Edward Feser's Blog, page 25

Just war theory and the Russo-Ukrainian war

One of the striking features of the catastrophe in Ukraine is how unambiguously the principles of just war doctrine seem to apply.  On the one hand, Russia’s invasion cannot be justified given the criteria of just war theory.  On the other hand, NATO military action against Russia cannot be justified either.  Here are the criteria for just military action as set out in section 2309 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

At one and the same time:

- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

- there must be serious prospects of success;

- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.  The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

End quote.  I submit that Russia’s invasion clearly fails to meet the first, second, and fourth criteria, and NATO military action against Russia would clearly fail to meet the second, third, and fourth criteria.

The injustice of the invasion is obvious even given the most generous interpretation of Putin’s motives.  Hence, suppose we conceded for the sake of argument that Russia has a legitimate interest in keeping Ukraine out of NATO.  Suppose that, as some have argued, the United States and her allies have long been needlessly poking the bear, and that Russia would have been far less likely to invade Ukraine had they not done so.  Even given those premises, it simply doesn’t follow that Ukraine is an “aggressor,” that Russia has suffered any “lasting, grave, and certain” damage from Ukraine, or that “all other means” of remedying Russia’s concerns “have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.”  Nor is the extreme harm inflicted on innocent Ukrainians by war proportionate to whatever grievances Russia has.  Hence Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cannot be said to meet the first, second, and fourth criteria for a just war, and therefore is manifestly gravely unjust.

For that reason, military action to repel Russia’s invasion clearly is legitimate, and justice requires favoring the Ukrainian side in the war.  In the abstract, support for Ukraine could include military action against Russia by any nation friendly to Ukraine.  However, the justice of the cause of defending Ukraine fulfills only the first of the four criteria set out by the Catechism.  What about the other three?

Putin has not-so-subtly threatened to use nuclear weapons if the United States or other NATO countries intervene militarily in the conflict.  The realistic prospect of such extreme escalation makes it impossible for such intervention to meet the Catechism’s fourth criterion, which emphasizes that “the power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.”  The use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine, to which Russia might resort if NATO intervenes, would surely “produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”  Graver still would be a situation where Ukraine, other nearby NATO states, and Russia (as a result of NATO nuclear retaliation) were all attacked with nuclear weapons.  And worst of all would be a scenario where what started out as a local war in Ukraine spiraled into an all-out global nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States.

Even a localized nuclear exchange would also render unlikely the fulfillment of the third condition for just war, viz. the “serious prospects of success.”  If Russia uses nuclear weapons against Ukraine or NATO itself, would NATO countries really retaliate in kind?  If they did not, it seems that Russian victory would be assured.  But if they did retaliate in kind, it is very far from clear that this would not spiral into a conflict that no one could win.  Nor can it be said that all the less extreme alternatives to NATO intervention have been exhausted, as the second criterion for just war requires.

It is therefore irresponsible in the extreme to suggest, as some have, that NATO impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which would entail direct military confrontation between NATO and Russia.  The problem is not just that this is foolish and reckless.  The problem is that such escalation cannot be justified by just war criteria, and would therefore itself be gravely unjust.  Any public authorities who take action that risks nuclear war – and thus the deaths of millions of innocent people – would be no less guilty of violating the moral principles governing war than Putin is.

Just war doctrine’s counsel to the United States and her NATO allies thus seems clear: Cheer Ukraine on and provide whatever assistance is possible consistent with avoiding the risk of a nuclear escalation.  Otherwise, stay the hell out of it.  Damon Linker seems to me to have the right idea: Putin’s actions must be unequivocally condemned and Ukraine supported, but Western policy should emphasize diplomacy, and work to create for Putin some feasible “off-ramp” from the path he has taken – rather than ratcheting up the rhetoric and entertaining reckless military scenarios and that can only make a nuclear confrontation more likely.

Now, you don’t need to be a Catholic or a natural law theorist to see all this.  Indeed, I think that probably most people have arrived at more or less the same view of the crisis that I have been arguing for here.  Yet there are some commentators who have rejected this view in favor of one extreme alternative or another – some downplaying the gravity of Putin’s evildoing, others reacting instead with excessive bellicosity and animus against all things Russian.  What accounts for this?

The answer, I would suggest, has largely to do with the extreme partisanship that has in recent years led too many people to drag irrelevant preexisting grievances into every new controversy.  When a crisis occurs, partisans succumb to the temptation to fit it into some general background narrative that explains “what is really going on” in terms of the machinations of evil forces on the opposite political extreme from the one they favor.  The Manichean ideologies that have gained influence on both sides of the political spectrum in recent years exacerbate this “narrative thinking,” as does the strong propensity of social media to foster irrational habits of thought. 

Hence, consider the strange new belligerence to be found today in some liberal circles.  When I was a teenager in the 1980s, it was still routine to fling against conservatives the longstanding accusations that they were prone to demonize Russia, were paranoid about Russian influence within American institutions, were eager to get into armed conflict with the “Russkies,” were frighteningly glib about the survivability of limited nuclear war, and were inclined to resort to McCarthyite tactics and charges of treason against anyone who objected to all of this.  These accusations were made despite the fact that Russia had recently invaded Afghanistan – not to mention the earlier invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, or all the proxy wars Russia was engaged in throughout the Cold War.  None of this, in liberal eyes, justified right-wing anti-Russian bellicosity or paranoia.

Yet now it is liberals who are most prone to exhibit exactly these traits they once attributed to conservatives.  What accounts for this bizarre reversal?  I would submit that it has to do, in part, with Putin’s predilection for traditionalist Christian and anti-LGBT rhetoric (as Richard Hanania has pointed out), and in part with persistent left-wing attachment to fantasies about Russian interference with American elections.  These factors had already transformed Putin into a bogeyman in the liberal imagination, so that his immoral invasion of Ukraine has made it seem justifiable to some to risk even nuclear war in order to destroy him.

And it is, I would suggest, overreaction to these liberal excesses that has led some on the opposite extreme end of the political spectrum to refuse to face up to the full gravity of the evil that Putin has done.  They have been tempted by the thought that if liberals hate Putin with such intensity, he can’t be that bad, and that opposition to his invasion must therefore have something essentially to do with the Great Reset, the woke agenda, the Covid healthcare dictatorship, etc. etc.

This is all bonkers.  The key facts to keep firmly before one’s mind are (a) that Putin’s invasion is unjustifiable, has caused the deaths of hundreds of innocent people so far and will almost certainly result in thousands more, and maybe worse, and (b) that NATO military engagement with Russia would entail a serious risk of nuclear war and therefore cannot be justified.  Longstanding political obsessions cannot alter these facts, but only blind us to them.

Taylor on cognition, teleology, and God

In his book Metaphysics , a classic brief and lucid introduction to the subject, Richard Taylor devotes a chapter to the topic of God.  Most of the attention philosophers have paid to it seems to focus on his version of the cosmological argument, which is indeed a fine brief exposition and defense.  But Taylor also presents a second argument, of a broadly teleological sort.  It is decidedly not a variation on Paley’s design argument (of which, as longtime readers know, I am not a fan).  It is much more interesting and metaphysically deep than that, and at least in a general way closer to the spirit of Aquinas’s Fifth Way(even if it is not quite the same as Aquinas’s argument either).

Stones and semantics

Taylor begins by asking us to consider a couple of scenarios.  Suppose you are traveling by train through the UK and, peering out the window, you see an arrangement of stones in a pattern that looks like this: THE BRITISH RAILWAYS WELCOMES YOU TO WALES.  You would naturally assume that the stones had been deliberately arranged that way by someone, in order to convey the message that you are entering Wales.  Now, it is possible in theory that the stones got into that arrangement in a very different way, through the operation of impersonal and purposeless natural causes.  Perhaps, over the course of centuries, the stones gradually tumbled down a nearby hill, and each one stopped in a way that generated just that pattern.  This is, of course, extremely improbable, but that is irrelevant to Taylor’s point and he allows for the sake of argument that it could happen.

Taylor’s point is rather this.  Even if you could reasonably entertain the latter possibility, what you could not reasonably do is both accept it as the correct explanation of the arrangement of stones and at the same time continue to regard that arrangement as conveying the message that you are entering Wales.  The arrangement could intelligibly be conveying that message only if there is some intelligencebehind its origin, which brought it about for the purpose of conveying the message.  If, instead, the arrangement came about through unintelligent and purposeless causes, then it cannot intelligibly be said to convey that message, because it could not in that case intelligibly be conveying any message at all.

Or, to take Taylor’s second example, suppose a rock were dug up from the ground and found to be covered with an interesting set of marks, of roughly the same size and arrangement that the letters and sentences of a book might exhibit.  One explanation of the marks might be that they had been formed by some impersonal and purposeless natural process, such as glaciation or volcanic activity, which simply happened by chance to result in a pattern that looked like writing.  Whether or not this is likely is, again, not to the point, and Taylor allows for the sake of argument that it might be a perfectly reasonable explanation. 

Another possible explanation, of course, is that it really is writing.  Suppose some scholar studied the stone on this assumption, and proposed that the correct translation of the marks would be: HERE KIMON FELL LEADING A BAND OF ATHENIANS AGAINST THE FORCES OF XERXES.  Now, Taylor allows for the sake of argument that you could opt either for the first explanation or the second.  But what you cannot reasonably do is suppose both that the marks arose through an entirely impersonal and purposeless natural process and at the same time that they really do convey the message represented by the proposed translation.  For if they arose through an impersonal and purposeless process, they cannot convey any message at all.

I hasten to emphasize again that Taylor’s point has nothing whatsoever to do with probabilities, and in particular nothing to do with how likely or unlikely it is for arrangements of the kind in question to form via natural processes.  He allows, for the purposes of the argument, that that could happen.  His point is rather that, no matter how complex and orderly are the arrangements of physical components that might be generated by purely impersonal and purposeless natural processes, they could never by themselves generate something with intentional or semantic content.  (This way of putting things is mine rather than Taylor’s.)  This is not a point about probabilities, but rather a conceptual and metaphysical truth.  Neither stones nor marks on a rock have any inherent connection with any semantic content we might decide to convey through them.  The content they might have must derive from a mind which uses them for the purpose of conveying such content.  Delete such a mind from an explanation of the arrangements of stones or marks, and you delete the semantic content along with it.

