Edward Feser's Blog, page 29

Confucius on our times

What is essential to a well-functioning society?  In a famous passage from The Great Learning traditionally attributed to Confucius (551-479 B.C.), the philosopher says:

The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states.  Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families.  Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons.  Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts.  Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts.  Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge.  Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

Things being investigated, knowledge became complete.  Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere.  Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified.  Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated.  Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated.  Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed.  Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.

From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.  It cannot be, when the root is neglected, that what should spring from it will be well ordered.

End quote.  These words from the great man of the East would be warmly endorsed in the West by ancient thinkers like Plato and Aristotle and medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas.  But they run counter to the modern West’s liberalism, including the libertarian brand of liberalism that too often passes for “conservatism.”  The liberal attitude is that the moral character of individuals does not matter for social order so long as the right rules and institutions are in place.  Part of Confucius’s point, and that of any conservatism worthy of the name, is that rules and institutions are ineffectual without individuals willing to subordinate their desires to them.  And individuals who do not seek the good (so as to “rectify their hearts”) and the true (thus pursuing the “investigation of things”) can neither curb bad desires nor cultivate good ones.  The brute force of legal coercion cannot substitute for this missing moral fiber.  As we read in chapter 2 of The Analects:

The Master said: “Lead them by political maneuvers, restrain them with punishments: the people will become cunning and shameless.  Lead them by virtue, restrain them with ritual: they will develop a sense of shame and a sense of participation.” (Simon Leys translation)

And again:

Someone said to Confucius: “Master, why don’t you join the government?”  The Master said: “In the Documents it is said: ‘Only cultivate filial piety and be kind to your brothers, and you will be contributing to the body politic.’  This is also a form of political action; one need not necessarily join the government.”

And in chapter 12:

The Master said: “I could adjudicate lawsuits as well as anyone.  But I would prefer to make lawsuits unnecessary.” (Leys translation)

In such passages, Confucius reminds us that the personal is the political, not in the totalitarian sense that absorbs the personal up into the political and tries to mold attitudes and actions via state coercion, but on the contrary in the humane sense that devolves the political down to the personal level, in the recognition that social order depends more fundamentally on prevailing morals and mores than on legislation.

In Our Oriental Heritage, the first volume of his famous Story of Civilization series, Will Durant glosses the passage quoted above from The Great Learning as follows:

This is the keynote and substance of the Confucian philosophy; one might forget all other words of the Master and his disciples, and yet carry away with these “the essence of the matter,” and a complete guide to life.  The world is at war, says Confucius, because its constituent states are improperly governed; these are improperly governed because no amount of legislation can take the place of the natural social order provided by the family; the family is in disorder, and fails to provide this natural social order, because men forget that they cannot regulate their families if they do not regulate themselves; they fail to regulate themselves because they have not rectified their hearts – i.e., they have not cleansed their own souls of disorderly desires; their hearts are not rectified because their thinking is insincere, doing scant justice to reality and concealing rather than revealing their own natures; their thinking is insincere because they let their wishes discolor the facts and determine their conclusions, instead of seeking to extend their knowledge to the utmost by impartially investigating the nature of things. (p. 668)

If this analysis applied in Confucius’s day 2,500 years ago, and when Durant wrote these words in 1935, it applies a thousandfold today.  Consider what, specifically, Confucius would regard as among the marks of either a well-ordered character or a disordered one.  Chapter 1 of The Analects expresses what is perhaps the best-known of Confucian themes:

Master You said… “To respect parents and elders is the root of humanity” …

Master Zeng said: “When the dead are honored and the memory of remote ancestors is kept alive, a people’s virtue is at its fullest.”(Leys translation)

Chapter 4 admonishes us as follows:

The Master said: “Do not worry if you are without a position; worry lest you do not deserve a position.  Do not worry if you are not famous; worry lest you do not deserve to be famous.” (Leys translation)

Chapter 12 advises:

The Master said: “The practice of humanity comes down to this: tame the self and restore the rites… The practice of humanity comes from the self, not from anyone else.” (Leys translation)

In chapter 16, we read:

Confucius said, “There are three things which the superior man guards against.  In youth, when the physical powers are not yet settled, he guards against lust.  When he is strong and the physical powers are full of vigor, he guards against quarrelsomeness.  When he is old, and the animal powers are decayed, he guards against covetousness…

There are three things of which the superior man stands in awe.  He stands in awe of the ordinances of Heaven.  He stands in awe of great men.  He stands in awe of the words of sages.  The mean man does not know the ordinances of Heaven, and consequently does not stand in awe of them.  He is disrespectful to great men.  He makes sport of the words of sages.”

And in chapter 17, we’re told:

The Master said: “I detest purple replacing vermilion; I detest popular music corrupting classical music; I detest glib tongues overturning kingdoms and clans…

I cannot abide these people who fill their bellies all day long, without ever using their minds!” (Leys translation)

Needless to say, the modern character type is the opposite of that of which Confucius would approve.  Youthful insolence is esteemed and ancestors and tradition are held in contempt. “Irreverent,” “subversive,” “rebel,” and the like are stock terms of approbation.  Power and fame are prized for their own sakes, regardless of merit.  The self is not tamed but indulged, driven by covetousness, lust, and the filling of the belly.  Tastes become ever more vulgar; the very notions of great men and sages, let alone heavenly ordinances, are sneered at; and popular opinion is molded instead by the glib tongues of a relentlessly cynical, mocking, and quarrelsome commentariat.  Longstanding morals and customs have been shredded and social order increasingly depends instead on legislation, regulation, and the threat of litigation.  Confucius, like Plato in his analysis of democratic egalitarianism, might as well have been describing twenty-first century America.

As hearts are ever further from rectification and thoughts from sincerity, people increasingly conform their ideas about the nature of things to their wishes, rather than conforming their wishes to the nature of things.  Among the consequences is the ideologization of language, so that it distorts reality rather than revealing it and becomes a tool for manipulation rather than rational discourse.  Confucius warned of this too, in a famous passage from chapter 13of The Analects:

Tsze-lu said, “The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you to administer the government.  What will you consider the first thing to be done?”  The Master replied, “What is necessary is to rectify names.”  “So! Indeed!” said Tsze-lu. “You are wide of the mark!  Why must there be such rectification?”  The Master said, “How uncultivated you are, Yu!  A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve.  If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.  If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

Unfortunately, we are very far from having a government capable of rectifying names.  Nor could disillusioned citizens trust it to do so if it tried.  One more passage from The Analects, from chapter 12:

Tsze-kung asked about government.  The Master said, “The requisites of government are that there be sufficiency of food, sufficiency of military equipment, and the confidence of the people in their ruler.”  Tsze-kung said, “If it cannot be helped, and one of these must be dispensed with, which of the three should be foregone first?” “The military equipment,” said the Master.  Tsze-kung again asked, “If it cannot be helped, and one of the remaining two must be dispensed with, which of them should be foregone?”  The Master answered, “Part with the food.  From of old, death has been the lot of all men; but if the people have no faith in their rulers, there is no standing for the state.”…

The Duke Ching, of Ch’i, asked Confucius about government.  Confucius replied, “There is government, when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son.”  “Good!” said the duke; “if, indeed, the prince be not prince, the minister not minister, the father not father, and the son not son, although I have my revenue, can I enjoy it?”

End quote.  Ours is indeed an age in which fathers do not act like fathers, and authorities in general do not act like authorities.  They either shirk their duties and flatter the mob, or go to the opposite extreme of exerting power in an arbitrary and despotic way.  But that is, in the long run, inevitable in a liberal polity, where neither citizens nor rulers understand leadership in paternal terms, but rather as merely one more prize to be competed for in the marketplace.  Sovereign individuals get the leaders they deserve – good and hard, as one of our own sages once put it.

Oppy and Feser after-party

After the first exchange Graham Oppy and I had on Cameron Bertuzzi’s show Capturing Christianity two years ago, Cameron hosted an after-show Q & A for his patrons.  He has now made it available to the general public on YouTube.  It runs for over half an hour and ranges over a wide variety of topics – the laws of logic, fundamental particles, divine simplicity and modal collapse, divine freedom, the “what caused God?” objection, dualism versus materialism, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Thomism versus theistic personalism, potentiality versus actuality, and even capital punishment.  Check it out.

You can see the first exchange Graham and I had on Capturing Christianity here, and the second one here.  The debate has continued in print: Graham’s article “On stage one of Feser's ‘Aristotelian proof’” and my article “Oppy on Thomistic cosmological arguments” both appear in the latest issue of the journal Religious Studies. 

Sterba on the problem of evil

Recently my article “The Thomistic Dissolution of the Logical Problem of Evil” appeared in the journal Religions.  It was part of a special issue devoted to critical responses to James Sterba’s book Is a Good God Logically Possible?   Sterba has now replied to his critics.  What follows are some remarks about what he says about my own contribution.  (Keep in mind that what I have to say below presupposes my earlier essay and that I’m not going to repeat here everything I said there.)

Analogical language

Sterba makes five main points.  The first has to do with the Thomistic view that language about God has to be understood in an analogical way.  He writes:

Now Feser recognizes that when we apply predicates to God and ourselves, such as being just or merciful or permitting evil, claiming our assertions are true, we have to be speaking analogically.  Even metaphorical statements made about God… which also purport to be true have to be conveying their truth, when they are true, through nonliteral, analogical language.  Yet what Feser fails to recognize is that I am always using the same analogical language of which he approves, as is illustrated, for example, by my repeated appeal to “the analogy of an ideally just and powerful state” throughout my book.

