Metaphysics and God: Essays in Honor of Eleonore Stump (Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Religion)

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Metaphysics and God : Essays in Honor of Eleonore Stump Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Religion ; 7.7 Timpe, Kevin.; Stump, Eleonore Taylor & Francis Routledge 0415963656 9780415963657 9780203875216 English Metaphysics, God. 2009 BD111.M5523 2009eb 210 Metaphysics, God.

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Page i Metaphysics and God

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Page ii Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Religion SERIES EDITORS: PETER BYRNE, MARCEL SAROT AND MARK WYNN 1. God and Goodness A Natural Theological Perspective Mark Wynn 2. Divinity and Maximal Greatness Daniel Hill 3. Providence, Evil, and the Openness of God William Hasker 4. Consciousness and the Existence of God A Theistic Argument J.P. Moreland 5. The Metaphysics of Perfect Beings Michael J. Almeida 6. Theism and Explanation Gregory W. Dawes 7. Metaphysics and God Essays in Honor of Eleonore Stump Edited by Kevin Timpe

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Page iii Metaphysics and God Essays in Honor of Eleonore Stump Edited by Kevin Timpe New York London

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Page iv First published 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2009 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereaf ter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Metaphysics and God : essays in honor of Eleonore Stump / edited by Kevin Timpe. p. cm.—(Routledge studies in the philosophy of religion ; 7) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Metaphysics. 2. God. I. Timpe, Kevin. BD111.M5523 2009 210—dc22 2008054843 ISBN 0-203-87521-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10:0-415-96365-6 (hbk) ISBN10:0-203-87521-4 (ebk) ISBN13:978-0-415-96365-7 (hbk) ISBN13:978-0-203-87521-6 (ebk)

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Page v For Eleonore, Scholar, teacher, mentor, friend. “the ray of grace from which true love is kindled— and then by loving, in the loving heart grows and multiplies—among all men so shines on you.” Dante, The Paradiso X.83–86

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Page vii Contents     Foreword THEODORE R. VITALI CP   Acknowledgments   Introduction KEVIN TIMPE  

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Part I  Preacipue de Deo  

1  God and Other Uncreated Things PETER VAN INWAGEN 2  Aquinas, Divine Simplicity and Divine Freedom BRIAN LEFTOW 3  The Real Presence of an Eternal God THOMAS D. SENOR 4  The Metaphysics of Divine Love WILLIAM E. MANN 5  Narrative, Liturgy, and the Hiddenness of God MICHAEL C. REA 6  Fittingness and Divine Action in Cur Deus Homo THOMAS P. FLINT

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Page viii 7 Conservation, Concurrence, and Counterfactuals of Freedom JONATHAN L. KVANVIG 8 More on Molinism JOHN MARTIN FISCHER

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Part II  Preacipue de Hominibus  

9 The Supervenience of Goodness on Being  143 JOHN E. HARE 10 The Second-Person Account of the Problem of Evil  157 LYNNE RUDDER BAKER 11 Theodicies and Human Nature: Dostoevsky on the Saint as Witness  175 TIMOTHY O’CONNOR 12 Do Human Persons Persist between Death and Resurrection?  188 JASON T. EBERL 13 Love and Damnation  206 C. P. RAGLAND 14 Friendship in Heaven: Aquinas on Supremely Perfect Happiness and the Communion  225 of the Saints CHRISTOPHER BROWN    Bibliography  249  Notes on Contributors  257  Index  259

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Page ix Foreword “Luckier Than Smart” Theodore R. Vitali CP In 1992, I invited Eleonore Stump to come to Saint Louis University (SLU) as a candidate for our Robert J. Henle SJ endowed chair. In a phone conversation with Al Plantinga earlier that year, I asked whom he would choose if he had an endowed chair to fill. He said: “Eleonore Stump.” I knew a little about Eleonore’s work in the philosophy of religion, having read and utterly disagreed with what she and Norman Kretzmann had written on the doctrine of divine eternity. Nonetheless, I also recognized that she was a significant contributor to the field, and so I was intrigued by Plantinga’s suggestion. But I doubted that Eleonore would be interested in coming to SLU since she was then a full professor at Notre Dame. Nonetheless, Plantinga assured me that she was at that time considering invitations from other schools, and so I invited her to apply. She accepted and subsequently also agreed to come for a visit. Although I had done a lot of hiring in the past, she surprised me during her visit by the professionalism of her presence and her philosophical gifts. In the end, also to my surprise, she chose the job at SLU over positions at significantly higher ranking institutions, because something about the spirit of the school attracted her. As we began to work together at SLU, I came to see that I had underestimated what Eleonore could do and what she was willing to do, when she put her heart into it. It became evident to me that we had gotten far more than we ever imagined at the time we made her the offer. I recall saying to her then, half seriously and half in jest: “Eleonore, we were luckier than smart when we hired you.” The truth is we were just lucky that, for whatever reason, Eleonore saw something special and worth dedicating herself to at SLU, something certainly that went beyond any argument I could have given her for taking the job. Although I’m best positioned to speak to the contributions Eleonore has made to the Department and to our University, these contributions are characteristic of her approach to the profession at large. What I have to say about her contribution to the Philosophy Department at SLU applies also to her professional involvement elsewhere, including not only with other universities in this country and elsewhere but also with professional societies

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Page x such as the APA, the SCP, and others, as well as with individual projects and scholars around the world. But, in my view, Eleonore’s contribution to the Philosophy Department at SLU is significant enough to merit telling, even if doing so requires that I present a brief picture of SLU’s most recent history, one that she has affected significantly. During the late 70s and early 80s, the SLU Philosophy Department underwent a decline because of the serious financial problems SLU had at that time. In the late 80s and early 90s, the University finally began to rebuild. The establishment of the Robert J. Henle SJ Chair of Philosophy was one part of the rebuilding program for our Department. Following on substantial financial improvements at the University, a number of academic developments prepared the way for a resurgence of the Philosophy Department. The University hired many excellent new junior faculty, who brought a freshness to their departments; in the Philosophy Department, they also brought a focus centered in the mainstream of the discipline. But with the appointment of Eleonore as the Henle Chair, the Philosophy Department made a significant advance. Eleonore brought to the Department and the University a new level of academic expectation. She expected, first of herself and then of the Department, a level of excellence measured by the highest standards of the profession, for teaching and service as well as for research. In consequence, she greatly reinforced the efforts made by our faculty, especially our new, junior faculty, and helped these efforts to achieve their goals. Richard Swinburne told me at that time that one cannot build a department from the bottom up, through the hiring of junior faculty. One needs to build from the top down. For me, the hiring of Eleonore confirmed his view. The kind of leadership and vision she provided made a very important contribution to the Department’s moving toward what it could be. Over the years she has been at SLU, Eleonore has given herself generously and tirelessly to the building of the Department. Her presence alone, of course, brought us immediate recognition in medieval philosophy, philosophy of religion, and certain areas of metaphysics. But her own active contributions have been broad and effective. To take just one example, one of Eleonore’s first goals was to establish the biannual Robert J. Henle Conference, a conference funded through her Chair. Though associated with the Henle Chair, the conference is designed to serve the interests of all our faculty and has thus been devoted to a wide range of philosophical areas, including topics in ancient and modern philosophy, political philosophy, and epistemology. This conference has brought some of the finest philosophers in the world to campus, to the benefit of our faculty and students. It was also part of Eleonore’s original plan for the Henle Conference that the papers from the Henle conferences be published in The Modern Schoolman , the journal associated with our Department, with the result that the benefits of these conferences have been widely distributed. In addition to such professional and scholarly contributions, Eleonore also brought to the Department and the University care for the University’s

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Page xi Jesuit mission. She understood the Jesuit Catholic ideal that is the hallmark of Saint Louis University and other Jesuit institutions; and in the years she has been here, she has worked hard to foster it. With others, she has labored to form a Christian community at the University that supports its mission without sacrificing anything of academic excellence. In some terms, she has run as many as three informal reading groups for faculty and students. In one recent term, for example, she ran a Saturday morning group (aptly called “Thomas on Toast” because they gathered over breakfast) to discuss Aquinas’s commentary on the Gospel of John and a Sunday afternoon group on Dante’s Divine Comedy; and, together with John Foley SJ, she ran a biweekly Saturday evening group devoted to discussion of primary sources in the Patristic period. And these were all in addition to the longstanding biweekly Friday evening gathering that she heads up with her colleague, John Kavanaugh SJ. This last group, the “Alexandrian Society,” is comprised of interested philosophy graduate students and faculty who gather for dinner, discussion of topics at the intersection of faith and philosophy, and prayer. As this limited list of her activities makes clear, Eleonore is a teacher at heart—habitually looking for opportunities to share with others things that she is in a special position to teach and that are of value to those with whom she shares them. Needless to say, therefore, as a mentor and teacher to our graduate students, Eleonore’s presence in the department has been transformative. She has guided numerous students through their dissertations and into their careers. While being demanding, never abandoning the philosophical standards that are the hallmark of her own career, she nonetheless cares for her students with maternal affection and commitment. One of her students recently narrated this to me about Eleonore’s style of mentoring. He wrote, “She is severe, uncompromising and ruthless when analyzing philosophical arguments. For example, she gives her students her ‘do not hang yourself when you get the comments’ talk more than once before giving back the pages of comments she writes on every graduate student’s first draft of a seminar paper. And no one hangs himself because in large part it is so absolutely clear that she cares for her students and isn’t being severe, uncompromising and ruthless to the person, but only to the arguments. She wants each of her students to flourish, and one way to help the student flourish in philosophy is to foster in each student a dogged severity toward his or her arguments.” Another student made a similar remark to me recently, one that certainly brings out her demanding but loving care of her students. He said that one time in class, just at the beginning of the semester, she tried to encourage her students to participate in seminar discussion by promising that “she would raise the grade of students who engaged in debate, and that if they were ill-informed, or even combative and rude, she would raise their grade as reward for their efforts at participation. By way of explanation, she said that philosophy is like athletics; the virtue of a good philosopher is not something acquired

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Page xii by passive absorption but by actively engaging in the contest.” Anyone who has worked with Eleonore, at any level, student or colleague, knows that these accounts accurately describe her mentoring style and character. While Eleonore’s contributions to the Philosophy Department have been significant, it is worth noting that her service to the University extends well beyond her contributions to her own Department. She is equally committed to serving the well-being of the University, no matter what other more academically rewarding and exciting tasks lay at hand. For example, for many years since arriving here, she has chaired and fostered the annual Endowed Chairs Conference, a conference supported by all the endowed chairs in the College and dedicated to a wide variety of interdisciplinary subjects including philosophy, theology, literature, history, the natural sciences, and the fine arts. She has also given generously of herself to support the administrative needs of the University. For instance, a few years ago when she was on sabbatical and trying to hide out at St. John’s Benedictine monastery in Minnesota to finish her Gifford Lectures, she agreed when the President of the University requested that she fly back to St. Louis to chair the search committee for the new provost. She certainly could have declined his request given the weightiness of the Giffords, but she did not. She interrupted her research and writing to honor the President’s request, and she came back to Saint Louis University to chair the provost search. Those who know her will not be surprised to be told that her Gifford Lectures, given in 2003, did not suffer in consequence. Eleonore’s work for SLU, illustrated by the few examples I have given here, are representative of the community-building and mentoring characteristic of all her work. She has helped and encouraged graduate students and faculty at other places, in this country and abroad. One example of this is her efforts at developing a strong academic relationship with some universities in China, especially Wuhan University. In the past few years, among her other efforts on behalf of Wuhan University, she has been instrumental in building at Wuhan a library in Western philosophy. She contributed thousands of books from her own library; and, with her encouragement and the help of the SCP, many scholars and presses from all over have donated to this burgeoning library. Named in honor of her late teacher and colleague, the Norman Kretzmann Library at Wuhan University is an impressive and still-growing collection. I should not end these brief remarks without saying what is perhaps most important, that, as the philosopher she is, Eleonore has brought her own individual style and insights, her own passions, to her research. Her work in medieval philosophy and the philosophy of religion is brilliant and bold. She has maintained the kind of rigor required for philosophical excellence while at the same time venturing into areas that the field has sometimes been reluctant to explore. Her Gifford Lectures are probably the best example. In them, she brought philosophical reflection on biblical narratives to bear on contemporary philosophical discussion of the problem of evil. Her

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Page xiii Wilde Lectures, also on the problem of evil, used Aquinas’s moral psychology to provide an analytically clear account of rich concepts relevant to the problem of evil but often avoided because they are as messy as they are rich. These two sets of lectures, which she is now combining into a large book, Wandering in Darkness, will be her major contribution to the field after her magisterial work Aquinas. Finally, I should add here a personal note. As a colleague and friend, she has taught me how to be a Christian philosopher, one who reveres the tradition and yet looks with competence and engagement at the contemporary discussion. Therefore, at this time and in her honor, I want to express my deepest gratitude for all she has given to me as a philosopher, a colleague, and a faithful fellow voyager in life. We were indeed luckier than smart when we hired Eleonore Stump as our Robert J. Henle SJ Professor of Philosophy. Now, we are blessed and not lucky because we are smart enough to know that her presence among us, not only at Saint Louis University but also in the philosophical community at large, is a gift, a gift for which we are all grateful.1 NOTES 1. I am grateful for the help I received from both faculty and students who made suggestions and provided both stories and insights that enriched my presentation.

