Theology’s Handmaid, Again

Last updated on: January 11, 2019 at 2:38 pm By Peter Leithart

Steve Duby objects to my brief set of warnings about the uses of philosophy in theology. I suppose I’ve said ill-considered things about philosophy or some philosopher in some of my writing. But this post was, in my judgment, generous in spirit, moderate in its claims, and modest in its aims. Duby says nothing to modify this assessment, because in the main his response attacks views I didn’t defend, or even mention, in my post.

To summarize what I said: My post offered a set of cautions about the risks that philosophy can pose to theologians. In honoring philosophy as a “handmaid” of theology – the premise of my post, the Thomistic image I describe as “apt” – I wasn’t dismissing philosophy. I didn’t claim that every use of philosophy seduces and bewitches, only that we should beware of the potential for bewitchment. Duby seems to have taken my whimsical personifications of the handmaid Philosophy as universal statements about all uses of philosophy by all theologians. Of course not. Handmaids are useful to queens, but they can get uppity; my post explored some of the ways the handmaids try to take over the mistress’ position.

Duby concludes that I am “wrong (either naïve or misleading) in suggesting that he manages to draw upon Scripture alone in articulating Christian doctrine.” Several times he attacks my supposed dismissal of all “extra-biblical” concepts in theology. The quotation marks make it appear that the term is from my post. It’s not. He claims that I attempt to take the high ground “by asserting that he or she is simply drawing from Scripture.” Where does he find this assertion? Not in my post.

My convictions (and my theological track record, which includes biblical engagement with Shakespeare, Austen, cultural anthropology, the life of Constantine, postmodern theory, among other things) are quite otherwise. I do believe that the Bible contains an explicit and implicit metaphysics, but that’s different from claiming that a biblical metaphysics won’t make use of material from outside the Bible. As John Frame says, the Bible itself demands that we look outside the Bible to understand the Bible. Everything is fodder for theological reflection, because the Triune god is Creator of all, because Christ is the one in whom all holds together. But everything that we bring into theology needs to be tested and, if necessary, corrected by Scripture. This, I take it, is precisely what Thomas was up to, though I may find fault at points with how well he achieved his aim.

A few notes on specifics. Duby is right that it’s a mistake to retroject a contemporary concept of “accident” into Augustine, and that theologians who use “accident” in a non-traditional way have an obligation to explain themselves. I agree that not all philosophies function as rigid systems; but some do, and that’s why I issued the caution. I quite disagree with his claim that “unity is superior to diversity” is “simply one of those basic insights into the nature of reality that it is difficult for us to avoid.” Would Triunity be better without the Tri-?

For several years, I have followed the lead of Robert Jenson in calling for a revisionary, “evangelized” metaphysics. Evangelization isn’t dismissal.

The Hidden One

Last updated on: January 8, 2019 at 4:26 am By Peter Leithart

In a chapter on “Nicene metaphysics” in The Hidden and the Manifest, David Bentley Hart explains the radical differences between the Plotinian metaphysics and the metaphysics implicit in early Trinitarianism. The article turns on the dynamics of hiddenness and manifestation.

Plotinus’s ultimate principle, “the One,” cannot reveal itself. It can never be manifest. That’s the case because “the disproportion between the supreme principle of reality and this secondary principle of manifestation remained absolute. Hence all revelation, all disclosure of the divine, follows upon a more original veiling. The manifestation of that which is Most High – wrapped as it is in unapproachable darkness, up upon the summit of being – is only the paradoxical manifestation of a transcendence that can never become truly manifest; perhaps not even to itself, as it possesses no Logos immanent to itself” (144).

To fill the gap, Plotinus and others conceived “some sort of scale of successively accommodating hypostases or emanations or abstract causes” between the One and the finish world. By this “pleonastic fallacy,” there was an “economic limitation of its source, so reduced in nature as to be capable of entering into contact with the realm of discrete beings, of translating the power of the supreme principle in to various finite effects, and of uniting this world to the wellspring of all things” (143). This was the assumption behind Arianism, which taught that the Logos was “generated with respect to the created order, as its most exalted expression, certainly, but also somehow contingent upon it” (144).

To put it differently, the One has no “specular” other within itself, no reflection and knowledge; the first thought of the One depends on Nous, which converts the “simply light of the One into boundless multiplicity” (145).

In Nicene trinitarianism, by contrast, the Logos is not generated for the sake of creation, not a lesser manifestation of a God beyond manifestation. Rather: “it is in fact the eternal reality whereby God is the God he is. There is a perfectly proportionate convertibility of God with his own manifestation of himself to himself; and, in fact, this convertibility is nothing less than God’s own act of self-knowledge and self-love in the mystery of his transcendent life. His being, therefore, is an infinite intelligibility; his hiddenness – his transcendence – is always already manifestation; and it is this movement of infinite disclosure that is his ‘essence’ as God” (147).

