The Re-Emergent Interdisciplinary Nature of Scholarship

One of the complaints about scholarship these days, especially in the humanities but also in the natural sciences, is that each discipline has become so specialized, that it has become irrelevant to those on the outside. Young scholars in PhD programs are continually pushed to the marginalia in the search for new and original topics, and the dissertations they churn out are frequently so obscure and specific that nobody would read them except the author and their board.

My goal in this post is not to complain about over-specialization in scholarship but rather to suggest that over-specialization is not the way of the future. David Brooks’ op-ed in the New York Times this week, entitled “The Young and the Neuro,” addresses the necessarily-interdisciplinary nature of contemporary research being conducted in the humanities, and especially in cognitive neuroscience, which fuses the fields of bioetechnology, psychology, economics, as well as political science and ethics. Scholars involved in this emergent field are actually transversing disciplines, all in the hopes of trying to figure out how and why people interact in the way that they do.

The new interdisciplinary nature of such scholarship is a reaction against the reductionism we saw in the earlier part of the century, especially in the wake of new knowledge about genetics. A funny side note: in yesterday’s NYTimes crossword puzzle, one of the clues (33 across) was “essence of a person, one might say.” Not to spoil it for you, but the answer is DNA.

The research Mr. Brooks discusses challenges this notion that DNA actually is the essence of a person. People like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson wanted to use genetics to explain the essence of all human behavior. Ethics, once considered a branch of philosophy, entered into the natural sciences as scientists hypothesized and rapidly worked to confirm that one’s genetic constitution could explain why you as a person behaved the way you did. This field became known as sociobiology–the systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of behavior.

If the sociobiologists would have stuck to ethics, they would not have ruffled very many feathers. But sociobiologists also had to attempt to illustrate how genetics could even explain the great metaphysical questions faced by humankind such as the nature of the soul and the existence of God. What happened in the wake of such books like The God Delusion was a widespread religious reaction against science, especially science that extolled genetics as a causal mechanism or used the dreaded word “evolution.” This religious antithesis to the new work in biology, genetics, and evolution became another form of reductionism. Instead of using science to explain everything, the “theologians” and preachers and ordinary believers wanted to use God to explain everything.

Here is what both sides missed. Different fields explain different phenomena and answer different pressing questions raised by human beings. This was something Aquinas (drawing on the Greek heritage of Aristotle) recognized in distinguishing the practical from the speculative intellect. The practical intellect deals with the natural world, the world that is contingent, subject to decay and change and evolution. The practical intellect deals with sense data derived from sensuous consciousness, that is, with this particular human being, this particular triangle, this particular action.

The speculative intellect is concerned not with the contingent, but with the necessary, the universal, the unchanging. The speculative intellect is concerned with the immaterial. It wants to know not “this particular triangle” but rather, what is the essence of “triangle?” What is the universal form that makes particular triangles come into being? The speculative intellect is not concerned with this particular action, but rather with the question of causation–what are the universal forces that causes anything at all to happen?

The practical intellect deals with what Aristotle called the practical sciences: physics, ethics, politics. The speculative intellect deals with the mother of all science: metaphysics (literally, “above or beyond the physics.”) Aquinas recognized in light of his theological preoccupations that even this neat division was not truly in accordance with reality with the recognition that theology was both speculative (metaphysical) and practical (ethical and political). That is, our study of God is primarily speculative but imminently practical. Theology is speculative because it deals principally with divine things which are immaterial, but secondarily practical because it is concerned with human acts insofar as these acts lead the person to beatitude. So even theology, the premier metaphysical pursuit becomes interdisciplinary in Aquinas’ work. The larger part of the Summa theologiae (“sum of theology”) deals with practical matters, what we would now call ethics.

But Aquinas’ ethics are a theological, and hence, interdisciplinary ethics. His ethics are most certainly theological in the sense that all human acts must be properly considered as part of the life in the spirit. Charity, the most important theological virtue, is the form and mother not just of the theological virtues, but of all the virtues, including the human or moral virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. Thomas’ sum of theology shows how biology, anthropology, politics, ethics, economics, metaphysics, and theology are interwoven, each answering different particular questions in order to draw the really important conclusions concerning why we (humans) are here on this earth, what we are supposed to be doing while we are here, and where we are ultimately meant to end up.

In Aquinas’ day, he could be a theologian, an ethicist, a political scientist, an economist, and an anthropologist, but such “renaissance men” were thought to have been long-extinct in the contemporary period in light of the increasing specialization of each of the disciplines. We assumed that to really know anything in the wake of the proliferation of knowledge that followed the modern scientific, industrial, and technological revolutions, you had to be a specialist.

What Brooks’ article indicates to my Thomistic eyes is that we are beginning to re-recognize the important ways in which the practical and speculative concerns overlap, the dangers of reductionism, and the importance of interdisciplinary pursuits in drawing the right sort of conclusions about the questions we are asking. As Brooks points out, we now know the important influence that genetics has on our behavior. But we are beginning to recognize also how complementary processes of social interactions and culture influences genetics and physiology. He writes,

All of these studies are baby steps in a long conversation, and young academics are properly circumspect about drawing broad conclusions. But eventually their work could give us a clearer picture of what we mean by fuzzy words like ‘culture.’ It could also fill a hole in our understanding of ourselves. Economists, political scientists and policy makers treat humans as ultrarational creatures because they can’t define and systematize the emotions. This work is getting us closer to that. . .

The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. It shines attention on the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments. It may even help policy wonks someday see people as they really are.

The challenge faced by young scholars like myself is no longer how to get my questions and my language specific enough to generate a new idea. Rather, young scholars are faced with the new challenge of how to gain a broad enough base of knowledge to re-ask the really old questions without dabbling too much, or drawing conclusions that are too broad to actually be meaningful.

My own dissertation asks how we can integrate a moral theological discourse into the already-interdisciplinary discourse about eating disorders, that is, anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Researchers have already acknowledged that eating disorders are physiological, biomedical, psychological, and sociological disorders; I argue that they are also moral disorders. So if you want to really know why people have eating disorders and what can be done about it, you need more that psychology, biomedicine, and sociology. You also need ethics, metaphysics, and yes, even theology.

Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse and Thomistic Anthropology

My husband and I are big Joss Whedon fans, probably because his shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and most recently Dollhouse), have such interesting philosophical and theological components. Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse is perhaps his most thoroughly philosophical.

The premise of the show is that the “Dollhouse” is a powerful, cutting edge organization that recruits young, beautiful individuals to be “dolls,” to have their brains wiped and memories erased so that they can be uploaded with different personalities to serve the needs of the Dollhouse clients. The leading scientist, the nerdy Topher, has designed a technology to quickly and practically effortlessly install the dolls’ brains with complete personalities, including memories, skills like rockclimbing and breaking into bank safes, and emotional connections with other people.

The most recent episode, starring, as always, Eliza Dushku as the evolving doll Echo, includes a new twist, as Topher figures out a way to change Echo on a glandular level in order to meet the demands of a distraught Dollhouse client who recently lost his wife in childbirth and can’t bond with his son. The man needs a mother for his son, and the Dollhouse provides. The opening scene shows Echo nuzzling an adorable baby as she breastfeeds him while her “husband” sleeps in the next room.

The client, Nate, quickly comes to recognize that the doll Echo is not his wife, and that hiring the Dollhouse to provide a mother for his son was a mistake. He calls the Dollhouse, demanding they remove her “or he’ll get rid of the baby,” while Echo surreptitiously listens at the door. Echo, fully installed with maternal instincts and lactating breasts, fears that her son is in danger, and desperately tries to escape.

She is almost successful. Echo is a remarkable doll in the show’s ongoing storyline, who is always sharp, smart, and talented, no matter what her personality, and always equipped with the best survival instincts. Her handler, Paul Ballard, ends up having to drag her screaming from a police station, while the father goes to recover his child. Even the standard calming line “Would you like a treatment,” fails to soothe the maternal Echo who fully believes that her child has been stolen from her.

When Topher goes to wipe the personality, returning Echo to the irenic “doll” state in which she walks around in pajamas and talks in naïve monotone, the story gets particularly interested. Echo’s maternal instinct doesn’t get wiped. When Topher asks her how she feels, Echo, half doll and half mother, punches Topher and makes for the exit, showing up at Nate’s house with the baby and a knife in hand, still fighting to keep her child.

When asked what went wrong, Topher responds:

“Maternal instinct is too strong for a normal wipe. I outplayed myself. . . Perhaps triggering lactation was a bridge too far.”