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Page xv Acknowledgments The volume has benefitted from the input of numerous individuals. My utmost gratitude goes to the contributors who participated in this project. The majority of the papers contained herein were written explicitly for this volume, and I am extremely thankful for all the participants adding this volume to the long lists of other pressing projects and commitments they already had. In addition, Jon Kvanvig provided needed advice in proposing this project to the press. At Routledge, I am thankful for the work of Erica Wetter, who offered valuable guidance and played an instrumental role in bringing this volume to fruition. Shawn Floyd, Faith Glavey Pawl, Tim Pawl, and Melissa Strahm all gave me helpful comments on the introduction. Finally, I am indebted to Eleonore Stump; I have benefitted from my time and interaction with her in more ways than I can mention.

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Page xvii Introduction Kevin Timpe The history of analytic philosophy of religion during the past half century has been well documented.1 Beginning in roughly the late 1960s, the influence of logical positivism, which had dominated 20thcentury Anglo-American philosophy and purportedly relegated philosophy of religion to meaninglessness in the process, started to wane. During the ‘metaphysical turn’ of the 1970s, analytic philosophy of religion entered a period of proliferation and continues to flourish to this day. Initially, this renewed interest focused largely on religious language, religious epistemology, arguments for and against the existence of God, and examination of the traditional divine attributes. Since roughly the mid-1980s, philosophy of religion has undergone a period of diversification, both in terms of topics and in terms of methodology. Commenting on the resurgence of philosophy of religion during this period, Eleonore Stump draws our attention to two major characteristics: The first characteristic is a broad extension of subjects seen as appropriate for philosophical scrutiny. Not so long ago work in philosophy of religion was largely confined to discussions of the meaningfulness of religious language and examinations of arguments for the existence of God. In the work currently being done, however, philosophers have gotten their courage up and ventured into such areas as providence, creation, conservation, and God’s responsibility for sin, areas where analytic precision is more difficult to attain but where the scope of the investigation is less constrained. The second feature of the new work in philosophy of religion is a willingness to bridge boundaries with related disciplines, most notably with theology but also with biblical studies…. In leaving biblical studies entirely to historical scholars of the texts, contemporary philosophers were cutting themselves off from a fruitful source of data about individual religions and the contributions those data make to issues relevant to philosophers.2 This second characteristic is true of philosophy in general. But within philosophy of religion in particular it has had a liberating effect, making it

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Page xviii “respectable to investigate and discuss a whole array of interesting subjects that philosophers would not have attended in the preceding period.”3 Furthermore, while philosophy of religion has often been looked at askance by many within the larger discipline—Basil Mitchell writes that “analytical philosophy of religion has always to some extent suffered from the taint of illegitimacy”4—it now enjoys a much greater degree of professional respectability. Quentin Smith describes one of philosophy of religion’s leading figures, Alvin Plantinga, as “writing at the highest qualitative level of analytic philosophy, on the same playing field as Carnap, Russell, Moore, Grünbaum.”5 In a similar vein, James Sennett’s comment on Plantinga’s work during this period also applies to contemporary analytic philosophy of religion more broadly: “Christian philosophy wasn’t supposed to be that good.”6 This renaissance in philosophy of religion has been led by, though by no means restricted to, a number of pioneering figures. Along with Plantinga, one thinks of Robert and Marilyn Adams, William Alston, Phillip Quinn, Richard Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen, as well as others too numerous to mention here. The present volume focuses on the impact of one of these influential scholars, Eleonore Stump. Like her mentor and frequent coauthor, Norman Kretzmann, Stump has exercised unquestionable influence by igniting renewed interest in medieval philosophy and bringing its insights to bear on contemporary scholarship in philosophy of religion. On Stump’s view, medieval philosophy is particularly beneficial to contemporary work in philosophy of religion due to its combination of breadth and depth, its willingness to engage enduring philosophical questions in provocative ways without loosing focus on the importance of the details. Early in her career, her work focused primarily on medieval logic,7 but she has since widened her attention to include a broad array of interests: philosophy of religion, metaphysics, free will, ethics, human nature and personhood, cognition, narrative, beauty, the relationship between philosophy and theology, and biblical studies. Her wide range of publications thus illustrates the first of the two characteristics she earlier noted in contemporary philosophy of religion. Her work also exemplifies the second quality as well, namely her willingness to bridge boundaries with related disciplines. Two notable examples of the second characteristic are her treatment of contemporary neuroscience in her Aquinas as well as her interaction with biblical studies in the forthcoming Wandering in Darkness. Despite its breadth, a number of consistent qualities can be found throughout Stump’s extensive work. The first is a reverence and respect for the accomplishments and continued relevance of medieval philosophy—and in particular the work of Thomas Aquinas. From her early work on the doctrines of divine simplicity and eternity through her more recent work on, for example, substances and artifact, Stump has sought “to explicate the views of Aquinas with reasonable historical accuracy and to bring them into dialogue with the corresponding discussions in contemporary philosophy.”8 Though aspects of her account of Aquinas’ thought have been

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Page xix disputed, it would be hard to overestimate her impact on current philosophical discussions of the Angelic Doctor. Second, Stump’s work combines the highest of philosophical standards with a genuine respect for the human person. Her influential work on evil, for example, is a philosophically rigorous and astute examination of why God allows sentient creatures to suffer. At the same time, she always keeps in mind that the problem of suffering arises precisely because of the horrors actual people suffer, and the grief and brokenness such suffering can lead to. Commenting on the task of theodicies in her forthcoming Wandering in Darkness, Stump writes: Philosophical analyses of the problem of evil can border on the obscene unless the pattern-processing of the intellectual exercise is coupled with a clear recognition of the awfulness of suffering and of our obligation to do what we can to alleviate it. Furthermore, it would be obtuse to fail to see that, no matter how successful a theodicy is, it cannot possibly alter the fact of suffering. Whatever justification for suffering theodicy finds, it remains a justification for suffering. To explain suffering is not to explain it away; the pain remains and the grief over it ought also to remain, no matter how successful the justification.9 And one finds this commitment to the lived importance of philosophical issues in the lives of human beings throughout her work. Finally, one would significantly underestimate Stump’s contribution to philosophy of religion if one limited consideration to her published corpus. Her influence can also be found in her service to philosophical organizations, her willingness to engage in philosophical dialogue, and her unrelenting efforts on behalf of others. Stump has served as president of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, the American Catholic Philosophical Association, and the Society of Christian Philosophers. In this last role, she was instrumental (along with Mel Steward) in establishing and promoting the Society of Christian Philosophy’s outreach program to China and recently took a leading role in helping establish the Norman Kretzmann Library at Wuhan University. Furthermore, numerous individuals have commented on Stump’s willingness to engage and advance the work of others, noting “her unstinting contributions as a partner in philosophical dialogue”10 and “her well-known brilliance as a philosophical interlocutor.”11 As one of her former students, not only have I benefited from her generosity myself, but I’ve also seen the way that she untiringly gives of herself to junior philosophers and students. Commenting on the life of Christian philosophers, Plantinga writes [I]t is … hard to think of any task more important, for a Christian philosopher, than doing what one can to train and equip the next generation of Christian philosophers. This means seeing younger philosophers,

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Page xx fledgling philosophers and graduate students as of immense value. Their well-being and development as members of the community of Christian philosophers is a real source of real concern: it requires our best efforts and any encouragement and help we can give.12 These comments perfectly encapsulate Stump’s role as teacher, mentor, and model of how one ought to philosophize. It is no surprise, then, that she was awarded the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching at Baylor University in 2004.13 *** From the beginning, the present volume has been envisioned as a way for some of those who owe Stump a debt of friendship or filial piety to repay that debt in small part. The contributors—her friends, interlocutors, colleagues, and former students—present this volume to her with admiration and affection, and in recognition of her substantial contributions to the field. In putting together a volume of this nature, it is no easy task to decide what to include and what, unfortunately but necessarily, must be left out. I have decided to focus primarily on Stump’s impact in contemporary philosophy of religion, though this obviously overlaps with her contributions in other areas, most notably medieval philosophy. The fourteen essays that follow are divided into two main sections: Preacipue de Deo Preacipue de Hominibus The essays in the first section focus on the divine nature and attributes, while those in the second deal with issues related to human persons. Each of these sections is an area where Stump’s contributions to the current discussions in philosophy of religion are marked. The first section, Preacipue de Deo, opens with Peter van Inwagen’s “God and Other Uncreated Things.” Working with the claim found in the Nicene Creed that God is “maker … of all that is, seen and unseen,” van Inwagen asks whether the Christian must take this creedal statement to mean that God has created everything —including, in particular, abstract objects. Building off his earlier rejection of nominalism,14 he argues that abstract objects cannot be created by God, since abstract objects are incapable of entering into causal relationships. He then argues that propositions and attributes and other items that are commonly called abstract objects cannot be indentified with concrete thoughts in the mind of God because there are no concrete thoughts (divine or otherwise). He concludes that the existence of free abstract objects in no way depends on the activities of God. Brian Leftow’s “Aquinas, Divine Simplicity and Divine Freedom” examines the consistency between two divine attributes, discussions of which

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Page xxi have been greatly influenced by Stump’s work on them. If God is simple, then his nature is identical with his volition. Insofar as God has his nature essentially, it would seem to follow that his volition to create is also necessary, and thus not free. In Chapter 3 of Stump’s magisterial Aquinas , she endeavors to reconcile the doctrine of divine simplicity with God’s free choice to create. She does so by arguing that God’s relationship with creation is a merely Cambridge, rather than intrinsic, property of God’s. However, Leftow argues that, on Aquinas’ view, God’s volition to create is an intrinsic property of God’s, and thus Stump’s attempted reconciliation fails. Leftow then advances his own solution, which involves the idea that God’s willing to create is a manner of willing his own being and goodness. It is only God’s willing his own being and goodness that is identical with the divine nature, and not so willing in a manner accompanied by creation. The next article, Tom Senor’s “The Real Presence of an Eternal God,” also explores a divine attribute whose current discussions are heavily influenced by Stump’s work—the doctrine of divine eternity. Along with her coauthor on this topic, Norman Kretzmann, Stump’s work on divine eternity has been pivotal in revitalizing a doctrine that had been viewed as hopeless by much of contemporary philosophy of religion. After explaining Stump and Kretzmann’s account of divine eternity, and the definition of ETsimultaneity on which it depends, Senor offers an objection to their preferred definition and then explores a potential problem with their account developed by William Hasker. According to Hasker’s objection, God cannot directly know temporal events; instead, he knows them via a divine representation of those events. Senor then argues that Hasker’s objection to divine eternity rests upon a principle that should be rejected. In “The Metaphysics of Divine Love,” William Mann uses Stump’s work on love, as well as other contemporary treatments, to explore the particular kind of love that God has for created individuals. Mann contrasts two types of answers to the question ‘Does God have good reason to love us?’ According to the first of these, found in the work of Harry Frankfurt, God does not love us for reasons at all; instead, he loves us because of an unlimited urge to love everything. According to the second answer, given by Gottfried Leibniz, God’s love for us is the maximal expression of reason, insofar as his nature necessitates that he do what is best. In contrast to both of these accounts, Mann argues for a middle position. On Mann’s view, God has a reason for loving us, namely his intention that creation be an expression of divine love. However, such an intention does not necessitate God to create the best, as Leibniz held; instead, God satisfices, creating a world with at least as much goodness as his creatures are able to detect and appreciate. Michael Rea’s contribution addresses an influential argument against belief in God, namely the argument from divine hiddenness. A standard line of response to the problem of divine hiddenness is to argue that God’s hiddenness is justified because it promotes great human goods. While Rea is sympathetic with this response, in his “Narrative, Liturgy, and the

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Page xxii Hiddenness of God,” he offers a different line of response to the argument from divine hiddenness. Rea argues that even if it does not promote a great human good, God’s hiddenness does not cast doubt on his love for humans. Rea first recasts the problem of divine hiddenness as a matter of divine silence. He then argues that divine silence is compatible with God’s love if God has provided a way for rational creatures to experience his presence despite the silence. Such opportunities to experience the presence of God, Rea claims, can be found in biblical narratives and liturgical acts. The question of God’s reasons for action is also at the heart of Tom Flint’s essay on “Fittingness and Divine Action in Cur Deus Homo.” It is often said that God chooses some option—such as the choice to become incarnate—not because such a volition was necessary, but rather because it was ‘fitting’ for God to do so. But what exactly follows from the fittingness of a possible action? Flint explores the nature of fittingness through Anselm’s work on the Incarnation. In particular, what is the relationship between the truth of a claim and the fittingness of that claim? As Flint sees it, Anselm’s position is that fittingness comes in degrees; and the truth of a claim necessarily follows only from that claim’s being most fitting, not simply from its being fitting. But the focus on what it is most fitting for God to do raises problems of its own. For it seems to follow from the necessity of God’s doing what is most fitting, and other propositions that Anselm accepts, that what isn’t most fitting isn’t even possible, while what is most fitting is necessary. Anselm thus seems to be committed to a kind of modal collapse. Flint then suggests various ways to avoid this result, but argues that each comes at a price Anselm himself would seemingly be unwilling to pay. The final two selections in the first section both have to do with Molinism. In “Conservation, Concurrence, and Counterfactuals of Freedom,” Jonathan Kvanvig argues that the motivation for the doctrine of middle knowledge, and its place in the logical space between God’s natural knowledge and his free knowledge, is the result of deistic tendencies. Through a discussion of God’s conservation of the created order, Kvanvig argues that a properly theistic understanding of God’s relationship to creation undermines the objection that gave rise to the theory of middle knowledge in the first place. It may be that there is some other reason why God’s knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom would need to be based on middle knowledge; but short of some argument for this further reason, Molinism is unmotivated. John Martin Fischer’s “On Molinism” extends his previous work on the Molinist account of providence. He argues there that while Molinism provides a model of divine providence, it does not, as many have supposed, provide a distinctive response to the theological fatalist’s argument for the incompatibility of God’s omniscience and human freedom.15 In contrast to other responses to the fatalist’s argument, such as Ockhamism or Open Theism, Molinism assumes rather than establishes that it is possible for

