Reading list for process metaphysics

The following is a list of books that should be very helpful for anyone interested in learning more about process metaphysics:

The ultimate authors behind process metaphysics are Whitehead and Hartshorne, but anyone who wants to understand the position in more depth will require some background. One should start with the British empiricists:

Thomas Hobbes: Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, On the Citizen, and Leviathan
John Locke: Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Second Treatise of Government
George Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues
David Hume: Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Treatise of Human Nature, Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and Selected Essays

The next important figure in epistemology and metaphysics is Immanuel Kant, but in order to understand him one must have read the major works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Discourses, The Social Contract, and Émile

Immanuel Kant:
Critique of Pure Reason
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Practical Reason, and Metaphysics of Morals, which can be found together in Practical Philosophy
Critique of Judgment
Religion Within the Boundaries of Reason Alone in Religion and Rational Theology

Then to three more British authors:
Adam Smith: Theory of Moral Sentiments
Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France and A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species

Then back to Germany:
Arthur Schopenhauer: Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and The World as Will and Representation (Volume 1 and Volume 2)
Friedrich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morals, which can be found in Basic Writings of Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which can be found in The Portable Nietzsche; and The Will to Power
(One's understanding of Nietzsche is likely to be enhanced by reading Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures)

Now to America and the pragmatist movement:
Charles Sanders Peirce: The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings (1867-1893 and 1893-1913)
William James: Writings 1902-1910
John Dewey: Experience and Nature

And finally to the heart of the matter. Alfred North Whitehead's thought is very difficult to access because his writing can be very obscure. I recommend building one's way up to his magnum opus Process and Reality slowly:

Begin with Modes of Thought.
Then move to Donald Sherburne's A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality. This book takes about 40% of the original text and rearranges it into a much more linear, accessible style, with explanatory introductions to the various sections.
At this point you should be ready for Process and Reality.
Finish with Adventures of Ideas and Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect

Charles Hartshorne's work builds on the work of Peirce and Whitehead:
The Divine Relativity describes the "neoclassical" conception of God in contrast to the classical conception.
Insights and Oversights of the Great Thinkers surveys Western philosophy, highlighting some tendencies away from the dominant substance metaphysics toward a process metaphysics.
Creativity in American Philosophy is a supplement to Insights focusing on American philosophy.
Philosophers Speak of God is an anthology of selections from the works of philosophers discussed in Insights.
Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes: the title speaks for itself.
Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method is a more systematic work.
Anselm's Discovery provides Hartshorne's proof of the existence of God, which is a modified form of Anselm's ontological proof.
The Zero Fallacy is a collection of essays from late in Hartshorne's life.

Then if one is interested in a political theory complementary to this evolutionary, processualist metaphysics, see the work of Friedrich Hayek:
The Constitution of Liberty
Law, Legislation, and Liberty (Vol. 1, Vol. 2, and Vol. 3)

Thoughts from a lifetime ago

Below are the texts of papers that I wrote in college and graduate school many years ago. I publish them here at the request of a fellow blogger. This post will serve as a main menu for the various papers.

The following papers represent my thinking when I was a Christian—or when I was in the process of becoming one:

Duty to God: Kierkegaard vs. Kant
Radical Monotheism and the Political Theory of Calvin's Institutes
Free Will and Predestination
Overcoming Violence, Gaining True Freedom and Love
Religious Silence
Erasmus on the Christian Life
Black Hole Soul
The God of Science
Progress in Knowledge Requires Moderation

And these three papers represent my philosophical thinking post-Christianity:

Locke and Leibniz on Revelation
Whitehead on Experience and Consciousness
Whitehead: Defending Brentano Against the Criticisms of Heretical Disciples

Footnotes do not work properly in certain versions of Internet Explorer. They do work in Firefox.

Locke and Leibniz on Revelation

This paper considers the consistency of Locke’s conception of revelation with the rest of his epistemological system. Finding the conception of revelation to be inconsistent with the larger system, we turn to consider the system itself and its inherent problems. Identifying the causal nature of knowledge as a primary problem with Locke’s theory, we turn to a philosophical system that does not involve any causal interactions among substances, Leibniz’s theory of monads, and we sketch an argument for the reasonableness of this system. The system is not only more internally coherent than Locke’s, but it also has the benefit of allowing for the possibility of knowledge of God.

Locke defines revelation, in distinction from reason, as knowledge accepted on the authority of a source external to one’s own mind, specifically the authority of God. (Locke, 689). Revelation is necessary because human minds do not have the capacity to acquire on their own certain important truths, particularly ethical truths and the truths on which ethics are based, such as resurrection to a future state of reward or punishment for one’s obedience to or deviation from the moral law. (id., 352) Revelation is distinct from reason, but it is not opposed to it. In fact, faith in any particular revelation is justified only by reason’s determination of the authenticity of the divine source. (id., 691) Rather than discovering the truth itself on its own, reason first accredits some external source as genuinely divine and then accepts whatever that source says, as long as it does not conflict with reason.

This position is not tenable because it is not possible within Locke’s epistemological framework to identify God as the source of any particular phenomenal event. All human knowledge, according to Locke, is derived from sensation and/or from reflection upon the internal operations of the mind. (id., 104). From the simple ideas of sensation and reflection we humans construct complex ideas of substances, but we are not capable of developing any clear ideas of the essences of substances because we have no way to ascertain the necessary relations between the various qualities of substances. (id., 444, 544). No matter how many times we may observe, for example, certain sensory qualities to be found together in gold, we have no way to be certain that we will never find another substance in the future that has several of the qualities of gold but mixed with other foreign qualities. Nor, given gold and the qualities that we have heretofore observed in it, are we able to determine any necessary relation to any undiscovered qualities in this familiar substance. Gold might have some surprises for us when placed under conditions previously unobserved.

So it is with God and any self-proclaimed revelation from him. Because we have no clear idea of essences but only of their effects upon us, i.e. the ideas that they produce in our minds, we have no way of knowing with any degree of certainty whether any particular phenomenal event is the product of God or of some other source. Though in all hitherto observed cases human beings once dead have stayed dead forever, we have no way of knowing that death is necessarily permanent. Locke acknowledges the possibility of the existence of intellectual beings radically different from ourselves (id., 555), and therefore potentially as superior to us humans as we are to brute animals. He cannot deny the possibility that vastly superior intellects could learn to use subtle powers to manipulate the minute particles of matter in such a way so as to reconstitute a deceased human being to his former state of vitality. Nor could he deny the possibility that such beings could act as deceptive demons, toying with our deepest hopes out of no more elevated a motive than mischief or boredom. The greatest intellects of our species are as susceptible to such motives as are the weakest of mind, if not more so.

Nor is this an argument simply that miracles are not a valid demonstration of the identity of the deity. In speaking of original revelation Locke discusses the possibility of a revelation through means other than the conventionally-accepted five senses, as in St. Paul’s extraordinary experience. (id., 690). Locke’s point was that such an original revelation could not translate into a traditional revelation since such super-sensory experiences cannot be communicated by words, which represent only the forms of sensation common to most human beings. But we may note here that, in Locke’s epistemology, even such extraordinary sensations as St. Paul or any mystic might have had, provide knowledge only of some external source as their cause; they cannot provide knowledge of the essence of that cause. Ignorant as we are the relationship between the minute particles of matter of which we are composed and the sensations that their interactions produce in our minds, we are incapable of denying the possibilities (1) that there exist radically different kinds of sensations from those to which we are accustomed, (2) that we might actually be capable of experiencing such sensations if placed in extraordinary circumstances, or (3) that there exist beings superior to us but inferior to God who might be capable of manipulating our bodies in such a way so as to produce these novel sensations in us.

Thus on Locke’s own terms, no kind of sensation can provide us with certain knowledge that its source is divine, and therefore revelation is impossible. But one might argue that while we cannot have certain knowledge that any particular phenomenal event is of divine origin, we might be capable of assigning greater or lesser probability to such judgments. After all, a large part of Locke’s concern with revelation is ethical; we look to God as the source of the moral law against which our actions will be judged for eternal reward or punishment. Just as we believe ourselves to be capable of judging an individual to be an authentic physician and therefore worthy of trust with our lives, are we not capable of judging a revelation as more or less likely to be authentic? The problem with this analogy is that it compares finite with infinite powers. When we judge of the qualifications of a self-proclaimed physician, we balance various finite ideas against each other and arrive at some finite measure of probability. But no finite set of experiences can be combined in such a way so as to produce anything commensurate with eternity. And we know that no revelatory experience can be infinite, because if it were of infinite duration then one would never have been done with it and therefore would not be here to tell us about it. Thus with respect to claims involving infinite power to produce eternal happiness or misery, one who would govern his assent well will remain perpetually agnostic. Even the souls of the damned may hope for a reprieve from a power still higher than their supposedly eternal judge.

Kant saw a way out of this dilemma. If we have access to the moral law through pure practical reason, then we can judge any revelation, original or traditional, against this standard. Locke does suggest that the moral law could be susceptible to demonstration, but he makes no attempt to accomplish this, and it seems unlikely that he could for reasons similar to what we have said about revelation. How could one deduce anything about the will of a being merely on the basis of one’s knowledge of its infinitude, eternity, and creativity? How could we finite beings, reflecting on our experiences of our own knowledge and desires, conceptualize the nature of unlimited knowledge and desire? What would such a being love? What would it hate? Why would it care about anything? We have no way to demonstrate anything in answer to these questions because nothing can be demonstrated on the basis of the concept of infinity. Infinitude is a complex concept built from simpler concepts (id., 209-13); the will of God is not part of its content, nor can any concrete thing like a desire for particular actions and aversion to others be built out of a combination of such abstract universals as omnipotence and omniscience.

If we cannot recognize God on the basis of his power to produce sensations in us, nor on the basis of his moral commandments, it would seem that we have no way to distinguish revelation from demonic deception. What access would we have then to an absolute moral law? Locke defines virtue as whatever a particular society finds praiseworthy and morality as whatever God commands and rewards. Locke presumably had access to Spinoza’s Ethics, which presents a very different basis for morality from reward and punishment, but Spinoza’s methods would have seemed too scholastic for Locke. And perhaps Locke would have agreed with Leibniz that while Spinoza’s ethical system was sufficient for a superior intellect like himself, it had the possibility to lead simpler minds astray.

These difficulties with the basis of morality could very well have been the cause of Locke’s motivation to find room for the moral authority of revelation within his epistemological system. Unwilling or unable to abandon this system and desperate for a firm foundation for morality, Locke might have been blinded to the inconsistency of his doctrine of revelation with the rest of his system. But these difficulties can be avoided if we instead challenge some of the basic elements of Locke’s epistemology, in favor of something like Leibniz’s system of thought.

The crucial difficulty in Locke’s epistemology for the purposes of this investigation has been the causal aspect of his theory of knowledge. We know of the existence of external things because of the ideas that they effect in us. (id., 630-32). We know that we are not the cause of these ideas and that therefore there must be an external object or objects causing them, but we cannot know what these external objects are; we cannot know the essence of anything. Because we are finite and all of our ideas are finite, we are incapable of communicating with the deity; we cannot know that any self-proclaimed deity truly is such, because we cannot test his or her claims against any concrete ideas in our minds. We can neither confirm nor deny claims regarding eternity because we cannot have experienced eternity before making the judgment, nor can we assign any probability to the truth of such claims, since no combination of our finite ideas is commensurate with an infinite magnitude.

But suppose that we go to the root of the problem and substitute for the causal theory of knowledge a theory based on mutual implication of essence. That is, rather than thinking of substances as discrete units that interact causally in ways that we cannot understand to produce effects that we cannot predict and knowledge that never really reaches the essence of anything, perhaps we should think of substances as microcosms of the entire world. Each substance contains all of the others and is in turn contained in the others. Each substance is a unique perspective on same totality that all share in common. Knowledge then is each substance’s experience of being itself. (Leibniz, 440).

This kind of theory makes knowledge of the truth possible, rather than leaving us at the mercy of external powers to compel belief. A causal theory of knowledge is contradictory because it expects us to govern our assent to the force of propositions, when the faculty doing the governing is itself determined by our previous causally-determined knowledge. A human being is born a blank slate with no innate ideas. A mind with no ideas has no standard by which to govern its assent to any ideas to which it is introduced, so it absorbs whatever ideas are imposed upon it. Then these ideas, which the mind did not choose for itself, become the basis for its future decisions in governing its assent, but the initial ideas could have been false, perverting the process of self-governance. We can never know that any proposition is true, only that it is powerful enough to cause us to believe it, and the knowledge of this fact is itself determined by some sufficiently powerful cause, and so on ad infinitum. We find ourselves falling into a general skepticism, just as in the above where we found ourselves agnostic with respect to particular revelations.

If we reject the causal theory of knowledge in favor of a theory of mutual implication of essence, then we blur the hard line that Locke draws between appearances and essences, making genuine knowledge of things possible. No longer are do we see ourselves as distinct substances impinged upon by unknown and unknowable external objects; we instead see ourselves as related to the objects of our experience in the most intimate way possible, internally. If Locke’s system is considered representationalist, then this system would best be described as essentialist. To have knowledge of something is not to have a mental representation of it. Rather, it is of the essence of things to be known; to be is to be known, to be experienced: esse est percipi. We experience things, not representations of things, but we experience them from a particular, finite perspective, and often confusedly (id., 390). Of course, this position raises questions of its own, such as what it means for two things to be implicated in each other’s essences. If object A is in object B and object B is in object A, then is it not the case that the two objects are identical? It is not helpful to propose that the two objects are only partly coextensive, with each retaining a part of itself distinct from that which they share. In this case all of the various substances would experience the same world and would have part of themselves outside of the world. Our experience of the world then would not be an experience of things different from ourselves; that which was different would remain unknowable.

The solution can be grasped through an analogy. Imagine two paintings sitting next to each other, with each painting containing the whole of the other within itself. The easiest way to imagine this is as two completely white canvases. Any part of the one contains the whole of the other, because both are wholly undifferentiated. But if the two are to be differentiated from each other, then they must be designed in the most exquisite detail, like fractals. And for so many diverse objects thus to coincide with each other suggests a pre-established harmony, which suggests a divinity.

Unlike Locke’s epistemology, this system allows us to have knowledge of the divinity, since the whole harmonious order of the world is inside of us. In fact, it seems likely that our knowledge of universals is derived from the divinity’s indwelling presence within each individual. Behind all of the particularity of our experiences lie such universal forms as space, time, and logic, within which the particularities are ordered. These forms can be explained as being derived from the universal, objective perspective of the divinity, which transcends all particular perspectives. Our faculty if reason, then, should allow us access to the essence of God, at least as far as our finite perspective permits.

We have seen that Locke’s epistemology not only makes his own conception of revelation incoherent but even tends to lead toward a general skepticism. Having identified the problem as the causal representationalist nature of his philosophy, we considered Leibniz’s theory of mutually-implicative monads and found it a viable alternative. Unlike Locke’s system, Leibniz’s allows for the possibility of a relationship with the divine.

Whitehead on Experience and Consciousness

Alfred North Whitehead described his philosophy as a return to the elements of seventeenth and eighteenth century thought that had been de-emphasized by its most prominent successors, and a repudiation of the elements of that thought that had been most emphasized by those successors. Whitehead’s position in relation the philosophy of this period can be summed up in the principle that “consciousness presupposes experience and not experience consciousness.” Set against the backdrop of early modern thought, unpacking this short statement can provide a summary introduction to Whitehead’s entire philosophical system.

According to Whitehead, the seventeenth century marks the beginning of the “subjectivist bias” in Western philosophy. The subjectivist bias is the belief that philosophy’s primary function is to analyze subjective human experience, as opposed to the objective external world. Whitehead shares this bias in a general sense, but he repudiates the dominant instantiations of this bias, what he calls the subjectivist and sensationalist principles. Respectively, these are the beliefs (1) that what is received in subjective experience can be analyzed entirely in terms of universal qualities and forms, and (2) that sensation is experienced merely as received in its bare form, without regard to the subjective form of the reception. As we shall see, Whitehead repudiates the sensationalist principle entirely and accepts a reformed subjectivist principle.

The subjectivist principle in its original form is associated with the understanding of experience as presupposing consciousness. Experience here means experience of particular external objects. If only universal qualities like color and shape are given for the subject, then the particular external objects must be inferred from the given data, and this inference requires or presupposes consciousness. One sees a round patch of redness and infers that a particular object such as a ball is there. But as Hume so convincingly argued, this way of understanding perception leads inevitably to skepticism: All one really sees is round redness; the “ball” is merely a construct of one’s consciousness, derived from one’s habit of associating certain forms and qualities in certain dynamic patterns. The ball itself is never directly experienced. Whitehead reverses this order, arguing that the particular object is primary in experience, with the universals (or “eternal objects”) arising secondarily. Consciousness, so far from being required to infer particulars from universals, is in fact derived from the preceding phases of experience and is even the rarest of all types of experience in the world. Making Whitehead’s claims clear will require a further explication of his system, beginning with the meaning of his “reformed subjectivist principle.”

Whitehead shares the subjectivist bias in the thought of Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant. That is, he agrees that the proper object of philosophical examination is subjective experience. But he tempers this subjective bias with an affirmation of objectivity in subjective experience. The more radical subjectivists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw particular subjective experiences as almost, if not entirely, independent of each other. Particulars are qualified only by universals, not by other particulars, so the thinking went. Whitehead asserts to the contrary that particulars do enter into the constitution of other particulars, though mediated by universals. Only in the most complex, high-grade subjects does this involve consciousness.

Whitehead is a subjectivist in that for him the metaphysically final real things are moments of subjective experience, “actual occasions.” Actual occasions enter into the constitutions of (are internally related to) other actual occasions; subjects become objects for other subjects. Every actual occasion is a synthesis of many past actual occasions and becomes an object for synthesis with another many into a future actual occasion: “The many become one, and are increased by one.” [X] Let us examine how this process works, and how consciousness arises from it.

The unification (or “concrescence”) of many actual occasions into one actual occasion can be analyzed into phases of “prehensions.” A prehension is one actual occasion’s feeling of another actual occasion’s feelings, or of an eternal object. The relevant feelings from the various actual occasions are given in the “initial datum” and then objectified in the new occasion. The first phase of the new occasion is conformal; the new occasion simply relives the previous occasion’s feelings. These are also called “physical feelings.” Then come the supplemental phases. The new occasion adds its own reactions to what it receives from the past. It reacts through the addition of conceptual feelings (of eternal objects) to the initial physical feelings. These conceptual feelings may simply be reproductions of the physical feelings, or they may be reversions from the physical feelings. Reproductive conceptual feelings simply reiterate the physical feeling, while reversions present conceptual feelings “partially identical with, partially diverse from” the physical feelings involved. Conceptual reversion introduces novelty into the process, which otherwise would be a tedious everlasting repetition.

The second supplemental phase is that of simple comparative feelings, which may take the form either of physical purposes or of propositional feelings. Comparative feelings unify physical feelings with the conceptual feelings derived there from. Physical purposes are the comparative feelings dominant in simpler, non-conscious occasions. A physical purpose involves a complete determination occasion’s valuation of the physical feeling. The occasion either values it positively and determines to promote it for future occasions, or it values it negatively, inhibiting the reproduction of the feeling for the future.

A proposition is a relation between some occasion or group of occasions (the logical subject) and an eternal object (the predicate). A proposition is itself indeterminate as to its realization, but is in fact either true or false. A propositional feeling is a prehension of a proposition with some positive or negative valuation, but this valuation is not necessarily determined by the truth or falsity of the proposition. Propositional feelings lead to further integrations of feelings which may direct future occasions to bring about the realization of a state of affairs that was not previously the case. A false proposition that leads to interesting consequences is more valuable than a true proposition of no interest.

The final supplemental phase is that of complex comparative feelings, also known as intellectual feelings. An intellectual feeling is a synthesis of a physical feeling with a propositional feeling, in the form of an affirmation or negation of that synthesis. An intellectual feeling either affirms the proposition with respect to the object of the physical feeling, or it negates the relation between the proposition and the object. Intellectual feeling is the stage of consciousness. From what we observe of our world, complex comparative feelings unifying concepts, propositions, and physical objects are rare, and thus so is consciousness. Most occasions in the observable world appear to resolve themselves into physical purposes. Protons and electrons either pass on the energy inherited from the past, or they withhold it from the future through some inhibition. They do not entertain propositions about what might be the best way to proceed. They feel, they experience, but they are not conscious: consciousness presupposes experience, not experience consciousness.

The final phase of the occasion is the satisfaction, the complete synthesis of all of the occasion’s feelings from all of the various phases, into one complex unity of feeling. An occasion that has achieved satisfaction then becomes a condition for the becoming of all future occasions in its line of inheritance.

This description of the process of concrescence deliberately emphasized the role of actual occasions in the constitution of other occasions, to distinguish Whitehead’s reformed subjectivist principle from the earlier subjectivist principle that Whitehead repudiated, but we would not provide an adequate picture of Whitehead’s thought if we did not discuss in further detail the role of eternal objects (universals) in this scheme.

Whitehead refers to eternal objects as “Pure Potentials for the Specific Determination of Fact,” (PR 22). We may state this more simply as “potential feelings,” as opposed to “potential occasions.” Eternal objects are potential constituents or determinants of actual occasions, not potential whole occasions. Eternal objects are the things that recur, not the things that occur, and occasions never recur, so eternal objects must be understood as feelings subordinate to whole occasions. One might ask precisely how eternal objects are distinguished from actual occasions, how eternal objects can enter into the constitution of actual occasions without thereby accounting for the entire constitution of the occasions—what is still left over of an occasion after it has been analyzed in terms of eternal objects.

Eternal objects are distinguished from actual occasions in that eternal objects are indeterminate as to temporal relations. Eternal objects have only eternal relations to other eternal objects. The relation between redness and yellowness is strictly eternal; it has no temporal determination. Actual occasions (as the name suggests) are determined by temporal relations. In reforming the subjectivist principle, Whitehead argues that moments of experience are not determined merely in terms of relations among eternal objects in a self-contained present moment; rather, each moment is constituted by its relations to past moments and its anticipation of potential future moments. This point is closely related to Whitehead’s rejection of the sensationalist principle. Eternal objects are not entertained merely as eternal objects; they are entertained in a certain subjective form, an important aspect of which is the temporality of the relation between the object felt and the subject feeling. Redness is felt not merely as redness in general, in the present, independent of its source in any particular past occasion; redness is also felt as redness, derived from a past subject. The vector character of the feeling as derived from there to here, is an essential aspect of the feeling. This is what Hume’s subjectivist sensationalism failed to account for, thereby leading him to skepticism as to causality.

