Against Arianism

1. The Christian’s deepest desire is for direct union with God.

2. Our union with the Father must always be mediated by the Son.

3. So, if only the Father is God, then the Christian’s deepest desire cannot be fulfilled.

4. The Christian’s deepest desire can be fulfilled.

5. So, it is false that only the Father is God.

A four-dimensional model of Eucharistic presence

In yesterday’s post, I discussed the Real Presence in the context of relativistic time. There, I made the assumption that when Christ is really present in the Eucharist, it is Christ at a specific time of life (intuitively, the current time, but that notion is tricky given Relativity). It is, in particular, an adult glorified Christ and not the toddler Christ who is present in the Eucharist.

But after discussion with my Aquinas seminar grad students, I think there is something rather appealing about denying that assumption. What if instead we say that the whole of the four-dimensional Christ is present in the Eucharist? Aquinas apparently thinks that the whole Christ is present in every potential “part” of the consecrated host. This suggests (but does not entail) the idea of a three-dimensional entity present at a single point in space. Why, then, can’t a four-dimensional entity be present at a single point of spacetime? This would require a distinction between internal and external time. During an instant of external time there would be a positive (indeed, infinite, in the case of a being that lives forever) length of internal time. This is just as the whole-presence of a three-dimensionally Christ in the Eucharist requires a distinction between internal and external space: there may be five feet (say) of internal space between Christ’s head and Christ’s toes, but both are present in the external space of two inches—or much less if Aquinas is right that Christ is present in every potential part.

Is there any point to such a supposition? Yes.

First, the Tradition holds that Christ is wholly present in the Eucharist. Given four-dimensionalism, a literal metaphysical reading of that requires the whole of the four-dimensional extent of Christ to be present. Granted, I think this is an overreading of the Tradition: even if four-dimensionalism is true, it is plausible that the doctrinal pronouncements on this only refer to the whole three-dimensional extent of Christ. But, still, supposing the four-dimensionalism, it is certainly in the spirit of the teaching on Christ being wholly present, even if not required by it, to suppose the whole four-dimensional extent of Christ to be present.

Second, in Q73.A4, Aquinas has a beautiful discussion of the threefold temporal signification of the Eucharist. With respect to the past, it commemorates Christ’s passion. With respect to the present, it brings all the members of the Church together. With respect to the future, it prefigures the enjoyment of God in heaven. If we think that we are united with Christ in his full four-dimensional extent, this deepens and underscores this threefold signification.

Third, the Catholic tradition holds that the Mass is a re-presentation of the sacrifice of Calvary. This is a mysterious doctrine, and a four-dimensional whole-presence model of the Eucharist gives us a precise account of that doctrine as well: Christ as hanging on the Cross is present in the Eucharist.

That said, there are three things that make me uncomfortable about this four-dimensional extension of the doctrine that the whole of Christ is present in the Eucharist. The first is simply that it is a new theological theory (as far as I know), and most new theological theories are heretical.

The second is that it feels important to me that it is the glorified Jesus who is present in the Eucharist. But perhaps I am wrong about this feeling, and in having this feeling I am underplaying the commemorative aspect of the past temporal aspect of the Eucharist. Perhaps a justification for my feeling of discomfort is given by the Church’s emphasis on the Eucharist as an unbloody re-presentation of the sacrifice of Christ—but if Christ’s mangled crucified body is present in the Eucharist, then this the unbloodiness is merely a matter of appearances.

The third is that it is difficult what to make of the period when Christ was dead. Aquinas thinks God was still incarnate in the dead body of Christ, and if the Apostles had celebrated the Eucharist then, a dead body would have come to be present. If Aquinas’s reasons are good ones, which I am not confident of, then on the four-dimensional whole presence model we should say that the dead body of Christ is present. But this doesn’t seem right. I worry both about the apparently unfitting gruesomeness of this, as well as about the idea that there is something in the Eucharist other than Christ’s body, blood, soul and divinity (a dead body is not a body!). That said, I am suspicious of Aquinas’s view of the Incarnation and the dead body of Christ. But even if Aquinas is wrong, we have another problem. If the whole temporal extent of Christ is to be present, the soul of Christ as it was when Christ was dead needs to be present. (Especially if, as I think, survivalism is correct.) But a soul is only present in a spatial location insofar as it is united to a body that is in that location. But the soul of Christ as it was when he was dead was not united to a body, so it seems that there is no way for it to be present in the Eucharist. If this problem cannot be solved, the account may yield the whole four-dimensional extent of Christ being present, but not the whole temporal extent of Christ being present (the soul is temporal but not spatial, and hence not four-dimensional). Thus, the account may not achieve quite as much as it seems to.

