Present perfect

Dale Tuggy has replied to my remarks about his criticism of the classical theist position that God is not merely “a being” alongside other beings but rather Being Itself.   Dale had alleged that “this is not a Christian view of God” and even amounts to “a kind of atheism.”  In response I pointed out that in fact this conception of God is, historically, the majority position among theistic philosophers in general and Christian philosophers in particular.  Dale replies:

Three comments. First, some of [Feser’s] examples are ambiguous cases. Perfect Being theology goes back to Plato, and some, while repeating Platonic standards about God being “beyond being” and so on, seem to think of God as a great self. No surprise there, of course, in the case of Bible readers. What’s interesting is how they held – or thought they held – these beliefs consistently together. Second, who cares who’s in the majority? Truth, I’m sure he’ll agree, is what matters. Third, it is telling that Feser starts with Plato and ends with Scotus and “a gazillion” Scholastics. Conspicuous by their absence are most of the Greats from early modern philosophy. Convenient, because most of them hold, with Descartes, that our concept of God is the “…idea of a Being who is omniscient, omnipotent and absolutely perfect… which is absolutely necessary and eternal.” (Principles of Philosophy 14)

End quote.  Take Dale’s second comment first.  “Who cares who’s in the majority?”  Well, Dale cares, for starters.  He, after all, is the one who raised the issue of what “most philosophers” think, when he asserted that “what most philosophers call ‘theism’” is the theistic personalism or neo-theism that defines itself in opposition to classical theism.  I was merely pointing out that if one is going to appeal to what “most philosophers” think, one could get a majority in favor of theistic personalism only if one arbitrarily confined one’s poll to merely a subset of contemporary philosophers -- essentially, to Anglo-American Protestant academic analytic philosophers and their atheist critics -- and will certainly get nothing close to a majority if one considers philosophers of the past.  Having had this pointed out to him, Dale suddenly decides that what “most philosophers” think maybe isn’t so important after all.  “Convenient,” as he would say!

There is a substantive issue here too, however.  Dale, remember, had claimed that the notion that God is Being Itself is “not a Christian view” and even “a kind of atheism.”  Surely the point that, historically, most theistic philosophers, including most Christian philosophers, have in fact held that God is Being Itself is highly relevant to evaluating Dale’s assertions.  Even if the claim that “Most Christian theistic philosophers historically have held that p” doesn’t provide much evidence that p is true, surely it does provide at least defeasible evidence that p is consistent with theism in general and Christian theism in particular.  Indeed, that is presumably why Dale himself had originally raised the issue of what “most philosophers” think.  It is arbitrary for him now to pretend that what “most philosophers” have thought is irrelevant to evaluating what is consistent with Christianity and with theism, when he finds he can’t after all get most philosophers to agree with him.

And of course there are reasons why the historically mainstream Christian philosophical tradition has always insisted that God is to be conceived of as Being Itself.  I summarized the basic idea in my recent reply to John Leslie and Robert Lawrence Kuhn, to which I linked in the previous post.  (The relevant considerations are explored in detail by Aquinas in Summa Theologiae I.III.  Article 4 is most directly relevant to the subject at hand, but it is best understood in the context of the surrounding material.  See also Summa Contra Gentiles I.22, and De Ente et Essentia.)  The idea is that if God were not Being Itself then he could not possibly be the ultimate cause or explanation of things.  Anything less than Being Itself would merely participate in being and thus be metaphysically less ultimate than that in which it participates; it would be a compound of actuality and potentiality rather than pure actuality, and thus require a cause which actualizes its potentials; and it would have an essence distinct from its existence and thus be metaphysically composite, where composites are metaphysically less fundamental than whatever principle accounts for their composition. 

