In contrast to this view, I will argue that these anti-Christian sentiments have nothing to do with evolution, but with an atheistic interpretation of the theory. It is not within the province of scientific discourse to prescribe moral actions. Conversely, I will show that natural law morality is complementary with biological evolution and must be preferred over naturalistic interpretations of the theory. I will then turn to a practical case to show that evolutionary ethics does not necessitate the overthrow of Judeo-Christian ethics, but reinforces the pro-life view in the surrounding abortion debate.
Evolutionary Ethics as Inherently Atheistic?
According
to
Since
the time of
“We
now know,” says Michael Ruse, “that despite an evolutionary process, centring
on a struggle for existence, organisms are not necessarily perpetually at conflict
with weapons of attack and defence. In
particular, co-operation can be a good biological strategy.”[8] Although it is rationally conceivable within
an evolutionary schema that “might makes right” and that nature is “red in
tooth and claw,” human nature has not predisposed us to make utterly selfish
actions.
“The
position of the modern evolutionist . . . is that humans have an awareness of
morality . . . because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a
biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth . . . .
Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective
something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says 'Love they
neighbor as thyself,' they think they are referring above and beyond themselves
. . . . Nevertheless, . . . such reference is truly without foundation.
Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper
meaning is illusory . . . .”[12]
Another example is the bioethicist Peter Singer. He has used evolution to emphasize the strict continuity between animals and humanity. In so doing, he has argued that humans do not deserve different treatment from animals. Since humans are the product of blind chance instead of divine decree, there is no good reason to invoke the Christian system of morality that once reigned supreme. “Quality of life” principles are to be endorsed over “sanctity of life” principles. Abortion, euthanasia, and infanticide are not only permissible, but in some cases should be endorsed.[13] In certain cases, animals have more value than human fetuses. Thus, Singer: “Now it must be admitted that these arguments [in favor of abortion or infanticide] apply to the newborn animals whose rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, and so on, exceed that of a human being a week, a month, or even a year old. If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.”[14]
Stephen
Pinker maintains that the logic of evolution enables mothers to kill their
newborn children, even after they are out of the womb.[15] He wrote a well known article in the New York Times in response to some
disturbing reports about a few teenage girls who killed their newborns by
dumping them in the trash. Reassuring
the American public from the lecture halls of
In
summary, all human behavior can be described and justified by referring to the
way in which our genes have developed.
According to these atheists, the only thing humans should do is
cooperate with their genes. Since there
is no teleology in the atheist’s evolutionary account, the chance processes of
natural selection haphazardly dictate which behaviors and traits will
prevail. Humans must adapt themselves to
the changing conditions of their environment in order to survive. Through the blind process of natural
selection (a process that is dysteleological), nature chooses which patterns of
behavior are conducive for the human species to exist. These patterns are known as moral
behavior. No divine law is necessary for
humans to adjudicate right and wrong. To
include a supernatural basis for the moral law would make things complex. Simpler explanations will do just fine. Evolution, and, by extension, evolutionary
ethics, is therefore atheistic.
Riposte to Atheistic Evolutionary Ethicists
I believe that there are many problems with an atheistic interpretation of evolution, as applied to ethics. The first objection is that evolution can only describe human conduct, not prescribe morality.[17] Certainly, the evolutionist cannot assess the most important moral question of them all: why be moral in the future? One cannot move from the way things have been to determine what persons should do tomorrow. What the atheistic evolutionist forgets is that in order to make a genuine ethical pronouncement, they must go beyond the scientific and enter the realm of philosophy.
Second, it is well known that evolution cannot account for the highest forms of altruism. On a Darwinian account, all organisms will act in accordance with their strongest passions. But clearly we do not see this happening in society (martyrdom and celibacy would count as two perfect examples where high altruism prevails over merely biological considerations). Although Darwinian analysis confines itself to lower forms of altruism, it cannot explain the highest forms of altruism. Higher forms of altruism may be defined as those moral behaviors that do not bestow any genetic value at all. Atheist Richard Dawkins, for instance, says he cannot explain “pure disinterested altruism” on an evolutionary account.[18] Given these two reasons, why have the atheistic evolutionists continued to prescribe morality?
Aside from the first two objections, which are noteworthy in and of themselves, the primary reason why these thinkers insist on believing that evolution can account for morality is that they think science is the only way to discover ethical truth (or, in some cases, the best way to know truth). But in either case we are dealing with a form of scientism. Scientism says “that the analytical and reductionist techniques of the . . . sciences provide the whole truth about every aspect of the real world, in a value free and completely objective, impersonal way.”[19] Stated as such, science is different from scientism; the scientific is different from the scientistic. Whereas science is concerned with the natural world, scientism circumscribes all valid knowledge to the scientific, assuming that the natural world is the only realm worth studying (obviously this would include morality). But there are many problems with scientism.
First, scientism is self-defeating. Scientism is not scientific, but is a philosophical position about science (that is, the claim that scientific claims can be considered true and/or rational is a philosophical statement, not a scientific one). Hence, the biggest and most immediate problem with scientism is that science is incapable of showing that scientism is true. The scientistic thinker must borrow from non-scientific rationality to make the claims that he or she does.
Second, scientism does not allow for the task of stating and defending the necessary preconditions of scientific investigation.[20] This would lead proponents of scientism to conclude that scientific truths are rationally superior to the presuppositions that undergird and justify those conclusions. But that is, of course, absurd. For example, scientists proceed on the assumption that they must be honest when gathering and collecting data. But this cannot be justified scientifically. Hence, there are many things that are true and extra-scientific, which scientism does not allow for (e.g., that torturing babies is wrong). Similarly, scientism as a philosophy cannot account for ethical prescriptions.[21] Just because something can be studied scientifically does not mean that it should be studied scientifically. For instance, should science be used to research of weapons of mass destruction and/or how to clone human beings? Scientists cannot answer this question, let alone proponents of scientism. Only those with moral vision can answer this question. The issue is not whether science can study how powerfully destructive weapons of mass destruction are, but whether or not this research ought to be done. “When confronted with the moral law or with the moral significance of human life in situations of tragedy or of supreme goodness or radical evil,” Hebblethwaite says, proponents of scientism are “. . . unable to subscribe to a naturalistic philosophy of value as no more than intersubjective preference.”[22]
Similarly, on a scientistic premise, there is no need to trust the rational faculties of persons, or even rationality itself (including the rationality involved in ethics). [23] As theologian Keith Ward poignantly remarks: “They inevitably appeal to reason and truth, and to our ability to apprehend such things and adjust our beliefs accordingly. Thus they transcend their own theories, for the adjustment of belief as a result of conscious apprehension and rational reflection is something that cannot be explained in terms of purely causal mechanisms or general laws, which can only deal with repetitive regularities and measurable, publicly observable data.”[24]
Further,
in hailing the “truth” of scientism, Dawkins,
Those
who build their ethical approaches on a scientistic premise will eventually
lose the right to decide what is moral.
The materialism undergirding their scientism logically allows for any
moral action without justification: all must be reduced to the status of an
object, and all must be explained in terms of general laws and causal
mechanisms alone (notice that freedom and accountability are out of the picture
in their views).[27] No wonder that
Fourth, scientific investigation depends upon faith in order to make the claims that it does, which makes scientism a self-stultifying approach to knowledge[29] As of right now, advocates of scientism have been unable to solve all of the problems in the universe (by definition, scientism says that science will be able to “figure it all out”). Not only does it seem impossible to solve all the problems in our world (according to any methodology), but scientistic philosophers must have some sort of faith to assert that science will be able to solve every relevant problem, including problems involving morality. “Science,” says Ted Peters, “every bit as much as theology, rests upon faith. Science must appeal to some foundational assumptions regarding the nature of reality and our apprehension of it, assumptions which themselves cannot be proved within the scope of scientific reasoning. In its own disguised fashion, science is religious, mythical.”[30]
Fifth,
it is impossible to get around the human bias involved in science, and
therefore it is nearly impossible to obtain the univocal, objective certainty
that scientism strives to obtain.[31] Scientific
theories are provisional in nature; and they cannot exhaust the truth. As J. M. Templeton argues, “Terms like significant period, some reason, and something
like are the essential elements of a valid approach to scientific truth in
the new scientific era.” Templeton goes
on to note: “This cautious approach, now accepted by a majority of working
scientists, ought to instill in all of us a greater openness to the more
philosophical and theological questions of meaning and purpose in our
universe. There simply are no exclusive
pathways to truth!”[32]
In summary, the idea that evolution can account for morality suffers from three major defects. First, evolution can only describe conduct, not prescribe moral action.[33] The scientific evolutionist cannot explain why we should be moral (because morality presupposes the validity of final causes; and science, it must be noted, is only concerned with the notion of efficient causes). One simply cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.”[34] There is a difference between mores and morals. Genetic predispositions do not equate with moral predeterminations. Peter Woodcock states, “It seems, then, that all we need at the biological level is ensure that people will act as if morality were objective is that there be a genetic disposition to believe privately what we offer as the public reasons for our actions. In effect, that is a disposition to socialization.” Notice that biological dispositions do not necessitate that people should do something, only that they are inclined to act in certain ways. On a strictly atheistic interpretation of evolution, one cannot rationally justify any one moral action over and against another. Woodcock pulls no punches: “Does this mean, then, that the worst tendencies of human nature will run rampant? It certainly means that the egoist and the malevolent individual are no more irrational per se than are moral or altruistic individuals, that they must undermine their most fundamental goals in a way not true of the moral person.”[35] The second major objection is that Darwinism cannot account for the highest forms of moral altruism. The Christian notion of “Love your enemies,” which has been played out in countless forms across the ages, cannot be explained on a Darwinian account. Simple altruistic acts, such as sacrificing one’s seat for an old lady on a bus, does not make sense on an evolutionary account alone. The third reason is that it rests on a scientistic premise. There are at least four or five defects with this methodology.
Evolutionary Ethics and Natural Law Ethics
Since
Darwinism cannot account for morality on its own terms, we must turn to
philosophical considerations. William
Lane Craig explains one of the ways in which evolution is thought to be
compatible with Judeo-Christian forms of natural law thinking: “The reasoning of
Now
if St. Thomas Aquinas were alive today, he would probably agree with the
evolutionary depiction created by
“The order of the precepts of the natural moral law is according to the order of natural inclinations. For there is in humans, first, an inclination to the good in accordance with the nature which they share in common with all substances, inasmuch as every substance seeks the preservation of its own being . . . and by reason of this inclination, whatever is a means of preserving human life, and of warding off its obstacles, belongs to the natural law. Second, there is in humans an inclination to things that pertains to them . . . according to that nature which they share in common with other animals; an in virtue of this inclination, those things are said to belong to the natural law which nature has taught all animals, such as sexual intercourse, the education of the offspring, and so forth. Third, there is in humans an inclination to the good according to the nature of their reason, which is proper to humans. Thus, humans have a natural inclination to know the truth about God, and to live in society; and in this respect, whatever pertains to this inclination belongs to the natural law: e.g., to shun ignorance, to avoid offending those among whom one has to live, and so on.”[38]
Thus, according to Aquinas, there is an organic and biological basis for our inclinations toward morality. Although Aquinas was ignorant of scientific evolution, the scientific evolutionist’s contention that our genes are responsible for guiding our moral activity smoothly parallels Aquinas’s emphasis on the vegetative powers of the human soul. The vegetative powers of the soul, per Aquinas, are concerned with preserving organisms in being. The functioning of the immunity system serves as a perfect example of the vegetative powers at work. Aquinas goes further, however. He would argue that human rationality complements and goes beyond the biological to determine which biological desires should prevail over others (thus, Aquinas’s theory of the virtues). Sometimes biological desires conflict. Reason determines which impulse should be allowed to prevail. Human reason corresponds to a Good that is itself spiritual (human reason is a spiritual faculty). As Aquinas says, “By the intellectual appetite we may desire the immaterial good, which is not apprehended by sense such as knowledge, virtue, and the like.”[39] Human nature is a necessary component to morality, but it is by no means a sufficient component.[40] Indeed, what is needed in conjunction with human nature is God’s moral law. “Aquinas,” Boyd says, “maintains that we pursue the goods of the sensual appetite not as the good qua good but as fulfilling some aspect of our sensual nature. As a result, the attainment of our sensual desires can never satisfy us as rational beings. The rational desire for truth, especially truth about God, propels us beyond the merely biological.” What is more, “A closely related point is that although the sensual inclinations are part of our nature, they themselves are not moral. It is the existence of reason that enables humans to make moral judgments that differentiate them form nonhuman animals who share the same sensual appetites.”[41] Aquinas’s anthropology provides a philosophical depiction showing the continuity and discontinuity between animals and humans. But the principles of rational life are distinctive to human persons alone.
Now in response to this synthesis atheists have been notorious for noting that chance—a staple of the blind processes of natural selection—is in opposition to the teleology presupposed in Aquinas’s anthropology.[42] Chance, they say, is in opposition to design. But this wholly is mistaken. As Benedict Ashley explains: “The reality of chance does not contradict natural law, since by chance we mean that one thing acting lawfully according to it nature interferes with the behavior of another thing acting lawfully according to its nature.”[43] Although chance is often seen as contrary to purpose (human nature is pointed toward an end and so has purpose in Aquinas’s view), it is impossible for the nonpurposive cause known as chance to give rise to another set of beings (and all beings are, by definition, purposive; beings have ends, namely, to be).[44] All beings are “fighters for ends,” as William James once put it. To put this in other terms, there is no causal power in chance—it is merely the intersection of certain lines of causality. “Of course,” says Ashley, “it is possible that there may be still a third law that regulates the interference of the two other agencies in a uniform manner. If this is the case we have a complex system of causes.”[45]
Chance,
then, is a merely word to cover up our ignorance. Simply because we do not know what the cause
is would not mean that there is no cause at all. Keith Ward adds: “. . . we cannot rule out
the existence of causal influences that are undetectable by us, and which may
be non-computable. We can never be sure
that we have specified all causally relevant properties exhaustively.”[46] R.J. Russell concurs: “We speak of this kind
of chance when we do not know, or prefer to ignore, the underlying causal
factors—while believing they are there in principle. We could in principle give a complete
causal—i.e., deterministic—description of natural processes from the cells to
galaxies; we chose a statistical description merely out of convenience.”[47] On the level of scientific investigation we
can say that organisms have certainly evolved through a chance process. What we are dealing with in chance is human
uncertainty, not indeterminism.
Moreover, there is much more to explaining reality than just science.[48] As I mentioned earlier, one can appeal to
final causes which are outside of the province of science. This is wholly in line with Aquinas’s
thought.
In conclusion, Thomistic natural law thinking is completely compatible with sociobiology—that field of science that seeks to understand morality from the biological perspective. “Unlike other philosophical theories,” Craig Boyd states, “especially those that appeal to divine commands or linguistic analysis, natural law morality stresses that any account of morality must recognize the importance of the biological.”[49] Hence, the Thomistic concept of natural law is compatible with modern day conceptions of evolutionary ethics. The pertinent science stresses the organism’s need to survive, reproduce, and cooperate with other members of the species to further human flourishing. Natural lawyers would agree with this contention and push the issue further: humans have the faculty of reason and therefore must refer to God to determine which biological drive should be allowed to prevail over the others. Some components of the natural law position transcend purely sociobiological considerations. Some sociobiologists recognize that sociobiology cannot sufficiently account for all of morality. As Harry Plotkin, an evolutionary psychologist, writes: “Underlying all the biological and social sciences, the reason for it all, is the ‘need’ (how else to express it, perhaps ‘drive’ would be better) for genes to perpetuate themselves. This is a metaphysical claim, and the reductionism that it entails is . . . best labeled as metaphysical reductionism. Because it is metaphysical it is neither right nor wrong nor empirically testable. It is simply a statement of belief that genes count above all else.”[50]
A Practical Test Case: Evolutionary Ethics In Support of
Pro-Life Positions
The time is ripe for Christian bioethicists to listen to scientists in order to have scientifically informed moral explanations.[51] It is unfortunate that so many bioethicists have not only refused to consider how evolutionary ethics is compatible with natural law thinking, but also with how it applies to real life ethical debates. There are at least three relevant scientific truths that are relevant to our inquiry. First, evolutionists, whether they are atheists or not, insist that one of the primary impulses in all of human life is to find a mate, reproduce with them, and pass on their genes (this holds true whether persons conscientiously realize this or not). Second, evolution ensures that parents will naturally seek to protect their offspring so that they will eventually grow up and flourish later on in life to pass on their genes as well. Similarly, relatives to the parent and child (or those who are genetically close to the parents and his or her offspring) will genuinely seek to protect these children from harm, helping them to mature. With this evolutionary picture in mind (which is applicable to all human beings), it is strange that atheistic evolutionists would argue that abortion should be allowed and even legalized. On the face of it, abortions are anti-evolutionary. Why, then, do they insist that abortions should be permitted?