Minds and meaning

Taylor then asks us to consider our perceptual and cognitive faculties.  These too we take to have intentional or semantic content.  We have visual experiences such as the perception that there is a cat on the mat, auditory experiences such as the perception that someone has just rung the doorbell, and so on.  We have the thought that there will be rain tomorrow, the thought that two and two make four, and so on.  We take it that a visual experience like the one in question is not merely the presentation to the mind of an array of colors and shapes, and that the auditory experience in question is not merely a sequence of sounds, but that the experiences convey the messages that the cat is on the mat and that someone is at the door.  Of course, we might be misperceiving things, but that is not to the point.  The point is that the experiences do convey those messages, whether or not the messages are accurate.  Similarly, we take it that when we “see” or “hear” a sentence like “There will be rain tomorrow” as it passes through our imaginations, this is not a mere string of internally apprehended sounds or shapes, but conveys the meaning that there will be rain tomorrow.

Now, Taylor is happy to allow for the sake of argument that, as with the arrangement of stones you see out the train window and as with the series of marks on the rock that has been dug up, our sensory organs and neural structures may have arisen through entirely impersonal and purposeless natural processes, such as evolution by natural selection.  He is not interested in challenging the probability of such explanations.  He writes:

The mere complexity, refinement, and seemingly purposeful arrangement of our sense organs do not, accordingly, constitute any conclusive reason for supposing that they are the outcome of any purposeful activity.  A natural, nonpurposeful explanation of them is possible, and has been attempted – successfully, in the opinion of many.  (p. 117 of the second edition)

Notice that he includes the “seemingly purposeful arrangement” of our sense organs as among the considerations that do not suffice to show real purpose.  The arrangement of stones you see out the train window and the marks you see on the rock seem purposeful, but Taylor allows that that may be an illusion.  Similarly, he allows that our sense organs could seem to have a purposeful arrangement and yet be purposeless for all that.  His argument has nothing at all to do with how likely or unlikely it is that the appearance of purpose could arise from purposeless impersonal process.

What he is concerned about instead is the case where we suppose our sense organs and neural processes to have genuinepurpose, and in particular where we suppose our perceptual experiences and thoughts to have genuine intentional or semantic content.  And he wants to make a point that parallels the point he made about the arrangement of stones and the marks on the rock.  We could take the deliverances of our sense organs and neural states to have genuine intentional or semantic content.  Or we could take those organs and states to have arisen through entirely impersonal and purposeless natural processes.  What we cannot reasonably do is both of these things at once.  In particular, we cannot intelligibly both take these cognitive faculties to have arisen through entirely impersonal and purposeless processes and at the same time regard them as having genuine intentional or semantic content – as conveying any message about cats on mats, the ringing of doorbells, rain tomorrow, or anything else. 

The cases, Taylor argues, are in all relevant respects parallel.  Delete mind and purpose from your account of the origin of the arrangement of stones or the marks on the rock, and you delete any semantic content along with them.  Similarly, if you delete mind and purpose from your account of the origin of our cognitive faculties, then you delete any intentional or semantic content along with them.  You can have one or the other account, but not both. 

Now, our cognitive faculties do in fact have intentional or semantic content.  We really do have perceptual experiences with the content that the cat is on the mat, thoughts with the content that it will rain tomorrow, and so on.  Since this is intelligible only on the supposition that our cognitive faculties originated via some mind and its purposes, there must be some intelligent being that brought us about with the aim of having our cognitive faculties convey to us information about the world around us. 

Taylor does not elaborate further.  Presumably he would identify this mind with the necessary being whose existence he argues for earlier in the chapter, by way of a version of the cosmological argument.  But if so, he does not explain how.  Indeed, he makes only modest claims for his arguments, and leaves it an open question what relevance they might have for religion.  If the chapter can be said to defend theism, it is a purely philosophical theism that does not entail (though it also does not rule out) a specifically Jewish, Christian, or Muslim conception of God and his relationship to the world.

Some bad objections

Taylor does address several objections that he suggests some readers might take to be obvious, but which in fact simply miss the point.  For example, some may point out that our cognitive faculties are not always reliable.  As Taylor says, this is irrelevant.  The point isn’t that our cognitive faculties convey accurate messages, but rather that they convey any message at all.  Consider once again the case of the arrangement of stones that you see out the train window.  If you suppose that it arose through purely impersonal and purposeless processes, then it isn’t just that you can’t regard it as accuratelytelling you where you are.  The point is rather that you can’t intelligibly regard it as telling you anything at all.  By the same token, Taylor argues, if you suppose that your cognitive faculties arose through purely impersonal and purposeless processes, then what would follow is not merely that they don’t accurately represent the world but rather that they don’t represent anything at all, whether accurately or inaccurately.

A second bad objection would be to suggest that Taylor is presenting an inductive argument from analogy, which is no stronger in this case than when Paley presents such an argument.  As Taylor emphasizes, he is not, in the relevant sense, presenting an argument from analogy.  In particular, he is not making a point about how improbable it is that a certain complex natural structure arose apart from intelligent design, given how similar it is to human artifacts.  On the contrary, he explicitly concedes that the complexity, refinement, and appearance of purpose that our sensory and cognitive faculties exhibit could have arisen through unintelligent processes, just as the arrangement of stones could have.

True, he does draw an analogy between the arrangement of stones on the one hand and our cognitive faculties on the other.  But the point of the analogy is simply to illustrate the general principle that it is metaphysically impossible for something to have actual intentional or semantic content (as opposed to the mere appearance of such) if it arose entirely from impersonal and purposeless processes.  He is not giving an inductive “argument from analogy” of the form: “A is like B, so the cause of A is probably like the cause of B.”  Again, probabilities are not what is in question.

A third bad reply, Taylor says, would be to suggest that, even if our faculties arose through entirely impersonal and purposeless processes, we have good inductive grounds for taking them to be reliable.  One problem with this, as he points out, is that such an argument would be circular.  For in order to get such an inductive argument off the ground, you’d have to rely on your cognitive faculties, and whether they are reliable in that case is precisely what is in question.

But the problem is deeper than that (and I think that in his response to this particular objection Taylor could have made the point clearer).  For as I have said, the point is not merely that our cognitive faculties would not reliablyconvey messages if they arose via purely impersonal and purposeless processes.  The point is that they would not convey any messages at all, that they would be as utterly devoid of intentional or semantic content as an arrangement of stones that formed via impersonal and purposeless processes.  And they would first have to have such content for us to be able to get any inductive argument, or any argument at all, off the ground.  Hence this third objection to Taylor simply misses the point.

A fourth bad objection addressed by Taylor would be to appeal to survival value as a reason to think that our cognitive faculties are reliable.  Taylor notes in response that the deliverances of our sensory and cognitive faculties far outstrip anything that could plausibly be said to have survival value.  But here too I think he could and should have made a stronger point, which is that the appeal to survival value also misses the point.

Suppose that the power to become immaterial at will would afford my descendants tremendous survival value.  (I’ve seen this example used by someone else, by the way, but I do not recall where.)  Does it follow that, through mutation, natural selection, and the like, such a power might arise in the generations that follow me?  No, because there is no plausible mechanism by which that power, specifically, might arise through such processes.  Or suppose that an organism would gain tremendous survival value from being a round square.  Does it follow that round squares might evolve via mutation, natural selection, and the like?  Of course not, because round squares are logically impossible.  Appeal to “survival value” is mere hand-waving without some plausible process by which a property or power could actually arise.

Now, the deep point behind Taylor’s argument is that you simply aren’t going to get intentional or semantic content from entirely impersonal and purposeless processes any more than you are going to get immateriality or round squares out of them, so that appeal to the survival value of having such content is a red herring. 

Evolution and cognition

Notice that, though Taylor is not explicit about it, this is compatible with an evolutionary story about the origin of our cognitive faculties.  It just isn’t compatible with a materialistic-and-mechanisticevolutionary story about the origin of our cognitive faculties – one that entirely excludes mind and purpose from the story. 

Daniel Dennett characterizes Darwinian evolutionary theory as a style of explanation that excludes any “mind first” account of the world, viz. an account that takes mind to be a fundamental feature of reality, rather than one that derives from non-mental phenomena.  But while this is true of Dennett’s preferred style of evolutionary explanation, it is not true of evolutionary explanations as such, not even Darwinian ones.  (See chapter 6 of Aristotle’s Revenge for discussion of this issue.)  And Taylor’s point is that whether or not evolutionary processes are part of the story of the origin of our cognitive faculties, we must in fact affirm a “mind first” account of the world.  There would simply be no minds like ours at all if there were not a more fundamental kind of mind to bring them into being.

Some readers will have noted that Taylor’s argument is reminiscent of the “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism” that Alvin Plantinga would develop years later (and which I have discussed in other places, such as this one).  But there are some important differences, and differences that, in my view, make Taylor’s argument the metaphysically deeper and more interesting one.  In Plantinga’s argument, there is a lot of heavy-going about probabilities.  But as I’ve been emphasizing, the point really has nothing essentially to do with probabilities at all, and in my opinion Plantinga’s emphasis on them just muddies the waters.  Second, Plantinga focuses on the question of whether our cognitive faculties would be reliable if they arose through entirely impersonal and purposeless natural processes.  But the deeper question is whether they would have any intentional or semantic content at all (whether reliable or not) if they arose in that manner.

Sex and metaphysics

My essay “The Metaphysical Foundations of Sexual Morality” appears in The Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics , edited by David Boonin.  You can view the anthology’s table of contents and other information about it at the publisher’s website.  The book is, unfortunately, as expensive as academic books tend to be, and thus hard to get hold of for those without access to an academic library.  But you can at least read a big chunk of it via the preview at Google Books.

