Arche Vol. III, No. 1 (Fall 2019)

Arche | Ἀρχή

Journal of Philosophy and Political Theory Fall 2019 | Volume III, Issue No. 1

Arche | Ἀρχή

Journal of Philosophy and Political Theory Fall 2019 | Volume III, Issue No. 1

A Journal Published by the Philosophy and Political Theory Students of Patrick Henry College

STAFF & CONTRIBUTORS editor-in-chief

Mary Katherine Collins senior editor publication manager

Thomas Keith senior editor

Rachel Hebert senior editor

Mikael Good financial director

Daniel Cochrane

The Arche Journal of Philosophy and Political Theory is an undergraduate journal publishing academic essays on topics of philosophy proper and political theory.

Arche (Ἀρχή) is an ancient Greek word meaning “beginning” or “origin.”

Carrying the idea of a source or ground of being from which other things flow, it captures the purpose of this journal: to present careful writing dealing with first principles and the deepest questions of reality and human life.

Essays in the journal represent the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily the views of Patrick Henry College or the editors.

ISSN 2471-2655 Patrick Henry College 10 Patrick Henry Circle Purcellville, VA 20132 (540) 338-1776 archejournal@gmail.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Authors of the respective essays in this publication retain copyright privileges.

Copyright © 2019 • Printed in the United States of America.

TA B LE O F C O N T EN T S Letter from the Editor

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On the Knowledge of Good and Evil:

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The New Atheists, Secular Morality, and Moral Intuitions

By Mikael Good

The Nature of God’s Being:

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The Morality of Language:

47

Body and Soul:

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Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and the Doctrine of Analogy

By Thomas Keith

A Wilsonian Proof for the Existence of Higher Law

By Mary Katherine Collins

The Harmony in Liturgy

By Marina Barnes

LET TER FROM THE EDITOR

Letter from the Editor

The cosmos have remained a source of profound, unsurpassed beauty and imagination since the earliest glimpses into mankind’s fascinations with the world. As Aratus writes, “They, all alike, many though they be and other star in other path, are drawn across the heavens always through all time continually. But the Axis shifts not a whit, but unchanging is forever fixed, and in the midsts [sic] it holds the earth in equipoise and wheels the heaven itself around.” When a child stares into the night sky, she is greeted with the overwhelming sense of how tediously infinitesimal she is.

However far she may stretch out her arms, she is unable to reach the heights of those solar systems to which she is necessarily constrained. These galaxies seem to acknowledge a transcendent order. Regardless of their desires, legislators cannot unfix the stars. Regardless of their attempts, scientists can barely scratch the surface of “what lies beyond.” Here, modern man finds the most baffling of all scientific revelations: he is unable.

Consider the oft-heard admonishment to “reach for the stars” which is given to wide-eyed youths dreaming of their supposed revolutionary destinies. “Reconstruct the stars” is never urged. It is unfeasible. Man may be able to rename the stars, but he falls short of altering them entirely by his sheer will. No; here is something which the scientists may measure, may evaluate, may predicate and postulate upon, but over which they do not possess the power to inflict their will. The stars are the last great reminder of a first mover to whom all things are ontologically bound.

All philosophy urges man to reflect. Great philosophy urges him to wonder, to marvel, to submit. Though often mocked for its tendency toward the esoteric and inaccessible, philosophical questions undergird life itself. Even questions of how many angels may fit onto the tip of a pencil have profound metaphysical value. Rather than settling for procrustean specialization, we at Arche seek to return great philosophy to its roots, to that which is beyond itself: toward the metaphysical, the anagogical, the forms, the genera, and ultimately, the stars. It is only when man reflects upon his position within the eternal hierarchy that he can truly flourish; his soul must first be properly ordered both toward his fellow man and toward heaven.

This view of mankind is not common today, but its lack of commonness might prove its very existence. As Wilhelm Röpke reminded us nearly one hundred years ago, “This desperate attempt has created a situation in which man can Vol. III, No. 1

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ARCH E JO URNAL OF P H I LOSOP HY AND POLI T ICAL T H EORY

have no spiritual and moral life, and this means he cannot live for any length of time, in spite of television and speedways and holiday trips and comfortable apartments. We seem to have proved the existence of God in yet another way: by the practical consequences of His assumed non-existence.” Regardless of where you choose the point the finger—to emotivism, to liberalism, to nominalism, to scientism—one whispered fact remains: no matter how far man runs, he will never fully uproot proper order. Resistance to the natural order of the galaxies is futile.

Here, disciples of Thomistic tradition should fi nd hope. In herent in ma n is the need for something greater. For even if religion “…should disappear from among us, we would again construct our shrine under some green tree or on top of some high hill, an altar to which the soul could free and before which it could bow down. People must make for themselves a sacred place where they can share their heightened awe before this vast, mysterious, beautiful universe.” The stars are far from the only reminder of man’s proper role to “love God and enjoy him forever.” From intuition to language, liturgy to analytical philosophy, the aidesmémoires of Heaven’s downward gaze are all-encompassing.

This idea of man’s bowing before the Good will be traced in various ways throughout this edition’s four papers. Within On The Knowledge of Good and Evil, Mikael Good notes the New Athiests’ lack of a proper metaphysical basis upon which to affirm moral absolutes, though they argue man has a moral obligation to abide by them. There is a moral universe to which man is bound, and that moral universe is intimately connected with the existence of God. Throughout The Nature of God’s Being, Thomas Keith will introduce you to the long historical discussion on how humans can say true things about God. Within The Morality of Language, I trace James Wilson’s argument that dialect’s inherent structure reflects a higher order and natural law. Regardless of its geographical origin, every language proffers the opportunity to predicate both “good” and “bad.” Finally, in Body and Soul Marina Barnes will engage you with a conversation regarding the physical and spiritual value of liturgy. She asks whether traditional liturgies (both Catholic and Protestant alike) truly lead congregations toward or away from the Kingdom of Man. Special thanks must be given to those who have assisted with the various elements of renewing this journal and its publication this Fall. In particular, Arche alumna Sarah Dunford who helped pass on documents and templates to this year’s renewed Editorial Board, along with Daniel Cochrane, our savvy financial consultant, whose wisdom granted us the opportunity to publish Arche once again. We must also thank Dr. Mark Mitchell, Dr. Matthew Roberts, and Dr. Roberta Bayer for their unyielding graciousness and wisdom over the past four years. They routinely drive us toward excellence, beauty, and Heaven.

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LET TER FROM THE EDITOR

There is a higher law, order, universe, and God to Whom men must bow.

Today with memento mori on our lips, we humbly attempt to do so.

Cogitate profunde, Mary Katherine Collins Editor-In-Chief

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MIKAEL GOOD

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On the Knowledge of Good and Evil: The New Atheists, Secular Morality, and Moral Intuitions Mikael R. Good

W

hy be good without God? In an increasingly secularized society, moral philosophers want to figure out whether a system of morality can be established in the absence of the divine. Many conclude that we can and should be good without God; a few conclude that we must throw out morality along with God. Most seem unwilling to follow the latter path. To save morality, then, atheists must not only justify the moral obligations commonly derived from moral intuitions but also explain why everyone has moral intuitions to begin with.

A group of contemporary scientists and philosophers informally known as the New Atheists seeks to accomplish both these tasks. They staunchly affirm moral realism and attempt to justify the presence of moral intuitions, which they often ground in evolutionary processes. They affirm that reality has moral features to which our moral intuitions point, but their naturalistic worldview does not satisfyingly explain why this is the case. Perhaps we do know about the nature of morality, even without belief in God—but why does reality have a moral structure? This paper will demonstrate that the moral realism of the New Atheists, albeit unjustified, is not surprising given the reality of divinely-instilled moral intuitions.

This paper will examine several facets of the New Atheists’ moral philosophy, including moral realism, moral objectivism, and attempts to justify moral obligations apart from God and religion. A few contemporary objections will help explain why New Atheist morality has no convincing metaphysical explanaVol. III, No. 1

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tion: the New Atheists continue to assume a standard that transcends the natural even as they contend that only the natural exists. As this paper will explain, the benefit of Christianity is that it provides both a justification for objective morality and an elegant explanation for the stubborn existence of moral intuitions.

Christianity accounts for the New Atheists’ unwillingness to give up on morality when their worldview cannot justify it: God has wired humanity to know good and evil whether or not they acknowledge His existence.

I. The New Atheists New Atheism refers to a movement led by a small group of contemporary intellectuals who share similar views on science, religion, and morality. This group includes Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there is no consensus on what exactly New Atheism entails. The New Atheists all published widely popular books around the same time in the early 2000s, and they all harshly criticize religion.1 The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy identifies metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical components shared by the New Atheists: God and the supernatural do not exist, religious belief is irrational, and there exists an objective moral standard.2 The New Atheists frequently employ the natural sciences in their philosophy, and they rely largely on scientific empiricism to determine the nature of reality.3 With this background in place, let us consider the first major facet of New Atheist ethics: moral realism.

II. Mor al R ealism The New Atheists uniformly believe that “good” and “evil” are real categories into which human actions fall. According to Chad Meister in his article “God, Evil and Morality,” the New Atheists are moral objectivists; they believe that evils such as racism are truly evil and goods such as generosity are truly good.4 The New Atheists make no attempt to veil their moral realism: these 1.

Paul Draper, “Atheism and Agnosticism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall

2017 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/atheism-agnosticism/, accessed 9 May 2018.

2.

James E. Taylor, “The New Atheists,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://www.

3.

Ibid.

iep.utm.edu/n-atheis/, accessed 9 May 2018.

4.

Chad Meister, “God, Evil and Morality,” in God is Great, God is Good: Why Believing in

God is Reasonable and Responsible (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Books, 2009), 109.

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moral facts about reality are not relative to individuals or cultures. Christopher Hitchens even says that harming a child is “something that even the most dedicated secularist can safely describe as a sin.”5 Daniel Dennett reveals that he believes in genuinely binding moral obligation when he says that he feels a “moral imperative” to teach people about evolution.6 Sam Harris in particular makes an explicit case against moral relativism. In a debate with Rick Warren, he affirmed that he believes in an absolute right and wrong. Honor killing, for example, is unambiguously wrong; atheism does not preclude this conclusion.7 In his book The End of Faith, Harris says that although many intellectuals have resorted to moral relativism, such a position “nonsensical.”8 He points out that it is self-defeating, for moral relativism is itself an absolute claim about how we ought to live. Harris also deals with a subtler opponent of moral realism: pragmatism, the view that beliefs are tools rather than facts about reality.9 Harris emphatically believes that our beliefs (including moral ones) should be a direct result of the way the world actually is. Reality is a certain way, independent of our beliefs, and according to Harris’s ethical realism there are moral truths which await our discovery just as scientific truths do.10 Because of this, Harris does not think moral truth can be determined solely via consensus. Even if everyone agrees about morality, their agreement does not constitute moral truth; it is conceivable that everyone is simply wrong.11 Many moral relativists argue that the lack of consensus about morality disproves the objectivity of ethics. But on Harris’ view “differences of opinion do not pose a problem for ethical realism.”12 We may disagree about morality as well as physics, but this is only natural given our finite knowledge of reality. Even the fact that moral standards differ widely between different cultures and times, Harris says, “suggests nothing at all about the status of moral truth.”13 The starkness of the New Atheists’ moral realism is almost startling. They 5.

Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York:

6.

Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York:

7.

Meister, 111.

Twelve, 2007), 52.

Penguin Books, 2006), 268.

8.

Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W.W.

Norton & Company, Inc, 2005), 178.

9.

Ibid., 179.

10. Ibid., 181.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 187.

13. Ibid., 171.

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are unapologetically confident in the existence of objective moral standards which are binding on all people and at all times. Yet the New Atheists think these moral standards are in no way contingent on the influence of religion.

III. R eligion and Mor alit y The New Atheists’ view of religion has two major prongs. First, they argue that morality is neither dependent on nor derived from religion. Second, they make a moral case against religion on the basis of the evil it spawns. As for the first, the New Atheists vehemently oppose the suggestion that atheists have no reason to be good. Hitchens thinks it an “appalling insinuation” that he would have no knowledge of right and wrong without the guidance of a “celestial dictatorship” which holds over him the threat of hell.14 Dawkins says that morality motivated by religion is not actually praiseworthy, because trying to be good merely to gain God’s approval is “not morality, that’s just sucking up.”15 Dennett agrees; he says that a doctrine which “trades in a person’s good intentions for the prudent desires of a rationalist maximizer shopping around for eternal bliss” is debasing to the pursuit of goodness.16 A pretense of piety can actually prevent people from sacrifice and good works, which are truly admirable.17 The New Atheists find it offensive to say that we will have no motivation to fulfill moral obligations outside the context of a divine command. We should be good for the sake of being good, not in order to gain a reward.

The New Atheists thus believe that morality has no essential link to religion. As Hitchens affirms in his book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, “Ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it.”18 Hitchens believes that moral precepts, even the Golden Rule, need to be separated from the hysteria and insanity of religion; they do not belong in a religious context.19 Dawkins thinks it is a low and pathetic view of man to think that without the vestiges of religion, “we would become callous and selfish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity, no generosity, nothing that would de14. Christopher Hitchens, “An Atheist Responds,” The Washington Post (14 July 2007),

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/13/AR2007071301461.html, accessed 7 May 2018.

15. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London, England: Bantam Press, 2006), 253.

16. Dennett, 281.

17. Ibid., 306.

18. Hitchens, God is not Great, 52.

19. Ibid., 214.

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serve the name of goodness.”20 Harris emphasizes the fact that we do not need to learn morality from religion. We understand that 2+2=4 even without reading it in a math textbook; likewise, we understand that cruelty is wrong without reading it in a holy book.21 Like Hitchens, Harris wants to remove the Golden Rule from its biblical context altogether, since religion is not only unnecessary for but actually counterproductive to moral education. Dennett also has high hopes for morality divorced from religious belief: “There is no reason at all why a disbelief in the immateriality or immortality of the soul should make a person less caring, less moral, less committed to the well-being of everybody on Earth.”22 From their standpoint of irreligious morality, the New Atheists condemn religion on moral grounds. Much of Hitchens’ book God is not Great consists of moral arguments against religion. His meaning cannot be mistaken when he says that “religion is...not just amoral but immoral”; he even refers to religion as original sin.23 Religion is immoral because it is based on concepts of atonement, blood sacrifice, and eternal punishment.24 Dawkins agrees on this point, describing the doctrine of atonement as “vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent.”25 Hitchens also specifically targets the “morality” of the Bible, spending two chapters of his book explaining why the Old and New Testaments are evil.

Harris agrees that Christianity is no suitable foundation for morality; he says, “The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago—and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since—is no one to consult on questions of ethics.”26 Furthermore, on a practical level, religion perpetuates incredible amounts of violence and oppression in the world. Religion does not make people behave better; in fact, it usually inspires them to be dogmatic, intolerant, and violent. In an article for The Washington Post, Hitchens provides a laundry list of common religious practices which he condemns as immoral (such as burning witches, condemning sexual “deviants,” prohibiting certain foods, suicide bombing and jihad, and slaughtering other tribes in the name of religion).27 Far from providing a foundation for morality, the New Atheists claim, religion actively brings about evil.

20. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 227.

21. Harris, 172.

22. Dennett, 305.

23. Hitchens, God is not Great, 52.

24. Ibid., 205.

25. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 253.

26. Harris, 172.

27. Hitchens, “An Atheist Responds,” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/

article/2007/07/13/AR2007071301461.html.

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But now a question arises: what is the basis for morality?

IV. Evolutionary Accounts of Mor alit y Given the New Atheists’ emphasis on natural science, it is unsurprising that they refer to evolutionary processes to explain morality. But none of them are willing to rely on natural selection as morality’s sole basis. In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins gives the fullest evolutionary account of morality. He admits that natural selection initially seems capable of explaining fear and sexual lust but not empathy and moral sense. The compassion we feel for a lonely widow or a crying child does not seem to contribute to our survival. But Dawkins argues that the concept of the “selfish gene,” upon which he bases his theories on evolution, does not necessitate a selfish organism or a selfish species.28 In fact, there are four Darwinian explanations for altruism—that is, unselfish behavior in relationships. First, it is in animals’ interest to behave altruistically towards their kin.