One can resolve the second and third problems by supposing a moderate version of the view: Christ’s whole glorified four-dimensional self is present in the Eucharist—namely, Christ in the Eucharist is all of Christ from the time of his resurrection. This loses some of the advantages of the view, and it is not clear that what remains is sufficiently compelling. But, on the other hand, it’s also not clear that there is any serious disadvantage to that view over a three-dimensional-slice view of the Real Presence, except maybe the novelty. And it has the advantage of there not having to be a fact about the exact correlation of times between heaven and earth.

Christ's concrete human nature

One of the old puzzles of Christology is why it is that in us the soul and body together compose a person, but they do not do so in Christ.

The problem is intensified if one thinks that there is an entity composed of the soul and body of Christ, an entity one might call “Christ’s concrete human nature”. For the person of Peter just is the entity composed of the soul and body of Peter, while in Christ the quite similar (except in sin) entity composed of the body and soul is not a person, but rather is united to a person.

The standard way out of this difficulty is to say that being a person is an extrinsic feature of a concrete human nature. Thus, Peter’s concrete human nature is a person because it is not united to a person distinct from it. But Christ’s concrete human nature is not a person because it is united to a person distinct from it. A problematic consequence of this is that personhood is not an intrinsic feature of an entity.

But there is a better way to get out of the difficulty. Just deny that in Christ there is any entity composed of his soul and body, and any statements about “Christ’s human nature” we need to make about his concrete soul and body should get paraphrased as statements about two entities, Christ’s soul and Christ’s body. Since there is no such entity as Christ’s concrete human nature, there is no puzzle as to why this entity isn’t a person.

This also solves another problem. If there is such a thing as Christ’s concrete human nature, then plausibly it thinks human thoughts, just as Peter’s concrete human nature thinks human thoughts. But Christ also thinks human thoughts. So in Christ there are two human thinkers: Christ and Christ’s concrete human nature. This is implausible! Granted, we can get out of it by making human thinking extrinsic as well, but each time we do the extrinsicness move, we intensify puzzlement.

But there is still a problem: Why is it that Peter’s soul and Peter’s body compose a whole—namely, Peter’s person—while Christ’s soul and Christ’s body do not compose a whole? Here we should make an extrinsic move. Christ’s soul and Christ’s body do not compose a whole because they are personally united to something else. Peter’s soul and Peter’s body, however, are not personally united to something else (I don’t count composition as personal union).

It may seem like at this point we have made no progress: we are back to an extrinsicness move. But this extrinsicness move is plausible in non-theological cases. Suppose Fred is missing a left leg. Then Fred’s soul, head, arms, torso, and right leg compose a whole. But Peter’s soul, head, arms, torso, and right leg do not compose a whole. Why the difference? Because Peter’s soul, head, arms, torso, and right leg are personally united to something else–namely, a left leg. But Fred’s soul, head, arms, torso, and right leg are not personally united to something else.

There is another worry. Suppose we embrace survivalism and think that Peter continues to exist in a disembodied way after death and before the resurrection of the body. But now Peter’s concrete human nature is reduced to a soul, and the soul does exist. So now Peter’s soul is a person, while Christ’s soul is not, even though both exist and are intrinsically alike (apart from accidental features). However, I think there is a way out of this, too. We deny that Peter’s soul is a person. The easiest way is to go four-dimensionalist: Peter’s soul is just a part of a four-dimensional entity that includes a body, though the body doesn’t happen to exist at this time. A less easy, but still tenable, way is to say that disembodied Peter has the soul as a proper part, with no co-part, and classical mereology needs to be modified to avoid Weak Supplementation (which is the axiom that says that if an object has a proper part, then it has another non-overlapping part).

Aquinas on Incarnation as a rock or animal

Aquinas thinks it would be unfitting for God to become incarnate as a non-rational creature. In Summa Theologiae III.4.1, his reasoning is that human nature had an appropriate dignity, as it “was apt to contain the Word Himself in some way through its operation, by knowing Him and loving Him”, but not so for the non-rational creatures. In Summa Contra Gentiles 4.55 we have a different and more philosophical argument:

We must also observe that the rational creature alone acts of itself, for irrational creatures are more driven by natural impetus than act of themselves [magis aguntur naturali impetu quam agant per seipsas]; thus they are to be regarded as instruments rather than principal agents. Now it was fitting that God should assume a creature capable of acting of itself as principal agent, because an instrumental agent acts through being moved to action, whereas the principal agent acts itself and of itself. Accordingly, if God were to do anything by means of an irrational creature, all that is required in accordance with that creature’s natural condition is that it be moved by God, and there is no need for it to be assumed into personal union so as to act itself, since its natural condition does not admit this, it being admitted solely by the condition of rational nature [quia hoc eius naturalis conditio non recepit, sed solum conditio rationalis naturae]. (Shapcote, with italicized phrases retranslated.)

