Populus Trinitatis

In just a few weeks, on 4 July, it will be the 820th anniversary of the defeat of the Crusaders in the Battle of Hittin. I was reminded of this the other day while reading a review in the Wall Street Journal of Robert Laqueur's new book, The Last Days of Europe. Laqueur is not one of those simplistic doom-and-gloomers one often sees on CNN or Fox, but his story is nevertheless one of doom and gloom. Europe is being out-reproduced by non-Europeans living in Europe, and it raises real questions about the prognosis for European ideals and institutions, such as individual liberty, democracy, and, of course, Christianity. In one way it's a depressing tale: the home of the world's greatest places of Christian worship, the Gothic cathedrals, has, to a large degree, given up the use of those cathedrals as places of worship, turning them instead into museums and gift shops. The last time I was in Notre Dame there were signs in the aisles asking visitors to exercise some discretion, because there just might be some people there who had come to pray. When I visited Chartres there was no evidence that anybody went there to worship at all. Indeed, it seemed the majority of visitors came to look at the stained glass windows or the labyrinth. I'll pass over in silence what I saw in England, where the churches were largely empty, devoid even of tourists and new agers.

In another way, however, the story is not so depressing, if only because it is not a story that we are hearing for the first time. There have often been such challenges to the truth and the common good, and we worry about the present ones perhaps a bit more than we need to simply because we are not always the best historians. Sure, we don't want to stand idly by and watch our institutions crumble around us, but on the other hand it is extremely unlikely that Christianity itself will suffer the fate of the pagan religions that it drove out of existence. One has only to study very carefully the history and anthropology of these religions and to compare them with the history and anthropology of Christianity to see that this is true: Christianity is qualitatively different from any other religion that has preceded or followed it, and its truths are rather more compelling.

Writing in the 12th century about the Battle of Hittin, the scribe Imad ad-Din al-Isfani described the defeat of the Crusaders this way:

Victory occurred on that day, Saturday 4 July 1187. Tormented by thirst, the Franks succumbed to defeat, impotent to recover their fall. The breeze was in their direction, and beneath their feet was grass. Some of our holy warriors set fire to the grass. Its flame bore down on them, and its heat became intense. They, the people of the Trinity, were consumed by a worldly fire of three types, each invincible and obliterating: the fire of flames, the fire of thirst, and the fire of arrows.

I've always been struck by that description of the Christians: The People of the Trinity. The scribe's joke, obviously, is that these people who believe that God is Three in One were consumed by three kinds of "fire", but the real joke is on our scribe: the Jews were blessed by God to know His name, but Christians are blessed to know His Nature. Saladin and his army, alas, knew neither.

The Franks on that day "were consumed by a worldly fire", but Christians of all times are continually consumed by the Divine Fire that is the Holy Spirit, who teaches us wisdom and truth. In that sense we never shall be, we cannot ever be, defeated. We wear the name "People of the Trinity" with pride, because we are his people in a way that no one else is, though everyone is invited to be. And therein lies another difference between us and Saladin's army. Saladin spread his faith with his sword, but Christianity, even though some have tried Saladin's approach, spreads more naturally without the use of force. It is a religion of love and communion, and this too is what it means to belong to the Trinity.

There will come a time when Saladin's religion experiences the same historical fate that Julius Caesar's did. Nobody knows when that will happen, but we do know that it will happen. It will not happen violently, but with love, compassion, and mercy. That is the mark of the Trinity, it is the mark that all of us bear upon our very being, for we are his.

Cretin Museum

John Farrell of Farrell Media had some fun yesterday with Evolution News, and I recommend perusing his comments. Indeed, John is a great science writer who also takes his religion very seriously, and he's worth reading in general (some folks may be familiar with him from stuff he's had published in First Things).

I'm sorry to say, however, that his witty and intelligent piece was overshadowed in the news somewhat by the opening, in Kentucky, of the so-called "Creation Museum", a rather expensive little monument to the density of the narrow-minded and unimaginative. The museum itself will probably attract about as many folks looking for a laugh as it will genuine adherents of the bizarre, unscriptural, and generally unchristian world-view that it endorses, but it is a sad little testament anyway, and no less so for the fact that among its principal proponents can be counted a real live university-employed physicist.

For people with a morbid fascination for the moronic, there is a commercial available at the Creation Museum website that features funky 1950s-style art (pretty much right out of the era from which most of these ideas themselves emanate) and melodramatic music. Although the museum's designers manifest a rather fundamentalist perspective on things, the staff apparently aren't allowed to, since the museum is open on both Saturday and Sunday, requiring its workers to violate the third commandment (well, I guess for the fundamentalists it's really the fourth commandment) no matter which day they count as the Sabbath. Maybe they view working for the museum as itself a kind of mitzvah.

Among the items available in the online bookstore are guides to the local aquarium and zoo written from a "biblical" perspective.

With aquariums around the world using God’s amazing creatures to teach evolution, Christians need information that gives them biblical truth. From the odd-shaped hammerhead shark and the powerful killer whale, to the colorful angelfish and the deadly lionfish, the Aquarium Guide covers more than 100 of God’s sea creatures and gives information about their features, their design, and much more. This spiral-bound book makes finding the truth about these animals easy.

God's creatures are amazing, but apparently God's methods of creation via natural selection are a lot less amazing. What kind of a God would "create" things just by bringing into existence a natural order in which God himself stands as the cause of all natural processes within that created order? Any old "god" could do that. The real "biblical" God would only create things ex nihilo, since that's the only way to impress the heathen.

One of the things you will learn if you study these guides is that plants aren't really alive. The bible says that there was no suffering or death before the Fall, and yet it also says that humans and other animals had things to eat. What did they eat, if not each other? According to these guides, they ate plants. If you're worried that the plants therefore died upon being eaten, don't worry, that didn't happen because plants aren't alive. They can't be alive, because if they were that would mean that they died by being eaten, and we all no that there was no death before the Fall. QED.

