Narrative, Philosophy, and the History of Philosophy

The discussion on Faber's previous post has become quite interesting. I began another comment but it grew so gargantuan that I'm putting it here in a new post.

Commenter Anonymous writes:

As graduate student in political theory who has just begun following this site, I find myself nonplussed by the denigration of narrative here. To complain about its prevalence in pomo won't just do; it's NOT a venture solely confined to the work of Continental philosophers practicing genealogy, but a core part of the philosophical discipline. . . . So then if you want to vindicate Scotus and set the record straight, more than a corrective for each problematical narrative is needed: an alternative one needs to be advanced. Merely clarifying his thought each time it is maligned is insufficient. How did Scotus differ from Aquinas? How did this influence Ockham? What was it about the legacy of scholasticism that lead to its abandonment by the early moderns? What had these moderns internalized from it (e.g. nominalism/conceptualism, voluntarism, etc.)? How did these intellectual developments interplay with political and social developments (e.g. the rise of science, emerging commercialism, power struggles between Church and state, etc.)? Of course you cannot answer all of the questions given the focus of your work--though I would think with a philosopher and a historian on this sight, insight could be gleamed into at least one of them, if not a full answer--but that doesn't render these questions unimportant. Rather, these questions draw people toward these moments and thinkers. The exposure to the material from a historical vantage has lead me to consider Aquinas' work on his own terms, of which I have begun reading. Similarly, I plan to eventually read many of the other scholastics as well (after I learn Latin). The point is that if you want people to seriously consider scholastics and if you unfortunately don't care about historical narrative, then use narrative as a foil to draw them into reconsidering scholastic thought on its own terms. Otherwise, most people, as I once did, will look at your work and think of it as a morbid preoccupation with extinct theories, rather than high philosophy unparalleled by anything in the last five hundred years.

Now in a way this is all fair enough. I have a couple of points to make in response. First, I don't at all insist that narrative per se is simply bad. Indeed, narrative in the sense of the reduction of disparate events to an order which can be grasped as a whole is both salutary and necessary. What I object to is a historical narrative that prefers its plot to respecting or even bothering to identify the relevant facts.

A good narrative in the history of philosophy is something like Copleston's technique: "After A we will look at B. B's positions and arguments are x and y. They are related to A's in this way: here's how they are alike and here's how they differ. I think A's arguments are better for these reasons. B's arguments were adapted by C in this way. C used B's insights to improve on A while avoiding the weaknesses in B."

I also respect the method John Deely used in his history of medieval philosophy which I read recently, in which he uses the doctrine of signs as his Ariadne's thread to guide the reader through the period and providing a unifying factor to the "Latin Age" between Augustine and John of St Thomas as opposed to ancient and modern thought. I find this sort of technique reductive and it obviously leaves an enormous amount out, but at the same time it's a valid approach to finding an intelligibility in the thicket.

Here's a bad narrative: "Plato and Aristotle were real philosophers, the Stoics were sort of dumb but had some good ideas, the neoplatonists succumbed to the growing religious atmosphere of late antiquity, then the fundies took over. They hated reason and produced a dark age of a thousand years. Nothing interesting happened. Then Descartes was a light shining out of the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not, for they loved their angels on pinheads and their Inquisition and Crusades too much. Then real philosophy started. No, I haven't read any of the books from that millenium, but I certainly have heard of one or two."

Here's another bad narrative: "Medieval philosophy was a golden age of the synthesis of faith and reason in which man's natural and spiritual sides reached a harmony and equilibrium. It's a marvelous gothic arch leading up to the point of Thomism, the supreme achievement of human rationality. The five ways are the best things anyone has ever said about anything, they're right at the tip of the arch. After that point the arch goes back down, sinking into decadence, modernity, and heresy. The golden age thus lasted about twenty-five years, though it was recaptured occasionally by the better of Thomas' commentators. No, I haven't read any of Thomas' non-Dominican successors, but I've certainly read Anselm and have glanced at a few early 20th-century manuals."

The problem with the second two is not that they are narratives, although they do make for more gripping stories than the first two. The problem with them is that they are a) false, and b) produced with little or no concern with actually happened in the time whose story they purport to tell. What happened in philosophy in a given period is what people thought in that period, and unless you grasp that first your story is BS.

This leads me to my second point, which is that the wrong kinds of narrative lead to the instrumentalization of philosophy, which destroys it. All the questions Anonymous brings up are valid questions. But they're not the questions that Scotus deals with in his works. If your primary concern is how "intellectual developments interplay with political and social developments (e.g. the rise of science, emerging commercialism, power struggles between Church and state, etc.)", then, frankly, Scotus isn't for you. Because Scotus doesn't talk about and doesn't care about these things. When I finish writing this post I'm going to go read a 30-40 page question on the ontological status of relations. I may or may not write a blog post on it. This is because I'm interested in relations as a part of metaphysics, and so is Scotus, who has profound and interesting things to say on the matter. But if you don't care about metaphysics for its own sake, what are the chances you're going to slog through the 1,200 pages of the Metaphysics questions or the thousands of pages of the Ordinatio with a keen enough attention and interest to figure out what Scotus cares about and how he argues for his positions? Very, very low.

The Reformation as a historical event is very interesting, and enormously complicated, and had millions of causes of various kinds which can be adduced to explain one factor or another. There are of course political and economic and theological and demographic and linguistic and other elements to how it played out. But what Scotus is interested in is metaphysics, and using metaphysics to explicate the doctrines of the Catholic faith. That's pretty much it. (Yes, I'm being reductive myself here.) If you don't approach Scotus with that in mind first of all, you're going to misunderstand him. Because of what he's doing, the proper way to read him is to ask: What is he saying? Why does he think this? What is this argument? Is this argument any good? A narrative which doesn't do this first, as a way of establishing its ground, will fail to have any relationship to Scotus as he actually lived and thought. Now perhaps there is a way that Scotus' dense and complex and subtle web of thought could be related in a meaningful way to the nexus of causality of the Reformation. But it seems that most of the people who are willing to actually study him are less interested in that than in understanding the metaphysics of the trinity or the incarnation, i.e. the things Scotus himself was interested in.