In neither text does Thomas deny the metaphysical possibility of God being incarnate as a nonrational creature, such as a rock, plant or animal. While this is an argument from silence, I think it is a pretty strong one: if he thought it was impossible, we really would expect him to say so, rather than merely saying it was unfitting.

Both arguments seem to me to be based on the idea that if it’s fitting for God becomes incarnate as X, if there is to be much of a point to this incarnation, this X needs to be of a sort that can express the divine person in a special way. If the Logos were to become a piece of granite, the petrous behavior of the rock would not differ from that of any other piece of granite. But if the Logos becomes a human, the rational behavior of this human is able to distinctively express the Logos in a way that ordinary human persons do not. We see this in the Gospels: Jesus as a human being, in his free human choices, movingly expresses the personality of the Second Person of the Trinity. He is just as human as all of us, but all of us humans are different from one another in our operations in a way that is expressive of the person. Of course, all pieces of granite are different from another, but these differences are not due to the operations of the rock differently expressing the rock’s hypostasis (we shouldn’t say person!). Rather they are due to the differences in the matter the rock was formed from and the external forces. God can be expressed in granite.

Of course, every rock reflects God’s goodness, and some rocks especially so, say because they are formed into a beautiful statue or inscribed with a meaningful text. But the special expression of God’s goodness is just a function of the rock’s initial matter and external influences. If God wants a rock to particularly well express him, there is no advantage to God’s becoming the rock: “all that is required … is that it be moved by God”—and all rocks are ultimately moved by God. But it is different for a human, that is a self-originator of its behavior. For the self-originated agency to be fully an expression of God, the person who is human, from whom that behavior originates, needs to be a person who is God. There is thus something that the Logos can accomplish by taking on a rational nature that cannot be accomplished in any other way. We might say that all of creation is God’s self-expression by creatures, but in becoming a human, God can be self-expressed in a creature—something that could not happen if God were to become a non-rational creature. This highlights how it it is that the Incarnation is also an ultimate completion of the act of creation. God’s becoming a non-rational creature would be just God showing off, rather than God manifesting his love by living that love as a human.

TWo closing thoughts. First, I think Aquinas’ Contra Gentiles argument works best if non-rational creatures function deterministically. Given quantum mechanics, we have good reason to think they are indeterministic. But nonetheless the basic point remains: randomness is not really a self-expression, so even if the Logos were to control the quantum processes from the inside, it seems that as long as that control was fully in accordance with the nature of the non-rational creature, it wouldn’t be distinctively expressive of divinity.

Second, I am not sure that Aquinas’ Contra Gentiles argument fits well with Aquinas’ theological compatibilism, on which God can through primary causation make us freely behave a particular way. At least we can say that the argument works better if we have theological indeterminism. And thus theological indeterminism has a theological advantage: it gives us a deep reason for why the incarnation as a human is fitting.

A perhaps underemphasized aspect of Christ's atonement

Usually, Christ’s sacrifice of the Cross is thought of as atonement for our sins before God. This leads to old theological question: Why can’t God simply forgive our sins, without the need for any atoning sacrifice? Aquinas’s answer is: God could, but it’s more fitting that the debt be paid. I want to explore a different answer.

Suppose that when you do a wrong to someone, you come to owe it to them to be punished. But now instead of thinking of God as the aggrieved party, think of all the times when we have done wrong to other human beings. Some of them have released or will release us from our debt through forgiveness. But, probably, not everyone. But what, now, if we think of Christ’s sacrifice as atomenent for our sins before the unforgiving. We don’t need to pay to other unforgiving humans the debt of being punished, because Christ has paid it on our behalf.

This neatly answers the question of why God’s can’t simply forgive us our sins: God can simply release us from our debt to God, but it is either impossible or at least significantly unfitting for God to simply release us from our debt to fellow human beings.

Here is a consequence of the story. If we fail to forgive our fellow human beings, that is yet another way in which we become shamefully co-responsible for Christ’s sufferings, since now Christ is atoning for these fellow human beings before us. We should then be ashamed of ourselves, especially given that Christ is also suffering for us.

The story isn’t complete. Christ’s atonement applies not just to my sins against my neighbor, but also to my sins against God alone and my sins against myself. But once we have seen that some atoning sacrifice is needed on our behalf, the idea of a total atoning sacrifice, capable of atoning for everyone’s debts to everyone, including to God, looks even more fitting.

