Four vivid, moving, memorable depictions of Love.
A post on some previous post commentary – no one can navel-gaze like a philosopher! 🙂 Here’s a pictorial recap, and some additional thoughts on the comments here, in response to Scott and JT. The point of all this: we’re exploring why people who call themselves “social trinitarians” don’t like what they call “Latin” theories, and specifically the claim that those “Latin” theories can’t do justice to the loving relationships between the persons of the Trinity.
Figure A: I said (comment #2) that social trinitarians, when they refer to “love”, esp. between Father and Son, they have this complex event or state of affairs in mind: two persons mutually acting for the benefit of one another.
Figure B: Scott points out (#3) that many social trinitarians doubt whether this “Latin” model adequately accounts for, or comes to the same thing as the fact in figure A. Here, the Father (composed of D, the divine essence, and P, the relation of paternity) loves the divine essence (D). (For more on this sort of chart, see this previous series.) Just below, to clarify, I’ve separated the lover and the beloved – though on this theory they would of course be separable in thought only. As JT observes (#5,6,8,9) adherents of this model believe that it includes personal relationship facts like those in Figure A. I say: sure, that’s what they think, but it’s not clear to me it is so.
Figure C: I said (#11) that by “love”, some mean an act, action, or attitude on an individual person – not the whole loving-relationship fact, as in figure A. Scott basically says (#2, 11) sure, but put two of those individual love-acts together, directed towards each other, and you’ve got the same fact as in Figure A.
I say, yes, that seems right. In fact, the model C may be better than A – instead of a “relationship” seeming to hover between the lovers, as if it is instantiated in no thing, but somehow between things, in Figure C we have the loving relationship being reducible to two persons, each of which instances a love-act, with these directed at one another. A technical point, to be sure. The more important issue is whether B captures the fact in A or C.
Figure D: I agree with Scott (#7, 12) that (barring mental illness) one can’t adopt the same kind of love towards a hot, steaming, pepperoni pizza, as towards another personal being.
But look at Figure B – the object of love there is no more a person than a pizza is a person. Of course, this D thing is a component of three persons, on that sort of Trinity theory. But we’ve no reason to think every component of a person is a person. Against these negative thoughts, JT urges (#15,16,17) that to love D (the divine essence) is to love any person which has D as a component. I say (#19), I don’t see why that should be so. Though I’m not a social trinitarian, I see the point of their resisting on this score.
Finally, Scott points out that while part of the “social trinitarian” discomfort with Figure B has to do with the fact that the objects of love aren’t the persons, but rather D, another issue is the idea, embodied in Figure B, that a divine person is to be understood as a composite of a universal (D) and a property or relational property (e.g. paternity, in the Father’s case). He says (#18) that many “social” theorists want to take persons as basic entities, not analyzable as the combination of various components. I say (#19) yes, that’s right – they’re following the lead of various (anti-medieval) early modern philosophers there.
Hey Scott – perhaps my coffee hasn’t kicked in – I’m not sure I follow your last two comments (#20,21). Could you elaborate in a post, complete with a pic or two? As you can see, I’ve effectively lowered the artistic standards around here, so go and get that pencil and scanner! You’ll have a hard time lowering them further! 🙂
Hello, I’m coming really late to the game, and I don’t have philosophical training. With those disclaimers out of the way …
Scott wrote, “But look at Figure B – the object of love there is no more a person than a pizza is a person.”
Could this be a problem with Figure B, rather than a problem with “Latin” theories?
Figure B part 1 shows Paternity loving the Divine Essence. Figure B part 2 shows the Father loving the Divine Essence.
But shouldn’t Figure B show the Father loving the Son?
Can you point towards specific locations in primary sources in the Latin tradition that write of the Divine Essence as the object of love in the Trinity?
Thank you for your time and assistance.
It is here that I would have to distinguish essential and necessary properties. Origin may be a necessary property for an individual, but I take it that individuals don’t have definitions and therefore do not have essential properties. Essences, on this view, belong to kinds. I also take it that everyone familiar with a kind has at least a basic understanding of the essential properties, as much as we philosophers haggle over specifics; if not, then a person would have absolutely no idea what a human being is, or God, or an ant, or whatnot. Necessary properties might be necessarily entailed by these essentials, but do not need to be known alongside them.
When I talk about loving Y as Y manifests Y’s essential properties, or a human as a human (that is, as the object of love is a human, not necessarily as I am a human), what I mean is this: I am loving Y for what Y is, and not for those properties which are accidental to Y (or perhaps non-essentially necessary). I’ll love my wife primarily as she is a human being, not as a bank account.
This is not to say that I love the abstract properties which make her human, but instead the realization of these properties. I take it that the will is an essential component of human being, and so I would love a human being for the particular realizations of that will. So, loving a human for the free choices that human being has made is precisely the sort of thing that I am talking about.
Hi M,
“if X loves Y as Y, then X loves Y as Y manifests its essential properties” This last “as” phrase, I’m not sure if I understand it. Perhaps you mean this: if X loves Y, then this is *because* Y manifests its essential properties.
That is not an exceptionless principle. A lot of love, it seems to me, is due to things other than expressions of one’s essential properties. e.g. One’s free choices, in particular, how one has interacted with me, the lover.
If you mean “loving as a human” (as rational, social) etc, to mean a different kind of loving, I don’t understand that at all.
I think this is false: “it would seem perverse to love an essence without also loving everything that essence essentially entails”. Some philosophers think that individuals essentially have a certain origin – e.g. they think it is essential to me that I had Dave and Ginny as parents. But it isn’t at all perverse for you to love me without loving that I was produced by Dave and Ginny.
I have a question: would you say that, if X loves Y as Y, then X loves Y as Y manifests its essential properties?
It seems to me that if I really love my wife as a fellow human being, I will love her insofar as she is human (with whatever that entails). For sure, I’ll love her in the concrete realization of the essential properties of humanity, and there may be specific realizations that I don’t care for very much. But, this is still in opposition to loving her merely as my source of income for grad school. I must love her as a rational, social, volitional, etc., or whatever your anthropology says, being.
If this is true, though, then it would seem perverse to love an essence without also loving everything that essence essentially entails (in this case, the persons). God wouldn’t love God as God unless the persons were to love each other, although I suppose that it would be theoretically possible for God to love the divine essence. The love for a pizza may be similar, in that it would be loving the pizza not as pizza, but as a person (which I think goes against most folks’ pizzaology).
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