This reminds me of a passage from Aristotle, who was created just a few short thousand years after the universe itself. He notes that when a menstruating woman looks into a mirror it will stain the mirror with a red color, because there is more red blood in the woman's eyes during the time of her menstruation. Although this appears to contradict the empirical evidence, it must be true, because it follows logically from the theory of vision to which Aristotle subscribed. These two cases, the non-livingness of plants, the stained mirrors, are examples of what happens when you put the saving of an a priori theory ahead of empirical evidence and logical coherence, and it shows again why creationism is not genuine science.

It's worth pointing out, just for fun, that the book of Genesis says quite clearly that humans were given some of the animals to eat for food even before the Fall, even though, according to the museum, animals are just as "alive" as human beings. So much for that part of the theory.

Evolution, Philosophy, and All That Jazz

The past two days have been something of a whirlwind for me. Things began with the annual philosophy department Philosophy Forum, in which we bring in a noted philosopher for two days of dialog, debates, and dinners. In past years we've had such luminaries as Hilary Putnam, Arthur Fine, Alasdair MacIntyre, and even Daniel Dennett. This year it was Michael Williams, and it was not a disappointment, even though he talked a lot about David Hume, my favorite philosopher next to Daniel Dennett.

Then, in the afternoon, I ran off to see Vincent DiMartino, who was in town for a School of Music shindig that, I guess, was the equivalent of the Forum, since he was here for several days playing gigs and giving master classes. For those who don't know who he is, he is one of the best trumpet players on the planet, with virtuoso skill in classical as well as jazz. He teaches at Centre College in Kentucky. At the first afternoon concert he played some baroque, 19th century, and jazz, and I was amazed at the sounds that came out of his horn. I couldn't decide whether it was something to aspire to or run away from in despair, but I suppose that for now I'll just keep playing my scales and etudes and hope that something works out.

After the concert I rushed home to meet the Darwins of DarwinCatholic fame, who happened to be in town visiting friends. And now I hope Lisa and I are their friends too, so they will come visit is again, because they are wonderful people and a delight to talk to. They also have three of the cutest little girls on the planet.

Then it was a mad rush back to campus to hear Vince DiMartino again, this time playing with the Ohio University Jazz Ensemble. My own teacher, B. J. Britt, plays trumpet in the Ensemble, and the group played for nearly an hour and a half that flew by as though it were just a few moments. It was like a glimpse of how the eternity of heaven is experienced by temporal creatures such as ourselves: a lengthy span of time appears to take no time at all because each moment is filled with an ineffable pleasure.

This morning it was more philosophy with Michael Williams, and then off to a master class on jazz improvisation with DiMartino, and then finally my very own trumpet lesson with B. J. If only I had been able to fit a round of golf into all of that, I really would have been in heaven, rather than just outside the gates listening to the Gabriels within.

Saying What Needs to be Said

As our polity begins to whip itself into a frenzy over the upcoming 2008 elections, it is important for faithful Christians to stand firm in their convictions. This can be particularly difficult for Christians who, for whatever reason, find themselves supporting politicians whose political views fly in the face of what Christians know to be most important. In the 2004 election year there was a small amount of worry that Christians would begin to hold politicians accountable for their views on matters such as abortion, stem cell research, and other important issues, but those worries proved to be unfounded. That's why one may rejoice, in a limited way, that the Pope is willing to say what ought to be said: politicians who cooperate in abortion - - even if that means nothing more than voting for policies that make abortion a little easier - - by that very act excommunicate themselves. Mike Liccione of Sacramentum Vitae puts it particularly well:

The pope, the bishops, and even some among the lower clergy can say until they're blue in the face that people who formally cooperate in abortion are unworthy to receive the Eucharist; but many bishops and priests will give the Eucharist to such people all the same, citing as justification that they can't be sure, in individual cases, whether the communicant is unworthy at that moment. That is a tiresome, hypocritical, and highly destructive dodge. Most such politicians are utterly unrepentant and make no bones whatsoever about that fact; so until most bishops and priests actually withhold the Eucharist from such people, the Church's claim that such people are unworthy to receive the Eucharist will not be taken seriously, and they will be understood to be "excommunicated" only when decrees of EFS are actually issued to that effect. Thus the clash between the good news and the bad news generates a huge amount of confusion, for which the bishops have only themselves to blame.

The solution is simple: withhold the Eucharist from those who, by their public actions and statements, formally cooperate in abortion. A scattering of bishops, both in the U.S. and abroad, do just that. But spreading that solution is not easy because it requires a courage that is in relatively short supply. We witnessed the lack of such courage during the coverup of the sex-abuse scandal. When will they learn that, in matters spiritual, clarity requires integrity and credibility requires both?

The Direction of Historical Causation

Mike Liccione of Sacramentum Vitae has an interesting post up today in response to some questions raised by Carl Trueman (now there's a great name for you) about Francis Beckwith's recent return to full communion with the Catholic Church. (Side note: Beckwith discusses his reversion at Right Reason, an interesting blog resource for conservative philosophers.) Trueman is a thoughtful and intelligent person, and Mike rightly notes the tone of civility with which he raises his questions about Beckwith's return to Rome. I don't think that there's any need for me to rehearse the actual questions, since I think Mike has already done an excellent job of putting the Catholic response to such questions, not only in today's post, but on many other occasions. What caught my attention, though, and seemed to me worth a comment, was this quotation from Trueman:

I find myself in basic agreement with Heiko Oberman on the nature of the Reformation struggle over authority. He argued that the clash between Rome and Protestants was not a clash between tradition and Scripture alone, but a struggle over the nature of tradition.

