Theology Wagging the Ontological Dog?

Dennis M. writes,

On Ockham and supposita: A little perplexity at the end, when you write that “[w]hat is curious here is how very specific theological doctrines are allowed to drive the general ontology.” One man’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens, I suppose, but if Ockham is trying to maintain theological orthodoxy it doesn’t seem too strange to me. Presumably his Christian faith came first, and wasn’t based on any complicated metaphysical arguments. Isn’t it reasonable for him to hold the faith unless it just can’t be done, no way and no how, rather than revise it for the sake of a more straightforward ontology – especially if he is concerned with the risk to his salvation? Maybe I’m misunderstanding something simple here.

I agree that Ockham's Christian faith came first.  But I don't agree that the content of his faith wasn't based on any complicated metaphysical arguments.  The theological dogmas had to be hammered out in the councils in the teeth of various competing teachings, later to be branded 'heretical,' and that hammering-out involved metaphysical reasoning using principles and distinctions and logical operations not to be found in the Scripture.  To state the obvious, the church fathers made use of Greek philosophical conceptuality.

For example, if the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, what exactly does that mean?  That God took on a human body?  That is, roughly, the Appolinarian heresy.  Does it mean that there are two persons in Christ, the Word and the person of the man Jesus?  That, roughly, is the Nestorian heresy.  If Jesus died on the cross, did a real man die on the cross, or merely a phantom body as the Docetists maintained? Did God the Father suffer on the cross as the Patripassians held?   And so on. 

Therefore, if Ockham's faith was, or was in part,  faith that certain dogmatic propositions are true, then his faith was based on "complicated metaphysical arguments."  Of course, there is much more to a living religious faith than giving one's intellectual assent to theological propositions. And one can and should question just how important doctrine is to a vital religious faith.

The problem I am trying to command a clear view of can be approached via the following aporetic tetrad:

a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian
definition)

b. There is only one person in Christ, the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity.  (Rejection of the heresy of Nestorius, according to which in Christ there are two persons in two natures rather than one person in two natures.)

c. The individual(ized) human nature of Christ is a primary substance of a rational
nature.

d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every
substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.

Now let's say you have been schooled in Aristotle's metaphysics and are also an orthodox Christian.  So you are inclined to accept all four propositions.  But they cannot all be true.  So one of them must be rejected.  Suppose you reject (d).  You are then allowing your theological convictions to influence your ontology, your metaphysica generalis. 

Is this kosher?  Well, if there are non-theological cases in which a distinction between substance and suppositum is warranted, then clearly yes.  But if there aren't, then the rejection of (d) and the attendant distinction between substances and supposita smacks of being ad hoc.  You are in a logical bind and you extricate yourself by making a distinction that caters to this very bind. 

The distinction is made to accommodate a piece of theology, namely, the orthodox Incarnation doctrine. 
And so the distinction between primary substance and supposit is open to the charge of being ad hoc.  The Latin phrase means 'to this' and suggests that the distinction has no independent support and is a mere invention pulled out of thin air to render coherent an otherwise incoherent, or not obviously
coherent,  theological doctrine.

Again, I ask: Is this (philosophically) kosher? 

If our question as philosophers of religion is whether the Incarnation doctrine is rationally acceptable, then it is hard to see how it can shown to be such by the use of a distinction which has no independent support, a distinction which is crafted for the precise purpose of making  the doctrine in question rationally acceptable.  To rebut this objection from ad hocness, someone will have to explain to me that and how the primary substance-supposit distinction has independent warrant.  Is there some clear non-theological case in which the distinction surfaces?  

If I ask whether the Incarnation doctrine is rationally acceptable, and you make an ad hoc distinction that removes a putative contradiction, this simply pushes the question back a step: is your distinction rationally acceptable?  Arguably, it is not if it is purely ad hoc.

But I admit that the  objection from ad-hocness or ad-hocceity is not decisive.  Dennis might say to me, "Look, the theological dogma has the force of divine revelation because it was elaborated by fathers of the church under the guidance of the Holy Ghost.  So what more support could you ask for?"

At this point we have a stand-off.  If the Incarnation doctrine in its specific Chalcedonian formulation is divinely revealed, then of course it is true, whether or not we mere mortals can understand how it is true.  But note also that if the doctrine is divinely revealed, then there is no need to defend it by making fancy distinctions.  The main point, however, is that anyone who worries about the rational acceptability of the orthodox Incarnation doctrine will also worry about how any group of men can legitimately claim to be guided by the Holy Ghost.  How could anyone know such a thing? Any person or group can claim to be under divine inspiration.  But how validate the claim?

This looks to be another version of the Athens versus Jerusalem stand-off.  The religionist can say to the philosopher: "We have our truth and it is from God, and we are under no obligation to prove its 'acceptability' to your puny 'reason.'  To which the philosopher might respond, "You are asking us to abandon our very way of life, the life of inquiry and rational autonomy, and for what?  For acquiescence in sheer dogmatism, dogmatism contradicted by other dogmatisms that you conveniently ignore."

