Edward Feser's Blog, page 43

Was Aquinas a property dualist?

One must always be cautious when trying to relate Aquinas’s position on some philosophical issue to the options familiar to contemporary academic philosophers.  Sometimes he is not addressing quite the same questions they are, even when he seems to be.  Sometimes he does not use key terms in the same ways they do.  And he is working with a general metaphysical picture of the world – in particular, a picture of the nature of substance, essence, causation, matter, and other fundamental notions – that is radically different from the options familiar to contemporary philosophers, in ways the latter often do not realize. Having said that, let me propose tentatively that there is a way that contemporary philosophers of mind might naturally fit Aquinas’s position on the mind-body problem into the framework of options they are familiar with – a way that is surprisingly neglected by them, even though it is pretty clearly implied by the way they tend to classify the options.
The usual classification goes something like this.  Descartes got the modern discussion of the mind-body problem going by putting forward his famous version of substance dualism.  For Descartes, there are two irreducibly different kinds of substance.  One of them is matter, conceived of as res extensa or extended substance.  The other is mind, conceived of as res cogitans or thinking substance.  The nature of each is entirely exhausted by extension and thought, respectively, and neither has any of the attributes of the other.  Res extensa doesn’t merely haveextension, but just is pure extension, utterly devoid of thought or consciousness.  Res cogitans doesn’t merely havethought, but just is pure thought, utterly devoid of extension.
Either one of these substances could exist in the absence of the other.  (That’s why each counts as a substance.  Each has an independent or freestanding existence relative to the other.)  A res extensa by itself and in the absence of a res cogitans would, even if it had all the physical and behavioral characteristics of a human body, be as devoid of thought and consciousness as a stone or a table.  It would be a “zombie,” in the sense familiar in contemporary philosophy of mind.  A res cogitans by itself and in the absence of a res extensa would be essentially like an angelic intellect.  A human being is a composite of these two kinds of substance, the result of their getting into a relation of efficient causal interaction.
Later modern philosophers do not all entirely agree with Descartes’ characterization of matter or of mind, but, to oversimplify a bit, they can be understood as essentially beginning with Descartes’ bifurcation and then modifying it in different ways.  One way to modify it is to keep res cogitans but deny that res extensa is real.  All that exist, on this view, are minds and their ideas, and tables, chairs, rocks, trees, and the like are really just collections of ideas.  Only mental substances and mental attributes are real, and physical objects are real only in the sense that they can be reduced toideas, which are mental attributes.  This is the idealism spelled out in different ways by thinkers like Leibniz and Berkeley.
Another way to modify Descartes’ picture is to keep res extensa instead and get rid of res cogitans.  On this approach, all that exist are material substances and material attributes, and thoughts, experiences, and the like are, if they are real at all, really just material attributes of some sort (neurological attributes, or computational attributes, or behavioral dispositions).  Minds are real only insofar as they can be reduced to, or shown entirely to supervene upon, matter.  This is the materialism spelled out in different ways by behaviorists, identity theorists, functionalists, and (in the most extreme version, which denies the reality of the mind altogether) eliminativists.
A third alternative to Descartes is to reject both res extensa and res cogitans, and hold instead that there is some thirdkind of substance that is the only kind that really exists.  What we think of as res extensa or res cogitansis really just this third kind of substance conceived of under different descriptions.  One way to spell this out is the dual aspect theory of Spinoza, and another is the neutral monism of Bertrand Russell.
Then there is the view developed in recent philosophy of mind according to which there is only one kind of substance – namely material substance – but that at least some material substances have two irreducibly different kinds of attributes, namely material attributes and non-material mental attributes.  On this view, materialism is right to deny a dualism of substances and to insist that material substances alone are real, but Descartes was right to insist on a dualism of attributes.  This view is sometimes called attribute dualism or, more commonly, property dualism.
Now, Aquinas certainly would not agree with any of these views.  He was an Aristotelian hylemorphist, and thus would reject the desiccated mathematicized conception of matter that Descartes and his successors put in place of hylemorphism.  He would reject Descartes’ substance dualism as too similar to the Platonic conception of the soul’s relationship to the body, which he was keen to reject.  He would reject the claims that only mind is real, or that only matter is real, or that only some third kind of thing that is neither mind nor matter is real.  And he would reject the property dualist claim that only material substances are real, albeit some of them have non-material properties.  (Into the bargain, he does not use the term “property” the same way that contemporary philosophers do, but that is a secondary point.)