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Page xxiii God to have foreknowledge of an agent’s action who nevertheless does that action freely. In the present paper, Fischer considers objections to this claim offered by Flint and Michael Bergmann. Both of these objections, Fischer argues, fail to show that Molinism offers a unique response to the problem of theological fatalism. The second part, Preacipue de Hominibus , focuses primarily on human persons. Stump has defended Aquinas’ claim that the goodness of a person supervenes on the degree to which a person actualizes her capacities, particularly her capacity for rationality. John Hare examines this claim in his “The Supervenience of Goodness on Being.” Utilizing the distinction between ‘weak supervenience’ and ‘strong supervenience’ from Jaegwon Kim, whose account Stump relies upon, Hare argues that neither of these accounts of supervenience captures what Aquinas takes to be the relationship between goodness and being. He then develops another account of supervenience, one based on the work of another medieval philosopher, Duns Scotus, which provides a better way of understanding the claim that a human’s goodness supervenes on being. In “The Second-Person Account of the Problem of Evil,” Lynne Baker begins by demarcating some of the defining characteristics of Stump’s recent work on evil: her focus on those who suffer evil, rather than the cause of evil; the centrality of relationships and our knowledge of other persons; and her use of biblical narratives to communicate that knowledge through second-person experiences. According to Stump, one significant consequence of suffering is that the sufferer is often unable to integrate his will toward the good, and is thus unable to remove the obstacles to love and be in union with God. After presenting Stump’s response to this difficulty, Baker extols what she takes to be the main strengths of Stump’s view: that, despite Stump’s own incompatibilism, her response to the problem of suffering does not require incompatibilism; that the ability to have a second-person experience of God assures the sufferer of God’s love and faithfulness; and that her account refuses to minimize the dreadfulness of suffering. Stump’s work on the problem of evil, and her use of second-person narratives in particular, also comes up in Timothy O’Connor’s “Theodicies and Human Nature: Dostoevsky on the Saint as Witness.” O’Connor examines Dostoevsky’s narrative treatment of evil in his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, focusing on the way Dostoevsky approaches the problem of evil as an existential and practical problem, rather than as a logical problem. According to O’Connor, Dostoevsky’s response to the problem of evil isn’t to find a set of possibly true propositions that would justify evil. Instead, his response is a way of life which accepts the fact of pervasive suffering and takes responsibility for it. Saints, as illustrated in Dostoevsky’s novel by Zossima, provide us with reason to believe that it is possible for ordinary human beings to fully integrate Christian teaching concerning suffering, even horrific suffering, into a life of active compassion and love for others.

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Page xxiv The final three chapters all address issues which arise from the Christian belief in the afterlife. Jason Eberl’s “Do Human Persons Persist Between Death and Resurrection?” elucidates Aquinas’ account of immortality, which is intended to be both a faithful explication of Christian teaching and a metaphysically sound hylomorphic account of human personhood. There is a prima facie tension, however, between Aquinas’ claim that the human person is identical with the composite of body and soul, rather than just the soul, and his view that after death and prior to resurrection the human soul exists in a disembodied state. Eberl carefully examines Stump’s and Robert Pasnau’s recent treatments of Aquinas’ view of the disembodied soul and argues, in agreement with Stump, that a human person persists between death and resurrection composed of, but not identical to, her soul alone. In “Love and Damnation,” Scott Ragland critically examines Stump’s defense of the traditional doctrine of hell. According to this view, which Stump finds in the works of Dante Alighieri, the damned experience neverending conscious suffering without hope of redemption. Drawing on work by Richard Swinburne and C. S. Lewis, Ragland argues that if, as Dante claims, hell is motivated by divine love for the damned, then either hell does not involve eternal suffering or else there must be hope, even in hell, for the damned to be reconciled with God. Ragland then defends a modification of the traditional account of hell on which, because of God’s love, the damned are able to repent even if they never will. Because of this opportunity, on Ragland’s view (as on Lewis’), there is no essential difference between hell and purgatory. The volume closes with Christopher Brown’s “Friendship in Heaven: Aquinas on Supremely Perfect Happiness and the Communion of the Saints.” Through a careful examination of Aquinas’ various texts on the subject, Brown differentiates between what he calls perfect happiness and supremely perfect happiness. He then argues that while Aquinas claims that God alone is the object of perfect human happiness, human community and friendship are required for supremely perfect happiness. According to Brown, this corporate dimension of human beatitude successfully synthesizes two incomplete models of blessedness. He ends by suggesting that Christian worship offers us insight into the relative importance of human society for perfect human happiness that he attributes to Aquinas. *** It is with great pleasure that I present this collection of essays honoring Professor Stump and interacting with her many contributions to philosophy of religion. I hope that it will contribute to the continuing flourishing of the field and that others will benefit from it in the same way that so many of us have benefited from Stump’s work.

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Page xxv NOTES 1. See, for instance, William Hasker (2004), James Harris (2002), and Richard Swinburne (2005). 2. Eleonore Stump (1993), 1. 3. Stump (1993), 2f. 4. Basil Mitchell (2005), 21. Similarly, Dean Zimmerman writes that “many of our colleagues still regard the persistence of religious belief among otherwise intelligent philosophers as a strange aberration, a pocket of irrationality” (Zimmerman, 2007, 12). 5. Quentin Smith (2001). 6. James F. Sennett (1998), xiii. In his “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,” ardent atheist Quenten Smith describes the ignoring of recent work in philosophy of religion by most naturalistic philosophers as “a disastrous failure” (Smith, 2001). 7. See, for example, Stump (1978). 8. Stump (2003), ix. 9. Stump (forthcoming), Chapter 1, page 19 in manuscript. 10. Thomas Williams (2005), 483. 11. Robert Pasnau (2005), 203. 12. Alvin Plantinga (1994), 81. 13. The Cherry Award requires each finalist, as well as the recipient, to have “a proven record as an extraordinary teacher with a positive, inspiring, and long-lasting effect on students, along with a record of distinguished scholarship.” It is the aim of the Cherry Award Committee that it be “the most significant honor for an individual who has a proven record for extraordinary teaching.” http://www.baylor.edu/cherry_awards/ 14. Van Inwagen (2004). 15. John Martin Fischer (2008).

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Page 1 Part I Preacipue de Deo

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Page 3 1 God and Other Uncreated Things Peter van Inwagen Is there anything (other than himself) that God has not created? In some sense, obviously, every Christian philosopher—every Christian—must answer No, for the Nicene Creed says that God has created all the visibilia and all the invisibilia .1 But must a Christian take this creedal statement to mean that God has created everything , everything tout court , everything simpliciter, everything full stop , everything period ? Or is it permissible for the Christian to regard the range of the quantifier ‘everything’ in the sentence ‘God has created everything’ as restricted to a certain class of objects—which is certainly a feature of many “everyday” sentences in which that quantifier occurs, sentences like ‘I’ve tried everything, and I still can’t persuade Winifred to apologize to Harold’? (“Really? Have you tried pelting her with bananas? Have you tried taking her on a holiday tour of the Pleiades?”) It is by no means prima facie absurd to suppose that this might be so. The well-known dispute about whether God can do everything may serve as an analogy. Jesus says, “With God all things are possible.”2 Could Descartes have used this logion as a proof text?—to provide biblical, and indeed Dominical, warrant for his thesis that God can create two mountains that touch at their bases and, nevertheless, surround no valley?3 Descartes might have thought so (as far as I know, he never mentions the Bible in connection with his views on the creation of the eternal truths), but Aquinas would deny it. I don’t know whether Thomas ever discusses Matt. 19:26,4 but here’s what I (who have a view of God’s power that is much closer to his than to Descartes’s) would say about that verse: The range of ‘all things’ is tacitly restricted to “things” that could possibly be of practical interest to human beings, and of interest particularly in the matter of their salvation; mountains that are removed and cast into the sea perhaps fall within this category, but mountains that are adjacent but have no valley between them certainly do not. (I mean this to be a point about that particular verse; I don’t mean to suggest that the scope of God’s power is limited to matters that pertain to practical human interests. I mean that those things are the things that were Jesus’ topic when he spoke those words, and that nothing that does not pertain to that topic can be a counterexample to the thesis that those words expressed in the context in which they were spoken.)

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Page 4 This example, the example provided by the biblical statement ‘With God all things are possible’, shows that it is at least not beyond dispute that in the creedal statement ‘God is the creator of all things’, ‘all things’ must be understood as an unrestricted quantifier. But if there are things that are, so to speak, not covered by the phrase ‘creator of all things’, what things might they be? One obvious answer to this question is not really germane to my concerns in this paper, but I will deal with it for the sake of completeness. There are nouns (‘suffering’, ‘sin’, and ‘death’) that in some sense have referents but which are such that Christians would say that God had not made those referents. (For everything that proceeds from God’s creative power is, as we learn from Genesis 1, good—intrinsically good. And suffering, sin, and death are certainly not intrinsically good things.) St Augustine solved the problem raised by such nouns by saying that their referents are not real things, not substances, but mere defects in substances. To bring about a defect in a substance is not, properly speaking, to create, and the “existence” of defects may therefore be ascribed to the acts of creatures. If Moses’ first attempt at smashing the Tables of the Law resulted only in a crack in one of them, Moses did not thereby add something, a crack, to God’s creation. This is certainly at least a plausible way of dealing with the problem. I myself would advocate a more radical form of Augustine’s thesis. I would say that phrases that purport to denote defects in things —‘the suffering of the innocent’, ‘the crack in the Liberty Bell’—do not really denote anything, not even some such ontologically substandard or second-tier item as a “defect.” To say this is to say that nothing that is to be met with in the world is a defect; it implies nothing about whether the things that are to be met with in the world are defective. In particular, it does not imply that the innocent do not suffer or that the Liberty Bell is not cracked. (My position on the ontology of suffering is therefore not to be confused with Mrs. Eddy’s. In her view, someone who thinks he is seeing people suffer is in every case like someone who is looking at a sound bell and thinks he is seeing a cracked bell because of an optical illusion, and not like someone who is looking at a cracked bell and affirms the metaphysical thesis that no part or component or constituent of the bell is a crack. I have to make this point very carefully, since one meaning of the sentence ‘Suffering does not exist’ is ‘No one suffers’, and this is indeed the only meaning this sentence could have outside metaphysics. So please don’t tell anyone that I believe that suffering does not exist. Telling them that would be like telling them that I have never stopped beating my wife: what you tell them would be true but a slander nonetheless. Falsity isn’t the only thing one can object to in a statement.) I think that my more radical version of the Augustinian ontology of sin and death and suffering is preferable to Augustine’s own ontology of these things (or non-things) because his ontology faces an objection that mine does not face. The objection is this: “All right, sin and

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Page 5 death and suffering aren’t substances but only defects in substances. Still, they’re there. If there are defects, they’re among the items to be found in the world. So either God has made them or there’s something to be found in the world that God has not made.” But if a philosopher’s position implies, as my position does, that the nouns ‘sin’ and ‘death’ and ‘suffering’ have no referents, then this objection does not apply to it. If defects or deficiencies or absences are not the putative counterexamples to the thesis that God has made everything that I propose to discuss, what putative counterexamples to this thesis do I propose to discuss? You have probably guessed. I mean to discuss what Quine has called “abstract objects”— properties or attributes, numbers, propositions, fill out the list as you will. I will not attempt to give a definition of ‘abstract object’. I have had something to say about how this phrase should be defined in an essay called “A Theory of Properties,” and I refer anyone who is interested in what I have to say about that problem to that essay. In the present essay, I will assume simply that we all have a grasp of the concept of an abstract object that will suffice for a consideration of the theological questions that abstract objects raise. Why are abstract objects “putative counterexamples” to the thesis that God has created everything? Why would anyone suppose that, granting for the moment that there are abstract objects, God has not created them—or at any rate, has not created some of them. One relevant consideration is this: many philosophers believe that at least some abstract objects exist necessarily. Pure sets, for example, purely general propositions, purely qualitative attributes, and numbers.5 Suppose this common belief is true. Suppose that at least some abstract objects exist necessarily. Does its truth entail that God has not created such abstract objects as exist of necessity? To ask this, I suppose, is to ask whether God can create something that exists necessarily. Or put the question this way: Does ‘ x exists necessarily’ entail ‘ x is uncreated’? Anyone who said that this entailment held would be contradicted by Richard Swinburne, if by no one else. For Swinburne holds that the Son and the Holy Spirit are necessarily existent beings who were created (not, of course, at some point in time) by the Father. Revealed theology aside, one might point out, simply as a matter of abstract logic, that if A exists necessarily, and if it is a necessary truth that if A exists, then A creates B, it follows that B exists necessarily.6 I am myself inclined to think that ‘ x exists necessarily’ does entail ‘ x is uncreated’, but I will not use this thesis as a premise because it is controversial and I know of no very interesting argument for it. There is a second line of reasoning that might be used to defend the proposition that abstract objects (if such there be) are uncreated. It is this. Creation is, in the broadest sense of the word, a causal relation, and abstract objects cannot enter into causal relations. Therefore, abstract objects are uncreated. The second premise of the argument, at least, has been disputed, but I want to point to another sort of problem the argument faces. According