Second, animals from different species can have symbiotic relationships wherein they benefit from altruism; Dawkins calls this “reciprocal altruism.”29 Third, animals may be motivated to be altruistic for the sake of reputation. Fourth, being altruistic can be interpreted as an advertisement of one’s dominance. Because altruism can contribute to survival, we have developed an impulse to be altruistic through evolutionary processes. But do the good things we feel obligated to do actually contribute to our survival? Dawkins explains, In ancestral times, we had the opportunity to be altruistic only towards close kin and potential reciprocators. Nowadays that restriction is no longer there, but the rule of thumb persists. Why would it not? It is just like sexual desire. We can no more help ourselves feeling pity when we see a weeping unfortunate (who is unrelated and unable to reciprocate) than we can help ourselves feeling lust for a member of the opposite sex (who may be infertile or otherwise unable to reproduce).

Both are misfirings, Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes. 30

Dawkins uses the language of “blessed, precious mistakes” because he does not want to degrade or delegitimize morality by explaining its evolutionary origins. He assures the reader that referring to “noble emotions” such as compassion and generosity as “misfirings” is not meant to be pejorative.31 Evolution is 28. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 215.

29. Ibid., 216.

30. Ibid., 221.

31. Ibid.

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responsible for morality, but morality is still valuable in its own right.

However, in his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins seems to say that morality must transcend biology. If we based society on the ruthless selfishness of the selfish gene, it would be “a very nasty society.”32 By way of warning, Dawkins says that if we wish to create a society of unselfish cooperation aimed at the common good, we cannot expect biological nature to aid us. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,” Dawkins exhorts us, “because we are born selfish. Let us try to understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.”33 Our genes may tell us to be selfish, but we are “not necessarily compelled” to obey them. We may not be genetically programmed for altruism, but we can learn it.34 Evidently, we have an obligation to be altruistic that is not rooted in biology after all.

Sam Harris agrees that evolutionary processes may explain the development of moral impulses but are ultimately insufficient to account for morality.

He says that game theory as well as evolutionary biology tell “plausible stories” about the roots of altruism, but we must not take these too much to heart. They mostly serve to demonstrate that moral impulses are not instilled by religion.35 Furthermore, what is “natural” in human nature—i.e., what gives us an evolutionary advantage—is not the same as what is “good.” In fact, “natural” and “good” are often at odds with each other. “Appeals to genetics and natural selection can take us only so far,” Harris concludes, “because nature has not adapted us to do anything more than breed.”36 The New Atheists recognize that moral realism requires more than an evolutionary account of the origin of moral feelings.

Impulses beneficial to survival do not constitute obligations which are binding no matter whether it is in our interest to fulfill them. The New Atheists do not give in fully to the evolutionary argument, and they attempt to supplement it with additional explanations for morality.

V. O ther Attempts to Justif y Mor alit y In The God Delusion, Dawkins considers the objection that only religion can give us absolute standards of right and wrong. Dawkins refers to moral princi32. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Harris, 185.

36. Ibid.

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ples based on religion as “absolutist” principles. He admits that absolute moral standards usually come from religion. “Fortunately, however, morals do not have to be absolute,” Dawkins says.37 Dawkins considers the deontology of Kant, who says that we must always do our duty solely for duty’s sake, and identifies this as moral absolutism. But there is also the option of consequentialist ethics, such as Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism; this is more of a pragmatic than an absolutist approach to ethics.38 Dawkins concludes that it is fairly difficult to establish an absolutist morality without religion, but this does not preclude having an objective moral standard which is not absolutist. He does not specify the source and nature of this standard. But he concludes by observing that there is much consensus about moral standards apart from religion. Dawkins points to a “broad liberal consensus of ethical principles” which includes free speech, not cheating, not murdering, and following the Golden Rule.39 He toys with the idea of a “New Ten Commandments” which would reflect this liberal consensus; perhaps it would instruct us not to cause harm to others, to administer justice but show forgiveness, to be open-minded, and not to discriminate on the basis of sex or race.40 Dawkins ends his defense of secular morality by pointing to the amazing amount of moral progress the world has seen in recent years.41 Harris attempts to give a more explicit account of the foundations of morality. He is concerned with the fact that without belief in God, why an action is good or bad is up for debate. A moral judgment such as “murder is wrong” does not seem “anchored to the facts of the world in the way that statements about planets or molecules appear to be.”42 Yet as demonstrated earlier, Harris does believe that moral judgments are anchored to reality. He concludes that “a rational approach to ethics becomes possible once we realize that questions of right and wrong are really questions about the happiness and suffering of sentient creatures.”43 We have ethical responsibilities to people if we have influence over their happiness and suffering; that is, it is happiness and suffering which provide a legitimate context for morality.

Harris thus links morality with consciousness, since consciousness creates 37. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 232.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., 263.

40. Ibid., 264.

41. Ibid., 265.

42. Harris, 170.

43. Ibid.

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capacity for suffering. But he has a hard time determining to whom we have moral obligations. We cannot be obligated to every being with consciousness; it does not make sense to draw a clean line between animals and humans; in fact, we are not even sure what makes a creature human.44 Harris also addresses a more foundational question: why do we care about the happiness and suffering of sentient creatures in the first place? Harris has no solid answer to this question, but he says it is evident that we do care and that this concern is the domain of ethics.45 The concern cannot be justified by evolution, because morality is often not self-interested. Besides, our evolutionary self-interest is merely to have as many children as possible, but our conception of happiness is much greater than that. Harris attempts to synthesize his intuitions about morality thusly: The basic facts are these: we experience happiness and suffering ourselves; we encounter others in the world and recognize that they experience happiness and suffering as well; we soon discover that “love� is largely a matter of wishing that others experience happiness rather than suffering; and most of us come to feel that love is more conducive to happiness, both our own and that of others, than hate. There is a circle here that links us to one another: we each want to be happy; the social feeling of love is one of our greatest sources of happiness; and love entails that we be concerned for the happiness of others.46

Though Harris certainly does not provide a systematized account of his ethics, he tries to move past evolutionary accounts and give a more substantial foundation for morality which is in line with our moral intuitions. Like the other New Atheists, he attempts to provide a natural explanation for morality while still affirming morality as an independent reality.

VI. New Atheist Mor alit y is Not New The New Atheists attempt to provide a rational foundation for morality that is modern, enlightened, and informed by the latest evolutionary science.

But it is not really new. The New Atheists are not the first to try to establish a rationally based ethics, trace religion back to its man-made roots, disprove religion by means of science, and criticize the dangers and harms of religion. For example, Hume made the same arguments for atheism as Dawkins, and attempts 44. Harris, 177.

45. Ibid., 185.

46. Ibid., 187.

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to establish an anthropology of religion were already underway in the nineteenth century (see for example Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals).47 Indeed, “it is difficult to identify anything philosophically unprecedented in their positions and arguments.”48 Underlying New Atheism is an Enlightenment confidence in the sufficiency of reason to establish an objective basis for ethics. Moral theories such as Kant’s deontologism and J.S. Mill’s utilitarianism sought to establish a secular ethics without reference to God or religion. Mary Poplin, in her book about secularism, quotes David Bentley Hart in saying that secular moral theory has been shown to be insufficient by the test of time: Part of the enthralling promise of an age of reason was, at least at first, the prospect of a genuinely rational ethics...not limited to the moral precepts of any particular creed, but available to all reasoning minds regardless of culture and—when recognized—immediately compelling to the rational will. Was there ever a more desperate fantasy than this? We live now in the wake of the most monstrously violent century in human history, during which the secular order...freed from the authority of religion, showed itself willing to kill on an unprecedented scale and with an ease of conscience worse than merely depraved.49

The twentieth century teaches us that setting up man as the measure of all things is an unstable condition. The events of the twentieth century hastened the rise of postmodernism, with which came a loss of confidence in human reason and in the objectivity of ethics. Friedrich Nietzsche proposed that instead of trying to establish a rational basis for ethics, philosophers ought to question morality itself. Regarding moral values, “the value of these values themselves must first be called into question,” for morality itself may turn out to be dangerous.50 Nietzsche concludes that once the idea of God is dead, man may move beyond the concepts of moral “good” and “evil.” What is “good” is merely whatever the strong man establishes as good via his will to power. Nietzsche’s view on morality is the honest end of atheism: without God, there is no moral order to the universe and no need to sustain a facade of moral obligation.

47. Draper, “Atheism and Agnosticism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://pla-

to.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/atheism-agnosticism/.

48. Taylor, “The New Atheists,” https://www.iep.utm.edu/n-atheis/.

49. Mary Poplin, Is Reality Secular?: Testing the Assumptions of Four Global Worldviews

(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 152.

50. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed.

Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 2000), 329.

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Though very few people since Nietzsche have been willing to give up morality (as he predicted), some other philosophers have recognized that morality cannot be sustained without God’s existence. Not the New Atheists. They are still in the business of trying to establish an objective, rational, secular ethics.

They affirm that man can do this without referencing anything higher than himself. They are far from the first to do it, and they do not bring much new material to the table. But even after Nietzsche and his fellow moral nihilists seemed to undermine the possibility of establishing an objective secular morality, influential intellectuals of the twenty-first century seem more optimistic about the project than ever. Yet as those who went before have discovered, their project has insufficient foundations in a naturalistic worldview.

VII. The Q ueerness of New Atheist Mor alit y George Mavrodes, in his article “Religion and the Queerness of Morality,” sets the stage for the discussion of why New Atheism morality fails. It is not necessarily a specific flaw in New Atheist logic that constitutes its downfall; rather, the New Atheists’ overall beliefs about the nature of reality lack harmony with their moral philosophy. Mavrodes posits that if naturalism is correct, there can hardly be such oddities as binding moral obligations. He explores the nonreligious worldview from the perspective of Bertrand Russell, who in his essay “A Free Man’s Worship” says that man is a mere collection of atoms who will be completely extinguished at death. Not only the individual, in fact, but the entire human species is doomed to extinction.51 What does this imply about the role of morality?

Mavrodes describes morality as something that prescribes certain duties or obligations which people must fulfill. A person’s unwillingness to fulfill her moral obligation is irrelevant to the obligation’s existence. Mavrodes admits that in many circumstances, fulfilling one’s moral obligations may result in a loss of contentment, pleasure, or happiness. Earthly benefits are the only ones possible in a Russellian world, but fulfilling our moral obligations often results in negative earthly benefits. Though it may benefit us if everyone else is moral, on many occasions it will actually hinder our self-interest to be moral ourselves.52 Mavrodes writes,

51. George Mavrodes, “Religion and the Queerness of Morality,” in Philosophy of Religion:

An Anthology, ed. Louis Pojman and Michael Rea, Thomson-Wadsworth, 2008.

52. Ibid., 584.

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I claim that in the actual world we have some obligations that, when we fulfill them, will confer on us no net Russellian benefit—in fact, they will result in a Russellian loss. If the world is Russellian, then Russellian benefits and losses are the only benefits and losses, and also then we have moral obligations whose fulfillment will result in a net loss of good to the one who fulfills them. I suggest, however, that it would be very strange to have such obligations—strange not simply in the sense of being unexpected or surprising but in some deeper way. I do not suggest that it is strange in the sense of having a straightforward logical defect, of being self-contradictory to claim that we have such obligations. Perhaps the best thing to say is that were it a fact that we had such obligations, then the world that included such a fact would be absurd—we would be living in a crazy world.53

Mavrodes addresses various secular accounts of morality, including the theory that morality has evolutionary origins. Mavrodes thinks the evolutionary argument is plausible; perhaps moral feelings contribute to the survival of the species. However, moral feelings inbred by evolution are not the same as moral obligations.54 The existence of moral obligations outside and above us would indicate that morality is not a subjective feeling but a feature of reality. It does not make sense that there are moral demands on us, says Mavrodes, “unless reality itself is committed to morality in some deep way. It makes sense only if there is a moral demand on the world too and only if reality will in the end satisfy that demand.”55 If morality does exist in a Russellian world, Mavrodes concludes, it must be an “emergent” phenomenon with no true explanation. Perhaps “we have our duties. We can fulfill them and be moral, or we can ignore them and be immoral.

If all that is crazy and absurd—well, so be it. Who are we to say that the world is not crazy and absurd?”56 Obligations may emerge, but they cannot run deep.

They “might cost a man everything but…[go] no further than man.”57 This is not logically impossible. But neither does it seem plausible.

Mavrodes’ article is relevant to this discussion because the New Atheists emphatically believe in moral obligations. They do not think morality is merely an emotion or a matter of taste. They sometimes say that moral intuitions are the result of evolutionary processes, yet they clearly believe in an independent moral reality which is contingent on no individual’s feelings about it. Furthermore, 53. Mavrodes, 581.

54. Ibid., 582.

55. Ibid., 583.

56. Ibid., 585.

57. Ibid.

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Harris and Dawkins both admit that morally good behavior is often antithetical to our natural instincts of self-interest and self-preservation. Then who or what in the world requires such behavior of us? Perhaps, as the New Atheists seem to believe, morality simply is—we know it exists, and that’s that. But naturalism as an account of reality seems peculiarly ill-suited to encompass such a phenomenon. Perhaps there is a more plausible explanation: there is a moral order to the universe which flows out of the nature of its Creator, and He has given everyone knowledge of this order.

VIII. C ontempor ary Objections Several contemporary philosophers have offered rebuttals to the New Atheist morality. Christian philosopher Chad Meister points out that the New Atheists rely heavily on the concept of objective evil in their critiques of religion.

Rape, slavery, and racism are unambiguously evil, even if some cultures or religions condone them. But the concept of objective evil assumes that there are objective moral values which are binding on all people at all times. And if such objective moral values exist, Meister argues, they need a metaphysical foundation.58 The lack of metaphysical foundation is New Atheism’s great shortcoming.

Meister agrees with the New Atheists that people can (and do) believe in moral obligations even if they have no religious belief. The question is not whether people have moral beliefs but whether they are justified in those beliefs. The New Atheists confuse an epistemic issue with an ontological one.59 We do indeed have moral knowledge, the nature of which seems to be transcendent of the natural world. And yet, from a naturalistic conception, how do we “understand the existence of a transcendent anything”?60 We cannot, Meister argues—hence the New Atheists’ failure to offer any substantial, convincing moral theory. “Certainly objective moral values didn’t simply pop into existence ex nihilo...And indeed nothing in biological evolution, most especially the alleged selfish-gene phenomenon, is capable of providing the foundation necessary to ground unconditionally binding moral values.”61 Simply put, atheists have never provided a convincing metaphysical basis for the existence of objective moral values, and the New Atheists are no exception.

John F. Haught, in his book God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, voices similar thoughts to Meister. He identifies 58. Meister, 109.

59. Ibid., 110.

60. Ibid., 112.

61. Ibid., 117.

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a major flaw in Dawkins’ evolutionary account of morality: Dawkins sets out to provide a naturalistic account of morality, but he ends up admitting that virtue has little to do with the natural world. As stated previously, Dawkins thinks that many of our moral impulses are “misfirings” of our survival instincts. Yet as soon as Dawkins begins to speak of “blessed” misfirings of human behavior, he is no longer giving a purely naturalistic account of morality. He is saying that evolutionary impulses are such that they sometimes misfire in ethical directions.62 Yet why is one kind of misfiring more ethical than another? Dawkins thinks he can make judgments about which types of evolutionary misfirings are ethical, and thus, “the actual content of our moral reflection and decision lies completely outside the scope of Darwinian explication after all.”63 Besides, even if evolutionary processes can fully account for morality, this fact undermines Dawkins’ critiques of religion. Dawkins thinks he stands on higher moral ground than religious people do, but how could “a blind, indifferent, and amoral natural process” get him there? Such a process cannot account for why “justice, love, and the pursuit of truth are now unconditionally binding virtues.”64 Haught makes an important distinction: Dawkins gives a historical account of morality, but not a metaphysical one. He assumes an objective moral standard when evaluating the products of evolutionary processes. And in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins plainly admits that our natural impulses are not that to which we should conform but which we ought to transcend. It is not in our biological nature to be good, yet we are morally obligated to be good nonetheless. If all that exists is the natural world, such an obligation cannot be accounted for.