The father is eventually able to talk Echo down, explaining to her that he hired her to be a mother because he could not be a father, but that the real mother is a part of his son. Echo is not. In a poignant realization of what she is, a doll and not a mother, Echo hands over the baby. The next scene shows her in a playground, as Paul Ballard tentatively approaches.

Echo: I had a baby, now I don’t have him anymore. I feel sad. All of these things that happen to me, I feel them.
Paul: I know, Echo. I know you remember everything.
Echo: Not remember. Feel. I was married, I felt love. And pain, fear. It’s not pretend for me. They made me love my little boy, and then they took him away. They make it so real, every time, they make it so real. Why do they do that?. . .

Paul: If you want I can tell Topher what is going on with you and he can wipe you. You won’t have to feel sad anymore.
Echo: Feeling nothing would be worse. That would be like being asleep, like before. I’m awake now. I don’t want to go back to sleep.

What is so interesting about this episode from an EverydayThomist perspective is that Joss Whedon is implicitly endorsing an Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology. For Aristotle and Aquinas, form subsists in matter. This means that the form of a person, their soul if you will, is not contained or trapped in the body, but is an integral, inseparable part of the body.

In Aristotelian studies, this concept is pitted against a Platonic metaphysic and anthropology that sees the body and soul or the matter and form of a substance as two different opposing realities that are connected, but not necessarily so, in the human person. For Plato, the human person is primarily spirit. The matter, and this includes the entire sensitive appetite including the emotions, is unnecessary, transitory, and disruptive. Aristotle argued against such a dualistic anthropology that body and soul were what made a human being a person. Matter, including the emotions, is not disruptive but necessary. The human form cannot subsist without matter.

In Thomist studies, this concept is referred to as Aquinas’ hylomorphic anthropology, hyle meaning “matter” and morphe meaning “form.” The passions or emotions like love and fear which Dushku mentions in the above quote must be understood in light of this hylomorphism. The subject of the passions is not only the body, nor is it only the soul, but is rather the substance, the unification of the two. The passions are accidents which are predicated of the hylomorphic unity of the person who can only subsist as both body and soul.

Every passion, therefore, involves a psychosomatic change in the person. This means that every passion, properly understood, effects both the immaterial soul of the person and the material body. This is not a question of cause and effect, as it was for the neo-Platonist Descartes who assumed that the immaterial mind/soul of the person was affected by the passions emerging from the body. Rather, the psychosomatic movement of the passions is a unified event for Aquinas. One quippy way of putting this is that every act of love is also an act of knowledge, and every act of knowledge is also an act of love. The intellect and the passions, the soul and body, the form and matter, are always moving as a unified, hylomorphic unity.

A more Cartesian anthropology assumes that the mind is the controlling force of the person. In other words, Descarte’s cogito, ergo sum posits that the person is a subject who thinks, or a mind who happens to have a body. The body, and the emotions, are not essential to anthropology (although there is some debate about whether this is a caricature of Descartes. Another story for another blogpost).

What Joss Whedon gives us in Dollhouse is a challenge to this Cartesian metaphysics and anthropology. Topher assumes that the mind is the operating principle of the person—change the brain, change the person. Moreover, he assumes that the brain controls the body as he illustrates in this episode. With the proper changes to the brain, Echo goes from gun-fighting superwoman to lactating mama.

But the person, as “Instinct” cleverly points out, does not subsist just in the mind or the form of the person, but in the body itself. Echo does not just think as her infused personalities do, she also feels the way they do. And when Topher wipes her brain at the end of each mission, what he fails to recognize is that he cannot fully wipe each personality because each personality is somehow in Echo’s body, and specifically in her sensitive appetite which is still left with the somatic imprint of the psychosomatic emotional changes that each of her personalities experienced.

In contemporary Thomistic studies, this is becoming more of an important point, post-Grisez and Finnis who, along with the other neo-Thomists, assigned too much control to reason, and neglected the dynamism of the sensitive appetite in Aquinas’ philosophical anthropology. This mistake was based on a larger cultural assumption that the “mind over matter” mentality encapsulated what it meant to be a human being. More recently, we are rediscovering the importance of human matter in moral psychology. Joss Whedon’s “Instinct” perhaps unwittingly pointed that out. Another point for the Thomists.

Two Forms of Judgment: Judgment per modum cognitionis and per modum inclinationis

Aquinas distinguishes between two types of knowledge at the beginning of the Summa Theologiae that correspond to two modes of judging. The first is judgment by cognition (per modum cognitionis), the second is judgment by inclination (per modum inclinationis):

Since judgment appertains to wisdom, the twofold manner of judging produces a twofold wisdom. A man may judge in one way by inclination, as whoever has the habit of a virtue judges rightly of what concerns that virtue by his very inclination towards it. Hence it is the virtuous man, as we read, who is the measure and rule of human acts. In another way, by knowledge, just as a man learned in moral science might be able to judge rightly about virtuous acts, though he had not the virtue. The first manner of judging divine things belongs to that wisdom which is set down among the gifts of the Holy Ghost: “The spiritual man judges all things” (1 Corinthians 2:15). And Dionysius says (Div. Nom. ii): “Hierotheus is taught not by mere learning, but by experience of divine things.” The second manner of judging belongs to this doctrine which is acquired by study, though its principles are obtained by revelation (I, Q. 1, art. 6, ad. 3).

According to Aquinas, right judgment can be achieved either through the perfect use of reason or by way of inclination. Judgment per modum cognitionis is notional knowledge attained by rational study. In other places, he refers to this mode of judging as per studium et doctrinam, per modum rationis, and secundum perfectum usum rationis.

Judgement per modum inclinationis is not cognitive, and not a judgment which takes place through the cogitative power, but rather, judgment according to affection or desire, and thus a kind of affective knowledge. Elsewhere Aquinas writes,

Wisdom denotes a certain rectitude of judgment according to the Eternal Law. Now rectitude of judgment is twofold: first, on account of perfect use of reason, secondly, on account of a certain connaturality with the matter about which one has to judge. Thus, about matters of chastity, a man after inquiring with his reason forms a right judgment, if he has learnt the science of morals, while he who has the habit of chastity judges of such matters by a kind of connaturality (II-II, Q. 45, art. 2).

Aquinas is distinguishing the two different forms of judging, or assigning value to something, using the example of virtue. A person may judge a thing like chastity should or should not be desired because he or she has been taught and understands how such a thing should be considered moral or immoral. On the other hand, a person may judge rightly as to whether something should or should not be desired not through a cognitive decision, but rather on the basis of whether or not he or she actually desires the thing in question. In the case of the former, the intellect is clearly providing the basis of judgment through the cogitative power. In the case of the former, the affective inclination of the person provides the basis for the judgment. In this way, the virtuous person is the rule and measure of human actions. The virtuous person is inclined towards the object of virtue (inquantum ad illa inclinator) or through a certain connaturality with the object of virtue (per quondam connaturalitatem ad ipsa).

We might think of an example in eating. Some individuals need to mentally check themselves to ensure that they do not overeat. How much food this person should desire on any given occasion is a cognitive decision. This individual may desire to eat a second helping of a dish, but decide that this second helping would make him or her too full, and therefore decline. Others, however, just naturally desire the right quantity of food on a given occasion. This individual does not have to decide whether a second helping of a dish is appropriate—the individual simply acts on his or her desires.

We must be careful not to go too far in pitting these two forms of judgment against each other as opposites, but see them rather as corollaries. Affective knowledge and judgment per modum inclinationis is not a judgment made without knowledge, but is rather the synthesis of love and knowledge—a synthesis of cognitive and affective activity. If we understand the two modes of judgment in this way, as a single activity of knowing and loving, we may resolve the apparent tension in Aquinas between the passions and reason. Recall that Aquinas holds that the human person is a hylomorphic unity of body and soul, and that the sensitive appetite stands between these two in a unified activity of putting the whole human person substantially in relation to the world. Knowing and loving are distinct activities, but with the same principle of operation, which is the substantial unity of the human soul.

Moral knowledge, therefore, is not either purely rational knowledge or purely affective knowledge, but is rather a synthesis of both knowledge per modum cognitionis and knowledge per modum inclinationis.

