioque is quite a big deal: it is not a mere theological Spitzfindigkeit.

Ware's exposition — which I assume is a faithful representation of the Orthodox position — saddles filioquism with a nasty dilemma: either ditheism or semi-Sabellianism.  For if the Son as well as the Father is an arche, a principle of unity in the Godhead, then the upshot is ditheism, two-God-ism.  But if it is said that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son tamquam ex/ab uno principio, 'as from one principle,' then, as the Orthodox see it, the Father and the Son are confused and semi-Sabellianism is the upshot.  (221)

Sabellianism or modalism is the view that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are modes or aspects of the deity.  The East sees semi-Sabellianism in the West insofar as the Western view, in avoiding ditheism, merges Father and Son into one principle so that they become mere modes or aspect of that one principle.

That's the lay of the land as seen from the East.  I have been concerned in this post with exposition only.  Adjudication can wait for later. (He said magisterially.)

 

Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?

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.

Continue reading “Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?”

MACRUES, Semantic Defeaters, and Epistemic Defeaters (Peter Lupu)

(A guest post by Peter Lupu.  Editing and commentary by BV.) 

As Bill notes, we are attempting to secure and study a copy of James Anderson’s book,  Paradox in Christian Theology.  (Publication details here, including links to reviews.)  Meanwhile, I will propose here some tentative observations that Anderson’s book may or may not have addressed. These observations are inspired by the following point Bill makes in a post above as well as by some conversations we had about the subject:

“…if I cannot see that a proposition is rationally acceptable (because it appears contradictory to me) then I wouldn't know what proposition I was accepting.”

A similar point is made by Richard Cartwright in On the Logical Problem of the Trinity:  "Nor is a mystery supposed to be unintelligible, in the sense that the words in which it is expressed simply cannot be understood. After all, we are asked to believe the propositions expressed by the words, not simply that the words express some true propositions or other, we know not which."

1). Let us agree that a Trinitarian Sentence (TS) is such that

 (i) The Bible entails TS;

(ii) The surface structure (SS) of TS exhibits the logical form of a contradiction;

(iii) We are not in the position currently and may not be in the position in our present form of existence ever to construct a contradiction free formulation or deep structure (DS) for TS;

Example of a TS: "The Father is God, the Son is God, the Father is not the Son, and there is exactly one God."  The surface structure of this sentence is contradictory.

Continue reading “MACRUES, Semantic Defeaters, and Epistemic Defeaters (Peter Lupu)”

Another Example of a Necessary Being Depending for its Existence on a Necessary Being

The Father and the Son are both necessary beings.  And yet the Father 'begets' the Son.  Part, though not the whole, of the notion of begetting here must be this: if x begets y, then y depends for its existence on x.  If that were not part of the meaning of 'begets'' in this context, I would have no idea what it means.  But how can a necessary being depend for its existence on a necessary being?  I gave a non-Trinitarian example yesterday, but it was still a theological example. Now I present a non-theological example.

I assume that there are mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sets.  And I assume that numbers are necessary beings.  (There are powerful arguments for both assumptions.) Now consider the set S = {1, 3, 5} or any set, finite or infinite, the members of which are all of them necessary beings, whether numbers, propositions, whatever.  Both S and its membership are necessary beings.  If you are worried about the difference between members and membership, we can avoid that wrinkle by considering the singleton set T = {1}.

T and its sole member are both necessary beings.  And yet it seems obvious to me that one depends on the other for its existence:  the set is existentially dependent on the member, and not vice versa.  The set exists because — though this is not an empirically-causal use of 'because' — the members exist, and not the other way around.   Existential dependence is an asymmetrical relation.  I suppose you either share this intuition or you don't.  In a more general form, the intuition is that collections depend for their existence on the things collected, and not vice versa.  This is particularly obvious if the items collected can also exist uncollected.  Think of Maynard's stamp collection.  The stamps in the collection will continue to exist if Maynard sells them, but then they will no longer form Maynard's collection. The point is less obvious if we consider the set of stamps in Maynard's collection.  That set cannot fail to exist as long as all the stamps exist.  Still, it seems to me that the set exists because the members exist and not vice versa.

And similarly in the case of T.  {1} depends existentially on 1 despite the fact that there is no possible world in which the one exists without the other.  If, per impossibile, 1 were not to exist, then {1} would not exist either. But it strikes me as false to say: If, per impossibile, {1} were not to exist, then 1 would not exist either.  These counterfactuals could be taken to unpack the sense in which the set depends on the member, but not vice versa.

It therefore is reasonable to hold that two necessary beings can be such that one depends for its existence on the other.  And so one cannot object to the notion of the Father 'begetting'  the Son by saying that no necessary being can be existentially dependent upon a necessary being.  Of course, this is not to say that other objections cannot be raised.

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

According to the Athansian 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 Lupu, 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 the divine noesis.  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.

Substance and Suppositum: Notes on Fernand Van Steenberghen

Here is another of the scholastic manuals I pulled off my shelf: Fernand van Steenberghen, Ontology (Nauwelaerts Publisher, Brussels, 1970, tr. Moonan).  A paragraph from p. 278 supports my thesis that the distinction between primary substance and suppositum is an ad hoc device invented for a theological purpose, a device for which there is no independent philosophical warrant:

4. The problem of subsistence or personality.  This problem was inserted into metaphysics for the benefit of theology, as is quite plain, in order to prepare the way for a satisfactory explanation of the theological  mystery of the incarnation, the question of knowing how and why the human nature of Jesus Christ does not constitute a human person.  But this problem is extraneous to philosophy and must remain so, for from the metaphysical point of view, there is no reason for distinguishing individual nature and individual.  It is therefore contrary to any sane method to ask in ontology on what conditions an individual nature might not be a suppositum (or person, where it is an intelligent nature that is in question.)

Continue reading “Substance and Suppositum: Notes on Fernand Van Steenberghen”