Dale Tuggy (PhD Brown 2000) was Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Fredonia from 2000-2018. He now works outside of academia in Middle Tennessee but continues to learn and podcast.
In round 2, Bowman descends to close combat on a few central texts. But first, he makes the methodological point that it is too easy to claim simply that your preferred texts are clear, whereas the ones central to your opponent’s case are obscure or ambiguous. I think that’s right, and that it is also correct that “academia… encourages revisionism”. He says, In the end,… Read More »SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – Bowman 2
There’s a lot of meat in Burke’s second round, and both his and Bowman’s second rounds were cleaner, more free of stray punches than round 1. Here I offer some summaries and brief comments on Burke.
A postscript to our Richard series: I was reading the interesting and dense The Mysteries of Christianity, by 19th c. German Catholic theologian Joseph Scheeben, on Richard of St. Victor, and he says the following in a footnote: Scotus states decisively that Richard of St. Victor adduces rationes necessariae for the Trinity, but not evidenter necessariae, because the principles from which he argues are not… Read More »Scotus on Richard of St. Victor?
I take it the purpose of the debate is whether or not “the” doctrine of the Trinity is derivable from the Bible. What is this doctrine, exactly? The burden falls on Bowman to be clear about just what doctrine is in view; he’s making the positive case. Here’s what he says: 1. There is one (true, living) God, identified as the Creator. 2. This one… Read More »SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – Bowman 1
At long last, we’ve reached the 25th and last chapter of book three of Richard of St. Victor’s De Trinitate! (Here are the other Richard-related posts here @ trinities.)
Richard starts off with the point that for the Persons of the Trinity, unlike the case of any other persons, there is “individuality without plurality” – each is what it is without any plurality of any kind – and “unity without inequality” – I’m not sure what he means by this second phrase. (p. 396)
In contrast, any other person, such as you or me, can be “unequal to himself”, in that we can become greater or lesser over time. (e.g. I’m smarter and morally better now than when I was 14.) And persons like us have multiple properties (we’re not simple). (p. 396) And of a human person, say Barak Obama, we can say that “his power alone is dissimilar to itself… [since] one thing is easy for him, another is difficult and a third is impossible.” (p. 397)
Then he says, “one and the same nature… in one respect is less, in another it is greater, and [so is]… dissimilar and unequal to itself.” (p. 397) So, the same point he made about persons, can also be made about natures. Thus,Read More »Richard of St. Victor’s De Trinitate, Ch. 25 (Dale)
In round 1, Burke explains that he’s a biblical unitarian, not a “rationalist” or “universalist” unitarian. Further, he confesses that: Jesus Christ is the Son of God, but not God himself and The Holy Spirit is the power of God, but not God himself. Further, The Bible is the inspired Word of God and the sole authoritative source of Christian doctrine and practice. He neither… Read More »SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – Burke 1
Over at Parchment and Pen, there’s a six week, six-installment debate starting over “the” doctrine of the Trinity. That is, what I’ve elsewhere called the orthodox formulas – that each Person “is” God, that there’s only one god, and that the three Persons differ. Here at trinities, we’ll offer summaries and philosophical commentary on each round. Feel free to weigh in with your views on… Read More »Scoring the Burke – Bowman Debate – Intro
In chapter 24, Richard says that
Certainly one and the same substance is not something greater or lesser, better or worse than itself. Therefore, [there are no inequalities among members of the Trinity] since one and the same substance is certainly in each. …for this reason any two persons [in the Trinity] will not be something greater or better than any one person alone; nor will all three taken together be more [great?] than any two or any one alone by himself… (p. 396)
I take it that in the first sentence here that by “substance” he’s referring to the divine nature, saying that it can’t be greater than itself. That’s hard to argue with. He then argues that no person can be greater than any other. There’s an assumption here that greatness is solely a function of a thing’s nature. I’m not sure why we should accept that. Why not other intrinsic properties as well? One might think, e.g. it is greater to be the Father than it is to be the Son, hence even though they share the divine nature, one might think that the Father is greater than the Son. The inference from X and Y have the same substance to X and Y are the same in greatness, seems invalid. But if we make a valid argument, by adding the premise that greatness is a function solely of essence, we have valid argument, but then, Read More »Richard of St. Victor’s De Trinitate, Ch. 24 (Dale)
Now, to resume our drawn out and often-stalled series on Richard of St. Victor, in which we blog through the entirety of book III of his De Trinitate (On the Trinity), in which he famously / notoriously argues for the Trinity from reason alone. These chapters, like many preceding ones, are too compressed, so I’ll try to unpack them for us.
In chapter 23, Richard says that between the members of the Trinity “there seems to be more identity [sameness] than equality.” (p. 395) He then cites as an example three indistinguishable golden statues. Because they’re indistinguishable, we say they are “equal”. But there are three masses of gold involved, and so there are really three things here, three statues. But the case of the Trinity is different, he urges. How? Because “whatever is in any one person of the Trinity, the smae is also completely in any other person.” Here, he implies, we do have a deeper kind of “identity” or “sameness”.
I take it that Richard’s point is that the three Persons of the Trinity don’t differ as far as their composition, because each contains one and the same divine nature, here thought of as a particular.
He then brings up a case of “three rational spirits”, three souls. Read More »Richard of St. Victor’s De Trinitate, Ch. 23
It’s all so clear now! Happy April Fools Day! (A link for those confused about the subject line.)
Here’s sound advice for non-philosophers, including theologians, who are interested in philosophy, in an interview with distinguished philosopher Timothy Williamson. The interview starts slowly, but gets interesting when Williamson recounts his experiences with “continental” philosophy. He also addresses a pervasive confusion, common in discourse outside analytic philosophy, between truth and certainty.
