Maverick Philosopher

"This is My Body": Literal or Metaphorical?

The question is moot, according to to Anthony G. Flood. The question of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist cannot arise for one who understands scripture.

“This do in remembrance of Me,” Jesus commanded His disciples at His last Passover, two days before the official Passover preparation that was concurrent with His passion. (He probably elected to follow Moses’ calendar.)

The antecedent of “this” is the Passover, given by God to the Israelites in Egypt and performed every year since until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. Henceforth, as often as His disciples would perform that ceremony, that is, annually, they were to contemplate not their ancestors’ miraculous escape from bondage, but Him, whose body, whose very Life, would soon be given for them.

Most Christians, from Roman Catholics to Plymouth Brethren, believe that Christ instituted an “ordinance” or “sacrament” at His last  Passover. The evidence for that belief, however, lies in tradition, not Scripture.

Comments? I myself am insufficiently equipped to weigh in on this topic.

Platonism and Christianity: Josef Pieper on Phaedrus 246c

At the center of the confrontation between Platonism and Christianity on the question of the survival of death lies the tension: immortality of the soul or resurrection of the body? More fully:  immortality of the disembodied soul or resurrection of the en-souled body? Connected with this is the question of whether and to what extent Christianity has been illegitimately Hellenized, in particular, Platonized. Platonism holds that the soul is the true self and that death is liberation of the soul from its entrapment by the body. This puts Platonism at odds with Christianity which teaches the resurrection of the body and which comports better with the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) view of the human person as a soul-body composite, and thus as essentially embodied. For Platonism, I am (identical to) my soul, and my body is an accidental adjunct. On the A-T view, however, I am not my soul, but a soul-body composite, both components of which are essential to me and to each other. But Platonism is one thing, Plato another. It is not clear that Plato was a Platonist.

Josef Pieper takes it a step further and roundly asserts that "Plato himself, however, is no Platonist." He refers us to the late dialogue, Phaedrus, and to the passage at 246c. The passage is concerned with the question "how it is that a living being is called mortal and immortal." Pieper takes Plato to be suggesting:

If ever immortality is conferred upon us, not just the soul but the entire physical human being will in some inconceivable manner participate in the life of the gods; for in them alone is it made real in its original perfection. . . . Plato himself, therefore, here concedes that it is a catachrestic, inadequate, use of language to call the soul immortal. (Death and Immortality, Herder and Herder, 1969, p. 116.)

Unfortunately, Pieper's interpretation, which attempts to assimilate Platonism to Christianity, is not borne out by the text:

This composite structure of body and soul joined together is called a living being and is further designated as mortal. Immortal it is not on any reasonable supposition: in fact, it is our imagination, not our vision, not our adequate comprehension, that presents us with the notion of a god as an immortal living being equipped both with soul and with body, and with these, moreoever, joined together for all time. (trs. Helmbold and Rabinowitz, emphasis added)

Pieper's mistake is a surprising one for a philosopher of his stature to make. But it is a mistake that does not detract much from the high quality of Death and Immortality, which I strongly recommend, and to which I regularly return.

Tongue and Pen

Top o' the Stack.

Christ has harsh words for those who misuse the power of speech at Matthew 12:36: "But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment."  But what about every idle word that bloggers blog and Substackers stack?  Must not the discipline of the tongue extend to the pen?

A Response to My Is Sin a Fact?

Brian Bosse is not convinced by my Substack article, Is Sin a Fact? A Passage from Chesterton Examined.   Brian writes,

Your Argument Against Chesterton

(1) If the existence of sin is a fact one can see in the street, then the existence of God is a fact one can see in the street. 

(2) It is not the case that the existence of God is a fact one can see in the street.

From (1) and (2), it follows that

(3) It is not the case that the existence of sin is a fact one can see in the street.  

Bill’s Prior Commitments

(4) The existence of moral evil is a fact one can see in the street.

(5) There are objective moral values/laws.

It seems to me that from (4) and (5) one must conclude that…

(6) The existence of objective moral values/laws is a fact one can see in the street.

Bill, do you accept (6)?  If so, do you think it is possible for there to be objective moral laws in a non-theistic worldview? 

I endorse the first argument. It is obviously valid in point of logical form, instantiating as it does modus tollens.  And I claim that both premises are true. You will agree with me that the first is true if you agree that sin is an offense against God, which implies that if there is no God, then there is no sin.  The first premise is uncontroversially true because true ex vi terminorum, which is a fancy way of saying that it is true by definition. You will agree with me that the second premise is true if you agree that the existence of sinful acts and sinful omissions is not perceivable via the senses. (More on this in a moment.)

As for the second argument, I did not give it and I do not endorse it. I do not consider (4) to be true. And I reject (6). Brian is omitting some important distinctions I make. I affirm the existence of moral evil (evil that comes about through the actions and omissions of free agents), but I say nothing in that Substack article about how the fact of moral evil is known. Is there moral evil? is one question. How do we know that there is moral evil? is a different question. 

Do we literally see moral evil? Is there any empirical access to it? Can we build a 'ponerometer,' an evil detector?  Do we humans possess a non-empirical sensus moralitatis whereby we discern the existence of moral evil? These are just some of the questions that naturally arise.  I deny that we literally see instances of moral evil.  I will give a graphic example in a moment. 

It is also important not to leave out the distinction I make between two senses or uses of fact.' On one use of 'fact,' a fact is a true proposition. On a second use, a fact is a true proposition known to be true.  If  the existence of moral evil is a fact in the second sense, that leaves open the question as to how we know that moral evil is a fact in this second sense. I deny that we can see it (with our eyes) "in the street." The fact of moral evil is not "as plain as potatoes," to use Chesterton's expression. I know that the vegetable on my counter is a potato by seeing it (with my eyes). I do not see moral evil with my eyes. I maintain that there are actions that are morally evil, but I deny that their being morally evil is a fact that one can literally see. Now for the example. 

There is a video online that depicts a black thug nonchalantly loading his semi-automatic pistol and shooting  in the back of the head a homeless man sitting on a curb.  What do you see? You see a man shooting another man in the head. You do not see the evil of the act. (You do not see the illegality of the act either. You see a killing; you do not see a murder.) That is not to say that the act is not evil; it is to say that the evilness of the act is not visible or in any other way empirically detectable by our outer senses even when instrumentally extended.  Suppose you saw the shooting from different angles in great detail, with the blood surging out of the wound, etc. You would still not thereby know by empirical means that the the act of shooting is an evil act.  Suppose you had a videotape of the entire execution and then analyzed it frame-by-frame. Would you then see (with your eyes) the evilness of the act? Of course not.

In sum, I affirm the existence of moral evil.  But I deny both that the existence of moral evil is a fact one can see in the street, and that the existence of sin is a fact that one can see in the street. The crucial point however, as Brian appreciates, is that moral evil is not the same as sin.  It is perfectly plain that sin presupposes the existence of God. It is not perfectly plain that objective moral evil presupposes the existence of God.  

Brian asks, "Do you think it is possible for there to be objective moral laws in a non-theistic worldview? [i.e., in a world in which God does not exist?]"  Well, there cannot be objectively binding moral commandments without a very special commander, or objectively binding moral imperatives without an Imperator.  But why couldn't there be objectively true moral declaratives -- e.g., it is wrong always and everywhere to torture innocent human beings for one's sexual gratification -- in the atheist's world?

But these questions go well beyond the topic of my article which was merely to show that Chesterton was blustering when he claimed that it is empirically obvious -- "plain as potatoes," a fact in the second sense -- that there are sinful deeds and omissions. That could be true only if it is empirically obvious that God exists. But the latter is not empirically obvious.  

The Lewis Trilemma

Does it prove the divinity of Jesus?

I argue that it doesn't at the top o' the Stack. People who think otherwise, Peter Kreeft for example, bluster.

People love to bluster.  Galen Strawson's rejection of theism is pure bluster.

Body, Soul, Self

  Tony Flood writes:

Hard to imagine Hitchens at almost 73, had he lived. Great post, but I have a question.

Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one's "true self"? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., "the man." The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God breathed the breath of life (nishmat hayyim) into him. The pre-animated ha-adamah was neither dead nor a "less-than-true" or incomplete human being; the animating nephesh is not the man's self or ego. When God withdraws the breath of life from a soul, that soul dies. I think know your non-Genesis source, but I want to hear it from you. Your passing comment reminded me that I had written quite a bit about this earlier this year.

 

Also interested in knowing whether there's anything you want to share from your retreat.

 

Tony is referring to this sentence of mine: "Those of us who champion  free speech miss him [Hitchens] and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world had he taken care of himself, or rather his body, his true self being his soul." What I wrote suggests that there is a difference between body and soul in a person, and that the soul is the person's self.  But why true self?  Well, if I can exist without a body, but I cannot exist without (being identical to) a soul, then 'my' soul, or rather me qua soul is 'my' true self. There are a number of different questions here, all very difficult.

 

To begin, we need to clarify our terminology. 'Soul' (psyche, anima, Seele) is ambiguous.  It could refer to the life-principle in living things.  'Soul' could also be used to refer to the subject or possessor of a person's mental states. For the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, "Each actual human being is essentially  a pure mental substance . . . " and ". . . a person has mental properties because their [sic] soul has mental properties." (Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019, p. 80)  

 

Now ask yourself which of the following is true:

 

(A) I am (identical to) a substance the form of which is my soul and the matter of which is my body.  Anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body.

 

(P) I am (identical to) a purely mental substance that contingently possesses a living human body.

 

A substance may be defined as any individual entity metaphysically capable of independent existence, where 'individual' implies unrepeatability and impredicability.

 

(A) is the Aristotelian-Thomistic view. A person is one substance, the individual human being, the soul of which is not a substance. 

 

(P) is the Platonic-Cartesian view. It is substance-dualist. In the book mentioned, Swinburne defends substance dualism according to which "each human consists of two parts -- a soul (a pure mental substance) and a body (a physical substance)." (p. 141)

 

So, when I wrote in my Substack entry about Hitchens taking care of himself, or rather his body, I signaled my inclination to accept the Platonic-Cartesian view. You can destroy your body with hooch and weed, but not your soul.  

 

Now which of the two views above is more biblical? This, I take it, is the question that exercises Tony, and I suspect that his view is either (A) or neither. I suspect that Tony's view is that the Platonic-Cartesian view is wholly unbiblical and thus that Christianity has little or nothing to do with Platonism.  

 

Serendipitously, Tony's question ties in nicely with a discussion I had with a man at the monastery about Mark 12: 18-27 and Christ's argument against the Sadducees re: bodily resurrection. Don't we need Platonic souls during the time between hora mortis nostrae and general resurrection?

 

Combox open.

The God Question and the Christian Proposition

A conversation between Alain Fikielkraut and Pierre Manent.  Very French and very flabby, but here is an excerpt that I approve of (emphasis added):

P.M. What is the nature of Islam’s challenge for us? And who is this “we” being challenged? The challenge lies in the fact that what is happening is that Islam is exerting considerable pressure on Europe, which should not have happened according to the grand progressive narrative elaborated since the eighteenth century—this philosophy of history, according to which humanity, under the leadership of the European avant-garde, was supposed to emancipate itself irresistibly from religious claims, dogma, and doctrine. The vitality that Islam as a whole has maintained, or rather reinforced, goes against a historical perspective that the weakening or “secularization” of Christianity seemed, to many, to validate. Islam is, in any case, the religion that refuses to come to an end and that affirms itself in ways that are manifestly public and triumphalist, casting doubt at least on the grand narrative of secularization. This challenges the consciousness upon which the self-confidence of modern Europe once rested.

Progressivism will not reconsider its approach to the religious question. What, then, does it do? On the one hand, it radically modifies its definition of progress in order to make Islam a part of the grand narrative. Europe no longer represents progress as the framework for the coming forth of a new association of humanity, of an industrial or socialist society, as August Comte or Karl Marx thought; on the contrary, it now represents progress because it has totally renounced self-affirmation and has reinvented itself as unlimited openness to the other—even when this other goes as directly as possible against our principles, particularly those concerning the equality of men and women. Since we now measure the quality of our progressivism by our disposition to welcome Islam unconditionally, Islam obliges us by confirming our grand narrative rather than refuting it. But since it is necessary all the same to take account of the fact that Muslim customs conflict with some of our essential principles, we decree with confidence (in a complementary strategic move) that secularism will take care of the problem by requiring Muslims to remove at least the visible signs of the subordination of women. While the first move boasts of its acceptance of Muslims as they are, the second promises that secularism will make them what they ought to be. Thus is removed all limitation on the welcoming of Islam, whether in the name of its present difference or in the name of its future similarity. Of course, this similarity will be slow in coming; progressivism lives by waiting.

MavPhil 'intervention': European progressivism is so progressive that it transmogrifies into ethno-masochism and cultural suicide. The progressivity of this progressivism is that of  a progressive disease. With the exception of Hungary, Europe is decadent-unto-death, and there is no decadent like a French decadent. (Am I being fair, Vito?) Of course, we over here are decadent as hell as well, but not as decadent, since about half of our population is willing to punch back against ethno-masochistic wokery, 'critical' race-delusionality, reality-denying social constructivism, the celebration of grotesquerie, the canonization of worthless individuals, the destruction of monuments to the great and noble, the destruction of the family, the moral corruption of children, the excusing of brazen mendacity at the highest levels of government, and all the rest of the depredations of cultural Marxism.

As for the "complementary strategic move," good luck with that! Do you Frenchies have the WILL to defend your superior culture against that of the Muslim invaders? Will European secularism "take care of" Muslim barbarism? Maybe. But addiction to la dolce vita is vitiating, weakening in plain English, and you Europeans may end up in dhimmitude. (My use of the Italian phrase may be inappropriate given the current 'stiffening' in my ancestral country, powered by a fiery Italian female.)

The rest of the discussion is pretty good too.

Le Figaro: The Catholic and Republican frameworks that hold together French society have become dislocated, as Jerome Fourquet explains at the beginning of his work L’Archipel francais. And so, we seek alternative religions. The philosopher Jean-Francois Braunstein recently published La religion woke. Alain Finkielkraut, what do you make of the idea of looking at wokeism as a religion?

A.F. I am not comfortable with this metaphorical use of the term religion. I am not convinced by the concept of secular religions. The promise of a radiant future is not religious. In his book, Pierre Manent sets up a very illuminating debate between Pascal and Rousseau. Original sin occupies a central place in Pascal’s thought. Manent writes: “The claim to overcome human injustice by ourselves, the injustice in which we are born and in which we will live as long as God has not delivered us, is the beginning and indeed the height of our injustice.” Rousseau says the opposite; he excludes the hypothesis of original sin: “I have shown that all the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it; I have stated the manner in which they are born. I have followed their genealogy, so to speak, and I have shown how through the continuous deterioration of their original goodness, men finally become what they are.”

