Edward Feser's Blog, page 11

Ed Piskor (1982-2024)

This week, cartoonistEd Piskor committed suicide in the wake of the relentless online pillorying andovernight destruction of his career that followed upon allegations of sexual misconduct,of which he insisted he was innocent. Piskor’s work was not really to my taste,but I often enjoyed the CartoonistKayfabe YouTube channel he co-hosted. I was always impressed by the manifestlove, respect, and appreciation he showed for the great comic book artists ofthe past. These are attractive and admirable attitudes to take toward thosefrom whom one has learned.

Piskor’ssuicide note is heartbreaking, and includes this passage:

I have no friends in this life anylonger. I’m a disappointment to everybody who liked me. I’m a pariah. Newsorganizations at my door and hassling my elderly parents. It’s too much.Putting our addresses on tv and the internet. How could I ever go back to mysmall town where everyone knows me? Some good people reached out and tried tohelp me through this whole thing but I’m just not strong enough. Theinstinctual part of my brain knows that I’m no longer part of the tribe. I’mexiled and banished. I’m giving into my instincts and fighting them at the sametime. Self preservation has lost out.

This episodevividly illustrates how diabolical is the moment through which we are currentlyliving, when the lust to defame others and stir up a mob against them – always atemptation to which human beings are prone – has been massively exacerbated bysocial media. I don’t know if Piskor was indeed innocent, but neither do thosewho hounded him to the point where he lost hope. May God have mercy on his souland on his family.

The illusion of AI

My essay “TheIllusion of Artificial Intelligence” appears in thelatest issue of the Word on Fire Institute’s journal Evangelization & Culture.

Wishful thinking about Judas

In a recentarticle at Catholic Answers titled “Hopefor Judas?” Jimmy Akin tells us that though he used to findconvincing the traditional view that Judas is damned, it now seems to him that “wedon’t have conclusive proof thatJudas is in hell, and there is still a ray of hope for him.”  But there is a difference between hope andwishful thinking.  And with all duerespect for Akin, it seems to me that given the evidence, the view that Judasmay have been saved crosses the line from the former to the latter.

Scriptural evidence

The reasonit has traditionally been held that Judas is in hell is that this seems to bethe clear teaching of several scriptural passages, including the words ofChrist himself.  In Matthew 26:24, Jesussays of Judas: “Woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed!  It would have been better for that man if hehad not been born” (RSV translation).  (Mark 14:21 records the same remark.)  It is extremely difficult at best to see howthis could possibly be true of someone who repented and was saved.  It makes perfect sense, though, if Judas wasdamned.  Matthew also tells us thatJudas’s very last act was to commit suicide (27:5), which is mortally sinful.

The evidenceof John’s gospel seems no less conclusive. Praying to the Father about his disciples, Jesus, once again referringto Judas, says that “none of them is lost but the son of perdition”(17:12).  It is, needless to say,extremely hard to see how Judas could be “lost” and of “perdition” and yet besaved. 

Then thereis the Acts of the Apostles.  It reportsthat Peter, referring to Judas’s death and the need to replace him, said: “Forit is written in the book of Psalms, ‘Let his habitation become desolate, andlet there be no one to live in it’ and ‘His office let another take’”(1:20).  This implies the opposite of ahappy fate for Judas, and a later verse confirms this pessimisticjudgment.  We are told that Matthias wasselected “to take the place in this ministry and apostleship from which Judasturned aside, to go to his own place” (1:25). As Haydock’scommentary notes, the reference appears to be “to his own place ofperdition, which he brought himself to” (p. 1435).

Commentingon Christ’s remark in Matthew 26:24, Akin suggests that it may have beenintended as a warning rather than a prediction. On this interpretation, Jesus was merely saying that it would be betterfor his betrayer not to have been born ifhe does not repent.  But this leavesit open that Judas did indeed repent. And in fact, Akin claims, we have evidence that Judas repented in thevery next chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, which tells us:

When Judas, his betrayer, saw that hewas condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chiefpriests and the elders, saying, “I have sinned in betraying innocent blood.” (27: 3-4)

But thereare several problems with this argument. The first is that it simply is not plausible on its face to suppose thatChrist’s words were meant merely as a warning rather than a prediction aboutJudas’s actual fate.  That it would bebetter for the damned not to have been born is true of everyone who might fail to repent – you, me, Judas, and for thatmatter, Peter, who also went on to betray Jesus (and who, we know, did indeedrepent).  And yet Christ does not make thisremark about Peter or about anyone else, but only about Judas.  Theobvious implication is that the words apply to Judas in a way they do not applyto anyone else, and that can only be the case if he was in fact damned.

A secondproblem is that Akin ignores the other relevant biblical passages.  In John’s Gospel, Christ says that Judas is“lost” and a “son of perdition.”  Thoseare peremptory remarks about what isthe case, not about what would be thecase if Judas did not repent.  Moreover, he says these things to the Father, not to Judas or to anyother disciple.  Hence they can hardly besaid to be warnings to anyone.  Thenthere are Peter’s remarks in Acts, which imply an unhappy fate for Judas andwere made after Judas’s death, sothat they too cannot be mere warnings about what would happen if he did notrepent.

A thirdproblem is that the passage cited by Akin has traditionally been understood tobe attributing to Judas a merely natural regret for what he had done, not thesupernatural sorrow or perfect contrition that would be necessary forsalvation.  This is evidenced by whathappens immediately after the passage cited by Akin: “They said [to Judas], ‘Whatis that to us?  See to it yourself.’  And throwing down the pieces of silver in thetemple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself” (27: 4-5).  As Haydock’s commentary notes, Pope St. Leoremarks, accordingly, that Judas showed only “a fruitless repentance,accompanied with a new sin of despair” (p. 1311).  Haydock notes that St. John Chrysostom also interpretsthe passage from Matthew as attributing only an imperfect repentance to Judas.

To be sure, Akinremarks that “suicide does not always result in hell because a person may notbe fully responsible for his action due to lack of knowledge, or psychologicalfactors, and because ‘in ways known to him alone,’ God may help the person torepent.”  That is true, but it does notfollow that we have any serious grounds for doubting that Judas’s suicide, specifically, resulted in damnation.  For one thing, there is no actual evidence from scripture that Judasfound sincere repentance just before the moment of death.  The very idea is sheer ungrounded speculationat best.  But for another thing, and as we’vealready seen, there are scripturalpassages that afford positive evidence that Judas was in fact damned.  And again, that is how they havetraditionally been interpreted.

Evidence from the tradition

Laterauthorities reiterate this clear indication of scripture that Judas isdamned.  We’ve already noted that PopeSt. Leo the Great and St. John Chrysostom do so.  Leo elaborates on the themeas follows:

To this forgiveness the traitor Judascould not attain: for he, the son of perdition, at whose right the devil stood,gave himself up to despair before Christ accomplished the mystery of universalredemption.  For in that the Lord diedfor sinners, perchance even he might have found salvation if he had nothastened to hang himself.  But that evilheart, which was now given up to thievish frauds, and now busied withtreacherous designs, had never entertained anything of the proofs of theSaviour's mercy… The wicked traitor refused to understand this, and tookmeasures against himself, not in the self-condemnation of repentance, but inthe madness of perdition, and thus he who had sold the Author of life to Hismurderers, even in dying increased the amount of sin which condemned him.

Similarly,in The City of God, St. Augustine writes:

Do we justly execrate the deed ofJudas, and does truth itself pronounce that by hanging himself he ratheraggravated than expiated the guilt of that most iniquitous betrayal, since, bydespairing of God's mercy in his sorrow that wrought death, he left to himselfno place for a healing penitence? … For Judas, when he killed himself, killed awicked man; but he passed from this life chargeable not only with the death ofChrist, but with his own: for though he killed himself on account of his crime,his killing himself was another crime. (Book I, Chapter 17)

It is truethat Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa held out hope that Judas repented.  But these Fathers also famously flirted withuniversalism, which the Church has since condemned, and this renders suspect theirunderstanding of the scriptural passages relevant to this particular topic.

In DeVeritate, St. Thomas Aquinas writes:

In the case of Judas, the abuse ofgrace was the reason for his reprobation, since he was made reprobate becausehe died without grace.  Moreover, thefact that he did not have grace when he died was not due to God’s unwillingnessto give it but to his unwillingness to accept it – as both Anselm and Dionysiuspoint out.  (Question Six, Article 2.  The context is Aquinas’s consideration of anobjection to a thesis on predestination that he defends in the article.  But the lines quoted reflect assumptions heshares in common with his critic.)

