This chapter contains sections titled: Mangling Aquinas The Argument from Design Why the Argument from Design Fails Dawkins' Case Against Theism A Fundamental Difficulty with Dawkins' Atheistic Argument.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PLATO'S PARMENIDES AND ST. THOMAS'S ANALYSIS OF GOD AS ONE AND TRINITY SHERWIN KLEIN Fairleigh Dickinson University Hackensack, New Jersey IN HIS CRITICISM of the Neopfatonic interpretation of the Parmenides, Cornford says, "The fanguage throughout is as dry and prosaic as a textbook on algebra; there is little here to suggest that the One has any religious significance as there is in the other case to suggest that x, (...) y, and z are a trinity of unknown gods." 1 I agree with Cornfo11d that the Neopl1 atoniJc interpreta.tion is very speculative and seriously flawed. Nonethe1ess, the "negative theology" these interpreters attribute to Plato is instruic1tive. More than this, it can be shown that opinions like Cornford's are, to say the least, unimaginative. I intend to est1 ablish, in the first and main part of this artide, the logical agreement between the PJatonic and Thomistic analyses of an absoJuteiy simple unity. The argument at Parmenides 137b-142a, Blato's analysis of the absoluteJy one, prov ]des a basis for determining what God, as an absolutdy simple unity, is not. By applying this 'argument in the Parmenides to St. Thomas's discussion of God as one, I shaill show that what appears to be " as dry and prosai:c as a textbook on algebra " has, contrary to Cornfo11d, " religious significance." In the second part of this article, I shall use the arguments at Parmenides 157b-159b and 159b-160b to determine what can 1 Plato and Parmenides: Parmenides' Way of Truth and Plato's Parmenides, trans. with introduction and commentary by Francis MacDonald Cornford (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1939), p. 131. 229 230 SHERWIN KLEIN be predicated of God, if St. Thomas's analysis of the Trinity is to aoco:rd with the articles of faith (God as an abso1utely simple unity as weU as a Trinity). Once again, we shall see the ":religious significance" of Plato's analysis and the irony of Cornfo11d's suggestion about the meaninglessness of applying Plato's analysis to " a trinity of unknown gods." I We should first he clear about how St. Thomas uses the term "one" as applied to God. In Q. n, A. 1 of the Prima Pars (The Unity of God),2 he distinguishes between one as "the negation of division" and one as "the principle of number." The first sense, which he calls the transcendental sense, applies to God; in this sense the one is opposed to the many as the undivided is :to the divided. Human beings cannot know what God is, but we can determine what God is not, e.g., not-many, the transcendental sense of being absolutely simple. (The human intdlect can only know the composite or tha,t which pertains to the composite; it cannot know that which is abso1ut ~ly sample or undivided.) St. Thomas says, "He is supremely undivided inasmuch as He is divided neither actually nor potentially by any mode of division; since He is altogether simple." 3 If we :compare the analysis of God as absolutely one or simple with the first hypothesis of the one in the Parmen~des, i.e., if the one is one, what can be predicated of it, then we shall notice an important similarity. If the one is simply one, none of the categories which can determine the nature of the one are predicable of it. Similarly, God as absolutely one or simple cannot be understood in,a positive manner (His nature is incomprehensible). However, He can be understood negatively. And what we can say negatively about God parallels 2 References are to the Summa Theologica in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aqu-Ynas, ed. Anton C. Pegis, vol. I (New York: Random House, 1945). a ST, I, q. 11, a. 4, c.; Pegis, p. 90. PLATO AND AQUINAS 231 Plato's determination of what is not predicable of the one as simple. To show what God is not, we must negate what does not apply to Him; this reveals the simplicity of God. If the one is one (in St. Thomas's transcendenta.l sense of "one " as simple ), says Plato, it cannot be many and, therefor:e, cannot have... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE STATUS AND FUNCTION OF DIVINE SIMPLENESS IN SUMMA THEOLOGIAE Ia, qq. 2-13 PETER BURNS, S.J. l esuit School of Theology Berkeley, California Introduction I N THE FIRST PART of what follows I hope to do four things: a) to give a brief summary of Aquinas's remarks contained in the third question of the first part of the Summa Theologiae, entitled de Dei simplicitate; b) to outline (...) two diferent ways of interpreting what Aquinas is about when making those remarks; c) to assess which interpretation is better from an exegetical standpoint; d) to assess which interpretation is better from a philosophical standpoint. In the second part my aim will be threefold : a) to trace the way Aquinas derives and uses the concept of divine simpleness in questions 2 through 11 ; b) to examine briefly the relationship between this concept and possible cosmological arguments for the existence of God; and c) to evaluate critically some modern treatments of arguments of the cosmological type in the light of this relationship. I shall not be concerned to show that Aquinas's conclusions in question 2 (the Five Ways) are justified by the arguments he adduces; rather, my concern will be to show that an adequate evaluation of his arguments cannot ignore the function of divine simpleness as a key element therein. I. The Status Of Divinle Simpleness (1) A Summary of S.T. la, 3 At the beginning of question 3 Aquinas lists eight points of inquiry. The first is whether God is a body, that is, composed 1 2 PETER BURNS, S.J. of extended parts. He offers three reasons why he thinks the reply must be negative. Firstly, an unchanging first cause of change, which God is (by la, 2, 3) would appear not to be bodily, since experience offers no examples of bodies causing change without themselves changing. Secondly, to be extended in space implies the potentiality of being divisible, but a primary reality is utterly actual, since absolutely speaking, actuality precedes po~ tentiality, and God is the primary reality. Thirdly, since the soul is nobler than inanimate things, and God is the most excellent of beings, God cannot be any less noble than the soul. But the soul in itself is not bodily but that in virtue of which bodies are what they are. In the next article Aquinas denies that God is composed of matter and form because matter is potential and only exists by participating in some form. In addition, since agents act in virtue of their form, God, as the prime source of activity and being in no way potential, must be considered as being essentially form without composition with matter, Aquinas then asks whether God can be identified with his own essence or nature. Given that matter is the individuating factor in beings composed of matter and form, and that such composition is ruled out in case of God, Aquinas claims that the distinctness of his being must be due to form. Hence God is his own form or nature or essence. In a crucial move in the next article Aquinas identifies God, who is his essence, with his existence, for as an uncaused necessary reality this essence must be self-subsistent. Thus God's nature or essence is necessarily self-instantiating, nor does God participate in existence, but essentially is identical with (the act of) 'existing', Therefore the distinction between essence and existence, between what something is and that it is, does not hold for God. Having daimed that God is his own existence, Aquinas argues that this existence is prior to genus in general and to the genus of substance specifically. So there is no possibility of distinguishing in God genus and difference, nor can God receive predicates as a substance, since this would imply potentiality. Therefore God is DIVINE SIMPLENESS IN SUMMA THEOLOGIAE 3 not composed of substance and accidents. In article 7, Aquinas claims that God is altogether simple. After summing up the previous remarks he makes two general points. Everything composite is subsequent to and dependent on its components, whereas God is the first, uncaused necessary being. Secondly, everything composite is caused, for essentially diverse elements must... (shrink)

This essay examines Aquinas's discussions of hatred in Summa Theologica I-II, Q. 29 and II-II, Q. 34, in order to retrieve an account of what contemporary theorists of the emotions call its cognitive contents. In Aquinas's view, hatred is constituted as a passion by a narrative pattern that includes its intentional object, beliefs, perceptions of changes in bodily states, and motivated desires. This essay endorses Aquinas's broadly "cognitivist" account of passional hatred, in line with his way of treating (...) passions in general. I suggest that Aquinas's account of hatred's arising out of attachment is compelling. However, I also argue that if Aquinas's treatment of hatred is to help us understand the phenomenon of hate, where classes of people are abominated for an identity they bear, and to avoid equating an oppressor's hatred with that of the oppressed for the oppressor, the cognitive pathway to hatred must be broader than through envy. (shrink)