Rousseau replaces original sin by the original crime: property, inequality. Those we call the oppressors are the successors of this crime. For Rousseau, politics must take responsibility for the whole of reality, and its final purpose becomes the elimination of evil. This project can take no other form than the elimination of the wicked; this is what the totalitarian experience teaches us. This is why we see the unexpected return of a meditation on original sin in late nineteenth-century thought. We human beings do not have the strength to deliver ourselves from sin.

Now, with wokeism, we return to the original crime, as if totalitarianism had never happened. With wokeism, evil has an address: evil is the male, white heterosexual over 50. Evil must be eliminated at all costs. Thus, cancel culture arises and spreads.

P.M. The new ideology no longer sees in human bonds the expression and fulfillment of human nature, but what threatens freedom and injures the rights of the individual. The new progressive finds his way in society as in a suspect country. The sole common cause is the protection of nature—but protection against whom? Against human beings, who stain or destroy nature, in one way or another. Political ecology introduces a principle of distrust or of limitless enmity between human beings and with respect to humanity as such. The desire for an earth without people turns humanity against itself and thus feeds the project of effacing what is special about humanity, of making human beings animals like the others, and so, in the end, inoffensive. Thus, at the moment when we claim to base all collective order on the sole principle of human rights, we wish to remove from humanity all that is distinctive by promulgating the rights of animals, plants, and rocks against humanity. Those who speak on behalf of species incapable of speaking need fear no refutation. All of nature provides them with an inexhaustible supply of motives in their accusations against other human beings.

As I have said, contemporary progressivism would have us admit that our species has no real or legitimate privilege over other species, which ultimately have as many rights as we do. And yet there is one point concerning which progressivism absolutely refuses to consider us as animals like the others: it rejects the idea that our lives should be organized according to the difference between the sexes, the natural polarity between males and females. How can we be animals like the others if the human order must construct itself on the basis of the negation of this natural difference that we have in common with animals? In this way, contemporary ideology succeeds in combining a radical contestation of the human difference with a radical contestation of the animal part of our natures. We have only to open the Bible to the book of Genesis to recover a bit of common sense.

 

"Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread"

Material bread or spiritual bread?

Substack latest.

Felicitas Theoretica et Visio Beata: Monasticism and Christianity

The bliss of the bios theoretikos as described by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics is the model for the Beatific Vision as described by Thomas Aquinas. The ultimate salvific state is a  contemplative state. Monasticism is an institutional expression of this root commitment.  The monk's life is decidedly biased toward the intellectual and the theoretical. As opposed to what? As opposed to a life in which praxis is paramount.

Question: Is the life of the monk the highest life for the Christian? Is the monastic life the highest form of  imitatio Christi?  Christ was no anchorite.  He did not flee from the agitation of the cities and from the people except for relatively short periods. He associated with the canaille, with publicans and prostitutes. His ministry was among them where he risked everything and in human terms lost everything.

Despite their drastic differences, Socrates too moved among the people  and met a predictable fate. He lived in no ivory tower where he could think and write in peace and in leisurely retirement. He wrote nothing. His academy was the agora. His was the dialectic of the streets, not that of the learned essay. A battle-hardened soldier, he knew how to translate military valor into civil courage. Among his interlocutors were powerful and vicious men.  He took risks, offended them, and was executed by the State.  But back to Christ.  Let us hear St. Neilos the Ascetic. This is from his Ascetic Discourse in the Philokalia, that marvellous compendium of Patristic teachings.

For philosophy is a state of moral integrity combined with a doctrine of true knowledge concerning reality. Both Jews and Greeks fell short of this, for they rejected the Wisdom that is from heaven and tried to philosophize without Christ, who alone has revealed the true philosophy in both His life and His teaching. For by the purity of His life He was the first to establish the way of true philosophy. He always held His soul above the passions of the body, and in the end, when His death was required by His design for man's salvation. He laid down even His soul. In this He taught us that the true philosopher must renounce all life's pleasures, mastering pains and passions, and paying scant attention to the body: he must not overvalue even his soul, but must readily lay it down when holiness demands.

The apostles received this way of life from Christ and made it their own, renouncing the world in response to His call, disregarding fatherland, relatives and possessions. At once they adopted a harsh and strenuous way of life, facing every kind of adversity, afflicted, tormented, harassed, naked, lacking even necessities; and finally they met death boldly, imitating their Teacher faithfully in all things. Thus through their actions they left behind a true image of the highest way of life.

Although all Christians should have modeled their own life on this image, most of them either lacked the will to do so or else made only feeble efforts. There were, however, a few who had the Strength to rise above the turmoil of the world and to flee from the agitation of cities. Having escaped from this turbulence, they embraced the monastic life and reproduced in themselves the pattern of apostolic virtue. They preferred voluntary poverty to possessions, because this freed them from distraction, and so as to control the passions, they satisfied their bodily needs with food that was readily available and simply prepared, rather than with richly dressed dishes. Soft and unnecessary clothing they rejected as an invention of human luxury, and they wore only such plain garments as are required for the body. It seemed to them a betrayal of philosophy to turn their attention from heavenly things to earthly concerns more appropriate to animals. They ignored the world, being above human passions.

I draw your attention to the third paragraph. Christ did not flee from the agitation of the cities. He did not ignore the world and its turmoil. He was not above human passions. The God-Man was fully human. He did not die like a Stoic sage. He experienced to the full the brutality of the brutal Romans, dying like a man in utter agony of body and in despair of spirit, abandoned.

So the question is: Is the monastic way a way to evade true imitation of Christ? I myself am of the monkish disposition and not at all inclined to go into the agora like Socrates  or into the temple with its moneychangers like Christ. Luther I find repellent; the anti-rational but also anti-mystical Kierkegaard fascinating but wrongheaded; the Roman church wishy-washy despite its deep depths of mysticism; it is the East and the mystical depths of Orthodox Christianity that attract me. Athens is closer to Constantinople than to Rome.

And so I ask my question in the spirit of Socratic self-examination. I do not have an answer.  The unexamined life is not worth living, and the highest examination is the examination of one's own life.

Related:

Kierkegaard: "To Hell with the Pope!" and Monkishness. The Highest Life

Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

Christianity and Individualism

Mark Tooley:

Easter is a timely reminder of Christianity’s development of individualism, which is now widely derided by many on both sides of the political spectrum. 

Yes.

Many on the post-liberal left replace individualism, which they equate with greed and capitalism, with raucous identity politics stressing communal identities based on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or some other category of victim group. Many on the post-liberal right disdain individualism as self-centered autonomous materialist hedonism disconnected from family, religion and community, degenerating into endless categories of personal expressivism. They propose hierarchy, tradition and subordination to institutions as alternatives.

That's right.

Easter is the supreme example of extraordinary, supernatural inspired individualism. Jesus the individual, as God Incarnate, redeemed the whole world through His suffering, death and resurrection. He was shunned by all, His people, His followers, His family, yet He sacrificially prevailed against all sin, death and hell. Humanity was not saved by the collective but by one individual.

Jesus is the exemplar of the anti-tribal whether you accept his divinity or not. But isn't the God of the Old Testament a tribal god, the god of the Jews who sticks up for them and smites their enemies?  Maybe so, but God himself is not a member of the tribe of gods. In himself, God is anti-tribal. His identity is not a tribal identity. If we are made in his image and likeness, then we are meant to be individuals too.  Normative individuality is pre-delineated in our divine origin. In simpler terms, God made us to be individuals, and it is our vocation and task to achieve individuation by lifting ourselves out of the social and the tribal from which we must start, but in which we must not remain.  Perhaps  we could read Christ as the highest manifestation and achievement of radical self-individuation.

This fearsome call to the individual has animated all of Christendom and bequeathed to us concepts of individual dignity, purpose, duties and rights, which ultimately resulted in societies that aspired to equality and opportunity for all. What is sometimes called classical “liberalism” is the respect for individuals and their consciences that unfolded across several millennia thanks to the Biblical God’s summons to each person.

This is my view as well. It is presently under assault both from the post-liberal Left and the post-liberal Right, e.g. Patrick Deneen and Ryszard Legutko, et al. 

Addressing one prominent contemporary critic of individualism and “liberalism,” Hanssen warns: “[Patrick] Deneen needs to be more careful, in taking aim at radical autonomy, that he doesn’t cast aspersions on the entire tradition in which Christianity has played a crucial role in elevating the dignity of the individual. It is the individual substance of a rational nature that is immortal: not the family, not the community, not the state.”  

Exactly right!  Speaking for myself: 

1) The individual is the primary locus of value, not the family, the clan, the tribe, any group, association, race, sex . . . .

2) Self-individuation is a task, a project, and for the believer, one presumably extending beyond this life and into the next.  We are to become who we are, and to be who we are becoming.  

3) Tribalism is tearing us apart. We are on a path toward increasing social malaise as a result.

4)  The cure for tribal self-identification is not an opposite tribal self-identification. White tribalism, for example, is not  a truly ameliorative and long-term answer to black tribalism.  I do concede, however, that tribalism pro tempore may be tactically necesary, here and there, for purposes of self-defense.

Ratzinger on the Resurrection of the Body

Substack latest.

You will note that in my writings I use the gender-neutral 'man' and 'he.'  It is important to stand in defense of the mother tongue. She is under vicious assault these days. You owe a lot to your mother; show her some respect. On Easter Sunday and on every day. Anyone who takes offense at standard English takes offense inappropriately.

Wittgenstein on Christianity

A Good Friday meditation.

Substack latest.

Last year's Good Friday Substack meditation.

Another Theological Conundrum: Hypostatic Union and the Contingency of the Incarnation

In the immediately preceding theological thread, Dr. Caiati reminded me of Fr. Thomas Joseph White's The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology (CUA Press, 2017). So I cracked open my copy and found some notes from October 2018, one batch of which I will now turn into a weblog entry.

'Hypostatic Union' ". . . refers to the divine person of the Word uniting a human nature to himself  in his own person." (113, emphasis in original) This is the familiar one person (hypostasis)- two natures doctrine.  The one person is the Word (Logos), the second person of the Trinity.  The union is called hypostatic because it is the union of two natures in one hypostasis. The two natures are divine nature and human nature. Both natures are to be understood as individualized, not as universals. They are natures of one and the same self-subsistent individual, the Word. There is no "confusion of natures," which is to say that the  two natures are really distinct, distinct in reality and not merely in our thought, though not separable in reality.  These two natures are nonetheless essentially together: neither can exist without the other.  It is not as if there is "merely an accidental association of two beings, the man Jesus and the Word of God." (113) There is only one being, the Word, which possesses two distinct but really inseparable natures.  Fr. White then concludes:

Consequently, Jesus's concrete body and soul are the subsistent body and soul of the person of the Word. The person of Jesus simply is the person of the Son [the Word or Logos or second person of the Trinity] existing as man.

I have two questions.

First, is human nature conjoined to the Word at every time? It would have to be given that the two natures are essentially, and not merely accidentally, united. The Word is essentially divine. So if the two natures are essentially united, then the Word is essentially human: it possesses essentially a human nature.  That implies that at no time is the Word not in possession of a human nature. Now the Incarnation is the acquisition by the Word of a human nature. The Incarnation is an event -- call it the Christ event -- that occurred at a particular time in a particular place.  Before that time, the Incarnation was at best prophesied.  A contradiction would seem to ensue:

1) The Word possesses human nature at every time;

2) It is not the case that the Word possesses human nature at every time.

How do we negotiate this aporetic dyad? More simply, how remove the contradiction? Can it be removed without adding 'epicycles' to the theory that raise problems of their own?

My second question is a modal counterpart of the first. The Incarnation is a contingent event. There was no necessity that it occur.   Had Adam not sinned there would have been no need for a Redeemer. Man would have continued blissfully in his paradisiacal, prelapsarian state. The soteriological significance of the Incarnation is that only by the Son's becoming man and suffering the ultimate penalty could man be restored to fellowship with God.  For the offense against God was so great that only God could expiate it. But if the divine and human natures are united essentially in one person, the Word, then, given that the Word is a necessary being, it follows that the Incarnation is a necessary event. A second contradiction seems to ensue:

3) The Word possesses human nature in every possible world;

4) It is not the case that the Word possesses human nature in every possible world.

(4) is true because there are worlds in which there is no Fall and thus no need for Incarnation. For those who don't understand Leibnizian 'possible worlds' jargon, the contradiction amounts  to saying both that the Word is and is not human necessarily. Bear in mind that if x has a property essentially, and x is a necessary being, then x has the property necessarily.

There is a third question the 'exfoliation' (unwrapping) of which I will save for later, namely, if the Word has a human soul in virtue of having human nature, how does that human soul integrate with the conscious and self-conscious life of the second divine person? A person is not merely an hypostasis or substratum, but one that is conscious and self-conscious.  A person is not an object but a subject or a subject-object. A number of further difficult questions spin off from here. Time to hit 'post.'

Doubting the Teachings of One's Religion

I argued earlier that besides its salutary role in philosophy, doubt also has a salutary role to play in religion. But I left something out, and Vito Caiati caught it:

I have been thinking about your recent post “A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and Religion” and would like to pose a question to you: While it is certainly true that the religionist “doubts the teachings of other religions,” does he not do the same with some or many of the teachings of his own religion?  In raising this question, I have in mind the intellectual believer, imbued with an inherent religious sensibility and inclination, desirous of affirming the foundational propositions of his faith, including those that appear illogical or contradictory, but who, however much he wills it, is often suffused with doubt about their veracity. I would go so far as to argue, speaking as a Christian and Roman Catholic, that certain dogmas and doctrines by their very nature engender such doubts. None of this necessarily entails the abandonment of belief, but it renders the faith of the religionist more tenuous and unstable than many would like to admit. His struggle to uphold one or more members of a set of beliefs is, at least for those not gifted with special grace, a characteristic property of his faith.  At best, he should acknowledge the tension and understand that he will repeatedly transverse an arc between belief and doubt and that the warm convictions of one moment will often dissipate in the cold misgivings of another. The gap between what is affirmed and what is consistently believed is for the religionist of this type never entirely closed.