To clarify this point even further, and to relate it to our general theme of the relationship between experience and consciousness, this is the appropriate place to discuss Whitehead’s theory of perception. Whitehead distinguishes three modes of perception: causal efficacy, presentational immediacy, and symbolic reference. Causal efficacy is associated with the initial conformal phase of the concrescence, presentational immediacy with the conceptual and simple comparative (propositional) phases, and symbolic reference with the complex comparative or intellectual phase, the phase of consciousness.

Let us remind ourselves that an actual occasion is a synthesis of feelings from many past occasions into the unity of a novel occasion. In the initial conformal phase of concrescence, one feeling from each of the past occasion is abstracted from the complete satisfaction of that occasion and is taken to represent the entire past occasion for the new occasion. In this phase the feeling retains its temporal character despite its abstraction from the other feelings. This conformal feeling is perception in the mode of causal efficacy: What was there is now here; that feeling translates into this feeling; the past causes the present. Temporality is essential to this mode of perception.

The mode of presentational immediacy corresponds to the next phases of concrescence. In the conceptual phase the bare eternal objects are abstracted from their temporal relations in the physical feelings of the conformal phase. In the simple comparative phase these conceptual feelings are synthesized with the physical feelings from which they were derived. In simpler occasions largely devoid of conceptual reversion, these simple comparative feelings take a determinate subjective form: either positive or negative valuation, adversion or aversion, promoting or inhibiting the feeling for integrations into future occasions. Simple comparative feelings of this type are called physical purposes. But in more complex occasions these simple comparative feelings take the form of propositional feelings, in which the temporal determination of the physical feeling is left indeterminate and the eternal object is determined merely to a region of space contemporary with the present occasion. Presentational immediacy is the mode in which one perceives regions of shaped color but not particular colored and shaped objects. This is the mode of perception that Hume and Kant took to be primary, the mode from which all other knowledge was derived. Whitehead argues to the contrary that this mode would not be possible if it were not derived from a mode of perception that included the particular objects in their temporal determinations.

The final mode of perception is the mixed mode of symbolic reference, the mode of ordinary conscious experience. This is the mode in which particular physical feelings are associated with the immediate presentational field. This is the mode of judgment of the truth-value of propositions. A predicate (eternal object) is determinately affirmed or negated of a logical subject (actual occasion). “The stone is grey.” Only conscious occasions are capable of making such judgments, and Whitehead’s primary dispute with early modern subjectivist thought is that it took conscious judgments in the subject-predicate form to be metaphysically fundamental. Whitehead argues to the contrary that prior to any such conscious judgment are innumerable occasions of experience not of the form “the stone is grey,” but simply, “stone-yes” or “stone-no,” or rather “electron-yes” or “electron-no,” with a massive process of integration and transmutation necessary in high-grade occasions before the notion of “stone” ever arises. Consciousness presupposes experience, not experience consciousness.

Hume’s skepticism can be seen as the inevitable result of a futile attempt to derive symbolic reference from presentational immediacy alone. Without causal efficacy, the presence of the past in the constitution of the present occasion, there is nothing from which presentational immediacy may be understood to be derived and therefore nothing to which it may be referred. Let us now clarify the distinction between Whitehead and the early modern subjectivists even further by presenting some of Whitehead’s categories and their roles in the concrescent process.

There are nine Categoreal Obligations, of which we will discuss five: the Categories of Subjective Unity, Transmutation, Subjective Harmony, Subjective Intensity, and Freedom and Determination. We already touched upon the Categories of Conceptual Valuation and Conceptual Reversion in the earlier discussion of the concrescent process; we will leave aside the Categories of Objective Identity and Objective Diversity for the purposes of this paper.

We can dispose of the Category of Transmutation fairly quickly: This refers to the way in which a group (or “nexus”) of microscopic occasions sharing some common characteristic is perceived as a single macroscopic object. A field of protonic, neutronic, and electronic occasions is perceived as a stone, or a horse, or a child. Whitehead’s Category of Transmutation stands in for Locke’s doctrine of substances as complex ideas. Locke understood the concept of “power” to be inferred from our experience of change in our simple ideas. Where there is a change from redness to greenness there must be something having a power to effect this change. When a variety of changes in simple ideas can be conceived under the unity of one complex idea, the underlying combination of powers is called a “substance.” But substances themselves are unknown; they are merely inferred from their power to effect change in our ideas. In Locke’s terms, Whitehead argues that the powers themselves enter into the constitution of our subjectivity and are therein associated with certain eternal objects. The common characteristic is identified, and the complex of powers (nexus of occasions) is transmuted into the unity of a substance (macroscopic object). But whereas in Locke the substance remains an empty term in our understanding, in Whitehead the physical feelings along with the eternal objects enter into the unity of the symbolic reference.

We may now deal with the Categories of Subjective Unity and Subjective Harmony. These categories describe the aspect of “pre-established harmony” involved in the process of concrescence and point to the important component of final causation in Whitehead’s thought. The Category of Subjective Unity imposes upon the subject’s feelings the condition that they be compatible for synthesis in the unity of the subject, while the Category of Subjective Harmony imposes the a similar condition upon the subjective forms, or valuations, of the conceptual feelings of the subject. The end of the process determines the elements of the process. Feelings are determined not merely by their origins but also by their destinations. Whitehead here turns Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic on its head: Whereas Kant understood sensory intuitions as relations to our sensibility, and space and time as necessary pre-conditions for the possibility of our intuition, Whitehead argues that our physical feelings are conformal relations to past occasions, with the form of our intuition arising within the process of unifying the given manifold.

There is more to be said regarding the categories of pre-established harmony, but first we must introduce the Category of Subjective Intensity, which will further illuminate these categories. Whitehead describes this category as follows. “The subjective aim, whereby there is origination of conceptual feeling, is at intensity of feeling (α) in the immediate subject, and (β) in the relevant future.” The process of concrescence aims to produce a unified feeling out of the diverse elements of feelings from many previous occasions. This category states that the aim in this process is toward maximum intensity of feeling, or maximum unity in diversity, both for the present subject and for its successors in the near future. By considering this category in concert with the categories of pre-established harmony we can arrive at a broader understanding of the process. An occasion begins with elements that are pre-arranged for it by the past occasions from which it inherits, arranged in such a way so that the diverse feelings will be compatible for unification in a single subjective occasion of experience. The conceptual reproductions and reversions in the of the supplemental phase arise in such a way so as to maximize the intensity of the contrast of the diverse elements of the present satisfaction, and so as to provide feelings that will be as compatible with the feelings of its contemporaries for synthesis by the next generation of occasions as were the feelings that it inherited from its past. All of this sheds further light on Whitehead’s insistence that occasions of subjective experience are essentially temporal and not reducible to associations of eternal objects. Every occasion of experience is possible only because it inherits from a past that aimed toward it. The unification of the present occasion is simultaneously an anticipation of posterity’s conformation to the present and therefore must take into account posterity’s need for an initial datum that is susceptible to unification.

The final category to discuss is the Category of Freedom and Determination, which provides that, “The concrescence of each individual actual entity is internally determined and is externally free.” (27) Whitehead elaborates, explaining that in each concrescence the past occasions leave a degree of indetermination for the decision of the present occasion. The past presents an initial datum that is pre-arranged for unification, but the past does not entirely determine the conceptual reversions that take place in the present concrescence. While the scope of reversion is limited by the condition of relevance to the initial datum, there is nevertheless a range of possible reversions that satisfy both the condition of relevance to the past and of compatibility for synthesis in the final satisfaction. Given the ontological principle’s provision that actual entities are the only reasons, if the past occasions are not entirely determinative, then the present occasion must be at least partly its own reason, with respect to the determination of its final satisfaction and the conceptual feelings contributing thereto. Here again Whitehead can be read as critiquing Kant: Because Kant saw sensory intuitions as conforming to our sensibility rather than our sensibility as arising in the process of unifying conformal feelings to the past, Kant arrived at the doctrine of an apparent object (phenomenon) and a thing in itself (noumenon). Freedom applied to the noumenon and strict determinism to the phenomenon. Whitehead reunites the noumenon and phenomenon with the doctrine that the subject conforms to its objects and in turn becomes an object for successive subjects. And so freedom and determination must similarly be united in a single entity, determined insofar as it conforms to the past, free in unifying itself within the limits set by that past.

The final issue to address in Whitehead is the nature of God. For Kant, the essence and existence of God were unknowable through pure speculative reason because all that could be known were appearances, not the ultimate things behind appearances. God was a transcendental illusion of pure reason, the supposed ultimate ground of reality. But in appearances no ultimate ground is available because every appearance is causally determined by a prior appearance so there can be no ultimate beginning of appearances but rather an infinite regress. God is utterly inscrutable because the only things that are knowable are the things that conform to our categories, our form of understanding. By inverting the order and making consciousness conform to experience, and thereby reuniting noumena and phenomena, Whitehead makes God, far from inscrutable, instead the “chief exemplification” of his principles. God is the unification of strictly everything, whereas all other actual entities are unifications of mere fragments of the totality.

We conclude with a few critical comments on Whitehead’s thought. Two points that seems open to dispute are the notion of God’s “everlasting concrescence” and the status of eternal objects in the primordial nature of God. The notion of an everlasting concrescence seems to contradict directly Whitehead’s ultimate principle that the many become one and are increased by one. It would seem that Whitehead thought that this was necessary because there had to have been an actual entity that was the reason for the conceptual ordering of the eternal objects, and this actual entity would have to be the same from eternity to eternity. But if we instead conceive of the eternal objects as maximally general characteristics of potentiality in the same manner as we conceive of the categoreal obligations as maximally general characteristics of the actual process of concrescence, then there is no need for a conceptual realization from eternity. The ordering of the eternal objects no more depends upon the decision of God than does the structure of the creative process itself.

With this issue aside we may conceive of God not as an everlasting concrescence but as a personal society of actual occasions, with the only difference between God and other occasions being that while God unites all of the feelings all occasions, other occasions unite only some of the feelings of some occasions. Even God’s consciousness must conform to the experiences of the occasions that God unites, and not even God’s decisions can wholly determine the concrescences of the occasions that succeed him.

Whitehead: Defending Brentano Against the Criticisms of Heretical Disciples

Thoughts refer to objects. There are thoughts of things like a man or a horse or a rock. But there are also thoughts of relations between and among things, as for example a man on a horse next to a rock. We might well wonder what kind of ontological status the objects of these latter thoughts have. Are relations among things themselves things? How ought we to think of such objects as, “the being of the man on the horse”? Another way of posing the question is, To what kind of entities, if any, do propositions refer? In this paper we will examine the way in which this question has been addressed by Franz Brentano and Alfred North Whitehead.

Whitehead’s philosophy shares an orientation similar to Brentano’s in that it is empirical and psychological. Whitehead defines much of his philosophy by reference to early modern thought. He says that the 17^th century marks a fundamental shift in orientation in philosophy from an objective to a subjective perspective. Whereas pre-modern philosophy had sought to comprehend the objects, philosophy after Descartes begins with the subject. Whitehead makes reference most often to Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant.

Starting from the subject, Whitehead defines the goal of philosophy to be the search for a system of the most general concepts in terms of which every element of experience can be interpreted. Whereas modern scientific materialism sought to understand the human being in terms of particles of unfeeling matter, Whitehead believes that the only way to proceed is to start from directed human experience and analogize down, as it were, to the simpler existents.

The difficulty with discussing Whitehead’s thought is that he does not present his doctrines in the form of a linearly developed argument. He simply presents the system as a whole—presents it several times, actually, in increasing degrees of detail and concreteness. Arguments for his positions and against others only come after the entire system has been presented and can be understood only in this light. This makes it difficult to confront Whitehead’s ideas with others point-by-point. I propose, therefore, before proceeding to the discussion of the relation to Brentano, to present here a sketch of Whitehead’s system with an emphasis on the most relevant points.

The best way to begin to sketch Whitehead’s system is to present his “categoreal scheme.” The categories are, as mentioned, intended to be a complete system of the most general concepts in terms of which all elements of experience can be interpreted. The categories fall under four headings: categories of existence, categories of explanation, categoreal obligations, and the category of the ultimate.

There are eight categories of existence: (1) actual entities, (2) prehensions, (3) nexūs (plural of nexus), (4) subjective forms, (5) eternal objects, (6) propositions, (7) multiplicities, and (8) contrasts. (PR[1] 22).

The central element of Whitehead’s philosophy is the actual entity. Actual entities are the “final real things” of which the universe is composed. An actual entity is a moment of subjective experience. Subjective experience is not necessarily conscious experience. What we call merely physical things are also a kind of experience; we may think of them as unconscious feelings and drives. It is important to keep in mind the momentary aspect of actual entities. Whitehead also often calls them “actual occasions” to emphasize their fleeting, momentary character. Temporality and change are central to Whitehead’s system. Different moments of a thing are ultimately different things. Present moments inherit the experience of past moments through what Whitehead calls “prehension.”

A prehension is an actual entity’s internal relation to another actual entity (or to an eternal object). Whitehead also calls prehensions “concrete facts of relatedness,” (PR 22). Simply put, prehensions are feelings, experiences of past experiences. The term is meant to draw to mind the notion of apprehension but without the connotation of consciousness. Actual entities are constituted by their prehensions of past actual entities.

A nexus is “a set of actual entities in the unity of the relatedness constituted by their prehensions of each other,” (PR 24). Nexūs are the objects of ordinary experience, whether microscopic or macroscopic. The simplest type of nexus is an elementary particle like an electron. An electron is a serial path of actual occasions with (presumably) only temporal structure, no spatial structure. (Assuming, for the sake of discussion, that electrons are not composed of still smaller particles—unlike protons, which are composed of quarks.) On the other end of the spectrum are macroscopic objects like trees, which have spatial as well as temporal structure.

It is important to note a possible ambiguity in Whitehead’s expression of the definition of a nexus. He says, “constituted by their prehensions of each other.” This could lead one to think that two actual occasions can mutually prehend each other, but this is not the case. Two actual occasions cannot mutually prehend each other. Prehension is internal relation. If two occasions prehended each other, then each would be internal to the other, which would lead to an infinite regress. This would also mean that the two occasions would be in each other’s past, meaning that each would be in its own past—and in its own future. This absurdity leads Whitehead to conclude that every internal relation involves a reciprocal external relation. Actual occasions are internally related to the past but externally related to the future. Kant’s relation to Plato is internal to Kant, it is constitutive of Kant. But Plato’s relation to Kant is external; Plato is what he is regardless of whether Kant or anyone else prehends him.

A subjective form is the way in which one occasion prehends another. It is the form of the internal relation. “[T]here are many species of subjective forms, such as emotions, valuations, purposes, adversions, aversions, consciousness, etc,” (PR 24). The subjective form determines the relevance of an occasion’s feeling for future occasions. If the subjective form is an aversion then the feeling will be inhibited from influence in future occasions. If the subjective form is an adversion then the feeling will be amplified in its influence on future occasions. Whitehead’s notion of subjective form answers to Brentano’s unification of feeling and will. Moments of experience are the final real things, and these moments consist of prehensions of past occasions. Because actual occasions are only externally related to future occasions, the only way for them to influence future occasions is in the way that they feel their own feelings.

An eternal object is a “pure potential for the specific determination of fact,” (PR 22). Examples of eternal objects include redness, softness, saltiness, squareness, quickness, etc. Eternal objects are the elements that recur throughout various occasions.

A proposition is “the unity of certain actual entities in their potentiality for forming a nexus, with its potential relatedness partially defined by certain eternal objects which have the unity of one complex eternal object. The actual entities involved are termed the ‘logical subjects,’ the complex eternal objects is the ‘predicate,’” (PR 24). “It is an essential doctrine in the philosophy of organism that the primary function of a proposition is to be relevant as a lure for feeling. For example, some propositions are the data of feelings with subjective forms such as to constitute those feelings to be the enjoyment of a joke,” (PR 25). This obviously deserves much closer attention, but suffice it to say for now that Whitehead does not see propositions as entities that are only either true or false. They might also be funny or useful or beautiful.

Whitehead’s conception of the proposition will be crucial to our analysis of his relation to Brentano and to the tradition of thought on states of affairs, so it is appropriate to say a few words here in anticipation of things to come: Actual entities are constituted by their (internal) relations to other actual entities, prehensions. Whitehead also calls prehensions “concrete matters of fact,” (PR 22). What he means is that the actual internal relations of particular actual entities to other actual entities are the only concrete matters of fact (states of affairs) that there are. Anything that does not (or has not yet) entered into the constitution of some actual entity is as yet only a potential matter of fact and cannot be said to be either true or false. Whitehead instead thinks of them primarily as “lures for feeling” because he sees the primary function of propositions to be pulling subjects toward making concrete determinations, not discovering them. This doctrine of Whitehead’s is what draws us to make the comparison to Brentano, who argues against thinkers like Bolzano with his “proposition in itself” or Meinong with his “objective.” As we will see, Whitehead takes a middle course between these positions by making the distinction between propositions (“matters of fact in potential determination,” (PR 22)) and nexūs (“public matters of fact,” (PR 22)).

A multiplicity, or “pure disjunction of diverse entities,” (PR 22), “consists of many entities, and its unity is constituted by the fact that all its constituent entities severally satisfy at least one condition which no other entity satisfies,” (PR 24). The distinction between a multiplicity and a nexus is that a nexus necessarily involves internal relations among its members, whereas a multiplicity is simply a grouping of actual entities on the basis of some common feature.

A contrast is a “mode of synthesis of entities in one prehension,” (PR 22). Take, for example, a human being looking out at a set of objects on a table. The field of vision is the synthesis of countless actual entities, transmitted by the nerves and united in the brain at a single point (a conscious occasion). One way for all of these entities to be synthesized would be simply to blur them all together in a single point. If my field of vision is composed of bits of light of various colors, they could all be synthesized as a point of brownness. Or they could be synthesized at any degree of clarity and distinctness. The particular mode in which these entities are synthesized is the contrast.

This completes the categories of existence. We have already used many of the categories of explanation in explaining these eight categories, and as there are twenty-seven of them in all we will skip over the rest of them for the sake of brevity. We will also skip for now the categoreal obligations and move to the category of the ultimate, which is creativity. This category can be states simply as follows: “The many become one, and are increased by one,” (PR 21). What this means is that each actual entity is a synthesis of other actual entities, but it is also a novel entity in its own right. Let us take, for example, a set of elementary particles, electrons. As we have said, each particle is actually a serial path of actual occasions, in this case “electronic occasions.” Each new moment in the career of each electron is a synthesis of various aspects of the set of immediately past occasions. Say we have six electronic occasions. Different aspects of these six occasions will be combined in six different ways to create six new electronic occasions, which are the successors of the previous six occasions. Each new occasion is dominated by the influence of one of the previous six and is therefore considered its successor, but each one is influenced by all of the others. Whitehead sometimes refers to his system as the philosophy of organism because he takes reproduction and synthesis to be at the very essence of all actuality. The analogy to sexual reproduction is very apt. Parents contribute aspects of themselves (not their whole selves) to produce a novel generation. Whitehead would say that human reproduction is a special case of the general reproductive character of all final real things, actual occasions. In general, aspects of many occasions go into the constitution of a novel occasion. And not only is a novel combination produced, but (particularly in higher-grade, conscious occasions) novel (conceptual) feelings are introduced in the synthesis. So not only are the feelings of a manifold of photons (light-transmitting particles) synthesized in the experience of a human consciousness, but additional feelings are also produced, feelings of the contrasts of these feelings, and the contrasts of contrasts, and so on almost without limit. In the experience of a sunset, for example, a vast array of color contrasts and contrasts of contrasts is experienced, in addition to the colors themselves.

Whitehead refers to the way in which one entity is synthesized from the manifold of given data as the process of concrescence. He analyzes this process into phases, though he does not thereby mean to suggest that these phases actually succeed each other in time. (An occasion is a unit of temporal extension. Time is in the occasions; the occasions are not set in time, do not take time to arise.) The phases of concrescence are somewhat analogous to Kant’s structure of the synthesis of the manifold in apperception. The primary difference between Kant and Whitehead is that Whitehead provides a more general synthetic process that can encompass unconscious as well as conscious entities.

There are two broad phases of concrescence, the conformal and the supplementary phase, which correspond in Kant to the receptivity of intuition and the spontaneity of understanding. The initial, conformal phase is the phase in which the present entity prehends the feelings given to it in the manifold of its datum. The phase is called conformal because the present entity simply feels the past entities’ feelings in the same way that the past ones did, without modification or addition. The feelings of the conformal phase are also called physical feelings.

The supplementary phase is what distinguishes unconscious entities from conscious entities. In the supplementary phase conceptual feelings (of eternal objects) are added to the physical feelings (of actual entities) of the conformal phase. In unconscious entities the conceptual supplementation to the physical feelings is negligible, meaning that there is very little novelty in the new occasion. Electrons, for example, exist in a few relatively well-defined states with very little variation. The way in which different aspects of different particles combine and recombine accounts for the laws of nature that we see in operation in the world. The special physical laws that govern this region of the cosmos in this cosmic epoch, are themselves the product of a kind of natural selection. The reason that electrons, protons, etc. have the particular properties that they do is because these properties were most effective in sustaining themselves in a large cosmic system over large periods of time. (Here we see the influence of C.S. Peirce on Whitehead.)

In conscious occasions there are further divisions within the supplemental phase. Whereas in unconscious occasions the conceptual feelings are nearly identical with the physical feelings, in conscious occasions the conceptual phase introduces novelty into the experience. The novel conceptual feelings are then integrated with the physical feelings in comparative feelings. In unconscious occasions, in which there is negligible diversity between the physical feelings and the conceptual feelings, the comparative feeling is a mere physical purpose, with a subjective form of mere adversion or aversion to the given physical feeling, meaning that the physical feelings are merely either promoted or inhibited. But in conscious occasions, in which there is greater diversity between the physical and conceptual feelings, the comparative feelings take the form of propositions, whose subjective form is basically indifference. A proposition is merely a proposal for the way in which physical feelings of actual occasions are to be united with conceptual feelings. This is simply to say that individuals/particulars are thought under the heading of concepts, e.g., “This object is a horse.” Later we will have to address Brentano’s claim that all propositions may be restated without change of meaning as existential propositions. Whitehead agrees with Brentano that the subject-predicate form of proposition is not the fundamental form of thought, but he means something somewhat different from what Brentano thinks about this. We will have to wait until we have laid out Whitehead’s theory of perception before we can discuss the consequences of Whitehead’s thought on Brentano’s theories of existential judgments and of the fundamental distinction between presentation and judgment.