It seems to me, however, that there is a sense in which Aquinas might arguably be classified as a property dualist, though certainly not a property dualist of the usual kind.  Again, contemporary property dualists hold that only material substances exist.  Aquinas disagrees with that, in part because he thinks that there are purely immaterial intellectual substances (namely angels).  But I think he would also reject the suggestion that a material substance could have non-material properties.  For Aquinas, the world exhibits an ontological hierarchy, from purely material things at the bottom to God at the top.  Things higher up in the hierarchy can be the source of things lower down, but not vice versa.  And a material substance with immaterial properties would seem to violate that principle.  It would be like an inorganic substance with vegetative properties.  Such a thing simply wouldn’t really be inorganic, and a material substance with immaterial properties simply wouldn’t really be a material substance.
But what about human beings, you ask?  Doesn’t Aquinas think of them as material substances with immaterial properties?  I’m inclined to say that that is not quite his view, or not quite what his view should be, given his broader metaphysical principles.  This is where the neglected option that contemporary philosophers of mind might have seen, but seem not to, comes in.  The idea of a material substance with both material and non-material properties is only one of two possible ways of spelling out property dualism.  Another way of doing so would be in terms of the idea of an immaterial substance with both material and non-material properties.  And that, I suggest, is essentially what Aquinas took a human being to be.
As I have argued elsewhere, most recently in an essay for the Blackwell Companion series, the Thomistic thesis that the soul is the form of the body is often misunderstood.  Many people read it as saying that the soul is the form of a substance that is entirely bodily, just as the soul of a dog or a tree is the form of a substance that is entirely bodily.  Then they find it puzzling that Aquinas could go on to say that the human soul subsists after death.  For how could the human soul continue after death if it is the form of the body and the body is gone, any more than the soul of a dog or of a tree could subsist after death?
But this misunderstands the Thomistic thesis.  The human soul is the form of a substance which has both bodily operations (like breathing, walking, seeing, etc.) and non-bodilyones (like thinking).  Because it is what gives the substance in question the bodily operations in question, it is, naturally, the form of the body.  But it doesn’t follow that the substance in question is entirely bodily, the way that a dog or a tree is.  It is not.  Even when alive, part of what we do (thinking and willing) isn’t entirely tied to the body in the first place.  That’s why the death of a human being does not entail his annihilation.  He carries on in a highly truncated state, reduced to his intellect and will – as an incomplete substance, as Aquinas says. 
And what kind of incomplete substance is that?  An immaterial one, naturally, since the body is gone.  As Aquinas writes:
It must necessarily be allowed that the principle of intellectual operation which we call the soul, is a principle both incorporeal and subsistent…
[T]he intellectual principle which we call the mind or the intellect has an operation per se apart from the body. Now only that which subsists can have an operation "per se." For nothing can operate but what is actual: for which reason we do not say that heat imparts heat, but that what is hot gives heat. We must conclude, therefore, that the human soul, which is called the intellect or the mind, is something incorporeal and subsistent.
End quote.  Now, a human being is one substance, not two.  Again, Aquinas rejects the Platonic view of the soul and would reject the Cartesian substance dualist view as too similar to it.  But a human being is not an angel, because angels have no bodily properties or operations at all and human beings do.  The implication seems clearly to be that a human being is an immaterial substance that has material or bodily operations and properties as well as immaterial ones.  In which case Aquinas is a property dualist of a sort.  And notice here that “property” in Aquinas’s sense of that term (and not just in the contemporary analytic philosopher’s sense of the term) is indeed the right word, because our bodily activities (again, breathing, walking, seeing, etc.) are indeed proper to us.  They are proper accidents of a human being rather than merely contingent ones.  A human being in his mature and healthy state will exhibit these bodily properties, which is why death is for Aquinas not a liberation (as it is for Plato).  It is, as I have put it elsewhere, something like a “full body amputation” – the loss of all of the bodily properties that a complete and fully functioning specimen of our kind would exhibit, leaving only the non-bodily properties.
Again, I say this tentatively.  Aquinas was not addressing precisely the issues contemporary philosophers are, and he does not use the relevant terminology in exactly the same way.  So a claim like “Aquinas was a kind of property dualist” is bound to be easily misunderstood.  It is bound to raise in some people’s minds connotations that I do not intend and that Aquinas would not accept.  But it seems to me that, suitably qualified, there is a sense in which it is true.
Further reading:
Was Aquinas a dualist?
Was Aquinas a materialist?
What is a soul?
So, what are you doing after your funeral?

