Maverick Philosopher

Notes on Mortality and Christian Doctrine

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? 

'Frege' on the Trinity

Peter Lupu writes,

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.

 

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

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

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of  iron; such is the 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?

East Versus West on the Trinity: The Filioque Controversy

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.)

 

Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?

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.

MACRUES, Semantic Defeaters, and Epistemic Defeaters (Peter Lupu)

(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.

Another Example of a Necessary Being Depending for its Existence on a Necessary Being

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.

Can A Necessary Being Depend for its Existence on a Necessary Being?

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.

Dale Tuggy's Weblog

Thanks to Dale Tuggy for his linkage.  Dale is an expert on Trinitarian topics so get thee hence and feast at his table.

Substance and Suppositum: Notes on Fernand Van Steenberghen

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.)

Substance and Suppositum: Notes on Klubertanz

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.

Professor Anderson and the Hyper-Inscrutability of the Trinitarian Doctrine (Peter Lupu)

(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.]

More Christology: Freddoso on Supposita

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.

Materialist Mysterianism

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. 

Whether Jesus Exists Necessarily

Lukas Novak comments by e-mail:

You list the following propositions in your post, Christology, Reduplicatives, and Their Truth-Makers:

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).

A Coherent Representing of the Incoherent

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.

This post is a comment on a comment.

David Stove on the Logos

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.)

A few comments are in order.

Christology, Reduplicatives, and Their Truth-Makers

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?

Negative and Positive Trinitarian Mysterianism

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.

From the Mailbag: More on the Lewis Trilemma

 Dear Mr. Vallicella,

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.

Peace and Blessings
Joshua Orsak

A Different View of the Lewis Trilemma: The Trilemma Vindicated?

Dr. Lukáš Novák e-mails:

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.]

The Lewis 'Trilemma'

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.

Supposita

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.

Of Pasta and Perichoresis

Dr. Vallicella,

 

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 article appears 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.

Augustine and the Child at the Seashore: Trinitarian Metatheory

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.

Trinity and Set Theory

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.

From the Mail: Trinity and Incarnation

Dr. Vallicella,

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.

 Mark Weldon Whitten, PhD   

Some Questions About the Trinity Distinguished

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.

 

On the Trinity: A Medievalist Takes Me to Task

 Long-time reader Michael Sullivan e-mails:

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.

Does Trinity Entail Quaternity?

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?

Some Water Analogies for the Trinity

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.

Trinitarian Reading Material

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?)

Jeffrey Brouwer and Michael Rea, Material Constitution and the Trinity.  For William Lane Craig's critique, see Does the Problem of Material Constitution Illuminate The Doctrine of The Trinity? 

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.

De Trinitate: The Statue/Lump Analogy and the 'Is' of Composition

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.

Is The Doctrine of the Trinity Logically Coherent? (Peter Lupu)

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?

Gratry on Trinity and Mystery

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.

Imago Dei in Relation to Aquinas and Christology

This just over the transom from Will Duquette:

 A fool rushes in...

In your comment on Peter Lupu's guest post, you say

> 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. 

Augustine on an Analogy for the Incarnation

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.