That is a very fine statement and I cannot disagree with it. Religious believers who are both sincere and intellectually sophisticated will in the main, and as a matter of fact, question the truth of their beliefs and the efficacy of their practices.  Dr. Caiati doesn't quite say it, but he does suggest that this is as it ought to be. Whether or not he would commit himself to the further step from the factual to the normative, I will commit myself to it: one ought to, at least sometimes, question truth and efficacy of beliefs and practices.  It has always seemed to me that a living faith, as opposed to a convenience and a soporific, must maintain itself in the teeth of doubt. A vital faith, a living faith is animated in part by doubt and a spirit of inquiry.  He who finds first had to seek; but here below the finding is never secure and final and so must be renewed by further seeking.  

Vito speaks of certain doctrines and dogmas that by their very nature engender doubts. Some of these are harder to believe than others. The hardest to believe are those that demand or seem to demand the  "crucifixion of the intellect."  Trinity and Incarnation are the two main main examples. One cannot be a Christian and deny them* (in the way one could be a Christian and deny Transubstantiation). It is, however, difficult to make logical sense of them (in the way that it is not difficult to make logical sense of the Resurrection.)  See my Trinity and Incarnation category for details, and this relatively short and precise entry in particular: The Logic of the Trinity Revisited.

Religious faith here below must remain "tenuous and unstable" to the intellectually awake. The tenets we hold to must remain tentative and thus "tenuous."  Doxastic 'grip,' like physical grip is subject to the world's loosening. No one's grip is absolutely secure.  There is no helping that unless you want to sink into the somnambulance of the worldling who has the world and its pleasures and "fire insurance" to boot.

Religious faith is a faith seeking understanding. It is not a blind faith without understanding, but neither is it a faith that goes beyond a clear understanding, superadding intellectual assent to a clearly conceived proposition.   Perhaps the Pauline image is apt: religious faith is a seeing through a glass darkly.  The glass of the discursive intellect is a distorting lens through which the Incarnation must appear logically impossible even though in truth it is actual.  

Let me put the question to myself directly: Do you or do you not accept Jesus Christ as the way, the truth, and the life, as your only hope for salvation? My acceptance takes the form, not of an acceptance of a ready-made proposition or set of propositions, but the acceptance of a task to be pursued in all seriousness, the task of investigating the matter in all its ramifications via reasoning, prayer, meditation, examination of conscience, study of all relevant literary sources, including scripture, commentaries thereon, the works of the great and not-so-great philosophers of all times and places,  with no slighting of Athens, or Jerusalem, or Benares, or Alexandria, and seeking out the few living who may have been vouchsafed a higher degree of insight than that which I find in myself.

_________________

*I spew from my mouth those miserable 'liberals' who would remake Christianity in their own stunted image. They are free to reject the doctrine, and I defend their right to do so; but they ought not be allowed to change it to suit themselves.  Christianity is what it is; its definatory tenets are essential to it and cannot be jettisoned without jettisoning the whole thing.

Addendum (6 February 2022):

Malcolm Pollack comments on the above  here.  In an e-mail he writes,

I hope you are well. I set off in 2022 imagining I was going to write a lot more (I'd been tapering off lately), but things are now so completely insane that I hardly know what to say. How does one analyze, or comment productively on, what goes on in a madhouse? Why even bother? And why continue to elaborate the various and infinitely detailed breakdowns and malfunctions of a system that's going over a cliff? I can hardly bring myself, any longer, to raise a pen.

There is indeed something absurd about continuing to add to the analytical literature on our social and political collapse. For example, what is the point of this excellent article by Anthony Esolen? It will not be read by those who need its instruction, and even if they did read it, it would do them no good. You cannot appeal to the reason of those bereft of reason, or to the consciences of those who either lack a conscience or whose conscience was never properly formed. 

So why do I continue to think about and write about these things? The short answer is that I have a theoretical bent. I enjoy figuring things out.  "All men by nature desire to know." (Aristotle). This is so even if few live up to their (normative) nature. The bios theoretikos and all that. Intellectual types derive intense pleasure from reading, study, thinking, and all cognate activities.

Even if the subject-matter is disgusting as is that of the medical and social pathologists, the pleasure of understanding is a delight.  The feculent can be fascinating.

Theory has its escapist joys. But in the end we would prefer to act upon the world and its recalcitrant denizens and bring about improvement. But even if we know what needs to be done to bring about, not mere change, but improvement, the tasks are formidable and perhaps insurmountable especially since we who oppose the current madness are divided among ourselves, which is the topic of this article which explains the Boomer versus 'Based' generation gap on the Right. Excerpt:

Do you hate America and want it to fail? 

A lot of younger right-wingers would say yes . . . in a certain sense, they do. And they have reasons for saying that. What young man with any sense wants to die for the Joe Biden regime in the Ukraine? Who wants to pay taxes so Kamala Harris can shower money on illegal immigrants and left-wing shock troops?

That’s a hard message to hear for anyone who lived through the 1960s and the Cold War. For a long time, to be on the Right—to defend liberty and morality and decency—meant to be a patriot and to love America. And it still does. But the enemies of freedom and decency who hate America are no longer godless communists abroad, they are the godless leftists at home who are currently in power.

If America means transgender rights and suffocating biomedical security measures, then those who love freedom will come to hate America—or, to be more specific, the current regime that has taken control of what used to be America.

Young people on the Right don’t hate liberty and morality and decency; they despise woke ideology. The older idea of “America” that the Boomers love is gone, as far as the younger generation is concerned. Most Boomers will never share this antipathy, but they must learn to distinguish between America the nation and America the state. The American state—as the COVID lockdowns, Russiagate hoax, and the political prosecution of the January 6 protestors show—is at war with the American people. (Many older conservatives recognized this distinction and gave Rush Limbaugh a pass when he famously remarked on air that he hoped Barack Obama would fail.)

A Christian Koan for Christmas Eve

From my Facebook page, three years ago, today. My writing is uneven in quality. But the Muse was with me below.

................................

 

Man is godlike and therefore proud. He becomes even more godlike when he humbles himself. The central thought of Christianity, true or not, is one so repellent to the natural human pride of life that one ought at least to entertain the unlikelihood of its having a merely human origin. The thought is that God humbled himself to the point of entering the world in the miserably helpless and indigent way we in fact do, inter faeces et urinam, and to the point of leaving it in the most horrendous, shameful, and excruciating way the brutal Romans could devise, and from a most undistinguished spot, a hill in an obscure desert outpost of their empire.

 

Addenda (24 December 2021)

 

1) "Pride of life" above alludes to 1 John 2:16:

For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. (KJV)

2) Goethe considered the cross "the most disgusting thing under the sun." See Walter Kaufmann's  essay, Goethe's Faith and Faust's Redemption. A similar attitude in Nietzsche. That the central Christian symbol is a Roman torture device shows that Christianity is a slander upon life, the only life there is.  That, in a sentence, is what I take to be Nietzsche's attitude toward the Christian cross.

3) How did we get to be so proud? Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?

In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." 

So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

4) The Islamic hate for the Christian cross.  Raymond Ibrahim details the ongoing murder of Christians by Muslims.  But didn't George W. Bush tells us that Islam is the religion of peace?  What a know-nothing that pseudo-con Dubwa was and is. Living proof that being a nice, regular guy is not enough. Patriots owe a lot to Donald Trump for having put paid to both the Clinton and Bush dynasties.

5) On the other hand, Daniel Pipes reports that Muslims are converting to Christianity like never before. But a word of caution. Some of the converters are pious frauds:

Some Muslims convert tactically for practical reasons, especially to facilitate emigration to the West. A Church of God pastor, Said Deeb, quotes desperate Muslims telling him, “Just baptize me, I will believe in whoever just to leave here.” National Public Radio paraphrases Şebnem Köşer Akçapar of Koç University in Istanbul to the effect that “only some of the refugees are genuine converts. Others are using religious persecution as a way to get to the West.” Aiman Mazyek, head of the Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland, reacts with acute skepticism about growing numbers of Muslim converts to Christianity.

6) Vito Caiati sends this excerpt from W. H. Auden's For the Time Being:

Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.

Karl Barth, Divine Revelation, and Mystical Experience

"It [divine revelation] is the opening of a door that can only be unlocked from the inside." Quoted by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Books, 1965, p. 10) from a Christmas sermon preached by Karl Barth in 1931. I am going to take this ball and run with it.

Imagine someone who would  pass through only those doors that he could open himself whether by hand, by key, by picking the lock, or by brute force.  Imagine him declaring, "The only  permissible passages are those initiated by me  and controlled by me at every step." Such a one would never knock or ring a bell. To knock or ring would be to rely on another for entry and thus to sacrifice one's ingressive self-reliance, to give it a name. It would be the heteronomy of help in violation of the autonomy of self-entry. "The only fully responsible entry is self-entry!"  "It is wrong always and everywhere to rely on another for entry."  "The only doors worth opening are those one can open by oneself!"

The person I am imagining would be like the modern (post-Cartesian) man who accepts as true only that for which he has sufficient evidence, only that which he can verify for himself by internal criteria and methods. Such a one, if he were standing before the portals of saving truth that can only be unlocked from the inside, would deny himself access to such truth out of a  refusal to accept help. His fear of error would prevent his contact with truth.

Would that be a prideful, and thus a morally censurable, refusal? Would it be the rebellious refusal of a miserable creature who, though dependent on God for everything, absurdly privileges his own petty ego and sets it up as epistemic arbiter?

Or would the refusal to accept divine revelation be a laudable refusal that bespeaks a cautious and critical love of truth? "I so love the truth that I will accept no substitutes!"

The question is not easy to answer. It is not even easy to formulate. The question concerns the very possibility of divine revelation, and the possibility of its acceptance, not the content of any particular putative revelation.

Trust or verify?  The child is trusting, but gullible; he learns to be critical. Having come of age, and having been repeatedly fooled, he trusts as little as possible. The adult is wary, as he must be to negotiate a world of snares and delusions and evil doers.

I had an unforgettable mystical experience at the age of 28. I was tormented by a torrent of deep doubts as to the ultimate sense of things.  Around and around I went like a Zen man in the grip of his koan. Striding along, alone, in the early pre-dawn of a Spring day in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, I came to a point where I caught a glimpse of the rising sun just as it appeared over the horizon. Suddenly all my doubts vanished and I was flooded with a deep intuition of the ultimate sense and rightness of things. The solar glimpse triggered a mystical Glimpse into the intrinsic intelligibility of the universe.  All my doubts vanished. The Last Word was sense, not absurdity! I bowed my head and was suffused with peace, and Metaphysical Trust, as I later described it in my journal.  Not a trust in this thing or that, or in any human person, or in oneself and one's powers of understanding, but trust in the Unseen Order in which this transient bubble of space-time is suspended and rendered meaningful.

But of course that remarkable experience was only an experience, and no experience proves the veridicality, the reality, of its intentional object.  That's Modern Philosophy 101 and only an unthinking dogmatist could think it easily dismissed.

The dialectic proceeds beyond this point, of course, but weblog entries are best kept succinct.  So I leave you with the alternative: Trust or Verify? Finite reason is not equipped to solve this conundrum. You will have to de-cide. That involves a leap of faith. You can put your faith in the Unseen or in your own powers.

Kerouac's Beat(ific) Visions and the Cross

A good essay by Joshua Hren at First Things.

What Hren says is complemented by this entry of mine from 31 October 2010:

The despairing section X of Book Thirteen of Vanity of Duluoz which I quoted yesterday is followed immediately by this:

Yet I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing all this.  I cant escape its mysterious penetration into all this brutality.  I just simply SEE it all the time, even the Greek cross sometimes.  I hope it will all turn out true.

It is fitting to conclude Kerouac month with the last section of Jack's last book, a section in which, while alluding to the Catholic mass, he raises his glass to his own piecemeal suicide:

Forget it wifey. Go to sleep. Tomorrow's another day. Hic calix! Look that up in Latin, it means "Here's the chalice," and be sure there's wine in it.

William Lane Craig . . .

. . . on the headwaters of the human race. A very intelligent article. I have had similar thoughts.  Here is an excerpt from an entry dated 30 August 2011:

But how can God create man in his image and likeness without interfering in the evolutionary processes which most of us believe are responsible for man's existence as an animal? As follows.

Man as an animal is one thing, man as a spiritual, rational, and moral being is another. The origin of man as an animal came about not through any special divine acts but through the evolutionary processes common to the origination of all animal species. But man as spirit, as a self-conscious, rational being who distinguishes between good and evil cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms. (This can be argued with great rigor, but not now!)

As animals, we are descended from lower forms. As animals, we are part of the natural world and have the same general type of origin as any other animal species. Hence there was no Adam and Eve as first biological parents of the human race who came into existence directly by divine intervention without animal progenitors. But although we are animals, we are also spiritual beings, spiritual selves. I am an I, an ego, and this I-ness or egoity cannot be explained naturalistically. I am a person possessing free will and conscience neither of which can be explained naturalistically.

What 'Adam' refers to is not a man qua member of a zoological species, but the first man to become a spiritual self. This spiritual selfhood came into existence through a spiritual encounter with the divine self. In this I-Thou encounter, the divine self elicited or triggered man's latent spiritual self. This spiritual self did not  emerge naturally; what emerged naturally was the potentiality to hear a divine call which called man to his vocation, his higher destiny, namely, a sharing in the divine life. The divine call is from beyond the human horizon.

But in the encounter with the divine self which first triggered man's personhood or spiritual selfhood, there arose man's freedom and his sense of being a separate self, an ego distinct from God and from other egos. Thus was born pride and self-assertion and egotism. Sensing his quasi-divine status, man asserted himself against the One who had revealed himself, the One who simultaneously called him to a Higher Life but also imposed restrictions and made demands. Man in his pride then made a fateful choice, drunk with the sense of his own power: he decided to go it alone.

This rebellion was the Fall of man, which has nothing to do with a serpent or an apple or the being expelled from a physical garden located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Original Sin was a
spiritual event, and its transmission is not by semen, pace certain  Pauline passages, but by socio-cultural-linguistic means.

If we take some such tack as the above, then we can reconcile what we know to be true from natural science with the Biblical message.  Religion and science needn't compete; they can complement each other -- but only if each sticks to its own province. In this way we can avoid both the extremes of the fundamentalists and literalists and the extremes of the 'Dawkins gang' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, et al.)

Our question was whether rejecting the literal truth of the Adam and Eve story entails rejecting the doctrine of the Fall.  The answer to this is in the negative since the mere possibility of an account such as the one  just given shows that the entailment fails.  Man's fallenness is a spiritual condition that can only be understood in a spiritual way.  It does not require that the whole human race have sprung from exactly two animal progenitors that miraculously came into physical existence by divine agency and thus without animal progenitors.  Nor does it require that the transmission of the fallen condition be biological in nature.

