Benjamin Jowett on Grace

A stunning formulation for your delectation from the translator of Plato and the don of Balliol College:

Grace is an energy; not a mere sentiment; not a mere thought of the Almighty; not even a word of the Almighty. It is as real an energy as the energy of electricity. It is a divine energy; it is the energy of the divine affection rolling in plenteousness toward the shores of human need.

An observation magisterial on all counts, combining as it does truth, economy of expression, and literary beauty: "the energy of the divine affection rolling in plenteousness toward the shores of human need."  Could it do with a bit of paring? How about this:

. . . the energy of God's plenary affection rolling shoreward toward human need.

Companion posts:

Grace

Post-Session Fruits of a Formal Session

St. John Cassian on Anger

The Philokalia, vol. I (Faber and Faber, 1979, p. 83):

If, therefore, you desire to attain perfection and rightly to pursue the spiritual way, you should make yourself a stranger to all sinful anger and wrath. Listen to what St. Paul enjoins: 'Rid yourselves of all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamour, evil speaking and all malice' (Eph. 4:31) In saying 'all' he leaves no excuse for regarding any anger as necessary or reasonable. 

[. . .]

Our incensive power can be used in a way that is according to nature only when turned against our own impassioned or self-indulgent thoughts.

We are at first told that no anger is "necessary or reasonable" and then told in effect that some anger is, namely anger at our own impassioned or self-indulgent thoughts.  

In a charitable spirit, we may take the second bit of text as correcting, rather than contradicting, the first.

There is righteous anger the object of which is oneself. I take it a step further: there is righteous anger the objects of which are others. 

But is contempt for others ever justified? I go back and forth on this question.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Robbie Robertson and the Band

True 'sixties veterans will enjoy the Band documentary Once Were Brothers.  And if you don't, then you are not a true 'sixties veteran.  (This is known in the trade as the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy.  I prefer to call it the No True Muslim Fallacy.)

New Yorker article about the movie.

The Weight. Robertson sat down one day to write a song and peering into his Martin guitar read, "Martin Guitars, Nazareth, Pennslylvania." This inspired the line, "I pulled into Nazareth, feelin' about half-past dead."

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. Nothing hippy-trippy or psychedelic about these '60s musicians. Pure Americana. Rooted, autochthonic.

I Shall Be Released. The synergy benefited both the Bard and the Band. They helped him move farther from the mind and closer to the earth.

Up on Cripple Creek

Chest Fever

Don't Do It

When I Paint My Masterpiece

The Shape I'm In

Forever Young

Lost Distance Operator

Orange Juice Blues

Bonus Cut: Rick Danko and Paul Butterfield, Java Blues

Our Pyrrhonian Predicament

It is widely admitted that there is something deeply unsatisfactory about the human condition.  One aspect of our wretched state is recognized and addressed by the Pyrrhonists: we want certain knowledge but it eludes us. And so we must content ourselves with belief. But beliefs are in conflict and this conflict causes suffering which ranges from mental turmoil to physical violence.  

Ours is a two-fold misery. We lack what we want and need, knowledge. We must make do with a substitute that engenders bitter controversy, belief.

Skeptic solution? Live belieflessly, adoxastos! But that is no solution at all, or so say I.

For details, see the following meatier entries:

Is Pyrrhonism a Doctrine? Can One Live without Beliefs?

The Pious Pyrrhonian: Is Beliefless Piety Possible?

Does Divine Immutability Entail Modal Collapse?

That divine simplicity entails modal collapse is a controversial thesis, but one for which there are strong arguments. Does the same hold for divine immutability? I don't think so. That immutability should entail modal collapse strikes me as based on a simple confusion of the temporal with the modal.

Modal Collapse

In the state of modal collapse, there are no contingent propositions, where a contingent proposition is one that is possibly false if true, and possibly true if false, and where there are no contingent beings, where a contingent being  is one that is possibly nonexistent if existent and possibly existent if nonexistent.  So in the dreaded state of modal collapse, every proposition is either necessarily true or necessarily false, and every being is either necessary or impossible.  