So let's look at some of Anonymous' questions. "How did Scotus differ from Aquinas?" This question can largely be answered, and we've said a great deal about it on this blog. But it's necessary first to know what Aquinas said and what Scotus said, but also to know a lot of other things. Until fairly recently Scotus was systematically misread because ever reader forced him into a false dialogue with Aquinas, neglecting the fact that much of the time Scotus is unconcerned with Thomas and his interlocutors were other scholastics. The Thomocentric narratives that required all scholastic discourse to revolve around the concerns of the Common Doctor produced endless misconstrual of Scotus' thoughts and their motivations. You can't read Scotus by asking, first, "Is Scotus enough of a Thomist to be orthodox?" You have to ask, "What is the principle of individuation? Is this account of the divine ideas sensible? Do we really need an intermediate distinction between the real and the rational?"

"How did this influence Ockham?" It's still hard to say. We can relate much of Scotus to Ockham, but Ockham is also in dialogue with a lot of lesser-known figures. But, more importantly (to me), how many people wanting to know just what made Ockham into such a villain have actually read enough Ockham to figure out what he was doing? Do they even care? Why do they care so much about the etiology of something they're not really interested in? Moreover nebulous talk about "influence" is suspect to me. Everyone is influenced by everything they read and hear; Scotus was the biggest genius just before Ockham, so of course Ockham was influenced by him. Of course he addresses Scotus' arguments and distinctions, accepting or rejecting them in turn. But Ockham's nominalism was caused by Ockham's thoughts, and those are what have to be addressed. Scotus is responsible for them only insofar as Ockham thought what Scotus thought and because he got it from Scotus, and in order to evaluate this we have to understand what Ockham thought and what Scotus thought and compare - which means, again, caring about the actual issues they discussed prior to polishing our narrative. If we do this we will see that everything his enemies hate about Ockham is related to Scotus just insofar as Ockham came up with it by rejecting Scotus' most distinctive thoughts, which (granted) wouldn't have been possible without Scotus as a foil.

"What was it about the legacy of scholasticism that lead to its abandonment by the early moderns?" This one is pretty easy, I think. Scholasticism produced works and methods which became extremely complex and difficult and voluminous, to the extent that its tradition seemed frustrating and boring and pointless to those who did not share its driving concerns. So instead of arguing with it they mocked it and ditched it. Yes, there are political and cultural and ecclesiological factors, and yes, to the historian these are worth pursuing, but for us I think they are not germane. For instance, the resistance of many late scholastics to the new counter-Aristotelian physics, which set so many people against them, is in my opinion a relevant but not essential point.

But to return to the main issue. For a philosopher history is a subordinate science, to be instrumentalized in the search for wisdom, while philosophy itself exists for its own sake (in the natural order). People who value philosophy primarily (rather than subalternately) for its capacity to illumine history are, in the philosopher's opinion, misguided. People who neglect, ignore, or distort philosophical arguments, and thus the facts about the history of philosophy, for the sake of a broader (even if otherwise well-intentioned) historical narrative are pernicious and deadly to philosophy. If a non-philosopher wants to investigate the effect of a philosophical idea on historical events, well and good; although this is not the correct disposition towards philosophy simpliciter it is permissible secundum quid insofar as the historian's profession is also licit. But in order to be even a good historian, he must at this point - even if only temporarily - stop caring about history as much as he cares about philosophy, and become at least enough of a philosopher to understand the ideas and arguments in themselves, not as historical facts but as approaches to ahistorical truth, before applying them to his narrative.

In the same thread Commenter Mark writes,

I don't see how history of philosophy is itself (as history) necessary to doing philosophy. Can't someone be a philosopher without knowing much of anything about the history of philosophy?

My answer is that it it is possible to be a philosopher without knowing the history of philosophy, but it is not possible to be a good philosopher. The reasons are the same as those outlined in an early chapter of Aquinas' Summa contra gentiles: although philosophical truths are those which can be known through reason and common experience alone, the life of any given man is too short and his intelligence too weak to discover all naturally-knowable truths himself. The progress of human wisdom then must be cumulative. But since philosophical knowledge is not a collection of facts that can be simply learned, but a body of truths which must be thought through and intuited through insight and argumentation, every philosopher who wishes to progress beyond the most rudimentary stages has to recapitulate the history of philosophy in his own mind, by thinking through the thoughts of his predecessors.

If this post isn't long enough, here are some past posts on these and related topics, handily collected:

http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2011/04/education-liberal-arts-and-philosophy.html

http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2011/05/gilson-on-history-vs-history-of.html

http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2011/03/around-net.html

http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2011/01/pope.html

http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2010/05/sokolowski-on-ancient-philosophy.html

http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2009/05/thomism-as-protestantism.html

http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/2009/04/historiographical-fiction.html

Robert Barron on Univocity and Voluntarism

Fr. Robert Barron recently made the following comment on this blog post, in the comments of which there was some discussion of the link between univocity and voluntarism in Scotus.

I would like to respond to the charge that I “erred” in linking Scotus’s voluntarism to his univocal conception of being. There is indeed a strong connection between the two. Once God is construed as one being, however supreme, among many, then the metaphysical links that tie creatures to God are severed and therefore the relation between us and God is established primarily through will. To see the details of the argument, I’d recommend my book The Priority of Christ, but that’s the very real connection between voluntarism and a univocal conception of being.

Now, I have written on fr. Barron before, but since he is so influential in popular catholicsm I think his views need to be addressed again since it is clear he will continue to misrepresent Scotus' views by relying on postmodernist jargon that avoids dealing with Scotus' arguments. To see the effects of this view in action, simply read "Nick's" review of Fr. Barron's book mentioned in his quotation at google books.  Nick gives an extremely bad "narrative" (I put this in quotation marks because it is the sort of word these people like, even though it is inherently relativistic and only shows them to be compromised by the very "secular values" they so decry in Scotus), despite his having studied the book directly with the author.