The hylomorphic unity of the human person also explains how one particular power can overcome the other. If the soul’s full energies are employed in the act of cognition, of knowing, such cogitation can impede the affective movement of the soul. Aquinas says that the concentration of the intellect can actually overcome the sensitive appetite so that it no longer experiences certain sensible functions: “In the powers of the soul there is an overflow from the higher to the lower powers: and accordingly, the pleasure of contemplation, which is in the higher part, overflows so as to mitigate even that pain which is in the senses” (I-II, Q. 38, art. 4, ad. 3). More commonly, however, the soul’s activities get concentrated on affection and its accompanying form of judgment. In this way, a person under the influence of anger may judge a thing good that he would not so judge if not under the influence of that passion:

Now it is evident that according to a passion of the sensitive appetite man is changed to a certain disposition. Wherefore according as man is affected by a passion, something seems to him fitting, which does not seem so when he is not so affected: thus that seems good to a man when angered, which does not seem good when he is calm (I-II, Q. 9, art. 2).

What is important to note, however, is that the sensitive appetite seems to present the intellect with an object already laden with value. This challenges the view among some Thomists that the role of the sensitive appetite is only to obey reason.

A Thomistic Response to N.T. Wright on Metaphysics, Trinitarian Formulas, and the Historical Jesus

In Chapter 4 of Scripture and Metaphysics, Matthew Levering takes on N.T. Wright who argues that traditional Western Trinitarian theology bypasses the narrative account of Scripture especially regarding the historical Jesus, and instead presents a fundamental non-narrative Trinitarian theology which “approache[es] the Christological question by assuming this [ontological] view of god and then fitting Jesus into it” (Wright, “Jesus and the Identity of God,” 54).

Wright begins his essay with a personal anecdote of talking to students who claim to not believe in god. Wright probes them to explain “which god they don’t believe in” and determines that when students say this, what they mean is that they do not believe in a god who sits on high, looking down and casting out judgment, what Wright calls the “spy-in-the-sky.” To these students, Wright responds that he does not believe in such a god either, but rather, believes in the God that is revealed in the historical Jesus of Nazareth.

Wright’s point is that we need historical studies of Jesus because it is all too easy to create an idol of Jesus, a heavenly, perfect, sinless, and non-Jewish Jesus “who wanders round with a faraway look, listening to the music of the angels, remembering the time when he was sitting up in heaven with the other members of Trinity, having angels bring him bananas on golden dishes.” Rather than starting off with the Orthodox, post-Nicaean and post-Chalcedonian Jesus as the second person of the Trinity (what Wright calls the kyriarchal portrait of God), Wright argues that we need to start with the historical Jesus who reveals to us not a creedal formula, but rather, the Old Testament God of Israel:

In Jesus himself, I suggest we see the biblical portrait of YHWH come to life: the loving God, rolling up his sleeves (Isa 52:10) to do in person the job that no one else could do, the creator God giving new life the God who works through his created world and supremely through his human creatures, the faithful God dwelling in the midst of his people, the stern and tender God relentlessly opposed to all that destroys or distorts the good creation, and especially human beings, but recklessly loving all those in need and distress. “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; he shall carry the lambs in his arms; and gently lead those that are with young” (Isa 40:11). It is the OT portrait of YHWH, but it fits Jesus like a glove.

In this chapter, Levering wants to save Aquinas from the implicit criticism of people like Wright, namely, that his conception of Jesus is sterile and formulaic, and completely detached from the Jesus as revealed in Scripture. Instead, Levering claims that Aquinas rejects the kyriarchal portrait of God just as strongly as Wright does. He cites the Tertia Pars, QQ. 46, art. 3. where Aquinas asks whether there was a more suitable way of delivering the human race than by Christ’s passion. In the first objection, alluding to St. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, Aquinas states that God could have liberated humankind solely by His Divine Will! This could have not only spared the life of the incarnate son of God but would have more suitably revealed God’s superior power.

But Aquinas rejects the mighty display of God’s power as more suitable than the Passion (as does Wright) on the grounds that Christ’s passion teaches us about the God who saves us: “In the first place, man knows thereby how much god loves him, and is thereby stirred to love him in return, and therein lies the perfection of human salvation” (IIIa, Q. 46, art. 3). As Levering writes:

Christ’s Paschal mystery reveals to human kind the extraordinary depth of God’s love. Without Christ’s passion, humankind would not have known the superabundance of God’s love. The Paschal mystery reveals the Trinity (God-in-himself) in terms of a wisdom of wondrous love,, to the point of the Son of God giving his own life for the salvation of sinners, that is, for the salvation of those who by pride had cut themselves off from God” (Levering 134).

Aquinas does not give us the “disembodied theological cipher” which Wright wants to counter with the historical Jesus, but rather, to use Wright’s own words, “the Jesus whose body was killed as the revelation of the love of God and raised to new life.”

Aquinas gives another reason that Christ’s bloody passion was more fitting than a mighty display of God’s power neatly accomplishing the same task. That is, by his passion, Christ “set us an example of obedience, humility, constancy, justice, and the other virtues displayed in the Passion which are requisite for man’s salvation. Hence it is written (I Peter 2:21): ‘Christ also suffered for us, leaving you an example that you should follow in His steps” (IIIa, Q. 46, art. 3). Levering’s point is this, that like Wright, Aquinas appeals to the cross and the scriptural account of Jesus to dispel what Wright calls the “kyriarchal” or aloof, uncaring and philosophically formulaic God. But unlike Wright wants to argue that his scriptural and historical account of Jesus reveals a God of superabundant love, of humility, and of personified wisdom, as opposed to the philosophical accounts of God that his students reject, Aquinas uses philosophy to probe the depths of this mystery further. Namely, Aquinas draws a Trinitarian conclusion.

Jesus, Aquinas argues, was able to endure such suffering (which we have already established is intended to suitably reveal the intimate love of God that God is willing to suffer with and for God’s people) because of intimate knowledge of the Father. In suffering, and suffering without sin, for the sins of others, Jesus had full knowledge of Father, which gave Jesus the ability to suffer the most profound sorrow for sin out of the love which is manifest in the Father. As Levering writes, “the Father inspired Christ’s human will with this perfect charity by infusing Christ’s humanity with the fullness of the grace of the Holy Spirit. In Christ’s passion, one thus sees manifested the incarnate Son’s obedience to the Father through the Holy Spirit. The Paschal mystery of Jesus Christ reveals God’s wisdom and love in Trinitrarian form” (136).

For Aquinas, the scriptural Jesus, and especially the scriptural account of Jesus’ death reveals the Father as the one who sends the Son as the Father’s Word of love for the world, reveals the incarnate Son who is God’s perfect Word in the world, and reveals the Holy Spirit who enables the incarnate Son to suffer with supernaturally-inspired love. That is, for Aquinas, it is not the study of metaphysics, though metaphysics certainly helps, and not the study of creeds, though creeds are important, but precisely the study of Scripture and especially the Passion which reveals the Trinity.

We see the central and foundational importance of scripture in Aquinas’ Trinitarian formulas elsewhere, specifically in his commentary on John. Commenting on John 5:20, Aquinas writes that “because the Father perfectly loves the Son, this is a sign that the Father has shown him everything and has communicated to him his very own power and nature” (Super Ioan. 5, lect. 3, no. 753). Because the Father gives the Son everything he has, the Son is the perfect image of the Father (Hebrews 1:3, Colossians 1:15) or as Aquinas reflects using metaphysical language “since likeness is a cause of love (for every animal loves its like), wherever a perfect likeness of God is found, there also is found a perfect love of God” (Super Ioan 5, lect. 3, no. 753). Just as the Father bets the Son by absolute self-gift, so too the Son, in order to reveal the Father, must give himself completely.” Hence, we get the Passion.

This is not a way of ignoring the God of Israel which Jesus reveals perfectly through his earthly life (as Wright wants to argue); it is, however, a fuller revelation of the God of Israel. Levering writes, “Before Christ’s coming, the people of Israel knew God the father, but they only knew him as father in the sense of Creator, and as the one and only God. Christ’s disciples, on the other hand, are able to know Father by faith (by the grace of the Holy Spirit) as the Father of the only-begotten son” (139). Aquinas cites John 5:36 on this point: “The very works which m Father has given me to perform—those works that I myself perform—they bear witness to me that the Father sent me.” According to Aquinas, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus, by revealing himself through his works, also reveals the Father. This is the basis of Trinitarian formulas—the works of Jesus as related by Scripture.

Wright wants to say that if we really study the Jesus as revealed in Scripture, we will not get at a creedal Trinitarian formula. The real Jesus and the Second Person of the Trinity have nothing to do with each other. He writes,

After fifteen years of serious historical Jesus study, I still say the creed ex animo; but I now mean something very different by it, not least by the word “god” itself. The portrait has been redrawn. At its heart we discover a human face, surrounded by a crown of thorns. God’s purpose for Israel has been completed. Salvation is of the Jews, and from the King of the Jews it has come. God’s covenant faithfulness has been revealed in the good news of Jesus, bringing salvation for the whole cosmos.

