I am presently working through Marilyn McCord Adams, "Aristotelian Substance and Supposits" (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 79, 2005, 15-72). The Czech scholastics and sometime MavPhil commenters Novak, Novotny, Vohanka, et al. have kindly invited me to read a paper at a conference on the Trinity in Prague this September and now I am under the gun to write something worth their time and attention.
Adams writes, p. 39, "(Ockham is willing to conclude that 'A human supposit can be assumed' is true, even though 'A human supposit is assumed' is contradictory; just as 'A white can be black' is true, even though 'A white is black' is impossible.)"
My present purpose is to make sense of this quotation.
I give 'A white can be black' a de re reading as follows:
1. A white thing is (logically) possibly such that it is not white.
For example, here is a piece of white paper. Heeding Mick Jagger's injunction, I can paint it black. But I wouldn't be able to do this if it were not logically possible for this thing that is actually white to be non-white. Although, necessarily, nothing white is non-white, the piece of paper is contingently white.
I give 'A white is black' a de dicto reading:
2. It is not (logically) possible that a white thing be non-white.
On these readings, both (1) and (2) come out true. (1) is about a thing (res) and ascribes a modal property to it; (2) is about a proposition (dictum) and ascribes a modal property to it.
I give 'A human supposit can be assumed' a de re reading:
3. A human supposit is (logically) possibly such that it is assumed.
From the opening page of Adams' paper, I gather that a supposit is an Aristotelian primary (individual) substance. So Socrates and Plato are human supposits, while a donkey is a supposit that is not human. And from her gloss on Boethius, I gather that a person is a primary substance of a rational nature. So Socrates and Plato are persons while a donkey is not.
Now if God incarnate is one person in two natures, as Chalcedonian orthodoxy has it, then God cannot assume a man. For a man is a supposit of a rational nature, hence a person. If God were to assume a man, then God the Son -- a person -- would be assuming a second person. But pace Nestorious, there are not two natures and two persons in Christ, but one person in two natures. So what is assumed in the Incarnation is not a supposit but a particularized human nature. This is why 'A human supposit is assumed' is contradictory. That is, in de dicto terms,
4. It is (logically) impossible that a human supposit be assumed.
(3) and (4) can both be true. It is impossible that a human supposit be assumed, for it it were it wouldn't be a supposit; but something that is a human supposit is possibly such that it is assumed. But this has the strange consequence that human supposits are only contingently supposits. So Socrates is not essentially a supposit, and if a supposit is a primary substance, the Socrates is not essentially a primary substance.
Thus Adams ascribes to Ockham the view that "The property of being a supposit is not essential to any creatable/created thing, because any creatable/created thing whatever can exist wthout it." (p. 39) So whatever is a supposit might not have been. Or rather whatever is a supposit might not have been its own supposit: every supposit is possibly such as to have an 'alien supposit,' namely God.
What is curious here is how very specific theological doctrines are allowed to drive the general ontology.
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 human 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 not more at least [at last?] than 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)
What follows is the whole of Chapter 16 of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange's Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought. My critical comments are in blue.
Chapter 16: The Divine Persons
Person in general is a being which has intelligence and freedom. Its classic definition was given by Boethius: Person is an individual subject with an intellectual nature. [548] Hence person, generally, is a hypostasis or a suppositum, and, specifically, a substance endowed with intelligence. [549] Further, since person signifies substance in its most perfect form, it can be found in God, if it be stripped of the imperfect mode which it has in created persons. Thus made perfect, it can be used analogically of God, analogically, but still in its proper sense, in a mode that is transcendent and pre-eminent. Further, since revelation gives us two personal names, that is, the Father and the Son, the name of the third person, of the Holy Spirit, must also be a personal name. Besides, the New Testament, in many texts, represents the Holy Spirit as a person. [550].
Now, since there are three persons in God, they can be distinct one from the other only by the three relations which are mutually opposed (paternity, and filiation, and passive spiration): because, as has been said, all else in God is identical.
Comment: The persons are distinct, numerically distinct. And they are really distinct: distinct in reality, not merely relative to our thought. What makes the persons distinct given that each is God and there is only one God? What is the principium individuationis within the Godhead? The relations between them. Thus the Father is distinct from the Son because the Father stands in the paternity relation to the Son but not vice versa. It is difficult to see, however, how a relation between x and y can constitute the numerical difference between x and y. I should think that the numerical difference between x and y is a logically prior condition of their standing in any relation. So I am already having difficulty following the Thomist account.
These real relations, since they are subsistent (not accidental): and are, on the other hand, incommunicable (being opposed): can constitute the divine persons. In these subsistent relations we find the two characteristics of person: substantiality and incommunicability.
Comment: If the relations were accidental, i.e., accidents, then they would be dependent in their being on something else, and the objection I just made would hold. So they are said to be subsistent, i.e., substances in their own right. And since they are 'incommunicable,' they have two characteristics of persons. The problem, however, is to understand how the relata of the relations (of paternity, filiality, etc.) can be (identical to) the relations. Paternity and filiality are different relations. So if the Father = paternity, and the Son = filiality, then it is easy to see how the Father and the Son are distinct. But what is difficult if not impossible to understand is how the Father could be identical to paternity and the Son to filiality.
A divine person, then, according to St. Thomas and his school, is a divine relation as subsistent. [551] Elsewhere the saint gives the following definition: [552] A divine person is nothing else than a relationally distinct reality, subsistent in the divine essence.
These definitions explain why there are in God, speaking properly, not metaphorically, three persons, three intellectual and free subjects, though these three have the same identical nature, though they understand by one and the same intellective act, though they love one another by one and the same essential act, and though they freely love creatures by one and the same free act of love.
Comment: So the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father by the same act of loving. But acts are individuated by their objects. So loving the Father is a different act than loving the Son. It cannot be the same act on pain of incoherence. But Aquinas says that they love by the same act. He has to say this because he cannot admit that there are three separate unities of consciousness in the Godhead. For this would entail that there are three Gods.
Hence, while we say: The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, we also say: The Father is not the Son, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father, and the Holy Spirit is not the Son. In this sentence the verb "is" expresses real identity between persons and nature, and the negation "is not" expresses the real distinction of the persons from each other.
Comment: This is contradictory as I have explained many times before, assuming that 'nature' refers to an individual existing nature. If the 'is' is taken to be the 'is' of identity, logical inconsistency is unavoidable. If F = G and S = G. then F = S, by the symmetry and transitivity of identity. You cannot consistently with that go on to say that it is not the case that F = S.
These three opposed relations, then, paternity, filiation, and passive spiration, belong to related and incommunicable personalities. Thus there cannot be in God many Fathers, but one only. Paternity makes the divine nature incommunicable as Father, though that divine nature can still be communicated to two other persons. To illustrate. When you are constructing a triangle, the first angle, as first, renders the entire surface incommunicable, though that same surface will still be communicated to the other two angles; and the first angle will communicate that surface to them without communicating itself, while none of the three is opposed to the surface which they have in common.
Comment: Garrigou-Lagrange is fudging now. He says that the opposed relations belong to related personalities. This is not what he said before. Before he said that the persons just are subsistent relations. Well, which is it? Are the relations identical to persons, or do the relations belong to persons? This fudge is to be expected since the doctrine attempts to articulate discursively a reality that lies beyond the discursive intellect, a reality that is mystical.
Here appears the profundity of Cajetan's [553] remark: the divine reality, as it is in itself, is not something purely absolute (signified by the word "nature") nor something purely relative (signified by the name "person"): but something transcending both, something which contains formally and eminently [554] that which corresponds to the concepts of absolute and relative, of absolute nature and relative person. Further, the distinction between nature and the persons is not a real distinction, but a mental distinction (virtual and minor): whereas the distinction between the persons is real, by reason of opposition. On this last point theologians generally agree with Thomists.
Comment: Cajetan's remark is profound. The divine reality must be absolute, not relative. But it must also in some sense be personal since the reality of persons surpasses that of every other category of entity. But persons are relative to each other. So the divine reality must in some sense be multi-personal and yet absolute. As I see it, theology issues in 'necessary makeshifts' that try to articulate in coherent discursive terms a trans-discursive reality. So it is no surprise that every doctrine of the Trinity issues in problems, questions, and outright inconsistencies. The doctrines point beyond themselves to a reality that cannot be grasped in discursive terms.
This is why doctrinal fights are absurd. Some doctrines are better than others, but in the end all are untenable. The divine reality is not a doctrine!
Thanks to Bill Clinton, it is now widely appreciated that much rides on what the meaning of ‘is’ is. Time was, when only philosophers were aware of this. The fact that Clinton made the point to save his hide rather than to advance philosophical logic is irrelevant. Credit where credit is due. But enough joking around.
In our recent Trinitarian explorations we have thus far discussed the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication. We saw that ‘The Father is God’ could be construed as
1. The Father is identical to God
or as
2. The Father is divine.
Both construals left us with logical trouble. If each of the Persons is identical to God, and there is exactly one God, then (given the transitivity and symmetry of identity) there is exactly one Person. On the other hand, if each of the Persons is divine, where ‘is’ is the 'is' of predication, then there are three Gods and tri-theism is the upshot. Either way, we end up contradicting a central Trinitarian tenet.
We explored the mereological way out and we found it wanting, or at least I found it wanting. God is not a whole whose proper parts are the Persons.
But there is also the ‘is’ of composition as when we say, ‘This countertop is marble,’ or in my house, ‘This countertop is faux marble.’ ‘Is’ here is elliptical for ‘is composed of.’ Compare: ‘That jacket is leather,’ and ‘This beverage is whisky.’ To say that a jacket is leather is not to say that it is identical to leather – otherwise it would be an extremely large jacket – or that it has leather as a property: leather is not a property. A jacket is leather by being made out of leather.
Suppose you have a statue S made out for some lump L of material, whether marble, bronze, clay, or whatever. How is S related to L? It seems clear that L can exist without S existing. Thus one could melt the bronze down, or re-shape the clay. In either case, the statue would cease to exist, while the quantity of matter would continue to exist. If S ceases to exist while L continues to exist, then S is not identical to L. They are not identical because something is true of L that is not true of S: it is true of L that it can exist without S existing, but it is not true of S that it can exist without S existing. I am relying upon the following principle, one that seems utterly beyond reproach:
(InId) If x = y, whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa.
(This is a rough formulation of the Indiscenibility of Identicals. A more careful formulation would block such apparent counterexamples as: Maynard G. Krebs believes that the morning star is a planet but does not believe that the evening star is a planet.)
Returning to the statue and the lump, although S is not identical to L, S is not wholly distinct, or wholly diverse, from L either. This is because S cannot exist unless L exists. Note also that while S exists it occupies exactly the same space as does L. As long as S exists, S and L are spatiotemporally coincident. What's more, they are composed of exactly the same matter arranged in exactly the same way. And yet they are not identical! Very curious. How could there be two physical things in the same place at the same time? But I have just shown that they cannot be identical. Suppose that the statue and the lump come into existence at the same time t and pass out of existence at the same later time t*. At all times they share the same matter, and at no time are they not spatiotemporally coincident. And yet they are not identical because modally discernible. In our world, L composes S now, but there are possible worlds at which L does not not compose S now.
The fact that there are bronze statues and that the statue and its matter are neither strictly identical nor strictly distinct suggests the following analogy: The Father is to God as the statue is to the lump of matter out of which it is sculpted. And the same goes for the other Persons. Each Person is to God as the statue is to the lump. Schematically, P is to G as S to L. The Persons are like hylomorphic compounds where the hyle in question is the divine substance.