End quote.  It seems to me that Sterba here misunderstands what Thomists mean by analogy.  For one thing, he at least appears to conflate “analogical” language with “nonliteral” language.  But nonliteral or metaphorical language is only one kind of analogical language, and when Thomists say that we need to understand predications of power, knowledge, goodness, etc. to God in an analogical way, they are not saying that these predications are nonliteral.  They are literal.  They just aren’t univocal.  (On the other hand, and in fairness to Sterba, he does seem to use “metaphorical” in a way that is possibly meant to distinguish it from other kinds of analogical language.  So I’m not certain about whether Sterba does suppose that all analogical language is nonliteral.)

Sterba also seems to conflate (a) using language in an analogical sense with (b) drawing an analogy.  That is also a mistake, as can be seen from the fact that even thinkers who insist that theological language is univocal rather than analogical (such as Scotists) are not saying that we should never draw analogies when talking about God.

Again, the key here is to understand that when Thomists say that language about God is to be understood analogically, they do notmean that it should be understood nonliterally.  They insist that there is a third literalsort of linguistic usage in between the equivocal and univocal uses.  God is, for example, literally powerful, not merely metaphorically powerful.  It’s just that the word “power” doesn’t have exactly the same sense as it does when we say e.g. that a corporate executive is powerful or that a cannon is powerful, even if it doesn’t have an entirely disconnected sense either.

Naturally, this raises questions about exactly what literal but analogical usage involves, and crucial to understanding that is to note the distinction between the analogy of attribution and the analogy of proportionality, and, where the latter is concerned, the further distinction between proper proportionality and improper (or merely metaphorical) proportionality.  I spell out these distinctions in Scholastic Metaphysics, at pp. 256-63, and of course there is a huge literature on the topic.  (Here is a useful primer from Joe Trabbic.)  The point to emphasize for present purposes is that for the Thomist, the key to understanding theological language is the analogy of proper proportionality and, to some extent, the analogy of attribution – and not the analogy of improper or metaphorical proportionality.

Yet the latter is what Sterba seems to have in mind when he talks about “analogical” language.  This is evident not only from his apparent conflation of “analogical” and “nonliteral,” but also from the example he gives.  He says that he is using analogical language when he compares God to “an ideally just and powerful state.”  But God is not literally a state, so that this is a case of merely metaphorical or improper proportionality.  And again, that is not the kind of analogical language that the Thomist has in mind in characterizing theological language as analogical.

There are deep semantic and metaphysical issues here the neglect of which vitiates not only Sterba’s argument, but much that is written today on the problem of evil by theists and atheists alike.

Drawing good out of evil

In my article I appealed to Aquinas’s view that God permits evil to exist because he draws a greater good out of it, and that no amount of evil could possibly outweigh the supreme good of the beatific vision.  Sterba responds:

Here, Feser understands, as do I, the beatific vision to be friendship with God.  However, I also argue that God’s offer of friendship cannot be logically dependent on his permission of horrendous evil consequences because if it were, his power would be impossibly limited.  So, it must always be logically possible for God to offer us his friendship without first permitting horrendous evil consequences of immoral actions to be inflicted on ourselves or anyone else, and if God were all-good, then he would always be doing just that.

End quote.  This seems to me to beg the question.  Thomists, like most other theists, hold that omnipotence does not include the power to do the logically impossible.  And they would also hold that the particular goods that God draws out of the evil that exists would not otherwise be logically possible.  Sterba seems here simply to assume, without argument, that one or both of these suppositions are false. 

In general, Sterba’s approach to the problem of evil both in his reply and his book seems to take for granted a conception of human life that Thomists, and indeed traditional Christian theology in general, simply would not agree with.  In particular, he writes as if determining whether things go well overall for a human being is a matter of determining how they go for him in this life.  But from the point of view of traditional Christian theology, what ultimately matters is the next life, not this one.  This life is merely a preparation for the next.  Hence, to judge the overall quality of a human life requires, most importantly, reference to the afterlife.  If you considered only what happened in this life to, say, the Christian martyrs, you might think they lived among the most unfortunate of lives.  But if instead you consider the reward this gained them in Heaven, they would have to be judged as having the most fortunate of lives.

Of course, the atheist will not agree that there is such a thing as an afterlife.  But the point is that if he simply assumes this as a component of his atheistic argument from evil, then the argument will beg the question.

Sterba also seems to assume that if God exists, there is at least a very strong presumption that there would be no suffering, so that the fact that there is suffering is very surprising and indeed problematic if theism is true.  But Thomists and traditional Christian theology more generally would reject that assumption too.  They would say that suffering is to be expectedgiven our nature as finite and corporeal creatures in a world interacting with other finite creatures.  To be sure, our nature is good as far as it goes.  But it is limited, and given those limits we are subject to injury, disease, ignorance, error, and the ramifications of those.  We are also liable to moral failures, and as these mount, the damage done to the character of individuals and to the social orders of which they are parts also snowballs and ramifies.  Given the facts of the natural moral law, we also come to merit the positive infliction of further harms as punishment for our evildoing.  In these ways, suffering is deeply ingrained into the very nature of human life, and therefore precisely what we should expect.

It would take supernatural assistance – that is to say, special divine action to raise us beyond the limits of our nature – to prevent this outcome from occurring.  And such assistance was indeed offered to our first parents.  Had they not rejected the offer, nature would not have taken its course.  That is the sense in which the evil that afflicts us is the consequence of Original Sin.  It’s not that the Fall introduced into the natural order evil that would not have otherwise been there.  It’s rather that it lost for us the supernatural prevention of evil that would have been there.

So, again, suffering is to be expected given our nature, rather than something that should surprise us.  But then, why is it nevertheless not removed given that through Christ we can be restoredto grace?  There are several reasons.  One of them is that grace, the supernatural order of things, builds on nature rather than smothering it.  By leaving in place much of the effects of Original Sin, God allows us to see much more clearly than would otherwise be possible the unbridgeable gap between what we are capable of just given our own limited nature, and what we require in order to achieve the beatific vision.  We see our need for grace better than we otherwise would.

For another thing, since we have in fact sinned, we merit punishment.  Even the repentant do not get off scot-free.  We need to do penance, either in this life or in Purgatory.  And the evils we accept in a penitential spirit in this life are preferable to those we face in Purgatory.  We can also accept unmerited suffering in the spirit in which Christ did so, as a sacrifice for others who need penance.  More generally, we can gain virtues such as patience, compassion, and courage.

Much more could be said, but that is enough to make the point that from the point of view of traditional Christian theology, suffering is an integral part of the natural and supernatural order of things, rather than something we should be surprised by.  That’s part of why the Cross is so central a symbol in Christian spirituality.  If you look at the world the way that the heroes of scripture, the Fathers of the Church, and the saints do, the idea that what we should expect from God is (say) some kind of bourgeois consumer paradise – and that we should shake an accusing fist at him for failing to provide it – just seems bizarre, even superficial in the extreme.

I’m well aware that this view of things is bound to seem very strange to an atheist or indeed to the average citizen of modern, affluent, secularized Western society.  But the point is that by approaching the problem of evil as if this traditional Christian view of things weren’t true, the atheist once again simply begs the question.  Sure, if you look at the nature and purpose of human life the way the secularist does, then the existence of suffering seems baffling.  But traditional Christian theology does not look at things that way.  And Sterba has given us no non-question-begging reason to do so.

Freedom from what?

In response to my point that those who are deprived of political freedoms and the like by oppressors do not thereby lose their free will, and that that is what matters most to their salvation, Sterba objects:

Yet the failures of even the most brutal and oppressive dictators to take away the inner freedom of their subjects does nothing to exonerate them for the evil they do by depriving their subjects of their external freedom.  Why should it be any different for God who could prevent all horrendous evil consequences, as needed, and thereby secure our external freedom as needed?

End quote.  Sterba’s analogy fails, for two reasons.  First, because unlike the dictator, God merely permits rather than inflicts the loss of freedom in question.  Second, because unlike the dictator or any other human being, God is capable of drawing out from this loss a good that infinitely outweighs it.

Sterba’s objection also greatly exaggerates the significance of the worldly freedoms that are lost, relative to what we gain in the hereafter.  That too may sound shocking from a modern secularist liberal point of view, but then, neither Thomism nor traditional Christian theology more generally looks at human life from that point of view in the first place.  Freedom to vote, to criticize state policy, to have a job one likes, etc. are all well and good.  But they are ultimately much less important than freedom from moral vice (a freedom which is still possible, even when political freedoms are lost, as long as we have free will).  

As St. Augustine says, we have as many masters as we have vices, and they enslave us in a much worse way than human tyrants do.  The reason is that losing the freedom to vote, to work, etc. won’t keep us from the beatific vision, but losing the freedom from bondage to sin will keep us from it.  And that is what matters most in the end.  So, if a world where the loss of freedoms of the kind Sterba is talking about is part of an overall order where there is an increase in freedom of the kind Augustine is talking about – with the salvation that that entails – then that is a much greater overall good than one in which the former, lesser freedoms are maximized and the latter, greater ones are less in supply.

