Just Thomism

Buckley explains the various theisms that have arisen from different considerations of motion. To consider any problem implies a method, meaning (at least) some idea of what will count as an explanation.

For Aristotle, the relevant sense of explaining something that gives rise to an idea of God is to give a cause that is primo and per se, and the relevant problems to be explained are a.) what causes motion? and b.) what exists/ is actual? Since we understand but the standard of what will count as an explanation and the problem to be explained, we understand God as the one of the explanations that must arise. Logically, the explanation of motion must either be something mobile or immobile, but no mobile explains motion but only posits another instance of it. Again, if we ask what explains existence like moving molecules explain heat in the kinetic theory or like warping space time explains gravity in relativity, no being that is finite or limited in any way will count as an explanation.

Newton, a paradigmatic mechanist, approaches the world with a fundamentally different sense of what will count as an explanation. This is clear from his very first law, which takes something in motion as a given – i.e. “a body in motion will persevere in a state of motion…etc”.  Though Martin doesn’t say this, because our modern physics seeks out mechanisms  its method takes some motion as a given, just as every machine takes some natural motion as a given (expanding, exploding, springing back into shape, etc.); but it desires mechanisms out of a desire for a system of the world explained in terms that are formally most knowable to us.

(Second to the last lecture in a class on nature and grace)

‘Today we reach the climax of our course on nature and grace, where we encounter the two main orthodox, and yet mutually contradictory accounts of the relation between nature and grace. We have already dealt with the imperfect or inadequate accounts of nature and grace- Luther’s account, for example, which was not intended to be systematic or precise, but  (at least from the point of view of those of us who like sharp, systematic distinctions in things) served more as a call and a challenge to look at grace in a new and fresh way; or Jansen’s account which, though it makes the extremely relevant and important point that the imparting of grace is not an act of violence nevertheless fails to account for genuine human freedom. Today we will take up the conflict between Thomism and Molinism. We will leave aside the question of Calvinism until we have sketched out the main opposition between the Thomists and the Molinists.

First, let’s get it out there from the beginning that the opposition between thomism and molinism is paradoxical and has yet to be adequately solved – even when we allow for the very different standard of what counts as a solution in theological matters. We have no consensus on the resolution to the paradox, nor has one ever been reached. No great champion or school has ever emerged to sway the debate one way or another, whether to Thomism or Molinism or a New Synthesis of the two or a radically new approach that calls into question the foundations of both. Either no one has yet seen the resolution, or all those who have seen it have failed to illumine a significant portion of others. This should give us pause, and a certain amount of fear when approaching the problem. But, like all fear, there is a note of excitement in it too. Every discourse is pushed forward by confronting its paradoxes, and is stultified by igoring them or pretending they aren’t there. Discipleship and commitment to a rational system have a necessary place, but they need to be balanced against the all too human vice of desire for mere comfort that disguises itself as the attainment of certitude. As any confidence man will tell you, no one is more vulnerable than when he thinks he has things all figured out.

The paradox of Thomism and Molinism can best be expressed by considering the different views that they take of God as creator. We’ll first deal with thomism.

At the heart of St. Thomas’s rational discourse about God is the proof that God is an unmoved mover. This doctrine is the same as saying that God is the source of all actuality; and St. Thomas was clear that the act of existence was the actuality of all acts. When we say that God is the unmoved mover, therefore, we mean (among other things, to be sure) that he is the source or existence as existence. Without his action on some X, that X would be immediately annihilated. If God chose to “stop thinking about the universe”, then it would instantly vanish, and leave not even empty space behind. If God decided to think about the possibility of the universe, the universe would be impossible (at least so far as we consider this possibility as outside of God’s own mind). The divine action is what makes the difference between anything at all and absolute non-being outside of himself.