Thus the Persons are not each identical to God, which would have the consequence that they are identical to one another. Nor are the persons instances of divinity which would entail tri-theism. It is rather that the persons are composed of God as of a common substance. Thus we avoid a unitarianism in which there is no room for distinctness of Persons, and we avoid tri-theism. So far, so good.
Something like this approach is advocated by Jeffrey Brower and Michael Rea, here.
But does the statue/lump analogy avoid the problems we faced with the water analogy? Aren’t the two analogies so closely analogous that they share the same problems? Water occurs in three distinct states, the gaseous, the liquid, and the solid. One and and the same quantity of water can assume any of these three states. Distinctness of states is compatible with oneness of substance. On the water analogy, the Persons are to God as the three states of water are to water.
Liquid, solid, and gaseous are states of water. Similarly, a statue is a state of a lump of matter. The main problem with both analogies is as follows. God is not a substance in the sense in which clay and water are substances. Thus God is not a stuff or hyle, but a substance in the sense of a hypostasis or hypokeimenon. Beware of equivocating on 'substance.' And it does no good to say that God is an immaterial or nonphysical stuff. God is an immaterila being, but he cannot be or be composed of an immaterial stuff. Besides, 'immaterial stuff' smacks of a contradictio in adjecto. It sounds like 'immaterial matter.' Furthermore, the divine unity must be accommodated. The ground of divine unity cannot be amorphous matter whether physical or nonphysical.
In addition, one and the same quantity of H20 cannot be simultaneously and throughout liquid, solid, and gaseous. Similarly, one and the same quantity of bronze cannot be simultaneously and throughout three different statues. Connected with this is how God could be a hylomorphic compound, or any sort of compound, given the divine simplicity which rules out all composition in God.
In sum, the statue/lump analogy is not better than the water/state analogy. Neither explains how we can secure both unity of the divine nature and distinctness of Persons.
Philosophers love a paradox, but hate a contradiction. Paradoxes drive inquiry while contradictions stop it dead in its tracks. The doctrine of the Trinity is a paradox threatening to collapse into one or more contradictions. Put starkly, and abstracting from the complexity of the creedal formulations, the doctrine says that God is one, and yet God is three. Now this is, or rather entails, an apparent contradiction since if God is three, then God is not one, which contradicts God's being one. But not every apparent contradiction is a real one. Hence it is a mistake to reject the doctrine due to its initial appearance of being self-contradictory. To put it another way, the doctrine is not obviously self-contradictory as some appear to believe. It is not obviously self-contradictory since it is not obvious that God is one and three in the same respect. To see contradictions that are not there is just as much of an intellectual mistake as to fail to see ones that are there.
I should say that I am interested in the general problem of apparent contradictions both in philosophy and out, what contradictions signify, and how we ought to deal with them. My interest in the Trinity is a special case of this general interest. Herewith, a preliminary attempt at cataloging some ways of dealing with apparent contradictions, taking the Trinity as my chief example.
The following catalog divides into two parts. The first five entries treat the three-in-one contradiction as merely apparent, unreal, unproblematic, while the remaining entries treat it as real or unavoidable. But what do I mean when I say that a contradiction is unavoidable? Let us say that a contradiction has limbs. For example, I am sitting now and I am not sitting now is a contradiction assuming that 'now' denotes the same time in both of its occurrences. I am sitting now is the first limb; I am not sitting now is the second limb. A contradiction is unavoidable (avoidable) if we have (do not have) good reasons for accepting both limbs. The example just cited is an example of an avoidable contradiction since there is no good reason to accept both limbs.
But some contradictions seem unavoidable. For example, there is reason to think that a set exists if and only if it has members. But there is also reason to think that a set -- the null set -- can exist without members. This apparent contradiction is quite different from the one concerning my being seated/unseated. It is not obviously avoidable if it is avoidable at all. I am not saying that this is genuine contradiction; I am saying that it is a plausible candidate for such status.
The Contradiction as Merely Apparent
1. Deny the first limb. In God is one and God is three, God is one is the first limb. The contradiction is easily dismissed if we simply deny this limb and embrace tri-theism. This is of course unacceptable to the Christian and indeed to any sophisticated theist. A defensible theism must be a monotheism.
2. Deny the second limb, and embrace radical monotheism along Jewish or Islamic lines.
3. Reject both limbs by rejecting the presupposition on which both rest, namely, that God exists, or that 'God' has a referent. If this presupposition is not satisfied, then the question lapses.
4. Make a distinction between the respect in which God is one and the respect in which God is three. Alphonse Gratry, for example, distinguishing between nature and person says that God is one nature in three persons. (Logic, p. 336) Drawing a distinction between respects is the standard way to defuse a contradiction. But in the case of the Trinity it accomplishes little unless one can explain how the distinguished items are related. Suppose one is told that a certain ball is both red and green at the same time. This is easily seen to be true if the ball is red in one hemisphere and green in the other. In this case it is clear without further ado how the two hemispheres are related. Not so in the case of the Trinity.
5. A more sophisticated strategy is to locate an uncontroversial phenomenon in nature that exhibits a trinitarian or binitarian structure. Suppose there is a two-in-one ( binity) in nature. If uncontroversially actual, then uncontroversially possible, even if we cannot understand how exactly it is possible. The possibility of a binitarian or trinitarian phenomenon in nature could then be used as a model to show, or begin to show, the possibility of the Trinity.
A putative example of a two-in-one is a statue. The statue S and the lump L of matter it is composed of are two things in that L can exist without S. If S is made of bronze, and the bronze is melted down, then L will exist without S existing. Even if the lump of bronze and the statue come into existence at the same time, and pass out of existence at the same later time, they are two. For they are modally discernible: the lump has a property the statue lacks, the property of being possibly such as not to be a statue. So, for both temporal and modal reasons, lump and statue are not strictly identical. They are two.
But they are also one thing in that S just is formed matter. If S and L come into existence at the same time, and pass out of existence at the same later time, then they are spatiotemporally coincident and composed of exactly the same matter arranged in exactly the same way. That strongly suggests that S and L are the same.
On the one hand, it seems we must say that S and L are two and not one. On the other, it seems we must say that they are one and not two.
Perhaps we can say that what we have here is a binity, a two-in-one. If binities are actual, then they are possible, even if it is not wholly clear how they are possible. Assuming that the real cannot be contradictory, then the apparent contradiction of a two-in-one must be merely apparent. If this fifth strategy works, one will come to see that the Trinitarian contradiction is merely apparent, even if one does not achieve full clarity as to how the Trinity is possible. (But of course the transcendence of God ought to insure that much about him will remain beyond the ken of our finite intellects both here below and in the life to come, if there is one.)
The Contradiction as Unavoidable
6. Take the contradiction to be real or unavoidable -- since both limbs are justifiable -- and as proof that the triune God is impossible and hence necessarily nonexistent. In other words, adopt the following stance: (i) there is excellent reason to say that God must be one; (ii) there is excellent reason to say that God must be three; (iii) it is a contradiction to maintain that God is both one and three; (iv) therefore, God is impossible, hence nonexistent.
7. Take the contradiction to be unavoidable as in #6 and as proof that God is logically impossible. But instead of inferring from logical impossibility to necessary nonexistence, draw the conclusion that God exists despite the contradiction. One is reminded of the phrase attributed to Tertullian: Credo quia absurdum, I believe because it is absurd (logically contradictory). This also appears to be the position of Kierkegaard. What distinguishes strategy #6 from #7 is that in the former one takes logic as having veto power over reality: one takes the logically impossible, that which cannot be thought without contradiction, to be really impossible, impossible in reality apart from thought. That is, one takes the finite discursive intellect to be at least negatively related to extramental reality: nothing can be real unless it is thinkable by us without contradiction. Strategy #7, however, rests on the assumption that there can be a reality -- the divine reality -- which is not subject to logical laws which, if this strategy is correct, can only be our laws. What is necessarily false for us can nonetheless be true in reality.
8. Take the contradiction to be real or unavoidable, but also to be true. In both #6 and #7, the contradiction is taken to to be false, indeed necessarily false, but on this dialetheist option, it is a true contradiction. Accordingly, the Trinity doctrine is a true contradiction!
Are there any other options? Note that the relative identity approach falls under #4.
UPDATE. Chad comments:
Regarding "are there any other options?" on approaches to the Trinity paradox.
Another option that falls under the 'apparent contradiction' category is mysterianism: the contradiction is apparent only, but the resolution is a mystery, either heretofore or in principle.
Another option, which might stand between the 'apparent contradiction' and 'contradiction' categories, is van Inwagen's relative identity approach: The Trinity is contradictory if the standard logic of identity is correct, apparently contradictory if not.
Yet another option that falls under the 'contradiction' category: To say that a father can beget a son without a mother is a parent [patent?] contradiction.
Chad is right about mysterianism. That is a further option under the first category. I'm surprised I overlooked it. As for the relative identity approach, this was Peter Geach's before it was van Inwagen's. But doesn't this approach fall under #4? I'm not sure why Chad calls his third point a third option. Furthermore , isn't 'beget' a technical term in Trinitarian theology? The Son is said to be "begotten not made." The idea, I take it, is to avoid saying that the Son is created. If created, then a creature, then not God. If 'beget' has a technical meaning, why should it be a contradiction to say that the Father begets the Son?
I put the question to Manny K. Black, brother of Max Black, but all I got was a yawn for my trouble. The title question surfaced in the context of a discussion of mereological models of the Trinity. Each of the three Persons is God. But we saw that the 'is' cannot be read as the 'is' of identity on pain of contradiction. So it was construed as the 'is' of predication. Accordingly, 'The Father (Son, etc.) is God' was taken to express that the Father (Son, etc.) is divine. But that has the unwelcome consequence that there are three Gods unless it can be shown that something can be F without being an F. At this point the cat strolls into the picture. Could something be feline without being a feline? The skeleton of a cat, though not a cat, is a proper part of a cat. And similarly for other cat parts. As a proper part of a cat the skeleton of a cat is feline. And it is supposed to be feline in the same sense of 'feline' as the cat itself is feline.
Now if the proper parts of a cat can be feline in the very same sense in which the cat is feline, without themselves being cats, then we have an analogy that renders intelligible the claim that the Persons of the Trinity are divine without being Gods. The picture is this: God or the Godhead or the Trinity is a whole the proper parts of which are exactly the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Persons are distinct among themselves, but each is divine in virtue of being a proper part of God. There is one God in three divine Persons. The mereological model allows us to avoid tritheism and to affirm that God is one and three without contradiction.
I have already expressed my doubt whether the mereological model can accommodate the divine unity. But now I raise a different question. Is 'feline' being used univocally -- in the very same sense -- when applied to a cat and when applied to a proper part of a cat such as a cat's skeleton?
This is not obvious. It appears to be being used analogically. We can exclude equivocity of the sort illustrated by the equivocity of 'bank' as between 'money bank' and 'river bank.' Clearly, we are not simply equivocating when we apply 'feline' to both cat and skeleton. But can we exclude analogicity?
To cop an example from Aristotle, consider 'healthy.' The cat is healthy. Is its food healthy? In one sense 'no' since it is not even alive. In another sense 'yes' insofar as 'healthy' food conduces to health in the cat. Similarly with the cat's urine, blood, exercise, and coat. Urine cannot be healthy in exactly the same sense in which the cat is healthy, but it is healthy in an analogical sense inasmuch as its indicates health in the animal.