Although one philosopher's datum is often another's (false) theory, I take it to be a datum, a Moorean fact, that, for example, I exist contingently and that many of the propositions about me are contingently either true or false. For example, it is contingently true that I am now blogging, and contingently false that I am now riding my bike, where 'now' picks out the same time. 

I take it, then, that we should want to uphold the modal distinctions and that it is an argument against a theory if it should fail to do so.

Divine Immutability 

In a strong form, the immutability doctrine states that God does not undergo any sort of intrinsic change.  We distinguish intrinsic from relational changes. If Hillary becomes furious at Bill's infidelity, that is an intrinsic change in her.  But there needn't be any corresponding intrinsic change in Bill.  He will change, but relationally by becoming the object of Hillary's wrath.  (And perhaps only relationally if Bill is unaware of Hillary's discovery of his infidelity and the onset of her wrath.) If, however, her rage should vent itself in her conking him on the head with a rolling pin, then intrinsic changes will occur in both parties to this famous marriage.

Similarly, if I start and stop thinking about God, I undergo an intrinsic change, but this intrinsic change in me is a merely relational ('merely Cambridge') change in God, and is insofar forth compatible with God's strong immutability.

Strong immutability, then, is the claim that God is not subject to intrinsic change.

Confusing the Temporal with the Modal

If God is strongly immutable, then any intrinsic property that he has at a given time he has at every time.  But if a thing has a property at every time at which it exists, it does not follow that it has that property necessarily. I'm a native Californian. I always was and I always will be. But that is a contingent fact about me: I might have been born in some other state. So the property of being born in California is one I have contingently despite my having it at every moment of my existence.  The same goes for intrinsic properties. Suppose the universe always existed and always will exist.  That is consistent with the universe's being contingent.  What is always the case needn't necessarily be the case.

Now suppose God always wills the existence of our universe. It does not follow that God necessarily wills the existence of our universe. Nor does it follow that what he wills– our universe — necessarily exists. This consideration puts paid to the threat of modal collapse.   Tim Pawl in his IEP article puts it like this:

Divine immutability rules out that God go from being one way to being another way. But it does not rule out God knowing, desiring, or acting differently than he does. It is possible that God not create anything. If God hadn’t created anything, he wouldn’t talk to Abraham at a certain time (since no Abraham would exist). But such a scenario doesn’t require that God change, since it doesn’t require that there be a time when God is one way, and a later time when he is different. Rather, it just requires the counterfactual difference that if God had not created, he would not talk to Abraham. Such a truth is neutral to whether or not God changes. In short, difference across possible worlds does not entail difference across times. Since all that strong immutability rules out is difference across times, divine immutability is not inconsistent with counterfactual difference, and hence does not entail a modal collapse. Things could have been otherwise than they are, and, had they been different, God would immutably know things other than he does, all without change . . . .

Three Theses

First, the divine simplicity doctrine entails modal collapse.  This was argued earlier.

Second, divine simplicity is not to be confused with divine immutability. The first entails the second, but the second does not entail the first.

Third,  divine immutability does not entail modal collapse.

It Is What It Is

Maybe not. It all depends on what the meaning of 'is' is.  (If you are old enough to get the joke, you are old.)

Seriously, though, the above-captioned saying is seeing quite a lot of use lately, or it was ten years ago.   It is a sort of present-tensed Que sera, sera.  Things are the way they are.  Don't kick against the pricks.  Acceptance and resignation are the appropriate attitudes.

From a philosophy-of-language point of view, what is interesting is the use of a tautological form of words to express a non-tautological proposition.  What the words mean is not what the speaker means in uttering the words.  Sentence meaning and speaker's meaning come apart.  The speaker does not literally mean that things are what they are — for what the hell else could they be?  Not what they are?  What the speaker means is that (certain) things can't be changed and so must be accepted with resignation.  Your dead-end job for example.  'It is what it is.'