Within this context, the problem of grace has a straightforward answer – straightforward, not easy. Efficacious grace is a being. God is the source of all being. God is therefore the source of efficacious grace (remember the division between sufficient grace, or the grace by which you could choose, and efficacious grace, by which you actually do choose. I know that some of you want to return to this division, but let’s take it as given for the moment.)  So, when a Thomist asks “how does God know that someone will receive an effficatious grace” the question is exactly the same as “How did Michaelangelo know that the David statue would be made?” or “How did Cervantes know that Aldonza Lorenzo’s name would be Dulcinea?” All of these know that something will come to be because they make it. Efficacious grace is a creature, and the creator knows what creatures will come to be because (do we even need to say it?) he will create them.

So what role does our will play in all this? Here we run into a Thomistic axiom which is at once sublimely simple and yet terribly vexing: sc. that God moves all things according to their natures, free things freely, and necessary things necessarily. For God to create means for him to give rise to some real being X, and so, if we take X as a given, then all that comes to be from it will be a case of God working through X. The divine action can get played in different keys, as it were, or it can be like a single melody played on different instruments. The instrument contributes something while remaining an instrument. Nevertheless, this contribution is a secondary reality. Fundamentally and primarily, it is the divine action, and the divine action alone, that makes the difference between existing in any way, and not existing at all. This raises the question of how will, precisely as will, and taken precisely so far as it is responsibel for its actions, can be fundamentally the instrument of another. This is the first great focus of criticism for the doctrine, though here again we stress that a criticism is not always an indication that the doctrine is weak – for all we know the criticism might ultimately be the occasion of the greatest triumph of a doctrine.

The second great criticism is arises from the account that we must give of a morally evil action if God is the source of all being. St. Thomas never balks – God causes a sinful action so far as it exists, though not so far as it issues from a corrupted will. In theological terms, God wills the entity of sin but not the malice. Again, we can’t deal with the value of the distinction here, but we can note that this is it is precisely where the controversy about thomism will arise, at least among those who know what they are talking about. Again (again) the distinction is not obviously false or obviously true- it more suggests lines of further research than it solves a problem. This is not to say we can;t give a simple answer to the question, only that even a simple answer comes at a high cost.

While Thomists focus on God’s creative action so far as it makes the difference between being and absolute nothingness, Molinists start with a view of the creator as considering all the possibilities of creation. Thomists stress the creative action as an action; Molinists start from the possibilities of the action known by the divine mind. These possibilities should be taken in the broadest sense: God the creator knows every answer to “what would happen if Q” or “If P were not, what would happen?” God has perfect awareness of the answer to every hypothesis, every counterfactual, every power that might be but is not, etc. While the creator of St. Thomas is seen as the source of all actual being; the creator in Molina is seen as considering noetically in himself all knowable reality. No real entity is hidden from the Thomistic creator; no intelligible entity is hidden from the Molinist creator. When we consider this Molinist creator so far as he knows the answer to all possible hypotheticals or counterfactuals, we are speaking about God’s scientia media – that is, an absolutely certain knowledge (scientia) that serves as a means (media). A means for what? The answer to this makes us turn back to the question we asked earlier “How does God know if he will give efficatious grace?” Here is the crucial point: while the Thomist answers the question by means to God’s creative act, the Molinist answers it by means of God’s scientia media. Because God foresaw that if he gave John sufficient grace, that John would choose it, he chose (for reasons we do not know, or at least don’t consider now) to give John that grace. Likewise, because he saw that Judas would resist the grace he was offered, he chose (for reasons we cannot know) to offer a sufficient grace. Unlike Thomism, the question whether one will freely choose a grace is directly relevant to God’s action in the bestowal of the grace. God is still ultimately in charge of what he gives or does not give, but the hypothetical response of the will – known only by scientia media – is essential to answer the question whether grace will be given at all. This is why the question of the truth of this question turns on the truth of a single question: is scientia media necessary to answer whether grace will be given? The thomists insist that it is not, and the argument is straightforward enough: the choice seen in scientia media exists and so is the free creation of God. Scientia media is superfluous – all we need to know is what God will do.”  

The internet and popular books abound in attempts to refute theistic proofs (say, St. Thomas’s First Way) but few if any of them show any awareness of the thing they are trying to refute. Eliminating such objections is necessary and valuable work, but it has an important limitation: if your objector is shallow, your dialogue with him stays shallow, and the objection he raises has little power to develop your ideas.