The Catechismof the Council of Trent promulgated by Pope St. Pius V, in itstreatment of penance, says: “[Some] give themselves to such melancholy andgrief, as utterly to abandon all hope of salvation… Such certainly was thecondition of Judas, who, repenting,hanged himself, and thus lost soul and body” (p. 264).  And in its treatment of the priesthood, theCatechism says:

Some are attracted to the priesthoodby ambition and love of honors; while there are others who desire to beordained simply in order that they may abound in riches… They derive no otherfruit from their priesthood than was derived by Judas from the Apostleship,which only brought him everlasting destruction. (p. 319)

The Churchhas also never prayed for Judas’s soul in her formal worship.  On the contrary, the traditional liturgy forHoly Thursday containsthe following prayer:

O God, from whom Judas received thepunishment of his guilt, and the thief the reward of his confession, grant us theeffect of Thy clemency: that as our Lord Jesus Christ in His passion gave toeach a different recompense according to his merits, so may He deliver us fromour old sins and grant us the grace of His resurrection.  Who liveth and reigneth.

Furtherauthorities could be cited, but this suffices to make the point that it hasbeen the common view in the history of the Church that Judas is in hell.  Indeed, so confident has the Church beenabout this that the supposition that Judas is damned has traditionally beenreflected even in her catechesis and herworship. 

Now, thiswould be extremely odd if there really were any serious grounds for hope thatJudas is saved.  As the Code of Canon Lawfamously reminds us, “the salvation of souls… must always be the supreme law inthe Church” (1752).  And Christ famouslycommanded us to pray for our enemies (Matthew 5:44).  How then, consistent with Christ’s teachingand with her supreme law, could the Church for two millennia fail to pray forJudas’s soul if there really were any hope for his salvation?  The Church also assures sinners that there isno sin, no matter how grievous, that cannot be forgiven if only one is trulyrepentant.  What better illustration ofthis could there possibly be than the repentance of Christ’s own betrayer – if indeed he really had repented?  And yet the Church has not only never heldJudas up as a sign of hope, but on the contrary has pointed to him as anillustration of what awaits those who refuse Christ’s mercy.

The only evidencefrom the tradition Akin cites in defense of his own position are some remarksfrom Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.  In particular, he notes that John Paul oncestated that it is not “certain” from Matthew 26:24 that Judas is damned.  And Benedict, Akin notes, once remarked thatit is “not up to us” to make a judgement about Judas’s suicide.

But this ishardly a powerful response to the case from scripture and tradition that I’vesummarized.  For one thing, John PaulII’s remark was not made in the context of a magisterial document, but ratherin the interview book Crossing theThreshold of Hope.  It is merely theexpression of his opinion as a private theologian.  Moreover, it is merely an assertion about Matthew 26:24 and failsto address the considerations that indicate that the passage does indeed show that Judas isdamned.  Nor does John Paul address theother relevant scriptural passages, or the evidence from the later tradition.

BenedictXVI’s comment was made in the course of a generalaudience, which has a low degree of authority compared to therelevant passages from scripture, the Fathers, and the rest of the traditioncited above.  Moreover, Benedict alsoacknowledges that “Jesus pronounces a very severe judgement on [Judas],” andgoes on to contrast Judas’s fate with Peter’s:

After his fall Peter repented andfound pardon and grace.  Judas alsorepented, but his repentance degenerated into desperation and thus becameself-destructive.  For us it is aninvitation to always remember what St Benedict says at the end of the fundamentalChapter Five of his “Rule”: “Never despair of God's mercy”.

Needless tosay, these remarks from Benedict tend to supportrather than undermine the traditional view that Judas’s suicide shows that hehad succumbed to the sin of despair.

“So you’re telling me there’s achance?”

It may seemfrivolous, when dealing with so serious a subject, to allude to a crude comedyfilm like Dumb and Dumber.  But it contains a line that is so apt that Iwill take the risk.  In a famous scene, JimCarrey’s character asks a girl he has a crush on how likely it is that shemight someday reciprocate his feelings.  Shesays the odds are “one out of a million.”  To which he replies: “So you’re telling methere’s a chance!  YEAH!!”

What she actuallymeans, of course, is that the odds are so extremely low that, practically speaking,there is no chance at all.  But thelesson he draws is that, because she didn’tquite say that there is zero chance,he has reasonable grounds for hope. 

Jimmy Akinis a smart guy for whom I have nothing but respect, so I am certainly notlikening him to the Jim Carrey character! But on this particular issue, it seems to me that he, like others whohave resisted the traditional view that Judas is damned, are committing anerror similar to the one that character commits.  Because, they suppose, the evidence fromscripture and tradition doesn’t strictlyentail that Judas is damned, they judge that it is reasonable to hope thathe is not.  In effect, they look at whatthe evidence is saying and respond: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!”  And like Carrey’s character, they thereby entirelymiss the point.

Jesuit Britain?

Did SpanishScholastic thinkers influence British liberalism? Youcan now access my Religion andLiberty review of Projectionsof Spanish Jesuit Scholasticism on British Thought: New Horizons in Politics,Law, and Rights , edited by Leopoldo J. Prieto López and José LuisCendejas Bueno.

Mind, matter, and malleability

Continuing ourlook at Jacques Maritain’s ThreeReformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau, let’s consider some arrestingpassages on the conception of human nature the modern world has inherited fromDescartes.  Maritain subtitles hischapter on the subject “The Incarnation of the Angel.”  As you might expect, this has in part to dowith the Cartesian dualist’s view that the mind is a res cogitans or thinking substance whose nature is whollyincorporeal, so that it is only contingently related to the body.  But it is the Cartesian doctrine of innateideas and its implications that Maritain is most interested in. 

For aScholastic Aristotelian like Aquinas, though the human intellect is immaterial,it is unfurnished until sensory experience gives it contact withmind-independent physical reality.  Evenwhen it rises to the highest of the metaphysical heights and comes to knowsomething of the immaterial and divine First Cause of all things, it does soonly on the basis of inference from what it knows about matter.  An angelicintellect, by contrast, is completely separate from matter and thus fromsensory organs.  Its knowledge is builtinto it at its creation.  And since it isGod who then furnishes it, there is, naturally, no chance of error so long asthe angel wills to attend to what it knows.

Descartes’account of human knowledge essentially assimilates it to this angelicmodel.  For him, knowledge of the basicstructure of reality is innate, rather than deriving from sensoryexperience.  This includes knowledge evenof the nature of material things.  Weneed only confine our judgements to accepting those propositions and inferencesthat strike us as “clearly and distinctly” true and valid, respectively, forGod would not allow us to be misled about those.  Error creeps in only when the willoverreaches that limit and embraces some claim or inference that is not clear and distinct.  A purely mathematical conception of matter isa natural concomitant of this account of knowledge, for it alone has therequisite clarity and distinctness.

The problem,of course, is that we are not in factangels; a faculty of infallible judgment is notbuilt into us; and we cannot read offthe natures of mind-independent things from our ideas of them.  Hence, when we interpret human knowledge inlight of Descartes’ erroneous model, we are bound seriously to misunderstandit.  On the one hand, we might fall intoa dogmatism that mistakenly takes a certain successful – but neverthelesslimited and fallible – way of conceiving of the world as if it were an exhaustive and necessary way of doingso.  On the other hand, we might fallinto a subjectivism that despairs of ever getting beyond our own ideas toobjective reality.  Both tendenciesresult from taking our own representationsof the world to be all we really know directly. The first tendency, which takes these representations to be angel-likein their adequacy to reality, yields excessive optimism.  The second tendency, which comes to see thatour representations are notangel-like, yields excessive pessimism.

Kant did nottranscend these two opposite extreme errors of dogmatism and subjectivism, butrather combined them.  On the one hand, he takes what is essentiallyjust a modern, post-Cartesian account of the nature of the mind’s cognition ofreality and dogmatizes it – confining our knowledge of the natural world to what post-Newtonian science has to tell us aboutit, and ruling out altogether any genuine knowledge of what transcends thenatural world (such as the existence of God and the immortality of thesoul).  On the other hand, he takes evenour knowledge of the natural world to be knowledge only of how it appears tous, and not of things as they are in themselves.

The upshot,says Maritain, is that:

With [Descartes’] theory ofrepresentational ideas the claims of Cartesian reason to independence of externalobjects reach their highest point: thought breaks with Being.  It forms a sealed world which is no longer incontact with anything but itself; its ideas, now opaque effigies interposedbetween it and external objects, are still for Descartes a sort of lining ofthe real world… Here again Kant finishes Descartes’ work.  If the intelligence when it thinks, reachesimmediately only its own thought, or its representations, the thing hiddenbehind these representations remains for ever unknowable. (p. 78)

Ironically,though, the sequel is not greater humility but rather a pridefulself-deification.  If it cannot makesense of a reality independent of itself, the modern mind all too often decidesto make itself the measure of reality:

The result of a usurpation of theangelic privileges, that denaturing of human reason drivenbeyond the limits of its species, that lust for pure spirituality, could onlygo to the infinite: passing beyond the world of created spirits it had to leadus to claim for our intelligence the perfect autonomy and the perfectimmanence, the absolute independence, the aseity of the uncreated intelligence… [I]t remains the secret principle ofthe break-up of our culture and of the disease of which the apostate West seemsdetermined to die…

[B]ecause it wants an absolute andundetermined liberty for itself, it is natural that human thought, sinceDescartes, refuses to be measured objectively or to submit to intelligiblenecessities.  Freedom with respect to theobjective is the mother and nurse of all modern freedoms… we are no longermeasured by anything, subject to anything whatever!  Intellectual liberty which Chesterton comparedto that of the turnip (and that is a libel on the turnip), and which strictlyonly belongs to primal matter. (pp. 79-80)

Hence thevarieties of idealism and relativism (perspectivalism, historicism, socialconstructivism, postmodernism,etc.) that have plagued Western thought and culture in the centuries afterKant. 