Atheists conclude that aberrant behaviors, such as abortion, are to be expected from time to time. Given these exceptions, which are sheer biological givens, we cannot endorse and uphold a pro-life stance. According to them, exceptional cases cannot be shown to be objectively wrong. Descriptions of behavior are subtly transcribed into moral prescriptions to fit a pro-choice stance. Natural lawyer J. Daryl Charles sees the implications: “Without binding moral principles, eventually anything and everything becomes negotiable—from abortion and fetal tissue research to mechanical reproduction and eugenics to euthanasia. All forms of bioethical discrimination and manipulation can be justified, not merely for the sake of quality of life principles but also against life itself.”[52]
Throughout this essay I have shown in at least three ways that atheistic interpreters of evolution are exalting “quality of life” principles at the expense of “sanctity of life” principles. Human beings, in the atheistic evolutionary view, differ from animals in degree and not in kind. As Craig Boyd puts it, “Since there is no teleology operative in evolution, evolutionary processes simply conform to the principle of natural selection. As this applies to all human beings, we see that human nature is not constant over time but simply a temporary phase in a continually evolving process.”[53] For reasons we have already discussed, we cannot resort to strictly utilitarian and/or egoistic ethical views (like the atheists have done, excluding final causes and free will).
Rather,
there are some acts that are intrinsically worthwhile to perform even if they do
not lead to anything of value. The
foundation of moral norms is a set of axiomatic necessary moral truths. Although one does not have to believe in the
Christian God in order for someone to recognize their moral duties, we cannot
make sense of them unless there is a God who grounds them. There is a difference between moral
epistemology and moral ontology (the latter being of interest to us). Consequently, not only can all normally
functioning persons recognize that objective moral truths exist without
believing in God, but everyone should be able to know and abide by them even if
nobody else recognizes them as such.
Through the providential workings of natural selection, human beings are
able to know and abide by objective moral norms. Certainly, evolution has made us fit to
reproduce, enjoining us to be moral at the same time in order for this process
to endure. In the words of ethicist
Mikhael Stenmark:
“A better explanation of much moral belief and behavior is therefore that gradually, as we evolved from our pre-human ancestors, our brain grew and we began to reason to a degree no other animals had achieved, and it is the possession of this ability that make possible not only science, but also morality and our questions about which curse of action are for the best. These ideas about which courses of action are then spread non-genetically through cultural transmission or communication, and people have become convinced that slavery is morally wrong, that women ought to be given equal opportunities and responsibilities to men, that other living things besides humans have moral standing and so forth.”[54]
Seen in this way, the natural moral law is not just the effect of practical reason, but includes the preconditions that make informed moral decisions possible to begin with. Humans must be a certain type of creature to discern and act in response to the demands of the natural moral law. Coupled with a theory of the virtues, persons will be able to determine which biological desires should be suppressed and/or appeased.
That evolution propels us to reproduce and protect our offspring is not in dispute. Now we must turn to the ways in which the natural moral law, which is complementary with evolutionary ethics, is thought to impel persons to embrace the pro-life position. For one thing, natural moral law theorists maintain that all normally functioning individuals can know what is right from what is wrong. We cannot not know these basic moral truths. One of these truths, it may be added, is that pro-life is to be preferred.
In
the case of abortion, it must be admitted that most women who consider having
an abortion at least think that they are pregnant with a baby and not an
impersonal thing. Secondly, no matter
what culture or time people have live in, the consensus of humanity has upheld
the idea that all persons have inherent dignity, sanctity, and worth. The same principles apply to persons in the
womb. In point of fact, the mere
probability that a person is involved in the womb suffices to impel ethicists
to not use any means of intervention aimed at aborting the embryo. Given the belief in a universal human nature,
the zygote is an actual human person (and not just a potential person) in the same
way that an infant or a toddler is a person with the potential to become a
mature as a person. Thus, the crucial
question is “Are we different in kind from animals or not?” If we are different in kind from animals,
then the pro-life view follows as the preferred view. As J. Daryl Charles points out, most of our
culture’s ethical and bioethical disputes are first determined by the way we
view the nature of humanity.[55] If one seeks to uphold the existence and
knowability of natural moral principles alone, then they can know that abortion
is wrong. As Professor Charles rightly
claims:
“Affirming objective moral truth—as witnessed to by the natural moral law—yields the common moral judgment to protect and dignify human life, and particularly vulnerable human life. Given our commitment to the intrinsic dignity of the human person, we are forbidden categorically form eliminating it. There is a moral line that connects the human embryo, fetal destruction, euthanasia, slavery, genocide, and totalitarian rule. If it is agreed that we never take the life of an innocent human, at any developmental stage and regardless of its functionality, then intentionally taking life at any point along the life spectrum for any reason will always be wrong. It is wrong not merely because the Christian church or the Bible teaches that it is wrong but because the moral law ‘written on the heart’ of every human, witnesses to its wrongness.”[56]
Furthermore, the precepts of the natural moral law are
complemented and brought to fulfillment by authoritative, divine
revelation. Although one can know that
abortion is wrong apart from this revelation, natural lawyers argue that reason
can lead persons to conclude that God is the type of God who would reveal
himself in human history to clarify and reinforce the precepts of the natural
moral law. According to St. Thomas
Aquinas, there are four reasons to think that God would reveal himself in
history:
“Besides the natural law and the human law it was necessary for the directing of human conduct to have a Divine law. And this for four reasons.
First, , . . . since man is ordained to
an end of eternal happiness which is inproportionate to man’s natural faculty .
. . therefore it was necessary that, besides the natural and the human law, man
should be directed to his end by a law given by God.
Secondly, because, on account of the uncertainty of human judgment, especially on contingent and particular matters, different people from different judgments on human acts; whence also different and contrary laws result. In order, therefore, that man may know without any doubt what he ought to do and what he ought to avoid, it was necessary for man to be directed in his proper acts by a law given by God, for it is certain that such a law cannot err.
Thirdly, because man can make laws of those matters of which he is competent to judge. But man is not competent to judge of interior movements, that are hidden, but only of exterior acts which appear: and yet for the perfection of virtue it is necessary for man to conduct himself aright in both kinds of acts. Consequently human law could not sufficiently curb and direct interior acts; and it was necessary for this purpose that a Divine law should supervene.
Fourthly, because . . . human law cannot punish or forbid all evil deeds: since while aiming at doing away with all evils, it would do away with many goods, and would hinder the advance of the common good, which is necessary for human intercourse. In order therefore, that no evil might remain unforbidden and unpunished, it was necessary for the divine law to supervene, whereby all sins are forbidden. “[57]
Aquinas’s first prong in the argument for God’s intervention in history consists of those reasons that can be utilized apart from the influence of divine revelation to show that God is the type of God who would want to become a human and do certain types of things that God would do in human history. These are a priori reasons arise from God’s nature and from the general condition of the human race. Elsewhere, Aquinas affirms the necessity of divine revelation with respect to the precepts of the natural moral law:
“It is necessary for man to accept
by faith not only things which are above reason, but also those which can be
known by reason: and this involves three motives. First,
in order that man may arrive more quickly at the knowledge of Divine truth. . .
. Second, . . . in order that the
knowledge of God may be more general.
For many are unable to make progress in the study of science, either
through dullness of mind, or through having a number of occupations and
temporal needs, or even through laziness in learning, all of whom would be
altogether deprived of the knowledge of God, unless divine things were brought
to their knowledge under the guise of faith.
The third reason is for the
sake of certitude. For human reason is
very deficient in things concerning God.
A sign of this is that philosophers in their researches, by natural
investigation, into human affairs, have fallen into many errors, and have
disagreed among themselves. And
consequently, in order that men, might have knowledge of God, free of doubt and
uncertainty, it was necessary for divine matters, to be delivered to them by
way of faith, being told to them, as it were, by God Himself Who cannot lie.”[58]
The need for a revelation is a recurrent theme for Aquinas. He opens up the Summa, asking himself whether there is any further revelation that is required for morality and thus for salvation.[59] The main reason why human beings need revelation is to know the precepts of the natural law clearly and with certainty.
The biblical teaching, according to Charles, indicates that
abortion is wrong: “At the core of Judeo-Christian moral tradition is the
proscription against taking innocent life (Gen. 9:5-6; Exod. 20:13; Deut. 5:17;
Matt. 5:21; Rom. 13:9; James 2:11)—a proscription that undergirds civilized
society. The reason for this is that
life is inherently sacred (Gen. 1:26-27; 9:5-6).”[60] Indeed, “As borne out by Hebrew grammar, the
sixth commandment is an absolute proscription not against all killing but
against the taking of innocent life.
Excluded from the command are the killing of animals, war that is
justified, the execution of criminals, and killing in self-defense.”[61] The Magisterium, which is considered by
Catholics as the authentic interpreter of the biblical revelation, has always
taught that direct abortion is wrong at every stage in the embryo’s life. The Fathers of Vatican II, in the Pastoral Constitution in the Modern World,
maintain that “life must be protected with the utmost care from the moment of
conception: abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes.”[62] The Instruction
on Bioethics in 1987 declares that the “human being is to be respected and
treated as a person from the moment of conception; and therefore from the same
moment his rights as a person must be recognized, among which in the first
place is the inviolable right of every innocent human being to life.”[63] Pope John Paul II condemned abortion in Evangelium Vitae: “I confirm that the
direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely
immoral. This doctrine, based upon that
unwritten law which man, in the light of reason, finds in his own heart (cf.
Rom. 2:14-15), is reaffirmed by Sacred Scripture, transmitted by the Tradition
of the Church and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.” Further, “Nothing and no one can in any way
permit the killing of an innocent human being, whether a fetus or an embryo, an
infant or an adult, an old person, or one suffering from an incurable disease,
or a person who is dying.”[64] Many more citations could be given. The point is that the Magisterium continues
to affirm the sanctity of life, making the precepts of the natural moral law
clear and binding.
Not only is evolutionary theory able to be reconciled with the dictates of the natural moral law, it is actually complementary with the pro-life view. Certainly, evolution tells us that the human desire to reproduce and pass on our genes to subsequent generations offers a glimpse as to what position should be preferred: pro-life. Even if one did not consider these conclusions, which are purely scientific, we would be able to recognize that natural moral law enables us to know that abortion is wrong. Lastly, revelation teaches that direct abortions are wrong as well. Thus, the pro-life position should be preferred. This final conclusion is warranted by evolution, natural law, and divine revelation, all of which, as I have shown, are compatible with one another.
Conclusion
Although
some scientists and philosophers have affirmed that ethics can be completely
explained in terms of the theory of evolution, there are many problems that
attend to this view. Moreover, natural
law morality is consistent with biological evolution and must be preferred over
naturalistic interpretations of the theory.
After this much was accomplished in this essay, I turned to a practical
case to show that evolution does not necessitate the overthrow the framework of
Judeo-Christian paradigm of ethics.
Despite the protests to the contrary, evolutionary ethics is not only
consistent with natural law thinking, but is actually complementary with the
pro-life view in the abortion debate.
[1] E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 562.
[2] In On the Origin of
Species (1859)
[3] Richard Dawkins, “Put Your Money on Evolution,”
[4] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without
Design, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 6
[5] Denis Alexander, Rebuilding
the Matrix: Science and Faith in the 21st Century, (
[6] Michael Ruse, Darwinism and its Discontents,
(
[7] Craig A. Boyd, A
Shared Morality: A Narrative Defense of Natural Law Ethics, (
[8] Michael Ruse, “The Significance of Evolution,” Blackwell Companion to Ethics, Peter Singer, ed., (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 502.
[9] Michael Ruse, “The Significance of Evolution,” 502.
[10] Michael Ruse, “The Significance of Evolution,” 502.
[11] Michael Ruse, “The Significance of Evolution,” 508.
[12] Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Paradigm, (London: Routledge, 1989), 262, 268-9. Cited in William Lane Craig, "The Indispensability of Theological Meta-ethical Foundations for Morality," Foundations 5 (1997), 9-12. Accessed online at: www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5175.
[13] Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation,
(
[14] Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 118.
[15] Steven Pinker, “Why They Kill Their Newborns,” New York Times, (November 2, 1997): accessed online at http://dylanwalborn.com/NYT-Pro-Infanticide19971102.htm.
[16] Steven Pinker, The
Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of
Human Nature, (
[17] Paul Copan, “God, Naturalism, and the Foundations of
Morality,” The Future of Atheism: Alister
McGrath and Daniel Dennett in Dialogue, ed. Robert B. Stewart., (
[18] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 230.
[19] Keith Ward, In Defence of the Soul, (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1998), 11. Cf. 117.
[20] For an excellent discussion of the
philosophical presuppositions of science, see J.P. Moreland, Christianity and the Nature of Science, (Grand
Rapids: Baker Book House, 1989), 108-133.
Moreland lists and explains ten of them: (1.) the existence of a theory
and of an external world; (2.) the orderly nature of the world; (3.) the
knowability of the external world; (4.) the existence of truth; (5.) the laws
of logic; (6.) the reliability of our cognitive and sensory faculties to serve
us in the pursuit of truth; (7.) the adequacy of language to describe the
world; (8.) the existence of values in science; (9.) the uniformity of nature
and induction; (10.) the existence of mathematical truths.
[23] John Polkinghorne, Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion, (
[24] Keith Ward, In Defence of the Soul, 120.
[25] Peter Woodcock, “The Case Against Evolutionary Ethics Today,” Biology and the Foundation of Ethics, ed. Jane Maienschein and Michael Ruse, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 287-288.
[26] Brian Hebblethwaite, In Defence of Christianity, 4, 12, 14.
[27] If the scientistic philosopher says otherwise, then he or she is committing the fallacy of “speciesism.” Speciesism is a view that affirms that humans are special in comparison with the rest of the animal kingdom—but for no rationally compelling reason. It is wholly arbitrary to say that humans are any different than any other animal in light of metaphysical materialism. Thus, “speciesism.”
[28] Keith Ward, In Defence of the Soul, 8, 9.
[29] Cf. Walter Hearn, “Evidence of Purpose in the Universe,” Evidence of Purpose: Scientists Discover the Creator, ed. John Marks Templeton, (New York: Continuum Books, 1994), 60.
[30] Ted Peters, “Science and Theology: Toward
Consonance,” from Science and Theology:
The New Consonance, ed. Ted Peters, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 22.
[31] Walter Hearn, “Evidence of Purpose in the Universe,” 59.
[32] Walter Hearn, “Evidence of Purpose in the Universe,” 10.
[33] It should be noted that I have not argued for the
design in nature as an Intelligent Design Theorist (those who argue that
science can detect design in nature)
in this section, but as a Thomistic proponent of the natural moral law. Design does not coincide with efficient
causes, but with final causes. Since
scientists are concerned with efficient causes, they are not concerned with
design. But this does not mean that design
is not a feature of reality that is either undetectable or illusory. Final causes are pinpointed by philosophers,
not scientists. Ric Machuga points out:
“The crucial difference between final and efficient causes is that they answer
different questions. Efficient causes
answer questions about how the
physical properties of things interact among themselves. Final causes answer questions about why something is what it is.” Ric Machuga, In Defense of the Soul: What it Means to be Human, (
[34] Peter Woodcock, “The Case Against Evolutionary Ethics Today,” 282-285.
[35] Peter Woodcock, “The Case Against Evolutionary Ethics Today,” 301.
[36] William Lane Craig, "The Indispensability of Theological Meta-ethical Foundations for Morality," 9-12.
[37] Of those cultures that have been critically studied, there are at least 300 moral behaviors that all persons uphold. For more on this, see Donald Brown, Human Universals, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
[38] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.II.94.2.
[39] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.80.2.
[40] Aquinas would argue that God is necessary for
morality as well. For more on this,
see Fulvio de Blasi, God the Natural
Law: A Rereading of Thomas Aquinas, (
[41] Craig A. Boyd, “Thomistic Natural Law and the Limits
of Evolutionary Psychology,” Evolution
and Ethics: Human Morality in Biological and Moral Perspectives, ed. Philip
Clayton and Jeffrey Schloss, (
[42] Ric Machuga, In Defense of the Soul, 57-63, 161-166.
[44]
Over the course of the twentieth century, equivocations on the word “chance”
have slowly crept into scientific circles.
As R. C. Sproul observes, “The shift from a formal probability concept
to a real force is usually slipped in by the addition of another seemingly
harmless word, by. When we say things happen by chance, the term
by can be heard as a dative of means.
Suddenly chance is given instrumental power.” As time went on “The ‘means’ now assumes a
certain power to effect change.
Something that in reality is nothing now has the ability or power to do
something.” Taken from R.C. Sproul, Not a Chance!: The Myth of Chance in Modern
Science and Cosmology, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1993), 6, 7.
[45] Benedict M. Ashley, “The Anthropological Foundations of the Natural Law,” 6.
[46] Keith Ward, God,
Faith and the New Millennium: Christian Belief in an Age of Science,
(Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1998), 84.
[47] Robert John Russell, “Does the ‘God Who Acts’ Really Act in Nature?,” from Science and Theology: The New Consonance, ed. Ted Peters, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 85.
[48] John F. Haught, Is
Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science, (
[49] Craig A. Boyd, “Thomistic Natural Law and the Limits of Evolutionary Psychology,” 222.