So just what are the principled objections to the First Way? Michael Augros raises ten wonderful objections here and responds to them, and there is very little I can add to the list. But there are a few more to include. I’ll give no responses here, since all of my responses are in various degrees of incompletion (I have pretty good refutations of some, others I’m still working on).

1.) The Scotistic Objection to omne quod movetur ab alio movetur. Peter King gives an extensive account of the objection here, but to summarize:

The necessity of something being moved by another comes from the incompatibility of actually possessing X and not actually possessing X.

But an equivocal cause can actually possess X in a more eminent way and not actually possess it in the lower way appropriate to univocal causes.

Therefore an equivocal cause has no need of being moved by another.

2.) The objection against motion being proper to bodies. St. Thomas is clear that the reason why everything in motion is moved by another is because only extended bodies are in motion. But this leaves us having to argue either that there is a luminiferous aether for all EM waves, or that nothing in the EM spectrum moves. Similar objections arise from considering magnetic fields or space, which admit of a bona fide motion and change without being extended bodies in any obvious sense of the term.

To be clear, the objection does not say “because physical thing X is not an extended body, therefore it is a mathematical point.” The objection rests on the claim that extended magnitude and points do not exhaust all possible physical subjects.

This objection is a broader critique of the science in which St. Thomas found the First Way. Such a science held that the formal object of Natural Philosophy was mobile being, and the material object was a physical body. St. Thomas always insisted that the formal object was self-evident but that the material object required proof and so was less certain. Now one can certainly say, as many thomists are tempted to say, that we can disregard the whole science in which St. Thomas located the First Way and yet keep the proof. But this is more of a critique of St. Thomas than a support of his thought; and it is ultimately an attempt to separate the grin from the cat.

3.) The objection from the adequacy of science. This is Milton Munitz’s objection in chapter four of his The Mystery of Existence.  Roughly, physical science either can give an adequate account of the causes of motion or it cannot. If it can, then there is no reason to invoke some cause outside of physics, even if  it is invoked as a term. But if it cannot, then what is inadequate about the causes it appeals to? Note that we cannot say “oh, natural science gives a perfectly adequate physical account or motion, but the First Way gives a metaphysical account of it.” The whole possibility of metaphysics rests on the inadequacy of the physical as physical to explain change.

4.) The objection that one cannot move from act as a principle to act as a separate act. Hans Kung might be hinting at this sort of objection in his critique of the First Way. Just as we only understand potency as the subject of some form, we only understand form as the act of some subject. But to conclude to a immobile mover requires moving from act as the act of something to act all by itself. But this change is as radical as moving from a tire or wagon wheel to a Euclidean circle.

St. Thomas claims truth is essentially a relation to intellect, and so one account of truth must develop along the lines of what essentially relates to our own intellect. Developed in this way, truth is how Kant describes it in his Copernican turn, namely that the only objects that we can know are those that owe their existence to our thought. So is this the only way to develop St. Thomas’s account of truth?

From one point of view, yes. We know object, but to be an object is to owe ones existence to a mind. It’s not as if there would be cognitive objects without minds to know them. Again, as the scholastics insisted, things are in knowers according to the way the knower exists.

One can distinguish his way out of this problem, but that is not the point here. Our present tendency to identify knowledge with the dialectics of “science” gets its clearest defense in this Scholasticism filtered through Kant, and if we wanted to get to the root of it, we should look here.

Anyone who reads this blog is the target audience for the movie Pi, which is now an insti-play option at Netflix. I simply cannot recommend the movie enough. Make watching it a priority.

One caveat: Do NOT watch it with someone who doesn’t love philosophy.

From the parable of the wicked tenants:

And the tenants took his servants, and beat one, and killed another, and stoned another.

Matthew 21: 35

To move  from beating to killing shows a clear escalation of violence, but the consummation of this is not murder but and unjust stoning, that is, a murder with legal and religious justifications. It’s sad, horrible, and familiar to envision how the first two envoys that the owner sent met with angry mobs bearing pitchforks, torches and lynch ropes while the third envoy was arrested, given a trial, subjected to a reading of religious texts that justified his execution, etc.