-/- In the Summa Theologiae ‘simplicity’ is treated as pre–eminent among the terms which may properly be used to describe the divine nature. The Question in which Thomas demonstrates that God must be ‘totally and in every way simple’ (1.3.7) immediately follows the five proofs of God's existence, preceding the treatment of His other perfections, and being frequently used as the basis for proving them. Then in Question 13 ‘univocal predication' is held to be ‘impossible between God (...) and creatures’ so that at best ‘some things are said of God and creatures analogically’ because of the necessity of using ‘various and multiplied conceptions’ derived from our knowledge of created beings to refer to what in God is simple for ‘the perfections flowing from God to creatures… pre–exist in God unitedly and simply, whereas in creatures they are received divided and multiplied’ (1.13.5). In line with this, in the De Potentia Dei the treatment of analogical predication is integrated into that of ‘the Simplicity of the Divine Essence’ (Q 7). Moreover, it lies at the root of Thomas's rejection of any possibility of a Trinitarian natural theology such as, for instance, St Anselm or Richard of St Victor had attempted to develop, on the grounds that ‘it is impossible to attain to the knowledge of the Trinity by natural reason’ since ‘we can know what belongs to the unity of the essence, but not what belongs to the distinction of the persons’ (1.32.1). Even modern minds sympathetic to Thomas have clearly found it difficult to understand his concern for the divine simplicity: in his Aquinas Lecture Plantinga speaks for many in stating that it is ‘a mysterious doctrine’ which is ‘exceedingly hard to grasp or construe’ and ‘it is difficult to see why anyone should be inclined to accept it’. Not surprisingly, therefore, some of the most widely read twentieth–century commentators on Aquinas have paid little attention to it. Increased interest has recently been shown in it, but a number of discussions pay insufficient attention to the historical context out of which Thomas's interest in the doctrine emerged, and consequently tend to misconstrue its nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES IN AQUINAS IN THIS PAPER I discuss principally the claim of Aquinas that the divine attribute which is the formal constituent of the divine nature is es.'!e. I also discuss the consequent attribute of simplicity, with some reflections on this relation of consequence. I conclude with some remarks on philosophical realism in general, which I take to be the necessary background to this theory or, as (...) I argue, discovery. * * * In St. Thomas's Summa Theologiae we are confronted first, not with a study of the attributes of God, but with Five Ways of knowing that God exists. Strictly consequent upon this, there are then two basic movements of thought upon which, to mix the metaphor, the next structure after the Five Ways, that of the attributes, is laid. The first step is to find just one attribute which can be put forward as the formal constituent of the divine natura, its essentia (this will be the so-called metaphysical essence, since the real divine essence is one with the simple and hence constituentless divine nature). This is come upon through an immanent logic arising strictly out of conclusions reached through the Five Ways, and is in fact subsisting existence, ipsum esse subsistens, often called Being, confusingly, since this translates ens as well as esse. If it were not this there would be unexplained composition in God, at least between His nature and His act of existing. The second step is then to derive whatever attributes can be strictly deduced from this conception of God as subsistent esse, while a subsidiary step is to divide these into what commentators later called entitative and operative attributes. The first step identifies the nature of God with His aot of existing, 37 38 liTEPHEN THERON actus essendi, stressing that as pure ad He is not in any genus, not to be grasped in an abstract idea, even though the theory of the attributes must go on to say He is truth, is goodness and so on. The saving grace of these attributions, however, is that they do not imply limitation, even though it is a general principle of the Thomistic interpretation of things that form is what places a limitation on being, so that in being a man I cannot be an elephant. Of course the necessary infinity of these absolutely simple perfections entails that each of them is really identical with the divine nature, itself identical with His esse, His actus essendi. There can only be one reality in God, understood as the infinite. But my intention here is not to run through all the well-known arguments yet again. Thus that God, any God, must be subsisting Existence, I take to be well established. We can't have a divine essence capable of receiving existence, and for God to be love, say, He has first to be. I can make no sense of saying that this is merely chosen as appropriate to our way of thinking. I would rather say it thinks itself, once we 'let being be' (Heidegger's inspired definition of thinking). Of course God is not being identified with ens in commune, that almost cynical error of pantheism. God is identified with His own act of existing, proper to Him alone. Since this is, as divine, an act without limitation, we then go on to say that this cannot be an existence shared with any other existing, that God must exist in a uniquely eminent way, that that act of existing which He himself is, is transcendent. In the sense in which God exists, nothing else does, as the doctrine of analogy should bring out rather than obscure.1 Nonetheless, we need to enquire into the significance and implications of it being just existence which is the formal attribute 1 Cf. Leo J. Elders, Die Metaphysik de Thomas von Aquin, I, Salzburg 1985, p. 133: 'Das ens commune ist das geschaffene Seiende... Gott fallt nicht unter das ens commune: Er ist das ganz Andere, von dem wir wohl wissen konnen, daB Er ist, nicht aber, was Er ist.' THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES IN AQUINAS 39 of the divine nature, something to which both Kant and Aristotle... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ST. THOMAS ON THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY Introduction HE PROBLEM OF THE naturalistic fallacy, or the laim that value and ought-judgments are not factual r 'is' judgments, has been a lively one this century, ever since Moore coined the term ' naturalistic fallacy '.1 This debate has died down rather, especially in analytic philosophy, but it has flared up again among students of St. Thomas. This is largely because of (...) the controversial interpretations of Grisez and Finnis.2 In a recent and commendable article Janice Schultz has gone over these interpretations and developed some serious criticisms.3 She rightly points out that for St. Thomas judgments about human goods can be theoretical and not just practical, and that they are practical and have prescriptive or imperative force only on the presupposition of some act of will underlying them. Grisez and Finnis want to say that reason is practical and makes prescriptions of its own nature and not on the presupposition of some prior act of will, and that the grasp by reason of human goods is always practical and never just theoretical. I will not repeat Ms. Schultz's arguments here, though I will use them later on. What I want to do in this article is to locate her arguments and contentions in a different context-not the context of the interpretations of 1 Principia Ethica, Cambridge, 1903, p. 10. 2 The main works are Finnis's Natural Law and Natural Rights, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980; and Grisez's article, 'The Frst Principle of Practical Reason: a Commentary on Summa Theologica Ia Hae, q.94 a.2.' Natural Law Forum, 10, 1965, pp. 162-201. Other references are handily collected in an article by Janice Schultz, 'Is-Ought: Prescribing and a Present Controversy ', The Thomist, vol. 49, Jan. 85, no. 1, pp. 1-2. a As cited in the previous note. 51 PETER SIMPSON Grisez and Finnis, but that of the naturalistic fallacy debate as this developed from Moore to Hare. My reason for wanting to do this is that this debate uncovered a series of important features of good and Ought that must be incorporated into any moral theory, naturalist or non-naturalist, if that theory is to be at all adequate. While modern proponents of naturalistic ethics have tended to play down or ignore these features (largely because they point in a non-naturalistic direction ), St. Thomas did not. His moral theory is superior as a result, and can indeed be said to constitute a model for all defensible naturalistic ethics. This can best be seen if his theory is expounded as a response to the points about good and Ought made by non-naturalists. The first part of this paper is therefore an attempt to state the key theses of non-naturalism; and the succeeding parts attempt to expound St. Thomas's position in response to them. The NaturaUstic Fallacy As Moore first coined the name ' Naturalistic Fallacy ' and initiated the debate about it, one should begin with him. According to Moore, the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy concerning the idea of goodness. Goodness, he said, is a simple, unanalysable notion, like yellow or red and the fallacy is committed when people try to define or analyse it.4 This is because when they do try to define it they always identify it with some natural or observable property (as pleasure), and good is not such an object. It is a non-natural property that is unique and peculiar to itself. There are two parts to this claim. The first is that good is indefinable, the second is that it is something non-natural. Moore endeavored to establish the first point by means of the so-called open-question argument. Whatever definition one proposes for good it is always possible to ask of the definition whether it is itself good. For instance, if one defines good as pleasure or what promotes the greatest happiness, it is always 4 Op. cit., p. 6ff., and chapter 1 passim. ST. THOMAS ON THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY 58 possible to ask, with significance, whether pleasure or what promotes the greatest happiness is after all good. But this would be impossible if this... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Understanding and Experience of Compassion:Aquinas and the Dalai LamaJudith BaradHis Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama writes that the essence of Mahayana Buddhism is compassion.1 Although most people recognize compassion as one of the most admirable virtues, it is not easy to find discussions of it by Christian theologians. Instead, Christian theologians tend to discuss charity, a virtue infused by God into a person. Some of these theologians, such (...) as Cardinal Henri de Lubac,2 insist that Christian charity and Buddhist compassion are very different from each other. Are they correct? A good source to investigate this claim is in Aquinas's Summa Theologica, which contains a very developed discussion of charity. If we look at Aquinas's text and compare it to what the current Dalai Lama writes about compassion, we will recognize that they are discussing the same virtue. Moreover, by combining the insights from East and West, as expressed by the thoughts of the current Dalai Lama and St. Thomas Aquinas, we can achieve a better grasp of compassion so that we can more easily practice it in our daily lives. Though remarkably similar, the two accounts offer differing perspectives, which can be incorporated for mutual enrichment.Much of Aquinas's philosophy of compassion derives from his Christian beliefs, just as much of the Dalai Lama's teachings on compassion are based on Tibetan Buddhism. This explains some of the differences in their accounts. Unlike Christians, Buddhists neither believe in a personal God nor in a soul. Yet despite their theological differences, Aquinas and the Dalai Lama generally share a very similar view of compassion. In fact, one could well imagine Aquinas agreeing with the Dalai Lama who, after acknowledging his religious influence, writes that his goal is "to appeal for an approach to ethics based on universal rather than religious principles."3 It is appropriate, therefore, to begin by considering the similarities in their accounts of compassion, starting with their definitions of compassion. [End Page 11]DefinitionsEtymologically, the word "compassion"—compassio—comes from two Latin words: com means "with" and pati means "suffer." Literally, then, "compassion" means "to suffer with." Aquinas discusses compassion as an interior effect of charity, a theological virtue. It is interior because compassion is felt within the person who has charity. The cause of compassion, charity, Aquinas describes as the friendship between God's children and God Himself. Although Aquinas wrote prolifically on the subject of charity, someone could overlook his writing on compassion because he discusses it under the term "mercy." Diana Fritz Cates, for instance, who draws on an Aristotelian-Thomistic ethical framework to develop a theory of compassion, observes, "Aristotle and Thomas have little to say about compassion: hence, it will not be helpful to begin with their accounts."4 However, Aquinas uses the word misericordia (mercy) as a synonym of compassio (compassion). The synonymous relationship between compassion and mercy is also recognized by the Dalai Lama, who affirms, "Mercy and compassion are the same."5Aquinas defines mercy as "heartfelt sympathy for another's distress, impelling us to succor him if we can." If we experience this heartfelt sympathy, we're not discouraged if the person we try to help doesn't respond. Explicitly connecting mercy and compassion, Aquinas add that mercy, misericordia, gets its name "from denoting a person's compassionate heart (miserum cor) for another's unhappiness."6 The concept of "another's unhappiness" is important to his discussion. A necessary condition of being happy, in Aquinas's view, is that an individual must obtain what he or she wishes. Conversely, someone is unhappy when he suffers what he doesn't wish to suffer. Aquinas maintains that the suffering produced by one's frustrated desire for what he or she perceives as good is a sufficient condition for evoking mercy. In regard to the merciful response, it shouldn't matter what the suffering person perceives as good. So long as the person is suffering what he doesn't wish to suffer, this person should be treated mercifully. Suppose a teenager suffers from being unpopular with his peers. Although the compassionate person may not value popularity, she should extend compassion to the... (shrink)

