Just Thomism

I’ve been puzzled and amazed for years by Paul’s “creation awaits” passage in Romans 8:19:

For the expectation of the creature waiteth for the revelation of the sons of God. 20 For the creature was made subject to vanity: not willingly, but by reason of him that made it subject, in hope. 21 Because the creature also itself shall be delivered from the servitude of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that every creature groaneth and travaileth in pain, even till now.

Human sin made all creation futile and vain. Ecclesiastes explains one aspect of this vanity, but Paul’s explanation is more radical: whereas Ecclesiastes explains the vanity of nature as something simply found (we simply fall into a world where we are subject to chance and all things are placed in time) Paul sees sin as effecting a real change in creation as such. Man has made creation futile- not because he made it something else, but because he failed to make it what he ought. We failed to order things around us to the divine. This means, first of all, that human beings failed to make good art, or at least they failed to make a certain kind of good art. Nature depends on man to be exalted to divine service, so much so that our failure to so exalt it, Paul claims, renders nature itself vain, useless, and meaningless.

In one of those coincidences that provides a teachable moment, today marks both the feast of the dedication of the Lateran Cathedral and the fall of the Berlin wall. I can’t image a better example of art that nature “awaited with eager anticipation” as compared to art that “subjected the creature to futility”. The Lateran was a family palace that was handed over to divine worship, becoming the seat of a spiritual, temporal, and (by all appearances) eternal power. The basilica is lofty, dignified, and ennobling, and inside confessions are heard in languages from around the globe as a testament to the a truly international character of the institution that the basilica instantiates. The Berlin wall  is also a monument erected by an institution that saw itself as having an international character, and yet the wall was a grotesque, ashen, morbid colossus, built in a cheap, slapdash fashion by men beholden to a ridiculous 19th Century philosophical movement that saw the critique of religion as the foundation of all critiques (with “critiques”, of course, being seen as the foundation of all thought). The city behind the wall was of the same quality, in keeping with the anti-aesthetic of Communism.

Augustine defines peace as the tranquility of order. “Tranquility” is not understood as the absence of activity (if it were. we could seek peace by telling everyone to go to sleep) but as the absence of disorder. So “tranquility of order” means “the absence of disorder in order” or “order, so far as it excludes or drives out disorder”. So far as order by its very nature drives out its opposite, peace cannot even be opposed to conflict.

And so what is said of peace is said of order: world peace is world order; the king of peace is the king of order; the peace of Christ is the Christian order, etc.

For St. Thomas, the notion of eternity arises from a consideration of immutability, just as the notion of time arises from a consideration of mobile being. It seems that the analogous notion that we apprehend in both is uniformity: just as there is a homogeneous uniformity in the numbering of times there is also a uniformity to the immobile so far as it is always the same. If this is so, the crucial concept to focus on in a consideration of the eternity (and to some extent, the aevum), will be uniformity.

Uniformity is the unity of form. Beginning with the notion of form, we negate division. In time this negation of division is seems to be spread out among parts: when we call time uniform we seem to mean simply that if we took any one part and placed “on top of” the another it would lack any principle dividing it from the other. This is an odd and paradoxical uniformity: the only way to speak about the way in which there is no division is if we presuppose parts actually divided. This is an extremely imperfect sort of uniformity- a uniformity that presupposes the opposite of uniformity in order to be at all.

Dallas Willard gives a perfect description of a view of logic which is common among Analytical philosophers:

Information (and misinformation) comes in units, e.g. that 8 is greater than 5 or that Sue’s dress is red. We shall call these units of information propositions Frege called them simply “thoughts.” Each proposition relates to some other propositions in such a way that its truth values (true or false) necessitate one or the other truth value in those other propositions. We shall here speak of such relations between propositions as

Because the unit of logic is the proposition, the simplest relation in logic is one that has only two propositions, which are hypothetical arguments (modus tollens, modus ponens, disjunctives, etc.)  So Willard immediately says:

Chief among logical relations are entailment or implication, where if P entails Q and is true, then Q must be true, and if P and Q are contradictions they must have opposite truth values.

How different from Aristotle! For Aristotle, the unit of logic is not the proposition, but the term. On this account, the proposition becomes chief among logical relations, since it is made of two terms. Likewise, the simplest argument is one that comes from three terms, sc. the categorical syllogism. From this point of view, the categorical syllogism is simpler, more basic, and even more causative than the hypothetical one, which Aristotle always insisted on (much to the irritation of contemporary logicians).

Willard, much to his credit, recognizes the foundation that his logic must stand on: “information comes to us in units” and these units are propositions. To be blunt, this is not my experience and I doubt that it is Willard’s. Information comes to us and we make propositions out of it. The difference is important. Neither experience nor information have a propositional character. Prior to forming a proposition, we have to determine a ratio of the subject, and these rationes are infinite. Consider the experience you have after the colon:

Dave.

What ratio did you specify the experience with? Did you see “Dave” and think “Chastek’s example” or “name” or “English” or “Wow, my name!” or “a guy” or “male”? All of them are true, all are there, and all of them set the condition for what proposition we form, if we form one at all. The determination of these rationes has many variables: English speakers will not form the same ratio as non-English speakers; people named Dave can’t be expected to form the same ratio as people who hate guys named Dave; people writing doctoral dissertations on the use of the silent “e” won’t have the same ratio as those who are not doing so, etc. Likewise, sometimes these rationes are formed more or less spontaneously, sometimes they are determined by cultural factors, sometimes they take a good deal of study and learning to discern. Sometimes these rationes specify something that exists, other times they do not. But a ratio is always pre-propositional, and it immediately follows upon our decision to engage our experience. It is the true unit of logical discourse.

