In defense of a changing beatific vision

It is widely taken in the Thomistic tradition that:

1. Different people in heaven have the beatific vision to different degrees, corresponding to the saints’ different levels of holiness.

2. The beatific vision does not change with time for a given individual.

I think there is a tension between these two claims which is best resolved by dropping the no-change thesis (2). Dropping the difference thesis (1) is not an option for Catholics at least, since it’s a dogma taught by the Council of Florence.

To see the tension, note that the fact that different saints have holiness to different degrees implies that those saints who have a lesser holiness have not maxed out what human nature makes possible. And holiness is attractive to the holy, and infectious. If one saint is less holy than another, it seems likely that given a sufficient amount of time, we would expect the second saint’s greater holiness to inspire the first to even greater holiness. And then we would expect the beatific vision to increase.

We also have one New Testament case where it seems likely that a person’s level of beatific vision has increased. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes of knowing someone who, fourteen years ago, was caught up to the third heaven. It is common to take that to be a modest reference to Paul himself, and the “third heaven” to be a reference to the beatific vision. Now, eventually Paul died and experienced the beatific vision again. It seems very implausible to think that the significant number of years between Paul’s first experience of heaven and his final experience of heaven did not result in Christian maturation and growth in virtue. Thus, it seems quite plausible that Paul had greater holiness when he died than when he was first caught up to heaven, and hence by the correspondence thesis (1), he had a greater degree of beatific vision at death than at the earlier incident.

Note, too, that a Catholic cannot say that the level of holiness is fixed at the time of death, since then purgatory wouldn’t make sense. And, intuitively, we would expect heaven to be inspiring of growth in holiness!

Now, one could insist that the level of holiness is fixed at the time of entry to heaven. But if so, then we couldn’t really say that the death of a saint is always something to rejoice at. Imagine that Paul had died at the time of his first experience of the beatific vision. Then on the no-change view of the beatific vision, he would eternally have had a lesser beatific vision than in actual world where he continued to grow in holiness for over decades more.

A picture of continual growth in holiness and the beatific vision fits better with our temporality. One may worry, however, that it takes away from the picture of resting in God. However, rest is compatible with change. One of the best ways to rest is to read a good book. But as one reads the book, one grows in knowledge of its content. And if one worries that the thought that one will come to have a greater happiness should induce in one a present sorrow of longing, I think it is plausible that with perfect virtue one would no more find the expectation of greater future happiness to be a source of sorrow than a lesser saint would find the observation of greater saints a source of envy. And, coming back to the book analogy, when one reads a good book, there need be no unhappiness at the fact that there is more of the book yet to come—on the contrary, one can rejoice that there is more to come. (In some cases, there may be a weak negative emotion as one longs for the author to reveal something—say, the solution of a mystery. But not every genre will generate that.)

Furthermore, there is good reason to think that change is not incompatible with rest. Since we will have bodies in heaven, and we will flourish in body and soul, while bodily flourishing involves change, heavenly rest must be compatible with change. And plausibly some of the bodily activities we will engage in will involve a variation in the level of happiness at least in some respects. Thus, eating is an episodic joy, and music, I take it, involves much in the way of anticipation and change.

Junia/Junias and the base rate fallacy

I think it would be useful to apply more Bayesian analyses to textual scholarship.

In Romans 16:7, Junia or Junias is described as “famous among the apostles”. Without accent marks (which were not present in the original manuscript) it is not possible to tell purely textually if it’s Junia, a woman, or Junias, a man. Moreover, “among the apostles” can mean “as being an apostle” or “to the apostles”. There seems to be, however, some reason to think that the name Junia is more common than Junias in the early Christian population, and the reading of “among” as implying membership seems more natural, and so the text gets used as support for women’s ordination.

This post is an example of how one might go about analyzing this claim in a Bayesian way. However, since I am not a Biblical scholar, I will work with some made-up numbers. A scholarly contribution would need to replace these with numbers better based in data (and I invite any reader who knows more Biblical scholarship to write such a contribution). Nonetheless, this schematic analysis will suggest that even assuming that there really were female apostles, it is more likely than not that Junia/s is one.

Let’s grant that in the early Christian population, “Junia” outnumbers “Junias” by a factor of 9:1. Let’s also generously grant that the uses of “famous among” where the individual is implied to be a member of the group outnumber the uses where the individual is merely known to the group by a factor of 9:1. One might think that this yields a probably of 0.9 × 0.9 = 0.81 that the text affirms Junia/s to be an apostle.

But that would be to commit the infamous base rate fallacy in statistical reasoning. We should think of a text that praises a Junia/s as “famous among the apostles” as like a positive medical test result for the hypothesis that the individual praised is a female apostle. The false positive rate on that test is about 0.19 given the above data. For to get a true positive, two things have to happen: we have to have Junia, probability 0.9, and we have to use “among” in the membership-implying sense, probability 0.9, with an overall probability of 0.81 assuming independence. So the false positive rate on the test is 1 − 0.81 = 0.19. In other words, of people who are not female apostles, 19 percent of them will score positive on tests like this.