But for Aquinas, as Levering points out, it is precisely by studying this historical, earthly Jesus that we are taught, as Jesus taught his friends, about the Trinity. Jesus teaches us through his words and actions. On this, Aquinas would agree with Wright. But whereas Wright uses only historical and literary methods to understand this Jesus, Aquinas also integrates metaphysical methods to not only exegete the historical Jesus, but also to be conformed to true knowledge of the living God revealed in scripture. Metaphysical speculation does not, as Wright criticizes, lead to the construction of an aloof kyriarchal idol, but rather, seeks to illuminate the true meaning of scriptural narrative of the transcendent and immanent God revealed to Israel as YHWH. In short, metaphysical speculation, in addition to historical and literary methods of understanding, complement one another by instilling within the believer greater contemplative understanding of the mystery of the Trinity. Or as A.F. Gunten, O.P. remarks,

“The texts of Scripture invited [Aquinas] to undertake a philosophical study that bears its fruits. It then permits him to give a more precise interpretation of Scripture.”

Aquinas on God’s Knowledge

Jon Levenson writes in Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence that three Christian theological errors have distorted the scriptural understanding of Israel’s God:

1. “the residue of the static Aristotelian conception of deity as perfect, unchanging being”
2. “the uncritical tendency to affirm the constancy of divine action;”
3. “the conversion of biblical creation theology into an affirmation of the goodness of whatever is.” (Levenson xxv).

This is the argument that Matthew Levering takes on in Chapter 3 of Scripture and Metaphysics, namely, that in light of Scripture’s numerous accounts of God’s capricious will e.g. Exodus 32, Jeremiah 18), incomplete knowledge (Genesis 18:21), and impotence to stop certain atrocious acts, how can Christian theology still hold that God is unchanging, omniscient, and omnipotent. Levering illustrates how Aquinas solves this problem through a creative interplay of Scriptural exegesis and metaphysical reflection. In this post, we will discuss Levenson’s argument that God is not omniscient as the metaphysicians claim that God is.

Levering first identifies three important aspects of Aquinas’ scriptural exegesis. The first is that Aquinas has a “whole-canon hermeneutic;” that is, he accepts on faith that the whole Bible contains God’s self-revelation. This means that Aquinas thinks that each passage which reveals something about God’s identity must be weighed against other relevant passages in order to understand the full meaning of these passages.

Second, Aquinas thinks that the images of God found in the biblical texts must be analyzed metaphysically in order to fully understand what the text is saying, and in order to avoid anthropomorphizing God. The third point is related to the second. That is, Aquinas believes that human language used to refer to God is analogical, meaning that words used to describe finite creatures like “good” or “wise” or “angry” cannot be fully and properly ascribed to God who is beyond human comprehension and human language. To see more on Aquinas’ use of analogical language to talk about God, check out this earlier post.

In seeking to understand God’s knowledge, Aquinas turns first to the relevant passages of Scripture, and then uses metaphysical speculation to investigate these revealed mysteries by establishing “their ontological, causal, and communicative structures, [thus enabling him as a theologian] to express judgments about the meaning of Scripture’s claims about God and human beings” (Levering 21; see Fides et Ratio no. 66).

Jon Levenson, influenced by process theology, doubts that God fully knows other creatures, arguing that this seems to contradict the image of God in scripture of God coming to know his creatures, whose free actions seem to frequently allude the knowledge of God. In investigating God’s knowledge, Aquinas begins with God’s perfection, citing Matthew 5:48: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is also perfect.” Aquinas notes that “a thing is perfect in proportion to its state of actuality, because we call that perfect which lacks nothing of the mode of its perfection” (Ia, Q. 4, art. 1). What he means is that we use the word “perfect” analogically to describe the being of something.

A thing is perfect in so far as it exists the way that it is supposed to. A pen, for example, is perfect in so far as it fully exists as a pen is supposed to exist, writing smoothly, etc. Human beings, however, are more complicated than pens. There are lots of different ways that humans can be. Humans can be wise or unwise, they can be good or not good, they can be knowledgeable or lacking knowledge. Human beings are good or perfect (that is, achieve the fullness of their being) to the extent that they do the various things that human beings are supposed to do. One of the things that humans are supposed to do is “know things.” Thus, knowledge is one of the various perfections that we can ascribe to humans.

But humans exist or “have being” in a different way that God does since they are (1) created and (2) embodied. Humans can have more or less existence. For example, somebody who has lived a long time and has done good and virtuous things and has gained a lot of knowledge we might describe as having “a full life.” Such a person has reached a greater state of perfection. I do not a moral state of perfection but an ontological state of perfection. They have reached a greater or fuller state of being. They have lived the way humans are supposed to live.

God, we have already established, is pure Being, because God is pure form. Since God is pure and simple Being, there is only one way for God to exist. In other words, God does not have more or less existence like human beings do. So all the “perfections” that we ascribe to humans to indicate the extent to which they are fulfilling how they are supposed “to be,” perfections like goodness and knowledge, are already in God because God is simple Being. God is not better or worse, or does not exist in a fuller or lesser way. God simply IS. And this means that any perfection that we would derive from existence is simply in God.

Aquinas uses this idea of God’s perfection to shed light on the scriptural passages that refer to different “perfections” of God like God’s knowledge. He looks at Romans 11:33, for example, “O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God” and Job 12:13 “With God is wisdom and strength, counsel and understanding” and Hebrews 4:13 “All things are naked and open to his eyes.” Aquinas’ explanation is metaphysical. Since God is simple being, God’s knowledge is not a perfection that exists apart from God’s being. As Levering writes, “God is his knowledge, and his knowing is infinite. Knowing is a perfection of His infinite Act” (86). Simple existence that God reveals of his identity in Scripture, from which all created things take their existence demands that God is also perfect and knowing.

But surely Levenson would argue that this is exactly the God that is not revealed in Scripture, but rather the philosophers’ god superimposed on the scriptural account. Levering would point to Scripture accounts of God not knowing, such as in Genesis 3 when he questions the woman. If God knew everything, why the questions?

Aquinas’ response to Levering is that Scripture clearly indicates that God is all-knowing. However, in describing the ways that human beings can relate to God, the authors of scripture sometimes portray God’s knowledge as incomplete, not because God’s knowledge is incomplete, but because human language is insufficient to describe the complex ways that human beings relate to God. Human beings know, to return to our last post, in an analogous fashion to the way God knows.

Human knowledge in Aquinas’ theory is obtained in two operations. The first operation, the sensitive operation, is when the sense perceptions like vision and hearing and touching perceive a particular object. Sense knowledge then is knowledge of particular things like a particular dog. The second operation is the intellective operation. Intellective knowledge is knowledge of universal things, that is, what makes this particular furry and barking thing in front of me a “dog.” So human knowledge proceeds from particular things to the ideas behind those things; that is, human knowledge processes from sensory knowledge to intellective knowledge of the ideas behind the sensory objects.

Another way of explaining this is with the distinction between form and matter (see this and this earlier post for more explanation). In Aquinas’ view, all things are composed of form, or the essence of what they are (the dogginess in the dog) and matter, the particular individuating “stuff” which makes one dog a particular dog and distinguishes it from other dogs. The sensory operation of knowledge perceives the various aspects of the dog like fur, four legs, paws, canine teeth. The intellective knowledge abstracts from the particular matter and judges the “thing” to be a dog. It is the intellect that allows a person to say that both a Chihuahua and a Doberman, despite their differences. That is, it is the intellective operation that allows a human to abstract the form “dog” from the particular substance.

Truth consists in the equality of the intellect with its object. True knowledge of a dog is when the intellect rightly abstracts the form “dog” from the particular substance, rather than abstracting the form “cat” or “bear” despite certain similarities in the particular matter.

God’s knowledge is different. God does not have a body, so obviously, God does not know things through a sensitive power. Nor is God’s knowledge a distinct power in God. As we established above, as simple Being, God is God’s own knowledge. So how does God know? God knows, according to Aquinas, because God is the cause of all things. God knows things because God makes them. God’s knowledge, therefore, (and this is the important part) is not affected by and dependent on what is known, but God’s knowledge is what causes anything to be known.

