Just Thomism

1.) Christians in liberal societies have argued about slavery in the Old Testament since the beginning, and the arguments proved both difficult to resolve and prone to violence, as is clear from Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. 

2.) No plausible reading of Scripture allows us to see slavery as a malum in se. Then again, no plausible reading of the Thirteenth Amendment allows this either:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Notice the except clause. If slavery were an intrinsic evil, it could never be a punishment, since punishments are just. This is why prisons involve mandatory labor under threat of punishment, and the only difference between this and slavery is between a term defined and its definition.

3.) The penal slavery or war slavery in scripture can be explained in terms analogous to how we would explain our own slavery systems in the contemporary US, and presumably we would evaluate it as moral or not on those terms, adjusted for historical and cultural norms. This explains a large part of biblical slavery, but not all. What about the rest?

4.) One fails to understand God as creator if he fails to see that man by nature is literally a divine chattel. God has full abusus rights over human persons, just as we have abusus rights over any animals, plants, and inanimate things. If God makes me your slave, or puts his authority behind a system by which it comes to pass, then I am your slave in fact, and by your moral right. All this is implicit in our calling God Lord. In liberal society, of course, Christians still say “Lord,” but the force of the word has been watered down to, at most, something like “boss,”  and its common usage is often indistinguishable from a word like “buddy.” The whole notion of God as Lord is intelligible only as offensive, but this yields a theology utterly incompatible with scriptural theology, or with the truth of the matter.

5.) Since everyone allows for morally acceptable slavery in principle, and to some extent in practice, the only question is what falls under this moral umbrella. We contemporary Americans limit the practice to penal slavery (and presumably war slavery) but even if we said everything beyond this was immoral, it would not address the morality of divinely sectioned slavery that in fact went beyond this. I’m already a divine slave by nature (as opposed to grace) and so God is within his rights to treat me as one, or even to delegate his authority over me to others. If I’m justly owned I can be justly given or sold.

6.) Our inability to see this is where our liberal indignation over slavery becomes theological error. We have come to see ourselves as not even God’s slaves by nature. This is both false and rules out our ability to give astonished thanks for being, by grace, “no longer slaves, but friends” or to rejoice that God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” making it so we are no longer a slave, but a son.

Motion and rest cannot coincide, and so there can be no moment containing both. For any mobile, there must be some motion separating it from rest, whether the rest of the terminus a quo or the terminus ad quem. So all the following are true:

a.) Body A rests

b.) Body A is in motion

c.) Whenever body A is in motion, it already was.

d.) Whenever body A is in motion, it will continue to be.

Catherine of Sienna sees pride tightly bound to impatience and misjudgment. What is the experience of this like?

I encounter something and am annoyed. The annoyance arises from feeling deprived of some good, but it also requires believing (a) that I’m owed the good and my rights trump whoever and whatever violated them and (b) that  the annoyance isn’t part of a greater good than the one I lost.  If I just said (a) out loud I would usually sound arrogant or petty, if not outright wrong (“I have a right for people to drive as fast as I wish!”); and it’s very hard to know (b.) Anything real, as real and not a privation, is an immediate procession from the divine mind, and so the real, as real, should be preferable to whatever desire of my own that reality frustrated.  So impatience (i.e. frustration and annoyance) seem to in one sense always, and in another sense often, to have pride and misjudgment as principles.

The pride is a sort of irrational standard of what one is due, but this arises in part from a misjudgment about providence, namely one fails to see reality as a gift from a loving father, even if, as a privation as opposed to real, it causes real harm. Evils exist in actualities and God immediately wills actuality as such, and so evil exists only as the backside of some divinely willed frontside.  In losing sight of this we are left only with the evil, and a corresponding sense that we are alone and in need of doing all things for ourselves; so a hidden despair leads to an irrational pride, manifesting itself in a very noticeable frustration and annoyance.

Thomas defines predestination and proves it exists: 

The idea (ratio) of something to happen existing in the mind of one who acts, is a kind of pre-existence in him of the thing to happen. So the idea just spoken of, namely of taking the rational creature to the end of eternal life, is called predestination

Ratio autem alicuius fiendi in mente actoris existens, est quaedam praeexistentia rei fiendae in eo. Unde ratio praedictae transmissionis creaturae rationalis in finem vitae aeternae, praedestinatio nominatur

ST 1. 23. 1 co. 

Notice that predestination is a a manner in which things exist in the divine mind, and therefore are characterized by their existence in the divine mind as opposed to their existence in reality. 

