Per Caritatem

I recently came across an interesting article by Paul DeHart entitled, “The Ambiguous Infinite: Jüngel, Marion, and the God of Descartes”[1] [thanks to Shane W. for sending this my way!]. In this post, I will comment briefly on Jüngel with regard to Descartes, as my next “guest blogger” will be presenting a series on Marion and Descartes.

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DeHart begins by presenting a passage from Eberhard Jüngel’s work, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt (1977):

“Thereby, however, the being of God necessarily falls asunder. For on the one hand God, in accordance with his essence—that is, as that which is absolutely superior to me—cannot be thought of as limited to the presence of the ego. Even for Descartes, it belongs to the essence of God to be more than merely present with me. On the other hand, God’s existence can only be asserted when he is present within the horizon of my existence. Because for ‘Descartes being-ness means: being represented through and for the subject,’ which ‘I’ am. Thus the following aporia emerges:

a) The existence of God is secured through me when the essence of God is represented by me.
b) In terms of his essence God is of course the almighty creator who exists necessarily through himself and through whom I exist (and also through whom I am what I am).
c) In terms of his existence, however, God is through me, inasmuch as even his existence can be understood only as a being-represented through and for the subject, which ‘I’ am” (pp. 76-77).

The aporia that Jüngel detects arises due to the traditional way of understanding God as the unique being whose essence is his existence. In other words, God’s existence is not “something” separable from his essence, as is the case with creatures whose existence comes from God and whose essences serve as limiting or determining factors. What Jüngel finds troubling is that though Descartes accepts this traditional understanding of God, his new epistemology seems unharmonizable with such a view. As DeHart explains,

“Descartes located the foundation for cognition and rationality in the human ‘ego’ or self, which ‘clearly and distinctly’ apprehends its own presence as well as it own defining activity, thinking. Heidegger, whom Jüngel closely follows in this discussion, argued that one result of this new foundation of thought is that the existence of things outside the self is strictly a function of their perception by the self, their ‘being present’ to thought. This is neither a logical inference, nor a stipulative definition […] Rather, Heidegger claims that the meaning of any assertion of existence is now implicitly determined as a mode of being present (‘re-presented’) with the cognizing self which makes the assertion: to say ‘X exists’ henceforth means or implies that X is within the horizon of the self’s presence to itself” (p. 78).

The difficulty that Jüngel brings to the surface is that given Descartes’ new epistemological configuration, for knowledge of God’s existence to be meaningfully asserted, the divine essence (given its transcendence to human reason) must be re-presented by human thought—“it must be given in some idea to that human reason and thus constructed by the human subject as an object, similar to any other existent. This is because in this new Cartesian epistemological scheme ‘to exist’ becomes virtually identical with ‘to be present in the form of some attribute which affects the knowing human subject’ ( Gott als Geheimnis, p. 166) [DeHart, p. 79]. Thus, there seems to be an irresolvable dissonance between the traditional view of God and Descartes epistemology founded on the “I” or “I think.”

According to Jüngel, Descartes attempts to conceal or attenuate this tension by distinguishing between finite and infinite substances—the latter referring to God who is a se and the former to creatures who depend on God for their being. Thus, the word “substance” is being used in a non-univocal fashion and is Descartes’ attempt to bring God into his “representational scheme” with the hope that this ambiguity of this unique will ease what Jüngel claims as ultimately unharmonizable position.

DeHart sums up the problem as follows:

“God’s essence is defined by Descartes (following venerable traditions) in such a way as to problematize its relation to the new role of the human subject in constituting knowledge. Existence now means objectifiable presence within the human cognitive horizon; but how can the absolutely transcendent creator appear within this horizon? Descartes’ denial of the univocity of substance suggests that God’s appearance in this horizon is possible but problematic, a quasi availability qualified by infinite unavailability. To know God as God involves a claim about God’s essence and a claim about God’s existence that do not exactly negate each other, but that are resistant to harmonization, threatening to move off in separate directions. This puts a question mark on the traditional metaphysical claim of identity of essence and existence. In short, Descartes’ traditionalist theism sits awkwardly with his revolutionary epistemology” (pp. 79-80).

Notes
[1] The Journal of Religion, Vol. 82, No. 1. (Jan. 2002), pp. 75-96.