Some Trinitarians, such as Thomas Aquinas, wish to claim that God is mereologically simple; that is, God has no parts distinct from Himself. In this paper, I present Simple Trinitarianism, a view that takes God to be simple but, diverging from Aquinas, does not identify the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with anything in our ontology. Nonetheless, Simple Trinitarians would like Trinitarian sentences to be true; thus, they must give a non-standard semantics for those sentences. (...) I will focus on one possible semantics a Simple Trinitarian may give: taking Trinitarian claims to be translatable into feature-placing sentences, which posit property instantiation without requiring commitment to any objects that instantiate those properties. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:REJOINDER TO BRUCE MARSHALL FREDERICK J. CROSSON University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, J.ndiana DISCUSSIONS HAVE to end sometime, and the differences in the reading of Aquinas by Bruce Marshall and myself will perhaps have sufficiently come into view if brief comments on several points are made. 1. In his second statement 1 Marshall seems to have shifted his argument. Originally he argued that a non-believer (e.g. a pagan (...) philosopher such as Aristotle) could not know or even properly refer to God.2 But in the subsequent statement, he seems to concede that, according to Aquinas, " That there is one God was known even by the philosophers, and is not a part of faith " and that " while some of the Gentiles knew God with respect to certain things which were knowable by reason, nevertheless they did not know him insofar as he is the Father...." (501; cf. 51213 ). Marshall seems now to hold that although that knowledge was possible at one time, it is not any longer: As Thomas reads Paul, then, the error (and specifically the idolatry) of the Gentiles overrides the knowledge of himself which God has given to them " from 1creation through the senses " ; in consequence the further possibility of this knowledge... is withdrawn by God. With regard to the Gentiles, including their sapientes-the philosophers with demonstrative arguments-the denial of knowledge overrides the initial ascription of it (512, my emphasis). 1 Bruce D. Marshall, " Thomas, Thomisms, and Truth", The Thomist 56 (1992) pp. 499-524. His original article was in ibid. 53 (1989), pp. 353-402. Page references in the text or footnotes without other citation will be to these articles. 2 " The person whose discourse does not cohere with the broader norms of Christian belief is not even talking about God, and so cannot possibly know or refer to him " (378-379), emphasis mine. 299 300 FREDERICK J. CROSSON I confess to a certain difficulty in understanding what "overrides " means here: cancels? contradicts? blots out? In any case, it seems that it was, at some time and for some non-Christian thinkers (e.g. Aristotle), possible to come to the knowledge of God's existence by reason, but that Marshall interprets Aquinas as saying that that knowledge is no longer even possible. 2. Marshall's general claim is that Aquinas must be read as holding a coherentist notion of revealed truth, so that a pagan and a Christian cannot mean the same thing the word ' God '. But Aquinas says exactly the opposite: Neither a Catholic nor a pagan knows the nature of God as he is in himself, but each knows him by some understanding (aliquam rationein ) of causality or excellence or remotion... Consequently a pagan can take this name God, when he says an idol is God, in the same way that a Catholic does in saying an idol is not God.3 3. Again and again, Marshall returns to the claim that, according to Aquinas, " In simple things any failure of knowledge (defectus cognitionis) is in fact a total lack of knowledge " (382) ;4 he cites the Commentary on John, in which Thomas declares... while it is possible for composite things to be known in part and to be unknown in part, if simple things are not grasped completely, they are not known (501). In Marshall's view, these claims about the knowledge of simple forms exclude the possibility of any adequation between the conclusion of a pagan philosopher's demonstration and the Divine esse: "... the defectus cognitionis of which Thomas speaks in II-II, 2, 2, ad 3, entails not a partial, but a total lack of corres:. pondence between the mind and God" (384). Marshall seems to read such statements as if they made the following objection: a Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, a. 10, ad 5: Dicendum quod ipsam naturam Dei prout in se est, neque catholicus neque paganus cognoscit; sed uterque cognoscit earn secumdum aliquam rationem causalitatis vel excellentiae vel remotionis... Et secundum hoc in eadem significatione accipere potest gentilis hoc nomen Deus, cum. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:St. Thomas Aquinas's Appeal to St. John the Baptist as a Benchmark of Spiritual GreatnessJohn Baptist Ku, O.P.When we think of sources of St. Thomas Aquinas's speculative theology, we rightly recall teachings given in Scripture—such as that sin came into the world through one man (Rom 5:12) or that all that the Father has belongs also to the Son (John 16:15)—as well as teachings, based on Scripture, imparted by (...) Church councils or Fathers, such as that Christ is one person with two natures1 or that the human nature of Christ is an instrument of his divinity.2 In the project of faith seeking understanding, these teachings lead expeditiously to distinctions and clarifications concerning person and nature, habit and action, primary and instrumental causality, intellect and will, faith and reason, and the like. However, the saints themselves too serve as a source for Aquinas's speculative theological reflection. Though they admittedly constitute a less abundant source than scriptural, conciliar, or patristic teaching, the saints' contribution to Aquinas's theology merits our attention.For instance, in "Jean-Baptiste: figure du prêcheur chez Thomas d'Aquin," Jean-Pierre Torrell observes that Aquinas's research into the Fathers of the Church for the Catena aurea bore considerable influence on his subsequent works, and Torrell documents how Aquinas's treatment of John the Baptist is a precise case that shows this influence.3 More recent [End Page 1119] scholarship has, fortunately, taken note of the saints' contribution to Aquinas's theology—in the figures of St. Benedict and the virgin martyrs.4This article will therefore examine St. John the Baptist as just such a source of Aquinas's speculative theology. Aquinas appeals to St. John as a benchmark of spiritual greatness against which to situate other figures: Christ, angels, Mary, apostles, prophets, evangelists, priests, and the people of God. By examining these cases, we will not only observe the Angelic Doctor's appreciation of the saints as our teachers, as examples to be imitated, and as proofs of God's love in transformative grace; we will also witness aspects of the Dominican master's theological method, that is, in his manner of interpreting Scripture and his application of reason to scriptural data to make arguments and draw conclusions.5 For instance, in his treatment of the least in the kingdom of heaven, Scripture will definitively confirm what theological reasoning can determine concerning the knowledge of those with the beatific vision. Furthermore, his exposition on the Blessed Virgin will reveal that he reads the Bible as a whole with one divine author, in support of traditional interpretations.6 However, he is not naive about diverse human authorship and the literal versus the spiritual senses [End Page 1120] of Scripture,7 and his methodology unveils his explicit conviction that Scripture must be the basis of theological claims.8My presentation will unfold in five sections. After (1) a glance at some of Aquinas's comments on the authority of various sources of theology so as to situate our conversation about the saints as a source of theology, I will review Aquinas's enlistment of John the Baptist as a standard by which to establish: (2) three simple points about Christians and Christ—that all of the articles of faith must be accepted, that prepubescent children can enter religious life, and that Christ's baptism manifests divine power—(3) the superiority of angels to wayfarers, among whom John the Baptist is the greatest, followed by apostles, prophets, and evangelists; (4) the eminence of John the Baptist and a ranking, in order, of God, angels, John the Baptist, prophets, priests, and then God's people; and (5) the holiness of Mary the Mother of God.The Authority of Various Sources of TheologyIn just a few lines in the Summa theologiae, Aquinas identifies the roles of reason and authority in theology. On one hand, "it is most proper" to theology to offer "proofs from authority," since theology's "principles are known through revelation"—making theological arguments dependent on "the authority of those making the revelation." But on the other hand, theology "also uses human reason, not to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE HIERARCHY OF TRUTHS IN THE CATECHISM AVERY DULLES, S.J. Fordham University Bronx, New Yark IN ORDER to throw light on the question of the hierarchy of truths in The Catechism of the Catholic Church, the topic here being addressed, it may be best to move by stages. I shall begin by saying something about the nature and purpose of the Catechism, then turn to the meaning of the (...) expression, " hierarchy of truths," and thirdly, in the main part of this article, discuss how the hierarchy of truths is or is not respected in the Catechism. Before concluding I shall add some remarks, fourthly, on the question of the different levels of authority of different doctrines. The Nature of the Catechism The Catechism of the Catholic Church was composed in response to the request of the Extraordinary Synod of 1985, which declared in its Final Report: " Very many have expressed the desire that a catechism or compendium of all Catholic doctrine regarding both faith and morals be composed, that it might be, as it were, a point of reference for the catechisms or compendiums that are prepared in the various regions. The presentation of doctrine must be biblical and liturgical. It must be sound doctrine suited to the present life of Christians." 1 From the beginning the new Catechism was conceived on the pattern of the Roman Catechism, also known as the Catechism of the Council of Trent. That catechism, published in 1566, was a lFinal Report, II B (a) 4; text in Origins 15 (December 19, 1985): 44450, at 448. 369 370 AVERY DULLES, S.J. rather complete restatement of Catholic doctrine in the light of the teaching of Trent. Like the Council out of which it grew, the Roman Catechism gave special emphasis to the Catholic doctrine of the sacraments, which had been particularly contested by the Protestants. The volume was written not for children or catechumens but for pastors. In conformity with the requests made in a number of the small working groups (" circuli minores ") at the Synod of 1985, the present Catechism was intended to be a full restatement of Catholic doctrine in the light of the Second Vatican Council. As a compendium of all doctrine, it includes the teaching of the Church on points that were not touched by Vatican II. The result is a comprehensive summa incorporating the data of Scripture, the heritage of the fathers and doctors of the Church, the pronouncements of popes, councils, and congregations of the Holy See, testimonies of the liturgy, and memorable reflections of classical theologians, saints, and spiritual writers. I know of no comparable instrument for ascertaining the relevant data from Scripture and tradition regarding the full range of Catholic faith and morals. For readers professionally concerned with theology and religious education, the footnotes alone would be worth the price of the volume. The notes contain some 4,000 biblical references, more than 1,000 references to conciliar texts, more than 250 references to papal statements (more than half of them from John Paul II), over 100 references to the Eastern and Western codes of canon law, more than 100 to liturgical texts, and nearly 500 references to church fathers and ecclesiastical writers. Like the Roman Catechism, this new synthesis of Catholic doctrine is directed not to the simple faithful but to pastors. As is stated in the Prologue, " this Catechism is addressed principally to those responsible for catechesis : in the first instance, to the bishops as doctors of the faith and pastors of the Church. It is offered to them as an instrument for the fulfillment of their task of teaching the people of God. It is addressed, through the bishops, to the editors of catechisms, priests, and catechists. It will THE HIERARCHY OF TRUTHS 371 also be useful reading for all other faithful Christians " ( 12).2 The present Catechism is composed for Catholics all over the world, but the authors are quite aware that it needs to be adapted to meet the needs and capacities of different groups. They insist in the Prologue that those who instruct the faithful, or compose other catechetical materials, should adapt their teaching to the culture, age, spiritual maturity... (shrink)

In order for God to be simple, He must be esse itself, but in some texts Aquinas seems to distinguish between esse and id quod est, so it seems that God cannot be an id quod est. To resolve this tension, Eleonore Stump proposes quantum theology, whereby we are able to attribute contradictory predicates to a thing of which we have no quidditative knowledge; so God then can be seen as esse itself and as an ens. In this (...) paper I criticise this approach and hold that there is a principled philosophical approach that we can take to these matters through a greater clarification of what it means for God to be pure esse. It is seen that this latter approach entails that God is indeed an ens, so that the ens-hood of God is derived from His being pure esse, in which case quantum theology is not needed for a Thomistic resolution of the problem. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the concept of Heaven and St. Thomas Aquinas I "Summa Theologica" explained the basis of natural law and metaphysics. The philosophy, the I's "Road" was opened on their own, said that the ultimate reality itself; second source that can be raw, such as "Dawson, one two, two three, three things," a phrase below; again , then follow all the rules change. In this regard, I tend to "Heaven", "heaven" statement, basically all things to (...) follow the law is. I focus on is that all things are to follow the law is. As for the man-made law, I tend to be severely criticized, such as saying "Fa Wu Zi-chang, way more than a thief," and the like. Having said that, by Taoism Taoism Taoism and Legalism affect the development of the legislation is still based on natural law is human law theory. Thomas Aquinas's natural law, is given in accordance with the rational nature of God and the law of action, we can see, St. Thomas Aquinas's natural law focused on people, not only contains a real natural , but also ought to include , two related but different. There are words on the surface, natural law is that "people according to their nature are looking for is good." However, the surface should be made, the principle of natural law is: "People should do good to avoid evil." In this paper, to compare the Heaven and the ultimate source of natural law, I inquire of the non-personal God of the Trinity Road and Thomas Aquinas on how chemical and biological weapons or to create things, by the generosity or wisdom and love of order and law generated. Then, on the Heaven and the natural law itself for comparison. Finally, the two can be dealt with through the office, and, and related concepts in Taoism. The basic concern of this paper is to compare Laozi's Heavenly Dao and St. Thomas' natural law for the purpose of bringing them to dialogue. Philosophically speaking, Laozi's concept of Dao means first, the ever self-manifesting and creative Ultimate Reality; second, the Origin giving birth to all things; third, the law of becoming of all things in the universe. For this last meaning, usually Laozi uses the term "Heavenly Dao" to represent laws of nature that all beings in the universe, including human beings , must comply with. As to human laws, he takes a critical position, to the point of saying that "The more legal objects multiply, the more robbers and thieves there will be." Nevertheless, under his influence, Huanglao daoists and legalists have developed their philosophy of positive laws.In Comparison, St. Thomas' natural laws are principles of human action according to human rational nature. The emphasis of St. Thomas is put therefore on the rational nature of human beings, which includes both the aspect of "to be" and that of "ought to be," both being closely related yet distinct. Seen from "to be," the natural law says that all human beings desire goodness by their nature; while as their "ought to be," all human beings should do good and avoid doing evil.This comparative study will focus first on how the generosity of Dao's giving birth to all things in Laozi and the wisdom and love of God in St. Thomas become order and law. Then we will compare Laozi's laws of nature, to which human beings should also live accordingly, with techniques inspired from them, and the principles of St. Thomas' natural laws. We will discuss the possible compatibility and dialogue between St. Thomas thoughts, which are essential to Catholicism , and those of Laozi as followed by lluanlao Daoism and Religious Daoism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Summa Contra Gentiles and Aquinas's Way to GodGaven KerrThere is to be found in Aquinas's writings a way to God which is his own and most personal. This way to God is the way from existence (esse) and arrives at God as pure existence itself, the fount of all being, without which nothing would be. It is deployed in several contexts ranging from the De ente et (...) essentia to the Summa theologiae [ST]. Yet, in the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], it is peculiarly absent. The proofs of God's existence which Aquinas offers in the latter are almost exclusively drawn from Aristotle, and they do not exhibit any of the refined metaphysical thinking about esse that characterizes Thomas's thinking about God in other works.1 For a work that is intended to be both apologetical in nature and explicitly philosophical from the outset, this is strange. Thomas is always at home in his own metaphysics of esse, and he deploys it with ease and finesse especially when demonstrating God's existence and discussing the divine nature. But in the SCG his proofs of God's existence and the subsequent reasoning about the divine nature are awkward and, one could even say, clumsy. Why did he not just dispense with the Aristotelian thinking on motion and movers and all the clarifications that involves? Why not simply stick with his own favored account of act and potency interpreted in terms of the metaphysics of esse?In the current paper I wish to address these issues. I shall begin with an account of what I take to be Aquinas's way to God and why I think it is [End Page 1273] his way to God. Having done that, I will then address the issue as to why this way to God does not appear in the SCG reasoning, but slowly emerges only after God's existence has been demonstrated. I shall conclude that the apologetical and consciously philosophical nature of the SCG offer us an insight into why Thomas did not lean on his metaphysics of esse in his (initial) discussions of God there.Aquinas's Way to GodAquinas famously argues that there is a distinction between essence and esse in things. The context of this distinction is that of universal hylemorphism, which holds that in all composite things there are two principles: a principle of potency and a principle of actuality. In traditional Aristotelian fashion, defenders of universal hylemorphism held that the principle of actuality in a thing is its form, whereas the principle of potency is its matter.2 All things other than God are composed of matter and form, since all things other than God have some element of potency. But to locate the potentiality of anything other than God in the matter of the thing creates a problem when it comes to separated substances (angels) and the immaterial rational soul. Such substances (or components of substances in the case of the rational soul) are taken to be separated from matter and all material conditions. Nonetheless they are created and thereby dependent on God, so they must have some potentiality.So how do we attribute matter—that is, potency—to separate substances?According to defenders of universal hylemorphism, the answer is to distinguish between corporeal matter and incorporeal matter. The former is the kind of physical matter that we typically take to be the matter of things, whereas the latter is a kind of non-physical matter which the separate substances possess. Thus, it is not proper to say that such substances are [End Page 1274] immaterial, but rather that whilst material they are incorporeal. Universal hylemorphism has the advantage that it neatly distinguishes all things from God by isolating a principle of potency (matter) which all things other than God have. Nevertheless, universal hylemorphism presents problems of its own, not least the thorny one of making intelligible just what exactly a real (as opposed to conceptual) kind of matter is that is incorporeal.Aquinas for his part rejected universal hylemorphism from his earliest writings.3 He holds that it is precisely because separated substances are separated from all material conditions that... (shrink)