Time-sensitive Turkey Day tweets (Updated)

UPDATE 12/10: I'm told that the Gordon-Carrier debate has been cancelled and may be rescheduled for another date.

Palgrave Macmillan announces a Cyber Week Sale until December 3.  Good time to pick up that copy of Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics you’ve been pining for.
Readers in the Los Angeles area might be interested to know that there will be a debate on December 13 at 7 pm between Catholic writer Timothy Gordon and atheist Richard Carrier, at St. Therese Catholic Church in Alhambra.

Time-sensitive Turkey Day tweets

Palgrave Macmillan announces a Cyber Week Sale until December 3.  Good time to pick up that copy of Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics you’ve been pining for.
Readers in the Los Angeles area might be interested to know that there will be a debate on December 13 at 7 pm between Catholic writer Timothy Gordon and atheist Richard Carrier, at St. Therese Catholic Church in Alhambra.

The Last Superstition in French

My book The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism is now available in a French translation.  The book is also available in Portugueseand German. 
While we're on the subject of translations, I suppose I might offer a reminder that Five Proofs of the Existence of God and Philosophy of Mind are also available in German, and that a book of some of my essays is available in Romanian.

Against candy-ass Christianity

The Mr. Rogers biopic, with Tom Hanks in the starring role, comes out this week and has been getting a lot of positive attention – in some cases, embarrassingly rapturous attention.  This might seem surprising coming from Hollywood types and secular liberals, given that Rogers was a Presbyterian minister.  But of course, Rogers’ adherence to Christian teaching has nothing to do with it.  Commenting on the movie, Angelus magazine reports that “Hanks mentions that Rogers was indeed an ordained minister but seems to take comfort that Rogers ‘never mentioned God in his show.’”  In the movie’s trailer, a man says to Mr. Rogers “You love broken people, like me,” to which Rogers replies “I don’t think you are broken” – never mind the doctrine of original sin. So, why the adulation?  The movie poster reminds us that “we could all use a little kindness.”  The Daily Beast story linked to above tells us that Rogers was America’s “one true hero” and that “Hanks could very well be a living saint,” all because of their extraordinary… “niceness.”  Indeed, “Tom Hanks playing Mr. Rogers may save us all,” because the movie reminds us that “the world we live in now still does have niceness in it.”
Niceness.  Well, it has its place.  But the Christ who angrily overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, who taught a moral code more austere than that of the Pharisees, and who threatened unrepentant sinners with the fiery furnace, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, was not exactly “nice.”
Now, my point is not to criticize Rogers himself, who I’m sure was a decent fellow, and who was, after all, simply hosting a children’s program.  I don’t know anything about his personal theological opinions, and I don’t know whether the movie accurately represents them or even refers to them at all.  The point is to comment on the idea that an inoffensive “niceness” is somehow the essence of the true Christian, or at least of any Christian worthy of the liberal’s respect.  For it is an idea that even a great many churchmen seem to have bought into. 
This is evident from the innumerable vapid sermons one hears about God’s love and acceptance and forgiveness, but never about divine judgment or the moral teachings to which modern people are most resistant – and which, precisely for that reason, they most need to hear expounded and defended.  And it is evident in the tendency of modern Catholic bishops to emphasize dialogue and common ground rather than conversion, orthodoxy, and doctrinal precision, and to speak of the Church’s teachings on sexual morality, if at all, only half-apologetically, in vague and soft language, and in a manner hedged with endless qualifications. 
Such “niceness” is in no way a part of Christian morality.  It is a distortion of the virtues of meekness(which is simply moderation in anger – as opposed to too much or too little anger), and friendliness(which is a matter of exhibiting the right degree of affability necessary for decent social order – as opposed to too little affability or too much). 
As always, St. Thomas illuminates where modern churchmen obfuscate.  Where meekness is concerned, Aquinas notes that just as anger should not be excessive or directed at the wrong object, so too can one be deficient in anger, and that this too can be sinful.  For anger is nature’s way of prodding us to act to set things right when they are in some way disordered.  The absence of anger in cases where it is called for is, for that reason, a moral defect, and a habit of responding to evils with insufficient anger is a vice.  Thus, as Aquinas writes in Summa Theologiae II-II.158.1:
Chrysostom says: “He that is angry without cause, shall be in danger; but he that is angry with cause, shall not be in danger: for without anger, teaching will be useless, judgments unstable, crimes unchecked.” Therefore to be angry is not always an evil…
[I]f one is angry in accordance with right reason, one's anger is deserving of praise …
It is unlawful to desire vengeance considered as evil to the man who is to be punished, but it is praiseworthy to desire vengeance as a corrective of vice and for the good of justice.
And as he adds in Summa Theologiae II-II.158.8:
[As] Chrysostom says: “He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins.  For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but even the good to do wrong.” …