Why stress this opposition? Because in all knowers there is an opposition between the object-as-real and the object-as-known. Humans, for example, know material beings by immaterial ideas, and express ideas that are single and undivided by discrete and divided words. In God the same opposition obtains and is maximized: God knows things that are in reality undetermined, temporal, and free by an idea that is absolutely determinate, unchanging, necessary, etc. Say all the scary and frightening things you want about predestination: the number of saints is determinate, our eternal destiny is already a fait accompli, there is nothing we can do to change God’s sovereign decision made from the beginning of time, the decision of grace is ante merita praevisa, etc. All of these are absolutely true but are truths about how things exist in the divine mind as opposed to how they exist in reality. Predestination is a divine idea. The idea is practical, i.e. a principle of action, but just as our immaterial ideas are principles of making material things, God’s absolutely determinate, singular, and necessary idea is the principle of making an undetermined, divided,  and contingent reality. 

Assume we deny God exists because of animal suffering. Our point is to make a case against divine justice, which demands the non-existence of any divinity we could believe in.

Our denial, however, also requires refusing to be open to the possibility of animal suffering having any meaning, even a mysterious or unknowable one. The AFE claims to know, whether probabilistically or not, that (some) suffering is incompatible with any meaning, even one possible only by divine power.*

The AFE is a good deal more persuasive on the first point than the second. every theist has probably felt the sense that his justifications ring hollow in the face of suffering, but we also feel, along with a good many persons who take the AFE as decisive, that existential despair in the face of suffering, even if it has a large grain of truth, needs to be balanced against an opposing truth of the same order. Our beliefs about suffering are more complicated than that it is simply pointless. No one denies the human ability to make some sufferings meaningful, or that an omnipotent being would have far more ability to do so, but the AFE demands holding up sufferings beyond the reach of even divine ability. As far as I can tell, this leaves only two options: (a) finding a logical contradiction between some suffering and justification or (b) hubris.

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*”Logical impossibility” is equivalent to “impossible even by omnipotence.” Note that any argument from evil therefore demands the logical impossibility that some evils be justified. In this sense, the arguments cannot be merely probabilistic or evidential: so long as there is even the logical possibility of justifying of some evil, even in a way utterly hidden and unknowable to us, the argument from evil can’t have the resources it needs to deny an omnipotent being, even if one “morally” perfect.  Said another way, in order to have the “gratuitous evils” required to make an AFE work, it’s not enough that you prove it is overwhelmingly probable that they are gratuitous, but that it is logically necessary for them to be.

1.) I can’t see how this evil could be justified, even by omnipotence.

2.) I see how this evil can’t be justified, even by omnipotence.

The argument from evil needs (2) and not just (1.)

(1) is an appeal to the limitations of my own knowledge, and in the face of concretely justifying evil these are overwhelmingly restrictive. I have a general justification for evil (it was the logically necessary conjunct to some good that could not be gotten any other way) but if you ask me for details about what good this suffering was for, I almost certainly have nothing to say, and anything I did say would be guesswork. If you wanted to stump me in giving concrete justifications for particular evils, don’t bother invoking the holocaust, children dying of cancer or 100 million years of animal suffering – the last cold I had or the last time I got embarrassed in class would do.

(2) by contrast is an appeal to the extent or power of my knowledge, to a knowledge of justification and evil that is penetrating enough to see some middle term to proving “there is a logical contradiction in this evil being justified.”

The shopworn example of knowledge is to gesture out the window and speak of a tree. This isn’t quote what the experience of knowledge is, however. We look out a window and see a world, or rather we go from already seeing a world to paying attention to one of the trees already a part of it.

We don’t see a tree, then grass, then sky, and then assemble a world from the various given parts; rather the whole is given first confusedly and the parts cut out of it though attention or abstraction. Knowledge is not first of all each object of knowledge, but the confused whole, where “confused” is meant not as perplexing but in the etymological sense of “poured together.”

This is crucial to seeing Thomas’s account of knowledge, which sees it as a remedy for the separateness of finite being. Finite beings are simply themselves, though they perhaps extend somewhat by causal interconnections, but even these cannot make for the givenness of the whole of things as whole. This happens only in knowledge.  The universe is one apart from knowledge, but its unity is not perfective of anything in a manner similar to how each of the forms in the cosmos is the perfection of its matter. This sort of perfective act has to be defined as similar to but ontologically divided from form-perfecting-matter, which is the first sense in which knowledge is immaterial. Form perfects matter so as to make it distinct from another and not whole, whereas knowledge consists precisely in the whole acting so as to perfect.

Basic axiom of biblical history: read the Bible like you would any other text. Read it without a presumption of inerrancy, or it being a divine word. Treat its fantastic claims like legends in Gilgamesh or the miracles of Muhammed. If you read with faith, this is faith seeking understanding, i.e. theology. One assumes this is true a fortiori for other texts with wonder-stories in them, like the lives of the saints.