This is a widely held view, and it is a view that is probably commonly taught in history courses of various stripes, but I think it is mistaken. It is the sort of revisionist view that often gets invented by intellectual historians who are looking for the common thematic trend that will help to unify their accounts into something interesting and memorable. It is true, of course, that intellectuals at the time of the Reformation did, indeed, argue about things that were related to the question of the nature of the tradition, but ultimately the real struggle at that time was motivated by concerns that had very little to do with religion. As more and more historians of the period are coming to argue (my favorite in this regard is Eamon Duffy, but there are others) the period was marked by plenty of non-religious struggles that were dressed up in religious clothing in order to inflame partisanship on both sides. The Reformation was driven not so much by intellectual struggles over how to interpret Scripture or where to vest the authority to make such interpretations, but by social, political, and economic clashes that were emerging out of the Medieval milieu and marking the beginning of the modern age, with its struggles between rich and poor, ruling and oppressed classes, democrats and aristocrats, etc.

These are the sorts of forces that usually shape history, not the debates taking place in academia. While it may be true that many made their political allegiances on the basis of this or that theological paradigm, it is certainly true that far more made their theological choices on the basis of their political and social allegiances already in place. To put that another way: the Reformation was not an intellectual struggle over authority in the Church, but potential secular authorities struggling over political power. This is particularly true in England but the same forces were at work on the Continent. This is why the present day differences between Protestantism and Catholicism are so distressing: they have their origins in political struggles that have long since been settled, yet they continue to keep faithful Christians apart who no longer (if they ever did) have any good reasons to be separated from one another. Nowadays, of course, when you get Catholics and Protestants in the same room, they act like they have real differences, but many of those differences were invented over time in order to justify the separation that had already taken place as a consequence of the outcomes of the political struggles. In some cases, such as Catholic and certain conservative Anglicans, it is slowly being discovered that the putative differences were not so communion-severing as was sometimes thought. In other cases, though, the bad feelings run too deep for any sort of quick healing. But with calm and thoughtful folks like Mike Liccione, Carl Trueman, and Francis Beckwith involved in the discussion, one may be permitted to hope for the best.

Freedom and Universalism

One of the best known features of Balthasar's populist theology, if only because it has become something of a lightning rod of late, is his dogged defense of universalism. For him, the possibility that all are saved is not something that we can know to be a fact but it is certainly something that we can hope for. This much seems both reasonable and true. Reasonable, on the one hand, because hope differs from mere desire in that we can desire literally anything, even things that are impossible, but it is rational to hope only for those things that are possible, and it does seem at least possible that all will be saved even if it is extremely unlikely. If it were literally impossible that all be saved, then the most we could do would be to desire that all be saved while regretting that all will not be saved. True, on the other hand, because the Church has always prayed for the salvation of all, and the Church has always believed that Christ's sacrifice was sufficient for the salvation of all. The Church also encourages such acts of popular piety as the so-called Fatima prayer that is sometimes added at the end of each decade of the Rosary ("O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell. Lead all souls into heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy") actively interceding for a realization of our universalist hopes.

Balthasar famously noted that "the dogma of the Church is that hell exists, not that people are in it", and referred to those who rejected universalism as the "populators of hell". One of his favorite arguments in defense of universalism was that if even one person winds up in hell at the eschaton then God has lost the wager he made with himself at the beginning of creation when he made a kosmos in which free will was to be the mechanism by which his love would be propagated to his creatures. And yet it seems as if free will is itself the greatest obstacle to genuine universalism, a universalism that is universal in reality rather than merely in theory. Of course in theory it is possible that all be saved, yet if it is true in reality that all will be saved then Wittgenstein was right when he remarked that "if what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with."

In other words, suppose that universalism is more than just a hope, suppose that it is the case that, in the end, all will be saved. If that is a truth, if it is a fact about the created order, then we are free to do literally anything we like, for in the end we will be saved. And this is true regardless of the theory one happens to have about how that salvation will occur. Perhaps we will all freely, at the last day, truly repent of all our sins, turn lovingly towards Christ, inviting him into our hearts as our personal savior, and then drop dead and go straight to heaven. Those who would attempt to dissuade us from living our lives over the top may cite the words of St. Paul: if the Gospel message is not true then let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die, and yet it turns out that even if the Gospel message is true we may eat and drink as much as we like, even if we're going to die tomorrow, because if universalism is a fact rather than merely a hope it won't matter what we do, because we know that we will repent on the last day, just in the nick of time.

This raises an interesting question. It seems that there is a big difference, in terms of how we actually live our lives, between universalism being a hope and universalism being a truth about how things are going to turn out. Yet Jesus preached as though it really matters how one lives one's life on a day-to-day basis. Maybe he thought that it would be more difficult to "truly" repent at the end of one's life if one were to live a debauched life for thirty or forty years, but it seems nearer to the truth of the Gospel to say that he thought that we should live virtuous lives in the here and now because that's what it takes to draw closer to God. Salvation, in short, is not an instantaneous event for most people, but a process that is lived out over a lifetime. If so, then what is it, exactly, that we are hoping for if we hope for universalism? Are we hoping that, in the end, everyone will repent of their sins and be with God, or are we hoping that, as a matter of fact, everyone does truly repent of their sins at the very least by the end of their life? There is a slight difference here. If we are hoping that everyone will repent in the end, we are at least open to the possibility that some people may not. If we are hoping that it is a fact that everyone does repent, we are hoping that the created order have a certain metaphysics true of it that it might not have. It is like the difference between hoping that your son hit a grand-slam home run in his baseball game, and hoping that the laws of physics temporarily be canceled out when your son comes up to bat.