The failure of Johnson’s critique of natural theology

At the Reformed Baptist Blog, Jeffrey Johnson has responded to my  First Things review of his book The Failure of Natural Theology: A Critical Appraisal of the Philosophical Theology of Thomas Aquinas .  He makes nine points, none of which is any more convincing than the book itself is.  What follows is a point-by-point reply. 

1.

I noted in my review that Johnson attributes to Aquinas the view that God “does not have any potencies.”  (The quote is from p. 120 of his book.)  I also noted that this is a misunderstanding of Aquinas.  Aquinas distinguishes between “passive potency” (which is the capacity to undergo change) and “active potency” (which is the power to bring about effects in other things).  What Aquinas actually holds is that God does not have any passive potencies, but is supreme in active potency.  (Cf. Summa Theologiae I.25.1.)  Hence it is not correct to say that for Aquinas, God “does not have anypotencies.”  Aquinas insists that God does have active potency.  It is only passive potency that he lacks.

Johnson claims that he did not overlook this distinction and that I have missed his point.  But he did overlook it, and I did not miss his point.  Note first that the words from p. 120 of Johnson’s book that I quoted were directed at something I had written in my book Scholastic Metaphysics, where I noted that for Scholastics like Aquinas, efficient causation is a matter of a thing exercising “its own active potencies or powers.”  Johnson argues that Aquinas cannot coherently take God to be an efficient cause in this sense.  The reason, he says in the full sentence from which I took the words quoted, is this: “How does God exercise his ‘own active potencies’ if he does not have any potencies?”  Obviously, Johnson could think this a telling response to Aquinas only on the assumption that Aquinas denies that God has potencies of any kind – an assumption that is, again, false.  Hence, I did not misunderstand Johnson.  I simply called attention to what he himself explicitly said in his book.

Nor is his misunderstanding of Aquinas’s position confined to this one line.  As I noted in my review, Johnson repeatedly attributes to Aquinas the thesis that God is “immobile.”  Now, Aquinas certainly thinks that God is immutable in the sense that he does not undergo change, and that he is impassiblein the sense that nothing external to him can have a causal influence on him.  But Johnson says (at p. 137 of his book) that “immobility” involves something more than immutability and impassibility.  Here’s one explanation by Johnson of what else it involves:

Thomas added to God’s simple and immutable nature an additional attribute not taught in the Scriptures: divine immobility. 

Aquinas made the assumption that mobility – the willful exertion of power – is an essential characteristic of imperfection, finiteness, and temporality.  Because God can’t be any of these things, mobility must not be in God. (p. 5)

So, according to Johnson, Aquinas denies that there is any “willful exertion of power” in God.  And this is, again, simply false.  Indeed, its falsehood is very easily demonstrated.  For example, Aquinas says that “in God there is active power in the highest degree” (ST I.25.1); that God “wills… other things to be” (ST I.19.2); that “God is first in the order of agents” and that “his inclination to put in act what His intellect has conceived appertains to the will” so that “the will of God is the cause of things” (ST I.19.4); and so on.  All of this entails precisely that God does willfully exert power, contrary to what Johnson claims is Aquinas’s view.  Hence Aquinas denies that God is “immobile” in Johnson’s sense.

Moreover, Aquinas even allows that there is a sensein which God is moved.  For example, he writes:

Since the will of God is His essence, it is not moved by another than itself, but by itself alone, in the same sense as understanding and willing are said to be movement.  This is what Plato meant when he said that the first mover moves itself. (STI.19.1)

Of course, Aquinas is speaking here only of something remotely analogous to what we call “movement” in us, since it does not involve any actualization of passive potency nor any causal influence from without.  But it further underlines how far Aquinas is from attributing to God “immobility” in Johnson’s sense.

Now, in his reply to me, Johnson insinuates that his point was simply to argue that, whatever Aquinas’s actual intentions, he is unable to reconcile an affirmation that God has active causal power with his Aristotelian approach to arguing for God’s existence and spelling out the divine nature.  But there are two problems with this.  First, Johnson does not merely say that Aquinas’s views implythat God lacks active causal power (even if Aquinas does not intend this result).  Rather – and as we have just seen – Johnson claims that Aquinas himself actually holds that God lacks such power.  Again, not only is that not true, but in fact Aquinas explicitly says the opposite.  So, Johnson has badly misrepresented Aquinas’s position.  Aquinas simply does not believe what Johnson claims he does. 

Second, Johnson also does not establish that the Aristotelian premises Aquinas is working from actually entail divine “immobility.”  Why does Johnson suppose otherwise?  One reason appears to be that Aristotle himself conceived of God as moving the world as a final cause rather than as an efficientcause.  And Johnson seems to think that anyone working from Aristotle’s premises must conclude that it is only as a final cause that God can move the world, that God cannot act as an efficient cause. 

But that is certainly not Aquinas’s view, and Johnson does not show that it follows from anything Aquinas says.  Johnson thinks he shows that this follows because he thinks that Aquinas claims that there is no potency of any kind in God and that God is “immobile.”  But as we have just seen, not only does Aquinas not claim these things, in fact he holds the opposite.  Hence he is not committed to the premises from which it would follow that God cannot act as an efficient cause. 

Indeed, even Johnson allows that the “immobility” of the unmoved mover “is not a necessary conclusion” of Aquinas’s First Way (p. 116) and that it is “inconsistent” with the conception of God that results from the Second and Fifth Ways (pp. 118 and 130).  Johnson thinks this shows that Aquinas’s position is inconsistent, but that would only be true if Aquinas had, in other places, explicitly or implicitly committed himself to divine “immobility.”  And as we have seen, he does not do so.  In his response to my review, Johnson writes:

Feser, however, didn’t attempt to answer this dilemma that I raised over and over in my book.  I assume that he leapt over it because it can’t be answered.  Thomas wasn’t able to reconcile this contradiction, and I am not convinced that anyone is able to do so.

End quote.  But Johnson misses the point.  I didn’t attempt to “reconcile this contradiction” for the simple reason that there is no such contradiction in the first place.  Johnson supposes otherwise only because he is attacking a straw man rather than Aquinas’s actual views.

Into the bargain, by the way, Johnson misunderstands Aquinas’s First Way.  He writes that “Aquinas’s first proof... is based on God being the final cause of the universe” (p. 115).  Now, as the reader of the First Way can easily verify from ST I.2.3, there is no reference to final causality anywhere in it.  Nor does anything Aquinas says there entail that the unmoved mover must move things by way of final causality rather than by way of efficient causality.  In fact, the text of the argument implies precisely the opposite.  To illustrate the kind of motion he has in mind, Aquinas refers to fire making wood hot and a hand causing a staff to move.  And fire and hand function precisely as efficient causes.  I would guess that Johnson is assuming that because (A) Aristotle presented a version of the argument from motion, and (B) Aristotle thought the unmoved mover moved the world as a final cause, then (C) Aquinas’s version of the argument from motion must be based on final causality.  But (C) does not follow from (A) and (B).

2.

I noted in my review that Johnson claims that by allowing for the sake of argument that the universe may not have had a temporal beginning, Aquinas makes God and the universe equally absolute.  I also noted that this claim is false, since Aquinas’s view is that, even if the universe had had no beginning, it could not persist in being even for a moment without divine conserving causality.  Hence even an infinitely old universe would depend for its being on God, who would be the sole absolute reality.  In his response, Johnson claims that I have misrepresented him, writing: “Of course, Aquinas made this claim.  I state this over and over in my book… No doubt, Aquinas believed that without God, there is no universe.  I wonder how Feser could have missed me saying all of this in the book.”

Here is what Johnson actually said in his book.  Commenting on Aquinas’s view that philosophical arguments cannot establish that the world had a temporal beginning, he wrote: “This is where Aquinas’s natural theology breaks down… Aristotelian metaphysics on its own merit cannot establish a temporal universe.   And without a temporal universe, God ceases to be absolute” (pp. 124-25, emphasis added).  He also says that “according to Aquinas, a temporal and unnecessary universe is not the logical conclusion of natural theology but, like the doctrine of the Trinity, is an article of faith that can only be received by divine authority” (p. 134).

So, according to Johnson, Aquinas holds that philosophy alone cannot establish that the universe is unnecessary – that is to say, that its existence is contingentupon some cause outside it.  And only if that were indeed Aquinas’s view would his allowance for an infinitely old universe entail that the universe and God are equally absolute.

But of course, Aquinas does not think that philosophy is incapable of showing that the universe is unnecessary or contingent.  On the contrary, he argues, on purely philosophical grounds, that anything whose essence and existence are distinct requires a cause, and is therefore contingent.  And he argues, again on purely philosophical grounds, that this cause must be something whose essence is identical with its existence, and that such a cause would be unique.  It follows – again, on purely philosophical grounds – that everything other than this cause depends for its existence upon it (so that the entire universe depends for its existence upon it).  This holds true whether or not the universe had a beginning (which is why Aquinas thinks that establishing that the world depends for its existence on God does not require arguing for a temporal beginning).

This is, rather famously, one of the main themes of De Ente et Essentia, and it also appears in many other places in Aquinas’s works.  For example, in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas writes:

It must be said that every being in any way existing is from God.  For whatever is found in anything by participation, must be caused in it by that to which it belongs essentially… [But] all beings apart from God are not their own being, but are beings by participation.  Therefore it must be that all things which are diversified by the diverse participation of being, so as to be more or less perfect, are caused by one First Being, Who possesses being most perfectly…

From the fact that a thing has being by participation, it follows that it is caused.  Hence such a being cannot be without being caused. (ST I.44.1)

Notice that the argument here appeals to philosophical premises, not to special divine revelation.  So, contrary to what Johnson says in his book, Aquinas does think that the contingency of the universe can be established via purely philosophical arguments, and thus he doesthink that it can be proved by such arguments that God alone is absolute, even though such arguments cannot in Aquinas’s view establish a temporal beginning of the universe.