So lets review Fr. Barron's The Priority of Christ, with special attention to the relation between univocity and voluntarism. First, some quotations.

(p.  12-13):

There have in recent years been numerous accounts of the etiology of modernity. Jurgen Habermas, Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Milbank, Colin Gunton, and Louis Dupre, among many others, have offered explanations of the transition from the premodern to the modern. I subscribe to the proposal that liberal modernity can best be seen as an energetic reaction to a particular and problemaitc version of nominalist Christianity. Early modernity saw itself as a salutary response to oppressive and obscurantist strains in Christian culture, but since it was reacting to a corruption of true Christianity, it itself became similarly distorted and exaggerated. As a result the two systems settled into a centuries-long and terribly unproductive warfare. Even when the two attempted a reconciliation (as in all forms of liberal Christianity in the past two centuries), the results were less than satisfactory, precisely because each party was itself a sort of caricature.

The trouble began with Duns Scotus's option for a univocal conception of being in contradistinction to Thomas Aquinas's analogical understanding. For Thomas, God, as the sheer act of to-be itself (ipsum esse subsistens), is that through which all creatures exist. What follows epistemologically from this metaphysical claim is that the meaning of "to-be," in reference to God and creatures, must be analogical, with God as primary analogue and created things as secondary. In accord with this intuitition, Aquinas maintained consistently throughout his career that God is inescapably mysterious to the human intellect, since our frame of reference remains the creaturely mode of existence, which bears only an analogical resemblance to the divine mode of being. We may say that God exists, but we're not quite sure what we mean when we say it; the "cash value" of the claim that God exists is that there is a finally mysterious source of the to-be of finite things.

In an effort to make the to-be of God more immediately intelligibile, Duns Scotus proposed a univocal conception of existence, according to which God and creatures belong to the same basic metaphysical category, the genus of being. Though God is infinite and therefore quantitatively superior to any creature or collectivity of creatures, there is nevertheless no qualitative difference, in the metaphysical sense, bewteen the supreme being, God, and finite beings. Whereas Aquinas insisted that God is categorizable in no genus whatsover, Scotus held that God and creatures do belong together to a logical category, that in a real sense, transcends and includes them. The implications of this shift are enormous and, to my mind, almost entirely negative. If the analogical conception of being is rejected, creatures are no longer seen as participating in the divine to-be; instead, God and creatures are appreciated as existing side by side, as beings of varying types and degrees of intensity. Furthermore, unanchored from their shared participation in God, no longer grounded in a common source, creatures lose their essential connectedness to one another. Isolated and self-contained individuals (God the supreme being and them any creatures) are now what is most basically real

.

Scotus's intuition was confirmed a generation later by his Franciscan successor William of Occam. Congruent with his nominalism, which denied ontological density to the unifying features of being, Occam held that there is nothing real outside of disconnected individual things (praeter illas partes absolutas nulla res est). As for Scotus so for Occam, God and creatures are set side by side, joined only through a convention of logic that assigns them to the category of "beings". A consequence of this conception is that God and finite things have to be rivals, since their individualities are contrastive and mutually exclusive. Just as a chair is itself precisely in the measure that it is no other creaturely thing, so God is himself only inasmuch as he stands over and against the world he has made, and vice versa. Whereas in Aquinas's participation metaphysics the created universe is constituted by its rapport with God, on Occam's reading it must realize itself through disassociation from a competitive supreme being. A further concomitant of this indivdualistic ontology is voluntarism. Since the metaphysically dense and natural link between God and creatures has been attenuated, any connection betwen the divine and the nondivine has to be through will. God's relation with his rational creatures is therefore legalistic and arbitrary. This understanding of divine power influenced Occam's conception of the human will as well. Finite freedom is, for him, absolute spontaneity, an action prorpted by nothing either interior or exterior to the subject. Accordingly, human power is a distant mirror of divine power: both are self-contained, capricious, absolute, and finally irrational. The most obvious practical consquence of this nominalist and voluntarist metaphysics is that divine and human freedom find themselves pitted against one another, God imposing himself arbitrarily on a necessarily reluctant and resentful humanity.

Both Martin Luther and John Calvin were formed according to the principales of late-medieval nominalism ...

[p. 193 repeats basically the same regarding univocity. Note that here the category that God and creatures allegedly share is a metaphysical one]

[p. 194]

"God" becomes but the collectivity of creatures considered as a totality. In this sense, modern pantheism is the logical fulfillment of Scotus' adoption of a univocal conception of being: God and the world can be spoken of univocally because there is finally no difference between them

.

[p. 202, following a quote from William James]

How like Scotus's claim that God and creatures are both beings, though the former is infinite and the latter finite, one the biggest part, the other smaller parts. God, in sum, is a being among others, capable of influencing lower relaitites without comporomising them, exisiting in the same universe as they and subject to the same metaphysical constraints.

Summary of Barron's position:
1. There are bad things that happened in the past that influence the present.
2. There is a popular narrative held by popular theologians that lays the blame for the clash of Christianity and modernity at Scotus' door.

Barron's statement of Scotus' position:

1. Scotus proposed a univocal conception of existence.
2. He did this to make God more intelligible.
3. On Scotus' view, God and creatures share the same metaphysical category, the genus of being.
4. God is infinite and quantitatively superior to creatures, but there is no qualitative difference between God and creatures "in the metaphysical sense".
5. Scotus held that God and creatures are contained in a logical category that transcends them.

Barrons's view of the consequences of Scotus' position:

1. If the analogical world-view is rejected, creatures no longer are seen as participating in the divine "to-be".
2. God and creatures are "appreciated" side by side, as beings among beings, differing only by degrees and intensity.
3. Once participation is gone, creatures are no longer connected to each other.
4. The "most basically real" becomes isolated and self-contained individuals.
5. As a result of their being individuals, God and creatures somehow become rivals.
6. Voluntarism: "Since the metaphysically dense and natural link between God and creatures has been attenuated, any connection betwen the divine and the nondivine has to be through will".  I'm not sure, but this "link" must be participation.
7. A laundry list of the usual alleged bad effects of voluntarism: capriciousness, problems with freedom, law, etc.