Genuine freedom just means that it is a very real possibility that some people, in the end, will not be saved. We may hope against that possibility, for of course the contrary is also possible: it may be that, in the end, everyone will freely and truly repent of all their sins. But it seems to me that we have to be careful about what, exactly, it is that we think we are hoping for, for surely it would be presumptuous to hope that the created order be other than how God made it.

Whatever Possesses Some People To Believe What They Believe?

I don't believe in ghosts, even though I am not, strictly speaking, ontologically committed to the impossibility of the existence of ghosts. It's funny, isn't it, how we pick and choose our beliefs? Christians believe that God became man and performed miracles among us, and yet, in my opinion, the more intelligent Christians do not take seriously even for a second reports of the paranormal of the sort that one sees on, say, the Discovery Channel. I suppose that, in my case at least, it's a matter of residual skepticism left over from when I was basically an abject atheist materialist, but there are probably other, non-psychological reasons for turning a blind eye, so to speak, to the ghostly.

As a Thomistic Aristotelian I do believe in other weird kinds of things: essences, for example, and distinctions between substances and accidents. These are slightly more technical things than ghosts, but equally silly in the mind of the materialist and the empiricist. I happen to think that there are no non-arbitrary reasons to reject such things and plenty of non-arbitrary reasons to accept them, but these are subjects about which reasonable people can agree to disagree, at least in my opinion. But for some reason, when it comes to ghosts and the like, I have a tendency to think that there's no way a reasonable person is going to take the idea seriously even for a second.

Hence you can imagine my surprise to find that some people, including some people whom I generally admire in the intellect department, appear to be endorsing the idea that Cho Seung-Hui, the young man who murdered more than 30 people at Virginia Tech before killing himself, did what he did because he was possessed by a demon. There is an interesting blog item about it at Spirit and Life, written by a priest by the name of Thomas Euteneuer. Euteneuer accepts the very real possibility that Cho was indeed possessed when he acted as he did. In my view, this is utter nonsense. Indeed, it is not merely utter nonsense, it is literally nonsense, and it is not something that I think any intelligent person can reasonably endorse.

First, it is unscriptural. The cases of demon possession in the New Testament are exclusively cases in which a demon is tormenting a person internally, not driving a person to commit evil acts against his will.

Second, speaking of acting against one's will, the idea that demons can, by means of possession, drive people to commit evil acts, destroys the notion of free will and takes away individual autonomy and moral responsibility. On this point, Euteneuer writes:

Well, first let me say that, as a Catholic priest, I have seen and worked with my share of possessed and obsessed individuals. It’s entirely possible for someone to be at once responsible for his own acts and totally under the influence of the devil in committing them. In this case, Cho pulled the trigger, but the devil was the author of the deed. Does not Jesus call him “a murderer from the beginning”? The devil is the prime mover of all evil in the world, but human beings freely cooperate with him in their evil decisions. No one gets off the hook of responsibility by blaming the devil, but we can’t say that the devil is a detached observer to crimes like this.

Virtually every sentence in this quotation begs the question, but it will suffice to point out that it is just plain silly to say that "It's entirely possible for someone to be at once responsible for his own acts and totally under the influence of the devil in committing them." This is either an outright contradiction or it is just plain bad theology. One would like to know more about how such a thing is "entirely possible", but we get no explanation, only assertion.

Third, demon possession is explanatorily otiose in cases such as this. Cho's behavior can be fully explained in terms of perfectly ordinary human motivations, mental illness, and other mundane concepts. There is literally no need to invoke some further cause, namely a "demon", to make the explanation of what he did complete. If there were such a need, then there is no reason to think that every evil act is not caused by demon possession. Sure, this act seems to us particularly egregious, but line-drawing is a notoriously arbitrary affair. If he had killed, say, five fewer people, would that mean he was not demon possessed? How about 15 fewer? What if he had only killed three people? Or just one? How does one know such things? It cannot be merely some vague and subjective sense of the enormity of it all, since that is nothing more than a personal and subjective judgment, and every such killing spree is, after all, nothing other than a concatenation of individual killings. If a killing spree is caused by demon possession, so is every individual killing. Yet that seems, well, rather difficult to believe, if for no other reason than that it leads to a slippery slope in which every evil act is reducible to a demonic possession, and demonic possession becomes nothing more than a synonym for "evil act". And yet clearly we distinguish between genuine demonic possession and mere run-of-the-mill viciousness.

Fourth, invoking demon possession does not seem to differ from the sort of magical thinking that always looks for a hidden variable to explain what appears to be otherwise inexplicable. Take, for example, this little gem from Euteneuer:

a crime of this immensity cannot be accomplished without a person’s total emotional commitment. After reprogramming a person’s thought patterns, the demon excites his passions to do what he wants. Others have very credibly explained how Cho’s pathetic video images imitating the Korean flick, Old Boy, were evidence of his heightened emotions influenced by violent images. He even ranted in imitation of the Columbine killers Harris and Klebold in solidarity for the deed he was about to commit. In other words, it’s very difficult to sustain such an emotional intensity about the evil he planned and carried out without some direct force multiplier.

Euteneuer can't imagine an unaided human being being able to sustain "such an emotional intensity about the evil he planned and carried out", so he posits "some direct force multiplier" that is literally outside of the system. Talk about begging the question! And yet this is given as one of the necessary conditions for demon possession. And then there's this:

He plotted—like all demons from Satan to the perpetrators of the World Trade Center attacks. He bought guns and ammo, he planned the date and times and places of the murder, and he even went regularly at night to work out at the campus gym in order to look the part of a mass murderer. The devil must have been very happy to witness his prey blast his brains out after perpetrating the bloody murders of 32 innocents. That is the ultimate victory for the devil.