The last of the supplemental phases is the phase of complex comparative feelings (or intellectual feelings). In this phase the propositions of the comparative phase are integrated with the physical feelings of the conformal phase. The contrast is either an affirmation or a negation of the proposition. The subjective form of an intellectual feeling is consciousness.

The final piece of Whitehead’s system to discuss for our purposes is his theory of perception. Whitehead holds that there are three modes of perception: causal efficacy, presentational immediacy, and symbolic reference.

Causal efficacy corresponds to the conformal phase of the concrescence. The mode of causal efficacy is best understood in terms of Whitehead’s rejection of what he calls the “sensationalist principle.” The sensationalist principle is the doctrine every particular individual experience can be described entirely in terms of universals and that our knowledge of external things is built up entirely from our sensations of such universal qualities as redness and coldness (what Whitehead calls eternal objects). Whitehead claims that the sensationalist principle is pervasive in modern philosophy and that, taken to its logical extreme it leads to skepticism with regard to knowledge of causality, as in the case of Hume. Universal qualities in themselves have no necessary relation to other universal qualities, at least in regard to their concrete instantiations in various spatial forms and patterns of dynamic succession. A red ball is dropped. The experience, described solely in terms of sensations of universal qualities and forms, is of a round patch of redness moving from the middle of one’s field of vision to a lower point in the field of vision. But in strictly universal terms, round redness in the middle of one’s field of vision does not necessarily imply succession by round redness slightly lower in one’s field of vision.

The denial of the sensationalist doctrine and the assertion of causal efficacy as a mode of perception do not provide a demonstrable set of laws that allows one to understand why one set of qualities succeeds another in one’s experience. This is an assertion that universal qualities and forms are not the primary elements of our experience but rather other particulars are. The denial of the sensationalist doctrine is the assertion that individuals (actual occasions) enter into the constitution of other individuals (through prehensions, internal relations), and the mode of causal efficacy is the mode of perception in which these conformal feelings are experienced.

Presentational immediacy corresponds to the early conceptual phases of concrescence. Since unconscious occasions have negligible conceptual novelty in their supplemental phase, it can be said that to the extent that unconscious entities like electrons have perception, it is only in the mode of causal efficacy. Presentational immediacy is the mode of sensation of universal qualities (eternal objects) in various forms (contrasts).

Symbolic reference corresponds to the intellectual feelings of the latest phases of concrescence in a conscious occasion. This mode of perception involves judgment, e.g., that this eternal object (in presentational immediacy) corresponds to this group of actual occasions (in causal efficacy). It is in symbolic reference that a group of actual occasions, represented by a shaped field of color, is taken to be a macroscopic object like a ball.

What Whitehead calls three modes of perception other philosophers, such as Kant, call different things altogether. Presentational immediacy corresponds to sensation in Kant’s thought. Symbolic reference corresponds to perception proper. And causal efficacy, which Whitehead places at the beginning, is what most other modern thinkers move toward from the foundation of sensation. For thinkers from Locke to Hume to Kant, our sensations of universal qualities are made the foundations of proofs for the existence of external things. Whitehead claims to the contrary that other individuals enter into experience in the primary mode of perception and that the other modes are derived from this causal efficacy. As Whitehead puts it in preface to his categoreal scheme,

The explanatory purpose of philosophy is often misunderstood. Its business is to explain the emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete things. It is a complete mistake to ask how concrete particular fact can be built up out of universals. The answer is, “In no way.” The true philosophic question is, How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature? (PR 20).

This concludes the presentation of Whitehead’s scheme. Now we move to the discussion of Brentano. Brentano distinguishes three fundamental types of cognition: presentation, judgment, and emotion (or feeling/will). He considers them three different ways of being conscious of an object. The three are related in that presentation is the basis for the other two; no judgment is made nor is any emotion felt about any object that is not first given in presentation. Brentano couples this psychological scheme with a correspondence theory of truth and with a theory that all propositions may be stated in existential form rather than subject-predicate form.

In his later work, Brentano denies that there exist any such entities as the being of a thing, in addition to the thing itself. This is in accord with his assertion in Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint, that existence is not a “predicate [that] is combined with ‘A’ as subject. The object affirmed is not the combination of an attribute ‘existence’ with ‘A’ but ‘A’ itself,” (PES[2] 208). Brentano is aiming against something like Meinong’s objective, e.g., “that the thing exists,” is an object of affirmation or denial above and beyond the affirmation or denial of the thing itself. According to someone like Meinong, it is one thing to affirm an object such as a triangle (as opposed to denying an object like a round square), but it is another thing to affirm that a triangle exists anywhere. Brentano deals with this issue in a different way, with his theory of fictitious objects. For Brentano it is possible to affirm a fictitious object as a fictitious object without affirming anything else about it. A centaur is affirmed as an object in someone’s mind, even though it is denied as an object in the world. Brentano seems to be saying that genuine and fictitious objects are distinct objects that may be affirmed or denied independently of each other. To get a better grasp on this we should discuss Brentano’s theory of the existential judgment.

Brentano denies that the subject-predicate form of proposition is the fundamental form of proposition. Instead he asserts that the existential proposition is the fundamental form. For example, “This tree is green,” may be restated as, “There is a green tree.” To say that there is “the being of a green tree” or the fact “that a green tree exists” is, according to Brentano, just a way of speaking that does not refer to any actual object. Brentano does not make a distinction between objects and the states of affairs in which they are placed, such that objects may be affirmed independently of the affirmation or denial of their instantiations in states of affairs (or in “objectives” or in “propositions in themselves”). Brentano’s distinction is between genuine and fictitious objects, or objects outside and objects inside of the mind. The fictitious object, the object in the imagination, is not the same as the genuine object—presumably the object in the senses. One can affirm that an object is imagined by someone without affirming that the object is sensed by anyone.

Though Brentano does not explicitly say this, it would appear that Brentano has (or would need to have) another distinction parallel to that between objects and states of affairs, and that distinction would be between simple (or abstract) objects and complex (or environmentally-situated) objects. Rather than predicating some position or situation to some subject, Brentano simply creates a more complex object and either affirms or denies it: rather than saying, “The deer is in the forest,” Brentano would say, “The deer-in-forest exists.” What other thinkers mean by the object itself, Brentano would consider a less complex (or more abstract) object. All such objects would have to be fictional (imaginary) since any genuine (sensed) object is always sensed in a complete context. (This points to the emergence of Gestalt psychology.)

We may illustrate Brentano’s position in contrast to the opposing position through the following examples: Where Bolzano or Meinong would speak of the object, independently of its instantiation in any state of affairs, Brentano would speak of the abstract object imagined. And where Bolzano and Meinong would speak of the proposition in itself or the objective, Brentano would the environmentally-situated object, either imagined or sensed.

Let us take a right triangle and a round square as examples of objects. Meinong would say, “The right triangle subsists,” and, “The round square does not subsist.” To translate this into Brentano’s scheme we would says, “The right triangle is imagined,” and, “The round square is not imagined,” which would further translate into, “There is an imagined right triangle,” and, “There is not an imagined round square.”

Let us then take a cup on a table and the existence of a centaur as examples of objectives. Meinong would say, “The being of the cup on the table subsists,” and, “The being of the centaur does not subsist.” Brentano would instead say, “There is a cup-on-a-table sensed,” and, “There is a centaur imagined,” but, “There is not a centaur sensed.” An interesting point, however, is that while Meinong would say, “The cup (independent of its situation) exists,” Brentano would have to say, “There is a situation-independent cup imagined, but there is not a situation-independent cup sensed.” This raises the problem of how to formulate the notion of a cup that persists through multiple situations, which is also the problem of objects existing independently of the mind, some object that has the power persistently to produce similar parts of different whole experience. But Brentano is an empiricist, and empiricists focus on what is sensed. But objects outside of the mind are not sensed. It is therefore appropriate that Brentano in The True and the Evident brings up the doctrines of the Sophists, who explicitly deny the possibility of knowledge of anything outside of the mind precisely because these supposed things are outside of the mind.

Let us consider this problem in relation to Brentano’s distinction between presentation and judgment. Objects given merely in presentation are neither affirmed nor denied. To judge is simply to affirm or deny the object presented. To judge correctly is to affirm an object if it exists or to deny an object if it does not exist. To judge incorrectly is to affirm an object that does not exist or to deny an object that does exist.

Brentano presents the contrary opinion of the Sophists. He explains Protagoras’ view as follows: “If a belief is true provided only it corresponds completely with something that exists, then every belief is true, for every belief is identical with itself,” (TE[3] 7). Brentano goes on to quote Parmenides, “What can be thought is only the thought that it is,” (TE 8). Brentano responds that it would be absurd to think that all thoughts are true simply because they are identical with themselves. Later he goes on to distinguish the thought or belief, which is “formally” in oneself, from the immanent object, which is “objectively” or “intentionally” given. (TE 15-16). He quickly moves on after this assertion, saying “there are other problems which may seem less easy to dispose of,” (TE 16), as though this problem had been easily disposed of. But this is really the crux of the matter, and Brentano does not elaborate on what he means by the distinction between a belief’s being “formally” in oneself versus an object’s being “intentionally given.”

Let us explore the Sophist’s position further. What we have in our minds are mental phenomena like sensations and concepts, or Lockean ideas. We have nothing else except what is in our minds. Anything that is outside of our minds we simply do not have anything at all to do with. Brentano insists that the thoughts in our minds either correspond or do not correspond to things outside of our minds. The object that we affirm in our minds either exists or does not exist outside of our minds. But as Brentano paraphrases Gorgias, “There is nothing which corresponds completely to anything other than itself. What is external to me is not in me, and what is and remains in me, does not pass over into anyone else. Thus truth, as well as the communication of truth, is impossible,” (TE 7).

The Sophist argument against the scheme that we developed above is as follows: While Brentano would do well to distinguish between objects imagined and objects sensed, none of this allows one’s knowledge to encompass anything outside of the realm of the individual’s own mind. From a purely empirical standpoint, as Berkeley points out, the only distinction between an imaginary object and a real or genuine one is that in the case of a real object one has no control over whether one experiences it or not, whereas in the case of an imaginary object one can manipulate the experience at will. Both Locke and Berkeley base their proofs for the denial of solipsism on the fact that one has ideas (or presentations in Brentano’s terms) that one does not call to mind oneself; if I did not produce this image I see then something else did. The difference between Locke and Berkeley is that for the former the external cause is unfeeling matter whereas for the latter the cause is another mind. Hume, completing the triumvirate of British empiricists, skeptically concludes that we simply cannot know what the cause of our ideas is, or even whether causation is a real law at all.

What can Brentano, as an empirical psychologist, mean by the notion of a genuine object, other than something that persists in our sensation, regardless of whether we desire it or not? And what does it mean to judge that such an object exists? To put it another way, what would it mean to judge that either fictional or genuine objects do not exist? To say, “There is no centaur-fiction,” is self-contradictory, because one would have to have invented the centaur-fiction before one could even ask the question of whether the centaur-fiction existed. To ask about any given fiction the fiction must already have been invented, in which case there is no way to deny that the fiction exists. Asking about a fiction presupposes the existence of the fiction. Similarly, there is no question about what one senses. The question is whether one’s sensations are caused by the “genuine object” by which one imagines it to be caused. Another way to put the question is, Is what is inside of my mind also outside of my mind? Given that only what is inside of the mind is inside of the mind, there is no basis upon which to judge.

Brentano’s system only leads to presentations built upon presentations. I am presented with a number of sensations, and then I am presented with the imagination of an external cause of these sensations. Brentano insists that we are doing something fundamentally different when we affirm what we imagine as an external cause rather than deny it, but on what basis are we making the affirmation if we have not (and never have) experienced anything outside of ourselves upon which to make any kind of comparison? Brentano has not adequately addressed the Sophists or skeptics like Hume. Brentano quotes John Stuart Mill as follows:

If belief is only an inseparable association, belief is a matter of habit and accident, and not of reason. Assuredly an association, however close, between two ideas, is not a sufficient ground of belief; is not evidence that the corresponding facts are united in external nature. The theory seems to annihilate all distinction between the belief of the wise, which is regulated by evidence, and conforms to the real succession and coexistence of the facts of the universe, and the belief of fools, which is mechanically produced by any accidental association that suggests the idea of a succession or coexistence to the mind. (PES 225).

The problem is that Brentano has not provided a theory to explain how there possibly could be a ground upon which to bridge the gap between what is associated within the mind and what is “united in external nature.” The pragmatist solution is to quit looking for knowledge about what is united in external nature and to fix one’s attention only upon what is continuous with experience. This leads them to the conclusion that all beliefs can ultimately be stated in terms of expectations of future experiences. Brentano says later in his career in a latter to Husserl,

There is no need at all to postulate any such thing as a truth in itself or a judgment in itself. There are only particular individuals who judge and only particular individuals who judge with evidence; what there is, no matter what area we are talking about, can consist only of things that are individually determined. (TE 137).

If judging subjects are all that there are, and if past experience is simply presented and not judged about, then what could these subjects be judging about other than their own future subjective experience? Perhaps Brentano was drifting toward the pragmatist position. In any event, Whitehead’s system will give us a position from which to clarify these issues.

Whitehead agrees with Brentano to some extent that presentation, judgment, and emotion are to be distinguished from each other. But he disagrees with Brentano on the order in which these elements of experience are derived from each other. The primary element of experience is emotion (feeling/will). Presentation is a special kind of feeling that is derived from the primary feelings in the mode of causal efficacy. Judgment is in turn a special way of feeling the relation between feelings in the mode of causal efficacy and feelings in the mode of presentational immediacy.

The problem with taking presentations as the primary datum of experience is that they involve no motivational force, which is to say that they are indifferent, and it is impossible to build motivation for feeling or will or judgment upon something utterly indifferent in itself. Vision is often taken as the paradigm case of primary sensation in empirical philosophy. But vision is a detached, indifferent kind of sensation, and it is only one particular kind among others. Most other senses, especially taste, touch, and smell, involve pleasure, pain, or some kind of motivation as a fundamental element. We think of presentation as something indifferent and primary and judgment and emotion as something fundamentally different and supplementary because we tend to think of all initial sensation as being of the same indifferent kind as sight. With sight one can close one’s eyes or shift one’s gaze; one has more control over sight than over other sensory presentations, and so one tends to think of judgment and emotion as something added to the presentation at the base of all cognition. But Whitehead would argue that to the extent that we moved at all to do such things as close our eyes or avert or fix our gaze, it is precisely because even visual presentations fail to some extent to be absolutely indifferent and equanimous.

Again, Brentano’s mistake was not in separating presentation from emotion and judgment, it was in making presentation, rather than emotion, primary. Presentation, if it is truly indifferent, cannot motivate emotion, and if it is not truly indifferent then it is simply a very mild, temperate emotion. Whitehead would say that the kind of feelings that we have in presentational immediacy, especially visual feelings, are interpretations and transformations of feelings that are discharged of some of their raw, emotional force in order to serve as data for calmer, rational deliberation. Color feelings are derived from more basic (unconscious) photonic and electrical feelings and synthesized under a particular subjective form that makes them useful for navigating a large, macroscopic body through a complex, macroscopic environment.

Brentano argued against those who suggested that judgment was a species of presentation but simply one with particular consequences for action. Brentano’s response to this theory is as follows:

There would be no special consequences, if there were no special basis for them in the nature of the thought process. Rather than making the assumption of an intrinsic difference between mere presentation and judgment unnecessary, the difference in consequences emphatically points up this intrinsic difference. (PES 203).

But there is no need for an “intrinsic difference between mere presentation and judgment” if presentations are themselves a kind of feeling that involves will and motivation. Raw, unconscious feelings lead to more indifferent, presentational feelings, which when integrated back with the original feelings produce intellectual feelings that involve consequences for action. Feelings intrinsically motivate action because of another fundamental aspect of Whitehead’s system, the idea that many actual occasions go into the constitution of each new individual occasion. One occasion’s feelings have consequences for action in the external world because every occasion is composed of feelings that are internalized from other occasions. A photon’s including a feeling of blueness causes me to experience blueness because I internalize the photon’s feelings in my own feelings. This is the way that the Sophist’s and skeptic’s challenge to knowledge of external things is overcome. I know about external things because they are the primary aspect of my own constitution, from which are derived the presentations and judgments that are considered merely internal.

Brentano argued that a judgment is not merely a combination of presentations, merely a more complex presentation; a judgment is the affirmation or denial of the combination. Therefore the fundamental form of proposition is the existential form, not the subject-predicate form. Whitehead would agree with this, even though he disagrees with Brentano on the fundamental difference between presentation and judgments. But what Whitehead means by calling a proposition true or false is not what Brentano means. Brentano presents a number of arguments and counter-arguments for the notion of truth as correspondence between belief and reality, resulting in a number of qualifications, but ultimately a belief is true if it corresponds to something in the world. To what the belief corresponds and how is unclear; it does not correspond to the natural candidate, the proposition in itself, since this has been eliminated. Toward the end of the discussion in “On the Concept of Truth,” Brentano finally says that the “expressions ‘to judge truly’ and ‘to judge appropriately’ would seem to be tautologically equivalent,” (TE 23), but it is never clear what Brentano means by “appropriate,” if not corresponding to the proposition in itself, to the state of affairs.

Whitehead has a clear answer to the question of what it means for a judgment to be appropriate. Two occasions are not related until they are related in some actual entity, by being integrated in one actual entity. (“The many become one . . .”) This is to say that two electrons have no spatial relations to each other until they are given spatial relations by the decision of some successor occasion. As radical as it sounds, what Whitehead is saying is that in the case of two entities, neither of which includes the other in its internal constitution, there is no relation between these two entities until they are given a relation by a successor, which is simply to say that the truth in some cases is determined by the judgment; the judgment does not conform to the truth because no truth exists yet. Experience is existence. When one experience includes another experience, the one exists in the other; the way that it is experienced is the way that it is. So when there are direct relations of inheritance between entities there is a determinate relation. But if the entities have no temporal relations then they are simultaneous, meaning that their relations are spatial. But these relations do not exist until they are experienced. The relations are created in the experience.

This might make truth seem entirely arbitrary, but there is still a sense in which truth as appropriateness makes sense in Whitehead. The aim of every occasion is to be included in future occasions. This is how feeling and will are united. Feelings are included in future feelings, so the form of a present feeling influences future feelings. Feelings that are incompatible with each other, or irrelevant, or incoherent cannot be combined in future occasions. Feelings that are more compatible with other feelings are more likely to be included in future generations of feelings. What feelings arise in any particular situation is to some extent up to chance. But if certain feelings happen to be more compatible for synthesis with other feelings, then these feelings will have a longer life than less well-adapted feelings. The “appropriateness” of an intellectual feeling (judgment) is simply its fitness for inclusion in future feelings. A judgment is false in the sense that it dies early: it fails to be included in future generations. An absolutely true judgment is one that is appropriate in all possible circumstances, that is not incompatible with any other feelings. This is the kind of truth that Whitehead is seeking in his metaphysical project: “a general system of ideas in terms of which every element of experience can be interpreted,” simply means “a set of ideas that are adaptable to any and all circumstances.” When Brentano says that “There is no need at all to postulate any such thing as a truth in itself or a judgment in itself. There are only particular individuals who judge,” (TE 137) Whitehead would respond, “Indeed, and the longevity of their judgments determines their truth-value, not the other way around.” All that Brentano lacked was an explicit expression of the pragmatic, evolutionary aspect of judgment.

If someone asks, “This is all well and good, but is the cup really on the table, or isn’t it?” we will answer, “In itself, the cup at this present moment has no relation to the table at this present moment. But the two might share common ancestors, making them more compatible for synthesis in future occasions. But that is ultimately up to the future occasions.” And if someone like J.S. Mill were to ask, “Well, then what is the difference between the wise who use reason and fools who believe whatever thing comes into their head by chance?” we will respond, “Reason is the subjective form of human conscious prehensions, a subjective form that has persisted through countless generations of occasions because it is highly compatible with the laws of physics reigning in this region of the cosmos in this cosmic epoch. In general, intellectual feelings that have this subjective form will tend to be longer-lasting than feelings that have some other subjective form, e.g., blind faith. In the long run, all other things being equal, when intellectual feelings having non-rational subjective forms are confronted with feelings having rational subjective forms, the rational feelings (judgments) will tend to produce more sustainable human lives.” I say “all things being equal” because often beliefs win out over other beliefs for reasons having nothing to do with a direct, intellectual confrontation. Sometimes ignorant and stupid people just happen to have stronger bodies or better social connections. In this case “more appropriate” beliefs are squelched before having the opportunity to receive an open intellectual hearing. When we say that a belief is true (or more true) than another, even though the “worse” believe prevailed in the world, what we mean is that even though many refused to listen to it and probably would have persisted in ignoring it no matter what, nevertheless if one had listened to it one would have believed it.

This metaphysical system of Whitehead’s, involving inheritance of feelings from past occasions, feelings derived from feelings, and the adaptation of feelings to their social environment, is the way in which Whitehead fulfills the promise of Brentano’s suggestions. Given the way in which this system understands the nature of intellectual cognition, there is simply no need for the belief in any such thing as truths in themselves or states of affairs. The truth, including this very truth that I am stating now, is simply an adaptation to its intellectual environment, and its truth value is entirely dependent upon its longevity.

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[1] Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: Corrected Edition. Griffin, D.R. and Sherburne, D.W., editors. New York: The Free Press.

[2] Brentano, Franz. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Tim Crane and Jonathan Wolff, editors. New York: Routlege.

[3] Brentano, Franz. The True and the Evident. Kraus, O. and Chisholm, R., editors. London: Routlege and Kegan Paul.

Duty to God: Kierkegaard vs. Kant

Prompt:

Recall that Problema II in Fear and Trembling is called ‘Is There An Absolute Duty to God?’ Johannes de Silentio argues therein that if one equates absolute moral duty (e.g. It is an absolute duty to love the neighbor) with one’s relation to the Absolute (The duty to love the neighbor is a duty we owe to God), this resolves into a tautology: i.e. there is no other content to the relationship with God than the moral duty of love for the neighbor.

"The whole existence of the human race rounds itself off as a perfect, self-contained sphere, and then the ethical is that which limits and fills at one and the same time. God comes to be an invisible vanishing point, an impotent thought; his power is only in the ethical, which fills all of existence," (p. 68).

Do you find that argument persuasive? If so, why? If not, why not? If you agree, what meaning beyond moral duty is there for faith in God? (You may use the interpretation of the Abraham/Isaac story as an example.) If you disagree, how would you argue that the duty, the divine law, of love is more than a duty or a law?