Contra Robert Barron:

Some general observations:

*Fr. Barron cites only pomo theologians, no primary sources; so in the end it is an argument from authority.
*Scotus, Aquinas, and Ockham aren't interested in "intuitions" but arguments.
*I'm not sure, but fr. Barron might be assuming that all the scholastics had a common, shared view on existence. But this is not the case, for Aquinas' views were quite idiosyncratic and controversial at the time.  Remember Scotus' comment from Ord. IV: "I know not that fiction that states that essence and existence are really distinct" or somesuch.
*For much of what I will say I rely on my previous posts in the fundamenta series wherein I quote and explain Scotus' views on univocity.

Against Barron's statement of Scotus' position:

(1). False. Scotus proposed a univocal concept of being, a concept which does not correspond to any external, extramental reality. As Richard Cross likes to say, it is a "vicious abstraction". See the fundamenta posts for the arguments that Scotus uses to establish this. He didn't just propose it, he thought he had arguments to support it.

(2). False.  Scotus did it to ensure that the arguments that theologians make about God don't commit the fallacy of equivocation. Scotus is quite up front about this in Ord. I d. 3.

(3.) False. Scotus says directly the opposite in Ord. I d. 8 q. 3 (ed. Vat. IV, ca. p. 200). A metaphysical category would be a real extramental category (Barron can't make up his mind whether God and creatures share a metaphysical or logical category).  But everyone since Aristotle agreed that being can't be a genus. Scotus also agreed with this.  Scotus thinks that if being were a genus that contained God and creatures divine simplicity would be compromised because God there would be a reality for the genus (being) and another reality for the specific difference (divine).

(4.) This one I don't understand. I suppose infinity was often thought of in quantitative terms, but in Scotus it is an intrinsic mode of the divine essence and he conceives of it (ie. infinity qua intrinsic mode) on the model of quality, which admits of degrees. But to say that in the metaphysical sense there is no qualitative difference between God and creatures is simply false.

(5). False. Scotus denies that God and creatures are both contained in a category. See above (1) and (3).

So there you have it. All of Fr. Barron's statements about Scotus' actual position are false.  Consequences are a nasty business, as they basically amount to character assassination by blaming Scotus for Ockham.  But we could just as easily blame Aquinas for Scotus, and therefore also for Ockham.  I will comment on some of the consequences.

Against Barron's "Consequences"

(1). Scotus never rejected analogy. As one can read in the fundamenta post on univocity, Scotus argues for a concept that is "not only analogical but univocal". So he accepts analogical concepts as well as univocal concepts. Also, Scotus never rejects participation.  And in any case, analogy is a doctrine about terms, while participation is a metaphysical doctrine. So while they may be connected, I don't think they are necessarily so.

(2). I don't know what "appreciated" means here. But yes, Scotus thinks God and creatures differ by degrees: infinite ones.

(3.) Scotus doesn't deny participation. Also, participation is in God, not in other creatures. Creatures are connected only insofar as they share the same form. I suppose one could say humans participate in the species-form of humanity.

(4). Um, but that's true. I don't know about the "isolated" part, but everything enjoying actual, extramental existence presumably is an individual (I'm not a platonist, I confess).

(5) Nonsense.

(6) This is what Fr. Barron's blog post that I quoted above was about. But since Barron already thinks that univocity makes God just a being among beings, it seems more plausible that we would have much greater access to and knowledge of God, and so we wouldn't have to rely purely on his will to know what to do.  But if this won't do, note that the claim seems to be about the loss of participation.  But I already pointed out, Scotus doesn't deny participation, nor does he deny analogy.
Conclusion:

Lee Faber's prescription for dealing with modern chaos in theology: develop a post-theological Christian theology. We can do this by
(1)  getting rid of inherently relativized terms such as "culture","value", "narrative", "genealogy", and so on, and talk about arguments.
(2) Reading primary sources.

Recent Publications on Petrus Thomae

an article:

G.R. Smith, "Bibliotheca Manuscripta Petri Thomae," in Bulletin de philosophie medievale 52 (2010), 161-200.

an edition:

Pere Tomas, Tractatus Brevis de Modis Distinctionum, ed. with English and Catalan translations by Cecilia Lopez and Josep Batalla with an introduction by Claus Andersen. Barcelona 2011.

For this edition, see the homepage for the series Bibliotheca Philosophorum Medii Aevi Cataloniae.

The edition is of what Smith, above, calls the "A" redaction of Peter Thomae's treatise. The "B" redaction was edited some time ago by E. Bos.

Recent Posts on Scotus

The Lex christianorum blog has recently had a series of posts on various aspects of Scotus' thought, mostly ethics.  Be sure to check them out.

On the formal distinction
Scotus the proto-existentialist
Synchronic contingency
Natural law

There are others as well.

Update:

The will, free and natural
Primacy of the will
On Praxis

More on the Duns Scotus Movie

Here.  Apparently Ignatius press will start selling the film in October.

Buridan contra Fundamentalism and Postmodernism

The meaning of a word has never obliged us [to construe words only in their proper senses, and to concede or deny propositions only according to what is required by their proper senses]. On the contrary, sometimes we must construe words their proper senses, and sometimes in improper senses, as in parabolic or ironic [expressions], or in other ways even more removed from the proper senses. For example, if we read the books of learned authors such as Aristotle or Porphyry, we must construe their words according to the senses those authors have imposed upon them, even if these are improper senses. And so we must concede that, strictly speaking, those words are true because they are true as construed in those senses. But even so, we must say that they have been imposed in such senses, and that if they had been imposed in their proper senses, they would be false. And if people reading the books of learned authors were to construe their words differently than they believe them to have been imposed by their authors, they would be insolent and cantankerous, and unworthy to study or read the books of the philosophers. In the same way, we must say that every word of the Bible and the Gospels is strictly speaking true, and we must construe these words in the senses in which they have been imposed and according to which they are true. And those who do otherwise are mistaken, as well as being blasphemers, or perhaps even heretics. But even so, we can correctly state in connection with many of these words that they are false, if imposed and construed in their proper senses.

