Thanks to Vlastimil Vohánka for referring us to this discussion between Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella and Dr. Lukas Novak of Charles University, Prague.
As I understand it, a suppositum is supposed to be an ultimate subject of characteristics / properties, as distinct from non-ultimate subjects. My individual human nature is supposed to be suppositum, but Christ’s is not.
One ought to be a little suspicious of this supposita theory, as apparently it was originally formulated just to deal with Incarnation difficulties, that is, to come up with a coherent reading of the creed of Chalcedon. Apart from this, apparently it’s hard to come up with any metaphysical work for this theory to do.
I confess that I don’t understand how this concept is being applied to come up with a consistent Trinity theory. Should I add a section to the entry?
Dr. Novak says,
Regarding my place in the classification of trinitarian theories in the SEP: frankly, it seems to me that the traditional orthodox position (which I hope I maintain :-)) is not listed. It is located somewhere under the “Latin trinitarianism”, but none of the modern attempts to capture it seems to do justice to it.
I think, based on what he says in that comment, he’s what I call a negative mysterian, although with some more metaphysical speculations added than the ancient “fathers” thought possible or advisable. As I think of it, mysterianism comes in both kinds and degrees, and is usually combined with another, apparently more positive Trinity theory.
Okay, so ‘exemplification’ is meant to exclude a relation to some extrinsic abstract object/universal, while ‘instantiation’ is not. Is that what you’re thinking?
@JT:
Re: whether the divine essence (for Scotus, or others, like Henry of Ghent) is a ‘Platonic universal’ vs. an ‘immanent universal’. The relation of instantiation or exemplification, of course, is important. But there is a slightly different issue regarding the existence of said universal. Does it exist independently of anyone thinking about it? If so, then we should ask the follow-up question about instantiation or exemplification. It seems to me these are closely related, but distinguishable questions.
Hi Lukas,
No offense taken at your criticisms! Would you be willing to do a guest post, of say, less than 1000 words, in which you say precisely what you take the classic, Catholic doctrine of the Trinity to be? If so, email me your basic biographical information & home page link, and let me know when you would like to do it.
Hey Scott, on your point about how many persons produce the Spirit, this is a minor point, but there is debate in the scholastic tradition about how many persons do in fact produce the Spirit. Some say two (the Father and Son), but others say the ‘being produced by’ relation applies only to the Father and Son together as one productive unit.
Hi Lukas, I like what you’re saying, and I like what Scott is saying. I would, however, be cautious of characterizing the divine essence as a ‘platonic universal’, for platonic universals are external to the things that exemplify them, and Scotus et al would say that the divine essence is not external to the divine persons. A more appropriate characterization, I think, would be ‘immanent universal’. For Scotus (for example), there are no platonic universals, but the divine essence is the only true case of an ‘immanent universal’.
Hey Brandon,
As often is the case, we both have a good point. I think that what I said is true. But you’re right – IF the doctrine earns its metaphysical keep, as it were, then it ought to be affirmed.
Sounds right to me…. it comes from the Aristotelian tag-line “actiones sunt suppositorum” (= actions are from [done by] supposites). Interestingly, Scotus rejects this Aristotelian thesis in order to account for the Father and Son internally producing the Holy Spirit. If this axiom were true, then it looks like two agents are required to produce the Holy Spirit– when one would be sufficient. So, supposes Scotus, we should think that the divine essence–had by the Father and Son–produces the Holy Spirit.
But yes– this is a special case–the Aristotelian axiom was used in many contexts, philosophical and theological.
One ought to be a little suspicious of this supposita theory, as apparently it was originally formulated just to deal with Incarnation difficulties, that is, to come up with a coherent reading of the creed of Chalcedon. Apart from this, apparently it’s hard to come up with any metaphysical work for this theory to do.
Aquinas alone uses the concept at least briefly in discussions of human individuation, divine simplicity, union of body and soul, singular propositions, and generation and corruption, not to mention the Trinity and the Incarnation. And Aquinas brings it out relatively rarely in comparison with other scholastics; the term runs all through later debates over the plurality of forms, for instance. One might as well say that the theory of rigid designators was created solely for the purpose of making possible 2-D dualism and does no work outside that context. Certainly it comes up most noticeably there; but that’s because it’s an area of special interest, not because it does no work elsewhere.
Likewise.
I should mention that if I remember correctly, Cross also claims that for Scotus, the divine essence is the only Platonic universal, whereas all else are not (Socrates’s has his humanity, and I’ve got my own, etc.).
Scott,
Great, now we understand each other. Yes: I have suggested in my discussion with Bill Vallicella that one way how to understand the doctrine of the Trinity is to regard the divine essence as the ONLY case of a “Platonic” universal, all the others being “Aristotelian”. It is flattering to hear that the Doctors made the same comparison. 🙂 Generally speaking, I think that Cross does a very good job in explaining Scotus.