Dennis also brings up the soteriological angle.  Is one's salvation at risk if one questions or rejects a particular doctrinal formulation of the Incarnation?  Is it reasonable to think that salvation hinges on the acceptance of the Chalcedonian definition?  Is it reasonable to think that Nestorius is in hell for having espoused a doctrine that was rejected as heretical?  Not by my lights.  By my lights to believe such a thing is border-line crazy.  How could a good God condemn to hell a man who, sincerely, prayerfully, and by his best intellectual lights, in good faith and in good conscience, arrived at a view that the group that got power labelled heretical or heterodox?

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Trying to Understand Ockham on Supposita in Light of the Incarnation

Comments

[BV]

Comment by Dennis Monokroussos:

There are at least three issues I’d like to address: the tetralemma about the Incarnation, the rationality of Ockham’s belief in the Incarnation in the face of the tetralemma and other challenges to orthodoxy, and the soteriological angle. The first will have to wait, as I’ll need to reacquaint myself with the historical, theological and philosophical fine points before I can say something worthy of this blog. I’m ready for a go on the other two topics, however.

My knowledge of Ockham’s life is inadequate to speak about his motivations and the nature and depth of his faith, though given his willingness to call Pope John XXII a heretic, and to do so either in his presence or at least in the same city and in response to an investigation commissioned by that Pope, shows remarkable courage and an impressive willingness to stand up for the truth as he saw it. Rather than discuss Ockham, I will offer an idealized 14th century Roman Catholic Christian to stand in for him, and ask what this person should do with the aporetic tetrad, given his background.

First then, our idealized believer – let’s call him Shockham – likely believed in the doctrines of Roman Catholicism from childhood. He trusted his parents, the clergy, and may have had some sort of properly basic belief in God. As he grew older, he may have been aware of arguments offered by the church for the existence of God and for the truth of the Roman church; he may also have had religious experiences of some sort – be they intense or “just” the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit. All of this gives him strong reason to accept the church and Christianity, a combination of testimony (divine and human), argument and experience.

Now to the doctrine of the Incarnation. Long before Shockham bothered about the fine philosophical points of the Chalcedonian formula, he would have known that Jesus was both God and man and that this is a biblical teaching first and foremost. Hammering out the details was a job for later philosophical theologians, but the critical data comes from scripture. Jesus’ humanity is repeatedly affirmed in the New Testament, his divinity is too (though not as often), and the referent of those attributes always appears to be a single person.

By the time Shockham is a fully-fledged philosophical theologian, his faith in God, Christ and the church is deeply held and is rational on multiple levels. Now we come to at last to the fateful moment when he starts to dig into the questions you’re raising, and feels the tension. What should he do? In my view, given that he has a wide range of reasons to trust the Roman Catholic Church and therefore its teaching on the Incarnation, it seems to me eminently rational to tinker with Aristotelian metaphysics first, the faith second. For all his brilliance, Aristotle’s work doesn’t have the seal of divine inspiration and Shockham won’t have had any religious experiences authenticating the Metaphysics. Nor for all its brightness and plausibility does Aristotle’s teaching on substance have the halo of self-evidence about it. Denying or adjusting his views on primary substance is not equivalent to denying or tinkering with the law of non-contradiction. Shockham is faced with a bit of cognitive dissonance, and beliefs that are central to his noetic system will come before Aristotle’s teachings, which are peripheral by comparison.

Regarding the soteriological issue, what we think about Nestorius’s proper fate isn’t the issue; what Ockham (or Shockham) might have thought is. (And all the more so in evaluating his own fate – especially as someone coming after the relevant theological pronouncements had been made.) Creedal statements typically had a host of anathemas attached to those who rejected them; it wasn’t just a matter of rejecting dogma, but of repudiating the church’s authority as well.

The foregoing isn’t intended as an argument for the believer to be impervious to challenges like the ones you’ve raised. A theory can die a death of a thousand qualifications, and even core beliefs can sometimes change. But such an upheaval will take a lot of doing, and will and should require more than an interesting metaphysical challenge to one of the most complicated doctrines of the faith, one dealing with a unique situation. To take an analogy from physics, it isn’t so shocking that laws based on the behavior of “medium-sized dry goods” fail when we consider goings-on at the quantum level. I don’t mean this as an argument for a repudiation or modification of Aristotelian doctrine, of course, but it suggests that Ockham (or Shockham) is reacting rationally.