Consolation, Book III prose X:

For everything is said to be imperfect is held to be so by some loss of its perfection. Which is why, if something is seen as imperfect in any genus, there it is necessary that there be some perfect thing in it. For if you take away the perfection, it cannot even be imagined (fingi) how something might be held to be imperfect. For reality (natura rerum) does not take its origin from what is lower or unmade, but, proceeding from things whole and absolute, it falls down into these last, worn down things.

omne enim quod imperfectum esse dicitur id imminutione perfecti imperfectum esse perhibetur. Quo fit ut, si in quolibet genere imperfectum quid esse uideatur, in eo perfectum quoque aliquid esse necesse sit; etenim perfectione sublata unde illud quod imperfectum perhibetur exstiterit ne fingi quidem potest. Neque enim ab deminutis inconsummatisque natura rerum cepit exordium, sed ab integris absolutisque procedens in haec extrema atque effeta dilabitur.

Gerrigou- Lagrange argues that all the proofs for the existence of God are contained virtually in the principle that Boethius articulates here. I think he is right, but there is an ominous corollary to the point since, mutatis mutandis,  all such proofs are virtually refuted or made impossible for one who thinks this principle is false or impossible.  And since the whole edifice of Scholastic theology rests on the initial view we get of God from the arguments about his existence, one who considers Boethius’s axiom might see all scholastic theology as standing in the balance.

We can, I think, get a view of Boethius’ claim that makes it axiomatic. Imperfection is to fall short of something, and nothing can fall short of what doesn’t exist. We can’t play the game “you’re getting warmer- you’re getting colder” without some real object that we can be closer or further from.The axiomatic character of the claim is manifested in the words – imperfect  = non-perfect, which presupposes that the perfect is already known and given before the imperfect is even thought of.

On the other hand, we can understand why someone would take exception with Boethius. It is not clear how this axiom is about nature – in fact, does it even make sense to speak of coming to be from the perfect? “Perfect” means done – it is not a term applied to initial conditions. The scholastics were aware of this, of course, and so they placed “the perfect” which is present at the beginning in the order of intention. But isn’t this to simply add an entire idealized order on top of the nature that we actually observe?

But a more radical objection to Boethius sees the very idea of perfect or imperfect as, at best, concepts of only limited application to nature. It might make some sense to speak of living things as maturing and thus as moving to a definite perfection, but most of the universe is neither alive nor presently involved with its generation or benefit. Is there any sense to speaking of weather patterns, planetary orbits, radioactive decay, tidal forces, the voyage of a photon from Rigel to Jupiter, etc. as perfect? So far as the Medievals knew about any of these things, they really did strive to relate them to some perfection – in general, they saw the cyclical motions of nature as essentially subordinate to the generation of life.

But the fundamental problem we have with seeing nature as Boethius sees it comes from being trained to see that the real view of nature is the one where the qualities of things recede into a background of mere lines and equations. Reality for us is the fact – shown by evidence, that is, the object appearing to us in a domain under our control. Whatever one wants to say about such a domain, there is no perfect or imperfect realities in it. The first sense we have of what is perfect or imperfect is from our ideas of good and evil (which might be why the first definition that Aristotle gives of “quality” is that in virtue of which a man is such-and-such), and good an evil are not under realities we control but realities that, fundamentally, we must accept. Thus in our very first idea of the perfect we divide it from fact (which gives rise to our strange, mythical oppositions of experience into facts and values, the objective and the subjective, the practical and the ideal, the quantifiable and qualia, etc.)