Of course, that’s just a one-sentence summary.  I wouldn’t expect someone unfamiliar or unsympathetic with the key concepts and arguments of classical (Neo-Platonic, Aristotelian, and Scholastic) philosophy to be convinced by, or even necessarily to understand, the ideas in question.  But of course it would be quite silly for someone unfamiliar or unsympathetic with classical philosophy to expect me to provide him with a compelling primer on these complex ideas in the scope of a blog post -- especially in a blog post which has to address the gigantic range of sweeping assertions (about what counts as truly ”Christian” theism, about Thomistic metaphysics, about the history of early modern philosophy, about the merits of contemporary analytic philosophy, and so on) that Dale casually fires off in these drive-by posts of his.  Here I am just making a very narrow point, namely that whether you agree with the arguments in question or not, the fact of their existence gives the lie to Dale’s key assertions.  For it is precisely the logic of theism itself-- in particular, the logic of the key theistic idea that God is the ultimate cause or explanation of things -- that drives the classical theist to characterize God as Being Itself.  This characterization is thus by no means something extrinsic to theism, something arbitrarily tacked on.  Dale might not like this way of developing the idea of God as creator, but that is what it is a development of -- and hence it is precisely a development of (rather than a reversal of, or an ad hoc addition to) theism in general and Christianity in particular. 

Certainly Dale has said nothing to show otherwise.  Yet the burden of proof is on him to do so, and not on me to prove classical theism to him.  For remember, what we are debating here is not whether the claim that God is Being Itself is true or even intelligible (though of course I think it is both).  What we are debating are assertions Dale made, to the effect that the notion of God as Being Itself is “not a Christian view of God” and amounts to “a kind of atheism.”  Hence when Dale complains that I haven’t clarified the notion of Being Itself to his satisfaction -- something I wasn’t trying to do in the first place -- he is engaging in something of a red herring.  For the philosophical defensibility of that notion is not what’s at issue.  What’s at issue is whether Dale can justify his (hardly modest) claim that Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and indeed the majority of past Christian thinkers were, not merely philosophically mistaken, but guilty of peddling an essentially anti-Christian and atheistic position.  So, let’s stick to the subject.

Dale perhaps thinks he has addressed the subject in his first point, viz. that some proponents of the view that God is Being Itself also “seem to think of God as a great self.  No surprise there, of course, in the case of Bible readers.  What’s interesting is how they held – or thought they held – these beliefs consistently together.”  The implication is that even if the Christian philosophers in question affirmed the personal God of the Bible, this affirmation was not consistent with their affirmation of God as Being Itself.  But here Dale simply begs the question.  For one thing, as I have said many times, classical theists do not in general deny that God is personal.  When they say that God is not “a person,” what they mean is not that he is impersonal but rather that he is not an instance of the kind “person,” for the reason that he cannot intelligibly be said to be an instance of any kind or property.  He is not less than personal, but more than a mere instance of the kind “person.”  (He does not instantiate the property being powerful either, since he is Power Itself rather than merely one powerful thing among others.  But no one for that reason accuses the classical theist of thinking of God as weak.)

Indeed, given the philosophical analysis by classical theists like Aquinas of what intellect and will are, we must attribute intellect and will (no less than being, power, etc.) to God, and intellect and will are the characteristic marks of personhood.  So there is a sense in which God’s being personal is partially constitutive of the purely philosophical (as opposed to specifically biblical or Christian) side of classical theism.  Of course, Dale might say that the conception of intellect and will appealed to by classical theists like Aquinas is not close enough to the conception reflected in biblical descriptions of God, or that it is in some way philosophically deficient.  Dale says lots of things.  What would be more impressive, though, is an argument, and so far he hasn’t given us one. 

There are also specifically Christian theological reasons for objecting to the bald assertion that God is “a person” or “a self.”  As Brian Davies has pointed out, the claim that “God is a person” apparently first appeared in English in 1644, when it was used to express a heretical Unitarian conception of God.  And of course, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity tells us, not that God is “a person” but rather that there are three Persons in the one God.  How can this be?  That is, of course, a much debated question, but if anything is clear from the debate it is that “person” is not being used in Trinitarian theology in quite the way it is used in ordinary contexts.  Indeed, it is being used in a way that requires that the Persons in question are not distinct “beings,” or substances -- which means of course that Trinitarianism requires us to abstract pretty far from the persons of everyday experience, who are distinct beings or substances. 