This implies an entirely different conception of transcendence. For Plotinus, the transcendence of the One is its inaccessibility at the top of the pyramid of being. But the Triune God isn’t the highest being in a scale of being; He is the source of all other beings. Transcendence isn’t simply “dialectical supremacy, and not ontic absence” but rather “the truly transcendent and therefore utterly immediate act of God, in his own infinity, giving being to beings.” God makes creation exist not by a diminution of His own reality, or through a lesser intermediary, by as the infinite God. His transcendence isn’t at the expense of His presence; His transcendence is the condition of the possibility of His presence (148).

But how can this One be anything at all: “in what way is that which absolutely transcends intuition, conceptualization, and knowledge, even within itself, anything at all. Being is manifestation, and to the degree that anything is wholly beyond thought . . . to that very degree it does not exist” (145). The One ends up being pure negation. And this negation negates everything: “the structure of reality . . . held together at its apex by a principle so exalted that it is also the negation of the whole, in all the latter’s finite particularities.” This resolves in “a dialectic of identity and negation” (146).

There is a pathos here, a sadness: “for if the truth of all things is a principle in which they are grounded and by which they are simultaneously negated, then one can draw near to the fullness of truth only through a certain annihilation of particularity, throughout a forgetfulness of the manifest, through a sort of benign desolation of the soul, progressively eliminating . . . all that lies between the One and the noetic self” (146).

Trinitarianism involves an affirmation of particularity. The particular thing isn’t a mode of tragic alienation from God; it’s not that we have to shed what we are to be united to the One. Rather “it is precisely through becoming what it is . . . that the creature truly reflects the goodness and transcendent power of God.” God is eternally and truly Logos; He and His manifestation are one God. And thus “creatures are insofar as they participate in the Logos’s power to manifest God.”

Creation isn’t a manifestation of the unmanifest God. Instead, “God in himself is an infinite movement of disclosure, and in creation – rather than departing from his inmost nature – he discloses himself again by disclosing what is contained in his Logos” (149). In short, “The image of God in creation – and in rational natures in particular – must be an actual communication of the light of God’s own inward life, his own eternal Image of himself within the Trinitarian mystery. It is, so to speak, a created reprise of the movement of God’s being as God, coming to pass within beings who have no existence apart from their capacity to reflect his presence” (161).

The Limits of Natural Law

Last updated on: December 18, 2018 at 11:48 pm By Peter Leithart

John Milbank currently has a series of essays on natural law running a Church Life Journal. It’s a “revisionist” account of natural law. And one of the revisions is Milbank’s post-Kantian conception of the relation of nature and culture, something he lays out in his essay, “Only Theology Saves Metaphysics.”

Milbank begins, as he is wont to do, with the linguistic turn in philosophy, which he sees as a theological turn. It is not, he insists, merely a linguistic form of Kantianism: “the linguistic turn, most radically understood, is not a ‘linguistic idealism’ which merely treats the fundamental grammar of human language (whether cultural or universal) as though it were a linguistification of the Kantian a priori categories of pre-linguistic thought. In terms of the latter, we ‘inwardly’ construct a human world by theoretically and imaginatively organising sensory information according to permanently constrained norms. In the linguistified version of this, the constraints of language force us to construct within the space of interpersonal culture our human version of pre-given nature.”

He rejects this because he rejects the Kantian conception of inwardness: “language belongs surely within our primary artisanal interaction with the external world, such that we only reflexively possess an ‘interiority’ as a result of this interaction – this was perhaps the later Wittgenstein’s most crucial message.” Because this interaction “is always both receptive and externally constructive (as of matter by the moulding of the hand, not of sensation by mind),” it becomes “impossible to disentangle the two components.”

That is, language is both receptive and constructive in relation to the world. We can’t peel off the linguistic layer of our interaction to get to the sheerly natural reality behind it. We can’t get to a pure nature in order to test our language by it. Because language is “within our primary artisanal interaction with the external world,” it is always already there. And thus culture doesn’t simply intervene between me and the world; it is entangled with the very possibility of me knowing the world at all.

Thus, Milbank argues, the “world is how we take it, yet what we take and modify is always the real world and always involves us in real relations to that world.” For instance: “Trees are seen and are at once seen as shelter; they are buildings before buildings, while wooden buildings allow us to see both trees anew, and shelter anew, and then to observe the trees now more for themselves and for the other relations in which they stand. . . . water observed is already water drunk and traversed and channelled, while fountains show us new and symbolic aspects of this liquid foundation for our lives.” Our interaction with the world is our interaction, and our interests in the world are foundational to that interaction.