Divine authorship

In response to my comparison of the created world to a story and of God to the author of the story, Sterba writes:

No doubt an author who chooses to fill his novel with an endless string of holocausts each worse than the last has not done anything morally wrong.  Yet it does not follow that a God who permits the horrendous consequences of a similar endless string of holocausts which he could have easily prevented without loss of greater good consequences or prevention of greater evil consequences has likewise not done anything morally wrong.

End quote.  This misses the point I was making with the author analogy.  The point is not that God is blameless for the specific reasons an author is blameless (which include the fact that the characters, unlike us, are not real).  Rather, the point is that God’s causality differs from ours in something like the way an author’s causality differs from that of his characters, and this difference in causality entails that laws of nature and the natural moral law do not intelligibly apply to God.  He is outside the causal order in something like the way an author is outside the order of the story.  But the relevant moral categories in terms of which the “logical problem of evil” judges God to be guilty of wrongdoing can intelligibly apply only to creatures withinthat order.

Divine morality

Replying to my claim that, since God is not a rational animal and therefore not governed by natural law, the Pauline Principle does not apply to him, Sterba says:

Yet, earlier, Feser recognized that certain virtues, such as being just and merciful, which do not make any direct reference to our appetites, do apply to God.  Likewise, here, the Pauline Principle, which does not make any direct reference to our appetites, applies analogically to God in the same way that being just and merciful apply analogously to God.

End quote.  It seems to me that Sterba has missed my point, which was that God’s being rational and our being rational does not by itself entail that the same predicates can in every case intelligibly be applied both to us and to God.  I am not saying that none of the same predicates can intelligibly be applied.  But those that do apply must be understood in a way that reflects the differences between God and created things (e.g. God is not in the created order, does not fall under a genus, etc.).  God’s lack of appetites is one of the differences, but it is hardly the only one.  The problem with applying the Pauline Principle to God is that it could intelligibly apply to him only if God were part of the moral community – which, since he is not even part of the causal order of which the moral community is a component, he is not.

That’s enough for now, and no doubt Sterba would have had more to say in response to my paper if had had time and space.  As it is, he had to reply to fifteenother contributors!  I thank him for his good sportsmanship and for an intelligent, civil, and productive exchange.

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part V: Woody Allen

So far in this series we’ve considered Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud, and Marx.  None of them is exactly a laugh riot.  So let’s now take a look at the lighter side of atheistic disenchantment and nihilism, in the work of that most philosophical of American comic filmmakers, Woody Allen.  We’ve noted how one of the features that distinguishes the New Atheism from the Old is its shallow optimism.  New Atheists typically refuse to see any good in religion at all, and thus can foresee no loss whatsoever in the prospect of its disappearance.  Allen is as free of that sophomoric attitude as any Old Atheist, which gives him at least some of the relative sobriety of the members of that club.

Not that Allen is Captain Gravitas.  The loss of meaning and morality in a world without God is a longstanding theme of his movies.  But it is played strictly for laughsin a goofball comedy like Love and Death, whereas in a drama like Hannah and Her Sisters it is remedied for one character who is going through an existential crisis by watching a Marx Brothers movie and deciding to try to enjoy life to the extent he can.  This is pretty banal stuff, albeit those are both very good movies.  And the atrocious Whatever Worksexhibits the same banality, but on steroids.  (How bad a flick is it?  So bad that Allen somehow managed to make Larry David unfunny.) 

All the same, Allen has also explored the theme in a more serious way, in the marvelous Crimes and Misdemeanors.  Martin Landau’s character Judah Rosenthal is a successful ophthalmologist whose life is unraveling because the woman with whom he has been committing adultery threatens to expose the affair to his wife.  He wrestles with his gangster brother’s proposal to solve the problem by having the woman killed, at first appalled by it but eventually consenting.  He is then racked with guilt, the religious teaching of his father, which he had always rejected, now coming alive for him at last.  He toys with the idea that God does exist after all and that he stands under divine judgment, and considers confessing his crimes.  In the end, however, when he realizes that he is not going to be caught, he gets over his guilt, abandons his tentative belief in God, and cynically returns to his life of affluence.

Meanwhile, Judah’s friend and patient Ben, played by Sam Waterston, is a rabbi who gradually loses his eyesight but remains devout and hopeful.  Woody Allen’s own character Cliff Stern is also going through a crisis, as his marriage is collapsing and his filmmaking career is going nowhere.  Unlike Judah, though, Cliff is not a cynic, and is trying to get a documentary made about a philosophy professor whose ideas he finds inspiring.  But his rival Lester, a fellow filmmaker played by Alan Alda, is a phony and a blowhard but one who nevertheless achieves the recognition and financial and romantic successes that elude Cliff.

One of the themes of the movie, then, is that in a Godless universe there is no moral order, so that the wicked prosper and the good suffer.  The good, and the religious in particular, are also portrayed as naïve and in thrall to wishful thinking.  As this interesting analysispoints out, the wearing of eyeglasses serves in the movie as a subliminal marker of those who are, either permanently or temporarily, dominated by moral or religious illusions.  The characters who do not wear them are those who, though hard and cynical, nevertheless see reality for what it is.

All the same, one of the most interesting features of Crimes and Misdemeanors is that, despite its atheistic worldview, the movie does not portray the devout with contempt, and even affords them a certain nobility.  Ben, the rabbi, is represented throughout as admirable, gentle, and a voice of moral reassurance.  Sol, Judah’s father, is stolid and even patient with, if exasperated by, his skeptical relatives.  He defends his faith with stubborn confidence, but in a manner that is nevertheless measured and without anger or fanaticism.  Meanwhile, the characters whose atheism is most pronounced, Judah’s aunt May and Judah himself, are represented as coldly amoral.

This is a far cry from the simplistic picture of the dispute between atheism and religion that one finds in a Dawkins or a Hitchens.  And the point is not that all atheists are like Judah – of course they aren’t – but rather that Allen is, unlike your central casting New Atheist, able to take a critical distance on his unbelief (at least in this movie – in Whatever Works, not so much).  He is willing to entertain the possibility that even if atheism is true, it may have horrific implications, and that even if no religion is true, religion may afford moral depth and consolation that is otherwise unavailable.

In one of the film’s best scenes, Judah imagines being back at one of the Seder meals of his childhood, listening to his father Sol spar with his atheist aunt May.  May insists that the hard truth is that “might makes right.”  Sol, meanwhile, serenely affirms that “if necessary, I will always choose God over truth.”

Naturally, this can be read as simple irrationalism, but there is another way to interpret it.  To me, it is reminiscent of Socrates’ famous remark in Plato’s Republic:

The good therefore may be said to be the source not only of the intelligibility of the objects of knowledge, but also of their being and reality; yet it is not itself that reality, but is beyond it, and superior to it in dignity and power. (p. 234 of the Desmond Lee translation)

For “the good,” read Sol’s reference to God, and for “being and reality,” read his reference to truth.  Plato takes the Form of the Good to be so fundamental to the order of things that it is prior even to being and reality themselves, being their source.  It is a kind of super-reality or super-being.  Sol, arguably, thinks of God in a similar way.  So fundamental is the notion of God to the very intelligibility of things that, for Sol, he is a more ultimate reality even than truth of the ordinary sort.  That is, admittedly, to read into Allen’s scene more than he probably had in mind.  It seems clear enough, though, that Sol is portrayed as more than merelyputting forward irrationalism or fideism – that Allen acknowledges in him a kind of dignity and moral gravitas despitehis eschewal of logic and evidence as May (and Allen) understand them.

These remarks are, of course, not intended to be metaphysically rigorous.  At the end of the day, I don’t think it makes sense to think of the good as beyond being or truth.  On the contrary, as the doctrine of the transcendentals holds, being, truth, and goodness are really all the same thing looked at from different points of view.  And as longtime readers know, I also think that the relationship between morality and theism is more complicated than either Allen or pop Christian apologists suppose.  The point is that, however one works out the philosophical details, there is a nuance in the treatment of religion in Crimes and Misdemeanors that is absent from New Atheist polemic, or even from some of Allen’s other work.

In chapter 2 of his recent book The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist’s Point of View, Tim Crane draws a distinction between pessimistic and optimistic atheist responses to the disenchantment of the world.  Both responses urge that we resolutely do our best to supply some sort of meaning and morality to the inherently meaningless and amoral world revealed by science (more accurately, by the philosophical naturalist’s interpretationof science).  But the optimistic atheist thinks that the situation could never really have been other than this, and that the religious view of the world is simply based on a confusion.  To abandon religion is to abandon something that never made sense in the first place, and thus involves no real loss.  The transcendent meaning and morality the religious believer affirms is simply unintelligible on analysis, and thus could never have existed.

The pessimistic atheist, by contrast, thinks that the religious view of things is intelligible, and that the world couldin principle have had the transcendent meaning and moral order that the religious believer attributes to it.  It’s just that, as it turns out, that’s not the way the world happens to be.  Hence the pessimistic atheist, unlike the optimistic atheist, feels a real sense of loss upon the abandonment of religious belief.  Allen’s attitude toward disenchantment is clearly of the pessimistic sort, as is, arguably, the attitude of most of the best-known Old Atheists in general.

Oppy on Thomistic cosmological arguments

My article “Oppy on Thomistic cosmological arguments” has just been published in the latest issue of the journal Religious Studies.  (It’s behind a paywall, sorry.)  It is a reply to all of the criticisms Graham Oppy has leveled over the years against arguments of that sort, not only in his Religious Studiesarticle on my Aristotelian proof, but also in his books Arguing about Gods and Naturalism and Religion and elsewhere.  (Regular readers will recall the two YouTube exchanges I had with Oppy on the program Capturing Christianity, which you can view here and here.)