The present article focuses on the idea that divine nature is prior to being. This idea was first articulated in John of Scythopolis’s commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius. It was adopted by Maximus Confessor and re-used in Meister Eckhart’s first Quaestio Parisiensis. The main tenet of this idea is that, if God is the origin of being, he must be more fundamental than being. Thus, being cannot be identical to divine nature. The conclusion that can be drawn from the discussion of (...) this idea is that the importance that has been traditionally attached to the "Exodusmetaphysik" must be reconsidered, and that the pro-ontological conception of divine nature constitutes an autonomous tradition in Christian thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:FINALITY AND INTELLIGIBILITY IN BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION ANTONIO MORENO, O.P. Graduate Theological Union Berkeley, California I N SCIENCE AND philosophy the final cause has always..,been controversial. To biologists the problem is complicated, but many believe that it is impossible fo give a complete description of the phenomenon of life without taking into oonsideration the teleological aspect of it. Thus Rensch: A special feature of all living organisms is the fact (...) that biological processes in general appear to be: 'meaningful.' They are not only appropriate to the immediate conditions, but also seem to be directed to some purpose which in individual development is only achievE:d at a relatively late stage and after many modications of form.1 Simpson's approach to this problem is shaped by the conviction that biology should attempt to answer all the questions, one of whioh is the reason for a living being's activity: "Here, ' What for '-the dreadful teleological question-not only is legitimate but also must eventually be asked about every vital phenomenon." 2 To understand how finality is realized in biology, let us first turn briefly to the nature of the final cause. The Nature of the Final CaU8e Aristotle deals with causes in the seeond book of his Physics: It is through the causes that scientific conclusions about mobile heings are demonstrated. Movement is intelligible when we discover the causes that produce it. Among the 1B. Rensch, Biophilosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. 107. 2 G. Simpson, Th,is Vi.ew of Life (New York: Ifarcourt, 1964),.pp. 104-108. l ANTONIO MORENO, O.P. causes, the first and most important is the final cause, which is defined as "that for the sake of which a thing is done." 3 The final cause is the motive or reason which impels the agent to operate. Motion is the vehicle by whioh the goal is attained and, consequently, the other causes exercise their causality in dependence on the final cause. Hence, Aquinas says: " The final cause is called the cause of causes, because it is the cause of the causality of all the causes. For it is the cause of the efficient ca:usality; and the efficient cause is the cause of the causality of both the matter and the form.".j, The final cause directs, inclines, and attracts; impelled by this attraction, the efficient pushes and exercises its action. Aquinas asserts that those who reject the final cause destroy the intelligibility of science, inasmuch as they suppress the motive or first reason which justifies motion. The final cause is not the cause that executes the adion, for this is the agent's function, the efficient cause. The final cause is the reason why the agent acts. Therefore, the efficient cause presupposes the final: "The end is not the cause unless it moves the agent to act. If there is no action the final cause does not exist." 5 It is interesting to note that many biologists believe that the existence of finality destroys causality, when actually the opposite is true. For example, Simpson says: " The finalist was often the man who made a liberal use of ignaV'a ratio,... when you failed to explain a, thing by the ordinary process of causality, you could ' explain ' it 1by reference to some purpose of nature." 6 A simple desirn or attraction is not a cause unless it is fol3 Aristotle, Ph&sias (Trans. W. D. Ross) Book II, 3, 194b34. (Oxford, 1962). 4 Thomas Aquinas, In V Metaph., Iect. 3, n. 782. Of. Summa Theol., I, q. 105, a.5. 5 Thomas Aquinas, On the Power of God, trans. English Dominican Fathers (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1952), q.5, a. l. 6 G. Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 274. FINALITY IN BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION 3 lowed by the activity of the agent. The desire to attain the goal is called the " intention " of the action, even when the goal is not achieved, as happens in many of our actions. Failure does not destroy finality; inactivity does. For that which is first in the intention is the last to be achieved as the effect. The intention does not... (shrink)

In the post-Newtonian world motion is assumed to be a simple category which relates to the locomotion of bodies in space, and is usually associated only with physics. Philosophy, God and Motion shows that this is a relatively recent understanding of motion and that prior to the scientific revolution motion was a much broader and more mysterious category, applying to moral as well as physical movements. Simon Oliver presents fresh interpretations of key figures in the history of western thought (...) including Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Newton, examining the thinkers' handling of the concept of motion. Through close readings of seminal texts in ancient and medieval cosmology and early modern natural philosophy, the book moves from antique to modern times investigating how motion has been of great significance within theology, philosophy and science. Particularly important is the relation between motion and God, following Aristotle traditional doctrines of God have understood the divine as the 'unmoved mover' while post-Holocaust theologians have suggested that in order to be compassionate God must undergo the motion of suffering. Philosophy, God and Motion suggests that there may be an authentically theological, as well as a natural scientific understanding of motion. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation. By ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. Edited by Timothy McDermott. Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1989. Pp. lviii + 651. $78.00 (cloth). There are probably just a few of us familiar with Dominico Gravina's Compendium rythmicum, an ancient little book that summarizes the entire Summa theologiae in the same Latin meter as " Tantum ergo." But doubtless many are familiar with the experience (...) Gravina must have had that led him to write such a book. It is the same experience that has led to a remarkable number of synopses, compendia, introductory translations, selections, and most recently to Timothy McDermott's Concise Translation. These attempt to present the doctrine of the Summa without the massive weight of syllogism and definition, unfamiliar style, and innumerable (sometimes obscure) references, which make it so daunting a task for the unprepared reader. For example, Paul Glenn in Tour of the Summa excises every objection and response and summarizes only the bodies of the articles. Walter Farrell in Companion to the Summa does not attempt trans· lation hut instead rewords and restructures the Summa in the typically modern paragraph style. However, these works have their shortcomings. By neglecting the doctrine contained in the responses and by failing to provide any transition from the summary of one article to another, the Tour considerably weakens the ordo disciplinae which, as Thomas argues in his prologue, is essential to this work. In this regard, even Anton Pegis's Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas tends to stumble along, despite being a close translation. The Companion, on the other hand, does preserve a continuity of thought, but in the final account it is Thomas's thought only secondhand. The Concise Translation, however, masterfully combines the strengths of these hooks, while avoiding their weaknesses. For it achieves concision in a manner that respects the order and development of the Summa, " not by selecting out parts, hut by compressing and distilling the whole" (p. xiii). Yet at the same time it is a translation. It is essentially Thomas in a similar form, approximately one sixth the size. McDermott admits that he has made certain omissions (for example, some of the remarkably lengthy discussions of the ceremonial and judicial precepts of the Old Law), but in these cases he retains enough to give the reader a sense of Thomas's treatment. There are of course 7~7 728 BOOK REVIEWS many passages which would he impossible to make more concise (for example, the proofs for God's existence), except by adapting them to a modern format. Here McDermott's use of modern punctuation and sentence structure tends to smooth out the stacatto (though extremely precise) structure of Thomas's syntax. At a glance, the Concise Translation appears as a thoroughly modern text, with paragraphs, titled sections, chapters, bibliography, and indices. Not surprisingly, it is divided into three main parts: God, Journeying to God, and The Road to God. Each of these is divided into chapters (numbered continuously through the parts) that correspond more or less to the so-called Treatises. For example, Part One, Chapter Five, entitled "Man's Place in Creation," corresponds exactly to the Treatise on Man. These chapters, in turn, are divided into sections which correspond closely to the major divisions that Thomas outlines in his introductions at the heads of various questions. The ohjec· tion/response format, however has completely disappeared, and the only evidence of the question/article format appears at the heads of certain paragraphs and in the margins. But this does not mean that the ohj ections and responses have altogether vanished. McDermott's careful eye has picked out many of the important distinctions they con· tain and has skillfully incorporated them into complete and unified paragraphs. This holds true also with many instances of the sed contra. Finally, in streamlining his text, he has done away with most references, keeping just enough to indicate on whom Thomas primarily relied. This regrettably leaves the reader unaware of Thomas's extensive use of his predecessors. But all in all, McDermott's format makes the text eminently readable. The translation itself is remarkable for its fidelity to the original and ease of comprehension. It almost... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:342 BOOK REVIEWS (5) What follows for the " critical " and " systematic " dimensions of theology, if, accepting Balthasar's centering of thought in (the paradoxes of) love and beauty, one sees mystery, metaphor, concrete imagery, and indeed "myth" as essential and not "accidental" to all theological meaning? In opening up these questions, O'Hanlon's important book identifies the areas where dialogue with Balthasar's work might best begin, even (...) as it makes its own constructive contribution to theology. John Paul II Institute Washington, D.C. DAVID L. SCHINDLER Goodness and Rightness in Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae. By JAMES F. KEENAN, S.J. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1992. Pp. xii + 212. $25.00 (paper). James Keenan says that he began his work on this book " believing the simple presupposition that goodness describes persons and rightness describes actions" (p. ix). The main focus of the study is the question of whether and to what extent this distinction can be found in the work of Aquinas. The author holds that the understanding of the relation of reason and will in the early work of Aquinas precludes the distinction of goodness and rightness held by the author and other contemporary moralists. Keenan claims, however, to find in the Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae a significant shift in Aquinas's notion of the will and its relation to reason, a shift toward an " autonomous will." Keenan states in the Introduction: "The will's autonomy is a necessary condition for understanding moral goodness "; indeed he proceeds to note that " without it there can be no distinction " between goodness and rightness (pp. ix-x). Before commenting on Keenan's work I will first briefly summarize the basic points of the book. The book is divided into four parts. In the first part we see the distinction between goodness and rightness. Keenan explains the distinction: Goodness and badness describe whether or not we strive to the extent we are able to attain rightness in our lives and actions. Rightness and wrongness describe whether or not we attain the end that reason dictates is proper and necessary for our lives and actions (p. ix). Keenan finds the foundation for this distinction in the reasoning of G. E. Moore. A person's actions can he judged right or wrong independently of a consideration of the person's motives. For instance, a BOOK REVIEWS 343 right action might be performed by a good person or by a bad person, the goodness or badness being determined by the motive. There are, then, two distinct moral descriptions; one, goodness or badness, pertains to persons and the other, rightness and wrongness, pertains to actions. Keenan joins several contemporary moral theologians in claiming something which Moore did not, namely, that " a person who performs a wrong action can be called good for performing the action" (p. 6). This assertion is based upon an understanding of goodness as determined " antecedent to action " (p. 15), and likewise as " antecedent to and distinct from rightness" (p. 7). Moral goodness is determined by the motivation, and motivation alone, of the person acting (p. 14). For example, does the person act out of love for God and neighbor, or rather out of a desire for self-aggrandizement? Jn question here is what Keenan calls the " fundamental, formal self-movement of the agent" (p. 14). Rightness on the other hand is a moral description determined by the measure of reason. It describes actions, and can also describe the agent, in terms of right order in relation to the end of human life. In Part II (the second and third chapters) Keenan turns to the supposed shift in the thought of Aquinas regarding reason and will. Keenan finds the early position of Aquinas incompatible with the distinction of goodness and rightness, but the later position compatible with the distinction. Keenan also presents Aquinas's distinction between specification and exercise in the act of the will as crucial to the distinction between goodness and rightness. I will return to this point shortly. Part III (the fourth and fifth chapters) considers Aquinas's treatises on the human act and moral virtue found in Summa Theologiae I-II. Keenan holds that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:nook REVIEWS 689 if everyone behaves as if everyone is saved the result is a world in which God could appear and not be crucified. To be sure, there is a chance of an infinite life. Pascal believed human beings are potentially infinite--as is shown by our capacity for extending our knowledge to the infinite--but we are also potentially nothing, as is shown by the fact that the person (...) never really appears in our scientific accounts. It is through God that our infinity is to be achieved, and so betting on God is also betting on ourselves in a perfectly intelligible way. This involw~s a notion of infinity not explored in any of these essays, which makes it possible to share with God without changing the divine nature (or losing ours). This sharing is a payoff which cannot be attained by.just any act. Our lives may also be endless and possessed of positive value because they are not lived in hell, but this is icing on a cake which you are supposed to eat anyhow. Still, though Pascal might have taught the authors a thing or two, he would have found this book handy for some of its new conceptual analyses and some of its classic essays. Ian Hacking's 1972 analysis of what he takes to be three different arguments in Pascal remains a good starting point and John K. Ryan's historical article of 1945 still has useful things to say about Tillotson, whose maximization-of-utility argument really was the one many commentators have taken to be Pascal's. (But Ryan misses much of the background in the combination of scepticism and fideism in Charron and La Mothe le Vayer.) Among the others Jeff Jordan does a good job on the "many gods" objections, Richard Foley's account of pragmatic grounds for belief adds some clear insights (though his account of rationality is open to some objections), and Thomas V. Morris's account of the problems of wagering and evidence will be a handy reference point. Edward F. McClennen's account of finite decision is a necessary counterpart to Sorensen's infinity paper, and Philip L. Quinn opens some of the moral issues involved in all such wagers. Finally, George Schlesinger's assessment of the subtleties of theistic argument well repays the time spent reading it. The bibliography is useful and up-to-date. The editor would probably cheerfully admit his book's shortcomings as a work in the history of philosophy, but the volume must nevertheless have a place on the bookshelf of everyone for whom these issues are central. LESI,IE ARMOUR Universityof Ottawa G. W. Leibniz. De Summa Rerum: MetaphysicalPapers, z675-76. Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by G. H. R. Parkinson. The Yale Leibniz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp lxiv + 145. Cloth, $37.oo. The YaleLeib,niz, under the general editorship of Daniel Garber and Robert C. Sleigh, Jr., will provide scholarly editions of Leibniz's original texts along with an English translation on facing pages. As the general editors explain in their introduction, each volume in the series will be "a collection of texts that constitute a natural unit," each will be edited and translated by a specialist who will also contribute an introduction, and 690 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER i99 5 each will include writings most of which either have not been published or, if published, have not been translated. The first volume of The Yale Leibniz, edited by G. H. R. Parkinson, is a tantalizing beginning. In it, Parkinson has collected, translated, and introduced some of the most interesting papers from the Academy edition's Series VI, Vol. 3, first published in 198o. In this volume the Academy editors have placed under the title of De Summa Return those papers which Leibniz wrote between late 1675 and December 1676 and which treat problems in the philosophy of mathematics (especially those of the infinite) and in metaphysics and philosophical theology. The papers are enormously important. Toward the end of his Paris stay (which lasted from March, 1672 to October 4, 1676) and after a breakthrough in his work on... (shrink)

