Plato's Unheard Doctrines

There is a passing reference in Aristotle's Metaphysics to "the unwritten doctrines" of Plato's school. Certain (principally) German scholars in the late 20th century decided that this meant that there was some sort of secret teaching at the Academy that didn't make it into the dialogs. Aside from Aristotle's cryptic remark there is no evidence to support such a claim, but publish or perish, as they say, and now lots of folks write about this secret doctrine all the time.

I mention this for reasons that are probably not very closely related to anything at all relevant other than the fact that I am not hearing some things about Plato that I was expecting to be hearing right now. You see, I was supposed to go to a conference yesterday at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana on Plato's Timaeus (you can find the conference details here). I had been planning on, and looking forward to, going to this conference for months. Plato's Timaeus is a fascinating text, and can, in some ways, be read as a kind of introduction to Platonic philosophy of nature (though, as usual with Plato, there are lots of other, equally plausible, ways of reading the text). Many of the biggest and brightest names in Plato scholarship were going to be there, including a few friends of mine, among whom I count the redoubtable Allan Silverman of Ohio State University, a verifiable genius, and that other Allan, Allan Code, probably the best ancient philosopher in the country.

Since Illinois is not that far away, I decided that I would drive there. I didn't know it at the time, but that was my first mistake. My car is, for me, anyway, a relatively new one, a 1997 Subaru Outback. As recently as last May, however, I took it in to my mechanic because it was starting to have a little trouble with sticking in first and second gear. My mechanic replaced some fluids and put in some cleaners and said that sometimes these things get a little gunky and he suggested that, in a month or so, the problem would just clear up on its own. I didn't know it at the time, but believing that was my second mistake. Last month the whole family went for a trip to Lake Michigan, and the car continued to have that little problem, and it wasn't getting any better, as one might expect in the case of a problem that is in the process of "clearing up on its own". Every morning, I had to drive around the block for ten minutes until the gears started shifting normally. Until things got loosened up, I couldn't go above 20 mph without sending the engine to the redline.

So yesterday I packed up the car and hit the road. I didn't know it at the time, but that was my third mistake. I drove around the block until the gears loosened up and then went to the highway. I got as far as a little place called Huber Heights, Ohio, before I decided that it was time for lunch. I wasn't really all that hungry, but I decided that I may as well get some more gas, too, so I pulled off the highway. I'm still not all that sure whether this was my fourth mistake or not. The car was working fine, and maybe if I had just kept on going, I would have made it all the way to Illinois. On the other hand....

As soon as I got to the end of the exit ramp, I heard The Noise. Probably you've heard noises kind of like this one, even if you've never experienced transmission trouble. Have you ever seen a backhoe being used to break up an asphalt road? If so, then you've heard a noise just like the noise I heard coming from under my car as I pulled up to the traffic light. When the light turned green I noticed, with a little alarm, that the car would not go when I gave it gas. The engine revved, and then, ker-chunk, it just dropped into gear and took off. It reminded me of when I was learning how to drive a stick shift: it was just like somebody dropping the clutch. I also began to wish that I still had a stick shift car instead of automatic. As I went faster, I noticed that things got back to normal once I was in fourth gear, and I calmed down a little bit. But only just a little bit, because I am probably one of the most panicky bunnies on the road when it comes to car trouble miles from home.

So I headed over to the nearby McDonald's and had myself a QPC, but everything tasted rather dry because I was beginning to work myself up into a state. I actually called my mechanic and asked him what to do (my mechanic is fabulous: during his off hours his calls are forwarded to his cell phone so he can help customers just like me who are on the road and starting to chew through their own body parts). Like a doctor, he said he couldn't tell me much without running some tests. He did advise me to check the fluids, which I did. This was either my fourth or my fifth mistake, depending on how you keep count: I did not bother to note, when I pulled the dipstick out, just whence I was pulling it. I then found that I couldn't get the transmission dipstick back into the proper place so--I swear to you that I am not making this up--I called my mechanic again to ask him how to do it. I'm sure it was all he could do to keep from busting out laughing on the phone, but he helped me out and I did get it back in with only a small case of the jitters. It occurred to me that I should drive around a little to see how things were "clearing up", because the transmission fluid looked fine to me. And you know what an expert I am at judging the status of transmission fluid.

It was then that I discovered that the car had somehow forgotten how to move backwards. I put the car in reverse and applied the gas, but it surged forward. I put a stop to that right away (good thing, too, because I was parked facing a very busy road). I let the thing idle for a second--you know, to let the problem "clear up" a little on its own--and tried again. This time the car wouldn't move at all, but I had that feeling one sometimes gets that there was some kind of struggle going on just beneath me. It really did feel as though the car was being pulled in two different directions at once. Then it began to move backwards and forwards, though mostly backwards. I got out of the parking place and drove over to a smaller parking lot where there were no other cars, and I parked in such a way that I could just pull out forwards when I was ready to leave. If I could get myself to that kind of state, that is.

I called--yep--my mechanic, and he said that it sounded to him like the transmission was failing (apparently my recent discoveries vitiated the need for those fancy tests he had talked about earlier). He recommended that I return to Athens.

I avoided making my fifth or sixth mistake by not continuing on to Illinois. Instead, I got back on I-70 East and drove home. It took me a little while, because I couldn't go above 55 or 60. I was trying to keep the engine at about 3500 rpm, and I appeared to have only one gear, so this was rather tricky. It took me three hours to get back, and I went straight to--yep, my mechanic's shop. Here another mistake was made, but I am happy to say that, for once, it was not mine. I stopped in front of the shop, but my mechanic said to pull into the bay, and maybe it was partly my fault but then again he's the expert so who am I to second guess him but I did know that there was no reverse on my car and I probably should have said something to him about that but, well, I pulled into the bay. It took my mechanic about 10 seconds to figure out that the whole transmission was shot, and he said he'd have to order a rebuilt one and it would take a while so why not drive home and wait for the call. OK, so how to get the car out of the bay? Oh, yeah.

Interestingly, even in neutral the car would not move. The guys in the shop had to jack the thing up on one of those jacks with wheels and roll it out into the street, where I started it and managed to drive it home (we only live about two blocks from the shop, which is rather convenient when you have cars like ours).

So here I am today, in Athens, wishing I were in Illinois hearing about Plato's Timaeus, but grateful for the existence of just the sort of expertise that Plato was always talking about, because my mechanic is definitely one of the best, and if it weren't for him I would be even more nervous about cars than I already am. Someday the conference papers will probably be published, and I can read them at my leisure. But I won't get to ask questions--that's always the best part about hearing papers at a conference, and it's more like the dialectical setting that Plato recommends for philosophy. On the other hand, when I read them in journals I never find myself distracted by worries about how I'm going to get home.

Hitting the Wrong Target

Radical Orthodoxy is one of those movements that looks good on paper, but tends to be somewhat less than fully appetizing upon closer inspection. It's also rather difficult to characterize, because its various proponents tend to adopt rather different strategies and methodologies in their quest to, as it were, get to the roots of orthodox Christian belief. One thing they appear to have in common, however, is a rather vitriolic dislike for traditional Catholic sexual morality. Gerard Loughlin, author of the highly readable and intensely stimulating Telling God's Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology, practically foams at the mouth whenever he talks about the Church's teaching on homosexuality, and now there is an interesting "commentary" by John Milbank, author of The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, on the recent work of the Anglican Communion to bring some sort of order to the chaos that is the Western (read: American) branch of that Communion, in which he calls for radical re-appraisal of the social foundations of the Church's teaching on same-sex relations. Although he agrees that the American branch of the Communion acted precipitously and unilaterally, what's done is done:

The election of Gene Robinson was premature. There was no proper preceding discussion even within the United States that could have legitimated such a new departure in church practice. However, it has now happened according to a formally correct canonical procedure, and to oppose his consecration once it has occurred is likely to become de facto to support conservative opposition to homosexuality. There is not in reality any foreseeable possibility of reaching a general worldwide Anglican consensus on this issue. In some countries, a sense of theological outrage at the exclusion of gays (including Britain itself) has become so strong that prophetic witness cannot readily be held back.

For Milbank, as for the other self-styled radically orthodox, the central political question at stake here is the status of the Christian community that is called into existence by the Gospel. Gays are manifestly a part of that community, and the RO position appears to be that that, as it were, is that.

There are certain junctures in history when commitment on the substantive issue has to take precedence over concern with formal propriety.

The substantive issue, it seems, is sex (my emphasis):

In just what way can there be a sexual path that is also a spiritual path? In a sense, this is a debate about human ecology, and it is notable that today, as earlier in the twentieth century, those who are "conservatively" critical of over-technologization and the exploitation of nature also tend to be in favor of a more positive attitude toward sex (D.H. Lawrence, J.C. Powys and Eric Gill, for example). Inversely, those who are more conservative, puritanical and legalistic about sex are often those who fully embrace technological modernity, the ruthless exploitation of nature and economic liberalism.

Moreover, in reality nearly all mainline Christian opinion has veered more toward the former combination than the latter. Even the Roman Catholic Church has taken new steps this century to admit more fully that sex as such, rightly exercised, is productive of good. And even the pope seems to concede, unlike his predecessors, that homosexual orientation as such is not wicked. Already, then, there has been a shift of Christian identity. Christianity is the religion of love -- yet what is love? Is agape also eros? Is love of the neighbor entirely distinct from love of the friend and love of the lover, including physical love? Astonishingly, there has been no Christian consensus here: for example, Kierkegaard's view is almost the opposite of that of Aquinas (the latter seeing agape as essentially also philia and eros, the former absolutely not).