Planning ahead is also a necessary condition on demon possession, it seems. Now there's underdetermination for you. This guy has been taking his Screwtape Letters way too seriously.

Fifth, it is way too provincial to think of acts such as Cho's as somehow fitting into a kind of paradigm of demon-possessed evil. History is long and full of far worse things that what Cho did, and it begins to seem rather desperate to explain all such things away as nothing more than cases of demon possession. It reduces the human person to a kind of automaton, for one thing, and a peculiarly simplistic one at that.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not claiming that there is not now, nor has there ever been any such thing as demon possession. But I don't see any reason to think that demon possession is what we see in the case of a person like Cho, or Stalin, or Hitler, and any such folks. The stories of demon possession that we find in the New Testament may, of course, be correctly describing the ontological status of the persons being described, but (a) they are clearly quite different than what Euteneuer is talking about and (b) I'm not so much of a fundamentalist as to think that the stories of demon possession in the New Testament are open to only one interpretation.

Clearly we want explanations for things like what Cho did; even more pressing is the need for an explanation when there is no evident will involved in suffering, as when a tsunami kills nearly half a million people. But I don't think it's a good idea to just make up explanations that appeal to whatever nostrums happen to be stowed away in our own peculiar ideational backpacks. That's not what explanation is all about. Maybe you have to have a little something extra in your intellectual equipment to take such explanations seriously, but I'm pretty sure I don't have that equipment, because I can never take such explanations seriously even for a second. They are laughable, in my view, and reveal more about the person who posits them than about the person who is allegedly "possessed".

Scotus on the Unicity of God

In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle argues that there is but a single highest good for humans, namely eudaimonia, that state of flourishing that exists in persons whose practical wisdom is habituated in such a way that they always make choices in accordance with right reason. That eudaimonia is one such "highest good" is virtually trivially true, but must it be the only such good? Can there not be many things that are fully self-sufficient in the sense that we choose them strictly for their own sakes and not for the sake of anything else? Aristotle appears to assume that there cannot be more than one such good, but he offers no argument in defense of this assumption, and that has caused some folks to wonder. Either ethics, as a discipline, is not such as to offer arguments for such things (as Aristotle himself points out in the Nicomachean Ethics, one must not look for greater precision in a given discipline than is possible in that discipline), or the argument for the assumption is, in some sense, obvious.

Since Aristotle is happy to provide arguments for similar assumptions elsewhere in the Nicomachean Ethics, it seems that the argument for this particular assumption must, somehow, be staring us in the face. As it happens, the argument is rather obvious if one is familiar with Aristotle's doctrine of causal explanation, and I was reminded of it recently while perusing Blessed John Duns Scotus' discussion of the unicity of God in his Opus oxoniense (1, dist. 2, q. 3; Vatican ed. vol. II, 222-243). God is, if you will, a kind of "highest good", not just for humans but for everything; yet we assert that there is but one God. Why? Can there not be multiple Gods, all of whom serve as "highest goods" in some theological scheme? In short, why is polytheism impossible? I say "impossible" because, according to Scotus, it is not merely a matter of faith or dogma that there is only one God: it is a matter of logical necessity.

Scotus begins with the assumption that any will that is infinite wills things in the way that they should be willed. This he takes to imply a principle that we may call the principle of natural will: a correct will loves what is lovable to the extent that it is lovable and to the extent that the will is capable of loving, hence an infinite will will love whatever is lovable to the extent that it is lovable without exception. Suppose, then, that we posit two such infinite wills, that is, two Gods, calling one A and the other B. Both A and B, then, will love whatever is lovable to the extant that it is lovable and without exception; since both A and B are infinitely lovable, then each will love the other infinitely. Here Scotus introduces an assumption that must be unpacked. He says that everything loves its own being more than any other, just so long as it is neither a part nor an effect of this other. We may call this the principle of natural love: fundamentally it means that, given a particular nature (e.g., human, dog, divine), the conscious awareness and will of any being with that nature will be most intimately familiar with its own being rather than that of any other particular nature and, hence, most naturally able to will and to do what is best for that particular nature (here "to love" means something along the lines of "having what is best for X at heart and in one's will").

In the case of our two Gods, A and B, we find that each of them is infinitely lovable, hence B is to be infinitely loved by A. And yet A must naturally love itself more than anything else, including B. But if A loves itself more than it loves B, then it does not love B infinitely, even though B is deserving of infinite love from A. If A does not love B infinitely, A is not acting in accordance with its own nature and, hence, cannot be infinite. So either A loves B as much as it loves itself and, hence, violates the principle of nature love; or A loves B less than A loves itself and violates the principle of the natural will. Both are conceptual impossibilities, hence the actual existence of more than one God is conceptually impossible.

The principle of the natural will and of natural love are, I think, unfamiliar to us and yet perfectly acceptable. If they seem strange, though, Scotus offers an ancillary argument based on this one. He remarks that there are two ways in which A may love B. Either A may love B for its own sake, or it may simply use B. If it merely uses B, the love is inordinate. If it loves B for its own sake because of B's nature, then, having the same nature as B, A will love itself for its own sake as well. But this means that A is beatified by two distinct objects, both A and B, neither of which depends upon the other, for A is made happy by itself just as much as it is by B. But it is conceptually impossible to find perfect beatitude in two distinct objects, because either one may be destroyed without any loss of beatitude, hence complete beatitude is not dependent upon either object.

It seems to be something like this latter argument that Aristotle must have in mind in the Nicomachean Ethics: humans have only one final good because the very notion of a "final good" seems to entail that there could only be one such thing. Scotus' arguments, in other words, have that logical flavor that so characterizes Scholastic argument generally.

The Great and Holy Sabbath

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation.