The global Peter Lombard research reinaugurated in 1990s has resulted in a number of recent publications, but the Master of the Sentences’ theology proper is partially underresearched. In particular, a more detailed exposition of the distinctions 35-41 of his Book of Sentences is needed in order to clarify his doctrine of God’s knowledge and its relation to the human free will. The article builds on the earlier established evidence that, for Peter Lombard in distinctions 35-38, God’s knowledge, in general, is (...) not causative, although some causative power has to be ascribed to God’s knowledge of the good. The last part of distinction 38 and the content of distinction 39 further analyze the capacities and functionalities of the divine omniscience and explain how it interacts with acts of human will. The key question here deals with the problem of alternative states of affairs: whether something may be otherwise than God foreknew. As it is shown, Master Peter agrees that it is possible for created things and events to be otherwise than they are, but insists that God’s knowledge must be in any case exhaustive and infallible. He uses a number of logical tools to defend the thesis about God’s perfect knowledge and the possibility of things happening otherwise, but lacks a strict definition of the notion of “possibility” used here. The study concludes that in few cases Lombard’s posse could mean a potency or a simple logical possibility, or the diachronic contingency, but the overall theological statement is clear: potentially, God’s knowledge can be different or include alternative state of affairs but it cannot change. (shrink)

John Dewey once said of philosophical problems that they are quite different from old soldiers. Not only do they never die, but they do not even fade away. Something similar might be said about the unfavourable Divine attributes of the 1950s and 60s, timelessness or eternity, necessary existence, foreknowledge of creaturely free choices, and immutability. All have contemporary defenders. Even the puzzling, traditional tenet that God is metaphysically simple now has formidable apologists. Perhaps the least popular of the traditional (...) theistic canon, the most likely to fade away, is the tenet that God is impassible. The recent appearance of Richard Creel's Divine Impassibility has shown that even this least popular of attributes can be powerfully articulated and defended. Roughly, the impassibility thesis is the claim that God does not undergo sensory experience including suffering and pain, nor is God subject to corruption, substantial essential change or to external agency. Creel's defence of Divine impassibilism is certainly the most balanced and sophisticated in the current literature. Any argument for passibilism must take Creel's work seriously. I intend to do just that in the course of defending the thesis that the God of Christian theism is passible in an important respect. There are substantive moral and religious reasons to believe God suffers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:154. 1 HUME AND THE GOD-HYPOTHESIS Interpretation of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion has always been contentious. While some think it obvious that Philo is Hume's spokesman, others think it is Cleanthes. Whether or not Philo is Hume's spokesman, he certainly produces the better argument. Nonetheless, that argument is flawed by an assumption which I doubt Hume ever questioned. I want to consider that assumption, but want to make (...) it clear that it is not my intention to defend Cleanthes' position. The second thing I want to do in this paper, which I have not seen done elsewhere, is to connect Hume's arguments in the Dialogues with his anthropological account of religiosity. Perhaps the least contentious thing about the Dialogues is that Demea's a priori position is not taken too seriously, nor is much time spent on the first cause argument, so important from Aristotle to Leibniz. What is given serious attention is what might be described as the 'God-hypothesis', which is more or less the Argument from Design. Philo rejects the argument for reasons we shall review below, but makes a concession. The concession is basically that it is intelligible to contend that the cause or causes of order in the world bear some resemblance to human intelligence. The catch, which is the point driven home against Cleanthes, is that, while intelligible, the idea is utterly pointless. Philo says: If the whole of Natural Theology... resolves itself into one simple...proposition, That_ the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence : If this proposition be not capable of extension...If it affords no inference that affects human life... if the analogy... can be carried no farther... (203) then it is without point. Hume is willing to let the theist have his vague analogy, for it serves no point. In fact, the theist cannot 155. win, for to the extent that the God-hypothesis might have explanatory power, it approaches the status of an empirical hypothesis, and as such loses theological import. The Dialogues should be devastating, yet seem to miss the mark. Suppose we look a bit more closely at what is going on. The position Cleanthes elaborates is an hypothesis to the effect that the world exhibits order and that that order is best explained by the postulation of an orderer. Cleanthes' moves are a bit more complicated, as we shall see in a moment, but this is the essential point. The hypothesis is conceived by Hume as either competing with or completing science. In the Enquiry we read that The religious hypothesis...must be considered only as a particular method of accounting for the visible phenomena of the universe : but no.just reasoner will ever presume to infer from it any single fact, and alter or add to the phenomena, in any single particular. (237) The passage is virtually a summary of Philo's thesis. There can be no move from an inferred cause to anything further in terms of either facts or properties. Cleanthes may be grudgingly granted his causal supposition, but he is not allowed to use it. Again: And what can you say more, allowing all your suppositions and reasonings?... (0)ur conduct and deportment in life is still the same... You persist in imagining, that, if we grant that divine existence,...you may safely infer consequences from it... You seem not to remember, that all your reasonings... can only be drawn from effects to causes... (238) The crucial failure is that All the philosophy...and all the religion... will never be able to carry us beyond the usual cause of experience, or give us measures of conduct and behaviour different from those which are furnished by reflections on common life. (244) God, as putative cause simply makes no difference, so long as we conform to the standards of rational thought. 156. It is important to be clear that what is being rejected is God as "a fruitful rival to scientific explanatory notions, such as gravity". The rejection of God as explanatory principle turns on the illegitimacy of Cleanthes' moves. As Peter Jones puts it, Cleanthes makes two inferences... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Atoms, Gunk, and God:Natural Theology and the Debate over the Fundamental Composition of MatterTravis DumsdayLET US SAY we take a rock and divide it in two. We then divide each of the halves again. We repeat. We keep repeating, over and over and over again, until we have reached down to the level of molecules and then to atoms and then to subatomic particles and beyond. What, eventually, will (...) we end up with? (A) Do we eventually reach “rock bottom,” a layer of fundamental objects that can be divided no further? Or (B) could the dividing process be carried on forever?Let us take (A), the idea that there are fundamental, indivisible objects. We may call these “atoms,” and the theory that affirms their existence atomism. (I use the label for historical reasons; the “atoms” discussed in the history of metaphysics are of course not equivalent to the atoms of contemporary physics, which are divisible into constituent subatomic particles.) What must be the nature of these objects? Here we can identify two distinct versions of atomism.According to the first, these entities cannot be spatially extended, since extension entails divisibility. After all, if something has discernible length, then its conceptually distinguishable left and right halves, for instance, could be separated from each other, at least in theory. The existence of the matter constituting the left half seems not to entail the existence of the matter constituting the right half or vice versa, so one could persist without the other (e.g., the left half could be annihilated while the right half continues in existence), and [End Page 227] could be divided from the other. Whether they could actually be separated by us, using current or future technology, is of course an entirely different question from the philosophically significant issue of divisibility in principle. Atoms are, on this view, extensionless “point particles” with no actual or potential proper parts. This may be called atomism version 1.According to the second version of atomism, these indivisible objects are nevertheless spatially extended. The reality of atoms is affirmed, but the relation obtaining between extension and divisibility, which is supposedly entailed, is rejected. Despite being spatially extended, these particles cannot possibly be divided. Consequently, although they are spatially extended, they do not possess actual proper parts in the sense that “proper part” is typically understood (i.e., as involving smaller constituent objects, which could in theory exist apart from the whole). The claim is not merely that they cannot be divided by us using current or future technology, nor that their division would be inconsistent with contingent physical laws. The impossibility referenced here is not mere physical impossibility. Rather, the claim is that it is metaphysically impossible (and logically impossible, for those who equate metaphysical and logical impossibility) for them to be divided. There is no possible world in which these entities are in any way divided, either by splitting in two or by destroying one section while leaving the rest intact. This may be called atomism version 2.Atomism’s major competitors may be grouped under the affirmation of (B), according to which division could go on forever. Matter is infinitely divisible. But what does infinite divisibility imply? Here there is a further divergence of views. One camp affirms the gunky view of matter. On this view, a material object is infinitely divisible because it is composed of an actual infinity of proper parts: any material object is composed of smaller proper parts that are themselves real objects composed of smaller proper parts that are themselves real objects composed of smaller proper parts, and so on, ad infinitum. Another camp denies the reality of actual infinities (at least in the material realm), and affirms instead the reality of extended simples. On this view matter is infinitely divisible, as [End Page 228] on the gunky view, but not because material objects are composed of an actual infinity of smaller objects. Instead, material nature bottoms out (in a sense) at objects that are spatially extended and potentially subject to division, but that lack actual proper parts. They are not composed of real, smaller objects. Rather, what makes it true that the object... (shrink)