For humans, something must exist (even as an abstraction like a dinosaur) for it to be known. For God, it is the opposite. God must know anything for it to exist. God’s knowledge is logically and metaphysically prior to existence. God’s causative knowledge raises a huge theological problem, namely the problem of evil, because if God’s knowledge causes all things, then how can we say that God does not thereby cause evil. We will address this problem in another blog post. But for now, it is sufficient to address Jon Levenson’s claim that God has incomplete knowledge with the metaphysical claim that our knowledge is analogical to God’s. So we have to use analogical language to talk about God’s knowledge. God does not know through sensory perception like we do, nor does God know in stages of perceiving, abstracting, and judging like we do. God’s knowledge of a dog, in its essence, is metaphysically necessary (though not sufficient) for the dog to even exist, much less be known according to human knowledge.

What Language Can We Use to Talk About God?

According to Aquinas, there are two incorrect ways to understand language about God, which Aquinas summarizes in Summa Theologiae Ia, Q. 13. Univocal statements about God are statements that mean the same exact thing as the same statement said when referring to human creatures. If we say “God is wise” univocally, we mean that “wise” means the same thing as when we say “Beth is wise.” Aquinas says that we cannot use language to say anything univocally about God. We obviously mean something different when we say that God is wise than when we say that Beth is wise. Human wisdom is different, more limited, more restrictive, than divine wisdom.

The other erroneous way to speak about God that Aquinas identifies is equivocally. Equivocal statements about God mean something completely different than the same statement made in reference to human creatures. So if we use “God is wise” equivocally, what we mean is something completely unrelated to what we mean when we say “Beth is wise.” But Aquinas says that language about God cannot be totally equivocal. That is, there is some similarity, some connection in meaning between the statement “God is wise” and the statement “Beth is wise.” Human wisdom is not completely different than divine wisdom, or else we wouldn’t use the same word for it.

This is where scripture and metaphysics merge for Aquinas. Philosophically (metaphysically) and scripturally, Aquinas believes that we can say something about God. That is, we do not have to assume that our language is completely equivocal. He cites Romans 1:20 that something about God can be known through creation, thus, philosophically we can say something about God. And he believes as a Christian that what the Bible says about God is true, so we can in addition to natural knowledge of God (indicated in Romans 1:20), we can also have revealed knowledge of God.

So if language about God is not univocal or equivocal, what is it? Aquinas says that language about God is analogical. The example he uses is health. Health is a characteristic of a human body. If I say “I have a healthy heart,” what I mean is that my heart pumps blood well. When I say “I have a healthy body,” I do not mean only that my body pumps blood well, although this is certainly part of having a healthy body, but I mean something more expansive. I mean that all the parts of my body are functioning well, I have no illness, etc. So the two statements are not equivocal (meaning exactly the same thing) nor are the equivocal (meaning exactly different things). Rather, I use the phrase “healthy heart” analogically to “healthy body.”

So this is how we speak of God. When we say “Beth is wise,” we mean something analogical to what we mean when we say “God is wise.” Just like my heart has certain characteristics of health that my body does, so too, if I am wise, I have certain characteristics of God who is wise. But when we say “God is wise,” we mean something larger, something more expansive than what we mean when we say “Beth is wise.” According to Aquinas, just as a healthy heart partakes in the fullness of health of a healthy body, so too do creatures, who are created by God, partake in the attributes of God like goodness, justice, and wisdom.

But we should not stop here. In article 6 of question 13, Aquinas asks whether analogical language refers primarily to God or to creatures. He is asking a philosophical question here. Philosophically, if we say that analogical language refers primarily to creatures, what we are saying is that we have words (like “wise” and “good”) to refer to creatures, and we extrapolate from there and say that the fullness of the meaning of these words must belong to God. That is, we start with what we know about creatures and then raise all of that to the nth degree and say the same thing about God. So if “Beth is wise,” God must be the fullness of wisdom, since if God wasn’t, God would not be God. This is the philosophical (and specifically metaphysical way) of knowing something about God.

The philosophical way of knowing God starts with creatures and the words that we use to describe those creatures, and then posits a god that is based on what we already know, and usually like, about creatures. That is why people complain that the philosophers’ god is different from the Christian God as revealed in Scripture. People complain that people want to think that God is all-good and all-powerful, and so they logically construct a good who is such. This is what theists do. They say, “I believe in this type of god which is a god I can rationally conceive.” If God appears to get angry or vengeful or capricious in Scripture, a theist could say, “that is not the god that I believe in. My god is all-good, etc. We will see how Levering treats this in the next post, when he argues against Jon Levenson who claims that the philosophical god of people like Aquinas (all-good, all-knowing) is not the same as the God revealed in Scripture.

What is important to establish first in this post is that Aquinas does not take the philosophical way to knowing something about God. That is, he thinks that analogical language refers actually primarily to God, and secondarily of creatures. This means that if we say “Beth is wise,” what we first mean is that we know what wisdom is because God is the fullness of it. Beth shows certain similarities to that which we see first in God. So Beth is wise in a similar way—in an analogical way—that God is wise.

Aquinas argues this point from Scripture. He cites Ephesians 3:14-15 “I bow my knees to the Father, of our Lord Jesus Christ, of Whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named.” His argument is a scriptural one that we only know what fatherhood is because we first know it in God. So when I say “John is a father,” what I mean is that I see something similar in John that I see fully expressed in God. I can name something in John that I only know because it is in God. Same thing about wisdom. I can only say “Beth is wise” because I first see it revealed in God. Where? In Scripture. For Aquinas, the starting point of everything we know is not human reason which we explore philosophically; the starting point of everything we know is Scripture which reveals to us the living God.

And when we say that God is a living God, we are saying something analogical, not univocal or equivocal. What we mean when we say that “God is a living God” is that we only know what “living” means, and can apply it to creatures (Beth is a living blogger) because we first saw it revealed in God.

This will be important for subsequent discussions about God. For Aquinas, we only know that God is good because Scripture reveals that God is good (Exodus 33:19, 1 Chronicles 16:34), and so we can use the language of goodness to apply to creatures. We can say that God is wise only because Scripture reveals that God is wise (Job 12:16, Psalm 104:24), and what we know about human wisdom comes from this revelation.

Aquinas does not take the philosopher’s path to talking about, and knowing about God. That is, he does not assume that we start with human knowledge and extrapolate to God. We start off with knowledge of God revealed in Scripture and apply it to humans. Philosophy serves to illuminate what Scripture reveals. But philosophy is the handmaid, not the equivalent of scripture. When I say that Aquinas uses Scripture and metaphysics together to talk about God, I mean that Aquinas first uses scripture to know something about God, and uses philosophy to expand, in human language, that knowledge about God. And he does so by speaking about creatures and creaturely know in an analogous way to God.

YHWH: God’s Being as Simple Being

Continuing on with our examination of Matthew Levering’s Scripture and Metaphysics, in this post I will give a concrete, hopefully simple, example of how metaphysical speculation can enhance our understanding of Scripture.

In examining Scripture, there are numerous passages that refer to God’s body. In Exodus 33, God speaks to Moses face to face, and allows Moses to gaze upon his back. Psalm 33 anthropomorphically depicts God sitting on his throne in heaven and looking down on the earth to judge the righteous and the wicked. Scripture frequently refers to God’s “right hand” (Psalm 48:10, Acts 7:56). However, Christianity holds that God is not a body, but that God is a spirit. In light of the scriptural passages that say otherwise, how can Christianity hold such a belief?

Aquinas, as Matthew Levering points out, provides one such way of interpreting these seeming conflicting passages, by using metaphysical reflection to illumine the relevant passages of Scripture. He begins with John 4:24: “God is a spirit” as providing the basis of his metaphysical reflection (Ia, Q. 3, art. 1). He then goes on to say, in light of the biblical quotations which describe God in bodily terms, that the Bible “puts before us spiritual and divine things under the comparison of corporeal things” (Ia, Q. 3, art. 1, ad. 1). Aquinas’ point is that human language must rely on sensible images to describe God, though God is immaterial.

But how do we know this is the case? In light of the numerous Scripture passages that say otherwise, would it not make more sense to conclude that God has a body (and a spirit, to take into proper account John 4:24)? Aquinas uses metaphysical arguments to the contrary. First, a body is composed of matter, and it would be impossible for matter to be attributed to God. This is because matter exists in a state of potentiality.

Aquinas takes his understanding of potentiality from Aristotle. Aristotle’s definition of potentiality in the Metaphysics, is the “power that a thing has to produce change” or “the source of change in something else or in itself qua other.” (1046a12). The exercise of potentiality is movement or process (kinesis) or actuality (energeia). So a thing has potentiality in so far as it is capable of changing, and especially in so far as it is capable of taking on a better or more complete state of being.