Anger… [is] a simple movement of the will, whereby one inflicts punishment, not through passion, but in virtue of a judgment of the reason: and thus without doubt lack of anger is a sin…
Hence the movement of anger in the sensitive appetite cannot be lacking altogether, unless the movement of the will be altogether lacking or weak.  Consequently lack of the passion of anger is also a vice, even as the lack of movement in the will directed to punishment by the judgment of reason…
The lack of anger is a sign that the judgment of reason is lacking.
End quote.  On the subject of friendliness or affability, Aquinas notes that just as one can be deficient in this trait and thus difficult for others to get along with, it is also possible to go too far in the other direction.  In Summa Theologiae II-II.114.1he writes:
[F]or the sake of some good that will result, or in order to avoid some evil, the virtuous man will sometimes not shrink from bringing sorrow to those among whom he lives… For this reason we should not show a cheerful face to those who are given to sin, in order that we may please them, lest we seem to consent to their sin, and in a way encourage them to sin further.
And in Summa Theologiae II-II.115.1he describes such excess as a vice opposed to genuine friendliness:
[A]lthough the friendship of which we have been speaking, or affability, intends chiefly the pleasure of those among whom one lives, yet it does not fear to displease when it is a question of obtaining a certain good, or of avoiding a certain evil.  Accordingly, if a man were to wish always to speak pleasantly to others, he would exceed the mode of pleasing, and would therefore sin by excess.  If he do this with the mere intention of pleasing he is said to be “complaisant,” according to the Philosopher (Ethic. iv, 6).
To be “complaisant” in this sense is to be agreeable, amiable, or keen to please.  It is, in short, to be Mr. Rogers-like.  And that is not only not per se Christ-like, it can, as Aquinas says, even be sinful if what is called for is talk that is bracingly frank and displeasing.
What is the root of these vices masquerading as the pseudo-virtue of “niceness”?  I would suggest that it is twofold, in part an error of the intellect and in part a malady of the will.  The intellectual error is the one that Pope Leo XIII referred to as “Americanism” – in particular, the
principle… that, in order to more easily attract those who differ from her, the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions to new opinions.  Many think that these concessions should be made not only in regard to ways of living, but even in regard to doctrines which belong to the deposit of the faith.  They contend that it would be opportune, in order to gain those who differ from us, to omit certain points of her teaching which are of lesser importance, and to tone down the meaning which the Church has always attached to them. 
End quote.  This is essentially the mentality that has come to prevail in the decades since Vatican II.  Eternal damnation, the necessity of conversion to the Catholic faith, the immorality of contraception, and many other unpopular doctrines are simply not much talked about, and are hedged and softened and deemphasized on the rare occasions when they are talked about.  By contrast, the rhetoric of freedom, human dignity, dialogue and ecumenism, and other themes and jargon congenial to the liberal mindset are trumpeted as if they were somehow at the very heart of Catholicism.  The stern gravitas of the Fathers, Doctors, and saints has with many churchmen been replaced by a back-slapping, glad-handing affability. 
Predictably, this has resulted, not in people being drawn to the Church in greater numbers, but rather in a massive decline in observance and orthodoxy among Catholics, and a general assumption among Catholics and non-Catholics alike that the unpopular doctrines are not really important after all and will inevitably be abandoned.
The malady of the will that underlies the contemporary Christian fetish for “niceness” is the one Aquinas labeled effeminacy, by which he meant a softness in the face of even relatively mild difficulties.  In Summa Theologiae II-II.138.1, he explains:
[F]or a man to be ready to forsake a good on account of difficulties which he cannot endure… is what we understand by effeminacy, because a thing is said to be “soft” if it readily yields to the touch.  Now a thing is not declared to be soft through yielding to a heavy blow, for walls yield to the battering-ram.  Wherefore a man is not said to be effeminate if he yields to heavy blows… [P]roperly speaking an effeminate man is one who withdraws from good on account of sorrow caused by lack of pleasure, yielding as it were to a weak motion.
End quote.  Effeminacy in this sense is rife among modern churchmen, who seem to fear controversy above all things, and especially controversy that might earn them the disdain of the secular liberal intelligentsia.  And for most of the last few decades, the worst they would have faced is some bad press.  The way Western culture is turning now, they will probably face far worse than that in the not too distant future – and will face it precisely because they did not speak and act boldly and consistently enough when bad press was all they had to fear.  Appeasement only ever breeds contempt among those appeased, and spurs them to greater evil.
In the end, pseudo-Christian “niceness” will only doom both those who practice it and those they fear to offend.  In the book of Ezekiel, God famously warns those placed as “watchmen” over his people:
If I say to the wicked, O wicked man, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand.  But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way; he shall die in his iniquity, but you will have saved your life. (Ezekiel 33: 8-9)
Churchmen take note: A little more harshness might just save your soul, and the souls for which you are responsible – but nice guys finish last.