There are many examples of the use of tautological sentences to express non-tautological propositions.  'What will be, will be' is an example, as is 'Beer is beer.'  When Ayn Rand proclaimed that Existence exists! she did not mean to assert the tautological proposition that each existing thing exists; she was ineptly employing a tautological sentence to express a non-tautological and not uncontroversial thesis of metaphysical realism according to which what exists exists independently of any mind, finite or infinite.

'What will be will be' is tautologically true and thus necessarily true.  What the sentence is typically used to express, however, is the non-tautological, and arguably false, fatalistic proposition that what will be, will necessarily be, that it cannot be otherwise.  So not only do sentence meaning and speaker's meaning come apart in this case; a modal fallacy is lurking in the background as well, the ancient fallacy of confusing the necessitas consequentiae with the necessitas consequentis.

Related: 

Necessitas Consequentiae versus Necessitas Consequentis

More on Tautologies that Ain't: 'He's his Father's Son'

Joe Biden

The man is stupid, senile, and utterly bereft of principles, except for the 'principle' of self-promotion. (Good Catholic that he is, he reversed himself on the Hyde Amendment!)  Kevin Williamson adds 'scoundrel' to the list of descriptors:

One of the worst features of our political life is the ugly and dishonest fights we have over Supreme Court nominations — a habit that can be laid squarely at the feet of Joe Biden, who along with Ted Kennedy, that pillar of human decency, organized one of the worst smear campaigns in modern American political history against Robert Bork, whose great crime against humanity was taking the “extremist” position that the Constitution actually says what it says rather than what anybody with power wishes it would say at any given moment, and that the way to amend the Constitution is to amend the Constitution rather than having nine wizards in black robes pull previously undiscovered constitutional mandates out of the penumbras upon which they sit all day. Don’t like the way Merrick Garland was treated? Mitch McConnell didn’t start that game — he is just better at it than his contemporary Democratic colleagues are. For lying partisan viciousness in the modern mode, Joe Biden is your man.

He is a liar, a corruptor of institutions, and a grifter of the first order.

‘A Fetus That Was Born’

More linguistic chicanery from the Left. Obviously, a fetus that was born is no longer a fetus.  To refer to a fetus that was born as a fetus aids and abets the next murderous move: the sanctioning of infanticide as just another form of abortion, post-natal abortion. The 'reasoning' might go like this: The killing of human fetuses is morally acceptable;  a human neonate is a human fetus; ergo, the killing of human neonates is morally acceptable.

But I must also lodge a protest against certain conservative extremists who think 'fetus' a dirty word. They think that the use of this perfectly good word somehow denigrates pre-natal humans or strips them of their right to life.  It does no such thing.

Language matters!  It is the foolish conservative who allows the leftist to hijack the terms of the debate.

World + God = God? The Aporetics of the God-World ‘Relation’ (2020 Version)

This from a reader:

I just started reading Philosophy for Understanding Theology by Diogenes Allen. The first chapter is devoted to the doctrine of creation.  These two sentences jumped out at me: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone." Do you agree? How would you unpack them?

These are hard sayings indeed.  Herewith, some rough notes on the aporetics of the situation.

I once cataloged twelve different meanings of 'world.' By 'world' here is meant the totality of creatures, the totality of beings brought into existence by God from nothing.  (Don't confuse this sense of 'world' with the sense of 'world' as the term is used in the 'possible worlds' semantics of modal discourse.) Now if  God is a being among beings, it would make no sense at all to say that "The world plus God is not more than God alone."  For if we could add the uncreated being (God) to the created beings, then we would have more beings.  We would have a totality T that is larger than T minus God.  If God is a being among beings, then there is a totality of beings that all exist in the same way and in the same sense, and this totality includes both God and creatures such that subtracting God or subtracting creatures would affect the 'cardinality' of this totality. (Not wanting to fall afoul of Georg Cantor, I assume that the number of (concrete) creatures is finite.)