The passage is from Buridan's Questions on Porphyry's Isagoge, and the translation is lightly adapted from Jack Zupko's book John Buridan (pages 18-19), which I intend to mine for my next post as well. I find the passage noteworthy for two reasons. First, it shows that the right relationship between doctrinal or biblical formulations and scientific was not worked out under pressure of advancing modernity and the onslaught of independent empirical science, but by philosophy when science was still in its nascent stages and both philosophy and science were flourishing under the purview of the undivided Catholic university. The whole Galileo issue could have been resolved easily by reference to Buridan here (or one might add to any number of other doctors); the reasons it wasn't were cultural, political, and personal, rather than because the Catholic Church was stuck in "dark ages" thinking. The thinking of the high middle ages was in general much more sane, moderate, and temperate than most of that emanating from the post-Reformation battles.

The second thing that strikes me about this passage is its implicit condemnation of much of modern and postmodern academia, of which one besetting sin is its fascination with mining old texts in the service of contemporary "relevance." We can't read an old book properly unless we care about the same things its author cared about, but with our presentist solipsism, narrow-mindedness, and progressive triumphalism, scholars (as much as Hollywood screenwriters) are constantly tempted to read them primarily in the light of our own political, cultural, or ideological concerns. The other day I reread Tolkien's classic lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, which makes the same point, namely that Old English scholars had up until his day used the poem as a data mine for their own interests, without caring about what the poet cared about. The result was that the poem was devalued as scholars pined after the poems they wished had been written instead. Buridan's passage reminds me that you're not going to read Beowulf correctly if you think monsters are stupid and a waste of time, no matter how much you're interested in what it tells you about the Ingeld legend, Scyld Sheafing, or Geatish architecture. And it seems to me that classicists, medievalists, philosophers, scholars of all stripes fall prey to this data-mining temptation across the board.

Henry of Ghent on Aquinas and Existence

For Thomists the "real distinction" between essence and existence is a bedrock principle of metaphysics. Often (e.g. Jacques Maritain in Preface to Metaphysics et al.) a Thomist will speak as though the real distinction is one of the first and most obvious metaphysical truths that can be known. It's one of the principal "Thomistic Theses" and St Thomas uses it constantly, for instance here, in Summa Theologiae I.104.1 (For the Latin see the Logic Museum):

Therefore as the becoming of a thing cannot continue when that action of the agent ceases which causes the "becoming" of the effect: so neither can the "being" of a thing continue after that action of the agent has ceased, which is the cause of the effect not only in "becoming" but also in "being." This is why hot water retains heat after the cessation of the fire's action; while, on the contrary, the air does not continue to be lit up, even for a moment, when the sun ceases to act upon it, because water is a matter susceptive of the fire's heat in the same way as it exists in the fire. Wherefore if it were to be reduced to the perfect form of fire, it would retain that form always; whereas if it has the form of fire imperfectly and inchoately, the heat will remain for a time only, by reason of the imperfect participation of the principle of heat. On the other hand, air is not of such a nature as to receive light in the same way as it exists in the sun, which is the principle of light. Therefore, since it has not root in the air, the light ceases with the action of the sun.

Now every creature may be compared to God, as the air is to the sun which enlightens it. For as the sun possesses light by its nature, and as the air is enlightened by sharing the sun's nature; so God alone is Being in virtue of His own Essence, since His Essence is His existence; whereas every creature has being by participation, so that its essence is not its existence. Therefore, as Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. iv, 12): "If the ruling power of God were withdrawn from His creatures, their nature would at once cease, and all nature would collapse." In the same work (Gen. ad lit. viii, 12) he says: "As the air becomes light by the presence of the sun, so is man enlightened by the presence of God, and in His absence returns at once to darkness."

Henry of Ghent paraphrases this passage in his Quodlibet I q.9, on whether a creature's essence is its being (my translation):

Those who say that in creatures the essence of a creature is one thing and its being another thing think that a creature participates in being. Whence they say that creatures are related to God as air to the sun illuminating it, for as the sun which shines by its nature, so that it is nothing other than light itself, so God has being through his nature and essence, for he is nothing other than being. And as air is of itself obscure, and of its nature is not altogether a participant in light unless it be illumined by the sun, participating through this light from the sun, so a creature of itself and of its essence does not have the character of being, but is in the darkness of nonentity, unless it be lightened by God and the being in which it participates be given to it.

After noting a different sense in which we might understand "participation", Henry goes on:

The first way of understanding the participation of a creature in being is mistaken; it is not an understanding but a phantastical imagination. For the essence of a creature should not be imagined like the air indifferent to obscurity and luminosity, but like a certain ray in itself apt to subsist, produced by the sun, not by the necessity of nature but by free will. Whence, if the sun by free will could produce a subsistent ray, that ray, inasmuch as its own nature is concerned, would be indifferent to being and non-being, and of itself would be a certain kind of non-being.

Henry goes on to explain the reason for the correction of St Thomas' image. In the image of the air being illumined by the sun the nature of the air is something different from the nature of the light or its illumination, whereas in a luminous body and the ray of light the nature of light is the same, though one light is dependent on and participates in the other. The ray which reaches our eye is not the same as the sun but is its similitude, as the creature is the similitude of God - but the air is not the similitude of the sun at all. (This seems to me to agree with the way Thomas elsewhere characterizes the essence of creatures as modes of imitability of the divine essence.) Thomas' image of the air's illumination is an image of one sort of thing being poured into another sort of thing to make it actual in a certain way, but for Henry (and, I might add, the Franciscan tradition in general along with him) existence can't be understood as a different sort of thing than the existing nature and added to it in order that it can be.

Of course, whether Henry's own account of the relation of essence and existence in terms of his intentional distinction is ultimately successful is another matter.