Join the Ur-Platonist alliance!

What’s in a name?  I’m an unreconstructed Thomist, but I would be the last to deny that it is a mistake to think that one man, Thomas Aquinas, somehow got everything right all by himself.  Aquinas was, of course, part of a much larger tradition that extends back to the ancient Greek philosophers.  Much of his achievement had to do with synthesizing the best elements from the different strands of thought he inherited from his predecessors, especially the Platonic-Augustinian and Aristotelian traditions.  And of course, his successors added further important elements to the mix.  Hence in some contexts, it is useful to employ a label that captures this breadth more clearly than “Thomism” does – such as “Aristotelico-Thomism” or, more broadly still, “Scholasticism.”  Indeed, I’m especially fond of the “Scholastic” label, and would urge its widespread adoption by young Catholic philosophers and theologians – in part for substantive reasons, but also in part as a way of showing solidarity with a group of thinkers who were the greatest the Church has produced, yet who have for too long been unjustly maligned even by some of their fellow Catholics.
However, especially where the issues do not have to do with specifically Catholic theology, but are of broader philosophical concern, even the “Scholastic” label can sometimes be too narrow.  There is a set of ideas and arguments that have their origin in Plato and Aristotle and are the common possession of later pagan thinkers like Plotinus, Jewish thinkers like Maimonides, and Muslim thinkers like Avicenna and Averroes, as well as the Church Fathers and the great Scholastics.  The label “classical theism” captures the shared philosophical theology of this diverse group, and “classical natural law” captures their shared ethical perspective.  But there are yet other philosophical themes that aren’t captured by these labels.
The 19thcentury Neo-Scholastic Josef Kleutgen suggested another label in the title of his important and recently translated book Pre-Modern Philosophy Defended .  Yet other labels sometimes used during the Neo-Scholastic era include “classical realism” and “the perennial philosophy.”  The trouble with these last two labels is that they are somewhat vague, and have been deployed by others in very different contexts to connote ideas that have nothing essentially to do with the thinkers mentioned above.
Now, there is another way to think about the tradition I’m describing, which has been developed by Lloyd Gerson in his important books Aristotle and Other Platonists and From Plato to Platonism (soon to be joined by a third volume titled Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy ).  In an excellent recent talk at the Thomistic Institute’s Student Leadership Conference at the Dominican House of Studies, Fr. James Brent proposed adopting Gerson’s framework as a way of understanding contemporary secularism.  Fr. Brent suggests that the conflict between secularism and traditional religious believers isn’t merely a dispute over the existence of God, but amounts to a larger conflict between philosophical naturalism on the one hand and what Gerson calls “Ur-Platonism” or “big tent” Platonism on the other.
As the title of the first of his books referred to above indicates, Gerson sees Aristotle as part of the Platonist tradition broadly construed, and that is in fact how many of the ancients also saw him.  Of course, Aristotle disagreed with Plato on some important points, but this disagreement took place against a background of agreement on the philosophical fundamentals.  Gerson also argues for a return to the ancient view that the thinking of so-called “Neo-Platonists” like Plotinus (who thought of themselves as simply Platonists full stop, and who also regarded Aristotle as part of the Platonist club) was in fact continuous with that of Plato, rather than marking some break or novelty.  Gerson proposes a couple of ways of spelling out the nature of the broad agreement that existed between these thinkers.
In From Plato to Platonism, he suggests that the common core of “Ur-Platonism” can be characterized in negative terms, as a conjunction of five “antis”: anti-materialism, anti-mechanism, anti-nominalism, anti-relativism, and anti-skepticism.  Together these elements make up a sixth “anti-,” namely anti-naturalism.  Thinkers in the Ur-Platonist tradition spell out the implications of this conjunction of “antis” in ways that differ in several details, but certain common themes tend to emerge, such as the thesis that ultimate explanation requires positing a non-composite divine cause, the immateriality of the intellect, and the objectivity of morality.  In his talk, Fr. Brent follows this approach to characterizing the tradition.
In Aristotle and Other Platonists, Gerson proposed a positive characterization of the tradition, as comprising seven key themes: 1. The universe has a systematic unity; 2. This unity reflects an explanatory hierarchy and in particular a “top-down” approach to explanation (as opposed to the “bottom-up” approach of naturalism), especially in the two key respects that the simple is prior to the complex and the intelligible is prior to the sensible; 3. The divine constitutes an irreducible explanatory category, and is to be conceived of in personal terms (even if in some Ur-Platonist thinkers the personal aspect is highly attenuated); 4. The psychological also constitutes an irreducible explanatory category; 5. Persons are part of the hierarchy and their happiness consists in recovering a lost position within it, in a way that can be described as “becoming like God”; 6. Moral and aesthetic value is to be analyzed by reference to this metaphysical hierarchy; and 7. The epistemological order is contained with this metaphysical order.
If Gerson and Fr. Brent are right, then arguably the two main competing visions in the history of Western thought are represented by Ur-Platonists on the one hand, and on the other hand those who defend the positions that Ur-Platonists are against (namely materialism, mechanism, nominalism, relativism, and skepticism), and especially philosophical naturalists.  (I don’t mean to deny that there are thinkers who don’t unambiguously fall into either of these camps.  Of course there are.  But I think it can be argued that these are the main tendencies, and that even thinkers that don’t clearly fall into one or the other at least tend in the direction of the one or the other.)
The main downside to the “Ur-Platonist” label is that the term “Platonism” is these days usually used by academic philosophers to refer to the thesis that there are abstract objects (such as Platonic Forms and mathematical objects) existing in a “third realm” distinct from either the material world or any mind.  But as Gerson argues, historically speaking that is in fact much too narrow a way of using the term.  For example, it isn’t what the Church Fathers mean when they talk about Platonism, and it isn’t what the so-called “Neo-Platonists” mean when they talk about Platonism.  Consider also that when naturalist thinkers like Nietzsche and Richard Rorty use “Platonism” as a pejorative term to describe what they are fundamentally against, they don’t mean merely the thesis that there are abstract objects.  Rather, what they mean to oppose is precisely the broad tradition that Gerson calls “Ur-Platonism.”
If the naturalists are the bad guys, then “Ur-Platonists” is as good a label as any for the good guys.  I recommend giving Fr. Brent’s talk a listen, and all serious students of philosophy and theology are well-advised to study Gerson’s work.

