Kindle Notes & Highlights
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September 10, 2020 - January 25, 2021
because it involves taking the reduplicative phrases as referring to parts.
qualifiedly to the whole is that it is borrowed by the whole from the part.
“X has a part R, and R is F”;
Because this reduces the meaning of the reduplicative sentence to claims about parts, we can call it (without prejudice) a “reductionist” version of the interpretation.
must not imply “Christ is passible” without qualification. There is, however, the following difficulty: There are seemingly
wholes can borrow features from their parts,
The topic of article 10 is whether it is true or false to say that Christ qua human is a creature
The objector is saying that from “X is F qua R,” it follows that whatever has R is, unqualifiedly, F. Therefore, if Christ qua human is a creature, then everything human is, unqualifiedly, a creature. But we know that not everything human is, unqualifiedly, a creature, because Christ (who is human) is not unqualifiedly a creature, something Aquinas had argued for in an earlier article. Therefore, we ought not to accept the claim that Christ qua human is a creature.
The word “human being,” insofar as it is placed in the subject position, looks more to [magis respicit] the supposit; but insofar as it is placed in the reduplication, it looks more to the nature, as was said. And because the nature is created, but the supposit is uncreated, therefore, although “This human being is a creature” is not granted unqualifiedly [simpliciter], nonetheless “Christ qua human is a creature” is granted.
When we say something about X qua R, the ‘R’ part of that sentence has more to do with – looks more to – the nature of X than to the supposit X itself.
The sentence for Aquinas implies something about the nature of X, not about the supposit X (and still less about every supposit sharing a nature with X). Although the supposit in question is not created, the human nature is, and therefore while one should not say that Christ is a creature unqualifiedly, one can say that he is a creature qualifiedly.
Christ, a supposit, exists in the unqualified sense; his human nature exists too, but only in a qualified sense.
Christ is not a creature, but there is a creature in him, i.e. his human nature.
Wholes, Aquinas says, can be named on the basis of their parts’ features only if those features are not suited by nature to belong to the wholes – we can call someone curly or lame, because really only hair is curly, and only feet are lame (these examples work better in Latin than in English).
The human nature is one of Christ’s parts, or anyway is sufficiently like one. And it is a creature. But whole supposits can be creatures too, so we should not just say that Christ is a creature; instead, we should say that he is a creature qua human, secundum hominem. And this will be figurative language.
semantic ascent
For this reason, we ought not to have words in common with heretics, lest we seem to be favoring their error.
Aquinas begins by saying that in Christology we sometimes have to use reduplication and sometimes not, and in saying this, he makes no mention of parts and wholes.
For an initial and cautious reading of this passage, I offer the following: “It is easy to run into problems when we engage in Christological talk, so we have to be careful. In particular, sometimes we have to make use of reduplicative qualifications, and other times we do not. That holds in the case at hand, when we are discussing whether Christ is a creature. And if this sounds like a totally made-up and ad hoc procedure, I will remind you that we already do it when we speak about physical, human things, as when we say that an Ethiopian is white according to his teeth.”
If we say that an Ethiopian is white, someone might think we are saying he is Caucasian, so we should specify that he is white teethwise; if we say that Christ is a creature, someone might think we are saying that he is less than the Father, so we should specify that he is a creature humanitywise.
proposed pragmatic interpretation of Aquinas,
the point of using qua-qualifications is to head off misunderstandings (some of which might have to do with parts and wholes, but some of which might not). This way of thinking about qua-phrases helps us to understand something puzzling that we saw earlier, namely, that Aquinas seems to say that qua-phrases are needed when we want to attribute to a person a feature that is suited by nature to belong to a person, but not needed when we want to attribute to a person a feature that is not suited by nature to belong to a person.
is almost as if Aquinas were telling us to put scare-quotes around words that are being used idiomatically, and not to put them around words that are being used unidiomatically.)
Even granting that, I can still maintain my account of qua-phrases. Even if Aquinas thinks that Christ is a creature because he has a created part, Aquinas wants us to say “qua human” not because of that mereological fact, but because he does not want to give aid and comfort to Arians.
Whether one uses reduplication is very much a pragmatic and contextual issue. Whether it is needed depends on who your interlocutor is, or who your anticipated reader is.
Consider again the claim that Christ suffered. Aquinas thought it obvious that this could not possibly be true in virtue of Christ’s divine nature, and so he says we can say “Christ suffered” without qualification. But in the twenty-first century, there is always process theology to think about, so if Aquinas were to come among us today, he would probably feel it necessary to say, “Christ suffered according to his human nature.”
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Determinate statements, like “Christ qua human is passible,” are stronger, more specific, more committal, more demanding:
am using “reduplicative” to mean any use of phrases like “qua human,” “insofar as he is human,”
On some topics, his view is not laid out very clearly (see Chapters 2 and 4); on others, he fails to arrive at a single stable position (see Chapter 5); on still others, he has very little to say at all (see Chapter 6). So while there is a point beyond
When listening to other people speak, we grasp what they say partly on the basis of the sounds we hear, and partly on the basis of what we consider it plausible for them to say.
what they are likely to say – our pre-judgments about it – are often indispensable factors in the listening process: Without even noticing, we sometimes fill in syllables that were drowned out by background noise, correct for misstatements, and
For example, consider a move discussed in Chapter 3. To address the problem of the Word’s immutability and impassibility, he does not invent a whole new set of notions from whole cloth; instead, he takes hold of a notion (mixed relation) that he had already deployed for the more general case of the God-creature relation, and then he makes a change to it, enough of a change to resolve a specific issue concerning the incarnation.
themselves. Whatever the reason, I think it is clear that an argument best worth listening to would include Aquinas. Putting it differently, Aquinas is an author one would do well to learn from. If this book has made it easier to do so, then its purpose has been accomplished.