[50] Harry Plotkin, Evolution in Mind: An Introduction
to Evolutionary Psychology,
[51] Benedict M. Ashley, Jean Dublois, and Kevin D.
O’Rourke, Health Care Ethics: A Catholic
Theological Analysis, 5th ed., (
[52] J. Daryl Charles, Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things, (
[53] Craig A. Boyd, A Shared Morality, 87.
[54] Mikhael Stenmark, Scientism: Science, Ethics, and Religion, (
[55] J. Daryl Charles, Retrieving the Natural Law, 195-197.
[56] J. Daryl Charles, Retrieving the Natural Law, 204.
[57] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.II. 91.4
[58] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II.II.2.4
[59] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.1.1.
[60] J. Daryl Charles, Retrieving the Natural Law, 203.
[61] J. Daryl Charles, Retrieving the Natural Law, 203.
[62] Austin Flannery, ed. Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and
Post-Conciliar Documents, (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1975), Gaudium et Spes, N. 51.
[63] Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Bioethics, (1987), I.1.
[64] John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, (1995), N. 57. Cf. N. 60, 62.
At times, Kilby appears to come close to anti-realists such as Cupitt or D.Z.Phillips in acknowledging that the doctrine of the trinity “can have an important grammatical and structural role within Christianity whether or not it carries any insight.”[2] Rather like the poem ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll, Kilby argues that “we have a grammar for speaking of God, but no accompanying understanding.”[3] However she distances herself from a radical application of this approach more generally in theology, while remaining ‘sympathetic’ of those who do.[4]
In this article I will attempt to argue that although Aquinas is informed by a long tradition of apophatic theology, he nevertheless makes a clear disjuncture from this tradition in at least three important ways, namely his distinctive doctrine of analogy, his emphasis on God’s revelation in Scripture and consequently his controlling hermeneutic of the plain sense of Scripture. Where Thomas runs into incoherence arises precisely where he attempts to square the circle of marrying the neo-Platonic doctrine of Divine simplicity with the Christian doctrine of the trinity. Contrary to his progressive instincts, Aquinas retreats back into apophaticism at this point because there is logically nowhere else for him to go.
The apophatic tradition.
Apophatic or negative theology (via negativa), dominant in the Eastern traditions of the Christian church and popularised through such writers as Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, Gregory of Palamas, Nicholas de Cusa and St John of the Cross stresses the dissimilarity of God’s essence to our language about him. According to this view, the best we can say about God is what God is not rather than what God is. We cannot say that God is wise, but we can say that He is not stupid! This is the via negativa and appears to be endorsed in the prologue to Summa Theologiae. “We cannot know what God is, but only what He is not. So to study Him, we study what He has not -- such as composition and motion”.[5] Alternatively and with more sophistication, we can resort to paradox: ‘neither x nor y’ but ‘beyond x and y’ (where x and y refer to attributes of God such as wise, good, atemporal etc.). This is the apophatic way, in that it is stressing not only the negative but also the apo, the beyondness of God to human discourse. Gregory of Nazianzus for instance compares himself to Moses ascending the Mount and hiding in the cleft of the Rock (Christ) before seeing God’s back parts only.[6]
It is probably fair to say that all theology is apophatic in one sense: God is infinitely more than our understanding and our language about him can ever be. God can never be reduced to our human concepts of Him. He dwells in unapproachable light.[7] The Cappodocean Fathers rightly draw us to a reverent humility and awe before the eternal Majesty of the Almighty. Yet it should also be remembered that unlike Moses with whom Gregory compares the believer, we have not come to Mount Sinai but “to Mount Zion, the City of the living God..to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant”. (Hebrews 12: 18, 22-24), the Mount, let us say, of revelation. In the words of Saint Paul, we may ‘see through a glass darkly’; nevertheless, this at least means that ‘ we know in part’.[8] I will discuss this qualification of apophaticism in more detail below in the section of Aquinas on revelation.
The Eastern tradition has a stronger definition of apophaticism than much Western theology would allow. It means total agnosticism regarding the ‘essence’ or nature of God. Pseudo-Dionysius, a leading articulator of this position in the 6th century famously applies apophasis even to God’s existence. “It (God) is the universal cause of existence while itself existing not, for it is beyond all being”[9] This is of course true if one means that God’s existence is necessary whereas creaturely existence is merely contingent. More contentiously however, and reminiscent of Buddhist thinking, Pseudo-Dionysius asserts that “the divine unity is beyond being…the indivisible Trinity holds within a shared undifferentiated unity……..the assertion of all things, the denial of all things, that which is beyond every assertion and denial.”[10] Similarly in The Mystical Theology he writes concerning the Cause of all being that:
“we should posit and ascribe to it all the affirmations we make in regard to beings, and more appropriately, we should negate all these affirmations, since it surpasses all being. Now we should not conclude that the negations are simply the opposites of the affirmations, but rather that the cause of all is considerably prior to this, beyond privations, beyond every denial, beyond every assertion”[11]
In this he parts company with Aristotle who argued that negations are the opposite of affirmations.[12] For Pseudo-Dionysius, God is beyond antithesis, logic and the law of non-contradiction[13]. In this respect he finds new resonance in Continental and postmodern philosophy influenced by Hegelian synthesis[14] and the Nietzschean rejection of binary opposites.[15] So for example Sartre sounds remarkably Dionysian in Being and Nothingness when he writes: “Being is equally beyond negation as beyond affirmation.”[16]
Aquinas, in contrast, (following Augustine), understood the laws of logic as necessary truths within the Divine mind: “necessary truths are eternal only because they exist in the eternal mind; nothing besides God is eternal.”[17] God is the Necessary Truth (John 14:6) on which logic depends. That is because He is the Logos (John 1:1). God can make no denial of himself (2 Tim 2:13) and cannot lie (Num 23:19; John 8:44-45). That is why, for Aquinas, there is no final conflict between the truths of faith and the truths of reason. The principles of reason have been Divinely implanted in us.[18]
In the so-called ‘Euthyphro’ dilemma, raised in Plato’s book by the same name, Socrates raises the puzzling riddle of whether something is pious or good because the gods command it or alternatively whether the gods command it because it is good. The same dilemma could be restated: ‘Does God follow the law of non-contradiction as a standard higher than himself or is it only a law because God says so?’ Aquinas’ answer to both forms of the riddle was that God does not have goodness, reason or logic as separate qualities in the way that human beings do. God has no composite qualities. He is absolutely Simple.[19] It follows therefore that, for God, to be is to be logical. He is his own goodness and love, reason and logic. The Word (Logos) was God (John 1:1). As Aquinas later expresses it: “..there is nothing in God that is not the divine being itself.”[20] Later I will suggest another way that Aquinas could have addressed the Euthyphro dilemma without resorting to a strong version of Divine Simplicity.
Thomas’ doctrine of analogy
In Summa Theologiae Aquinas discusses the issue of whether we have words for God[21]. He quotes Pseudo-Dionysius as an authority on this question[22]
“Of him (God) there is neither name or opinion”, and later "negations about God are true; but affirmations are vague (or, according to another translation, ‘incongruous’)."[23].
Thomas, like many in his day, mistakenly believed Dionysius to be a first century convert of Paul with apostolic authority: It is all the more remarkable therefore that Thomas finds his position inadequate: “True affirmative propositions can be formed about God”[24], he counters, for example the affirmative proposition that ‘God is three and one’ or that he is ‘omnipotent’. Aquinas refers to positive theological statements in Scripture such as “The Lord is a great warrior: Almighty is his name” (Exodus 15:3). Church fathers like Augustine similarly applied positive predicates such as ‘strong’, ‘wise’ and ‘being’ to God. It is clear then that the famous quotation from Aquinas in the Summa’s Prologue “We cannot know what God is, but only what He is not,” which Ward[25], McCabe[26] and others use to defend a strong apophatic reading of Aquinas is not straightforwardly obvious in its meaning, and must be qualified.
Since Aquinas had a more Aristotelian view of logic in his theology than Dionysius, it would be a fallacy, he reasons, to apply words such as ‘strong’, ‘wise’ and ‘being’ to God in an equivocal sense. This is a question still faced by Wittgensteinian fideists and anti-realists. If God-talk is equivocal, why should we use these particular words rather than entirely opposite words or else no words at all? One can only fall back on the arbitrary authority of tradition in establishing the ‘grammar’ of theology, once a ‘correspondence’ account of truth has been abandoned.
This does not mean that Aquinas naïvely accepts that human language can be applied univocally (i.e. in exactly the same way) with respect to the infinite, transcendent God[27]. All human use of language derives from finite creaturely experience. God, in contrast, has a different mode of being[28] to creatures, since there is nothing in Him which is not Divine. This amongst other reasons[29], makes univocality impossible.
So, if language about God cannot be applied in the same way as language about the world (univocal), but neither can be applied in an entirely different way (equivocal), there appears to be logically only one possibility left, namely that language must have a similar meaning when applied to God.[30] One example of using terms similarly would be using the predicate ‘bright’ to describe both the sun and a painting. The painting is bright in a similar (but immeasurably inferior) way to the brightness of the sun. Aquinas calls the relationship between the two senses ‘analogical.’ He justifies this similarity primarily on the grounds of a diminished participation of the creature in its Creator.[31] That is why A.N.Williams sees in this doctrine of analogy an essential component of Thomas’ understanding of the goal of existence: namely participation in the Divine Nature, to be fulfilled in the beatific vision.[32] Though Pseudo-Dionysius also speak of the Divine by way of analogy and metaphor[33], noone previously had clarified the concept as clearly as Aquinas did. It is his lasting contribution to the religious language debate.
Yet, some critics have accused Aquinas of being incoherent here. They argue that an analogy can only work by presupposing some univocal correspondence, otherwise it reduces again to an equivocation. The critics are correct, nevertheless Geisler suggests that Aquinas has already addressed this problem. Analogy does imply univocality to some extent, but this univocality is not in the realm of being, but in the realm of concepts and definitions. Aquinas is saying that concepts have the same definition for both humans and Creator but that they are applied differently[34]. (So God’s love is unlimited and perfect in contrast to human love). Aquinas explains:
“ In names predicated of many in an analogical sense, all are predicated because they have reference to the same one thing; and this one thing must be placed in the definition of them all.”[35]
He illustrates this principle with the example of the term ‘wise’:
“Thus also this term "wise" applied to man in some degree circumscribes and comprehends the thing signified; whereas this is not the case when it is applied to God; but it leaves the thing signified as incomprehended, and as exceeding the signification of the name. Hence it is evident that this term "wise" is not applied in the same way to God and to man.”[36]
Aquinas concedes along with the apophatic tradition that our intellect “cannot see Him (God) as He is in Himself”, or at least not in this life, [37]but he draws different conclusions from the mystics by maintaining that the intellect “knows that one and the same simple object corresponds to its conceptions”.[38] Just as we are able to understand lower material objects in a non-material mode while still affirming intellectually that they are in themselves material,[39] so according to Aquinas, we can understand transcendent concepts such as God being simple, even though our mode of understanding him is composite.[40]
For Aquinas then the via negativa comes into its own qualified and legitimate sphere in refining how concepts may or may not be applied to God, having stripped them of their empirical limitations. Only the perfection is to be applied and not the finite mode of signification.[41] This means that creatures can have the same characteristics as God (eg goodness), but not in the same way that God has them. God has them in ‘the mode of supereminence’[42]. Aquinas adds that: “all perfections exist in creatures dividedly…and in God unitedly.”[43]
Thomas’ doctrine of analogy points to the understanding that God cannot be known infinitely or exhaustively, for then humans would have to be omniscient[44], yet God can still be known truly. This reading harmonises Thomas’ insistence that:
“it is clearly impossible for any created intellect to know God in an infinite degree. Hence it is impossible that it should comprehend God”[45] and that the name God is incommunicable. [46]
with his later qualification of this statement:
“this name God is communicable, not in its whole signification, but in some part of it by way of similitude…”[47] Likewise, God is comprehensible to believers in contrast to ‘non-attainment’ but is incomprehensible in terms of ‘being included in the one comprehending.’[48]
Thus the apophatic proof text found in the prologue to the Summa Theologiae: “We cannot know what God is, but only what He is not,” should be contextually interpreted as meaning we cannot know anything about God in this life univocally but only either negatively or analogically.[49] The more accessible work, Summa Contra Gentiles, makes this clearer. In the context of a discussion on names of perfections used in the mode of supereminence, Aquinas uses the similar proposition to the Summa Theologiae: “We cannot grasp what God is, but only what he is not” except that, significantly here Aquinas adds the qualifying phrase, “and how other things are related to him.” [50] which signals a reference back to his doctrine of analogy.
Thomas on revelationWhether or not we can speak adequately about God in human language is inseparably connected with the question of whether or not God has spoken adequately to us in human language. This is the second disjuncture I note in Aquinas from absolute apophaticism: i.e. Aquinas’ emphasis on God as a God of revelation. If God has used language to communicate to us then it follows that this human language must be adequate to convey truth about God. Words about God may be anthropomorphic, but “God has anthropomorphised himself”[51], thus bridging the finite/infinite gap. In Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas concludes a chapter on reason and faith with a quotation from Paul:
“So the things that are of God no man knoweth but the the Spirit of God. But to us God hath revealed them by His Spirit.”[52]
Furthermore, humans are theomorphic, made in the image of God, resulting in an ontology of participation. As previously noted, Thomas anticipates an ultimate climax to this participation in a full eschatological participation in the Divine nature leading to deiformity. God changes and indwells the intellect of the redeemed, making their knowledge like his own. “When any created intellect sees the essence of God, the essence of God itself becomes the intelligible form of the intellect.”[53]
Thomas Aquinas was known as magister in sacra pagina (Master of the sacred page). He was devoted to the study of Scripture. As a Dominican friar he was required to expound the sacred writings between one and four times a week and as a Master Teacher his duty was to read the text to his pupils explaining its sense and application. [54] This resulted in his writing numerous commentaries as well as the famous Catena aurea (Golden Chain) of the four Gospels.
Aquinas’ devout practice embodied his profound conviction that the Bible is God’s revelation to humanity. “Revelation is the basis of sacred scripture”[55] he wrote, since “The author of Holy Scripture is God”[56] Curiously, a modern scholar of Aquinas seems to overlook this fact and instead project his own Barthian understanding of Scripture onto Aquinas:
“For Thomas, then, Scripture is not of itself revelation so much as the bearer of revelation, rather as in a dependent way (dependent upon both God and Scripture), the church is the bearer of revelation, too”[57]
In contrast to this neo-orthodox view of the Bible as a human witness to the Word, however, Aquinas insisted that the Bible is ‘Divinely inspired Scripture’[58], quoting 2 Timothy 3:16 (‘All Scripture is inspired by God’). Without this revelation, Aquinas points out that God’s truth would only be known by a few and would be mixed with much error.[59] Furthermore, in discussing the relationship of sacred knowledge in scripture to the other sciences, Aquinas teaches: “Sacred doctrine derives its principles not from any human knowledge, but from the divine knowledge, through which, as through the highest wisdom, all our knowledge is set in order”.[60] This does not preclude the fact that for Aquinas God has also revealed himself in nature (a point also accepted by Dionysius), but that some truths, for example the truth of the incarnation or that ‘God is trinity’, can only be accessed through special revelation. Although there are ‘vestiges’ of the trinity in nature[61], natural revelation and unaided reason are insufficient for arriving at this truth.[62]
Again, unlike the later Barthians, Aquinas held to the inerrancy of scripture: “nothing false can underlie the literal sense of Scripture”[63]. Concerning the books of Scripture, he writes, “I firmly believe that none of their authors have erred in composing them”[64] Indeed, “It is heretical to say that any falsehood whatsoever is contained either in the gospels or in any canonical scripture.”[65]
None of this sits easily with the Neo-Platonic roots of apophaticism. Plotinus (d AD 270), the father of neo-Platonism, described a hierarchy of being descending from the ineffable One who is wholly other to the base world of matter.[66] There is no conception of the One revealing (him)self in neo-Platonism. The One is rather beyond all knowledge and being. “The One is in truth beyond all statement”.[67] Even the title ‘One’ is only a negation of plurality. “If we are led to think positively of the One, name and thing, there would be more truth in silence.”[68] Anticipating Kierkegaard, Plotinus writes of the necessity of transcending reason in order to ‘know’ this One: “only by a leap can we reach to this One which is to be pure of all else.”[69] Hence self-authenticating mystical experience is privileged over reason within this tradition.
On the one hand Thomas remains tied to neo-Platonism in his belief that God cannot be known in his ‘essence’, but only through his ‘effects, either of nature or of grace’[70] yet begins to free himself from these strictures in his Christian confession of a God who has made himself known in the person of Jesus Christ who himself used human language to communicate God’s mind.
Thomas on the plain sense of Scripture
A third important way in which Aquinas began to break from previous apophatics was his emphasis on the plain meaning of the text of Scripture. Consistent with Aquinas’ dual basis of the analogical nature of religious language and the fact of propositional revelation, it is unsurprising that Aquinas also insists upon the intelligibility of God’s written revelation.