Although he "favor[s] the gay cause", Milbank admits that the "conservative" view is more realistic as an interpretation of the Scriptures and the Tradition. That's why we need to chuck both:

But what we need to see is that this biblical view of idolatry and sex fails to be radical enough. Building upon the spirit rather than the letter of Scripture, we should recognize that there can be non-idolatrous homosexuality just as there can, of course, be idolatrous heterosexuality. At its weakest, the biblical view that we are to bow down to no idols seems to mean "worship Israel's god, not other gods," or acknowledge only this mode of material mediation and not others (for example, writing but not pictures). This, then, coordinates with the idea that one kind of sex and not others is exclusively good and pure. Yet, at its profoundest, the Bible means by non-idolatry that the One God, beyond even the one and the many, is above all other powers of any kind whatsoever as their creative source.

That's actually a fairly interesting argument. It depends, of course, upon the idolatry interpretation being the only legitimate one of the purpose of the Hebrew strictures on certain forms of sexual activity. While that may, in point of historical fact, be the only valid interpretation of those texts, it is rather surprisingly fundamentalist and literalist to assume that such is the only possible reading of those texts. In particular, the Fathers were always quick to point out that the Old Testament, if it is to be understood properly, must be read in light of the New, something that the Hebrews who produced those texts, obviously, could not, in principle, have done. Personally, I don't see anything either very radical or very orthodox about making oneself a slave to positivistic readings of history. Does that commit me to a certain hermeneutic when it comes to the adumbration of my Church's social teaching? Well, yes, but then one's a priori commitments always and necessarily have such an effect, so it's nothing particularly to do with my own peculiar Weltanschauung as such that commits me to following the pope, even if he is finding himself a little more laid back about things than his predecessors when it comes to the entailments of a particular form of activity being categorized as "intrinsically disordered".

Milbank seems to want to play along with folks like me, however, and in doing so to have his cake and eat it too:

But to develop and deepen the grasp of idolatry in this way requires a recognition of the role of developing tradition and the authority of the church to recognize authentic developments. It requires a Catholic and not simply Protestant perspective (though many Protestants may have such a perspective).

Ouch! That's going to leave a mark! Just when I was accusing him of literalism and fundamentalism, too! But in the end it won't work that way: in order for this move to work, he must subscribe to a view of the development of doctrine that is in itself alien to the understanding of the Church that believes in the development of doctrine. In short, one man's development of doctrine is another man's heresy, and in this instance he's on the wrong end of that stick.

But once you've gone down that road, you can advocate really going down that road:

Since even many younger, quite conservative evangelicals are changing their minds on this issue, there is every reason to think that gradually resistance to gay practice will fade. Therefore, Catholic Christians should not feel afraid of taking a prophetic stand at this juncture for fear of schisms which are likely to prove only temporary, since they do not concern more perennial divergences of doctrine. Not to do so is likely further to compromise the church in the eyes of the world which, not at all without reason, believes that over this issue it is mired in fantastic and almost comical depths of hypocrisy.

There are a number of distinct issues involved in the theological question of the moral licitness of homosexuality as far as Christianity is concerned. One of them, surely, is the question of whether same-sex sexual activity is in itself licit or not. This issue is related to, but not the same as, the question of whether, say, masturbation by a lone person, or fellatio within a heterosexual marriage, or other non-penile/vaginal sorts of sexual activity are licit or not. Very often, when the issue of the question of homosexuality is raised within the context of the Christian Church, it is mistakenly confined to these merely technical details. I have read some fairly elaborate arguments to the effect that married heterosexuals may not licitly engage in oral sex and, while these arguments are sometimes interesting, sometimes, dare I say it, (intellectually) stimulating, they rarely, if ever, speak with much authority. It is possible, I think, to be a little too interested in the analysis of such problems.

Be that as it may, the discussion of homosexuality often degenerates into a discussion of what could possibly be wrong with loving people who are deeply committed to one another rubbing their genitals and other various appendages together. This discussion often turns on cultural phenomena: we in the West have a particular view of the matter that is due principally to historical accident, perhaps even to ancient Hebrew strictures against idolatry, and other cultures may view the matter differently and, indeed, biology itself makes no particular claim on how these things ought to go down (if you will pardon the expression), given that "in nature", as is often noted, animals are wont not only to rub their genitals against all nature of thing but also to eat their own young, eat their own feces, kill their own kin, and do all manner of other things that we find abominable in our benighted human delicacy.

If this were really all there were to it, I think, it might be worth arguing that unilateral resistance to the traditional understanding could, under certain circumstances, be warranted. Suppose, for example, that one lived at a time when the Church taught that chattel slavery is something that can be tolerated until such time as it is eliminated in an "organic" way. I would suggest that a unilateral decision to resist it with great ferocity right away, and to refuse to tolerate it at all, would not be an indiscretion in the least. It will always be morally licit to do the right thing immediately, even when someone with moral authority is telling you that it is also licit to wait for a while before doing the right thing. Just because it is licit to wait before acting, it does not follow that it is not better to act right away. That which is permitted is not necessarily required, even if what is required is not demanded immediately. So if the Church's understanding of same-sex sexual activity is fundamentally wrong-headed, then it is at least plausible that a unilateral decision to ignore that understanding immediately could be regarded as, if not licit, then at least not particularly illicit. On these kinds of grounds Milbank's view could, possibly, be tolerable.

Sadly, Milbank is right about the wrong thing. Whatever the origin of the teaching on homosexuality, it is wrong to suggest that it is the sort of teaching that could possibly develop in the direction in which Milbank thinks that it inevitably will. In this he is no different from those depressingly blind little people who go about confidently awaiting the day that women are admitted to Holy Orders. Furthermore, he says nothing about the question of the Sacramentality that is at issue. First and foremost, from the point of view of the contemporary kurfuffle, there is the matter of sex outside of Holy Matrimony. Whether or not gays ought to be recognized as able to confect that Sacrament, they have not as yet done so in a way that has been recognized as licit by the Church. So they are not only having sex outside of a Sacramental environment, they are ipso facto flouting the authority of the Church to administer the Sacraments to boot. Who's the Protestant now, Johnnie boy? But putting aside that rather complicated matter, we may proceed to a matter that is perhaps even more complicated: the theology of the body that lies behind the theology of Matrimony. In short, what of the Sacramental aspect of the "marital act" itself? Forget about idolatry: what sort of Sacramentality are we endorsing if we regard these sorts of acts as morally licit?

Possibly Milbank has not studied the theology of the body: I suspect that certain sorts of theologians find the whole thing somewhat, well, kitschy, and I would not be at all surprised to find theologians such as Milbank, Loughlin, Pickstock, and other RO types falling under that rubric rather readily. But it is a very serious issue, and whether this particular teaching will ever "develop" in the way Milbank wants it to surely hangs more squarely on this question than on any other. If sexuality is an essential element in the essence of man whereby he comes to share in God's creative aspect, then there is more to be said about this issue than that "love is a continuum from mere regard to blissful material union" or some such. Love may indeed be at least partly that, but to say that it is is not to say that that is all that it is. To know what love is in its entirety we must take the teachings of Our Lord in the greater context of our Tradition, within which it is clear that this teaching has been settled.

Once we realize that Milbank's argument fails on theological grounds, it takes on a new aspect. Instead of arguing that idolatry can take many forms, we find that he is saying something along these lines: we live in a materialistic, hedonistic age, and in that sort of an age, people are going to do this sort of thing whether we want them to or not, and really, why should we care so much that they do this sort of thing when the harm principle, as it is understood in this sort of an age, cannot be invoked? Live and let live. That is clearly a much weaker argument, at least from the point of view of someone who is really radically orthodox. Whether the Radical Orthodox really are radically orthodox remains to be seen.

Another Really Great Use of Science

Today I got an announcement from Princeton University Press for a new book by John Harris called Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making People Better. Here is the description that came in the announcement:

Decisive biotechnological interventions in the lottery of human life--to enhance our bodies and brains and perhaps irreversibly change our genetic makeup--have been widely rejected as unethical and undesirable, and have often met with extreme hostility. But in Enhancing Evolution, leading bioethicist John Harris dismantles objections to genetic engineering, stem-cell research, designer babies, and cloning to make a forthright, sweeping, and rigorous ethical case for using biotechnology to improve human life.

"[Harris] challenges conventional thinking about genetic engineering, stem-cell research, designer children and other concepts that make most people uneasy."--Richard Ha licks, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

I think the Nazis already tried this, but they were bad people; I'm sure that if really super enlightened people, you know, like the "Brights" and, say, experts in "bioethics", were in charge of things, we could really "improve human life". They could start by finding a way to engineer the human genome so that we are born with brains hard-wired in such a way as to make religious belief impossible.

I wonder if he's any relation to Sam Harris?