There is a long tradition of arguments for the existence of God. Early examples include Aristotle’s cosmological argument in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics, arguing that if there is change, there must be at least one unchanging and perfect being that originates all change, while the first chapter of Romans and chapter 13 of the Book of Wisdom insist that “from the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen” (Wis. 13:5, NAB). This (...) tradition continues, and indeed starting in the 1950s, analytic philosophy has seen an impressive resurgence of more and more careful formulations and criticisms of arguments for the existence of God. I shall show how the phenomenon of altruism yields a theistic argument. Some arguments for the existence of God proceed by pure reasoning alone and yield ontological arguments like Anselm’s, while others depend in part either on particular empirical claims (e.g., the argument from miracles or the argument from religious experience), or on general empirical claims, such as that there is motion, consciousness or life. The pattern of the arguments based on general claims is usually simple: (A) There is a general fact about reality, say that there is change or that there are complex organisms. (B) One argues that either the best or the only explanation is to be found in some state of affairs that includes the existence of a God-like being. And so (C) one concludes that a God-like being.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Another Look at Silence and Knowledge of God in Ignatius's Letter to the EphesiansRyan Patrick Budd"The man whose delight is in the Lord's teaching knows the art of sitting still in the right place."—Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical PoetryIn this essay, I attempt to supplement the better analyses of St. Ignatius of Antioch's Epistle to the Ephesians (Ign. Eph.) 14.1 through 15.3 with structural insights. The main fruit (...) of the analysis will be to affirm the "mystical" meaning of Ignatius's concept of "hearing Christ's silence": the mature believer, who truly understands Christ's word, will be able to hear the silence of Christ—meaning, to understand Christ's hidden and mysterious Godhead—because Christ dwells within the believer as in a temple. The essay will proceed in three sections: First, a review of the more substantive commentaries on "silence" in Ign. Eph. 14–15; second, a presentation of a potential structure of the passage and a commentary on what that structure, if correct, would yield; and third, a very brief confirmation of the findings by reference to themes in St. Paul's own Epistle to the Ephesians.Scholarly Commentary on Ignatius and "Silence"In discussing Ign. Eph. 14–15, scholars have come to a wide variety of views, for almost as many reasons, as to what Ignatius means when he says the following: [End Page 451]It is better to be silent and to be, than to speak and not be. Teaching is good, if the one speaking should do. There is, then, one Teacher, who "spoke and it came to be," and even the things he has done silently are worthy of the Father. The one truly hearing the word of Jesus can also hear his [Jesus's] silence, that he might be fully made, that he might act through what he says and be understood through his (the believer's) silence.(15.1–2)1There are, however, two predominant camps into which one could group the different scholarly opinions: the first camp holds that Ignatius merely is speaking about integrity, the correspondence between words and deeds;2 the second camp holds that he is enunciating a kind of Christian mysticism.3 Two prominent members of the second camp, Virginia Corwin and Gregory Vall, though quite distinct in their views of the bishop of Antioch, provide reasoning that I find decisive in favor of recognizing that Ignatius—while certainly emphasizing a true correspondence between words and deeds—carries the point further than simple moralizing.Virginia Corwin's "Reserve of Deity" and the Believer's Knowledge of ChristCorwin, in her analysis of the passage, points toward a "reserve" existing "behind" the visible works of Christ, which is to be identified with his invisible, and thus "silent," Godhead, which one who truly hears his word can also "hear." She acknowledges, however, that Ignatius first recognizes Christ as an example of a truly effective teacher due to the absolute [End Page 452] correspondence between his words and his acts. She writes, "Christ... is a teacher unlike most, since there is no contrast at all between his profession and his actions.... He has an absolute clarity and a complete lack of any hypocrisy."4 The result of this recognition is not to stress ethical integrity, however important: it is to argue that, because of the correspondence between Christ's words and his silent acts and his even more silent person, the one who knows his words can come to a deep, profound, and infallible knowledge of who he is, himself.Corwin argues that there is something more about this Teacher than the mere—though impressive—integrity of his message:But it is not only the integrity of the teacher that distinguishes him, but his unique power: "He spoke and it came to pass"; at these words to the minds of both the writer and the hearers of the letter must have occurred the image of the mighty acts of creation.... It is precisely because the words of Jesus are in a sense mighty acts that they must be seen in the larger perspective.5Which "larger perspective" she means... (shrink)

Following Thomas Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria's analysis of justice in exchanges takes place by commenting on the corresponding questions of the Summa Theologica. The identification of the just price with that of common estimation occurs under a sufficient concurrence of sellers and buyers. A high level of concurrence limits the ability to take advantage of the need on the other side of the market. This fact guaranties a full consent of the parties involved in trading. Under conditions of (...) market power or when some authority fixes a legal price, just price should also be taken as a normative ideal. (shrink)

We investigate indeterminism in physical observations. For this, we introduce a distinction between genuinely indeterministic observational processes, and fully deterministic observational processes, which we analyze by drawing a parallel between the localization properties of microscopic entities, like electrons, and the lateralization properties of macroscopic entities, like simple elastic bands. We show that by removing the randomness incorporated in certain of our observational processes, acquiring over them a better control, we also alter these processes in such a radical way that (...) in the end they do not correspond anymore to the observation of the same property. We thus conclude that a certain amount of indeterminism must be accepted and welcomed in our physical observations, as we cannot get rid of it without also diminishing our discriminative power. We also provide in our analysis some elements of clarification regarding the non-spatial nature of microscopic entities, which we illustrate by using an analogy with the process of objectification of human concepts. Finally, the important notion of relational properties is properly defined, and the role played by indeterminism in their characterization clarified. (shrink)