That’s anold story, of course, and a more complicated one than these remarks fromMaritain let on.  But it’s not what Iwant to consider here.  Rather, whatcatches my eye is the comparison of the modern mind (as it tends to conceive ofitself) to “primal matter.”  What doesMaritain mean by this? 

Primematter, in Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy, is the pure potentiality to takeon form.  Prime matter by itself is not any particular thing atall.  It becomes a concrete particular thingof some kind – water, gold, lead, a star, a tree, a dog, a human body, orwhatever – only when conjoined with some substantial form or other.  And qua pure potentiality for form, it canbecome any of these things.  It is not limited to being a physical thing onlyof a certain kind (as is secondary matter,matter already having some substantial form or other).  (For discussion and defense of the notion ofprime matter, see pp. 171-75 of ScholasticMetaphysics and pp. 310-24 of Aristotle’sRevenge.)

Maritain’s analogyis clear enough, then.  Just as primematter can become anything (or at least anything physical, to be more precise)so too do constructivist and relativist theories make of human nature somethingindefinitely malleable.  But this mightat first glance seem an odd criticism for an Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopherlike Maritain to level against such views. For Aristotle holds that knowledge involves the intellect’s taking on theform of the thing known.  And there is nolimit in principle to what forms the intellect might in this way take on.  Indeed, Aristotle famously remarks in De Anima that, given this power of theintellect to take on the forms of all things, “the soul is in a way all thethings that exist” (Book III, Chapter 8). But if Aristotelians themselves allow that the intellect can in thissense become anything, why is there a problem with the views Maritain iscriticizing saying something similar? And why compare these views’ conception of human nature to prime matter,rather than to Aristotle’s own conception of the intellect?

The answeris to be found by answering another question, namely: What is the differencebetween the way prime matter takes ona certain form, and the way the intellecttakes it on?  The difference is this:When prime matter takes on the form of a dog, the result is a dog. But when the intellect takes on the form of a dog, the result is not a dog.  Rather, it is knowledge of a dog.  WhenAristotle says that the soul – or to be more precise, one specific faculty ofthe soul, the intellect – is all things, he is, of course, speakingfiguratively.  The intellect does notreally become a dog when it grasps the form of a dog.  To be sure, the figure of speech is apt,because, by taking on the form of a dog, the intellect takes on the nature of a dog.  The intellect takes on “dogginess.”  But to take it on merely intellectually is precisely to take it on without actually being a dog.  By contrast, for matter to take on thatnature just is to take it on in the sort of way that does entail being a dog. 

This shouldmake it clear why Maritain’s analogy is appropriate.  Views that take reality to be relative to ourperceptions, our language, our conventions, etc. make human beings out to besomething like prime matter insofar as they entail that what a human being is (and not just what a human being knows) is indefinitely malleable,susceptible of changing with changes in perception, language, conventions,etc.  And, in fact, that is simply nottrue of us.  We are, among other things,by nature rational animals, and no change in our perceptions, language,conventions, or the like can change that in the least.  The most such changes can do is blind us toreality, but without changing reality itself.

The metaphysics of individualism

Modern moraldiscourse often refers to “persons” and to “individuals” as if the notions weremore or less interchangeable.  But thatis not the case.  In his book Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau(especially in chapter 1, section 3), Jacques Maritain notes several importantdifferences between the concepts, and draws out their moral and socialimplications.

Traditionally,in Catholic philosophy, a person is understood to be a substance possessing intellectand will.  Intellect and will, in turn,are understood to be immaterial.  Hence,to be a person is ipso facto to beincorporeal – wholly so in the case of an angel, partially so in the case of ahuman being.  And qua partiallyincorporeal, human beings are partially independent of the forces that governthe rest of the material world.

Individuality,meanwhile, is in the case of physical substances a consequence precisely oftheir corporeality rather than theirincorporeality.  For matter, as Aquinasholds, is the principle of individuation with respect to the members of speciesof corporeal things.  Hence it isprecisely insofar as human beings are corporeal that they are subject to theforces that govern the rest of the material world.

With a wholly corporeal living thing like aplant or a non-human animal, its good is subordinate to that of the species towhich it belongs, as any part is subordinate to the whole of which it is a part.  Such a living thing is fulfilled insofar asit contributes to the good and continuance of that whole, the species kind ofwhich it is an instance.  By contrast, aperson, qua incorporeal, is a complete whole in itself.  And itshighest good, in which alone it can find its fulfilment, is God, the ultimateobject of the intellect’s knowledge and the will’s desire.

Insofar aswe think of human beings as persons,then, we will tend to conceive of what is good for them in terms of whatfulfills their intellects and wills, and thus (when the implications of thatare properly understood) in theological terms. But insofar as we think of them as individuals,we will tend to conceive of what is good for them in terms of what isessentially bodily – material goods, pleasure and the avoidance of pain,emotional wellbeing, and the like. However, we will also be more prone to see their good as something thatmight be sacrificed for the whole of which they are parts. 

Maritainputs special emphasis on the implications of all this for politicalphilosophy.  The common good is more thanmerely the aggregate of the goods enjoyed by individuals.  But because human beings are persons, and notmerely individuals, the common good is also not to be conceived of merely asthe good of society as a whole and not of its parts.  Rather, “it is, so to speak, a good common to the whole and the parts”(p. 23).

On the onehand, the political order is in one respect more perfect than the individualhuman being, for it is complete in a way the individual is not.  On the other hand, in another respect theindividual human being is more perfect than the political order, because qua person he is a complete order in hisown right, and one that has a destiny beyond the temporal political realm.  Hence, a just political order must reflectboth of these facts.  In particular, itmust recognize that the common good to which the individual is ordered includesfacilitating, for each member of the community, the realization of hisultimate, eternal end in the hereafter.  Thus,concludes Maritain, “the human city fails in justice and sins against itselfand its members if, when the truth is sufficiently proposed to it, it refusesto recognize Him Who is the Way of beatitude” (p. 24).

This refusalis, needless to say, characteristic of modern societies, both liberal andcollectivist.  And unsurprisingly, they haveat the same time put greater emphasis on human individuality than on human personhood.  Both do so insofar as they conceive of thegood primarily in economic and other material terms rather than in spiritualterms.  Liberal societies, in addition,do so insofar as they conceive of these bodily goods along the lines of thesatisfaction of idiosyncratic individual preferences and emotional wellbeing.  Collectivist societies, meanwhile, do soinsofar as they regard human beings, qua individuals, as apt to be sacrificedto the good of the species of which they are mere instances.  (It should be no surprise, then, that Burkewould famously condemn “the dust and powder of individuality” even as hecondemned at the same time the totalitarianism of the French Revolution.  For individualism and collectivism are rootedin precisely the same metaphysical error.)

Maritaincites a passage from Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange that summarizes the moral andspiritual implications of the distinction between individuality and personhood:

To develop one’s individuality is to live the egoistical life of the passions, to make oneself thecentre of everything, and end finally by being the slave of a thousand passinggoods which bring us a wretched momentary joy. Personality, on the contrary,increases as the soul rises above the sensible world and by intelligence andwill binds itself more closely to what makes the life of the spirit.  The philosophers have caught sight of it, butthe saints especially have understood, that the full development of our poorpersonality consists in losing it in some way in that of God. (pp. 24-25,quoted from Garrigou-Lagrange’s Le SensCommun)

Among the paganphilosophers, perhaps none is as clear on this theme as Plotinus, who in the FifthEnnead contrasts individuality with orientation toward God: “How is it, then,that souls forget the divinity that begot them?... This evil that has befallenthem has its source in self-will… in becoming different, in desiring to beindependent… They use their freedom to go in a direction that leads away fromtheir origin.”  And among the saints,none states this contrast more eloquently than Augustine, who distinguishes “twocities [that] have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self,even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to thecontempt of self” (City of God, BookXIV, Chapter 28).  This earthly city, inits modern guise, has been built above all by individualism.

Related posts:

Tyranny of the sovereign individual

MacIntrye on human dignity

Liberty, equality, fraternity?

When do popes speak ex cathedra?