An Embarrassing Misunderstanding

The other day I attended a neighborhood association meeting at which several candidates running in the Athens mayoral race showed up to explain their platforms and talk to some potential voters. Two of them were fairly standard as mayoral candidates go, but one of them was a junior at Ohio University. Now, on the one hand, I have to say that I admire young people who have a sincere desire to take on new challenges and who, at the same time, believe that they can really make a difference if they just throw themselves into things and grasp the bull by the horns, so to speak. On the other hand, I had to avert my eyes just about every time this young fellow tried to answer a question from his audience, because his youth and inexperience were glaringly obvious in everything he said, and to be perfectly frank I felt just a little bit of embarrassment for him. The other fellows had obviously been involved in local politics for some time, and they knew about things like infrastructure, tax rates, easements, annexation of county land, and all the rest that goes with running the business end of a small town. The OU junior seemed principally interested in helping to get trash collected in student neighborhoods and trying to figure out what to do about the annual crisis that is the "Halloween Party" here in Athens. I don't doubt that someone of his intelligence could learn, in time to do most, if not all, of the other things involved in running Athens, but a large part of wisdom, according to Socrates, is coming to grips with what one doesn't know, that is, learning how to recognize our own shortcomings and make the adjustments necessary. When the young man realizes that he is not qualified to be mayor of Athens, that will be the beginning of his (possibly long) road to actually qualifying for the office he seeks to fill.

As I listened to this young man I was reminded of something that Fr. Al Kimel brought to my attention over the weekend. It is a review of Pope Benedict XVI's book, Jesus of Nazareth, by the New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann. Now here is a man who, it should be fair to say, "knows what he's talking about". He's not some junior from OU who's just shooting from the hip about history, theology, and textual criticism, he has real training and experience in these areas, and is widely regarded as an "expert in the field". And yet, reading his review, I could not avoid feelings of embarrassment not unlike those I felt at the neighborhood association meeting. He characterizes Pope Benedict's book about Jesus as "an embarrassing misrepresentation", because in his view understanding Jesus of Nazareth is a strictly empirical, historical problem. That means that any attempt to assess the meaning (not to mention content) of Jesus's life must itself be strictly empirical in nature--the temptation to interpret, especially in light of theology or claims of revealed truths, must be vigorously resisted. He goes so far as to complain about how "the book constitute[s] a thinly disguised exposition and defense of the Roman Catholic faith". Now, I'll grant you that "facts" of history don't always support every hypothesis that they're summoned to defend, but it is a bit much to be told, by someone who is evidently well educated, that a materialist empiricist will find anti-materialist and anti-empiricist claims difficult to swallow. To be told this with a straight face, on the assumption that it would be absurd to be anything but a materialist and an empiricist, is where one begins to avert one's eyes.

That, I am sorry to say, is really only half the story, as it turns out. For reasons known only to him, Lüdemann includes on his personal web site a link to a story about him in the online edition of The Tennessean with the headline "Praying nonbeliever remains 'open to the mystery'". Here we discover--and in a context where it is very difficult to avert one's eyes--that "Though he prays to no God, he prays nevertheless. He disdains atheism as arrogant." Shoo-ee, wouldn't want to be arrogant after all. Moreover, he is quoted as saying "We must remain open on the question of God in this age of the open society, where scientific investigation never ceases...I'm a praying person — not petitionary prayer, but prayers of gratitude. I pray to the mystery of life, thankful for being on this earth. I feel protected in the universe. I'm thankful, so I pray — a spontaneous act. It prays in me."

"I pray to the mystery of life"?!?

You know, on second thought, why avert one's eyes? After rolling them around a bit, why not stare, with the same morbid fascination with which one stares at a highway accident, fearing to see decapitations yet strangely drawn to the horrors lying on the road ahead (get it? Ahead? A head? Come on, it's funny!). When there is banality as deliciously steeped in unconscious self-parody as this on display, it would be sheer folly to pretend that the man has not blasted us all with the intellectual equivalent of a prodigious, window-rattling fart. So, like Leontius, son of Aglaion who, in Plato's Republic (4.439e) "saw some corpses lying at the executioner's feet...had an appetite to look at them but at the same time he was disgusted and turned away...but finally, overpowered by the appetite, he pushed his eyes wide open and rushed towards the corpses saying 'look for yourselves, you evil wretches, take your fill of the beautiful sight'", let us succumb to the appetite for an examination of the vapid and, pushing our eyes open, rush towards the claims of a man who prays when he knows that prayer is meaningless and who talks about the universe like some sappy, doe-eyed Saganite who's been licking too many toads.

As in the case of Leontius, our spectacle is also a corpse: the faith of a man who "once was a teenage evangelist" (good horror-movie title there: "I was a teenage evangelist") but now counts himself as a kind of Walt Whitman who can contain the whole universe ("It prays in me"). A scholar, he commits himself at a professional level to the empirical analysis (well, what he considers as empirical analysis, anyway) of the "facts" of history from the point of view of the "neutral" observer who is not under the dominion of any particular dogmatic perspective driven by ideology, and yet at the same time he speaks of the growth, in Europe, of "a Western spirituality that explains human beings to themselves...But it will not be an absolutist faith that excludes others. It will unite us, make us see our common fate.... I believe in the progress of knowledge". Sure, plenty of empirical evidence to support that hypothesis, after all. Just look how far religion and spirituality have progressed along the lines he suggests in the past 5000 years. Hey, are you averting your eyes over there? Surely you're not finding this embarrassing? Don't forget that Lüdemann is arguably proud of this interview, since he links to it on his own web page.

Now, I suspect that some of you are snickering up your sleeves at all this, but try to remember that it's just an interview in a newspaper. It doesn't do justice to the man's scholarship. For that, we can have a look at another link that Lüdemann provides on his web page, a link called "What does Easter mean to me?" Here's what it means to him:

For me, resurrection has to do with this present life, which is like a small raft afloat on a vast, dark ocean. An icy wind blows, and the people on the raft are united only by the bond of the death that will come to all of them, nor can they expect any compassion from the impersonal universe. But by coming to terms with the reality of such terrors in humility, wisdom and love, I discover the threshold of a new life. From now on I am no longer cowed by the notion that death is a punishment for my sin, nor do I hope for a resurrection. Instead, I accept my perishability, and that gives rise to a new Easter vision. Now impervious to the undertow of panic, I join with all humanity in the daily task of living in the light of love. Together we can make life stronger than death.

Well, of course it's easy to make fun, especially with this kind of material just sitting there for the reading. I suppose that my detractors might be thinking "Oh come now, if you're going to be shooting fish in a bucket, you'd better be sure those fish aren't red herrings!" In spite of the fact that the man's views on religion appear to be cribbed straight out of Joseph Campbell, it's fair to say that he does have some expertise in New Testament criticism, and we may forgive him his dinosaur-like positivism on the grounds that his views don't seem to matter very much to most folks.

I once wrote an essay (one of my personal favorites from this blog, actually; you can read it for yourself, if you are so inclined, here) in which I compared the worldview of folks like Gerd Lüdemann to being color blind. The capacity to believe about the New Testament what the Church teaches about the New Testament requires a capacity to see that the Lüdemanns (Lüdemen? Lüdemänner?) of the world appear either to have lost or, like dogs and color vision, perhaps, never to have had to the fullest extent to begin with. I noted in that essay the perplexity with which we would greet the claim of a man born blind that a faculty like vision could not possibly exist. Such a claim would seem ludicrous to those with sight, but of course it would be impossible for them to convince the person born blind that sight is not only possible but actual. The blind person could legitimately claim that our notion of "vision" is completely incompatible with the empirical evidence (available to him). And yet he would be mistaken, though he could never grasp, cognitively, the fact that he is mistaken. He may, perhaps, come to believe that he is mistaken. He might, that is, come to believe us when we tell him that he is mistaken. But it is important to see that his believing us is not the same thing as him coming to have a cognitive grasp of his mistake. In particular, and most importantly of all, it is not possible for him to come to have a cognitive grasp of his mistake by means of the cognitive apparatus available to him. In short, if he is to realize and understand his mistake at all, he needs us: he needs to believe the account we are giving him of the visual faculty, and he needs to accept it, well, on faith.

So here comes good ol' Gerd, and he cannot accept the truth of the Gospel as it is proclaimed by those benighted believers. Perhaps it is not entirely due to the fact that he is in the grip of a theory--I think that it is a more fundamental problem than that. I think he is a blind person who does not believe that there is such a thing as sight, and finds the "testimony" of all the sighted folks out there just so much psycho-babel and wishful thinking. Sure, wouldn't it be great to be able to "see" things? Once you believe that "sight" is possible, you start "seeing" things all over the place, but that is just self-fulfilling prophesy, or mere delusion, after all, because we all know that there isn't really any such thing as "sight". Besides, if you want assurance that "sight" is just a myth, all you have to do is to consider the fact that people make wildly differing claims about the things they believe they "see". If there really were such a thing as "sight", everyone would "see" exactly the same things, and there would never be any disputes about the objects of "sight".

At least the guy's good for a laugh, but I fear I may have disappointed Fr. Al, who may have wanted me to say something serious about that book review. If I could take the guy seriously, even for a second, I might have been able to come up with something, but I have to confess that in this day and age of folk-atheism, driven as it is by adolescent dinosaurs like Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, it's really hard to get worked up over things like this. When even some of the more intelligent folks can't come up with anything better than puerile posturing, it's difficult to see why any of us should care enough to mount a serious response. Why not just engage in the usual rubber-necking, and feast our eyes on the corpses of their "arguments"? Look for yourselves, you wretches! Aren't they beautiful?