To put this otherwise, “any word at once denotes a fact and an interpretation, in such a fashion as to render both empiricism and even a Kantian, critical idealism impossible.” As a result, “we always arrive too late to disentangle what we have received from what we have constructed or what we have constructed from what we have stumbled upon.” We have contact with reality, but that contact is linguistically, which is to say, culturally formed.

In sum, “if the natural is always already for us cultural, the cultural never exits the natural and what is ‘fundamental’ for culture remains an attempt to discern what is ‘fundamental’ for nature.” And if the natural is always already cultural, then we can never measure nature by culture. We simply measure some nature-culture hybrids in comparison to other nature-culture hybrids.

Natural law theories that require contact with nature that is unmediated by culture are impossible.

Simplicity: Further Exploration

Last updated on: December 18, 2018 at 2:32 am By Peter Leithart

Steven Duby (Divine Simplicity) addresses the sort of argument I offered in yesterday’s post. I quote a long paragraph (p. 148), with comments interspersed.

“One might contend,” Duby writes, “for a divine complexity that is necessary and irrevocable with no risk of divisibility. Such a hypothesis elicits several comments. First, complexity cannot be absolutely necessary but, at beast, hypothetically necessary. For the amalgamation of parts arises from an antecedent determination about those parts.” He quotes Thomas (Summa contra gentiles) in support: “if there is composition, it is from many; but, things which are many according to themselves, would not convene into one unless they were united by something composing.”

But the only way we know that parts are amalgamated by an antecedent determination is because that’s the way composite created things are composed. Thomas’s argument makes the same assumption: Multiple things are made into one only by a composing something; if the Lord were many, then He would be self-composing, and thus, impossibly, prior to Himself. But how do we know that divine multiples (e.g., multiple attributes) become one only by being united by a composer? As I said yesterday, the argument only works if “composite” is understood univocally; since “composite” as applied to created things cannot be attributed to the Lord, the term cannot be used at all. But why can’t “composite” be used analogically?

Duby continues: “Nor could a divine self-composition be enfolded into the absolute necessity of God’s self-willing. For if would required that God should cause himself to be what he is instead of simply delighting in his own goodness and perfection as in a tradition account of the divine will.”

Why can’t a God who is analogically “composite” delight in His own composite goodness and perfection? Why does “self-cause” need to enter into it? Again, it seems to enter because “composite” is being used univocally.

Duby continues: “One could claim that parts in God just are absolutely necessarily joined together, but this would mean propping up a necessity which seems to conflict with God’s definitiveness and ultimacy by placing him under a governing ontological framework.”

Drop “necessity.” One might say that God just is the composite being that He is, without being subjected to any real or theoretical necessity.

He also argues that “this would . . . run aground on the fact that, instead of underlying things that exist, modality supervenes on the intrinsic structure of those things. God is not God because he is ens necessarium; he is ens necessarium by virtue of what he is as God.”

On the hypothetical notion of “divine composite” in view, though, the last statement would still be true. As for the first claim, about modality: This again a note of univocity. Modality supervenes on the intrinsic structure of created things; why would we assume the same of divine being? Perhaps in God, modality and intrinsic structure are equiprimordial.

As I said in yesterday’s post, I’m not advocating the notion that God is composite. I’m pushing the issue to tease out the logic of divine simplicity. If these explorations have merit, they not only suggest that the defense of simplicity requires a “moment” of univocity but also hint that “simplicity” may simply be a way of marking the Creator-creature difference.

We must say “simplicity,” it seems, just because created notions of composition can’t apply to God; “simplicity” is a marker of God’s transcendence of created metaphysical categories. If so, it’s not clear how saying “divine simplicity” marks this different any better than saying “divine composition.”

Metaphysics without God

Last updated on: December 14, 2018 at 1:38 am By Peter Leithart

In his monograph on Divine Simplicity, Steven J. Duby discusses the relation between metaphysics and dogmatics. He writes,

“In addition to Thomas’s metaphysics, the metaphysical works of Bartholomaus Keckermann, Johann Alsted, and Johannes Maccovius provide guidance here. For Keckermann, metaphysics is ‘the science of being [entis], or of a thing [rei] absolutely and generally accepted. It is therefore ‘first philosophy.’ It concerns ‘being’ (ens, or ‘that which is’ and ‘that which has essence’) or a ‘thing’ (res) as such. In treating ens qua ens, metaphysics plots its divisions, principles, modes, relations and so on, Similarly, Alstead defines metaphysics as wisdom concerning ‘being [ente] insofar as it is being.’ Metaphysics handles being ‘reduplicatively,’ taking it according to just its formal reason qua ens, while logic handles being ‘specifically,’ modifying and restricting being with various predicates. Metaphysics focuses especially on ‘real being’ (ens reale) yet as ‘abstract,’ while other disciplines prescind and contemplate one cross-section of it. Likewise, Maccovius takes metaphysics as a ‘contemplative science, which treats of being [ente], as far as it is being.’ Its object is ‘being in general’ (ens in genere) or as a quasi-genus'” (60-1).