Given the significance placed on the dialectic of the two powers (potentia absoluta et potentia ordinata Dei) by the moderni (mentioned in the previous post), it would be helpful to spend some time discussing this distinction, its historical background, and its use by the theologians of the via moderna. The distinction of the two powers can be traced back to Peter Damien and Anselm of Canterbury.[1] St. Thomas Aquinas also recognized the distinction; however, he employed it as a limiting concept rather than making it a central focus.[2] For example, St. Thomas taught that from an initial set of possibilities God freely chose to actualize a particular subset. God, being both free and omnipotent (limited only by acting such that the principle of non-contradiction is upheld), could have willed to actualize a different subset. However, given his choice, God abides by his decision and the unrealized possibilities must be regarded as only hypothetically possible.[3] As McGrath explains, the initial set of possibilities open to God refers to his potentia absoluta, whereas the actualized subset refers to his potentia ordinata. This distinction enabled theologians to provide a defense against any charge of necessatarianism. As McGrath explains,

God cannot be said to act out of absolute necessity (neccessitas consequentis), in that he was free to select any possibilities he cared to for actualization, subject to the sole condition of non-contradiction (that is, God is unable to construct a triangle with four sides). Nevertheless, having selected which possibilities to actualize, God imposes upon himself a certain degree of restriction, in that he has freely chosen to be faithful to a certain ordering of his creation. The significance of the distinction between the two powers of God lies in the concept of necessity involved: how can God be said to act reliably, without simultaneously asserting that he acts of necessity?[4]

In other words, the dialectic provided a way to affirm the reliability of God’s actions, while rejecting that God acts necessarily. God in a sense freely limits himself and commits himself to that which he has ordained. The ordained order is a contingent consequence of God’s free decision in which he acts not by absolute necessity but by a “conditional necessity (necessitas coactionis or necessitas consequentiae).[5] So long as the dialectic of the two powers remains a dialectic and functions as a limiting notion, it can be a useful theological tool.

Notes
[1] Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), p. 55.
[2] See, ST I, q. 25, a.5, resp., “God does not act from natural necessity, but that His will is the cause of all things; nor is that will naturally and from any necessity determined to those things. Whence in no way at all is the present course of events produced by God from any necessity, so that other things could not happen. […] when the end is proportionate to the things made for that end, the wisdom of the maker is restricted to some definite order. But the divine goodness is an end exceeding beyond all proportion things created. Whence the divine wisdom is not so restricted to any particular order that no other course of events could happen. Wherefore we must simply say that God can do other things than those He has done.”
[3] Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), p. 55.
[4] Ibid., p. 56.
[5] Ibid., p. 56.

The university at Wittenberg, founded in 1502 by Frederick the Wise, served as the context for much of Martin Luther’s early intellectual training. As McGrath observes, upon his return to Wittenberg in the late summer of 1511, Luther “found an Augustinian priory and a university in which three particularly significant elements of later medieval thought were well established,” viz., the studia humanitatis, the via moderna, and the schola Augustiniana moderna.[1] For my purposes here, I focus on the via moderna, which includes a discussion of the dialectic between the two powers of God (potentia absoluta et potentia ordinata Dei). The via moderna, which arose in the latter half of the fourteenth century, is often explicated in contrast with the via antiqua. The former is generally associated with the nominalism[2] of William of Ockham and Gregory of Rimini, whereas the latter represents the realist positions of St. Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.[3] Moving outside of the narrow confines of epistemological theories, nominalism as a movement exercised a far-ranging impact that extended well beyond the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For example, Heiko A. Oberman lists the following as key elements of the nominalist movement in its broader understanding. First, there is the dialectic between potentia ordinata (that which God has in fact decreed but which could have been otherwise) and potentia absoluta (the infinite possibilities available to the absolutely free God, i.e., barring a violation of the principle of non-contradiction). Second, we encounter an emphasis on the contingency of creation. Oberman emphasizes that this contingency must be understood both vertically (God—world—human beings) and horizontally (world—human beings—future), and should not be taken as that which is unstable and constantly threatened by potentia absoluta. Rather, “[t]he contingency of creation and salvation means simply that they are not ontologically necessary. The point is that in the vertical dimension our reality is not the lowest emanation and level in a hierarchy of being which ascends in ever more real steps to the highest reality, God.”[4] Third, nominalism insists that our world is not a shadowy reflection of “higher levels of being,” but instead has its own “full reality.”[5] Fourth, the nominalists of this period protested against “wild speculation” and “vain curiosity,” particularly against claims of reason that are not verified by tests of experience. Stated from a different but related perspective, one might view the underlying intention of nominalism as a rejection of meta-categories that obfuscate reality. “Just as it rejected metaphysics to establish physics, so nominalism ventured to strip theology of her distorting meta-theological shackles, with the result that the Scriptures and the prior decrees of God were emphasized at the expense of natural theology.”[6] Fifth, we find an emerging new image of God as a result of the stress on God’s potentia ordinata. Here God is understood as the covenant God who has made a pactum with his creation (which includes salvation history and everything that entails) and human beings are seen as “contractual partners” with God in this covenant. According to Oberman, this new emphasis on God as a “contractual partner in creation and salvation,” is intimately connected with what he considers as a Pelagianist view of facere quod in se est, a doctrine which is here interpreted as God having determined in eternity “past” to accept and reward certain human moral efforts apart from a prior movement of grace.[7]