Later reformers such as Luther and Calvin criticised mystical writers of the middle ages such as Pseudo-Dionysius (‘whoever he may have been’), for their fanciful allegorisation of Bible passages[71], insisting instead upon “the proper and simple sense of Scripture”.[72] Yet Aquinas should be credited with paving the way for this approach. Just as the speculative allegorisation of texts by the mystics was entirely consistent with their presuppositions regarding the mystery of the Divine being and the inadequacy of human language to describe him; conversely Aquinas with his presupposition of the Bible as revelation in analogical language followed this through consistently with his insistence on the plain meaning of the text as the controlling sense.
One may also note the link here between Pseudo-Dionysius’ allegorisation of Scripture and his hierarchicalism. Dionysius is credited with coining the term ‘hierarchy’; it is so central to his thinking, and occurs in the title of two of his works. His ecclesiastical hierarchy corresponds closely to Plato’s political hierarchy headed up by the Philosopher-King. In his book, The Celestial Hierarchy, Dionysius explicitly segregates the enlightened ones from the common masses:
“it is most fitting to the mysterious passages of scripture that the sacred and hidden truth about the celestial intelligences be concealed through the inexpressible and the sacred and be inaccessible to the hoi polloi. Not everyone is sacred, and, as scripture says, knowledge is not for everyone.”[73]
It must be conceded that Aquinas, as a man of his time was not immune to an hierarchical worldview. He still admired Pseudo-Dionysius (falsely considering him apostolic) and answered a question himself with eight articles to the hierarchical ordering of the nine choirs of angels.[74] Nevertheless, one can see a radically new direction emerging in Aquinas when he observes that natural reason alone, without ‘supernatural inspiration as an object of belief’, would have the ‘awkward consequence’ that ‘few men would possess the knowledge of God.’[75] Aquinas’ emphasis on the plain sense of Scripture blew open the door for the later Reformers to champion the democratisation of the knowledge of God [76]
Karen Kilby is also concerned to avoid ‘privileging the theologian.’ She associates a graspable understanding of (Trinitarian) doctrine with the social Trinitarians and acknowledges this as a possible solution. Her sensibilities however incline her to level things out for the ordinary believer in the admission of absolute mystery for all.[77] My contention is that this does not appear to be Aquinas’ initial methodology, but I will qualify this claim in my conclusion.
Modern exponents of a plain sense of Scripture are often portrayed as doing ‘violence’ to the text of Scripture by insisting on a ‘singular’ meaning.[78] However, this would be a straw man argument if applied to Aquinas. Aquinas accepts that “in Holy Scripture a word may have several senses.”[79] As a result he is not dogmatic in favouring say an interpretation of Augustine as opposed to Basil or other eastern fathers.[80]The different senses may include for example a typological, moral or eschatological sense. Together they may present a ‘sensus plenus’, yet the important thing for Aquinas is that the primary and controlling meaning remains the literal meaning[81].
‘Literal’ did not carry for Aquinas the same wooden connotation as it does for us. He incorporates within this term a place for symbolism and poetry. ‘Literal’ is really just another way of referring to the plain sense intended by the author. So, for example “When Scripture speaks of the arm of God, the literal sense is not that he has a physical limb, but that he (literally) has what it signifies, namely the power of doing and making,”[82] The word ‘author’ is itself an ambiguous term which in Aquinas’ hermeneutic does not always refer to the human author’s intention, but sometimes what he sees as the Divine Author’s intention (eg in Messianic applications of Old Testament prophecies). Nevertheless, for Aquinas, the key to the plain sense of Scripture is it’s original historical sense, so for example, the Red Sea crossing, the events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection and (alien to modern thinking) the narrative of Adam and Eve which he also accepts as a space-time event. Aquinas concludes that “nothing necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward by the Scripture in its literal sense.”[83]Thomas’ dependence on extra-Biblical philosophy
It is unfortunate, then, that Aquinas is not always consistent with his own methodology. At times he operates with a controlling hermeneutic not of the plain sense of scripture, but of ad extra philosophical constructs such as Divine Simplicity. Karen Kilby rightly observes that problems occur (or at least get worse) when Aquinas moves from a discussion of Biblical words like ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘ Holy Spirit’ to a more abstract dimension of Trinitarian reflection.
I will focus on just one example of this: namely Thomas’ treatment of the Divine persons as ‘subsisting relations’.[84] Kilby traces this idea first to Gregory of Nazianzus and then to Augustine. She goes on to contrast this with the so-called ‘social Trinitarian’ model of three ‘somethings’ united in love. Aquinas appears to be exclusively speaking of ‘relations without relata’, a thought which is unthinkable for the human imagination (and hence enters the realm of the apophatic). I think this assessment is accurate in regards to Aquinas, but that he has also mutated the tradition in a significant way.
Aquinas begins with the Boethian definition of person: ‘persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia.’ as a translation of the Greek hypostasis which Thomas further defines as ‘an individual in the genus of substance’.[85] This does not suggest relations without remainder but rather indicates an individual existence for each hypostasis. However, in light of what we have argued earlier regarding Thomas’ doctrine of analogy defining terms univocally and then applying them in the ‘mode of supereminence’, Aquinas appears to apply the term ‘persons’ to God exclusively as ‘relations’(‘persona est relatio’),[86]. He is attempting to strip the term of its empirical limitations, leaving only the perfection and not the finite mode of signification. McCabe comments:
“Aquinas quotes with ostensible approval Boethius’ definition of a person as ‘an individual substance of rational nature.’ But, as speedily emerges, the ‘persons’ of the Trinity are not individuals, not substances, not rational and do not have natures. What Aquinas labours to show is that in this unique case ‘person’ can mean relation.”[87]
An investigation of the trajectory of ‘persons as relations’ within the tradition however reveals that Aquinas’ reductionist interpretation is a novelty. [88] Augustine, for example, who also deployed the language of relations could at the same time still link these to their relata.[89] So in De Trinitate he writes:
“..every being that is called something by way of relationship is also something besides the relationship; thus a master is also a man, and a slave is a man…….If the Father is not also something with reference to himself, there is nothing there to be talked about with reference to something else.”[90]
Commenting on the Augustinian understanding in contrast to that of Aquinas, Moltmann writes:
“…this relational understanding of the Persons has as its premise the ‘substantial’ interpretation of their individuality; the one does not replace the other.”[91]
Similarly, it is significant that Gregory of Nyssa who defended the ‘relations’ idea is also one of the most explicit proponents of the ‘threeness’ of the Godhead to the extent that he had to defend himself from those who accused him of preaching three Gods[92]. Likewise Basil[93] speaks boldly (and by modern Barthian standards somewhat crudely) of Peter, Andrew and John united by the common predicate ‘man’ as an analogy of Father, Son and Spirit united in the one nature ‘God.’[94] This very clearly avoids modalism and is consistent with those theologians who speak of the persons in terms of three ‘centres of consciousness’[95], or three ‘Subjects’ and ‘centres of action’[96]. Aquinas’ weakness is that his model precludes any such description.
A primary consideration for the shift to a reductionist interpretation of persons in terms of ‘relations’ seems to be for Aquinas his commitment to a strong form of Divine simplicity. This states not only that God, as an immaterial mind, is not composed of parts ( a weak form of Divine Simplicity), but also the strong claim that God is identical with all his properties and that in some ineffable way they all identical with one another, so that it would be more accurate to say apophatically that God does not have any properties. This doctrine is so fundamental for Aquinas that he deals with it as of first importance in Summa Theologiae 1a, Question 3. “since God is absolute form, or rather absolute being, He can be in no way composite.”[97]
Although attractive for Christian apologetics in providing a possible solution to the Euthyphro dilemma and in strengthening the cosmological argument, this doctrine of God has the weakness of not being taught in the Scriptures themselves. It has been questioned in modern times not only by the radical Process theologians such as Hartshorne[98] and Griffin[99], but also by more conservative scholars such as Moltmann[100], Ward[101], Pannenberg[102], and Plantinga.[103]
It is not difficult to trace this doctrine back through the mystical tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius (c.500 AD.) to the neo-Platonist Plotinus (204-270AD) and beyond to the pre-Socratic Parmenides (c.515-440 BC). Indeed the whole mystical tradition could be seen as a ‘series of footnotes to Parmenides’ (to misquote A.N. Whitehead)! Parmenides poem ‘On Nature’ refers to the simplicity of The One in Fragment 8:
“Nor is it divisible, since it all alike is;
Nor is it somewhat more here, which would keep it from holding together,
Nor is it somewhat less, but it is all full of what is.”[104]
Parmenides argues that the One must be indivisible, otherwise in one place it would be one thing and in another would not. Yet for Parmenides it is not possible to speak of what is not (being non-existent) and therefore reality must be one indivisible plenum.
Interestingly, Aquinas turns the premise of Parmenides on its head: God is wholly simple therefore we can only speak of what God is not and not what He is (univocally)! For Parmenides, on the other hand, it is impossible to speak of what is not therefore the One must be wholly simple (indivisible). In order to avoid the post-hoc fallacy then we must admit that Aquinas inherits Parmenides’ One only indirectly through Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius.
Of course it would also be a genetic fallacy to conclude that the doctrine of simplicity in Aquinas must be false solely on the basis that we can explain its origin. What we do observe, however, is that Aquinas struggles to squeeze the doctrine of the Trinity into this alien mould of Parmenidean simplicity – which is really a radical Unity without distinctions, rather than submit this construct itself to the revealed ontology of the Tri-unity manifested in the ‘history of God’[105]. In other words, we can only truly understand the immanent trinity by means of the economic trinity as revealed in Jesus Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit.
The traditional doctrine of the trinity, in contrast to the heresy of modalism, associated with Sabellius in the early third century AD, demands that there are real distinctions in God (and therefore real generation and real procession). Modalism teaches that ultimately God is only one person. In order to hold onto orthodoxy, Aquinas agrees in Summa Theologiae that “relations exist in God really.”[106] and that:
“if the relations were not really distinguished from each other, there would be no real trinity in God, but only an ideal trinity, which is the error of Sabellius.”[107]
The problem with Aquinas, is not in what he says, but in what he also says. Aquinas’ instinct, arising from the organising principle of Simplicity, leads him towards the very modalism he seeks to avoid, when he asserts, “it is manifest that relation really existing in God is really the same as His essence and only differs in its mode of intelligibility.”[108]
Aquinas illustrates his position with Aristotle’s example of action, passion and motion to show that fatherhood and sonship are logically distinct in a similar way.[109] This could be criticised however as pointing to the conclusion that God is one person (in the modern sense of the term) with logically distinct self-relations. In other words, this still leads to Sabellianism.
Cornelius Plantinga observes that, to avoid modalism, it is not enough for Aquinas simply to show that these relations are logically distinct, Aquinas must show that they are really distinct[110].
Instead, Thomas presents a position which appears to endorse two mutually incompatible beliefs: namely that subsisting relations really differ from each other and not only in our understanding but also that they differ only in our understanding. Karen Kilby observes the same dilemma in her essay.[111]
Another problem not addressed by Thomas is how, within his model of the Trinity, the Son can know that he is the Son and distinct from the Father? and how the father can know that he is the Father and distinct from the Son when according to simplicity there is only one knowledge and one consciousness?
It is noteworthy that Aquinas’ contemporary Dominican, Meister Eckhart (1260–c. 1328) followed Divine Simplicity to its more consistent and logical conclusion, seeing in the concept of the Trinity a mere representation of the Father as knowledge, the Son as Life and the Holy Spirit as Being beneath which lies a Unity without distinction (‘unum non unus’).[112] One of the articles for which he was condemned as a heretic by Pope John XXII was that:
“24. Every distinction is alien to God, both in his nature and in the persons. The proof: since His nature itself is one (una) and this very One (unum), and each Person is one and this same One as the nature.”[113]
The principle of ‘Ockham’s Razor’), that ‘all things being equal, the simplest explanation is the best’, is named after another contemporary of Eckhart’s: the Franciscan, William of Ockham But Ockham’s Razor is itself is a logical fallacy. It led Ockham down a different, but analogous error to Eckhart by denying that properties or concepts exist except in name only. This ‘Nominalist’ school prefigures in many ways the later reductionism of Logical Positivism and scientism. In his award winning poem, ‘Snow’, poet Louis MacNiece challenges an oversimplification of reality.
“…World is crazier and more of it than we think. Incorrigibly plural.” [114]
A problem remains though. Is it possible to jettison Aquinas’ doctrine of Divine simplicity and still have an answer to the ‘Euthyphro dilemma’? How, can universals such as goodness, or the law of non-contradiction not be a standard higher than God without denying their existence? Augustine's solution, taken up by Aquinas, was to place universals in the mind of God. Here the universal ideas are not independent but remain eternal and a basis for the decisions of God’s will (and hence his decisions are not arbitrary). We can still affirm Augustine’s answer without taking the next step that all universals are identical and collapse ineffably into one within God. As an immaterial Being, God is simple in the weak sense of ‘not composed of parts’ in an analogous way to the human immaterial mind, yet He need not be simple in the strong sense argued by Aquinas as a necessary resolution of the Euthyphro dilemma or to reply to the atheist objection to the cosmological argument. ( that the universe is simpler than a complex God).[115] Aquinas, at least for these purposes, proves too much. (I am not suggesting this was Aquinas’ purpose, but it may be a modern rationale for retaining his theology).
Conclusion
The result of Aquinas proving too much is an intractable set of difficulties for his doctrine of the Trinity which are highlighted in Karen Kilby’s article, and can only be accommodated within the apophaticism which she personally endorses. I have argued however in this paper that in at least three areas: namely his doctrine of analogy, belief in revelation and the plain sense of Scripture, Aquinas has made great strides to escape from the confines of the type of apophaticism taught by mystics like Plotinus or Pseudo-Dionysius. As a child of his time, however, he never completely succeeded. He did not work through the full implications of his insights regarding the controlling authority of the revealed words, because, to borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein, ‘a picture held him captive’: primarily the extra-Biblical ‘picture’ of absolute Divine Simplicity. This paper has argued that this picture is fundamentally at odds with the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity[116], being more consistent with Sabellianism, and lands Aquinas having to defend mutually incompatible views. The only way out for Aquinas it seems, is to take refuge, (unfortunately, in my view), within the fog of apophatic theology, with its claims that God is in essence unknowable.
[1] Karen Kilby, Aquinas, the Trinity and the Limits of Understanding, 2008 p.15
[2] Op cit p. 16
[3] Op cit p.18
[4] Op cit.
[5] Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, 1a, q. 3 prologue.
[6] Gregory Nazianzus, Second theological oration, in Edward R. Hardy (ed), Christology of the Later Fathers, (Philadelphia, Westminster Press 1954), p.136-159.
[7] I Timothy 6:16.
[8] 1 Corinthinans 13:12, 9.
[9] Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names.
[10] Ibid chapter 2 Pseudo-Dionysius The Complete Works translated by Colm Luibheid, Paulist Press 1987 edition p. 61.
[11] Ibid, The Mystical Theology ch 1, p.136
[12] Aristotle, On interpretation 17a 31-33 cited in Colm Luibheid (above).
[13] Out of respect for Dionysius, Aquinas tries to reinterpret him, reading the affirmations as referring to the ‘meaning of the name’ and the denials as ‘the mode of signification.’ ( Summa Contra Gentiles Bk 1, ch 30, par 3.
[14] The point of Hegelian logic is to “make clear the inadequacy of the notions (which it) considers one by one and the necessity, in order to understand them, of raising each to a more complete notion which surpasses while integrating them.” Cited in Sartre, Being and Nothingness, (Routledge 2008), p.36
[15] Eg Peter Rollins: How (not) to speak about God. (SPCK 2006)
[16] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, (Routledge 2008), p.21
[17] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1, 9:3
[18] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk 1, ch 7
[19] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a, q. 3, art 7
[20] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk 1, ch 32, par 3
[21] Summa Theologiae 1a 13.1-6 The Latin for ‘word’ here is nomina, also translated ‘names’ as in Pseudo-Dionysius’ book: ‘The Divine Names’, but Timothy McDermott believes that in both cases the word nomina has a wider connotation than just ‘names’, so uses the translation ‘words’. Timothy McDermott (transl) Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings (Oxford University Press 1993) p. 214
[22] In Thomas’ day the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius had become more widely available.
[23] Dionysius (Cel. Hier. ii)
[24] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 13, 12
[25] Keith Ward, God: A guide for the perplexed, Oneworld publications 2005.
[26] Herbert McCabe, Aquinas on the trinity, essay in Davies and Turner (ed), Silence and the Word, (2008)
[27] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk 1, ch 32.
[28] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk 1, ch 32, par. 3
[29] Aquinas adds, for example, the arguments that God is simple and has no accidents. (SCG Bk1, ch 32, par 3-5).
[30] Karl Barth was one of the few theologians to reject Aquinas’ solution, but he admitted that he had nothing to replace it with. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol 2, (Edinburgh T & T 1964), p. 230.
[31] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles Bk 1, Ch 29, par 5.