Since a skeleton is called feline only by reference to an animal whose skeleton it is, I suggest 'feline' in application to a cat skeleton is being used analogically. If this is right,then the Persons are divine in only an analogical sense, a result that does not comport well with orthodoxy.
You wrote: "For one thing, wholes depend on their parts for their existence, and not vice versa. (Unless you thought of parts as abstractions from the whole, which the Persons could not be.) Parts are ontologically prior to the wholes of which they are the parts.This holds even in the cases in which the whole is a necessary being and each part is as well." Chad M. seems to be following William Lane Craig. Craig's partner-in-crime is J. P. Moreland, who argues that with substances, the whole is metaphysically prior to its parts. For example, a heart has its identity only because it is a constituent of the human person. Removed from a human person, it ceases to be a heart.
If a concrete particular such as book counts as an Aristotelian primary substance, and it does, then I should think that the book as a whole is not metaphysically/ontologically prior to its (proper) parts. In cases like this the whole depends for its existence on the prior existence of the parts. First (both temporally and logically) you have the pages, glue, covers, etc., and then (both temporally and logically) you have the book. If, per impossibile, there were a book that always existed, it would still be dependent for its existence on the existence of its proper parts logically, though not temporally. So it is not true in general that "with substances, the whole is metaphysically prior to the parts."
But a book is an artifact whereas Kevin brings up the case of living primary substances such as living animals. The heart of a living animal is a proper part of it. Now does it depend for its existence on the whole animal of which it is a proper part? Is it true, as Kevin says, that the heart is identity-dependent on the animal whose heart it is?
I don't think so. Otherwise, there couldn't be heart transplants. Suppose Tom, whose heart is healthy, dies in a car crash. Tom's heart is transplanted into Jerry whose diseased heart has been removed. Clearly, one and the same heart passes from Tom to Jerry. Therefore, the heart in question is not identity-dependent on being Tom's heart. In principle if not in practice, every part of an animal can be transplanted. So it seems as if the whole is not metaphysically prior to its parts in the case of animals.
Accidents and Parts
Tom's smile cannot 'migrate' from Tom to Jerry, but his heart can (with a little help from the cardiologists). This is the difference between an accident of a substance and a proper part of a substance. If A is an accident of substance S, then not only is A dependent for its existence on a substance, it is dependent for its existence on the very substance S of which it is an accident. This is why an accident cannot pass from one substance to another. The accidents of S cannot exist apart from S, but S can exist without those very accidents (though presumably it must have some accidents or other). So we can say that a substance is metaphysically prior to its accidents. But I don't think it is true that a substance is metaphysically/ontologically prior to its parts. The part-whole relation is different from the accident-substance relation.
So as far as I can see what I originally said is correct.
Further, you wrote, "The divine aseity, however, rules out God's being dependent on anything." Would it not be more accurate to say that divine aseity is the thesis that God's being is not dependent upon anything external and distinct from himself? If that is the case, the dependence of God (proper) upon his members (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) would be a dependence upon nothing external to himself (unlike a Platonic rendition of God which postulates that God is dependent upon the properties he instantiates, these properties being external to himself). There is a strong strand in Christian tradition that states that the Son is God of God, that he is begotten of the Father and yet retains full divinity. If his divinity is not in jeopardy because of dependence upon the Father, why should the one God's divinity be in jeopardy because he depends upon the members of the Trinity?
The reason I said what I said is because it makes no sense to say that God is dependent on God. God can no more be dependent on himself than he can cause himself to exist. I read causa sui privatively, not positively. To say that God is causa sui is to say that he is not caused by another; it is not to say that he causes himself. 'Self-caused' is like 'self-employed': one who is self-employed does not employ himself; he is not employed by another.
For you, however, God can be said to depend on God in the sense that God as a whole depends on his proper parts, the Persons of the Trinity. The problem, however, is that you are assuming the mereological model that I am questioning. You are assuming that the one God is a whole of parts and the each of the Persons (F, S, HS) is a proper part of the whole.
And isn't your second criticism inconsistent with your first? Your first point was that a whole is prior to its parts. But now you are saying that God can depend on God by depending in his proper parts.
Our question concerns the logical consistency of the following septad, each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy. See here for details. How can the following propositions all be true?
1. There is only one God. 2. The Father is God. 3. The Son is God. 4. The Holy Spirit is God. 5. The Father is not the Son. 6. The Son is not the Holy Spirit. 7. The Father is not the Holy Spirit.
If we assume that in (2)-(7), the 'is' expresses absolute numerical identity, then it is clear that the septad is inconsistent. (Identity has the following properties: it is reflexive, symmetric, transitive, governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals). For example, from (2) and (3) taken together it follows that the Father is the Son by Transitivity of Identity. But this contradicts (5).
So we have an inconsistent septad each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy. The task is to remove the contradiction without abandoning orthodoxy. There are different ways to proceed.
In a paper he sent me, Chad M. seems to adopt the following approach. Distinguish between the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication, and construe (2), (3), and (4) as predications. Well, suppose we do this. We get:
2*. The Father is divine 3*. The Son is divine 4*. The Holy Spirit is divine.
But this implies that there are three Gods, which contradicts (1). The trick is to retain real distinctness of Persons while avoiding tritheism.
Chad also blends the above strategy wth a mereological one. Following W. L. Craig, he thinks of the Persons as (proper) parts of God/Godhead. Each is God in that each is a (proper) part of God/Godhead. The idea, I take it, is that Persons are really distinct in virtue of being really distinct proper parts of God, but that there is only one God because there is only one whole of these parts. Each Person is divine in that each is a part of the one God. The parts of God are divine but not God in the way that the proper parts of a cat are not cats but are feline. Thus the skeleton of a cat is not a cat but is feline. The skeleton is feline without being a feline.
But I have a question for Chad. On orthodoxy as I understand it, God is one, not merely in number, but in a deeper metaphysical sense. Roughly, God is a unity whose unity is 'tighter' than the unity of other sorts of unity. Indeed, as befits an absolute, his unity is that than which no tighter can be conceived. The unity of mathematical sets and mereological sums is fairly loose, and the same goes for such concrete aggregates as Kerouac holding his cat. Although we are not forced to take the whole-part relation in the strict sense of classical mereology, I think it remains the case that the unity of anything that could be called a whole of parts will be too loose to capture the divine unity.
For one thing, wholes depend on their parts for their existence, and not vice versa. (Unless you thought of parts as abstractions from the whole, which the Persons could not be.) Parts are ontologically prior to the wholes of which they are the parts. This holds even in the cases in which the whole is a necessary being and each part is as well. The mathematical set of all primes greater than 1 and less than 8 is a necessary being, but so is each element of this set: 3, 5, and 7 are each necessary beings. Still, the existence of the set is metaphysically grounded in the existence of the elements, and not vice versa. The divine aseity, however, rules out God's being dependent on anything.
So my question for Chad is this: does the view that God is a whole of parts do justice to the divine unity?
1. Let's start with the word 'mortal' and remind ourselves of some obvious points. 'Mortal' is from the Latin mors, mortis meaning death. That which is mortal is either subject to death, or conducive to death, or in some way expressive of death. Thus when we say of a human being that he is mortal we do not mean that he is dead, but that he is subject to death. My being mortal is consistent with my being alive and kicking. Indeed, if I weren't alive I could not be said to be either mortal or immortal. Spark plugs are neither mortal nor immortal. Some will say of a car that it has 'died.' But that is a loose and metaphorical way of talking. Only that which was once alive can properly be said to have died.
We also apply 'mortal' to wounds and sins. A mortal wound is not one that is subject to death but one that has a high probability of causing the death of the body of the one whose wound it is. A mortal as opposed to a venial sin is one that is conducive to the death of the soul in the sense of the separation of the soul from its ultimate good, God. Thomas Nagel has a collection of essays entitled Mortal Questions. These questions are neither subject to death nor conducive to death, but they are questions raised by mortals especially insofar as they are mortal. Thus the first essay in the collection is appropriately entitled "Death." And an excellent essay it is.
2. Although 'mortal' applies to all living things, what interests us particularly is 'mortal' as a predicate of human beings. To be mortal in this sense is to be subject to death. But this phrase has at least two senses, one weak the other strong.
WEAK sense: X is mortal =df X is able to die, liable to die, has the potential to die. Mortality as posse mori.
STRONG sense: X is mortal =df X has to die, is subject to the necessity of dying, cannot evade death by any action of its own, is going to die, will die in the normal course of events. Mortality as necessitas moriendi.
Correspondingly, there are strong and weak senses of 'immortal':
STRONG sense: X is immortal =df X is not able to die.
WEAK sense: X is immortal =df X is able to die, but is kept alive forever by a factor distinct from X.
3. Let's run through some cases to illustrate the distinction. God is not mortal in either the weak or the strong sense. It is built into the divine nature (essence) that he cannot die. 'God is dead,' taken literally is nonsense. (Of course, that is not the way Nietzsche intended it to be taken; he was making a cultural point.) God is a necessary being, a being that exists in all possible worlds and at all times in those worlds containing time.
Your humble correspondent is mortal in both senses. Not only can I die, I must die, I cannot do anything to avoid eventually dying: I am subject to the necessitas moriendi. Cryogenics won't help for reasons I won't belabor at the moment. It is worth noting that, according to Christian doctrine, my having-to-die is a contingent attribute of me unlike my being-able-to-die. My having-to-die is punishment for original sin and is as contingent as that sin. My being-able-to-die, however, is grounded in my nature as a soul-body composite, and I am essentially such a composite. Thus it is not my nature to be immortal (in the strong sense), whence it follows that if I achieve immortality (in the weak sense) it is due to a supernatural gift: God freely grants me immortality; I don't have it apart from free divine donation. In this sense I am not naturally immortal: I am not immortal in virtue of my nature or essence the way God is.
Prelapsarian human beings are mortal in the WEAK sense but not in the STRONG. Unlike God, there is nothing in the nature (essence) of such beings to prevent them from dying if they should will to die. But if they do not will to die, God grants them unending life. Postlapsarian human beings, however, are mortal in both the weak and the strong senses.
4. Now what about Jesus Christ? He is one person in two natures; fully man and fully God. But all men are mortal in the weak sense: they can die. So Christ is mortal in the weak sense. But he is not mortal in the strong sense: he is not subject to the necessitas moriendi. He freely chose his death.
So is Christ a counterexample to 'All men are mortal'? It depends on what is meant by 'mortal.' Taken in the weak sense, Christ is not; taken in the strong sense, he is.
5. But there is still a Christological problem that wants solving. If Jesus Christ is God (or, to be precise, the Second Person of the Trinity), then JC is strongly immortal. But if JC is fully human, then he is not strongly immortal, but weakly immortal. How can one and the same person have contradictory attributes?
The following are some recent thoughts about the Trinity. Let me know what you think.
The three expressions of the Trinity: ‘The Father’, ‘The Son’, and ‘The Holy Spirit’ all refer to the same divine being namely God. Thus, with respect to reference, each pair of expressions forms a true identity. However, they have different senses in Frege’s sense. The three senses are as follows:
1) The sense of ‘The Father’ is the will of the divine being to love, atone, and forgive. Call this the divine-will.
2) The sense of ‘The Holy Spirit’ is the will of a non-divine being when and only when it genuinely aspires to be like the divine with respect to its moral identity and worth. Call this the inspired-will.