Notes
[1] Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), p. 27.
[2] Speaking epistemologically, nominalism (understood as “terminism”) is the denial of extramental universals.
[3] Ibid., p. 30.
[4] Heiko Oberman, The Dawn of the Reformation, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), p. 27.
[5] Ibid., p. 27.
[6] Ibid., p. 28.
[7] Alister McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), p. 29. McGrath, in contrast, does not interpret the facere quod in se est teaching of the nominalist theologians as Pelagianist, but does deem it synergistic. This alternate interpretation will be discussed in more detail in a subsequent section.

This post is a kind of “follow-up” to the previous short series on Scotus and the univocity of being. Given that finals are approaching and papers are coming due, this will unfortunately be a very informal post with the hopes of at least pointing out features of Radical Orthodoxy’s critique of Scotus and his influence on modernity that seem to me worth further exploration. (Much of what I say below is inspired by a recent discussion given by a fellow classmate at UD—J. McIntosh).

First, the absence of Neoplatonic elements in Scotus (in comparison with Augustine and Aquinas) is interesting and this absence no doubt is interpreted as a serious lack by RO proponents. RO of course highlights the Neoplatonic aspects of St. Thomas, and in my opinion for good reason, as these seem downplayed in many accounts which want to portray an overly “rationalistic” Thomas (think of the way in which numerous introductory texts to St. Thomas present selected excerpted texts so as to further this portrait). Moreover, RO, Pickstock in particular, has brought to our attention the vast differences between Thomas’ view in which truth is understood as adequatio of the mind to the object, which involves participation (intrinsically) understood—again there are strong Neoplatonic themes here—and Scotus view, viz. that what one knows is a picture or representation of reality. More explicitly, in Scotus’ representative epistemology the concept in which the meaning lies is separated from reality—thus, RO will say that things are turned into meanings. The movement here in the direction of modern epistemologies is not difficult to discern. RO, following the Christian Neoplatonic/Thomistic participatory path, wants to emphasize that there is a greater ontological depth in knowing as they favor a “thicker” metaphysical terrain. Lastly, in the representation model, things are indifferent to the mind, whereas for RO’s Thomas, one’s knowing the tree is not indifferent to knowing the tree, rather, the tree is there to be known—as Pickstock (I believe) puts it in Truth in Aquinas, you “catch the tree on its way back to God.”

I am also quite sympathetic to RO’s rejection of the dualism between theology and philosophy, and frankly, I see much continuity with Milbank’s read of Aquinas and certain emphases of Gilson. Milbank stresses that Thomas breaks with Aristotle in many places due to his Christian faith. For example, contra Aristotle, Thomas upholds the Creator/creature distinction in his claim that metaphysics studies ens commune (created being) and not being in its entirety. In making this distinction metaphysics is subservient to theology and not vice versa. In other words, we might say that Aristotle still falls prey to and promotes onto-theo-logy whereas, according to RO, Aquinas gives us a theo-ontology.

Other interesting topics for further study would be why theology must be construed as a science on the model of Aristotle, the relation between a metaphysics of participation and whether this necessarily involves some (Christianized) theory of recollection or divine implantation of ideas, as well as the significance of Scotus’ reduction of exemplar causality to efficient causality and how this fits into RO’s more global critique.