If purely philosophical considerations lead the classical theist to attribute a kind of personhood to God even though he is Being Itself, and Trinitarian considerations lead the Christian theologian to move away from the everyday notion of persons when speaking of God, it is hardly surprising that Christian classical theists hold that the two trajectories ultimately converge.  So where does Dale get off casually insinuating, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, that a Christian can’t plausibly affirm both that God is Being Itself and that he is personal? 

Dale’s answer, in part, is to resort to some Bible thumping. “[T]o think of God as a great self” is, he says, “no surprise… in the case of Bible readers.“  The trouble with Bible thumping, though, is that the thumper often unwittingly reads his own theology into the text before reading it back out again.  Certainly you won’t find anything close to the formula “God is a great self” in the Bible.  Of course, Dale knows that; what he means is that the Bible often describes God in the sorts of terms we often apply to human persons or selves.  That is perfectly true, but these descriptions include examples that Dale himself would surely agree cannot be taken literally.  For instance, in the Old Testament God is variously described as if he walked about in the garden of Eden (Genesis 3:8), has eyes and eyelids (Psalm 11:4), breathes (Job 4:9), and so forth.  Apart from the Incarnation, these things cannot be true of God, since if he literally has legs, eyes, lungs, etc., he would be part of the material world and thus not the cause of the material world. 

But something similar is true of any biblical description of God that seems to attribute to him mental qualities that entail corporeality, limitation, or changeability.  Hence while there is certainly a sense in which God can be said to be angry at sin, this cannot be a matter of his having a sort of feeling (since feelings are corporeal) or a change of mood.  He cannot literally be said to learn, to change his mind, to regret some course of action, etc.  For anything literally describable in these ways has potentialities that require actualization, metaphysical parts that require composition, etc., and no such thing can be the ultimate cause or explanation of the world.  He would be just one part of the world among others, even if a “great” one, and thus not truly divine at all.

There are also biblical passages that clearly point away from a theistic personalist conception of God and toward the classical theist conception.  For instance, Malachi 3:6 describes God as unchanging.  Exodus 3:14 tells us that God refers to himself as “I AM,” which has sounded to a  lot of interpreters over the centuries like he is indicating that he is Being Itself.  John 14: 6 tells us that Christ is the truth, and John 4:6 tells us that God is love -- as opposed to merely instantiating or having love.  (Why don’t theistic personalists ever say: “How can a person be love?  That’s Greek philosophy speaking, not the great self of the Bible!”  Why don’t they complain: “How can God be truth?  Are we supposed to believe that he is a conjunction of propositions?”  These biblical statements make perfect sense given the doctrines of divine simplicity, analogical predication, the convertibility of the transcendentals, etc.  Given theistic personalism, not so much.) 

Of course, Dale is bound to disagree with these interpretations of the biblical passages in question, but the point is precisely that merely waving the Bible around doesn’t by itself settle anything.  For the correct interpretation of the relevant passages is itself part of what is in dispute between the classical theist and the theistic personalist.  Simply to cite the Bible against Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, et al. in criticizing their notion of God as Being Itself as “not a Christian view of God” and “a kind of atheism” is just to beg the question.

Then there is the fact that Dale is untroubled by appeals to the Trinity, because as it happens he doesn’t take all that Trinitarian stuff seriously in the first place.  (As longtime readers know, Dale and I have had a few exchanges on this subject.)  Yes dear reader, that sound you hear is rich irony sinking in.  Dale is accusing those who regard God as Being Itself of taking a view that is “not a Christian view of God” and indeed “a kind of atheism” -- even as he rejects what has historically been regarded as the very heart of a distinctively Christian conception of God!  (Again, dear reader, the answer is Yes -- that is a straight face you see on Dale in the YouTube video just linked to.)