3) The sense of ‘The Son’ (i.e., the person of Jesus) is when the divine-will and the inspired-will coincide in a human person such as Jesus. Thus, Jesus is a moral-exemplar (Steven’s term) of a case when the divine-will and the inspired-will seamlessly coincide.
The senses of the three expressions of the Trinity are different. Therefore, while identities among each pair with respect to their senses are false, identities with respect to their referents are true.
It warms my heart that a Jew should speculate on the Trinity on Good Friday. Rather than comment specifically on the senses that Peter attaches to 'the Father,' 'the Son,' and 'the Holy Spirit,' I will address the deeper question of whether the logical problem of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity can be solved by means of Gottlob Frege's distinction between the sense and the reference of expressions.
The Logical Problem of the Trinity
Our question concerns the logical consistency of the following septad, each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy. See here for details. How can the following propositions all be true?
1. There is only one God. 2. The Father is God. 3. The Son is God. 4. The Holy Spirit is God. 5. The Father is not the Son. 6. The Son is not the Holy Spirit. 7. The Father is not the Holy Spirit.
If we assume that in (2)-(7), the 'is' expresses absolute numerical identity, then it is clear that the septad is inconsistent. (Identity has the following properties: it is reflexive, symmetric, transitive, governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals and by the Necessity of Identity). For example, from (2) and (3) taken together it follows that the Father is the Son by Transitivity of Identity. But this contradicts (5).
So we have an inconsistent septad each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy. The task is to remove the contradiction without abandoning orthodoxy. There are different ways to proceed. Here I consider only one, the Fregean way. (Of course, Frege himself did not address the Trinity; but we may address it using his nomenclature and conceptuality.)
The Fregean solution is to say that 'Father,' 'Son,' and 'Holy Spirit, are expressions that differ in sense (Sinn) but coincide in reference (Bedeutung). Frege famously gave the example of 'The morning star is the evening star.' This is an identity statement that is both true and informative. But how, Frege asked, could it be both? If it says of one thing that it is identical to itself, then it is true but not informative because tautological. If it says of two things that they are one thing, then it is false, and uninformative for this reason. How can it be both true and nontautological?
Frege solved his puzzle by distinguishing between sense and reference and by maintaining that reference is not direct but routed through sense. 'Morning star' and 'evening star' differ in sense, but coincide in reference. The terms flanking the identity sign refer to the same entity, the planet Venus, but the reference is mediated by two numerically distinct senses. The distinction allows us to account for both the truth and the informativeness of the identity statement. The statement is true because the two terms have the same referent; the statement is informative because the two terms have different senses. They are different modes of presentation of the same object.
Now let's apply this basic idea to the Trinity. To keep the discussion simple we can restrict ourselves to the Father and the Son. If we can figure out the Binity, then we can figure out the Trinity. And if we restrict ourselves to the Binity, then we get a nice neat parallel to the Fregean example. The Frege puzzle can be put like this:
a. The Morning Star is Venus b. The Evening Star is Venus c. The Morning Star is not the Evening Star.
This parallels
2. The Father is God 3. The Son is God 5. The Father is not the Son.
Both triads are inconsistent. The solution to the Fregean triad is to replace (c) with c'. The sense Morning Star is not the sense Evening Star.
The suggestion, then, is to solve the Binity triad by replacing (5) with 5'. The sense Father is not the sense Son.
The idea, then, is that the persons of the Trinity are Fregean senses. To say that the three persons are one God is to say that the three senses, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, are three distinct modes of presentation (Darstellungsweisen) of the same entity, God.
Why the Fregean Solution Doesn't Work
Bear in mind that we are laboring under the constraint of preserving orthodoxy. So, while the Fregan approach is not incoherent, it fails to preserve the orthodox doctrine. One reason is this. Senses are abstract (causally inert) objects while the persons of the Trinity are concrete (causally efficacious). Thus the Holy Spirit inspires people, causing them to to be in this or that state of mind. The Father begets the Son. Begetting is a kind of causing, though unlike empirical causing. The Son loves the Father, etc. Therefore, the persons cannot be Fregean senses.
Furthermore, senses reside in Frege's World 3 which houses all the Platonica necessary for the semantic mediation of mental contents (ideas, Vorstellungen, etc.) in World 2 and primary referents in World 1. Now God is in World 1. But if the persons are senses, then they are in World 3. But this entails the shattering of the divine unity. God is one, three-in-one, yet still one. But on the Fregean approach what we have is a disjointed quaternity: God in World 1, and the three persons in World 3. That won't do, if the task is to preserve orthodoxy.
At this point, someone might suggest the following. "Suppose we think of senses, not as semantic intermediaries, but as constituents of the entity in World 1. Thus the morning star and the evening star are ontological parts of Venus somewhat along the lines of Hector Castaneda's Guise Theory. To say that a sense S is of its referent R is to say that S is an ontologcal part or constitutent of R. And then we can interpret 'The Morning Star is the Evening Star' to mean that the MS-sense is 'consubstantiated' (to borrow a term from Castaneda) with the ES-sense. Thus we would not have the chorismos, separation, of senses in Worldf3 from the primary referents in World 1: the senses would be where the primary referents are, as ontological parts of them.
But this suggestion also violates orthodoxy. The persons of the Trinity are not parts of God; each is (identically) God. No proper part of a whole is identical to the whole. But each person is identical to God.
I conclude that there is no Fregean way out of the logical difficulties of the orthodox Trinity doctrine. If so, then Peter's specific suggestion above lapses.
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 human 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 not more at least [at last?] than 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)
Christianity is the ultimate in "heterogeneity to the world," to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard. God becomes man in a miserable outpost of the Roman empire, fully participates in the miseries of human embodiment, is rejected by the religious establishment and is sentenced to death by the political authorities, dying the worst sort of death the brutal Romans could devise. Humanly absurd but divinely true?
Our meeting with the affable and stimulating Dale Tuggy on June 20th at St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox monastery a little south of Florence, Arizona, got me thinking about the Trinity again. So I pulled Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church off the shelf wherein I found a discussion of the differences between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman approaches to the doctrine. Let's take a look. Earlier this year, in January and February, we had a stimulating and deep-going discussion of Trinitarian topics which the interested reader can find here. But there was no discussion of the Orthodox line. It is high time to fill that lacuna. (Image credit.)
East and West agree that there is exactly one God in three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They also agree that the Father is neither born of anything nor proceeds from anything, that the Son is born of the Father but does not proceed from the Father, and that the Holy Spirit proceeds but is not born. Bear in mind that 'born' and 'proceeds' in this context refer to relations that are internal to the triune Godhead, and are therefore eternal relations. I hope it is also clear that neither of these relations is one of creation. Each of the persons is eternal and uncreated.
The main difference between East and West concerns that from which the Holy Spirit proceeds. The West says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque), whereas the East says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. One can of course question whether this dispute has any clear sense, but let's assume that it does for the space of this post. I don't reckon there are any Stovian or other positivists hanging around this site. (If there are, I pronounce my anathema upon them.)
The question is whether there is any reason to prefer the one view over the other. Ware naturally thinks the Orthodox view superior (pp. 219-222). He thinks it is superior because it is able to account for the unity of the three persons without making of this unity something impersonal. His reasoning is as follows. The tripersonal God is one God, not three Gods. So the question arises as to the unity of the Godhead. What is the ground of God's unity? There is one God because there is one Father, the Father being the 'cause' or 'source' of Godhead, the principle (arche) of unity among the three. The Orthodox speak of the "monarchy of the Father." The other two persons originate from the Father. Because the principle of unity is the Father, and the Father is one of the divine persons, the principle of unity is personal in nature. So although there are three persons in one God, the unity of these three persons is itself a person, namely, the Father.
The Western view, however, issues in the result that the principle of unity is impersonal. The reasoning is along the following lines. If the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son, then "the Father ceases to be the unique source of Godhead, since the Son is also a source." (219) Consequently, "...Rome finds its principle of unity in the substance or essence which all three persons share." (219) This implies that, on the Roman Catholic view, the principle of unity is impersonal. (I am merely reporting Ware's reasoning here, not endorsing it.)
And that, Ware maintains, is not good. "Late Scholastic theology, emphasizing as it does the essence at the expense of the persons, comes near to turning God into an abstract idea." (222) The concrete and personal God with whom one can have a direct and living encounter gets transmogrified into a God of the philosophers (as opposed to the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), an impersonal being whose existence needs to be proved by metaphysical arguments.
And so the Orthodox "regard the filioque as dangerous and heretical. Filioquism confuses the persons, and destroys the proper balance between unity and diversity in the Godhead." (222) God is stripped of concrete personality and made into an abstract essence. And that's not all. The Roman view gives the Holy Spirit short shrift with the result that his role in the church and in the lives of believers is downplayed. What's more, this subordination of the Holy Spirit, together with an overemphasis on the divine unity, has deleterious consequences for ecclesiology. As a result of filioquism, the church in the West has become too worldly an institution, and the excessive emphasis on divine unity has led to too much centralization and too great an emphasis on papal authority. It is worth noting in this connection that the Orthodox reject papal infallibility while accepting the infallibility of the church.
You can see, then, that for the Orthodox the filioque is quite a big deal: it is not a mere theological Spitzfindigkeit.
Ware's exposition -- which I assume is a faithful representation of the Orthodox position -- saddles filioquism with a nasty dilemma: either ditheism or semi-Sabellianism. For if the Son as well as the Father is an arche, a principle of unity in the Godhead, then the upshot is ditheism, two-God-ism. But if it is said that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son tamquam ex/ab uno principio, 'as from one principle,' then, as the Orthodox see it, the Father and the Son are confused and semi-Sabellianism is the upshot. (221)
Sabellianism or modalism is the view that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are modes or aspects of the deity. The East sees semi-Sabellianism in the West insofar as the Western view, in avoiding ditheism, merges Father and Son into one principle so that they become mere modes or aspect of that one principle.
That's the lay of the land as seen from the East. I have been concerned in this post with exposition only. Adjudication can wait for later. (He said magisterially.)
I have been, and will continue, discussing Trinity and Incarnation objectively, that is, in an objectifying manner. Now what do I mean by that? Well, with respect to the Trinity, the central conundrum, to put it in a very crude and quick way is this: How can three things be one thing? With respect to the Incarnation, how can the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal and impassible Logos, be identical to a particular mortal man? These puzzles get us thinking about identity and difference and set us hunting for analogies and models from the domain of ordinary experience. We seek intelligibility by an objective route. We ought to consider that this objectifying approach might be wrongheaded and that we ought to examine a mystical and subjective approach, a 'Platonic' approach as opposed to an 'Aristotelian' one. See my earlier quotation of Heinrich Heine.
1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.
(A guest post by Peter Lupu. Editing and commentary by BV.)
As Bill notes, we are attempting to secure and study a copy of James Anderson’s book, Paradox in Christian Theology. (Publication details here, including links to reviews.) Meanwhile, I will propose here some tentative observations that Anderson’s book may or may not have addressed. These observations are inspired by the following point Bill makes in a post above as well as by some conversations we had about the subject:
“…if I cannot see that a proposition is rationally acceptable (because it appears contradictory to me) then I wouldn't know what proposition I was accepting.”
A similar point is made by Richard Cartwright in On the Logical Problem of the Trinity: "Nor is a mystery supposed to be unintelligible, in the sense that the words in which it is expressed simply cannot be understood. After all, we are asked to believe the propositions expressed by the words, not simply that the words express some true propositions or other, we know not which."