Considerfour groups that, one might think, couldn’t be more different: Pope Francis’s mostzealous defenders; sedevacantists; Protestants; and Catholics who have recentlyleft the Church (for Eastern Orthodoxy, say). Something at least many of them have in common is a seriousmisunderstanding of the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility – one whichhas led them to draw fallacious conclusions from recent papal teaching thatseems to conflict with traditional Catholic doctrine (for example, on HolyCommunion for those in invalid marriages, the death penalty, and blessings forsame-sex couples).  Some of PopeFrancis’s defenders insist that, since these teachings came from a pope, they must therefore be consistent with traditionaldoctrine, appearances notwithstanding. Sedevacantists argue instead that, given that these teachings are notconsistent with traditional doctrine, Francis must not be a true pope.  Some Protestants, meanwhile, argue that sinceFrancis is a true pope but the teachings in question are (they judge) notconsistent with traditional Christian doctrine, Catholic claims about papalinfallibility have been falsified. Finally, some Catholics have concluded the same thing, and left theChurch as a result. 

I’ve addressedthe doctrinal controversies in question at length elsewhere and will notrevisit them here.  The point for presentpurposes is that, whatever one thinks of them, none of these inferences issound, because they rest on the false assumption that Catholicism claims that apope could not err in the ways Francis is in these cases alleged to haveerred. 

The Church’steaching, as famously defined at the FirstVatican Council, is as follows:

When the Roman Pontiff speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacherof all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines adoctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, hepossesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, thatinfallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in definingdoctrine concerning faith or morals.

It is fairlywidely understood that this does not mean that a pope is impeccable in hispersonal moral behavior, or that he cannot err when he speaks on some topicunconnected to faith or morals, or that he cannot err when he offers a personalopinion on some theological matter rather than teaching in his capacity as pope.  Rather, it is only when speaking as universalpastor of the Church on a matter of faith or morals that he is infallible.

However, whatis somewhat less widely understood is that even this is not enough for aninfallible ex cathedra statement.  As the passage from Vatican I says more thanonce, the pope also needs to be speaking to the universal Church on a matter offaith or morals in a manner that definessome point of doctrine.  And to “define”a doctrine is more than just putting it forward as binding on thefaithful.  As the Second Vatican Councilteaches in LumenGentium, even papal teaching that is not ex cathedra is normally binding (though as I’ve discussed elsewhere,the Church acknowledges rare exceptions). To define a doctrine involves, in addition, putting it forward in an absolutely final, irrevocablemanner.  When a pope defines some pointof doctrine, he is teaching it in a way that is intended to settle the question for all time and can never be revisited.  It only when speaking with this maximum degree of solemnity that a popeis claimed by Vatican I to be making an infallible ex cathedra pronouncement. 

Suchpronouncements are rare, and Pope Francis has never made one.  In particular, none of the doctrinal controversiesreferred to above involves any such pronouncement.  Neither AmorisLaetitia’s teaching on Holy Communion for those in invalid marriages, northe 2018 revision to the Catechism on the topic of capital punishment, nor Fiducia Supplicans’s teaching onblessings for same-sex couples, involves any ex cathedra statement.  Noneof these documents is intended to “define” or settle in an absolutelyirrevocable way any doctrinal matter.  Hence,if one or more of them really does contain doctrinal error, that would be –though regrettable and indeed scandalous – nevertheless compatible with thedoctrine of papal infallibility, because none of them is the kind ofpronouncement that is covered byinfallibility.

Hence, noneof the inferences referred to above is sound. The fact that these doctrinal pronouncements were issued under thepope’s authority does not (contraryto some of Pope Francis’s defenders) byitself guarantee that they must be reconcilable with tradition, becausethey are not ex cathedra definitions.  Nor, if they are erroneous, would that entailthat Francis is not a true pope, since (contrary to what some sedevacantistsseem to think) even true popes are not infallible when teaching in the specific manner of the documentsin question.   For the same reason – andcontrary to what some Protestants and some Catholics who have lost their faithsuppose – if Francis has erred in these cases, that would not falsify Catholicclaims about papal infallibility, because the Church never claimed in the firstplace that popes are infallible when making pronouncements of the specific kind in question, since none of them involves anattempt at making an ex cathedradefinition.

The teaching of the manuals

It isimportant to emphasize that this is in noway some novel interpretation of papal infallibility manufactured in orderto deal with the controversies that have arisen during the pontificate of PopeFrancis.  It is simply the way Catholictheologians have always understood the matter. To see this, consider what is said in several standard theology manualsof the period between Vatican I and Vatican II. This was, of course, the period when the popes were most keen toemphasize their power to settle matters of doctrine.  And yet the manuals say exactly what I justsaid about the conditions on an excathedra statement.  It is worthadding that these are manuals that received the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur.  That does not entail that they areinfallible, but it does mean that what they say was regarded by ecclesiasticalauthorities as perfectly orthodox and unremarkable. 

Let’s beginwith Scheeben’s 1874 Handbookof Catholic Dogmatics, Book One, Part One.  Commenting on papal authority infallibly tojudge matters of doctrine, it tells us that “only those propositions orconsiderations which the judge evidently intendedto determine peremptorily are to be regarded as judicially determined andthus infallibly true” (p. 331, emphasis added). That is to say, unless the pope intends to settle a matter in aperemptory or final way, his pronouncement is not of an ex cathedra nature. Accordingly, Scheeben says, “it is possible, notwithstanding thecontinuing operation of his authority, that the pope extra iudicum [i.e. not excathedra] should profess, teach, or attest something false or heretical” (p.144, parenthetical remark in the original).

Brunsmannand Preuss’s 1932 Handbook of FundamentalTheology, Volume IV, tells us the following:

An ex-cathedra decision…implies the unmistakable intention of the pope to utter a definitive andbinding doctrinal decision and to oblige the Universal Church to accept it withabsolute certainty.  Hence if the pope,even in his capacity as supreme shepherd and teacher, were to recommend to allthe faithful a certain doctrine regarding faith or morals, even if he commandedthat doctrine to be taught in all the schools, this would be no ex-cathedra definition, because no definitive doctrinaldecision would be intended.  The case issimilar with regard to decrees issued by the Roman congregations, when they (ashappens with the S. Congregation of the Holy Office, over which the popehimself presides) condemn a doctrine, and the decision is confirmed by thesupreme pontiff and published by his authority. Such decrees are not per se infallible… If and so long as there is areasonable doubt whether the pope intends a definition to be ex cathedra, no one is in conscience bound to accept itas such.  (pp. 49-50)

Notice thatBrunsmann and Preuss not only note that a papal pronouncement does not count asex cathedra if it is not intended as“definitive” and as settling the matter with “absolute certainty,” but alsooffer specific examples of teaching that would, accordingly, not count as ex cathedra.  Even a doctrine that a pope in his capacityas universal teacher commends to all the faithful and commands to be taught, ora doctrine taught with his approval by the Holy Office (now known as theDicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith), would not count as ex cathedra unless there were an “unmistakable intention” and no “reasonable doubt” that he intendedit as an absolutely final and irrevocable doctrinal definition.

Ludwig Ott’s1955 Fundamentals of Catholic Dogmasays:

Not all the assertions of theTeaching Authority of the Church on questions of Faith and morals areinfallible and consequently irrevocable. Only those are infallible which emanate from General Councilsrepresenting the whole episcopate and the Papal Decisions Ex Cathedra.  The ordinary and usual form of the Papalteaching activity is not infallible. Further, the decisions of the Roman Congregations (Holy Office, BibleCommission) are not infallible. (p. 10)

The condition of the Infallibility isthat the Pope speaks ex cathedra.  Forthis is required… that he have the intention of deciding finally a teaching ofFaith or Morals, so that it is to be held by all the faithful.  Without this intention, which must be madeclear in the formulation, or by the circumstances, a decision ex cathedra isnot complete.  Most of the doctrinalexpressions made by the Popes in their Encyclicals are not decisions excathedra. (p. 287)

Ott herereiterates the points we’ve already seen in the other manuals, and adds that“the ordinary and usual form” ofpapal teaching, including “most of thedoctrinal expressions… [in] Encyclicals,” are not infallible. 

Salaverriand Nicolau’s 1955 SacraeTheologiae Summa, Volume IBnotes that “to speak ex cathedra,according to Vatican I, implies that the Roman Pontiff teaches something… defining it as something that must be held,that is, obliging all to an absolute assent of the mind and deciding the matter with an ultimate andirrevocable judgment” (p. 216, emphasis in original).  They add that “the manifest intention of defining something is required” (p. 219,emphasis added).  In other words, and asthe other manuals note, unless a pope explicitly tells us that he intends tosettle some doctrinal matter in an absolutely final and irrevocable way, wedon’t have an ex cathedra definitionand thus don’t have an infallible pronouncement.

Van Noort’s1957 Dogmatic Theology, Volume II:Christ’s Church comments on the matter at length:

The pope, even acting as pope, canteach the universal Church without making use of his supreme authority at itsmaximum power.  Now the Vatican Councildefined merely this point: the pope is infallible if he uses his doctrinalauthority at its maximum power, by handing down a binding and definitivedecision: such a decision, for example, by which he quite clearly intends tobind all Catholics to an absolutely firm and irrevocable assent.