The Ought-to-Do, the Ought-to-Be, and the Aporetics of "Be Ye Perfect"

Could one be under a moral obligation to perfect oneself?  Substack latest.

John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike, 1960. (Source)

Given what we know from yesterday's Updike entry, the suspicion obtrudes that, while Updike clearly understands the Resurrection as orthodoxy understands it, his interest in it is merely aesthetic in Kierkegaard's sense, and not ethical in the Dane's sense, which suspicion comports well with the charge that Updike radically divorced Christian theology from Christian ethics.

Or perhaps, as a Protestant, Updike thinks that since God in Christ did all the work of atonement, he needn't do anything such as reform his life and struggle and strive for metanoia but can freely enjoy himself in the arms and partake of the charms of other men's wives.  Am I being fair?

John Updike's Christianity

Gerald R. McDermott (emphases added):

In Updike’s religion, then, there are no commandments we are meant to keep except the obligation to accept what is: “Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.” Our only responsibility is to “appreciate” the great gift that life represents. He learned from Barth that the next life is simply this life in review, and from his Lutheranism, he wrote, “a rather antinomian Christianity”—the idea that there are no laws we should fear or live by—which he was “too timid to discard.” There is no hint of final judgment. Nor is there any imperative to repent or improve ourselves: in Begley’s words, “Original sin may be inescapable, but any concerted effort to improve one’s game resembles a righteous struggle for salvation.” And if there was anything he learned from Barth, it was that all human efforts to save ourselves are wrongheaded and futile. As one critic summed it up, Updike “radically divorced” Christian theology from Christian ethics.

The upshot was a self-indulgent religion that basked in self-affirmation while running from voices that would challenge the self to change, particularly in ways that were not pleasant. It is telling that Updike’s last poem ends with words of self-assurance from Psalm 23: “goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, forever.”

One cannot help thinking that Updike’s religion helped build the theological scaffolding for mainline Protestantism’s baptism of gay marriage. Updike wrote of mainline Protestants and their efforts to justify the sexual revolution. Although Updike himself regarded heterosexual sex as normative, his elevation of sex as a way to transcendence would prevent heterosexual Protestants from barring the door to other kinds of sex. Updike told the CBS reporter, “Sex is one of the means—maybe the foremost means—whereby the [moral and religious] search is conducted.” Once mainline America became persuaded—even in the absence of empirical evidence—that gays are born that way, how could they deny that their sex might be their way to the divine? Updike would surely have agreed. And millions of Updike readers could thank the novelist for helping them see that marriages defined by desire were not only a right but also a sacrament.

'See' is standardly employed as a verb of success. I wonder: does the author in his last sentence so intend it?  'Believe' would work better, no?

More importantly, it is just self-serving nonsense to view sex as the foremost means for conducting the moral and religious search. That sounds like a joke. I am put in mind of Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."

We are concupiscent from the ground up. So it is no surprise that even Christianity can be so twisted as to serve the sex monkey by one who apparently was its slave.

But if truth be told, I just now ordered Couples to see how the brilliant Updike makes his case.  Updike is a master of social phenomenology as I discovered when I read Rabbit is Rich in the early '90s.

As for the radical divorce of theology and ethics, there cannot be anything salutary about splitting them asunder. But if split them you must, it would be better to jettison the theology and keep the ethics for the sake of our happiness in this world, which we know, as opposed to the next which we merely believe in.  It is an empirical question, but on balance the sexual revolution has not improved human eudaimonia. Our predicament post-pill is hardly a paradise.

Updike looks to be a poster boy for the false dichotomy of spirituality versus religion. 

Related: A Death Poem at Year's End.  I reproduce and comment on a fabulous Updike poem.

At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

A Good Friday meditation at Substack.

Addendum 4/4/21. Vito Caiati writes,

I have been pondering the profound and poignant Good Friday meditation, “At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron,” that you just posted on Substack.  The Weil text that inspired your post leaves me, nevertheless, with a tormenting question, one which arises from her conviction that when an iron spike rips through the flesh of a human hand, “The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is then that of privation.”  However, does the assumed equivalence between the overwhelming pain and suffering of human beings whose flesh is pierced by iron and that of Christ really hold, for it is the Second Person of the Trinity who is crucified and, as such, a Being who is omniscient? However the admixture of the divine and human natures of Christ are conjoined in his Person, we cannot assume, without falling in heresy, that one of those natures, with its inherent intellectual capacities, ceases to be operational at certain moments, so that on the Cross only the human nature is present. If both natures are present, than the divine nature of Christ faces death with the divine knowledge of those things that are hidden from other men, in particular the certainty of God’s existence and the knowledge of His nature,  the destiny of the soul after death, its relation to God, and so on.  Thus, while Christ’s physical suffering is comparable to ours, his emotional suffering is not: He is in a unique and privileged existential position, one that derives from his absolute knowledge of all things, which permits him to die without the terrors of the unknown that plagues us ordinary human beings. Thus, it would seem that the analogy of his suffering and ours holds but only to a certain point and not absolutely. Am I wrong on this?

Well, Vito, I can't say that you are wrong. Indeed, I think you are right about an implication of the orthodox and traditional "two natures, one person" understanding of the Incarnation.  If Christ is one person with two natures,  then both natures must be "operational" to use your word at all times during Christ's earthly sojourn. (What happens after the Ascension is a further question.) But if there is no 'switching off' of the divine nature during the Crucifixion, then how can Christ experience fully the human predicament in which the worst of suffering is not mere physical suffering but the latter together with the utter desolation of abandonment?  Recall that the traditional understanding, hammered out over a number of Church councils, was that Christ is fully man, and of course fully God as well.  And to experience fully the horror of the fallen human predicament, one would have to experience the spiritual and emotional agony of abandonment, and this to its highest degree.  "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Who is speaking here?  Not the Second Person of the Trinity. A man is speaking, no ordinary man, of course, but a man nonetheless who came into the world in the usual way, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.   There is no satisfactory clarification of this state of affairs, at least none satisfactory to the discursive intellect.  This is because the Incarnation as traditionally understood is logically contradictory.  I have discussed this many times. (See Trinity and Incarnation category.) In the present context, the contradiction takes the following form. The man dying on the cross is the God-Man; he is one person (hypostasis) in two (individual) natures. Now who cries out in extremis to the Father? Not a nature, hence not Christ's human nature.  A nature can do no such thing. A person can. But there is only one person on the cross, the Logos Itself, the Word, God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. So the Second Person is crying to the First Person: Why have you forsaken me? That's absurd, i.e. logically impossible (given the background theological assumptions). God cannot forsake God. Don't forget: Trinity is not tritheism.  God is one.

I would say that that the absurdity of the Incarnation, which was recognized by Tertullian, Kierkegaard, Shestov, et al. is what allows the heresies to arise such as the one espoused by Simone Weil.  The heresies are attempts to make rational sense out of a combination of ideas unintelligible to the discursive intellect.  They have a logic to them.

Could it be that some contradictions are true, and that the Incarnation is one of them?  Call that the dialetheic way out. Or you might take the view that no contradictions are true, and that, in reality the Incarnation is non-contradictory; it is just that our cognitive architecture makes it impossible for such weak reeds as we are to understand how it is non-contradictory. Call that the mysterian way out. You could also ditch both Trinity and Incarnation (as traditionally understood) and go Unitarian.

A Difference Between Jesus Christ and Buddha

"And Jesus wept." (John 11, 35)

David French, Christianity, and Politics

Substack latest.

Platonism and Christianity

Brother Dave writes,

I'm re-reading Boethius' Consolation. Boethius does have a foot in Athens and one in Jerusalem, it seems to me. Now you sir are a Christian, and argue your positions in a blog subtitled Footnotes to Plato . . . .  Would it be fair to refer to you, as I would to Boethius, as a Christian Platonist?

As for whether I am a Platonist,  all of us who uphold the Western (Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman) tradition are Platonists broadly construed if Alfred North Whitehead is right in his observation that:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.  I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings.  I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.  [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)

So in that general sense I am a Platonist.  And I also like the modesty conveyed by "footnotes to Plato."  Some say the whole of philosophy is a battle between Plato and Aristotle.  That is not bad as simplifications go, and if you forced me to choose, I would throw in my lot with Plato and the Platonists.  So that is a more specific sense in which I provide "footnotes to Plato." 

As for Platonism and Christianity, you could refer to me fairly as a Christian Platonist. But what does that come to?

Part of what it means for me is that a de-Hellenized Christianity is of no interest.  Christianity is a type of monotheism. The monotheistic claim is not merely that there is one god as opposed to many gods.  Monotheism as I see it overturns the entire pantheon; it does not reduce its membership to one god, the tribal god of the Jews. Monotheism does of course imply that there is exactly one God, but it also implies that God is the One, and that therefore God is unique, and indeed uniquely unique.  To understand that you will have to follow the link and study the entry to which it leads. Now if God is uniquely unique, then God is not a being among beings, but Being itself.  He is not an ens among entia, but esse: ipsum esse subsistens.  Kein Seiendes, sondern das Sein selbst.

Now we are well up into the Platonic stratosphere. Jerusalem needs Athens if theism is not to degenerate into a tribal mythology. (That Athens needs Jerusalem is also true, but not my present theme.)

I don't believe I am saying anything different from what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict  XVI) says in his Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius, 2004, orig. publ. in German in 1968).  Here is one relevant quotation among several:

The Christian faith opted, we have seen, against the gods of the various religions and in favor of the God of the philosophers, that is, against the myth of custom and in favor of the truth of Being itself and nothing else. (142) 

Writing of the unity of belief and thought, Ratzinger tells us that

. . . the Fathers of the Church believed that they had discovered here the deepest unity between philosophy and faith, Plato and Moses, the Greek mind and the biblical mind. (118)

Plato and Moses!  The God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are one and the same.

The problematic is rich and many-sided. More later.

The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation

God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind.  The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality.  God creates potential rebels.  He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus.  He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway.  Lucifer as the father of all perversity.

God creates and sustains, moment by moment, other minds, like unto his own, made in his image, who are yet radically other in their inwardness and freedom.  He creates subjects who exist in their own right and not merely as objects of divine thought. How is this conceivable?  

We are not mere objects for the divine subject, but subjects in our own right.  How can we understand creation ex nihilo, together with moment by moment conservation, of a genuine subject, a genuine mind with intellect and free will and autonomy and the power of self-determination even unto rebellion?

This is a mystery of divine creation.  It is is above my pay grade.  And yours too.

God can do it but we can't.  We can't even understand how God could do it.  A double infirmity. An infirmity that sires a doubt: Perhaps it can't be done, even by God. Perhaps the whole notion is incoherent and God does not exist. Perhaps it is not a mystery but an impossibility.  Perhaps Christian creation is an Unbegriff.

Joseph Ratzinger accurately explains the Christian metaphysical position, and in so doing approaches what I am calling the ultimate paradox of divine creation, but he fails to confront, let alone solve, the problem:

The Christian belief in God is not completely identical with either of these two solutions [materialism and idealism]. To be sure, it, too, will say, being is being-thought. Matter itself points beyond itself to thinking as the earlier and more original factor. But in opposition to idealism, which makes all being into moments of an all-embracing consciousness, the Christian belief in God will say: Being is being-thought -- yet not in such a way that it remains only thought and that the appearance of independence proves to be mere appearance to anyone who looks more closely.

On the contrary, Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence. In this it goes beyond any mere idealism. While the latter , as we have just established, explains everything real as the content of a single consciousness, in the Christian view what supports it all is a creative freedom that sets what has been thought in the freedom of its own being, so that, on the one hand, it is the being-thought of a consciousness and yet, on the other hand, is true being itself. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, German original 1968, latest English version Ignatius Press, 2004, p. 157, emphasis added)

And that is where the good Cardinal (later Pope Benedict the XVI) leaves it. He then glides off onto another topic. Not satisfactory!  What's the solution to the paradox?

If you tell me that God creates other minds, and then somehow releases them into ontological independence, my reply will be that makes hash of the doctrine of creatio continuans, moment-by-moment conservation.  The Christian God is no mere cosmic starter-upper of what exists; his creating is ongoing. In fact, if the universe always existed, then all creation would be creatio continuans, and there would be no starting-up at all.

On Christian metaphysics, "The world is objective [objectified] mind . . . ." (155) This is what makes it intelligible. This intelligibility has its source in subjective mind: "Credo in Deum expresses the conviction that objective [objectified] mind is the product of subjective mind . . . ." (Ibid.)  So what I call onto-theological idealism gets the nod. You don't understand classical theism unless you understand it to be a form of idealism. But creatures, and in particular other minds, exist on their own, in themselves, and their Being cannot be reduced to their Being-for-God.  Therein lies the difficulty.

Is divine creation a mystery or an impossibility?

Related: Realism, Idealism, and Classical Theism 

Identity Politics as a Deformation of Christianity

This First Things article by Joshua Mitchell is well worth reading. Excerpts:

Marxism could never take hold in America because Americans believed in private property. Because property is the cornerstone of our republic, and cannot be removed, Marxism failed. Postmodernism could never really take hold in America because Americans believe that history has a meaning—and even that America has a special place in history. The reason identity politics has taken hold is because Americans suffer deep and abiding guilt, from two main sources: Christianity itself, and the legacy of slavery in this country. What the left could not do through Marxism or postmodernism, it now is doing through identity politics—namely, undermining every institution and every venerable historical memory in America.

[. . .]

Donald Trump was someone who, literally, could not exist in the world identity politics constructs. That is why the left needed “Russian collusion” to explain his election in 2016. Russian collusion was the deus ex machina that made it possible for Trump to infiltrate their world. The left had to destroy Trump if identity politics was to continue its reign of perverted righteousness. Many of us saw that clearly. That is why we voted for him. We wanted to contribute to the end of its reign.

[. . .]

Identity politics is a profound deformation of Christianity, a ghastly and crippled derivative that seeks the redemption of the world through the scapegoating of one group by another. For the moment, it has in its sights heterosexual white males. It will not stop there. White women will be next; followed, I suggest, by “heteronormative” black men. Like all revolutionary movements, it will eventually come for its early proponents, in a final reign of terror.

How does the current terror end? The identity politics reign of righteousness will end when we return to the orthodox Christian understanding that only the divine scapegoat, Christ, can take away the sins of the world. That insight once transformed the world. It can do so again.