Anaximander and natural theology

The idea of natural theology is the idea of knowledge of God’s existence and nature that is attainable through purely philosophical arguments, entirely independently of any special divine revelation.  (This is usually contrasted with revealed theology, which is knowledge of God’s existence and nature attainable through some special divine revelation – for example, through a prophet sent by God whose veracity is backed by miracles.)  In Western philosophy, natural theology goes back to the very beginning, to the Greeks – and not just to Plato and Aristotle, but to the Pre-Socratics.  Arguably it begins with the second of them, Anaximander of Miletus (610 – 546 B.C.).

The Pre-Socratics inaugurated the search for what they called the archē of all things, where the term “archē” originally connoted either a beginning point or a position of authority.  An archē is a principle of order, and the search for the archē of all things is essentially the attempt to find an ultimate source and explanation for the order of the world.  Anaximander’s predecessor Thales famously proposed wateras the source from which all else derives.  His view seemed to be that the ordinary objects of our experience are all water in various configurations.  Perhaps he had in mind the idea that just as water can in everyday experience take on a liquid, solid, or gaseous form, so too the other objects of our experience are just further transformations of it (an idea analogous to Anaximenes’ later proposal that all things are air in various forms).

However, and Anaximenes notwithstanding, the tradition largely and quickly moved beyond such crudely materialistic models.  Even those Pre-Socratics who took the archē to be in some way material came to see that it had to be radically unlike any of the objects of ordinary experience.  And as Lloyd Gerson notes in his book God and Greek Philosophy, the trajectory of the Greek tradition was toward locating the ultimate explanation of things in a single archē that exists of necessity.  The theistic implications of this line of thought are obvious, and some thinkers did indeed arrive at conceptions of the archē that would deeply influence the classical theist tradition – for example, Xenophanes’ non-anthropomorphic philosophical monotheism, Parmenides’ Being, Plato’s Form of the Good, Aristotle’s Prime Unmoved Mover, and Plotinus’s One. 

Arguably we see something like a germ of classical theism already in Anaximander’s notion of the apeiron as the source from which all else derives.  The apeiron is the “unbounded” or “unlimited.”  The things of our experience are all bounded or limited in various ways – to being water and having the specific range of properties and powers distinctive of water, to being fire and having the properties and powers of fire, to being a tree with its characteristic properties and powers, or a dog with its properties and powers.  The ultimate source of things must notbe bounded or limited in any of these ways, or it could not be the ultimate source of things.  For example, if it was limited to being water, then it could not be the explanation of things that are beyond the powers of water; if it was limited to being fire, it could not be the explanation of things that are beyond fire’s powers; and so on.

Anaximander took the apeiron to be unbounded or unlimited in duration as well.  It cannot have a beginning, or it would have come from something else, in which case that other thing would be the true source of all things.  It cannot have an end, for only things that are bounded or limited in some way can have that.  For example, because of the properties and powers to which fire is limited, it can be put out by water; because of the properties and powers to which a tree is limited, it can be chopped down and burned; and so forth.

More could be said about the properties Anaximander attributes to the apeiron, and why he does so (though given the limited textual evidence, some of this would have to be speculative).  But as Werner Jaeger emphasizes in The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, these properties – being unbounded, beginningless and endless, immortal and indestructible, all-encompassing and all-governing, the source from which everything comes and to which everything returns – are precisely the sorts which the Greeks regarded as marks of the divine.  Indeed, Aristotle tells us that Anaximander took the apeironto be divine. 

To be sure, the apeiron does not seem to be personal in nature.  But in the Greek tradition, whether the source of all things was to be regarded as personal or impersonal is essentially treated as a question about the nature of God, not the existenceof God.  Aristotle, for one, treats the divine as personal, insofar as he attributes thought to the Prime Unmoved Mover.  But that Anaximander does not make such an attribution to the apeirondoes not by itself make of him any less a theist than Aristotle was.  It just makes of him a theist of a different kind (even if one who, from the point of view of us Aristotelian-Thomists, understood the divine nature less well than Aristotle did).

We should note a couple of further points about Anaximander’s theism, if indeed we want to assign that label to his views.  First, and as Jaeger notes, “his theology is a direct outgrowth from the germ of his new intuition of φύσις” (p. 23).  That is to say, his theism was not incidental to or detachable from his work as a natural philosopher or physicist.  On the contrary, he took the reality of the apeironand its divine properties to be the inevitable conclusion of the search for a complete explanation of the natural order.  Second, however, as David Roochnik points out in his excellent book on Greek philosophy, Retrieving the Ancients, Anaximander also thought that the search for the archē of all things required going beyond what was knowable by observation.  He was in this sense engaged in a kind of rationalist metaphysics, rather than merely in empirical hypothesis formation. 

I make these points and cite these experts on our topic because they are at odds with the impression the unwary reader would get from popularizations like Carlo Rovelli’s book Anaximander.  When treating Anaximander’s views about the apeiron and the project of ultimate explanation, Rovelli seems to me to get things badly wrong.  For one thing, he characterizes Anaximander’s notion of the apeiron as if it were different from or even at odds with a theological explanation – completely ignoring both the testimony of Aristotle that Anaximander regarded the apeiron as divine, and what actual experts on the Pre-Socratics’ views about religion such as Jaeger and Gerson have to say.

Why would Rovelli put forward such a view, and so matter-of-factly?  For one thing, he seems to have the simplistic view of theology that too many scientists evince when they write popular works attempting to relate science and religion.  Following Augustine, Gerson notes in God and Greek Philosophy that to understand the views of the ancients on matters of religion, we need to distinguish (1) civic theology, or the cultic practices of various ethnic and political groups, (2) mythical theology, such as stories about the Greek and Roman pantheons, and (3) natural theology, or rational argumentation concerning the existence and nature of God of the kind developed by philosophers. 

Too many writers of pop science books treat all discourse about God as if it were of type (1) or (2), either ignoring (3) altogether or quickly dismissing it without serious examination as if it could only ever be a feeble attempt to prop up (1) or (2).  This is a little like dismissing all of physics on the grounds that it can only ever be a feeble attempt to patch up the crude and failed theories of Thales and Anaximenes.  Certainly it does not do justice to the arguments of a Xenophanes, an Aristotle, or a Plotinus.  Those thinkers did not regard the crudities of mythical theology as a reason to give up theology, but rather as a reason to give up mythand replace it with a rational theology.  (You might think that even if arguments of type (3) at one time had some plausibility, they have now been refuted by science or otherwise been shown to be no longer defensible or interesting.  But as I have demonstrated at length elsewhere, nothing could be further from the truth.) 

Rovelli seems to be of the mindset that cannot see beyond (1) and (2) to give a fair shake to (3).  Because Pre-Socratic thinkers are clearly trying to move beyond myth as a way of making sense of the world, he appears to suppose that they must therefore be moving beyond theology as a way of making sense of it.  Hence he does not consider the possibility that the notion of the apeironmight be a concept in natural philosophy andat the same time a theological concept.  To be sure, it is only fair to note that Rovelli is admirably willing to think beyond clichés about the ancients in other contexts.  Unfortunately, his imagination seems to fail him when theology is at issue.

A second problem is that Rovelli explicitly declines to consider exactly what Anaximander might have meant by the term “apeiron.”  He tells us that this is no more important than determining the meaning of the term “quark,” which physicist Murray Gell-Mann borrowed more or less at random from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.  Modern particle physics would be no different if Gell-Mann had borrowed some other word instead, and Rovelli claims that “in the same fashion, had Anaximander called his principle something other than ‘infinite’ or ‘indistinct,’ the scientific relevance of his idea would have been strictly the same” (p. 66).

This is quite a bizarre claim.  That Gell-Mann’s bit of terminology was picked more or less at random and could easily be exchanged with something else doesn’t entail that all terminology in physics or natural philosophy is like that.  That is just a non sequitur.  And Anaximander’s term “apeiron” was most definitely not chosen at random.  Again, what he was trying to convey is the idea that the ultimate source of all things cannot be bounded or limited in any of the ways the things of our experience are, or it too would be in need of precisely the sort of explanation they require.  It would in that case not be ultimate.  To fail to see this is simply to miss Anaximander’s whole point. 

That Rovelli does entirely miss it is clear from his suggestion that the atoms of Leucippus and Democritus “are the direct descendants of Anaximander’s apeiron.  They are natural objects (nothing is particularly divine about atoms) that escape our direct perception but in terms of which we understand the constitution of matter” (p. 68).  Rovelli also claims that Faraday’s notion of the field is similarly comparable to the apeiron.

In fact, these notions are in no way comparable to Anaximander’s.  It is true that the atomists took the atoms to be the fundamental reality, but one of the difficulties with their position is that it is hard to see how anything having the properties attributed to the atoms could possibly befundamental.  An atom is extended, and thus could in principle be smaller than it actually is, in which case it is hard to see how it could be (as the atomists claimed it was) unbreakable in principle.  It has a certain specific shape, speed, and trajectory, and all of these could in principle have been different.  In short, the atoms are contingent in various respects, and they are so precisely because they are limited or bounded in various respects.  Hence they are no more like Anaximander’s apeiron than the water of Thales’ natural philosophy is.