This essay explores a simple argument for a Ground of Being, objections to it, and limitations on it. It is nonsensical to refer to Nothing in the sense of utter absence, hence nothing can be claimed to come from Nothing. If, as it seems, the universe, or any physical ensemble containing it, is past-finite, it must be caused by an uncaused Ground. Speculative many-worlds, pocket universes and multiverses do not affect this argument, but the quantum cosmologies of Alex (...) Vilenkin, and J. B. Hartle and Stephen Hawking, which claim that the universe came from literally nothing, would. I argue that their novel project cannot work for reasons both physical (their "nothing" is actually a vacuum state governed by eternal physical laws) and methodological (physical theory cannot explain the emergence of the physical per se). Thus my argument stands. However, as David Hume showed, a posteriori arguments like mine infer a creation, and Creator, of a certain character, namely, a stochastic concept of creation and a panentheistic, partly physical Creator lacking omniscience and omnipotence. Rather than undermining the cosmological argument, as Hume intended, these limitations liberate the concept of the Ground from unnecessary problems, as Hartshorne suggested. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS God Encountered: A Contemporary Catholic Systematic Theology. Vol. I: Understanding the Christi.an Faith. By FRANS JOZEF VAN BEECK, S.J. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989. Pp. xiii + 338. $27.95. Frans Jozef van Beeck has written an excellent first volume of a projected three-volume opus of systematic theology, a book at once erudite and elegant, complicated in articulated structure yet simple in synthetic viewpoint. The work's (...) architectonic themes are: theology as an objective interpretive understanding which occurs within and also extends the "Great Tradition," and which has as its object a real God, not simply theology itself and its practitioners (who increasingly see themselves as merely meta-theologians) ; the explanatory category of encounter/experience as denoting the locus of human contact with the divine; the Greek theological motif of grace as divinization, and the Eastern understanding of Christology's exchange principle, together with the Western emphases on creation's exitus from God and reditus to God, all of which van Beeck uses to illumine a catholic interpretation of what our encounter with the divine involves. In addition, pleasingly sprinkled throughout the book are lapidary phrases such as "[theology's] pursuit of pi.a veritas amounts to vera pietas" (p. 26) and " understanding is... more humane and peaceful than coin and cannon" {p. 33). One may grasp the central insights and concerns of the book by comprehending how well its three titles synopsize and synthesize its basic themes. Its main subtitle shows that it is a systematic theology whose nourishing forms are catholicity and contemporaneity. Section 6 underlines just how systematic van Beeck wants his work to be; it is divided into chapters, numbered sections, and lettered subsections so that its arrangement supports " an internal reference system inde· pendent of pagination" (p. 11). The work is unabashedly catholic in the sense of a universal and ecumenical catholicity which is normative for all theology, comprising as it does both an integrity with the past and an openness to the present and future; it is also forthrightly Catholic in the more "positive " sense of advancing ideas peculiarly evident in Catholicism. In both senses, van Beeck sees a Catholic systematics as respecting the " Great Tradition " and desiring to understand it more deeply and as stressing the organic unity of Christian theology, which 141 142 BOOK REVIEWS current emphases on pluralism and specialization jeopardize. Sections 21-22 discuss the catholicity of theology as a pluriform, hierarchical system of truths and briefly describe some of the current pluralism within theology, concluding that "if systematic theology is to be catholic, it must be an exercise in dialogue, that is to say, in mutual trust" (p. 82). Still, one must find footing somewhere in this age of pluralism, and so section 23 displays the central convictions which will inform the entire opus: worship as fundamental to doctrine; christology and its "exchange principle" as the central focus of Christian theology; the theological importance of fundamental theology as an interpretation of the Christian faith in terms of grace and nature; creation and incarnation, together with the exitus/reditus theme, as determining the shape of the system; Vatican II, especially in its attention to history, as the single most important vantage point from which to offer a catholic and contemporary interpretation of the Christian Tradition; ecumenism as a crucial dimension of the system; Christian doctrine as interpreted by the structural relatedness between worship, conduct, and creed. There is no doubt as to the book's contemporaneity; it is evident on every page. The book's main title is significant since it expresses God as the work's unifying objective reference (section 5) and encounter/experience as the primary way of getting to know this God: " The central reality of the Christian faith... is encounter in ecstatic immediacy " (p. 161). It is extremely difficult to explain, without falling into reductionistic subjectivism, how one can experience God in this life. Enlisting Otto and Rabner against just such a tendency in Schleiermacher, van Beeck defends the objectivity and "otherness" of God within religious experience (section 35 and pp. 258-60). He does not discuss in any detail, however, how experience of God is related to faith and to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Living Zen, Loving GodRobert E. CarterLiving Zen, Loving God. By Ruben L. F. Habito. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2004. Pp. xxi + 129.At a time when one hears all too often of the irreconcilable differences between religions, it is a relief and a delight to read the words of someone who has gleaned much from Christianity (as a Jesuit priest) and from Zen Buddhism (as a practitioner whose (...) enlightenment has been duly authenticated). Father Ruben L. F. Habito's challenge has been to harmonize the beliefs of these two distinct traditions, both of which have provided him with quite distinctive transformative experiences. It is a mutual influencing that he presents in very accessible prose in Living Zen, Loving God.While the lectures in this volume are not attempts to reconcile competing doctrines and approaches in detail, they do strive to move the reader back to those originary experiences of spiritual insight that both traditions share. Father Habito seeks to uncover the spiritual springs of Zen and Christianity, letting each speak in its own way, for religion is not about doctrines and dogma; rather, as the Zen philosopher Nishida Kitarō maintained, "religion is an event of the soul."1 Habito seems to be in agreement with such a position. In explicating this experiential territory, he includes chapters on emptiness and fullness, the Heart Sūtra, the four vows of the Bodhisattva, Kuan-yin with a thousand hands, and Zen and Christian spirituality. There are many apt conclusions and comparisons in these pages, such as a Christian adaptation of the Buddhist admonition to slay the Buddha if you meet him-for to meet him is to lose him by fixing his significance and intent as rigid doctrine and by rendering the absolute a "thing" in the first place. Habito writes that "if you meet the Christ, crucify him!" (p. 36). Or again, there is an excellent and simple account of compassion: "an out-stretched hand adjusting a pillow in the middle of the night... the night of emptiness, of unknowing.... And in the middle of this, as my pillow slips off, and my head feels displaced, spontaneously, my hand reaches out to adjust the pillow, and I go back to sleep. That's all. This koan is saying, that's compassion" (p. 76). The self has dropped off, and one now acts spontaneously and effortlessly from the purity and depth of radical interconnectedness.What is impressive about this book is the accuracy and ease with which difficult Zen and Buddhist ideas are expressed. For example, kensho is seeing clearly "the reality of everything as not separate from oneself, of everything as it really is" (p. xiii). This realization of interconnectedness results in social engagement, "the discovery of the real and deep bond that makes that person one with society, with the marketplace, with the whole universe" (p. 22). More precisely, "one sees one's True Self in the 'other,' the 'other' in one's True Self" (p. 22). While the goal of meditation is personal enlightenment, the fruit of enlightenment is the emptying of the ego-self, [End Page 343] and a reconnection with the everyday world, with a concern and passion heretofore unknown.Yet, as a devout Roman Catholic, Habito filters Zen through Christian lenses as often as he filters Christianity through Zen lenses. Creation ex nihilo, he urges, can be understood "as an invitation to that experience of the nothingness that is at the heart of our being, which becomes the fulcrum for experiencing the infinite life of God pulsing through this being, through the universe, from moment to moment" (p. 23). Each and every thing is now to be understood as "a complete and perfect manifestation of the Infinite" (p. 23). But what is less than clear here is the meaning of "manifestation." Exactly what is every thing a manifestation of? The Zen answer must be that the awareness of everything as a manifestation of the "absolute" must be understood nondualistically. Habito provides a powerful chapter on the Heart Sūtra, which instructs us that emptiness is precisely form, and form precisely emptiness. Everything is a manifestation of the creative universal energy that is the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Śaṅkara, Tillich, and Abhinavagupta’s Use of “God” as a Peircean Index to the Ground of Being and Depths of NatureGreylyn Robert Hydinger (bio)I. IntroductionThis article argues that the sign “God” can function as a Peircean index to, not an icon of, the ground of being or depth dimension of existence. The ground and any generic traits of existence that the ground grounds would be the content of the symbol, (...) the object to which the indexical symbol points. Paul Tillich argued that (good) theology employs the “method of correlation,” highlighting the “independence and interdependence of existential questions and theological answers.”1 This article presents an answer to two vitally important questions about religious naturalism posed by Dan Ott, LeRon Shults, and Demian Wheeler: (1) must theology be theistic, and (2) what content can the concept of “God” have in naturalism?2 Succinctly, the answers are, “no,” and the content meaning of the sign “God” in a religious naturalism should be the ground of being and the depths of nature.To support these answers, the article builds on a Peircean semiotic theory and compares the theologies of Adi Śaṅkara and Paul Tillich, with a strong appeal to Abhinavagupta; this comparison provides evidence that supports the hypothesis that a determinate symbol like “God” can be used and has been used to refer to an indeterminate, non-personal, naturalistic ground of being. Therefore, theology need not be iconically theistic. In Peircean terms, these philosophical theologians all claim that the sign “God” (Sanskrit: Īśvara, Nārāyaṇa, or Parameśvara; also, Kṛṣṇa or Śiva) stands, in one or perhaps several respects, for the object (“the Ground of Being” or “nirguṇa Brahman”) to an interpreter without implying that the object of interpretation is like the sign that points to it. All three of these philosophical theologies avoid the personal, agential being understanding of [End Page 60] “God” that is so frequently and justly the object of religious naturalist critique. The argument of the article is thus very simple on Peircean grounds, so long as the ground-of-being case studies do in fact illustrate the use of God as an index to the ontological ground of nature. The first part of the article, therefore, provides a semi-detailed discussion of Peirce’s semiotics; the second part demonstrates how Tillich, Śaṅkara, and Abhinavagupta have employed theistic symbols to engage the naturalistic ground of being.Two additional hypotheses undergird this inquiry as “premises.”3 First, naturalism can be a legitimate and important constraint on theological inquiry or a correction to theological hypotheses. Second, at least some ground-of-being theologies find compatibility with religious naturalisms, while iconic theisms do not. Each of these premises requires qualifications.First, as Robert Neville has pointed out, religious naturalism gets several things right as an ideology: (1) it rejects authoritarianism in favor of empirical and experiential inquiry, and (2) it rejects “literal supernaturalism [and supra-naturalism, cf. Tillich] as having explanatory or hermeneutical power.”4 In these respects, naturalism does provide appropriate constraints on theological inquiry. While literal, or iconic, supernaturalism, or theism, lacks explanatory power, part of the argument of this article is that theism can be used indexically to engage the depth dimension of nature, including its ontological ground, which is nothing apart from the things grounded (see the later discussion of Abhinavagupta’s “ābhāsa-vāda” theory).5 This indexical theism provides a pragmatic approach to “effing the ineffable,” as Wesley Wildman would say.6 [End Page 61]However, naturalism also can be “so easily wrong.”7 Alfred North Whitehead argued that philosophy (or theology) has a vital role to play in relation to science: philosophy must both critique science’s abstractions (and reductions) and engage in speculative flights of the imagination.8 While science engages parts of reality with exceptional clarity, it is reductive to the categories of (primarily) mathematics. Moreover, as Neville and Donald Crosby argue, science almost always excludes value from its account of reality.9 Science is thus partially inadequate to experience and, ironically, less empirical than (good) philosophy in this respect. In this regard, philosophy or theology can also be an appropriate constraint... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dei Filius I:On God, Creation, and ProvidenceRudi A. Te VeldeIn this essay, I want to share my impressions of the first chapter of the dogmatic constitution Dei Filius of Vatican I. It begins its declaration of the basic truths of Christian faith in a language which is similar, and probably intended to be similar, to that of a solemn confession of faith: "The holy, catholic, apostolic, and Roman church (...) believes and acknowledges that there is one true living God, creator and lord of heaven and earth."1 It reminds one, in some of its formulations, of the Nicene Creed, but with a remarkable difference: here, in the text of the constitution, the object of the confession is formulated as a proposition about God's existence.2 What is said is not, for example, "I believe in one God, the Father almighty"; but the Church believes and holds it to be true that there exists a God. One can notice a subtle shift from a confession of faith to the proclamation of a (rational) truth. The Pope, gathered with all the bishops of the Church, declares that there exists a God, the one and true living God, a doctrinal statement directed, by implication, against those who dare to deny the existence of God. The opening sentence of chapter 1 corresponds with its canon, which says that, "if anyone denies the one true God, creator and [End Page 823] lord of things visible and invisible: let him be anathema."3 Thus the constitution says that the "one, true living God" of the biblical faith exists, that this is a truth, and that, as consequence, the opposed thesis of atheism is false and must be rejected.Who is asserting this truth? Who is speaking and with which authority? The text leaves no doubt about the speaking subject. It is the Church, entitled to speak with authority about matters of faith, because it is the Roman Church, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The Church speaks, in the person of the pope, the legitimate successor of St. Peter, with authority granted to her by God himself through his Son Jesus Christ. In the preface preceding chapter 1 of the constitution, it is said that the Church is appointed by God to be "mother and mistress of nations." Hence:She can never cease from witnessing to the truth of God... and from declaring it, for she knows that these words were directed to her: "My spirit which is upon you, and my words I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth from this time forth and for evermore"(Is 59:21).4This gives the pope, sitting in the chair of Peter, the authority of "teaching and defending Catholic truth and condemning erroneous doctrines."5 And the first thing to be declared, as part of the Church's task to proclaim the Catholic truth to all the nations, is to assert the existence of God against the error of atheism.It is important to understand the genre of a dogmatic constitution. It is a document in which the Church, by mouth of the pope together with the bishops, expounds the basic tenets of Christian teaching. The purpose of a dogmatic constitution is to reaffirm the basic truths of Christian doctrine, to clarify the fundamentals of faith in a message to the world. A constitution may be occasioned by actual developments in the world and society, but it speaks as it were from the standpoint of eternity. In case of the constitution Dei Filius, the addressee is the world of the mid-nineteenth century, a time of dominance of scientific reason, of materialism, naturalism, atheism, and not unimportantly, of current forms of idealistic pantheism (Georg Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, the influence of German Idealism in general); what the constitution especially stands opposed to [End Page 824] is the view of supernatural religion as being irrational. For this purpose it wants to reclaim reason and to overcome the disastrous gap between faith and (modern) rationality.The double program underlying the constitution—teaching the Catholic truth and condemning erroneous doctrines—reminds one of the Summa contra gentiles [SCG] of Thomas Aquinas.6 The... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Deep Mysteries: God, Christ, and Ourselves by Aidan NicholsGerard T. MundyDeep Mysteries: God, Christ, and Ourselves by Aidan Nichols, O.P. (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2020), vii + 133 pp.Basic Catholic teaching declares that God's will must be trusted and that perfect knowledge of all that is resides in the Creator. An implication of this claim is that all of God's work within time and history—in man's linearly conception (...) of time and history—is meaningful. For, as perfect order himself God's work is neither random nor coincidental. God's perfect understanding means that he is able, colloquially speaking, "to connect the dots" perfectly. Thus, the historical particulars of the New Testament events are not random and coincidental, but they connect perfectly within God's plan.In terms of biblical events, then, what are the significances of the time periods during which, and places at which, they occurred? "Why was Jesus born on a particular date, at a particular time, and in a particular manger in Bethlehem? Why was the womb of Mary, Mater Dei, chosen at that exact time, and at that exact place? Why did Jesus stand on that particular mountain and not upon another? There are perfect answers to all of those questions and more, for, as Proverbs declares in this vein: "The LORD has made everything for a purpose" (16:4).In Deep Mysteries: God, Christ, and Ourselves, Father Aidan Nichols, O.P., meditates on questions related to the potential reasons for some of the historical particulars of "the principal Christological mysteries." Fr. Nichols defines the mysteries as these: "the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Baptism, the Transfiguration, the Passion and Death, the Descent into Hell, the Resurrection, the Ascension, Pentecost, and the Second Coming." (41).Attempting to understand how all of the parts of the New Testament fit together perfectly in an historical sense—as God's mind would see it—is a fascinating intellectual endeavor. The primary difference between the innocent inquirer and the vain one, however, is that the former understands that God's reason is infinite and that only the First Mover has the ability to see and to put together all particulars. Thomas Aquinas elucidates the essence of the endeavor to connect the particulars when, in reference to man's ability to understand "the truth of faith," he argues: "Yet it is useful for the human reason to exercise itself in such arguments, however weak they may be, provided only that there be present no presumption to comprehend or to demonstrate. For to be able to see something of the loftiest realities, however thin and weak the sight may be, is... a cause of the greatest joy" [Summa contra gentiles I, ch. 8).Posing the question of what the particulars of history might mean brings immediately another question. As Fr. Nichols asks: "How can the Eternal [End Page 386] and time be conjoined in a phrase, and the truth of such conjoining made credible?" (29). Indeed, if God transcends the man-conceived conception of time, how can man even understand God's movements if man can see time only in linear fashion? Fr. Nichols contends that Christ's "mystery-events are not just historical occurrences that, like all such events, belong to the human past" (31). Rather, argues Fr. Nichols, the mysteries "are permanently able to affect the intended beneficiary of the mysteries: namely, the human race" (31). In other words, contends Fr. Nichols, the mysteries are past, present, and future, in the human conception of time.Attempting "to connect the dots" in Christological historical particulars is a subjective endeavor that requires a great deal of individual deciphering, with reliance especially on the interpretation of perceived symbolism. Fr. Nichols's broad theme-based meditations can provide starting points for further study on more concentrated topics.The most exceptional part of the book is Fr. Nichols's discussion on how Jesus's mysteries exist, simultaneously, in the past, in the present, and in the future. This point is of great significance for both theology and philosophy. For, until the Second Coming, God, not being tied to man's limited experience of time, simultaneously, and... (shrink)

This study provides the historical background to, and analysis and translations of, two seminal texts from the medieval Islamic world concerning the univocity of being/existence and a theory of “ambiguous predication” (tashkīk), which is similar to the Thomistic theory of analogy. The disputants are Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (1149–1210), who defended a theory of the univocity of being, and Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (1201–1274), who defended the theory of ambiguous predication. While the purported issue is whether a quiddity can cause its own (...) existence, the debate extends further. Rāzī draws on several arguments that “existence” must be predicated univocally of God and creature and then concludes that, given the univocity of “existence,” God cannot be simple, but is a composite of the divine quiddity and distinct attributes. In contrast, Ṭūsī denies that “existence” is said univocally of God and creature and rather is predicated ambiguously/analogously, and then defends divine simplicity. (shrink)

This is the sequel to Miller’s From Existence to God: A Contemporary Philosophical Argument. In that book, he presents a version of the cosmological argument for the existence of God that does not rely on the principle of sufficient reason in any of its forms. A central upshot of that argument is that God, as uncaused cause of the universe, must be Subsistent Existence, i.e., a being not distinct from its existence. The notion that anything could be non-distinct from (...) its existence is, of course, an exasperatingly difficult one, and is rejected as incoherent by many, along with the doctrine of divine simplicity of which it is an integral part. An ontologically simple God is a most unlikely God, since he is one in whom there is no real distinction between form and matter, act and potency, essence and existence, or individual and attribute. Since Miller’s theistic argument terminates in the affirmation of a simple God, it is essential to his overall project to show the coherence of the very idea of a simple God and to rebut the numerous objections that have been brought against it. That is the task of the book under review. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim to examine the relationships between four solutions to the dilemma of divine foreknowledge and human freedom—theological determinism, Molinism, simple foreknowledge and open theism—and divine providence and theodicy. Some of these solutions—theological determinism and Molinism, in particular—highlight God’s government of the world. Some others—simple foreknowledge and open theism—highlight human autonomy and freedom. In general, the more libertarian human freedom is highlighted, the less God’s government of the history of the world seems possible. However, the (...) task of theodicy becomes easier because humans are fully responsible for the evil they do. Conversely, the more God’s government is highlighted, the more human freedom seems to be restricted. Moreover, God seems to be directly or indirectly responsible for evil in the world. Because of the trade–off between control and freedom, each solution finds itself at ease with some problems, while on other fronts, it must adopt a defensive position. As we will see, no solution can solve all problems; thus, the pros and cons of each solution should be weighed carefully. (shrink)