So, it’s not just the Neo-Platonists, Aristotelians, and Scholastics who’ve gotten the Christian conception of God all wrong.  It’s Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants in general.  Indeed, it’s pretty much everyone, for two millennia now, except for a handful of Unitarians here and there.  Connect all the dots and it seems that it’s only contemporary theistic personalist analytic philosophers of religion with Unitarian leanings, specifically, who’ve at last attained a really philosophically serious understanding of God.   And if, after connecting them, you read between the lines that result, perhaps you’ll find that the group that’s really, really gotten this whole Christian theism thing finally worked out consists of…  well, pretty much just Dale Tuggy.  Which means, I guess, that the notion of Being Itself really is incompatible with Christian theism after all.  Q.E.D.

To hell, then, with what most Christians, past and present, have thought.  But never with what “most philosophers” think, if that means what “most contemporary analytic philosophers” think.  For Dale’s answer to my charge that he’s got a bad case of presentism is strenuously to object that that’s putting it just way too mildly.  I paraphrase; what he actually wrote is this:

Philosophers and intellectuals generally, in [the early modern] era, rejected the traditions of medieval philosophy as too deferential to authority, too unclear, and going nowhere.   Locke… with all the bitterness of one who was a student intellectually smothered by such masters… [speaks of their] “artificial ignorance and learned gibberish” [and] “obscurity”…

Analytic philosophers are the descendants of these early moderns who tried to reboot Western philosophy. To some extent, they succeeded. The era from about Hobbes to Kant was a golden age of philosophy. We’re in a greater golden age right now.

End quote.  Dale must have an unlimited line of credit at the First International Bank of Tendentious Philosophical Assertions.  At least I hope so; otherwise, at the rate he’s going, he’s going to have some metaphysical Chili Palmer breathing down his neck.  “Dale, look at me.  Let me tell you the way it is.  You keep tossin’ off these big conclusions without payin’ us the arguments you owe, Momo’s gonna send me to throw you down the stairs like I did Bear.  Might mess up your pretty little goatee…”

Dale’s clichéd description of Scholasticism might pass muster for the World Book Encyclopedia, but as an account of the actual historical facts it’s now considered rather dated even by many analytic philosophers.  First, as contemporary Scholastics often point out, the early moderns were reacting to a late and degenerate form of Scholasticism that had been corrupted by nominalism, rather than to the high Scholasticism of writers like Aquinas.  Second, it’s pretty much an open secret among historians of early modern philosophy that Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Co. don’t really give us a fair picture even of Scholasticism as they found it.  Anyone familiar with the work of writers like Dennis Des Chene, Walter Ott, Margaret Osler, Robert Pasnau, and Helen Hattab knows how sophisticated was the tradition the early moderns were reacting against, and how much of it survived in the thinking of the early moderns themselves. Third, it is a mistake to treat the Scholastic ideas the early moderns were reacting against as if they are a mere historical curiosity.  Recent metaphysics has seen, even outside the ranks of Thomists, a revival of interest in powers (e.g. George Molnar, Stephen Mumford, Nancy Cartwright, C.B. Martin, John Heil), natural teleology (e.g. Molnar, Paul Hoffman, John Hawthorne, Thomas Nagel), hylemorphism (e.g. Kit Fine, Kathrin Koslicki, Michael Rea, Mark Johnston), and other essentially Aristotelian and Scholastic ideas.