[32] A.N.Williams, The Ground of union (Oxford University Press 1999). See also Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk 1, ch 29, par 6.
[33] Aquinas quotes Dionysius’ Celestial Hierarchy in Summa Theologiae 1, art 9. and On the Divine Names in Summa Contra Gentiles Bk 1, ch 29, par 4
[34] Norman Geisler, Thomas Aquinas: an evangelical appraisal (Baker 1991), ch 10, but see footnote 104.
[35] Ibid 1, 13, 6
[36] Ibid 1, 13, 5
[37] Ibid 1a, 13, 1
[38] Ibid 1a, 13, 12
[39] Ibid 1a, 13, 12
[40] This point can still be maintained if as I argue one holds to only a weak doctrine of simplicity.
[41] See discussion in Geisler, Thomas Aquinas: an evangelical appraisal (Baker 1991) ch 3 and ch 10
[42] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles Bk 1, ch 30, par 2
[43] Summa Theologiae 1a q.13, 5.
[44] Ibid I, 12, 8
[45] Ibid I, 12, 7
[46] Ibid 1,13,9
[47] Ibid 1,13,9
[48] Ibid I, 12, 7
[49] This appears to be Anthony Kenny’s view in Aquinas (Oxford University Press 1980), p.9.
[50] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles Bk 1, ch 30, par 4
[51] Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality(University of Notre Dame Press 2006), p.230
[52] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles Bk 1, ch 5, par 6
[53] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1. 12,5. I am indebted to this reference from A.N.Williams discussion in The Ground of union (Oxford University Press 1999) p.38
[54] Norman Geisler, Thomas Aquinas: An Evangelical Appraisal(Baker 1991) p. 43
[55] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a 1,10
[56] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a 1,10
[57] Nicholas M. Healy, Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life (Ashgate 2003) p. 47
[58] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a 1, 1
[59] Ibid 1a 1,1
[60] Ibid 1a 1,6
[61] Ibid 1a, q. 42, art 7
[62] Ibid 1a, q. 32, art 1
[63] Ibid 1a, 1,10 ad 3
[64] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.1,8.
[65] Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Book of Job,13, lecture 1
[66] Plotinus, Enneads II, 4, 11
[67] Ibid V, 3, 13
[68] Ibid V, 5,6
[69] Ibid V, 5,4
[70] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a 1,7
[71] Eg Luther, The Pagan Servitude of the Church: A first Inquiry p310,311 in Woolf, Reformation Writings of Martin Luther Vol 1. (Lutterworth Press 1952).
[72] Ibid p.312.
[73] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy ch 2 140A, (ibid p.149)
[74] I am grateful to Joseph Vnuk for this reference which is taken from Aquinas. Summa Theologiae I. 108
[75] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles Bk1, ch. 4, 1-3.
[76] Eg John Wycliff: “We will give God’s Word to God’s people and God’s Spirit will teach them”. So Luther aware of the pseudepigraphy of Dionysius can regard him as “more of a Platonist than a Christian” and advise his readers “(not) to give the least weight to these books.” (which were a favourite of his nemesis John Eck)!
[77] Karen Kilby, Aquinas, the Trinity and the Limits of Understanding, 2008 p.22-23
[78] Eg by apophatic writer Peter Rollins, in How (not) to speak about God, (SPCK 2006)
[79] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, 1,10.
[80] Ibid. I. 66 ar.1
[81] “That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal, and presupposes it”. (ibid 1,1,10)
[82] Ibid Ia, 1,10
[83] Ibid 1a,1,10
[84] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1, q.40, a.2
[85] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1, q.40, a.2
[86] Ibid.
[87] Herbert McCabe, Aquinas on the Trinity in Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (ed), Sllence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, (Cambridge 2008) p. 92
[88] Barth takes Aquinas’ definition (together with his assumption of Divine simplicity) as a springboard for dispensing of the term ‘person’ altogether since it might carry an unacceptable (for Barth) connotation of ‘a centre of consciousness’. He replaces it with his preferred term ‘mode of being’. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 1:1, (T&T Clark International), 2004
[89] And this is in spite of the fact that Augustine also held (inconsistently in my view) to a strong view of Divine Simplicity.
[90] Augustine, De Trinitate, VII, 2 (219-220).
[91] Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, (SCM 1981), p. 172
[92] Gregory of Nyssa, An answer to Ablabius: That we should not think of saying that there are three Gods. In Hardy, Christology of the Later Fathers (Westminster Press 1954)
[93] Basil, Letter 38, par 2
[94] Augustine rejected this illustration, though it can be defended imperfectly and by analogy. God is not in a genus, as Aquinas recognised. God is the category in which we all participate contingently and which we understand analogically.
[95]Scott, Howard, J. ‘Toward a Biblical Model of the social trinity: avoiding equivocation of nature and order’, (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Sep 2004)
[96] Eg W.Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, T&T Clark Ltd 1991, p.319
[97] ST, 1a, q.3, art 7
[98] Eg Charles Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection (Illinois 1962).
[99] David Ray Griffin, God, power, and evil: a process theodicy, (Westminster John Knox Press, 2004)
[100] Eg Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, (SCM 1981),
[101] Keith Ward, Rational Theology and the Creativity of God, (Blackwell 1982), ch 3-4.
[102] W.Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, T&T Clark Ltd 1991,
[103] Alvin Plantinga, Does God have a nature? (Marquette University Press, Milwaukee 1980).
[104] Parmenides of Elea, Fragments: A Text and translation with an introduction by David Gallop, (University of Toronto Press 1984), Fragment 8 lines 22-25.
[105] The ‘history of God’ is a Moltmannian term. (also used by Pannenberg who interprets theology through the lens of history).
[106] ST, 1, q.28, art1
[107] ST, 1, q.28, art 3
[108] ST, 1, q. 28, art 2 italics mine.
[109] ibid p. 41 quoting Summa 1a, q.28, art 3, ad 1
[110] Cornelius Plantinga Jr. in Feenstra and Plantinga (ed), Trinity, Incarnation and Atonement, (University of Notre Dame Press 1989). p.41
[111] Karen Kilby, op cit.
[112] M.O’C.Walshe (ed and translator), Meister Eckhart: Sermons&Treatises Volume 1 (Element Books 1979). P. xxxiv
[113] Ibid p.l(It could be countered in Eckhart’s defence that Pope John XX11 was also a heretic in condemning the poverty of Francis, but this would be an ad hominem argument! Eckhart’s view really is heresy because it departs from the orthodox formulation of the Trinity and not just because this particular pope said it did).
[114] Louis Macniece, ‘Snow’
[115] Eg Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion.
[116] It may also be incompatible with his doctrine of analogy if we take Geisler’s interpretation of it as based on univocality of definitions. According to Summa Contra Gentiles Bk 1, ch 32, par 4 even definitions cannot be predicated of God univocally because there are no accidents in God as a result of Divine simplicity. Geisler’s theory could be salvaged however if we take Aquinas to mean merely that the definitions are applied differently. (an interpretation supported by SCG Bk 1, ch 34 par 5).
In
his previous Quodlibet articles,
Anton Karl Kozlovic explicated the religious films fears associated with: (a)
satanic infusion, graven images and iconographic perversion, (b) cinematic
sinfulness, and (c) being sacrilegious, criticising or devaluing the faith. In
this latest instalment, he explores the religious film fears of abandoning
orthodoxy, paganisation and the ascendancy of post-Christian culture. Utilising
humanist film criticism as the guiding analytical lens, the critical film and
religion literature was briefly reviewed and the popular
This
is the second century of the “Age of Hollywood” (Paglia, 1994, p. 12) during
the ascendancy of moving image culture wherein movies1 have become “the
lingua franca of the twentieth
century” (Vidal, 1993, p. 2) that will continue to dominate throughout the
post-Millennial period. Unfortunately, they have also generated intense fears
within Christian communities throughout its history because of their potential to
corrupt morally, socially and doctrinally, as self-evident by the many provocatively
titled books against the media, such as: The
Devil’s Camera: Menace of a Film-ridden World (Burnett & Martell,
1932), What is Wrong with the Movies?
(Rice, 1938), Hell Over Hollywood: The
Truth about the Movies (Gilbert, 1942), What’s
Wrong with the Cinema? (Derham, 1948), Hollywood
Cesspool: A Startling Survey of Movieland Lives and Morals, Pictures and
Results (Sumner, 1955), The Menace of
the Religious Movie (Tozer, 1974) and Evil
Influences: Crusades Against the Mass Media (Starker, 1989).
These
film fears were sometimes justified and sometimes exaggerated, but whatever the
intrinsic merits of their arguments; they are legitimate concerns that can
dramatically impact upon congregations, the discipline of religion studies2
and its teachers, thus warranting serious consideration. Consequently, the film
fears associated with satanic infusion, graven images and iconographic
perversion (Kozlovic, 2003a), cinematic sinfulness (Kozlovic, 2003b), and being
sacrilegious, criticising or devaluing the faith (Kozlovic, 2004) were investigated.
However, there are still many more fears to deal with to assuage the anxious
and smooth the pathway for the exciting and emerging interdisciplinary field of
religion-and-film (aka sacred
cinema, spiritual cinema, holy film, cinematic theology, cinematheology,
theo-film, celluloid religion, film-and-faith, film-faith dialogue).
To
aide its growth into an even more powerful pedagogic tool, such fears have to
be acknowledged, examined and rationally addressed. Not only is this important
for the future of the field, but as Robert K. Johnston (2001, p. 15)
appreciated, the dialogue between theology and film is a valid contemporary
means of revitalising religion studies itself, otherwise: “the church risks
irrelevancy without its walls and complacency within. We have boxed in God and
the results are proving disastrous. New eyes are called for as we attempt to
see God anew.” Indeed, “Christians cannot afford to be out of touch with popular films if they are to remain in touch with the swirling currents of
contemporary society” (Maher, 2002, p. 5). Besides, such “is the power and
influence of the modern mass media, that to a large extent it has replaced the
church as the major institution in society which informs public opinion,
constructs our values and provides us with the stories that will shape our
outlook on life” (Jenkins, 2003, p. 21). Therefore, it strongly behooves the religion
professions to look seriously at this extra-ecclesiastical resource rather than
just lament films’ existence and its supposedly deleterious influence upon our
youth and society.
The
writer argues that one should employ the popular Hollywood cinema3 as
an essential component of a 21st century theology that proactively embraces
rather than rejects our media-saturated society, especially if it wishes to
remain culturally relevant to our film-savvy youth, and allow the profession to
thrive in our increasingly post-print, postmodern and post-Christian world. As
Bob McKinney (2003, p. 13) advised his teaching staff: “Learn to use the trends
and current events displayed by the media as resources for connecting faith
with the real world and thereby teaching biblical truths. Develop the ability
to see God at work in all things”
including the popular cinema because as Marilyn Gustin put it: “Do we imagine
than when we step onto a sailboat, God stays ashore? Or that when we enter a
movie, God waits on the sidewalk?” (Brussat & Brussat, 1996, p. 537). Of
course not! Indeed, seeking out the flickering light of God in the popular cinema
is nowadays a necessary part of ones’ Christian duty to “discern the signs of
the times” (Matt. 16:3).4
Utilising
humanist film criticism as the guiding analytical lens (i.e., examining the textual
world inside the frame, but not the
world outside the frame—Bywater & Sobchack,
1989), the
critical film and religion literature was briefly reviewed and the popular Hollywood
cinema selectively scanned to reveal the film fears associated with abandoning
orthodoxy, paganisation, and the ascendancy of post-Christian culture. The
following is an introductory explication of these fears interleaved with
pro-film justifications, defences and other counter-arguments for utilising feature
films for religion studies. Copious inter-genre exemplars were employed to
demonstrate the range, relevance and diversity of the phenomena.
Popular
feature films can provide valid extra-canonical insights, but whose
non-traditional sources are potential concerns for some religionists. For
example, Edward Fischer (1977, p. 56) reported how a “priest said that when he
saw, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter he
came away feeling that it had done more for him than a spiritual retreat, an
admission he made with some embarrassment because things are not supposed to
happen that way.” Pastor Edward McNulty (1998) confessed:
I first became aware of the spiritual effect of film
almost thirty years ago while watching Franco Zeffirelli’s “Brother Sun, Sister Moon.” For its two
hour duration I sat in the darkened theater with a group of strangers and was
totally mesmerized as the story of Francis of Assisi transported me to another
time and place, the effect strongest in the scene in which Francis was joined
by former friends and poor villagers in restoring the ruined church where
Christ first had called him.
The lush photography, fine performances of the
actors, and lilting musical score by Donovan all contributed to an experience
in which my own calling to serve God through the church was reaffirmed and
renewed. I left the theater feeling lifted high, but was unable to explain the
feeling the next day to my wife or anyone else who had not seen the film. Many years
later, when I visited Assisi itself and sat quietly for a while in the little
church of San Damiano, I felt a peace and a gentle presence, but no more
strongly than I had felt at the movie theater. This feeling of Presence, of
receiving a glimpse of the Holy, has occurred at a number of other film
viewings, including “The Pawnbroker,”
Diary of a Country Priest,” “Babette’s Feast,” “Romero,” “Eleni,” “Field of Dreams,” “Grand Canyon,” “Jesus of
Montreal,” “Places in the Heart,”
“The Fisher King,” “The Bagdad Cafe,” “Rhapsody in August,” “Tender
Mercies,” “Secrets and Lies,” and
“The Spitfire Grill” (pp. 1-2).
These
heart-felt confessions proved that popular films can indeed be “pearls of
revelation” (Verbeek, 1997, p. 172), and that finding “a film that which seeds
true nourishment for our soul is better than gold” (Sinetar, 1993, p. 5), if
not the Bible itself, which film can never replace, only buttress. However, if
one watched the French comedy Let There
Be Light, it showed the possibility of film being the revelatory medium of the
Divine in the future. God had decided that humanity needed an updated version
of His holy message for modern times, so he wrote the perfect film script and through
various human intermediaries, had the movie made. It impressed everyone who saw
it, including the Devil!
That
playful scenario is not as far-fetched as it may at first appear. As Anglican
Christian, Sally Cloke (2003, p. 5) lamented about the Bible: “God could have
chosen any art form—as the religious ‘stories’ of other traditions make
extensive use of dance, painting and theatre. But we’re stuck with the book—and
at the mercy of the writer,” but not necessarily for eternity. Of course, film
technology did not exist in Jesus’ time, yet, is it too outrageous to consider
that when Jesus eventually returns at the Second Coming that he, his followers
and the media, would not use the
communications tools of the day to transmit, document and disseminate his
sacred words and images? Let alone preserve that archival material for
posterity and repeated showing during religious instruction? One would suggest a
resounding ‘No!’ After all, Jesus was a man of the people whose teaching
strategy was to go to the people,
speak to them in their language about
their concerns so as to teach them his desires.
For
religionists suspicious of film per se,
these extra-canonical insights can manifest as turf wars, especially when they see
filmmakers as professional rivals who should not be doing their sacred
work. This source of anxiety may manifest as a concern over getting the
theological/religious/biblical “facts” wrong (i.e., monitoring the scholarly
sins of omission and commission), or worries about distorting “the true meaning”
(i.e., their specific interpretation of scriptural passages, meanings and
intent), or qualms about promoting sectarian views anathema to their own
religious stance (e.g., rejecting any suggestion that God is dead).
Therefore,
such fearful religionists would desperately need to control the cinema as a
form of religious/moral/ideational quality control (i.e., the traditional
gatekeeper function). The most obvious historical manifestations of this film
fear were the genesis of the Legion of Decency, the National Catholic Office
for Motion Pictures, and the many other associated censorial organisations-cum-name
changes (Black, 1994, 1998; Skinner, 1993; Walsh, 1996). These religious bodies
were deliberately designed to regulate films’ content, public distribution, and
audience viewing habits, with varying degrees of influence and impact.
In
other quarters, popular films were seen as a pagan challenge to the authority
of the Church itself, and thus another major turf war in the making. For
example, during the 1930s, the Most Revd. John Cantwell (1936, p. 21) was
concerned that seventy-five per cent of scriptwriters were pagans who practised
infidelity and cared nothing for decency, good taste, refinement, respect for
religion or spiritual values. As he claimed:
So great is the power of the motion picture to
impress the youth of the land that one hour spent in the darkness of a cinema
palace, intent on the unfolding of a wrong kind of story, can and frequently
does nullify years of careful training on the part of the Church, the school,
the home. So great is the problem suggested by the wrong kind of talking
picture that drastic efforts must be launched at once if we are to stave off
national disaster (Cantwell, 1936, p. 25).
Similarly,
Dan Gilbert (1942, p. 11) argued in Hell
Over Hollywood: The Truth About the Movies that Tinsel Town had
“established a sort of uncrowned and unofficial dictatorship” over manners and
morals, standards and tastes, modes of dress and speech, and the ways of
thought and personal conduct. In short, societal influences that the Church
considered were its professional domain. Furthermore, Gilbert argued that:
These
comments were a heart-felt attempt to character assassinate the cinema, albeit,
for good and pious reasons. They were designed to put the fear of God into the
religious community by evoking God’s traditional enemy, Satan (aka the Devil,
the great dragon, old serpent, Lucifer—Rev. 12:9; Isa.
