{"id":1053,"date":"2009-08-16T22:03:24","date_gmt":"2009-08-17T02:03:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=1053"},"modified":"2009-08-16T22:14:04","modified_gmt":"2009-08-17T02:14:04","slug":"richard-of-st-victor-11-response-to-the-argument-from-love-thus-far-scott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/richard-of-st-victor-11-response-to-the-argument-from-love-thus-far-scott\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard of St. Victor 11 – Response to the Argument From Love Thus Far (Scott)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Does
Does love have enough gas to get us there? Stay Tuned.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In three of the last four posts (Rick St. Vick 6, 7, 9, 10) I surveyed some of Richard of St. Victor\u2019s arguments for why there must be at least three divine persons<\/strong>. (We\u2019ve yet to see an argument for there aren\u2019t more than three persons.) Here I\u2019d like to respond to these, and to one\u00a0 JT\u2019s responses too.<\/p>\n

Richard proposes the following:<\/p>\n

(T7)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Supreme love should be directed at the highest kind of lovable beings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Richard seems to assume that love is a kind of volition fixed by its object. If I love an ant, well, I\u2019ve got ant-love. But if I love a human being, then that\u2019s a higher kind of love, human-love. And, if I love God, that is the highest kind of love possible. I don\u2019t find anything problematic with the notion that a divine person (and any creature) should love \u2018the highest kind of lovable being<\/strong>\u2019. What needs to be teased out more is why more than one divine person satisfies this description<\/em>. It isn\u2019t until Book 4 that Richard tells us what he thinks a \u2018person\u2019 is; so at this point we are left wondering why we should think \u2018the highest kind of lovable beings\u2019 is a person (several persons) who has the divine substance.<\/p>\n

Next, Richard considers two states of affairs:<\/p>\n

(S1)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A divine person x<\/em> (1) has self-love and (2) loves divine person y<\/em>, and (3) y<\/em> has self-love but (4) y<\/em> does not love x<\/em>.<\/p>\n

(S2)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A divine person x<\/em> (1) has self-love and (2) loves divine person y<\/em>, and (3) y<\/em> has self-love and (4) y<\/em> loves x<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Prima facie<\/em> it does not seem problematic to say that (S2) is a better state of affairs than (S1) <\/strong>on the assumption that loving another person is something better to have than not having it simpliciter<\/em> [= pure perfection]. On, e.g., Chisholm’s good\/evil calculus, (S1) contains a negative feature (4) that nevertheless is either balanced off or defeated by (1)-(3) (you decide which). But (S2) does not contain any negative features, but contains entirely good features; hence (S2) is a diffusively good state of affairs.<\/p>\n

This brings us to JT\u2019s worry that Richard seems to beg the question <\/strong>by saying that perfect love by definition entails <\/strong>that a person loves another person, and vice versa. Richard certainly stipulates that perfect love entails more than one person. If we take ‘perfect love’ simpliciter<\/em>, then there isn’t much traction for thinking why it entails two additional divine persons. But if we take ‘perfect love’ as a perfection relative to a person (e.g., in the way that sweetness is a perfection of sugar, and awesomeness is relative to JT’s bartending abilities), then we might find some intuition that helps us to see whether Richard begs the question or not.<\/p>\n

What intuition<\/strong> might Richard have that being a person entails that it is good for the person<\/strong> to love another person? This might be a moral intuition, it might be an ontological intuition, or both. It would seem to be vaguely analogous to God deciding that it’d be better for Adam (for a person) to not be alone in the garden; so God decides to create Eve (another person, not a talking rock or circuit board); in fact, a human capable of bearing children. The whole ‘be fruitful and multiply’ notion seems to be in the back of Richard’s mind, at least insofar as the goodness of there being more than one person is concerned. (One might look to Aristotle’s ‘a person is a social animal’ as another motivating intuition.) Or again, this might be the neo-Platonic ‘plenitude of goodness’ thesis–that goodness by definition brings about others. And Richard supposes ‘others’ here are divine persons (and not creatures). But what does e.g., Adam gain from Eve<\/strong> that puts Adam in a better situation?<\/p>\n

JT writes:<\/p>\n

What could a divine person gain from loving another that he wouldn\u2019t get through self-love? Or as Ockham puts it, how could a divine person\u2019s act of loving another divine person be any more or less perfect than their act of loving the divine essence itself? After all, God\u2019s internal acts of love are supposed to all be equally perfect.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A charitable reading of Richard might go like this. It is true that a divine person loving the divine essence is a perfect act; but so too is a person loving another person. We might say it is like comparing apples (loving the divine essence) and oranges (loving another person). Both acts of loving are perfect insofar as they are the kinds of acts they are (acts fixed by the kind of object). It isn\u2019t that loving another divine person is \u2018more perfect\u2019 than loving the divine essence simpliciter<\/em>; but that loving another divine person is another kind of perfection (a person-relative perfection). So, what Adams ‘gains’ is the person-relative perfection of loving another person. Either this begs the question, or states what are primitive facts about persons.<\/p>\n