Consequently even if the pope, andacting as pope, praises some doctrine, or recommends it to Christians, or evenorders that it alone should be taught in theological schools, this act shouldnot necessarily be considered an infallible decree since he may not intend tohand down a definitive decision.  Thesame holds true if by his approval he orders some decree of a sacredcongregation to be promulgated; for example, a decree of the Holy Office…

For the same reason, namely a lack ofintention to hand down a final decision, not all the doctrinal decisions whichthe pope proposes in encyclical letters should be considered definitions.  In a word, there must always be present andclearly present the intention of the pope to hand down a decision which isfinal and definitive…

[W]hen he is not speaking excathedra… All theologians admit that the pope can make a mistake in matters offaith and morals when so speaking: either by proposing a false opinion in amatter not yet defined, or by innocently differing from some doctrine alreadydefined.  (pp. 293-94)

Van Noortgoes on to give an example of a case where a decree of a sacred congregationwas issued with papal approval but turned out to be doctrinally erroneous:

It should be candidly admitted, wethink, that the sacred congregation did condemn Galileo’s teaching by what wasactually a doctrinal decree. The opinion of some theologians that the decree… was a purely disciplinary decree… is, in our opinion, difficult tosquare with the facts of the case. Likewise it should be frankly admitted that the Congregations of theInquisition and of the Index committed a faux pas in this matter…

The pope was aware of the decree ofthe congregation, and approved it as a decree of the congregation. (pp. 308-9)

Van Noort’sdiscussion repeats the points made in the other manuals, and adds the positiveexplicit assertion that “the pope can make a mistake in matters of faith andmorals” when not speaking ex cathedra,along with an example in which a Vatican congregation acting with papalapproval did in fact issue a mistaken doctrinal decree.

Again, thesemanuals were all written afterVatican I proclaimed papal infallibility but before Vatican II and the doctrinal controversies that arose in itswake.  Hence no one can claim that theyreflect some more limited, pre-Vatican I conception of papal authority.  Nor can anyone claim that they reflect thepolemical interests of post-Vatican II progressives or traditionalists who, forvery different reasons, would want to emphasize the limits of papal power.  They are also exactly the sorts of manualssedevacantists like to appeal to in support of their position.  But in fact they undermine that position,because they show that the errors sedevacantists accuse the post-Vatican IIpopes of would (even if these popes really were guilty of all the errors theyare accused of) be errors of precisely the kind the Church acknowledges canoccur, consistent with what Vatican I says about the conditions oninfallibility.

Again, I’mnot going to revisit here the details of the doctrinal controversiessurrounding Pope Francis.  But if the pope’s exhortation Amoris Laetitia, the 2018 revision tothe Catechism, or the DDF declaration FiduciaSupplicans contain doctrinal error, then these would be the kinds of errorsthe Church acknowledges to be possible for a pope to make, because none of themis an ex cathedra pronouncement.  Hence they would not falsify Catholicism, norwould they show that Francis is not a true pope.

A heretical pope?

But whatabout the thesis that a pope might lose his office due to heresy, which wasdiscussed by St. Robert Bellarmine, Francisco Suárez, and others among theChurch’s great theologians?  The firstthing to say here is that what is in view in this thesis is formal heresy, not mere material heresy.  A material heresy is a claim that is in factheretical in its content, whether or not the person who asserts it realizesthat, or would persist in adhering to the claim after being warned that it isheretical.  A person who holds some viewthat is materially heretical would not for that reason alone sufferexcommunication and thus cease to be a Catholic.  That would happen only as a result of formal heresy, which is a materialheresy that a person persists in despite the attempts of ecclesiastical authorityto correct him.  Moreover, we have to becareful in determining what counts as “heresy,” which in canon law is not justany old theological error, but specifically the denial of some teaching thatthe Church has officially defined.  A formal heretic, then, is someone whoobstinately denies some doctrine that the Church has formally defined, despitethe attempt of the Church to correct him.

The thesisin question is that if a pope were a formal heretic in this sense, he wouldcease to be a Catholic, and thus cease to be pope, since a non-Catholic cannotbe a pope.  But as Ihave argued elsewhere, no one has succeeded in showing that PopeFrancis is a formal heretic.  So the thesisthat he might have lost his office due to formal heresy is moot.  But even if he were a formal heretic, thematter is still nowhere near as straightforward as sedevacantists suppose.  For one thing, the thesis that a pope couldlose his office for formal heresy is not a teaching of the Church, but atheological opinion, nothing more. Whether a pope really could become a formal heretic, and, if so, whetherhe would lose his office, are matters that have been debated but never settled,either by theologians or by the Church. 

Here is whatVan Noort says on the matter:

Thus far we have been discussing Catholic teaching.  It may be useful to add a fewpoints about purely theological opinions…Theologians disagree… over the question of whether the pope can become a formalheretic by stubbornly clinging to anerror on a matter already defined.  Themore probable and respectful opinion, followed by Suárez, Bellarmine and manyothers, holds that just as God has not till this day ever permitted such athing to happen, so too he never will permit a pope to become a formal andpublic heretic.  Still, some competenttheologians do concede that the pope when not speaking ex cathedra could fallinto formal heresy.  They add that shouldsuch a case of public papal heresy occur, the pope, either by the very deeditself or at least by a subsequent decision of an ecumenical council, would bydivine law forfeit his jurisdiction. Obviously a man could not continue to be the head of the Church if heceased to be even a member of the Church. (pp. 293-94)

Salaverriand Nicolau write: “Theologians concede that a general Council can licitlydeclare a Pope heretical, if this case is possible, but not to depose himauthoritatively since he is superior to the Council, unless it is clearlycertain that he is a doubtful Pope” (p. 217).

Note firstthat both manuals are tentative about whether it really is even possible for apope to become a formal heretic, though some theologians do allow that this ispossible.  There are two lessons to drawfrom this that are relevant for present purposes.  The first is that the Church does permittheologians to entertain and debate the possibility that a pope may not onlyerr, but even fall into formal heresy.  This is important for properly understandingthe doctrine of papal infallibility, because it shows that the Church is veryfar from claiming that everything apope might say on matters of faith or morals is infallible.  Second, though, the common opinion is thateven if a formally heretical pope is possible in theory, it is highly unlikelythat divine Providence would allow this ever in fact to occur.  And this reinforces a point that should beobvious in any event, which is that a Catholic ought to be extremely cautious about accusing a pope of formal heresy, asopposed to some lesser degree of error. 

But it is,in any event, not up to just any old Catholic with a stack of theology manualsand a Twitter account to make this determination.  Note that the manuals make reference to theaction of a council against a popeguilty of formal heresy.  For to whomdoes the task fall to warn a pope that he is in danger of such heresy?  And who has the authority to decide that,after having been warned to no avail, his heresy is obstinate and thus has infact passed from being material to being formal?  If just any old Catholic could claim theright to do this, the result would be precisely the sort of chaos that theinstitution of an authoritative hierarchical Church is supposed toprevent.  Hence the common view is that, if a pope were to fall into formalheresy and if he were to lose hisoffice as a result, the latter could only occur after some authoritativeecclesiastical body had made the juridicaldetermination that he had in fact fallen into formal heresy and ipso facto lost his office.

Yet eventhis, as Ihave argued elsewhere, would by no means solve all the problems thatarise in such a scenario.  And thisreinforces the point that we are dealing here not with any actual teaching of theChurch, but with highly controversial and problematic theological theories,albeit ones the Church permits us to speculate about.  And it is merely on such speculative theories, rather than on official Catholic doctrine,that the sedevacantist position is grounded. 

Ex cathedra heresy?

So far wehave been discussing papal teaching that is not presented in the first place asif it were an irrevocable ex cathedrapronouncement.  But what if a popeattempted to teach some heresy in an excathedra way?  Is this possible evenin theory?  Sometimes Catholics saythings to the effect that were a pope ever to try to do this, God would strikehim dead before he could carry it out. Interestingly, though, Scheeben treats the matter as being morecomplicated than that.  He writes:

Infallibility in itself does notabsolutely rule out the possibility that the judge oflast resort may place… a formally invalid act of judgment.  In this sense, therefore, many theologians inthe Scholastic period were able to deem the judicial infallibility of the popeconsistent with the possibility that he, out of wantonness or fear, might placepersonal acts, even with the claim of his authority, which should not beregarded at the same time as acts of his authority or of his See and hence,without prejudice to the infallibility of the latter, could be erroneous.

Those theologians considered… thesole [hypothetical] case of obvious and absolute temerity the one in which thepope would attempt to define a notorious heresy, or, what amounts to the same thing, to reject a notoriousdogma that is held withoutdoubt by the entire Church and thus to require the whole Church to abandon herfaith; for in this case, they said, the pope would behave not as a shepherd but as a wolf, not as a teacher but as a madman, whileon the other hand the Church or the episcopate could and would have to rise upimmediately as one against the pope, although we could not say thatshe was rising up over or even merely against papal authority; rather she would rise up only against the arbitrariness of the person whohitherto had possessed the papal authority, but plainly through thequestionable act renounced it and relieved himself of it. (p. 310)

WhatScheeben appears to have in mind by a “notoriousheresy” or the “reject[ion of] a notorious dogma” is the explicit denial ofsomething manifestly previously definedas irreformable doctrine.  And by the“attempt to define” such a heresy, Scheeben seems to have in mind a case wherea pope issued a decree like the following: “Using my full authority assuccessor of Peter and universal teacher of all the faithful, I hereby declareand define by a solemn and irrevocable decree that Jesus of Nazareth was notthe Son of God,” or something similarly manifestly heretical. 