1). Let us agree that a Trinitarian Sentence (TS) is such that
(i) The Bible entails TS;
(ii) The surface structure (SS) of TS exhibits the logical form of a contradiction;
(iii) We are not in the position currently and may not be in the position in our present form of existence ever to construct a contradiction free formulation or deep structure (DS) for TS;
Example of a TS: "The Father is God, the Son is God, the Father is not the Son, and there is exactly one God." The surface structure of this sentence is contradictory.
The Father and the Son are both necessary beings. And yet the Father 'begets' the Son. Part, though not the whole, of the notion of begetting here must be this: if x begets y, then y depends for its existence on x. If that were not part of the meaning of 'begets'' in this context, I would have no idea what it means. But how can a necessary being depend for its existence on a necessary being? I gave a non-Trinitarian example yesterday, but it was still a theological example. Now I present a non-theological example.
I assume that there are mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sets. And I assume that numbers are necessary beings. (There are powerful arguments for both assumptions.) Now consider the set S = {1, 3, 5} or any set, finite or infinite, the members of which are all of them necessary beings, whether numbers, propositions, whatever. Both S and its membership are necessary beings. If you are worried about the difference between members and membership, we can avoid that wrinkle by considering the singleton set T = {1}.
T and its sole member are both necessary beings. And yet it seems obvious to me that one depends on the other for its existence: the set is existentially dependent on the member, and not vice versa. The set exists because -- though this is not an empirically-causal use of 'because' -- the members exist, and not the other way around. Existential dependence is an asymmetrical relation. I suppose you either share this intuition or you don't. In a more general form, the intuition is that collections depend for their existence on the things collected, and not vice versa. This is particularly obvious if the items collected can also exist uncollected. Think of Maynard's stamp collection. The stamps in the collection will continue to exist if Maynard sells them, but then they will no longer form Maynard's collection. The point is less obvious if we consider the set of stamps in Maynard's collection. That set cannot fail to exist as long as all the stamps exist. Still, it seems to me that the set exists because the members exist and not vice versa.
And similarly in the case of T. {1} depends existentially on 1 despite the fact that there is no possible world in which the one exists without the other. If, per impossibile, 1 were not to exist, then {1} would not exist either. But it strikes me as false to say: If, per impossibile, {1} were not to exist, then 1 would not exist either. These counterfactuals could be taken to unpack the sense in which the set depends on the member, but not vice versa.
It therefore is reasonable to hold that two necessary beings can be such that one depends for its existence on the other. And so one cannot object to the notion of the Father 'begetting' the Son by saying that no necessary being can be existentially dependent upon a necessary being. Of course, this is not to say that other objections cannot be raised.
According to the Athansian Creed, the Persons of the Trinity, though each of them uncreated and eternal and necessary are related as follows. The Father is unbegotten. The Son is begotten by the Father, but not made by the Father. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Let us focus on the relation of the Father to the Son. When I tried to explain this to Peter Lupu, he balked at the idea of one necessary being begetting another, claiming that the idea makes no sense. One of his arguments was as follows. If x begets y, then x causes y to begin to exist. But no necessary being begins to exist. So, no necessary being is begotten. A second argument went like this. Begetting is a causal notion. But causes are temporally precedent to their effects. No two necessary beings are related as before to after. Therefore, no necessary being begets another.
I first pointed out in response to Peter that the begetting in question is not the begetting of one animal by another, but a begetting in a different sense, and that whatever else this idea involves, it involves the idea of one necessary being depending for its existence on another. Peter balked at this idea as well. "How can a necessary being depend for its existence on a necessary being?" To soften him up, I looked for a non-Trinitarian case in which a necessary being stands in the asymmetrical relation of existential dependency to a necessary being. Note that I did not dismiss his problem the way a dogmatist might; I admitted that it is a genuine difficulty, one that needs to be solved.
So I said to Peter: Look, you accept the existence of Fregean propositions, items which Frege viewed as the senses of sentences in the indicative mood from which indexical elements (including the tenses of verbs) have been removed and have been replaced with non-indexical elements. You also accept that at least some of these Fregean propositions, if not all, are necessary beings. For example, you accept that the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12' is necessarily true, and you see that this requires that the proposition be necessarily existent. Peter agreed to that.
You also, I said to him, have no objection to the idea of the God of classical theism who exists necessarily if he is so much as possible. He admitted that despite his being an atheist, he has no problem with the idea of a necessarily existent God.
So I said to Peter: Think of the necessarily existent Fregean propositions as divine thoughts. (I note en passant that Frege referred to his propositions as Gedanken, thoughts.) More precisely, think of them as the accusatives or objects of divine acts of thinking, as the noemata of the divine noesis. That is, think of the propositions as existing precisely as the accusatives of divine thinking. Thus, their esse is their concipi by God. They don't exist a se the way God does; they exist in a mind-dependent manner without prejudice to their existing in all possible worlds. To cop a phrase from the doctor angelicus, they have their necessity from another, unlike God, who has his necessity from himself.
So I said to Peter: Well, is it not now clear that we have a non-Trinitarian example in which a necessary being, the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12,' depends for its existence on a necessary being, namely God, and not vice versa? Is this not an example of a relation that is neither merely logical (like entailment) nor empirically-causal? Does this not get you at least part of the way towards an understand of how the Father can be said to beget the Son?
To these three questions, Peter gave a resounding 'No!' looked at his watch and announced that he had to leave right away in order to be able to teach his 5:40 class at the other end of the Valle del Sol.
Here is another of the scholastic manuals I pulled off my shelf: Fernand van Steenberghen, Ontology (Nauwelaerts Publisher, Brussels, 1970, tr. Moonan). A paragraph from p. 278 supports my thesis that the distinction between primary substance and suppositum is an ad hoc device invented for a theological purpose, a device for which there is no independent philosophical warrant:
4. The problem of subsistence or personality. This problem was inserted into metaphysics for the benefit of theology, as is quite plain, in order to prepare the way for a satisfactory explanation of the theological mystery of the incarnation, the question of knowing how and why the human nature of Jesus Christ does not constitute a human person. But this problem is extraneous to philosophy and must remain so, for from the metaphysical point of view, there is no reason for distinguishing individual nature and individual. It is therefore contrary to any sane method to ask in ontology on what conditions an individual nature might not be a suppositum (or person, where it is an intelligent nature that is in question.)
This recent excursion into the philosophy of The School is proving to be quite fascinating, and I thank Dr. Novak et al. for their stimulation. I should say that I have read thousands upon thousands of pages of scholastic material, from Aquinas to Zubiri, from Maritain to Marechal, over the past 40 years, so it is not as if I am a complete stranger to it; I do confess, however, to finding some of it mumbo-jumbo and lacking in the sort of analytic rigor that we broadly analytic types prize. To get a better handle on the notion of suppositum ('supposit' in English), this morning I pulled down from the shelf a number of scholastic manuals.
Let us first turn to George P. Klubertanz, S. J., Introduction to the Philosophy of Being, 2nd ed. (Meredith Publ., 1963). Back in the day, when Catholic colleges were Catholic as opposed to catholic, this textbook was inflicted upon many a bored undergraduate in required courses. In those days, philosophy was taught systematically; this was before and during Vatican II, before and while the rot set in (if rot it was) and before chaos descended, the kind of chaos that issued in the Vagina Monologues being presented at the University of Notre Dame. (To cop a riff from Dennis Prager, there is no coward like an academic coward, and the abdication of authority on the part of university officials from the 60s on is something to marvel at.)
But I digress. According to Klubertanz, "The first substance is the singular substance which exists. When we want to designate the being precisely as an existing, substantial, complete individual, we call it a 'supposit.'" (251) He goes on to say that a supposit is a "complete individual" and therefore not something common to many in the manner of a secondary substance. Nor is a supposit an integral part, or an essential part, of a substance. Klubertanz gives the example of the body of a living thing as an example of an essential part of it -- presumably because a living thing cannot exist without a body -- and the example of a hand as an example of an "integral part." Klubertanz gives no rigorous definition of the latter phrase, but I surmise that an integral part is a part that is not essential to the whole of which it is a part. Thus a primary substance such as a particular man can exist without a hand.
(This gem is pulled up from the vasty deeps of the ComBox to where it may shine in a more fitting setting. Minor editing, bolding, and comments in blue by BV.)
1). Let us say that a *real* contradiction is a sentence which comes out false according to every possible model (M): i.e., M = language-plus-domain-plus-interpretation, where an ‘interpretation’ is a complete and systematic assignment of extensions to the non-logical terms of the language (L). We assume that L is a well developed natural language such as English and we have a sufficiently rich domain that includes whatever entities are required to implement an interpretation that will suffice for theological purposes.
1.1) Note: We are assuming throughout classical logic in two sense: (a) the logical constants are interpreted classically; (b) there are no *real* true contradictions.
1.2) Sentence S is a *real* contradiction just in case there is no *normal model* M in which it comes out true. A normal model in this context is one which features an interpretation that assigns extensions to the non-logical terms in the usual way prior to resolving any potential ambiguities. On a realist conception of truth, S [if contradictory] has no truth-maker (T-maker) in any normal model or possible world.
2) Let us now define at least one sense of an *apparent contradiction* in model theoretic terms. Let S be a sentence expressible in L and suppose S comes out false in every normal model M. S appears to be a contradiction. Is it really a contradiction? Prof. Anderson maintains that there are sentences which are contradictory in every normal model, but are non-contradictory in some other models of L. How can that be? [Shouldn't Peter have 'false' for contradictory and 'true' for non-contradictory in the preceding sentence? After all, in (1) we are told in effect that contradictoriness is falsehood in every model, which implies that noncontradictoriness is truth in some model. 'Contradictory in every model' is a pleonastic expression.]
To better understand the doctrine of supposita and the role it plays in the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, we turn to Alfred J. Freddoso, Human Nature, Potency and the Incarnation (bolding added):
According to the Christian faith, as defined in this instance by the great Christological Councils and mirrored in centuries of liturgical practice and theological reflection, Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man. More precisely, he is a single divine person, the eternal Word, in whom are united, whole and unmixed, a divine nature and a human nature--so that he is, to quote Chalcedon, "one with the Father in his divinity and one with us in his humanity."
In expounding this doctrine medieval theologians fashioned the technical metaphysical notion of a suppositum (or hypostasis), i.e. an independently existing ultimate subject of characteristics.4 The philosophically astute will detect at once that, so understood, the concept of a suppositum is remarkably akin to that of an Aristotelian primary substance or individual(ized) nature. Indeed, had it not been for the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, medieval Christian thinkers would never have been led to assert that suppositum and substance (or: individual nature) are distinct concepts. To speak now only of the Incarnation, Christ's individual human nature, i.e. the individual composed of a body and an intellective soul and united to the Son of God, is a paradigmatic Aristotelian [primary] substance . . . .Yet, because of its metaphysical union with and dependence upon the eternal Word, this nature is not the ultimate metaphysical subject of Christ's characteristics--not even of his "purely human" characteristics. So in this one instance, known to us only by divine revelation, we have a substance which is not a suppositum, a substance which is metaphysically "sustained" by something distinct from it. To complete the picture, a person is just a suppositum with an intellectual nature, i.e. a suppositum essentially endowed with intellect and free will.