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Page 6 to some metaphysicians, there are contingently existent abstract objects, and at least some of them are contingently existent precisely because they depend for their existence on contingently existent concrete (nonabstract) objects. Consider, for example, the proposition that Alvin Plantinga is an able philosopher. (Suppose for the moment that there are propositions—and that there is such a proposition as that one.) Some theorists of the abstract say that Plantinga is in some sense a component or constituent of this proposition (along with the attribute “being an able philosopher,” and perhaps even some other items, such as a “predicative tie” whose business it is to unite the man and the attribute into the whole that is the proposition). And they maintain that Plantinga is an essential constituent of this proposition, a thesis that obviously entails that the proposition cannot exist if Plantinga doesn’t. And they seem to believe (though they may not say this explicitly) that if Plantinga does exist, the proposition exists. (I suppose the argument would be that the predicated attribute—and the “tie,” if that’s involved—are necessarily existent, and that it’s a necessary truth that a proposition exists if all its constituents exist.) But God created Plantinga. And, of course, before he created Plantinga, he knew that when he created Plantinga that act of creation would be sufficient for the existence of a proposition whose subject was Plantinga and whose predicate was the attribute “being an able philosopher.” (Sufficient for its existence, but not, of course, sufficient for its truth.) It therefore seems at least plausible to say that, in creating Plantinga, God created the proposition that Plantinga is an able philosopher. And if that is true, then at least one of the following two theses must be false: The proposition that Plantinga is an able philosopher cannot enter into causal relations. For all x and all y, if x creates y, at least one causal relation holds between x and y. (And it seems clear enough that any proposition is an abstract object, even if it has a concrete object as a constituent.) Now I do not myself believe that the proposition that Plantinga is an able philosopher—I do believe that there is such a proposition—is a contingent thing. At any rate, I find the thesis that it is a contingent thing a very counterintuitive thesis. It seems to me that if Plantinga had not existed, his existence would nevertheless have been possible. (To deny this would be to deny that the accessibility relation is symmetrical, and the symmetry of the accessibility relation is a good candidate for a Truth of Reason.) I would suppose, moreover, that if it is true in any possible world that Plantinga might have existed, the proposition that Plantinga exists must exist in that world—for it must be possibly true in that world and a proposition can’t be possibly true if it doesn’t exist. And I would suppose that if the proposition that Plantinga exists exists in a world, so does the proposition that

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Page 7 Plantinga is an able philosopher. This argument, however, presupposes a controversial thesis of modal metaphysics, the thesis called Serious Actualism—that an object cannot have a property in a world if it, the object, does not exist in that world. Since Serious Actualism is indeed controversial, I will not appeal to this argument. And I will make no use of its conclusion, which—generalized—is that propositions like the proposition that Plantinga is an able philosopher (if no others, propositions expressed by sentences that contain proper names of concrete objects) exist necessarily. I will say this. Some propositions do not depend for their existence on the existence of contingent things. And those propositions, at least, exist necessarily. I think that no proposition depends for its existence on the existence of any contingent thing and that all propositions exist necessarily, but it will suffice for my purposes to say that some propositions exist necessarily. “Purely qualitative” propositions, as some philosophers call them, certainly have this feature—propositions like the proposition that some things are material (or are yellow or are warm blooded). And I would say the same thing about numbers, “purely qualitative” attributes, and pure sets (always assuming that there are such things as numbers, purely qualitative attributes, and pure sets). Let us call such abstract objects as these “free”—free, that is, of ontological involvement with particular concrete objects. I would suppose that if an abstract object is free in this sense, it could exist even if there were no concrete objects at all (if that is a possible state of affairs). For—I would suppose—the only thing that could prevent an abstract object that exists in one possible world from existing in another would be its involving some concrete object that fails to exist in the latter world. Suppose there are free abstract objects. What would follow? These things, I say. Even if there are possible worlds in which nothing concrete exists—most theists who understand the metaphysical issues the question of the existence of “empty worlds” raises would of course deny their existence—I contend that the proposition that some things are yellow and the attribute “material” and the number 510 exist in those worlds. (In such worlds, of course, the proposition is false, the attribute is uninstantiated, and the number numbers only other abstract objects.) And in no world, I contend, do free abstract objects (if such there are) enter into causal relations. Now I will affirm something I believe. It will not be my purpose to try to convince you that belief of mine is true. My purpose is rather to defend the proposition that my belief is consistent with the creedal statement that God has created everything. The belief, as you will no doubt have guessed, is that there are free abstract objects. I will say again something I have said several times in different ways: In my view, all abstract objects are free. I think that the proposition that Plantinga is an able philosopher (exists and) is free. I think that the attribute “being identical with Saul Kripke” (exists and) is free. I think that numbers and functions and vectors and tensors (exist and) are free. It is certainly true that if there are sets that

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Page 8 have concrete members (or even sets to which some concrete object bears the ancestral of the membership relation), then those sets are not free. But I’m inclined to think that there are no sets: I incline toward something like a “no class” elimination of set-theoretical predicates from ontologically serious discourse. But my conviction that all abstract objects are free (a non-vacuous truth, I say) will not figure in my argument. I appeal only to my conviction that there are free abstract objects. If there are, as I suppose, free abstract objects, then they must be uncreated—since (I affirm this thesis as well) creation is a causal relation and free abstract objects cannot enter into causal relations. A theist might dispute my thesis that there are uncreated abstract objects, and the argument I have given for this thesis, in either of two ways: I agree that if there were free abstract objects they would be uncreated. But, since God has created everything, this simply shows that there are no free abstract objects. And there are no free abstract objects for a very simple reason: there are no abstract objects at all. In a word, theists—or at any rate theists who take the Nicene Creed seriously—should be nominalists. I agree that if there were free abstract objects they would be uncreated. But, since God has created everything, this simply shows that there are no free abstract objects. There are abstract objects, all right (in my view, nominalism is not an option), but none of them is free. In a word, theists—or at any rate theists who take the Nicene Creed seriously—should be Aristotelians. To use a pair of medieval Latin tags, although theists may (and should) affirm the existence of universalia in rebus , they must deny the existence of universalia ante res . I will not discuss the first option. I refer the interested reader to my essay “A Theory of Properties” for an account of my reasons for supposing that “nominalism is not an option.” (They may well be defective, but, if they are, that would hardly be an argument for summarizing them here.) Let us turn, then, to the matter of universalia in rebus . (Or, since I am not assuming that the only abstract objects are universals, perhaps I should say abstracta in rebus .) What does it mean to say that universals or other abstract objects exist “in” things (that is, in concrete things or in individuals or in particulars)? We should note first that the idea of an abstract object’s existing in a concrete object is not the same as an idea we have already met, the idea of an abstract object’s being a constituent of a concrete object. An example should make this clear. Some philosophers think that there is such a property or attribute as “being a descendant of David.” Suppose these philosophers are right. Some of them (not all) believe that this attribute has King David as a constituent, and is thus not what we have called a “free” attribute. I have used

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Page 9 the phrase ‘free of ontological involvement’ in this connection: the attribute “being a descendant of David” is, at least in the minds of some philosophers, not free of ontological involvement with concrete objects because David is a constituent of this attribute. But no one, these philosophers included, thinks that David has or exemplifies or instantiates or possesses “being a descendant of David.” And, therefore, although “being a descendant of David” may exist in, say, Solomon or St Joseph, it does not exist in David. And, although it involves David, it does not involve Solomon or Joseph. Therefore, the concept of an attribute’s existing in a concrete individual is not the same concept as the concept of an attribute’s having a concrete individual as a constituent. (In this argument, I have assumed that an attribute can exist in a concrete individual only if that individual has that attribute. I will later examine a conception of “existing in” that does not depend on this assumption—that attributes and other abstract objects exist in the mind of God.) That is a point about what “existing in” is not. What can we say about what it is? I have to confess that I do not understand this idea, and I am not one of those philosophers—there are such philosophers— who are good at explaining ideas that they themselves do not profess to understand. But it seems to be clear that whatever existing in may be, the thesis that attributes exist (only) in the concrete objects that instantiate them implies the thesis that there are no uninstantiated properties. It follows that if there are uninstantiated properties, then this thesis is false if it is meaningful at all. The thesis can therefore be refuted—assuming that it is meaningful, assuming that there is such a thesis as it—by producing even one convincing example of an uninstantiated property. From my point of view, this is not hard to do. From my point of view, a property is very like a proposition. Both propositions and properties, I say, are things that can be said —that is, asserted. Propositions and properties are assertibles. Propositions are saturated assertibles: they can be said or asserted full stop, period, without qualification. That the earth goes round the sun is something that one can say. Properties are unsaturated assertibles: they can be said or asserted, but only of something. For example, one of the things one can say of the earth is that it goes round the sun, and one can say it, that very same thing, of Mars and Venus as well. (If Professor X says that Mars goes round the sun and Professor Y says that Venus goes round the sun, there is something that both of them said of something —and not of the same “something.” If someone said to you, “Say of Jupiter what Professor X said of Mars and Professor Y said of Venus,” you would know exactly what to say in response to this imperative.) “That it goes round the sun” is, moreover, a thing that can be said truly of a few things like Mars and Venus and the Earth and Jupiter, but only falsely of Arcturus and the number 510 and most other things. A property of something x, a property that x has or instantiates or exemplifies, I say, is simply an unsaturated assertible that can be said truly of x. An uninstantiated or unexemplified property, therefore, is a thing that can be said of things but

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Page 10 cannot be said truly of anything. And obviously there are such assertibles if there are any unsaturated assertibles at all. One of the things you can say about something, for example, is that it is a woman who was the president of the United States in the twentieth century. (If there is such a thing to be said about something as that it is a woman who was the prime minister of the United Kingdom in the twentieth century, how could there not be such a thing to say about something as that it is a woman who was the president of the United States in the twentieth century?) But this thing, although it can be said of things, can’t be said truly of anything. It is therefore an uninstantiated property, and its existence refutes the thesis that properties can exist only in the things that have them. What I have said, of course, presupposes my own account of properties. But I know of no other account of properties that (a) is equally explicit as to the nature of properties, (b) is intelligible, and (c) has the consequence that properties exist only in the things that have them. (I do not count nominalism as a theory of properties. By a theory of properties, I mean a theory that affirms the existence of properties and attempts to give some account of their nature—that attempts to specify some of the salient and philosophically important properties of properties.) Still, it would be nice (from my point of view) to have an argument against the Aristotelian view of properties that did not presuppose the account of properties that I favor. I will present an argument that presupposes neither my theory of properties nor any other particular theory of properties. And here is the argument. Properties and other abstract objects themselves have properties, and many of the properties of abstract objects could not be properties of concrete objects. The number 510 has such properties as being an even number and having irrational square roots, for example, and the property ductility has the property of being instantiated and the property of entailing the property solidity. It cannot be true of these properties—being an even number and being instantiated, and so on—that they exist only in the concrete objects that have them, for they are not had by concrete objects at all. And it would seem— this seems evident to me, at any rate—that “being an even number” is a property in the same sense of ‘property’ as the sense in which “being white” is a property. And it would seem that 510 has the property “being even” in the same sense of ‘has’ as the sense in which the Taj Mahal has the property “being white.” Some properties, therefore, do not exist only in the concrete objects that have them. And if some properties can do this thing, why should we not say that all of them can? If this question does not constitute a refutation of the thesis that some properties can exist only in concrete things ( sc . the things that have them), it at any rate constitutes a significant challenge to the intuition on which allegiance to that thesis rests, namely that it is impossible for a property to exist otherwise than “in” the concrete objects that have it. One could certainly respond to the question by insisting that, although such properties as logical inconsistency