In addition, Haught critiques Harris’s insistence that human reason is a sufficient ground for morality. Harris’s basic explanation, Haught says, is that “reason alone is the ultimate source, foundation, and justification of ethics.”65 Yet why should we trust our reason? According to evolutionary thought, our minds are the product of irrational and mindless processes.66 And even if reason is a means to moral knowledge, it is not infallible, and it certainly does not create morality. The fact that we seem to be able to grasp moral realities via our reason does not explain the nature and source of moral realities.

The New Atheists exhibit a pattern of missing the deeper issue in their discussions about morality. Perhaps evolution can explain our moral impulses—but 62. John F. Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and

Hitchens (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 71.

63. Ibid., 71.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., 74.

66. Ibid., 73.

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how is it that we can be aware of a moral obligation when we have absolutely no desire to fulfill it and doing so will not directly benefit us? Why should we fulfill such an obligation? Perhaps we are motivated to be good even if we do not believe in God. But why? Maybe we think we know who “deserves the name of goodness,” in Dawkins’ words. But who bestows this name, and why do we care?

Perhaps moral truths are akin to self-evident mathematical truths. Perhaps rational people tend to agree about ethics and have a hardy sense of what is right and wrong which is a fairly stable foundation for practical morality. But why do rational people agree? Why are they so confident in their common starting-points for morality? Is there any way to account for all these “whys”? The New Atheists do not offer any satisfying answers, because they lack one crucial thing: a metaphysical foundation for moral intuitions.

IX. The Power of Mor al I ntuitions The New Atheists cannot adequately explain the existence of moral intuitions. Yet they treat them as foundational. Even if their worldview indicates that moral intuitions have no grounding in metaphysical reality, the power of moral intuitions is such that they cannot dismiss them. The New Atheists seem to see their strongest moral intuitions as akin to foundational a priori truths or first principles. Even if they cannot be explained, they exist, and we must live according to them. Harris says that intuition is “the most basic constituent of our faculty of understanding.”67 Yes, we may have to rely on intuition in ethical matters, but that does not mean that ethics is relative or ambiguous.68 Intuition gives us knowledge of reality. Hitchens says he would probably commit suicide if he were even suspected of harming a child, saying, “This revulsion is innate in any healthy person, and does not need to be taught.”69 He also says that “ordinary conscience” is sufficient as a moral guide, independent of religion.70 Dawkins points out that different people tend to have very similar moral intuitions even if those intuitions are not well-thought out. He refers to a book

by Marc Hauser about the universal sense of morality which has supposedly been inculcated by natural processes. When faced with moral dilemmas like the Trolley Problem (and its variations), people tend to come to the same conclusions even if they are unable to justify them. After doing studies where he posed ethical dilemmas to various groups, Hauser concluded that there is no significant 67. Harris, 182.

68. Ibid., 184.

69. Hitchens, God is not Great, 52.

70. Ibid., 214.

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difference between the moral intuitions of atheists and unbelievers, or between those of people in the West and people in non-Western cultures.71 Hauser’s point, Dawkins says, is that “such moral intuitions are often not well thought out but that we feel them strongly anyway, because of our evolutionary heritage.”72 We have already seen (from Dawkins himself) that evolutionary heritage cannot adequately explain morality. But Hauser’s central observation remains: common moral intuitions have powerful sway over virtually all human beings.

The New Atheists are outraged by the suggestion that atheists would resort to lives of uninhibited immorality. But if there is no God telling us what to do, what does prevent us from being bad? It is our moral intuitions. We are wired in such a way that makes it almost impossible for us to ignore or dismiss morality.

New Atheism cannot explain this. Christianity can.

X. The Divine C ontext of Mor alit y From the Christian perspective, it makes sense that people have moral intuitions even if they have no religious training or education. It makes sense that they do not lead lives of total self-interest but instead continue to value sacrifice, kindness, and generosity. It makes sense that secularism and naturalism have been unable to eradicate morality even though they have stripped away its metaphysical foundations.

Christianity tells us that we are moral beings who inhabit a moral universe.

We can deny God’s existence and develop philosophies which are void of the transcendent, but we cannot escape the reality in which we live. God has set eternity in the human heart and given us knowledge of good and evil. He has created us to be like him in righteousness and holiness. He has instilled in us a yearning for Himself, the source of all truth and goodness. This account of reality adequately explains the existence of moral intuitions and humanity’s ongoing commitment to morality. It is significantly more plausible than the New Atheists’ account of reality.

Haught says that from a Christian perspective, we have good reason to trust the rightness of our intuitions. We understand the source of these intuitions; they do in fact reflect truth and reality, for this is their divine purpose. Haught sums up the explanatory power of the Christian worldview beautifully: Our minds have already been taken captive by a truthfulness that inheres in things, a truthfulness that we cannot possess but which possesses us. Likewise, we can 71. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 226.

72. Ibid., 225.

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trust our sense of outrage at evil ultimately because we are already grasped by a goodness that is not made by ourselves, or by our genes, but which is the silent and unobtrusive goal of all our moral striving. Meaning, Truth, and Goodness are all names for the ultimate and endless horizon of Being in which our minds first awaken and our longing for rightness blossoms into virtue. The name theology gives to this ever-present context of all existence, thought, and action is “God.” And the name for our trustful surrender to this mystery is known as “faith.” 73

We are not born tabula rasa. Our minds are captive to the truth, even if we deny it. We are created with the imago Dei and wired to strive towards the Good. God in His mercy has given us knowledge of Himself and His ways; we know something about His invisible qualities from our moral intuitions. The moral nature of creation is meant to point beyond itself. Unfortunately, the New Atheists are short-sighted, worshiping moral goodness without looking up to worship the Creator.

73. Haught, God and the New Atheism, 75.

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Bibliogr aphy Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London, England: Bantam Press, 2006.

———. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Dennett, Daniel C. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

Draper, Paul. “Atheism and Agnosticism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/atheism-agnosticism/, accessed 9 May 2018.

Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2005.

Haught, John F. God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens.

Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.

Hitchens, Christopher. “An Atheist Responds.” The Washington Post, 14 July 2007. http://www.

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/13/AR2007071301461.html, accessed 7 May 2018.

———. God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve. 2007.

Mavrodes, George. “Religion and the Queerness of Morality.” In Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology. Edited by Louis Pojman and Michael Rea. Thomson-Wadsworth. 2008.

Meister, Chad. “God, Evil and Morality.” In God is Great, God is Good: Why Believing in God is

Reasonable and Responsible. Edited by Chad Meister & William Lane Craig. Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Books, 2009.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 2000.

Poplin, Mary. Is Reality Secular?: Testing the Assumptions of Four Global Worldviews. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014.

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The Nature of God’s Being: Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and the Doctrine of Analogy Thomas D. Keith

“I

n the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful; Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds; The Most Gracious, the Most Merciful; Master of the Day of Judgment; It is You we worship, and upon You we call for help.”1 These are the opening lines of the Qur’an. Here, in one of the great sacred texts of the monotheistic tradition, we find a theme that is central to Islam, Judaism, and Christianity alike: the nature of God. As humans, we use and understand the concepts of mercy and graciousness through the lens of a finite and contingent existence, yet as theists we predicate them of an infinite and necessary God. Are we justified in doing this? And if so, how?

In the medieval era, philosophers addressed these questions by focusing on the nature of being. By first understanding how God relates to our finite and contingent understanding of existence itself, we can discover how God relates to our creaturely understanding of His other attributes. The objective for these philosophers was simple: meaningfully describe an immanent God without losing His transcendence. To achieve this, medieval philosophers developed three different categories of theories as to the nature of God’s being: the doctrines of equivocity, analogy, and univocity. Do any of these theories succeed? This paper will argue that the version of the doctrine of analogy formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas succeeds in preserving both God’s transcendence and His immanence.

1.

Qur’an 1:1-5 (ClearQuran Translation).

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ARCH E JO URNAL OF P H I LOSOP HY AND POLI T ICAL T H EORY

In doing so, this paper will first explain the background of the debate and explore its history. We will find that the doctrine of equivocity, particularly as formulated by Rabbi Moses Maimonides, severely undermines the personal and immanent nature of God. Then, we will look at Aquinas’s alternative: the doctrine of analogy. We will find that his near-pedantic distinctions between different kinds of analogy allow him to argue for his position without falling into the same traps of his predecessors. We will then evaluate the arguments of John Duns Scotus. He believed that Aquinas’s position logically devolves into equivocity, and that the only way to meaningfully predicate terms of God is to accept a doctrine of univocity. We will find t hat Aquinas’s position does not, in fact, devolve into a doctrine of equivocity. Furthermore, we will find that Scotus’s doctrine of univocity does not provide Christian orthodoxy with an acceptable alternative.

I. The p robleM of K NowINg g od How is it possible for mere humans to predicate terms of God? On one hand, the Bible makes references to characteristics that are true of God: His holiness, His justice, His wisdom. In predicating these terms of God, the authors of sacred texts assume that these concepts can describe God in meaningful ways.

However, whenever we use these terms colloquially, we are referring to concepts that are derived from our experience as created beings. These concepts are therefore contingent and finite. It seems difficult, therefore, to justify predicating them of a transcendent God because it forces us to bring God under creaturely concepts. In other words, it appears as if we are reducing Him to human terms.

We might avoid this problem by taking the alternative, and say that these terms, when applied to God, are wholly unlike our creaturely experience of them. If we do this, however, then in the words of Alexander Broadie, “a question arises as to why we’re justified in using the term [to describe] God.”2 It seems that if we do not turn God into a being ontologically rooted in creation, then we place Him so far outside of creation that we cannot meaningfully connect Him to the concepts we predicate of Him. These two extremes are often described using the terms “univocal” and “equivocal.” If a term is univocal, it means that it is the same in name and content. This means that every time a univocal term is predicated of a subject, it is 2.

Alexander Broadie, “Duns Scotus and William Ockham,” in The Medieval Theologians:

An Introduction to Theology in the Medieval Period, ed. G.R. Evans (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 250.

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predicated of that subject in the same way.3 For example, if something is “quantifiable,” it is quantifiable in only one way: numerically. Because there is no other way that something can be quantified, there is no other way that something can be “quantifiable.” Therefore, the term is univocal. At the same time, if a term is equivocal, it is the same in name but different in meaning. You can predicate the term of different objects in the same way and the term can mean something entirely different.4 For example, “pitcher” sometimes means a container designed for pouring liquids. At other times, it refers to a baseball player whose job is to pitch the ball to the batter. Because the word “pitcher” picks out different parts of reality depending on the context in which it is uttered, it is therefore an equivocal term. A term can also be analogical. This means that it is the same in name and similar in content. For example, the color “blue” can be predicated of both the sky and naval uniforms but not in the exact same way. Both may be blue in a similar sense, but their blueness is qualitatively different.

Although this threefold distinction is primarily expressed today as a linguistic one, it derives its credibility and importance from the question of how we can say true things about God.5 Those supporting the “doctrine of equivocity” claim that when we apply a term to God, we are always doing so equivocally.

This means that the term being applied will always mean something entirely different to us than it does to God. Another group supports the “doctrine of univocity,” claiming that, at least when we use terms describing perfections, those terms can be predicated of God in the same way that we would predicate them of human beings. The “doctrine of analogy,” which we will explore later, represents a middle ground between the two positions–an attempt to retain the best of both.

Philosophers such as Moses Maimonides argue that the terms we predicate of God are necessarily equivocal, at least from an epistemological standpoint.6 This means, in the words of Maimonides, that “their meaning when they are predicated of Him is in no way like their meaning in other applications.” 7 Mai3.

John F. Wippel, “Metaphysics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman

4.

Ibid.

6.

Kenneth Seeskin, “Maimonides,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, March 15, 2017,

Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 90.

5.

Broadie, 252.

accessed December 25, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maimonides/.

7.

David B. Burrell, “Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers,” in The Cambridge Com-

panion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 77.

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monides argues that we cannot know the essence of God, and therefore there is a fundamental separation between the meaning of those terms when applied to God and their meaning when applied by human beings. Even though we describe both humans and God using the term “wisdom,” for example, the content of that term is different when applied to each, and therefore the term is equivocal.8 This doctrine of equivocity is a central plank in “negative theology,” which argues that we can never accurately perceive what God is, only what He is not.9 According to this view, the Bible, in making statements like “good and upright is the Lord,”10 is not telling us to equate our creaturely concepts of “goodness” and “uprightness” with God, but instead to apply to Him the connotations of those concepts while withholding the denotations.11 While the doctrine of equivocity does an excellent job of preventing God from being reduced to His creation, it was believed by many medieval thinkers to lead to agnosticism, if not atheism.12 If all knowledge we have is creaturely, and nothing creaturely can be meaningfully applied to God, then we cannot have any meaningful knowledge of God. Or rather, even if we can, we have no means of determining whether or not we do. We might have a concept in our minds that we call “God,” but there is no ontological connection (at least as far as we know) between that concept and something that actually exists. Instead, our faith in God is either a faith in something nonexistent or a faith in something epistemically inaccessible. Hence, the doctrine of equivocity appears to scrub God from reality.

Maimonides responds to this claim by arguing that we can still make true statements about God, provided that anything that predicates a characteristic of God must be interpreted as expressing “an attribute of His action and not an attribute of His essence.”13 God, Maimonides argues, can be spoken of in human terms as long as attributes are only predicated of what He does, not who He is.

One can say “God is wise,” provided that the statement is interpreted to mean that the way in which God acts is wise. The problem with this solution, however, is that it still fails to provide us with an actual, existing thing that can be characterized as divine. We can see God’s actions and characterize them as wise and just, but we have no ontologically meaningful concept of God to connect those 8.

9.

Broadie, 252.

Ibid.

10. Psalm 25:8 (Revised Standard Version).

11. Burrell, “Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers,” 76-77.

12. Broadie, 251.

13. Burrell, “Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers,” 77.

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actions to. To say that “God” did something wise is to say that “something inexplicable” did something wise. Therefore, for Rabbi Moses to say that attributes predicated of God characterize God’s actions but not God Himself leaves us with the same problem as before.

The problem with a rejection of Maimonides’s position is that he explicitly designed it to safeguard God’s divinity from any attempt to reduce God to creation, as he believed was done by the doctrine of univocity.14 This is important especially in light of the longstanding Islamic debate on divine attributes.15 The Qur’an often ends long exhortations by reminding readers of a list of terms that are predicated of the Islamic god.16 Many Islamic thinkers, the al-Ash’ari in particular, endorsed the view that those terms could be predicated of God univocally (even though the way in which they are predicated is mysterious).17 While this perspective does not imply that God can possibly err, it does imply that God is limited by the same moral and intellectual perfections that limit humans. A perfectly wise human and a perfectly wise God are, in this view, equal to each other in wisdom. As such, either God appears to have been reduced to creation, 18 or creation has been exalted to the level of God. Even worse, because the alAsh’ari claim that the way in which those univocal terms are predicated of God is mysterious, they leave themselves open to the same critique outlined above against Maimonides: that their statements about God are effectively meaningless. One can avoid this latter problem by claiming that we know how univocal terms can be predicated of God, as Parmenides did,19 but this would only serve to emphasize the primary issue with the doctrine of univocity: that it appears to undermine God’s transcendence.