There is a competing view of how we got into the present identity-political mess, and what the solution is. On this alternative Right view, to which I do not subscribe, it is not a deformation of Christianity that lead us to the present pass, but Christianity itself. I now hand off to Matthew Rose:

There is no better introduction to alt-right theory than his [Alain de Benoist's] 1981 work On Being a Pagan. Its tone is serene, but its message is militant. Benoist argues that the West must choose between two warring visions of human life: biblical monotheism and paganism. Benoist is a modern-day Celsus. Like his second-century predecessor, he writes to reawaken Europeans to their ancient faith. Paganism’s central claim is simple: that the world is holy and eternal. “Far from desacralizing the world,” Benoist tells us, paganism “sacralizes it in the literal sense of the word, since it regards the world as sacred.” Paganism is also a humanism. It recognizes man, the highest expression of nature, as the sole measure of the divine. God does not therefore create men; men make gods, which “exist” as ideal models that their creators strive to equal. “Man shares in the divine every time he surpasses himself,” Benoist writes, “every time he attains the boundaries of his best and strongest aspects.”

Benoist’s case against Christianity is that it forbids the expression of this “Faustian” vitality. It does so by placing the ultimate source of truth outside of humanity, in an otherworldly realm to which we must be subservient. In his Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth notoriously described Christian revelation as the “abolition” of natural religion. Benoist is a Barthian, if selectively. He accuses Christianity of crippling our most noble impulses. Christianity makes us strangers in our own skin, conning us into distrusting our strongest intuitions. We naturally respect beauty, health, and power, Benoist observes, but Christianity teaches us to revere the deformed, sick, and weak instead. “Paganism does not reproach Christianity for defending the weak,” he explains. “It reproaches [Christianity] for exalting them in their weakness and viewing it as a sign of their election and their title to glory.”

Benoist’s theology is in the service of a political warning, and it is this, more than his Nietzschean posturing, that attracts the alt-right. Christianity is unable to protect European peoples and their cultures. Under Christianity, the West lives under a kind of double imprisonment. It exists under the power of a foreign religion and an alien deity. Christianity is not our religion. It thereby foments “nihilism.” The allegation is explosive. Benoist means that Christianity renders Western culture morally lethargic and culturally defenseless. Most perniciously, its universalism poisons our attachments to particular loyalties and ties. “If all men are brothers,” Benoist claims, “then no one can truly be a brother.” Politics depends on the recognition of both outsiders and enemies, yet the Christian Church sees all people as potential members, indeed potential saints.

And here we reach Benoist’s remarkable conclusion. The decadent West has never been more Christian. Christianity imparted to our culture an ethics that has mutated into what the alt-right calls “pathological altruism.” Its self-distrust, concern for victims, and fear of excluding outsiders—such values swindle Western peoples out of a preferential love for their own. Benoist’s ideas have reached the margins of American conservatism, perhaps no more noticeably than in the writings of the late Sam Francis. A former contributor to leading conservative publications, his thinking took a late turn toward what we would now call the alt-right. “Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it,” he announced in an influential 2001 article. Francis’s essay was a lament as much as a protest (he was received into the Church on his deathbed), but his work is receiving a new hearing.

 

Reading Now: Leszek Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing

I'm on a Kolakowski binge.  I've re-read Metaphysical Horror (Basil Blackwell, 1988) and Husserl and the Search for Certitude (U. of Chicago, 1975).  I purchased the first at Dillon's Bookstore, Bloomsbury, London, near Russell's Square in late August, 1988.  Auspicious, eh? I was in the U. K. to read a paper at the World Congress of Philosophy in Brighton.  Both of the aforementioned books are outstanding even if the translations are inadequate. But knowing the ideas, I can figure out how the translation should have gone.

Kolakowsi is erudition on stilts. The man's range is stunning. While some of his essays are sketchy, he can be scholarly when he wants to be, as witness his magisterial three-volumed Main Currents of Marxism.

Kolakowski began as a communist but soon saw through the destructive ideology. For the great sin of speaking the truth, he was stripped of his academic post and prohibited from teaching in Poland.  He found refuge in Canada, The U. S. A. and the U.K. When the Left takes over the West, where will dissident truth-tellers go? Here is what Kirkus has to say about the exciting book I am now reading:

GOD OWES US NOTHING: A BRIEF REMARK ON PASCAL'S RELIGION AND ON THE SPIRIT OF JANSENISM

by Leszek Kolakowski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1995

A provocative critique of the Jansenist movement and of its celebrated proponent Blaise Pascal, from internationally renowned scholar Kolakowski (The Alienation of Reason, 1968, etc.; Committee on Social Thought/Univ. of Chicago). Jansenism, the powerful 17th-century heresy condemned by Rome, has often been called the Catholic form of Calvinism. Inspired by the writings of Bishop Cornelius Jansen of Utrecht, the Jansenists claimed to be orthodox disciples of St. Augustine and taught that salvation was gratuitous in a way that ruled out any human cooperation. Since those whom God had freely predestined would inevitably be saved, Jesus Christ died only for the elect; all others would be justly condemned to eternal torments, irrespective of whether they were good or bad, including unbaptized babies. Human nature was totally corrupted by sin, especially original sin. Kolakowski gives us a detailed account, with copious quotations, both of St. Augustine and of the positions of Jansen and his followers, and he guides us through the central questions of the debate. He devotes the second half of his study to the writings of Pascal, whose profound pessimism he sees as embodying the Jansenists' world-denying ideals. The arts, free intellectual inquiry, and even hugging one's children had no place in what Kolakowski calls Pascal's religion of unhappiness. The author rarely refers to other studies of this great controversy. He is surely being malicious when he holds that Rome's rejection of Jansenism was a compromise with the world and a de facto abandonment of the Church's tradition, since he presents the latter in an overly Augustinian form, choosing to ignore, for example, the Eastern Fathers, Aquinas, and the basic doctrine that the human person, endowed with free will, is made in the image of God. Brilliantly cynical presentation of an unpopular but still influential religious outlook.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-226-45051-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Univ. of Chicago

Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995

Categories: PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

David French, Donald Trump, Christianity, and Politics

David French maintains that Christians cannot, if they are to remain true to Christian teachings, support Donald Trump:

The proper way for Christians to engage in politics is a rich subject . . . but there are some rather simple foundational principles that apply before the questions get complex. For example, all but a tiny few believers would agree that a Christian should not violate the Ten Commandments or any other clear, biblical command while pursuing or exercising political power.

But of course we see such behavior all the time from hardcore Christian Trump supporters. They’ll echo Trump’s lies. They’ll defend Trump’s lies. They’ll adopt many of his same rhetorical tactics, including engaging in mocking and insulting behavior as a matter of course.

Farther down:

I fully recognize what I’m saying. I fully recognize that refusing to hire a hater and refusing to hire a liar carries costs. If we see politics through worldly eyes, it makes no sense at all. Why would you adopt moral standards that put you at a disadvantage in an existential political struggle? If we don’t stand by Trump we will lose, and losing is unacceptable. (Emphasis added.)

French has just touched upon the deepest issue in this debate.  He is right that it makes no sense for conservative Christians not to support Trump if politics is seen through worldly eyes. The question, however, is whether one can avoid doing so. Can one see politics and pursue it through unworldly eyes?  Can one participate in politics at any level, and especially at the higher levels, while adhering strictly and unwaveringly to Christian principles and precepts and while practicing Christian virtues?  Can one combine contemptus mundi with political action?

I don't believe that this is possible.

Christian precepts such as "Turn the other cheek" and "Welcome the stranger" make sense and are salutary only within communities of the like-minded and morally decent; they make no sense and are positively harmful in the public sphere, and, a fortiori, in the international sphere.  The monastery is not the wide world.  What is conducive unto salvation in the former will get you killed in the latter.  And we know what totalitarians, whether Communists or Islamists, do when they get power: they destroy the churches, synagogues, monasteries, ashrams, and zendos. And with them are destroyed the means of transmitting the dharma, the kerygma, the law and the prophets.  

An important but troubling thought is conveyed in a recent NYT op-ed (emphasis added):

Machiavelli teaches that in a world where so many are not good, you must learn to be able to not be good. The virtues taught in our secular and religious schools are incompatible with the virtues one must practice to safeguard those same institutions. The power of the lion and the cleverness of the fox: These are the qualities a leader must harness to preserve the republic.

The problem referenced in the bolded sentence is very serious but may have no solution.  That's the aporetician in me speaking. 

The problem as I see it is that (i) the pacific virtues the practice of which makes life worth living within families, between friends, and in such institutions of civil society as churches and fraternal organizations  are essentially private and cannot be extended outward as if we are all brothers and sisters belonging to a global community.  Talk of  global community is blather.  The institutions of civil society can survive and flourish only if protected by warriors and statesmen whose virtues are of the manly and martial, not of the womanish and pacific, sort. And yet (ii) if no  extension beyond the private of the pacific virtues is possible. then humanity would seem to be doomed  in an age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.  Besides, it is unsatisfactory that there be two moralities, one private, the other public.

I say that we need to face the problem honestly.

Consider the Christian virtues preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.  They include humility, meekness, love of righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, love of peace and of reconciliation.  Everyone who must live uncloistered in the world understands that these pacific and essentially womanish virtues have but limited application there.  Indeed, their practice can get you killed. (I am not using 'womanish' as a derogatory qualifier.)

You may love peace, but unless you are prepared to make war upon your enemies and show them no mercy, you may not be long for this world.  Turning the other cheek makes sense within a loving family, but no sense in the wider world.  (Would the Pope turn the other cheek if the Vatican came under attack by Muslim terrorists or would he call upon the armed might of the Italian state?)  My point is perfectly obvious in the case of states: they are in the state (condition) of nature with respect to each other. Each state secures by blood and iron a civilized space within which art and music and science and scholarship can flourish and wherein, ideally, blood does not flow; but these states and their civilizations battle each other in the state (condition) of nature red in tooth and claw.  Talk of world government or United Nations is globalist blather that hides the will to power of those who would seize control of the world government. United under which umbrella of values and principles and presuppositions?

What values do we share with the Muslim world? Do they accept the Enlightenment values enshrined in our founding documents? Obviously not.  Christianity has civilized us to some extent. Has Islam civilized them? Their penology is barbaric as is their attitude toward other cultures and religions. 

The Allies would not have been long for this world had they not been merciless in their treatment of the Axis Powers.  

Israel would have ceased to exist long ago had Israelis not been ruthless in their dealing with Muslim terrorists bent on her destruction.

This is also true of individuals once they move beyond their families and friends and genuine communities and sally forth into the wider world. 

The problem is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):

     The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all
     earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular
     -- be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian -- have been
     frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended
     protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of
     the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the
     wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned
     against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who
     for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good
     for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for
     others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth
     interests of the community.) [Arendt cites the Nicomachean Ethics,
     Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

There is a tension  between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen.  As a philosopher raised in Christianity, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian  "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare.

This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to  influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his  perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I   cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug smuggler or a human trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law breaking. I must be concerned with public order.  This order is among  the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's law breaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" as the New Testament enjoins us to do.

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops  and others who confuse private and public morality. 

David French is such a one.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Decoupling Rock and Roll from Sex and Drugs

Five examples:

Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus. This is one powerful song.

Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. Why is Clapton such a great guitarist? Not because of his technical virtuosity, his 'chops,' but because he has something to say.

George Harrison, My Sweet Lord

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass. Harrison was the Beatle with depth.  Lennon was the radical, McCartney the romantic, and Ringo the regular guy.

Good YouTuber comment: "Immortal song, even if all things must pass . . . " 

Presentism and the Cross

Alexander Pruss argues:

1) It is important for Christian life that one unite one’s daily sacrifices with Christ’s sufferings on the cross.

2) Uniting one’s sufferings with something non-existent is not important for Christian life.

3) So, Christ’s sufferings on the cross are a part of reality.

4) So, presentism is false.

The Prussian argument is an enthymeme the tacit premise of which is

0) On presentism, only temporally present events exist or are real.

Add the above to your Holy Saturday meditations.

He Breathed His Last

If you have ever struggled with the one-person-two-natures doctrine, then you may be inclined to agree with Dale Tuggy:

Today is when we remember that terrible and wonderful day when our Savior willingly died for us, breathing his last.

This whole time, God was not breathing at all. As a divine spirit, God lacks lungs, throat, mouth, and diaphragm. He lived on to witness the heroic death of his beloved Son, his Christ – and later (spoiler alert!) to raise Jesus back to life.

Recent and ancient catholic traditions have created a lot of confusion about just who gave up his life on the cross. The gospel is not that God died for you; God is essentially immortal. Rather, the gospel is that God’s human Son died for you. It was one of us who atoned for the rest of us.

Do you imagine that somehow Jesus having “two natures” can explain how he can die even while being the essentially immortal God? I invite you to think again – such speculations just don’t work out. Think carefully through these things; don’t just blindly repeat unclear and non-biblical language, e.g. Jesus “died in his human nature” but “lived in his divine nature.”

Let’s celebrate this wonderful event without muddying the waters; the New Testament is very explicit that God is immortal, and also that his human Son died for us.

That a man should be raised from the dead by the power of God is a miracle, but it involves no conceptual incoherence or logical contradiction that I can see. It is of course incompatible with metaphysical naturalism and its epistemology, scientism, but it is no affront to the discursive intellect.  Chalcedonian orthodoxy is. To this extent I agree with my friend Tuggy.  The fancy footwork that is used to show that Chaldedonian orthodoxy is logically in the clear convinces neither of us.

But how seriously should we take affronts to the discursive intellect in theological matters?   One might attempt a mysterian move in support of the two-natures doctrine.  Tuggy will of course balk. At the end of Intellectual Integrity and the Appeal to Mystery, I offer a partial response.

Anthony Flood Reviews David Horowitz, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America

Excerpts:

Cultural Marxism is but the latest form of the cultural cancer now metastasizing throughout the body politic. (Marxism-Leninism was only the deadliest form, not the first, but even today old-fashioned Communism does not lack adherents.) That the Democratic Party is now this malignancy’s host is the grim, but well-documented, conclusion of Horowitz’s long literary career.

In Dark Agenda’s last chapter, Horowitz puts forward the metaphor of civil war to define what might be in front of us. It’s a possible outcome of the divisions that beset us and which we’re all supposed to want to “heal.” One prosecutes a war, however, not to heal one’s enemies, but rather to incapacitate them.