Whether Johnson acknowledges elsewhere in his book that Aquinas takes the universe to depend on God is irrelevant.  For the point is that Aquinas holds (contrary to what Johnson says in the passages I quoted above) that philosophy by itself, apart from special divine revelation, can establish this dependence of the world on God.

3.

In my review of his book, I noted that Johnson claims that for Aquinas, we can only ever know a representation of God rather than God himself, and can only speak of God metaphorically or symbolically rather than literally.  And I cited specific passages in which Aquinas actually says precisely the opposite of these claims – for example, passages in which he says that the blessed in heaven know the very essence of God, and in which he says that some terms do apply to God literally.  As I pointed out, Johnson misses the latter point because he conflates metaphor and analogical language (which can be metaphorical but need not be).

In his response, Johnson does not deny that he is guilty of these errors – and they are very basic and serious errors of scholarship – even if he doesn’t quite admit it either.  Instead he tries to change the subject.  He notes, for example, that Aquinas holds that God’s attributes are identical, and suggests that this makes it difficult to understand what terms like “good” mean when applied to God.  But there are several problems with this sort of move.  First, it is completely irrelevant to the point I was making, viz. that Johnson misrepresented Aquinas’s views about theological language and what we can know about God.

Second, the reason Aquinas identifies the divine attributes is because he is committed to the doctrine of divine simplicity – to which Johnson is also committed.  So, if the identity of the divine attributes that divine simplicity entails is a problem for Aquinas, it is also a problem for Johnson.  To be sure, Johnson indicates at p. 164 of his book that he would not himself identify the divine attributes with one another.  But what he needs to explain is how he can avoid doing so while at the same time affirming divine simplicity.

Third, Johnson raises this issue as if it were not something that Thomists and others have addressed many times in the large literature on divine simplicity.  If Johnson doesn’t find what they have to say convincing, then fine, he is free to raise objections to it.  But he seems not even to be aware of it. 

Johnson also suggests that, even if Aquinas does affirm that some terms are applied to God literally, he was not “consistent with himself” insofar as he also denied that we can know God’s essence in this life, and instead have to represent God using terms we learn from their application to created things.  But there is no inconsistency here at all, because the latter claim does not entail that no language about God is literal.  Indeed, it doesn’t even imply that the inadequate ways we represent God using terms originally applied to created things are non-literal. 

Again, Johnson clearly just doesn’t understand what Thomists mean when they talk about the analogical use of terms.  That’s no sin – unless you’re going to make absurdly overconfident pronouncements about the “failure” of Aquinas’s philosophical theology, without first bothering to learn what Aquinas actually says. 

4.

In my review, I noted that Johnson took a remark of mine out of context (specifically, from my essay “Natural Theology Must Be Grounded in the Philosophy of Nature, Not in Natural Science,” which appears in my anthology Neo-Scholastic Essays).  His misuse of the quote, I pointed out, rested on a failure to distinguish between science as it is generally understood today and philosophy of nature.  In his response, Johnson suggests that he was not really saying anything different in substance from the point I was making in that essay.  Really?  Here is what he actually said in his book, in the context of commenting on Aquinas’s First Way:

[W]e cannot know for certain, based on Aquinas’s first proof, if God moves himself or not.  Herman Bavinck placed his finger on the problem when he stated, “We have no right… to apply the law of causality to such a first cause, and that we therefore cannot say anything specific about it.”  The cosmological argument collapses because it jumps from physics to metaphysics, from science to philosophy, without having any epistemological warrant for such a leap.  It may appear that God’s nature can be derived from sense experience, from natural science, but such a conclusion is only a philosophical assumption.  Even one of the leading Thomistic scholars of our day, Edward Feser, admits to this: “I do deny that arguments grounded in natural science alone can get you to classical theism.”

This is the breaking point.  This is where the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas fails.  (pp. 117-18)

I don’t think anyone who has read the essay of mine quoted from, or indeed who knows anything about my work on natural theology, could say with a straight face that I would agree that “the cosmological argument collapses,” or that we “cannot say anything specific” about the divine nature based on such an argument, or that such an argument cannot be grounded in “sense experience.”  What I actually believe, of course, is that Aquinas’s First Way is a successful proof of God’s existence, that it is grounded in sense experience, and that following out its implications tells us much about the divine nature.  True, I don’t think that natural science, as that is generally understood today, can provide the foundation of such an argument.  But Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of nature (the main principles of which were included as part of “science” as Aristotle and Aquinas understood it) can provide such foundations.

(Johnson says, in his response: “I would like to know what these broader principles are.”  But if he really read the essay of mine he quoted from, and the other works of mine that he cites in his book, then he should already know the answer to that question.  The principles in question include ideas like the Aristotelian theory of act and potency.)

Johnson also now claims that he was merely noting, in the passage I quote from his book, that you can’t get to everything the Biblesays about the divine nature from science alone.  But as you can see from the quote above, that is not what he said in that passage.  What he actually said is something much stronger than that – that if science doesn’t provide a basis for the First Way, then Aquinas’s argument “collapses,” that his natural theology therefore “fails” altogether, that you “cannot say anything specific” about the divine nature on the basis of Aquinas’s argument, and so on.  (And of course, no one ever claimed in the first place that the First Way gets you all the way to everything the Bible says about God.  That’s a straw man.)

5.

Revisiting the topic of the “immobility” that he says Aquinas attributes to God, Johnson writes:  “Yes, Aquinas claimed God exerted willful power in creation.  I cite him saying such statements.  I never denied this about Aquinas.”  But as I showed above, by citing specific passages, Johnson does in fact deny this in his book.  (Johnson says: “I actually wonder if Feser read or merely skimmed my book.”  Well, I did read it, every word.  But I’m starting to wonder if Johnson read it!)

6.

In my review, I noted that some of the things Johnson doesn’t like about Aquinas’s account of the Trinity derive, not from the thesis of divine “immobility,” but rather from the doctrine of divine simplicity, which Johnson himself accepts.  In response, Johnson writes:“I go to great lengths to explain the difference between the two forms of simplicity – a simplicity rooted in philosophy (which I reject,) and a simplicity rooted in Scripture (which I accept).”

But this is no answer at all.  For one thing, what matters in the present context is not thesource of the idea of divine simplicity (whether philosophy or scripture) but rather the content of the idea.  For it is the content of the doctrine of divine simplicity that some claim to be incompatible with Trinitarianism.  For another thing, though Johnson would claim that the content he would give to the notion of divine simplicity is different from the content Aquinas would give to it, what we need to know is exactly howsuch a difference would make a difference to the specific issue at hand.  For example, exactly why is Trinitarianism compatible with Johnson’s conception of simplicity if it is not compatible with Aquinas’s?  (At least part of the answer, for Johnson, would be that Aquinas attaches the idea of “immobility,” in Johnson’s sense of the word, to divine simplicity.  But I have already shown that Aquinas is not in fact committed to “immobility” in that sense.)

7.

I noted in my review that Johnson merely asserts, without argument, that the Bible does not recognize the legitimacy of natural theology, but only of what he calls “natural revelation.”  In his response, he essentially just repeats this question-begging assertion.  He cites passages like the following:

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. (Psalms 19:1) 

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.  So they are without excuse.  (Romans 1:19-20)

But there is (contrary to what Johnson alleges) nothing in such passages that entails that the knowledge of God we get from nature is entirely non-inferential and does not require argumentation.

8.

Johnson admits that his assertion that “Plotinus didn’t leave behind any writings” (p. 75) was an error. 

9.

Johnson also admits that he made a “copy/paste error” when purporting to quote the text of the Second Way from Summa TheologiaeI.2.3, at p. 101 of his book.  Unfortunately, he also claims that “the substance of what was communicated by Aquinas was not compromised” by this error.  But that is not the case.  The passage Johnson wrongly presented as the text of the Second Way from the Summacontains the following lines:

If the series of efficient causes extends ad infinitum into the past, then there would be no things existing now.  That is plainly false (i.e., there are things existing now that came about through efficient causes).  Therefore efficient causes do not extend ad infinitum into the past.

End quote.  Not only is this not what the Second Way says, it directly contradictsAquinas’s view that it cannot be proved through philosophical arguments that accidentally ordered series of efficient causes do not extend ad infinitum into the past.  (That is, after all, why, as we saw above, Aquinas thinks that philosophical arguments cannot prove that the universe had a beginning in time.)  This is a pretty egregious error of scholarship.

Johnson sums up his response by emphasizing once again his main theme that “divine immobility is incompatible with the God of the Bible.”  But as I have shown, Aquinas is not committed in the first place to “divine immobility” in Johnson’s sense.  His main objection, like his other criticisms, is directed at a straw man.

Johnson contra Aquinas

My review of Jeffrey D. Johnson’s book The Failure of Natural Theology: A Critical Appraisal of the Philosophical Theology of Thomas Aquinas appears in the March issue of First Things.  You can read it online here.

McDowell’s Aristotelian near miss

John McDowell’s paper “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space” made a big impression on me in graduate school, around the same time his influential book Mind and World was published.  Like a lot of philosophers, I thought there was something deep going on in McDowell’s work, though (also like a lot of philosophers, I think) I was not quite sure what to make of it.  Part of this has to do with the difficulty of McDowell’s style, but that difficulty reflects, at least in part, the difficulty of the subject matter.  The nature of thought and of experience is so close to us – like the tip of one’s nose, always in one’s field of vision, and thus rarely noticed – that it can be, precisely for that reason, harder to get hold of than the extra-mental world is. 

Hence, other than briefly alluding to his work in my doctoral dissertation, I moved on to other matters in the years immediately after first encountering it.  It wasn’t until years later, after getting hip deep into Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy, that I realized that what was going on in McDowell was a partial rediscovery of an essentially Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of knowledge.  That is not how McDowell himself presents it, though.