We can think of potentiality as “potential energy” in physics. A stone sitting at the top of the hill has potential energy, which will be translated to movement (kinesis or kinetic energy) as the stone rolls down the hill and comes to a rest. But metaphysically, potentiality has a wider meaning that refers to states of being. An infant, for example, has potentiality to grow into an adult, thus taking on a more perfect or more complete state of being, because as an adult, the infant will be able to do more things properly ascribed to humans (walking, talking, reasoning, making art) that an infant cannot do.

According to Aristotle, everything in the universe can be described as a combination of form and matter. Matter is the raw material of things, whereas form is the structure of a thing or the “essence of what a thing is.” A woman and a gazelle are both composed of matter, and some of the same types of matter (like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen) but the two substances are distinguished by their form—the woman has the form of a human and the gazelle the form of the gazelle. All matter is in a state of potentiality because it could take on any number of forms. So matter is the “waiting to happen” part of existence; form is the “happening” part of existence. An infant’s matter will change over time, but the form, the essence of what that infant is, will remain constant, which is why the three year-old, 20 year-old, and 90 year-old “former infant” can still be said to be the same person.

Things that have bodies, therefore, are in a state of potentiality. They are changing, they are always in the process of becoming. So if God had a body, God would be in a state of change. But Aquinas, based on both Scripture and metaphysics, does not accept that God changes. He cites James 1:17 that in God “there is no change nor shadow of alteration” and Malachi 3:6 “For I the Lord do not change” and Numbers 23:19: “God is not as a man, that He should lie, nor as the son of man that He should be changed” (see Ia, Q. 14, art. 10 and Q. 19, art. 7) Using these passages of Scripture, Aquinas can then return to his metaphysical speculation—things that have bodies composed of matter are in a state of potentiality, and therefore they change. But God does not change. Thus, God must not have a body composed of matter.

Metaphysically, this informs Aquinas of something important. He accepts the Aristotelian dictum that all things are composed of matter and form or potentiality and actuality. But if God does not have matter, then God must be only form, and if God is only form, then God must be only actuality without any potentiality. Another way of saying this is that God is “pure Act” or the perfect fullness of “to be.” Moreover, things that are composed of matter and form are composites, but God is not composed of matter and form and therefore cannot be a composite. Thus, Aquinas concludes, that God is simple.

These are the two metaphysical assumptions which Aquinas bases all subsequent metaphysical reflection when discussing God’s existence: (1) God is pure Being or pure Act and (2) God is simple. Although he uses metaphysical language to make these claims, Aquinas is not doing pure metaphysical speculation. In other words, he is not just recapitulating the “static Aristotelian conception of the deity” as a “mere philosophical problem” (Levering 86) but is rather using Aristotelian metaphysics to illuminate an understanding of the God of Israel and this God’s relation to human history.

For Aquinas, the language of God as “pure Being” is not separable theologically from the revelation of “YHWH”: “The two names complement each other, revealing God’s historical presence as infinite, sheer, eternal Presence. They express the same God, understood metaphysically and historically” (Levering 61).

So why use the metaphysical language at all? Because, as we saw at the beginning of this post, Scripture uses language to refer to God that describes God in human terms, and as such, the language of Scripture can possibly dispose readers to idolatry, to create God according to a human image. According to Aquinas, as Levering points out in his book, the metaphysical language God ascribes to Godself in Exodus 3:14 is intended to wean God’s people from idolatry by revealing God as pure being and nothing more, without any particular mode of being (i.e. as simple) and consequently, and here is the important part, as sheer presence.

Because God does not have any particular mode of being, God is eternally present. As YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God is intimately active without being limited by temporality. There should be no doubt that Aquinas is not trying to create a philosopher’s God who is detached from creation, but is rather trying to use metaphysical language to illuminate the God who is intimately close to creation, who is personal, and eternally present. God as Aquinas describes him in the language of Greek metaphysics as Pure, Simple Being is also the living and creating God of Israel. On this point, Thomas Weinandy finds a unity of metaphysical and historical naming of God in Christian thought:

Within Greek though these attributes [e.g. imperishability, perfection, goodness, power] constitute God as one who is removed from, even if related to, all else that is. They constitute him as transcendent in the sense of not only making him other than the cosmic order, but also as often being incapable of actively relating to the cosmic order. Within the Judeo/Christian tradition these attributes do constitute God as wholly other than all else, but they equally constitute him as Creator and so immediately related to all else that is” (Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 72)

So here we have one example of how Aquinas uses both Scripture and metaphysical reasoning to illuminate God as revealed in Scripture, namely, as a God who is simple (not composite form and matter but rather pure form without a body) and a God who is Pure Being.

Questions:
1. Aquinas uses metaphysics to make sense of all those scriptural passages saying that God has a body. How do you make sense of those passages?
2. It is very important for Aquinas’ understanding of God that God does not have a body. In your mind, what difference does it make if God does or does not have a body?
3. Does describing God as “Pure Being” obscure or illuminate God as God is revealed in Scripture, especially in light of the fact that God gives the name YHWH “I am who I am” to Moses as the name by which God should be called.

Is Anger an Appropriate Response to Suffering?

In the last post, I said that I was going to do a series of posts on some of the thoughts I have been having related to the “theodicy” issue, or the problem of evil and suffering in light of the belief that God is all-good and all-powerful. In this post, I am going to use as my starting point a quote from Harold Kushner, who I mentioned in the last post wrote a very famous book on theodicy called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. In his effort to explain God’s involvement in the suffering humans experience on this earth, Kushner writes,

We can recognize our anger at life’s unfairness, our instinctive compassion at seeing people suffer, as coming from God who teaches us to be angry at injustice and to feel compassion for the afflicted. Instead of feeling that we are opposed to God, we can feel that our indignation is God’s anger at unfairness working through us, that when we cry out, we are still on God’s side and God is still on ours (45).

In this post, I am going to expound on Kushner’s provocative idea about anger from a Thomistic framework in order to determine the moral and theological significance of anger, and whether Kushner is right is saying that suffering should prompt anger.

We tend to think of anger as vicious or harmful. Somebody may say, “I didn’t mean to do X, but I was blinded by anger,” or “anger is wrong; I want to be a more peaceful person.” Aquinas is aware that anger connotes sinfulness. There is good reason for this. In Matthew 5:22, for example, Jesus claims that one who is angry with his brother is liable to judgment. In his discussion of anger, Aquinas asks whether all anger is contrary to virtue, to which he answers a resounding no. Anger, which is a passion, can be aroused according to reason, which makes anger in some situations virtuous.

So how do we determine if anger is virtuous (according to the standards of reason) or not? Aquinas looks at the object of anger, or that to which the anger is directed. He identifies two objects to anger: one is the injury that the person suffers, and the other is vindication (vindicatio) that the person seeks. The vindicatio is the justice that one seeks to exact against an perceived injustice. It is the way of making an injustice right. The vindicatio is an evil under the aspect of good. Denying a person his freedom for a number of years in punishment for theft, for example, could be a vindicatio because it is an evil (imprisonment) that seeks to rectify an injustice (the theft), thus rendering the vindicatio itself a good.

If a person seeks a vindicatio against a person who does not deserve it, for example, the anger would be sinful. If a person seeks too great a vindicatio, such as when a person repays an injustice with a much greater injustice (beating a child for spilling milk), such anger would be sinful. So anger is virtuous if a truly unjust offense occurs and the response is proportionate to the injustice.

What about Matthew 5:22 that says that anyone who is angry against their brother is liable to judgment? In light of scripture, how can Aquinas still say that anger can be virtuous? One way which Matthew 5:22 has been explained is using the person/sin distinction. That is, it is wrong to be angry against a person, but okay to be angry against a sin. Because Jesus is referring to the former in his condemnation of anger, it does not contradict the thesis that anger can be virtuous. This is the explanation Augustine used, claiming that one is properly angered at the sin of one’s brother, not one’s brother himself. Thomas disagrees with this, claiming that if a person is unjust, it is fitting and proper to be angry towards that person, granted that one’s anger is proportionate and the vindicatio sought is just.

The reason is that anger is that, according to Aquinas, has a two-fold object—the injustice, and the rectification of that injustice. An injustice is when a person is not given their due. The order of the universe which is in natural things and in the human will reveals that there is justice in God. God orders things and orders that they be in right relationship, and this is what is meant by God’s justice. Kushner is right in identifying that when we recognize that things or people are not in right relationship, we are participating in God’s justice.