We will explore whether this critique of the doctrine of univocity is justified later. For now, it is important to recognize that by the time of Maimonides, the problems with both doctrines had become widely recognized.20 Those problems became more obvious as the debate began to focus on increasingly fundamental characteristics of God, such as His being. When the debate focuses on God’s being instead of His goodness, the debate over equivocity stops being 14. Burrell, “Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers,“ 75.

15. Ibid., 76.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. I use the phrase “appears to have been reduced” instead of “is reduced” because whether

or not this is the case is a controversy that will be examined toward the end of this paper.

19. Wippell, 89.

20. Ibid., 77.

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about whether God is good and starts being about whether God exists. Similarly, the debate over univocity stops being about whether God’s goodness is creaturely and more about whether or not He is more than His creation. As such, the debate over univocity and equivocity had become increasingly incommensurable.

Different alternatives had been proposed—such as a doctrine of analogy—but until the time of Aquinas, most of these doctrines were unstable and failed to escape many of the problems with both perspectives.

II. Aquinas ’s S olution: The A nalogical N ature of Being The doctrine of analogy formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas did not exhibit these same problems. He argued that the characteristics we predicate of God are done so analogically. A simple way to explain this involves a reference back to the analogical use of terms in language. The color “blue” can be predicated of objects in tangibly different ways, but the content of that term, though different, will be rooted in the same overarching abstraction: “blue.” Even if we cannot envision “blue” without its qualified applications, such as “dark blue,” “light blue,” “baby blue,” et cetera, we can intuit that those applications are analogous due to their connection to the ambiguous concept of “blue.” Similarly, our knowledge of the wisdom, justice, and existence of God would be similar to one’s knowledge of the color of the sky if he had only been exposed to navy blue. Such a person would be told that the sky is “blue, but different.” Though the blueness of the sky would remain incomprehensible to that person, they could still be said to have an understanding of “blue.” That understanding would merely be one that is analogous to the understanding that one has of both kinds of blue.

If one lacked knowledge of any shade of blue but navy blue (as we lack knowledge of any kind of being but our own), it does not follow that they are justified in thinking that blue is univocally extended to navy blue. To do so would be to reduce all other possible kinds of blue to one particular shade. However, to claim that one’s understanding of blueness is equivocal would require a similarly problematic claim that navy blue may be just as closely connected to other shades of blue as it is to red or orange. As such, provided that one at least has an abstract understanding that navy blue is not the only kind of blue, it is proper for him to treat blue as something that can be predicated analogically of both navy blue and the light blue of the sky (which is not actually experienced). In other words, the person who has only experienced navy blue can still understand in an abstract way that blueness encompasses more than just navy blue. He can still be said to understand what blue is, though perhaps incompletely.21 21. Wippell, 90-91.

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According to Aquinas, we lack direct knowledge of the essence of God in a way that is similar to how one might lack an understanding of light blue. In understanding a contingent being that is separable from, yet related to, God’s necessary being, we are able to understand particular aspects of the nature of God’s being because we recognize that the very idea of “being” entails something more than our creaturely conception of it. To Aquinas, however, it is not merely that we lack an understanding of how “light” can be applied to a familiar “blue.” Rather, the very nature of “blue” involves an analogical application that can only be fully understood when all of its differing applications are understood.

To Aquinas, that is the kind of understanding that God has of “being.”22 Aquinas parses this out further by describing two ways in which “being” is predicated analogically. The first is a kind of horizontal, modal level of being, grounded in sense experience, where being is separated by categories. Quality, quantity, time, substance, and properties all have being in this horizontal sense, but they have a different kind of being. To Aquinas, the “being” of numbers is tangibly different from the “being” of humans or the “being” of relations. As such, Aquinas believes that “being” is predicated analogically between different categories of being because each involves a substantively different way that a thing can exist.23 The second way in which a term can be predicated analogically involves a vertical level between contingent being and necessary Being.

This means that there is a way in which all of these categories, while being horizontally analogous to each other, are vertically analogous to a different kind of being: a necessary being.

In determining how best to relate analogical predication to each of these two levels, it is important to examine the two ways24 in which Aquinas thought that terms could be predicated of subjects analogically.25 The first is the analogy of attribution, or secundum intentionem tantum et non secundum esse, which involves objects that, characterized by the same name, have a “notion signified by this name [which] is the same with respect to the term but different as regards 22. Wippell, 90-91.

23. Ibid., 89-90.

24. There is technically a third: analogy of inequality. This is where something has the same

name, denotes the same concept, but is applied to two things that unequally participate in that same

concept. However, neither Aquinas nor his successors saw this as a genuine example of analogy, so I leave it unmentioned here.

25. Robert E. Meagher, “Thomas Aquinas and Analogy: A Textual Analysis,” The Thomist: A

Speculative Quarterly Review 34, no. 2 (April 1970): 233, accessed November 25, 2018, doi:https:// doi.org/10.1353/tho.1970.0054.

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the relationship to this term.”26 In other words, the same term is attributed to different objects but done so in different ways. The second is the analogy of proper proportionality, or secundum intentionem et secundum esse, which deals with objects that have the same name, yet have a “notion expressed by this name [that] is similar according to a proportion.”27 In other words, the same term is attributed to different objects but is done so proportionally.

Aquinas describes three ways in which concepts can be predicated according to the analogy of attribution.28 First, concepts may be analogous because they are ordered to one end. He gives the example of “health,” which can be said of urine, a potion, and a body. In this list, the first is a sign of health, the second is a cause of health, and the third is a subject of health, and therefore they are all united by the same end of “health” even though the way in which “health” is used is different in each case. Second, concepts may be analogous on the grounds that they are related to the same agent or efficient cause. For example, “medical” may be predicated of a physician, a medical student, and an instrument used in medicine because they are all related to the practice of medicine. Third, concepts may be analogous because they are related to the same subject. All of these things are attributed to the same notion but the relationship between them and the notion is fundamentally different. It is in this way, Aquinas argues, that being is said to be analogous on a horizontal level between accidents because accidents are related to one subject: substance.29 While all of these subdivisions are useful and important for understanding Aquinas’s theory of analogical predication, none of them are sufficient to predicate terms of God. The “being” of man and the “being” of God are not necessarily related to any particular final cause, and therefore the two cannot be analogous in the same way that “health” is. While man’s and God’s being might be analogous on the grounds that God is the efficient cause of man, that efficient cause is not sufficiently unifying to allow us to predicate terms of God, except 26. Meagher, 233.

27. Ibid., 234.

28. Most contemporary Thomists admit to there being a fourth subdivision of the analogy

of attribution: similitude. This was proposed before St. Thomas by St. Severinus Boethius, but was

unmentioned in St. Thomas’s works. If accepted, it allows for four analogies of attribution that are each related to one of Aristotle’s four causes. However, because it is not relevant to the current discussion, we will refrain from exploring its meaning.

E. Jennifer Ashworth, “Medieval Theories of Analogy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

September 15, 2017, accessed December 24, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analogy-medieval/.

29. Wippell, 90-91.

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perhaps “Creator.” Similarly, our being might be analogous to God’s because our being is related to His as a subject. However, this is only meaningful when the relationship between the two is known, as is the case of substance and accidents.

The nature of the relationship between us and God, however, is the very question that we are trying to solve. Until this question is answered, the relationship is unknown. Therefore, it is effectively meaningless to say that our being is related to His as a subject. In the words of Aquinas, when speaking of the analogy of attribution, “there must be some definite relation between the things having something in common analogously. Consequently, nothing can be predicated analogously of God and creature according to this type of analogy; for no creature has such a relation to God that it could determine the divine perfection.”30 As such, Aquinas and his successors see the analogy of attribution as something that cannot properly have metaphysical or religious application.31 Aquinas writes in his De Veritate that knowledge, being, and the good are instead predicated of God and man by the analogy of proper proportionality. This means that they are predicated of both in the same way that “sight is predicated of bodily sight and the intellect because understanding is in the mind as sight is in the eye.”32 Therefore, as long as the terms “include no defect nor depend on matter for their act of existence,”33 “there is no reason why some name cannot be predicated analogously of God and creature in this manner,” for “no definite relation is involved between the things which have something in common analogously.”34 This lack of definite (definitional) relation distinguishes Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy from others that have been proposed. Aquinas agrees that if such a definite relation existed, as most other theories of analogy assume, 35 then an identical, unifying concept would have to be placed in the definition of each. This means that the analogates (God and man, in this case) might be predicated with reference to the same thing, as quality and quantity are predicated in reference to substance. This appears to require that something be ontologically prior to both God and man, as substance is ontologically prior to quality and quantity, and thus would either devolve the doctrine of analogy into 30. Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q2, art 11. Trans. Robert W. Mul-

ligan, S.J., comp. Joseph Kenny, O.P. (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1952), accessed December 24, 2018, https://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer2.htm.

31. Meagher, 233.

32. Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q2, art 11.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Ashworth, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analogy-medieval/.

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a doctrine of univocity or make it merely an expression that does not provide a meaningful alternative to the doctrine of univocity.36 Terms predicated of God analogically, therefore, should only be done without a definite relation. Aquinas expands on this in the Quodlibet, where he observes that Being is predicated essentially only of God, since the divine esse is subsistent and absolute. Being is predicated of all creatures by participation: no creature is its own existence, but rather is a being which has existence. In the same way, God is essentially good, because he is goodness itself; creatures are called good by participation, because they have goodness… this proposition, “Socrates is,” is an accidental predication when it signifies either a thing’s being or the truth of a proposition.37

In other words, “being” belongs to a metaphysical hierarchy. The perfections in God’s nature are divine perfections, not creaturely perfections. Those creaturely perfections are analogous to God’s and therefore relate to His perfection, but in a way that is essentially distinct from Him. III. The I mportance of A nalogy to Aquinas ’s O ntology Aristotle writes in On Interpretation that “spoken words are the symbols of mental experience.”38 According to Robert E. Meagher, Aristotle and Aquinas believed in the importance of “[taking] refuge in spoken words,” in “the power of human language to translate the language of the things themselves and thus to symbolize the mind’s experience as a whole.”39 Meagher raises this in the context of Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy to emphasize that this power of language is the power of analogous signification. “Without analogy,” he writes, “names would be but serial numbers stamped upon the objects of our experience and designating no more than the sequence in which we encountered them.”40 French philosopher Etienne Gilson emphasizes this in his discussion of Aquinas’s epistemology, wherein “our intellect forms all its concepts by the aid of sense intuition, 36. Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q2, art 11.

37. Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae Quodlibetales, Q2, art 1. Trans. Sandra Edwards, comp.

Joseph Kenny, O.P. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1983), accessed December 24, 2018, https://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDquodlib.htm.

38. Meagher, 230.

39. Ibid., 231.

40. Ibid.

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wherefore, in its present state, it can have no object unattainable by means of such intuitions.”41 However, our intellect “longs for the intelligible in the sensible,” and thus, by abstracting from the sensible and applying those sensible concepts to the intelligible, we can know the Good through analogy.42 Thus, for Aquinas, analogy is the very core of knowledge.

It is important to distinguish this from Aristotle’s thought. According to Aquinas, Aristotle shows by means of their shared epistemology “that there exists a first unmoved mover who we call God.”43 Aquinas then extrapolates from Aristotle’s argument, pointing out, as paraphrased by Etienne Gilson, that It is obvious that if God creates things solely because He moves the causes which produce these things by their movement, God must be a Mover as Creator of movement. In other words, if the proof by the first mover suffices to prove creation, then this proof must of necessity imply the idea of creation. Now the idea of creation is wanting in Aristotle, and so the Thomist proof of the existence of God, even if it merely literally reproduces an argumentation of Aristotle’s, has a meaning altogether of its own, a meaning that the Greek philosopher never intended to give it.44

Because the Greek philosophers never pass beyond the plane of efficient cause, they “[fail] to emerge from the order of becoming.”45 Rather than things receiving their causality from a higher being, they merely receive a cause that allows them to exercise their already-existing causality. This, for Aristotle, requires that he explain second causes as unmoved movers, for they are “not dependent on any other being in their being.”46 Aquinas, on the other hand, argues that “the efficient cause produces the being of its effects,” and therefore his ontology requires that the very existence of created things make them contingent upon God. In other words, because Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy involves vertical predication between contingent and necessary being, it demands that existing things point to something that is beyond themselves merely by existing.

This is particularly significant for Aquinas’s theology, which philosopher and theologian James K.A. Smith characterizes as being based in a “meta41. Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, trans. A.H.C. Downes (New York,

NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940) 258.

42. Ibid., 263.

43. Ibid., 76.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., 77.

46. Ibid.

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physics of participation in God.”47 The immediate impact of Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy is that “God’s very essence is existence, whereas the creature ‘is’ only to the extent that it receives the gift of being from the Creator, or, in other words, the extent to which the creature participates in the being of the creator.”

In the words of Gilson, the “very existence of beings subject to becoming,” for Aquinas, requires a “radical contingency” on the creator.48 According to Smith, this contingency means that rather than existing by itself (as an equivocal view seems to imply) or on a concept seemingly prior to and separated from God (as a univocal view seems to imply), creation and thus metaphysics are fundamentally dependent on God. They “cannot be divorced from theological considerations.”49 IV. John D uns S cotus ’s C ritique of Aquinas Like St. Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus was committed to avoiding the doctrine of equivocity. Though he initially held to that doctrine, he eventually concluded with Aquinas that any attempt to predicate terms of God in an equivocal manner will effectively make all theology useless, for “there would be no certitude about any concept” that is applied to God.50 He also agreed with Aquinas that no theological claims are univocal and that theology must be done on an analogical basis.51 Furthermore, he agreed that “terms for intellectual and moral perfections are predicated primarily of God and secondarily and derivatively of creatures.”52 However, Scotus was dissatisfied with Aquinas’s treatment of the analogy of being, particularly as formulated by Henry of Ghent.53 He believed that both Aquinas and Henry failed to formulate a doctrine of analogy that can be meaningfully separated from either the doctrine of equivocity or the doctrine of univocity.54 Scotus argues that in order for theology to work on an analogous basis without devolving into equivocity, it logically requires some 47. James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology

(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 97.

48. Gilson, 68.

49. Smith, 97.

50. Richard Cross, Duns Scotus, Great Medieval Thinkers (New York, NY: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1999), 36.

51. Ibid., 35.

52. Broadie, 253.

53. David B. Burrell, “John Duns Scotus: The Univocity of Analogous Terms,” The Monist

49, no. 4 (October 1965): 640, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27901617.

54. Cross, 37.

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element of univocity.55 He begins his argument with an innovative definition of a univocal concept. First, he claims that a concept is univocal when it “possesses sufficient unity in itself, so that to affirm and deny it of one and the same thing would be a contradiction.”56 Second, he argues that it needs “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 among themselves.”57 In other words, the concept named by the term needs to be sufficiently identified with its name in order to be clearly applied and sufficiently unified as a concept in order to adequately relate other concepts together. For example, the concept defined by the word “beagle” is unified by what is common to all beagles and is identified by a name that lacks any other common application.58 As such, “beagle” might be used as the middle term of a syllogism: [1] All beagles have long, floppy ears.

[2] Simon is a beagle.

[3] Simon has long, floppy ears.

If the concept “beagle” was equivocal or analogical, we might say that this syllogism is possibly a non sequitur because it does not specify the way in which Simon is a beagle. Because the concept is univocal, however, the term can be meaningfully applied as the middle term without confusion.

Scotus then analyzes the doctrine of analogy. He first argues that analogy between two concepts requires some similarity and dissimilarity between the two, saying that “things are never related as the measured to the measure, or as the excess to the excedent unless they have something in common.”59 Scotus believes that without this “something in common,” we cannot meaningfully conceive of how the two concepts can be analogously related to each other, and therefore the concept is equivocal, not analogical. This “something common” ensures, in his words, that “in every comparison something determinable is com55. Broadie, 253.

56. John Duns Scotus, Philosophical Writings, trans. Allan Wolter, O.F.M. (Indianapolis,

IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964), 23.