Oppy and Lim on Five Proofs

Graham Oppy’s article “On stage one of Feser’s ‘Aristotelian proof’”, which responds to some of the arguments I give in Five Proofs of the Existence of God , has recently been posted at the website of the journal Religious Studies.  I will be writing up a response.  (In the meantime, readers who have not seen it may be interested in my recent debate with Oppy on Capturing Christianity.) 
In the Fall 2019 issue of Nova et Vetera, Joshua Lim kindly reviews Five Proofs.  From the review: Each chapter on a given proof is divided into two stages.  In the first stage, Feser begins with a description (first mover, incomposite being, necessary being, etc.) and argues for the existence of a thing that corresponds to that description.  In the second stage, he shows how that thing must also have various attributes that are typically ascribed to God (simplicity, unity, goodness, intelligence, omnipotence, etc.)…
It is the second stage of this twofold division that constitutes the most helpful contribution of Feser’s work.  Contrasting Feser’s two-stage manner of proceeding with Thomas’s famous quinque viae in Summa theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3, highlights the former’s advantages…
[T]he relationship between the being whose existence is proven (i.e., God) and the attributes that are traditionally predicated of God (simplicity, immutability, goodness, intelligence, perfection, and so on) is shown more quickly and directly…
Insofar as natural theology falls under the purview of both theology and philosophy, this book is a good primer for budding philosophers and theologians on how natural theology is done… Feser’s work will greatly benefit both kinds of thinkers.

Two popes and idolatry

How bad can a bad pope get?  Pretty bad.  Here are two further examples from history.  Marcellinus was pope from c. 296 – 304.  During his pontificate, Emperor Diocletian initiated a persecution of the Christians, requiring the surrender of sacred texts and the offering of incense to the Roman gods.  Marcellinus and some of his clergy apparently complied, though Marcellinus is also said to have repented of this after a few days and to have suffered martyrdom as a result.  Some claim that by virtue of his compliance he was guilty of a formal apostasy that resulted in loss of the papal office, though his purported repentance and martyrdom also led to his veneration and recognition as a saint. But exactly what happened is controversial among historians.  St. Augustine denied that Marcellinus was really guilty of the sins in question.  On the other hand, other ancient sources claim that he was, and the later pope Damasus I omitted reference to Marcellinus when paying tribute to his predecessors.  Nor is it clear whether Marcellinus really did either suffer martyrdom or lose his office.
However, that Marcellinus could have been guilty of these sins has not been denied by orthodox Catholic theologians, because it is not ruled out by the conditions under which a pope teaches infallibly.  Indeed, in Book 4, Chapter VIII of On the Roman Pontiff, St. Robert Bellarmine judges that it is “certain” that Marcellinus “sacrificed to idols.”  He also thinks that Marcellinus did not ipso facto lose the papal office, because he acted out of fear.
John XII, who was pope from 955 – 964, was one of the most debauched men ever to sit on the throne of Peter.  He is said to have confiscated the offerings left at the altar for his personal use, to have violated female pilgrims to Rome and effectively to have turned the Lateran palace into a brothel, and to have died while in bed with another man’s wife – on one account as a result of a stroke, and on another at the hands of the cuckold who caught him in the act.  John was also said to have invoked the names of the pagan gods while gambling. 
John brought the office of the papacy into widespread disrepute, and the period was marked by bitter factional conflict.  He was deposed by a synod in Rome, in part on grounds of “sacrilege,” and replaced by Pope Leo VIII – though the legitimacy of this series of events was widely challenged, given papal primacy, and in any event John was able by threat of force to reverse this state of affairs and get himself reinstalled as pope and Leo excommunicated.  Those who had accused John were punished by scourging or bodily mutilation.  After John’s death, Leo was restored as pope – though only after another claimant to the papal office, Benedict V, was first elected and then deposed.  (At Benedict’s deposition – to which he apparently acquiesced – he was stripped of his papal regalia and his staff was broken over his head by Leo as Benedict lay prostrate.  They played for keeps in those days.)
These examples illustrate several important points.  First, popes can, consistent with the doctrine of papal infallibility, be guilty even of sins as grave as idolatry.  Second, when their sins touch on theological matters, as they do in these examples (and as they did in a very different way in the case of Pope Vigilius), Catholics have sometimes understandably been moved to question their legitimacy.  This is theologically problematic, and in my view it cannot plausibly be maintained that Marcellinus, Vigilius, or John XII lost the papal office.  However, whatever canonical chaos temporarily afflicted the Church during the times of these popes was ultimately their fault.  Certainly one can lay heavy blame on the churchmen who tried to depose John XII, and on the emperor Otto I, who played a major role in the events in question.  But the fact remains that it is John’s extremely scandalous behavior that prompted this overreaction.  It is the pope himself who is manifestly the villain of the story.
A further lesson, however, is that these incidents are also noteworthy precisely for their rare and fleeting character.  The theological and/or canonical chaos that bad popes like Vigilius, Honorius, Stephen VI, John XII, et al. inflict on the Church can be intense but it is also always temporary, and the Church eventually so thoroughly returns to order that the chaos is soon forgotten by all but historians and anti-Catholic propagandists scrambling to find evidence that the Church succumbed to error.  The Church can get very sick indeed for relatively short periods of time, but she also always gets better.  Naïve and sycophantic papal apologists refuse to see the first fact, and the anti-Catholic propagandists refuse to see the second. 
Further reading:
The strange case of Pope Vigilius
Popes, heresy, and papal heresy
Some comments on the open letter
The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances
Papal fallibility
Why Archbishop Viganò is almost certainly telling the truth
Denial flows into the Tiber

Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics

My article “Natural Law Ethics and the Revival of Aristotelian Metaphysics” appears in The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics , edited by Tom Angier.  You can find out more about the volume at the Cambridge University Press website and at Cambridge Core.