For Americans only the Age of Lincoln offers the closest comparison to our parlous state. But shall Christians and their Jewish allies (agnostic and observant alike) prepare for military conflict and await—or initiate—our Fort Sumter? Is it not quixotic to put all our eggs in the electoral consensus-building basket? Are we restricted to chronicling our enemies’ crimes, as Horowitz has masterfully done in dozens of popular and scholarly tomes? Urgency calls forth a response, but if Horowitz has an idea of how Americans might defeat the Left’s dark agenda, he doesn’t share it here. No suggested plan of action follows the note of urgency he sounds.

In the third paragraph, Flood touches upon a point that troubles me as well. We have reams of incisive conservative commentary on what the Left has wrought but precious little by way of concrete proposals for ameliorative action by individuals. In  fairness to Horowitz, however, it needs noting that in the concluding chapters of Big Agenda (Humanix 2017), he lists various things the Republican party and President Trump can do. So he does outline a plan of action, and he is appropriately combative:

The movement galvanized by Trump can stop the progressive juggernaut and change the American future, but only if it emulates the strategy of the campaign: Be on the offense; take no prisoners; stay on the attack. To stop the Democrats and their societal transformation, Republicans must adhere to a strategy that begins with a punch in the mouth. That punch must pack an emotional wallop large enough to throw them off balance and neutralize their assaults. It must be framed as a moral indictment that stigmatizes them in the way their attacks stigmatize Republicans. It must expose them for their hypocrisy. It must hold them accountable for the divisions they sow and the suffering they cause. (Big Agenda, Humanix, 2017, p. 142)

Still and all, I would like to see a list of what individuals can do beyond voting and writing letters and blog posts.  Does Tony Flood have any suggestions?  I suppose I myself should put up or shut up while well aware of the dangers of saying anything that might incite violence among the unhinged. (But violence is being done every day by leftists to the unborn and to our Constitutional rights and sacred American values). So here are three suggestions, just to keep this post short. I invite Tony to e-mail me with any thoughts he may have.

• Buy guns and learn how to use them. The idea here is deterrence and not aggression. A well-armed populace is a mighty check against both the criminal element that leftists work to empower, and against leftists themselves and their agents. We can demoralize them without firing a shot. Call it winning through intimidation. They will never respect us, but they can be brought to fear us. (An analysis of respect might show that fear is is a large part of it.) Grandmaster Nimzowitsch's remark is apropos: "The threat is stronger than the execution."  2A is concrete back-up for 1A and all the rest of our rights. Leftists know this. This explains the mindlessness and mendacity of their confiscatory assault on our Second Amendment rights.  
• Vote with your feet and your wallet.  Leave blue localities and let them languish in the feculence their policies have birthed, and bring your money and tax dollars to healthy places. 
• Defund the Left. For example, refuse to support your leftist alma mater, to use a border-line pleonastic expression.      

Flood's review concludes:

Of course, Dark Agenda is no more an essay on spirituality than on political philosophy. The case it makes, however, cries out for at least a hint of the response that its author believes will meet this greatest of all challenges. If there’s no political way to overcome the darkness, only the spiritual route is left.

Yet David Horowitz leaves this tension unresolved. For him, the Christian Scriptures are not (as far as I know) a source of divinely revealed truth; Christianity is but the historically contingent arrangement that works for people who happen to love instead of hate Western civilization; things don’t go any deeper than that. Am I wrong about him?

Like all human arrangements, however, Western Civ will eventually pass away into the void out of which all things, including humans, allegedly emerged . . . unless the Christian worldview is overarchingly true. Maybe Horowitz has one more book in him in which he can address this question. But I’d prefer to be shown that something in his vast literary oeuvre already has.

Having read more Horowitz than Tony has, I believe he is right in the second paragraph lately quoted.

And I am sympathetic with the third paragraph, though not with Flood's enthusiasm for Van Til. See the entries in my Van Til and Presuppositionalism category. 

Finally, I have a deep-going analytic post on Horowitz' agnosticism as he presents it in Dark Agenda. See Five Grades of Agnosticism.  

Reader Considers Converting to Islam. Would Christian Unitarianism Satisfy his Scruples?

Here is the beginning of the letter he sent me:

I've been considering converting to Islam.

You've had a big part in this, though I know it won't please you to hear it. Your arguments against the coherency of the Incarnation are hard to get past.

My arguments against the Chalcedonian, 'two-natures-one-person' theology of the Incarnation may or may not have merit. In any case, this is not the place to rehearse or defend them. What I want to say to my young reader is that it would be a mistake to reject Christianity because of the problems of the Trinitarian-Incarnational version thereof.   Someone who rejects Trinity and Incarnation as classically conceived might remain a Christian by becoming a Unitarian. My friend Dale Tuggy represents a version of Unitarianism. You will have no trouble finding his writings on the Web.

There are any number of better choices than Islam if one wants a religion and cannot accept orthodox -- miniscule 'o' -- Christianity. There is, in addition to Unitarian Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, all vastly superior to "the saddest and poorest form of theism" (Schopenhauer) . . . . 

I will conclude this entry by posting some quotations from William Ellery Channing, the 19th century American Unitarian. These are from Unitarian Christianity (1819). (HT: Dave Bagwill) Bolding added.

In the first place, we believe in the doctrine of God's UNITY, or that there is one God, and one only. To this truth we give infinite importance, and we feel ourselves bound to take heed, lest any man spoil us of it by vain philosophy. The proposition, that there is one God, seems to us exceedingly plain. We understand by it, that there is one being, one mind, one person, one intelligent agent, and one only, to whom underived and infinite perfection and dominion belong. We conceive, that these words could have conveyed no other meaning to the simple and uncultivated people who were set apart to be the depositaries of this great truth, and who were utterly incapable of understanding those hair- breadth distinctions between being and person [substance and supposit?], which the sagacity of later ages has discovered. We find no intimation, that this language was to be taken in an unusual sense, or that God's unity was a quite different thing from the oneness of other intelligent beings.

We note here a similarity to Islam: "There is no god but God."  

We also note that unity is defined in terms of 'one' taken in an ordinary numerical way.  Reading the above and the sequel I am struck at how similar this is to the way Tuggy thinks. God is a being among beings, and his unity is no different than the unity of Socrates. There are of course many men, and Socrates is but one of them. But if Socrates were the only man, then he would be the one man in the way God is the one god. Unity in classical Christianity has a deeper meaning: God is not just numerically one; he is also one in a way nothing else is one. God is not the sole instance of deity; God is his deity; God does not have (instantiate) his attributes; he is his attributes.  God is not only unique, like  everything else; he is uniquely unique unlike anything else.  God is not just the sole instance of his kind; he is unique in the further sense that there is no real distinction in God between instance and kind.

We object to the doctrine of the Trinity, that, whilst acknowledging in words, it subverts in effect, the unity of God. According to this doctrine, there are three infinite and equal persons, possessing supreme divinity, called the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Each of these persons, as described by theologians, has his own particular consciousness, will, and perceptions. They love each other, converse with each other, and delight in each other's society. They perform different parts in man's redemption, each having his appropriate office, and neither doing the work of the other. The Son is mediator and not the Father. The Father sends the Son, and is not himself sent; nor is he conscious, like the Son, of taking flesh. Here, then, we have three intelligent agents, possessed of different consciousness[es], different wills, and different perceptions, performing different acts, and sustaining different relations; and if these things do not imply and constitute three minds or beings, we are utterly at a loss to know how three minds or beings are to be formed. It is difference of properties, and acts, and consciousness, which leads us to the belief of different intelligent beings, and, if this mark fails us, our whole knowledge fall; we have no proof, that all the agents and persons in the universe are not one and the same mind. When we attempt to conceive of three Gods, we can do nothing more than represent to ourselves three agents, distinguished from each other by similar marks and peculiarities to those which separate the persons of the Trinity; and when common Christians hear these persons spoken of as conversing with each other, loving each other, and performing different acts, how can they help regarding them as different beings, different minds?

For Channing, Trinitarianism is indistinguishable from tri-theism. His too suggests a comparison with Islam. From the point of view of a radical monotheist, Trinitarianism smacks of polytheism. 

Having thus given our views of the unity of God, I proceed in the second place to observe, that we believe in the unity of Jesus Christ. We believe that Jesus is one mind, one soul, one being, as truly one as we are, and equally distinct from the one God. We complain of the doctrine of the Trinity, that, not satisfied with making God three beings, it makes; Jesus Christ two beings, and thus introduces infinite confusion into our conceptions of his character. This corruption of Christianity, alike repugnant to common sense and to the general strain of Scripture, is a remarkable proof of the power of a false philosophy in disfiguring the simple truth of Jesus.

According to this doctrine, Jesus Christ, instead of being one mind, one conscious intelligent principle, whom we can understand, consists of two souls, two minds; the one divine, the other human; the one weak, the other almighty; the one ignorant, the other omniscient. Now we maintain, that this is to make Christ two beings. To denominate him one person, one being, and yet to suppose him made up of two minds, infinitely different from each other, is to abuse and confound language, and to throw darkness over all our conceptions of intelligent natures. According to the common doctrine, each of these two minds in Christ has its own consciousness, its own will, its own perceptions. They have, in fact, no common properties. The divine mind feels none of the wants and sorrows of the human, and the human is infinitely removed from the perfection and happiness of the divine. Can you conceive of two beings in the universe more distinct? We have always thought that one person was constituted and distinguished by one consciousness. The doctrine, that one and the same person should have two consciousness, two wills, two souls, infinitely different from each other, this we think an enormous tax on human credulity.

There are closely related difficult questions about how one person or supposit can have two distinct individualized natures, one human and one divine.

And so I say to my young friend, "Don't do anything rash!" First consider whether there is a less deadly form of religion you can adopt that will satisfy your intellectual scruples.

Ash Wednesday

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence.  This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't.  If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist.  That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.

More here.

You Are Going to Die.

Christopher Hitchens has been dead for over eight years now.  In Platonic perspective, what no longer exists never truly existed.  So here we have a man who never truly existed but who denied the existence of the Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.

Another Note on Buddhism and Christianity

We feel intensely and care deeply. We are immersed in life and its passions and projects, its loves and its hates. But wisdom counsels detachment and withdrawal, mentally if not physically: one does not have to haul off to a monastery to cultivate detachment. Retreat into the serene and ataraxic can however be  protracted unto nirvanic oblivion, and it is in Buddhism. That might be taking it too far.

Renunciation and world-flight in Christianity, by contrast, are for the sake of a higher life in which finite personhood is, in an Hegelian trope, aufgehoben, simultaneously cancelled and preserved. "I came that you may have life and have it more abundantly." (John 10:10) Jesus did not preach extinction. He preached personal transformation. Buddhism is radical: the renunciation is total. This aligns it with metaphysical pessimism and indeed nihilism, whereas Christianity is full of hope and promise.

One thing is clear: to seek the final fulfillment of desire in this life is a mistake. But could desire itself be a mistake, as the Second Noble Truth has it?  If desire itself is a mistake, then life is a mistake.

But you and I have been through that
And this is not our fate;
Let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late.

Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

Analysis here.

"And the Word was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us." (John 1:14)

Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible . . . . Read the rest here.

It is a 'sermon' you will not likely hear in any Catholic Church.  What you will hear in the decadent Catholic churches of the present day is all manner of diversionary pablum as if designed to keep one from confronting the Christian narrative in its full strength. The few exceptions will prove the rule.

Communism and Christianity

Communism is a 'religion' refuted by experience. It delivered not paradise, but the gulag and the torture chamber. Its attempted redemption by blood succeeded in spilling oceans of it but achieved no redemption. It is only the spilling of the God-Man's blood that can achieve the redemption of man. Man cannot save himself. That is the teaching of Christianity.  Is Christianity true? Whether or not it is, it remains the case that man cannot save himself. 

Postscript to Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation: Reply to Dr. Caiati

Vito Caiati writes,

 . . . while I see the wisdom in your assertion “no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of grace, a certain free granting ab extra,” I am troubled about the soteriological implications of such a view. I find it troubling that the necessary grace would be restricted to a relatively small portion of humanity, while the rest of us remain “lost in the diaspora of sense objects.” Is it your assessment that few are called to a higher state of consciousness, or is it that the call is more generally available but drowned out by the distraction fits to which the human mind inevitably falls prey?

What I want to say is that no one is likely to commit himself to a serious meditation practice with all that it entails unless he has had certain experiences which, phenomenologically, exhibit a gift-character and that point to a depth-dimension below or beyond surface mind. By that I mean experiences that seem as if granted by a Grantor external to the consciousness of the meditator whether or not, in reality, they are grantings or vouchsafings of such a Grantor.  (One example of such an experience is that of a sudden, unintended, descent into a blissful state of mental silence.) This formulation is neutral as between the Pali Buddhist denial of divine grace and the Christian affirmation of it.

But even on this neutral formulation, Caiati's problem arises. Small is the number of those who are capable of having these experiences, and smaller still the number of those who actually have them. And among those who actually have them, still smaller is the number of those who set foot on the spiritual path and keep it up.  And among the latter only some of them, and maybe none of them, attain the Goal. We cannot be sure that Prince Siddartha attained it.  It would seem to be a very bad arrangement indeed if salvation were to be available only to a tiny number of people.  

I think that this is a really serious problem for Buddhism. I have met met many a Buddhist meditator, but none of them struck me as enlightened. And the same goes for the Stoics and Skeptics I have met: none of them struck me as having attained ataraxia. The vast, vast majority of Buddhist meditators will die unenlightened. Unless you believe in rebirth, that's it for them.  

The same problem does not arise for Christianity.  In Christianity, unlike in Buddhism, there is no salvation without a divine Savior, the agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. The Savior doesn't do all the work, but the work that remains to be done can be done by any ordinary person who sincerely accepts Jesus Christ as his savior and who lives in accordance with that acceptance.  Faith is the main thing, not knowledge, insight, or realization.  There is no need for special experiences.  Perhaps we can say that the soteriology  of the East is noetic, that of the Middle East pistic.  But I should immediately add that contemplative practices and mystical theology play a large role in Christianity with the exception of Protestant Christianity.

As I see it, faith is inferior to knowledge and any knowledge of spiritual things we can acquire here below can only serve to bolster our faith. Speaking for myself, given my skeptical mind, philosophical aptitude, and scientific education, I would probably not take theism seriously at all if it were not for a range of mystical, religious, and paranormal experiences that I have had.  They, together with arguments for theism and arguments against metaphysical naturalism, incline me toward theism to such an extent that that I live as if it is true. 'As if it is true' does not imply that it is not true; it signals my not knowing whether or not it is true.  