How does this intersect with the puzzle of witness vs. testimony? To pivot to another text with miracles – Raymond of Capua repeatedly insists that he witnessed either first or second hand the miracles of Catherine of Sienna. We have Raymond’s witness, but for us it’s testimony, which triggers Hume’s argument about testimony for miracles. The problem is that Raymond seems fully cognizant that it’s more in line with the totality of our evidence to think he’s lying or honestly mistaken than that he’s telling the truth, but  he’s still emphatic that he saw what he saw. So we’re left saying, at minimum, that some very good evidence for a historical event is a wonder-story. It looks like the historical approach allows one to say that historical research occasionally presents one with odd things that one can’t know what to make of, like miracle stories that as historical, can neither be believed nor explained away.

So what is the as historical doing in the last sentence? Perhaps this – history is the domain into which the miracle or revelation breaks though. The miracle interrupts something – the mundane, the common, the “life of the age” or secular world. The historian as such might be taken as the one describing this world-miracles-interrupt. History is “what happened” only in the way that natural science is the study of “what exists”, that is, history is only what happened under the hypothesis that nothing interrupts in the manner of revelation. For all that, the revelation is still interruption or breaking into a world. For Thomas, what breaks in is precisely a summons to a world-beyond-world; which presupposes that what one breaks into is somehow whole – it’s a world, after all – without being all there is.

The problem is that natural science has a logical implication of divinity in a way that history does not. One can use natural science to form cosmological arguments, but it’s not clear that there is any analogy to a cosmological argument from historical fact. Historical data is perhaps too (a) dependent on hypothesis and (b) underdetermined to fact to ever force a strong conclusion analogous to a cosmological argument from testimony alone. Though faith does come from hearing, i.e. testimony, it can’t come from it as a sufficient cause, but always demands a sort of interior witness or light.

1.) Cognitive soul does not move body by some sort of noetic pre-energy pushing it from behind but by giving matter and agents the end for which each acts. What does not get this end from its own cognition gets it from another’s.

2.) The freedom of the will arises because one intellective act, knowing a finite good, makes known both a good and its many opposite goods. Understanding a finite object means to know it as object and contrary goods, since limited goods are constituted by excluding other goods. Any intellect is thus free before what is finite to it.

3.) So far as all its parts are homogeneous, the mathematical grid we place over motion occludes its action for an end, and so it seems to leave cognition as a superfluous ghost haunting an odd machine that begins only because it was run into randomly, and proceeds only to run randomly into something else. But in fact this whole image is a conflation: math occludes both action for an end and random action. When we say “mathematical motion is not for an end” this is the “not” of “pink is not a sound” as opposed to “pink is not blue.” Weinberg’s famous quip in The First Three Minutes about the universe being pointless is true as far as it goes, but this is only because, considered through the math, the universe is neither for a point nor pointless, just as pink is neither sour nor sweet. Said briefly, Weinberg is conflating the negation of ends with their privation; or not realizing an end with realizing there is not an end.

For Aristotle, matter, or the material thing as material, is in motion first and then extended, that is, the need for material things to be extended arises from their mobility. If all mobiles are extended, however, anything non-extended is non-mobile. This demands seeing a contradiction in the motion of a Euclidean point.

The contradiction arises in motion being through some middle to some next state, whether it stops at that state or not. Said another way, motion isn’t just being at state A then at state B, but in getting to B through some state. Points can’t do this since anywhere they are is simply a next state, whereas this is not true for extended things, which can have one part in one state, another in the middle or final.

Consider walking into a room, and even assume the rooms are separated by a Euclidean plane. At some point one is partially in one room, partially in another. So far, so good. But a point can’t do this, but is either (a) in one room, (b) in another, or (c) at the limit between them. At (a) the motion hasn’t started, in (b) the motion is already over, and at (c) the point is not moving through anything. Said another way, one is either in one state, in another, or (at c) in a state that is only logically distinguished from being in (a or b) and not really different from being in them. Our Euclidean point is either in one state, in another, or in a state not really distinct from either.  Motion never happens, that is, getting to a state by moving though one really different from it.

True, nothing is easier to imagine than two separate locations, with “a point” going from one to the other, leaving the trail of a Euclidean line behind it. Isn’t this “moving though a state really different?”  The line is really different from its endpoints, isn’t it? To be sure, a line is really different from its endpoints, but this is an ignorantio elenchi: any state of a hypothetical partless mobile is being at or being in but never moving through, and motion consists per se in moving though, not in being at – in fact, being at is the contrary of motion.

The parts of a line, in other words, aren’t made by a moving point any more than the parts of a shape could be colored in or filled up with points. There are infinite points on a line in the sense that no one point or definite number of them needs to be the last one – the finitum or end – but not in the sense that a point could produce the parts of the line.