57. Ibid.

58. “Beagle,” Merriam-Webster, accessed December 25, 2018, https://www.merriam-web-

ster.com/dictionary/beagle.

59. Broadie, 253.

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mon to each of the things compared.”60 Analogy, therefore, requires commonality. To illustrate this, he uses the example of the analogy between humans and donkeys, writing that “if a human being is more perfect than a donkey, he is not more perfect qua human than a donkey is; he is more perfect qua animal.”61 Broadie explains that for Scotus, “In the phrase “human animal,” “animal” is the determinable and “human” the determinant which qualifies “animal.” Likewise in “asinine animal,” “animal” is the determinable and “asinine” the determinant.”62 Thus, Scotus separates all analogous terms into a determinable and a determinant, whereby the latter qualifies the former and thus creates the kind of similarity and dissimilarity that Scotus believes is needed for analogy to be meaningful. In this way, he rejects Aquinas’s analogy of proper proportionality, which exists without a definite relation–without that “something common” demanded by Scotus.

This has implications for how we predicate terms analogically of God. Scotus agrees with Aquinas that theology must be done on an analogical level, but he only does so in light of the above. This means that in predicating creaturely characteristics of God, there will always be a determinable concept shared by both God and man, and a set of determinants that qualify the univocal, determinable characteristic. That determinable is shared by both but can be considered apart from each in a univocal sense. This means that, in the case of wisdom, there is a “wisdom” shared by both God and man that is also apart from God and man. “Wisdom” is akin to “blue” insofar as it is shared by both “light blue” and “dark blue” but is ultimately prior to and apart from both. This does not mean, per se, that determinable “wisdom” is ontologically prior to God’s wisdom. Scotus did not believe that at all. Instead, he believed that the determinable element of an analogical concept is the “ultimate quid” of that concept. It is something conceptually prior to both divine and human wisdom that contains the commonalities of both. This concept is therefore something about God that we can know perfectly as humans because it is something that both we and God possess fully and completely.63 According to Scotus, this simpliciter or quiddity is known directly, “but only by an intellectual act of abstraction, by which, starting from the concept of the determinate, we form a concept of what remains if we think away the determinant.”64 In other words, the determinable is what Alan Philip Darley 60. Broadie, 253.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Burrell, “John Duns Scotus: The Univocity of Analogous Terms,” 644.

64. Broadie, 255.

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calls a “vicious abstraction which is subsequently applied analogically.”65 In applying concepts to God analogically, Scotus believes that we need to form the creaturely concept in our head and then think away all of the creaturely aspects.

Whatever remains is what applies univocally to God. Scotus, therefore, believes that we can predicate terms analogically of God provided that we acknowledge that there is always a univocal element to that predication which connects both God and man.

In this way, Scotus believes that the doctrine of the analogy of being as formulated by St. Thomas and Henry of Ghent ultimately devolves into a doctrine of univocity. This means that the concept of being, when used analogously, necessarily entails a conceptually prior “being simpliciter” that is always predicated univocally. In the words of Etienne Gilson, What the doctrine really means is that the quiddity, the very essence of the act of existing, taken apart from the modalities which determine the different modes of existence, is apprehended by the intellect as identical…When Duns Scotus says that what first falls under the intellect is being, he no longer therefore understands with St. Thomas the nature of sensible being as such, but existence in itself, without any determination whatsoever, and taken in its pure intelligibility. To say, under these conditions, that being is univocal as regards both God and creatures, is simply to affirm that the content of the concept applied to them is the same in both cases, not because they are beings of the same order, or even of comparable orders, but because being is not regarded as signifying only the very act of existing, or the very existence of this act, independently of every other determination.66

In other words, “finite being” and “infinite being” may be of entirely different orders and therefore analogical, but only because the “is” of something can ultimately be traced back to what it means to “be” in a very fundamental and univocal sense. This univocal sense of being is called “being simpliciter” by Scotus.67 Another way to phrase this is that being simpliciter is the univocal common ground between our being and God’s, for if being was characterized by anything outside of that common ground, then either God lacks being or we do. Scotus believed that being simpliciter is “not known directly or by an intuition, but only 65. Alan Philip Darley, “Does Aquinas’ Notion of Analogy Violate the Law of Non-Con-

tradiction?” The Heythrop Journal 54, no. 2 (November 24, 2010): 232, accessed November 25, 2018, doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2265.2010.00626.x.

66. Gilson, 264.

67. Broadie, 254.

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by an intellectual act of abstraction”68 because he believed that only through such abstractions can we hope to understand concepts apart from our creaturely experience of them.

This is important for Scotus’s epistemology, which is rooted in Augustinian Platonism. For Scotus, the “intellectual act of abstraction” produces a concept that is closer to God and therefore closer to the Truth than the sensible things we perceive (which are only indirectly connected to God through the quiddity that connects the two). For Scotus, therefore, the sensible world is not something that is naturally perceived by the intellect (as Aquinas argues) but is instead something that happens “simply on account of the state in which [humanity] in fact finds itself ” after the fall of man from the garden.69 Only through “purely intelligible” abstractions can we in our creaturely, sensible state rise closer to the knowledge of God.70 In connecting God and creaturely, sensible reality, these intelligible concepts are at least ontologically prior to the way we perceive the world. Because of this, Scotus believes that “by birthright, [the human intellect’s] proper object can only be a pure intelligible… and what it immediately attains is neither the essence of the singular sensible thing as such, nor yet the essence of this singular rendered universal by a logical operation, but the intelligible essence itself.” 71 Scotus believed that his analysis of the doctrine of analogy was needed to prevent analogy from devolving into a doctrine of equivocity. If this devolution occurred, then the critiques outlined above against Maimonides would apply to all theistic theology.72 Furthermore, Scotus argues that for us to make arguments such as Aquinas’s “Argument from Motion,” the term “cause” needs to have the same sense when applied to God and creatures.73 Otherwise, it would be impossible to reason from the causes of movement in the world to an overall first mover: God. In the words of Scotus, “That from the proper notion of anything found in creatures nothing at all can be inferred about God, for the notion of what is in each is wholly different. We should have no more reason to conclude that God is formally wise from the notion of wisdom derived from creatures than we would have reason to conclude that God is formally a stone.” 74 68. Broadie, 255.

69. Gilson, 263.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., 264.

72. Cross, 36.

73. Broadie, 255.

74. Ibid., 256.

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It is important to emphasize that Scotus did not believe that his doctrine reduced God in any way. Instead, he believed that we should still be able to meaningfully say that God is still infinite, uncreated, and therefore existing in a different mode of being. Scotus is particularly emphatic in affirming God’s infinity as His primary characteristic. For Scotus, until the existence of an infinite being has been established, it is not God whose existence has been proved.

Aquinas agrees.75 Both of these philosophers spend an extensive amount of time describing the nature and implications of God’s infinity. The primary difference is the way in which they go about doing it. Like Aquinas, Scotus speaks of God through analogies. Unlike Aquinas, however, he insists that those analogies contain a definite relation to the essence of God and therefore include an element that exists inside of both yet is apart from both. In speaking of being qua being, to Scotus, we are always speaking of this definite relation, the being simpliciter.

Aquinas, by rejecting such a definite relation, is able to say that being qua being involves the essence of God, something that our existence only participates in.76 In other words, Aquinas believes that the true Being is God Himself, while Scotus believes that the true Being is being simpliciter.77 V. The I mpact of S cotus ’s A rgument Although Scotus himself wanted to avoid reducing God to the creaturely, many philosophers say that that is exactly what his doctrine of univocity does.

Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith argues that under Scotus’s theory, “Being… becomes a category that is unhooked from participation in God and is a more neutral or abstract qualifier that is applied to God and creatures in the same way.” 78 Smith quotes Philip Blond, who further argues that “Duns Scotus, when considering the universal science of metaphysics, elevated being to a higher station over God, so that being could be distributed to both God and His creatures.” 79 Their argument is that when there are concepts that apply univocally to both God and man, even “vicious abstractions” such as Scotus’s being simpliciter, the “vertical suspension of creation from the Creator is unhooked, and because being is ‘flattened,’ the world is freed to be an autonomous realm.”80 75. Gilson, 56.

76. Ibid., 51.

77. Ibid.

78. Smith, 97.

79. Ibid.

80. Ibid.

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Furthermore, God’s aseity (His existence a se, or independent of contingency) is threatened because “being” now is a necessary precondition to God’s existence.

This seems to be a fair critique. Recall that Scotus’s problem with the doctrine of analogy is simply that analogy is too ambiguous to be anything but equivocal if it does not have a univocal element. This ambiguity is rooted in the idea that you need a “something common” to connect two concepts to make them analogous. This “something common” is Scotus’s being simpliciter, which is applied to both God and man, and can be considered apart from both. As a concept, being simpliciter is truly conceived even without any divine or creaturely properties attached to it. That is, being simpliciter can be considered apart from His essence. Furthermore, because nothing can be said to exist without being simpliciter, it seems as if all existing things are ontologically dependent on being simpliciter for their existence–even God. David Burrell argues that “this proves unwelcome for theological reasons,” for “this style of thinking leads to a notion of a being indistinguishable from the most common genus.”81 Burrell argues that “creator cannot share a genus with creature and still remain God.”82 Scotists might respond by drawing a Kantian distinction between conceptual (phenomenological) priority and ontological (noumenal) priority, but there is no indication that this is a distinction that either Aquinas or Scotus would have accepted.

Some philosophers trying to reconcile Scotist univocity with Christian orthodoxy, such as Norman Geisler, concede that Scotist univocity effectively places God and man under the same genus but say that this is not necessarily bad.

For example, man and dog share the genus “animal” equally but are not equal animals.83 Just because God and man are equally predicated by a determinable does not mean that they themselves are equal. The determinants “God” and “man,” by their differing essences, involve greater or lesser versions of that same determinable. This helps mitigate the claim that Scotus’s doctrine of univocity undermines God’s transcendence, but not with the claim that it undermines God’s aseity. One could reject God’s aseity and therefore the Anselmian view of God as a maximally perfect being, but doing so would involve rejecting a key tenet of (at least) Christian orthodoxy.84 Something more important than God’s aseity would need to be at stake for theism for theologians and theistic philosophers to accept Scotus’s argument.

81. Burrell, “John Duns Scotus: The Univocity of Analogous Terms,” 643.

82. Ibid.

83. Darley, 232.

84. William F. Vallicella, “Divine Simplicity,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, January

02, 2015, accessed December 24, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine-simplicity/.

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VI. C ritique of S cotus ’s Doctrine of Univocit y Perhaps something more important is at stake. If Scotus is right that (1) the doctrine of equivocity undermines all theological discourse, that (2) Aquinas’s doctrine logically devolves into a doctrine of equivocity, and that (3) Scotist univocity is the best alternative to Aquinas’s doctrine, then perhaps Scotism is necessary for the science of theology to be preserved. Because theology needs to first be meaningful for us to even say that God is a se, maybe Scotus’s doctrine of univocity is preferable to Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy even if it undermines God’s aseity.

An opponent of Scotus’s argument may respond in three ways. First, one might reject (1) and argue with Maimonides against Aquinas, Scotus, and the scholastics. This approach was discussed in the second part of this paper. Second, one might reject (3) and argue that Scotus is correct in his critique but wrong in his alternative. This approach, taken by philosophers such as William of Ockham, is an important approach to examine, but one outside of the scope of this paper. Third, one might reject (2) and argue that Aquinas has a way to wiggle out of Scotus’s critique. We will examine this approach in what follows.

The validity of Scotus’s critique centers around a single question: is he correct in rejecting the analogy of proper proportionality? Such an analogy, which Aquinas uses to predicate terms analogically of God, does not involve a “something common” between terms and would, under Scotus’s view, be no different than predicating terms of Him equivocally. If Scotus is wrong that there is no meaningful difference between equivocity and the analogy of proper proportionality, then Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy still allows us to meaningfully predicate being of God and remains a viable alternative to equivocity and univocity.

Unfortunately, Scotus’s critique came years after Aquinas’s death,85 and thus we lack a direct response from Aquinas. However, it is not too difficult to construct a potential defense of the analogy of proper proportionality in light of Aquinas’s writings on the subject. The most helpful of these involve examples that he gives to describe the meaningfulness of the analogy. These examples are important because they give us tangible ways in which an analogical predication might be different from an equivocal predication, even in the absence of a definite relation. The example mentioned earlier was that of sight. Aquinas says that “sight is predicated of bodily sight and the intellect because understanding is in the mind as sight is in the eye.”86 This kind of analogical reasoning seems to be 85. Scotus, xv.

86. Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae Quodlibetales, Q2, art 1.

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both common and meaningful in daily life. If we were to insert “blood vessels are in the brain” in the place of “understanding is in the mind,” it would seem clear that we are no longer comparing concepts that are analogous in the same way. Both “understanding is in the mind” and “blood vessels are in the brain” are phrases that lack a meaningful definite relation to the sight of the eye, but the former still seems to be a far more fitting analog to “sight is in the eye.” It would seem, then, that there is more to analogy than a “something common” between two concepts.

Of course, defenders of Scotus might argue that the only reason Aquinas’s example is meaningfully analogous is because we already have a basic understanding of the two concepts being compared. We know that the sight of the mind and the sight of the eyes are analogous to each other because we already apprehend some unifying concept that binds the two. We do not have the same kind of understanding of the essence of God. That is, an analogy is only meaningful if we first understand the way in which the being of man is related to the being of God—through a being simpliciter. Indeed, it is true that we can only understand what an analogy of proper proportionality is and the full extent of its meaning through the use of an example. However, that is not the same as requiring that all analogies of proper proportionality require some knowledge of both terms in order to be meaningful.

In fact, it is easy to see how an analogy of proper proportionality might be meaningful even with complete ignorance of one of the two concepts. This happens frequently when certain practices or experiences that are unique to a particular culture or time period are also unique to their language, such that the same experiences cannot be fully communicated to someone who comes from a different culture and speaks a different language. Whenever someone who has experienced this unique cultural characteristic tries to put it in the terms of a different language, they have to borrow terms that are analogous to the concept they are trying to explain. The person receiving the explanation can only think of the concept in terms that they understand. That explanation, given in different terms and using words that do not contain the same concepts, will necessarily be analogous in a way that does not seem to involve a definite relation.

An excellent example of this can be found in a dialogue that takes place in World on Fire, the fifth episode of the first season of Daredevil. One of the characters, Claire Temple, is trying to understand how the main character, Matthew Murdock, can perceive as much as he does even though he is blind. She asks, “What does a hairline fracture sound like?” He describes it as “an old ship.” He explains that he draws from all of his other senses, such that “all the fragments form a sort of impressionistic painting.” Confused, she asks, “But what does

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that look like? What do you actually see?” He responds, “[I see] a world on fire.”87 After the conversation, both the viewer and (presumably) Claire have a much better understanding of how this blind man who walks with a cane can fight off “the bad guys” with so much speed and accuracy. This understanding is not gained through any meaningful definite relation between the concepts “old ship” and “hairline fracture,” but instead through analogies and metaphors. In telling Claire that the picture of a “world on fire” to one’s eyes is analogous to that “impressionistic painting” he puts together with his accumulated senses, Matthew is communicating concepts to Claire that are too similar in context to be considered equivocal.

It is true that without the “something common” demanded by Scotus, the extent to which an analogy of proper proportionality is meaningful will never be fully understood. It will be vague–a blur. However, in the same way that one without any understanding of what it is like to see while blind can have a better (though vague) understanding once metaphors and analogies are used, one with that understanding can still understand with greater clarity. Once a concept is expounded upon further, it can be better understood.