The Cartesian prison

One of McDowell’s major themes is an attack on the Cartesian conception of the mind.  I’m not talking about Descartes’s substance dualism, though McDowell does reject that.  What is in view is rather what McDowell describes as follows:

In a fully Cartesian picture, the inner life takes place in an autonomous realm, transparent to the introspective awareness of its subject; the access of subjectivity to the rest of the world becomes correspondingly problematic, in a way that has familiar manifestations in the mainstream of post-Cartesian epistemology…

[It is] the idea of the inner realm as self-standing, with everything within it arranged as it is independently of external circumstances. (“Singular Thought,” pp. 146 and 152)

On this Cartesian picture, our conscious experiences could be exactly as they are, without there actually being any external world corresponding to them (as in Descartes’s scenario where these experiences are hallucinations caused by an evil spirit).  You might think that the worry here is the familiar one that this picture of the mind makes the external world unknowable.  But though that is closer to the point, McDowell is primarily concerned with an even deeper problem, which is that the Cartesian conception makes external reality unthinkable.  It’s not merely that we’re locked in a Cartesian theater, having direct access only to mental representations of the external world, and cannot be certain that there really is anything outside the theater, anything which corresponds to the representations.  It’s also that the Cartesian picture threatens to make it unintelligible how our experiences could count as true representations in the first place – how they could have the intentionalitythey do, how they could so much as stand for or be about external objects (whether or not those objects exist).

The problem is the contingency of the connection between mind and world posited by the Cartesian picture.  Here’s an analogy (mine, not McDowell’s).  Words like “dog” and “cat” have no inherent or necessary connection to dogs and cats.  They are, of themselves, just meaningless strings of shapes or noises (depending on whether they are written or spoken).  The connection of these symbols to the dogs and cats they represent is a matter of convention.  Now, the convention gets set up because our thoughts about dogs and cats do have some kind of necessary connection to the things they are about, and the linguistic symbols inherit this connection by standing in for the thoughts – or so it seems.  But on the Cartesian model of the mind, mental states too have only a contingent connection to external reality.  For, again, the model holds that the mental realm could be exactly as it is even if there were no external world corresponding to it.  So, how do mental states have, in that case, any more power to represent external reality than meaningless strings of shapes or sounds do?  How can they have what philosophers call any “intentional content” at all?

McDowell concludes that “it [is] quite unclear that the fully Cartesian picture is entitled to characterize its inner facts in content-involving terms – in terms of its seeming to one that things are thus and so – at all,” so that the mental realm it posits is “blank or blind” rather than having any genuine intentionality or aboutness (“Singular Thought,” p. 152).  If the Cartesian conception were correct, our own experience would have the character of what William James called, in another context, “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”  It would not even seem to be an experience of a world of tables, chairs, dogs, cats, trees, clouds, and people. 

Note that this has nothing essentially to do with Descartes’s view that the mind is immaterial.  As McDowell emphasizes, modern materialism has inherited this broadly Cartesian conception of the mind and just relocates the mind so conceived in the brain rather than in Descartes’s res cogitans.  It typically retains the idea that there is no inherent connection between mental states and the external objects mental states are said to represent.  It posits a causal correlation between mental representations and external objects (just as Cartesian dualism does) while allowing that the representations might in principle fail to represent the world as it really is – in which case, again, it is hard to see what makes them true representations at all.  Material states no less than states of a res cogitans should, given the Cartesian picture, be “blank or blind” rather presenting the world to us in the way consciousness actually does.

Opening up the mind

Hence McDowell concludes that the Cartesian picture is not correct.  He argues that we ought “to picture the inner and outer realms as interpenetrating, not separated from one another by the characteristically Cartesian divide” (“Singular Thought,” p. 150).  What does that amount to?  McDowell proposes several ways of spelling the idea out.  One of them involves the notion of a singular proposition(also sometimes called a Russellian proposition after Bertrand Russell, who developed the idea).  A singular proposition is a proposition about some particular individual thing, where the thing itself is a constituent of the proposition.  For example, the proposition that the Wilshire Grand Center is the tallest building in Los Angeles will be a singular proposition in this sense if the Wilshire Grand Center itself really is a constituent of that proposition.  (Whether a particular individual thing really can be a constituent of a proposition, and thus whether there really are singular propositions, is a matter of controversy.)

A singular thought (using “thought” here to refer to a psychological episode of the familiar sort) would be a thought whose content is a singular proposition – and thus a thought which has, as a constituent, some particular individual thing.  For example, if I am thinking that the Wilshire Grand Center is the tallest building in Los Angeles, then the Wilshire Grand Center itself would be a constituent of my thought.  On this conception, suggests McDowell, we could take the “inner space” of the mind to extend outward to include such external objects themselves.   And in that case, “there is now no question of a gulf… between the realm of subjectivity and the world of ordinary objects” insofar as “objects themselves can figure in thoughts which are among the contents of the mind” (“Singular Thought,” p. 146).

Another way of spelling out the “interpenetration” of mind and world is developed in Mind and World, where McDowell rejects the idea that there is a sharp divide between the content of a thought, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the facts in the world that the thought is about.  He writes:

[T]here is no ontological gap between the sort of thing one can mean, or generally the sort of thing one can think, and the sort of thing that can be the case.  When one thinks truly, what one thinks iswhat is the case… [T]here is no gap between thought, as such, and the world. (Mind and World, p. 27)

Commenting on passages like these, Tim Thornton attributesto McDowell an “identity theory of thoughts and facts.”  And if thoughts and facts are identical, that would (so the argument goes) rule out a conception of the mind that makes it “blank or blind,” devoid of intentionality.  We cannot say that the contents of the mind would be just as they are, independently of whether there was an external world, if those contents just are the same things as the facts comprising the external world.

Developing the argument of Donald Davidson’s classic paper “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” McDowell rejects the conception of experience as devoid of structure or intelligibility apart from some conceptual scheme we impose upon it from outside, as if the former could exist apart from the latter.  Only what is already conceptualized could ever serve as a rational justification for anything, so that if experience was, considered by itself, devoid of conceptual structure, it could never play any justificatory role in anything we believe.  What McDowell calls “the space of reasons” (a phrase he picks up from Wilfrid Sellars) – the order of logically interrelated concepts, beliefs, and inferences – would thus float free of empirical reality.

The right way to think about human experience, then, is as already, of its nature, saturated with conceptual content, and the right way to think about the external world that experience reveals to us is as itself having a structure that corresponds to this conceptual content.  McDowell contrasts this with the “disenchanted” view of nature we’ve inherited from early modern science, and from empiricists like Hume.  He writes:

[W]e cannot suppose that intelligible order has completely emigrated from the world we take to be mirrored by intellectual states… We have to suppose that the world has an intelligible structure, matching the structure in the space of logos possessed by accurate representations of it.  The disenchantment Hume applauds can seem to point to a conception of nature as an ineffable lump, devoid of structure or order.  But we cannot entertain such a conception.  If we did, we would lose our right to the idea that the world of nature is a world at all (something that breaks up into things that are the case), let alone the world (everything that is the case).  (“Two Sorts of Naturalism,” in Virtues and Reasons, edited by Hursthouse, Lawrence, and Quinn, at p. 160)

But it isn’t really science itself that presents us with such a picture of nature.  It is the interpretation of science put forward by scientism and reductionistic brands of naturalism that does so.  “This kind of naturalism tends to represent itself as educated common sense, but it is really only primitive metaphysics” (Mind and World, p. 82).

Kant or Aristotle?

Even those sympathetic to McDowell’s position might have at least two concerns about it.  The first is that it seems to rely too much on metaphorical ways of characterizing the position McDowell wants to put in place of Cartesianism and reductionistic naturalism.  How exactly should we cash out talk about the mind and world “interpenetrating”?  What is the nature of the “inner space” of the mind, given that it is not like the literal space that material objects outside the mind occupy?  What exactly does the Wilshire Grand Center being a constituent of my thought about it amount to?  Obviously it is not a constituent of my thought in the same sense in which it is, say, a constituent of a certain city block in Los Angeles. 

A second concern is that attributing to the world something like the conceptual structure of thought, and making external things constituents of the mind, might seem to entail a kind of idealism that collapses the world into the mind.  This worry is only exacerbated by the fact that McDowell finds inspiration in Kant and post-Kantian idealism, albeit he does not characterize his own position as idealist.

Now, as I said at the beginning, it seems to me that there are, in McDowell’s work, clear gestures in the direction of what amounts to an Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the mind’s relation to the world.  And resources from that conception would, I suggest, rescue McDowell from the two difficulties I’ve referred to.  To be sure, McDowell does cite Aristotle prominently in his exposition of his preferred conception of nature.  But his focus is on Aristotle’s ethicsas a model of how to conceive of human beings in a way that is broadly naturalistic without being reductionist.  He does not make use of the relevant Aristotelian epistemological and metaphysical ideas.

The key theme here is the Aristotelian-Thomistic idea that when the intellect understands something, it takes on the thing’s form– the same form that, when informing a bit of matter, makes of that matter a particular instance of the kind of thing the form defines.  For example, when the intellect understands what it is to be a triangle, it takes on the form of a closed plane figure with three straight sides, which is the same form that, when taken on by a bit of ink, makes of that ink a triangle. 

The reason the intellect does not itself become a triangle by virtue of taking on this form is that it takes on the form without matter, and a triangle is a kind of material thing.  Hylemorphism – the thesis that physical substances are composites of form and matter – is thus a crucial metaphysical component of this epistemological story.  It makes it possible to say that the intellect is identical to the objects of thought formally, but not materially.  Why is this important?