As for the work of the early moderns having ushered in a “golden age,” I would say that in fact it’s largely just riffs on the same mistakes made by Pre-Socratics -- warmed-over Parmenidean rationalism, Heraclitean sensism, Democritean atomism, and Sophist relativism -- which Plato, Aristotle, and their medieval followers had already refuted before the moderns put pen to paper.  The early modern philosophers’ bloated reputation has largely to do with the successes of the scientific revolution, to which their ideas are only contingently connected.  What they inaugurated was in reality a progressive degeneration of philosophical understanding, which has only in recent decades -- with the rise of bizarre metaphysical doctrines like eliminative materialism, grotesque “ethical” systems like consequentialism, and theological crudities like theistic personalism -- reached full putrescence.  Alasdair MacIntyre famously argued that modern philosophy created conceptual chaos in ethics by sundering key moral concepts from the context in which they had their natural home.  I have argued that the same thing is true in metaphysics -- that many of the “traditional” problems of philosophy as we know them today are in fact a product of the early moderns’ anti-Scholastic revolution, and are as intractable as they are only because few think to question the metaphysical presuppositions that generated them. 

This, by the way -- and to address Dale’s third point above -- is why I didn’t cite any early modern philosophers as representatives of classical theism.  It’s not that none of them was a classical theist -- I think a case could be made that writers like Descartes and Leibniz were, more or less, classical theists.  But their initially only partial abandonment of Scholasticism makes their views unstable -- they point backward to the systematic theological rigor of Scholasticism, but also forward to the decay that would culminate in the Humean and Kantian critiques of natural theology.  And some of the moderns clearly are theistic personalists; William Paley, with his lame “designer,” is a good example.  (For further Paley-bashing, go here, here, and here.)

Perhaps Dale will just shrug and dismiss all this as eccentric dissent from what “most philosophers” these days think.   But as Dale likes to say out of the other side of his mouth: “Who cares who’s in the majority?  Truth is what matters.”  (It’s nice to agree with Dale when I can!)

As for Dale’s assertion that contemporary analytic philosophy represents an even “greater golden age” than early modern philosophy -- where early modern philosophy no doubt surpassed, in Dale’s view, anything the ancients and medievals accomplished -- that not only fails the laugh test, it fails the ROFLMAO test.  Though I suppose if you seriously think Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas were committed to something akin to atheism, then it’s a cinch to convince yourself there’s someone in academic philosophy today remotely close to the stature of a Descartes or a Leibniz, let alone a Plato, Aristotle, or Aquinas.

Unlike the history of philosophy from Thales to Aquinas -- which, I would argue, is progressive and culminates in a body of genuine knowledge that preserves the insights, and avoids the errors, of what came before -- the history of philosophy since Ockham (grandfather of modern philosophy) is, I would argue, a history of dissolution and fragmentation, with contemporary academic philosophy in something like a Kuhnian crisis state.  It has no body of genuine metaphysical and moral knowledge to offer us (unless you count its dogmatic naturalism and its dogmatic and desiccated Rawlsian liberalism, which I assume Dale would not).  Its practitioners are often (by no means always, but often) unbelievably insular, seriously interacting only with the work of other contemporary analytic philosophers and having little knowledge of the history of philosophy, of continental philosophy, or of non-Western philosophy.  Their opinions about religion are typically as laughably ill-informed as they are confidently expressed.  And their mindset is often shaped by a vulgar careerism that is unchecked by forces of the sort that counteracted academic ambition in earlier stages in the history of philosophy (the autonomy afforded by aristocratic leisure in ancient philosophy, religion in medieval philosophy, independence from the academy in early modern philosophy). 

If contemporary analytic philosophers have anything to boast of, it is not their results but only their methods -- and those methods are pretty generic, comprising little more than clarity of expression, facility in logic, and rigorous argumentation.  These are indeed very real strengths, and analytic philosophers are right to prize them highly and to criticize those who do not do so.  But they are hardly original.  Indeed, there was another group of thinkers well-known for precisely their emphasis on these ideals.  They were called the Scholastics, and they were unjustly accused (by the early moderns, mind you) of hair-splitting and logic-chopping, just as analytic philosophers are.  Been there, done that, and did it better.