Analogous problems afflict the suggestion that Faraday’s notion of the field is in any interesting way like the apeiron.  In general, if it is even intelligible to ask “Where did it come from?” or “Could it have been otherwise?” or any questions of a comparable sort, then we are not talking about the apeiron, because we are not talking about an ultimateexplanation of things.  Again, to fail to see this is to miss the whole point.

Now, when contemporary physicists make a stab at ultimate explanations, this typically involves positing some fundamental laws of nature.  The trouble with this, as longtime readers of this blog know, is that laws of nature are simply not the kinds of thing that could possibly befundamental, for reasons Aristotelian philosophers have set out (and which I survey at pp. 177-190 of Aristotle’s Revenge and in this talk).  Hence they too cannot be the ultimate explanation of things, and thus cannot be the sort of thing Anaximander had in mind in putting forward the notion of the apeiron.

Indeed, you aren’t ever going to understand what Anaximander was up to if you interpret him as doing only natural science as that is understood today (even if that was, of course, part of what he was doing).  And that brings us to a third problem with Rovelli’s treatment, which is precisely that this is how he (mis)interprets Anaximander.  He essentially remakes Anaximander in the image of a contemporary academic scientist, and one whose views on matters of methodology and religion are apparently very similar to those of Rovelli.  That Anaximander was no less a metaphysician and, as some scholars of Pre-Socratic philosophy argue, a natural theologian too, is thus lost on him.

Pope Francis’s scarlet letter

Consider two groups of Catholics:  First, divorced Catholics who disobey the Church’s teaching by forming a “new union” in which they are sexually active, thereby committing adultery.  And second, traditionalist Catholics attached to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass (i.e. the “Latin Mass”), some of whom (but by no means all) hold erroneous theological opinions about the Second Vatican Council and related matters.  In Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis radically altered the Church’s liturgical practice in order to accommodate the former group.  And in Traditionis Custodes, he has now radically altered the Church’s liturgical practice in order to punish the latter group. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letterfamously portrays an unmerciful society in which adulterers are forced to mark themselves off from others by wearing a scarlet A on their clothing.  Pope Francis clearly would disapprove of such cruelty, and rightly so.  Yet the cruel treatment of the community of those attached to the old form of the Mass – the innocent majority of them no less than the minority with problematic theological opinions – amounts to something analogous to the affixing on them of a scarlet letter: the letter T for “traditionalist,” the one group to which the pope’s oft-repeated calls for mercy and accompaniment appear not to apply.

Accompanying adulterers?

Let us consider just how radical each of these papal moves is.  The Church has consistently taught that a valid sacramental marriage does not end until the death of one of the spouses, and has condemned as gravely sinful any sexual relationship with anyone except one’s spouse.  Hence those in such a marriage who divorce a spouse and then form a sexual relationship with someone else are guilty of grave sin, and cannot be absolved in confession without a firm resolution not to continue the sexual relationship.  This is grounded in Christ’s teaching on marriage and divorce in passages like Matthew 19:3-12 and Mark 10:2-12.

The gravity of this teaching cannot possibly be overstated.  Christ acknowledges that “Mosesallowed” for divorce.  But then he declares: “And I say to you” that divorce is forbidden.  Now, the law of Moses was given to Moses by God himself.  So who has the authority to override it?  Who would have the audacity to declare: “Moses allowed” such-and-such but “I say” differently?  Only God himself.  Christ’s teaching against divorce is therefore nothing less than a mark of his very divinity.  To put ourselves in opposition to that teaching would thus implicitly be either to deny Christ’s divinity or, blasphemously, to put our authority above even his.  It would be to declare: “Christ said such-and-such, but I say differently.”  Absolutely no one other than God himself, not even a pope (whose mandate is precisely only ever to safeguard Christ’s teaching), has the right to do that. 

If the teaching in question sounds “rigid,” blame Christ.  His own disciples thought it so, going so far as to opine that if that is how things are, it would be better not to marry (Matthew 19:10).

Now, no Catholic in a state of mortal sin is permitted to receive Holy Communion until he is validly absolved in confession.  And no Catholic can be validly absolved who is aware of the Church’s teaching on marriage and divorce, violates that teaching by having a sexual relationship with someone other than his spouse, and refuses to end this sexual relationship.  Hence no Catholic who refuses to end such a relationship is permitted to receive Holy Communion. 

This teaching too is extremely grave, grounded as it also is in scripture, specifically in the words of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 11: 27-29.  According to St. Paul’s teaching, to take Holy Communion while refusing to end such a sexual relationship is nothing less than to profane Christ’s very body and blood and therefore to bring judgment upon oneself. 

These doctrines are as clear, consistent, and authoritative as any Catholic teaching is or could possibly be.  They are as ancient as the Church herself, are presented by her as infallible and absolutely binding, and have been unambiguously reiterated again and again and again.  This is, of course, why Amoris Laetitia was so controversial.  For it seems to allow that, in at least some circumstances, those who refuse to stop engaging in adulterous sexual activity can nevertheless take Holy Communion.  To be sure, Pope Francis has not explicitly rejected any of the teachings summarized above.  But he has also notoriously refused requests from several of his own cardinals (in the famous “dubia”) explicitly to reaffirm that traditional teaching, and thereby decisively put to rest any worries about the consistency of Amoris with that teaching. 

That the Holy Father himself is aware of how grave the issue is, and has even had his conscience troubled by it, is evident from a conversation recounted by one of his defenders, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn.  Crux magazine (not exactly a traditionalist outlet) reported:

Schönborn revealed that when he met the Pope shortly after the presentation of Amoris, Francis thanked him, and asked him if the document was orthodox.

“I said, ‘Holy Father, it is fully orthodox’,” Schönborn told us he told the pope, adding that a few days later he received from Francis a little note that said: “Thank you for that word. That gave me comfort.”

End quote.  Note that the pope himself had at least some doubt about the document’s orthodoxy – enough that he took “comfort” in being reassured about it – even after it had already been finalized and published!

My point here is not to rehearse all the details of the controversy over Amoris.  The point is simply to note the extreme lengths to which the pope was willing to go to try to accommodate the weaknesses even of those who obstinately refuse to obey the teaching of Christ and St. Paul.  Even if you think Amoris itself does not cross the line of heterodoxy with regard to that teaching, it cannot be denied that the document is extremely gentle with and accommodating to those who docross it. 

Shaming traditionalists

The contrast with the treatment of traditionalist Catholics in Traditionis Custodes could not be more stark.  Note first that, in the accompanying letter explaining his decision, Pope Francis claims that attachment to the old form of the Mass “is often characterized by a rejection… of the Vatican Council II itself, claiming, with unfounded and unsustainable assertions, that it betrayed the Tradition and the ‘true Church.’” 

The first thing to say about this is that, even if it is true that some people attached to the old form have this attitude, it is by no means true that all of them do.  On the contrary, as Pope Francis himself notes in the same document, his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI affirmed that many who are attached to the old form “clearly accepted the binding character of Vatican Council II and were faithful to the Pope and to the Bishops.”  All the same, Pope Francis’s severe restriction of the old form of the Mass punishes these innocent Catholics along with the guilty.

Secondly, we need to consider the precise nature of the purported heterodoxy and/or schismatic tendencies of which some of these traditionalists are accused.  There are, of course, some extreme traditionalists who deny that we have had a valid pope for decades (namely the sedevacantists), and others who are in some less radical way in imperfect communion with the pope (such as the SSPX).  But precisely because they are not in regular communion, the errors of these groups are irrelevant to the intended audience of Traditionis Custodes – namely, traditionalist Catholics who are in regular communion with the pope (such as the FSSP, and attendees at Extraordinary Form Masses offered at ordinary diocesan parishes). 

By definition, the latter groups are not in schism.  And though there are no doubt some among this small group within the Church who might nevertheless be said in some sense to have a “schismatic mentality,” the same is true of the untold millions of liberal Catholics who casually dismiss the pope’s authority to tell them what to believe or how to act – including the adulterous Catholics the pope accommodated in Amoris.  Clearly, the pope feels no urgency about dealing with the schismatic mentality among countless liberals.  So, why the urgency in dealing with the schismatic mentality of a small number of traditionalists?

Then there is the question of what it meansexactly to “reject” Vatican II.  Typically, with those traditionalists who are in full communion with the pope, what this means is that they reject some particular teaching of the Council, such as its teaching about religious liberty.  Now, I disagree with those who reject that teaching.  My view is that Vatican II’s teaching on religious liberty can and should be reconciled with the teaching of the pre-Vatican II popes on the subject.  (My favored way of doing so is the one developed by Thomas Pink.)  But for one thing, the teaching of Vatican II on this subject is not one that has been proposed infallibly (even if, of course, that does not entail that we do not owe it assent); and for another, how exactly to interpret it in light of traditional teaching has been a matter of controversy among theologians faithful to the Magisterium.  So, if the pope is going to be gentle and accommodating with those who obstinately defy the ancient and infallible teaching of Christ and St. Paul on marriage and Holy Communion, then how can he reasonably be less gentle and accommodating with those who have problems with a non-infallible teaching that is only a little over fifty years old?

So, the offense of which the traditionalists to whom Traditionis Custodes is addressed are accused is (a) not one of which all of them are guilty, and (b) manifestly less grave than that of Catholics who reject the Church’s teaching on marriage, divorce, and Holy Communion.  Yet those who reject that teaching are shown mercy, whereas traditionalists, the innocent as well as the guilty, are shown harshness. 