This paper’s focus is about some questions concerning the ontology of the angel and the theory of knowledge. About ontology, the main problems discussed by Albert are the metaphysical composition (despite its immateriality) of the angel, the nature of angel’s individuality and the angel’s relationship with the separate intelligences. On this last point Albert, unlike Thomas, argues that angels and intelligences are distinct entities and that the identification between them would be a denial of angel’s ministerial function. In order to (...) accomplish this function, angels must know not only God’s essence, the first object of their contemplation, but also particular things and events of human lives. This is one of the reasons why Albert considers the mind of the angel through a close comparison with the characteristics of the divine mind on the one hand, and with the human mind on the other. The angel, unlike man, is an immaterial entity, devoid of sense organs: in the terms of Aristotelian gnoseology valid for man, it is not clear how angel can know particular things. In order to resolve this difficulty, Albert hints at a cognitive mechanism per applicationem of the innate form of the thing. The angelic mind therefore appears to Albert as characterized, unlike God, by only habitual knowledge of things, which becomes in actu only after a “contact” with the things themselves. (shrink)

One of the criteria to a strong principle in natural sciences is simplicity. The conventional view holds that the world is provided with natural laws that must be simple. This common-sense approach is a modern rewording of the medieval philosophical/theological concept of the Multiple arising from (and generated by) the One. Humans need to pursue unifying frameworks, classificatory criteria and theories of everything. Still, the fact that our cognitive abilities tend towards simplification and groupings does not necessarily entail (...) that this is the way the world works. Here we ask: what if singularity does not pave the way to multiplicity? How will we be sure if the Ockham’s razor holds in real life? We will show in the sequel that the propensity to reduce to simplicity the relationships among the events leads to misleading interpretations of scientific issues. We are not going to take a full sceptic turn: we will engage in active outreach, suggesting examples from biology and physics to demonstrate how a novel methodological antiunitary approach might help to improve our scientific attitude towards world affairs. We will provide examples from aggregation of SARS-Cov-2 particles, unclassified extinct creatures, pathological brain stiffness. Further, we will describe how antiunitary strategies, plagiarising medieval concepts from William od Ockham and Gregory of Rimini, help to explain novel relational approaches to quantum mechanics and the epistemological role of our mind in building the real world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:GOD'S KNOWLEDGE OF FUTURE CONTINGENTS: A REPLY TO WILLIAM LANE CRAIG DAVID B. BURRELL, c.s.c. University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana IT IS FORTUNATE that other duties kept me from responding to William Lane Craig's "Aquinas on God's Knowledge of Future Contingents" when it came out (Thomist 54 [1990]: 33-79), for my initial perusal found me at once impressed and dismayed, and quite unable to disentangle the two (...) responses. A more careful subsequent reading allows me, I believe, to pinpoint where he goes wrong in reaching the conclusion which he does, yet to do so in such a way as to send readers back to an essay which is otherwise quite remarkable in the way it learns from Aquinas and offers us useful ways to read him on these perplexing issues. In doing so, he corrects many a misreading, and amasses sufficient textual and conceptual clarifications as almost to correct his own misreading. And best of all, I can hope that my rejoinder will send readers back to Aquinas above all. Indeed, one cannot but feel that the current climate of controversy regarding the proper understanding of his nuanced synthesis in philosophical theology would please Aquinas far more than attempts earlier in this century to distill it all into a " doctrine." Craig's conclusion reads: In maintaining that God's knowledge is the cause of everything God knows, Thomas transforms the universe into a nexus which, though freely chosen by God, is causally determined from above, thus eliminating human freedom (79). I shall claim that he reaches this conclusion only because ( 1) he presumes God's knowledge to be propositional knowing (52-53), 317 318 DAVID B. BURRELL, C.S.C. even though he asserts that it is not (60, n.61); and (2) that such a presumption leads him to overlook the vast difference between scientia visionis and scientia simplicis intelligentiae, though he insists on the difference and formulates it nicely in parallel with practical and speculative knowing in God (40). Such presumptions about divine knowing are not uncommon, of course, and what they lead to is one's overlooking what Josef Pieper called the "hidden element in the philosophy of St. Thomas "-creation. Indeed, my critique could begin there, remarking how Craig's careful delineation of Aquinas on God's eternal knowing of contingent things proceeds oblivious of the central fact that God's knowing in such cases is that of a creator (" In summary, then, Thomas has appealed e%clusively to the tradition of God's timelessness in order to defuse the threat of fatalism" [61, emphasis mine]). The simple observation that the God in question is always the free creator of all-that-is would have allowed him to see that Aquinas does not make the relation of God to contingents turn solely on that of an eternal knower of temporal things, but that the eternity/time relation subserves that of creator/creature. (This ordering is the more crucial, we shall see, for its power to correct the endemic tendency to equate " eternal " with " timeless," which Craig manifests throughout.) And despite Pieper's reminder that creation is largely hidden, it remains sufficiently present to a careful reader that Craig must indeed confront it at the end. Yet by the time he does so, his earlier presumptions have led him to complain that Aquinas's insistence that "God's knowledge is the causa essendi of the things that are going to happen... seems nearly unintelligible " (73). Indeed what I shall offer as the key to resolving his crucial dilemmas, and so overturning his stated conclusion, Craig introduces as a " final issue [which] threatens to undermine Thomas's attempt to preserve contingency in the face of divine knowledge, [viz.] his doctrine that God's knowledge is the cause of its objects rather than the objects' being the cause of God's knowledge" (70-71). The theologian in me would prefer to begin right here, with the radical eruption into an Aristotelian world of a free creator, GOD'S KNOWELDGE OF FUTURE CONTINGENTS 319 whose relation to the universe is indeed such as to turn our sense of knowing inside-out.1... (shrink)

This slender volume is a polemical work on two fronts. First and foremost, it is an attempt to distinguish sharply the aim of Aquinas from that of post-Cartesian rationalism with respect to the role of philosophical argumentation in establishing the existence of God. Cartesian rationalism holds that it is possible to articulate presuppositionless, universal, compelling, and purely philosophical reasons to justify a foundational belief in God. Velecky criticizes this view on Wittgensteinian grounds and holds that there are significant affinities between (...) Aquinas and Wittgenstein on the relationship between religious belief and philosophical justification. What counts as a good philosophical case for the existence of God is always relative to the existential situation of the inquirer. So-called proofs for the existence of God are really attempts to formulate corroborating intellectual grounds for a belief that one has already come to on the basis of God's self-revelation, faith, and personal encounter. Belief in the proposition "that God exists" is not a statement reporting the existence of an item encounterable in our normal experience or the conclusion of an argument, but rather expresses the adoption of an entirely distinct perspective on the whole of reality. So when Aquinas describes arguments for the existence of God as preambula fidei, he does not mean that they are prior to faith as epistemologically necessary conditions for belief, but rather that they are logically required by faith in a different sense. It must be possible to locate or refer to the object of religious belief within a universe of philosophical discourse; or, to put it another way, it must be possible to give some content to the notion of divinity. The function of Aquinas's arguments is thus to make the proposition Deum esse intelligible within the universe of broadly Aristotelian discourse. This is especially important if believers want to have any kind of conversation with nonbelievers. Velecky writes: "At the conclusion of the Five Arguments nothing more--and nothing less--has been achieved than that a reasonable philosophical case has been made for a topic of conversation between Christians and others about the basic characterization of something which is thought to be the transcendent cause of all beings and which has left some traces of its transcendence in the world we can experience". Velecky's Wittgensteinian reading of Aquinas is a welcome antidote to the more usual Cartesian reading. But while Velecky is careful to distinguish Aquinas from Wittgensteinian fideism, nevertheless his overall strategy comes dangerously close to pushing Aquinas too far in that direction; Aquinas is neither Cartesian nor Wittgensteinian. (shrink)

Recent non-representationalists and metaphysical anti-realists have argued that the “Enlightenment notion” of a “God’s eye” point of view of the world is unsustainable. Deployment of conceptual schemes and/or intersubjective assent both constitute the world and fix the truth value of our statements about it. Many theists, on the contrary, hold an equally extreme realist position according to which God has a view of the world as it is “in itself" which provides an exhaustive description of the world. Furthermore, on this (...) view, God has access to this exhaustive picture because the world exists and is what it is in virtue of its being the object of divine creative intentions. For these theistic realists, truths about the world must ultimately be able to be cashed out in terms of an ontology consisting only of simple and composite substances—substances which exist in virtue of the ontological structure set out in the world via God's creative activity. As a result, on this view, the world is constituted in a way that is independent of the activity of created cognizers and their conceptualizing activity. The truth of our assertions must ultimately find its grounding in this independently constituted world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:GOD AND THE STATUS OF FACTS JOHN PETERSON University of Rhode Island Kingston, Rhode Island I EVEN BEFORE mid-century, Platonism was in such retreat that Croce could call it "traditional philosophy." By " Platonism " is meant any philosophy which admits transcendent entities, be they individuals or universals. This philosophy, complains Croce,... has its eyes fixed on heaven, and expects supreme truth from that quarter. This division of heaven (...) and earth, this dualist conception of a reality which transcends reality, of metaphysics over physics, this contemplation of the concept without or outside judgment, for ever imprints the same character, whatever the denomination the transcendental reality may bear: God or Matter, Idea or Will; it makes no difference, while beneath or against each of them there is presumed to subsist some inferior or merely phenomenal reality.1 Though few recent philosophers would follow Croce in his identification of philosophy with history, most would applaud the Italian idealist's castigation of Platonism. Between their acts of mutual criticism, idealists, existentialists, logical empiricists, pragmatists, Marxists, philosophers of language, neo-Nietzschians, deconstructionists and most phenomenologists unite against the transcendent. The metaphysics of Plato and Kant are dead, they chant. No timeless Reality lurks behind appearences, eluding eye, ear, language and inner sense. Insisting on the reality of at least relational universals, the early Russell for a time resisted the tide. But his abandonment 1 Benedetto Croce, " History as the Story of Liberty " in Morton White, ed., The Age of Analysis (New York, 1964), pp. 50-51. 635 636 JOHN PETERSON of logical atomism weakened his case for Platonism and a turn to empiricism followed. Moreover, even as he defended universals in his early days, Russell shunned transcendent individuals. In this effort his most celebrated ploy was the Theory of Descriptions, according to which commitment to individuals such as the king of France and the golden mountain is eschewed. Less famous was his move to spike that metaphysical individual known as substance. This he did by attacking the traditional subject-predicate form of the proposition. If all simple propositions are of the subject-predicate form and if true propositions map facts and thirdly if there are no facts which cannot be mirrored by propositions, then, says Russell, either there is only one substance or there are many substances between which there are no relations.2 And under both alternatives-the one Spinozistic and the other Leibnizian-substance is a hidden, transcendent thing which accounts for all phenomena without itself being part of any phenomenon. But be it from Croce or James or Dewey or Sartre or the Marxists or Quine or whomever, is this anti-platonism really justified? Are these celebrated philosophers right or even consistent in eliminating the transcendent? To see that they are not, one need only consider the case of facts. If facts are timeless and not temporal, then there are transcendent entities after all and the anti-platonists are wrong. Take, for example, the fact that Napoleon was defeated by Wellington at Waterloo on June 18, 1815. Defenders of temporalism as regards facts must either count this as being a past fact or else hold that this fact is no different from the historical event, "fact" being just another name for "event". But both of these options fail. That facts are not events is shown by the difference in how the following questions are answered: (a) " Why did I not hold class this morning in Adams Hall "? and (b) "What is meant by saying that the statement ' I did·not hold class this morning in Adams Hall ' is true "? While (a) may be answered by citing some event which prevented my hold2 Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (New York, 1975), pp. 9495. GOD AND THE STATUS OF FACTS 637 ing class in Adams Hall this morning (for example, a fire broke out in Adams Hall just before class), (b) is never answered this way. Though the event of the fire in Adams Hall (or some other event) may be what prevented my holding class this morning in Adams Hall, it is nonsense to cite either that fire or any other event as an answer to (b). Yet, a perfectly sensible answer... (shrink)