Anger, then, because it is concerned with justice, is properly determined by relationships. In order to determine if anger is appropriate, one must be in some relationship of justice, that is, a relationship that is ordered according to God’s standards. This requires a little explanation. I cannot be angry against an inanimate object, for example, because the inanimate object cannot do me an injustice. I may stub my toe on my desk, but my anger cannot rightfully be oriented towards the desk. Nor can I be angry at a hurricane or a virus for the same reason. I may be hurt by these things, but they cannot be the object of my anger because they did not commit an injustice against me. Anger, for Aquinas, is really properly directed at people.

Additionally, if anger is to be justified, the right rectification must be sought. A child who commits a grievous fault–perhaps he hits one of his siblings–has committed an injustice which the parents, due to their relationship of justice with the child, have a responsibility to rectify. Perhaps they will ground the child, or require some sort of positive compensation to the assaulted sibling. However, the sibling who has been harmed is not in a relationship that allows him to seek the necessary vindicatio. It would be inappropriate for the sibling to ground his own sibling or to hit his sibling back. It would also not be appropriate for a stranger to punish the pugilistic sibling. Nor would it be appropriate if a child was the victim of an injustice committed by a parent to seek vindicatio. If a child is hit by a parent, the appropriate response is to appeal to a higher authority, like the police. In short, in order to seek a vindicatio, one has to be in the right position of seeking justice.

This is why we frown on vigilantes, or civilians who go out to seek vindicatios against injustices that are going unpunished. Because such civilians are not in the proper relationship of justice to the people whom they are punishing, they are actually committing an injustice in their actions in seeking a vindicatio that is not theirs to seek. Their anger is not virtuous, because the vindicatio sought is not virtuous.

Reasonable anger (and hence, virtuous anger) according to Aquinas is (1) prompted by an occasion of injustice, (2) directed at the perpetrator of injustice, and (3) seeks a just vindicatio to restore the injustice. If anger meets these three requirements, Aquinas would say it is virtuous.

So how does this play out regarding the theodicy question as Kushner sees it? First of all, the object of anger must be an actual injustice, not just something that makes us unhappy. Aquinas would not say it is virtuous to be angry if you, for example, get diagnosed with a terminal illness. This is not an injustice that should rightfully prompt anger. Moreover, there is no committer of an injustice towards which one can direct their anger. A more proper response would be sorrow at the fact that one is experiencing an evil, but not an injustice. But it would be proper to experience anger at a news story relating how somebody has been raped or murdered, or to be angered when you hear about the violence in the Middle East or Zimbabwe. Here, we do have an injustice, and perpetrator, which can be the object of our anger.

Second, the anger must be directed at the right person. If I read about what is going on in Zimbabwe and get angry at Robert Mugabe, my anger may be justified. If I read about Zimbabwe and get angry at black people, my anger is definitely not. Similarly, if I get angry at God when I hear about Mugabe’s egregious offenses against his people, my anger is not targeted at the right person. Such anger, according to Aquinas would not be justified.

Lastly, the vindicatio sought must in itself be just. If I decide that I am going to go assassinate Mugabe to stop his injustices, the unjust vindicatio thus renders my anger unjust. A more just vindicatio might be writing to the UN or raising awareness in this country by writing letters to the newspaper or marching in DC, or praying to God for the Zimbabweans who are suffering.

Kushner is right that we should feel compassion and sorrow for those who suffer. But I am not quite sure that an appropriate response to suffering is anger. Anger connotes that an injustice is being done that one can do something about. Sickness, death, and natural disasters are indeed evils, but they are not injustices. Such tragedies may be handled in an unjust way. Hurricane Katrina, for example, was not itself an injustice, but the subsequent way it was dealt with in many ways was.

This is not to say that Aquinas thinks we should remain Stoic in the face of suffering. He acknowledges that the passion of sorrow, which is the apprehension of some pain or evil, is a appropriate. When one is faced with a pain or evil, it may be appropriate to weep, to seek to remove or alleviate the harm, or even, as is the case with Job, demand answers from God. But for Aquinas, and I think he is right, it is not an injustice to experience pain, nor does God owe us any answers. The proper response to suffering, I would argue against Kushner, is not anger, but rather sorrow. The situations that concern Kushner, the death of a child for example, do not arouse God’s anger because no injustice is being done. God’s universe is still in order, even if we suffer.

But this is not the final word for Aquinas against Kushner, which will be the subject of another post on the issue. Aquinas, as a Christian, has not only a God that gets angry at injustice, as Kushner does, but also, a God who through the incarnation, is capable of suffering with, or feeling compassion and sorrow with his creation. And through the resurrection, Aquinas has a God who not only suffers with his creation, but has also ultimately defeated suffering in the grand eschatological scheme. Thus, for Aquinas, suffering should prompt not only anger if an injustice is done, or sorrow if no injustice is done, but should also prompt us to reflect on the God who loved us so much, that he suffers with us, and is himself ultimately the remedy to our sorrow.

An Ethical Response to the Fragility of Human Life

Human life is a fragile thing. The goodness of human life is dependent on (or threatened by) external circumstances such as wealth, health, beauty, talent, and simple luck. Since antiquity, people have pondered how to factor in the seeming necessity of external contingents into an ethical account of the “good life.” The Stoics were notorious for their conclusion that external contingents like health, wealth, friends, and family were not relevant factors in the formula for a good life. For the Stoics, all that mattered was virtue. If you were a virtuous person–that is, a courageous, temperate, just, and prudent person–you could lose your home, your friends and family, all your possessions, and even your health and still, if you kept your virtue, you would still be happy.

Although most of us probably feel that the Stoic response is somehow not really human, we can be sympathetic to what this school of philosophy was trying to achieve. Bad things happen to good people. Even in antiquity, this was a truism. In light of this, the task of ethics is to keep good people from turning into bad ones when disaster hits. The Stoics concluded that detachment from the need for external goods was the only way to stay good in a world full of badness. “Love only virtue,” was the Stoics’ rallying cry. If you loved only virtue, you could lose a child and remain unfazed. If you loved only virtue, you could get a cancer diagnosis and not be troubled. In the face of any adversity, you stayed stoic, and most importantly, virtuous.

The alternative to the Stoic conception of happiness and morality in light of the fragility of external goods is Aristotle’s way. Aristotle said that we need more than just a virtuous character to be happy. As humans, we need food and shelter, we need a certain degree of wealth and life success, we need good health, and we need relationships. No amount of virtue will create a happy life if we are missing any of these things.

The Stoic tendency shows up a lot in history, Christianity included. Christian morality is often caricatured as teaching the saints live an austere life, indifference to grief, joy, pleasure, or pain. I want to argue, however, that the Christian conception of happiness is much closer to the Aristotelian notion than the Stoic, namely, that we need certain external goods to be happy.

Enter Job. Job is a righteous man, and blessed by God. He has a big family, robust health, a huge estate with lots of animals, and quite a bit of wealth. Not only is he a happy guy, he’s virtuous as well.

But then he gets tested. He loses his animals, his children die, his home is destroyed, and eventually, even his health goes. Poor Job is sitting on the ash heap covered with boils and sores, and he is miserable. Not only is he miserable, but he wants answers from this alleged “good” God that has allowed him to suffer so.

And God gives an answer:

Then the LORD addressed Job out of the storm and said: Who is this that obscures divine plans with words of ignorance? Gird up your loins now, like a man; I will question you, and you tell me the answers! Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its size; do you know? Who stretched out the measuring line for it? Into what were its pedestals sunk, and who laid the cornerstone, while the morning stars sang in chorus and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:1-7)

I heard my husband preach on this text this weekend, and he brought Job into dialogue with Paul in 2 Corinthians 6 who is not, unlike Job, complaining about his suffering, but actually boasting and rejoicing in it. My husband pointed out that there is a major difference between Job and Paul when they confront the contingency of external goods, and the terror that comes with losing them. The difference is that Job has something to lose, but Paul, as well as the other apostles, have already given everything up. They have left their homes and their families, and given up any hope of being rich. With nothing to lose, suffering does not present the same sort of problem for the disciples of Christ as it does for Job.

The moral lesson of the story, according to this sermon, was to be preemptive when it comes to losing the external goods that cause so much suffering by giving up these goods voluntarily. If you don’t want to be afraid of losing your money, give most of it away. If you don’t want to suffer badly when you lose your job, don’t get to attached to it.