Scotus, of course, is a Christian philosopher/theologian and takes seriously our predications about God. For Scotus, contra Maimonides and the claims of negative theology, our negative predications of God must be “grounded” in positive statements. For Maimonides (or a thinker in this tradition), one can claim only negative knowledge of God (given God’s simplicity) and thus negative predication is the proper way to speak of God. For example, to predicate “is not dead” of God is more fitting than to say “God is alive.” As William E. Mann explains, this position was attractive to Maimonides for the following reasons. The first has to do with what is called the “repeatability criterion” for attributes. That is, “any positive attribute is repeatable or sharable: one thing’s being good does not preclude many things from being good.” The second reason relates to God’s simplicity—the idea that God is not composed of “parts” and has no real distinctions (e.g., between essence and existence or substance and attributes).[1] At the end of the day, for Maimonides, the metaphysical account of how a creature is good, wise, etc. must be wholly other than that of God. To claim that wisdom is a positive attribute of both God and a creature is (for Maimonides) to claim (in accordance with the repeatability criterion) that the two are good in exactly the same way. This would then land us in some form of polytheism. Thus, all positive predications of God must be rendered in negative terms. Scotus too wants to uphold God’s simplicity; however, he finds the negative theology approach incoherent for a number of reasons. First, simple negative concepts are impossible because “every negative concept is logically parasitic on some positive concept.” The only simple concepts that we have are positive concepts. Second, to apply a negative predicate to God, we ultimately must have in mind some positive affirmation of God to which the negative predication stands in contradiction. Third, “our greatest love is not directed at negations. When we love God, it is not because he is conceived as not dead or not bad.”[2] As we stated above, Scotus affirms the doctrine of God’s simplicity, and it is for this reason that he introduces “quasi-properties.” In other words, because the grammatical structure of the two statements, “God is wise,” and “Socrates is wise,” is identical, the (infinite) ontological difference between the two is concealed. Hence, “what is a property in creatures must be understood as an as-it-were property in the case of God.”[3] This is not to suggest that Scotus conceives of God as “having” properties. Scotus here is in perfect continuity with Aquinas in understanding God to be Wisdom Itself, Goodness Itself, Power Itself etc. Where Scotus does in fact disagree with Aquinas concerns the former’s denial of analogy as a “third” way between equivocity and univocity. For Scotus, however delicately one parses analogy, in the end it remains a subset of equivocity. In order for a concept to qualify as univocal it must (1) result in a contradiction if the same thing is both affirmed and denied of it; (2) it must be able to function as a middle term in a valid syllogism.[4] Moreover, Scotus is after a simple concept of God that is naturally acquired. An analogical concept, which for Scotus is actually an equivocal concept, is a complex concept. Either this analogical (or equivocal) concept is ultimately grounded in a univocal concept or it is incoherent because we have no way of telling what it is about. Such a situation would of course have serious ramifications for our theological predications. Though significantly more could be said (particularly by those who know Scotus much better than I), hopefully, I have presented a fair and accurate sketch of Scotus’ understanding of the concept of the univocity of being.

Bibliography
Mann, William E. “Duns Scotus on Natural and Supernatural Knowledge of God,” as found in the Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 238-262.

Notes
[1] William E. Mann, “Duns Scotus on Natural and Supernatural Knowledge of God,” pp. 240-241.
[2] Ibid., p. 241. Other reasons may be cited, but the above-mentioned ones are suitable for our purposes.
[3] Ibid., p. 244.
[4] Ibid., p. 246. Again, this formulation indicates that Scotus is concerned with scientific understanding and discourse.

As I noted in the previous post, the doctrine of the univocity of being is a Scotist distinctive. As Peter King observes, according to Scotus, “there is a single unified notion of being that applies equally to substance and accident (and generally to all ten categories), as well as to God and creatures, which serves to ground metaphysics as a science.”[1] King notes two arguments (among many) that Scotus gives for the univocity of being. First, Scotus states that one can be certain about a concept that he possesses and yet doubt another concept. The example that Scotus gives is that one can be certain that God is a being and yet doubt whether God is an infinite or finite being or a created or uncreated being. Consequently, this indicates that “being” can be separated from the concepts of a finite or infinite being, yet being is included in the latter concepts.[2] The second argument is a kind of reductio ad absurdum. That is, Scotus argues that if we do not have a univocal concept of being, then we ultimately must deny that substance, and more seriously, God, are unknowable (by us). Given that the viator’s knowledge is derived from sense perception, which leads to “simple concepts that have a content in common with that which inspires them,” there is, therefore, “no basis [contra Henry] for forming simple analogous concepts.”[3] In addition, if we do not possess a simple concept of being, then in light of the fact that we do not directly perceive substance (but only perceive accidents directly), it would be cast into the realm of the unknowable. The same type of argument can also be applied to God.

Bibliography
Duns Scotus. Philosophical Writings, trans. Allan Wolter. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.
King, Peter. “Scotus on Metaphysics,” as found in the Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 15-57.

Notes
[1] King, “Scotus on Metaphysics,” p. 18. Scotus himself writes, “I designate that concept univocal which possesses sufficient unity in itself, so that to affirm and deny it of one and the same thing would be a contradiction. It also has sufficient unity to serve as the middle term of a syllogism, so that wherever two extremes are united by a middle term that is one in this way, we may conclude to the union of the two extremes themselves” (Philosophical Writings, p. 20).
[2] “Every intellect that is certain about one concept, but dubious about others has, in addition to the concepts about which it is in doubt, another concept of which it is certain. […] Now in this life already, a man can be certain in his mind that God is a being and still be in doubt whether He is a finite or an infinite being, a created or an uncreated being. Consequently, the concept of ‘being’ as affirmed of God is different from the other two concepts but is included in both of them and therefore is univocal” (Philosophical Writings, p. 20).
[3] King, “Scotus on Metaphysics,” p. 18.