Self-Identity, Infinite Regress

Identity is unity or union; either because the things which are said to be the same are plural in their being, and yet are called the same insofar as they agree in some one factor; or because they are one in their being, but the intellect treats them as though they are plural in order to think a relation. For a relation can only be thought to obtain between two extremes, as when something is said to be the same as itself; for then the intellect treats what is one in reality as though it were two; otherwise it could not designate a relation of something to itself. Wherefore it is clear that if a relation always requires two extremes, and in relations of this sort there are not two extremes in reality but only in the mind, the relation of identity is not a real relation but only a relation of reason . . . for if the relation of identity were some thing besides that which is called the same, that thing which is a relation, since it is the same as itself, for the same reason would have another relation which would be identical with itself, and on to infinity. But it is impossible to go to infinity in things. But in matters of the intellect nothing prohibits it. For when the intellect reflects on its acts it understands that it understands, and it can understand this as well, and so on to infinity.

--St Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics, Lib.V, lectio XI, par.912, my translation

A couple of thoughts about this passage. First, it's a good example of the fact that some of the "problems" that modern philosophy finds the most challenging and fascinating, such as the nature of self-identity, are for the classical and scholastic mind non-starters (the converse is also true, of course). In fact this disconnect between what modern thinkers find interesting or worth spilling gallons of ink on and what I find interesting and worth reading and thinking about is part of what makes reading much modern philosophy so difficult for me (it's rather like my reluctance to read contemporary fiction rather than classical and medieval poetry). Not only are modern philosophers frequently preoccupied with issues that to the classical mind seem rooted in silly misunderstandings, but those - to us - misunderstandings also seem to breed contempt for the kinds of thinking that I and the scholastics do find worthwhile. In any case, Aquinas is not alone here in finding nothing mysterious or profound about identity, since it's a mere relation of reason: what's difficult is understanding the being and the essence of a thing, not how that being is the same as itself. But, as I've claimed on this blog before, it seems to me that a lot of the absurdities of modern philosophers stem ultimately from an inability to tell the difference between real being and beings of reason.

A second, related, thought is that Thomas' point here not only makes use of an infinite regress argument, but is important for understanding infinite regress arguments in general. Anyone who's read much of the modern literature on arguments for the existence of God will know that the denial of the impossibility of an infinite regress is a favorite way for moderns to wiggle out of them. St Thomas' comments suggest that the reason an infinite regress, so obviously absurd to the scholastics, is unproblematic to the moderns, is (again) because moderns are not used to carefully distinguishing between real relations and relations of reason. And this is unsurprising, given that so much modern philosophy (and "science"), being born of Cartesian mathematicism, has been accustomed to axiomatically assuming that mathematical techniques are paradigmatic for philosophical (and "scientific") knowledge. But mathematical objects are indifferently divided between purified (i.e. denuded of what the Thomists always call material conditions) formal abstractions from experience and mere relations of reason, which happily sit on the number line together. Mathematics itself doesn't care about the distinction, but metaphysics must.

I believe this thought is suggested by Thomas here but it jumped out at me because it reminded me of a passage in John Deely's recent Medieval Philosophy Redefined, which I read a couple of months ago (the following is from page 268):

This contrast between relations in the physical order which depend upon actual characteristics of actual individuals (upon "subjective accidents of substances" in Aristotle's terms) and relations in the objective order which are not tied to actual subjective characteristics but may be founded upon whatever other relations happen to exist within a given cognition was the reason why Aristotle, and the Latin logicians after him, rejected arguments which led to an infinite regress. An infinite regress is actually possible only in the mind, because only in the mind can relations be founded upon relations. So any argument that involves an actual infinite regress, to the extent that it involves one, is an argument that has lost touch with the order of physical being as something to be explained through proper causes. For proper causes are found only within the physical interactions of finite substances, and these, as finite, are always determinate within the order of moved movers. . . .

Deely gives a further reference to his book The Human Use of Signs, which I have not read. In any case it's interesting to note that modern thinkers so often take the rejection of infinite regress as an arbitrary ad hoc principle whose only purpose is to force one to accept a First Cause, when the scholastics themselves not only see it as completely necessary and self-evident but also use it constantly in a host of nontheological contexts.

Grave Poems

There's a grave for March,
one for Gwythur,
another for Gwgawn Redsword...

The grave of Arthur is a mystery.

From "Grave Poems" in the Black Book of Carmarthen (trans. M. Pennar, p.104).

Aureola

In his Quodlibet II.12, Henry of Ghent was asked whether someone could obtain the halo given to Doctors in heaven if they were worthy to become professors of theology but never actually received a position.

No, it seems, for the judgment of the Church Triumphant conforms to the judgment of the Church Militant. If the Church on earth therefore doesn't see fit to honor a scholar with the rank of master, for which the halo specially belonging to Doctors is merited, neither will the Church in heaven.

Henry disagrees with this. One merits a halo in heaven (as one merits anything) on account of one's acts, not on account of public recognition of those acts or status. So a virgin will receive the halo of virginity even if her virtue is never recognized or lauded; similarly then so can someone who teaches and preaches in order to lead others to eternal life by the way of truth merit the halo of the Doctors.

Henry notes that it's not enough merely to wish to teach, a positive activity is required for merit; if one is impeded from teaching by one's locality or lack of opportunity one may receive the essential reward for one's good will, but not merit the halo. But if a qualified and worthy teacher who teaches well is not given a professorship [magisterium], this is an error on the part of the appointing body.

--------

I have to say that I find this quaestiuncula strangely comforting and cheering, as I hope others will who may, like me, doubt whether they can reasonably hope to be granted tenure by any other university than that whose gates St Peter guards, or wonder what college might accept us onto their permanent faculty besides that which resides in Dante's Heaven of the Sun.

Notes on Individuation

After I ranted a bit in a personal exchange Faber suggested that I write up a bit on individuation. First a quick recap: here of course Faber reproduced a bit of Scotus on whether a relation can individuate. "Don Paco" of the blog Ite ad Thomam linked to it here, where commenter Aquinas 3000 asked what he thought of it. Don Paco replies,

I hold the Thomistic view: "The principle of individuation, i.e., of numerical distinction of one individual from another with the same specific nature, is matter designated by quantity. Thus in pure spirits there cannot be more than individual in the same specific nature." (Thesis 11, from the 24 Thomistic Theses).