These comments, Duby says “delimit the discipline of metaphysics” (61). Color me dubious. Without further explanation and definition, these brief descriptions leave nothing delimited.

In any case, Duby’s question is to ask how metaphysics so defined related to theology. His answer is: “Instead of subsuming God under the categories of metaphysics, they promptly locate God outside the bounds of metaphysics. He quotes Keckermann: “The metaphysician does not treat of God as a metaphysician. For God is still something beyond being” [supra Ens]” (61). Maccovius finds some room for God in metaphysics, but only “by the mode of a cause” (61). Metaphysical concepts can be applied to God only after they “first pass through the filter of the biblical Creator-creature distinction” (62).

Duby goes on to say that for these writers metaphysics is a handmaiden to theology; the relation is not a symmetrical one. With that I have no quarrel, but I do think the whole enterprise, as Duby describes it, is off-kilter from the start.

I can make the point simply: Is a “thing as such” a created thing? If so, it implies a Creator. Who or what is that Creator? Is “being considered in itself” dependent? On whom or what? With all due regard for the Creator-creature distinction, it doesn’t allow us to analyze the creation without reference to the Creator. In fact, the error of trying to “delimit” the scope of metaphysics creates the problem of theological language. If you didn’t start with a metaphysics that worked within the horizon of creation, you wouldn’t need to puzzle over how metaphysics relates to what- or whomever is over the horizon.

Duby goes on to discuss Bruce McCormack’s proposal that theologians resolve “never to speak of God on any other basis than that of the incarnation” (63). That “basis” language is very unclear, but I would also appeal to the incarnation: Does metaphysics recognize that created being is capable of receiving the Word? If not, then it’s wrong about created being. If so, then it’s not delimited anymore.

I’m put in mind of Jenson, as I often am, but with a twist. Jenson urged theologians to carry on the work of evangelizing metaphysics. I worry that Duby has set the rules of the game so as to make metaphysics impervious to evangelization.

Mammon and Modern Economics

Last updated on: December 12, 2018 at 10:41 pm By Peter Leithart

Wesley Bergen’s Reading Ritual explores Leviticus through the lens of contemporary popular culture. Instead of treating Leviticus as “religious” ritual in opposition to daily life, he tries to de-de-familiarize Leviticus ritual by finding parallels with contemporary culture.

In the first chapter, he examines the ritual dimensions of a meat-packing plant, drawing comparisons with the activity of priests at the tabernacle. Following Catherine Bell’s criteria for ritualized activity (formalism, traditionalism, rule-governance, invariability, sacred symbolism, and performance), he finds that meat-packing meets 4 of the 6 in a fairly obvious way. The last two – sacred symbolism and performance – aren’t so obvious. Bergen attempts to draw a connection by suggesting that meat-packing is linked to the modern sacred as much as sacrifice was to the ancient sacred. The modern sacred being money.

Bergen writes (15-16), “If we define ‘the sacred’ within the context of biblical Israel as ‘the core that infuses and informs and guides and explains the whole of life,’ then arguably the most sacred thing in our society is money. Modern economics claims to encompass all of life. It acts in our society as a complete system, a meta-system for our world. In our culture, religion is just one small part of our lives—it is individual, private, segregated. It is the stock market that acts as a final judge in larger society, an objective measurement of the pleasure or displeasure of our national deity.”

He admits that we don’t typically think of money in these terms, but claims that “when we study the actions rather than the rhetoric of our society, the identification takes on more weight. Money, of course, is simply the most obvious sign of a larger system, the economic system, just as God is usually the most obvious sign for a larger religious system. Gods are usually understood to be beings (or Being) whose actions are open to some measure of explanation and attempts at prediction, but who are thought of as beyond direct control. Many actions are taken to influence gods, but the effects are often not sure. Much the same can be said of modern economics.”

He points to studies of law-and-economics as further evidence for the pervasiveness of Mammon: “Good law leads to good economics, and therefore economic outcome can be a factor by which we differentiate good law from bad. . . . In the Old Testament, law was founded on the will of Yahweh. Law was not open to human debate at all (at least in theory), because one cannot debate the will of a deity. God spoke; humans obeyed or disobeyed. The current shift toward an economics-based legal system means that money has replaced God as the ground of value, as the arbiter of good or evil. If this is so, then actions done for money (jobs) have become the ‘religious’ ritual of our time. In the meat packing plant the actions performed on the killing floor are purely about money.”