Scheebendoes not claim that Providence might ever in fact allow such a thing, but hedoes discuss it as an abstract possibility that would not be strictly ruled outby the doctrine of papal infallibility. But how could it not be ruled out? Scheeben’s view (or at least, the view of the Scholastic theologians hehas in mind) is that such an act would be “formally invalid” precisely because it would manifestly conflictwith previously defined dogma.  The ideaseems to be that among the conditions on an excathedra definition is that it be logically consistent with previousdefinitions.  After all, when proclaimingpapal infallibility and setting out the conditions on ex cathedra pronouncements, Vatican I explicitly says that:

The Holy Spirit was promised to thesuccessors of Peter not so that they might, by his revelation, make known somenew doctrine, but that, by his assistance, they might religiously guard andfaithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by theapostles.

The positionScheeben is describing, then, would seem to be that an attempt to define amanifest heresy ex cathedra would bea kind of misfire, a failure right from the get-go to fulfill a basic conditionon making an ex cathedra definition –just as a failure explicitly to speak in one’s capacity as pope, or a failureto manifest one’s intention actually to define a doctrine irrevocably, would bea failure to fulfill the conditions on an excathedra pronouncement.  (In thisrespect, the position Scheeben is describing would be analogous to Fr. ThomasWeinandy’s thesis about the conditions on magisterial teaching more generally,which I discussed in arecent post.)

Some mightobject to this position (as some have objected to Fr. Weinandy’s thesis) thatit amounts to an appeal to “private judgment,” the very thing Catholicscriticize Protestants for.  For if aCatholic were to judge some papal definition heretical, wouldn’t this preciselybe to rely on his own judgment rather than that of the Church?

But thisobjection rests on a crude misunderstanding of the notion of “private judgment.”  The Church has never claimed that we have no understanding at all of scripture,tradition, or past papal teaching apart from what the current pope happens tosay about it.  And such a claim would bemanifestly false.  You don’t need thepope to tell you, for example, that scripture teaches that God created theuniverse, that he made a covenant with Israel through Moses, that Jesus claimedto be the Son of God, and so on. Non-Catholics no less than Catholics can know that much just from reading the Bible and noting how it has alwaysbeen understood for millennia.  It’s notas if the text is just a bunch of unintelligible squiggles that we can makeabsolutely no sense of unless the current pope tells us: “This is what thissquiggle means, this is what that squiggle means, etc.” 

What theMagisterium of the Church is needed for is to settle matters that go beyond what the text has always beenunderstood to say – finer points of interpretation, implications for doctrinalcontroversies, applications to current problems, and so on.  For example, it is open to the Church to say:“This is what divine creation of the universe amounts to,” or “Here is theright way to reconcile this passage with that one.”  It is notopen to the Church to say: “Actually, God did not create the universe afterall,” or “It turns out that we’ve always been misunderstanding scripture whenwe took it to be saying that God created the universe.” 

To deny thiswould be to empty of all content theChurch’s claim to her own infallibility. It would be to say, out of one side of one’s mouth, that the Churchalways teaches in accord with scripture and tradition – but then, out of the otherside, effectively to take this back by saying that if the Church ends upcontradicting some teaching that has always been regarded as part of scriptureand tradition, then it must not reallyhave been part of scripture and tradition after all.  That would be an instance of what is known inlogic as a “No true Scotsman” fallacy.  Itwould make the Church’s claim to infallibility unfalsifiable.

Furthermore,as Ihave shown at length elsewhere, the Church has always acknowledgedthat it can in some cases be legitimate respectfully to criticize popes, evenon doctrinal matters.  The Church couldnot have done so if every criticismof papal teaching necessarily amounted to “private judgment.”

So, Scheebenis correct to hold that, if a pope were to try to define ex cathedra a claim like “Jesus of Nazareth was not the Son ofGod,” that would be a manifest heresy, and it would not amount to “privatejudgment” to say so.  On the contrary, itwould be precisely to adhere, not to one’s own private judgment, but to whatthe Magisterium itself has in the past always insisted is irreformableteaching.

But nowanother objection to Scheeben’s thesis (or rather, the thesis he isentertaining) might arise.  For doesn’tthis thesis itself also make thedoctrine of papal infallibility unfalsifiable? For doesn’t it amount to saying that popes always speak infallibly whenmaking an ex cathedra pronouncement –but then going on to insist that if they do utter some error in what purportsto be an ex cathedra pronouncement,it must not really have been an ex cathedra pronouncement after all?

But that isnot in fact what Scheeben says.  What hesays is that if a pope attempts to define excathedra some “notorious heresy,”then in that sort of case it wouldnot amount to a genuine ex cathedraact but rather only to a failed attempt at such an act.  Again, he evidently has in mind cases where apope would deny some doctrine that has manifestlybeen formally defined by the Churchas irreformable doctrine (for example, the teaching that Jesus is the Son ofGod).  But Scheeben does not addresscases where a pope might attempt to define excathedra some heresy that is notnotorious or blatant, but more subtle.  Andhere, one might argue, is where the doctrine of papal infallibility might openitself to falsification even if one accepts the thesis discussed by Scheeben.

Here wouldbe an example.  Suppose a pope were toattempt to make an ex cathedradefinition like one of the following: “Using my full authority as successor ofPeter and universal teacher of all the faithful, I hereby declare and define bya solemn and irrevocable decree that the death penalty is intrinsically evil,” or “Using my full authority as successor ofPeter and universal teacher of all the faithful, I hereby declare and define bya solemn and irrevocable decree that same-sex sexual activity can be morallyacceptable.” 

Suchpronouncements would not contradict any past formal doctrinal definition – a previous ex cathedra papal pronouncement, a conciliar definition, or thelike.  But they would manifestly contradict the clear and consistent teaching ofscripture and of the ordinary magisterium of the Church for two millennia.  And the Church holds that scripture and theconsistent teaching of the ordinary magisterium cannot be in error on a matterof faith or morals.  Hence, if a popeattempted to make an ex cathedrapronouncement of one of the kinds just described, he would clearly be teachingerror.

Hence, Iwould say, if a pope were to make such a pronouncement, that would falsify the doctrine of papal infallibility.  And I am myself not inclined to agree withthe thesis entertained by Scheeben either. That is to say, I am inclined to say that, if a pope tried to define ex cathedra a “notorious heresy” likethe claim that Jesus was not the Son of God, that too would falsify thedoctrine of papal infallibility.

Since I haveno doubt that that doctrine is true, I would predict that such a thing will neverin fact happen.  The doctrine isfalsifiable in the sense that it makes substantive empirical claims that can betested against experience.  But it haspassed every such test for two millennia, and will continue to do so.

Relatedposts:

Whendo popes teach infallibly?

Popes,heresy, and papal heresy

Whatcounts as magisterial teaching?

TheChurch permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances

Aquinason St. Paul’s correction of St. Peter

Papalfallibility

Theerror and condemnation of Pope Honorius

CanPope Honorius be defended?

What counts as magisterial teaching?

Popes speakinfallibly when they either proclaim some doctrine ex cathedra, or reiterate some doctrine that has already beentaught infallibly by virtue of being a consistent teaching of the ordinarymagisterium of the Church for millennia. Even when papal teaching is not infallible, it is normally owed“religious assent.”  However, the Churchrecognizes exceptions.  The instruction DonumVeritatis , issued during the pontificate of St. John Paul II,acknowledges that “it could happen that some Magisterial documents might not befree from all deficiencies” so that “a theologian may, according to the case,raise questions regarding the timeliness, the form, or even the contents ofmagisterial interventions.”  Donum Veritatis explicitly distinguishessuch respectful criticism from “dissent” from perennial Church teaching.

The clearestsort of case where such criticism would be justifiable would be if a popehimself says something that appears to conflict with the Church’s traditionalteaching.  This has happened a handful oftimes in Church history, the clearest examples involving PopeHonorius I and Pope John XXII.  TheChurch has always acknowledged that in these rare cases, it can be justifiablefor the faithful respectfully to reprove a pope.  I have written on this matter elsewhere (hereand here)and direct the interested reader to those articles.