Simplicity and Necessity

Suppose you hold the view, often attributed to Saints Augustine and Aquinas, that God is "absolutely simple". What follows from this? Well, it depends, of course, on what you mean by "absolutely" and "simple". It also depends on what you mean by "God" and "is". (In philosophy, everything is a matter of entailments from conceptual starting points.) Suppose what you mean by "God" is the Three Persons of the Christian Trinity; we'll look into those other concepts presently.

To say that something is "identical to its essence" is a metaphysical slogan that goes back to Aristotle. What the Stagirite had in mind is this: a substance, that is, a metaphysical unity or primary being, is something that can be considered under two aspects. On the one hand, the ontological aspect is the substance as such. For Aristotle, for example, a particular man or a particular horse would count as a substance, and each of these things is a material entity that is "informed", if you will, by virtue of belonging to a particular biological species. A particular human is a material manifestation of the species homo sapiens; the species determines what kind of thing the man is, and the matter determines which instantiation of that particular kind he is. From an ontological point of view, the man is a compound of matter and form. But from an epistemological point of view the man is just form: only the universal can be an object of knowledge, and the species is that universal, present in the matter/form compound. When Aristotle says that each thing is identical to its essence, what he means is that to know what that particular man is just is to know the form, the species, to which he belongs. But it should be obvious that there is another sense in which the particular man is not identical in a Leibnizian sense with that form, since the form is immaterial and the particular man is a matter/form compound. So there must be a distinction here between two different kinds of primacy: primacy in the order of ontology (matter/form compound) and primacy in the order of understanding (immanent form, essence).

Matter is pure potentiality, a principle of individuation in most metaphysical systems. God is not only immaterial, he is sui generis, hence there is no principle of individuation associated with the substance that is God. That is precisely why there is only one of him. (Within Christian theology, angels, too, are each of them sui generis, since they are also immaterial and matter is the principle of individuation in Christian metaphysics.) It is essential to note that the Divine Persons are not principles of individuation in God, else there would be three gods, not one God. There is a single, Divine Nature that the three Persons all share. In the case of the particular man, Jesus of Nazareth, there are, interestingly, two different natures compresent: the Divine Nature of the Second Person, and the human nature of the son of Mary. By reason of a peculiar metaphysics, the material, particular entity, Jesus of Nazareth, is identical to the Second Person of the Trinity, even though Jesus of Nazareth and the Second Person of the Trinity do not share all of their properties.

This is an important point to keep in mind. Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary, is a temporal being. That is, he came into existence at a particular point in time, and he perdured for a certain extent of time, and then he ceased to exist as a material entity. (This point may be open to dispute, depending upon what is intended in the Scripture by the expression "glorified body"; but at the very least it is true to say that Jesus came into existence at a particular point in time, which is not true of the Second Person of the Trinity.) Traditionally, identity is understood thus:

(x)(y)(F)[if (Fx iff Fy) then (x = y)]

Hence, in order for the Christian metaphysics needed for the doctrine of the Trinity to be compatible with the doctrine of Christology, a different conception of identity is required. My purpose here is not to provide an account of that conception of identity; it is sufficient for my purpose in this post to show that it is a non-standard notion to the extent that it fails to be Leibnizian.

Since the notion of identity required to make any sense out of Christian metaphysics is already a non-standard notion, folks who appeal to identity when making extravagant claims about this or that theological system need to be somewhat circumspect when claiming that identity makes nonsense of the system under consideration. For example, there are some who claim that, because God is what he is by necessity, and because he willed to create, if you think that God is absolutely simple you are committed to thinking that God's will to create was a matter of necessity and, hence, you are committed to the unacceptable view that God was not free when he created. This objection is often put forward as an objection to the Augustinian and Thomistic notions of absolute divine simplicity, though it could just as easily stand as an objection to the necessity of God's essence. Which problem you pick on is, apparently, a function of believing that one of the problems is not really a problem, while the other one is a problem.

There are different sorts of necessity out there. One kind is merely logical. For example, it is logically necessary that all bachelors are unmarried males. That is logically necessary because the meaning of the word "bachelor" guarantees the truth of the universal generalization. Another kind is what we might call "historical necessity". If we define "necessity" as "that which cannot be otherwise", then the facts of history, which cannot now be changed, are, in a very tenuous sense, necessary truths. By contrast, if we define "necessary" as "true in every possible world" (a definition that could satisfy only a 20th century analytic philosopher) we find that there is no such thing as "historical necessity", but there is such a thing as "rigid designators", and we may stipulate that, as a matter of reference, water, for example, just is H2O in every possible world and, hence, water is necessarily H2O (this is a controversial view).

And then there is a sort of necessity that seems to fall somewhere between these other examples. Take the act that is named by the phrase: "sacrifice by means of cutting the throat". This act has a particular consequence, namely, the death of the thing sacrificed. As a matter of physical fact, every thing that is sacrificed in this way dies. As a matter of necessity (if it were to survive, either by miracle or by surgical intervention, it would not be true to say of it that it had been "sacrificed"--even Our Lord had to die in order for his act to count as a sacrifice). Now, it should be obvious that the act named by the expression "sacrifice" is not the same thing, that is, is not identical to, the act named by the expression "die". And yet the act of sacrificing entails, by a kind of necessity, the act of dying. There is a necessary connection between the two without the two things being identical. There might be a question of boundary conditions here: perhaps the slicing of the throat in sacrifice is the "beginning of the process of dying" or some such. But it is possible to get a little too anal in these kinds of cases.

In what sense, then, is God identical to his essence, and what follows of necessity if his essence is a matter of necessity? One thing that does not follow is that every act of God's will is necessitated in the sense that he could not have willed otherwise. This is clear enough simply by considering that God's properties are all of them atemporal, and so "willing to create", if it is to be understood as applying to an atemporal being such as God, must be but one disjunct of a disjunctive property, "willing to create or not to create", only one of which can be realized as a matter of logical necessity. God has this property in precisely the same sense that I have the property "able to write a blog or not to write a blog", and God was as free not to create as I am free to refrain from writing this blog (as I am sure many folks are hoping). Quite obviously God is not identical to this property, any more than he is identical to any of his other properties. To say that God is simple is to say no more than that he is sui generis, it is not to say that he may not be analyzed, as Aristotle was fond of saying, logikôs. It might be fair to say that God is identical to his essence, and that his essence is, as it were, a metaphysical unity of all of his properties, but this conveys no necessity to any particular willing on God's part. At worst in involves us in the puzzle of what counts as identity in Christian metaphysics, but that will be a problem for any Christian, not just the Christian of an Augustinian or Thomistic stripe.

Why Should You Pay the Price?

Fr. Al Kimel, quondam Pontificator, has drawn my attention to an essay by a young man who is a traditionalist-minded Catholic who also happens to be gay, on the subject of Sacramental Confession. The part that interested Fr. Kimel was a section on temporal punishment and indulgences, but the entire essay is actually rather interesting, if somewhat tendentious. Indeed, I found the whole website rather interesting: the author has done a fair amount of homework on a number of topics, and often has interesting things to say about them.

What he says about indulgences is mostly handbooky stuff, but as I read through it I couldn't help thinking that, as handbooky as it all was, it needed to be read in the context of the overall essay as a whole, and doing so is something of a complicating factor in this particular case, because the author clearly rejects some very central elements of traditional Roman Catholic theology while at the same time averring that he is a very traditional, orthodox Roman Catholic. Same-sex attraction is the big exception for him, and in order to justify this exception he has done something rather interesting. Rather than jettison entirely the theological edifice that supports the arguments against same-sex attraction, he has simply accepted those parts of it that have nothing to do with sex in any direct way, and rejected those parts that touch on sex in any way. In particular, he has come up with a rather novel idea that can perhaps best be described as Relative Natural Law:

I strongly support the Church's traditional teaching that the proper order of man's nature must be observed if human dignity is to be maintained; that unchangeable objective principles operate here; and that these can be discerned by human reason. However, I believe the Church to be wrong in assuming that Human Nature is uniform: that what is natural for one is natural for all. Hence, I believe that She is mistaken in deducing first that one rule is good for all, and next that if a rule seems not to fit someone, then the nature of the individual in question is in some sense dis-ordered; and at odds with God's design and manifest intent.

I see this kind of thing in my own students all the time. I will ask them to write an essay comparing and contrasting two markedly different points of view, say, scientific realism and instrumentalism, and I will ask them to conclude the essay by explaining which view, in their opinion, is more tenable and why. Students are rather notorious for their wishy-washiness when it comes to saying what they think and why, so these essays often end up by claiming that the correct view is actually neither of the proposed views, but a new hybrid view that combines the very best parts of both of the old views. It doesn't matter that the new, hybrid view is logically incoherent, totally novel, and intellectually bankrupt, it has, for them, the virtue of suiting their needs at the moment.

Regarding indulgences, then, it is interesting to note that our author explains the history of the institution rather accurately, and concludes the Appendix with a set of discussion questions with his suggested answers:

* How can an indulgence, which is of a legal nature, heal the ravages of sin?
o It can't.
o One is never a better person by virtue of having gained an indulgence.
o One can only presume that the process of sanitization at the particular judgement is "instantaneous" if one has no "temporal debt" to discharge.