And the punishment is very harsh.  The pope aims to banish the Extraordinary Form of the Mass from ordinary parish communities, to restrict future ordinations of priests interested in celebrating it, and effectively to quarantine from the rest of the Church those communities which are still permitted to use the old form of the Mass until such time as they are prepared to adopt the new form.  As Cardinal Gerhard Müller observes, “the clear intent is to condemn the Extraordinary Form to extinction in the long run.”  The pope is essentially telling traditionalist Catholics attached to the old form of the Mass that as individuals they are suspect, and as a group they are slated eventually to disappear.  As Cardinal Müller writes:

Without the slightest empathy, one ignores the religious feelings of the (often young) participants in the Masses according to the [old] Missal… Instead of appreciating the smell of the sheep, the shepherd here hits them hard with his crook.  It also seems simply unjust to abolish celebrations of the “old” rite just because it attracts some problematic people: abusus non tollit usum.

This is bad enough when the harm done to traditionalists alone is considered.  But it is the whole Church that suffers from this decision, not just traditionalists.  For one thing, Pope Benedict XVI made it clear that the preservation of the Extraordinary Form was by no means a matter merely of catering to the needs of a certain group within the Church.  Rather, it had to do with reestablishing the connection of the Church as a whole with her own past in the liturgical context.  That is why, though Benedict too hoped that there would in the future be only a single form of the Mass, he wanted the old form to exert an influence on the new no less than the new would exert influence on modifying the old.  This was part of Benedict’s general insistence on a “hermeneutic of continuity.”  Traditionis Custodes shows no sensitivity whatsoever to this dimension of the issue.

For another thing, while the pope says that he took this decision in order to foster greater unity in the Church, it is manifestly likely to foster instead only greater disunity.  That is inevitable in any family when a father shows a double standard toward his children.  Indeed, it is precisely this double standard, and not the old form of the Mass, that has generated the disunity of recent years.  What has done more to lead some traditionalists to question Pope Francis’s orthodoxy?  The fact that they hear the Latin Mass every week?  Or Amoris Laetitia and the pope’s refusal to answer the dubia?  To ask the question is to answer it.  Traditionis Custodes will not put out the fire Amorisstarted.  If anything, it will pour gasoline on it.

He is still the Holy Father

Some will say that the pope is merely acting like the father in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32).  The resentful older son in the parable, on this interpretation, represents traditionalists, whereas the prodigal son represents Catholics who do not obey the Church’s teaching on marriage and divorce.

But the analogy is ridiculous.  For one thing, the prodigal son in the parable repents and explicitly declines special accommodation.  He does not say “I intend to keep living an immoral life, but I demand some of that fattened calf anyway.”  For another, the father does not treat the older son at all harshly, but rather gently reassures him that he loves him no less than he loves the prodigal son.

All the same, the pope is, when all is said and done, a father – indeed, he is still the Holy Father of all Catholics, traditionalists included.  And while the Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances, this cannot properly be done except with humility, respect, and restraint.  The pope is not some politician or corporate executive whom we might see fit to mock or to fire or vote out of office.  He is the vicar of Christ, and he has no superior on earth.  We may respectfully urge him to reconsider some course of action, but if he refuses, then we have to leave it to Christ to resolve the problem in the manner and at the time he chooses. 

Moreover, because he is the pope, we must in this case even more than in any other follow Christ’s command to turn the other cheek and pray for those who harm us.  We must be willing to embrace the suffering this entails and to offer it up for others – including for Pope Francis himself.

Related posts:

Pope Victor redux?

Aquinas on bad prelates

Do not abandon your Mother

The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances

Papal fallibility

Two popes and idolatry

The strange case of Pope Vigilius

Some comments on the open letter

Popes, heresy, and papal heresy

Denial flows into the Tiber

Pope Victor redux?

The Quartodeciman controversy of the second century A.D. had to do with the date on which the resurrection of Christ ought to be observed.  Churches in Asia Minor preserved the custom of tying this observance to the date of the Passover, whatever day of the week that happened to fall on.  The Roman practice was instead to observe it on a Sunday, since that was the day Christ was resurrected.  The eastern practice was defended by St. Polycarp, who appealed to the authority of none other than his teacher St. John the Apostle.  Pope St. Anicetus tried unsuccessfully to convince Polycarp to adopt the Roman practice, and they agreed to disagree.

Pope St. Victor I, who came along a few decades later, was not so accommodating.  He tried to convince the eastern bishop Polycrates to adopt the Roman custom, just as Anicetus tried to convince Polycarp, and was equally unsuccessful.  But unlike Anicetus, Victor decided to force the issue by excommunicating those who refused to conform.  Whether the excommunications were ever rescinded is a matter of historical controversy.  But Victor was criticized at the time for his intolerance even by some who agreed with the Roman practice, such as St. Irenaeus.  Victor did what he did in the name of unity, yet the practice he forbade had a long precedent (indeed, one going back to the apostles themselves) and had been tolerated by his predecessors.  So why act with such severity?  Though they did not deny that Victor had, as pope, the right to do what he did, his critics questioned the wisdom and charity of his exercise of that right.

A pope who, in the name of unity, gravely offends much of his flock by needlessly and harshly curtailing ancient and legitimate liturgical practice that had been permitted by his predecessors.  Sound familiar?

Catholic teaching has always acknowledged that popes can make grave mistakes of various kinds when they are not exercising the fullness of their authority in ex cathedra decrees.  Usually, errant popes exhibit serious failings of only one or two sorts.  But Pope Francis seems intent on achieving a kind of synthesis of all possible papal errors.  Like Honorius I and John XXII, he has made doctrinally problematic statements (and more of them than either of those popes ever did).  Like Vigilius, his election and governance have involved machinations on the part of a heterodox party.  The Pachamama episode brings to mind Marcellinus and John XII.  Then there are the bad episcopal appointments, the accommodation to China’s communist government, and the clergy sexual abuse scandal, which echo the mismanagement, political folly, corruption and decadence of previous eras in papal history.  And now we have this repeat of Victor’s high-handedness.  Having in this way insulted a living predecessor, might Francis next ape Pope Stephen VIby exhuming a dead one and putting the corpse on trial?

Probably not.  But absolutely nothing would surprise me anymore in this lunatic period in history that we’re living through.

Related posts:

Aquinas on bad prelates

Do not abandon your Mother

The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances

Papal fallibility

Two popes and idolatry

The strange case of Pope Vigilius

Some comments on the open letter

Popes, heresy, and papal heresy

Denial flows into the Tiber

Aquinas on bad prelates

What attitude should a Catholic take toward cruel and arbitrary prelates – for example, those who endlessly stir up division and then shamelessly blame the division on those who note and bemoan the fact?  In Quodlibet VIII, Aquinas makes some relevant remarks when addressing the question whether “evil prelates” should be honored.  You can find the passage in the Nevitt and Davies translation of Thomas Aquinas’s Quodlibetal Questions , from which I quote:

We can distinguish two things about a prelate: the person himself and his office, which makes him a sort of public person.  If a prelate is evil, he should not be honored for the person he is.  For honor is respect shown to people as a witness to their virtue.  Hence, if we honored such a prelate for the person he is, we would bear false witness about him, which is forbidden in Exodus 20: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.  But, as a public person, a prelate bears an image and occupies a position in the Church… that does not belong to him but, rather, to someone else, viz. Christ.  And, as such, his worth is not determined by the person he is, but by the position he occupies.  He is like one of those little stones used as a placeholder for 100 marks on a scale – quite worthless in itself.  As Proverbs 26 says: He who gives honor to a fool is like one who puts a stone on Mercury’s heap… So, too, an evil prelate should not be honored because of who he is but because of the one whose position he holds.  The case is similar to the veneration of images, which is directed to the things depicted therein, as Damascene says.  Hence Zechariah compares an evil prelate to an idol: Woe to the pastor and idol who deserts the flock…

An evil prelate is unworthy to be a prelate and receive the honors due to prelates.  But the one whose image the prelate bears is worthy to have his vicar honored, just as the blessed Virgin is worthy to have a painted image of her venerated, although the image itself is not worthy of such respect. (pp. 70-71)

There are two key points here.  The first is that when a man is a bad prelate, we should not pretend otherwise merely because of his office.  That, Aquinas says, would be a violation of the eighth commandment – a lie.  He also compares it to idolatry.  An image of Christ or of a saint has no value in itself, but only as a pointer to something beyond it.  When we focus on the image itself we turn it into an idol.  Similarly, a bad prelate merits honor only because of the office he holds.  When we pretend his personal faults are not real, strain to attribute good motives to manifestly unjust acts or hidden wisdom to manifestly foolish utterances, we are like someone who fixates on an image and pretends that the many flaws and limitations it contains as a mere piece of matter must somehow really be divine. 

The second key point is that such a prelate nevertheless must be given the honor that attaches to his office as a vicar of Christ.  It is an insult to Christ to refuse his representative such honor – as if it is not Christ himself who is permitting such a man to be his vicar, or as if Christ does not know what he is doing in permitting it. 

As I have discussed in detail elsewhere, according to Aquinas – and according to Catholic teaching more generally – such a prelate can and ought to be criticized publicly by his subjects when he does something that endangers the faith.  But given the nature of his office, even this must be done “not with impudence and harshness, but with gentleness and respect.”  And if the prelate in question is the pope, respectful criticism is the most one can do, because he has no superior on earth.  Christ alone can, and will, resolve the problem in his own time and in the way he judges best.