Severaldocuments issued during the pontificate of Pope Francis have, according to hiscritics, exhibited “deficiencies” of precisely the sort Donum Veritatis says can be criticized in this way.  There is, for instance, Amoris Laetitia, which appears to allow, in some cases, absolutionand Holy Communion for those in invalid marriages who are sexually active andlack firm purpose of amendment.  There isthe 2018 revision to the Catechism, which gives the impression that the deathpenalty is intrinsically wrong when it characterizes it as “an attack on theinviolability and dignity of the person.” Most recently, there is FiduciaSupplicans, which allows for blessings for same-sex and adulterouscouples.  In these particular respects,these documents appear to conflict with the traditional teaching of the Church.

I havewritten on these controversial documents elsewhere, and what I want to addresshere is a different issue.  Suppose oneor more of these magisterial statements is indeed problematic in just the waysthe critics allege.  It seems that whatwe would have in that case is magisterial teaching that is, to borrow thelanguage of Donum Veritatis,“deficient.”  But in arecent article at The Catholic Thing,Fr. Thomas Weinandy has proposed what appears to be an alternativeinterpretation.  Commenting on Fiducia Supplicans, he suggests thatsuch deficient teaching is not truly magisterial after all, and for that reasonnot binding on the faithful.  Here is therelevant passage:

St. John Henry Newman providescriteria for judging what is true and what is erroneous doctrinal development(a “corruption”)… Newman presumed that all pontifical teaching or teaching frombishops concerning doctrine and morals is magisterial.  I propose that any pontifical teaching orteaching from bishops that overtly and deliberately contradicts the perennialteaching of previous councils and pontiffs is not magisterial teaching,precisely because it does not accord with past magisterial doctrinal teaching.

The pope or a bishop may be, byvirtue of his office, a member of the magisterium, but his teaching, if itcontradicts the received previous magisterial teaching, is notmagisterial.  Such false teaching simplyfails to meet the necessary criteria.  Itpossesses no ecclesial authoritative credentials.  Rather, it is simply an ambiguous or flawedstatement that attempts or pretends to be magisterial, when it’s not.

Endquote.  This might at first glance seemodd.  If teaching on faith or morals ispresented by the magisterium of the Church, isn’t it, by that very fact, magisterial in nature?  But it seems to me that what Fr. Weinandy isgetting at can be illuminated by way of an analogy with what St. Thomas Aquinassays about the nature of law.  Aquinasfamously distinguishes several kinds of law, the two most relevant for presentpurposes being natural law and human law.  The natural law, of course, has to do with morallybinding precepts grounded in human nature and discoverable by unaided reason.  Human law, by contrast, is man-made ratherthan discovered or grounded in nature. 

But humanlaw is necessary in order to give precision to the application of naturallaw.  For example, we can know by naturallaw that it is wrong to steal or damage someone else’s property.  But how exactly to determine what counts as another person’s property canin some cases be difficult.  For example,if someone homesteads some piece of land, how deep under the ground do hisproperty rights extend?  How much of theairspace above the land does he have a right to control?  Does he have the right to drain stormwateronto adjacent land, or to prevent it from draining onto his own?  And so on. Human law is needed in order to resolve such questions so that propertyowners can know what they can reasonably expect of one another and how toresolve disputes between them.  To theextent that human law applies and extends the natural law in such a way, it isbinding on us, just as natural law is.

However,such law is binding on us only tothat extent.  Indeed, for Aquinas,strictly speaking, it doesn’t even countas law if it is not consistent with natural law.  He writes: “Every humanly made law has thecharacter of law to the extent that it stems from the law of nature.  On the other hand, if a humanly made lawconflicts with the natural law, then it is no longer a law, but a corruption oflaw” (Summa Theologiae I-II.95.2, Freddosotranslation).  And since it is not law,it lacks the binding force of law. Suppose, for example, that some purported law was passed by Congress thatpermitted people to steal the property of those of some particular race orethnicity, or abolished private property altogether.  Because such a measure would positivelycontradict the natural law, it would on Aquinas’s analysis not count as agenuine law at all, and for that reason no one would be bound to obey it.

Law, on thisunderstanding, cannot properly be understood except teleologically, by reference to the end or purpose it serves. Human law, to be true law, must facilitate the application of the naturallaw.  Hence, when it deviates from thisend, it fails to be true law.  It is insuch a case mere pseudo-law, or atbest a failed attempt at law.  Attempting to make such laws is likeattempting to make tea but forgetting to put the teabag into the hot water, orby running the water through coffee grounds. Even if the person making it intendedit to be tea or even thinks of itas tea, the result will not in fact be tea.

Thisanalysis, as I say, gives us an analogy by which we can understand Fr.Weinandy’s thesis.  Like human law,magisterial acts have a teleology, anend or purpose for which they exist and apart from which they cannot properlybe understood.  That purpose is to conveythe deposit of faith, draw out its implications, and apply them to concretecircumstances.  When they facilitate thatpurpose, we have genuine magisterial teaching. But should some act, even an act by a pope, be contrary to that end,then the result cannot be a genuine magisterial act, any more than a human lawthat contradicts the natural law can be a true law, or any more than hot waterrun through coffee grounds can be true tea.

Suppose, forexample, that a pope were to teach that Christ had only one will, as PopeHonorius appeared to do in the letter that led to his condemnation for aidingand abetting the Monothelite heresy.  OnFr. Weinandy’s interpretation, the correct thing to say is not that this was agenuinely magisterial act, albeit one that was in error.  The correct thing to say is that this was not a genuinely magisterial act, butrather at best a failed attempt atcarrying out a magisterial act.  It was akind of misfire, because a truly magisterial act always facilitates conveying thedeposit of faith, and Honorius’s act did the contrary of that.  In Fr. Weinandy’s view, the novel teaching inFiducia Supplicans is anothermisfire, an attempt at a magisterialact that fails insofar as it is contrary to the deposit of faith.

I wouldsuggest that yet another way to understand Fr. Weinandy’s position is that heis, in effect, interpreting the word “magisterial” as what philosopher GilbertRyle called a “success word.”  A successword is a word that describes an act or state that must be successful if it isto be carried out or exist at all.  Forexample, if you can be said genuinely to have proved something or to knowit, then it must in fact be true.  Youcan’t really have known something that turns out to be false, but at most onlyhave thought that you knew it.  Nor can you prove something that is false,but at most only try to proveit.  By contrast, “believe” is not asuccess word, because you can believe something even if it is in fact false.

“Magisterial,”on this interpretation, is also a success word. If some thesis is in fact contrary to the deposit of faith, then itcannot be genuinely magisterial, any more than a false statement can be knownor proved.  At most it can wrongly be thought to be or intended as magisterial, just as you can think you know or intendto prove something that is in fact false.

If it seemsbold to say that the Church can in some cases attempt a magisterial act and yetfail, it is worth pointing out that there is a sense in which Fr. Weinandy’sthesis is actually less bold thanwhat Donum Veritatis itselfsays.  For again, Donum Veritatis says that it is possible for “magisterial documents”and “magisterial interventions” to be “deficient” even with respect to their “contents,”and not just their form or timeliness, and for that reason open to legitimate criticismby theologians.  This seems to imply thata thesis can be genuinely magisterialand yet nevertheless mistaken and open to correction by the faithful.  Fr. Weinandy’s positon, by contrast, impliesthat a genuinely magisterial act cannot be mistaken or open to suchcorrection.  Whatever one thinks of hisposition, it is hard to see how it is in any way less respectful of magisterialauthority than Donum Veritatis is.

A comment on comments

Dear reader,if it seems your comment has not been approved, sometimes it actually has been approved even if you don’t see it.  The reason is that once a combox reaches 200comments, the Blogger software will not show any new comments made after thatunless you click “Load more…” at the bottom of the comments page.  The trouble is that this is in small printand easily overlooked.  In the screen capabove, I’ve circled in red what you should look for.

Occasionally,your comment does not appear because it has notbeen approved.  Sometimes this is becausethe comment is too off-topic.  Most of thetime, it is because the comment is nothing more than a drive-by insult or thelike, or is blasphemous or obscene. Those are never let through if I notice them.  Sometimes obnoxious comments are let throughif they are not too egregious and there is also a more substantive point madein the comment.  But I ask readers kindlyto refrain from sophomoric squabbles and the like.

Finally, sometimesyour comment has not appeared simply because it takes me a while to get toapproving comments.  I’m trying to bemore speedy on that, sorry.

Avicenna, Aquinas, and Leibniz on the argument from contingency

Avicenna,Aquinas, and Leibniz all present versions of what would today be called the argument from contingency for theexistence of a divine necessary being. Their versions are interestingly different, despite Aquinas’s havingbeen deeply influenced by Avicenna and Leibniz’s having been familiar with Aquinas.  I think all three of them are good arguments,though I won’t defend them here.  Idiscussed Avicenna’s argument in anearlier post.  I defendAquinas’s in my book Aquinas ,at pp. 90-99.  I defend Leibniz’s inchapter 5 of my book FiveProofs of the Existence of God . Here I merely want to compare and contrast the arguments.

Because Iwant to focus on what I take to be the main thrust of each of the argumentsrather get bogged down in exegetical details, I will offer my own paraphrasesof the arguments rather than quote directly from any of these thinkers’ texts.