The strange case of Pope Vigilius

The increasingly strange pontificate of Pope Francis is leading many Catholics into increasingly strange behavior.  Some, like the emperor’s sycophants in the Hans Christian Anderson story, insist with ever greater shrillness that nothing Pope Francis does is ever really in the least bit problematic.  If your eyes seem plainly to be telling you otherwise, then it is, they insist, your lying eyes that are the problem.  Others, incapable of such self-deception, are driven into a panic by the pope’s manifestly problematic words and actions.  They overreact, either beating a retreat into sedevacantism or judging that the claims of Catholicism have been proven false and that the only recourse is Eastern Orthodoxy. This is all quite ridiculous, and evinces an ignorance of the theology and history of the papacy.  Both sides falsely assume that Catholic teaching rules out a pope’s being guilty of the errors the pope is accused of.  Hence the one side concludes that he must not really be guilty of them (all the evidence notwithstanding), and the other side concludes that either he must not really be a pope or that Catholicism must not be true.
In fact, popes are in principle capable of a fairly wide range of errors of governance and even of teaching, when not speaking in a manner that meets the strict criteria for an ex cathedradeclaration.  And in practice some popes have been guilty of very grave errors – witness the condemnation of Pope Honorius I by his successors for his failure to uphold orthodoxy, the notorious and bizarre Cadaver Synod of Pope Stephen VI, the sacrilege and Caligula-like lifestyle of Pope John XII, the doctrinal error for which Pope John XXII was criticized by the theologians of his day, and so on.  All of this is consistent with the doctrine of papal infallibility, because the fathers of Vatican I who defined the doctrine formulated the conditions under which a pope speaks infallibly very precisely, and in a way that took account of this history. 
I have discussed the examples just cited on earlier occasions.  (See the posts linked to at the end of this one.)  Another instructive example, one perhaps especially relevant today, is that of Pope Vigilius (who was pope from 537-555).
The circumstances under which Vigilius became pope were scandalous.  His predecessor Boniface II had wanted Vigilius, a Roman deacon, to succeed him as pope, but the Roman clergy resisted this and Boniface withdrew the nomination.  Vigilius later became instead a nuncio to Constantinople, where he also became a confidant of the eastern Roman empress Theodora, the wife of Justinian.  Now, Theodora was a monophysite, and keen to reverse the fortunes of this heresy.  She made a secret pact with Vigilius, the terms of which were that in exchange for her getting him installed as pope, he would repudiate the Council of Chalcedon and reinstate a bishop who had been dismissed because of his adherence to the monophysite heresy.  Vigilius agreed.  The trouble was that a new pope, Silverius, had already been elected.  So Justinian’s general Belisarius pressured Silverius to resign, and when that failed, had Silverius deposed on trumped up charges.  He then forced through a new election, by which Vigilius was made pope.  Naturally, some questioned the legitimacy of this procedure.  Hence, so as to ensure that Silverius would not be restored to the papal throne, Vigilius had his predecessor exiled.  While in exile, Silverius suffered great hardships, seems to have abdicated under pressure, and soon died.  Vigilius’s legitimacy was at this point recognized by all the Roman clergy.
Vigilius’s pontificate was doctrinally problematic as well.  As pope, he would end up pleasing neither the monophysite heretics nor the orthodox, though he tried to appease both.  Privately he appears at first to have assured the monophysites that he sympathized with them, while also emphasizing that stealth was necessary in order to advance the monophysite cause.  However, he did not keep his end of the bargain with Theodora.  Moreover, he also later assured Justinian, who had turned against the monophysites, that he too was against them and would uphold Chalcedon. 
Now, the sequel was the notorious incident of the “Three Chapters.”  Justinian decided that to reconcile the monophysite heretics to orthodoxy, it would be a good idea to condemn the persons and works of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrus, and Ibas of Edessa.  Chalcedon had not challenged the orthodoxy of these theologians, and they had died in good standing with the Church.  But they were disliked by the monophysites, who suspected them of Nestorianism, an opposite extreme heresy from that of monophysitism.  The condemnation was seen as a way to placate the monophysites and to facilitate their reunion.  Justinian demanded that the bishops endorse this trio of condemnations (or “Three Chapters”), and many did so even if reluctantly.
The theological issues here were complex, but the basic problem was this.  On the one hand, some of the views of the three theologians in question were indeed problematic.  On the other hand, since the Council of Chalcedon had not questioned the orthodoxy of these men, condemning them was seen by many as unjust and even as an attack on Chalcedon.  Hence, signing on to Justinian’s condemnation was regarded by many to amount to a sell-out to the monophysite heretics.