As Bergen sees it, the relation of signified and signifier has shifted: “In biblical Israel economics was an indicator of the pleasure or displeasure of the deity. Economic success was understood as a sign of the blessing or curse of Yahweh (Deut. 28). In our society, economics is the signified, not the sign. Economic prosperity has become an end in itself, rather than a sign of a greater good. People (now called consumers) are encouraged to sacrifice large amounts of time to increase ‘productivity’, which is said to help the economy. Then consumers are encouraged to sacrifice this money they have earned, to spend more than they have, which is also for the benefit of the economy. All of this obfuscation and suggestion of sacrifice without any personal benefit to either the individual or society sounds like the church at its worst.”

The analogy is strained at some points. Is God a “sign” of a “larger religious system”? Does intention have no role in determining whether or not an act is idolatrous? Still, there are pointers here to a Levitical analysis of economics, which a project worthy of pursuit.

Whose Simplicity?

Last updated on: December 7, 2018 at 3:12 am By Peter Leithart

In the third volume of his magisterial Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Richard Muller offers a helpful summary of pre-Reformation discussions of divine simplicity. Today, simplicity is making a comeback, taken as essential to orthodoxy. Muller’s discussion is a healthy reminder that “the doctrine of divine simplicity has not always been understood in the same way or received the same emphasis in theology.”

At a minimum, simplicity provided a way of buttressing unity and heading off any idea of composition, and hence of dependence. Muller writes, ““The doctrine of divine simplicity . . . belongs to the full locus de Deo, the larger topics of essence, attributes, and Trinity—and it belongs there as having the specific function, not of ruling out distinctions per se, but of allowing only those distinctions in the Godhead that do not disrupt the understanding of the ultimacy and unity of the One God. With very few exceptions in the history of the doctrine, discussion of simplicity, in the context of the full locus, provides the place at which the datum of divine oneness is coordinated with one level of distinction ad intra, corresponding with the distinction of attributes, and another level of distinction ad intra, corresponding with the necessarily different distinctions among the three divine persons.”

Citing the work of Basil Krivocheine, for instance, Muller claims that in Nyssa, “the notion of simplicity is seen to be the exclusion only of compositeness and division, not of other kinds of distinction, notably the distinction between divine hypostases and divine energies or powers.”

In Augustine too, simplicity was compatible with certain kinds of ad intra distinctions: “Augustine affirmed the divine simplicity on the ground that God is not composite and is devoid of accidents and did so primarily in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity as an affirmation of the fundamental unity and uniqueness of the Godhead. Nonetheless, Augustine indicated that (in addition to the distinction of the persons in the Trinity), there was some distinction of attributes: he spoke of God as ‘both simple and manifold,’ having a ‘simple multiplicity or multifold simplicity.'” In his doctrine of divine ideas, further, “Augustine also assumed that God knows these distinct ideas as distinct ideas.”

Theologians of the middle ages “took a patristic conception that, in its most strict forms, could stand in a problematic or paradoxical relationship to the distinction of divine attributes and the doctrine of the Trinity, and worked to develop a more nuanced and flexible concept that could rule out composition while at the same time allowing for the ‘operational complexity’ of the Godhead.” More elaborately that patristic writers, the medievals “argued that the identification of ‘simplicity’ as uncompoundedness did not rule out either the distinction of divine persons or the distinction of divine attributes. Indeed, it would be one of the burdens of scholastic argumentation to identify precisely what kinds of distinction there might be in the simplicity or uncompoundedness of the Godhead.”

Operating within a Platonic frame, Anselm affirmed simplicity against the notion that there are accidents in God. For Anselm, this was largely a way to affirm aseity: “it is the same for God to be just and to be justice itself, given that the justness or righteousness of God is not a separable property as righteousness is in human beings. This must be so, Anselm argues, inasmuch as God is just through himself, not through or on the basis of a prior justice in another.”

Gilbert de la Porée’s theology sparked a debate over simplicity, which ended with “the rejection of a theory of real distinctions among the divine attributes and the affirmation of a basic doctrine of divine simplicity.” The debate didn’t, however, fully clarify “whether the attributes are merely distinct ad extra and in our human comprehension or are distinct in some manner ad intra apart from consideration by a human knower.”

Dolf te Velde (Doctrine of God, 58) draws this conclusion from Muller’s evidence: “Even around key concepts such as divine simplicity and freedom, Reformation and post-Reformation theology inherited a diversified tradition, of which it could weigh the elements on their own merits.”

As I say, a healthy reminder – of the ambiguity of the concept of “simplicity” and the dangers of assuming that Thomas’s doctrine simply is orthodoxy.