This is illustrated in Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous book, After Virtue, where he complains of a shallow modern understanding of the much older, Greek conception of “virtue.” This shallow understanding, he argues, is often imposed by modern philosophers onto Greek texts, producing a distorted understanding of their actual meaning.88 To adequately explain the ancient concept of “virtue,” however, MacIntyre does not resort to a brief definition or a short, pithy explanation of its meaning. Instead, he spends eighty-three pages describing the etymologies, histories, and nuances of the different Greek words translated as “virtue.” In describing the story of how an entire society’s moral language evolved, he can, though imperfectly, give us some conception of the cultural context in which Aristotle operated when he formulated his conception of the virtues. Armed with that understanding, the modern reader is able to substitute a shallow, modern account of the virtues with an account similar to the one inherited by Aristotle. Though MacIntyre’s description of Aristotelian virtue is inevitably imperfect because it is being communicated to readers who remain removed from Aristotle’s cultural context, MacIntyre’s account allows him to meaningfully describe concepts that are alien to our current culture and intel87. Luke Kalteux, writer, “World on Fire,” in Daredevil, dir. Farren Blackburn, Netflix,

April 10, 2015.

88. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN:

University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 119.

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lectual tradition. But it takes eighty-three pages.89 MacIntyre is using analogy when he puts the experiences of other cultures in terms of our language and culture. This act of translation involves drawing abstract concepts that the English language never had use for, has forgotten, or has changed, and putting them in terms we can understand. Perhaps this is why it is so important for MacIntyre to emphasize at the very beginning of this eighty-three page discussion that “the chief means of moral education” in classical cultures “is the telling of stories.”90 Matthew Murdock uses metaphors to communicate what he “sees” without eyes. MacIntyre uses stories to communicate what the Greeks saw without the Enlightenment. The differing amount of effort that they put into their explanations is indicative of the differing amounts of clarity they achieve. Murdock gives us a vague picture. MacIntyre, in his words, “captures much, but very far from all, of what the Aristotelian tradition taught about the virtues.”91 Scotus might say that the latter example ultimately devolves into a kind of univocity. Once each conception of “virtue” is fully developed, there will be commonalities and differences between the two, allowing a Scotist to divide the analogy into an equivocal set of determinants and a univocal determinable.

While this argument can be made, it does not refute my point. Aquinas’s example already shows us that an analogy of proper proportionality can be meaningful even without a definite relation. Murdock and MacIntyre show us that there are ways to explain meaningful analogies without an appeal to a definite relation. The analogy of proper proportionality can be explained in a similar way.

VII. C onclusion While this brief discussion of a centuries-old debate is insufficient to settle the issue, it appears that contemporary defenders of St. Thomas’s doctrine have relatively good grounds to argue that the doctrine of analogy is meaningful. If this is the case, Scotus’s critique of that doctrine fails. Rather, the beliefs of both Scotus and Aquinas need to be compared on their merits. Because Scotus’s doctrine undermines the aseity and transcendence of God in a way that Aquinas’s doctrine does not, it appears that orthodox Christians and theists have reason to prefer the latter.

89. MacIntyre, 121-204.

90. Ibid., 121.

91. Ibid., 203.

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Bibliogr aphy Aquinas, Thomas. Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q2, art 11. Translated by Robert W. Mul-

ligan, S.J. Compiled by Joseph Kenny, O.P. Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1952.

Accessed December 24, 2018. https://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer2.htm.

———. Quaestiones Disputatae Quodlibetales, Q2, art 1. Translated by Sandra Edwards. Compiled

by Joseph Kenny, O.P. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1983. Accessed December 24, 2018. https://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDquodlib.htm.

Ashworth, E. Jennifer. “Medieval Theories of Analogy.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. September 15, 2017. Accessed December 24, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analogy-medieval

“Beagle.” Merriam-Webster. Accessed November 25, 2018. https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/beagle.

Broadie, Alexander. “Duns Scotus and William Ockham.” In The Medieval Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Medieval Period, edited by G.R. Evans, 250-268. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001.

Burrell, David B. “Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers.” In The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, edited by Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump, 60-84. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

———. “John Duns Scotus: The Univocity of Analogous Terms.” The Monist 49, no. 4 (October 1965): 639-58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27901617

Cross, Richard. Duns Scotus. Great Medieval Thinkers. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Darley, Alan Philip. “Does Aquinas’ Notion of Analogy Violate the Law of Non-Contradiction?”

The Heythrop Journal 54, no. 2 (November 24, 2010): 228-37. Accessed November 25, 2018. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2265.2010.00626.x.

Gilson, Etienne. The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. Translated by A.H.C. Downes. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940.

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Kalteux, Luke, writer. “World on Fire.” In Daredevil, directed by Farren Blackburn. Netflix. April 10, 2015.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

Meagher, Robert E. “Thomas Aquinas and Analogy: A Textual Analysis.” The Thomist: A Specula-

tive Quarterly Review 34, no. 2 (April 1970): 230-53. Accessed November 25, 2018. doi:https:// doi.org/10.1353/tho.1970.0054.

Scotus, John Duns. Philosophical Writings. Translated by Allan Wolter, O.F.M. Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964.

Seeskin, Kenneth. “Maimonides.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. March 15, 2017. Accessed December 25, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maimonides/.

Smith, James K.A. Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004.

Vallicella, William F. “Divine Simplicity.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. January 02, 2015.

Accessed December 25, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine-simplicity/.

Wippel, John. F. “Metaphysics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, edited by Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump, 85-127. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

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The Morality of Language: A Wilsonian Proof for the Existence of Higher Law Mary Katherine Collins

What laws? I never heard it was Zeus Who made that announcement, And it wasn’t justice, either. The gods below Didn’t lay down that law for human use.

And I never thought your announcements Could give you—a mere human being— Power to trample the gods’ unfailing, Unwritten laws. These laws weren’t made now Or yesterday. They live for all time, And no one knows when they came into the light.

No man could frighten me into taking on The gods’ penalty for breaking such a law.1

N

atural law has been one of the most controversial and widely discussed topics since the very beginning of philosophical tradition. From Plato’s and Socrates’ insistence upon respecting higher law, to Blackstone’s common law definitions, to Kant’s and Nietzsche’s determination to throw out God and eternal law altogether, the conversation spans thousands of years and dozens of relevant dimensions. While at times referred to by near synonyms such as “common law,” “eternal law,” “higher law,” or “law of nature,” the undertones of the term 1.

Sophocles, Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone (Bos-

ton: Mariner Books, 2002), lines 450-460.

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remain the same. At its foundation, the concept of “natural law” implies a consistent rule that exists beyond the man-created law. Throughout the transcripts from his Lectures on Law, James Wilson provided multiple proofs to propose that affirming natural law is a more logical belief than debunking it.2 This work will buttress Wilson’s proposal that language’s inherently implied moral judgements, which lace nouns and adjectives alike, point to a higher standard through a discussion on the distinctions between human and higher law, an examination of Wilson’s argument, and an evaluation of the role of Thomism and Genealogy within the paradigm of language.

Richard Hooker’s work, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, outlined what he understood to be five distinct types of law: “the law which God from before the beginning hath set for himself to do all things by,”3 (divine law), the law which guides nature (nature’s law), the law of the angels (angelic law), the law which directs man “to the imitation of God”4 (law of nature). and the law of man.5 Hooker’s work is clear in its articulation of the fact that “not all laws are created equal.” Though Hooker roots his argument in his explicitly Christian beliefs, such beliefs are not necessary to defend the proposition of a higher law. Because of this, it is perhaps easier to refer to higher law as “the law of the gods,’” regardless of either genuine belief in gods or belief in specific deities.

This allows us to use Wilson to defend more ancient accounts that do not align with a Christian narrative. For instance, the ancient poet, Aristophanes—a religious pantheist—wrote in Clouds, “You’re the one responsible for this. You’ve turned yourself toward these felonies… Each time we see someone, who falls in love with evil strategies, …we hurl him into misery; so that he may learn to fear the gods.”6 This ancient conception that the gods demand certain actions and forms of justice, virtue, and veneration is consistent with the writings of other ancient Roman philosophers as well. St. Boethius wrote, “But in blindness they do not know; Where lies the good they seek: That which is higher than the sky; on earth below they seek…” 7 This shows us that in ancient Roman and Chris2.

James Wilson, Collected Works of James Wilson: In Two Volumes (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty

3.

Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Books I.-IV. (London: George Rutledge

4.

Ibid.

6.

Aristophanes, and edited by Jeffrey Henderson, Aristophanes (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-

Fund Inc., 2009), 1:500-25. and Sons, 1888), 58.

5.

Ibid.

vard University Press, 1998), lines 1454-1460.

7.

Boethius, and translated by Victor Watts, The Consolation of Philosophy (New York: Pen-

guin Classics, 1999), Book III-VIII, 62.

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tian thought, there is a clear distinction between laws written by kings such as Creon, and the eternal gods of the heavens. To use Wilson’s rhetoric, “Laws may be promulgated by reason and conscience, the divine monitors within us.”8 Again, undertones of a deity are present even if the facial verbiage might exclude a heavenly originator.

Regardless of mens’ wishes, it is the will of these deities that ought to be followed and revered more highly. This thesis is proposed by Sophocles in Antigone, a discourse on this very query: if the laws of men and heaven collide, who is to be disregarded? Certainly, it cannot be expected that the arbitrary men and unfaltering heavens will be in perpetual agreement. Antigone, Sophocles’ protagonist, was steadfast in her obedience to higher law throughout the play, willing to give up her life rather than submit to an earthly order which violated her understanding of the law of the gods. Creon confronts the girl after she is brought to his court as the perpetrator who illegally buried her brother Polyneices. “You dared defy the law.”9 Creon argues, believing his proclamation to be the true binding law of the land. Antigone’s response is, I dared.

It was not God’s proclamation. That final Justice That rules the world below makes no such laws.

Your edict, King, was strong, But all your strength is weakness itself against The immortal unrecorded laws of God. They are not merely now: they were, and shall be, Operative forever, beyond man utterly.10 Here we find a clear articulation of law that is above the whims of man, to which men must submit to or risk violating justice. This paper is more concerned with the foundational question of whether such a higher standard exists to begin with.

James Wilson’s seven arguments in support of natural law derive from a variety of sources, including the “beauty of the universe,”11 obligation from knowledge, obligation from God’s superiority, a unity of “reason and divine will,”12 utility, social obligation, and an innate moral sense. Each presents its own unique attempt at proving the existence of higher law. Defending natural 8.

9.

Wilson, 470.

Sophocles, 352.

10. Ibid., 356-363.

11. Wilson, 505.

12. Ibid., 506.

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law requires defending an absolute standard which is always true. This means that if natural law proposed that only Brown cows could be morally eaten, that argument would hold true absolutely and regardless of how delectable an Oreo cow might appear. In order to substantiate the rationality of natural law, Wilson must begin by defending the value of absolute truth statements.

The classical Aristotelian conception of truth is understood to be: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true.”13 However, this definition could easily be converted into more common modern philosophical terms by expressing it slightly differently: “The truth of a sentence consists in its agreement with (or correspondence to) reality.”14 Truth is historically understood in comparison or contrast with its correspondence with reality – trees, for instance. It was Albert Einstein who wrote that, “‘Three trees’ is something different from ‘two trees.’ Again ‘two trees’ is different from ‘two stones.’”15 As the reflexive property reminds us, things are equal to which that they are. Even Thomas Aquinas supported this to be a correct understanding of truth.16 Words are, therefore, properly meant to describe the reality of the world – to accurately, symbolically portray the idea they intend to communicate. It is called “truth” when they correctly do so.

Wilson argued for absolute truth with his, “Argument From Utility.” Premise one: community’s end is to increase general happiness and utility. Premise two: some actions positively increase (or diminish) general happiness and utility.

Conclusion: therefore, some actions effect the community’s end. Actions ought to be measured by their inclination to affect happiness. “Whatever is expedient, is right.”17 Utility alone infers an obligation toward some actions and away from others. This very obligation is a statement of absolute: the language of ‘ought’ conveys a standard of some kind which it is asserting should be obeyed. This argument gains significant traction with the utilitarian and hedonistic philosophies, though they tend to present utility as an alternative to natural law instead 13. Alfred Tarski, and edited by Irving J. Lee, “The Semantic Conception of Truth,” in The

Language of Wisdom and Folly: Background Readings in Semantics (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1949), 68.

14. Ibid.

15. Albert Einstein, Leopold Infeld, and edited by Irving J. Lee, “Physics and Reality,”

in The Language of Wisdom and Folly: Background Readings in Semantics (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1949), 92.

16. Ewa Thompson, “The Great Amputation: Language in the Postmodern Era,” Modern

Age 60, no. 4 (Fall 2018), 43.

17. Wilson, 507.

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of arguing that it offers proof for higher law’s necessary implications upon the world of men.

Alternatively, consider Wilson’s “Argument from Sociability.” It states that if “the care of maintaining society properly, is the foundation of obligation and right,”18 once again a corresponding obligation can be drawn from the higher calling of “the whole human kind.”19 Since men ought to properly maintain society they either pass or fail the standard of whether their actions properly do so.

The nuances of the standard might be ambiguous—what all does the care of properly maintaining society infer?—but the foundational argument is that nonetheless a standard is required.

Wilson also argues from “An Innate Moral Sense.” He postulates that “The universality of an opinion or sentiment may be evinced by the structure of languages… where all languages make a distinction, there must be a similar distinction in universal opinion or sentiment. For language is the picture of human thoughts; and, from this faithful picture, we may draw certain conclusions.”20 Language, he believes, often shares commonalities despite varying dialects. The Japanese konnichiwa, the French bonjour, the Chinese ni hau, the Italian ciao, the German guten tag, the Hindi namaste, or the Russian zdras-tvuy-te, are each examples of a pleasant greeting that is expressed upon seeing a friendly face.

This particular example, of course, hardly scratches the surface of the repetitive patterns within languages. Consider eerily similar grammatical structures, declensions, shared root words, male/female tenses, and oddly consistent noun usage despite linguistic origins thousands of miles or hundreds of years apart.

Separately evolving semantic constructions found need for similar words in a plethora of situations including nouns (boys or Jungen), adjectives (white or blanco), and verbs (drinking or trinkt).21 Though there might not be a clear cause for these shared traits—to claim they originated from the gods at this point has the potential to be tautological—that does not minimize their existence.

Wilson is clear that he believes the similarity within languages is rooted in a shared underlying sense of morality. All languages speak of a beautiful and a deformed, a right and a wrong, an agreeable and disagreeable, a good and ill, in actions, affections, and characters. All languages, therefore, suppose a moral 18. Wilson, 507.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., 511.

21. This is in no way meant to propose that dialects can simply be mapped onto each other

through elementary translation—a vast multitude of even modern vocabulary still lacks equivalent translatability—but merely a drawing out of the underlying recurrences.

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sense, by which those qualities are perceived and distinguished.”22 There is a moral sense ingrown to the regular use of language. Concepts such as a man who is “indelicate or hard,” “who has no admiration of what is truly noble,” “who has no sympathetick [sic] sense of what is melting and tender,”23 exist commonly in language. The language of “enemy” or “friend,” “good boy” versus “bad dog,” “obedience” or “dishonor,” “holy man” or “whore,” are all phrases that bear with them inherent judgements about an individual, place, time, thought, or action.

“Far from aiming at suspended judgment, the spontaneous speech of a people is loaded with judgments. It is intensely moral—its names for objects contain the emotional overtones which give us the cues as to how we should act towards these objects.”24 Calling a man a “friend to the family” when one introduces him is to per se suggest a pattern of behavior in regard to him – generosity or charity, perhaps.

To label a woman a “whore” inherently casts darkness, disapproval, and contempt upon her activities, pattern of speech, or perhaps clothing. Language is essentially biased and non-neutral. “Spontaneous speech is not a naming at all, but a system of attitudes, of implicit exhortations. An important ingredient in the meaning of such words [as enemy] is precisely the attitudes and acts which go with them.”25 Wilson argues that this inborn moral exhortation is the true beauty within a language. The greatest poets, authors, and playwrights utilize these undertows of affection and disapproval to play with the audience’s hearts, to move them in passionate, zealous emotion, to inflict sorrow and grief upon those who deserve. “If it were void of a relish for moral excellence, how frigid and uninteresting would the finest descriptions of life and manners appear!”26 Language laced with inherently understood morality is the difference between the capability of calling a disobedient lad a “menace” and finding one’s self unable to disapprove of or label his actions at all.