What these points together entail is suffering.  And suffering, as the lives of the saints attest and as scripture teaches us from beginning to end, is the lot of the righteous man – suffering penitentially, suffering in solidarity with others, suffering in unity with Christ’s own agony.  This suffering can result from our own sins, or from the effects of original sin on the world around us, or from persecution.  And sometimes it can come even from within the Church itself.  Christ promises only that she will not be destroyed or, in her decisive pronouncements, bind the faithful to error.  Short of that, she can be and sometimes is afflicted with evil of every kind, even at the very top.  This is permitted in part precisely to illustrate the truth of Christ’s promise.  Even bad popes cannot destroy the Church. 

But Church history is not a Marvel movie, where everything works out in two hours, or at least by the next movie in the series.  As the Cadaver Synod, the Great Western Schism, and other episodes illustrate, it can sometimes take decades to resolve the problems resulting from papal folly, corruption, and mismanagement.  We modern Catholics are soft and impatient, and we need to recover the forbearance of our forebears. 

Current events make timely the recollection of some words from Pope Benedict XVI, while he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, on the event of the death of Michael Davies, the well-known traditionalist Catholic writer and stalwart defender of the Tridentine Mass.  The cardinal wrote:

I have been profoundly touched by the news of the death of Michael Davies.  I had the good fortune to meet him several times and I found him as a man of deep faith and ready to embrace suffering.  Ever since the Council he put all his energy into the service of the Faith and left us important publications especially about the Sacred Liturgy.  Even though he suffered from the Church in many ways in his time, he always truly remained a man of the Church.  He knew that the Lord founded His Church on the rock of St. Peter and that the Faith can find its fullness and maturity only in union with the successor of St. Peter.  Therefore we can be confident that the Lord opened wide for him the gates of heaven.  We commend his soul to the Lord’s mercy.

End quote.  Notice that Cardinal Ratzinger acknowledged that Davies suffered from the Church – and that nonetheless, he remained loyal to her, and thus loyal to the successor of St. Peter.  This is an example we ought to strive to emulate.  We must suffer for the Church even when – indeed, especially when – we suffer from her. 

Related posts:

Do not abandon your Mother

The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances

Papal fallibility

The metaphysical presuppositions of formal logic

By “logic” we might mean (a) the rules that determine the difference between good and bad reasoning, or (b) some formal system that codifies these rules in a specific way, such as the systems of propositional and predicate logic that contemporary students of analytic philosophy learn as a routine part of their education.  These are not the same thing, and it is fallacious to confuse them. 

Most philosophers have at least a vague awareness of this.  For instance, they know from standard textbooks that traditional and modern logic differ in their interpretation of categorical propositions, the repercussions this has for their understanding of the square of opposition, and so forth.  They know that there has been much debate in contemporary philosophy over the status of modal logic, not to mention even more exotic systems like quantum logic.  They may be at least dimly aware that systems of logic were developed in the history of Indian philosophy that differ from those familiar to Western thinkers.  And so on.

All the same, contemporary philosophers tend unreflectively to utilize the formal methods they learned in graduate school, treating (b) as if it were for all practical purposes the same as (a).  In particular, they seldom consider that these methods might assume, or at least suggest, challengeable metaphysical presuppositions. 

When you think about it, it would be surprising if it were not so.  As I have argued many times (e.g. in this recent post and in greater depth in Aristotle’s Revenge), the mathematical abstractions of modern physics, for all their undeniable utility and power, can distort our conception of concrete physical reality if we are not careful.  For mathematical representations of their very nature both leave out aspects of the concrete reality they represent, and can also introduce features that are not part of that reality but rather merely reflect the mode of representation itself. 

But formal logic can do the same.  For one thing, qua formal, its aim is precisely to abstract from the specific nature of the subject matter being reasoned about.  (What is traditionally called material logic, by contrast, aims to reflect rather than abstract from that specific nature.)  At the same time, modern symbolic logic was developed precisely in a manner that would facilitate the expression of one particular subject matter, namely mathematics.  It would hardly be surprising, then, if the way that propositions concerning some other subject matter are expressed in modern formal logic might be potentially metaphysically misleading.

For example, John Bigelow has suggested that modern physics’ mathematical representations of local motion over time, together with the apparatus of modern predicate logic, tend to insinuate an eternalist rather than presentist conception of time.  For when we formulate the propositions of physical theory using predicate logic, we need to quantify over not only present events but also past and future events.  And if the existential quantifier asserts the existence of a thing, then physical theory is thereby made to seem to assert the existence of past and future events no less than present ones. 

Now, this fact does not by itself actually show that past and future events really do exist just as present events do.  For all we know just from what has been said so far, the result in question may reflect, not objective reality itself, but merely modern formal logic’s mode of representingobjective reality.  To show that the eternalist conclusion really follows, and does not merely falsely appear to do so, would require independent metaphysical argumentation.  But in that case it is precisely this independent metaphysical argumentation itself, and not the system of formal logic, that is really doing the work.  (I would suggest that the “truthmaker” objection to presentism – which, as I have argued several times, is greatly overrated – may reflect this fallacy of reading off metaphysical conclusions from what is really nothing more than predicate logic’s mode of representation.)

Humean logic?

Rani Lill Anjum and Stephen Mumford, in chapter 5 of their book What Tends to Be: The Philosophy of Dispositional Modality (which earlier appeared as a separate paper), argue that modern formal logic reflects a metaphysical bias in favor of a Humean conception of the world and against an Aristotelian conception.  In particular, it is well suited to express causal propositions understood, as Hume would, as describing merely contingent relationships holding between “loose and separate” existents.  It is poorly suited to express causal propositions understood the way Aristotelians understand them, as describing necessary connections between intrinsically related existents. 

Now, among the crucial features of modern logic in this connection are that it is extensional and truth-functional.    In the context of predicate logic, extensionality has to do with the fact that co-referring terms can be substituted for one another without changing the truth value of a statement.  For example, since the statement that Spider-Man fights crime is true, and Spider-Man = Peter Parker, then it will also be true that Peter Parker fights crime.  (Statements involving propositional attitudes don’t fit this pattern, however.  They are famously intensional rather than extensional.  For example, if it is true that Aunt May believes that Spider-Man fights crime, then even though Spider-Man = Peter Parker, it does not follow that Aunt May believes that Peter Parker fights crime.  For if she does not know that Spider-Man = Peter Parker, the second statement might not be true even though the first is.)

In the context of propositional logic, extensionality has to do with the fact that a proposition that is a component of a compound proposition can be replaced by one having the same truth value without changing the truth value of the compound proposition.  For example, if it is true that water is wet and grass is green, and we replace the second of the component propositions with the true proposition that the sky is blue, then the resulting proposition that water is wet and the sky is blue will also be true.

Truth-functionality has to do with the fact that in propositional logic, the truth or falsity of a compound statement is a function solely of the truth or falsity of its component parts.  For example, if it is true that the sky is blue and it is also true that I am drinking coffee, then the conjunctive statement that the sky is blue and I am drinking coffee will also be true. 

Now, where these features have especially interesting implications – and implications relevant to Anjum and Mumford’s point – is with respect to material conditionals, statements of the form p É q or “If p, then q.”  In propositional logic, the only case where a statement of this form is false is when the antecedent p is true and the consequent q is false.  In every other case the conditional will be true.  This has some notoriously odd results (known as the “paradoxes of material implication”).  For example, the statement that if the sky is green, then robots rule the earth is true.  The antecedent and consequent are, of course, both false, but the statement as a whole still comes out true, as anyone knows who has worked through the relevant truth table.  Also true are the statement that if the sky is green, then 1 + 1 = 2(since the consequent is true even though the antecedent is false) and the statement that if the sky is blue, then 1 + 1 = 2 (since both antecedent and consequent are true even though they have nothing to do with one another). 

Now, suppose you agree with Hume that there are no necessary connections between any things or events in the world.  Everything is, as Hume puts it, “loose and separate,” and in theory any effect or none might follow upon any cause – striking a match may cause it to turn into a cat, planting an acorn might cause a Volkswagen to grow out of the earth, and so on.  We don’t seriously believe such things will ever happen, but that has nothing to do with the natures of these things themselves.  It has instead to do only with psychological expectations on our part based on past experience, or at most with whatever laws of nature happen contingently to associate an event of one type with events of another type (where what a “law of nature” is on a Humean view is itself a problematic issue). 

In that case, say Anjum and Mumford, modern formal logic is well suited to convey any causal claim you want to make.  Weird conditionals like the examples given above are not prima facie suspect.  (True, there may be no law connecting, say, the sky’s being green with robots ruling the earth, and for that reason a contemporary Humean wouldn’t take the conditional in question to express a true causalclaim.  But that would have nothing to do with anything intrinsic to the sky’s being green – nothing to do with there being no objective necessary connection between the sky’s color and robots ruling the earth.  Again, for the Humean there are no intrinsic or necessary connections between things in the first place.)