Hope vs. despair

A well-known problem, noticed by Meirav, is that it is difficult to distinguish hope from despair. Both the hoper and the despairer are unsure about an outcome and they both have a positive attitude towards it. So what's the difference? Meirav has a story involving a special factor, but I want to try something else.

If I predict an outcome, and the outcome happens, there is the pleasure of correct prediction. When I despair and predict a negative outcome, that pleasure takes the distinctive more intense "I told you so" form of vindicated despair. And if the good outcome happens, despite my despair, then I should be glad about the outcome, but there is a perverse kind of sadness at the frustration of the despair.

The opposite happens when I hope. When the better outcome happens, then even though I may not have predicted the better outcome, and hence I may not have the pleasure of correct prediction, I do have the pleasure of hope's vindication. And when the bad outcome happens, I forego the small comfort of the vindication of despair.

The pleasures of correct prediction and the pains of incorrect prediction are doxastic in nature: they are pleasures and pains of right and wrong opinion. But hope and despair can, of course, exist without prediction. But when I hope for a good outcome, then I dispose myself for pleasures and pains of this doxastic sort much as if I were predicting the good outcome. When I despair of the good outcome, then I dispose myself for these pleasures and pains much as if I were predicting the bad outcome.

We can think of hoping and despairing as moves in a game. If you hope for p, then you win if and only if p is true. If you despair of p, then you win if and only if p is false. In this game of hoping and despairing, you are respectively banking on the good and the bad outcomes.

But this banking is restricted. It is in general false that when I hope for a good outcome, I act as if it were to come true. I can hope for the best while preparing for the worst. But nonetheless, by hoping I align myself with the best.

This gives us an interesting emotional utility story about hope and despair. When I hope for a good outcome, I stack a second good outcome--a victory in the hope and despair game, and the pleasure of that victory--on top of the hoped-for good outcome, and I stack a second bad outcome--a sad loss in the game--on top of the hoped-against bad outcome. And when I despair of the good outcome, I moderate my goods and bads: when the bad outcome happens, the badness is moderated by the joy of victory in the game, but when the good outcome happens, the goodness is tempered by the pain of loss. Despair, thus, functions very much like an insurance policy, spreading some utility from worlds where things go well into worlds where things go badly.

If the four goods and bads that the hope/despair game super-adds (goods: vindicated hope and vindicated despair; bads: frustrated hope and needless despair) are equal in magnitude, and if we have additive expected utilities with expected utility maximization, then as far this super-addition goes, you are better off hoping when the probability of the good outcome is greater than 1/2 and are better off despairing when the probability of the bad outcome is is less than 1/2. And I suspect (without doing the calculations) that realistic risk-averseness will shift the rationality cut-off higher up, so that with credences slightly above 1/2, despair will still be reasonable. Hope, on the other hand, intensifies risks: the person who hoped whose hope was in vain is worse off than the person who despaired and was right. A particularly risk-averse person, by the above considerations, may have reason to despair even when the probability is fairly high. These considerations might give us a nice evolutionary explanation of why we developed the mechanisms of hope and despair as part of our emotional repertoire.

However, these considerations are crude. For there can be something qualitatively bad about despair: it makes one not be as single-minded. It aligns one's will with the bad outcome in such a way that one rejoices in it, and one is saddened by the good outcome. To engage in despair on the above utility grounds is like taking out life-insurance on someone one loves in order to be comforted should the person die, rather than for the normal reasons of fiscal prudence.

This suggests a reason why the New Testament calls Christians to hope. Hope in Christ is part and parcel of a single-minded betting of everything on Christ, rather than the hedging of despair or holding back from wagering in neither hoping nor despairing. We should not take out insurance policies against Christianity's truth. But when the hope is vindicated, the fact that we hoped will intensify the joy.

I am making no claim that the above is all there is to hope and despair.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter to all my readers! Christ has indeed risen, turning despair into hope, shining light where there was none.

Faith in Christ without having heard the Gospel

There is no salvation apart from faith in Christ. But what about those who haven't heard of Christ? A standard story is that they can have a spiritual relationship with Christ even though they do not know that they are having a relationship with Christ. They can be "anonymous Christians."

But faith is supposed to be an interpersonal relationship. The kind of hidden mysterious relationship that falls under the head of anonymous Christianity seems to fall short of the best kind of interpersonality, and seems not to be very incarnational in character. Now, there is nothing wrong with saying that although it falls short of the best kind of interpersonality, it is sufficient as faith. But I want to explore a dimension that gives more of an interpersonal and incarnational aspect to being an anonymous Christian.