Can We Trust the Gospels?

Last updated on: December 7, 2018 at 1:18 am By Peter Leithart

In Can We Trust the Gospels?, Peter J. Williams, Principal at Tyndale House, Cambridge, doesn’t aim to prove that the gospels are true. He wants to show rather that “they can be rationally trusted” (120). If successful, this demonstration is a big deal, as Williams says on the closing page (140). But his aims are rather modest.

I admit that I started out with a hearty Yes to the title question. But I think any careful reader will find Williams’s arguments powerful, if not utterly compelling. Here I record a few of his conclusions and sum up a few lines of argument.

1) Williams compares the amount of material available in the gospels to the amount of ancient material on Tiberius, the Roman emperor during Jesus’ ministry. The only contemporary account of Tiberius comes from Velleius Paterculus, but he “was a propagandist for Tiberius, composing flattery, perhaps under the patronage of Tiberius” (41). His testimony is suspect. Besides, the various biographies of Tiberius include a great deal of material about his reign, material that does not deal with Tiberius directly. By contrast, the gospels are almost entirely about Jesus.

Williams concludes that “Jesus has more extended text about him, in generally closer proximity to his life, than his contemporary Tiberius, the most famous person in the then-known world” (41).

2) After reviewing the deep Jewishness of the gospels, he concludes: “the four gospels are so influenced by Judaism in their outlook, subject matter, and detail that it would be reasonable to date them considerably before the Jewish War” (81). He doesn’t affirm that they were written that early, but the fact that they are Jewish texts in a church that rapidly lost contact with these Jewish roots suggests that they were written early, within decades of the events themselves.

3) So, lots of text, written soon after the fact. Did the writers know their stuff? Williams shows that the evangelists were well-informed about the landscape, topography, and settlements of Palestine. He lists all the towns, regions, bodies of water, and other places mentioned in the gospels (52-54). Some of the towns are well-known, others virtually unknown, apart from residents of Judea. Each of the evangelists includes some unique places, and so none is completely dependent on others (54). Local knowledge of this sort would be extremely hard to come by from reading or mere hearsay; it’s more likely the result of personal exposure or “detailed hearing” (55). A resident of Judea could have made it all up, using his knowledge of the landscape. Not someone from elsewhere.

Williams’s test cases are the apocryphal gospels: “The Gospel of Thomas mentions Judaea once, but names no other location. The Gospel of Judas names no locations” (61). These later texts “show that sometimes people wrote about Jesus without close knowledge of what he did” (63).

4) The evangelists’ use of personal names leads to a similar conclusion. The gospels include people with popular Palestinian Jewish names (Simon, Joseph, Judah, Joshua) and some uncommon names (Andrew, Bartholomew, Thomas). Few of the popular names among Egyptian Jews (Eleazar, Sabbataius, Joseph, Dositheus, Pappus are the five most popular, 66) shows up. If the gospels are fictional, they are works of genius – of four geniuses, who all, somewhat independently, reflect the distribution of names that one would expect to find in Palestine.

Disambiguation of names provides a fascinating side line of evidence. Simon was a popular name, and so the evangelists often add an identifying moniker – “called Peter,” “the leper,” “the Zealot” (67). Williams notes that the writers tend to disambiguate in reported speech, but not in narration. That is, when a character speaks of “Jesus” (a popular name), he or she identifies him as “the prophet of Nazareth” or somesuch. The authors don’t add the identifier; they simply call Jesus “Jesus,” since by the time they wrote he was clearly identifiable (73-75).

Apocryphal gospels again provide a nice control group. The Gospel of Thomas includes only seven names; the Gospel of Judas has only two recognizable Palestinian Jewish names – Judas and Jesus – while peopling the story with people bearing “names from the Greek Bible and contemporary mysticism” (69).

If the evangelists were making up all these names, they were far, far better at it than their apocryphal competitors. The simplest explanation is that the “authors were able to give an authentic pattern of names in their narrative because they were reliably reporting what people were actually called” (77).

5) Williams devotes a chapter to the textual tradition, a topic on which he has spent considerable energy. His argument for the reliability of textual transmission begins with the 1516 New Testament of Erasmus, constructed from the two texts he had available to him, both from the twelfth century. Five centuries have now passed, and “a couple of thousand Greek manuscripts of the Gospels have been discovered or identified” (113).

Yet, there are remarkably few major differences between Erasmus’s text and very recent editions. Erasmus was already aware of the largest disputed chunks (Mark 16 and John 7:53-8:11) and was also aware of a few other disputed passages. He knew 77% of the uncertain verses. When his edition is compared to the recently-discovered manuscripts, though, the differences are small. With two late manuscripts, Erasmus “was able to produce an edition of the Gospels that represented them essentially as they were over a thousand years before his time” (116). Erasmus couldn’t have known that; we do. He illustrates by comparing the prologue of John in five editions of the New Testament from Erasmus to 2017: in “a sequence of 188 words or 812 letters, we find no differences in these editions” (119).