* If an indulgence only remits "temporal debt", then why is anything to be remitted after absolution?
o Once contrition is achieved, further temporal punishment aimed at eliciting repentance is superfluous.
o However, one still has an obligation to "make up for" the mess one has caused.
o This expiation can be expected to be hard, painful and distressing work.
o An indulgence frees the repentant sinner from the unpleasant task of discharging his/her "temporal debt".
o It is a means of solidarity.
o The Church as a body, and Jesus in particular, shoulders the responsibility of binding up the painful wounds of the Cosmos, rather than insisting that those who caused the hurt do so.

* Is not the modern condition for the reception of an indulgence silly?
o A total distancing from sin is required.
o This disposition is symptomatic of complete spiritual health.
o It would seem to be sufficiently meritorious in itself so as to discharge any obligation to expiate one's sins.
o On the other hand, it is not clear that the condition is quite so meritorious.
o Nevertheless, this prevents exactly that class of person who is most in need of an indulgence from obtaining one.
o It is therefore pastorally inept!

With regards to the first question, I think I am in agreement with our author: I myself do not see how any system of retribution can be interpreted as actually setting wrongs right. This is a point often made by those who argue against the old lex talionis by pointing out that "executing a murderer does not bring his victim back to life". Such a crime cannot be "made right", all one can do is hope that the demands of justice are met in meting out punishment, but there doesn't seem to be any a priori reason to think that it is a necessary condition on justice that reparation for an act take on some sort of physical manifestation of the sort suggested by the traditional understanding of "temporal debt" due to sin. Indeed, it raises the rather uncomfortable question of why the kosmos should be constituted in the particular way that it is.

In this regard, I think that our author does a fairly good job of giving a plausible account in his discussion of the second question. I particularly like the bit about Christ and his Body the Church shouldering "the responsibility of binding up the painful wounds of the Cosmos, rather than insisting that those who caused the hurt do so." This appears to be what Calvary is all about, and if we are to believe that Calvary was necessary in any sense, surely this is the sense in which it was necessary.

The final question draws attention to a historical dissonance: the institution of indulgences grew out of a time when penances were public, extreme, and to be done prior to being recognized by the Bishop as readmitted to Communion. Historically, there were certain sorts of cases where the penitent would be readmitted earlier than was ordinarily permitted according by the Canons. In some cases the penance could be waived entirely and readmittance granted as soon as Confession was made. At this time, the public penance prior to readmittance just was the "temporal punishment due to sin", hence to have it lessened or waived was to be granted an "indulgence" in a rather straightforward and ordinary way. Only much later, when the Rite of Readmittance was no longer in use, did the practice of granting indulgences fall prey to the objection raised here: what's the point of having a certain part of one's penance lessened, or waived entirely, if one has already been forgiven for the sin? Well, the standard answer goes, you've been forgiven for your sin, but you haven't "paid the penalty for it" yet. This raises some rather uncomfortable questions about what it means to have one's sins "forgiven": when the Prodigal Son returned, his Father welcomed him with open arms as soon as he said the words "Father, I have sinned against you". We hear nothing in that story about that Prodigal Son having to say five Our Fathers before he can have any of that fatted calf.

For that matter, given that the early penances were so strict (in some cases involving exclusion from the Church for up to nine years, no readmittance to Communion for three more years after that, with lots of going about in public with sackcloth and ashes), one can only look at modern penances with a raised eyebrow. My parish priest routinely asks me to "go out into the Church and say a short prayer for...". And that's my "temporal punishment due to sin". One begins to wonder why anyone would seek an indulgence for something like that. Gee, I can't believe I have to pray for something today! That's so burdensome, it's like being punished for something! Even if we imagine that the idea is supposed to be that we are giving up a part of ourselves for a little while to do something that otherwise we would not do, it is hard to see why that is a punishment due to sin rather than just an everyday Christian obligation.

But I don't want to gripe too much about contemporary penitential practices lest my parish priest read this and decide to have me start standing in front of the Church every Sunday in Lent singing songs from Glory and Praise. I'm much more interested in the question of the relationship between Absolution and "being in debt". To be absolved from sin is literally to be "set free from" the sin, "acquitted" of it: one ceases to be charged with the wrong. If sin is a broken relationship with God, then being set free from that brokenness is to have that brokenness somehow healed. But we, obviously, cannot do the healing ourselves, sins it is precisely due to an act of our own will that the brokenness is there in the first place. We express a certain cooperativeness by repenting and turning to God for forgiveness, but that in itself does not reestablish the relationship as it was before the sin. To accomplish that, God must be in on the deal. Hence, the healing is miraculous precisely because a sin against God can be fully wiped away only by God. There is no natural power that can accomplish such a thing since there is no natural power to which God is subject (hence the miracle stories in the Gospels that depict Christ as controlling natural events may be read as metaphors for God's greatest power of all, the power to forgive sin).

So I go to Confession and receive Absolution. My relationship with God is fully restored. Oh, except now I have to "pay the penalty". Why? What is accomplished by that? Why should I pay the price? Because that's how God ordered the kosmos? Suppose you have a headache, and you ask a friend for help. He gives you ibuprofen, you take it, and your headache goes away. You say "Wow, how did that work? How did that pill make my headache go away?" Your friend says "It did it by means of its headache-relieving powers." Talk about your unsatisfying, insufficient explanations. And yet, to say that a price must be paid because that's how God ordered the kosmos is no better, as explanations go.

Fortunately there is another explanation that is a little better, though only a little. Penance is a kind of virtue: the virtue of being disposed to hatred of sins one has committed. Every virtue is a capacity, that is, a potentiality to act in a certain way as a matter of habit. Hence, to perform a penance is to actualize a potentiality, and actuality is ontologically prior to potentiality. In short, when one performs a penance, one manifests a virtue and is, hence, actually virtuous, as opposed to merely having a disposition to act virtuously and thus being merely potentially virtuous but not actually so. Repentance is clearly a necessary condition for genuine forgiveness of sin, but repentance as such is an internal mental state; penance is the outward manifestation of that inner state. One can only dismiss the necessity of having outward signs of inner states if one dismisses the whole notion of Sacramentality, and that's not likely to happen in our religion. To this we may add that, if properly understood, it seems that to be doing penance is in itself to be actually hating sin and, hence, being actually (rather than merely potentially) free from sin, because it seems that a sound mind cannot at one and the same time genuinely hate and genuinely will the same act. So our penance is not only an outward manifestation of our inward hatred of sin--a sacramental aspect that, arguably, carries first-person deixis--it is also an outward manifestation of our own sinlessness (however temporary), which is clearly a sacramental aspect with second-person deixis, that is, it is a form of evangelization.

Notes on Substance

Jonathan Prejean, one of the most intelligent Catholic apologists on the block, posted some correspondence with Ramond Maxwell Spiotta at Crimson Catholic yesterday, and I found all of it fascinating but the discussion of hypostasis, being, and substance particularly so. The word "substance" has taken on a rather restricted, ahistorical meaning, principally due to the historical accident of the rise of a new form of empiricism in the 16th and 17th centuries that led to the final dominance of materialism in Western intellectual history.

These days when one hears the term "substance" one thinks almost automatically of something material. "What is the substance in that beaker?" "What is this substance on my shoe?" "The surface of the water was coated with an oily substance." But the identification of "substance" with "matter" is an accident of history, dating from the Scientific Revolution when the dominant materialism assumed that everything that exists is material. The word "substance", philosophically, just means "something that exists as a metaphysical unity", and if you're not a materialist you might be willing to endorse the idea that non-material things exist as metaphysical unities, things like God, or one's own soul, or numbers. But if you're a materialist, obviously, only material things can exist as metaphysical unities (indeed, most materialists also chuck the notion of a metaphysical unity) and so only material things can be substances and so when one says "substance" one means "some kind of material thing."

The English word "substance" is derived from the Latin term substantia, which in turn is derived from sub, "under", and stare, "to stand". A substance, then, is something that "stands under" something else. This becomes clearer, if only a little so, when we note that the Latin term is itself a translation of a Greek word with the same meaning, hupokeimenon, from hupo, "under", and keimenai, "to lie" or "be situated". That which lies under something else, according to Greek metaphysics, is the thing in itself, and that which it underlies are the thing's accidental properties. The Greeks, particularly Plato and Aristotle, were interested in giving a metaphysical explanation of change, particularly the problem of how it is that objects, principally objects like human beings but also things like tables, rocks, bodies of water, etc., can at one and the same time be in a process of change, that is, becoming different, and yet remain the same thing through time. For example, a human being is conceived as a single cell, grows into a fetus, is born an infant, grows into a toddler, a child, an adolescent, an adult, and then dies. At each of these various times the human is both very different than it was before and will be in the future but also the same thing that it was right from the beginning and will remain right until the end.

Early Greek philosophers had been fascinated by this state of affairs. Heraclitus, a Greek speaking philosopher living in Ephesus (on the west coast of what is today Turkey) found the process of change itself to be the most fundamental phenomenon in the kosmos, and he argued, in effect, that to be anything at all just is to be some sort of process or other. By contrast, the Eleatic philosopher Parmenides (Elea is in southern Italy) maintained that being implies stasis: how can something be said to be if it is engaged in some sort of process of changing? To change is to go, for example, from one state, call it S, to a different state that we may call not-S, and that latter state, not-S, is inherently a kind of non being, that is, it is the non-being-of-S. Since it is, on this account, a kind of non-being rather than a kind of being, Parmenides held that it is meaningless to talk about it, hence we can never speak meaningfully about the sorts of processes that Heraclitus held were the fundamental constituents of the world. Instead there are only beings. Or rather, there is only Being: Parmenides also held that all being is one, since if we were to differentiate one being from another we would thereby be admitting again the possibility of non-being. For example, to say that being A is a different being than being B is to say that B is the-non-being-of-A, which Parmenides holds is meaningless. So everything is one.