Not too long ago I reviewed Raymond Tallis’s book Logos: The Mystery of How We Make Sense of the World.  Tallis notes how modern attempts to close the divide between mind and world opened up by Descartes tend either to collapse the mind into the world (as reductionistic naturalism does) or to collapse the world into the mind (as idealism does).  The trick to avoiding both extremes, he rightly argues, is to preserve the distinction between mind and world without opening up the unbridgeable gapbetween them that the Cartesian picture entails.  We need, as Tallis says, to preserve “connection-across-separation.”  As I noted in the review, the Aristotelian-Thomistic position does precisely this.  Because a thought and the thing thought about are formally identical, the mind has such an intimate connection with the world that there is no epistemic and semantic gap of the kind deplored by thinkers like McDowell.  But because they are nevertheless not materially identical, there is no collapse of mind and world.

McDowell is by no means unfamiliar with this account.  In his collection Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars, he discusses it in an essay with the intriguing and playful title “Sellars’s Thomism.”  I say “playful” because Sellars was, of course, hardly a Thomist.  But like McDowell, he was keen on making dialogue partners of great thinkers of the past, including those with very different philosophical commitments than his own, and Aquinas was no exception.  McDowell discusses the use Sellars made in his essay “Being and Being Known” of the Aristotelian-Thomistic account of knowledge I just sketched. 

Sellars’s concern was the relationship between the intentionality of thought and the meaningfulness of language, and he thinks there is an interesting connection between his own views about these matters and Aquinas’s notion of the “mental word.”  McDowell tells us that his main concern in his own essay is with understanding Sellars’s use of Aquinas rather than with Aquinas himself, but he does suggest that Sellars’s naturalistic presuppositions lead him to misread Aquinas.  And he closes the essay with the following paragraph:

Now Aquinas, writing before the rise of modern science, is immune to the attractions of that norm-free conception of nature.  And we should not be too quick to regard this as wholly a deficiency in his thinking.  (Of course in all kinds of ways it is a deficiency.)  There is a live possibility that, at least in one respect, Thomistic philosophy of mind is superior to Sellarsian philosophy of mind, just because Aquinas lacks the distinctively modern conception of nature that underlies Sellars's thinking.  Sellars allows his philosophy to be shaped by a conception that is characteristic of his own time, and so misses an opportunity to learn something from the past.  (p. 255)

All the same, McDowell himself mostly just describes the Aristotelian-Thomistic position in the course of discussing Sellars’s treatment of it, rather than either endorsing or rejecting it.  Nor (as far as I know) does he discuss the matter elsewhere.  So, McDowell’s salutary critique of Cartesianism seems, for all its strengths, insufficiently attentive to an important approach to the matter – a pre-Cartesian perspective, which is importantly different from the post-Cartesian perspective represented by the thinkers who have most influenced McDowell (Kant, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson, et al.).

Related posts:

Truth as a transcendental

Fodor and Aquinas on the Extended Mind Thesis

Putnam on causation, intentionality, and Aristotle

Putnam and analytical Thomism, Part I

If you’ve been missing links

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Thomas Chatterton Williams on encountering Thomas Sowell, at AIER.

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A conference on Second Scholasticism, Analytical Metaphysics, and Christian Apologeticswas hosted by the Catholic Theological Faculty in Prague last October, with presentations by Gyula Klima, Michael Gorman, and many others.  Via YouTube, you can still watch the first, second, and third sessions.

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Yujin Nagasawa is interviewed at What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? 

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Connor Grubaugh on Hannah Arendt on anti-racism as a totalitarian ideology, at the Tablet.  Critical Race Theory indoctrination: the kids don’t like it, reports Robby Soave at Reason.  John McWhorter, author of Woke Racism, is interviewed about the book and about Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi.  At The Upheaval, N. S. Lyons argues that woke insanity is nowhere close to being over.

Australian Catholic University has launched the Ethics Finder website.  A video explains.

At The Spectator, Sam Leith argues that the modern economy is built on addiction.

Hell is not empty

We’ve been talking about Balthasar’s view that we may at least hope that all human beings are saved.  Now, Balthasar was a Catholic theologian who was careful to try to avoid contradicting definitive Church teaching on the subject.  That is why he does not endorse the universalist view that all mustand therefore definitely will be saved, which is heretical (as is shown hereand here).  But it is also significant that in the title of his famous book on the subject, he is careful to frame his question: “Dare we hope ‘that all men be saved’?”  In other words, he’s asking about whether all human beings might be saved.  He’s not asking whether all creatures with intellect and will, including fallen angels, might be saved.  Indeed, in the book he says, of demonic powers:

Let it be said at the outset that theological hope can by no means apply to this power.  The sphere to which redemption by the Son who became man applies is unequivocally that of mankind… [O]ne cannot agree with Barth’s claim that the angels had no freedom of choice and that the myth of a “fall of the angels” is thus to be rejected absolutely… [T]he doctrine of a fall of the angels, which is deeply rooted in the whole of Tradition, becomes not only plausible but even, if the satanic is accepted as existent, inescapable. (pp. 113-14)

To be sure, Balthasar then goes on to speculate about whether the concept of “person” would still apply to a fallen angel – on the grounds that persons typically exist in a way that involves relationship with other persons, and those who have permanently opted for evil have thereby locked themselves into a selfishness that prevents a proper relationship with others.  Now, this is pretty woolly metaphysics.  For one thing, persons fixed on evil cannot enter into healthy relationships to other persons, but that doesn’t mean they cannot enter into any relationships at all.  For another thing (and as Balthasar seems not to deny), demons would still retain intellect and will even if they no longer had any relationships even of a defective kind with other persons.  That would suffice to make them persons, certainly on a Thomistic analysis.  Anyway, however we choose to characterize them, Balthasar does not seem to deny that demons are forever lost, so that we cannot hope for their salvation.

The reason, no doubt, is that that too is something required by Catholic orthodoxy.  As the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) teaches:

He will come at the end of time to judge the living and the dead, to render to every person according to his works, both to the reprobate and to the elect.  All of them will rise with their own bodies, which they now wear, so as to receive according to their deserts, whether these be good or bad; for the latter perpetual punishment with the devil, for the former eternal glory with Christ.

Even if you were to argue that this does not entail that there will in fact be any human being who suffers perpetual punishment (as opposed to entailing the mere possibility of this happening), it cannot reasonably be denied that it entails that the devil suffers perpetual punishment.  Similarly, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “there is no repentance for the angels after their fall,” so that the demons’ choice against God is “irrevocable” and their sin “unforgivable” (393).  This teaching is found also in scripture:

Then he will say to those at his left hand, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Matthew 25: 41, 45-46)

And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulphur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever. (Revelation 20:10)

So, no Catholic can, consistent with orthodoxy, claim that hell is empty.  At the very least, the fallen angels are in hell and there is no hope whatsoever for their repentance.  Even Balthasar admits this.  At least for the Catholic, this constitutes an absolute boundary beyond which orthodox speculation on the subject of hell cannot go.  It’s not just that it cannot be affirmed that all creatures must and will be saved.  It’s that it must be affirmed that some are damned – the demons, at the very least.

What does this tell us about whether any human beings are damned?  Quite a lot.  For one thing, it undermines the main ground for the Balthasarian hope that at least all human beings might be saved.  The argument is that God willsall human beings to be saved, as is affirmed in passages like 1 Timothy 2:3-4.  If God wills it, then, it is argued, that gives us good grounds to hope that it will happen.  But God also obviously willed that all the angels would be saved, and yet it is certain that some are damned anyway.  So, why would God’s willing that all human beings be saved make it any more likely they will all in fact be saved?  (In Book XXI, Chapter 17of The City of God, St. Augustine makes the related point that it is absurd to appeal to divine mercy as an argument for the salvation of all human beings, while conceding that the demons are lost forever despite God’s mercy.)

If anything, it is a priori far less likely that all human beings will be saved than that all angels will be.  Angels have far more powerful intellects and wills than we do, and being incorporeal, they lack the passions that can blind the intellect and overwhelm the will.  They cannot fall into the kind and number of errors that lead human beings into sin, and they cannot be distracted from the good by feelings of anger, lust, craving for alcohol or drugs, etc.  So, if even many angels are nevertheless damned, it is a priori extremely improbable at best – and, really, practically impossible – that no human beings are damned. 

That much alone should make any Catholic wary of putting much stock in the suggestion that there is any hope that all human beings will be saved.  But much more can be said.  I noted in my previous post that Bl. Pope Pius IX, in The Syllabus of Errors, condemned the following proposition: “Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ.”  But what about those who are in it?  Well, Pope Pius II, in 1459, condemned the proposition “that all Christians are to be saved” (cf. Denzinger 717b).  Of the human race in general, the Council of Quiersy in 853 taught that “omnipotent God wishes all men without exception to be saved, although not all will be saved” (cf. Denzinger 318).  Note that the council explicitly says that in fact not all will be saved even though God desires that they be saved. 

Such doctrinal statements are perfectly in line with what scripture clearly teaches, in passages like these:

Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.  For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few. (Matthew 7:13-14)

And some one said to him, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” And he said to them, “Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.”  (Luke 13:23-24)

Many, many more passages could be cited from both scriptureand tradition.  The blindingly obvious implication is that some human beings will in fact be damned – indeed, Christ’s own statements, made in response to a direct question about the matter in the case of the passage from Luke’s gospel, imply that most people will be damned. 

And yet Balthasarians tie themselves in logical knots trying to find loopholes in these various statements by which a hope for the salvation of all might squeak through on a technicality.  This is an absolutely bizarre way to do theology.  It’s comparable to a doctor who, looking at the grim statistics on pancreatic cancer, notes that it is nevertheless at least possible to survive it, and then chirpily tells his patients: “We can at least hope that all pancreatic cancer patients will survive!”  After all, if it is possible for some, isn’t it possible for all?

In the case of pancreatic cancer, though survival is possible, a number of things have to go right in order for this to happen, and because it is in most cases highly improbable that they will all go right, there is simply no realistic hope at all that the possibility of survival will be realized in every case.  But the same thing is true with respect to the salvation of souls.  It’s not enough to note that, in the abstract, any particular soul could be saved.  We also have to ask what, specifically, has to happen in order for the salvation of a soul to occur, and how probable it isthat it will occur in every single case.  Once we do that, the notion that we can hope for the salvation of all can once again be seen a priori to be laughably unrealistic.