Though Ludemann has laid down an absolute division between history, fact and knowledge on the one hand and belief, faith, and the handing down of tradition on the other, he hasn’t yet applied it to the text of scripture. The truth of the division would require denying that the books of scripture are intrinsically unified as by a single author or – what is the same thing – that there is any single authority makes the scriptural books a canon. As Ludemann puts it “Trusting the Gospels and reading them as supplementing one another [i.e. as forming a single whole - Ed.] is an anachronism in view of of modern scholarship’s adoption of the Two Documents Hypothesis… According to this, Matthew and Luke both used Mark and and the Saying Gospel Q… and did so independently of one another, but eyewitnesses composed none of these”. Ludemann supports his thesis by an appeal to Luke 1: 1-4:

Since many have attempted to compose a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, according as they have delivered them unto us, who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word:  It seemed good to me also, having diligently attained to all things from the beginning, to write to you in order, most excellent Theophilus,  that you may know the verity of those words in which you have been instructed.

Ludemann’s exegesis of the text is:

This passage is vital for judging the question of the origin of the Jesus traditions. What emerges is this: First came the oral tradition of eyewitnesses and servants of the word, none of whom set down his recollections of Jesus in writing. That happened only later, and certainly more than two Gospels came to be in this way. But these several written accounts had not yet gained significant and widespread respect. Therefore, based on his knowledge of Mark, Q, and several other resources, Luke intends to supercede – and probably replace – these earlier works with his gospel.

Thus, by this exegesis, it is necessary to read the books of Scripture in opposition to one another and not as supplementing each other.

Gerd Ludemann begins his book-length refutation of Benedict XVI’s book on Jesus with the following claim, which he regards as “undeniable, indeed axiomatic”:

In his insightful book The Historian and the Believer, Van Harvey drives home the point that history must be carefully distinguished from belief and identifies the crucial difference between the two: the historian must present objective evidence for his assertions. The rules of the game do not permit him to rely on uncorroborated testimony or claims of authority. Thus the validity of the historians conclusions derives from the very nature of historical knowledge. The chronicler who fails to challenge eyewitness testimony and to submit documentary sources to critical examination is not a historian. Rather he or she becomes, in Harvey’s trenchant but apt words, “no longer a seeker of knowledge but a mediator of past belief; not a thinker but a transmitter of tradition.”

This really is an axiom for Ludemann – he’s laid down a principle from which every other claim roles out with perfect logic. The axiom gets some dialectical defense – it’s not pure stipulation – but the genius and value of Ludemann’s work is its rigor, clarity, and consistency with his axiom. Once one has set down an absolute division between history/ knowledge and the transmission of tradition/ claims of authority, much of what he has to say about Christianity is pretty clearly sketched out.

Benedict, of course, does not see the Ludemann’s sharp, axiomatic lines. History has an intrinsic limitation when applied to the Christian faith, and must have its truth supplemented. Ludemann sees this as a search for an excluded middle:

[Quotations from Benedict- Ed.] In other words, this “Jesus of the Gospels” – who in the previous paragraphs was described as the product of a self-transcendent People of God, the Church that in turn received “its very self from the Incarnate Christ” – is now portrayed as “real”, “plausible” and “convincing” using the historical-critical method! The ontological disconnect leaves one breathless.

The claim that morality is impossible without God means many things, but Boethius’s account of this in Book III of the Consolation is a beautiful confluence of tight argumentation, abstract notions, and the concrete facts of the moral life.

Since happiness can’t be characterized by a lack of some good, happiness is a whole containing different sorts of goods. Since we are confronted with diverse goods  (pleasure, power, wealth, etc.) happiness is either a synthesis or transcendence of them. A difficulty arises, however, in trying to make a synthesis. If we try to make the synthesis by attaining each good one-by-one, we run into the problem that to perfectly attain any of the particular goods one-by-one requires sacrifice of the others: perfect wealth attainment calls for sacrificing many great pleasures, etc. Neither can we seek a synthesis by seeking the multitude of distinct things as a multitude: this would actually cripple action by demanding that it attain multiple distinct ends all at once. Happiness is therefore somehow behind the distinct goods- we have to find each of the distinct goods while seeking something other than each of them. We can’t simply call this thing “happiness” – since this is simply to say that we seek happiness by seeking happiness. Happiness must be the good which transcends the particular goods – by being a place of unity in which they objectively coalesce. It is only by aiming at this that we can escape the problem of having to find distinct goods without being able to seek them distinctly.