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Kant argues in the Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals that in order for an action to be moral it must be in conformity with duty and it must be willed strictly because it is one’s duty, not on account of any other interest. An action cannot be a duty unless its maxim is such that it is capable of being made a universal law without self-contradiction and it posits reason to be its own end. “Do not commit murder” is a maxim that can be made a universal law, whereas “Commit murder” cannot be made a universal law, because the giver of such a law would have to will his own murder, which would terminate his capacity to reason, and therefore reason would not be its own end but would destroy itself. Murder cannot be a duty for Kant because it cannot be universalized without contradicting reason as its own end.

The good will must will that it be in conformity with reason; that is, reason must determine the will directly without any natural desire impinging upon it. This is the principle of autonomy of the will, as opposed to heteronomy, i.e. allowing the will to be determined by something external to itself, such as sexual desire, alcohol addiction, or even God. Though the will wills the universal, it is still an inward and autonomous determination because it is the reason itself that proposes the law to be universal and then determines the will. If the will allows itself to be determined by something external to itself then it cannot be moral, because it is not responsible for its own decision; a moral will is not determined by the authority of the pope or the king.

In the Critique of Practical Reason,[*] Kant says that the assumption of the existence of God is a moral necessity (p. 241), though it cannot be demonstrated on the basis of pure speculative reason. In order to will the highest good, which is morality and happiness (nature being in conformity with one’s end) in proportion to morality, one must believe that it is possible for this highest good to be realized. But a finite rational being is not the cause of the natural world or even of his own nature, and therefore does not have the ability to make his nature conform perfectly to the moral law. Kant thus postulates the existence of a being transcending nature that has the ability to make nature conform to morality, that is God (p. 240-1). It is not possible to prove the existence of this being theoretically, but from a practical, moral perspective, such a being must exist if morality is to have any real meaning and force.

It is this understanding of God that Johannes de Silentio criticizes. He does not criticize the ethics themselves of Kant (and Hegel), in fact, he praises the nobility of ethics:

The knight of faith knows that it is inspiring to give up himself for the universal, that it takes courage to do it, but that there is also a security in it precisely because it is a giving up for the universal… This he knows, and he feels as if bound; he could wish that this was the task that had been assigned to him (p. 76).

What concerns Johannes de Silentio is the place of God in these systems. In Kant’s system, for example, morality is determined prior to the knowledge of God. In order for the will to be good, it must be autonomous and self-legislating, though also universally legislating, which makes morality more than merely subjective. It is the necessity of the possibility of the realization of the good that makes the existence of God necessary. But one does not enter into relation with God in determining the ethical. It is one’s own reason that determines the will directly. Johannes says that such a system makes God into a mere “impotent thought,” but another way of stating it is that God ceases to be a lawgiver and becomes nothing more than a cosmic bureaucrat; he carries out the law that exists independent of himself. He exists for the benefit of a higher end, which is also our end, which we can determine just as well as He does—and in fact we must determine it without Him in order for our actions to be truly moral.

Kant is right to find the basis of the existence of God in a practical necessity, as opposed to a speculative discovery, but he is not right to limit God’s power merely to the implementation of the ethical in the natural whole, and in fact in doing so he destroys the possibility of taking God seriously as an actuality, i.e. he does make God into an “impotent thought,” as Johannes claims.

The existence of God cannot be proven speculatively because, as Kant says, we do not know things in themselves but only our perceptions of them, upon which our minds impose rules of order so that we may understand the world around us. All of the laws that we understand to operate in the world are laws that we ourselves invent, including the law of causality. We have no way of knowing whether things in themselves actually operate causally and deterministically; it is only because of our special position as finite, temporal beings that we are forced to represent things to ourselves in this way. Therefore, the strongest speculative proof of the existence of God, the necessity of a first cause of all motion, does not stand up, because causation itself cannot be proven to exist in itself, but only in our minds.

Basically, there is no way to know by pure reason alone whether there is any fundamental order to existence. For all we know, it could be that, as Johannes says at the beginning of the “Eulogy on Abraham,”

…underlying everything there [is] only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions [produces] everything, be it significant or insignificant…a vast, never appeased emptiness [hides] beneath everything… (p. 15).

Chaos, disorder, and meaninglessness are the fundamental principles of existence. Everything appears by chance, including the temporary order that we represent to ourselves in our perceptions. It takes an act of will, a practical necessity, to believe in order. But then the question arises, if there is order, what is its source, and what is the nature of this source?

The principle of order in existence is God; this almost everyone agrees, but we begin to diverge when we start to consider the nature of God. There are two major parties in this discussion, the first of whom I will call “rationalists,” who believe in a God of science, a cosmic bureaucrat, and the second I will call “absolutists,” who believe in God as an absolute monarch. Johannes takes the absolutist position against rationalists like Kant and Hegel.

From the rationalist perspective, there are two main ways of thinking of God: either He is intelligent or He is not. It could be that the principle of order in existence is not itself intelligent, that it only has to do with the laws of the deterministic, physical world; this is the atheist position, which Kant does not take. The other is the deist position, God as intelligent and rational—infinitely so, and yet His reason is the same as our reason; reason is independent of both God and the natural order. It is this second position, that God is intelligent and yet subject to the same reason that we are, which Johannes criticizes.

The absolutist position is that the will of God is the source of what is rational and good; there is nothing independently good in itself, but God’s willing it makes it so. In positing an absolute duty to God, one could change Kant’s opening line of Section I of the Groundwork from “It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will,” (p. 49) to “It is impossible to think of anything…that could be considered good without limitation except the will of God.” This leads to the possibility of a teleological suspension of the ethical, a higher good above the ethical, such as God’s completely personal command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, which is opposed to the universal ethical duty of the father to love the son.

Kant’s ethical system is extremely admirable, in that it puts morality above any corrupting influence of reward and punishment; doing one’s duty is its own incentive, and happiness follows only afterward. As Johannes said, it also has a sense of security to it; there is a way for me to judge my actions objectively, to know with confidence whether I am in conformity with the moral law. And Kant’s emphasis on the autonomy of the will, on the responsibility of the will to determine and decide for itself its morality, seems to make the intuitively necessary distinction between brute animals and free moral beings.

But Kant’s system posits two ordering principles while Johannes’ posits only one. For Kant, there is the good/rational, which is not in itself intelligent, and there is also God, who is intelligent but beneath the rational in the same way that we human beings are. Johannes unifies these two principles into a single, absolute God. While Kant subjects the will of God to the rational, so that “Even the Holy One of the Gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before he is cognized as such,” (p. 63), Johannes posits “an absolute duty to God” such that “the individual relates himself as the single individual absolutely to the absolute,” (p. 70), a God who stands above the ethical and can even make the ethical a temptation. The law exists independently of Kant’s God, who serves merely as a police officer; Johannes’ God is the lawgiver Himself, who can make a general law for all then make a special law for his favored subjects.

If Kant is right and the law is independent of God, then what is the ultimate source of the law? It must have no source, so now it is the uncaused cause. How does the law determine God’s will? Is God’s will autonomous as the human will is? Could He then choose to not obey the law? Could God sin? If not, then God is not a free will; He becomes just another deterministic law of nature, not really transcendent at all, not really God. Belief in such a God becomes a blind faith in a moral mechanism in nature—“God comes to be an invisible vanishing point, an impotent thought.” Nietzsche and others would later spread the word that this God is dead.

The only God who should be taken seriously is the God who is the source of the good, not merely its enforcer. It is impossible to prove by speculative reason the existence of such a God, but it is equally impossible to disprove His existence; belief or disbelief requires an act of will or grace. It is a practical necessity to decide one way or the other; to choose to dismiss the question is implicitly to answer it in the negative. Either I will live my life according to my desires, or I will conform my will to the universal (which I do strictly on my own, and not in relation to any intelligence higher than myself), or I am brought into an absolute relation to the absolute, such that I am governed by an absolute law that applies to me purely as a single individual.

Kant would call this heteronomy of the will, allowing something external (God) to determine the will. But if God is understood as the absolute ground of all order, then there can be no distinction between God’s will and one’s own reason. The will can be both autonomous and divinely determined simultaneously. In fact, it could even be the highest form of autonomy and freedom for the single individual to be in an absolute relation to the absolute.

This, however, opens up an enormous problem, that there is no universal standard of moral duty in relation to God. Anyone can get it into his head that he can do anything he likes and say that it was God’s will. Johannes, however, does not think that this is as big of a problem as one might suppose:

…existing as the single individual is considered to be the easiest thing in the world, and thus people must be coerced into becoming the universal. I can share neither that fear nor that opinion, and for the same reason. Anyone who has learned that to exist as the single individual is the most terrible of all will not be afraid to say that it is the greatest of all, but he must say this in such a way that his words do not become a pitfall for one who is confused but instead help him into the universal, although his words could create a little room for greatness (p. 75).

Simply because God’s role is not limited merely to the universal does not mean that the universal is entirely obliterated or that God has nothing to do with it (p. 70). It is still a great thing for a person to do his ethical duty, but it is greater still to enter into a personal relationship with God (p. 16). There is a way of life in which one lives merely for himself and follows his own drives without restriction, but this is absolutely not the life of faith, though externally it may be difficult to tell the difference (p. 79).

There are some words of Jesus in the gospel of John that express well this new relationship with the divine:

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.

Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my father I have made known unto you.

Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you (John 16:13-16, KJV).

God is not looking for mere servants to execute his universal, ethical commands; He is looking for friends—who can both love him and struggle with him (p. 16). God wants a direct, personal relationship with those whom He chooses—but it is critical that it is He who chooses, not us. Only God can suspend the ethical law; we cannot assert ourselves as individuals into such a position (p. 93). And even those who are called never cease to feel the pull of the ethical as a temptation, just as some are tempted to gratify their base desires rather than to do the ethical.

If God is really going to be God, the one source of all order, then He must be the author of the good itself, not merely its executor. As author, God stands above the ethical and has the ability to pull those whom He chooses into a personal relationship with Himself, such that one can become great by means of a “purely personal virtue” (p. 59), as Abraham did. One does not thereby free oneself totally of the pull of the ethical, but one enters into a paradoxical relationship to it. The meaning of one’s life ceases to be mere moral duty and becomes friendship with God as an end in itself. The great difficulty with this situation is that it cannot be communicated to anyone else, precisely because it is strictly personal; there can be no comforting general rules for how one ought to live in faith. The knight of faith is always alone in the world.

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[*] I. Kant, M. Gregor. Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Radical Monotheism and the Political Theory of Calvin’s Institutes

For Calvin, there is no higher principle than God’s absolute distinction from, superiority to, and mastery over creation. Everything in the Institutes of the Christian Religion can be traced back to this principle—from predestination to justification by faith to the distinction between the spiritual and temporal kingdoms and its implications for politics. In order to demonstrate the unity of Calvin’s thought and the place of politics in it, to show the presence of God’s utter superiority underlying all of Calvin’s major doctrines—and as a guiding principle for the interpretation of Scripture—this paper will trace the logical progression of these doctrines from the first principle defined above and will culminate in an explication of Calvin’s political theory.

The God-World Distinction

Calvin does not see God as a watchmaker, who creates a world, establishes its laws, and then abandons it to run on its own. A watchmaker God is one that can be understood by man; that is, if one can develop a system of laws that explains all of the phenomena in the universe, then one will understand the mind of God. Calvin, however, insists that God is utterly incomprehensible to man and is, at the same time, continually involved in the government of the world:

“What is God? Men who pose this question are merely toying with idle speculations... What good is it to profess with Epicurus some sort of God who has cast aside the care of the world only to amuse himself in idleness?”[1]

But while God is not totally absent from us, He also is not to be understood as being one with the world and nature:

“I confess, of course, that it can be said reverently, provided that it proceeds from a reverent mind, that nature is God; but because it is a harsh and improper saying, since nature is rather the order prescribed by God, it is harmful in such weighty matters, in which special devotion is due, to involve God confusedly in the inferior course of his works.”[2]

Calvin is trying to avoid deism on the one side and pantheism on the other. God is not an idle observer of the world, nor is He a part of the world. On the contrary, God is radically distinct from the world and utterly superior to it, and at the same time He continually sustains and governs it, “whenever and wherever we cast our gaze.”[3] God’s essence is incomprehensible to us, and therefore “the universe is for us a sort of mirror in which we can contemplate God, who is otherwise invisible.”[4] Note here that Calvin says the universe is a mirror in which to contemplate God, not to see God. God in His essence is not to be associated with any kind of sensory perception, with anything of the world. The perception of creation can direct a pious mind toward a kind of understanding of God, a knowledge of His power and majesty, but material things should never be confused with God Himself, since they are in every way inferior to Him.

Idols vs. Scripture

The radical distinction that Calvin makes between God and the world can help to explain the zeal with which he attacks the use of images in the church, while promoting Scripture. God is absolutely superior to perceptible, created things, and thus it is an insult to His majesty for man, a creature, to attempt to represent Him in an image produced by the human mind, as Calvin argues at some length.[5] On the other hand, it is perfectly appropriate for God the Word communicate Himself in the written and spoken words of Scripture; even though the language itself is manmade, it is God using it.

There are arguments that one could raise against this distinction between Scripture and images. Is it not true that words are symbols for perceptible things and, in fact, perceptible themselves? A word represents a material thing, whether it is an object, a process, a state of being, or a motion. “Beauty” stands for something that one sees, “justice” for something that one does or that is done to one. To say that God is beautiful or just is to associate Him with material things or processes. It is impossible for a human being to say any word without its being associated in his mind with some perceptible image, so what good does it do to distinguish between the use of images and words, which manifest themselves either as audible perceptions, as in speech, or visible perceptions, as in print? Further, how can visual artists be said to be any less divinely inspired than the writers who translated God’s Word into print? Calvin says that the world is a mirror in which we may contemplate God’s majesty: Is it any less reasonable to contemplate God in a statue or heaven in a painting than it is to do so in text?

While these points have a certain force, it is nonetheless incorrect to equate words with images. A word represents something that is perceived in the world, and is itself perceptible, but in its representation of the thing it can also be said to be beyond the thing, on the level of intelligibility, as opposed to perception. Words are things that allow human beings to relate their various perceptions within their own minds and also to communicate their perception and understanding to each other. Words and images both represent things, but words also can communicate in a more direct way than images can. Calvin likely would say that to the extent that human beings necessarily associate words with images, this is a frailty that should be condemned, not accepted.

As to the divine inspiration of visual artists, it can be said that while the world is a mirror in which one can contemplate God’s majesty, it is vanity for any human being to believe that he can add anything to a created object to make it more like God. As will be discussed further, God’s superiority to the creation involves not only the beasts and inanimate objects, but human beings, as well:

“The story of Job, in it description of God’s wisdom, power, and purity, always expresses a powerful argument that overwhelms men with the realization of their own stupidity, impotence, and corruption.”[6]

Man has nothing of his own to offer God and certainly nothing that he can add to God’s creation, except perhaps corruption. Therefore, it is superfluous and even harmful for man to take it upon himself to represent God in any form.

Only God can communicate Himself to us, through His creation, His Word, and His Son. The Word, like the creation and like the person of Jesus Christ, is not a representation of God, but His direct communication with us. God may choose to lower Himself to speak in our language or be incarnated in our form, but we must not think ourselves able to form a representation of Him in a created thing, which God has already made perfectly.

Absolute Monotheism: Predestination and Evil

Calvin’s understanding of the distinction between God and the world may be further illuminated by an investigation of his doctrine of predestination, for which he is widely known. Calvin teaches that God not only permits evil, but even controls it:

“Satan, no less than the angels who willingly obey, presents himself before God [Job 1:6; 2:1] to receive his commands…[for] it would be ridiculous for the Judge only to permit what he wills to be done, and not also to decree it and to command its execution by his ministers.”[7]

This is a very different solution to the problem of evil from that adopted by St. Thomas Aquinas, who says,

“…God wills some things to be done necessarily, some contingently, to the right ordering of things, for the building up of the universe. Therefore to some effects He has attached necessary causes, that cannot fail; but to others defectible and contingent causes, from which arise contingent effects… God therefore neither wills evil to be done, nor wills it not to be done, but wills to permit evil to be done; and this is a good.”[8]

Calvin, however, insists that there is no such thing as a distinction between God’s permission and His will.[9]

Thomas believes in free will, the idea that man is given to make his own choices, whether good or evil. He understands this not as a limitation upon God’s omnipotence but as an expression of it; God is so powerful that he can create a being that is free of His direct control.[10] Calvin, however, sees God’s role in a different way. He sees God as not only the first cause, but the only cause of everything that happens in the material world: “[N]othing is more absurd than that anything should happen without God’s ordaining it, because it would then happen without any cause.”[11] Thomas teaches that all beings have God as the cause of their existence,[12] but not of their actions—at least in the case of humans and angels. This is Calvin’s extreme monotheistic position, that all things not only exist because of God, but also behave in the way they do because God so commands them: God is the one source of everything that happens.

Some may wonder how it is that human beings can be responsible for their actions if God is the cause. The doctrine of predestination, however, is in no way meant to be a negation of responsibility. Though we are caught up in the guilt of the original sin from the moment of birth without having chosen it ourselves, we still cannot be said to be compelled into sin. “Man sins of necessity, but without compulsion.”[13] God does cause human beings to sin, but He does not apply force to us, but rather wills that we choose to sin voluntarily, that we want to sin: “As if these two statements did not perfectly agree, although in divers ways, that man, while he is acted upon by God, yet at the same time himself acts!”[14]

The next objection that one might raise is how it is that God can apparently will two contradictory things at once, commanding us to obey the law while willing us to do another. But to this Calvin replies,

“God’s will is not therefore at war with itself, nor does it change, nor does it pretend not to will what he wills. But even though his will is one and simple in him, it appears manifold to us because, on account of our mental incapacity, we do not grasp how in divers ways it wills and does not will something to take place.”[15]

The assertion is that God is so superior to His creatures that things that appear contradictory to them are perfectly simple to Him. God’s omnipotence extends even to willing a logical contradiction.

Perhaps most difficult to deal with, however, is the fairness of all of this. Is it not hypocritical of God to say, “Do as I say, not as I make you do,” and then to punish his creatures for doing what he wills? One could argue, along with Thrasymachus in the Republic, that “the just is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger,”[16] or the Athenians in The Peloponnesian War that “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must;”[17] thus God, who is infinitely strong, may do whatever He pleases with His creation and no created being has any basis for complaint. This would certainly not be Calvin’s argument, however:

“And we do not advocate the fiction of ‘absolute might’; because this is profane, it ought rightly to be hateful to us. We fancy no lawless god who is a law unto himself…but the will of God is not only free of all fault but is the highest rule of perfection, and even the law of all laws. But we deny that he is liable to render an account.”[18]

The rules of justice that obtain among human beings do not apply to God, not because He is so powerful that no punishment can be applied to Him, but because He is the source of all laws to begin with. In God, the distinction between subjective and objective good is meaningless. The good is good because God wills it, and God loves goodness because it is good.

The modern mind has difficulty with such an idea because it runs counter to the notion of equality. Tocqueville described the situation best:

“As conditions become more equal and each man in particular becomes more like all the others, weaker and smaller, one gets used to no longer viewing citizens so as to consider only the people; one forgets individuals so as to think only of the species.

“In these times the human mind loves to embrace a host of diverse objects at once; it constantly aspires to be able to link a multitude of consequences to a single cause.

“The idea of unity obsesses [the mind]; it seeks it on all sides, and when it believes it has found it, it willingly wraps it in its bosom and rests with it. Not only does it come to discover only one creation and one Creator in the world; this first division of things still bothers it, and it willingly seeks to enlarge and simplify its thought by enclosing God and the universe within a single whole.”[19]

Calvin is saying that God is not a part of the universe itself, is not subject to its laws, because He is its law; and yet He is not a tyrant. He is not under the law, nor does he raise Himself above it purely out of might; He simply is the law and so is rightfully above us in an absolute way.

In the Image of God: the Body-Soul Distinction

If Calvin is going to hold to this radical superiority of God over material things, then he could be seen to run into a problem with Genesis 1:26, in which God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” In what sense can man, a corporeal creature, be said to be made in the image of God, Whose majesty is above all images, as Calvin emphasizes so forcefully?

This problem would seem to have something to do with the distinction Calvin makes between body and soul: “[A]lthough God’s glory shines forth in the outer man, yet there is no doubt that the proper seat of his image is in the soul,” for “indiscriminately extending God’s image both to the body and to the soul, mingles heaven and earth,”[20] something that would violate Calvin’s most fundamental principle.

The body-soul duality can be difficult to understand; Calvin himself seems confused about it. If the body and soul are such radically distinct substances, one made in the image of God and the other not, how is it that certain chemicals, for example, can affect human behavior? Calvin admits that “there is something organic in the soul,” but then argues that there are “[activities] of the soul distinct from the body,”[21] which he goes on to list. Now some of these activities are not entirely convincing, for example dreaming, in which Calvin believes the soul continues to operate independently while the body sleeps, or astronomical observation; dreaming can be explained biologically, and astronomical observation can be seen merely as a means to other material ends, such as navigation; he seems here to be trying to make empirical observations fit the doctrine he wants to assert. But it is difficult to argue with the following as a proof of the distinction between soul and body: “With our intelligence we conceive the invisible God and the angels, something the body can by no means do.”[22] One might take issue with Calvin’s use of this as a proof of the soul’s immortality, since it is not self-evident that a being must be immortal in order to interact with immortal things, but the body-soul distinction point, at least, seems sound.

Justification by Faith, the Sacraments

In this light one can better understand the reasoning behind Calvin’s doctrine of justification by faith alone. If the body and soul are distinct objects and only the soul is made in the image of God, how could any works done by the body justify one before God? To earn salvation and eternal life in heaven through the works of the body would mingle heaven and earth, which, as mentioned above, Calvin expressly urges us not to do.[23] The only temporal work that justifies man has been done by God Himself, when Christ died upon the cross.[24] Good works are most certainly encouraged, but they in themselves are not what save us. It is faith that is the basis of any works righteousness.[25] As Kant says, “ Nothing in the world—indeed nothing even beyond the world—can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a GOOD WILL.”[26]

Justification, then, is by faith alone, and what is more, it is a free gift, which is further consistent with the principle of God’s absolute superiority and control over the world. Man cannot be considered to be the source of his own faith; even his faith is a gift from God, which “rests entirely upon God’s mercy.”[27]

Certain important aspects of Calvin’s teaching on the sacraments follow also from this. Calvin identifies two sacraments, baptism and holy supper, as legitimate, the other five that the Roman church has he dismisses; and his understanding of these sacraments is consistent with everything that has come before. Calvin argues for infant baptism[28] and against the idea that the unbaptized necessarily go to hell,[29] and he also denounces the idea of transubstantiation, or the physical presence of Christ’s body in the holy supper.[30]

It is clear why Calvin denies that baptism is necessary for salvation: no worldly action can determine the state of one’s soul one way or the other, and this means that there is no reason to postpone it to the latest possible time in order clear one’s sins before one dies.[31] Also, Calvin sees a child’s parents or guardians as the authorities ordained by God over the child,[32] so it is fitting, since grace is a free gift given by God and not taken by the individual, for the parents to bestow the sacrament on the child even before he is aware of its meaning.