Into this mix came the Platonists (we may include Aristotle and his school under this rubric). Plato, famously, held, with Parmenides, that the beings (in Greek, ta onta) of the world do not change: they are eternally what they are, and they are what they are without reference to the being of any other thing. Hence they are ontologically prior. These beings Plato often refers to as ousiai, a noun form derived from the Greek verb to be. They are literally "the beings", then, but the word ousia is usually translated as "substance", so the ousiai are what Plato holds to be the substances of the kosmos, the things that are the metaphysical unities.

What are these beings, according to Plato? We get some indications of what he thinks they are in dialogs such as Phaedo, Republic, Symposium, Parmenides, and Sophist, but Plato nowhere argues for their existence directly and nowhere lays out a formal theory of being. Instead we must garner what little information we can from these sources and cobble together a theory for him. One clue comes from the fact that Plato speaks of these beings as paradeigmata, paradigms or examples, and as eidê, images or forms (the word eidos comes from a Greek verb meaning "to see" or "to look"--the beings literally are the shape, or form, of things, what they "look like"). What this seems to mean to him is that in spite of the fact that things like human beings and chairs and dogs and oak trees undergo many observable changes, there is still something that they continue to be like. A particular human, for example, whether she is tall or short, light or dark, blond or brunette, is a thing that is derived from a kind of blue print, the paradeigma of all human beings, what we may call The Human Itself. All other particular human beings are also derived from this example, and according to Plato it is the example, the paradeigma or eidos, form, that is the genuine being in this picture. The particular human being is not a being in this most important, Platonic sense, but a derivative thing, a shadow or an image of a being.

Plato was not a materialist, so for him it was not puzzling to say that the most real beings of the kosmos are non-material entities that serve as blueprints for the material entities that we observe all around us. Indeed, on his view, the things that we call beings, the particular humans, horses, plants, etc., are in some sense not really beings at all, and that is extremely puzzling to modern sensibilities, hence there are few Platonists out there these days other than among professional philosophers (and perhaps some mathematicians).

Platonism was among the dominant philosophical schools during the early centuries of the Christian era, and as Christians became better educated and started thinking and writing about their religion, they naturally turned to the language of the philosophical schools for their theological language. Indeed, much early Christian theology is clearly influenced by Platonism in its metaphysics and moral theory. This fact is not always congenial to all Christians these days, but it is undeniable, and has come about as close as anything can come to being a proven fact in the scholarship bearing on the Patristic period. In particular, the Greek Fathers borrowed much of the terminology of Neoplatonism (which, in spite of its name, is really an attempt to return to the original form of Platonism of Plato's own school) in their writings, where we find such terms as ta onta, ousia, hupokeimenon, and eidos deployed in pretty much the same way that any ordinary Platonist would deploy them. Some Christians are willing to admit the borrowing of terms from Neoplatonism but deny that Christian metaphysics are in any way Platonic, but that is mostly ideological posturing: the similarities are striking and very real, even though there are also some obvious differences.

Central to any Platonic theory of substance, from Plato through Aristotle to Plotinus and beyond, is the notion of substance as cause, a notion that has disappeared entirely from 21st century materialist theories of substance (to the extent that there are such theories). On Plato's account, a substance causes particular things to be the things that they are: the form of The Human Itself, which is an immaterial entity, stands in a causal relation to all the particular humans out there such as Socrates or Gregory or Thomas. Each of them is human by virtue of "participating" somehow in the Form, having a "share" of it, to use Plato's term (methexis). Plato nowhere explicates this notion sufficiently to suit most philosophers, and I confess I find it rather mysterious. I think Aristotle may have agreed with me, because in his hands the notion of substance as cause is rather straightforwardly explanatory: we can explain a substance by talking about its formal, final, efficient, and material causes, all of which are nothing more than ways of explaining where the substance in question comes from (for example, the "efficient cause" of a substance is simply who or what brought it into existence; the "material cause" is what matter it is made out of, etc.). If I were to categorize myself in this way, I would have to say that I am more of an Aristotelian Platonist than a Platonic Platonist, but perhaps things are confusing enough around here already without getting into that.

One of the most important importations (phew) into Christianity from Neoplatonism is the notion of a hupostasis. This is a rather interesting word, because it is quite close, etymologically, to the Latin word substantia: it comes from the Greek hupo, meaning "under", and stasis, "standing", and yet it was not used by the earliest Platonists to mean "that which stands (or lies) under processes of change". As we have seen, the word hupokeimenon was used for that. Instead it referred to the more classically Platonic idea of that which stands under the outer appearance, that is, it refers to the inner, objective reality of some entity. The use of the term developed over time; in some writers it is used interchangeably with ousia, in others it develops a more technical sense: Person; but there is often disagreement about how best to employ it. John Philoponus, a sixth century Christian philosopher and commentator on Aristotle, famously argued that the word basically means the same thing as "nature" and so it doesn't make any sense to say that the Son, being one Person, also has two natures. (It's worth noting that Philoponus makes this argument by appealing to an ambiguity in the term "nature", but I will not enter into that debate here.)

I can't lay claim to being any kind of expert metaphysician, but I am quite impressed by folks like Jonathan Prejean who have such admirable talents at making these difficult and obscure matters seem clear and obvious, and who, in addition, often do so in the context of apologetics, a valuable ministry in itself.

You Will Know Them By Their Love

Mike Liccione has posted a nice reaction to my essay on his meditation on the narrow gate. I suspect that he and I are basically on the same page regarding the broader issues, but it seems to me that there are some finial points on which we do not quite see eye to eye. In particular, he questions my language when I referred to those who carry signs that read "God hates fags" as exhibiting the most distasteful sort of fundamentalism. He notes my terms, and then retorts by proof-texting me from St. Paul:

I find that [use of the expression "distasteful fundamentalism"] rather odd. St. Paul says [emphasis added]:

Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor boy prostitutes nor sodomites nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.

Is this a "particularly distasteful" form of "fundamentalism," no better than that exhibited by people "wearing placards that read God hates fags?" Is it really incompatible with Jesus' message of love?

I suspect that Mike is just playing coy here, because with his education and, indeed, pastoral background, he is surely aware of the difference between the sort of language that St. Paul is using (which, though not strictly technical in nature is certainly very different from the sorts of terms one finds in, say, Aristophanes, who refers to homosexuals with terms that could well be translated into English with phrases like "wide-ass" or "fudge-packer") and that deployed by the aforementioned placard-bearers.

We may begin by noting that the two contexts are very different. St. Paul is addressing his own converts, people who, one assumes, were confident of his love and concern for them, even when they happened to stumble, and even in that context he uses language that is simply descriptive, not abusive. The placard-bearers are addressing strangers who are the very people against whom they are carrying their placards, and they are addressing them in the vilest of terms, expressing thoughts that no civilized person ought to express (God does not "hate fags", even if he does hate homosexual activity). It will do no good to say, But the sin of which they are guilty is more vile than the terms used to describe it, for that is just a sophistic excuse for heaping abuse on someone whom one doesn't like or approve of. Our Lord did not say to the adulterous woman, "You whore, don't you know God hates people like you?" Indeed, of all the sinners with whom he had dealings, the only ones he treated roughly were those selling items in the Temple, and the only ones to whom he addressed deliberately abusive words were the hypocrites who deemed themselves holier than the common faithful Jew by virtue of their adherence to the letter of the Law. I think it's fair to say that your average homosexual person who is just on his way to school or work can hardly be assumed to fit into either one of those categories.

Basically, there are two ways to tell a person who engages in homosexual sex that what he is doing is wrong. You can say to him, Look, God wants what's best for you, and by virtue of the way he established the created order, what's best for you is to live your life in this way, the way described by Our Lord, and the way you're living now is not consistent with that sort of life, so whether you realize it or not you are turning away from God, almost as if a heliotropic flower were to turn away from the sun and die. Or you can say, You despicable fornicating fag, God hates you and you're going to burn in hell forever.

Perhaps there is an underlying commonality to these two messages, but I doubt it. Doctrinally, perhaps, they have a common point of reference in the moral wrongness of homosexual activity. But Mike asks whether these two ways of talking to the homosexual are really all that different. I ask the same question, but I will leave it to my reader to discern what I think the answer is.

It has become trite, perhaps, to engage in such sloganeering as "Hate the sin, love the sinner." Probably a lot of the folks at the receiving end of such dicta find them tiresome, condescending, or both. But there is a certain amount of truth to it nonetheless. It seems as plain to me as a Quaker on his day off that St. Paul does not hate homosexuals, he hates their sin, but the placard carriers give every reason to think that they hate the sinners themselves at least as much, if not more than, the sin. Given what I am about to say just below I will bracket that and admit that it is just an assumption, not something I know for sure; but my work in the philosophy of language has, perhaps, predisposed me to think of speech acts as meaningful at more than just one level. BTAIM, for all the language of wailing and gnashing of teeth one finds in the more alarmist Gospels of Mark and Matthew it is hard to escape the conclusion that the overall message is supposed to be one of good news, not bad, and that talk of being cast outside into the never ending fire is not intended to frighten or convey God's hatred of you but is merely a description of what happens when a heliotrope fails to trope towards the helios.