Williams admits that this evidence can always be set aside. One can always imagine an ingenious plot stretching from the first to the twenty-first century, involving conspiratorial evangelists, copyists, and modern scholars. A starting plot for a Dan Brown novel. Not likely as history.

Suffer the Children

Last updated on: December 6, 2018 at 4:37 am By Peter Leithart

Children provide a test case for psychological and epistemological theories. Many theories fail: They do not suffer the little children to come to them.

That’s part of the point of Vasudevi Reddy’s fascinating How Infants Know Minds. The title contains the thesis: Infants know other minds. They don’t act by mere instinct, or mere reflex. And they aren’t just responding to stimuli or bodies. Infants know other minds.

Reddy began to formulate her thesis when she had children of her own: “The most striking thing my babies were telling me was that they could understand me and others as persons. They were teasing, joking, playing with our expectations and attitudes and interests, being shy, and showing offer long before they were able to speak. Understanding other minds didn’t seem to be a problem to them” (1).

Consider the fact that “neonates can imitate tongue protrusions” and the “considerable evidence that they can imitate mouth opening, and some evidence that they can imitate finger movements and eye blinking and even one vocal sound – an elongated ‘aaaa'” (47). This should arouse more wonder than it does. How does an infant even know he or she has a tongue, much less that it’s somewhere near the part of the face as the adult’s tongue? The adult intends to be imitated; somehow the infant knows that too, discerning intentions and not mere bodily movements.

Piaget thought infant imitation impossible, for two reasons: “(1) because imitation requires quite a complex ability to rasp the similarity between self and the person or animal to be imitated, an ability presumed to be impossible at birth without considerable experience of self and others; and (2) because imitation of specific acts was presumed to require specific learning about the similarity between self and other in the parts of the body producing those acts” (45). Infants haven’t studied themselves in mirrors: How can they know these thing. Yet they do imitate. Which means something is amiss in post-Piaget child pscyhology.

Reddy provides evidence that tongue protrusion isn’t a mere reflex. One study found that infants sometimes delay imitation, suggesting that the protrusion isn’t merely imitative but a provocation to interaction (53). She also probes the notion that “mere” imitation doesn’t indicate any contact of mind with mind. Savages, Darwin and other explorers have said, are keen mimics; it’s a low and primitive form of interaction. Reddy doesn’t believe it: “imitation can be a means of making contact in the absence of any common language. . . . It seems to establish something shared, some common ground on which both interactants can stand. . . . It seems to be a psychological door through which one is immediately led into world of intentional relations with another person” (45).

The sorts of other-directed activities don’t start with birth: “Even in utero, and as early as 15 weeks gestational age, ultrasound scanning studies have revealed at least fifteen different well-coordinated non-reflexive movement patterns, including independent finger movements, rapid and slow mouth opening, hand movements, repetitive contacting of mouth with fingers.” She thinks it “indisputable that human neonates are capable not only of intentional actions, but also of intentional actions motivated by curiosity and interest rather than merely those driven be physiological needs” (49).

Why has this been missed? Reddy faults the dualistic assumptions that are embedded in psychology, whether cognitivist or behaviorist. When she began talking about infants knowing other minds, she was warned to “mind the gap” – the gap between mind and body, the gap between mind and mind. If there is such a gap, there needs to be a bridge to cross it.

What if there’s no gap? What if minds aren’t concealed inside bodies but communicated through bodies? What if minds were never disconnected in the first place, thus undermining the ned for bridge-building? What if minds are constituted by their interaction with one another? What if, in short, psychology is best pursued not as a first-person nor as a third-person discourse, but as a second-person science (cue Buber here, though, sadly, not Rosenstock!). Psychologists reject Cartesian dualism; but the warnings to “mind the gap” show that Descartes shadows the discipline.

In one clever riposte to the denial of intersubjectivity between infants and others, Reddy writes: “The reason for such distinctions is often attributed to the scientifically respectable desire for parsimony. Parsimony, however, exists only in a theoretical context: if, and only if, we accept a theory which says that perceiving the physical is simpler than perceiving the mental, is it more parsimonious to suggest that infants perceive only physical qualities. But if we reject the dualism separating mind from body . . . it may well be more parsimonious as well as more coherent to reject the dualism of separating the perception of the body from the perception of the mind” (23).