But we have very good reason to think that even if there were any female apostles in the early church, they are quite rare. Our initial sample of apostles includes the 12 apostles chosen by Jesus, and then one more chosen to replace Judas, and none of these were women. Thus, we have reason to think that fewer than 1/13 of the apostles were women. So let’s assume that about 1/13 of the apostles were female. If there were any female apostles, they were unlikely to be much more common than that, since then that would probably have been more widely noted in the early Church.

Moreover, not everyone that Paul praises are apostles. “Apostle” is a very special position of authority for Paul, as is clear from the force of his emphases on his own status as one. Let’s say that apostles are the subjects of 1/3 of Pauline praises (this is something that it would be moderately easy to get a more precise number on).

Thus, the chance that a randomly chosen person that Paul praises is a female apostle even given the existence of female apostles is only about (1/13)×(1/3) or about three percent.

If we imagine Paul writing lots and lots of such praises, there will be a lot of Junia/s mentioned as “famous among the apostles”, some of whom will be male, some female, and some of whom will be apostles and some not.
All of these are the “positive test results”. Of these positive test results, the 97% percent of people praised by Paul who aren’t female apostles will contribute a proportion of 0.19 × 97%=18% of the positive test results. These will be false positives. The 3% people who are female apostles will contribute at most 3% of the positive test results. These will be true positives. In other words, among the positive test results, approximately the ratio 18:3 obtains between the false and true positives, or 6:1.

In other words, even assuming that some apostles are female, the probability that Junia/s is a female apostle is at most about 14%, once one takes into account the low base rate of women among apostles and apostles among those mentioned by Paul.

But the numbers above are made-up. Someone should re-do the analysis with real data. We need four data points:

• Relative prevalence of Junia vs. Junias in the early Christian population.

• Relative prevalence of the two senses of “famous among” in Greek texts of the period.

• Reasonable bounds on the prevalence of women among apostles.

• Prevalence of apostles among the subjects of Pauline praise.

And without such numbers and Bayesian analysis, I think scholarly discussion is apt to fall into the base rate fallacy.

A reading of 1 Corinthians 14:33b-34a

1 Corinthians 14:33b-34a is one of the “hard texts” of the New Testament. The RSV translates it as:

As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches.

Besides the fact that this is a hard saying, a textual difficulty is that earlier in the letter, at 11:5, Paul has no objection to women prophesying or praying (it seems very likely that praying would be out loud), though it has been suggested that this was outside of a liturgical context. Nor does later Church practice prohibit women from joining in vocal prayer during the liturgy.

I assume that the second "the churches" means "the churches of Corinth", while the first "the churches" refers to the churches more generally. And yesterday at our Department Bible study, I was struck by the fact that the “As” (Greek hōs) that begins the text can be read as “In the manner of”. On that reading, the first sentence of the hard text does not say that women should keep silent in the Corinthian churches. Rather, it says that women should keep silent in the Corinthian churches in the way and to the extent to which they keep silent in the other churches. In other words, women should only speak up in Corinthian liturgies at the points at which women speak up in non-Corinthian liturgies. This is compatible with women having various speaking roles—but only as long as they have these roles in “all the churches of the saints.”

(Note, however, that some versions punctuate differently, and make “As in all the churches of the saints” qualify what came earlier rather than what comes afterwards. My reading requires the RSV’s punctuation. Of course, the original has no punctuation.)

On this reading, the first sentence of the text is an application of a principle of liturgical uniformity between the churches, and Paul could equally well have said the same thing about the men. But the text suggests to me that there was some particular problem, which we can only speculate about, that specifically involved disorderly liturgical participation by Corinthian women, in addition to other problems of disorderly participation that Paul discusses earlier in the chapter.

The difficulty for my reading is the next sentence, however:

For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. (1 Cor. 14:34b, RSV)

I would want to read this with “speak” restricted to the kinds of speech not found in the other churches. Perhaps in the other churches, there was no “chatting in the pews”, or socializing during the liturgy (Mowczko in a very nice summary of interpretations notes that this is St. John Chrystostom’s interpretation).

Another interpretation is that “the law” here is Roman law or Corinthian custom (though I don’t know that in Koine Greek “nomos” can still cover custom, like it can in classical Greek), so that Paul is reprising a motif of noting that the Corinthians are behaving badly even by their own cultural standards.

I don’t know that my reading is right. I think it is a little bit more natural to read the Greek as having a complete prohibition on women speaking, but my reading seems to be grammatically permissible, and one must balance naturalness of language with consistency in a text (in this case, consistency with 11:5). And in the case of a Biblical text, I also want an interpretation compatible with divine inspiration.