In technical medieval terminology, then, Jesus Christ is a divine suppositum or person, the Son of God, who has freely "assumed" and now "sustains" an individual human nature. What's more, this human nature is united to the divine person "hypostatically," i.e. in such a way that properties had immediately by the human nature have the Son of God as their ultimate metaphysical subject--in a manner analogous to that in which many properties had immediately by a proper part of a whole have the whole itself as their ultimate metaphysical subject.
I wonder whether mysterianism in defense of such theological doctrines as the Trinity does not in the end backfire by making possible the philosophical justification of philosophical theses incompatible with it. To ease our way into this line of inquiry, let us consider materialist mysterianism.
1. If mysterianism is an acceptable approach in theology, why can't a materialist make use of it in the philosophy of mind? The (positive) mysterian maintains that there are true propositions which appear (and presumably must appear given our 'present' cognitive make-up) contradictory. This is not to be confused with dialetheism, the view that there are some true contradictions. For the mysterian there are no true contradictions, but there are some truths that must appear to us as contradictory due to our cognitive limitations.
1. The man Jesus = the 2nd Person of the Trinity. 2. The 2nd Person of the Trinity exists necessarily. 3. The man Jesus does not exist necessarily.
and then say that "each of these propositions is one that a Christian who understands his doctrine ought to accept." And then you develop a way how the (quite obvious) inconsistency could be explained away.
What I want to point out is that in fact the third proposition most certainly is not something that a Christian who understands his doctrine ought to accept. Quite to the contrary!
There is more to Dr. Novak's e-mail than the above excerpt, but it may help if I give an explicit argument for (3):
4. God is a necessary being: he exists in every possible world.
5. God's creation of a physical universe is a libertarianly free act: there are possible worlds in which God creates a physical universe and there are possible worlds in which he does not. So, although God exists in every possible world, he does not create in every possible world.
6. The existence of a physical universe and of each physical thing in it is contingent. (from 5)
7. Jesus is a man (a rational animal) born in Bethlehem of Mary, etc.
8. Animals, rational or not, are physical denizens of the physical universe.
9. Jesus is a contingent being. (from 6, 7, 8)
10. That which exists contingently (in some but not all worlds) does not exist necessarily (in all worlds). (Self-evident modal principle)
3. The man Jesus does not exist necessarily. (from 10)
This appears to be a 'knock-down' argument. Surely, (4) and (5) are propositions an orthodox Christian must accept. (6) follows from (5). No orthodox Christian can deny (7). (8) is an analytic truth. (9) is a valid consequence of (6), (7), and (8) taken together. (1) is a self-evident modal axiom. (3) follows directly from (10).
I suggest that this crystal-clear argument is more worthy of acceptance that the obscure doctrine of supposita with which Novak attempts to rebut (3).
It is broadly logically impossible that there be a hand that both draws itself and is drawn by itself. So what the Escher print represents is B-L impossible, and in this sense 'incoherent' and 'unintelligible.' But the Escher drawing itself is coherent and intelligible as a representation. And so we can say that we understand the drawing while also saying that we do not understand that which is depicted in the drawing.
Commenting on philosophy's alleged "deep affinity with lunacy," Australian positivist David Stove writes,
That the world is, or embodies, or is ruled by, or was created by, a sentence-like entity, a ‘logos’, is an idea almost as old as Western philosophy itself. Where the Bible says ‘The Word was made flesh’, biblical scholars safely conclude at once that some philosopher [Stove’s emphasis] has meddled with the text (and not so as to improve it). Talking-To-Itself is what Hegel thought the universe is doing, or rather, is. In my own hearing, Professor John Anderson maintained, while awake, what with G. E. Moore was no more than a nightmare he once had, that tables and chairs and all the rest are propositions. So it has always gone on. In fact St John’s Gospel, when it says’In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, sums up pretty accurately one of the most perennial, as well as most lunatic, strands in philosophy. (The passage is also of interest as proving that two statements can be consistent without either being intelligible.) (From The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, Basil Blackwell 1991, p. 32.)
Consider this triad, and whether it is logically consistent:
1. The man Jesus = the 2nd Person of the Trinity. 2. The 2nd Person of the Trinity exists necessarily. 3. The man Jesus does not exist necessarily.
Each of these propositions is one that a Christian who understands his doctrine ought to accept.But how can they all be true?In the presence of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, the above triad appears inconsistent: The conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3). Can this apparent inconsistency be shown to be merely apparent?
Dale Tuggy tentatively characterizes Lukas Novak's position on the Trinity as an example of negative mysterianism. This I believe is a mistake. But it depends on what we mean by 'negative mysterianism.' Drawing upon what Tuggy says in his Trinity entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, let us try to understand what mysterianism is in its negative and positive varieties.
A. The Problem. We first remind ourselves what the problem is. To put it simply in a 'binitarian' form, the problem is to understand how the following propositions can all be true:
1. The Father is not the Son.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4. There is only one God.
It is obvious that if in each sentence the 'is' is the 'is' of absolute numerical identity, then the quartet of propositions is inconsistent. The conjunction of (2) and (3) by the transitivity of identity entails the negation of (1). The conjunction of (1), (2), and (3) entails the negation of (4).
B. Positive Mysterianism. The response of the positive mysterian to the inconsistency is that, in Tuggy''s words:
. . . the trinitarian doctrine can't be understood because of an abundance of content. [. . .] So while we grasp the meaning of its individual claims, taken together they seem inconsistent, and so the conjunction of them is not understandable . . . . The positive mysterian holds that the human mind is adequate to understand many truths about God, although it breaks down at a certain stage, when the most profound divinely revealed truths are entertained. Sometimes an analogy with recent physics is offered; if we find mysteries (i.e., apparent contradictions) there, such as light appearing to be both a particle and a wave, why should we be shocked to find them in theology?
The position of the positive mysterian seems to be the following. The Trinity doctrine is true and therefore consistent in reality despite the fact that it appears to us (and presumably must appear to us given our cognitive limitations) as inconsistent and therefore as necessarily false. Thus positive mysterianism is not to be confused with dialetheism about the Trinity which is the doctrine that there are some true contradictions and that the Trinity doctrine is one of them. The positive mysterian is not saying that the doctrine is a true contradiction; what he maintains is that in itself it is both true and noncontradictory: it only appears to us as contradictory. It is a mystery in the sense of a merely apparent contradiction.
C. Critique. Positive mysterianism seems to entail the view that inconceivability does not entail impossibility. For it implies that the conjunction of (1)-(4), though inconceivable (i.e., not thinkable without contradiction) is true and therefore possible. That conceivability does not entail possibility is old hat. But that inconceivability does not entail impossibility is an innovation that should give us pause.
Why can't I be a positive mysterian about round squares? I cannot conceive of something that is both round and not round at the same time, in the same respect, and in the same sense of 'round.' Normally this inconceivability would be taken as definitive proof of the impossibility of round squares. But if positive mysterianism is true, then the inference fails. For what positive mysterianism countenances is the 'possibility' that a proposition which after due reflection and by all normal tests appears contradictory is in reality not contradictory. So it could be that -- it is epistemically possible that -- round squares are possible and actual. And similarly for an infinity of impossibilia. This seems to be a reductio ad absurdum of positive mysterianism.
Perhaps I will be told that positive mysterianism applies only to the Trinity and the Incarnation. But this restriction of the strategy would be ad hoc and unmotivated. if it works for the Trinity, then it should work across the board. But if it is rigged solely to save the theological doctrines in question, then one's labor is lost. One might as well just dogmatically affirm the two doctrines and not trouble one's head over philosophical justification. Just say: I accept the doctrines and that's that!
Or perhaps I will be told that God is incomprehensible and that the divine incomprehensibility is what warrants the acceptance as true of apparent contradictions. But God cannot be all that incomprehensible if we are able to know that the Father is God,the Son is God, the Father is not the Son, the Son is Jesus, etc. If these propositions are inconsistent when taken together how can unknown and unknowable facts about God remove the contradiction? The contradiction p & ~p cannot be removed by adducing q, r, s, etc. Conceivability can be nullified by the addition of further information; inconceivability, however, cannot be nullified by the addition of further information.
D. Negative Mysterianism. Among the senses of 'mystery' distinguished by Tuggy are the following: "[4] an unintelligible doctrine, the meaning of which can't be grasped….[5] a truth which one should believe even though it seems, even after careful reflection, to be impossible and/or contradictory and thus false." Tuggy then tells us that "We here call those who call the Trinity a mystery in the fourth sense “negative mysterians” and those who call it a mystery in the fifth sense 'positive mysterians'."
E. Critique. I don't think we need to waste many words on negative mysterianism. If the Trinity is an unintelligible doctrine, then there is nothing for me to wrap my mind around: there is no proposition to entertain, and so no proposition to accept or reject. If it is just a mass of verbiage to which no clear sense can be attached, then the question of its truth or falsity cannot even arise.
F. Novak's View. If I understand Novak's view, it is certainly not a form of mysterianism. For he thinks that if we make the right metaphysical distinctions we will be able to see that the doctrine is noncontradictory. But I'll leave it to him to explain himself more thoroughly.
I am a theologically-trained youth minister who has studied the Bible 'professionally' for almost 10 years. While I believe that Jesus Christ is in some sense God, I agree with your analysis of Lewis' ridiculous claim. I'd like to add one more dimension.
Lewis' claim presupposes that the Gospels are literal accounts of history. Very few Biblical historians consider that to be the case. Most historians believe Mark to be the oldest Gospel, and the closest to the original oral material. And Mark is a clearly adoptionist text. [hyperlink added by BV]Over time, Jesus is identified closer and closer with God. For a great exposition of, say, Paul's "Christology" which differs from what most people nowadays take to be orthodoxy, see Samuel Sandmel's THE GENIUS OF PAUL, one of the best books of New Testament History I've ever read. The Johannine Tradition which you indirectly mentioned, including the Gospel of John, the Epistles of John and especially Revelations, place Jesus' life, death and resurrection in a cosmic context, making them revelatory of the nature of God. (Notice, there is still a difference between Him being a REVELATION of the nature of God, and identical with God). Those later insights are written into the story of Jesus, and you see that evolution within the gospels, from Mark through Luke and Matthew and finally to John. In each Jesus is identified closer and closer with God.
I've brought this up to people who have tried to bring up Lewis' "Trilemma" and they accuse me of making the Gospels 'liars' rather than Jesus or God. But this is just to misunderstand the nature of myth, and to assume from the outset that God's revelation must be solely historical. It never occurs to them that the story itself, the mythos itself, could be revelatory in nature, that through the ideas and stories that surround the original historical events, God could be revealing Himself. In any event, the very fact that the exact nature of the Gospels themselves is in question shows that Lewis is wrong here. We need not take the Gospels literally to take them seriously. And that opens us up to a whole range of possibilities, including the ones you brought up.
I am writing to you personally concerning your last post on your blog, "The Lewis Trilemma." I would like to offer you two things: first, a criticism of your criticism of the "trilemma" (you are right with your terminological quibble, but is there any other word to use instead?), and second, an answer to your question why it isn't possible that Jesus was just "exaggerating" or a "mystic".
I understand that I am quite flooding you with my texts lately, so please feel free not to respond to or even to read this! [Thank you for carefully addressing what I said. It is good so I am publishing it here. Comments are open.]
1. I think that you are mistaken in claiming that "people like Kreeft inadvertently concede [that there is a fourth horn to the trilemma] when they discuss the further possibilities that Jesus never claimed to be divine and that he might have meant his characteristic sayings mystically."