But if God is not a being among beings, but Being itself in its absolute fullness, as per the metaphysics of Exodus 3:14 (Ego sum qui sum, "I am who am") then there is no totality of beings all existing  in the same way having both God and creatures as members.  When we speak of God and creatures,

. . . we are dealing with two orders of being not to be added together or subtracted; they are, in all rigour, incommensurable, and that is also why they are compossible.  God added nothing to Himself by the creation of the world, nor would anything be taken away from Him by its annihilation — events which would be of capital importance for the created things concerned, but null for Being Who would be in no wise concerned qua being. (Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Scribners, 1936, p. 96.  Gilson's Gifford lectures, 1931-1932.)

Gilson Etienne with cigaretteHere, I am afraid, I will end up supplying some 'ammo' to my Protestant friends Dale Tuggy, Alan Rhoda, and James Anderson. For the Gilson passage teeters on the brink of incoherence.  We are told that there are two orders of being but that they are incommensurable. This can't be right, at least not without qualification.   If there are two orders of being, then they are commensurable in respect of being.  There has to be some sense in which God and Socrates both are.  Otherwise, God and creatures are totally disconnected, with the consequence that creatures fall away into nothingness.  For if God is Being itself, and there is no common measure, no commensurability whatsoever, between God and creatures, then creatures are nothing.  God is all in all. God alone is. 

Gilson is well aware of the dialectical pressure in this monistic direction: "As soon as we identify God with Being it becomes clear that there is a sense in which God alone is." (65)  If we emphasize the plenitude and transcendence of God, then this sensible world of matter and change is "banished at one stroke into the penumbra of mere appearance, relegated to the inferior status of a quasi-unreality." (64)  That's exactly right. (I will add in passing that this metaphysical conclusion underwrites the contemptus mundi of the old-time monk and his world flight.) But of course Christian metaphysics is not a strict monism; so a way must be found to assign the proper degree of reality to the plural world.

Here is the problem in a nutshell.  God cannot be a being among beings.  "But if God is Being, how can there be anything other than Himself?" (84)  We need to find a way to avoid both radical ontological pluralism and radical ontological monism.

It's a variation on the old problem of the One and the Many.  (It is important in these discussions to observe the distinction between Being and beings, between esse and ens, between das Sein und das Seiende.  Hence my use of the majuscule when I refer to the former and the miniscule when I refer to the latter.)

A. If Being itself alone is, then beings are not.  But then  the One lacks the many.  Not good: the manifold is evident to the senses and to the intellect.  The plural world cannot be gainsaid.  In theological terms: If God alone is, then creatures are not, even in those possible worlds in which God creates. But then what is the difference between possible worlds in which God creates and those in which he does not?

B. If beings alone are, then Being is not.  But then the many lacks the One.  Not good: the many is the many of the One.  A sheer manifold with no real unity would not a cosmos make.  The world is one, really one. It is One in itself, not merely by our conceptualization.

C. If Being and beings both are in the same way and and the same sense, then either Being is itself just another being among beings and we are back with radical pluralism, or Being alone is and we are back with radical monism.

Gilson's Thomist solution invokes the notions of participation and analogy.  God is Being itself in its purity and plenitude and infinity.  Creatures exist by participation in the divine Being: they are limited participators in unlimited Being. So both God and creatures exist, but in different ways.  God exists simply and 'unparticipatedly.'  Creatures exist by participation.  These are radically different modes of existence. God and creatures do not form a totality in which each member exists in the same way.  We can thus avoid each of (A), (B), and (C).

But the notion of participation is a difficult one as Gilson realizes.  It appears "repugnant to logical thought" (96):  ". . . every participation supposes that the participator  both is, and is not, that in which it participates." (96)  How so?