Suppose that our anonymous Christian is blessed by being in a community with other anonymous Christians. They are all, unbeknonwst to themselves, animated by the grace of Christ. They are all, unbeknownst to themselves, members of the body of Christ. Thus in relating to one another they are relating to Christ. But their relations to one another do have the right kind of interpersonality and incarnational character. The presence of Christ through other anonymous Christians in their community—maybe even everyone in the community is an anonymous Christian—make their implicit faith in and love of Christ much more of an interpersonal relation than it would otherwise be. And of course in this regard they are not that different from explicit Christians, since so much of what we know of Christ is based on what we know of people whose lives are made radiant by Christ's grace.

Apart from Christ there is no hope

The deep realization that Christ is our only hope has significant existential force for a lot of people in motivating Christian faith. It is interesting that there need be nothing irrational here. In fact, a clearly valid argument can be given:

1. Apart from Christ there is no hope.
2. There is hope.
3. If there is hope but apart from x there is no hope, then there is hope with x.
4. If there is hope with Christ, the central doctrines of Christianity are true.
5. So, there is hope with Christ. (1-3)
6. So, the central doctrines of Christianity are true. (4-5)

Clichéd as that sounds, premise (1) really is something that I come to realize more and more deeply the longer I live. (See also this book by one of my distinguished colleagues.) Premise (3) is some kind of "logical truth'. Premise (4) would, I think, take some defending. I think the central thought here is something like the idea that Christ is Lord, liar or lunatic, and in the latter two cases there is no hope with Christ.

Premise (2) is the crucial one. I suspect that accepting (2) in the relevant deep existential sense of "There is hope" usually, perhaps always, is a fruit of grace. There is darkness, but one sees that there is light shining in it even if one cannot identify the light.

One can perhaps, though this very rare, argue oneself by the light of natural reason into accepting that the central doctrines of Christianity are true. But without grace one cannot argue oneself into accepting the central doctrines of Christianity (it is one thing to think something is true and another to accept it; I think the latest theorem proved by my colleagues at the Mathematics Department is true, but I don't accept it—if only because I don't know what it is!), much less into having faith in them.

It may be that for some people the point where grace enters the process of gaining faith is precisely at premise (2). If grace enters the process at accpetance of (2), this is quite interesting. For (2) is not overtly Christian. Yet when someone comes to faith in this way, with grace entering the process in conjunction with an existentially rich acceptance of (2), it plausibly follows that at that stage they already have faith. For, plausibly, there is no way to get to faith from something that isn't faith without grace. So that means that a deep existential acceptance of (2) (and that's not just a light and breezy optimism) could itself be faith.

The reflections on grace and faith are simply speculation. But the argument I stand by.

A quick theological argument that we do not cease to exist at death

On materialist reconstitution views of the resurrection, we cease to exist at death, but then we are reconstituted at the resurrection. On Thomas Aquinas's view, we cease to exist at death, though our soul continues to exist, and then at the resurrection we come back to life.

On these views, we should view the badness of death as primarily constituted by a cessation of existence. But Christ did not cease to exist when he died. The Trinity did not become a Binity between Good Friday and Easter Sunday! So if the badness of death is primarily constituted by a cessation of existence, Christ either did not die or at least did not undergo the primary badness of death. And both options do serious damage to the doctrine of atonement.

(The view of death that seems right to me is that death is the destruction of the body. And Christ underwent that.)

Speculation on the virtuous person's emotions

Take seriously the Socratic idea that emotional awareness is a kind of perception of normative states of affairs: pain is a perception of actual ill-being, fear of potential future ill-being, joy of present good, and so on. Aristotle seems to think that the virtuous person's emotions will be perfectly in tune with reality. The courageous person will only fear what is genuinely fearsome, and so on.

But if we take the Socratic view of emotional consciousness, then we will have reason to doubt Aristotle. For the virtuous person's emotional awareness is going to be properly functioning. But it is false that properly functioning perceptions are always veridical. Indeed, sometimes, a sensory perception must be non-veridical to be properly functioning. As Descartes notes in the Meditations, any cause that produces the same effect in our body will result in the same perception. A barn and a barn facade (seen face on) produce the same effect on our retinas, and result in the same perceptions. Moreover, when this happens, our perceptions are properly functioning, and were we to see these same effects differently, our perceptions would be improperly functioning. If the barn facade didn't look like a barn, your sense of sight would be malfunctioning. (Our senses might always produce veridical results in heaven. If so, then that is a sense in which our nature is somehow transformed in heaven.) Most of the time, we see barns, not barn facades, and our senses' proper functioning is adapted to what gets us to truth for the most part (much as according to Aquinas, the proper functioning of the reproductive faculties is adapted to what leads to the good for the most part, which is why he thinks fornication is wrong even when it does not harm children, since for the most part, fornication is bad for offspring, and therefore our nature is such that fornication is not a part of our proper function.)