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Page 11 and divisibility by 3, properties that are not properties of concrete things, can exist independently of concrete things, properties of concrete things, whiteness and solidity and the like, can exist only in the concrete things that instantiate them. But one would at least have to concede that this was because whiteness and solidity were properties of a certain sort, and not because they were properties simpliciter. A further conceptual burden is laid on the backs of those who say that properties of concrete objects can exist only in the concrete objects that have them by the observation that there are properties that are properties of both concrete and abstract objects (if abstract objects there are): selfidentity, for example, or not being a prime number. If properties (and no doubt other abstract objects as well) do not exist in things, if the Platonic, as opposed to the Aristotelian, view of properties is correct, then one cannot say that God creates properties by creating concrete things. (And even if the Aristotelians are right about whiteness and solidity, there is still the case of properties of abstract things. Those obviously do not exist in the concrete things that have them, since, as we have observed, concrete things do not have them. It therefore cannot be that God has created “divisibility by 3” by creating concrete objects.) If properties existed only in the concrete things that had them, it is easy to see how God would go about creating properties: he would simply create concrete objects, and the creation of properties would be part and parcel of his creation of concrete objects. If, however, properties exist ante res , it is very hard indeed to see what the “creation” of properties could consist in. How might defenders of the position that (given that there are such things as abstract objects) God is the creator of abstract objects reply to this argument? They could, of course, simply insist that— however hard it may be to see what the creation of ante res universals might consist in—God nevertheless does perform this act of creation. And there is no way to refute this position. There is, however, a more interesting kind of reply. I have in mind the reply provided by the thesis that ante res universals and all other abstract objects are thoughts in the mind of God. It does seem that one is in some sense the creator of one’s own thoughts. One creates them—it seems —by thinking them. Suppose, for example, that I think a thought whose appropriate verbal expression would be “Ah, here’s Jane coming round the corner now.” Don’t I bring that thought into existence by thinking it? This proposal faces one serious problem that I shall not make too much of. The problem is this: if one supposes that the number 510 or the property whiteness or the relation “to the north of” are thoughts in the mind of God, it is not easy to say what thoughts they might be. The proposal is rather easier to apply in the case of propositions—or true propositions, at any rate. That is, it is easier to apply it in the case of abstract objects that have truth-values than it is in other cases. This is because the most straightforward notion of “a thought” is this: a thought is a “thinking that ,” an

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Page 12 episode in which a thinker asserts in foro interno that something is the case. A moment ago, I identified a thought I might have had by reference to some words I might have used to express it: ‘a thought whose appropriate verbal expression would be “Ah, here’s Jane coming round the corner now.” ’ And it would seem, when we think of “thoughts” we think of mental episodes whose appropriate mode of expression in language is the declarative sentence. If a proponent of the view that abstract objects are thoughts in the mind of God is asked to say what thought in the mind of God the proposition that the Earth goes round the sun is, it will not be hard for him to provide an answer that is at least plausible: it is that thought of God’s whose appropriate verbal expression would be (or one appropriate verbal expression of which would be), “The Earth goes round the sun.” I confess I am not clear what thought in anyone’s mind, God’s or anyone else’s, could possibly be identified with a number or a quality or a relation. (Could we say that “to the north of” is the thought God has when he thinks of that relation? Well, first, it’s not clear that there is any such thought if there is no object that is the relation “to the north of” and which, in some sense, exists independently of the thought—as its object . Secondly, in my case at least, I doubt whether there is any such thought as the thought I think when I think of “to the north of”: there is the thought whose appropriate verbal expression is “The relation ‘to the north of’ is transitive”; there is the thought whose appropriate verbal expression is “The relation ‘to the north of’ is asymmetrical” … And it’s not clear to me that even God can think of that relation otherwise than by thinking something about it.) It is, in fact, hard to see what thought in God’s mind could possibly be identified with any false proposition. We cannot, for example, identify the proposition that the sun goes round the Earth with that thought in God’s mind whose appropriate verbal expression would be, “The sun goes round the Earth”—for the plain reason that there is no thought in God’s mind that can be so expressed. The easiest case for the proposal to treat is the case of true propositions. (This fact has a parallel in the Aristotelian theory of universals. If the Aristotelian theory is to be extended to abstract objects other than universals—other than properties or attributes—well, it’s not clear how to do so. As the thesis “Abstract objects are thoughts in God’s mind” is most easily understood if the abstract objects in question are propositions, so the thesis “Abstract objects exist in the concrete objects that instantiate them” is most easily understood if the abstract objects in question are properties—since it’s not easy to see what it would be for something to “instantiate” a number or a proposition. The parallel is not exact, however, for, as the Aristotelians themselves concede, their theory implies that there are no uninstantiated properties; but I wonder whether the proponents of the former theory would be willing to say that their theory had the parallel implication: that there are no false propositions.)

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Page 13 Let us look at the easiest case, the proposal that true propositions are thoughts in the mind of God. If that proposal turns out to be “workable,” perhaps we shall be able somehow to extend it in such a way that it applies to other abstract objects. If it turns out to be unworkable even in the easiest case, there will be no point in trying to extend it to the more difficult cases. Let us ask this: What is a “thought” in the appropriate sense? Or, if you like, What meaning should the count-noun ‘thought’ have when we use it to state the thesis that true propositions are thoughts in the mind of God? Let’s start with the thoughts of human beings. Consider my hypothetical thought about Jane. Let us suppose that I did think a thought of that description. I have a friend whose name is Jane, and this morning I saw her (or someone I took to be her) coming round a corner, and I thought a thought—or had a thought; I’ll not get into the matter of “cognate accusatives”—whose appropriate verbal expression would have been, “Ah, here’s Jane coming round the corner now.” What, exactly, was this item that I’m calling a “thought”? This is a question we cannot avoid, not if we are being serious about metaphysics, and I doubt whether one can address the question of God’s relation to abstract objects if one is not being serious about metaphysics. If we are going to identify true propositions with certain thoughts—thoughts in the mind of God, to be sure, but at the moment we are simply asking what a thought, anyone’s thought, is—we must suppose that thoughts are objects of some sort. I use ‘object’ in its most general, or “logical,” sense: an object is anything that can be the value of a variable, anything that can be referred to by the use of a pronoun. This is a very undemanding sense to give to the word ‘object’, I concede, but the thesis that thoughts are objects in even this undemanding sense has enough content to impose a certain discipline on the thinking about thoughts of those who accept it. Even in this undemanding sense of ‘object’, every object must, for every property, have either that property or its complement, and every object must be a member of some logical or metaphysical category. (One could deny this only if one were willing to say that the idea of a logical or metaphysical category was meaningless: once you grant that the idea of a category makes sense, you have to be willing to place every object in your domain of quantification—in your ontology—into at least one of them.) What logical category do thoughts (in the sense of ‘thought’ that figures in “True propositions are thoughts in the mind of God”) belong to? It seems to me that the only appropriate category is event : a thought, in the sense of the act, is a mental event of some kind. And, if one distinguishes between event-types and event-tokens, one must suppose that thoughts are event-tokens—for if our argument appeals to the premise that thinkers bring mental events into existence by thinking or the premise that the existence of mental events depends on the act of thinking, these premises will be plausible only if by ‘mental event’ we mean ‘mental event-token ’.

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Page 14 The thesis that true propositions are thoughts—mental event-tokens—in the mind of God is most easily understood on the assumption that God, although everlasting, is not extra-temporal. (If God is outside time, as Boethius, Augustine, and Aquinas and many other philosophers and theologians have supposed, and if thoughts are events, then God can have “thoughts” only in some analogical sense.) Let us assume, then, that God is in time. We assume this only to make things as easy as possible for the theory that true propositions are thoughts in the mind of God. If we suppose that thoughts are event-tokens, we must ask what event-tokens are—ontologically speaking. According to Kim’s account, and I have no better account to offer, event-tokens are propertyexemplifications, or, better—better because some philosophers have used the phrase ‘property exemplification’ for another purpose—“episodes of property exemplification.” (That is the simplest case; more generally, events are episodes of relation exemplification, but I’ll consider only the simplest case.) Suppose, for example, that I became hungry at noon, that at noon I came to have or exemplify the property “being hungry.” (I’m using the word ‘noon’ as a name for a particular moment of time in the world’s history, and not as a word for something that recurs every day or occurs in different moments in different time zones.) It follows—according to Kim’s theory, as I understand it—that the proposition that I became hungry at noon implies the existence of at least four objects. In addition to me and the property hunger and the time noon, it implies the existence a fourth item, an event-token or concrete event, that might be called ‘my becoming hungry at noon’ or ‘my acquisition of the property hunger at noon’. I have to say that that seems to me to be an ontologically profligate thesis. Why should one suppose that, simply because I come to exemplify a certain property at a certain time, there is something “there” in addition to me and the property and the time? Those three objects seem to me to the only objects that need figure in an adequate description of, as we say, what happened. There are, I would say, no events. That is to say, all statements that appear to involve quantification over events can be paraphrased as statements that involve quantification over objects, properties, and times—and the paraphrase leaves nothing out. We can, I say, in every case in which an object acquires a property describe “what happened” without supposing that there are objects that have the property of happening. I would point out that this position avoids difficult questions about the counterfactual individuation of events. Kim has said things that imply, or appear to imply, that the event that is in the actual world denoted by ‘the death of Caesar’ occurs in every possible world in which Caesar dies at the particular moment at which he in fact died—including those worlds in which he dies of heart failure or because Cleopatra has poisoned him. But those of us who like Kripke’s essentiality-of-origins thesis will feel a strong inclination to say that the event we in fact call ‘Caesar’s death’ can occur only in worlds in which Caesar is stabbed on the floor of the Roman

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Page 15 Senate by certain conspirators. If, however, we suppose there are no events, we avoid the problem of individuating them, and it’s always nice to avoid knotty philosophical problems. Nevertheless, I do not recommend the theory—if I may dignify a mere negative statement with the title “theory”—that there are no events because accepting that theory will enable one to avoid the knotty philosophical problem of the individuation of events. I recommend it because it seems evident to me, on inspection of the idea of an object’s gaining a property, that when an object gains a property at a certain time, there’s just nothing “there” besides those three things: the object, the property, and the time. I would say, therefore, that there are no thoughts. There are thinkers, yes. There are mental properties, yes. Some mental properties are of a kind of which the following property is representative: “noticing that one’s friend Jane is just now coming round the corner.” One does momentarily acquire such properties, yes. There was (in the story I told) a moment at which I acquired (and then briefly exemplified) the property “noticing that one’s friend Jane is just now coming round the corner”—yes. But there was nothing else there (or, rather, there would have to have been lots of other things there, but no other things figured in my story). There was nothing that answered to the description ‘the event that consisted in my acquiring then briefly exemplifying the property “noticing that one’s friend Jane is just now coming round the corner.”’ The property “noticing that one’s friend Jane is just now coming round the corner” is a mental property, if you like. It is a mental property in the sense that it entails the properties “has a mental life” and “thinks.” But it is not an inhabitant of the world of concrete things. It is an ante res universal, and it would have existed—I say—even if Jane and I had never existed, even if God had not created anything, even if (if this were possible) there had been no concrete existents at all. And it is a universal, a sharable property. It is a property you might exemplify too if Jane were a friend of yours as well as a friend of mine. If, as I suppose, there are no events, and if thoughts in someone’s mind, if they existed, would be events, then, obviously, nothing is a thought in God’s mind. But let us suppose that I am wrong and that events exist. Let us suppose that, for any object x, any property F, and any moment of time t , the proposition that x has F at t entails the existence of an event, to wit, x’s having F at t . And let us suppose that when x is a thinker and F is a mental property of the right sort, this event is a thought in the mind of x. And let us suppose that God (who, remember, we are supposing is a temporal being) has at various times certain mental properties of the right sort, and that there are, therefore, such things as thoughts in the mind of God. If the proposition that the Earth goes round the sun is one of these items, one of God’s thoughts, which one is it? Let us, to avoid having to deal with some purely technical problems (problems that a satisfactory account of true propositions as thoughts in the mind of God would eventually have to

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Page 16 solve), suppose that the past and the future are infinite and that the Earth has always been going round the sun and always will be. And let us suppose that the proposition we are considering is the proposition that Earth has always been going round the sun and always will be—world without end. What thought in the mind of God is that proposition? It would, I suppose, be the event that consists in, for every time, God’s then thinking that the Earth is going round the sun—or perhaps the event that consists in, for every time, God’s then thinking that the Earth always has been going round the sun and always will be. This event—on either reading—consists in God’s always having a certain mental property: “thinks that the Earth is now going round the sun” or “thinks that the Earth always has been going round the sun and always will be.” (If properties are, as I suppose, unsaturated assertibles, the former will be what one says of something when one says that it is now thinking that the Earth is going round the sun—and similarly for the latter.) It is not clear to me that this maneuver accomplishes anything. If there are thoughts (in the sense we have given to the word), they are events, and events involve abstract objects, if indeed they are not themselves abstract objects. If there is such a thing as the event that consists in x’s having the property F at the moment of time t , that event has a certain abstract object, the property F, as a constituent. I admit that I’d be hard put to it to provide a satisfactory definition of ‘involves’ or ‘constituent’—but then I’m not the one who thinks that there are events. If you think that there is such an object as my having the property hunger at noon (or my acquiring hunger at noon, having it throughout the period noon through 1:00 p.m., and then ceasing to have it), I don’t see how you’re going to avoid saying that hunger is in some sense a constituent of that event. And hunger is a property, an abstract object. And the same goes for mental properties: “fearing that one has a fatal illness” is no less an abstract object than hunger is. But if events, and therefore thoughts, and therefore thoughts in the mind of God, have abstract objects as constituents, what does one accomplish by saying, “True propositions are thoughts in the mind of God; God is the creator of his thoughts; therefore, God the creator of true propositions”? If thoughts have constituents, and if God is the creator of his thoughts, then, surely, God must be the creator of all the constituents of his thoughts? Therefore, the thesis that God creates at least one sort of abstract object, true propositions, depends on the thesis that he creates another sort of abstract object, properties. If we know that God can create properties, why do we need some special theory that explains how he creates true propositions. Why not simply say that he creates propositions using whatever means he employs to create properties—mutatis mutandis—and that some of the propositions he creates turn out to be true? Might we avoid all these problems if we said that a true proposition was not a thought in the mind of God but rather one of God’s beliefs ? I don’t see that that would accomplish anything, for it seems to be a perfectly trivial assertion, something that would be readily accepted by those who say that God does not create abstract objects. Of course the class of true