I exist, but contingently.  That is: I exist, but at every moment of my existence it is possible that I not exist. There is no necessity that I exist at any moment of my existence. I am not the source or ground of my own existence.  No existential boot-strapping! Assuming that I cannot exist as a matter of brute fact, my Being (existence) is not my own, but received from another, from God, who is Being itself.  So my Being, as wholly received from another, is God's Being.  But I am not God or anything else.  I have my own Being that distinguishes me numerically from everything else.  So I am and I am not that in which I participate.

To formulate the contradiction in a somewhat clearer form: My existence is MY existence, and as such 'incommunicable' to any other existing item AND my existence is NOT MY existence in that it is wholly derivative from Gods existence.

In terms of the One and the Many: Each member of the Many is itself and no other thing; its unity is its own and 'incommunicable' to any other thing, AND each member of the Many derives its ownmost unity and ipseity from the One without which it would be nothing at all, lacking as it would unity.

In terms of creation:  Socrates is not a character in a divine fiction; he does not exist as a merely intentional object of the divine mind; his mode of Being is esse reale, not esse intentionale, AND Socrates receives from his creator absolutely everything: his existence, essence, and properties as well as his free and inviolable ipseity and haecceity that make him an other mind, a Thou to the divine I, and a possible rebel against divine authority. So Socrates both is and is not a merely intentional object of the divine mind.

Gilson does not show a convincing way around these sorts of contradiction.

The One of the many is not one of the many: as the source of the many, the One cannot be just one more member of the many.  Nor can the One of the many be the same as the many: it cannot divide without remainder into the many.  The One is transcendent of the many.  But while transcendent, it cannot be wholly other than the many. For, as Plotinus says, "It is by the One that all beings are beings."  The One, as the principle by which each member of the many exists, cannot be something indifferent to the many or external to the many, or other than the many, or merely related to the many. The One is immanent to the many.  The One is immanent to the many without being the same as the many.  The One is neither the same as the many nor other than the many.  The One is both transcendent of the many and immanent in the many. Theologically, God is said to be both transcendent and omnipresent.  He is both transcendent and immanent.

What should we conclude from these affronts to the discursive intellect?  That there is just nothing to talk about here, or that there is but it is beyond the grasp of our paltry intellects?  If what I have written above is logical nonsense, yet it seems to be important, well-motivated, rigorously articulated nonsense.

Bloomberg Blames the Victim!

Here:

As the financial crisis first began to strangle American homeowners, Michael Bloomberg, then the mayor of New York, identified a scapegoat. Bloomberg didn’t blame the banks for handing out subprime mortgages; he blamed the consumers who’d applied for them.

On an August 2007 broadcast of “The John Gambling Show” on WABC, Bloomberg first aired a pronouncement that he would later repeat during the recession and after it. “What happened here is a bunch of people who didn’t really have the wherewithal to get mortgages, got mortgages,” Bloomberg told Gambling. “Now, if they didn’t have access to those mortgages, the elected officials would scream, you’re discriminating against them. Some of them lied about their incomes, some by a lot. Now they say, ‘Oh, well, the salesman convinced them to do it.’ But we live in a world where when you put your signature down, you’re supposed to know what you’re signing, and you have to take responsibility. Because every time there’s a victim, we’ve got to find somebody that’s responsible for it.”

Is it not obvious that some of the blame here must be borne by the consumers? It is obvious to me.

I go into some detail on this question of blaming the victim in the appropriately appellated On Blaming the Victim.

I do not support Bloomberg's candidacy. He is a fraud and a phony driven by personal ambition. That he reversed himself on "Stop and Frisk," a successful and justified law enforcement tactic that protected blacks as well as whites, not to mention other 'persons of color,'  shows that he is not rooted in principle. Did he come to see the 'racism' of the tactic? Of course not. He believes now what he believed when mayor, namely, that the tactic is a good one.  The reversal is fake, a sop thrown to the Left in an ill-starred attempt to curry favor with them. The old man has not only thrown away a half billion dollars of his own money (at the time of this writing); he has also thrown away his dignity.  All for nothing.