It would be surprising indeed if the same weren't true of emotional awareness. Sometimes, this is true simply because of sensory illusions. If you grew up happily on a farm, the convincing barn facade gives you the same nostalgic feeling as a real barn, and if you failed to feel nostalgia, something is wrong with you. But the same can be true even where there is no sensory illusion. Sometimes, virtue requires one to to knowingly (maybe even intentionally) cause pain to another. But the knowledgeable causing of pain to another quite properly makes one feel bad about what one is doing, and this should happen even when one knows that one ought to be doing what one is doing. In such a case, the emotional awareness may be non-veridical, but it is, nonetheless, properly functioning. If one did not feel bad, then one would have a malfunctioning emotional awareness, and one would not be fully virtuous.

I remember reading that St Catherine the Great Martyr, when young, was puzzled by Christ's suffering in the garden. Wouldn't Christ welcome suffering for righteousness' sake? So she supposed that his suffering was a kind of display for our benefit. But no: It wasn't a show. A virtuous person suffers fear when contemplating a terrible death, even if the virtuous person knows that this death should not be avoided. The feeling may be non-veridical, but why should Christ have been exempt from non-veridical emotions? After all, we do not think he was exempt from visual illusions: Surely a stick in the water looked broken to him. Of course, he might well judge the emotion non-veridical, much as we judge the one about the stick, but just as the stick still looks broken, Christ would still suffer.

But perhaps this is all wrong. It all depends on just how teleological proper function is.

Emotional perception

On Friday I was feeling somewhat poorly and in the interests of public health (not that I minded!) I opted out of participation in the PhD graduation dinner and Saturday's commencement. Sunday I felt somewhat worse, and today rather worse (nothing serious, just the usual "flu-like" symptoms, and both of our big kids had such in the preceding two weeks). But there is one piece of relief: It is good to have been right about the fact that I was getting sick.

It is not particularly bad to have suffered physically and similarly it is not particularly good to have enjoyed physical pleasure. But it is bad (or at least it feels bad--which is evidence for its being bad!) to have been wrong and similarly it is good to have been right. The value here isn't the value of being recognized by others as having been right or wrong. Nor is it the value of oneself presently recognizing oneself as right or wrong. For one hopes (though perhaps not simpliciter, if the prospect is particularly nasty) that one be right and that one not be wrong, not just that one recognize oneself or be recognized as right or wrong. The recognition is just the icing or mould on the top of a good or bad cake.

Eternalists have a difficulty with the fact that it doesn't seem bad to have suffered physically (bracketing any present suffering from painful memories, of course), even though past suffering is just as real as present suffering. Presentists have a difficulty with the fact that it seems to be bad to have been wrong and to be good to have been right.

I think eternalists can make a better go of it, though. Feelings like the pleasure of having been right or the pain of having been wrong are a kind of perception of normative features of the world. But not all truth is equally perceived. I am now visually aware that I have two hands, and properly so. But were I now visually aware that you have a head, my visual system would be malfunctioning. For although, dear reader, you do have a head, your head is not presently within my field of view. It is thus a part of the correct functioning of my visual apparatus that I be presently aware of my hands but not your head, even though all three parts (my two hands and your one head) are equally real.

Likewise, then, some goods and bads are appropriately within my emotional field of view--e.g., my having been right about getting sick--and some goods and bads are not appropriately within my emotional field of view--e.g., the unpleasantness of the last time I had a cavity filled. These goods and bads may be equally real (assuming that pain itself really is bad--there is room for discussion here, but it is at least extrinsically bad), but it could be (I am not sure about the first one, actually) that my having been right is appropriately within my emotional field of view while my having suffered (not at all severely--he really is an excellent dentist) at a past dental visit is not.

But we sometimes mistake absence of perception for perception of absence, like an infant who cries that the parent has left the room or the adult who sees no objection to an action and all too hastily concludes the action is permissible. Not emotionally seeing the past pain as bad--i.e., a not being pained by the past pain--is mistaken by us for seeing the past pain as not being bad.

The eternalist should thus say that the past physical pains and pleasures are bad or good, in the same way that present ones are, but we do not see their badness or goodness. Thus, the eternalist attributes to the agent a misinterpretation of absence of perception. The presentist, however, should say that having been right or wrong is not presently good or bad (though maybe it was good or bad), but we misperceive it as such. The eternalist thus attributes more correctness to our emotional perception, while attributing a well-known generalized cognitive error in explaining what went wrong. The presentist has to say our emotional perception is just wrong. I prefer the eternalist explanation.