Genesis 2.1-3

Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Genesis 3.17b-19

I was not raised religious, so when I became a Christian in my mid-twenties I was not familiar with very many of the traditional interpretations of scriptural passages and religious practices. An example that comes to mind today is the saying of Our Lord, which can be found in all four Gospels, that "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." When I first heard this text proclaimed I'm pretty sure I thought that it meant that God gave us the Sabbath day as a day of rest, that it was "ours" in that sense. But of course that sense doesn't make any sense of the context in which Our Lord said that the Sabbath was made for us, because, of course, he and his disciples weren't resting when they were accused of violating the Sabbath, they were picking grains of wheat as they walked along. Perhaps someone raised in the Church would have known what I only figured out over time, that the text refers to God's mercy. Our labors are a result of our Fall, and God gave us a day on which we must not labor, so that in our resting state we may stand as a sign to all the world that our Fall is not irreversible, thanks to God's great mercy.

Today is the Sabbath day par excellence, since it is the central point of the sacred Triduum in which God poured himself out for us on the Cross and rose again from the dead. The old creation, with all its labors and passions, passed away on Good Friday, and our state of condemnation with it, and on the Sunday of the Resurrection a new creation, a re-creation of our primordial state, takes its place. Between the two is a day of rest, commemorating the great mercy and love that is the bridge between the old creation and the new. In the Office of Readings for today we read the traditional account of Christ's descent into Hell on this day, to bring the Good News of the new creation to Adam, Eve, and all the rest who passed from the old creation before the coming of the kingdom. This story is a very old one; more recently Holy Saturday has been portrayed as a "waiting day", the so-called "Vigil" day, or "Easter Even", in which creation sits expectantly at the tomb awaiting the coming forth of her Lord in glory. Both of these things, the old tradition and the new interpretation, reflect, in my view, an attempt to "do something" with Holy Saturday. It's so obvious, after all, what the Friday of Our Lord's Passion and the Sunday of his Resurrection are all about, but what are we to do with that day in between?

Coming to Christianity as a convert who is all too keenly aware of his need for mercy, I look on Holy Saturday somewhat differently. The Passion is done, the Price has been paid, so there is no "waiting" involved in this "Easter Even". The Resurrection is coming, but before it does I am bidden by the Commandment to bask for a time in God's great mercy, before I turn to the joyous celebration of the start of a new creation. Have you ever taken a great deal of trouble to wrap a Christmas or birthday gift for someone whom you love deeply? Maybe you selected special paper, perhaps you took some time to make a bow and to curl some ribbon, maybe you worked hard to get those corners folded over just right. Whenever I get a gift like that, a gift that was obviously hand wrapped with such great care, I make it a point to take in the labor of love that is the wrapping before I start ripping into it. Indeed, such gifts I do not "rip into", but instead I usually undo the wrapping very carefully, and sometimes I save it. To this day, 20 years later, I still have the wrapping in which the woman who was to become my wife gave me the first gift she ever gave me, which turned out to be a very nice Rosary. God's infinite mercy and love is the finest of papers in which our gift of redemption has been wrapped, and once one realizes that, one no longer takes the Sabbath for granted as a mere "day of rest". We rest not so that we may begin laboring again the next day, but so that we may breath deeply of God's mercy, take it in, enjoy the wrapping and exult in the great work of love that God has accomplished for us, because He loves us.

He loves us. Don't rip into that paper and toss it aside, but drink it in with your soul and savor it. Most weekends Christians are content to regard Sunday itself as the "Sabbath day", because it is the "Lord's Day". But this weekend is different: this weekend the Sabbath day and the Lord's day are two different days, and we have a chance to experience God's entire Sacramental message to us in a way that it is very difficult to capture on other days. Spend this Great and Holy Sabbath basking in God's mercy, so that tonight, when you celebrate your recreation, you will have that sense of loving gratitude and Eucharistic joy that will draw you closer to God.

Quantum Textual Differences

Some of you may remember that I have been reading through the Greek NT as part of my "Lenten exercises." Although I've done this every Lent for nearly 15 years, I think I benefited from doing this more this year than I have in a long time; in the near future I plan to post some on why I think this is so, but before I do that I'd like to remark on a few textual curiosities that popped up in the course of the reading. If you've ever browsed around in various translations of the Gospel of St. John, you may have noticed that there is some difference of opinion as to how best to punctuate verses 3 and 4 of the first chapter. In the King James Version, for example, the two verses read

(3) All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. (4) In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

This punctuation was maintained in the Revised Standard Version, which reads

(3) all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. (4) In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

In the Revised New Testament of the New American Bible, however, the verses are punctuated this way:

(3) All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be (4) through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race.

I will pass over in silence the inconcinnity of that "the light of the human race", but if you look into this matter further you will find that the majority of translations made before the 1980s favor the punctuation adopted by the King James Version and retained in the Revised Standard Version, but that there is a growing preference for the punctuation adopted in the New American Bible. What difference, exactly, could any of this possibly make?

Punctuation as such was not something that was in widespread use in antiquity. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find it much in evidence anywhere in the 1st century, when the Gospel texts were first being committed to writing. In fact, putting spaces between words was not exactly a common practice, let alone putting in little marks to indicate new sentences or breaks in thought. The text of these two verses on most manuscripts would have looked vaguely like this (I'm attempting to imitate the look of uncials here--it's only an approximation):

ΠANTA∆IAYTOYEGENETOKAIXΩPICAUTOYEGENETOOY∆EEN
OGEGONENENAYTΩIZΩHHNKAIHZΩHHNTOΦΩCTΩNANΘPΩΠΩN

If it's hard to imagine reading a text like that for very long you needn't worry: not many folks in those days could read anyway. These manuscripts weren't for the idle middle classes lounging around after an eight hour day down at the office. The market for these texts was primarily a scholarly one (the word "scholar" is derived from the Greek word skholê, which means "leisure time"). The scholarly set was familiar enough with the writing conventions of the day to be able to read such texts with (relative) ease. I suppose we could get used to it, too, if we had nothing else to compare it with. To see some samples of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, check out the website for the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.