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Page 17 propositions and the class of God’s beliefs are identical, for a belief—yours, mine, God’s, anyone’s— simply is a proposition, and for any proposition, God accepts that proposition if and only if it’s true. What could a belief be if it were not a proposition? Beliefs have truth values, don’t they? And most of my beliefs, perhaps all of them, could be someone else’s beliefs, too, so they’re obviously a kind of universal, and are therefore abstract objects of some sort. What are one’s beliefs if not the propositions one accepts? If you know of any other candidate for the office “belief” than “proposition,” I should be interested to learn what it might be Or might true propositions—and false propositions and all other abstract objects—be ideas in the mind of God? Again, I don’t see what an idea could be if it were not some sort of abstract object. You have the idea of an even number and I have the idea of an even number and God has it too. And how can more than one person have a certain idea if that idea is not a universal of some sort—an abstract object. I can see no way to understand ‘idea’ that has the following consequence: the phrase ‘my idea of an even number’ and the phrase ‘God’s idea of an even number’ both have referents and the referents they have are different. (I don’t think I’m blaspheming if I contend that some of the ideas in God’s mind are also ideas in mine. Some ideas are so simple that even I can have them, and if I can have an idea, then, of course, God can, and will, have that idea too; and it seems obvious enough that the idea of an even number is one of those ideas that is so simple that even I can have it. After all, I do have it.) And if ideas in the mind of God are abstract objects, then we cannot prove that God is the creator of abstract objects by any such argument as: Abstract objects are ideas in the mind of God God is the creator of the ideas in his own mind Hence, God is the creator of abstract objects. The argument is valid; perhaps it is even sound. But it is useless as a tool of persuasion, for no one who accepted its first premise would accept its second premise unless he already accepted its conclusion, unless he had accepted its conclusion prior to his consideration of the argument. And that is certainly my case. Since I believe that ideas in the mind of God are abstract objects, I will of course accept the first premise. But when I come to the second premise, my response will be, “No, I don’t accept that. I think it’s false because, in my view, no one, not even God, could be the creator of an abstract object.” I admit that there is a certain fausse naïveté in this response to the argument. No doubt anyone who offered an argument framed in the words I have imagined would have meant something by these words that could be stated more adequately as follows: So-called abstract objects are really certain particulars, ideas in the mind of God; that is to say, the role in our discourse that many think is played by ante res universals and such is really played by particulars existing

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Page 18 in the mind of God; these are perfect exemplars , à la Plato. Thus, if one says that the leaf is green, one is really saying that the leaf resembles God’s idea of a green thing—a particular existing in God’s mind. God is the creator of the particulars that exist in his mind (just as we human beings are the creators of the mental particulars that exist in our minds). Hence, God is the creator of the things that really play the role in our discourse that some suppose (wrongly) is played by abstract objects. Now I reject the theory that this argument appeals to—divine-exemplar nominalism, one might call it. I don’t think it can do justice to the data of the problem of universals. But this is not the place to enter into a dispute about the problem of universals. It will suffice for my purposes to point out that it is a form of nominalism, and I of course concede that if any form of nominalism is correct, the question whether God is the creator of abstract objects does not arise. In the end, I see no way in which abstract objects of any sort can be identified with God’s thoughts or beliefs or ideas—no way, at least, that can lend any sense to the idea that God creates abstract objects. God’s thoughts may be (or involve) abstract objects, just as yours and mine may. God’s beliefs may be abstract objects, just as yours and mine may. God’s ideas may be abstract objects, just as yours and mine may. But if God’s thoughts or beliefs or ideas are abstract objects, he does not create any of these items by thinking—any more than, if your and my thoughts and beliefs and ideas are abstract objects, you and I create any of these items by thinking. If your and my thoughts and beliefs and ideas are abstract objects, then, when you and I think certain thoughts we thereby bring it about that we stand in certain relations to various abstract objects. If, for example, I am engaged in a certain line of thought and, as a result of this process, come to the conclusion that Plantinga is an able philosopher, I have thereby put myself into a certain relation to the abstract object called ‘the proposition that Plantinga is an able philosopher’ (the relation called ‘accepting’). The proposition that Plantinga is an able philosopher, as a result of my thinking, acquires the relational property “being accepted by van Inwagen,” but its intrinsic properties or nature and its existence are wholly indifferent to the fact that it has acquired that relational property. And it’s the same with God, really. Since Plantinga is indeed an able philosopher, the proposition that Plantinga is an able philosopher has the relational property “being accepted by God,” but that relational property has no more to do with its nature and its existence than the relational property “being accepted by van Inwagen” does. In the end, I can find no sense in the idea that God creates free abstract objects, no sense in the idea that the existence of free abstract objects in some way depends on the activities of God. (Recall that, although I believe that all abstract objects are free, that is not a position that I am concerned to defend in this chapter.) And that is because the existence of free abstract objects depends on nothing. Their existence has nothing to do with causation. One can no

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Page 19 more cause a purely qualitative property or proposition to exist than one can extract a cube root with a forceps. Causation is simply irrelevant to the being (and the intrinsic properties) of abstract objects. And, if abstract objects and their intrinsic features cannot be effects, neither can they be causes. An abstract object can be neither of the terms in any causal relation.7 I am happy to admit that I am uneasy about believing in the existence of “causally irrelevant” objects. The fact that abstract objects, if they exist, can be neither causes nor effects is one of the many features of abstract objects that make nominalism so attractive. I should very much like to be a nominalist, but I don’t see how to be one—since (having been exposed to Philosophical Investigations at an impressionable age) I think that most of the things we human beings believe must be true, and (having come in more mature years to accept Quine’s theses on ontological commitment, and having come to believe that many of the things we all believe involve ineliminable quantification over abstract objects) I think that a very significant proportion of the things we believe entail the existence of abstract objects. Since I accept both the existence of abstract objects and the propositions contained in the Nicene Creed, I must regard the phrase ‘creator of all things visible and invisible’ as containing a tacitly restricted quantifier. And the tacit restriction on the quantifier ‘all things’, I say, is this: its domain is restricted to objects that can enter into causal relations. In my view, therefore, in reciting the opening lines of the Nicene Creed, I commit myself only to the proposition that God is the creator of all things (besides himself) that can in some sense be either causes or effects. Obviously, visibilia must enter into causal relations, since seeing is a causal relation. The invisibilia , I maintain, are things that do not and cannot enter into the causal relation “seeing,” but do enter into various other causal relations. (Angels are the only invisibilia that come readily to mind.) Creation is, everyone will agree, a causal relation. Theists will say more: that creation is, in a very important sense, the causal relation, the causal relation that is the fons et origo of all the others. If there are objects to which the concept of causation has no application—in the way in which the concept “pulling out of something by using a physical tool” has no application to the process of extracting a cube root—the existence of such objects is irrelevant to the Christian doctrine of creation. And whether there are objects to which the concept of causation has no application is a question that theology should regard as no business of hers, a question that she may in good conscience leave to her handmaiden, philosophy. NOTES 1. In the sequel, when I speak of God’s creating everything, I mean God himself to be excluded from the range of this generalization—as does the Nicene Creed, for obviously God is, strictly speaking, an invisibile. 2. Matthew 19:26: Theo pantá dunatá esti. Quite possibly, the intended meaning of this verse is not ‘Nothing is impossible for God’ but rather, ‘With

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Page 20 God’s help, nothing is impossible for human beings’. If the text has the latter meaning, this will not affect the point I make in the text about restricted quantification—for one can still ask, “Does the text imply that, with God’s help, it’s possible for a human being to draw a round square?” 3. Assuming that Descartes did actually mean to affirm that thesis. See Peter van Inwagen (2006), 157, n. 6. 4. In the discussion of omnipotence in Summa theologiae (I.25.3), the biblical verse Aquinas discusses is Luke 1:37, which is usually translated in some such way as “For with God, nothing is impossible.” But a more literal translation would be, “For with God, every word ( rima ) is possible.” I take ‘every word’ to mean ‘anything you might choose to ask him for’ or, perhaps, ‘everything he might choose to decree’. Aquinas comes down heavily on ‘word’: “Whatever implies a contradiction cannot be a ‘word’, because no intellect can possibly conceive such a thing.” It seems probable that he would say something similar about the Matthean text: that ‘all things’ ( pantá, omnia ) should be understood as meaning ‘every word’ ( pan rima , omne verbum ). 5. Frege supposed that numbers were what would today be called “impure sets.” It follows—it is at least a plausible thesis that it follows—from his ontology of number that the number four would not have existed if James I (who presumably might not have existed) had not existed. The argument in virtue of which this thesis is plausible is this. The number four numbers, among other things, the Stuart kings of England. It is the set of all four-membered sets, and it numbers the Stuart kings by having the set of Stuart kings—James I, Charles I, Charles II, James II—among its members. But the members of a set are essential to a set and thus that particular four-membered set would not have existed if James I had not existed, and the set that is in fact the set of all four-membered sets would not have existed either. I take it that this very consideration shows that Frege cannot have been right about what object the number four was. For if he was right, the proposition that four is an even number would not have been a necessary truth, and it is a necessary truth. (We must, however, grant Frege this much: if his ontology of number is right, the sentence ‘Four is an even number’ expresses, with respect to each possible world, a contingent proposition that is true in that particular world.) 6. I am assuming that if a thing has been created, that thing exists. Neo-Meinongians who believe both that Dickens created Mr. Pickwick, and that Mr. Pickwick does not exist, will of course dispute this assumption. I hope they will forgive me for assuming without argument that they are wrong. One can’t address every relevant issue in a paper if that paper is to be of manageable length. 7. I do not deny that abstract objects may figure in causal explanations: I do not deny that when we say things of the form ‘so-and-so because such-and-such’, the explanans will often be a proposition that demonstrably entails the existence of certain abstract objects. But to say that is not to say that abstract objects can enter into causal relations.

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Page 21 2 Aquinas, Divine Simplicity and Divine Freedom Brian Leftow It’s orthodox Western monotheism that God acts freely. Thomas Aquinas was nothing if not orthodox, and so asserts this.1 Further, he thinks that God’s freedom involves alternate possibilities: as He acts, it is in all respects open to Him to do otherwise.2 For he argues that God is omnipotent—that he can bring about any state of affairs whose obtaining would not entail a contradiction3—and that this entails that He had power to do another act instead.4 But for Thomas, God is timeless.5 So God’s power to do otherwise cannot consist in being able first to do one thing, then later in His own life do something else.6 The possibility that He do otherwise must be one He could have realized in the same eternal present in which he actually acts.7 Yet a central aspect of Thomas’ concept of God seems to militate against His having this sort of freedom. Aquinas holds that God is a simple being, entirely without parts or real internal distinctions.8 As he sees it, everything in God is identical with everything else in God. As this is so, God has just one volition, and (V) God’s volition = His essence.9   So if God has His essence necessarily, it seems to follow that for Thomas He has His actual volition necessarily. But then it seems that He necessarily wills what He does: that it is not possible that He do otherwise. This is not a problem for Thomas alone. The doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) is a core commitment of classical theism. It was common Christian coin from Augustine till Duns Scotus. Its Moslem friends included Avicenna and Averroes; among Jews there were Philo and Maimonides; and Jews and Moslems no less than Christians believe that God was free not to create. The problem I’ve raised, then, is really one aspect of the broader question of whether classical theism is compatible with the standard theological commitments of the Western monotheisms. I now take up what Aquinas did and should say about the problem. IDENTITY-STATEMENTS In de Potentia, Thomas asserts (V), and that this entails that what God does by will He also does by nature.10 One would think that what a thing does

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Page 22 by nature, it does necessarily. But within a few lines of this, Thomas denies that it follows from (V) that God creates “by natural necessity” because He creates by will.11 If one thing is both the divine essence and the divine will, Thomas holds, we can still say that God acts freely rather than by natural necessity.12 This is a legitimate move. That God’s essence = God’s volition sets our problem. But the bare fact of their identity does not determine what is true of the one thing which is both. If an identitystatement “A = B” is true, then where one could have thought there to be two items, A and B, there is only one. This has all properties A really has and all properties B really has, but may have only some or none A has been thought to have or only some or none B has been thought to have. Given only the identity, all consistent combinations of attributes A and B have been thought to have are equally licit. By analogy, Thomas might say on our present question that (V) does not entail that God’s volition has another attribute we associate with God’s nature, that of being had necessarily. But this move would leave behind a difficulty. If we don’t infer from (V) that God has His act of will necessarily, what are we to say about how He has His essence? Nothing can have an essence contingently: a thing’s essential properties are by definition had necessarily. One option is that given (V), one thing is both volition and essence; considered as the divine essence, God has this one thing necessarily, but considered as the divine volition, God has it contingently. Thomas comes close to this in de Veritate. He first gives an objection: In God, to be and to will are identical. But it is necessary for God to be all that He is…. Therefore it is necessary for God to will all that He wills.13 Thomas’ replies to this and the following objection include the following: Though the divine being itself is necessary in itself, still creatures do not proceed from God necessarily, but by free will.14 “to b” does not express an act which is an operation…. “to will” expresses an act which is an operation; and so from the differing ways of signifying, something is attributed to the divine essence which is not attributed to the divine will.15 In context, “by free will” implies differing modally from God’s being: the rest of the first response makes this point.16 But the next text seems to make this modal difference a function of how we signify the one item which is essence and volition. Yet this won’t do. Theists who hold that God acts freely do not think that this is true because of how we speak about God. They think it would be a fact about God no matter how we spoke. Thus neither “contingent” nor “perspective-relative” are plausible answers to our question. But Thomas’ argument in another place suggests that he would embrace neither, but instead argue, surprisingly, that God has His volition and His essence necessarily, but this is compatible with His acing freely.17