A similar issue comes up for Christ's suffering on the cross. With a number of theologians, I take the center of our Savior's suffering not to be the horrific suffering of nails ripping through his flesh, but his deep emotional awareness of the horribleness of the totality of our sins (perhaps with the help of the hypostatic union or beatific vision bringing the particularities of all of humankind's sins to him). But this leads to a query: Why did Christ only have this awareness on the cross? We do not see him constantly and equally weighed down by this suffering earlier in life? Was he failing to have a correct emotional awareness? But now we can say: Not at all. It is the salient goods or bads that are within the field of view of correct emotional perception. And it is on the cross, at the high point of the sacrifice for our salvation from these sins (the high point: for all his life was such a sacrifice), that this became fully salient, in such a way that this perfect man--who is also true God--emotionally bore the full weight of our sin.

Note, too, that this is a story about Christ's sufferings that is difficult for the presentist to give. For it is difficult for the presentist to explain why earlier and later, and hence then-unreal, sins were bad at the time of Christ's crucifixion. Perhaps the presentist has to say that Christ's suffering came from an erroneous emotional perception of past and future sins as then-bad?

Redemption in Christ from individual and cosmic sin

There is a danger in seeing Christ's work of redemption as solely focused on one's individual sins. But at the same time the lived experience of Christians is precisely an experience of redemption from individual sins that block union with God and neighbor: "How can I ever be friends with Him, or with him, or with her, or with them, after I did that to Him, or to him, or to her, or to them?" In the context of one's individual repentance, a focus on the sin of the world and the deeply rooted social dimensions of sin, may be a distraction or even an excuse. "It's not my sin, but our sin." And it is not far from our sin to nobody's sin. Adam shifted the blame for his sin onto Eve, and Eve onto the serpent. It would have been no better if they shifted it onto the world.

None of this denies that there are structures of sin that are of cosmic importance, and that the means by which the individual sinner is redeemed is through-and-through ecclesial. But we must also not overestimate the importance of cosmic sin. For there is nothing worse in the world than mortal sins, and it is only individuals who commit those, and thereby separate themselves from God and one another. Moreover, to the true lover, the beloved is a cosmos. And God loves each of us.

Kenotic Christianity and the problem of Christ's resurrected body

According to kenotic Christianity, when Christ became incarnate, he literally ceased to have divine omni-properties. But at the same time, after his resurrection, he was glorified and presumably has regained them.

But what happened to his humanity after his glorification? Either Christ is still human or he is simply divine. If Christ is still human, then it follows that having the divine omni-properties is logically compatible with being human, which undercuts I assume one of the major motivations for kenotic Christianity. If Christ is no longer human, what happened to his resurrected body? Was it resurrected only to be destroyed shortly thereafter? That seems deeply unfitting.

Penal substitution theories of the atonement

According to the penal substitution theory of the atonement, Christ's sufferings satisfy justice in place of our being punished. That is, basically, the theory as found in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo.

Some contemporary Christians, mainly Protestant, add the claim that Christ was punished by the Father, and his punishment substitutes for our punishment. We can call the resulting theory punishment by punishment substitution (PBPS). PBPS isn't Anselm's theory, and as Mark Murphy has pointed out it may even be incoherent, since a part of punishing is the showing of disapproval at the person being punished, while God cannot show disapproval at an innocent person.

The Heidelberg Catechism explicitly only says that Christ satisfies for us. But it says in the answer to Question 14 that no mere creature can satisfy for us because "God will not punish any other creature for the sin which man has committed", which may implicate that satisfaction involves being punished. Still, it does not say that it does so in the case of Christ.

In any case, it seems to me that the biblical theory is not that the punishment of Christ substitutes for our punishment, but that the sacrifice of Christ substitutes for our punishment. Old Testament sacrifices for our sins were not punishments of the animals, except in the extended sense of the word as when we speak of "the punishing heat of Texas summer." It is central to the idea of sacrifice in the Old Testament that it is the best that is sacrificed. To sacrifice something is to treat it as the best that is available. But when someone is being punished, then he is far from being treated as the best—he is being treated as one of the worst. Thus, the biblical picture of Christ as sacrificed is in serious tension with PBPS.

That the sacrifice of Christ substitutes for our punishment isn't yet a theory of the atonement. To make it a theory of the atonement one would have to say how it does so.

Happy Easter

I wish a very happy Easter to all my readers.

Christ is risen! Indeed he is risen!