I think that it is clear that to claim that there are just X horns to a trilemma does not mean that it is impossible to suggest or even defend any additional (or seemingly additional) alternative. It is a platitude that to any x-lemma there can be potentially infinitely many other alternatives one can think of. I can think of several others, in this case: Jesus was an extraterrestrial making some research on humans, Jesus was a collective hallucination, Jesus was an incarnation of Quetzalcoatl who could not speak clearly in the Jewish milieu...
When someone is presenting a x-lemma, he must mean something else then: not that these are the only thinkable alternatives, but these are the only thinkable alternatives consistent both in themselves and with certain given data and reasonable assumptions.
[I see your point, but isn't it an extremely reasonable assumption that no man can be identical to God? On the face of it, that is an egregious violation of the logic of identity. I would say that that is a very reasonable assumption despite your attempt, in another thread, to defend a metaphysical framework which renders the Incarnation coherent. So if one grants that it is reasonable to assume that no man could be God, then it is reasonable to consider whether Jesus' words can be given a mystical interpretation or else interpreted as dramatic ways of making a claim that does not violate standard logic. Note also that you are not being quite fair in suggesting that my view opens the floodgate to a potentially infinite number of wild alternatives. It does not, because the mystical interpretation is not unreasonable, has been put forward, and is arguably much more reasonable that that a man is actually God. Its reasonableness is heightened by the extreme unreasonableness of the God-Man identity theory. Tertullian, Kierkegaard, and Shestov, you will recall, embrace the identity precisely because it is absurd. Of course, you will not grant that it is absurd. But I hope you grant that it is reasonable to believe that it is absurd. (I would argue that it would be unreasonable for you not to grant that it is reasonable to view the identity as absurd.) So although I agree that we must consider "the given data and reasonable assumptions" there is room for disagreement as to what these are.]
A commenter on my old blog referred me to this famous passage from C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of thing Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
The commenter offered this as a specimen of good writing, which it undoubtedly is. But content is king and style is arguably mere 'packaging,' or, if "style is the physiognomy of the mind," (Schopenhauer), then content is the mind itself. So let's consider the content of the passage, the famous Lewis Trilemma: Jesus is either the Son of God, or he is a lunatic, or he is the devil. This trilemma is also sometimes put as a three-way choice among lord, lunatic, or liar.
We have been discussing the question of the logical consistency of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. Dr. Lukas Novak (Charles University, Prague) has offered a solution to the consistency problem that relies crucially on the notion of a suppositum or supposit. If I have understood him, his suggestion is that there is nothing logically problematic in the suggestion that the individual divine nature has three supposits, The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
It is worth reminding ourselves that any solution to the consistency problem will depend on one's background logic and general ontology. And the same holds if one decides that the problem is insoluble.
But being none too clear about what a supposit is supposed to be, I asked Novak if he could define the term and how it stands vis-a-vis such terms as 'bare particular' (Gustav Bergmann) and 'thin particular' (David Armstrong). He responded as follows:
Ad 4) X is a suppositum iff X is something endowed with individual nature and suppositality, that is, X is both uninstantiable and incommunicable to a subject (and not a part nor an aggregate).
Ad 5) It is better said that Socrates' humanity inheres in Socrates, who is a suppositum. Suppositum is not a bare or thin particular. If there were bare particulars, they would probably be classified as supposita, but classically supposita are not considered to be "thin" or "bare" - they have their rather "thick" essences or natures de re necessarily. Socrates is identical to Socrates' suppositum. Socrates' humanity inheres in Socrates and is a metaphysical constituent of Socrates. Socrates' humanity plus his suppositality makes up Socrates. Neither Socrates' humanity nor his suppositality are entities in their own right, they are just aspects or metaphysical constituents of Socrates. So I use "inhere" here as _not_ implying any particular kind of distinction between the nature and the suppositum.
Regarding your recent posts on the trinity and the incarnation, I wanted to float something by you again. I referred you some time ago to a book by James Anderson titled, Paradox in Christian Theology: An Analysis of its Presence, Character, and Epistemic Status . I am writing you again to suggest that its argument be taken into account as you are looking into the questions and problems that arise from thinking about the trinity and the incarnation.
Regards,
Paul Manata (a fellow Italian who cooks his pasta just the way you like it)
Mr. Manata,
Now I have to take the book seriously! The book has been placed on my list. I recently became aware of Anderson via Dale Tuggy. Tuggy classifies his Trinitarian metatheory as positive mysterianism. The pasta allusion is to my The Seven Deadly Sins of Pasta. As for perichoresis, this Wikipedia articleappears to be competent.
UPDATE from Mr Manata:
Thanks. I should add that I did write a very lengthy review of Anderson's book (located here). It's about 30 pages long and might serve to whet the appetite of some of your readers. Dr. Anderson was sent a copy of the review and feels it is a good summary of the book.
I was told this story as a child by a nun. One day St. Augustine was walking along the seashore, thinking about the Trinity. He came upon a child who had dug a hole in the sand and was busy filling it with buckets of seawater.
Augustine: "What are you doing?"
Child: "I am trying to empty the ocean into this hole."
Augustine: "But that’s impossible!"
Child: "No more impossible than your comprehending the Trinity."
The point of the story is that the Trinity is a mystery beyond our comprehension. It is true, even though we cannot understand how could it be true, where 'could' expresses epistemic possibility. It is a non-contradictory truth that lies beyond our mental horizon. Could there be such truths?
Note that there are at least three other ways of thinking about the Trinity doctrine. One could take the view that the doctrine is both true and contradictory, along the lines of dialetheism according to which there are some true contradictions. (b) Or one could take the view that the doctrine is all of the following: true, non-contradictory, and intelligible to us, even though we cannot know it to be true by reason unaided by revelation. Under this head would fall putative solutions to the consistency problem that aim to provide an adequate model or analogy, a model or analogy sufficient to render the orthodox doctrine intelligible to us. (c) Finally, one could take the line that the doctrine is contradictory and therefore false.
Thus there appear to be at least four meta-theories of the orthodox Trinity doctrine. These are theories about the logico-epistemic status of the doctrine. We could call them Mysterianism, Dialetheism, Intelligibilism, and Incoherentism. The last two terms are my own coinages.
Note that I have been talking about orthodox (Athanasian) Trinity doctrine. But religion and theology are, I would urge, open-ended, analogously as science is, and so there is no bar to theological innovation and development. Perhaps one of the doctrines that got itself branded 'heretical' can be rehabilitated and made to work. It is worth pondering that the orthodox are heretics to the heretics: had a given heretical sect acquired sufficient power and influence, had it drawn to its side the best minds and most persuasive exponents, then it would not be heretical but orthodox.
Everyone likes to think of his own doxa as orthotes but not every doxa can be such on pain of contradiction. So we ought to be humble. Apply the honorific 'orthodox' to your doctrine if you like, but smile as you do so.
Let S and T be mathematical sets. Now consider the following two propositions:
1. S is a proper subset of T.
2. S and T have the same number of elements.
Are (1) and (2) consistent? That is, can they both be true? If yes, explain how.
If you think (1) and (2) are consistent, then consider whether there is anything to the following analogy. If there is, explain the analogy. There is a set G. G has three disjoint proper subsets, F, S, H. All four sets agree in cardinality: they have the same number of elements.
Thank you for some exceptionally helpful posts lately! Regarding your point
(1) “Is there a clear scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Trinity?”
It would seem that a part of that question, or perhaps a prior question to it is:
(1*) “Is there a clear scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Incarnation?”
It was because early Christians came to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was divine/God that the question of how a divine Christ/God-Christ related to the ‘Father God’ to whom he prayed and in whom the Christians also first believed. As a theologically-trained former minister, who still tries to keep up with contemporary work on the historical Jesus, I must confess that I fail to see that (1*) is the case, therefore I fail to see that (1) is the case.
It may help to distinguish the following questions.
1. Is there a clear scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Trinity?
2. Is the doctrine, as formulated in the Athanasian creed and related canonical documents, true?
3. Is it possible for human reason, unaided by divine revelation, to know the doctrine to be true?
4. Is the doctrine of the Trinity possibly true?
5. Is the doctrine thinkable (conceivable) without contradiction?
I have little to say about the exegetical (1) since it is beyond my competence as a philosopher. I cannot pronounce upon (2), either for or against, until I have decided (4) and (5). The same goes for the epistemological question, (3). My present interest is in (4) and (5), which are logically prior to the first three, with (5) being logically prior to (4).
(4) and (5) are distinct questions. An affirmative answer to (5) does not entail an affirmative answer to (4). This is because conceivability is no sure guide to real (extramental) possibility. Of the two questions, (5) comes first in the order of inquiry: if we cannot think the Trinity without contradiction, how could we advance to the further question of whether it is really possible?
(5) is the question at the center of my interest.
It is difficult to get some people to appreciate the force and importance of (5) because they are dogmatists who accept the Trinity doctrine as true simply because they were brought up to believe it, or because it is something their church teaches. Since they accept it as true, no question of its logical coherence arises for them. And so they think that anyone who questions the doctrine must not understand it. To 'set the objector straight' they then repeat the very verbal formulas the logical coherence of which is in question. "What's the problem? There is one God in three divine Persons!" They think that if they only repeat the formulas often enough, then the objector will 'get it.' But it is they who do not get it, since they do not understand the logical problems to which the doctrinal formulations give rise.
Or the adherent may think that the objector is merely 'attacking' or polemicizing against his faith; it doesn't occur to the adherent that there are people whose love of truth is so strong that they will not accept claims without examination. Now if one examines the creedal formulations, one will see that the gist of the Trinity doctrine is as follows:
1. Monotheism: There is exactly one God.
2. Divinity of Persons: The Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Ghost is God.
3. Distinctness of Persons: The Father is not the Son; and the Holy Ghost is not the Father or the Son.
The problem is to show how these propositions are logically consistent, that is, how they can all be true, but without falling into heresy. If you cannot see the problem, you are not paying attention, or you lack intelligence, or your thought-processes are being distorted by ideological commitments. Whatever you think of Brower and Rea's solution to the problem, their exposition of it is very clear and I recommend it to you. My reason for not accepting their solution is here.
In my experience a lot of the problems in modern philosophy of religion come about from not taking enough care to get right the religious position the philosopher is analyzing. Part of this difficulty stems from the way terminology shifts across the centuries, so that the modern philosopher takes for granted an anachronistic understanding of key terms.
I think something like this is happening in your most recent post "Some Water Analogies for the Trinity". You write: " The sense in which water is a substance is not the sense in which God is a substance. Water is a substance in the sense of a stuff; God is a substance in the sense of a hypostasis (that which stands under) orhypokeimenon (that which is placed under), or as I prefer to say, an individual."
From the standpoint of traditional, classical Trinitarian theology, this is incorrect. God is a substance neither in the sense of stuff (hyle) nor in the sense of individual (hypostasis). Here's a representative explanatory snippet from St John of Damascus, showing the universal traditional use of the terms, from "De Fide Orthodoxa" c.48: "Substantia quidem communem speciem et complectivam speciem homoiodon (id est earum quae unum sunt specie) hypostaseon (id est personarum) significat, utputa Deus, homo; hypostasis autem atomon (id est individuum) demonstrat, scilicet Patrem, Filium, Spiritum Sanctum, Petrum, Paulum."