Someone might object at this point, Whoah there, cowboy, what are you doing? You know perfectly well that you agree with what Mike says about just about everything, this included, so why the hand-wringing bleeding heart stuff all of a sudden? In particular, you're going to make me ROTFLMAO if you try to say that you don't agree 100% with Mike about Catholics who knowingly and obstinately refuse to assent to DMT!

Well of course I agree with him about that. But again there is a tension between what he and I both assent to regarding DMT--the talking the talk part--and the pastoral side of how we go about walking the walk. On the one hand, Mike seems to have in mind especially those educated Catholics who, in some sense, "ought to know" what the teachings of the Church are, to what degree they are authoritative, and what all the ramifications are of assenting to them:

One kind [of dissenting Catholic] is the sophisticated cleric or theologian who produces finely wrought rationalizations for rejecting DMT despite having been given every tool and reason for knowing better. Such a person sets themselves up as part of a magisterium opposed to the Magisterium. It is just such people for whom the classic formula "let him be anathema" (Galatians 1:9) is meant. They are heretics; if unrepentant, they will be severely judged. And they need to hear that in one way or another.

I'm not all that sure what's supposed to happen to the other 99.999999% of dissenting Catholics, but even regarding this 0.0000001% it seems somewhat tendentious to assert, in such a broad fashion, that their reasons for rejecting DMT "despite having been given every tool and reason for knowing better" are mere rationalizations. This presupposes that they are not in earnest in their beliefs, which strikes me as a particularly hubristic presupposition to make about anyone, but especially about someone who's brain one does not personally inhabit. Granted, it is fair to assume that an intelligent person, given p and if p then q, will infer q, but it is a well known fact that plenty of really smart people fail to make even the most obvious of logical inferences for perfectly benign reasons that have nothing to do with rationalization. While it is true that such persons are duty bound to submit themselves to the teaching authority of the authentic Magisterium, I doubt very much that they see themselves as setting up the para-magisterium that Mike is talking about, even if that is, de facto, what they are doing. But the canonical definition of "mortal sin" posits three conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient (CCC 1857):

For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: "Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent."

This is usually interpreted to mean that the sinner must know that his act is sinful and at the same time will said sinful act. I doubt very much that the clerics and theologians Mike has in mind see their actions in that light, hence their sin is probably only venial.

As for the remaining vast majority of folks who reject DMT for whatever reason, usually ignorance but sometimes weakness of will, all I can say is that Mike Liccione of all people ought to know that he treads on thin ice here. He has written at length and with great knowledge and insight about the Church's teaching nulla salus extra ecclesiam, and he knows better than most of us that mere ignorance of the truth of any particular DMT is not a sufficient condition for exclusion from heaven. Can ignorance explain ("explain" is different from "excuse" but in the present case it is fair to say that if genuine ignorance is the correct explanation then it is also the beginning of an excuse) the behavior of those homosexuals who steadfastly refuse to accept the Church's teaching about homosexual sex? According to Plato it can. In fact, according to Plato ignorance explains every moral failing. One can, of course, refuse to be a Platonist about morality, but to do so here would be to beg the question against the Platonist who wants to assert something about the eschaton. I don't see how a defender of the Church's position regarding sin, free will, and all the rest is automatically committed to anti-Platonism, but perhaps he is. I'll wait to see what Mike has to say on this--perhaps he will convince me to chuck the Republic and all it's lies and empty promises.

To my mind, much of the present discussion is actually a tempest in a teapot. I don't disagree with Mike that folks who openly flout DMT are irritating, but I really doubt that the central point of the narrow gate passage for the present day Church, whatever the authorial intent may have been, has much to do with such issues--which is really why I wrote as I did in the first place. Of course, writing that way from a perspective like mine is bound to let you in for some heavy teasing. John Farrell has already remarked in a comment that he suspects me of crypto-Balthasarian universalism, and I don't doubt that some of my other regular readers are snickering up their sleeves at me. But I guess where Mike and I finally part company is not so much in the doctrinal or even methodological areas, but in the pastoral. He seems to think that it's a good idea to tell people that they might burn in hell if they don't change their ways, and perhaps, in a utilitarian sense, he's right. If someone dies in a state of mortal sin, they will not attain the Beatific Vision, and for them that would be a Very Bad Thing. Personally, I wonder to what extent such a person is going to be affected by threats of burning in hell, but who knows--if that's the only way to reach them, then maybe it couldn't hurt to try it. What worries me more, however, than the prospects of saving some very tiny percentage of the sinful population by scaring the bejesus out of them with medieval stories of the torments of the various Circles of Hell, is the pastoral damage that could be done to those more thoughtful souls who will rightly see this kind of talk for what it is: coercion. Coercion is in itself immoral, and I doubt very much that Our Lord had coercion in mind when he told the parable of the narrow gate, though it is possible that some of his earliest followers (including the redactors of Mark and Matthew) were not above that sort of thing, so it is, perhaps, not wrong to say that the text can be so interpreted. Whether it ought to be so interpreted, however, is another matter.

So I'm not a crypto-Balthasarian universalist: for all I know, Hell is very crowded. But I'm not going to go around telling people that it is as a matter of pastoral policy and, quite frankly, the question of how many souls are in hell, who's going there, and why, strike me as questions that ought to be the furthest thing from the mind of a Christian. It's far better, I think, to tell them the story of the narrow gate in the context of the story of the prodigal son. The gate is narrow because it is difficult to walk the walk, not because a lot of people have failed to go through it or are in imminent danger of going through the wide gate. It is possible, after all, for an entire population to get through a gate that is only wide enough for one person, it's just a matter of time, and the forgiving father is waiting on the other side, looking for each one of us. But however many persons wind up going through the narrow gate, that is the one that we must point at, not the other one, and I really wonder what the interest in the other one is for some people. If we're allowed to speculate about the motives of certain doubting clerics and theologians, after all, why not speculate about the motives of the gate pointers, too? Justice is one thing, but it's in the hands of Our Lord, in the end, and we must trust his judgment, not our own. As a practical matter, it just seems more sensible to talk about salvation rather than damnation, hope rather than fear, love rather than hate. As Aristotle was fond of remarking, there are many ways to act viciously, but only one way to act virtuously--virtuous behavior, he said, is like the bulls-eye on a target in that it is what one ought to aim at, though it is easy to miss. Still, when the archery instructor is telling you what to do, he says "aim for the bulls-eye", he does not say "don't hit any of those circular rings, whatever you do!" A golf instructor will tell you to "get it in the hole", not "keep it from going anywhere but in the hole!" It's a matter of focus, emphasis, and direction. If the Good News is to be news about what is Good, then the "utility" of accentuating the negative is highly questionable, in my view.

How Narrow is Narrow?

Mike Liccione of Sacramentum Vitae has an interesting and thought provoking meditation on Sunday's Gospel. It was so thought provoking for me that I tried to post a comment on it at Sacramentum Vitae, but Haloscan worked against me, cutting my comment in half and leaving out the most interesting part. So rather than try to post a comment again over there I'm just going to try to reconstruct here what I wrote. I'll start by copying what did get through over there.

To begin with, I think there's much to agree with in Mike's post--for example, I agree that for some Catholics accepting or rejecting certain Church teachings appears to be more a matter of convenience than anything else, and it also seems to be true to say that religious belief has become something of a pro forma matter for some. But taking note of such social phenomena is, I think, a dangerous background for the interpretation of passages such as the one on offer, which was clearly aimed at Jews who assumed that adherence to the letter of the law was a sufficient condition for the virtue of piety. There is a sense in which it would be "easy" to just do what the Commandments command in a kind of knee-jerk, thoughtless way, like an automaton, and clearly the gates of heaven are "narrower" than that. But while admitting that the gate is narrower than that, just what are we committing ourselves to? Just how narrow do we want to say that gate really is?

It seems to me that there is often a danger, in attempting to explicate passages such as this Gospel or other passages having to do with "getting into heaven" or "avoiding hell", of treading too closely to what amounts to a kind of spiritual utilitarianism. It seems that analyses such as the one Mike offers make out heaven as a kind of reward for good behavior, hell a kind of punishment for bad, when in fact it seems to me that a more sophisticated analysis would see both in terms of standing in a certain sort of relationship with God, that is, a state in which a particular soul can be more or less in communion with God.

On this view, there's nothing to prevent everyone from being "saved" if what one means by "saved" is "not turning away entirely from God". While Mike worries that this leads to a false universalism, it seems clear to me that some people turn away more completely from God than others, and so it seems at least possible that there will be differing degrees of beatitude. Sure, it is just as obviously possible that some people will, in the end, turn away completely from God and hence not get through that narrow gate at all, but to suggest that the narrow gate passages in the Scriptures are intended to warn some folks that they just aren't going to get in at all unless they toe the line in a certain way, while it may have some connection to the underlying historical background of the texts in question, seems to me to be a rather useless reading for this day and age, when everyone struggles on a daily basis with matters of faith and morals, and it is just plain silly to suggest that the principal emphasis here is that there is a certain, clearly drawn line at which the bar is set and if you don't make it over that line you aren't getting through that gate. One has only to consider the spiritual tribulations of Mother Teresa and others who experience the "dark night of the soul" in an intense way to realize that, when you get right down to it, in the end it really is only the objective standards that anybody has any business worrying about. As Saint Augustine said, love God and do as you please--the subtext being, apparently, that if you genuinely love God then doing what you please will also be pleasing to God, but I note that Augustine says a lot less about what "genuinely" loving God is in explicit terms and a lot more about his own struggles to love God in that way. Worries about particular acts of self-sacrifice or specific degrees of commitment are misplaced.