As for transubstantiation, it should be clear that Calvin must deal with John 6:51 and Luke 22:19—

“I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread which I will give is my flesh…And he took bread, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.”

—in such a way so as to maintain his denial of justification by works, for if the sacrament in the holy supper were to be thought of as the physical body of Jesus Christ that one must physically eat in order to be saved, the idea of justification by faith alone would be in serious trouble. In order to conform the holy supper to his principles, therefore, Calvin asserts that it is a sign, though a very important one that we should take seriously, but not the physical body and blood of Christ.

Christian Freedom

One of the most important chapters in the Institutes is the one entitled, “Christian Freedom.” Calvin explains that it is a difficult subject, one through which a middle course must be charted to avoid misunderstandings on different sides, but nonetheless it must be undertaken, for “unless this freedom be comprehended, neither Christ nor gospel truth, nor inner peace of soul, can be rightly known.”[33] Simply put, Christian freedom means freedom from the judgment of the law, so that “consciences observe the law, not as if constrained by the necessity of the law, but that freed from the law’s yoke they willingly obey God’s will.”[34] From this follows the freedom to use indifferent things as one judges appropriate, though not in such a way that one harms those weak in faith.

Calvin calls Christian freedom “an appendage of justification,”[35] which helps to explain how this doctrine follows from what precedes it. Justification is by faith alone; regardless of the external appearance of an action, its goodness depends entirely on the goodness of the will of the person acting. Rightly ordered bodily acts cannot be good in themselves, and therefore add nothing to our salvation, since they are accomplished entirely by our corporeal part, which cannot be mixed with the glory of heaven. We can gain salvation only by faith, the right ordering of our spiritual part. Since we are not justified by works, we are free from the works of the law. But the faithful soul desires to do good works, not in the hopes of winning salvation, but as a necessary consequence the pure love of obeying God.

Understanding our justification and freedom in this manner is as close as humans can come in this life to overcoming the original sin of pride. Original sin consists in asserting one’s own will against God’s will, one’s finite concerns against God’s infinite providence. Some see doing the works of the law to earn salvation as a way of subordinating oneself to God, but Calvin thinks that for any created being to think himself capable of doing anything to save himself is pride. One could even go further and say that doing works to earn salvation is not so much love of God as it is love of self. Luther, for example, says that had Adam not sinned, his assigned tasks “would truly have been the freest of works, done only to please God and not to obtain righteousness,” and Luther recommends such an attitude for those who have been justified by faith.[36]

The Two Kingdoms

In what appears to be the culmination of the chapter on Christian freedom, in a section entitled, “Freedom of conscience from all human law,” Calvin says, “in those matters in which the Lord has willed them to be free, we conclude that they are released from the power of all men.”[37] At first, one might think that Calvin is leading in the direction of a liberal conception of human rights, but a few lines later one realizes that this is a gross misunderstanding of Calvin, for, in fact, he does not mean that all human obedience is to be done away with:

“[T]here is a twofold government in man: one aspect is spiritual, whereby the conscience is instructed in piety and in reverencing God; the second is political, whereby man is educated for the duties of humanity and citizenship that must be maintained among men.” [38]

Calvin says that while Christians are free in spirit, they nonetheless may be bound to bodily servitude. This distinction should not be surprising in the context of what has come before. However one understands the separation, there is a definite distinction between the soul and the body. The works of the body are indifferent, as regards the justification of the person; only the faith of the inner soul really matters. But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that Calvin cares nothing for the government of the material realm, quite the opposite. For since God is the one source of everything that is and that occurs, both the spiritual jurisdiction and the temporal jurisdiction ultimately have God as their ruler, but their government is different, according to their different natures.

Church Government

The government of the church is very different from that of the state. Calvin insists that the church be founded on consent, something that he never requires for the civil government. He reserves to the civil authorities the right to use force against wrongdoers, leaving the church leaders only the powers to preach and to excommunicate. Even within the purely spiritual realm, Calvin leaves the church authorities no absolute power; he denies that excommunication from the church necessarily means damnation and that certain men may determine for everyone what books are to be included in Scripture.

This may seem to be in conflict with the idea of the keys, which Christ gave to Peter, but it makes sense from Calvin’s perspective. He introduces within the government of the church itself the same distinction that he makes in everything else, the separation between the temporal and the purely spiritual: the visible church and the true church. The visible church is the institution that one sees working in the world, ministers teaching and disciplining the people and administering the sacraments. Ministers may excommunicate congregation members for evil deeds, and while it is likely that apparently unrepentant sinners are going to hell, there is no way to tell by external observation whether this is so, since justification is by faith alone and it is never possible to see directly into another person’s soul. Ministers generally can be trusted to administer discipline properly, but to give men the final say on spiritual matters would be to limit God’s absolute power.

No man can be said to be the head of the church, at least not the true church, of which only Christ is the absolute king. The true church could be said to be parallel to the visible church—one is probably more likely to be saved if one is in it than if one is not—but there are differences that result from the fallibility of human judgment of external things. There may be ministers who do not teach doctrine in precisely the right way, or there may be excommunicated sinners who are actually among the elect or damned individuals who sit in the physical presence of the other believers. God is capable of making these things, which it is not within our mental capacity to comprehend. Therefore the visible church is to be understood to be a guide for us in our lives to receive God’s grace, but it is the invisible, inner connection with Christ that constitutes the true church.

Civil Government

One might reasonably wonder how it is that Calvin distinguishes the visible church from the civil government, when he grants the magistrate power not only to promote the peace, but also to prevent “idolatry, sacrilege against God’s name, blasphemies against his truth, and other public offenses against religion from arising and spreading among the people.”[39] What is the difference between these two institutions—or rather why are there two instead of one—why is it that one is based on consent and the other not, the one able to use force but not the other? And how can it be, as Calvin claims, that while the civil authority has power to punish those who practice religion improperly, he nonetheless does not “allow men to make laws according to their own decision concerning religion and the worship of God”?[40]

The difference between these two jurisdictions is subtle. The purpose of the church is to teach proper doctrine, while the state has the responsibility to prevent anyone from undermining this work of the church, by force if necessary. While the following analogy is not a perfect one, the church could be compared to a modern university: a school teaches, and it may discipline its students for failure to complete their assignments, for example by placing them on academic probation (the equivalent of excommunication), but it does not use force against anyone to make them accept its doctrines. If someone is disruptive to the learning environment or says things that undermine the institution, they may call the police to remove the offender and punish him, but it does not do so itself.[41]

It is in the visible church, the teaching institution, that we see Christian freedom expressed. While in some sense a worldly institution, the church’s purpose is spiritual, and since Christians are free in spiritual matters, it makes sense for the visible church to be democratic—though the true church is monarchical, with Christ as its absolute ruler.

Civil government, on the other hand, can take many different forms and can impose a diversity of laws, according to the needs of the particular people that it governs. And contrary to the liberal tradition that developed after Calvin, civil government is not founded on consent of the people, but on the ordination of God. Whoever appears to have control of affairs, no matter how wicked the man, is to be considered legitimate.[42] In spiritual government, there is a distinction between the true and the visible church; in civil government there is not the same kind of distinction, since whoever appears to be controlling affairs in the world really is controlling them, whereas there can be some question as to whether the visible church is in accordance with the true church. The apparent civil government is the true civil government, and so it rules with the same right as Christ rules the true church.

There is an important distinction here, however, for while even a wicked temporal ruler is a legitimate lord over those he commands—whereas a wicked minister is not legitimate—there is a difference between just and unjust rulers. “[T]hey who rule for the public benefit are true patterns and evidences of this beneficence of [God’s],” but, “they who rule unjustly and incompetently have been raised up by him to punish the wickedness of the people.”[43] That is, it is possible for a ruler to be unjust, and for this he will be punished by God, but he must nonetheless be obeyed.

‘Rights’

A right is generally thought to be a justification for a claim to some good, such as life, freedom, or a certain minimum of wealth. A right is thought to be absolute or “inalienable,” so that it is, in all cases, wrong to kill an innocent, to enslave him, or to take his property without appropriate compensation. Rights are self-centered, that is, they are focused on the right-bearer primarily and the duty-bearer secondarily. I have a right to X, therefore you have an obligation to provide it; it is because of my right to live that you have an obligation to not kill me.

In Calvin, however, it is duties that come before rights. To the extent that anyone has a right to life, it is because God has imposed a duty on individuals to not kill. And any other rights, beyond this most basic one, are difficult to justify in an absolute sense in Calvin. For example, there is no such thing as a right to freedom of speech, where freedom means the right to say things that are wrong or useless, for the civil authorities have the responsibility to punish offenses such as blasphemy.[44] Nor is there freedom from involuntary servitude, for the magistrate has the authority to levy tribute on the property, and therefore indirectly the labor, of his subjects.[45] Far from having a right to choose one’s rulers, a right to self-government, there is instead a duty to obey whomever whoever is in control, no matter how abusive.

On the other hand, Calvin does say that freedom in government is a very good thing:

“I freely admit that no kind of government is more happy than one where freedom is regulated with becoming moderation and is properly established on a durable basis…Indeed, the magistrates ought to apply themselves with the highest diligence to prevent the freedom…from being in any respect diminished, far less violated.”[46]

But almost in the same breath Calvin argues that those who do not live under such a state ought not even to consider changing their government, which move would “not only be foolish and superfluous, but altogether harmful.”[47] Freedom is a very desirable thing, which the magistrate has a duty to preserve, but one does not have a right to it. A right implies a duty on another that one may lawfully enforce or assert for oneself, but Calvin says that one ought not “to inquire about another’s duties, but every man should keep in mind that one duty which is his own.”[48] The magistrate has a duty to defend freedom, but the subject has a duty to endure servitude to a magistrate who fails to meet his obligations.

To the extent that one has rights, they are, properly speaking, gifts of the magistrate. That is, Calvin allows that Christians may assert their property rights or other kinds of rights against others, and even against lower magistrates, “the magistrate may without impiety be called upon and also appealed to,”[49] so one may, under the proper circumstances, bring a lawsuit against one’s neighbor, or, as Paul did, appeal to the higher authority when the lower one judges wrongly.[50] But no individual may appeal beyond the highest magistrate; if that magistrate fails to protect what one considers to be one’s right, then one must accept it and obey. The rights that the magistrate grants are all one may assert for oneself; anything more is to resist God’s judgment.

The Unity and Diversity of Laws

Closely related to the variability of rights is Calvin’s discussion of the unity and diversity of laws. Calvin argues that different laws are appropriate to different times, places, and peoples; but that all laws have the same end, equity.[51] The Ten Commandments are common to all; no one may be allowed to commit blasphemy, murder, theft, adultery, and the like, but the punishments may vary from place to place, as local conditions require. “There are nations inclined to a particular vice, unless it be most sharply repressed.”[52] Where theft is rampant, it may be met with the punishment of death, but if not it may be better to deal with it less harshly. This diversity is, according to Calvin, “perfectly adapted to maintain the observance of God’s law.”[53]

A question that one might raise here is Calvin’s relationship to liberalism. Liberals favor a society in which individual’s actions are regulated as little as possible by civil government. A liberal government is one that uses force only against crimes that involve the initiation of force, such as murder and theft, but not consensual or “victimless” crimes like adultery and drunkenness. Such a government also refrains from regulating economic activity and from providing for the material welfare of its subjects.

Liberal government is entirely possible for Calvin. In his terms, what this would mean is that crimes other than those involving force would be punished by social disgrace, instead of by the magistrate’s sword, but they would still be punished. But while liberal government is certainly possible for Calvin, it is difficult to know whether he would have thought it good:

“Yet it is necessary for the magistrate to pay attention to both [harshness and clemency], lest by excessive severity he either harm more than heal; or, by superstitious affectation of clemency, fall into the cruelest gentleness, if he should (with a soft and dissolute kindness) abandon many to their destruction. …it is indeed bad to live under a prince with whom nothing is permitted; but much worse under one by whom everything is allowed.”[54]

There are no universal maxims that one can draw from this, except that the magistrate ought to make whatever laws create the greatest possible amount of order in a particular place for a particular people at a particular time, which is the point of the unity and diversity of laws. If punishing drunkenness with death turns alcohol into a forbidden fruit that only incites curiosity, and punishing only the violent acts that drunkenness often induces causes people to be responsible with their drinking and therefore to drink less, then the latter is what ought to be chosen. If, however, this is not a sufficient deterrent and drunkenness can only be prevented by cutting off the supply of alcohol by executing those who transport and sell it, then this is the appropriate policy. Everything depends upon the temperament of the governed.

A somewhat different problem still remains, however, regarding what kind of religious toleration Calvin could permit. Calvin himself was involved in having the heretic Servetus executed, and one wonders what kind of social conditions could legitimate the failure to protect the people from heresy. One could make the argument that force is not needed or even desirable to protect religion in a society of generally well educated common people. Calvin himself certainly did not need protection from heretics; he was merely trying to protect those weaker in faith from being drawn in by Servetus’ lies. If, however, virtually everyone were able to read the Bible and other theological documents for themselves, understand them, and converse intelligently about them, perhaps it would be more useful to keep the heretic around so that one could better understand one’s own position. As John Stuart Mill, echoing Cicero, said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”[55]

It would be a mistake, however, to confuse the kind of liberalism possible in Calvin with that of someone like Mill. Calvin, for instance, would never say, “In the part which merely concerns himself, [man’s] independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign,”[56] Yet Calvin might agree with the following, rather surprising statement from Mill:

“Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement… Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.”[57]

Not only must a people be educated and be able to carry on intelligent discourse, but they must also be “capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.” That is, they must be trained in moral strength, the virtue of self-mastery and putting one’s beliefs into practice, in addition to knowledge of the arts and sciences.[58] It would seem that the general level of education and moral fortitude of a people is the most reasonable way to determine what level of individual freedom and clemency the people ought to be allowed. In discussing the function of the law for unbelievers, Calvin says that by it men “are restrained, not because their inner mind is stirred or affected, but because, being bridled, they keep their hands from outward activity,” yet as a result, “they are neither better nor more righteous before God,” as “the more they restrain themselves, the more strongly they are inflamed.”[59] This is the result of the use of the threat of punishment to ensure the observance of the law. Obviously, Calvin would prefer that men obey out of love, rather than out of base self-interest, and so it seems likely that the best applicable regime for Calvin is one in which people can be the most free and treated the most leniently.

It must always be remembered, however, that to the extent that Calvin would desire such a regime, he would do so not for freedom as an end in itself, but for free obedience as the end. Also, it should be kept in mind that Calvin identifies “aristocracy, or a system compounded of aristocracy and democracy”[60] as the best political organization. To the extent that there is any democracy, it must be combined with aristocracy; Calvin does not seem optimistic about the ability of the masses to maintain an orderly self-government. Perhaps he sees the potential of the idea of equality to lead to an obscured understanding of God, as Tocqueville says, and thus to a moral decline, which, because of the tendency of the will of the majority to continually reinforce itself, would be difficult to overcome, whereas an educated, leisured aristocracy has a greater capacity for self-reflection and therefore moral renewal.

Resistance

Saying that the divinely appointed ruler of a place is whoever appears to have controls of affairs and that individuals have no right to overthrow unjust magistrates presents some difficulties, including the method of transition between different regimes. In a time of peace, it is relatively easy to determine whom one should follow, but in times of conflict, when different factions are vying for control of a territory—the most important time to know whom to follow—it may not be as clear who is in control. It is obvious, however, that such conflicts and transitions occur, that at one moment one person is in control and ought to be obeyed, and then at another moment one’s obedience belongs to another. How does someone who is a subject at one moment, forbidden from attacking the king, later become the rightful ruler—presumably by committing a sin? How do the followers of such a revolutionary know that they are doing the right thing, if they are?

While Calvin denies private individuals the right to rise up against their appointed governments, he does mention the possibility of certain other constitutional magistrates’ being able to defend the freedom of the common people, “as in ancient times the ephors were set against the Spartan kings, or the tribunes of the people against the Roman consuls, or the demarchs against the senate of the Athenians.”[61] In fact, Calvin considers the faithful execution of such an office to be a sacred duty, and those appointed guardians who betray the freedom of the people are guilty of a high crime. In addition, there is the possibility of God’s calling just men like Moses, who do not have a constitutional magistracy, to subdue “the lesser power with the greater, just as it is lawful for kings to punish their subordinates,”[62] or God may direct wicked men, whose actual intention is only their own power, to avenge the evils inflicted by a bad king.[63]

That constitutional magistrates may resist the evil done to the people by a bad prince is not difficult to accept: one could see this as one divinely appointed authority overturning another, who had lost his mandate—much like Confucian civil servants’ replacing a king who had lost the Mandate of Heaven, or the elected representatives of the American Colonies’ declaring independence from the British Crown. But how can Calvin say that private individuals cannot overthrow a magistrate, while defending Moses, who would appear to have been a mere private individual, and—even more confusing—leaving open the possibility of unjust persons avenging God’s people?

The answer, as with everything else in Calvin, is that God, not human beings, is the source of everything. God institutes the unjust ruler in the first place, along with the other magistrates with the ability to overthrow him, or else he calls a just—or even an unjust—man to overthrow the prince. The central point is that we should never understand ourselves to have a right to defend our interests against injustice; only someone, whether motivated by righteousness or wickedness, who is called by God, may do so. God protects us, if He so pleases; we do not protect ourselves. Even if He were to call us to protect ourselves, it would be by His call, not by our instigation, and certainly not for our own interests.

Conclusion

Calvin believes that God is the one source of everything that is, a Being distinct from and superior to His creation. As a result of this, human beings cannot search out God for themselves, cannot represent Him in anyway; they can only know Him through the revelation He gives them. They cannot do anything for themselves, without God being the ultimate, preordaining cause. To the extent that they are made in His image, it is in their spiritual part only, which must therefore be distinct from the body and be the only part that is important in being saved—by faith alone. The distinction between the body and soul necessitates a separation of the external (temporal) and the internal (spiritual) kingdoms or jurisdictions, both of which are subject to God’s absolute control.

Individuals, in relation to their Creator, have no rights, no higher authority or standard of justice to which to appeal, and therefore they have no personal rights in relation to the government that God institutes. When civil government turns despotic, private individuals have no choice but to endure; they may never initiate force against their magistrates. Only other constitutional magistrates, or other people called by God, either directly or through the influence of Satan, may overturn a government. Only God may overthrow a ruler He has appointed. Because God is absolute king of the universe, and not a mere constitutional monarch, the laws and magistrates that He establishes among men are equally absolute and irresistible.

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[1] Calvin, 41

[2] Calvin, 58

[3] Calvin, 52

[4] Calvin, 52

[5] Calvin, 99-120

[6] Calvin, 39

[7] Calvin, 229-30

[8] Kreeft, Peter. A Summa of the Summa: The Essential Philosophical Passages of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica Edited and Explained for Beginners. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. p. 161-2

[9] Calvin, 956

[10] Kreeft, 161, n. 153

[11] Calvin, 208

[12] Kreeft, 189-90

[13] Calvin, 295

[14] Calvin, 231

[15] Calvin, 234

[16] Plato; Bloom, Allan. Republic, 2^nd Ed. USA: Basic Books. 338c.

[17] Thucydides, et al. The Peloponnesian War. New York: Random House, Inc., 1982. p. 351

[18] Calvin, 950

[19] Tocqueville, Alexis de; et al. Democracy in America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. p. 426

[20] Calvin, 186-7

[21] Calvin, 56-7

[22] Calvin, 185

[23] Calvin, 187

[24] Calvin, 753

[25] Calvin, 812-4

[26] Kant, Immanuel; Beck, Lewis White. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 2^nd Ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. p. 9

[27] Calvin, 748

[28] Calvin, Bk. IV, Ch. xvi

[29] Calvin, 1349

[30] Calvin, 1374

[31] Calvin, 1305

[32] Calvin, 401-4

[33] Calvin, 834

[34] Calvin, 836

[35] Calvin, 833

[36] Luther, Martin; Lambert, W. A.; Grimm, Harold J. A Treatise on Christian Liberty. USA: Fortress Press, 1957. p. 23

[37] Calvin, 846

[38] Calvin, 847

[39] Calvin, 1488

[40] ibid

[41] Granted, universities may have their own police forces, but these are also sworn officers of the state.

[42] Calvin, 1512

[43] ibid

[44] Calvin, 1487

[45] Calvin, 1507

[46] Calvin, 1494

[47] ibid

[48] Calvin, 1516

[49] Calvin, 1506

[50] Calvin, 1507

[51] Calvin, 1504

[52] Calvin, 1505

[53] ibid

[54] Calvin, 1499

[55] Mill, John Stuart; Gray, John. On Liberty and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press Inc. p. 42

[56] Mill, 14

[57] Mill, 14-15

[58] This raises the question, which cannot be adequately dealt with here, how one inculcates moral strength.

[59] Calvin, 358

[60] Calvin, 1493

[61] Calvin, 1519

[62] Calvin, 1517

[63] ibid

Free Will and Predestination

One of the most difficult problems in Christian theology is that of predestination and free will. On the one hand, there are those who claim that God gives men free will to do with as they please, and on the other are people who think that God must have preordained everything that happens, including the damnation of those who are not saved. There are questions on one side regarding the goodness of God and on the other questions of His power. How can a good God create some people specifically to go to hell, yet how can the all powerful source of everything that is, not have determined everything that happens with His creation?

Kreeft, in one of the footnotes to his abridged version of St. Thomas’ Summa Theologica, at a point at which the compulsion of the human will by God is proposed,[1] says,

“This is a fundamental premise of Calvinism. What it forgets is that grace, however infinitely powerful, deals with nature according to its nature, and that even omnipotence does not extend to contradictions such as a human will being simultaneously voluntary (uncompelled) and compelled (involuntary).”[2]

This is a common understanding of the relationship between the Thomist and Calvinist teachings on free will and predestination. Unfortunately, as will be shown, it is both a gross oversimplification—and probably misinterpretation—of Thomas’ doctrine, as well as a clear misunderstanding of the Calvinist position.