Animals have intentions that transcend the proper information of sense: when a bird looks at a stick or a worm it receives more information than just color and shape. If animals only saw color and shape and motion, they wouldn’t move to any one thing any more than another. As far as we can tell, however, these intentions only transcend the information of sense as such by revealing something that exists in relation to the animal. “Food” and “predator” and “mate” and “shelter making” are all defined in relation to the animal which is sensing. The animal world is rigorously and perfectly Ptolemaic: all that is known is essentially related to the one knowing as an absolute center.

The human world contains this animal world and something more. We not only can look at something and see “food”, we can look at it and see “apple” or “fish”. A bird can see something on the ground and see “house part”; we can look at the same thing and see “twig”. What we see need not be understood in relation to us. We need not place ourselves at the center of the universe.

In the measure that we fail to transcend imagination or our merely animal cognitive powers, we will understand all things in relation to ourselves as opposed to seeing what they are. One very noticable thread in the history of the sciences (though not the only thread) is the gradual ascent to a vision of the universe that is harder and harder to imagine. In this line of development, the series mythic poets, Presocratics, Aristotle, Newton, Einstein is one where each member steps further away from a world where the causes are given to sensation or imagination.  The only science which was ever developed more or less at once and in perfect order is the one that is wholly contained within imagination- geometry.

The theologian has to deal with different limitations of language. On the one hand, everything said about divine things involves some negation of things given to sense (hence we have terms like immaterial, simple (non-complex) immobile, immutable, eternal, etc. Even “good” when said of God involves some negation of goods known to sense.) On the other hand, existence does not have an essential relation to our thought, and therefore neither does it have an essential relation to our language (which allows us to speak of things like “a stone so great that God cannot lift it”)

St. Thomas defines logical possibility as the non-repugnance of a predicate to a subject. Interestingly, he denies that it is a sort of possibility at all, real or otherwise, even analogously (STA says that this sort of thing is a “possibility” only by metaphor). Modern and contemporary philosophers have largely ignored him, and now it is common for us to think that X is really possible because we can see no contradiction in it or because we can imagine it being the case.

As soon as we start thinking that logical possibility is real possibility, we come to believe that our inability to see a contradiction in something bespeaks some real possibility that must be dealt with. We think we are in the position of being unable to count out the possibility of X because we see no contradiction in X. All of a sudden, an infinitude of things become really possible; universes of possible worlds spring up; and we are stuck at every turn thinking that we have to do something to rule out some “real possibility” in things.

I use my eyes. This I can be taken in two ways.  So far as I am moving my eyes, the “I” transcends the organs it uses; so far as when you strike my eyes you strike me, the “I” is immanent in the organs it uses. This is not surprising: transcendence and immanence are not opposed, except when we try to understand them in a carnal way (viz. when we visualize immanence as being in a box and transcendence as floating over it.) This carnal understanding gives rise to two dead ends: on the one hand, we imagine that the transcendence of the I requires that it be some little man floating like a ghost in our bodies; on the other hand, we imagine that the immanence of the I makes it an accident of the body. These two dead ends will always be the most popular, as they are today.

Something uses my eyes. Something is using yours too, apparently to read this. What?

By “eye” I mean not just the round thing in the socket, but that whole mass of flesh that is required to see. “Eye” in this sense involves what is also sometimes called “brain”, or at least a part of it.

Apparently, it is the same thing that uses my hands and legs and mouth and ears. Here again, by any of these organs we mean the whole that is proper to them. The use of my legs involves the spinal cord and some brain parts, so let this whole be called “leg”, just as the ear canal, drum, auditory nerve, etc are called “the ear”.

So what user is left after I have divided up all the parts which are used? Perhaps some part of the brain (whatever is left of the brain after we have divided it up among all the organs of which it is simply an extension). But why do we think the brain? Presumably, this is because we figure that a “user” ought to know what it is doing. Direction comes from intelligence, apparently. (Are we supposed to forget this when we see things in nature directing themselves?)

Or is the answer just obvious? I use my eye. “I” must mean here “the intelligence which directs” (given the above). So I am something other than the organ.  The organ is the used thing, I am the user. This seems to be what I knew already.

But I am the organ too. To harm my eyes is to harm me. To use requires transcendence; to be one with requires immanence.

The easiest argument for divine simplicity is this:

What is really composite is caused by another

God is in no way caused by another

God is in no way really composite

Since “simple” means nothing but “non-composite” (which is often overlooked in these arguments) it follows that God is absolutely simple.

The major premise follows from the nature of real composites- a composite exists because it is composed, which makes it causally posterior to the causes of its composition (namely, its parts and the source of their composition). More simply, a composite cannot act until it is composed (since it does not exist) and so its activity and existence must come after some other. That God is not caused by another follows analytically from the proofs we use to establish his existence (these are often overlooked in arguments about composition too- we contemporary people frequently have problems stringing two thoughts together when we think about God)

Of course, while the above argument shows that God must be absolutely simple, it does not show what this simplicity must consist in, that is, it does not tell us exactly which kinds of composition we ought to negate. The divine simplicity is the negation of all real composition. If, for example, we do not hold that essence and existence is a real composition, then we need not negate it in our consideration of the divine simplicity.