Here’s what the Church says has to go right.  If you are a Catholic guilty of mortal sin, you must repent of it with a firm purpose of avoiding such sin in the future, you must have at least imperfect contrition (that is to say, sorrow for sin because you fear divine punishment or abhor the ugliness of sin), and you must in the case of imperfect contrition actually receive absolution in the sacrament of confession.   If you have not received such absolution, then you can still be saved if you have perfect contrition (that is to say, sorrow for sin out of love of God) and at least the intention to go to confession and receive absolution.  Without meeting these conditions, you cannot be saved.  For example, if you lack perfect contrition, never go to confession, and die, you will not be saved.  If you are outside the visible boundaries of the Church, then you can still be saved, but only if you have perfect contrition and at least an implicit desire for baptism.  If you lack these upon death, you cannot be saved.

Now, there is, of course, more to be said about these criteria, and various qualifications to be made.  For example, what counts as perfect contrition, or as an implicit desire for baptism?  I would argue for a fairly broad interpretation of these concepts.  For instance, I would argue that one might have, through no fault of his own, many false beliefs about the divine nature yet still plausibly be said to have perfect contrition or sorrow for sin out of love for God. 

But by no means does anything go.  For example, a person whose entire live is devoted to making money and partying, and who treats morality and religion as matters of complete indifference or even scorn, can hardly be said to have perfect contrition even if in some banal sense he’s a “nice guy.”  Hence, if he suddenly dies, it is hardly likely that he will be saved.  Is it possible, for some particular person like this, that there is a deeper side to him that the world does not see?  Sure.  Maybe there are recesses of his soul that only God sees, in which perfect contrition is evident, so that his death does not entail his damnation.  But is it remotely likely that every singleperson who lives like this is really perfectly contrite deep down, and thus might be saved – even though not even all the angelsare saved?  The very idea is preposterous.  And here I am talking about immoral lives of just the everyday, ordinary kind.  When we factor in far more morally depraved people (murderers, rapists, drug dealers, etc.) it is even more absurd to suppose that every single one of them might die in a state of perfect contrition.

Scripture itself indicates even of some specifichuman beings that they are lost.  Revelation 20:10, quoted above, indicates that the beast and false prophet of the last days will be damned.  Jude 7 states that “Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise acted immorally and indulged in unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.”  Christ says of Judas that “it would have been better for that man if he had not been born” (Matthew 26:24) and “I have guarded them, and none of them is lost but the son of perdition” (John 17:12). 

Here too some people resort to mental gymnastics to try to get around the clear meaning of these texts.  None of these efforts is credible, and there is no point in even attempting such creative reinterpretations unless one is operating with the background assumption that it is plausible that all might be saved.  Once we see that (for the reasons I’ve been spelling out) this is not plausible, any residual motivation for straining to see in these texts anything but the implication that the people referred to are damned drops away.

All the same, I expect that many will prefer to cling to false hope.  Christ himself could appear to them and say: “Listen very carefully and read my lips: Some people are in hell,” and they would respond: “Lord, you mean that just as a warning that some might go to hell, right?  Or maybe you mean ‘people’ in some unusual sense.  And what exactly does ‘hell’ mean, anyway?  Come to think of it, ‘some,’ ‘are’ and ‘in’ could mean all sorts of things too.  Lord, you sure speak in mysteries, but I trust that some day you’ll reveal to us what all this means.  Anyway, until then we can hope!”

Or perhaps they would accuse Christ of wanting people to go to hell, as theologians and churchmen who warn about hell are routinely accused of doing.  This is as irrational as accusing the doctor who warns of the low survival rate of pancreatic cancer of wanting people to die from it.  No Catholic wants anybody to go to hell; certainly I don’t.  And I submit that those who warn of it are more compassionate, not less, than those who preach false hope.

Related posts:

How to go to hell

Does God damn you?

Why not annihilation?

A Hartless God?

No hell, no heaven

Speaking (what you take to be) hard truths ≠ hatred

Hart, hell, and heresy

No urgency without hell

Scripture and the Fathers contra universalism

Popes, creeds, councils and catechisms contra universalism

Geach on Hell

A fallacy in Balthasar

A fallacy in Balthasar (Updated)

In his influential book Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved?” , theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar gives the following argument:

If it is said of God that: “God our Savior … desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.  For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim 2:4-5), then this is the reason for the fact that the Church should make “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings … for all men” (1 Tim 2:1), which could not be asked of her if she were not allowed to have at least the hope that prayers as widely directed as these are sensible and might be heard.  If, that is, she knew with certainty that this hope was too widely directed, then what is asked of her would be self-contradictory.  (pp. 23-24)

This is the basis for Balthasar’s famous view that we can at least hope for the salvation of all.  For if we are commanded to pray, for all, that they will be saved, it must be possible for all to be saved.  Otherwise we would be praying for something impossible, which we would never be commanded to do.  (Note that Balthasar does not take the universalist view that all must and therefore definitely will in fact be saved, which would be heretical.)

However, the argument is fallacious, as can be seen by comparison with the following examples.  Suppose you watch as ten people are asked to draw straws, in order to determine who is going to carry out some unpleasant task.  It is reasonable for you, with respect to any one of the ten, to hope that he is not the one to draw the short straw.  For there is nothing about any one of the ten that makes it necessary that he will be the one to draw it.  But it would not be reasonable to hope that none of the ten draw it.  Somebodyis going to draw it, even if there is nothing about any one of the ten people that determines that it must be him, specifically, who will do so.

Or suppose a forest fire is raging toward a small town which has a hundred buildings in it.  For any one of those buildings, it might be perfectly possible for it to be saved from the fire.  There may be nothing special about any one of them that entails that it, specifically, will be destroyed.  Hence you could reasonably hope, for any one of the buildings, that it will be saved.  But it might at the same time be true of the fire – given its size, speed, the layout of the town and so forth – that it will inevitably destroy at least some of the buildings.  Hence it would not be reasonable to hope that none of the buildings is destroyed. 

Similarly, from the premise that, for any particular human being, it is reasonable to hope that he will be saved, it doesn’t follow that it is reasonable to hope that all human beings will be saved. 

Now, it might be claimed that there is a crucial disanalogy here.  In the case of drawing straws, the setup guarantees that not everyone can avoid drawing the short straw.  And in the case of the fire, the way I have described the scenario guarantees that not every house can be saved.  By contrast, it might be argued, in the case of salvation, there is nothing that guarantees that not everyone will be saved.

There are two things to be said in response to this.  First, even if it were true that there is nothing that guarantees that not everyone will be saved, Balthasar’s inference is still fallacious.  The fact that, for any man, we should pray (and thus hope) for his salvation, simply does not by itself entail that all might in theory be saved. 

But second, in fact it seems we do have a guarantee that not all will be saved.  For the clear and consistent implication of both scriptureand traditionis that some people will be damned.  Christ tells us that few find the way to life and many go the way of destruction (Matthew 7:13-14); he warns that many who seek to enter the Kingdom of God will not be able to (Luke 13:24); and so on.  It’s not like we don’t have evidence one way or the other and thus are free to hope.  We do have evidence, and it all points in the direction of some being lost.  This is true even if we were to concede (as we should not) that we don’t have good reason to think, of any specific person, that he in particular is lost.  For the clear implication of the relevant texts (which are set out in the articles just linked to) is that some people are lost, whether or not we know who they are.  (The reason we should not concede that we lack such knowledge of any particular person is that scripture and tradition also clearly do imply that certain specific people are lost – Judas, for example, and the beast and false prophet of Revelation, not to mention the demons.)

So, we are in fact in a position analogous to that of someone watching the ten people drawing straws, or someone watching a fire approach the town.  You can reasonably hope, of any particular person, that he will not draw the short straw, but not that no one will.  You can reasonably hope, of any particular building, that it will not burn down, but not that none of them will.  And even if you can reasonably hope, of any particular person, that he will be saved, you can’t reasonably hope that everyonewill be.  In all three cases, we have positive evidence against there being hope for all, even if we can still reasonably have hope for any particular individual.

What has been said so far shows only that Balthasar’s hope is in vain, but it might otherwise seem harmless.  But is it?  In The Syllabus of Errors, Bl. Pope Pius IX condemned the proposition: “Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ.”  To be sure, with blanket condemnations of long lists of propositions (which is what we have in the Syllabus), not all the propositions will necessarily be problematic in the same way or to the same degree.  For example, they may not all be heretical, but merely rash, ambiguous, or the like, and thus potentially misleading.  Hence the proposition that we can have “good hope” for the salvation of all might be problematic even if it is not strictly heretical.

Why?  Well, suppose, in the case of the fire raging toward the town, that someone went around telling all the homeowners that there was good hope that all the buildings would be saved.  Suppose that some of them protested that this was unlikely, that it was in any event a waste of time to speculate about such an optimistic scenario, and that what was urgently needed instead was to get busy and do what was necessary to save as many buildings as possible.  And suppose the optimist simply doubled down on his happy message, criticizing the skeptics for worrying the other homeowners, and rehearsing for them all the reasons for hope while minimizing the evidence of grave danger.  Suppose that some of the homeowners, reassured by the optimist’s message, opted to sit there listening to him in order to calm their nerves, rather than taking urgent action to save their homes.

What would result from this?  Obviously, that those who sat around listening to the optimist would be far more likely to end up losing their homes, whereas those who were more pessimistic and took urgent action would be far more likely to save their homes.  The optimist would bring about the destruction of many homes, precisely by trying to convince everyone that all of the homes would probably be saved.