[Br. JD]

I have been thinking about the problem you posed in regard to distinguishing supposita and substances. Fundamentally, I think "substance" is being used in at least two senses. Aquinas remarks in the TP, q. 2, a. 6, "Now substance, as is plain from Metaph. v, 25, is taken in two ways: first, for essence or nature; secondly, for suppositum or hypostasis--hence the union having taken place in the hypostasis, is enough to show that it is not an accidental union, although the union did not take place in the nature." So his way of understanding substance indicates the distinction he might make between (1) nature/essence and (2) subsistence of that essence in a primary substance. I think his idea is that two essences, and in that sense "substances," are united in a complete subsistence akin to a singular being. It is a unique union, an example of which I don't think would exist in other purely natural cases, but I think the distinction between nature and subsistence is not purely theological. I'd tend to think it is akin to, if not the same as, the essence/existence distinction. Again, just to look to medieval usage where this arises, Aquinas distinguishes supposita in FP, q. 29, a. 2, to avoid precisely the kind of syllogism you cite (albeit in reference to the Trinity): "As we say "three persons" plurally in God, and "three subsistences," so the Greeks say "three hypostases." But because the word "substance," which, properly speaking, corresponds in meaning to "hypostasis," is used among us in an equivocal sense, since it sometimes means essence, and sometimes means hypostasis, in order to avoid any occasion of error, it was thought preferable to use "subsistence" for hypostasis, rather than "substance."

[BV]

Thanks for the comment, Br. JD.

What is at issue is not the distinction between primary and secondary substance, but the distinction between primary substance and suppositum (hypostasis).

True, the distinction between nature and supposit is not purely theological; but that is not the question. The question concerns the difference between primary substance and supposit.

Further, the nature-supposit distinction is not the same as the essence-existence distinction. The former we find in Aristotle, but not the latter.

[BV]

Dennis,

Thanks for the beautifully written comments. I agree with you that Schockham is not being unreasonable, but then neither is the person who rejects the Incarnation as incoherent.

>>For all his brilliance, Aristotle’s work doesn’t have the seal of divine inspiration and Shockham won’t have had any religious experiences authenticating the Metaphysics.<<

While Schockham had no religious experiences authenticating the work of philosophus as Aquinas referred to Aristotle, S. presumably did have various philosophical experiences that authenticated it for him.

We can put it this way: Aristotle does not speak with divine authority, nor does he claim to; the Roman church claims to speak with divine authority (on matters of faith and morals, not all matters). But last time I checked, you were a Protestant. Of course, since last we talked some years ago you may have 'swum the Tiber.' If you are still a Protestant, do you accept the Roman church's teaching authority as divinely underwritten? Do you accept Transubstantiation, Immaculate Conception, Papal Infallibility, etc.?

[Dennis Monokroussos]

The compliment is appreciated, Bill. I'm pleased that you agree with me about Shockham's reasonableness, but I'm not sure we understand this in the same way. My position is not that Shockham is justified in accepting the doctrine of the Incarnation in spite of its incoherence in all extant philosophical formulations. Rather, I argue that his independent sources of justification for belief in the doctrine as expressed by the Chalcedonian formula justifies his tweaking the concept of a supposit. That tweaked concept is logically coherent, and it underwrites an understanding of the Incarnation that is also coherent.

If the foregoing is correct and you're granting all of this on Shockham's behalf, then it seems that you should grant that the (doctrine of the) Incarnation is coherent (bracketing other putative problems). The dialectic here seems relevantly similar to that in the logical problem of evil. Even if someone is an atheist and rejects libertarian free will, he should still acknowledge that the Free Will Defense (FWD) proves that the concept of an all-good and all-powerful God is not rendered incoherent by the existence of evil per se. Correspondingly, one might reject the theological sources for belief in the Incarnation and think there aren’t any supposita that aren’t subtances.

One might even draw a further parallel: a determinist might think that the compatibilist understanding of free will is superior to the libertarian’s, just as the advocate of Aristotle’s conception of suppositum will prefer his definition to Ockham’s. Even so, the compatibilist ought to grant the success of the FWD, and do so even if he’s a physicalist and thinks the appeal to libertarian freedom is ad hoc. Likewise for the Aristotelian with the coherence of the Incarnation.

With respect to my own beliefs, I'm still a Protestant and cannot make appeal to the infallible pronouncement of the Roman Catholic magisterium. (Despite this, many Protestants accept the first seven ecumenical councils.) If that were a necessary condition for justified belief in the Incarnation I would be in trouble, but I don't believe it is. All Shockham's other sources are available to me as well, and I believe they suffice.

[BV]

Dennis,

I think we agree on this: Nothing is rationally acceptable if it is, or entails, a narrowly-logical contradiction. But my present concern is not with whether Trinity, Incarnation, Transubstantiation, etc. are logically contradictory, but with the murkier and more difficult question of whether the 'tweaking' you mention amounts to an ad hoc patch job as opposed to a fruitful enriching of one's general ontology.

The 'evil' and 'freedom' parallels would be worth exploring.