Taking the next step of semantic value: words are also not meant to be simply contained to prima facie meanings. There have historically been four different levels at which words have had meanings: literal (“daily dealings with the physical world”), 27 analogical (“…language [that] is used to invoke a classical Aristote22. Wilson, 511.

23. Ibid.

24. Kenneth Burke, edited by Irving J Lee, “Two Functions of Speech,” in The Language

of Wisdom and Folly: Background Readings in Semantics (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers,

1949), 40.

25. Ibid.

26. Wilson, 511.

27. Thompson, 43.

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lian mimesis.”), 28 symbolic (“…similarities of a nonmaterial nature…”), 29 and the anagogic level (“…on which human language reaches toward the metaphysical world. On this level, symbols are also utilized, but they point to a transcendent reality rather than to the intellectual or material one.”) Dr. Ewa M. Thompson wrote that “medieval thinkers took it for granted”30 that language included all four of these elements. It is not as if some words were anagogical and other literal, even the literal words might have value on all four levels. Otherwise, a priest’s call to “be charitable and chaste” in his Sunday homily might prove to be entirely useless to his congregation.

Arguably, learning to sense these nuances of level within literature is the purpose of a liberal education to begin with. “By reading fine texts individuals develop an ability to discover aspects of language invisible to a barbarian.”31 Tuning one’s ear to these shades of language is not merely valuable on a philosophical level. In the words of Aldoux Huxley: “For evil then, as well as for good, words make us the human beings we actually are.”32 The profound significance of language is the communication of thought.

Audible and written communication holds its place as “the highest and most amazing achievement of the symbolistic human mind. The power it bestows is almost inestimable…”33 Without language, it is impossible to think or evaluate, to analyze or consider. Symbolism is necessary to put vague conceptions into thought and then into words or actions. As De Maistre wrote, “The question of the origin of ideas is the same as that of the origin of language, for thought and language are simply two splendid synonyms, the mind not being able to think without knowing what it thinks…”34 First, there is a cow in a field. Then, a barbarian looks out and sees the cow in the field and is able to mentally imagine that particular cow standing in that particular field, but he still does not have a way to communicate the thought - even to himself. Later that day he imagines 28. Thompson, 43.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Aldous Huxley, edited by Irving J Lee, and., “Behavior That Language Makes Possi-

ble,” in The Language of Wisdom and Folly: Background Readings in Semantics (New York: Harper &

Brothers Publishers, 1949), 58.

33. Susanne K. Langer, edited by Irving J Lee, and., “The Phenomenon of Language,” in The

Language of Wisdom and Folly: Background Readings in Semantics (New York: Harper & Brothers

Publishers, 1949), 7.

34. Joseph De Maistre, and translated by Jack Lively, The Works of Joseph de Maistre (New

York: The MacMillan Company, 1965), 209.

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it again and draws a circle with four legs on a cave wall. But, still, no one understands. Without language, he can only hope that someday his drawing skills will improve to the point where another barbarian will recognize the cow he has also seen out in the field. When words are implemented, it becomes possible to both state facts and ask questions. Some have gone so far as to say that “the birth of language is the dawn of humanity.”35 Language is far more than a mere conversation held between a group of individuals. In reality, language is verbally spoken as frequently and precisely as it is held in the mind as a thought. This should not be a surprise, “for it is equally foolish to believe either that a symbol can exist for an idea which does not exist or that an idea can exist without a symbol to express it…”36 Furthermore, consistency in human behavior is rooted in language. It “permits human beings to behave with a degree of purposefulness, perseverance and consistency unknown among the other mammals…”37 Language both gives and refines man’s purpose. In his article, Behavior That Language Makes Possible, Aldous Huxley argues that this consistency of human behavior “is due entirely to the fact that men have formulated their desires, and subsequently rationalized them, in terms of words.”38 When men are able to plainly consider their actions through clear, descriptive language, they act more logically, more reasonably, and more predictably. Without language, one might not consider the consequences of an action such as eliminating an enemy, but once language permits rational thought, the repercussions can perhaps come into clarity. As it becomes possible to analyze situations, individuals begin to make more regular choices and results become more consistent. The value of language is obviously not something to be minimized. Words clearly have (and ought to have) profound meaning.

Unfortunately, meanings—particularly at the anagogic level—are being slowly eradicated in the name of a rising Genealogical tradition. This is primarily because Wilson is far from the only philosopher who has used language to point back to transcendental truths; if the moral undertones of language can be eliminated, its reliance upon and reflection toward natural law can also be censored. Alasdair MacIntyre writes in his Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, that the Genealogist tradition is built upon an eradication of transcendentals.

This eradication undermines to even identify a conception of telos along with a complete overturning of absolute truth. Eva Thompson commented on this transition, “You get ‘construction of identity,’ as contemporary philosophers and 35. Langer, 7.

36. Ibid., 206.

37. Huxley, 57.

38. Ibid., 57-58.

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sociologists have taught us to say. Note the assumed absence of a core. This popular scholarly phrase is classically nominalist.”39 Rather than seeking to uphold a higher or eternal law, Genealogy throws that notion out the window. It rebukes Thomistic tradition altogether. In fact, even under Encyclopedic tradition—as outlined by MacIntyre—truth is allowed to exist, with the asterisk that it is entirely relevant to the time, place, and situation. Encyclopedic tradition debunks transcendentals, but still does not take the final step that Genealogy does: refusing the acknowledge the validity of truth in any situation whatsoever.

This Genealogical framework is inherently contradicted against a conception of higher law providing mankind fundamental, transcendental duties and moral obligations to uphold. Certainly, if a paradigm is accepted where “2 + 2” cannot be assured to reach a sum of “4,” then any semblance of moral order is laughable. The robust, anagogical understanding of language from the Medieval period is also necessarily stripped to its core. This was, in fact, one of the primary aims of Genealogy: By 1873, [Nietzsche] was asking, ‘What then is truth?’ and replying, ‘A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, a sum, in short, of human relationships which, rhetorically and poetically intensified, ornamented and transformed, come to be thought of, after long usage by a people, as fixed, binding, and canonical. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions, worn-out metaphors not impotent to stir the senses, coins which have lost their faces and are considered now as metal rather than as currency’ (Über Wahrheit und Lüge im Aussermoralischen Sinn I).40

Nietzsche understood academic utterances to be repressive expressions “disguised behind a mask of fixity and objectivity.”41 He emphasized the concept that though it might bear an external resemblance to truth, in reality, it is no more than a mask. Though an individual may be thoroughly convinced that something pertaining to their life is ‘true,’ that is simply not the case under a Genealogical perspective. They have accepted the masks they put on for the moment as a sign of something more significant.

Under this paradigm, Wilson’s argument is absurd. If there is no absolute truth, moral absolutes cannot underlie language. The argument simultaneously goes both ways: if the end goal is to promote a Genealogical tradition of morality, 39. Thompson, 41.

40. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and

Tradition (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 35.

41. Ibid., 39.

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then altering language has the potential to help fulfill that objective; meanwhile, if a Genealogical perspective filters down through society it can result in a disembowelment of language. The two progress hand-in-hand. Of course, Nietzsche was aware of this natural motion. He shamelessly opposed Thomistic tradition with “wholehearted hostility,”42 warning others against being entrapped in the Socratic dialects while favoring the Sophists’ lectures, “for he perceived correctly that only by breaking with that dialectic at the outset could one hope to escape from arriving at Platonic and Aristotelian conclusions.”43 Not all agree with Nietzsche’s reinterpretation of tradition.44 Thomism and Genealogy are at direct odds; it is impossible for both to simultaneously coexist. Thompson reflected upon this as she wrote: “Something happened to the English language within my lifetime. Its most subtle and ineffable level has been amputated. The most respected humanistic texts are anti-essentialist in a way that precludes assigning a ‘metaphysical vibration’ to language. In public discourse, words have ceased to be, in Seamus Hearney’s expression, ‘bearers of history and mystery’…”45 This brings the discussion around full-circle to the contrast with tradition.

It would not require an extensive search of Plato’s work to discover his transcendental view of the world.46 When skimming the Gorgias, for instance, one will find Socrates proudly stating: “There is nothing worse than injustice and wrongdoing,”47 while Callicles—his Sophistic interlocuter—proposes that, “The only authentic way of life is to do nothing to hinder or retrain the expansion of one’s desires, until they can grow no larger.”48 Socrates proposes that a clear standard of justice exists, while Callicles argues for the restraint-free idealism that Nietzsche’s Genealogical morality later affirms. This argument is affirmed repeatedly by critics reflecting upon Plato’s writings, “E. R. Dodds argued that 42. MacIntyre, 60.

43. Ibid.

44. De Maistre, for example, was firmly against the modern reinterpretation of language.

“…let us establish first of all that the greatest, noblest, and most virtuous geniuses in the world are

agreed in rejecting the origin of ideas in sensory perceptions. It is the holiest, most unanimous, most inspiring protest of the human spirit against the gravest and vilest of errors…”

De Maistre, 207.

45. Thompson, 41.

46. Plato, trans. by C. D. C. Reeve, Republic (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,

Inc., 2004) lines 505a1-505b3.

47. Plato, trans. by D.J. Zeyl, Gorgias (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.,

1987), lines 479b-c.

48. Ibid., lines 491e-492a.

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we find in the Callicles of the Gorgias an anticipation of Nietzsche’s response to Plato.”49 Within Socrates’ worldview, men may not live however they please, instead they are expected to uphold a set of standards and rules.

Plato believes that abiding by the standards of justice and natural law is so critical to one’s soul that it could potentially continue to affect one’s eternal outcome even after death. The end of the Gorgias includes a vision of exactly such an eternal soul, “Once the soul has been stripped of the body, all its features become obvious… scourged and covered in the scars which every dishonest and unjust action has imprinted on it…the promiscuity, sensuality, brutality, and self-indulgence of his behaviors has thoroughly distorted the harmony and beauty of his soul.”50 He who is just, truthful, and virtuous will bear a clear soul while he who is unrighteous will wear the scars for eternity. Though perhaps hyperbolic, if there is an absolute standard of truth it would seem fair to assume that souls (if they do indeed exist) might possibly experience some sort of wrath or penalty for leading wicked lives. The flip-side of the same coin is that an absolute standard of justice and virtue also provides an incentive for lives to take on an intrinsic value simply because it is worth supporting, worth fighting for, and worth adhering to.

If Thomism and Genealogy - along with the substantial divide between the two - have been accurately portrayed, then Wilson (perhaps prematurely) pinned down one of the greatest subliminal battles of the modern era. In 2018, Dr. Ewa M. Thompson wrote a piece in Modern Age entitled “The Great Amputation: Language In the Postmodern Era” in which she discussed what she referred to as a “flattening out”51 of language due to what MacIntyre has labeled a ‘Genealogical tradition.’ Thompson prefers the terminology ‘postmodern,’ though the concepts as discussed in this work and Thompson’s work are clearly close to, if not entirely, synonymous. She notably drew attention to the vanishing of anagogical meanings within modern use of language. Thompson largely contributes this to a vanishing of religious sensibilities. For example, the term mother used to deeply denote the profound spiritual implications which ‘Mary, the Mother of God’ shed upon the pronoun. Today, “hardly a trace remains.”52 “We learned to read and write texts as if there were no metaphysical dimension to language and as if the range of possible meanings never exceeded what the New York Times 49. MacIntyre, 60.

50. Plato, Gorgias, lines 524d-525a.

51. Thompson, 47.

52. Ibid., 46.

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offers us as intellectual food.”53 Phrases such as “father,” “holy,” “master,” “king,” or “priest,” used to be steeped in deeply religious understandings. When an individual was referred to by such titles, the anagogical meanings were remembered and shared via common knowledge. “It should be noted that mainly nouns are being consigned to oblivion.”54 In the same way that a mother might name her son after her favorite saint in the hopes that he would mimic the holy habits of the Saint as he grew, anagogical meanings of nouns and titles were commonly understood in their metaphysical context. “For centuries, first names carried an anagogical echo because they were the names of Christian saints.”55 Unfortunately, according to Thompson, that meaning has largely been lost. “As a result, texts of all kinds became colorless and uninteresting, and their half-life has become short.”56 These meanings were safely secured through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Metaphysical understandings of words were valuable because of the very religious connotations that they provided. It was only with the rise of the Enlightenment that there was a move toward exterminating them. In the words of Thompson, In Medieval Exegesis, de Lubac mentions dozens of language philosophers of the Middle Ages; …there exist profound texts most educated people do not know anything about. Instead of building on them, we started anew during the Enlightenment and declared that the anagogic level of language does not exist and attempts to connect to it should disappear from public discourse.57

More than likely, Wilson could not have predicted such a shift in semantic usage throughout the subsequent two hundred years. Jeremy Bentham engaged in a mission to slice basic nouns from their deeper meanings. “[It was] partisan quality in speech which Bentham, who specifically formulated the project for a neutral vocabulary, would eliminate. He rightly discerned in it the “poetry” of speech and resented its “magical” powers in promoting unreasoned action.”58 Rather than flowing naturally from a societal shift Jacques Derrida also hoped to eliminate the entirety of metaphysics from the world of language altogether but encouraged active progress toward that end: “What he tried to get rid of— 53. Ibid., 48.

54. Thompson, 41.

55. Ibid., 46.

56. Ibid., 47.

57. Ibid., 48.

58. Burke, 40.

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the very core of Western culture—has all but disappeared.”59 Cutting meanings free from their traditional words and usage, this is the Genealogist and postmodernist’s game. The most basic disembowelment of language is necessary in order to snip it off from its anagogical value. Wilson would doubtless be entirely disheartened to hear of this modern project.

Though there are many significant arguments which could be brought into a proper discussion of the Genealogist’s war against words60 —that discussion must be set aside for a more appropriate context. Three arguments have been made clear: natural law is classically understood to refer to an absolute, higher standard to which men must conform their arbitrary whims; James Wilson argues that language’s inherent moral exhortations which are inherently connected to words and phrases is a reflection and proof of this higher law; and the Genealogical tradition seeks to simultaneously undermine both the Thomistic understanding of an absolute higher law and the anagogical value of language which points men toward it. It is perhaps valuable to see their very resistance to language as a mere buttress to Wilson’s claims. One does not fight where is not an enemy. Meanwhile, Wilson, Thompson, and Plato light a path of return to the anagogical, metaphysical, morality-infused language to which men naturally are drawn. “Language’s resonance and depth stem from its contact with the spiritual world – a context which cannot be replaced by the complex verbal aerobatics that postmodern philosophy and literature have offered.”61

59. Ibid., 42.

60. Alasdair MacIntyre argues this at length in his Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry

including the following passages: “The problem then for the genealogist is how to combine the

fixity of particular stances, exhibited in the use of standard genres of speech and writing, with the mobility of transition from stance to stance, how to assume the contours of a given mask and then to discard it for another, without ever assenting to the metaphysical fiction of a face which has its own

finally true and undiscarded representation, whether by Rembrandt or in a shaving-mirror. Can it be done?”

“The attempt to spell out the consequences of the death of God by moving beyond the con-

straints of grammar and the logic of all established values was bound to end in tragic failure.”

“Nietzsche did not advance a new theory against older theories; he proposed an abandon-

ment of theory.”

MacIntyre, 47-9.

61. Thompson, 51.

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Bibliogr aphy Aristophanes, and edited by Jeffrey Henderson. Aristophanes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Boethius, and translated by Victor Watts. The Consolation of Philosophy. 1969. New York: Penguin Classics, 1999.