Vigilius initially refused to sign on, but eventually, under pressure from Justinian, he agreed to do so.  For this he was denounced by many bishops for having betrayed Chalcedon, and a synod in Carthage even declared him excommunicated.  This led to Vigilius withdrawing his condemnation, though also to his calling for a council to settle the matter.  But after a long and complicated period of conflict with Justinian over the issue, Vigilius once again agreed, under pressure, to the Three Chapters condemnation.  Unsurprisingly, he was not popular when he died, and consequently was not buried in St. Peter’s.
What should we think of the legitimacy of Vigilius’s election, and of his orthodoxy?  It is widely agreed that the theological issues surrounding the Three Chapters are complicated, and that Vigilius’s understanding of them was impaired by his inability to read Greek (the language in which the relevant controversial documents were written).  His statements on the matter were also hedged with qualifications.  Moreover, Vigilius was under duress during much of the long controversy.  Certainly, then, if he erred in his public statements or actions, he did not do so in a way that conflicts with what the Church teaches about papal infallibility.  The conditions under which a pope might make an infallible ex cathedra pronouncement simply did not obtain.
But what about Vigilius’s personal orthodoxy?  In Book IV, Chapter 10 of his treatise On the Roman Pontiff, St. Robert Bellarmine considers, but rejects as unproved, the thesis proposed by some that a letter in which Vigilius had assured the monophysite heretics of his sympathy with them was a forgery.  He allows that Vigilius really did speak contrary to orthodoxy.  But he says that since the letter in question was written while Silverius was still alive, Vigilius was at the time not yet a true pope but an anti-pope!  AfterSilverius’s death, Bellarmine argues, Vigilius was a true pope – but also after that point never again expressed sympathy with monophysitism, and instead refused to keep his bargain with Theodora.
What we have, then, is a pope whom heterodox parties favored and schemed to get elected; who was made pope while his predecessor, who had been under pressure to resign, was still alive; whose legitimacy as pope was questioned by some as a result; and who was known for speaking out of both sides of his mouth and for ambiguous theological positions.  Sound familiar?
It should, because these features are claimed by many to fit Francis’s pontificate.  The pope’s doctrinally problematic statements (on Holy Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, capital punishment, etc.) are well known and have been discussed here in other posts.  Some have alleged, on grounds not all of which are entirely frivolous (though in my view still mistakenly), that the validity of Pope Francis’s election is doubtful.  Several arguments are given for this claim, one having to do with the allegation that Benedict XVI resigned under pressure, and thus invalidly.  Another has to do with alleged irregularities in the conclave, involving a purported agreement between liberal cardinals of the “St. Gallen Group” to do what they could to get Cardinal Bergoglio elected.  I don’t myself find these theories convincing, for reasons of the sort explained by canon lawyer Ed Peters. 
The most interesting of the theories concerns the claim that Benedict never fully renounced the papacy, but renounced only the “active” papal ministry (leaving that to Francis) while retaining a “contemplative” papal ministry.  The reason this is interesting is that the theory is grounded in some eyebrow-raising remarks from none other than Benedict’s close associate Archbishop Georg Gänswein – who proposed that Benedict has introduced just such an “expanded” Petrine ministry, and who was presumably speaking with the knowledge and approval of the former pope himself.  The notion of an “expanded” Petrine ministry certainly seems theologically problematic; there cannot be two popes at once.  But as an argument for the invalidity of Benedict’s resignation, this theory still faces a serious problem of its own – namely that Gänswein, once again surely speaking with the knowledge and approval of Benedict, has also insisted that Benedict did indeed resign, that there is only one pope, and that that pope is Francis.
The point is this.  Not only do the odd and unsavory aspects of recent papal history not entail either that Francis is not pope or that Catholicism is false, but as the example of Pope Vigilius shows, they are not unprecedented either.  This sort of thing sometimes happens.  It does not happen often, and when it does it is horrible and damaging to souls and to the Church.  But it does happen.
Why does Christ tolerate this?  Why the brinksmanship?  Why doesn’t he wake up already and calm the storm? 
In part, I would argue, precisely to prove that the Church is indestructible.  Even bad popes cannot destroy it, as history shows.  Catholics are well advised to learn more about this history, so as to get a more balanced and sober perspective on current events.  They might start with books like E. R. Chamberlin’s The Bad Popes , or Rod Bennett’s recent Bad Shepherds .  As St. John Henry Newman famously said, to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.  It is also to cease to be a naïve and worried Catholic.  Keep calm and do not abandon your Holy Mother Church in her hour of need.
Further reading:
Popes, heresy, and papal heresy
Some comments on the open letter
The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances
Papal fallibility
Why Archbishop Viganò is almost certainly telling the truth
Denial flows into the Tiber