Compare Kreeft’s assertion above with the following statement from Thomas: “[W]hatever is done voluntarily must also be traced back to some higher cause other than human reason or will…Man is so moved as an instrument by God, that, at the same time, he moves himself by his free choice.”[3] Now note this saying from Calvin:

“Man sins of necessity, but without compulsion…man, as he was corrupted by the Fall, sinned willingly, not unwillingly or by compulsion…we see no inconsistency in assigning the same deed to God, Satan, and man; but the distinction in purpose and manner causes God’s righteousness to shine forth blameless there.”[4]

Thomas says that man is moved in such a way so that he moves voluntarily, not by compulsion; Calvin says something perhaps stronger, but nonetheless in the same vein. Kreeft misses the entire point of what Calvin says about free will and predestination. Nonetheless, he is not incorrect to point to a difference between the two doctrines. To clarify this distinction, it will be useful first to review Thomas’ teachings on good, evil, and God’s will and then to come back to this statement that man is moved by God in accord with man’s own free choice.

Thomas teaches that existence (being) and essence are the same in God and that being and goodness are the same thing. [5] Therefore, God is the supreme good. He also says that evil is itself not a nature but merely the absence of good or being;[6] good is to evil as light is to darkness. In order for the universe to be perfect, or completely made, it had to contain all grades of goodness—or all intensities of light—and so the inequality of created things comes from God.[7] So in order for the universe to be complete, it had to contain beings such as humans, who are by nature good, but whose goodness is limited, so that their will can fail. Since evil is not a nature in itself it must be caused by good, and in some indirect sense by God, but there is no supreme evil that causes evil as there is a supreme good that is responsible for all goodness.[8]

Using the light analogy, the presence of evil can be understood in something like the following way: God creates all good things; he creates a good light that he shines on a good person to warm him, and then he puts a good cloud in between the two, casting a shadow, an absence of light, onto the person, causing him to freeze to death. God created nothing but good things, but an evil nevertheless resulted from their interaction. Blocking the light caused an evil, a reduction in goodness, for the person.

One can understand evil in human actions very well in this framework. Human beings consist of two seemingly incompatible natures: flesh and rational spirit. Beneath us in the chain of being are brute animals that consist only of flesh, and above us are angels that are pure spirit. We can take, for example, the problem of human sexuality from this perspective. Reproduction is a necessary aim for animals; therefore many lower animals have intercourse promiscuously, as their appetite directs them. On the other hand, angels have no need of sex or reproduction, rejoicing in the Lord without fear of death. Humans, of course, fall somewhere in between, having intercourse according to the rules of chastity, which require all sexual acts to be directed towards, or at least allow for the possibility of, the production and education of children. Reason rules over the desire of the flesh. Thus fornication, adultery, and unnatural vice are prohibited.

The light of reason should illuminate the body’s appetite and lead it to its proper expression, but sometimes something good in itself, like the cloud that blocked the light, gets in the way, and the person engages in less human sexual acts, such as fornication, which is less likely to result in the happiness of any children produced, since they would be without two parents bound together by marriage, or one may frustrate the sex act in such a way so as to not produce children at all, and enjoy the animal pleasure in itself for no rational purpose. These actions, which would be good in an animal, are evil in a person, because when he engages in them he is less than he could be and promotes less being than he could if he acted in a fully human way. Everything in him is good, insofar as it is, but one could say that his different parts, which are good, are arranged in a less than optimal way. An engine may be constructed of nothing but the best parts, but if something obstructs the valve chamber, the cylinder will not be able to fire, and the engine will be less of an engine.

Having established the way in which evil may arise from God’s good creation, it remains to be seen how God’s intention is involved in the evil. That is, does God merely permit good things to interact in such a way so that evil will result, or does he cause it to happen? Do human beings have free will, and if so, to what extent?

Thomas, in one of his objections, raises the problem of the following passage from Isaiah (xlv. 5, 7): “I am the Lord, and there is no other God, forming the light, and creating darkness, making peace, and creating evil,” to which he responds with a quote from Augustine: “God is not the author of evil, because He is not the cause of tending to non-being.”[9] This latter makes a certain amount of sense. How can God, Who supremely is, lead things to be less? Yet Isaiah suggests an important idea, that one who forms, or shapes, light also creates darkness in the area where the light is not present. Thomas would say that this is a necessary consequence, as “the goodness of the fire causes evil to the water,”[10] but does not the one setting the fire know the consequence of his action? God does not act directly upon non-being, except insofar as he destroys it, or converts it to being, but in giving form to light He gives form to the darkness, as one who shapes a block of marble gives shape to the not-marble, the surrounding air. Thomas’ reply that the verse from Isaiah refers to “the evil of penalty, and not the evil of fault,”[11] seems somehow incomplete. It fails to address the intentionality of God in the form that He indirectly gives to darkness. The question is one of God’s will and its effect upon the human will.

Thomas raises the question, “Whether the will of God imposes necessity on the things willed?” This is where he lays the foundation for the doctrine of free will. Thomas affirms that nothing happens that is against the will of God, but, “From the very fact that nothing resists the divine will, it follows that not only things happen that God wills to happen, but that they happen necessarily or contingently according to His will.”[12] But wait, how does God will something contingently? If an action is willed contingently, what is its cause, if not the first cause? This is where Kreeft’s statement, quoted earlier, that omnipotence does not extend to willing a contradiction, meets its challenge.

Thomas is here saying that God not only wills that things happen, but wills that they may happen, such as with evil, “God therefore neither wills evil to be done, nor wills it not to be done, but wills to permit evil to be done.”[13] That is, God, the first cause of everything that is, can will that something happen without His causing it or without His knowing what He will cause as He causes it. When human beings will something contingently, they generally put it into the hands of an outside force, such as a pair of dice, but surely Thomas is not suggesting that there is such a thing as chance. God either denies Himself knowledge or influence, either of which would both affirm and restrain omnipotence in different ways, but would certainly seem to imply a contradiction to human reason and perhaps lend some credence to Calvin’s statement that for humans to explore the divine will is to enter a labyrinth.[14] Everything about free will for Thomas depends upon God’s willing contingently, and one would generally pass over this idea easily, but when one seriously considers the issue, one realizes that it is a completely baffling notion.

But still it may be useful to press further, to look more directly into God’s impact on the human will. Thomas first leads into this with the question, “Whether violence can be done to the will?” [15] The first objection is a reasonable one:

“It would seem that violence can be done to the will. For everything can be compelled by that which is more powerful. But there is something, namely, God, that is more powerful than the human will. Therefore it can be compelled, at least by Him.”

And Thomas’ reply is very interesting. He says that God can indeed move the will, “But if this were by compulsion, it would no longer be by an act of the will, nor would the will itself be moved, but something else against the will,” which is the same thing as saying that man’s will can be moved in such a way so that his action is his free choice.

Further on, Thomas argues that the will moves itself,[16] which is the basis of the idea of free will, but also that the will can be moved by “an exterior principle,” yet this is in accord with free will, since for the will to move itself, “it is not necessary that this inward principle be the first principle unmoved by another.”[17] Now God alone is the exterior principle that can move the will, but Thomas also says specifically that he means that God moves man’s will toward good, as by grace;[18] he says nothing of moving it toward evil, as Calvin insists God does.

It is generally believed that the difference between Thomas and Calvin is that Thomas thinks that God is more intelligible to human reason than Calvin thinks that He is, that for Thomas there is a difference in magnitude between our finite reason and God’s infinite reason, while Calvin appears to think that there is something not just limited but flawed about our reason. There is something to this distinction, at least as far as the two writers’ style and emphasis are concerned, but when one closely examines the two sets of teachings, looking beyond the different methods, it is difficult to see what the fundamental difference is.

Thomas says that we cannot know the essence of God, “we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not.”[19] We cannot understand God in terms of the essences that we know; He is something radically distinct from us, and we can only know that He is not like us and gather as much as we can from that fact. Everything that we experience is finite, therefore God is in-finite. In what sense is this rational? A non-repeating, non-terminating decimal is by definition an irrational number, but we can, in some sense, grasp these numbers, but what number is more irrational than infinity itself? Some would say that Thomas is using reason to show the limits of human reason, but what else is this but to point to something other than human reason that is different from and utterly superior to it? Why is it difficult to accept that such a being can will things that are to our minds contradictory, such as the human will’s being both voluntary and predestined?

Thomas says that God can will things contingently, such as the goodness of the human will, which He wills to be able to fail, but that He is not the cause of tending to non-being. But Calvin says that “it would be ridiculous for the Judge only to permit what he wills to be done, and not also to decree it and to command its execution by his ministers,”[20] by which he argues the point that God’s will and His permission are indistinguishable, that God does not merely permit things but causes them. And he sees no contradiction in saying that

“although in divers ways…man, while he is acted upon by God, yet at the same time himself acts! …Yet God’s will is not therefore at war with itself, nor does it change, nor does it pretend to will what he wills. But even though his will is one and simple in him, it appears manifold to us because, on account of our mental incapacity, we do not grasp how in divers ways it wills and does not will something to take place.”[21]

Is this mental incapacity in Calvin fundamentally different from our inability to comprehend God’s infinitude in Thomas? Is Calvin’s notion of the simplicity of God’s will in Itself yet manifold appearance to us any less “rational” than Thomas’ assertion of God’s ability to will things contingently? The fight here is really over the goodness of God, not the power of God. Thomas and Calvin see God’s goodness in different ways, and both are willing to sacrifice different kinds of intelligibility in order to preserve it.

Some would argue that Calvin’s God is a tyrant, since He does as He pleases with His infinite power and defines whatever He does as good, yet Calvin argues,

“For what else seems to be said here than that God has a power that cannot be prevented from doing whatever it pleases him to do? But it is far otherwise… we do not advocate the fiction of ‘absolute might’… We fancy no lawless god who is a law unto himself… the will of God is not only free of all fault but is the highest rule of perfection, and even the law of all laws.”[22]

Calvin argues that whatever God wills is by definition good, not because of His power but because God is the law of all laws. As Thomas says, there are no accidents in God; God is His own attributes,[23] including, presumably, His lawfulness. Therefore, there is no problem with His will imposing necessity on the things willed, with His intentionally shaping the darkness along with the light, or with our incapacity to understand how He appears to us to will contradictory things.

Thomas, however, wants to avoid God’s interaction with non-being, or evil, altogether, so he focuses entirely on how God shapes the good and how he influences our will through grace. To make this work, he asserts God’s power to will things contingently, which, though he does not explicitly state this, is utterly beyond our ability to comprehend.

Though Thomas’ intentions are good, Calvin’s explanation would seem to be more honest about the problem of evil and our inability to understand how God’s will works in us and in the government of the world. It is clear that Doctor of the Church understood these problems, but Thomas, influenced by Aristotle, puts insufficient emphasis on the limitations of human reason, and seems to bury the real issue in the idea of God’s willing contingently, while Calvin is very direct and explicit about the problems and defends God’s righteousness in His involvement with evil more forcefully as a result.

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[1] ST I-II, Q. 6, A. 4, Obj. 1

[2] Kreeft, 401-2, n. 101

[3] ST I, Q. 2, A. 3, Rep. Obj. 2 & I-II, Q. 21, A. 4, Rep. Obj. 2

[4] Calvin, John; McNeill, John T.; Battles, Ford Lewis. Institutes of the Christian Religion. The Library of Christian Classics, Philadelphia: Westminster Press , 1960. pp. 294 & 311

[5] ST I, Q. 3, A. 4 & I, Q. 5, A. 1

[6] ST I, Q. 48, A. 1

[7] ST I, Q. 47, A. 2

[8] ST I, Q. 49, A. 1-3

[9] ST I, Q. 49, A. 2

[10] ST I, Q. 49, A. 1, Rep. Obj. 2

[11] ST I, Q. 49, A. 2, Rep. Obj. 1

[12] ST I, Q. 19, A. 8, Rep. Obj. 2

[13] ST I, Q. 19, A. 9, Rep. Obj. 3

[14] Calvin, 73

[15] ST I-II, Q. 6, A. 4

[16] ST I-II, Q. 9, A. 3

[17] ST I-II, Q. 9, A. 4, Rep. Obj. 1

[18] ST I-II, Q. 9, A. 6, Rep. Obj. 3

[19] ST I, Q. 3

[20] Calvin, 230

[21] Calvin, 231 & 234

[22] Calvin, 950

[23] ST I, Q. 3, A. 6

Overcoming Violence, Gaining True Freedom and Love

Nietzsche accused Christianity of being a slave morality, arising from the resentment of the weak against the strong. The emphasis on God’s exalting the meek and making low the mighty simply represented the desire of the powerless masses to get back at the powerful elite who controlled the world. But Kierkegaard puts forth a very different way of understanding Christian faith and morality, as a system that allows for true human greatness and dignity. Faith does not merely enslave the individual to God and one’s neighbors, it gives the individual the greatest kind of freedom possible, the freedom to love absolutely.

To understand the way in which Kierkegaard’s notion of faith frees the individual, it may be useful to compare it to the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes said that in the state of nature, each person has a right to everything he needs to survive, including other people’s bodies. In this state, one can never know for certain whether or not others intend to harm him, and therefore he may choose, if he finds some reason to fear another, to kill him preemptively. This results in a state of war of each against all, a miserable life. The only way to overcome this condition is by each person’s completely relinquishing his personal rights and binding himself to obey an absolute sovereign. The sovereign stands outside of the society as an impartial arbiter among individuals, and, unlike in Locke’s system, there is no contract between the people and the sovereign, because the sovereignty is prior to all possible contracts; otherwise there would have to be a sovereign to arbitrate the contract between the people and the sovereign—kings on top of kings on to infinity.

Now consider the three stages sketched out in the “Eulogy on Abraham.” The esthetic hero loves himself, expects the possible, and struggles with the world; the ethical hero loves others, expects the eternal, and struggles with himself; and the religious hero loves God, expects the impossible, and struggles with God. The esthetic stage is much like the Hobbesian state of nature: each person loves himself and is focused on his self-preservation and the promotion of his own power to project his will onto the world; thus he struggles with the world and finds himself in a state of war with it. His best hope is to conquer the world: “For he who struggled with the world became great by conquering the world.”[1]

Can this in any sense be considered freedom? To spend one’s entire life struggling with the world, working to conquer it, and then, if one is successful, trying to hold onto it? Expecting only the possible, the mundane? Loving only oneself, never really free to love another? One could never really be open with the world in such a condition, for one would always be struggling against the world. There might appear to be peace on the surface of a society with such foundations, but it would never be based on anything more than an enlightened self-interest, a Machiavellian trust in the notion that “Everyone sees how you appear, few touch what you are.”[2] Any kind of love that one might experience in such a condition would always relate back to oneself in some way; it could never be genuine love of another, but love of the other for oneself, and even sacrificing oneself for the beloved would be no more than a means to eternal fame, a grand exit that exerts one’s power to make a permanent imprint on the world. No matter how good the appearance of one’s actions, they cannot but be a an imposition upon, even a violation of others, a struggle with the world, in the service of one’s enlightened self-interest.

Hobbes offers a way out of the state of nature, by relinquishing one’s rights to a sovereign, and Kierkegaard does something similar, infinite resignation, by which one gives oneself over to the eternal, but one does not necessarily gain faith thereby:

The act of resignation does not require faith, for what I gain in resignation is my eternal consciousness. This is a purely philosophical movement that I venture to make whenever it is demanded and can discipline myself to make [it], because every time some finitude will take power over me, I starve myself into submission until I make the movement, for my eternal consciousness is my love for God, and for me that is the highest of all.[3]

Infinite resignation puts one in the ethical stage, with consciousness of the eternal (expectancy of the eternal), and a struggle with oneself (“discipline myself…starve myself into submission”). That is, one makes God, the universal, one’s sovereign, but as in Hobbes, there is no contract with the sovereign: “The tragic [ethical] hero[4] does not enter into any private relationship with the divine, but the ethical is the divine.”[5]

At this stage, the sovereign makes universal laws without respect to individual persons, and the individual struggles with himself so that he may conform himself to the universal. This is the philosophical way of life that can be traced back to Plato’s Republic, self-mastery, ordering one’s soul so that the rational element, the element that sees the eternal truth, rules as king over the other, temporal parts. This can be seen as a great improvement for the freedom of the individual, for he now struggles less trying to master the outside world and he does trying to master himself so that he can rule freely over his life, direct his own destiny, rather than being directed strictly by the possibilities that the world offers and that his base desires crave.

Yet there is still a higher mode of being, the life of faith, but in his infinite resignation the ethical hero has relinquished all of his power, and he has no claim upon the divine, as it sits unreachable above him. The only way that one may transcend the ethical is to be called by the sovereign into a direct, personal relationship, so that, in Kierkegaard’s terms, “the individual relates himself as the single individual absolutely to the absolute.”[6] But what must be emphasized is that the individual cannot do this for himself, he cannot reach up beyond the universal to the absolute, he must be called, so that his actions

…would not be due to his wanting to place himself as the single individual in an absolute relation to the universal but to his having been placed as the single individual in an absolute relation to the absolute.[7]

One can become ethical on his own, he can resign himself to the sovereign on his own, but he cannot then gain the sovereign’s personal friendship without an invitation, he cannot will himself to have faith; it must be willed for him.

The Hobbesian political analogy helps here, but it can only go so far without associations with despotic kings getting in the way. When one resigns oneself to another being who is by nature equal to oneself, it is easy to see how this is not freedom but slavery, but resigning oneself to an abstract, universal law (for example, the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights) is something else. But if we take this even further, beyond the political and to the metaphysical, then it is even clearer how this can be understood as absolutely liberating, overcoming one’s struggle not only with other people but with the universe as a whole, for the absolute is king not only of men but of all things that are. Some prefer to see the esthetic as true freedom, living without external authority, imposing one’s will onto the world, but is not such a life completely governed by chance? No individual can comprehend the whole of the universe, and therefore as he struggles against it he is taking a shot into the unknown, hoping that his efforts will have their desired effect but never being able to account for every variable to a certainty; he is playing a game of chance, with an unknown as his opponent—is basing one’s life on a roll of the dice freedom? Can it be freedom to have no true sense of where one’s life is headed, to what purposes one’s actions are truly aimed?

The ethical is somewhat of a step up, being able to work more in harmony with the world according to universal rules, knowing to expect the eternal in response—fate. One becomes much freer in mastering oneself, in learning at least to control oneself, if nothing else, in relation to the eternal expectation. And how much greater to be able to love others, to devote oneself to others rather than to war against them—this in itself is liberating, freedom from the perpetual struggle with the world, freedom to be in some sense at home in the world.

But nothing can surpass the life of faith. There can be no greater freedom than to love the absolute, to love existence itself and to conquer it not by strength but by weakness.[8] How can it be anything but the greatest kind of freedom to obey the absolute sovereign of the universe itself, to obey existence itself and none other? This is not alienation of oneself to another being or even to a whole universe of beings but to being itself. True freedom is to be given one’s place in the order of everything by the sovereign who orders everything—and now we move beyond chance and fate to providence, wherein one glides through the universe like a graceful dancer,[9] not opposed to it at every step like a soldier—everything fits into its perfect place.

This understanding of freedom in relation to the divine is expressed well in O’Connor’s story, “The Displaced Person.” The distinction is very apparent in the characters of Mrs. McIntyre, Mr. Guizac, and the old priest. Mrs. McIntyre brings a foreigner to work on her farm, Mr. Guizac, who for some time seems to be a great asset to her, though he upsets Mrs. Shortley. At some point, however, Mrs. McIntyre learns that Mr. Guizac intends to arrange a marriage between his niece, who is in a refugee camp in Europe, and one of the black farmhands. Though such a marriage is completely ethical in itself, it runs entirely against the custom of the South at this time, and therefore Mrs. McIntyre chooses to impose her will upon the ethical. Thereafter, Mrs. McIntyre finds herself increasingly displeased with Mr. Guizac and his work. It is precisely because he does everything so perfectly, he orders himself so well to the world as it truly is, that she resents him so much, because he does what is right rather than doing what she thinks ought to be done. Even the Negroes who steal from her do not bother her so much as Mr. Guizac, who would never think of doing such a thing, because this is how she thinks things are supposed to be, people look out for themselves only.

Mrs. McIntyre is not free. She loves only herself, expects only what she has known to be possible, and struggles against the world. Finally, she goes to dismiss the ethical man, but he dies before she gets a chance, and when his family comes to mourn him, “She felt she was in some foreign country where the people bent over the body were natives, and she watched like a stranger…”[10] Thereafter, she finds her physical condition worsening, weakening, losing her voice and eyesight and help on the farm—losing every means she once had of imposing her will upon the world. Finally, she is confined to a bed, completely unfree.

The priest, in sharp contrast, is free and able to love. Part of the way we can see the priest’s freedom is in his ability to turn any conversation back onto his own fixed purpose. He has the highest end that a person can have in the world, bringing others to God, and he does this single-mindedly, without concern for other considerations. Always he brings the discussion back to the doctrines of the Church or—in his conversation with Mrs. McIntyre in which she tries to tell him that Mr. Guizac is unsatisfactory [11]—to the peacock, which seems to give him an inspiration about the Transfiguration of Christ. Everything relates to the absolute, to Christ, for him, and so he is never out of place in the world, even with someone like Mrs. McIntyre. He is free to love someone even as hateful as Mrs. McIntyre and to hope against all reason in the possibility of her conversion.

Of course, none of this proves the existence of the absolute, but it demonstrates the longing that we ought to have for it, or at least the appreciation, as opposed to contempt, that we ought to have for those who are able to relinquish themselves to an absolute sovereign and to attain this absolute form of freedom. To the extent that Christianity is a slave morality, it is a slave to existence itself, as opposed to chance. Truly free is the knight of faith who conquers existence, not the esthetic hero who merely conquers the world. The paradox of faith is that one must give up all claims upon the world and submit completely to the absolute in order to conquer existence, be brought into a personal relationship with the sovereign, and become truly free.