Burke, Kenneth, edited by Irving J Lee, and. “Two Functions of Speech.” In The Language of Wis-

dom and Folly: Background Readings in Semantics, 40. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1949.

De Maistre, Joseph, and translated by Jack Lively. The Works of Joseph de Maistre. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1965.

Einstein, Albert, Leopold Infeld, and edited by Irving J. Lee. “Physics and Reality.” In The Lan-

guage of Wisdom and Folly: Background Readings in Semantics, 92. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1949.

Hooker, Richard. The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Books I.-IV.. London: George Rutledge And Sons, 1888.

Huxley, Aldous, edited by Irving J Lee, and. “Behavior That Language Makes Possible.” In The Language of Wisdom and Folly: Background Readings in Semantics, 58. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1949.

Langer, Susanne K., edited by Irving J Lee, and. “The Phenomenon of Language.” In The Language of Wisdom and Folly: Background Readings in Semantics, 7. New York: Harper & Brothers Pub-

lishers, 1949.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994.

Plato. Gorgias. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1987.

———. Republic. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2004.

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Sophocles. Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone. Boston: Mariner Books, 2002.

Tarski, Alfred, and edited by Irving J. Lee. “The Semantic Conception of Truth.” In The Language of Wisdom and Folly: Background Readings in Semantics, 68. New York: Harper & Brothers Pub-

lishers, 1949.

Thompson, Ewa. “The Great Amputation: Language in the Postmodern Era.” Modern Age 60, no.

4 (Fall 2018): 40.

Wilson, James. Collected Works of James Wilson: In Two Volumes. Vol. 1. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Inc., 2009.

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Body and Soul: The Harmony in Liturgy Marina D. Barnes

I

n Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observes nineteenth-century Americans’ obsession with reducing the world to bare facts so as to strip away any seemingly superfluous wrappings that hamper the comprehension of truth. He argues that this tendency leads Americans to reject forms in an effort to tear asunder the “veils placed between them and truth.”1 The rejection of traditional liturgy in many modern American churches is symptomatic of the disdain for forms that Tocqueville noted.

By shunning liturgy, these American Christians diminish the symbolism of worship and deny the deeply ceremonial nature of human beings as embodied souls. Rather than veiling the truth, liturgy brings the physical and the spiritual—the outward and the inward—back into harmony, using the rich physicality of this world to point us to the next.

According to Tocqueville, the rejection of forms is rooted in Americans’ philosophic method. Perhaps unconsciously influenced by Descartes’ extreme rationalism, Americans view human reason as the “most visible and closest source of truth.”2 As Tocqueville writes, Americans “like to see the object that occupies them very clearly; so they take off its wrapping as far as they can; they put to the side all that separates them from it and remove all that hides it from their 1.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Win-

2.

Ibid.

throp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 404.

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regard in order to see it more closely and in broad daylight.”3 Thus, Americans tend to scorn symbols as “puerile artifices that are used to veil or adorn for their eyes truths it would be more natural to show them altogether naked and in broad daylight.”4 The frenzied restlessness that Tocqueville notices in American society understandably results in a devaluing of ceremony and structure: “the sight of ceremonies leaves them cold, and they are naturally brought to attach only a secondary importance to the details of worship.”5 Overall, Tocqueville concludes that Americans feel “an instinctive disdain” for forms, which “excite their scorn and often their hatred.”6 Although Tocqueville primarily aims to offer a description of Americans’ treatment of forms, he briefly expresses his disapproval of the American perspective. Given his Catholic faith, Tocqueville’s disagreement is unsurprising. He states that he “believe[s] firmly in the necessity of forms,” explaining that “they fix the human mind in the contemplation of abstract truths, and by aiding it to grasp them forcefully, they make it embrace them ardently.” 7 Tocqueville goes on to nuance this affirmation of forms in a somewhat unexpected fashion. Because of the growing emphasis on equality in America, Tocqueville argues that forms should be restricted, retaining “only what is absolutely necessary for the perpetuation of the dogma itself, which is the substance of religions, whereas worship is only the form.”8 While this may simply be a pragmatic acceptance of the minimization of tradition in order to preserve Christianity in America, it is nonetheless surprising to hear a Catholic portray worship as distinct from the substance of religion. This peculiar comment aside, Tocqueville places great value on forms, arguing that we “must have an enlightened and reflective worship of them” and that “[s]everal of the greatest interests of humanity are linked to them.”9 A cursory examination of Christianity in modern America affirms Tocqueville’s observations on the rejection of forms. Many evangelical churches have eschewed traditional liturgy in favor of “personalized” expressions of prayer and worship. Even within historically high churches, some parishes have gradually shifted away from the traditional liturgical structure in an attempt to appear more modern and to attract young people. For example, on April 25th, 2018, Grace Cathedral—a breathtakingly beautiful Episcopal church in San Francis3.

Tocqueville, 404.

5.

Ibid.

4.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Ibid., 421.

Ibid., 669.

Ibid., 421.

Ibid., 422.

Ibid., 669.

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co, California—held a “Beyoncè Mass,” with music and a message inspired by the singer.10 Of course, this example is extreme. However, many other churches choose to trade tradition for relevance in smaller ways. A more typical example could be found in St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church of Purcellville. Every Sunday at 5pm, the parish holds a “Teen Mass,” replacing the traditional hymns with contemporary music and toning down the formality of the “old school” traditional mass.11 Dilution and rejection of liturgy occurs for other reasons beyond an attempt at relevance. In Evangelical is Not Enough, eventual Roman Catholic convert Thomas Howard portrays the rejection of liturgy in evangelical circles as an elevation of the spiritual at the expense of the physical: Ah, but those things are of the earth, says the spiritual man. We must set our affections on things above, not on things on the earth. Here we have no continuing city.

The world passeth away and the lust thereof. This will all be folded up as a garment.

Since this is so, we must tailor our worship and piety accordingly. Textures and colors and smells have no place here. The locale of true spirituality is in the heart.12

The 21st century stripping away of traditional liturgy in search of “true spirituality” parallels the desire of nineteenth-century Americans to remove the wrappings and unveil the truth that Tocqueville observes. This desire is understandable—admirable, even. Indeed, it reflects a determination to draw nearer to the Truth and remove any unnecessary barriers between man and God. However, well-intentioned though such a desire may be, the pursuit of this end through the rejection of liturgy misunderstands the relationship between the physical and the spiritual and the way in which man was designed to relate to God. We are embodied souls, occupying a physical world. Every moment of our existence is imbued with a rich physicality. As Howard writes, “None of us is a bare intellect. Our eyes see colors; our nose smell fragrances; our fingers feel textures.”13 Corrupted though it would become, physicality was no accident of the Fall. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were not disembodied ghosts, dwelling with God in a distinctly spiritual plane. Rather, in Eden, “the web of 10. Malcolm Clemens Young., “About the Beyoncè Mass,” Grace Cathedral, April 20, 2018,

https://www.gracecathedral.org/about-the-beyonce-mass/ (accessed April 26, 2018).

11. “Saint Francis de Sales Catholic Church,”, http://www.saintfrancisparish.org/(accessed

April 26, 2018).

12. Thomas Howard, Evangelical is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament (San

Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), 25.

13. Ibid., 24.

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Creation was seamless.”14 All of creation existed in harmony, “not in a blur or a confusion, but a continuum, like a musical scale or the spectrum of colors.”15 There was no rift on any level—man and God, man and woman, man and creature—all lived in perfect peace. In this perfectly harmonious existence, there was no need for liturgy. There was, in fact, “nothing but liturgy.”16 Thomas Howard explains this purely liturgical state: We needed no liturgy there—no setting aside of a special hour when we might turn away from the jumble of our activities and compose ourselves and offer to God the sacrifice of praise…‘The work of the people,’ which is what the word liturgy means, included our eating and drinking and resting and loving as well as our work, which we experienced not as drudgery but as freedom since we were perfectly suited to it and perfectly empowered to carry it out…we lived in the fullness of ceaseless adoration to God. Our activity was our oblation. Simply being human—having been made in the image of God—constituted our dignity.17

In Eden, there was no need to draw near to God through any symbol or ceremony; man simply dwelt with God in perfect peace.

The Fall shattered this peace. The “sacred seamlessness in which every fiber of Creation was knit together in a pattern that blazoned the glory of God” was ripped apart, leaving us with “a torn garment.”18 With the Fall, sin, strife, and division entered man’s world. Both our physical bodies and our souls are now marred, stained by sin. As Howard writes, “Our bodies, the very statuary of God so to speak, are now torn from our spirits in the ultimate division called death, which yields in the place of the noble creature called man two pitiable horrors, a corpse and a ghost.”19 Man’s life is now haunted by conflict: man is pitted against man; man is pitted against God; indeed, man is pitted against his very own self.

The entire created order trembles from the after-shock: “When the physical is divided from the spiritual, there results the cacophony that brays and clashes in the abyss outside the harmony of the divine order. Division. Hell.”20 But for the goodness of God, the story would end here. However, the Incarnation offers redemption, knitting back together the created order and wed14. Howard, 29.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 30.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 31.

20. Ibid.

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ding the spiritual and physical once again. Christ is the embodiment of perfect wholeness—the same embodied wholeness to which we are called. Our worship is intended to be deeply incarnational, allowing us to participate in His redemption and restoration. We are not called to worship in a disembodied realm, separate from our humanity. For Christ “did not come to thin out human life; He came to set it free.”21 Howard describes this vision of incarnational worship: The worship of God, surely, should be the place where men, angels, and devils may see human flesh once more set free into all that it was created to be…We are creatures who are made to bow, not just spiritually (angels can do that) but with kneebones and neck muscles. We are creatures who cry out to surge in great procession, ‘ad altare Dei,’ not just in our hearts (disembodied spirits can do that) but with our feet, singing great hymns with our tongues, our nostrils full of the smoke of incense. 22

Spiritual connection with God does not require detachment from the physical world. Our worship is made rich by the textures of physical life. Liturgy does not veil our love for God in shadows; it clothes it with flesh.

The physical forms of worship—the symbols, ceremonies, and rituals— are deeply imbued with meaning. The need for physicality and ceremony is not unique to man’s relationship with God. In marriage, declarations of love are symbolized with a ring, celebrated with a ceremony, and sealed with the sexual act. Man is a ceremonial creature. When significant events occur, “we are not content merely to pass through them; we must also do something about them.

This seems to be the mark of our humanness, and the thing which we do about these experiences is to ceremonialize them.”23 Ceremonies marking human occurrences, such as birth, marriage, and death, are the continuation of a timeless tradition. In the same way, traditional liturgy connects Christians throughout the ages. The repetition of the Lord’s Prayer, for example, has a deeper meaning beyond the plain meaning of the text; when we recite it, we tap into a rich heritage that traces back to the prayer’s initial utterance by Christ Himself.

Though implicitly addressed throughout, the objection of the nineteenth-century Americans (as relayed by Tocqueville) that forms obscure truth merits a more direct response. Rather than obscuring truth, forms help man to grasp it more fully. As Howard explains, 21. Howard, 36.

22. Ibid., 37.

23. Ibid., 97.

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Ceremony assists us to cope with the otherwise unmanageable. Far from erecting a barrier between us and the truth, it ushers us closer in to the truth. It dramatizes the truth for us. Ceremony does what words alone can never do. It carries us beyond the merely explicit, the expository, the verbal, the propositional, the cerebral, to the center where the Dance goes on. 24

Through participation in the sacraments, man can directly encounter the Truth both physically and spiritually. Whether in the silence of a dimly lit chapel or the grandeur of a sweeping chorus, the engagement of our senses inspires us with a proper sense of reverence and awe, teaching us the proper response to the Truth.

Others might object that, even if forms can point us to the Truth, they are too rigid and hamper our ability to worship freely. However, forms, as well as the order and structure they provide, are not opposed to a spirit of freedom. Howard addresses this objection: Those who kept insisting that ‘the liberty of the Spirit’ stood over against such forms were forgetting the architecture of the universe. The liberating Spirit who brooded over chaos brought an exact, elegant, and mathematical order out of that chaos, and it was good. It was beautiful and free and ample…Clearly, to pit the liberty of the Spirit against set forms is to insist on a false distinction. 25

Freedom and order are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary, they are designed to go hand-in-hand. Indeed, true liberty is only possible when operating within an established order. Such a principle applies to religious practice as much as the functioning of society. We certainly can—and should—approach God individually in both prayer and praise. The form of liturgy in no way hampers our ability to do so; rather, it roots us in tradition and reminds us to maintain a proper reverence in attitude when approaching God. Another significant objection to liturgy and forms in worship is that individuals can conform externally while internally rebelling. In this way, the critic would argue, liturgy becomes an empty repetition devoid of meaning, as the participant’s heart remains detached. This argument has merit. Indeed, only God can truly know the depths of a man’s heart. However, the phenomenon of inward rebellion paired with outward participation is not unique to liturgical worship.

Howard writes: “Exalted feelings by no means guarantee that real worship is going on in the heart. Chances to fool oneself lie all about. The minute we see 24. Howard, 98.

25. Ibid., 47.

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this, we also realize that these chances are as likely in a simple meeting hall or at a kitchen table as they are at the Chartres.”26 Insincerity can be present in all forms of worship, liturgical or otherwise.

Sincerity in the hearts of worshippers cannot be manufactured. However, by embracing our physicality, liturgy is able to uniquely direct our emotions to God, helping us to align our emotions with the Truth. Howard directly addresses the prior objection: The question is not merely one of outward gestures and postures that express something interior. It works the other way around as well. The outward posture actually helps to create the inner attitude…Baron von Hügel remarked that he kissed his son because he loved him but that he also kissed his son in order that he might love him. The act dragooned his somewhat untrustworthy and wayward feelings and helped to bundle them along toward their true object. 27

We cannot control our emotions merely through an act of the will. Nevertheless, we can choose to participate in the liturgy in spite of a disconnect in our emotions. God honors our desire to honor Him, even when our fallen emotions are not properly aligned. Choosing to overcome our initial emotions and act rightly helps to shape our inner attitudes as well.

A final objection—and arguably the most important objection to address— is that traditional liturgy actually separates man from God by encouraging idolatry. Indeed, the beauty of the liturgy can be a distraction if not approached from the proper perspective. It is certainly possible to cling onto the forms too tightly, valuing symbols and ceremonies for the aesthetic they create rather than the Truth they represent. However, this is not a fault of the liturgy itself. It is man’s disordering of loves that causes this elevation of the form of worship over the object of worship. Sinful man can abuse or misuse liturgy—but when approached properly, liturgy points us towards God. The observations that Alexis de Tocqueville made about nineteenth-century Americans’ disdain for forms appear to be accurate today as well. Churches across America—both inside and outside of the broader evangelical movement— continue to reject liturgical worship, instead crafting their services to appeal to a more modern audience. However, to excise the symbols, ceremonies, and rituals from worship is to, in the words of Thomas Howard, “suggest that the gospel beckons us away from our humanity into a disembodied realm…[and] to turn the 26. Howard, 27-28.

27. Ibid., 43-44.

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Incarnation into a mere doctrine.�28 Liturgy is no more a wrapping for the Truth than our bodies are mere wrappings for our souls. The rejection of traditional liturgy brings men no closer to the Truth. The liturgy allows us to step into divine redemption by participating in the reunification of the physical and the spiritual that will be made perfect in the new heavens and new earth. It is truly a foretaste of glory divine.

28. Howard, 36.

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Bibliogr aphy Howard, Thomas. Evangelical is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984.

“Saint Francis de Sales Catholic Church.” http://www.saintfrancisparish. org/ (accessed April 26, 2018).

Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Young, Malcolm Clemens. “About the Beyoncè Mass.” Grace Cathedral.

April 20, 2018. https://www.gracecathedral.org/about-the-beyonce-mass/ (accessed April 26, 2018).

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Thanks Arche Journal of Philosophy and Political Theory would like to gratefully recognize the Collegiate Network for their contribution to the success of our publication.