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Page 23 THE CONDITIONAL-NECESSITY MOVE In the Summa Contra Gentiles ( SCG ), Thomas notes that God necessarily wills His own goodness, and His act of willing this is identical with His act of creating (as DDS implies). So (Thomas asks) how can it not follow that God creates necessarily?18 Thomas answers, in effect, that it does follow, but this is not problematic. There is (he writes) just one divine volition, but the necessity that it will God’s goodness is unconditional, while the necessity that it create is conditional. So in the argument (1) Necessarily, God wills that a universe be. (2) Necessarily, for any P, if God wills that P, then P. So Necessarily, a universe exists, (1) asserts a conditional, (2) an unconditional necessity. So the necessity in the conclusion is conditional: (2) just transfers (1)’s conditional necessity to it. The crux here is that conditional necessity is a weaker modality transferred to the conclusion by a premise with a stronger modality. This weaker modality is compatible with the universe’s existence having been unconditionally contingent before God made it, and so with God’s having made the universe freely.19 Unconditional necessity rules out ever having been contingent. So Thomas’ claims in SCG are these. There is one divine act of will. It wills God’s goodness with unconditional necessity. It creates with only conditional necessity: it is necessary on the condition that God has created. As the necessity in this case is only conditional, it is compatible with creating freely—for a conditional necessity is necessary only once the condition obtains, and the condition can be made to obtain freely. THOMAS’ MODAL CONCEPTS EXPLICATED To see what Thomas’ move comes to, we must explicate Thomas’ modal concepts. I initially approach these without invoking possible worlds, because the concept of a possible world plays no role in his modal semantics. But they are in fact amenable to possible-worlds portrayal, and so I then put them in worlds-terms to provide a clearer account. Thomas’ SCG argument is in terms of his strongest necessity and weakest possibility. Thomas writes that if a proposition does not imply a contradiction, it is absolutely possible, and “things which imply a contradiction … cannot have the nature of the possible.”20 That they cannot have the nature of the possible tout court rather than of one sort of possibility indicates that this is the weakest sort of possibility he recognizes.21 His strongest necessity pairs with this. For Thomas, propositions have this sort of possibility iff they do not imply a contradiction.22 Correspondingly, P has this sort of necessity iff ¬P implies a contradiction.

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Page 24 This modal concept, then, is near what we call narrow logical modality. But the match is only rough. Narrow logical possibility is time-invariant, but Thomas thinks that what implies a contradiction varies with time: Socrates did not sit at t implied no contradiction before t , but if Socrates sits at t , it implies a contradiction ever after.23 It implies this only conditionally—namely, on the condition that Socrates does sit then—but implies it all the same. That Socrates sat at t is conditionally necessary implies that Socrates did sit at t , and for this reason, after t , Socrates did not sit at t implies a contradiction. We would say instead that on its own, Socrates did not sit at t never implies a contradiction, and the conjunction Socrates sat and did not sit at t . (It implies itself.) Because this modality involves Thomas’ strongest objective necessity and his weakest objective possibility, it plays for him the role broad logical necessity and possibility play for us. And some of Thomas’ examples of this sort of necessity fit broad rather than narrow logical necessity: though Thomas thought they do, God’s being angry or sorrowful do not in fact imply contradictions.24 But if we put this Thomist modality into possible-worlds terms, it would not look much like broad logical modality as we usually conceive it. As just noted, what is possible in this sense shifts over time, and so there would not be a constant stock of possible worlds. But we think broad logical modalities time-invariant and the stock of possible worlds constant. Because this Thomist modality resembles both narrow and broad logical modalities as we conceive them, yet varies over time, let’s call it Temporalized Logical (TL) modality. Thomas thinks that what implies a contradiction varies over time, and so what is TL-necessary does, and so the stock of TLpossible worlds shifts over time, due to his conception of the necessity of the past. Thomas thinks that the past, once past, is TL-necessary: it would imply a contradiction for the past to have been otherwise, and so even omnipotence can’t alter the past.25 Suppose that at t , Socrates sat. Prior to t , Socrates did not sit at t did not imply a contradiction. It could have turned out true. But if Socrates sat at t , it is impossible accidentally—contingently—that Socrates did not sit at t . In In I Sent. , d. 42, q. 2, a. 2, Thomas traces this impossibility to the necessity of the present: God cannot do all that implies a contradiction, and because of this cannot make it the case that what is past did not happen; because what is, necessarily is, while it is, and is impossible not to be at the time that it is, and because this necessity and impossibility pass into the past.26 For the past not to have happened can be taken as accidentally impossible and as impossible per se…. The thing itself which is called past, e.g. Socrates’ running, is not (necessary) save by something accidental to it, which is outside its nature, namely becoming past…. If however it is taken according as it has the accident of pastness, it is impossible per se (as) for Socrates not to run while he is running is impossible: because the adjoined ratio is impossible per se.27

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Page 25 If in the present, P, it cannot now also be the case that ¬P. That is, Thomas thinks that when it is supposed that P, that P becomes conditionally necessary, necessary on the condition that P, in that, P being given, were it then also the case that ¬P, it would be the case that P and ¬P. This remains the case when the present becomes past. Thomas’ later discussions drop the reference to the necessity of the present, following only the second text.28 With or without that reference, the argument that to change the past would entail a contradiction can seem to beg the question. Granted, if God doesn’t remove Socrates’ running from the past, then also makes it the case that he did not run, we get a contradiction. But why couldn’t God just remove Socrates’ running, i.e. make it the case simply that Socrates never ran—that it has never been the case that Socrates did anything other than not run? Perhaps Thomas simply thinks that the past, qua past, is on its own necessary and irremovable—that its necessity explains why a contradiction would follow rather than being a consequence of the supposed fact that one would follow. This would be a strong claim, but it would keep Thomas from begging the question. Still, it would leave another. If the past is only contingently necessary, why wouldn’t a God able to effect all that is contingent (as Aquinas thinks29) retain His power to have something else have been necessary? That is, why would God be unable to alter the past? Whatever the explanation of Thomas’ view that it would entail a contradiction for the past to be altered, the view entails that past states of affairs, once past, have a necessity as “hard” as narrow-logical. Thus as time passes, alternate pasts cease to be possible, though it remains the case that they were possible. Before t , at which Socrates sat, it was possible that there be world-histories including Socrates’ not sitting at t . Once Socrates sits at t , no such world-histories are any longer possible in any sense: in our terms, it would be narrow-logically impossible for any such history to turn out to be the true one. This being so, we can give a neat possible-worlds rendering of a modal scheme Thomas never put into possible-worlds terms. Let’s depict all possible worlds as trees of alternate possibilities branching out of a causally first state of things, which is God actually existing alone, causally though not temporally prior to creating:

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Page 26 God’s initial state is atemporal. God for Thomas has no intrinsic accidents—which at least seems to imply that he has no contingent intrinsic attributes.30 If it does imply this, as I will assume, all possible worlds fork outward from the same initial state.31 The left-right direction through the tree represents the passage of time according to the possible world-histories those trees represent. The first state of each tree after God existing alone is the creation of an initial set of creatures: as there are many possible initial sets, there should initially be many trees.32 Each possible world corresponds to a single path through some tree, proceeding only to the right. Now for Thomas, as more present and past are “laid down,” more becomes necessary—which is to say, in effect, that as time begins and then passes, branches of possibility drop off the trees. When God first creates an initial set of creatures, immediately it is not possible that He have created any other set. Thus at that point, all other trees of possibility disappear. Suppose that all God had created was a single angel which could either freely love or freely hate Him, and was pre-programmed to make the choice as soon as it existed. The first branch of the tree, then, represents the angel’s loving and the angel’s hating God. Suppose that it freely hates God. At that point it ceases to be possible that it at that time love God instead. Ever after, it is necessary in the corresponding sense that at that point it hated God. So all branches which had to that point been possible, in which at that point it loved God, cease to be possible: in effect, they drop off the tree, leaving a reduced set of worlds behind:

All possible worlds left at any point have in common the actual past. We can express Thomas’ concept of unconditional TL-necessity in terms of this “tree” picture: P is unconditionally TL-necessary = df. at all points on all trees, P.33 Or we can do so without the “tree” picture: P is unconditionally TL-necessary = df. in any world possible timelessly or at any time, P.

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Page 27 “Unconditional” implies that there is no condition to be met for P to be necessary. As there is none, P’s necessity needn’t wait for time reaching a certain point. Rather, at any time or timelessly, in any possible world, P is “already” true. This is our concept of broad logical necessity. Thomas’ way of explicating the concept adds to our picture only a mistaken belief that its extension coincides with that of what we call narrow-logical necessity. But this belief, though mistaken, was at least understandable. As there is no condition to be met if P’s necessity is unconditional, beyond P’s being the proposition it is, it is a natural thought that if anything accounts for P’s necessity—and surely something does—it is P’s content alone. Thomas thinks that if P’s content alone guarantees this sort of necessity, it must do so by making it the case that ¬P implies a contradiction. It is hard to see how else it could, and we jib, as he did, at positing utterly unexplained brute necessities. We can also use the “tree” picture to explicate Thomas’ account of conditional TL-necessity: P is conditionally TL-necessary = df. at all points on all trees rightward of the point at which a particular condition is met, P. This represents a definition in possible-worlds terms, P is conditionally TL-necessary = df. in all worlds remaining possible as of the time at which a particular condition is met, P. Unconditional TL-necessity could thus emerge as a limiting case of conditional, where the condition to be met is just that P be P. But as Thomas uses the concept of conditional necessity, the condition is always something other than a proposition’s being the one it is: for any P, P is conditionally necessary, if it is, due partly to some condition beyond P’s having its content. This condition is or implies a change in the stock of possible worlds, in which only P-worlds are left as possible. Given that this condition obtains, Thomas thinks, ever after, ¬P implies a contradiction conditionally. For given that P, it would imply a contradiction for ¬P also to be true, and as of the time the condition obtains, only worlds in which P are left as possible, and so were ¬P true, Thomas in effect thinks, it would be true in a world in which P. Conditional TL-necessity is thus in effect broad (and narrow) logical necessity in the reduced set of worlds possible as of a given time. If P is conditionally necessary, ¬P cannot be true. But it could have been true. This provides a sense in which P’ s necessity is contingent: it need not have been the case that only P-worlds are possible, and in fact it once was not the case. Thomas calls conditionally TLnecessary many things we would call broadly logically contingent. The difference between our modal ascription and his stems from his belief that once a condition

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Page 28 appropriately related to P has been met, alternate pasts in which ¬P are no longer in any sense possible. PROBLEMS WITH CONDITIONAL NECESSITY Thomas’ SCG claims amount to these: God has one act of will. Everything He wills, He wills in that one act, and necessarily. But the necessities aren’t of the same kind. He wills to create by only conditional necessity: that is, it is true in all worlds possible “after” God’s choice that God creates, but this necessity is established by a free decision of God. So divine freedom is compatible with at least one consequence of DDS, and so to that extent with DDS itself. This move is problematic. If P is only conditionally necessary, ¬P could have been true: ¬P was possible, though it is no longer. From God’s timeless standpoint, when “was” it possible that He not create? If God timelessly limits the possible to worlds in which He creates, “when” were non-creation worlds possible? At God’s timeless standpoint, God has already—timelessly—eliminated non-creative worlds from possibility. It is not possible that He do other than create; the best Thomas can do, it seems, is claim that non-creation worlds are only contingently impossible, and are so due to God’s choice. More worrying, the same applies to worlds in which God creates any other than what were actually the initial creatures. On Thomas’ account, it was never possible that God do other than create what He initially did; it merely could have been possible. Those who’ve thought God free to do other than create what He has have usually meant that other alternatives are open to Him in a thicker sense than this. But perhaps the worry is less than it seems. We might see Thomas’ God as facing initially a set of alternatives some of which have no modal status at all, and determining their modal status in a single act of will: He renders possible the possible, and contingently impossible the contingently impossible. He (we can suppose) faces no constraints at all in doing so; He has alternatives of distributing modal status differently, though in the nature of the case these aren’t initially possible (or impossible) alternatives. God is able to do otherwise, but “able” in this case is a-modal. Still, there are other worries here. It is not so much that God has His actual volition, given DDS, as that He is that volition. If we accept Thomas’ modal framework, some identity-statements are true with only conditional necessity: if Socrates does not exist till t , then at t Socrates = Socrates becomes conditionally necessary. But God’s existence is not contingent, has no beginning, and is not a matter of conditional necessity for Aquinas: on the contrary, it has the same unconditional necessity as analytic truths.34 So for Aquinas, God = God is unconditionally necessary. Substituting a co-referential term for “God” in “God = God” shouldn’t yield a claim differing in modality. But “the actual divine volition” and “God” are co-referential, given DDS. And it won’t do to say that this is a case like “Benjamin