·
It violated the scriptural law of hearing.
·
It embodied the mischievous notion that religion is, or can
be made, a form of entertainment.
·
Religious movies are a menace to true religion because they
embodied acting which was a violation of sincerity.
·
The filmmakers owed it to the public to give biblical
authority for their act which they have not done.
·
God only ordained four methods by which truth should
prevail, and the religious movie was not one of them.
·
Religious movies are out of harmony with the spirit of the
Scriptures and contrary to the mood of true Godliness.
·
They have harmful effect upon everyone associated with them.
Although
each of these propositions are defendable historically, scripturally, logically,
theologically, philosophically, spiritually and pragmatically (Cosandey,
Gaudreault & Gunning, 1992; Ludmann, 1958), it is an important cultural indicator of the strength of anti-film
feeling that is only three decades old. Nor is such anti-film prejudice
out-dated today. As Margaret Miles (1996, pp. xiii-xiv) reported: “many people,
including some of my academic friends, believe that one should not study
popular films because one will--at best--become tainted with their triviality,
their invidious superficiality; at worse, one will absorb their highly
questionable values,” or as Revd. Larry J. Kreitzer (1999, p. 30) heard when a
colleague found out he was working on another volume in his fiction and film
series: “When are you going to do some serious
New Testament work?”
Films
were frequently cast as the boogeyman in many a mother’s warning to her child.
For example, Paul Crouch, executive producer of The Omega Code reported within his DVD special feature Behind the Codes: The Making of the Feature
how his mother filled him with fear over the incompatibility of feature films
and Jesus Christ. When he disobeyed her and watched a Roy Rogers and Dale Evans
movie, he was miserable throughout because he expected Jesus to catch and
punish him for his transgression. Clive Marsh (1997, p. 33) suggested that anti-film
prejudice occurs because: “Theology which takes film seriously reminds itself
of its own ephemeral character.” After all, when all the holy prophecies are
fulfilled, the Second Coming came and went, and the priests’ religious
care-takers roles were fulfilled, what is left for this professional class of
sacred devotees now out of work?
Another
disturbing possibility is that the popular cinema can showcase non-orthodox
Christianity and foreign religious traditions. For example, Michael Medved
(1993) was deeply concerned with
They follow the Tibetan
Book of the Dead and the spiritual guidebooks of L. Ron Hubbard far more
closely than they follow the Bible; they reflect
Yet,
without any statistical evidence, one suspects that more Christians and Jews
live in
…three popular films have been released which feature
explicitly Gnostic themes, evidence that the myth is alive and active in the
imaginations of Xers. The Truman Show,
This
feature hints at a post-Christianity metamorphosing into a pre- or
parallel-Christianity that has already accepted the fusion of sound and image, text
and screen as normal and their
cultural birth right. Indeed, for the American writer John Updike, movies were a
secular church. As he confessed:
…the cinema has done more for my spiritual life than
the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big
screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and
more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and
action-controlling images. During a certain phase in my life film was a
substitute for religion (Herrmann, 2003, p. 190).
Peter
MacNicol similarly claimed: “No priest or homily so calibrated my moral compass
as did movies. No classroom lecture so humanized me as did
Therefore,
the religion professions should take more seriously the possibility that the
popular cinema can act as a substitute for organised religion, as well as be a
significant shaper of human consciousness and values, let alone be a phenomenal
technological medium for transmitting religious ideas worldwide. In fact,
Christians in this post-Millennial age increasingly want the cinema as part of their regular theological diet. As
Robert K. Johnston (2001, p. 14) noted: “With attendance at church stagnating
and with movie viewing at theatres and through video stores at an all-time
high, Christians find themselves wanting to get back into the [God/theology]
conversation.”
This
is surely one of those “signs of the times” (Matt 16:3) that warrants further
investigation, in addition to being a powerful pedagogic tool with which to
explore religion, theology and Scripture, whether in the classroom, home or
pulpit. However, before this cinematic tool can become a practical reality, a
necessary first step upon its developmental path is to acknowledge the
sacramental dimension of film itself. That is, to appreciate that a secular
medium can legitimately give lessons in spirituality to an audience composed of
believers and non-believers alike.
As
Fr. Andrew Greeley (1988, p. 248) argued: “film is a sacramental art form par
excellence. Sacramental films are not for the Church a luxury or a utility but
a fundamental and essential necessity.” Why? Because “either as a fine or
lively art nothing is quite so vivid as film for revealing the presence of God.
Film in the hands of a skilled sacrament-maker is uniquely able to make “epiphanies”
happen” (pp. 245-246), and thus a hierophanic medium for revealing theological
truth (Kozlovic, 2000). Fr. Greeley (1988, p. 254) also warned that because “we
ignore it when we are not condemning it is sad proof of how much we are cut off
from our own traditions.” Yet, in “the contemporary postmodern situation, it is
precisely the film image that has the power to signal, in a manner accessible
and reliable for everyone, that religion is not a dried-up existential and
historical source” (De Bleeckere, 1997, p. 101). Film really can make religion
live anew, just as Robert K. Johnston (2001, p. 15) claimed.
Fortunately,
this film diet deficiency is slowly being corrected within the scholarly
community, as evidenced by Peter Fraser’s (1998) Images of the Passion: The Sacramental Mode in Film which explored
sacramentalism as a religious film style in such diverse features as: A Farewell to Arms, Andrei Rublev, Babette’s
Feast, Black Robe, Diary of a Country Priest, Gallipoli, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Hardcore, Jesus of Montreal,
The Mission, On the Waterfront, Rome, Open City, The Word and You Only Live
Once. Not surprisingly, Presbyterian Charles
It seems to us an essential calling of the church,
synagogue, temple or mosque to help people interpret the “signs of the times.”
And when you think about it, movies are one of the most revealing signals of
what is happening in American [and Western] culture. Our movies often reveal
the central hopes and fears of people who are trying to make their way through
these confusing times (p. 6).
Interestingly,
Raymond Schroth (1995) saw the screen character of Fr. Leclerc (Gilles Pelletier)
in Jesus of Montreal as a living
embodiment of the Roman Catholic Church’s fear of change. As he argued:
The film’s most pathetic, though poignant, character
is the shrine priest, who first orders the play renewed but backs off in fear
when it succeeds and church authorities protest the play’s disturbing content.
Leclerc joined the priesthood as a boy, hoping to use his theatrical talent.
Now he trembles in fear of his religious superiors, but lacks the courage to
leave the priesthood. Though his woman friend would marry him, he wobbles in
face of the “outside” world and marriage’s risks and responsibilities. Clearly,
he symbolises the post-Vatican II church--intimidated by the forces let loose
by renewal, and lacking the religious faith and emotional resources to ride the
rough seas of change (p. 109).
Other
religionists objected to the popular cinema because they considered that sacred
subject matter was just too complex to vulgarise in feature films, or when it
came to filming the life of Jesus Christ, it was “un-do-able” (Tatum &
Ingram, 1975, p. 471), even if his message was filmable. Others were more
concerned about religious authenticity, accuracy and the attendant fear of
incompleteness. For example:
In 1921 a priest had written to the Ecclesiastical Journal asking if it
would be appropriate for the clergy to play themselves in the movies. The
answer was definitely not; “those finer qualities of the true priest” were too
subtle to be captured on the screen, and anything
While
accepting popular films as potentially worthy of aesthetic consumption, some
viewers only wanted to see “good/wholesome” films, thereby establishing a de facto religious film orthodoxy. Yet,
even this simple desire is fraught with complexities. For example, Peter Fraser
railed against the evoking of simplistic, pro-Christian rules that may not be
effective when it comes to watching films in the real world. Consider:
…“I won’t allow my young kids to see a PG film, but
all Disney films are fine.” But are all Disney films fine? Have Christian
parents watched all of The Little Mermaid
or Aladdin or Pocahontas and given thought to the messages of these films? One
suggests that a sixteen-year-old should be defiant of her father and pursue the
person most incompatible with her. One implies that all first dates should end
in a kiss. One distorts American history beyond recognition in an age when
students a need prompting to name the man who discovered
Christian
filmmaker Lloyd Billingsley (1989) encountered even greater difficulties when
he recommended Chariots of Fire to a
Christian friend who wanted assurances about its “Christian” nature before
watching it:
I replied that I didn’t know if Chariots of Fire was a Christian film, but that one of its major
characters was a committed Christian. I thought this explanation would suffice,
but it did not. One Christian character, my friend insisted, did not a
Christian film make. As the discussion unfolded, I raised the question whether
there was any such thing as a specifically Christian movie. My friend was a
still photographer of considerable talent. I asked him if the photos he took of
trees and rock were “Christian” pictures. If the subject of one of his
portraits was a faithful pastor, would this automatically make it a Christian
photograph? What if a Zoroastrian priest or atheist had taken the same
photograph? Would it still qualify as Christian? Did he perhaps use Christian
film or a Christian camera? Or, if a picture of the
Conversely, how about a picture of, say, Billy
Graham, with his face cropped just above the eyebrows? What about an
overexposed, out-of-focus shot of Chartres Cathedral, with a garbage truck
parked in front? Would these poor efforts qualify as Christian pictures, even
if a Christian took them? No clear answers to the questions emerged. I then
applied this line of reasoning to Chariots
of Fire. I didn’t know the religious beliefs of those who made the film,
but I assumed they were not Christians, since few in the film business are. Nor
were all the characters in the story Christian, and no one gets converted.
Moreover, it is made clear that the Christian character meets an untimely
demise. My photographer friend was still not satisfied, but his sole answer to
these arguments was to repeat his original question. I believe that at one
point I asked if The Ten Commandments
was a “Jewish film.” We eventually called a truce (pp. ix-x).
These
debates are intriguing and worthy of further philosophical analysis, but beyond
the scope of this paper. Fortunately, Fr. Andrew Greeley’s argument concerning
cinematic portrayals of God can be fruitfully applied to these issues and other
religious film debates. Namely:
Is any image adequate and accurate? I would rather
say that it is surely not adequate because no metaphor for God, no collection
of metaphors is adequate to describe the ineffable, but that it is accurate as
far as it goes--and perhaps a good deal more accurate than that presented in
most Sunday homilies or theological tracts. But does not this image
anthropomorphize God, a certain kind of intellectual will ask? Surely it does,
but is there any other way of speaking about God except through metaphor?
Or
as the Lebanese mystical poet Kahlil Gibran (1972, p. 66) succinctly put it in The Prophet: “Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth” [my emphasis]. After all, no
one person, book, image, medium or institution has a monopoly on truth, and there
is also a very thin line between religious fact and religious fiction,
regardless of the intentions of the author. As William Telford (1995) explained:
The representation of Christ in fiction and film is
based on the representation of Christ in the Gospels, as is the scholar’s
Christ. Indeed it is based on no less than four
such representations. Is the Markan Christ, or the Matthean Christ, or the
Lukan Christ or the Johannine Christ to be considered any less a ‘construction’
than the Kazantzakis Christ? Even when the search for ‘the Galilean’ is
conducted with all the scholarly precision of a Gerd Theissen, the fact that
our knowledge of Jesus is after all based on such literary sources and representations should give us pause when
seeking the answer to historical questions, and make us consider all the more
keenly the part played by the imagination in the creation of so-called
‘historical tradition.’ Indeed, recognizing the power of the literary and
religious imagination, as these studies lead us to do, serves to expose the
relative subjectivity of all our efforts to secure facts in areas like religion
(p. 385).
Notwithstanding
this argument, Stanley Grenz (1996) posited that the popular cinema is the new
cultural foundation of our society, and should be respected because:
Living in a postmodern society means inhabiting a
film-like world -- a realm in which truth and fiction merge. We look at the
world in the same way we look at films, suspicious that what we see around us
may in fact be illusion. Despite a film’s disjunctions, however, the viewer can
at least be certain that it expresses something about the minds that produced
it; the filmmaker provides an often unattended center to the world the film
creates (p. 33).
Nor
is this directorial input necessarily a bad thing, for as Bruce Stewart (1972,
p. 43) argued: “the cinema has given us Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, as profound a bit of Christianity as
you could hope to encounter in months of churchgoing.” One suspects that in most
cases, a film will be remembered longer than any specific Sunday sermon! Just
as importantly, one should not overlook the fact that mere exposure to the
cinematic Christ can prompt (if not actually cause) radical religious
conversions. For example, Geoffrey Macnab (1993, p. 14) reported, that The Mastership of Christ was shown in
“the
Some
religionists were concerned that even if a religious film was made, its
quasi-religious power was prone to being transformed into something tawdry—the
dreaded kitsch art, that is, pretentious piousness wrapped in kitsch
reverentiality (Brown, 1975; Dorfles, 1968). For example, Lotte Eisner (1968)
claimed that:
In Cecil B. de Mille’s first [The] Ten Commandments
(1922) there are grandiose sequences such as the pursuit of the Jews by the
Egyptians and the crossing of the
Yet,
the “chief aim of religious kitsch is to justify the ways of man to man by
making him Feel Good, all safe and snug deep down inside” (Brown, 1975, p. 44).
This is what DeMille’s The Ten
Commandments (1956) was partially designed to do, in fact:
…religion as spectacle is the longest-running road
show in
Therefore,
it is not too surprising to find that the supposedly kitsch The Ten Commandments (1956) was considered
virtuous by Steve Simels (1993, p. 75) who claimed: “Cecil B. DeMille’s
kitsch-run-riot sensibility makes this biggest of Fifties blockbusters
something to marvel at even now. Bernstein’s wonderfully overripe score matches
it note for grandiose note.” In fact, watching DeMille’s Technicolor Moses movie
was part of the Passover festivities (and associated Seder rituals and Pesach
stories) for at least one Jewish elder—Ted Roberts. As he playfully reported:
Around Passover I spread the word to the kids and
grandkids. “Channel 10,
Not
only is religious showmanship a prime site for kitsch religiosity, but the very
nature of filmmaking itself can contribute to it. As George MacDonald Fraser
(1996) argued:
…more than ordinary films, they [historical filmmakers]
are liable to strike a false note. Those who make them know that while millions
of dollars’ worth of planning and building, and painstaking research beyond the
dreams of many academics, and sheer technical brilliance, can pass without much
notice, one bad line (and it doesn’t even have to be a bad line, it just has to
sound amiss), or one visual anachronism, or piece of unhappy casting, or
directorial slip, will have the customers falling about. There have been enough
of these - as well as more culpable commissions of bad taste, wilful
philistinism, and sheer ignorance - to give costume movies, if not a bad name,
at least a patronised and faintly derided status. My history teacher was
reluctant to see The Sign of the Cross
because he feared he might be offended by the sight of gladiators who chewed
gum and talked like gangsters (pp. 5-6).
Interestingly,
Fr. Daniel Lord complained that DeMille’s religious film The Sign of the Cross was not immoral, just uninspiring. As he
reported:
We had been waiting so eagerly for this picture; we
hadn’t had a religious picture for so long; we thought this would be a
magnificent story of the martyrs…and the martyrs played a secondary part to the
pomp and circumstances that was Pagan Rome. The Jesuits of the city saw the
film just yesterday. I’ve only seen a few of them. Those that I saw took pretty
much this attitude: “Morally, there is really not much to object to. The dance
is bad; the bath is unnecessary; the undressing of the girl who joins the
empress indelicate; but in the main it is not nearly as objectionable in those
parts as the advertisements and the criticisms had led us to expect. But it is
ethical rather than Christian in the motivation of the martyrs. They seem in
general a rather sorry lot compared with the pagans who rush triumphantly in
power and pleasure through the scenes. Their martyrdom lacks the elements that
would inspire others with the same idea; Marcus plainly does not believe and
simply dies, except for a brief flash of possible [God?] light, to be with the
girl. There is a feeling that many of the group go out to die under the lash
rather than voluntarily. We were not inspired by the Christians’ going to death
(quoted in Winters, 1996, p. 90).
It
was an assessment cynically confirmed by Roger Dooley (1981, p. 279) who said:
“except by implication [it was] no more a tract for promoting Christianity than
the anti-Nazi films were propaganda for Judaism.”