This is not to deny the truth of Mike's complaint that "it is common to assume that if you more-or-less believe...you will be saved in the end", but I think it is also too common, at least in certain quarters, to use passages such as the narrow gate passage to frighten or even coerce those more-or-less believers into "accepting" things that they may not be quite ready to absorb fully into their hearts. I'm not sure what that kind of acceptance really amounts to in the end, and as long as we're approaching the matter in such a utilitarian way I'm not so sure I see the utility of scaring people into "belief" by threatening them with hellfire. For one thing, it reeks of a variety of fundamentalism that is particularly distasteful, the kind that walks around wearing placards that read "God hates fags".

Mike is surely right about two things: "none of us [is] strong enough to" to enter through the narrow gate on our own, without grace, and "some people who are formally in the Church, the household of God, are not followers of Christ in their hearts, despite claiming to be and having a velleity, as distinct from a will, to do so. And they show that by how they live." But there is a tension in Mike's post between these two ideas. On the one hand, he, like me, is irritated by folks who claim to be Catholic (or even just Christian), who talk the talk, but who don't really walk the walk. This is where the narrowness of the gate seems particularly noticeable. On the other hand, however, it is just as clear that none of us can get through that gate without grace. We must strive to live in accordance with grace, but grace would not be grace if its efficacy were contingent on the degree of our effort to live in accordance with it. We don't want to go all semi-pelagian here.

The passage about the narrow gate must be balanced against the passage where Our Lord says that his yoke is easy, his burden light. In his day there were religious authorities who heaped all sorts of requirements upon the faithful, making so many things necessary for piety as to make piety impossible. Christ declared that a loving relationship with God is all that is necessary for salvation, and that such love is light and easy, because it is natural to us. While I may agree that the Church's teachings are all of them true, I cannot agree that the acceptance of every single one of them is a necessary condition for getting through that gate, no matter how narrow it is. Mike is right to complain that too many Catholics who ought to know better express doubts about which pronouncements of the Church are and which are not to be regarded as binding or even infallible; but to emphasize such a fact in the context of the narrow gate passage is dangerously misleading, in my view. I'm as irritated as the next conservative Catholic that too many folks, Americans in particular, make too many excuses as to why they can't accept, for example, the Church's teaching on artificial contraception, or divorce, or what have you. But I would not want to connect the acceptance of such things to the passage about the narrow gate, since I think it falsely suggests that "gaining heaven" is some sort of game of rule-following, to be won or lost by the persons who follow best the greatest number of most important rules, thus turning our religion away from the pursuit of God's presence in our hearts and in our lives and into the merely intellectual pastime of trying to figure out what all the rules are. The very thing that Jesus disliked about the Pharisees of his own day. While it may very well be the case that having God in your heart and in your life is not unrelated to knowing what all the rules are, the two cannot be co-extensive, otherwise Christ's burden would be neither easy nor light. What does it mean to say that a burden is easy and light if in fact nobody is able to shoulder it? Ought implies can, and can implies understanding of human nature.

So while I agree with the substance of Mike's complaints about lackadaisical religious belief and slipshod catechesis leading to bankrupt theology in many self-styled believers, especially in the materialistic West, I'm less comfortable with the connection he seems to want to draw between outward manifestations of piety or even intellectual assent to particular doctrines and the Gospel passage from last Sunday. This means that I also agree with Mike that getting through that narrow gate is a matter of having your heart in the right place, a matter, as Augustine said, of loving God and doing what you please, and that doing that might, indeed, be very difficult. Difficult, but not impossible, and not necessarily rule-bound. First century thinking about piety was eudaimonistic, not utilitarian.

Textbook Spirituality

Another book review came my way today from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, this time it was James Wetzel's review of John Peter Kenney's recent book The Mysticism of Saint Augustine: Rereading the Confessions (Routledge, 2005). I almost let this one go unnoticed, since Routledge is principally a student textbooky sort of publisher, not typically a source of really high level scholarship they way Oxford or Cambridge often are, but James Wetzel is a noted authority on Augustine (presently he's at Villanova) so I thought it would be worth reading just to get his take on things. As usual, Wetzel is interesting and incisive, but I did a double-take when I read this bit:

The most famous of the three episodes -- the tolle, lege experience -- is badly book-ended by the other two, or at least it is if we are bent on thinking of extraordinary religious apprehension on the model of supersensible sensation. Kenney credits William James with having made this model so seductive to modern theorists. In the mysticism chapters of The Varieties of Religious Experience, James definitively associates mysticism with mystical experience and offers four defining criteria for the requisite experience: it is knowledge-conveying, rightly authoritative for the person experiencing it, short-lived, and passively received. Probably what is most important about mystical experience thus construed is that it sustains an experiential gulf between haves and have-nots; either one has the experience and so knows what it conveys or one is hopelessly in the dark. This model, which admits of great refinement (I think of William Alston on the logic of perceptual experience), risks making the experience of the divine akin to getting a first taste of ice cream or, dare I say it, having an orgasm, but being a supersensible matter, the experience of the divine bears a logical, not a qualitative, analogy to ordinary sense experience. In other words, to experience the divine is, on this model of mysticism, to be transported to a world apart from the ordinary, a place of unlikeness.

I'll pass over in silence the reference to orgasms, as sponge-worthy as it is for commenting purposes. Instead I'll draw attention to the notion of mystical experience as experience. Probably most folks interested in the debate between materialist empiricism and religion would like to agree that something about the mystical, or indeed even the spiritual, is "knowledge-conveying" and "rightly authoritative for the person experiencing it", but there seems to be an ambiguity here, an equivocation on the word "experience" such that it wavers between the generic and the specific. Generic in the sense of being "knowledge-conveying" but specific in the sense of verging on the empirical. I don't think the problem is cleared up much by talk of being "transported to a world apart from the ordinary, a place of unlikeness". If ever there were a more meaningless string of words, I would like to see it.

Of course, the notion of a place of unlikeness is a thoroughly Augustinian one, but it is very difficult to see how it can by anything other than a metaphor of the analogy of being. According to Wetzel, Kenney argues for a reading of Augustine through a Plotinian lens, but specifically a Plotinus who has been stripped of certain 20th century misinterpretations and restored to a more authentic (read, late antique) Neoplatonism. On Kenney's view, the traditional notion that Plotinus was the source of Augustine's concept of transcendence fails to take into account the fact that Augustine sees himself as free to think of the body as a principle of individuation, hence he can reject the Plotinian idea of God as essentially not a body. As Wetzel puts it in his review:

It is not that Augustine still harbors some lingering attachment to Manichean materialism; the point is more that his incarnational theology is inescapably a part of his theology of creation (his monotheism). If we allow that point its play, then it makes sense to pair the ascent to God in book VII with the descent to the flesh in book VIII; the two are aspects of a single contemplation. It also becomes evident what makes the vision at Ostia in book IX so singular and important: the conjunction of seeing God and being aware of the presence of another person.

In the end this book looks like it goes well beyond what I expected of a typical textbook from Routledge, and I look forward to reading the whole thing with a view to judging it on its own merits.

The Evolution of Christianity

If, like me, you have an interest in the developmental patterns that structured the Christian religion during the first century, you are probably most familiar with those elements of the patterns that have been popularized in the mass media, elements such as the work of the Jesus Seminar, the publication of various Gnostic texts, and the like. Less familiar to most folk theologians such as myself, I imagine, are the internecine struggles that shaped the earliest Christianity of all, the Church of the Apostolic age. So I was quite interested in an essay published in the July, 2007 issue of New Testament Studies called "Matthew 7.21-23: Further Evidence of its Anti-Pauline Perspective" (53:325-343). Here is the abstract:

The redactional pericope in Matt 7.21-23, in which Jesus the final judge condemns certain false Christians, can and should be viewed as an anti-Pauline text. Those rejected by the Matthean Jesus are none other than Paul and those of his circle. This identification is indicated not only by their description as workers of lawlessness, but also by their defense that they are true Christians because they prophesy, work miracles and perform exorcisms in the name of Jesus. These charismatic activities were clearly associated with Paul and/or his churches.

I am not an expert in this field, so it is beyond the scope of my training to evaluate adequately the evidential claims made in this article, but I must say that the thesis strikes me as very interesting. It seems clear to me that the gospels of Mark and Matthew in particular show evidence of that patchwork composition that can be taken as evidence of having been cobbled together from a variety of sources with a variety of ends, audiences, and methods. That the gospel of Matthew in particular should have anti-Pauline elements does not strike me as implausible at all, given the nature of the various factions at work within the Church at that time.

It would be fascinating to know more about the earliest history of the Church but, as is often pointed out, the history of conflict is mostly written by the victors, so it seems unlikely that we will ever find the sort of evidence that would be necessary for a genuine reconstruction of the period in question.