So the soul is individuated through its body. This is the case, even when the soul no longer informs its body body: even then, this soul is still the soul (form) of that body (matter) and of no other.

On Edward Feser's blog Aquinas3000 puts the position this way:

The soul still has a relation to the body as it is the soul of this particular body. It also has its own separate act of esse. The matter individuates it as this particular human being. Once it is separate from the body it is no longer a human being as such, since this refers to the composite. It is an incomplete substance that is capable of subsisting due to its spiritual character that has a relation to this particular body i.e it is the soul of this body.

Some comments later our own Lee Faber replies:

So immaterial human souls have a different principle of individuation out of the body than in the body? So really for Thomas there are lots of principles. At one time it's matter, at another time it's a relation. But a relation requires two fundamenta. How can there be a relation to a non existent (the body)? All you've got is one term and a relation to nowheresville.

First of all I want to clear up the matter of the foundations of relations. Faber's remark, and Scotus' comment reproduced in the first post just cited, "every relative form presupposes something absolute in which it is founded," needs to be qualified. There can be a real relation with one nonexistent foundation, in the case of opinion, memory, anticipation, understanding, will, etc, regarding a non-existent, no-longer-existent, or not-yet-existent object. That is, there can be a real relation between something with subsistent (subjective) being - the mind - and something with merely objective being - the object which exists only in thought and not in itself. However, that's not really relevant to the present case.

In my view, which is the Scotist view, the Thomist account of individuation is involved in insuperable difficulties, which the case of the separated soul merely highlights. Consider the fact that the human body, upon decomposition, no longer exists, while ex hypothesi the human soul continues to exist apart from the body. The matter does not cease to exist, in the sense that prime matter is never naturally created or destroyed according to the principle of the conservation of energy; but individual bodies certainly do cease to exist. This flesh, this blood, these bones, these ashes, this carbon and oxygen, these electrons etc., can all dissembled into their components, be converted to energy and dissipated, and enter into composition with other matter and assume new forms and become new individual substances. This happens all the time. So "this body," the human body that the separated human soul once informed, ceases to exist. As Faber points out, the principle of individuation for an existing concrete substance cannot be something nonexistent, since no non-being can be the real principle of a being. But upon the decomposition of the body, "this" body no longer exists. According to the Thomists, therefore, the separated soul is individuated by something non-existent. But this is impossible, ergo etc.

Perhaps, however, the Thomists do not mean that the soul is individuated by this human body, but by the "signate matter" which individuated the body. So upon the destruction of the body, the "same" matter continues to exist, and the soul is individuated by its relation to this particular bit or chunk or amount of matter which, if it were informing it, would be its body. Sadly, however, this is no better. For the same quantity of matter, when it loses the form of "this" body, takes on some new form. It then becomes a new substance, "this(2)" body, which is numerically distinct from the first "this(1)" body. (Of course what really happens, and which I think strengthens the Scotist case, is that this quantity of matter enters into composition with an indefinite number of new bodies, but talking about it this way is simpler and clearer.) Then, according to the Thomists, this signate matter "this(0)" is the principle of individuation of "this(2)" body; but the principle of individuation for this soul "this(3)" is its relation to "this(1)" body, which is grounded in "this(0)" matter as well. So "this(0)" is the principle of individuation of both "this(2)" and "this(3)", through the latter's relation to the now-nonexistent "this(1)". This sure seems to imply that "this(2)" and "this(3)" are numerically identical, since they share a numerically identical concrete constitutive principle. This is, as a good scholastic would say, inconveniens.

However, a more fundamental objection to the Thomist account arises when we consider the famous Ship of Theseus problem. Any living organic substance, like a constantly repaired ship of Theseus, is constantly excreting old and absorbing new matter. They say - I don't know with how much truth - that we replace all our cells something like every seven years. (In any case particular quantities of matter are exchanged with my environment with every breath, effort, drink, bite, and trip to the restroom.) In that case every seven years all my proximate matter is replaced, and thus of course all my signate prime matter is replaced. But I am the same individual and my body is the same body as it was when I was an infant. Therefore signate matter is not the principle of individuation for my body. Are we really supposed to accept on anyone's authority, even that of a great saint such as St Thomas, that I only remain myself because somehow my body never excretes the little initial collection of atoms making up the chromosomal strings of the sperm and the egg that joined in my conception, and that that self same core of signate matter constitutes my individuality? The notion is absurd. What if that little core were surgically extracted? Clearly I would remain myself. The truth of the matter is that the continuity of the individual existence of any body is insured not by continuous possession of any given bit of matter, or of the whole quantity of its matter, but by the identity and continuity of its form. This is the case even for inanimate bodies, so that souls need not come into it at all. A lake is not individuated by its water; it remains the same lake even though fresh water is continually trickling in and out.

If you want to read more about individuation, the best Scotus texts are in Book VII of the Quaestiones Metaphysicae and in Book II, Dist. III of the Ordinatio, in both of which he discusses a vast range of possible positions and arguments. The best and most comprehensive secondary source is Individuation in Scholasticism, edited by Jorge Gracia. I haven't read all of the latter, I have to admit, despite meaning to get to it for some years now.

Scotus on whether Relations Individuate

On the Thomistic view of individuation, matter is the individuating factor (or "signate" quantified matter depending on what work of Aquinas you happen to be reading).  But this leaves a problem for Thomists in the case of human souls, which are supposed to subsist after death.  For there is no matter remaining at all (Aquinas famously rejects spiritual matter). Consequently, we should expect subsistent human souls to be universals, or perhaps to be absorbed in the common nature of humanity (... but Aquinas thinks common natures have no being or unity...). Not so fast says the Thomist (or, if you prefer, the A-T theorist; this subject recently came up on Feser's blog), the soul still has a relation to its body. It is this relation that keeps the soul a particular (other Thomists have told me that the soul is individuated at the instant of its creation and just stays that way).  Scotus rejects this line of thought in the passage I have translated below.  This question is something of an embarrassment for Scotists of the strict observance (including the editors), for Scotus endorses spiritual matter (that old foolish doctrine that Thomas allegedly refuted for all time). Well, sort of. The following quote is labeled (without evidence) as "ad mentem Guilelmi de la Mare". For details on Scotus' views on spiritual matter (for example, who actually wrote the following section), see our co-blogger Michael's dissertation.