That sounds nice in theory, but Paul’s boasting in his suffering and the disciples’ total renunciation of worldly goods is not the way most Christians live. And it sounds a little too Stoic for my taste. Plus, it is fine to talk about the renunciation of external goods like property and wealth, but what about external goods like relationships and health? Surely Christians are meant to have at least some attachment to these external goods. So how are Christians to make sense of external goods that the world offers, and which sometimes are cruelly taken away?

Thomas Aquinas is Aristotelian in his approach to the question of external goods. This means that he is not going to recommend detachment from externals, like the Stoics or some Christian interpretations of the command to “hate the world.” Instead of detachment, Aquinas recommends “ordered love.” External goods can be loved, but they have to be loved in the right way. This means that goods like a nice home, a reliable car, a big family, and a sound bill of health are all goods that we can and even should desire. We just may not desire these goods as ends in themselves. Ordered love prefers always the greatest good, which is God, to all other lesser goods.

We pervert the proper order of love when we either love lesser things inordinately, like loving someone loving their car so much that they go bankrupt in taking care of it, or we pervert the proper order of love when we don’t love greater goods enough. The greatest good being God, all other goods should be subordinated to Him. This means that it is disordered to love your friends so much that you skip worship to spend time with them. It is disordered to love our health so much you spend all of your money on gym memberships and supplements and health food, to the neglect of other financial pursuits like charity and tithing.

But what is important to note about this idea of ordered love is that according to Aquinas, Christians can still love the goods of this world, and be attached to them, and mourn them when they are lost. It is good and proper to mourn for a lost loved one, and it is appropriate to worry about losing your home and possessions during tight economic times. Aquinas recognizes that we need these things to be happy, that is, to lead full and flourishing human lives. Aquinas’ way is not a way of detachment, but rather of proper attachment. Aquinas recognizes that becoming a Christian disciple does not necessarily prevent you from becoming Job yourself, sitting on top of an ash heap and mourning the fact that you’ve lost everything against your will.

Life on this earth is full of contingents. Sometimes things work well for us. Sometimes, we get to marry the person of our dreams, land a dream apartment in a cool city, get a job that is not only a career but a vocation, and surround ourselves with friends and family that love and care for us. At other times, we may have to deal with the mess of losing our job, or having a spouse lose their job. We may have to face a debilitating illness or watch a loved one succumb to a terminal disease. We may lose our home to the force of nature, become victims of violence, or find that the love we once thought was strong has grown dim or even disappeared. A good ethical response to the fragility of life on this earth is not detachment from external goods, but rather, fostering the sort of attachment that allows you to desire and love and mourn properly, without losing your desire and love for the greatest good—the God who is the source of all good things.

How Should Christians Make Sense of the Theory of Evolution?

In John Paul II’s message to the Pontifical Academy of Science on Evolution in 1996, he finely summed up the Roman Catholic Church’s stance on evolution, reaffirming the statement made by his predecessor Pius XII in 1950 that “there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man and his vocation.” The conflict among theologians over evolution according to the pope was not whether Darwinian theories were compatible with Christianity, but rather “the true role of philosophy and, beyond it, of theology.” Some, like Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn in this NYTimes Op-ed, claim that John Paul II’s support for evolutionary theories are overblown. Pope Benedict XVI said in his 2005 inaugural mass that “We are not some causal and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.” But this should not be taken as a Catholic hostility to the theory of evolution, per se. For both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, science and religion are ultimately compatible, each with different questions, tools, and spheres of influence, but at certain points, mutually enlightening.

Evolution is a materialist theory, meaning that it is a theory concerned with matter. It explains the reorganization of matter over time. As an empirical theory, it is based on observations and measurements. The job of the natural sciences is to explain such natural phenomenon like the differences between the species or the biological development of organisms over time.

But there are other disciplines that study phenomena that are not natural, not concerned with matter, and not empirically observable. For example, the soul, according to Christian theology is immaterial. Thus, it cannot be explained by a materialistic theory like evolution. Rather, the question of the soul is a metaphysical question. Metaphysics simply means “beyond or above physics.” Whereas physics and the other natural sciences are concerned with nature, that is, observable and measurable phenomena, metaphysics is concerned with that which cannot be observed, with those deep and abiding questions of why. Why are we here? What is our purpose? What is the soul?

It is concerning the question of human evolution, particularly when it comes to humans having an immortal soul, where evolutionary theories and theology really seem to conflict. It seems directly contrary to the Biblical account of creation to say that human are the process of natural selection. Moreover, it seems repulsive to the idea of human dignity rooted in the belief that human beings are created in the image of God to say that human beings and monkeys descended from a common ape-like ancestor. How can human beings bear the divine image if one accepts that they are descended from an animal?

Thomas Aquinas offers us one such solution. Thomas Aquinas adopted Aristotelian biology to explain the biology of the human being. Aristotle thought that human beings were animals, and Aquinas affirmed him on that. According to both, the organizing structure (or form) of the human being was the soul, which was both immaterial and inseparable from the body (unlike Plato who thought the soul was imprisoned in the body). In the Aristotelian view, the human soul had three levels. The most primitive level was the vegetative level that allowed the human being to do plant-like things like grow through cellular division or use energy. The next level of the soul was the animalic level, which allowed the human being to do animal-like things like hunt down food, attack in self-defense, and mate with other human animals. But where humans were distinct from their fellow animal kingdom members was that they had a third level of their soul—the rational part–which allowed them to do things like think, ponder, form communities, create moral codes, resist animal instincts, and wonder about God. Most importantly, it is the rational part of the soul that allows the person to have free will, that is, the ability to act voluntarily and intentionally. The idea of the soul as having multiple levels allowed Aristotle and Aquinas to conceive of the human person as both an animal and more than an animal.

According to Aquinas, it is in the rational part of the soul that we find the image of God. This is an important point to emphasize: for Aquinas, being in the image of God means being able to act (1) voluntarily and (2) with intention or purpose.

So this gets to why the Roman Catholic Church, which is heavily influenced by the theology and philosophy of Aquinas, can accept evolution. It is because the church sees the realm of philosophy and theology to be concerned primarily with the rational dimension of the soul and with the human being as a free and intentional creature, capable of conceiving a realm of reality that is not material, a realm of reality that is concerned with immaterial, or metaphysical phenomena like the true, the good, and the beautiful.

It is not the job of philosophy and theology to explain functioning of the other parts of the soul that control things like cell division and appetite. This is the job of the natural sciences like biology. Theology, since it is based on revelation, cannot explain the exact observable mechanisms of the way the world works or the way God creates. Saying that God created the earth is one thing; explaining how is quite another. Science, on the other hand, cannot explain the deep and inescapable existential questions that arise in human existence. Why are we here? Where are we heading? How do we lead a good life?

There are reductionist tendencies on both sides of the debate. There are some religious folk who say that everything we need to know is in the Bible. This sort of Biblicism (sometimes called fundamentalism) is ultimately self-defeating. The majority of even the most stringent Biblicists or fundamentalists will go to a doctor when they are sick. The Bible talks about healing, so why not turn to the Bible for answers to an illness? Because the Bible does not give us those answers. The Bible does not tell us how to set a broken bone or how to cure strep throat. To think that the Bible provides all the answers is an example of reductionism.

The reductionist tendencies on the scientific side of the debate try and use science to provide all the answers. We said before that religion can provide answers to the deep-seated metaphysical questions that emerge in each of our lives, but scientific reductionists will say that science provides answers to these questions. To the question, “why are we here?” scientific reductionists will say that we are not here for any reason, but are rather the products of chance. To the question, “what happens when we die?” scientific reductionists will say that nothing happens when we die besides the fact that our biological mechanisms cease to function. To the question, “how do we live a good life,” scientific reductionists will say something like “there is no such thing as a good life, only as much subjective pleasure as possible.” But like the religious reductionist position, this scientific reductionism is also ultimately self-defeating. There is no scientific (i.e. empirical) evidence to prove that there is no God or that chance, not God, is the force behind the evolutionary processes. You cannot use the tools of science to examine metaphysical questions like the meaning of life, the nature of God, or the question of final causality.

This is why Darwin’s theories have never been officially condemned by Vatican. Darwin sought to explain a physical question, whereas the church seeks to explain metaphysical questions. Now, metaphysical explanations are partially dependent on physical phenomena, but metaphysics goes beyond what physical theories like evolution can tell us. Theologically, it would be devastating for the acceptance of evolutionary theories if they embraced a view of human beings as wholly material, and indeed, some evolutionists believe this. But Darwin did not, and strictly speaking, evolutionary theories do not contribute to such a view of mankind.