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[1] Kierkegaard, p. 16

[2] Machiavelli, Niccolo; Mansfield, Harvey C. (translator). The Prince, 2^nd Ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. p. 71

[3] Kierkegaard, 48

[4] “The tragic hero is still within the ethical.” Kierkegaard, 59

[5] Kierkegaard, 60

[6] Kierkegaard, 70

[7] Kierkegaard, 93

[8] Kierkegaard, 16

[9] Kierkegaard, p. 41

[10] O’Connor, p. 326

[11] O’Connor, p. 316-7

Religious Silence

Following the argument in Fear and Trembling, from Problema I, “Is there a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical?” and Problema II, “Is there an Absolute Duty to God?” it is not immediately obvious that Johannes would move to the question of “Was It Ethically Defensible for Abraham to Conceal His Undertaking…?” in Problema III. After discussing such deep metaphysical questions as the single individual’s absolute relation to the absolute, the question of the ethical defensibility of silence seems rather mundane and arbitrary. Who cares about Abraham’s adherence to a particular ethical rule, when the highest ethical rule has been suspended in the command to sacrifice Isaac? In fact, however, Johannes is using the issue of silence and hiddenness to further illuminate the meaning of the single individual’s absolute relation to the absolute and to contrast this with esthetic and ethical ideals.[1]

Johannes puts the problem of hiddenness in the context of the metaphysical investigation from the very beginning of the section, in a way that helps one to understand why this specific problem for Abraham is germane to the larger discussion:

The ethical as such is the universal; as the universal is in turn the disclosed. The single individual, qualified as immediate, sensate, and psychical, is the hidden. Thus his ethical task is to work himself out of his hiddenness and to become disclosed in the universal.[2]

That first statement, that the ethical is the universal and therefore the disclosed, is reminiscent of Kant’s maxim to act in such a way so that one’s action can be made a universal law, applicable to all rational beings. It would seem logical that someone attempting to act in such a way that one’s action could be made a universally applicable law would tend to be very open about his actions and the reasons for his actions. What possible good would be done by hiding a universally applicable law? Indeed, in one of Kant’s more controversial works, the philosopher denies the existence of a right to lie, even for benevolent purposes.[3] It has already been shown, however, that in faith Abraham is above the ethical; he is the single individual in absolute relationship to the absolute, and therefore, according to what Johannes claims about the individual, he is supremely hidden.

The difference in the understanding of silence for esthetic, ethical, and religious purposes can be seen quite clearly in Johannes’ analysis of the story of the young man given a dire warning before his wedding:

If he wants to speak, he can very well do that, for he can make himself understandable; if he wants to be silent, it is because in the capacity of being the single individual he wants to be higher than the universal… But if the will of heaven had not been declared to him by an augur, if it had come to his knowledge quite privately, if it had entered into a purely private relation to him, then we are in the presence of the paradox… Then his silence would not be due to his wanting to place himself as the single individual in an absolute relation to the universal but to his having been placed as the single individual in an absolute relation to the absolute.[4]

The difference between the esthetic hero and the religious hero is that the former reaches hubristically for something above the universally applicable, while the latter finds himself placed, through no choice of his own, above the universal, in direct relationship with the absolute. For the esthetic hero there is a universal law that could be applied, but he chooses to disregard it, but—and this is the crucial point—for the religious hero there is no universal law, only a personally applicable law given directly by the divine, and therefore it is not communicable to anyone else.[5] The esthetic hero can speak but chooses not to, while the religious hero cannot speak, nor does he choose his calling in the first place. The ethical hero, who both has a universal law and applies it to himself, condemns the former and wonders at the latter.

Matthew 6:1-18 seems to support the idea of religious silence resulting from a hidden, direct relationship with God, and yet it also complicates the issue somewhat. It requires that one pray and fast in secret, not in front of the world, which certainly seems to contradict the ethical idea of disclosure, in favor of private communion with the divine. Yet in the very act of its proclamation it takes on the character of a universal law.

There is no contradiction here, however. Jesus is giving a commandment to each and every person to establish an individual relationship with the divine, yet this is not the same thing as a universal, ethical law. A universal law is inherently external, as can be understood in Kant’s maxim: an action is ethical if the law that commands it can logically be extended to every other rational being. That is, one cannot lie because one thereby would be willing others to deceive oneself, which would destroy the meaning of language altogether; a man cannot kill his son because he thereby would be willing his father to have killed himself, and therefore he would not be able to kill his son in the first place, a logical contradiction. A universal law is external because the rest of the universe is external to oneself and the universal law therefore has external effect. But choosing to pray or not pray has no effect on anyone but oneself, even when extended to all other potential subjects of the law. This law is therefore internal and individual, because while it applies to all, it applies to each individually, not in relation to others.

This law requires silence in order to maintain the purity of the strictly individual relationship it ordains. One must pray and fast in secret and in silence, so that no external entities may enter the relationship, so that shame does not replace love as the impetus for the interaction, so that prayer to God remains an internal, not an external activity.

Nevertheless, this silent, internal religious activity is different from esthetics, because despite the fact that both have a subjectivity that distinguishes them from ethics, the internal focus of Christian morality is directed toward submission to something beyond oneself, the absolute highest. But instead of looking inside to obey something beyond oneself, esthetics looks to impose what is inside on the outside world, like the merman who crushes Agnes or the bridegroom who remains silent because he “wants to delude himself with all sorts of fantastic ideas about how she [the bride] will quickly forget this sorrow…”[6] predicted by the Delphic oracle. Religious internality is self-transcending, while esthetic internality is self-imposing. Granted, many esthetic heroes risk great danger for noble causes (the Iliad comes to mind), but this is done out of a desire to enhance one’s honor. Esthetics is self-centered even in its self-sacrifice.

One need only look further on in Matthew to see another example of true religious silence:

And Jesus stood before the governor: and the governor asked him, saying, Art thou the King of the Jews? And Jesus said unto him, Thou sayest.

And when he was accused of the chief priests and elders, he answered nothing.

Then said Pilate unto him, Hearest thou not how many things they witness against thee?

And he answered him to never a word; insomuch that the governor marvelled greatly.[7]

Jesus had faith in the absurd, that he was the Word made flesh, that he would be resurrected from the dead on the third day, that one saved one’s life by losing it. What could he have said to the chief priests and elders? The absurd truth? No, this was incommunicable to them; the more he professed the truth, the more they would believe a lie, and Jesus the redeemer could not be the cause of sin. Nor could he have told them a lie, that he was not the Son of God, for his intention was to be killed as a ransom for the sins of mankind. Therefore Jesus stood silent in the face of his accusers.

This is the meaning of religious silence, to recognize the incommunicability of one’s absolute relationship as the single individual to the absolute, but nevertheless, in distress and anxiety, in fear and trembling, to live the paradox of faith.

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[1] “The road I must take is dialectically to pursue hiddenness through esthetics and ethics, for the point is to have esthetic hiddenness and the paradox appear in their absolute dissimilarity.” (p. 85)

[2] p. 82

[3] Kant, Immanuel. On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns

[4] p. 93

[5] “Even though I go on talking night and day without interruption, if I cannot make myself understood when I speak, then I am not speaking.” (p. 113)

[6] p. 93

[7] Matthew 27:11-14

Erasmus on the Christian life

Prompt:

“‘Opinions Worthy of a Christian’ presents the complete scope of Christian living in short compass.” Analyze this scholarly judgment and discuss its validity for Erasmus’ ethics. You should particularly address the question of the role that thinking plays in this ethical endeavor. You might also consider how this chapter fits into the structure of the Enchiridion as a whole.

______________________________________________________________________________

Let Christ, the only source of both true understanding and a happy life, be enough for you. This, of course, the world considers pure madness and folly; but through it God is pleased to save those who believe. He is happily a fool who is wise in Christ, miserably a fool who does not know Him, (p. 160).

The fundamental source of ethical goodness for Erasmus is the teaching of Jesus; in fact, there is no other source of right behavior at all. One can gather from this that Erasmus believes that the division between God and His creation is such that only God can propose anything good; nothing in the created order can do this. Therefore, human reason is limited to being an instrumental faculty. That is, the function of reason is to determine in any given situation how the law of Christ is to be implemented, and it commands the particular external actions necessary to actualize this end. Human reason cannot, however, propose for itself an end or a law that is good. Without the revelation of Jesus Christ, human beings would have no true knowledge of the good, for by the standards of purely worldly wisdom, divine truth is “madness and folly.”

This does not mean, however, that reason and revelation can be completely disentangled or that Scripture as a whole ought to be followed blindly and arbitrarily. Reason is necessary to separate the good from the bad even in saintly characters in Scripture, but this again is by means of the revelation of Jesus Christ. “I say unequivocally that not even the prophets or the Apostles should be made our models if they deviate in any way from the instruction of Christ…” (p. 157). Reason therefore has a very broad scope in Christian ethics; it not only applies the lessons of Scripture to contemporary human life, it even discerns within Scripture what actions are Christian and which are not.

The boundary that reason cannot cross is this: it cannot question the teaching of Jesus Christ as it has been handed down to us by means of the Gospels and canonical epistles (certainly the Pauline epistles, at the very least). One might ask how we are to know that all of the documents that we have, in the form that we have them, are authentic media of transmission for the instruction of Christ. But this is a question that Erasmus does not deal with in the Enchiridion, and understandably so, since the book is intended as a handbook for the Christian life, not as a thorough defense of the entire belief system and its foundations.

Obey the teachings of Christ as we have received them; apply your mind to implementing His law in your daily life as your first and only principle—this is the foundation of Erasmus’ ethical system. Now the issue is the content of this teaching as presented in the chapter “Opinions Worthy of a Christian” and whether “the complete scope of Christian living” can be found in such a compact form.

It is difficult to imagine an aspect of ethical life that is not touched upon at least to some degree in this short chapter; in fact, even the first sentence contains virtually everything one needs to know to understand Erasmus’ entire ethics:

…no Christian should suppose that he was born for himself or should want to live for himself, but that whatever he has or is, all this he should attribute not to himself but to God, the Creator, from whom it came; and that he should consider all his goods the common property of all men, (pp. 144-5).

This is the starting point for a system of ethics that comprises relations with other persons, with material things, and with political offices; each of these relations is understood in terms of the relationship between God and His creation and our place in that creation.

A crucial sentence for understanding our relation to other persons in terms of our relation to God is the following: “Remember only how little you deserved the things Christ did for you, and that He wants you to repay His goodness, not to Himself, but to your neighbor,” (p. 145). This sentence serves to obliterate all distinctions one could make among persons, and this universalism is the foundation for Christian love and charity. God lowered Himself to the station of a human being and allowed Himself to be sacrificed for the salvation of people who in no way merited it. He put others before Himself and made Himself a servant of his inferiors. He did all of this despite the infinite disparity in greatness that divides humanity from Himself. If God ignored an infinite disparity between Himself and His creatures, then how can any finite person make a meaningful distinction between himself and another finite person regarding merit? If God was able to love beings that were so far beneath Himself, then how can one sinner despise another sinner who is only a little bit worse than himself? And if God allowed terrible violence to be done to Himself on our behalf, then how can we justify defending ourselves against attack by others?

Humanity has an infinite debt to its Creator, and yet there is an infinite gulf between itself and its Creator, such that nothing that any human being does can affect God one way or the other; we cannot give Him anything directly, nor can we take anything from Him. Therefore, the only way that we can repay our infinite debt to God is through service (finite though it may be) to our neighbor. Just as God gave of Himself to improve us, who are so far beneath His goodness, so should we who are fortunate enough to be closer to God than others, work to improve others, not to condemn them or to despise them as human beings, but instead to correct their sins.

Another way in which our relationship with God influences our relationship with others is that, since we are all equally called to be one with Christ, we are all part of one body (p. 146). Erasmus quotes Paul, who describes the way in which this fact should color the way in which we understand our various differences: Being members of the body of Christ is like being different organs of the same human body; the foot, though lower than the eye, is just as necessary as the eye. All of the various distinctions of class, occupation, and nationality that arouse so much enmity between us ought properly to be seen as giving us our respective responsibilities for serving the whole, not giving us pride in ourselves as individuals. The eye serves the body with its vision, the hand with its manipulation; so also the artisans and the farmers serve the body of Christ in the world in their diverse ways. Since Christ is the head of the body, no one may consider himself the master of anyone else. The eye is not the master of hand; the brain is. Therefore, each of us ought to see himself as common subjects of a single king, working together and serving each other for the common good, as the king commands (p. 148).

As we are each a part of one body, so all material things are the common property of all. Erasmus argues against the idea that any individual may arbitrarily use his property as he sees fit (p. 148). “If you are rich, remember that you are the manager, not the owner, and scrupulously observe how you handle these common goods,” (p. 151). Being in possession of something does not mean that one’s individual authority over it is absolute. There is nothing wrong in itself with having possessions for one’s personal use, but these goods cannot be totally severed from the common domain, since even one’s own person may not be severed from it. Every member of the body should be interested in every other member of the body having enough property to comfortably sustain himself. No one member should store up goods for himself to the exclusion of others, any more than one would neglect to cover one’s feet in order to give superfluous cover to the hands. If one part of the body is cold, then it matters to the entire body, and the entire body works to cover even its weakest parts. The sufferings of others ought to be our own just as much as one part of the body concerns itself with the pain felt in other parts.

Christ’s kingship over the body of humanity extends beyond the realm of personal action and into the political realm: “There is not one Lord for bishops and another for civil officials. Both administer their charges under the same, and to the same both must give an accounting,” (p. 152). Erasmus treats the issue of magistracy in much the same way as he deals with property. The magistracy belongs to an individual, not for his own benefit, but for the benefit of others. An official should not use his position to enrich himself, to be a mere robber of robbers (p. 152); he ought to be completely self-giving in the exercise of his office, willing to give up even his own life for the sake of justice (p. 153). Since Christ is the one lord of all, the magistrate should never see himself as being above the law; the law does not suit his desires, rather his actions must conform to what is right. And even beyond punishing those who commit injustices, the civil official should see it as his duty to make an example for others of virtuous behavior (p. 153).

As strong and concise of an account of Christian magistracy as this is, there are yet two questions that it may leave one asking: (1) What is the role of the civil official in promoting or protecting the religious faith of his subject? (2) How can the violence inherent in the administration of justice be reconciled with the pacifist Christian ethic that Erasmus has defended up to this point?

In regard to the first question, it is clear that a Christian civil official has a duty to promote virtue in external acts, to denounce greed, lust, and envy. But what responsibility, if any, does the civil official have for the inward beliefs of those he governs? Earlier in the chapter, Erasmus says that a Christian should deal with sinners in the same way that a doctor relates to a sick person (p. 145). We should treat the person’s illness, not destroy the person: “let [the Christian] destroy Turkishness, not the man.” The Christian has an obligation to try to convince Turks (Muslims) that their religion is wrong and the Christian religion is right. Obviously, there is no component of force here; only words should be used. The question is, what about the Turk who actively tries to convert Christians to his religion? What are we to do about him? In particular, what is the Christian civil official to do with him? Is a Muslim’s attempt to change a Christian’s (particularly a weak-minded Christian’s) faith an infraction against the Christian? May it be punished?

One could argue that it is an act of love to prevent the Muslim from damaging the faith of others, to separate the Muslim from Christian society and to argue with him in private until he professed the Christian faith. It seems likely that Erasmus would in fact favor keeping non-Christian voices away from the common lot of believers, physically restraining non-Christians from coming and disturbing Christian society with false preaching. Perhaps it would be better to move weak-minded Christians away from bad influences, rather than using force to remove these influences, but at a certain point it would be impractical to have an entire city run away every time a non-Christian proselytizer came to town. Even if Erasmus agreed that a Christian city could stand its ground against non-Christian influences, it is still extremely difficult to believe that he would ever agree that one could go so far as to engage such persons with serious violence. Have the guards carry away the Muslim preacher, but do not strike him or inflict any bodily injury to him; do not lock him up but set him free outside of the town where he can do no harm to anyone. Perhaps send a missionary to follow him around and try to convert him through peaceful persuasion. This would seem, based upon Erasmus’ ethical principles, to be the best way to deal with any kind of heretical or obscene public speech; he would be extremely hesitant to inflict physical injury on such a speaker (burn him at the stake), but he also would not want such a person to be allowed to corrupt the people with impunity.

The other question is how to reconcile Erasmus’ denial of a Christian right to self defense with the physical force that is inherently necessary in the administration of justice. Erasmus argues that it is better to be done an injury than to do an injury to another (p. 149-51), that one should “correct [one’s] enemy either by overwhelming him with kindness or conquering him with mildness,” (p. 150). But how can the civil official, who answers to the same lord as everyone else, enforce the law in this way? How can one deal with lawlessness without physically restraining lawbreakers? Could it be that while one does not have a right to defend oneself with physical force, one nevertheless has the right to defend others with it? Such an idea would certainly be in keeping with Erasmus’ instruction to put the good of others above one’s own, to compete with others only for the opportunity to love and serve (p. 154). But if this is so, then is this a right (to defend others) that applies to Christians as individuals or only as civil officials? May a private citizen defend a robbery victim, or may only civil authorities do this? This is a question that, from the point of view of this chapter, and even of the whole work, is difficult to answer. Yet this is an important and basic question that does fall within the scope of Christian living.

Overall, however, “Opinions Worthy of a Christian” does deal broadly with all of the important aspects of living a Christian life. It posits a single source of revelation for all ethical knowledge, and it shows how one ought to understand oneself in relation to God (as utterly subordinate), to other people (as fellow members of the same body, servant of all), to things (as common to all, managed by each person for the good of all, ultimately not valuable in themselves), and to political authority (as under the same lord as all other authority, used for the service of others). It condenses everything that comes before it, which largely deals with understanding oneself in relation to the world and with the principles that are the guide one’s action, in preparation for what comes after, which can be described as practical exercises in the development of virtue. It offers in a simple, compact form a vision of the goal for which the weapons of Christian soldiering are to be used.

Black Hole Soul

The nature of evil in Paradise Lost is a complex issue. On the one hand, Milton’s description of Death as, “shape/ If shape it might be called that shape had none…/ Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,”[1] appears to indicate an Augustinian or Thomistic conception of evil as the absence of good, yet in one description of the geography of hell, Milton says, “A universe of death, which God by curse/ Created evil…”[2] indicates an openness to a more Calvinist idea that God created certain things evil, or ordained them to be evil, rather than merely permitting them to become so. Further examination of the text will show that Milton really is trying to accomplish something like a synthesis of these two ideas, and that a helpful way of understanding Milton’s conception of evil is by analogy, not merely to darkness versus light, but to the modern physics concept of a black hole, as contrasted with a star.

A black hole is a star that has collapsed under its own gravity. All matter has the natural property of attracting other matter to itself by means of gravity, curving space toward itself in such a way that other things fall toward it. In objects like stars, this force is generally counterbalanced by an opposing force of outward pressure. This pressure allows the star, though incredibly dense, to maintain stability, and therefore not collapse on itself. But when the nuclear reaction within a star is finished, the outward pressure is gone, and gravity takes over completely, pulling all of the matter into itself, compacted into an infinitely small point in space called a singularity. No matter how many stars’ worth of matter is compacted into the singularity, it is still no bigger than a point. It has no dimensions in space, only mass.

The gravitational pull of such an object is so strong that outside of a certain distance from the singularity, no light can escape. This perimeter is called the event horizon of the black hole, and it is this event horizon that can be likened to the description of Death quoted above, since it is really not a shape and has no substance, but is like a three-dimensional shadow.

Comparing evil to a black hole, rather than to mere darkness, seems to be a better fit because of the emphasis that Milton puts on the great power of Death:

Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as hell,

And shook a dreadful dart; what seemed his head

The likeness of a kingly crown had on…

“…that mortal dint,

Save he who reigns above, none can resist.”[3]

Darkness is merely the absence of light. One does not require the supreme light to vanquish it; the slightest emission will do. Light destroys darkness, not the other way around; darkness has no power in itself. This description above, however, leads one to think of Death as a potent foe, a destructive force that nonetheless has no shape or substance.

Hence the analogy to the black hole, rather than to mere darkness. A black hole is not passive like the empty void of space; it actively draws things to itself to destroy. Likewise, evil for Milton is a powerful force that can draw to itself and destroy everything but the Almighty; it is not simply the absence of being, as Augustine or Thomas might say.

What is more difficult to determine is Milton’s precise position on a closely related issue, the problem of free will and predestination. Though it might appear at first glance that Milton is rejecting Calvin and affirming the doctrine of free will, this becomes less clear when one examines what Calvin actually says on the subject. First God, as Milton has Him speak:

“…Ingrate, he had of me

All he could have; I made him just and right,

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall…

They trespass, authors to themselves in all

Both what they judge and what they choose; for so

I formed them free, and free they must remain,”[4]

The doctrine of predestination holds that God is the first and only cause of everything that happens, but this wording here, particularly the use of the phrase “authors to themselves in all,” suggests that man is also a first cause, to some extent independent of God’s will, at least within the limits of God’s permission.

Compare this, however, with Calvin’s views on the same subject, and the distinction becomes far less clear:

In this integrity man by free will had the power, if he so willed, to attain eternal life…Adam could have stood if he wished, seeing that he fell solely by his own will. But it was because his will was capable of being bent to one side or the other, and was not given the constancy to persevere, that he fell so easily. Yet his choice of good and evil was free, and not that alone, but the highest rectitude was in his mind and will, and all the organic parts were rightly composed to obedience, until in destroying himself he corrupted his own blessings.[5]

Even Calvin claims that Adam had free will, that “the highest rectitude was in his mind and will,” echoing Milton’s “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” Returning to the black hole analogy, both seem to be saying that man had sufficient internal pressure to balance the gravity that would cause his soul to collapse and turn inwards.

Yet despite the fact that both seem to be talking about free will, there is a difference in the way each talks about it. While Milton says that the humans are “authors to themselves in all,” Calvin speaks of man’s will being “capable of being bent to one side or the other, and…not given the constancy to persevere.” Milton has the will operating as a first cause, while Calvin sees it deterministically. Granted, Milton also has, “man falls deceived,”[6] for which reason he will receive mercy and grace, whereas the fallen angels will receive none, but later in the section quoted above of Calvin’s Institutes there is much more of a sense of the inevitability of the Fall for God’s purposes, while Milton seems to indicate that it was avoidable.

To stretch the black hole analogy perhaps further than it should go, both are saying that man had sufficient pressure to resist the pull of gravity to collapse, but while Calvin says that the supply of fuel (the will) was limited and inconstant, Milton’s God claims that man was created such that he had a self-determined supply of fuel to maintain the pressure to prevent collapse.

What is interesting is that Milton appears to agree with Calvin regarding what happens after the collapse:

“Man shall not quite be lost, but saved who will,

Yet not of will in him, but grace in me

Freely vouchsafed; once more I will renew

His lapsèd powers…

By me upheld, that he may know how frail

His fall’n condition is, and to me owe

All his deliv’rance, and to none but me.”[7]

As noted above, none can resist Death but God; similarly, no one can pull man out of his fallen, collapsed state but God. Man fully chose his destination, but he can do nothing to get himself out. The will itself has collapsed, so that God’s grace is required to will one’s own salvation. Once anything enters the black hole, it cannot escape it by its own power, only by the power of the Almighty. Such also is the nature of evil.