In the case of John 1.3-4 the problem of breaking up the text into sense units is an interesting one. We have evidence that St. Jerome punctuated these two verses differently at different stages of his career. In his commentary on Habbakuk, dating from around 391-392, he cites the verses in the form employed in the New American Bible. But in many of his works dating from the period 401-416, including his Homily on the Gospel of John (401-410), he cites these verses in the form employed by the King James Version and the Revised Standard Version. So within a period of about 10 years, it seems, St. Jerome changed his mind about the best way to read these verses. What may have prompted the change?

The Macedonians were given their name from the fact that it was thought that they were followers of Macedonius, Bishop of Constantinople from around 342 until he was deposed in 360 by the Arian Council of Constantinople. Although the association with Macedonius is doubtful, the Macedonian heresy, for better or for worse, was attributed by St. Jerome to him. The fundamental feature of this heresy is the denial of the divinity of the Holy Spirit (hence the Macedonians are also known as the Pneumatomakhoi). In his Homily on the Gospel of John St. Jerome notes that there are many who read these verses "badly" (male legunt), and he goes on to explain their error this way. The heretics appeal to the punctuation that we find nowadays in the New American Bible, and that St. Jerome himself had used in his commentary on Habbakuk. Since it is the Holy Spirit that gives life through Christ, the heretics argued, we must read the Gospel as telling us that the Holy Spirit is a creature of the Word, since the Gospel itself tells us that "what came-into-existence through him was life, and that life was the light of men." In other words, the Gospel itself clearly tells us that the life that was the light of men, i.e., the Holy Spirit, was one of the things that came-into-existence through the Word. So St. Jerome, in his Homily on the Gospel of John, recommended reading the verses differently--in particular, he recommended the punctuation that we find in the King James Version--in order to avoid the possibility of reading the Gospel in the Macedonian, Pneumatikomakhoi way. Subsequent Fathers relied on St. Jerome's recommendation, changing the punctuation of the verses so that they say rather explicitly that only those things that came-into-existence (i.e., not the Holy Spirit) came into existence through the Word. Period. New Sentence. "In Him was life," etc.

It is worth pointing out, I think, that the older reading, the punctuation adopted by St. Jerome in his Commentary on Habbakuk, is preferable to the later, anti-Macedonian reading. First, the anti-Macedonian reading is extremely ad hoc, and has the Gospel telling us something rather banal, namely, that the things that came into existence came into existence through the thing that brought them into existence. That's like saying that all paintings are painted by painters. It's true, but trivially so. Second, it has the Gospel informing us that there was life in the Word, and that life was the light of men. Taken with the previous verse, this is just a restatement of the same thought: the Word is what brings things into existence and, in the case of living things, causes them to be living things. None of this is very interesting, but of course trivial truths are certainly truths, so we cannot accuse St. Jerome of perverting the meaning of the Gospel for purely polemical purposes.

However, the older punctuation tells us something quite extraordinary and remarkable. It tells us about something specific that came about through the agency of the Word, namely, the renewal of that eternal life that was lost by men at the Beginning. It is worth pointing out that this was the reading favored by St. Jerome when he was translating the Scriptures into the version that we now know as the Vulgate. This means, in my opinion, that it is arguably a more authentic reading of the tradition, since it was not influenced by a polemical purpose, namely, the combatting of a semi-arian heresy.

Little differences can add up to big ones, and the ways in which we read our texts are not always matters of easy and unambiguous decisions. In the present case the placement of a single comma can make an enormous difference. Imagine having to sort things out without any punctuation marks at all!

Magical Thinking

Imagine an educational environment in which something like the following scenarios would be possible.

First, imagine a class in elementary mathematics where the teacher is required, by state law, to allow his students to define mathematical functions any way they like. Generally speaking, for example, the "addition" function takes numbers as inputs and gives other numbers as outputs and the outputs follow the pattern with which we are all familiar: 1 + 1 = 2; 1 + 2 = 3; 1 + 3 = 4; etc. Suppose, however, a student wants to define the "addition" function differently, so that, for example, 1 + 1 = 17; 1 + 2 = 36; 1 + 3 = 2; etc. (here "et cetera" cannot mean what it did above; it must mean, rather, something like "in a continuously random manner"). It should be possible, of course, for a student to define the "addition" function in such a way that 1 + 1 yields a different number each time it is "calculated", that is, it can have as its answer anything the student likes.

Before we get into a discussion of how the teacher would grade our student's math homework under this sort of regime, let's imagine another scenario. This time, imagine a medical school, where, alongside tradition "Western Medicine", a "spiritual medicine" is also taught, again by state mandate. According to the "spiritual medicine", illness and disease is not caused by pathogens of the sort we're all familiar with, but by evil spirits. The "medical students" at this "medical school" may choose to specialize in either traditional "Western Medicine" or they may specialize in "spiritual medicine". Some students may want to study both, but that is difficult because they are two very different curricula: neither one overlaps with the other in any way. In particular, "spiritual medicine" requires that they know how to perform various dances and sing certain sorts of incantations, while "Western Medicine" requires them to know anatomy, biology, chemistry, you know, that kind of stuff.

Do these scenarios seem workable to you? I suppose they are workable in the sense that they could, indeed, be mandated by law if we were so inclined to mandate things, but are they workable in a more pragmatic sense? If students could learn mathematics they way I described it above, how far would they get in the general "marketplace of ideas"? Could they manage, for example, to keep their own checkbook balanced? Could they get elected to national office and have power over the U.S. budget, or trade relations? What about medicine? Which sort of "doctor" would you choose to go to?