For
some, the kitsch potential of films came a poor second to their alleged evil
impact, particularly its anti-literacy, anti-education and anti-cultural
influence upon society. As Steven Starker (1989) argued in Evil Influences: Crusades Against the Mass Media:
…literacy and intelligence also were at risk. The
power of their attraction was equated with a surrender of the will, which
transformed human beings into passive repositories for all manner of
suggestion…Intellectuals of all persuasions…found that movies represented a
distinctly unwelcomed break from the primacy of the written word. Even a “bad”
novel maintained some baseline of literacy in readers, providing an avenue of
eventual improvement through “better” readings. Movies, on the other hand,
offered sensation, emotion, and entertainment through mere images, without
requiring or sustaining literacy. This seemed a return to a more primitive
pre-alphabet form of communication. Some feared the death knell of culture and
the written word had sounded in
This
is still a prominent fear today, as evidenced by John Davies (1996, p. xii) who
argued in Educating Students in a
Media-Saturated Culture: “Television, video, film, and popular music
require no particular skills to be used. Listening/viewing can be done by anybody
at any time!” Even Christian filmmaker Lloyd Billingsley (1989, p. 205) argued
that a “cinematic culture, practically speaking, amounts to no true culture at
all” because “the language of cinema narrows our imagination by substituting
its images and memory for our own. Perhaps that is why Christians have
historically been people of the word more than people of the image.” Yet, this
is not strictly true, even if a historical excuse for eschewing feature films
in pedagogic contexts today. As Commonweal
film critic Richard Alleva (1999) passionately argued:
All my life I had been told by teachers that reading
was greater than movie-going because you had to work at reading, had to
decipher the words, turn them into images in your mind, had to work at understanding
what the author had to say, and it was the work of reading that consecrated
that activity and made literature a greater form than film, which was scarcely
art at all, since movies just flowed in front of your eyes and did all your
imagining for you. [Not so!]…To truly watch a movie was to read it, i.e. to see
all that was put before you and to question yourself about what was shown (p.
468).
Or
as Richard M. Gollin (1993) put it:
Supposedly a passive medium but in fact highly
interactive, films require subtler acts of perception and discrimination than
we like to acknowledge. Their narrative, visual, and aural intricacy should not
surprise us, since films include the expressive and persuasive conventions of
virtually every earlier art form, as well as some unique to themselves (p.
391).
This
is presumably the underlying reason why S. Brent Plate (2003, p. 159) lamented
the fact that a serious cinematic theology had to take a more critical stance
toward the re-creation of the world by film. His prescription entailed learning
the art and science of cinema to more fully understand, deploy and appreciate
the true value of the medium, and because: “Unless theologians and religious
leaders can critically examine the formal nature and modes of production of
film itself (everything from cinematography to mise-en-scene to editing), they will do little to build a bridge
between theology and culture.” It was sound advice and the basis for a second
strand of religion-and-film studies.
The
popular
…I have found that inter-disciplinary studies such as
those offered here have proved to be enormously rewarding professionally, as
well as immensely enjoyable personally. I am more than excited than I have ever
been before about the relevance of the New Testament for the contemporary
reader, and find again and again in teaching situations that biblical stories
suddenly spring to life for students when they are approached through more
familiar subjects, such as those contained in literature and film. I remain
confident that inter-disciplinary hermeneutics is a sign of the future (p. 30).
One
can only agree with him. Further research into the emerging and exciting
interdisciplinary field of religion-and-film is warranted, recommended and is already
long overdue.
Notes
1. Although there are real ontological
differences between “movies,” “film,” “cinema,” “video,” “TV movie,” “DVD,”
“VCD,” “MPEG-4,” “Internet movie” etc., they all deal with audiovisual images,
and so will be treated herein as essentially interchangeable.
2. The term “religion studies” will be
used herein as an umbrella term to cover the professional disciplines of
“religion,” “studies in religion,” “religious education,” “theology,” “faith
education,” “new religious movements” etc., thus avoiding needless repetition
and boredom for both reader and writer.
3. The term “
4. The Authorized King James Version of
the Bible (KJV aka AV) will be used throughout, unless quoting other
translations, because most of the biblical phrases that are embedded in Western
culture are from the King James Version, which is the most widely used English
translation of the Bible today (Taylor, 1992, p. ix, 71).
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Bresson)
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Robinson)
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Gilliam)
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Pasolini)
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Ellis)
Jesus of
Let There Be Light (Que la Lumiere Soit) (1998, dir. Arthur Joffe)
The Little Mermaid (1989, dir. John Musker
& Ron Clements)
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Ginever)
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Larry Wachowski)
The
The Omega Code (1999, dir. Rob
Marcarelli)
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The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, dir. Carl Theodor
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The Pawnbroker (1965, dir. Sidney
Lumet)
Places in the Heart (1984, dir. Robert
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& Eric Goldberg)
Rhapsody in August (1991, dir. Akira
Kurosawa)
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Secrets & Lies (1996, dir. Mike Leigh)
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DeMille)
The Spitfire Grill (1996, dir. Lee David
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The Ten Commandments (1923, dir. Cecil B.
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The Ten Commandments (1956, dir. Cecil B.
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Tender Mercies (1982, dir. Bruce
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The Truman Show (1998, dir. Peter Weir)
The Word (aka Ordet) (1957, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer)
You Only Live Once (1937, dir. Fritz Lang)
In this
article, it is inquired which reasons are decisive for acting in accordance
with divine commands, and whether these can be regarded as moral reasons; the
emphasis lies on Christianity. To this effect, the position of God as a – basic
– lawgiver is expounded, with special attention to the role His power plays. By
means of an account of the grounds given (in the Bible) to obey God, the
selfish motives in this respect are brought to light. It is questioned whether
any other elements can be discerned, particularly from a meta-ethical
perspective.
Introduction
An appeal to
‘good’ and ‘bad’ actions in religions is evident. Stealing, e.g., is considered
to be wrong, whereas giving to the poor is prescribed as good. In this article,
I will examine to what extent it may be maintained that such moral elements are
indeed inherent in divine commands or exhortations; I will focus on the
Christian faith. In section 1, two positions are outlined. Those who indicate
some things to be good or bad as such, irrespective of God’s ruling, and the
thinkers who emphasize God’s radical power and who state that God decides these
matters, thus arguing a radical omnipotence, are juxtaposed, although their
positions may not differ greatly from an ethical (or meta-ethical) viewpoint.
Section 2 is focused on the
consequences of these alternative outlooks. If there are such things as good
and bad actions, it is important to find out whether these are respectively
prescribed and abhorred (subsection 2.1). A number of Biblical passages may
illustrate the reasons to display a certain behavior. Subsection 2.2 briefly
explores the second perspective stated in section 1.
Section 3 presents an alternative; the goal is to be as critical as
possible in analyzing the reasons to adhere to the commands one is to obey. In
particular, it is inquired which role selfishness plays; is an act of altruism
possible? I have not limited the research to religion here, but have tried to
find a broader scope. In section 4, some relevant remaining meta-ethical
questions are dealt with. Some Christian philosophers have, e.g., appealed to
intuitions in order to account for the existence of goodness.
In this article, I attempt to approach matters with an open view, not
dismissing any position a priori. This should lead to a consistent whole and to
credible results.
1. The nature of ‘goodness’ from a religious
perspective
The main
question addressed in this article, whether moral acts can be performed within
a religious scope, raises the subsequent one on what basis goodness can be
acknowledged to exist. Whether this can exist at all is a more fundamental
question, which will be dealt with later, though it is connected with the issue
of the source of goodness, which is the subject-matter of this section.
In Christian philosophy, two
positions can rudimentarily be distinguished. On the one hand, it is stated
that goodness exists as such, God’s commands reflecting this. On the other
hand, it is deemed to be at God’s disposal to determine which acts are good and
which aren’t, rendering goodness contingent in this respect. (The issue
already, in nuce, receives attention
from Plato; in an early work, the question is put forward whether something is
approved of by the gods because it is pious, or, conversely, pious because they
approve of it.[1])
Of course, middle positions are also possible and have even been defended, but
as this is of minor relevance to this article, I will merely deal with the two
options mentioned.
Bonaventura’s line of thought is an
example of the first position. He limits God’s power by stating:
“God is omnipotent, but in such a way that no culpable acts are attributed to Him, such as lying and wanting
evil.” (“[…] Deus est omnipotens, ita tamen, quod ei non attribuuntur actus culpabiles,
utpote mentiri et malle velle […].”);[2] “God’s will
is so right that it can in no way
stray.” (“[Voluntas
Dei] sic est recta, ut nullo modo potest obliquari […].”)[3]
A (or the) right way to
act is presupposed here, independent of God’s decisions. Further,
“The divine omnipotence, through everything, is
irreprehensible, since it only prescribes,
prohibits, or suggests justly; it merely acts
in a good way, and permits nothing
unjustly.” (“[Divina
omnipotentia] per omnia est irreprehensibilis, quia nihil nisi iuste praecipit, prohibit,
vel consulit; nihil agit nisi bene, nihil permittit
iniuste.”)[4]
This
presupposes a (or the) just way to proceed, again independent of God’s
decisions. In a similar vein, Thomas Aquinas indicates some acts to be good or
bad by their kind. (“[…] Quidam actus sunt boni ex genere […]; quidam vero sunt actus
mali ex genere […].”)[5]
Even Damiani, famous for his emphasis on God’s omnipotence,[6] maintains
that God can’t perform an evil act:
“It is clear that God is unable to do something bad, just as He is
ignorant in this regard. For He is unable to lie, or commit perjury, or do
something unjust, nor does He know how to.” (“[…] Videlicet quicquid malum est, sicut
non [Deus] potest agere, ita nescit agere. Non enim potest aut scit mentiri,
vel peiurare, vel iniustum aliquid facere.”)[7]
It would not
contribute to God’s power to engage in such actions, so His being unable to
perform them does not conflict with His omnipotence. From Damiani’s
presentation it appears that his view is similar to Bonaventura’s with regard
to the existence of goodness (and evil). Leibniz presents an additional
argument:
“If it were the case that the works of God are merely good because of
the formal reason that God has performed them, God, knowing that He is their
creator, would only have to observe them afterwards, and deem them good. […]
Furthermore, by saying that things aren’t good by any standard of goodness, but
by God’s will only, one destroys, is seems to me, without thinking, the entire
love of God and His entire glory.” (“Dieu sçachant qu’il en est l’auteur,
n’avoit que faire de les regarder par après, et de les trouver bons […]. Aussi,
disant que les choses ne sont bonnes par aucune regle de bonté, mais par la
seule volonté de Dieu, on détruit, ce me semble, sans y penser, tout l’amour de
Dieu, et toute sa gloire.”)[8]
Leibniz,
then, emphasizes the content of goodness and on that ground wants to cling to
an absolute standard by which God abides.
By contrast, one may argue that God’s power is not limited in this
respect, nor should it be, God Himself determining what it is for something to
be good at all.
“[…] There can be nothing whatsoever which does not depend on God. This
applies not just to everything that subsists, but to all order, every law, and
every reason for anything’s being true or good. If this were not so, then […]
God would not have been completely indifferent with respect to the creation of
what he did in fact create. If some reason for something’s being good had
existed prior to his preordination, this would have determined God to prefer
those things which it was best to do. But on the contrary, just because he
resolved to prefer those things which are now to be done, for this very reason,
in the words of Genesis, ‘they are very good’; in other words, the reason for
their goodness depends on the fact that he exercised his will to make them so.”[10]
It is
difficult to assess the merits of these positions with regard to their claims
on God’s options and (possible) limitations. This would require a more
intricate metaphysical theory than I would pretend to be able to proffer here;
moreover, these thinkers do not, perhaps with the exception of Leibniz, really
produce arguments why their position should be correct and, even if they had
done so, in the absence of a covering, or – as is pertinent to this issue –
God’s eye view, the matter can’t be resolved with a metaphysical analysis.
It is, however, possible to evaluate the positions from a meta-ethical
point of view.[11]
According to the first approach, good and bad exist as absolute standards.[12] An
account is needed why it is good to, e.g., give almonds to the poor, or bad to
lie. In the next section, a number of Biblical sections will be explored in
order to find out whether an answer to this question can be found there.
According to the second approach, in which God determines what ‘good’ and ‘bad’
actions are, an external criterion to obey Him is not available as it is
supposed to be in the first approach, so the question why this should be done
presents itself.
2. The two options explored
In this
section, I will try to establish the tenability of the two positions outlined
in the previous section. Firstly, I will, in subsection 2.1, evaluate the
claims of those who argue that goodness as such exists from a religious (mainly
Christian) point of view, and that it may provide a basis for acting. Secondly,
the basis of God’s position as a fundamental lawgiver, to which the defenders
of the second position adhere, will be investigated in subsection 2.2.
Admittedly, the Bible – presumably having been written in an accessible style –
doesn’t convey a philosophical message,[13] but
that doesn’t mean that the texts should not be analyzed critically.
2.1. The basic ‘goodness’ as a motivational
element
There are a
number of Biblical passages in which ‘good’ deeds are prescribed and ‘bad’ ones
are forbidden. I will argue that the basis for complying with the norms
according to which one is to behave and abstaining from those one is to avoid
has a different basis than an acknowledgement of their being ‘correct’ (or
‘right’) respectively ‘wrong’.
The revelation of the Ten
Commandments is an obvious place to start. These are presented as the
fundamental directives God imposes upon man. According to the first option,
there would be something inherently ‘good’ in obeying these commandments, or
inherently ‘wrong’ in disobeying them. It is clear that adhering to most, or
possibly all of them would contribute to a stable society. The interdiction to
murder (Deuteronomy
Some of the Commandments are not motivated but simply postulated; they
can’t be helpful to this inquiry. In the case of blasphemy, conversely, a
reason is given. This consists in the fact that “[…] the Lord will not hold him
guiltless who takes His name in vain.” (Deuteronomy 5:11). In this case, then,
the (concealed) penalty which is to be bestowed upon the blasphemer is the
basis for keeping to the norm. Similar accounts are given in Deuteronomy
28:15-68, where the curses for disobedience are described.
In the New Testament, the negative effects of failing to comply are, on
the whole, less pungent than in the Hebrew Bible and are presented more subtly.
Still, the basis analysis is the same. Matthew 7:1-2 reads: “Judge not, that ye
be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with
what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” The second verse
gives the explanation – one shouldn’t judge because of the negative effects for
oneself – but even the first verse points to this: there is a necessary
connection between the imperative and the consequence by the use of the
conjunction ‘that’ (‘hina’).[14] It
is hard, then, to evade the conclusion that self-interest is the motivation to
comply. This is also the way the ‘golden rule’[15] is
to be interpreted.[16]
There are also passages in which the negative element is stressed –
e.g., Matthew 26:52 (“[…] All they that take the sword shall perish with the
sword.”) – but the analysis is the same here: don’t partake in ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’
actions because they will reflect on you.[17]
The positive elements, i.e., those which point to rewards, evince the
same analysis as the penal ones outlined above. To commence again with the Ten
Commandments, the Fifth is “Honor thy father and thy mother, as the Lord thy
God hath commanded thee; that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go
well with thee, in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” (Deuteronomy
5:16). In this case, the reason for keeping to the Commandment appears to be
that a reward will follow. No intrinsic reason is given[18][19]
(which may be impossible at any rate, but that will be dealt with further on).
The general motivation is presented in Deuteronomy 29:9: “Keep […] the
words of this covenant, and do them, that ye may prosper in all that ye do.”[20] The
reward for believing and acting as God commands lies in being saved (e.g.,
Matthew 6:1-6,
2.2. God as the basic legislator
The
interpretation of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ actions of the previous subsection
amounts to the conclusion that the basis for acting or refraining lies in the
penalty or reward which may result from it. The question is whether the second
position, according to which God decides what it means for something to be
‘good’ or ‘bad’, may provide another analysis.
A basic given is God’s power to both
reward and punish (Deuteronomy
The problem is evident: if the reason one is to obey God lies in His
position as a legislator (and final judge), there doesn’t seem to be a moral
criterion. It is simply God’s power, and not His or another goodness, which is
decisive.[25]
His authority would be analogous to that of the human legislator. This is an
important given which is to be explored in section 3.
3.1. Selfishness as the pivotal element
Now that the
two positions have been explored, it is time to evaluate them, as will be done
in this subsection and the next. The problem with the first position appears to
be that no explanation is given why
something is good. The Bible mentions the knowledge of good and Evil (Genesis
It seems obvious that, e.g., it is a
good thing to give to the poor and a bad thing to commit murder. If the reasons
why one acts or abstains are investigated, however, the issue may turn out to
be more intricate than it may seem to be at first. In this case, the
self-interest I made explicit in the previous section (where, e.g., the rewards
given by God are decisive) is not at stake, as I already indicated not to focus
on it for now.
A first option is that one simply gives to the poor because one may at
some point in the future be poor oneself; for that reason, one wants others to
remember one’s deed so that they (themselves having acquired enough means in
the meantime) will reciprocate, perhaps for the same reason one oneself gave in
the first place. The act then becomes one of insurance, really; one isn’t sure
whether one will fall on bad times, but should such a situation arise, it is
nice to know there is a chance one won’t be deprived of the basic[26]
needs. The situation is, of course, optimal if one doesn’t have to rely on the
other party’s willingness to return the favor or contributing for another
reason and one lives in a society with a relatively stable system of
distribution.
Such a system of distribution has been implemented and expanded in the
developed countries.[27] In
this case, one merely contributes (e.g., through taxes) because of the
safety-net which is provided for oneself. (There are those who are rich enough
not to have to worry and whose position might only be in danger in case of an
emergency, but they don’t have the option not to contribute. They simply pay
because their voice isn’t strong enough or, put differently, their view isn’t
represented to a great enough extent in the political process.)