Dale,
Concerning understanding and comprehension: informally, I understand a term or a sentence iff I am capable of associating the correct meaning with it. I can comprehend that meaning perfectly iff I have a distinct knowledge of any part of the meaning.
An example: I understand the sentence “LCD displays are flat”. I know the meaning of all the terms and grasp the syntax. But I have a very poor comprehension of the concept of “LCD display”. I know how it looks like, but am almost ignorant of what it IS, how it FUNCTIONS, how exactly it differs from plasma displays etc.
Concering the Church Fathers – well, I am not sure they are mysterians. Certainly, Augustine is not, IMHO. It is, IIRC, a “sententia certa” in the Catholic Church that Trinity is a “mystery strictly speaking” – but that is not mysterianism in your sense which claims that the doctrine cannot even be positively stated in an understandable way. All the scholastics withtheir elaborate theories did as a matter of course endorsed the claim that Trinity is a mystery in this sense. It seems to me that your accound makes too great a gap between the “mysterian” Fathers and the “intelligibilist” scholastics. Certainly there is some distinction in their approach, but that is rather based in the general fact that the Fathers are mostly Platonics whereas the scholastics are Aristotelian.
Regarding the “common denominator” or the “classical doctrine – yes, I mean the stable teaching of the Catholic Church which remained practically the same since middle ages. The different scholastic theories are, from an external point of view, really very minor variations. For a summary of the gist I suggest some detailed classically-written dogmatics. The standard one I use is the one by Luwig Ott (Eglish translation for example: Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, Fourth Edition, James Bastible, tr., Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1960). I plan to start uploading somewhere on the web a translation of another quite thorough dogmatics (a Latin work of a Czech theologian from the early 20th century) as soon as I have some time to translate.
I apologise for my criticism concerning the SEP entry. I missed the statement in the introduction that says that the entry focuses on the analytical recastings of the doctrine and took is as an attempt of a general comprehensive classification.
Your scheme: I must say I am very sympathetic with it. I think you a very good job in emphasizing that the divine simplicity applies to God’s ESSENCE and that it (naturally) does not preclude the non-identity of the Persons (“T is complex, of course – but what else do you expect, when it is the case that there are three ‘persons’ in the one God.”). There is just one (but fatal) fault with the scheme, namely that your Persons are not supposita but modes. In your conception, there is one suppositum with three really distinct modes inhering in it. In the orthodox conception, the relation of the essence to the persons is in fact reversed: the persons are the supposita whereas the essence inheres in them.
Best regards,
Lukas
Yep. Sounds good. But yes, ‘exemplification’ might be a term of art that is satisfied only in the context of the divine persons. A divine person has (exemplifies) the divine essence, and shares it with the other divine persons. The divine essence is not only a “this essence”, but also is a communicable “this essence”. There’s a lot more to be said, of course. Also, notice that Cross says “if pushed” we might say that for Scotus the divine essence is a universal. (Interestingly, some of Scotus’s predecessors explicitly said that the divine essence is an extra-mental singular existing universal–Henry of Ghent for one, and I’m told that Richard Middleton did too.)
Scott,
Certainly, I endorse the teaching of singular esence in God. There must be some misunderstanding: I agree with all you have just written, except that I am a semiarian!
I say: precisely because divine essence is singular, it cannot be universal. I dare to say that Scotus never says it is universal. My point is that Cross used the term “universal” when explaining Scotus’s doctrine in a non-standard way, and that translated into the standard language he meant exactly the same what I say: that the divine essence is singular, therefore not individuable nor exemplifiabe (this is de facto the same thing). Using “exemplification” for the relation of the essence to the three Persons is just a misnomer or non-standard usage, for exemplification in the standard sense means multiplication, which is precisely what is prohibited in case of God’s essence.
I hope I have made myself clear?
Hi Lukas,
I do not understand your distinction between understanding and comprehension. Can you say more about it?
It is clear by what you say that you are not an extreme negative mysterian. But you say you uphold “the classical doctrine”, and as I understand them, the 4th-5th c. fathers are negative mysterians (to varying degrees).
You are right that the scheme in my “Trinity” entry is neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. They forced me to break it up into the supplementary documents. I think it is important to discuss mystery appeals, and to think carefully about what is going on there. I believe this to be a huge gap in the literature.
I’m not sure what you mean by “the classical doctrine” – is this a late medieval to early modern scholastic view? Do you mean something like this: https://trinities.org/blog/archives/200
Can you point me to a source in English, by your or anyone, which clearly lays out this “common denominator”?
The purpose of the main entry is to survey work by recent analytic philosophers. They have – rightly or wrongly – not yet taken some of these medieval views seriously.
Thanks,
Dale
@Lukas,
I’m confused, are you endorsing the traditional ‘singular divine essence’ teaching, or rejecting it?
I’d be curious to see how you distinguish between an individuable essence and an exemplifiable essence?