In short, these scenarios seem very silly indeed, and yet it is something very like one of these scenarios that Christoph Cardinal Schönborn regards as the natural state of affairs in what he calls "a truly liberal society". Such a society is one in which

students [are allowed] to hear of the debate between anti-teleological theories and those scientists and philosophers who defend teleology in nature. And this, in turn, requires considerable freedom in the discussion of open questions in evolutionary theory. Commonly in the scientific community, every inquiry into the scientific weaknesses of the theory is blocked off at the outset, and there prevails a type of censorship similar to that for which the Church is frequently reproached.

This is from Cardinal Schönborn's recent essay, "Reasonable Science, Reasonable Faith", in the April issue of First Things, an essay adapted from his address given at the pontifical colloquium on creation and evolution in September of last year. What is the purpose of "allowing students to hear" of the "scientific weaknesses" of evolutionary theory? If it is merely a matter of letting students know that there are biblical literalists out there who think that evolutionary theory is incompatible with Christian belief, a class in evolutionary biology hardly seems the proper venue for the dissemination of that information. The only possible scientific purpose for "allowing students to hear" about the "scientific weaknesses" would be in order to test, scientifically, they theory of evolution itself. It turns out, however, that the "test" that Cardinal Schönborn has in mind is not a test of evolutionary theory itself, but of materialism. Students in science classes should be allowed to question the very foundations of the discipline in which the theory is being proposed. It is not enough, Schönborn claims, for the scientist to endorse a merely methodological materialism, since, according to Schönborn, even to "endorse" a view is to presuppose something other than materialism: you cannot "endorse" a view or "propose" a scientific theory if materialism is true, because to "endorse" or "propose" presupposes the existence of immaterial things: spirit, reason, and freedom. These things, he claims, cannot be "reduced" to the material.

Regular readers of this blog already know that I am, myself, an anti-materialist, but of the arguments against materialism that I have seen this is probably among the weakest. Indeed, it begs the question, since Schönborn nowhere shows that these could not be reduced to materialist processes in principle, he simply assumes that they cannot be, and uses this assumption as a proof that materialism is false. Eliminative materialists like the Churchlands have long since shown arguments such as this to fail.

This is not to say that I don't have a certain degree of sympathy for Cardinal Schönborn's own methodological stance. He says that

Scientism - - by which I mean the philosophy (usually implicit and unrecognized) that modern science is the only way of gaining objective knowledge of reality - - must be overcome.

I believe that is true, but it is not a very important truth. For example, what ought we to call the adherents of "scientism"? To form a word in the usual way would give us "scientist", and yet I don't think we want to call the advocates of "scientism" "scientists", because most working scientists are not advocates of "scientism", indeed, very few deeply thoughtful people would advocate it at all, since it is virtually self-contradictory (let the letter "S" denote the view of "scientism" that the only way of gaining objective knowledge of reality is through modern science: can modern science, then, tell us that "S" is true?). There are, of course, advocates of "scientism" as Schönborn defines it floating around out there, but they are mostly dyspeptic outliers like Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins. These people, actually, are not exactly idiots, but they are ideologues, which is why scientism appeals to them.

The editors of First Things are not idiots, either, and yet they seem to fall victim to a kind of ideology of their own at times, especially when it comes to this issue of the connection between global materialism and the defense of evolution. Schönborn's essay is neither convincing nor philosophically sophisticated, and yet it has managed to find more than one eager audience of yes-men. Reading it is like watching a theocon version of The View, with Schönborn filling in for Rosie O'Donnell with his vapid pseudo-aristotelian inanities carelessly cribbed from Copleston's History of Philosophy and Fr. Neuhaus doing time as Barbara Walters, silently egging on the Schönborns in the While We're At It section while pretending that the Stephen Barrs don't exist. I suspect that the reason has less to do with anyone's commitment to scientific methodology and more to do with thumbing one's nose at the advocates of scientism. Not that it isn't fun to thumb one's nose at such people, but still. Cardinal Schönborn is quite right when he says

If [George C.] Simpson had said merely that no plan according to which mankind came about may be discerned using the purely quantitative-mechanical methods of scientific inquiry, then this assertion could be correct. But this way of looking at things - - this "self-limitation of reason," in the words of Benedict XVI's Regensburg address - - is not "given by nature" but is a deliberate, methodological, and eminently goal-oriented choice.

He is right, but it is a straw man, because few, if any, reasonable scientists would say otherwise. Nor does it help that this particular quotation comes immediately after this howler:

The existence of a ship leads to the question "Who constructed it?" - - and so the self-evidence experience of nature (as being directed toward an end, as ordered, and as beautiful) leads to the question "Where do these marks of intelligence come from?"

It's difficult to imagine a more naive approach to this particular problem. Even Cicero had deeper thoughts than this. It's ironic, in a way, that those who are ordinarily the strongest defenders of the idea that there is such a thing as objective truth are suddenly driven to scientific anti-realism when science has something to say that they don't find congenial. Of course, the position being defended by Schönborn has a certain advantage to it: being a priori it will have the advantage of necessity, a feature that no scientific hypothesis can share. Talk about fightin' dirty!

There was a movement afoot in the first half of the twentieth century to make philosophy more like science. The Positivists, Logical Positivists, Verificationists, and others shared a vision of empiricist philosophical method that took nearly thirty years to send off to the ash heap of philosophical history. It would be too bad if we traded a movement to turn philosophy into science for a movement to turn science into philosophy. But there seems to be a new movement afoot - - what to call it? Illogical Positivism? - - that appears to aim to do just that. The demarcation problem is not really that much of a problem, and the sooner folks on both sides of this issue realize that, the better off all subsequent discussion will be.