The improbable and the impossible

This discussion from Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (pp. 165-166) struck me as quite interesting:

[Kate:] "What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? 'Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'"

"I reject that entirely," said Dirk sharply. "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely impossible lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.'"

"Well, it happened to me today, in fact," replies Kate.

"Ah, yes," said Dirk, slapping the table and making the glasses jump, "your girl in the wheelchair [the girl was constantly mumbling exact stock prices, with a 24-hour delay]--a perfect example. The idea that she is somehow receiving yesterday's stock market prices out of thin air is merely impossible, and therefore must be the case, because the idea that she is maintaining an immensely complex and laborious hoax of no benefit to herself is hopelessly improbable. The first idea merely supposes that there is something we don't know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The second, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. ..."

This reminds me very much of the Professor's speech in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.

Both Dirk Gently and the Professor think that we need to have significantly greater confidence in what we know about other people's character than in our scientific knowledge of how the non-human world works. This seems to me to be just right. Our scientific knowledge of the world almost entirely depends on trusting others.

So, both C. S. Lewis and Douglas Adams are defending faith in Christ, though of course Adams presumably unintentionally. :-)

Aquinas on why the incarnation is fitting

I find it striking and interesting that in the article where Aquinas officially addresses whether the Incarnation is fitting, his argument in favor of the fittingness of the Incarnation makes no mention of salvation. In other words, it's clear that the Incarnation would be fitting whether or not we sinned, though Aquinas is inclined to think that had we not sinned, the Incarnation would not have occurred. The focus on epistemic benefits is particularly interesting:

On the contrary, It would seem most fitting that by visible things the invisible things of God should be made known; for to this end was the whole world made, as is clear from the word of the Apostle (Romans 1:20): "For the invisible things of God . . . are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made." But, as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iii, 1), by the mystery of Incarnation are made known at once the goodness, the wisdom, the justice, and the power or might of God--"His goodness, for He did not despise the weakness of His own handiwork; His justice, since, on man's defeat, He caused the tyrant to be overcome by none other than man, and yet He did not snatch men forcibly from death; His wisdom, for He found a suitable discharge for a most heavy debt; His power, or infinite might, for there is nothing greater than for God to become incarnate . . ."
I answer that, To each things, that is befitting which belongs to it by reason of its very nature; thus, to reason befits man, since this belongs to him because he is of a rational nature. But the very nature of God is goodness, as is clear from Dionysius (Div. Nom. i). Hence, what belongs to the essence of goodness befits God. But it belongs to the essence of goodness to communicate itself to others, as is plain from Dionysius (Div. Nom. iv). Hence it belongs to the essence of the highest good to communicate itself in the highest manner to the creature, and this is brought about chiefly by "His so joining created nature to Himself that one Person is made up of these three--the Word, a soul and flesh," as Augustine says (De Trin. xiii). Hence it is manifest that it was fitting that God should become incarnate.

Of course, in the next article, Aquinas does talk of the need for the Incarnation for our redemption. It's not an absolute need, but it is necessary for our redemption to be worked in a better and more fitting way (Aquinas compares it to the necessity of a horse for a journey--presumably, one could always walk, but a horse is better). In that article, Aquinas gives ten benefits for the sake of which the Incarnation was fitting in respect of our redemption. It is interesting that penal satisfaction is only one of the ten.

And then Aquinas adds: "And there are very many other advantages which accrued, above man's apprehension." How does he know? Is it just a confidence that God does many, many good things for us? Could one argue that the Incarnation of an infinite being must somehow bring infinitely many benefits, of which only finitely many will be understandable to us?

Reasons of trust

Suppose you promise me to do something and suppose I should trust you. Then I have a moral reason not to check whether you did what your promised. Of course, if I have a special responsibility for it, I may also have a moral reason to check. But generally speaking, I think we have an imperfect duty not to check up on people when we should trust them. Moreover, we should trust people unless we have good reason to the contrary. I would be wronging a colleague if, out of the blue, I were to start running his papers through TurnItIn.com to look for plagiarism. Such an action would be a failure to show required trust. It would thus be contrary to collegial love.

Natural love, thus, requires natural faith of us. But our supernatural love for Christ requires supernatural faith of us.

Christ's sacrifice and presentism

After it took place, Christ's sacrifice had never ceased to be a part of reality. But Christ's sacrifice did not continue to be always a part of the present. (Christ's sacrifice is present during the Mass, but there have been times, since Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, during which no Mass was being celebrated.) Hence, the present and reality are not coextensive.

Whether this contradicts presentism depends on what one makes of the imprecise predicates "is a part of reality" and "is a part of the present".