But you may be of a different opinion and perhaps you have reasons that justify your opinion. No one KNOWS the ultimate answer. Toleration, therefore, is needed, the toleration of those who respect the principle of toleration, and therefore, not Sharia-supporting Muslims or other anti-Enlightenment types such as throne-and-altar reactionaries. What is needed are toleration and the defense of religious liberty which along with free speech and other sacred American rights are under assault by the Democrat Party in the USA.  This hard-Left party needs to taste bitter defeat.  And so, as strange as it may sound, if you cherish the free life of the mind and the free life of the spirit, you must vote for Donald J. Trump in 2020.  

Was Jesus a Socialist?

Yet another excellent, and mercifully brief, Prager U video.  Can you pay attention for five minutes? 

The Christian View of Death and Immortality

Thanatology presupposes philosophical anthropology: what death is taken to be depends on what the human being is taken to be. Although Christianity certainly has affinities with Platonism, so much so that Nietzsche could with some justice speak of Christianity as Platonism for the people, the Christian view of man is in an important respect un-Platonic. In terms of Aquinas' Latin, Platonism holds that homo est anima utens corpore, man is a soul using a body. On this view the person is essentially the soul, and the body is a temporary and accidental housing or vehicle. There are Platonic passages in which the soul is described as "imprisoned" in the body. The body is the prison house of the soul. The soul is in the body like an oyster in its shell. These and other metaphors can be found in the Platonic dialogues.  If one thinks in this way, then death is not a calamity but something good. Death is liberation, release, the separation of one thing, the soul, from another, the body, to which it should not have been attached in the first place. The fall into time is a fall into the flesh.  For Platonism, death undoes the fall into time. Death is to that extent good, and the philosopher welcomes it. Indeed, the philosophical life is a preparation for death. (Plato, Phaedo, 67e)

Christianity, however, in terms of Aquinas' Latin, maintains that (a) homo non est anima tantum, man is not the soul alone, and (b) anima forma corporis, the soul is the form of the body. The human person, then is essentially a form-matter composite, and not essentially a soul. On the Platonic view soul can exist without body, though not conversely, while on the Christian view as understood by Aquinas, neither soul nor body can exist without the other.* The two need each other: the body needs the soul to animate it and 'personalize' it, to make it a person's body as opposed to a corpse. And the soul needs the body to achieve its proper unfolding. Despite the difference between soul and body, man is a unitary being in a way in which he is not unitary on the Platonic conception.

There is another important difference. For Platonism, the fall into time — see Phaedrus — is a fall into an evil condition. But for Christianity, everything is and is good because it comes from God who is all-good. So our embodiment cannot be evil. For Christianity there is of course a Fall, but it is not a Fall into embodiment. It is a fall from a perfect form of embodiment to an imperfect form.

For Christianity, then, we are not immortal souls accidentally housed in mortal bodies, and death cannot be understood as affecting only our bodies. Death is not release of one part of the self from another, but the destruction of the entire unitary self. Being, bestowed as it is by God, is good, and so, if we are essentially embodied, death is a total calamity.

On the Christian view, then,  we are not naturally immortal: we are mortal body and soul. Any immortality that we come to acquire requires a supernatural agent operating in a supernatural way. But weren't humans naturally immortal before the Fall? Didn't death enter the picture only when sin did?

It is true that on the Christian scheme death first enters the picture as punishment for sin. But it does not follow that we are naturally immortal in our prelapsarian state. The doctor angelicus discusses this question in the Summa Theologica, Q 97, art. 1. If prelapsarian, paradisiacal man were immortal by nature, then he could not have lost his immortality, which is precisely what happened when he sinned. Some of the angels sinned but did not lose their immortality because they are naturally immortal. But man is not: his prelapsarian immortality was a divine gift. By nature he is mortal, i.e., subject to death, able to die. Aquinas speaks of a "supernatural force given by God to the soul, whereby it was enabled to preserve the body from all corruption so long as it itself remained subject to God."

In sum, man in his own nature is mortal, body and soul, in both his prelapsarian and postlapsarian states. But owing to a supernatural gift, man in his prelapsarian state was given the power to preserve himself as long as he willed to so so. Prelapsarian man could die, but not against his will. We, however, are condemned to death nolens volens by Adam's sin.

______________________

*On Aristotelian hylomorphic metaphysics, the form and the matter of a primary sublunary substance are not themselves substances: they cannot exist on their own apart from the substance of which they are 'principles' or ontological factors.  In particular, the soul, as form of an animal body, cannot exist disembodied. But then what accounts for the continuity of the human person from the time of death to the resurrection of the body?  As I understand Aquinas, he simply makes an exception in the case of the deceased human animal: in this case the soul as form can exist apart from a material substratum.  This exception goes along with the exception in the case of God himself, the forma formarum, form of all forms. God is self-subsistent pure form, form without matter and the human soul between death and resurrection is pure form as well, although not self-subsistent pure form.

The first exception strikes this philosopher as and ad hoc move  that does not fit within Aristotelian hylomorphism.  If the forms of sublunary substances are not themselves substances, then this should hold across the board and allow of no exceptions. It has been said that Aquinas is a Aristotelian on earth, but a Platonist in heaven.  Is this a problem? I should think it is, but others will disagree.

Christianity has civilized us . . .

. . . but it has also weakened us.  Our virtues, which once were strengths, are now weaknesses.  Some of our virtues have come to vitiate as much as some of our vices. 

We in the West no longer crucify malefactors or break them on the wheel. We now wring our hands, absurdly, over whether lethal injection is "cruel and unusual punishment."  A nation that has lost the will to execute its worst and most destructive criminals is a nation not long for this earth.  Can the will to live exist in a people who under no circumstances can muster the will to kill?

One of the fruits of civilization is toleration, that touchstone of classical liberalism.  It is a beautiful thing. It becomes a weakness, however, when it extends to the toleration of those who crucify and behead and throw homosexuals off of buildings.

Crucifixion in Islam:

It is all too common to view the practice of crucifixion as a form of torture and execution from antiquity which hasn’t been used in nearly two millennia, yet this is hardly the case. In fact, crucifixion is a standard means of execution in Saudi Arabia, and there is a growing movement among Islamists to bring back crucifixion as the preferred means of punishment for a variety of crimes, including apostasy from Islam, “fitna,” which is a pliable term which can refer to unbelief or mischief-making, or anything which goes against Islam and Shariah. This is explicitly taught in the Qur’an:

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this: that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off… (Qur’an 5:33).

Ominously for Christians, strongly associated with fitna is “shirk,” the associating of partners with Allah. Believing Jesus to be the Son of God is, for Muslims, one of the worst forms of shirk, and is therefore punishable by death, including crucifixion. (There is a dark irony here, as Muslims do not believe Jesus was crucified, yet they prescribe crucifixion as punishment for Christians.)

Read it all. Disturbing images.

Absurdistan: The Cross of Christ is Supposed to be an Argument against the Death Penalty!

From a German correspondent I learned about the theology blog Nachtgedanken, Night Thoughts. I agree entirely with the current post which begins:

"In der Karfreitagspredigt sagt Bischof Ulrich Neymeyr: "Der Justizirrtum, dem auch Jesus zum Opfer gefallen ist, ist eines der schlagkräftigen Argumente gegen die Todesstrafe". Tagespost 19.4.2019.

 

Diese bischöfliche Aussage evoziert eine Frage: Was wäre, wenn Pontius Pilatus dieser Justizirrtum nicht unterlaufen wäre? Jesus Christus wäre nicht gekreuzigt worden, er wäre so nicht für unsere Sünden gestorben und wir wären so Nichterlöste. Wenn aber die an Jesus Christus vollstreckte Todestrafe uns erlöst hat, sie so also Gutes gewirkt hat, wie soll dann diese vollstreckte Todesstrafe gegen die Todesstrafe sprechen? 

 

The stupidity of this 'bishop' beggars understanding.  He obviously does not understand the Christian narrative he is supposed to be articulating and promoting. Had Christ not been crucified, he would not have died for our sins, and we would not have been redeemed. It was God's will that Christ, the sinless one, suffer the death penalty. How then can the execution of Christ speak against the death penalty? 

 

Quite apart from Christian teaching, anyone who is not morally obtuse should be able to see that the death penalty is precisely what justice demands in certain cases.   The punishment must fit the crime.

 

I explain the PFC principle here and distinguish it from barbaric versions of lex talionis.

Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of  iron; such is the hum an condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed  part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The  whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is then that of privation. This stage has to  be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron  is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real   proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

We are spiritual beings, participants in the infinite and the absolute.  But we are also, undeniably, animals.  Our human condition is thus a  predicament, that of a spiritual animal.  As spirits we enjoy freedom of the will and the ability to encompass the whole universe in our thought.  As spirits we participate in the infinity and absoluteness of truth.  As animals, however, we are but indigent bits of the world's fauna exposed to and compromised by its vicissitudes.  As animals we are susceptible to pains and torments that swamp the spirit and obliterate the infinite in us reducing us in an instant to mere screaming animals. In the extremity of suffering, the body that served us as vehicle becomes a burden and a cross, and our way through the vale becomes a via dolorosa.

Now if God were to become one of us, fully one of us, would he not have to accept the full measure of the spirit's hostage to the flesh?  Would he not have to empty himself fully into our misery?  That is Weil's point.  The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated experience the worst of embodiment and be tortured to death.  For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation possible to a human. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all,  define being human. 

The Crucifixion is the Incarnation in extremis.  His spirit, 'nailed' to the flesh, is the spirit of flesh now nailed to the wood of the cross. At this extreme point of the Incarnation, doubly nailed  to matter, Christ experiences utter abandonment and the full horror of the human predicament.  He experiences and accepts utter failure and the terrifying thought that his whole life and ministry were utterly delusional. 

The darkest hour.  And then dawn. 

Self-Made Meaning is Unmeaning

One can bake bread, buy bread, or beg bread. Can one bake for oneself the bread of meaning? Or must one ask for it? (One cannot buy it.) Some say that the only meaning a life has is the meaning the liver of the life gives it.  This is a mistake as I will argue in painful detail in a separate entry. For now I merely invoke the authority of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trs. Foster and Miller, Ignatius Press, 1969, p. 73, orig. publ. in German in 1968:

Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand or live, cannot be made but only received.

To which I add: if there is no meaning there to be received, then there is no meaning.

Meaning as Bread

As an addendum to yesterday's Platonizing entry on "Give us this day our daily bread," I draw upon Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trs. Foster and Miller, Ignatius Press, 1969, p. 73, orig. publ. in German in 1968:

Meaning is the bread on which man, in the intrinsically human part of his being, subsists.

David Horowitz on the War Against Christianity

David Horowitz argues in his new book "Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America," that secularists and leftists want to turn the nation into a godless, heathen society where religion has absolutely no role.

Horowitz, who heads the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles, is used to taking controversial positions. He is the New York Times best-selling author of "Radical Son and Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America."

“The war on Christianity is real, and it’s right on our doorstep,” Horowitz says.

In an exclusive interview with Newsmax magazine, Horowitz details the perils facing our nation’s religious freedoms and the efforts by conservatives of all faiths to save them.

Newsmax: Many people think of the persecution of Christians as being limited to the Mideast, Far East, and Africa, far away from the United States. But that’s not true?

David Horowitz: No, it’s very bad in the U.S. This war against Christianity is a war of the left, which is the Democratic Party, because Christian values are incompatible with the social justice delusions of the left. Everything about Christianity — the sanctity of the individual, the individual soul, individual accountability and equality — all these things are anathema to the left. Efforts to keep religion out of daily life continue to grow, such as school prayers and public displays of faith.

But you argue that’s not what our founding fathers intended.

Horowitz: That’s right. The First Amendment prevents the government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion, but the left has attacked that clause. Jefferson acknowledged a wall of church-state separation, but all that meant was the state won’t make one religion like Anglicanism the official religion and persecute the other religions. The American Civil Liberties Union stood that reassurance on its head with “wall of separation between church and state” becoming a bumper-sticker slogan for leftists and secularists who want to silence religious people and marginalize their beliefs. You describe yourself as an atheist Jew.

Why would a Jewish skeptic write a book coming to the defense of Christians in America?

Horowitz: It was prompted by the murder in 1974 of a friend of mine, Betty Van Patter, a dedicated leftist and mother of three who was a bookkeeper at the New Left magazine Ramparts, which I edited. I had raised money to buy a Baptist church and turn it into a school for the Black Panthers; after Betty discovered the Panthers had doctored their books, she was raped, tortured, and beaten to death. I investigated and found the Panther Party was a criminal gang engaging in extortion, arson, drug trafficking, and murder. Still, their leaders received the support of the American left which defended the killers because they were the voices of the oppressed and champions of the progressive clause.

How does President Donald Trump fit into the fabric of American Christianity today?

Horowitz: He’s terrific for America. He’s a great patriot, and I think that’s what inspired the Evangelicals to support him. He wouldn’t have been elected without them.

What is your view of the Democratic Party?

Horowitz: It no longer respects equality. It’s a racist party. White people, males, and straight males are guilty before the fact, and people of color, women, and gays are innocent, even if the facts show they’re guilty.

Will the persecution of Christians be a big issue in the upcoming 2020 presidential election?

Horowitz: Oh, totally! It’s going to be a huge issue. Once either [Supreme Court Justices] Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Clarence Thomas retire, and Trump nominates this Catholic woman [believed to be U.S. Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett] there’s going to be a battle.

Do you believe Roe v. Wade will be overturned?
Horowitz: I hope so. This is a war. The left wants to kill babies outside the womb; they’re baby killers. Their slogan “pro-choice” is completely fraudulent, because they make choices. You have to choose to have sex, you have to choose who to have sex with, you have to choose whether to use contraception or not . . . or if something goes awry you have to choose not to use the morning-after pill, or to give birth to the baby and find it an adoptive mother, or kill it. It’s not about choice or reproductive freedom B.S.

You say the catalyst for writing the book was the intolerance of the left. Can you explain?

Horowitz: Before I began writing the book and was becoming acquainted with all of the issues, I thought the persecution of Christians was a somewhat parochial issue. I [began having] sympathy for this community because the left is being so intolerant . . . Now I see it as a central battle. The country is at stake. The left wants a one-party state, you can see that. How can you have a resistance to a dually elected president? It’s sedition. It’s treason, in the normal sense of the word, to obstruct a president. Everything that’s running the Democratic Party today is obstructionism. You can’t have a democracy if you don’t accept the legitimacy of an election. I mean, that is fundamental.

Is St. Paul an Anti-Natalist?

I wrote in Christian Anti-Natalism? (10 November 2017):

Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for  example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist.

Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the idea that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus God, or rather the second person of the Trinity, entered into the material world by being born of a woman, entering into it in the most humble manner imaginable, inter faeces et urinam nascimur. 

The mystery of the Nativity of God in a humble manger in a second-rate desert outpost of the Roman empire would seem to put paid to the notion that Christianity is anti-natalist.

To sum it up aphoristically: Nativity is natalist.

I still consider what I wrote above to be basically correct: Christianity is not, or at least is not obviously, anti-natalist. But now I want to consider a much more specific question: Is Paul an anti-natalist? To narrow the question still further: Is Paul advocating an anti-natalist position at 1 Corinthians 7? My correspondent, Karl White, thinks so:

Paul promotes celibacy as the highest ideal, the logical outcome of which is an end to humanity. I simply cannot see how anyone can dispute this. 

I shall now dispute it.

We cannot sensibly discuss the question whether Paul is an anti-natalist without first answering the logically prior question: What is an anti-natalist? David Benatar, the premier contemporary spokesman for the view, summarizes his position when he writes, "all procreation is wrong." (Benatar and Wassermann, Debating Procreation: Is it Wrong to Reproduce? Oxford UP 2015, 12) He means, of course, that it is morally wrong or morally impermissible to reproduce.  The claim, then, is a normative one. It is therefore not a statement about what is factually the case or a prediction as to what is likely to happen.  It is a claim to the effect that we humans ought not reproduce.  (If you are curious about Benatar's reasons for his unpopular view, I refer you to my Benatar category.)

The question, then, is precisely this: Does Paul, at 1 Corinthians 7, maintain that all procreation is wrong and that we ought not reproduce?  I answer in the negative.

Karl White is certainly right that Paul "promotes celibacy as the highest ideal."  The passage begins, "It is good for a man not to marry," i.e., good for a man not to have sexual intercourse with a woman.  The issue here is not marriage as such, since there can be celibate marriages; the issue is sexual intercourse, and not just sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, but also homosexual and bestial intercourse. And let's not leave out sexual intracourse (to coin a word), i.e., masturbation. (There are Catholic priests who, horribile dictu, actually maintain that their vows of celibacy do not rule out sodomy and masturbation.)*

And there is no doubt that Paul wishes all men to be like him, celibate. (verse 7) But he goes on (verse 9) to say that each has his own gift from God, with different gifts for different men. His gift is the power to be celibate. But others are not so gifted as to be able to attain this lofty standard. For those lacking Pauline self-control  it is better to marry than to burn with lust and fall into a cesspool of immorality.

Paul does not say that it is morally impermissible to reproduce or that it is morally obligatory to refrain from sexual intercourse. In fact, he is saying the opposite: it is morally permissible for a man to marry and have sex with a woman.  It is also a prudent thing to do inasmuch as it forces a man who takes his vows seriously to channel his sexual energy in a way which, even if not productive of offspring, keeps him from immoral behavior.

Paul does not affirm anti-natalism as defined above. He can be plausibly read as saying that sexual intercourse for the purpose of procreation (and presumably only for this purpose)  is morally permissible, but that there is a higher calling, celibacy, one which is not demanded of all.  (It can't be demanded of all, because it is not possible for all: 'Ought' implies 'can.' Only some have been granted Pauline self-control.)

Karl White said, "Paul promotes celibacy as the highest ideal, the logical outcome of which is an end to humanity." But it is not a logical consequence of Paul's preaching that either a) procreation will cease -- no chance of that! -- or b) that procreation ought to cease.  For he is not saying that all ought to be celibate. He is saying that celibacy is supererogatory, above and beyond the call of duty or the demands of moral obligation.  It is only for those we are specially called to it.

Paul is not an anti-natalist in the Benatar sense. He is not maintaining that procreation is morally wrong. But I grant to Karl that there is a sort of anti-natalist flavor to Paul's preaching, perhaps along the following lines.

Procreation is not immoral, contra Benatar. But it nevertheless would be better if people did not engage in it.  This is an ideal that is unattainable except in rare cases and so cannot be prescribed as a moral requirement for all of humanity.  But if it is an ideal, then ideally it would be better if procreation cease and the human race come to an end.

_________________________

*Well, we are all given to self-deception. The weight of concupiscence makes it hard to avoid. Raw desire suborns intellect and conscience.  As a young man, before I was married, I rationalized an affair I had with a married woman by telling myself that I was not committing adultery; she was. It is extremely important for the moral life to observe carefully, and in one's own case, how reason in its infirmity can be so easily suborned by the passions.  Is reason then a whore, as Luther said? No, that goes too far. She's more like a wayward wife. Reason is weak, but not utterly infirm or utterly depraved. If she were either of these, the reasoning of this weblog entry could not be correct when, as it seems to me, it is!

ADDENDUM (3/4/19)

Karl White responds:

To clarify, I should have been more precise in my wording.

 

What I meant to say was something along the lines of "If everyone became celibate, then humanity would end within a generation. Presumably if celibacy is the highest ideal, then Paul could not morally protest at this outcome."

 

Also, Paul is not for a total end of humanity. He believes its highest manifestation is in the guise of the 'spiritual bodies' he describes in his one of his letters and to which he desires all humans will come.

 

So I agree that Paul is not an anti-natalist in the Benatarian sense, but that he would have little problem with humanity in its current manifestation coming to an end seems fairly clear to me.

 

BV:  Now we agree!

 

Dave Bagwill writes,

Some thoughts on Paul and celibacy. I think it is probably the case that Paul thinks of celibacy not as the highest ideal at all, but rather as a vocation, a calling. To contend otherwise would be to ignore Paul's saturation in Jewish thought and worldview. That worldview, shaped by the Jewish scriptures, encourages, admonishes, and praises married life from the very beginning, and children are part and parcel of that state. I think that any interpretation of Paul that disregards this fundamental imperative must be suspect; conversely, his statements are most fruitfully understood in the over-arching Creation imperatives.

 

The case can also be made that biblically, man + woman = Man. Certainly, from experience, married life is the only way (excepting a special call to celibacy) that I could be 'complete', to the extent that I am. The 'classroom' of marriage is where I've learned and am learning that "Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained." - C.S. Lewis

 

It is also prudent to consider not just the words that Paul spoke, but , as Miles Coverdale advised: "“It shall greatly help ye to understand the Scriptures if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goeth before and what followeth after. ” "At what time, to what intent, with what circumstances" - if I were a competent exegete, I think an investigation into Paul's writing about celibacy would clear up any notion of a 'higher life' to be had as a result of celibacy alone. I in fact tend to distrust any purported 'spiritual' or 'higher-life' proponent that begins with a disparagement of the married estate.

 

ADDENDUM (3/5/19) Karl White responds to Dave Bagwill:

 

. . . I politely disagree with Dave Bagwill's comments. Paul is famous/infamous for his breaking with Jewish thought - in many ways that is the essence of Paul and why he is credited as the 'founder' of Christianity. His placing of celibacy as the highest ideal seems fairly uncontroversial to me. Also, merely because an individual has found personal contentment in marriage does not somehow invalidate Paul's espousal of celibacy - many have found contentment in celibacy and solitude and Jesus seemed to have little time for the family as an institution.

Two Senses of 'Presupposition' in Van Til and in General

Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., p. 279: "Thus the truth of Christianity appears to be the immediately indispensable presupposition of the fruitful study of nature." My gloss:

The fruitful study of nature presupposes the truth of Christianity.  It is a fact that we study nature, and it is a fact that our natural-scientific procedures are successful in many ways and in many areas of inquiry.  Now what is factual is actual, and what is actual is possible. But how is it possible? What are the conditions of the possibility of our successful understanding of nature and (some of) her laws? We are being told by Van Til that an indispensable and thus necessary condition is the truth of Christianity.

This illustrates one legitimate use of  'presupposition.' Presupposition in this sense relates an activity or procedure to a proposition.  To say that activity A presupposes proposition p is to say that A could not be undertaken with the hope of success  were p not true. 

For example, the procedures of natural science presuppose the intelligibility of nature.  We would not seek the laws of planetary motion, for example, if we did not antecedently believe that the motion of the planets was regular and law-like and understandable by us. But IS nature intrinsically intelligible, intelligible an sich? We have  good reason to think so given the success of our physics as shown by its technological implementation.

The presupposition of the intelligibility of nature is therefore well-grounded .

We can push our transcendental regress a step further by asking: what does the intelligibility of nature itself presuppose? What are the conditions of the possibility of nature's being understandable by us?  What would have to be the case for nature to be intelligible to us?  Here are some candidate answers:

A. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the truth of Christianity. (Van Til)

B. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the existence of God. (It is only because a supreme Intelligence created the world that it is intelligible.)

C. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the truth of Kant's transcendental idealism according to which "The understanding is the law-giver of nature." 

D. The intelligibility of nature presupposes an immanent order and teleology along the lines of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. On Nagel's view, the rational order is self-explanatory, a necessary feature of anything that could count as a cosmos. Nagel views the intelligibility of the world as "itself part of the deepest explanation why things are as they are." (17).  Now part of the way things are is that they are understandable by us.  Given that the way things are is intelligible, it follows that the intelligibility of the world is self-explanatory or self-grounding. "The intelligibility of the world is no accident." (17)   "nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings." (17) See my Nagel category for much more on Nagel's book and other works of his.

I myself incline toward (B).  (A) entails (B), but I see no reason to accept (A).  The sort of bottom-up reasoning that can plausibly justify us in positing God cannot plausibly justify us in positing the God of orthodox Christian theism with all the Reformed add-ons.

The other sense of 'presuppose' is in play here: "I therefore presuppose the Reformed system of doctrine." (Van Til, p. 27) A presupposition in this sense is an assumption that is accepted unconditionally, uncritically, without question. 

Bottom-Up and Top-Down

The first sense of presupposition fits with a bottom-up approach. We start with various features of the world we experience and we then ask what makes them possible.  We attempt  a regress from the given to the hidden. We start with the world, not with God, and we aim to arrive at God.  But if we arrive at God in this way, then the properties we will be justified in attributing to God will  only be those needed for our explanatory purposes.   Those properties are in a certain sense tied to our starting points.  For example, one might reason along these lines: the universe is contingent, but its existence is not a brute fact; so it must have a cause external to it.  In this way we get to God as First Cause.  Or we start from the intelligibility of nature and arrive at God as the supremely intelligent source of the intelligibility we find here below.  Supposing we can get to the true God in this way, a God that needn't have caused anything, or sourced the intelligibility of anything distinct from himself,  it nonetheless remains the case that the properties of this God will reflect the facts we start with and our need to explain them. 

The second sense of presupposition fits with a top-down approach.  We start with God, or at least we try to start with God, and then, instead of regressing from the given to the hidden conditions of the possibility of the given, we progress from the hidden to the given.  This is possible if the God who is hidden to the natural man with his natural intellect has revealed himself.   I understand Van Til to be saying that we know the true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob only because he has revealed himself to us.  The revelation that Van Till accepts is the final truth, not only about God, but also about man, and the universe.  Since it the revelation of God, it cannot be questioned.   We can say that for Van Til, God and his revelation understood along Reformed lines constitute the Absolute Presupposition.

Interim Conclusion

Van Til's bottom-up  transcendental argumentation appears to be a sham. Despite appearances, he is not trying to justify belief in the God of orthodox Christian theism by argumentation from given facts (the existence of nature, its order, beauty, and intelligibility) to that which must be presupposed if they are to be so much as possible; he is not trying to justify belief in the Christian God at all.  For he just assumes the existence of the Christian God as something that needs no justification and cannot be questioned since it is that without which there would be no questioning or proving or anything else.

With that absolute presupposition in place as his unquestionable starting point, he can then advance, but not justify, claims like (A) above: 

A. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the truth of Christianity.

What Van Til is doing in effect is simply presupposing the truth of (A)! What he ought to be doing, however, is giving us a reason to accept (A). It comes as no surprise, then, that Van Til claims that all reasoning is circular reasoning. (123) We will have to examine that claim and Oliphint's defense of it in a separate post.

Van Til just assumes the truth of his worldview and then in effect says: See! I can explain everything, including why there is no neutral ground for the assessment of worldviews, and why people who reject the particulars of my worldview reject them.  But this is of no help to someone who sees no reason to accept his worldview  in the first place.

Suppose I grant that that sin has noetic consequences. I grant the thesis.  But that leaves open the question as what exactly the noetic consequences are. Is it a noetic consequence of sin that I do not accept Van Til's worldview?  Or is rather a noetic consequence of sin that Van Til denies that there is a neutral ground for the assessment of worldviews?

Fascinating! More later. And thanks again to Dave Bagwill for inspiring me to get going on this.

Van Til on an Absolutely Certain Proof of Christianity

Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., p. 381:

The best, the only, the absolutely certain proof of the truth of Christianity is that unless its truth be presupposed,there is no proof of anything.

Van Til's  claim, to employ some Kantian jargon, is that the truth of Christianity is a condition of the possibility of proving anything. That's quite a claim. Let's put it to the test.

One can prove that the null set is unique by reductio ad absurdum. We begin the reductio by assuming that the null set is not unique, that there are two or more null sets. By the Axiom of Extensionality, two sets differ numerically only if one has a member the other doesn't have, or vice versa. But the null set, by definition, has no members. So the assumption leads to a contradiction. Therefore there cannot be two or more null sets. Hence the null set is unique. 

The proof presupposes the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), and I am willing to grant that LNC and the other laws of logic can be argued to presuppose in their turn the existence of an omniscient necessary being. One argument to this conclusion is the Anderson-Welty argument which I critically examine here. I conclude that, while the argument is not rationally compelling, it does contribute to the rationality of belief in God.  In other words, the Anderson-Welty argument is a good reason to believe in the existence of God. It does not, however, establish the existence of God in a definitive manner. It does not show that the existence of God is absolutely certain.

At the very most, then, one can plausibly argue to, but not prove, the existence of an omniscient necessary being whose existence is a presupposition of our rational operations in accordance with the laws of logic.  But this is a far cry from what Van Til asserts above, namely, that the truth of Christianity with all its very specific claims is a condition of the possibility of proving anything. Trinity and Incarnation are among these specific claims. How are these doctrines supposed to bear upon the laws of logic?  Perhaps the Van Tilians have an answer to this. If they do, I would like to know what it is. But not only is Van Til's conception of God Christian, it is also Calvinist so that all the characteristic claims of Calvinism are also packed into the conception of a God that is supposed to be a condition of the possibility of all  proof.  How does predestination, for example, bear upon the laws of logic?