Reddy recognizes the radical implications of her suggestion. If psychology is second-person, then the best approach to observation may not be detached experiment but engagement (note the incisive discussion of Piaget on 37-38). Maybe a child psychologist will learn things from playing with children that he could not learn by watching them play. Perhaps “Suffer the children to come to me” is the most scientific stance available.

Correlationism and Secondary Qualities

Last updated on: December 5, 2018 at 10:39 pm By Peter Leithart

Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude opens with a powerful assault on what he calls “correlationism” through a defense of the distinction of primary and secondary qualities.

He explains the rationale behind the distinction of primary and secondary. On the one hand, “nothing sensible – whether it be an affective or perceptual quality – can exist in the way it is given to me in the thing by itself, when it is not related to me or to any other living creature. When one thinks about this thing ‘in itself, i.e. independently of its relation to me, it seems that none of these qualities can subsist. Remove the observer, and the world becomes devoid of these sonorous, visual, olfactory, etc., qualities, just as the flame becomes devoid of pain once the finger is removed.”

On the other hand, “one cannot maintain that the sensible is injected by me into things like some sort of perpetual and arbitrary hallucination. For there is indeed a constant link between real things and their sensations: if there were no thing capable of giving rise to the sensation of redness, there would be no perception of a red thing; if there were no real fire, there would be no sensation of burning. But it makes no sense to say that the redness or the heat can exist as qualities just as well without me as with me: without the perception of redness, there is no red thing; without the sensation of heat, there is no heat. Whether it be affective or perceptual, the sensible only exists as a relation: a relation between the world and the living creature I am.”

Thus, “the sensible is neither simply ‘in me’ in the manner of a dream, nor simply ‘in the thing’ in the manner of an intrinsic property: it is the very relation between the thing and I. These sensible qualities, which are not in the things themselves but in my subjective relation to the latter – these qualities correspond to what were traditionally called secondary qualities.”

This distinction is ridiculed by much contemporary philosophy because it’s so “resolutely pre-critical – it seems to represent a regression to the ‘naive’ stance of dogmatic metaphysics.” It seems to imply that “thought is capable of discriminating between those properties of the world which are a function of our relation to it, and those properties of the world as it is ‘in itself, subsisting indifferently of our relation to it. . . . It is an indefensible thesis because thought cannot get outside itself in order to compare the world as it is ‘in itself to the world as it is ‘for us’, and thereby distinguish what is a function of our relation to the world from what belongs to the world alone.”

As a result, “the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant seems to be that of correlation. By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” Or, in other terms, “Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another.”

Meillassoux sees this as the “bereavement” of modern philosophy, its inability to reach the “great outdoors,” to make contact with reality. He calls this the philosophical “two-step,” which “consists in this belief in the primacy of the relation over the related terms; a belief in the constitutive power of reciprocal relation. The ‘co-‘ (of co-givenness, of co-relation, of the co- originary, of co-presence, etc.) is the grammatical particle that dominates modern philosophy, its veritable ‘chemical formula.'”

He thinks that this runs aground on scientific claims about realities that preceded the emergence of human beings: “what is it exactly that astrophysicists, geologists, or paleontologists are talking about when they discuss the age of the universe, the date of the accretion of the earth, the date of the appearance of pre- human species, or the date of the emergence of humanity itself? How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon a manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life –posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world?”

Correlationists have some answers to this question. They can add an implicit codicil to the effect that ancestral statement X is true for later humans. They can suggest that such scientific statements have a double sense – a literal sense, which is ultimately illusory, and a correlationist sense.

Meillassoux thinks these are dodges: “The retrojection which the correlationist is obliged to impose upon the ancestral statement amounts to a veritable counter-sense with respect to the latter: an ancestral statement only has sense if its literal sense is also its ultimate sense. If one divides the sense of the statement, if one invents for it a deeper sense conforming to the correlation but contrary to its realist sense, then far from deepening its sense, one has simply cancelled it. This is what we shall express in terms of the ancestral statement’s irremediable realism: either this statement has a realist sense, and only a realist sense, or it has no sense at all.” He wants the correlationist to stick to his guns and tell the scientist outright that his ancestral statements are illusory.

In short, the denial of secondary qualities ends up in contradictory nonsense. Back to Descartes! Meillassoux calls.

He concedes in passing that pre-Kantian, “naive” metaphysics has no such problem with ancestral statements: “the metaphysician who upholds the eternal- correlate can point to the existence of an ‘ancestral witness’, an attentive God, who turns every event into a phenomenon, something that is ‘given-to’, whether this event be the accretion of the earth or even the origin of the universe.” There is still the inescapable relation of subject and object – only the subject is the Creator.

And that opens up a possibility that Meillassoux himself doesn’t consider closely – a theological correlationism that is also a theological realism. Maybe, then, Back to Berkeley!