A second option consists in giving to someone one cares about, like a
friend.[28] Is
self-interest at stake here? The difficulty lies in the qualification of ‘self’.
I won’t expound a discourse here that would diverge too much from the current
theme, but the question whether one considers a friend (or, e.g., one’s wife,
or a family member) as exhibiting a special position is a relevant one. The
sort of relation there is to another person seems, in many cases, to matter to
one’s attitude towards him or her. One may argue, then, that in this case
self-interest is displayed, albeit not self-interest in the sense that only the
actor is at stake (abandoning his friend, wife or family member if that should
prove to be most advantageous) but in the sense that one is connected to
another person and on that basis
wants him or her to prosper.
This does, of course, call for a division within the notion of
‘self-interest’; this variant may be dubbed ‘indirect self-interest’ rather
than direct self-interest (by ‘direct self-interest’ I understand the
self-interest which is at stake when one intends to serve one’s own needs).[29]
After all, the action isn’t directed at a random person but just at someone
whose interest one wants to promote. In other words, it is in one’s (indirect)
self-interest that the (direct) self-interest of the other party is served.
This even extends to dying for one’s friends (John
A third option is to focus on the situation rather than on the quality
of the relation. One may experience sympathy when one observes how someone one
doesn’t even know suffers as a result of his or her lack of means. Does this
point altruism? The etymology of ‘sympathy’ is helpful here. The word
‘sympathy’ is a compound of ‘sun’ (‘together’) and ‘pathos’ (‘feeling’ or
‘suffering’).[30]
If one takes this seriously, it is the suffering of oneself in observing the
struggles of someone else that is at stake; the person in distress and the
observer both suffer (albeit in different respects). This means that it is
really one’s own suffering one wants to alleviate. No ‘good’ deeds are
involved.[31]
3.2. A Satanic Stance
If God is
the propagator of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and if His power is the decisive element
(cf. subsection 2.2), a number of confronting questions are raised. Hobbes’s
stance is helpful in this regard. In his view, the reason to abstain from
malicious acts is that these may have negative effects for oneself: “The
institution of eternal punishment was before sin, and had regard to this only,
that men might dread to commit sin for the time to come.”[32]
‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are interpreted as subjective[33]
until the legislator creates an – artificial – standard.[34]
As Hobbes maintains that man only
acts in his own interest,[35] it
is not surprising that it is God’s power which is decisive:
“The right of nature, whereby God reigneth over men, and punisheth those
that break his Lawes, is to be derived not from his Creating them, as if he
required obedience, as of Gratitude for his benefits; but from his Irresistible
Power.”[36]
In
subsections 2.1 and 3.1, the problems with the criterion which focuses on the
content of the norm to which one is to adhere were brought to light. If the
criterion (God’s position as a legislator) also fails to display a moral
element, why would it be moral to obey God? In fact, if the power criterion is
determinative, one might argue that it would be incumbent on man, acting in his
self-interest, to obey Satan, if he should prove to be more powerful than God.
Just to be clear, this is not what I myself propose. After all, if the Christian
doctrine is correct, God is more powerful than Satan (cf., e.g., Job
4. Meta-ethical considerations
In order to
attempt to unnerve the results reached in the foregoing, one might try to
appeal to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (or ‘evil’). Don’t the issues mentioned attest of
these notions? Isn’t it, e.g., simply good to give to the poor? From an ethical
point of view, this may indeed be argued. At that level, the pivotal question
is: ‘what is good?’; one seeks to do
good things. The meta-ethical question, and that is the one at stake here, is:
‘what is ‘good’?’ The meaning (if
any) of the ethical notions is concerned.
One may adduce that it is not
because of the agreeable results that one acts but, conversely, that rewards
are sought because they are considered good.[37] In a
similar vein, it may be stated that
“it is necessary for evil men to be unhappier when they have
accomplished what they longed for than if they might be unable to implement the
things they long for.” (“[…] Infeliciores esse necesse est malos cum cupita perfecerint,
quam si ea quae cupiunt implere non possint.”)[38]
Augustine
indicates that happiness is only attainable for those who do not seek after
evil.[39]
The problem in these accounts is
that they presuppose the existence of good and evil; it isn’t clarified how
this may be maintained and what it means. If these notions can’t be maintained
for that reason, does that also mean that the difference between doing
something out of selfish motives and for a moral reason is cancelled, reducing
the latter to the former? Abelard makes the following distinctions:
“[…] Repentance at one happens out of love for God and is fruitful, at
another because of some penalty with which we do not want to be burdened […].”;[40]
“Daily […] we see many about to depart from this life repenting of their
shameful accomplishments and groaning with great compunction, not so much out
of love of God whom they have offended or out of hatred of the sin which they
have committed as out of fear of the punishment into which they are afraid of
being hurled.”[41]
Assuming one
acts out of love of God, if one does, it is not the direct self-interest which
is concerned (as would be the case if one were to act to avoid punishment), but
the indirect self-interest (cf. subsection 3.1). One simply prefers acting out
of love of God to sinning. Of course, it may be objected that one has faith
without being able to know (through reason) whether one will be rewarded or
punished. Doesn’t this evince the righteousness of the believer? Firstly, if
this is his position, his faith is blind; he has no ground to believe in
anything rather than in anything else and any conviction (if one may call it
that) he has is random. The religion to which he adheres is interchangeable for
another, precisely because of the fact that he has no reason to cling to one
rather than to another.[42]
Secondly, this course of action doesn’t appear to differ from insuring one’s
possessions (not knowing whether something may happen to them), where paying
the premium is similar to performing the ‘good’ deeds. By contrast, if one is able to know whether a reward or
punishment will ensue, the major premise of the objection is cancelled.
The objection that one acts from an insight into what is ‘good’ and
‘bad’ can still be proposed. One acts in accordance with the Ten Commandments,
e.g., because one acknowledges their value. I can’t prove that those who have
an intuition of this sort are wrong. It is, however, doubtful whether their
position is tenable. Is there such a thing as an intrinsic good quality? The
Bible isn’t helpful here. In the statement that “The Lord is good, a strong
hold in the day of trouble […].” (Nahum 1:7), is ‘a strong hold in the day of
trouble’ the reason why He is good? If so, the positive effects of His actions
are simply posited and ‘good’ should be understood as ‘agreeable’ or ‘useful’.
If not, no reason for His goodness is given.
Leaving the Bible aside, it is difficult in general, having analyzed the
elements involved in actions, to find ‘goodness’, especially if one considers
accounts such as Mackie’s argument from queerness, indicating that it is hard
to see how moral qualities would fit with the things with which one is acquainted.[43] It
is, then, up to those who appeal to intuitions, to inquire whether these really
pertain to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ elements or whether they may be reduced to other
elements than these.
Conclusion
In this
article, I have attempted to ascertain whether moral elements may be present in
religion, having focused on the Christian faith. A number of results were
reached which may be perceived by some as radical. It was my intention to
inquire as critically as possible, not eschewing any conclusion a priori.
Still, the outcome doesn’t necessarily lead to far-reaching practical changes.
In particular, no reasons not to adhere to Christianity (or any other religion)
were brought to the fore. By contrast, I have concentrated on the specific
motivation to do so. This culminated in two perspectives.
If one is to act on account of an acknowledgment of the (inherent)
goodness or wickedness of some things, it is important to find out whether such
qualities may be said to exist at all. The reason frequently given in the Bible
(a reward or punishment which is to follow) merely points to a selfish
perspective and discounts an alternative explanation.
The same analysis can be applied to the situation in which God’s power
is the central issue. Selfishness may be advanced in general as the basic drive
to act. A meta-ethical inquiry also poses some difficult questions (not only to
religions, but to a number of philosophies as well) which can’t be ignored.
This is not necessarily detrimental to the position of religions; it does mean
that some of the doctrines pertaining to reasons for adhering to them may be up
for critical revision. Still, it will mean that the followers of religions will
be able to maintain them in a world in which their tenets are ever more
critically questioned.
Literature
P. Abelard, Ethics (Scito Te Ipsum). Translated
by D. Luscombe.
Anselm,
De Conceptu Virginali et De Originali Peccato. Complete
works, vol. 2.
Th.
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. Complete
Works, vol. 7. Rome: Ex Typographia Polyglotta S. C. de Propaganda Fide, 1892
Augustine,
De Natura Boni. Œuvres de Saint
Augustin, vol. 1. Edited by B. Roland-Gosselin.
Augustine,
De Trinitate, part 2. Œuvres de Saint
Augustin, vol. 16. Edited by P. Agaësse. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1955
G. Biel,
Collectorium circa Quattuor Libros Sententiarum, Book 3. Tübingen:
J. Mohr, 1979
Boethius,
De Consolatione Philosophiae. Munich/Leipzig:
K.G. Saur, 2000
Bonaventura,
Breviloquium. Complete Works, vol. 5. Florence: Ad Claras Aquas, 1891
R.
Bultmann, Die Geschichte der synoptischen
Tradition. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979
P. Damiani, De Divina Omnipotentia. Edited by A. Cantin. Paris:
Les Éditions du Cerf, 1972
R.
Descartes, Meditations on First
Philosophy (Meditationes de Prima Philosophia). The
Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2. Translated by J. Cottingham, R.
Stoothoff, D. Murdoch. Cambridge et al.:
Th. Hobbes, De Cive (the English version).
Th. Hobbes, Leviathan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984
S.
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Frygt og Bæven).
Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6. Translated by H. Hong and
G.
Leibniz, Discours de Metaphysique. Complete
Writings and Letters: Philosophical Writings, vol. 4, part B. Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 1999
J. Mackie, Ethics. Inventing Right and Wrong. Harmondsworth
et al.: Penguin, 1978
J. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism.
Plato, Euthyphro. Complete Works, vol. 1. Translated
by M. Croiset. Paris: Les belles lettres, 1959
B. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Complete Works, vol. 3. Edited by
C. Gebhardt.
References
[1] Plato, Euthyphro,
10a.
[2] Bonaventura, Breviloquium, pars 1, cap. 7
(p. 215). In each instance where I have translated a section myself, I have
included the original texts. The spelling of the original texts in English and
French has been preserved, even if this conflicts with the present spelling.
[3] Bonaventura, Op. cit., pars 1,
cap. 9 (p. 217).
[4] Bonaventura, Op. cit., pars 1,
cap. 9 (p. 218).
[5] Th.
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae, q.
92, art. 2 (p. 161).
[6] E.g., P. Damiani, De Divina Omnipotentia, 612
A, B (p. 448/449).
[7] P. Damiani, Op.
cit., 597 C (pp. 390/391, 392/393) (cf. 600 A (p. 400/401), 610 D (p. 442/443)).
[8] G. Leibniz, Discours
de Metaphysique, § 2 (p. 1532).
[9] G. Biel, Collectorium circa Quattuor Libros
Sententiarum, Book 3, Distinctio
38, Quaestio unica (Art. 2, Concl. 2),
G. (pp. 649, 650).
[10] R.
Descartes, Meditations on First
Philosophy, Sixth Set of Replies, p. 294.
[11] Meta-ethics
deals with the basic notions in ethics, e.g., what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mean (if
anything). The next sections will present a more elaborate account than this
one.
[12] Of
course, it is argued that evil things are nothing, as they don’t proceed from
God (P. Damiani, Op. cit., 609 B (p. 436/437), 610 C, D (p. 442/443)), and that evil is to be considered an absence of goodness (e.g., Anselm, De Conceptu
Virginali et De Originali Peccato, Cap.
5 (p. 146)); cf. Augustine, De Natura
Boni, XVII, 17 (p. 454/455)).
[13] B.
Spinoza, Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus, Cap. 13 (p.
167).
[14] This
Gospel is possibly a translation of an Aramaic or Hebrew text which is lost.
[15] Matthew
7:12: “[…] All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even
so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.”
[16] Cf. R. Bultmann, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition, p. 107.
[17] Cf., e.g., Sura 16:104-111.
[18] Cf., e.g., Sura 43:74, Sura 44:51-57.
[19] Hinduism,
e.g., in which reincarnation into a new body by the soul after one has died is
a central tenet, and the concept of God (if one may qualify it as such) differs
greatly from that of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, proffers a different
explanation from a metaphysical point of view, but it may be argued that the
way one’s deeds in life (Karma) are the basis for one’s misery or fortune (or,
rather, in Hinduism, the degree of misery), and one’s attempt to reach ‘Moksha’
(the release from life) can be qualified in the same way from a meta-ethical
point of view.
[20] Cf., e.g., Deuteronomy 8:1.
[21] Cf.
Sura 19:60-61.
[22] Cf., e.g., Sura 3:189, Sura 5:40.
[23] S.
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, pp.
59, 60.
[24] Matthew
27:38-44 and Mark 15:27-32 report that neither of the two men who were
crucified together with Christ repented.
[25] Cf.
Mackie’s observation that resorting to the position that God’s commands supply
the prescriptive element in morality undermines morality itself (J. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism, p. 256).
[26] One
may debate which needs are ‘basic’; I won’t deal with that in this article as
it is not a crucial issue here.
[27] There
are varying degrees to which the basic needs can be supplied, the Scandinavian
countries at present realizing a more elaborate program than, e.g., the
[28] There
is no a priori limit here – animals could also be recipients – but for
convenience’s sake I’ll limit the account to human beings.
[29] The
demarcation between direct and indirect self-interest may be difficult or even
impossible to find, but that is not a problem for the analysis which is
proposed here.
[30] The
phoneme /n/ has changed to /m/ through regressive assimilation.
[31] Incidentally,
the motivation to sympathize with other beings in Hinduism (with both human
beings and animals) is based on the fact that one thinks ‘Âtman’ (one’s soul)
is actually identical to ‘Brahman’ (the whole of things) so that the
explanation can be used here, albeit in a somewhat intricate way, too.
[32] Th. Hobbes,
[33] Th. Hobbes, De
Cive, Ch. 3, § 31 (p. 74); cf. De
Cive, Ch. 12, § 1 (p. 146). Significantly,
Hobbes also states: “[…] There is no such Finis ultimus, (utmost ayme,)
nor Summum Bonum, (greatest Good,) as is spoken of in the Books
of the old Morall Philosophers.” (
[34] Th.
Hobbes,
[35] “[…]
Of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some Good to himselfe.” (Th. Hobbes,
[36] Th.
Hobbes,
[37] Boethius, De
Consolatione Philosophiae, 4, 3, 7 (p. 109).
[38] Boethius, De
Consolatione Philosophiae, 4, 4, 3 (p. 113).
[39] Augustine, De Trinitate, 13, 6, 9 (pp.
286/287, 288/289).
[40] P. Abelard, Ethics,
p. 76/77.
[41] P. Abelard, Ethics,
p. 78/79.
[42] In
fact, this is my position. This is the reason why I suspend judgment with
regard to the issue which religion is the right one (if any) and consider
myself an agnostic.
[43] J.
Mackie, Ethics. Inventing Right and Wrong,
pp. 38-42.
Abstract: From
the Quran and Arabic Language - and all the results apply to Hebraic and
Aramaic as well - this paper discusses the real sense of some passages of the Gospel,
specially the parable of the Good Samaritan and the episode of Zacchaeus,
showing how Exegesis depends on the Semitic distinction between three different
“ifs” (certainty, impossibility and doubt) while our Western Languages confound
them in only one “if”.
Confounding
Thinking
Distinguishing and confounding, according to
Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, are two major functions of thinking
and language, or of the "language / thinking system", as the
outstanding philosopher of language, Johannes Lohmann1, suggests (since
language and thinking should be considered not as independent elements, but in mutual
interaction).
As Julian Marias says, if the only function of
thinking were to distinguish and direct the mind to different forms of reality,
we wouldn’t know how to deal with complex realities in their connections and there
are cases in which we are interested exactly in “the common” rather than in the
differences2. If a bug (“bicho”
in the original) lands on my shoulder, I am not interested in determinating its
precise species among the hundred thousands distinguished by biologists: if it
is the coleopterus so or so… it does not matter to me: it is just a bug, an
importunous bug and all that I say is: “Shoo, bug, shoo, away”.
Actually, in certain situations we need
distinguishing; in others, counfounding. Yes, it is certain that every language
is, in some measure, confounding; after all, language itself, being abstract,
is confounding. But there are levels in that tendency. As we have shown in
other articles, roughly speaking, Eastern Languages tend relatively to be more
confounding than the Western ones (and it goes without saying that when we say
“confounding” we mean no judgment of value).
Lets consider for example the Arabic word Salam (or its Hebraic equivalent: Shalom), usually translated by “peace.” Or better yet, for the Semitic
semantics - in which consonants are what really count -, consider the
tri-consonantal root S-L-M (/ Sh- L-M). “Peace” is only one of the many
meanings confounded in S-L-M, that also expresses: unity, (moral or physical)
integrity, health, salvation etc.
Confounding
Thinking and Biblical Exegesis
This cumulative, confounding character of Semitic Languages is very important to Biblical Exegesis. Outside this context, how to understand, for example, the enigmatic sentence of the apostle Paul who writes in Greek (but still thinks in his Hebraic mother tongue) “Christ is our Peace...”