Here are thethree arguments.  Avicenna’s is from the Najāt, and can be paraphrased asfollows:

At least one thing exists.  It has to be either necessary orcontingent.  If it’s necessary, thenthere’s a necessary being, and our conclusion is established.  But suppose it is contingent.  Then it requires a cause.  Suppose that cause is a further contingentthing, and that that further contingent thing has yet another contingent thingas its own cause, and so on to infinity. Then we have a collection of contingent things.  That collection will itself be eithernecessary or contingent.  But it can’t benecessary, since its existence is contingent on the existence of itsmembers.  So, the collection must becontingent, and in that case it too must have a cause.  That cause is either itself a part of thecollection, or it is outside it.  But itcan’t be part of the collection, because if it were, then as cause of the wholecollection, it would be the cause of itself.  And nothing can cause itself.  So, the cause of the collection of contingentthings must be outside the collection. But if it is outside that collection, it must be necessary.  So, there is a necessary being.

Aquinas’sversion is the third of his famous Five Ways in the Summa Theologiae.  It can beparaphrased as follows:

Some things are contingent in nature,as is evident from the fact that they come into existence and go out ofexistence.  Such things can’t existforever, since whatever is contingent, and thus is capable of failing to exist,will in fact at some point fail to exist. So, if everything was contingent, then at some point nothing would haveexisted.  But if there was ever a timewhen nothing existed, then nothing would exist now, since there would in thatcase be nothing around to cause new things to come into existence.  But things do exist now.  So, not everything can be contingent, and theremust be a necessary being.  Now, such athing might derive its necessity from another thing, or it might have itsnecessity of its own nature.  But therecouldn’t be a regress of things deriving their necessity from something elseunless it terminates in something having its necessity of its own nature.  So, there must be something which has itsnecessity of its own nature.

Leibniz’sversion is in the Monadology.  It might be paraphrased as follows:

For anything that exists, there mustbe a sufficient reason for its existence. In the case of the contingent things that make up the universe, thiscannot be found by appealing merely to other contingent things, even if theseries of contingent things being caused by other contingent things extendedbackward into the past without beginning. For in that case, we would still need a sufficient reason why the seriesas a whole exists.  But the series as awhole is no less contingent than the things that make it up.  So, the explanation cannot lie in the seriesitself.  A complete explanation orsufficient reason can be found only if there is a necessary being that is thesource of the world of contingent things. So, there must be such a necessary being.

Each of thesethinkers goes on to argue that, on analysis, it can be shown that the necessarybeing must have the key divine attributes, and therefore is God.  But I want to focus here just on thereasoning each argument gives for the existence of a necessary being.  And again, I won’t be defending the argumentshere, but just comparing them.  So Iwon’t say anything about how the arguments might be fleshed out or thereasoning made tighter, how various objections would be answered, and so on.

What do thearguments have in common?  First, they allrest, of course, on the distinction between contingent beings and necessarybeings, and argue that it cannot be that everything falls into the formerclass.  Second, they all reason causally to the necessary being as thesource of everything other than itself. Third, for that reason, they all have at least a minimal empirical component insofar as theyappeal to the contingent things we know through experience and argue from theirexistence to that of a necessary being.

A fourthsimilarity is that all three thinkers cash out the nature of the necessarybeing’s necessity in terms of the distinction between essence and existence.  Though, as my paraphrases indicate, this is adistinct step that does not and need not be stated in the argumentsthemselves.  Furthermore, our threephilosophers do not do this in quite the same way.  Avicenna, and Aquinas following him, holdthat the cause of things in which essence and existence are distinct must be anecessary being in which they are notdistinct.  Leibniz, however, does not saythat God’s essence is his existence,but that his essence includesexistence.  (This way of putting thingshas influenced much contemporary discussion – and not for the better, because itobscures the implications for divine simplicity that Avicenna's and Aquinas’s wayof speaking makes clear.)

A fifthsimilarity is that none of the three arguments either presupposes or assertsthat the universe had a beginning.  Allof them hold that the existence of a necessary being can be established even ifwe were to suppose that the world of contingent things has always been here.

A sixthsimilarity is that each of the arguments moves from a claim about contingentthings considered individually to a claim about contingent things consideredcollectively, albeit in different ways. For Avicenna, just as an individual contingent thing requires a cause,so too does the totality of contingent things require a cause.  For Aquinas, just as individual contingentthings must fail to exist at some point, so too must the collection ofcontingent things fail to exist at some point, at least if there were nonecessary being.  For Leibniz, just asindividual contingent things require an explanation outside them, so too doesthe collection of contingent things require an explanation outside it.

How do thearguments differ?  First some background.  Scholastic philosophers often distinguish physical from metaphysical arguments for God’s existence.  Physical arguments are those that proceedfrom facts about the concrete physical world as interpreted in light of thephilosophy of nature.  For example, Aquinas’sFirst Way is commonly interpreted as a physical argument because it begins withthe reality of motion, understood along Aristotelian lines.  Metaphysical arguments are those that proceedfrom more abstract considerations that are not tied to the physical world perse.  For example, Aquinas’s proof for God’sexistence in De Ente et Essentiabegins with the fact that there are things whose essence and existence aredistinct and argues that such things require a cause whose essence just issubsistent existence itself.  Since thereis an essence/existence distinction in angels no less than in material things,the argument does not depend on facts about the physical per se. 

Of the threearguments we’re considering here, Aquinas’s has a more physical cast than thoseof Avicenna and Leibniz.  For theobservation that material things come into being and pass away, and the claimthat material things individually and collectively would go out of existence givenenough time, play a big role in the argument, and these are points about thephysical qua physical. 

By contrast,Avicenna’s and Leibniz’s arguments have a more metaphysical cast.  Even if we take them at least to refer tophysical things, what they focus on is the contingencyof these things rather than anything specifically physical.  And angels, which are immaterial, are in asense contingent too, insofar as there is in them an essence/existence distinctionand thus the need for a cause which imparts existence to them.  (To be sure, there is for Aquinas also a sense in which angels are necessarybeings, since once they exist, there is nothing in the created order that candestroy them.  Still, they have to becreated by God, who could also annihilate them if he wills to.  Hence angels have only a derivative necessity rather than a strict necessity.  For that reason, they also have a kind ofcontingency.)

Hence, itseems that one could remove any reference to the physical as such from Avicenna’sand Leibniz’s arguments without altering their basic thrust.  Indeed, one could even remove any referenceto any actual specific contingent things and argue simply that if there are contingent things (whetheror not there really are any), they couldn’t be the only things that exist, for the reasons Avicenna and Leibnizgive.  Aquinas’s Third Way, by contrast,would be a very different sort of argument if the physical claims it makes wereremoved from it.

A seconddifference is that the notion of explanation,and with it the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), play an explicit role inLeibniz’s argument but not in Avicenna’s and Aquinas’s.  That is not to deny that Avicenna and Aquinasare at least implicitly committed to PSR, and that it lurks in the backgroundof their arguments, which are of course offering explanations.  But this is not thematized in theirarguments, the way it is in Leibniz. This reflects Leibniz’s distinctively rationalist approach to metaphysics.

Here’s oneway to understand the difference.  TheScholastics distinguish several “transcendentals,” attributes that apply to allthings of whatever category – being, truth, goodness, andso on.  These are taken to be “convertible,”the same thing looked at from different points of view.  For example, truth is being considered asintelligible, and goodness is being considered as desirable.  (I say a lot more about the transcendentalsin this article.) 

Avicenna’sand Aquinas’s arguments essentially consider reality under the guise of the transcendentalattribute of being.  The being of contingent things, they argue,must derive causally from the being of something that exists in an absolutely necessaryway.  Leibniz’s argument, by contrast,essentially considers reality under the transcendental attribute of truth. The intelligibility of contingentthings, he argues, presupposes a necessary being which is intelligible in itself rather than by reference to something else.

A thirddifference is that the impossibility of an infinite regress of a certain kindplays a role in Aquinas’s Third Way that finds no parallel in Avicenna’s andLeibniz’s arguments.  To be sure, and asI have said, none of the three arguments rules out the possibility of aninfinite temporal regress – a regressof what Aquinas would call “accidentally ordered” causes extending backwardinto the past.  None of them supposes ortries to establish that the world had a beginning.  But Aquinas’s argument does include thepremise that a series of beings that derive their necessity from something elsewould have to terminate in something that has its necessity of its own natureor built into it.  And here he isappealing to the impossibly of an infinite series of causes of what he calls an“essentially ordered” kind, also known as a hierarchicalcausal series.  (I discuss thedifference between these two kinds of causal series in many places, including Aquinas and Five Proofs.)

Any furtherdifferences between the three arguments seem to me to reflect these threefundamental differences.  And thedifferences are important, both because they capture different aspects ofreality, and because they entail that some objections that might seem to haveforce against one version of the argument from contingency will not necessarilyapply to other versions.  (Though, as Ihave indicated, I think each version can successfully be defended againstobjections.)