Call me a satisfied customer – I had a great time at the Eastern Regional Conference of the Society of Christian Philosophers this weekend. Thanks to Patrick Toner and Wake Forest University for their great hospitality! The program was very strong. To mention just a few sessions: Paul Herrick present a paper analysing and endorsing Richard of St. Victor’s main argument for the Trinity, and… Read More »Eastern SCP report (Dale)
It seems I touched a nerve, judging by the word count so far (here, and here). First, let me make clear that I have no interest in mocking Catholic doctrine. I’m a non-catholic (and so non-Catholic) Christian, and am in sympathy with the Catholic tradition in many ways. I’m going to avoid some well-worn Catholic-Protestant battle areas here, and try to stick to what I… Read More »More on Loyola’s “white is black” passage
Philosophy Compass is a unique philosophy journal which only publishes survey articles, pieces which aim to summarize recent work. Its aim, as editor Brian Weatherson explains, is to enable people to keep up with a vast, overspecialized, fast-moving, and only somewhat accessible world of philosophical research. What’s more exciting – they sell the pdfs of the articles for $1.99. They’re trying to be the iTunes… Read More »Robin Le Poidevin on metaphysics and the Incarnation @ Philosophy Compass
St. Ignatius Loyola (1495-1556) founded the Jesuit order and authored a famous book of Spiritual Exercises. There, in a list of rules for correct belief, we have this: Thirteenth Rule. To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it, believing that between Christ our Lord, the Bridegroom, and the… Read More »Loyola: tradition trumps sense perception
Philosopher Graham Priest is notorious for his claim that there are true contradictions. I have to confess that when I first heard this years ago, I thought the people telling me were pulling my leg. But, they were not. Priest is deadly serious, and has developed paraconsistent logics – logical systems which allow some true contradictions. And he’s vigorously defended his claims against all comers, as in this recent book.
No, he doesn’t say that all contradictions are true – only some of them. And the ones which are true are also false. He claims that this thesis of dialetheism solves the liar paradox and others.
Very rarely, some theologian will come along, and assert that the Trinity doctrine is a true contradiction – not a merely apparent contradiction, but a real one.
Most Christians, though, eschew such a claim. Mysterian James Anderson discusses and rejects this approach to Christian mysteries in his book Paradox in Christian Theology.
Much to my surprise, I recently found a move like Priest’s in Gregory of Nazianzus (d. c. 390), in his Third Theological Oration.
Gregory is considering an argument by Arians, a premise of which is that the Son who the Father begot either was or was not in existence – I take it, prior or “prior” to his being begotten. (It is clear at the end of this section that Gregory takes them to mean literally before.)
Gregory asserts that this claim “contains an absurdity, and not a difficulty to answer.” He then gives a non-too-clear time example, which I’ll skip. Then he argues,
…in regard to this expression, “I am now telling a lie,” admit one of these alternatives, either that it is true, or that it is a falsehood, without qualification (for we cannot admit that it is both). But this cannot be. For necessarily he either is lying, and so is telling the truth, or else he is telling the truth, and so is lying. What wonder is it then that, as in this case [of the liar paradox] contraries are true, so in that case [concerning the Arians’ premise above] they [i.e. both alternatives] should both be untrue, and so your clever puzzle prove mere foolishness?
I take it that the “contraries” he mentions would be: “the man is lying” and “the man is telling the truth”. Contraries are often defined nowadays – I’m not sure how they were defined in his day – as claims that can’t both be true. But here, Gregory asserts that both are trueRead More »Gregory of Nazianzus – an early dialetheist? (Dale)
What I call positive mysterianism about the Trinity is the view that the doctrine, as best we can formulate it, is apparently contradictory. Now many Christian philosophers resort to this in the end, but only after one or more elaborate attempts to spell the doctrine out in a coherent way. On the other hand, some jump more quickly for the claim, not really expanding on or interpreting the standard creedal formulas much at all. These are primarily who I have in mind when I use the label “positive mysterian”.
I ran across a striking version of this recently, in a blog post by theologian C. Michael Patton, who blogs at Parchment and Pen: a theology blog. In his interesting post, he says that all the typical analogies for the Trinity (shamrock, egg, water-ice-vapor, etc.) are useful only for showing what the Trinity doctrine is not.
This contrasts interestingly with what I call negative mysterians. Typically, and this holds for many of the Fathers, as well as for people like Brower and Rea nowadays, they hold that all these analogies are useful, at least when you pile together enough of them, for showing what the doctrine is. Individually, they are highly misleading, and only barely appropriate, but they seem to think that multiplying analogies like these results in our achieving a minimal grasp of what is being claimed. Maybe they think the seeming inconsistency of the analogies sort of cancels out the misleading implications of each one considered alone.
In any case, in Patten’s view, the best you can do is to Read More »Mysterians at work in Dallas
Over at the Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella and some others have been on a tear of philosophical theology, specifically on appeal to mysteries in theology, and on incarnation issues. Here, atheist philosopher Peter Lupu mounts an argument against positive mysteriansism. Bill asks: Does inconceivability entail impossibility. (No.) And: Whether Jesus exists necessarily? (No.) In another post, Bill argues that if a mysterian defense works for… Read More »Linkage: Mavericking Mysteries
Thanks to Ed Feser for some interesting dialogue on the topic of mysteries in Christian theology. This post is just a bunch of miscellaneous responses to his thoughts posted last week, here and here. As he mentioned, Ed and I knew each other briefly as students at what is now called Claremont Graduate University. I remember having a conversation in his car once, maybe around… Read More »More on Mysteries