You are right about Scotus on (created) universals that have less than numerical unity. But it is different with the divine essence. The divine essence in se is numerically one. So, the divine essence is not like created (individuable) universals in an important way–the divine essence is NOT multipliable. To be multipliable seems to require numerical division and numerically distinct instances. But this is _precisely_ what is to be rejected in the case of the divine essence, no? Otherwise we head toward polytheism, or at least, semi-Arianism. Now that I think of it, this might be your view; are you a semi-Arrian that says each divine person has his own essence (his own numerically one essence), but their essences are exactly similar such that no divine person is ontologically less than the other?
Don’t confuse Scotus with semi-Arrianism….
Scott,
I have not had time yet to study Cross’s bookon Scotus’s trinitary doctrine (shame on me!), but AFAIK it is true that Cross uses the term “exemplify” and construes the divine essence as a kind of universal, but at the same time he points out that the divine essence differs from other universal in that it is not multiplied by being multiply exemplified. Whereas I (and the moderate realist scholastics including Scotus) always understand universality as involving real multiplication in the individual instances. So my impression is that Cross is kind of “extrapolating” the concept of universality and exemplification, in order to help the modern reader to understand, but in that extrapolation he excludes an essential note of universality, that is, real multiplication in multiple instances. It seems to me that the resulting “extrapolated” notions of universality and exemplification coincide with the more traditional notion of one SINGULAR essence having three distinct suppositalities and thus subsisting as three distinct supposita.
Bill Vallicella on this post of Dale:
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2010/02/negative-and-positive-trinitarian-mysterianism-.html
FYI: Richard Cross has written some articles on Scotus on supposites that _exemplify_ the divine essence (in Medieval Philosophy and Theology); and more recently Marilyn Adams has a very helpful article, “The Metaphysics of the Trinity in Some Fourteenth Century Franciscans”, in _Franciscan Studies_ 66 (2008).
Dr. Tuggy,
I think it is not correct to say that “My individual human nature is supposed to be suppositum, but Christ’s is not”. Neither human nature is a suppositum. Each nature needs to be complemented with another principle (at least conceptually distinct) called “suppositality” or “subsistence” or “personality” in order to become a suppositum.
It is, I think, wrong to think of the conceptual apparatus used to express the classical trinitarian doctrine (including the concept of a “suppositum”) as of something that “helps to come up with a consistent theory”. It is not so that we have some theory, which appears to be contradictory, then we apply – say – the concept of “suppositum” and the inconsitence is mended. Rather, we need the concept of “suppositum” in the first place in order to be able to state the theory adequately at all.
Regarding the “negative mysterianism”: I am afraid that I (as one attemting to hold the traditional orthodox position) cannot agree with most of the description of that position on the SEP: I do not hold that the doctrine is not understandable (note that I distinguish “understanding” and “comprehension” – you can for example understand what it means that infinite sets can have proper subsets of the same cardinality, because you know the elementary meaning of the terms “infininte”, “set”, “same” and “cardinality”, but it still can be something you do not _comprehend_, like you can comprehend for example that 3>2). Furthermore, I hold that the doctrine can be stated in literal language and that the notion of “person” can be worked out with great precision – we certainly are not confined to mere analogies. I deny that no human concept applies to God literally.
Besides, if it is the case that “mysterianism” goes in degrees and that it is consistent and often connected with “more positive” alternatives, doesn’ it seem that there is some confusion in the criteria on which the entire classification is based? For it seems that the classification it is doubly deficient: it is not exhaustive, and its members are not mutually exclusive.
But perhaps it was not meant as a rigorous classification of positions, but rather as a list of certain most characteristic types without the claim of eithr exhaustivity or mutual exclusivity. But even then it is strange that what I would regard as the most typical, standard “orthodox” position is not, as such, clearly mentioned.
So yes, it seems to me that in the entry there certainly should be paid some attention to the classical doctrine. It is in fact paid in the supplementary historical entry, but I see at least two drawbacks of this disposition: first, that the most “standard” theory is relegated to “history”, and second, that the precisely developed “common denominator” of all the orthodox variants is never explained. Aquinas and Scotus, for example, come out so dissimilar from each other that one could hardly tell what they have in common – and yet their differences are negligible, as compared to the differences between the modern theories.
Dale,
Lukas’s theory of the Trinity is probably extensively informed by his fine knowledge of baroque and early modern scholastic — which was very technical and rigorous (and in this respect resembling analytical philosophy). Thus, Lukas seems to represent a sophisticated, though not well-known, Latin view of the Trinity. I guess he could supply you with many tips on the most relevant texts of those periods (on the Trinity and Incarnation; also on the Eucharist, if you would like). He has proven to me as an invaluable source of philosophical, theological, and historical insights.
Here’s info on his philosophical and historical research group:
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2010/02/contemporary-czech-analytic-scholasticism.html
Comments are closed.