But suppose instead that you take the Aristotelian view that natural substances have inherent dispositions or powers by which they necessarily tend to generate effects of a certain specific kind.  Then, weird examples of conditionals like the ones in question aresuspect.  They show that the connections between things that are captured by the material conditional are simply too weak to correspond to the strong connections posited by the Aristotelian metaphysics of causal powers.  You’re not going to be able to capture the truth of a causal statement like “Striking a match generates flame and heat” or “A planted acorn will grow into an oak tree” via the material conditional.  Indeed, attempts to capture such claims in terms of conditionals, or even in terms of counterfactuals, face notorious difficulties.  (See pp. 53-63 of Scholastic Metaphysics for an overview of the main arguments.)

Now, Anjum and Mumford note that adding predicate logic to propositional logic does not solve the problem, because predicate logic builds on propositional logic’s account of the material conditional.  But even adding modal operators, as modal logic does, does not solve the problem either, because the truth-functional character of propositional logic is preserved.  You’ll still get weird results (known as the “paradoxes of strict implication”), and in particular results that are going to be suspect from an Aristotelian point of view.  For example, you get the result that anything strictly implies a necessary statement:

□ q ® (p® q)

For instance, “If it is necessary that water is H2O, then this strictly implies that the fact that tomorrow is Taco Tuesday strictly implies that water is H2O.”  That weird sort of modal statement hardly captures the kind of necessary connections in nature that Aristotelians posit when they affirm the reality of causal powers.

Now, David Lewis famously held that every possible world is as real as the actual world.  And as Anjum and Mumford point out, this provides a way to read even statements in modal logic in a Humean manner that denies any intrinsic causal connections between things.  The truth of the statement that necessarily, if p then q requires only that in every possible world where pis true, q is also true.  It does not require that there be anything intrinsic to the states of affairs described by p and q (such as causal powers that follow upon the essence of a thing) that ties them together.  Of course, most people wouldn’t agree with Lewis’s view about possible worlds, but the point is that the mere possibility of interpreting modal logic in Lewis’s terms shows that it doesn’t capture the kinds of necessary connections that Aristotelians attribute to the natural order.

There is also the fact that on the Aristotelian account, causal powers tend toward generating certain outcomes, but still may not in fact generate them, because the manifestation of a power can be blocked.  Given the nature of the sulfur in the head of a match, it tends toward generating flame and heat when struck (as opposed to frost and coldness, or turning into a snake, or what have you).  But that doesn’t entail that flame and heat will always follow, because that tendency can be frustrated (for example, if the match gets wet). 

So, things are not “loose and separate” in the manner Hume supposes (e.g. it just isn’t true that striking a match might in principle bring about any old effect at all).  But at the same time there are not going to be exceptionless correlations between events (because the operation of a power can be frustrated, so that the event of striking a match might in some cases not be followed by the event of flame and heat being generated).  Anjum and Mumford propose positing a “dispositional modality” of tending toward that lies in between mere possibility on the one hand and necessitation on the other.  More traditional Aristotelians would speak of potenciesthat are distinct from actualities but are nevertheless really there in things themselves even if they are never actualized.  But however we describe the metaphysical details, Anjum and Mumford’s point is that they are not going to be captured in standard extensional and truth-functional formal systems. 

You might say “So much the worse for the Aristotelian,” but the point is that such a judgment would have nothing to do with formal logic itself.  Rather, it has to do with independent metaphysical assumptions that might lead one to favor a certain formal system.  A formal system may be useful for certain purposes and not so useful for others.  Our metaphysical predilections might lead us to judge that there is nothing more to the world than what the formal system captures, or they may lead us to judge that it leaves important things out.  Either way, the characteristics of the formal system itselfdon’t settle anything.  As Anjum and Mumford write:

Metaphysics is First Philosophy, prior even to logic.  And from that it would follow that one should first choose one’s metaphysics and then choose one’s logic, rather than the other way around. (p. 86)

I would qualify this by saying that metaphysics is prior to logic if “logic” is understood in sense (b) described above, though not if understood in sense (a).  Naturally, we have to presuppose certain canons of reasoning when reasoning about anything, including metaphysics.  But it doesn’t follow that we have to presuppose the codification enshrined in some particular formal system – such as, for example, modern propositional and predicate logic rather than traditional Aristotelian logic, or rather than some system that tries to capture the best of both worlds (such as that of Fred Sommers). 

Again, at some level most philosophers realize this, but it can be easy to forget if you and your colleagues all routinely learn and utilize a certain formal system, and questions about its underlying philosophical assumptions are considered only by the small minority of philosophers who specialize in such things.  Anjum and Mumford speculate that, despite his famous disagreement with Mill on matters of the philosophy of mathematics, Frege picked up a set of essentially Humean empiricist prejudices about logic from Mill’s A System of Logic.  These were then passed down from Frege to Carnap, then from Carnap to Quine, and then from Quine to Lewis and contemporary philosophers in general.  (Naturally, Russell and Whitehead played a major role too.)  Whatever one thinks of this hypothesis, it is certainly true that a dogmatic conventional wisdom can take root on matters of logic no less than it can with respect to any other area of intellectual interest.

What-logic versus relating-logic

Aristotelian complaints about the metaphysical prejudices enshrined in modern formal logic are not new.  Over fifty years ago, Henry Veatch addressed the issue at length in his book Two Logics: The Conflict between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy(which was recently reprinted by Editiones Scholasticae). 

Veatch notes that we can distinguish what a thing isfrom the relations it bears to other things.  Now, Aristotelians are essentialists, who hold that there are facts of the matter about what things are and that we can at least to some extent discover those facts.  Logic, as understood in the Aristotelian tradition, is a tool for helping us to discover and express what things are.  A humble categorical proposition like “All whales are mammals” does precisely that, however little such a statement tells us all by itself.

However, Veatch argues, statements formulated in terms of the formal logic hammered out in works like Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica do not and indeed cannot, strictly speaking, tell us what a thing is.  They can express only relations.  Now, one of the advantages of modern predicate logic is precisely that it can represent relations in a way that Aristotelian categorical logic cannot.  It does so using multi-place predicates.  For example, the relation “___ loves ___” would be represented by the two-place predicate L ___, ___ where the spaces would be filled by lower-case letters naming individuals.  Hence “Harry loves Sally” would be represented as: Lhs.

But even one-place predicates, Veatch notes, are treated as representing relations, viz. relations between a thing and a property.  For instance, “Fred is bald” or Bf would represent the relationship between Fred and the property baldness.  One-place predicates are essentially treated as a limiting case of relational predicates. 

For this reason, Veatch argues, modern formal logic can really only ever express the relations between things, and not what a thing is.  Before you judge that that cannot be right, it would be a good idea to keep in mind that Russell himself held that even modern physics, when formulated in the language of modern logic, gives us knowledge only of relations and not of the intrinsic natures of anything.  (I discuss Russell’s views a length in Aristotle’s Revenge.)  One could, however, take this to show, not how little physics tells us, but rather how little formal logic tells us.

As Veatch also points out, the analysis of ordinary statements into statements of predicate logic tends to suggest an ontology of bare particulars and universals.  For instance, the statement “There’s a Ferrari parked outside” comes out as something like: ($x) (Fx • Px).  Any concrete attributes that might characterize the thing being described get analyzed as predicates, leaving just a bare something of which the universals named by the predicates (being a Ferrari, being parked outside) are predicated. 

Now, the notion of a bare particular is metaphysically dubious (cf. David Oderberg’s essay “Predicate Logic and Bare Particulars”), as is the notion of a world of which we can know only relations.  Of course, someone might nevertheless want to defend such philosophical exotica.  The point, however, is that even if the utility of predicate logic might suggestsuch views, it does not actually by itself give evidential support for them.  Again, if some apparent aspect of reality is difficult to describe using the apparatus of a system of formal logic, that may indicate merely the expressive limitations of the system, rather than the absence of those aspects from objective reality.  We cannot read a metaphysics out of formal logic without first reading one into it.  Metaphysics, as Anjum and Mumford insist, is in this sense prior to logic.

Faux rigor

Such considerations lend additional force to a point I have made before, which is that the use of formal methods in philosophical analysis and argumentation by no means guarantees that the results are more rigorously established, and indeed in some cases can even make them less so. 

For example, when analyzing an argument like Aquinas’s Third Way, some commentators like to reformulate it using the formal apparatus familiar from contemporary modal logic.  The reader easily impressed by such things thinks: “Wow, this is so much more rigorous than a less formal treatment!”  But in fact, such an analysis will simply change the subject, because the distinctively Aristotelian way in which Aquinas understands the relevant modal concepts cannot (as Anjum and Mumford point out) be captured in that formal language.  And an analysis that simply fails to capture what Aquinas is talking about is hardly rigorous.

In a post from a decade ago I discussed Robert Nozick’s treatment in Philosophical Explanations of the question why there is something rather than nothing, and noted that it affords another example of how semi-formal methods can obfuscate rather than illuminate.  Nozick speaks of various possible “states N [that] are natural or privileged” (one of which might be “nothingness” itself), of various “forces of type F” (one of which might be a “nothingness force”), of an “amount” there might be of such a force, and so on, and then proceeds to consider what relations may hold between N and various quantities of F, etc.  Because the discussion is couched in terms of symbols and variables, it gives the appearance of rigor.  But it is not prefaced with any treatment of the more fundamental and indeed crucial philosophical question of whether the proposed states and forces referred to are plausible (or indeed even coherent) in the first place.  Hence the apparent rigor is bogus.

None of this is intended to suggest that formal methods have no value, or to deny that sometimes they are even necessary.  The point is rather that their utility can be oversold and their neutrality overestimated.