Duns Scotus, Quaestiones de anima, q. 15 n. 10-(Opera Philosophica V, 131-2):

I respond that probably [probabiliter] it can be said that there is matter in the soul, and this according to the Philosopher and those who posit the contrary. One [argument] is that the plurality of individuals in one species requires matter in those individuals, just as is clear from XII Metaphysics, where it is said " that there are not many in the same species moving heaven, because the first does not have matter." This is also clear from diverse [thinkers] positing matter to be the principle of individuation; but in the species of the rational soul there are many individuals, also when it is separated from the body; therefore, etc.

You might say, just as the contrary [party] does, that the soul has matter which it perfects or is made apt to perfect, namely the body. And by reason of the aptitude for diverse perfectible bodies, the [separated soul] can be plurified, not however does it have matter from which it is made.

Against them:

The soul does not exist on account of the body, but rather contrariwise; therefore neither is the distinction nor plurality of souls on account of the distinction of bodies, but rather contrariwise. Whence the Commentator VII Metaphysics says that the members of a lion differ from the members of a deer, because their souls differ; and not contrariwise.

Again, with the foundation or term of a relation destroyed, there is no relation; but that inclination or aptitude to the body is a certain relation; therefore, with the body destroyed after death, there is no inclination of the soul to the body.

The argument is confirmed: because there is no real relation of being to non-being, for relatives are simultaneous in nature; the soul is separated, not however the body which it informs; therefore, etc.

Again, if the distinction of souls is from the side of bodies only, God cannot create two souls without bodies; because there would not be distinguished by bodies, nor also by an inclination to a body; therefore, etc.

Again, every relative form presupposes something absolute in which it is founded; but that inclination to the body is a certain relative form founded in the essence of the soul which is so inclined; therefore the essence of the soul is prior to that inclination; the prior however is not distinguished by the posterior just as neither is it constituted by it, but rather contrariwise; therefore, etc.

Again, that inclination is not of the essence of the soul, because the soul is an absolute nature in itself; therefore it can be understood by an essential understanding [?? intellectu essentiali] without such an inclination, and consequently one is distinguished from another without an inclination to diverse bodies.

Again, because the soul is a 'this', therefore it has such an inclination to this body, not contrariwise; therefore, etc.

Edith Stein, Essential Being, and Henry of Ghent

I was rather surprised last weekend to receive yet a third issue of the ACPQ in as many weeks (this is the one with Feser's article). I was even more surprised by the final article of the issue.  I reproduce the abstract:

"Edith Stein and Medieval Metaphysics", Victor Salas Jr.

This essay considers Edith Stein's account of "essential being" and finds therein a point of continuity with medieval metaphysics. Scholarly attention has already been given to this feature of Stein's metaphysics; it has been argued that "essential being", while serving as a crucial point of distinction between Stein and Thomas Aquinas's own metaphysics, functions as a point of similarity between Stein and Duns Scotus. However, I argue that, while there are certainly many points of congruence between Stein and Scotus on the topic of essential being, the position that Stein advances comes much closer to Henry of Ghent's doctrine of esse essentiae. Fiinally, I show that the consequence of her adopting a position so similar to Henry of Ghent is that it opens stein to a number of criticisms raised by Scotus himself against esse essentiae.

I didn't read the article, though it did look fairly serious and scholarly. He cited the appropriate editions, etc., and showed himself to know about medieval thought in his discussion of Scotus, Godfrey and Henry. It is just a rather surprising revisionist project to adopt. But I suppose in the catholic world, Stein is a hot commodity right now (I seem to be constantly seeing announcements for conferences about her), so I suppose it makes sense.  Her indebtedness to Scotus sometimes went off the rails, however. A cursory glance at her From Finite to Essential being reveals a reliance on spurious material she believed to be by Scotus (the de rerum principio). Consequently, she defended spiritual matter (which should make my co-blogger Michael happy).

All in all, itt was a nice surprise to see an article in the ACPQ which took Scotus seriously, rather than assigning him boogey-man status as is normally the case.  I guess I could try my hand a being relevant as well: an essay about Lonergan's criticism of Scotus' formal distinction showing that Lonergan confuses Henry's intentional distinction with Scotus' formal distinction. Hmm...

Another item which caught my interest was an essay by David Schindler about Aquinas, Balthasar, and the Transcendentals. On p. 338 he claims that "This  continuity within dissimilarity, or unity in every greater difference, is what the fourth Lateran Council defined as the essence of analogy."  His emphasis. But of course this is ludicrous. The text is found in the Council's repudiation of the doctrine of Joachim of Fiore, and the quote in full is: "...quia inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo notari, quin inter eos major sit dissimilitudo notanda."  This has on the surface nothing to do with the analogy of being, and certainly wasn't conceived as a definition of it.  This misuse of the council's phrase is common among Thomists, however, though I thought this sort of thing had gone out of fashion. Schindler himself makes no more of this than what I have quoted, but the standard procedure among polemicists such as Garrigou-Lagrange was to maintain that Scotus violated every conciliar decree ever promulgated, and this text was one of their favorites. So it look's like we have the ghosts of the 60's still present.

Reflections on the 'Resurrection' of Medieval Philosophy

Here.  The comment about the "stifling" atmosphere that Catholic colleges create for the study of medieval philosophy made me laugh. Catholic colleges aren't interested in medieval philosophy any more than analytic philosophy departments.  They just need an in-house pet Thomist that they can point to when the Magisterium comes a knockin'.

Popularity

When I logged into the blog today a window popped up with a statement to the effect of "It looks like your blog is popular! Why not Monetize!" I find the idea that The Smithy is getting popular somewhat dubious as our all time highs this spring were just around a 100 hits a day, and have recently plummeted to a mere 50. But, anyway, thanks for reading.