I submit that we are in an exactly parallel situation where preaching and theological discussion about hell are concerned, even in otherwise conservative contexts.  I once heard a parish priest give a sermon on one of Christ’s dire warnings that many would be lost, on a Sunday when such a Gospel passage was among the lectionary readings for the day.  His message was similar to Balthasar’s.  Though Christ himself, in the Gospel passage that was read, warned: Be very careful, you could wind up in hell, the pastor, in commenting on the passage, reassured his congregation: Don’t worry, you probably won’t end up in hell.

What the hell? 

This sort of thing is extremely common.   Conservative Catholic priests, prelates, and theologians are careful not to endorse universalism or otherwise to teach heresy where the doctrine of hell is concerned.  They suppose they have thereby done their duty, and then immediately go on to deemphasize the doctrine, treating hell as if it were merely an abstract possibility.  This is as delusional and dangerous as reassuring the homeowners in my example that losing their homes is merely an abstract possibility.  Scripture and tradition consistently treat hell as far more than that – as a clear and present danger that we must be gravely concerned about.  Doing one’s duty vis-à-vis Catholic teaching requires doing the same.  There is no surer way to send people to hell than to reassure them that probably no one goes there.

UPDATE 1/22: In the comments section, a couple of readers accuse me of misreading Balthasar, and hold that rightly understood, his argument commits no fallacy.  One of them says:

I disagree with Balthasar.  Nevertheless, Feser here commits a strawman.  This is Balthasar's argument:

P: The Church prays for all to be saved

Q: It must be possible that all will be saved

1. If P, then Q

2. P

3. Therefore, Q

In Feser's misrepresentative construal he substitutes an entirely different P, namely, "The Church prays for each one, separately, to be saved."  This is clearly not the proposition that Balthasar is concerned with.  If Balthasar had been utilizing this strawman then he would indeed have committed a fallacy.

End quote.  But this won’t work.  The problem is that “all” is ambiguous, and Balthasar reads it in a question-begging way.  As the reader implicitly acknowledges, the proposition:

P: The Church prays for all to be saved

will support the proposition:

Q: It must be possible that all will be saved

only if “all” in P means “all, collectively” as opposed to “each one, individually.”  But no one who does not already agree with Balthasar would concede that P is true in that sense.  All we are entitled to assume, in a non-question begging way, from scripture and tradition, is P interpreted in the weaker, “each one, individually” sense.  And then Q won’t follow, for the reason I gave in the original post.

Another reader accuses me of holding a Calvinist view of predestination.  But nothing I said presupposes anything about the topic of predestination, and certainly not a Calvinist view.  It presupposes only that God knows what will happen in the future, including who will be saved and who will be damned.

I suspect that the reader was thrown off by my reference to a “guarantee” that not all will be saved.  He seems to think that I meant “guarantee” in some metaphysical sense.  But in fact I meant it in an epistemological sense.  I don’t mean that it is guaranteed that some will be damned in the metaphysical sense that God will cause this to happen.  I mean that it is guaranteed in the epistemological sense that we can know that some will be damned because it has been revealed that some will be.

Related posts:

How to go to hell

Does God damn you?

Why not annihilation?

A Hartless God?

No hell, no heaven

Hart, hell, and heresy

No urgency without hell

Scripture and the Fathers contra universalism

Popes, creeds, councils and catechisms contra universalism

Geach on Hell

A fallacy in Balthasar

In his influential book Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved?” , theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar gives the following argument:

If it is said of God that: “God our Savior … desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.  For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim 2:4-5), then this is the reason for the fact that the Church should make “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings … for all men” (1 Tim 2:1), which could not be asked of her if she were not allowed to have at least the hope that prayers as widely directed as these are sensible and might be heard.  If, that is, she knew with certainty that this hope was too widely directed, then what is asked of her would be self-contradictory.  (pp. 23-24)

This is the basis for Balthasar’s famous view that we can at least hope for the salvation of all.  For if we are commanded to pray, for all, that they will be saved, it must be possible for all to be saved.  Otherwise we would be praying for something impossible, which we would never be commanded to do.  (Note that Balthasar does not take the universalist view that all must and therefore definitely will in fact be saved, which would be heretical.)

However, the argument is fallacious, as can be seen by comparison with the following examples.  Suppose you watch as ten people are asked to draw straws, in order to determine who is going to carry out some unpleasant task.  It is reasonable for you, with respect to any one of the ten, to hope that he is not the one to draw the short straw.  For there is nothing about any one of the ten that makes it necessary that he will be the one to draw it.  But it would not be reasonable to hope that none of the ten draw it.  Somebodyis going to draw it, even if there is nothing about any one of the ten people that determines that it must be him, specifically, who will do so.

Or suppose a forest fire is raging toward a small town which has a hundred buildings in it.  For any one of those buildings, it might be perfectly possible for it to be saved from the fire.  There may be nothing special about any one of them that entails that it, specifically, will be destroyed.  Hence you could reasonably hope, for any one of the buildings, that it will be saved.  But it might at the same time be true of the fire – given its size, speed, the layout of the town and so forth – that it will inevitably destroy at least some of the buildings.  Hence it would not be reasonable to hope that none of the buildings is destroyed. 

Similarly, from the premise that, for any particular human being, it is reasonable to hope that he will be saved, it doesn’t follow that it is reasonable to hope that all human beings will be saved. 

Now, it might be claimed that there is a crucial disanalogy here.  In the case of drawing straws, the setup guarantees that not everyone can avoid drawing the short straw.  And in the case of the fire, the way I have described the scenario guarantees that not every house can be saved.  By contrast, it might be argued, in the case of salvation, there is nothing that guarantees that not everyone will be saved.

There are two things to be said in response to this.  First, even if it were true that there is nothing that guarantees that not everyone will be saved, Balthasar’s inference is still fallacious.  The fact that, for any man, we should pray (and thus hope) for his salvation, simply does not by itself entail that all might in theory be saved. 

But second, in fact it seems we do have a guarantee that not all will be saved.  For the clear and consistent implication of both scriptureand traditionis that some people will be damned.  Christ tells us that few find the way to life and many go the way of destruction (Matthew 7:13-14); he warns that many who seek to enter the Kingdom of God will not be able to (Luke 13:24); and so on.  It’s not like we don’t have evidence one way or the other and thus are free to hope.  We do have evidence, and it all points in the direction of some being lost.  This is true even if we were to concede (as we should not) that we don’t have good reason to think, of any specific person, that he in particular is lost.  For the clear implication of the relevant texts (which are set out in the articles just linked to) is that some people are lost, whether or not we know who they are.  (The reason we should not concede that we lack such knowledge of any particular person is that scripture and tradition also clearly do imply that certain specific people are lost – Judas, for example, and the beast and false prophet of Revelation, not to mention the demons.)

So, we are in fact in a position analogous to that of someone watching the ten people drawing straws, or someone watching a fire approach the town.  You can reasonably hope, of any particular person, that he will not draw the short straw, but not that no one will.  You can reasonably hope, of any particular building, that it will not burn down, but not that none of them will.  And even if you can reasonably hope, of any particular person, that he will be saved, you can’t reasonably hope that everyonewill be.  In all three cases, we have positive evidence against there being hope for all, even if we can still reasonably have hope for any particular individual.

What has been said so far shows only that Balthasar’s hope is in vain, but it might otherwise seem harmless.  But is it?  In The Syllabus of Errors, Bl. Pope Pius IX condemned the proposition: “Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ.”  To be sure, with blanket condemnations of long lists of propositions (which is what we have in the Syllabus), not all the propositions will necessarily be problematic in the same way or to the same degree.  For example, they may not all be heretical, but merely rash, ambiguous, or the like, and thus potentially misleading.  Hence the proposition that we can have “good hope” for the salvation of all might be problematic even if it is not strictly heretical.

Why?  Well, suppose, in the case of the fire raging toward the town, that someone went around telling all the homeowners that there was good hope that all the buildings would be saved.  Suppose that some of them protested that this was unlikely, that it was in any event a waste of time to speculate about such an optimistic scenario, and that what was urgently needed instead was to get busy and do what was necessary to save as many buildings as possible.  And suppose the optimist simply doubled down on his happy message, criticizing the skeptics for worrying the other homeowners, and rehearsing for them all the reasons for hope while minimizing the evidence of grave danger.  Suppose that some of the homeowners, reassured by the optimist’s message, opted to sit there listening to him in order to calm their nerves, rather than taking urgent action to save their homes.

What would result from this?  Obviously, that those who sat around listening to the optimist would be far more likely to end up losing their homes, whereas those who were more pessimistic and took urgent action would be far more likely to save their homes.  The optimist would bring about the destruction of many homes, precisely by trying to convince everyone that all of the homes would probably be saved.

I submit that we are in an exactly parallel situation where preaching and theological discussion about hell are concerned, even in otherwise conservative contexts.  I once heard a parish priest give a sermon on one of Christ’s dire warnings that many would be lost, on a Sunday when such a Gospel passage was among the lectionary readings for the day.  His message was similar to Balthasar’s.  Though Christ himself, in the Gospel passage that was read, warned: Be very careful, you could wind up in hell, the pastor, in commenting on the passage, reassured his congregation: Don’t worry, you probably won’t end up in hell.

What the hell? 

This sort of thing is extremely common.   Conservative Catholic priests, prelates, and theologians are careful not to endorse universalism or otherwise to teach heresy where the doctrine of hell is concerned.  They suppose they have thereby done their duty, and then immediately go on to deemphasize the doctrine, treating hell as if it were merely an abstract possibility.  This is as delusional and dangerous as reassuring the homeowners in my example that losing their homes is merely an abstract possibility.  Scripture and tradition consistently treat hell as far more than that – as a clear and present danger that we must be gravely concerned about.  Doing one’s duty vis-à-vis Catholic teaching requires doing the same.  There is no surer way to send people to hell than to reassure them that probably no one goes there.

Related posts:

How to go to hell

Does God damn you?

Why not annihilation?

A Hartless God?

No hell, no heaven

Hart, hell, and heresy

No urgency without hell

Scripture and the Fathers contra universalism

Popes, creeds, councils and catechisms contra universalism

Geach on Hell