So "substance" here means something like "essence" or "being" (in the sense of ousia) rather than hypostasis; the whole doctrine of the Trinity depends on this distinction between the one nature, substance, being, essence, etc. on the one hand and the three individual persons or hypostases on the other. In most cases where there is one existing human nature (man), there is one individual hypostasis (Peter or Paul); in the case of the Trinity there is one divine nature (God) instantiated in three hypostases (Father and Son and Holy Spirit); conversely, in the Incarnation there are two existing natures (God and man), but only one hypostasis (Christ the Incarnate Logos).
I hope you don't think this too presumptuous; but Christian doctrine really does turn to unintelligible mush in these crucial distinctions are not carefully preserved.
Christianity, like the other two Abrahamic religions, is monotheistic. But unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity holds to a trinitarian conception of God. The idea, spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are distinct from one another. How is this possible? How can Christians convince Jews and Muslims that their position is logically tenable and does not collapse into tritheism, and thus into polytheism to the detriment of the divine unity and transcendence?
Here is one problem. God is said to be tripersonal: the one God somehow includes three numerically distinct Persons. But none of these Persons is tripersonal. The Father is not tripersonal. The Son is not tripersonal. The Holy Ghost is not tripersonal. Now if two things differ in a property, then they cannot be identical. (This is the irreproachable principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals expressed in its contrapositive form.) Now God and each of the Persons differs in point of tripersonality: God is tripersonal while no Person is tripersonal. It follows that God is not identical to the Father, nor to the Son, nor to the Holy Ghost. Therefore, God is not identical to any of the Persons, whence it follows that God is distinct from each of the three Persons. And if God is distinct from each of the Persons, then he is a Fourth.
Is God a divine person? If you say yes, then we are on our way to the Quaternity, the doctrine that there is one God in four divine Persons. For if God is not identical to the Father, or to the Son, or or to the Holy Ghost, each of which is a person, and God is a person, then there are four – count ‘em – four Persons.
Some doctrines in philosophy threaten to collapse into others. Thus mind-brain identity theory threatens to collapse into eliminativism about the mind. Other doctrines seem to want to expand. How do we keep the Trinity from expanding into the Quaternity? The attentive reader will have noticed that the argument can be iterated. If the Three-in-One becomes a Four-in-One, how avoid a Five-in-One, ad infinitum?
The following is based partially on H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, Volume One: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation (Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 359-363.
Hippolytus: The Logos comes from the Father as water from a fountain.
Tertullian: The Father is to the Logos as fountain is to river. One substance assumes two forms.
Lactantius: The Father is an overflowing fountain, the Son a stream flowing from it.
Zeno of Verona: Father and Son are two seas filled with the same water which, though two, are yet one.
Vallicella of Arizona: Water occurs in three distinct states, the gaseous, the liquid, and the solid. One and and the same quantity of water can assume any of these three states. Distinctness of states is compatible with oneness of substance.
Of the water analogies, I like the last one best (!) despite its being as worthless as the others. All four involve an equivocation on ‘substance.’ The sense in which water is a substance is not the sense in which God is a substance. Water is a substance in the sense of a stuff; God is a substance in the sense of a hypostasis (that which stands under) or hypokeimenon (that which is placed under), or as I prefer to say, an individual. Note also that a quantity of H2O can be in the three states only successively not simultaneously whereas God is 'simultaneously' the three Persons.
Of course, there are better physical analogies, light for example, and also nonphysical analogies such as the soul (Augustine). Something on this later. My only point is that these water analogies do nothing to render the Trinity doctrine intelligible, hence no one should be convinced by them.
Dale Tuggy's Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, Trinity, provides a good overview. The specialist blog, Trinities, to which he contributes will also be of interest. Here is Richard Cartwright's excellent "On the Logical Problem of the Trinity." Caveat lector: it contains a few scanning errors. Essential reading nonetheless. Cartwright rejects Peter Geach's relative identity solution. For a defense of the relative identity approach, see A, P. Martinich, Identity and Trinity. (Requires access to JSTOR. What? You say you don't have access to JSTOR? How do you live without it?)
That barely scratches the surface, but should keep you busy for a while.
By the way, don't confuse the diagram with the doctrine. It is a graphic 'aid' which probably does more harm than good. Philosophical thinking is not picture-thinking. As Hegel might have said, Philosophisches Denken ist nicht vorstellendes, sondern begriffliches, Denken.
Thanks to Bill Clinton, it is now widely appreciated that much rides on what the meaning of ‘is’ is. Time was, when only philosophers were aware of this. In our Trinitarian explorations with the help of our Jewish atheist friend Peter we have discussed the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication. We saw that ‘The Father is God’ could be construed as
1. The Father is identical to God
or as
2. The Father is divine.
Both construals left us with logical trouble. If each of the Persons is identical to God, and there is exactly one God, then (given the transitivity and symmetry of identity) there is exactly one Person. On the other hand, if each of the Persons is divine, where ‘is’ functions as copula, then tri-theism is the upshot. Either way, we end up contradicting a central Trinitarian tenet.
But there is also the ‘is’ of composition as when we say, ‘This countertop is marble,’ or in my house, ‘This countertop is faux marble.’ ‘Is’ here is elliptical for ‘is composed of.’ Compare: ‘That jacket is leather,’ and ‘This beverage is whisky.’ To say that a jacket is leather is not to say that it is identical to leather – otherwise it would be an extremely large jacket – or that it has leather as a property: leather is not a property. A jacket is leather by being made out of leather.
Suppose you have a statue S made out for some lump L of material, whether marble, bronze, clay, or whatever. How is S related to L? It seems clear that L can exist without S existing. Thus one could melt the bronze down, or re-shape the clay. In either case, the statue would cease to exist, while the quantity of matter would continue to exist. It follows that S is not identical to L. They are not identical because something is true of L that is not true of S: it is true of L that it can exist without S existing, but it is not true of S that it can exist without S existing. I am assuming the following principle, one that seems utterly beyond reproach:
(InId) If x = y, whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa.
(This is a rough formulation of the Indiscenibility of Identicals. A more careful formulation would block such apparent counterexamples as: Maynard G. Krebs believes that the morning star is a planet but does not believe that the evening star is a planet.)
Returning to the statue and the lump, although S is not identical to L, S is not wholly distinct, or wholly diverse, from L either. This is because S cannot exist unless L exists. This suggests the following analogy: The Father is to God as the statue is to the lump of matter out of which it is sculpted. And the same goes for the other Persons. Schematically, P is to G as S to L. The Persons are like hylomorphic compounds where the hyle in question is the divine substance. Thus the Persons are not each identical to God, which would have the consequence that they are identical to one another. Nor are the persons instances of divinity which would entail tri-theism. It is rather than the persons are composed of God as of a common material substance. Thus we avoid a unitarianism in which there is no room for distinctness of Persons, and we avoid tri-theism. So far, so good.
Something like this approach is advocated by Jeffrey Brower and Michael Rea, here.
But does the statue/lump analogy avoid the problems we faced with the water analogy? Aren’t the two analogies so closely analogous that they share the same problems? Liquid, solid, and gaseous are states of water. Similarly, a statue is a state of a lump of matter. Modalism is not avoided. If the Persons are like states, then they are not sufficiently independent. But a statue is even worse off than a state of water. Water can be in one of its states whether or not we exist. But a hunk of matter cannot be a statue unless beings like us are on the scene to interpret it as a statue. Thus my little ceramic bust of Beethoven represents Beethoven only because we take it as representing the great composer. In a world without minds, it would not represent anything. The Persons of the Trinity, however, are in no way dependent on us for their being Persons of the Trinity.
It might be counterargued that water is not to its states as lump to statue. Water must be in one of its three states, but a lump of bronze need not be in any statue-state. That is indeed a point of disanalogy between the two analogies. But notice that God and the Persons are necessarily related: God cannot exist without the Persons. A lump of bronze can exist without being a statue. In this respect, the water analogy is better: water must be in one its three states just as God must be composed of the three Persons.
Besides the threat of modalism, there is also the fact that God is not a substance in the sense in which clay and water are substances. Thus God is not a stuff or hyle, but a substance in the sense of a hypostasis or hypokeimenon. And it does no good to say that God is an immaterial or nonphysical stuff since what must be accommodated is the divine unity. The ground of divine unity cannot be matter whether physical or nonphysical. We saw that one and the same quantity of H20 cannot be simultaneously and throughout liquid, solid, and gaseous. Similarly, one and the same quantity of bronze cannot be simultaneously and throughout three different statues. Connected with this is how God could be a hylomorphic compound, or any sort of compound, given the divine simplicity which rules out all composition in God.
In sum, the statue/lump analogy is not better than the water/state analogy. Neither explains how we can secure both unity of the divine nature and distinctness of Persons.
In this installment, Peter Lupu, atheist, defends the logical coherence of the doctrine of the Trinity. My critical comments follow in blue.
It may be somewhat of an astonishment to those who know me well that I should venture to defend the doctrine of the Trinity. I am not a Christian; I am not religious; I am an atheist; and I have at least on one occasion privately expressed to Bill my reservations about the coherence of the Trinity doctrine. Nevertheless, there is a question here that deserves exploring. What is the question?
Alphonse Gratry (1805-1872), Logic, tr. H and M. Singer (Open Court, 1944), p. 336:
What does Catholic theology have to say about unity in the Trinity, and of the Trinity in unity? It teaches that the unity and the Trinity are not expressed in the same respect but in two different respects: absolute unity of nature; absolute trinity of persons. The nature of God, which is one, is not triple; that would be a contradiction in terms . . . ; the nature is purely, simply, and absolutely one. The persons, in their turn, which are three, are not one at all; they are purely, simply, and absolutely three. Doubtless the mystery still remains, but reason . . . is completely maintained here, veiled, it is true, but unimpaired: indeed, instead of unimpaired, I might say that it is divinely sustained.
> Man was not created in God's material image, since he has none; he > was created in God's spiritual image. But this implies that what is > essential to man is not his animal body which presumably can be > accounted for in the naturalistic terms of evolutionary biology, but > his spirit or consciousness.
However, St. Thomas would say that it is man's nature to be a rational animal, and hence man's animal body most certainly is essential. I appreciate that you might be working in a broader theistic context rather than an explicitly Christian context; but given that Christ is God Incarnate, and now dwells in eternity, it seems to me that man now just is created in God's image, body and soul both. From the standpoint of eternity God created the universe, man in it, and become incarnate as a man as one single act.
I enjoy your blog; it's part of my continuing education. Thanks for providing it.
You're welcome, Mr. Duquette. Your comment is pertinent and raises a number of difficult and important questions.
On this, the Feast of St. Augustine, it is fitting to meditate on an Augustinian passage. There is an interesting passage in On Christian Doctrine that suggests a way to think about the Incarnation. Commenting on the NT text, "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us," Augustine writes:
In order that what we are thinking may reach the mind of the listener through the fleshly ears, that which we have in mind is expressed in words and is called speech. But our thought is not transformed into sounds; it remains entire in itself and assumes the form of words by means of which it may reach the ears without suffering any deterioration in itself. In the same way the Word of God was made flesh without change that He might dwell among us. (Bk 1, Ch. 13, LLA, 14; tr. D. W. Robertson, Jr.)
What we have here is an analogy. God the Son, the Word, is to the man Jesus of Nazareth as a human thought is to the sounds by means of which the thought is expressed and communicated to a listener. Just as our thoughts, when expressed in speech, do not become sounds but retain their identity as immaterial thoughts, so too the Word (Logos), in becoming man, does not lose its divine identity as the second person of the Trinity. Thought becomes speech without ceasing to be thought; God becomes man without ceasing to be God.
Recent Comments