One might object to this assessment, noting that God says, “I formed them free, and free they must remain,”[8] but note also that He adds “Till they enthrall themselves…”[9] God is speaking here either outside of time or the fall happens. He has already ordained free will and cannot or will not change His command, but knows how the free will will be used. And he says that once they do sin, then their free will will be diminished, their souls will collapse on themselves and will not be brought back to their former state, except by a special intervention by God.

Evil in Paradise Lost is a negative, destructive force, not simply the absence of good. It is a powerful force, yet it is only chosen freely, unlike what Calvin thinks about it. While Calvin thinks that man was endowed with the physical and mental rectitude to have withstood evil, he does not think that he was given the necessary constancy of will; he says free will, but this does not seem to mean the same thing as Milton says. In Paradise Lost, however, God claims to have given man everything he needed to withstand, including a completely free will. Evil therefore develops completely separately from God, whereas Calvin believes it was predestined.

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[1] Milton, John; Elledge, Scott. Paradise Lost, 2^nd Ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Bk. II, 666-67, 668

[2] Milton, Bk. II, 622-23

[3] Milton, Bk. II, 671-73, 813-14

[4] Milton, Bk. III, 97-100, 122-24

[5] Calvin, John; McNeill, John; Battles, Ford Lewis. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960. Bk. I, Ch. XV, 8

[6] Milton, Bk. III, 130

[7] Milton, Bk. III, 173-75, 180-82

[8] Milton, Bk. III, 124

[9] Milton, Bk. III, 125

The God of Science

René Descartes opened the door to a completely new world with his method of scientific reasoning, and one of the most important things Descartes claims to prove with his method is the existence of God. Descartes’ God, however, is wholly unlike the God of Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad; being immutable, it does not suspend the laws of physics or otherwise intervene in the affairs of this world. A careful investigation of the true meaning of God for Descartes reveals the dramatic consequences this concept, if accepted, would have on one’s view of the universe, society, and oneself.

Descartes’ proof of the existence of God begins with the assumption that there must be something more perfect than Descartes himself since he recognizes that his knowledge is limited and doubtful.

“…reflecting on the fact that I was doubting, and that consequently my being was not wholly perfect, for I saw clearly that it was a greater perfection to know than to doubt, I decided to inquire from whence I had learned to think of something more perfect than I was. And I recognized it as evident that this must be from some nature that indeed was more perfect,” (p. 31, li. 6-11).

This more perfect nature Descartes calls God, but this notion of perfection seems an odd thing to introduce for a thinker attempting to build his knowledge upon nothing but self-evident truths. That is, how does Descartes know that there is any such thing as perfection, of which some things possess more and others less?

The perfection of which Descartes speaks seems to be closely related to completeness and certainty. He says that he was doubting, which is another way to say that one’s knowledge of a thing is incomplete or uncertain. Thus perfection for Descartes is not the kind of perfection one might think about in terms of goodness or beauty, but it is an objective measure of how complete and certain one’s knowledge of a thing is, regardless of the goodness of that knowledge.

Therefore Descartes’ insistence that there exist a nature more “perfect” than himself is justified if one accepts Descartes’ premise that there is such a thing as indubitable truth, that for which Descartes has rejected the inquiry of the philosophers in order to pursue. For this perfect being Descartes describes is really nothing other than perfect truth, and if one sees it as self-evident that one does not possess complete truth, then it immediately follows that there is more complete truth to be sought.

One could argue, however, that Descartes is deluding himself in believing that there is more complete knowledge than that which he already possesses. He admits that he may have conjured up his knowledge of the things of his world from nothing, through some defect in his own nature, but insists, “it could not be the same with an idea of a being more perfect than mine: for to have gotten it from nothing was a thing manifestly impossible,” (p. 31, li. 19-21) and, “if I had been alone and independent of everything else, so that I had gotten from myself the little by which I participate in perfect being, I could have gotten from myself, by the same argument, all the remainder that I knew I lacked,” (p. 32, li. 6-9).

The problem one might find with this argument is that it assumes that there is other certain knowledge out there. At this point Descartes has only truly proven that he, a thinker, exists; how can he be certain that he does not know all that there is to be known? As it turns out, the answer is in the question itself. The fact that one can ask that question shows that there is true knowledge one does not possess, for certainly there is an answer to the question of whether other knowledge exists, and if one does not have the answer to that question, then there must be knowledge one does not have. The fact that one can ask questions about things one does not know proves that there is more complete, or perfect, knowledge—or being—than what one possesses, and this perfection Descartes calls God.

Later, Descartes ascribes five perfections to his God, claiming that he must be “infinite, eternal, immutable, all-knowing, [and] all-powerful,” (p. 32, li. 10-11). We may grant that perfect truth would be eternal, immutable, and all-knowing. Certainly it would exist at all times and would be the same always, and it would, to the extent that it is perfect as described above, be all-knowing. That it is infinite may be granted on the grounds that there exists the concept of infinity, and perfect truth would necessarily encompass this concept. Finally, that perfect truth is all-powerful may be understood in the sense that all that is possible—all that can be done—must necessarily be included in perfect truth or being.

At first glance, this may sound a great deal like the God of the Bible, which may very well have been the way Descartes wanted the Church authorities to read it, but more careful scrutiny reveals that Descartes’ God is not the God of the Catholic Church.

Certainly, the Christian God is infinite, eternal, all-knowing, and all-powerful, but He is not immutable in the way Descartes later implies when he says, “it is at least as certain that God, who is this perfect Being, is or exists, as any demonstration in geometry can be,” (p. 33, li. 27-28), and “I have also discerned certain laws that God has so established in nature…that after sufficient reflection, we cannot doubt that they are exactly observed in all that is or happens in the world,” (p. 37, li. 17-21). The nature of God is like that of a geometric figure, certain and unchanging, but also lifeless; and God is the originator of all the laws of nature which are unerringly followed in everything that happens in the physical world. The immutability of the Cartesian God might be otherwise described as inactivity or impotence, for Descartes does not prove that God is all-powerful in any other way than the one described above, i.e. containing knowledge of all that can be done and how, but since Descartes insists that the corporeal is not a part of God’s nature (p. 32, li. 24-p.33, li. 1), there is nothing to suggest that this God has any capacity to act upon the corporeal world.

Thus God for Descartes becomes indistinguishable from the laws of physics. And this becomes all the more important when Descartes says, “if there were some bodies in the world, or even some intelligences or other natures which were not wholly perfect, their being must depend on his power,” (p. 33, li. 1-4). This makes a great deal of sense when one considers that all knowledge and all power are within this perfection, which is God, but it also indicates that our own being and intelligence are utterly dependent upon God, or upon the immutable laws of nature. This seems to suggest that just as all of the truths we know come from God, everything that we think and feel is pre-ordained by his laws; there is no such thing as free will.

Descartes, however, argues against this proposition later in the Discourse when he says,

“…if there were machines that resembled our bodies and imitated our actions as much as is morally possible, we would always have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not true men. The first is that they could never use words, nor compose other signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others…[for] we cannot conceive that it can arrange words in different ways to reply to the meaning of all that is said in its presence…And secondly…we would discover that they acted not from knowledge, but only according to the arrangement of their organs,” (p. 53, li. 7-24).

But if “intelligence,” which could reasonably be said to include the knowledge of which Descartes here speaks, is dependent upon God, or the laws of nature, what is the difference between a man and a highly complex machine? Perhaps Descartes is again appeasing the Church, or perhaps he merely wants to believe that he has free will. It will be shown shortly that, in any case, whether or not the human soul is truly of a different nature from that of the beasts and possesses free will, this concept of God and the laws of nature has profound moral consequences for human beings.

If human behavior is reducible to matter, motion, and energy; if humans are biochemical machines, there is no absolute morality; in fact, nothing that any human being does deserves praise or blame, because one’s actions were set in stone from the moment God first agitated the chaos and stepped away. The justice of human beings is a meaningless convention, since human action is nothing more than the motion of extension through space. Whatever happens can be said to be just or right.

But let us assume momentarily that Descartes is not only serious but also correct when he says, “our soul is of a nature entirely independent of the body,” (p. 56, li. 14). If God’s hands are tied and the entire universe runs like clockwork, except for human beings, if we are the only beings in existence with an independent soul or will, does this not make human beings the true gods of this world, and God the slave of humanity?

Consider: Descartes’ God sits, forever unchanging, always sustaining the universe in exactly the same manner, even sustaining our human bodies, but our souls have forces of their own, they guide their bodies according to their own designs, not bound by the laws of physics; we make our own choices, while God stopped choosing before the dawn of time. Human beings, using science, can learn the secrets of nature, gain mastery over it, and work to become themselves all-knowing and all-powerful. We can remake the world and remake ourselves, and God cannot, or at least does not, do anything to hinder us, and in fact is gradually forced to deliver up his secrets for our uses. By this way of thinking, would there be any way to distinguish between the God of Scripture and a highly knowledgeable human being who has gained mastery over nature and transformed his own being?

And what is to become of justice if humans are the divinity? The only real test of right in this universe would be power, and which individuals possessed the greatest amount of it. This helps illuminate the rules of the morality in Part III, the first of which is to “obey the laws and customs of my country, “ or, put another way, “to regulate myself by [the opinions of] those with whom I would have to live,” (p. 22, li. 10, 19-20).

If human beings are the only force in the universe with free will, then there is no higher judge than the will of the greatest number, or of the group with the greatest mastery over nature. Murder, theft, rape—nothing is immoral, as long as one can escape capture by an individual or group of individuals with the desire and ability to punish those who commit such acts.

Certainly, if justice is determined by the strong, and not by God—whether one would otherwise discover God’s moral laws through religious revelation or through Socratic inquiry—then there are no limits upon the lengths to which science may reach to fulfill its purposes, as defined by the scientists and the governments or wealthy private corporations who support them. Who is to say that the experiments Nazi doctors performed on innocent Jewish people in the 1940’s were wrong? The former Allied powers and their successors can say that they were wrong because they won the war, they showed themselves to be the Germans’ superior in numbers and military science; but if Germany had won the story would be a completely different one: the Jewish minority was inconvenient, and they were disposed of accordingly, to the benefit of the more powerful Germans.

One should not think, however, that the German Nazis were the only ones exemplifying the morality resulting from the concept of the Cartesian God. If God is nothing but the laws of physics, then there need be no human law except that which is most convenient for the most powerful group of human beings. It is even irrelevant whether or not there is such a thing as a human soul, distinct from that of the beasts, for there can be no physical law demanding that one human soul show reverence or even consideration to another, except as it pleases one. Thus the most vulnerable and powerless in the world, whether they are human embryos created in a laboratory, fetuses in the womb, mentally or physically handicapped individuals, the poor, the sick, or the elderly, all may be used or destroyed at the convenience of the strong. Granted, some people who claim to believe in a less static God also support embryo research, abortion, euthanasia, and other such practices; but when one accepts a disinterested or powerless God, there is ultimately no basis on which to argue that any human being owes respect to any other human being’s life, except out of one’s own convenience.

For all of this, however, and for all of science’s achievements since Descartes wrote, science on its own terms can never prove that God is immutable in the way Descartes describes. For while it might be inconvenient for the scientist if God suspended or changed the laws of nature, there is no reason to believe that He cannot do this. Perhaps God does not Himself change, but perhaps He has eternally decided that the universe will proceed in a way that defies complete human understanding and mastery, so that humans can only ever hope to approximate the laws of physics, to say what most likely will happen if God has not prepared a surprise for us. Thus we see that Descartes has not proven that God is dead, and a divinely inspired morality, while not certain to exist, is at least possible; but science can never find it.

Progress In Knowledge Requires Moderation

The issue of knowledge is of central importance to Paradise Lost because it is in pursuing a certain kind of knowledge (of good and evil) that man is expelled from paradise. This could lead one to ask what the proper kind of knowledge for man is in the poem. Man is described as being at the height of the created order on earth, far nobler than the other animals, and yet his knowledge is placed within somewhat narrow bounds. One could argue that this is because God intends to keep man within a certain niche in his creation, but this paper will argue that the most important kind of knowledge for man is an understanding of his deficiency relative to God, along with knowledge limited to man’s particular sphere of activity. But this is not intended to keep man in a set place, but to make him obedient to the most high, so that he can progress at an appropriate rate and eventually rise to ever higher levels of knowledge.

One could see the limits on man’s knowledge in the same way that Satan does, as a way “to keep them low whom knowledge might exalt / Equal with gods,” [1] and point out a potential problem that could come with such a limitation as they are given:

…And do they only stand

By ignorance, is that their happy state,

The proof of their obedience and their faith?

O fair foundation laid whereon to build

Their ruin! [2]

In this view, God is a tyrant who creates beings presumably for the mere joy of controlling them. He does not want them to have knowledge that could put them on a level equal with himself, so one could say that he does not really love them, he simply enjoys the pleasure that he gets from being in control.

A further problem is that this limitation of their knowledge leaves them in a precarious position. Based in ignorance, their faith is unstable; a strong gust of wind could knock it over, and indeed it does, in the form of Satan. It would seem that building up Adam and Eve with firm knowledge of both good and evil would balance and strengthen them against outside influences. Satan, of course, abuses this situation maliciously for his own ends, but it is conceivable that, in the absence of firm knowledge to the contrary, Adam and Eve could have come to a mistaken conclusion about the tree on their own. Why was this information not given to them?

These are strong points, but they miss the point of God’s plan. God’s intention is not merely to create marionettes with which to play an essentially mindless game. He is setting up a system that will give its participants a chance at dynamic, virtually limitless growth, and he is starting those participants in a humble position (i.e. with limited knowledge) so that they may learn to appreciate the rules of the system, the paramount rule being trust in the creator.

To understand God’s plan as it relates to human knowledge, the best place to start is the one of the first lessons that God teaches Adam. After admonishing Adam regarding the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God brings before Adam all of the beasts for naming, and Adam finds none to be a fit companion.[3] He speaks forth his want to God, that he should have others with whom to enjoy the pleasures of Eden, and God replies that Adam has all of the beasts with whom to consort. Adam asserts that the beasts are unequal to him and therefore unfit partners for conversation. To which God in reply asks whether Adam thinks that God has a similar lack, since all of his creatures are far more inferior to himself than the beasts are to Adam. The lone man responds appropriately, having gathered the lesson that God intended to impart:

…To attain

The highth and depth of thy eternal ways

All human thoughts come short, Supreme of things;

Thou in thyself art perfect, and in thee

Is no deficience found; not so is man, [4]

This response is pleasing to God, since it demonstrates Adam’s knowledge of himself and of the divine image he bears that distinguishes him from the beasts,[5] but also because it shows Adam’s understanding of his inferiority to God, which balances Adam’s sense of greatness.

It is important that both of these kinds of knowledge, both of man’s nobility and his deficiency, are intertwined in this way. It is this balanced self-understanding that should have kept man in obedience to God. It is not simply ignorance, as Satan claims, but a firm self-knowledge. Satan oversimplifies the situation by implying that man’s state is merely servile and low. Man has firm knowledge of the unique greatness that he possesses relative to the rest of the earthly creation, but he also firmly understands that he is not the highest, and this ought to put him in just the right position to judge his own good, neither too low nor too high. Satan by his interference throws this self-understanding off balance, but, as God says of man,

…Ingrate, he had of me

All he could have; I made him just and right,

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. [6]

God is giving man this balanced knowledge of himself precisely so that he will be sufficient to remain obedient. And in fact Adam and Eve’s wills do remain stable in themselves, since they do not sin of their own initiation but by the suggestion of an outside force, which is why God makes the distinction he makes between humanity and the fallen angels: the former shall receive grace but not the latter.[7]

This is the most important kind of knowledge for man in Paradise Lost, since it is designed to keep man obedient and therefore happy. But closely allied with this lesson for man is the command from the angel Raphael to Adam:

…joy thou

In what he [God] gives to thee, this Paradise

And thy fair Eve; heav’n is for thee to high

To know what passes there; be lowly wise:

Think only of what concerns thee and thy being; [8]

Keeping their minds focused on the immediate, the present, will help Adam and Eve to remain in their rightful place and to be obedient, unlike the fallen angels in hell, who

…reasoned high

Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate…

And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.

Of good and evil much they argued then…

Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy: [9]

If man begins to speculate about things outside of his experience, there could be no limit to where his mind could wander. A certain amount of idle speculation might seem harmless, but in the infinite gulf between God and man there is no end of space for the human mind to explore, no obvious place to put an end to one’s investigation. As the demons in hell, one could find oneself in a maze, unable to work one’s way out, and no longer concerned with the purpose one was given in the first place; displaced from his assigned sphere, obedience would be difficult to maintain, difficult to recover if lost.

But there is a concern even beyond losing touch with the present, which is the possibility not only of idleness in speculation but also of error. Man was made to bring order in the abundance of Eden; what if he were to attempt to establish an order in things above his competence? Errors would not then be merely idle but blasphemous, man imposing his notion of how the cosmic order ought to be, above God’s providence. In order to stay on the path, man must focus on the path and not get lost while staring aimlessly at the stars.

Say it is granted that from God’s perspective the most important kind of knowledge for man is a knowledge of himself as a noble but limited creature, beneath the creator, and a focus on knowledge pertaining only to his own realm of action, yet how does this answer Satan’s charge that God is trying “to keep them low whom knowledge might exalt / Equal with gods”?[10] Perhaps God is merely trying to keep man low and static, never developing his potential as an intelligent being made in the image of God. The first and most important response to this challenge is that, however much man may be made in the image of God, there is no way that he can match the infinitude of God, or, being a mere part of a created whole, can he be totally sufficient in himself, as God is. But the charge that God is simply keeping man low and subject is also quite untrue.

Man may appear to have only a menial task, pruning the garden, shaping its over-abundance, but there is much greater potential promised to man. Leaving aside the creativity that is allowed to man even in this task, there is also an important potential for progress for man:

…time may come when men

With angels may participate…

And from these corporal nutriments perhaps

Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit,

Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend

Ethereal, as we, or may at choice

Here or in heav’nly paradises dwell;

If ye be found obedient, and retain

Unalterably firm his love entire

Whose progeny you are. Meanwhile enjoy

Your fill what happiness this happy state

Can comprehend, incapable of more. [11]

As man is at this time, he is incapable of more than what he does on earth, and therefore he ought to think upon and enjoy what he has in this life. But if he remains firmly obedient to God in these assigned tasks, his nature may improve with time, until eventually

…by degrees of merit raised

They open to themselves at length the way

Up hither, under long obedience tried,

And earth be changed to heav’n, and heav’n to earth,

One kingdom, joy and union without end.[12]

This is far from being a servile, mindless obedience. It is a wonderful, dynamic obedience, with infinite potential. No, God does not intend to keep his human creatures merely pruning plants for all eternity; he has plans for them to transcend their corporeal bodies, ascend to heaven, and unite heaven and earth. And it is this firm self-understanding and strong focus on the knowledge necessary for the here and now that will keep them on the road to this ultimate progress.

Why, however, does this preclude the knowledge that would be received by eating the fruit of the tree? Would not a moderate and balanced knowledge also include knowledge of good and evil? Well, in order to answer this question, it is important to keep in mind some important facts about the nature of evil in this system. Milton seems to take a monistic, as opposed to a dualistic, view of good and evil. The relationship between the two is more analogous to that of heat to cold or light to darkness, rather than of forward to reverse or plus to minus.

Though hot and cold are seen as opposites, in reality only one has a true essence, and that it heat. Below absolute zero there is no negative temperature, only degrees of positive temperature. The appropriate temperature for the life of a human being is not a mixture of heat and cold, but rather a set degree of heat. God says that man would have been happier, “had it sufficed him to know / Good by itself, and evil not at all.”[13] Some might argue that this does not make sense, to know something without knowing its opposite, but there is no reason that one cannot know heat without knowing cold, just as one does not need to know darkness in order to use his sense of sight in distinguishing among colors. One does not necessarily need to know deprivation of a thing in order to know the thing. Adam and Eve in some sense knew over-abundance of good, which is why they had to prune the garden, but they did not have to know deprivation of the garden in order to know the garden. This is the situation with good and evil. Adam and Eve could have known their middle place without knowing what it was like to fall from that place. The knowledge of good and evil does not mean knowing the good better by knowing its opposite, it means knowing deprivation of the good, and this is exactly what eating of the fruit of the tree caused Adam and Eve.

Still, one could argue that the knowledge of good and evil is in some sense a lofty thing, since God says to the assembled angels, “like one of us man is become / To know both good and evil.”[14] Does this not show that there is something elevated about knowing good and evil, and is this not being denied to man? Well, if man were eventually to join with the angels, then presumably he would at that point know everything that they know. The problem is not with their ever knowing of evil, but with the way in which they learned of it.

Strength and weakness are another pair that can be compared in the same way as good and evil. Weakness is a lack of strength, rather than an opposing force, and one can completely lose his strength but not be negatively strong. Exercise is something that makes one stronger over time, so that one becomes better. Steroids are another option, allowing one to bulk up with less effort, but while these chemicals will make one strong, they also have negative side effects that deprive one of the good of health in other ways. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was like using steroids to become strong; it caused an unintended deprivation of the good, which was the banishment from the garden of Eden and the other consequences. Had Adam and Eve gone through the work of exercise, knowing their own limits, and working within their present situation in order to improve, they would have earned a higher spiritual condition, but unfortunately they did not.

Therefore, the most important kind of knowledge for humans in Paradise Lost is knowledge of their nobility resulting from their having been made in the divine image, accompanied by an appreciation of their deficiency relative to God; and the knowledge that they should focus on is that which is useful for their present life, not so that they may remain stuck in it forever, but so that through active, thoughtful obedience they might work their way up to a higher state. The problem with Adam and Eve’s actions was not in acquiring knowledge, but in their taking it without properly earning it, in a way that caused them to experience a deprivation of good.

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[1] Bk. IV, 525-6

[2] Bk. IV, 518-23

[3] Bk. VIII, 364-6

[4] Bk. VIII, 412-16

[5] Bk, VIII, 437-44

[6] Bk. III, 97-9

[7] Bk. III, 129-32

[8] Bk. VIII, 170-4

[9] Bk. II, 558-65

[10] Bk. IV, 525-6

[11] Bk. V, 493-505

[12] Bk. VII, 156-61