However, Richard needs to give us reasons<\/strong> to suppose we should think there must be such a person-relative perfection in God<\/strong>. To my mind, Richard takes “a person loves another person” as a primitive intuition<\/strong> about the perfection of persons. It shouldn\u2019t be that e.g., the Father\u2019s loves the Son, is how the Father is morally perfect (supposing \u2018moral perfection\u2019 is a divine attribute), or that the Father gains some epistemological or psychological insight about himself or the nature of love. It might just be that by saying “\u2018a person loving another person\u2019 is better than \u2018a person not loving another person\u2019\u201d [PL<\/em> = perfect love] is a negative claim. Consider\u00a0 this,<\/p>\n

(3) If e.g., y<\/em> does not love x<\/em> (e.g., because y<\/em> is unwilling), then x<\/em> grieves because y<\/em> does not love x<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As I mentioned before, Richard takes grieving<\/em> and being happy<\/em> (with regard to the same object) as contraries. Hence, if Richard wants to say that the Father is perfectly happy, then he\u2019s got to deny that the Father is one who grieves. So, perhaps when he posits PL<\/em> Richard is merely denying that \u2018a person grieves because of another person\u2019. If this is right, then Richard\u2019s argument from love is a kind of apophaticism<\/em><\/strong> (negative theology–saying what God is not). However, this might not be right because Richard seems committed to saying that love is a real divine attribute, not merely the negation of grief. In any case, it is worth considering.<\/p>\n

Richard also mentions that a divine person might not have perfect love if the person in question is unwilling or unable. Given (3), Richard seems to add that a divine person might not have perfect love if another person is unwilling or unable to love the first person.\u00a0 So, there might be two senses of ‘unable’: (1) x<\/em>‘s not having power to love another person, (2) x<\/em>‘s not having all the right conditions for perfect love (that is, x<\/em> needs y<\/em> to love x<\/em> if x<\/em> is to have perfect love, so x<\/em> is ‘unable’ to have perfect love if y<\/em> doesn’t love x<\/em>.).<\/p>\n

However, what Richard is missing is why there is a second or third divine person<\/strong> (who might be unwilling to love (another) divine person). Richard argues for three person on the basis that there is perfect love, but then considers the case that there might be three persons and there isn’t ‘perfect love’. But why suppose there are three persons if there isn’t perfect love<\/strong>? Richard doesn’t argue for three persons and there not being perfect love. It would seem then that Richard has significantly unjustified assumptions.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, Richard seems to assume that the second and third divine persons, in some sense, perfects the first divine person. This would seem to go against Augustine<\/strong>‘s repeated claim in De Trinitate<\/em> that every divine person is perfect in se<\/em>. The Father is entirely perfect without the Son, etc. Perhaps Richard would claim that the only perfection in question here is ‘perfect love’, and that every divine person would have this perfection immanently. To say every divine person has this perfection immanently <\/strong>contradicts claims like ‘the Son does the Father’s understanding for the Father’. If this is the illicit theological view that Augustine had in mind, then Richard could say that every divine person remembers, understands, and loves in se<\/em>, but that any one divine person has perfect love immanently in part thanks to the two other divine persons. Scotus later rejects such a view. But I take it that Scotus has a different theological opinion than Richard does.<\/p>\n

Next, Richard believes that [x<\/em> = divine person]:<\/p>\n

(5.i) If x<\/em> is unwilling to have perfect love, then perfect love must be elsewhere.<\/span> But who else besides a divine person could have perfect love essentially? Nobody. But a person who has the divine substance essentially satisfies the description of \u2018the best of all possible beings\u2019 (substances). Therefore, a person, who has the divine substance essentially, has perfect love.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But why should we suppose that \u2018perfect love\u2019 exists anywhere?<\/strong> Richard assumes that it has got to exist somewhere. And the most likely place is that it exists in whatever being satisfies the description \u2018the best of all possible beings\u2019. But even still, we might be of a nihilist persuasion such that we don’t suppose that love is a basic fact about the creator of the world (if there is a creator of the world). Richard doesn’t give us arguments for why perfect love must exist; but he works from the angle that we have experienced love in this world, and we find love extraordinarily compelling and basic to the make- up and (normative) ordering of the world, esp. in human society.<\/p>\n

Richard seems to take it as intuitively obvious that the (S2) is a better state of affairs than (S1). This intuition is what seems to drive his entire argument from love, and from happiness. What seems much less obvious<\/strong> is Richard\u2019s claim that perfect love is satisfied only by three mutual lovers<\/strong>. Suppose we accept his intuition that perfect love entails (at least) three mutual lovers, but why not more than three?<\/strong> The more, the merrier? In book 4 he\u2019ll give an argument for why there are exactly three divine persons, but not from his notion of perfect love, rather from the origin of produced divine persons and an appeal (in effect) to the indiscernibility of identicals. It seems then that Richard gives up on the idea (if he seriously held it) that he can argue from perfect love that there are exactly three mutual lovers. Instead, Richard seems to take his argument from perfect love to be successful if it shows us that there must be at least three divine persons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In three of the last four posts (Rick St. Vick 6, 7, 9, 10) I surveyed some of Richard of St. Victor\u2019s arguments for why there must be at least three divine persons. (We\u2019ve yet to see an argument for there aren\u2019t more than three persons.) Here I\u2019d like to respond to these, and to… Read More »Richard of St. Victor 11 – Response to the Argument From Love Thus Far (Scott)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1062,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-theories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1053"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1066,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053\/revisions\/1066"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}