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Page 29 Franklin” and “the inventor of bifocals,” in which the terms are only contingently co-referential, and the statement overall contingent, because the description applies to Franklin only contingently. The analysis just mooted turns an apparent contingent identity-statement into a contingent conjunction, of Franklin = Franklin (which is necessary) and a contingent predication, that Franklin is the inventor of bifocals. The parallel move in this case would yield God = God and God actually wills the divine volition. This comes out contingent only if the second conjunct is contingent. But what we’re trying to do is explain how a simple God could fall under a contingent intrinsic description; we’re not entitled to appeal to this way of accounting for contingency till we’ve got an independent answer to this question. Further, the conditional-necessity move really just shifts the bump under DDS’ rug rather than flattening it away. For we now must ask: given (V), and that God has His actual volition by conditional necessity, does God have His essence by conditional necessity too? Is He only by His own free choice divine? How could that be? Again, the section on identity-statements ended with the question of how God has His essence. The conditional-necessity move accepts that necessarily, God has the volition identical with His essence, in which He wills our universe to be. It holds that while this volition could not have failed to will God’s goodness, it possibly possibly fails to will to create, though it cannot so fail. It is possibly possible, though impossible, that this very act of will have existed but not created. But this is problematic. It seems that volitions are individuated in part by their content—that no volition could have failed, or possibly possibly fails, to will all that it wills. So how can we understand the thesis that God’s volition has some of its content with only a contingent necessity? We would say that some or all of what Thomas calls conditionally necessary is just contingent. So in our eyes, the question Thomas’ move poses is really how God’s volition can have some of its content contingently. I have noted the difference between Thomas’ modal concepts and ours, but it will simplify discussion if I speak in our terms, not his. So henceforth, I address this last question. Eleonore Stump offers an answer to it on Thomas’ behalf. I now argue that the answer fails. EXTRINSIC MODALITIES Stump writes, Because some but not all … objects of (God’s) act of will might have (differed, there is) a logical distinction between the conditionally and the absolutely necessitated objects of that single act of will…. (If) with regard to some but not all of its objects, God’s will … might have been different … this … shows us … a difference in the ways in which the single act of divine will is related to the divine nature, on the one hand,

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Page 30 and to created things, on the other (stemming) from logical differences among (its) diverse objects … that one thing is related in different ways to different things does not entail that it has distinct intrinsic properties, only distinct Cambridge properties.35 Stump’s thought is that for Aquinas it is an extrinsic property for necessity in God’s will to be conditional or unconditional—i.e. for it to have its content necessarily or contingently. Thomas commits to something close to this in his 1270–1 commentary on de Interpretatione .36 There Thomas takes up two parallel arguments—that if God knows everything and is infallible, all that happens, happens necessarily, and that if God wills everything and His will cannot fail, everything He wills happens necessarily. Both arguments involve modal terms. Thomas doesn’t say what sort of modality is at issue. The premises of these arguments are (2) and (3) Necessarily, for any P, if P is true, God knows that P. (4) Necessarily, for any P, if P obtains, God wills that P. (5) Necessarily, for any P, if God knows that P, P. (2) is unconditionally necessary. So are (3) and (4), both true due to God’s nature, and (5), a conceptual truth. So Thomas cannot use his earlier conditional/unconditional necessity move. Instead Thomas replies that the divine will should be understood as existing outside the order of beings … necessity and contingency in things originate in the divine will, and the distinction between them is according to … their proximate causes. God gives necessary causes to effects He wants to be necessary, and causes acting contingently —i.e. able to fail—to effects He wants to be contingent. According to this condition of their causes effects are … necessary or contingent, though they all depend on the divine will as on a first cause that transcends the order of necessity and contingency.37 It is a profoundly Aristotelian thought that the content of possible worlds is determined not by a realm of Platonic abstract entities but by the powers of concrete things. And this account fits with TLmodalities. Recur to our branching tree, and suppose that there is at a particular branching-point a cause unable to fail to bring it about that P. Then at that branching-point it is the case that P, and P is the case along all branches extending from that point—and so P is conditionally TL-necessary. Suppose now that at a branching-point there is a cause able to bring it about that Q and also able to fail to bring it about that Q . Then if this is the only relevant cause, it is the case that Q in some but not all branches from that point. If this cause brings it about that Q at the branching-point, then Q -then is conditionally TL-necessary, but Q simpliciter, without temporal indices, is TL-contingent.

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Page 31 God’s will is a proximate cause to its direct effects. And for Thomas God has just one volition. So given the principle that (PC) the modality with which the proximate cause acts determines the modality of the effect, were this one volition contingent it could not produce a necessary cause, and vice versa. Thomas thus asserts in this text that God’s volition in itself—intrinsically—causes what it does neither necessarily nor contingently. God and His will have no cause at all. If whatever is contingent has a contingent cause and whatever is necessary has a necessary cause, what has no cause is (intrinsically) neither necessary nor contingent: Thomas is entitled to this move. But if God’s will is not intrinsically necessary or contingent, then either it is not after all a proximate cause to its effects, or (PC) is false, or the necessity or contingency that it will what it does is extrinsically determined. Thomas thus commits himself to this last claim in this text: he makes the move Stump ascribes to him. It might seem that not everything Thomas says in this text hangs together. The divine exception can seem in fact to wreck (PC). If God’s volition acts neither necessarily nor contingently, but does have contingent and necessary effects, it is false that whatever is contingent has a contingently acting cause and whatever is necessary has a necessarily acting cause. Nor does the claim that God’s will has extrinsic modal properties wholly save (PC). If God’s volition counts as necessary in its role of having a necessary effect and contingent in its role of having a contingent one, this saves only (PC)’s shell, that effects have causes of the same modality. It does not save the idea that the modality of the cause determines the effect’s modality. For we now seem to have it that the divine cause counts as necessary because it has a necessary effect, rather than the effect being necessary because its cause is. But in fact, Thomas’ views are consistent here. The key is this: God’s will is a necessarily acting cause; it cannot fail to produce the effect it aims at. And courtesy of the necessity of the present, its initial effects (and all its direct effects later on) are all conditionally necessary. Contingency can emerge only by the intervention of causes that can fail to act. These too will have direct effects conditionally necessary by virtue of the necessity of the present, but it will have been the case beforehand that they need not have produced those effects, and this slightly attenuated version of contingency—not that things can be otherwise at the time they occur, but that at a time prior, they could have been otherwise—is the only sort Thomas’ overall modal scheme allows. FOUR DIFFICULTIES I now note four problems in the extrinsic-modality view. Stump says, again, that all turns on “a difference in the ways … the single act of divine

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Page 32 will is related to the divine nature … and to created things … that one thing is related in different ways to different things does not entail that it has distinct intrinsic properties, only distinct Cambridge properties.”38 But consider the relation of God’s volition to the divine nature. It does not produce it. It wills it in the sense of enjoying and rejoicing in its goodness. And it is identical with it. That God enjoys and rejoices in His goodness is an intrinsic fact about Him; it is settled independent of anything outside Him. The same holds for the fact that God’s will does not produce His nature. If identity is a relation at all, it is an intrinsic relation, as is any relation of a thing only to itself. I don’t see any other relevant relations. So, pace Stump, any property God’s will has solely in virtue of its relation to the divine nature is intrinsic. This entails that on Thomas’ account, it is intrinsic to God’s volition to will God’s nature with unconditional necessity. Only the contingency of its contingent content could be extrinsic here. However, a feature of Thomas’ general modal metaphysics defeats the claim that what makes it the case that God’s being F is contingent is extrinsic. Thomas holds views which imply that if there “are” possible worlds, prior to all Creation, they exist “in God’s power,” in the strong sense that what makes talk of them true is really God’s power.39 God’s power is intrinsic to Him. If all possible worlds exist in God’s power and God’s power is intrinsic to Him, then if God is contingently F , the worlds which make it the case that God’s being F is contingent are intrinsic to God. Post-Creation, there is a sense in which worlds exist outside God—there exist outside God powers which determine (or rather overdetermine) that certain sorts of branching trees and not others represent modal reality. But the presence of overdeterminers does not change the fact that there is intrinsic to God a sufficient basis for the contingency of whatever is contingent in Him. If Thomas wants to make the extrinsic-modality move, this part of his modal metaphysics stands in his way. Moreover, the “created things” involved in these relations are presumably real things outside God’s mind: only relations ad extra are extrinsic. But then we have it that God’s will might have differed (in some respects) because what He willed to exist need not have existed: that the contingency of God’s effects renders it (extrinsically) contingent that God’s will has some of its content. This might be what Thomas had in mind, but it seems the wrong direction of explanation. Surely what God wills need not exist because He need not will it to exist: it seems right that the cause’s modality in this case determine the effect’s. Finally, for Thomas, God’s willing is necessarily simple: it is identical with God, and God is simple by nature. Let’s ask just how a necessarily simple event can contingently fall under the description “willing creatures to exist.” This description is either intrinsic or extrinsic. If intrinsic, it can’t fail to apply in virtue of a difference in part or in the broader sort of constituent a Thomist accident (or some other sort of real inherent property) is. A simple event is its own only constituent. Add a part or constituent and the

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Page 33 result is not simple, and so not that event if the event is necessarily simple. Substitute something else for the one constituent the event is and the result is not that event either. But what other than a difference in part, accident or property could account for an intrinsic description’s applying contingently? On the other hand, extrinsic descriptions apply to things due in part to how things are beyond their boundaries. For Thomas, there is anything external to this event, by relation to which this event could fall under an extrinsic description, only if and because God creates. But then if “willing creatures to exist” is an extrinsic description, the existence of creatures will help explain the event’s falling under it, rather than vice versa. This is unintuitive: surely there are creatures because God wills there to be, rather than its being the case that God wills there to be because there are creatures. One might reply here by distinguishing the senses of “because”: in “there are creatures because God wills there to be,” “because” expresses something efficient-causal, while in “God wills there to be creatures because there are creatures” it expresses a non-causal relation in virtue of which a predicate applies. But it’s not clear that these two explanations really cohere. If God’s causation accounts for creatures’ existence, then logically before the creatures exist, God’s volition has a character sufficient to account for their existence. If it does, then at that point and for that reason it is a willing of creatures: there is nothing left for an extrinsic relation to the creatures themselves to explain. So it seems both that “willing creatures” must be intrinsic and that if intrinsic it can’t on Thomas’ terms apply contingently. THE SIMPLEST THOMIST RESPONSE Stump offers a simple response on Thomas’ behalf. That God willed to create is contingent and intrinsic. A simple God has no accidents, but, says Stump, “that God has no accidents (does) not (imply) that God is (intrinsically) exactly the same in all possible worlds.”40 As Stump reminds us, Thomas has a thick metaphysical account of what an accident is, with a number of conditions to be met.41 When Thomas denies that God can have accidents, he implies that if there are true divine contingent intrinsic predications, their truthmakers fail to meet at least one of his conditions of accident-hood. The one I’ll focus on at present is this: for Thomas, accidents are tropes, abstract particulars which inhere in and so bring internal complexity to their bearers. If tropes bring internal complexity, a simple God can contain none. It might seem ad hoc to say that my willing to make coffee involves a trope but God’s willing to make a world does not. It is not ad hoc if Thomas has available an account of why a trope is needed in my case—that is, why the simpler account of predication that works for God won’t work for us. He does in fact have such an account, adapted mainly from Aristotle. Mixed theories of predication were common in the Middle Ages. Ockham was a trope theorist about some sorts of accident, but for

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Page 34 all other properties was a concept-nominalist. Aquinas was a trope theorist about bottom-level accidental and essential kinds; for higher-level kinds his view had elements of concept- and resemblance-nominalism. Some realists held to universals for essential properties but tropes for accidents. Aquinas held that God does not fall univocally under any creaturely term. So he is not in the position of saying that the same term used in the same sense is truly predicated of God and creatures for radically different metaphysical reasons. Thus it is no more ad hoc for him to hold to tropes for creatures but not God than it was for any medieval to assign different sorts of truthmaker to predications of different sorts. In each case, relevant differences in the facts prompt different philosophical accounts of the facts. So the simplest Thomist response would be that different contingent intrinsic predications could have been true of God without His differing in constituent, i.e. containing a trope to make them true. Actually God falls under the intrinsic description “willing creatures”; had He not fallen under it, He would have differed internally, but not in virtue of containing or failing to contain a trope. But Thomas never tries to say what a contingent intrinsic difference without a difference in accident can be. And it’s not clear that his DDS would let him give an account of this. Anything we could point to that might differ intrinsically in God would be a distinguishable aspect of Him, and His having such aspects is not obviously compatible with DDS. So on this move, there would in Thomas’ eyes be no metaphysical account at all of what makes God intrinsically different from world to world. It would be a brute fact that He is one contingent way rather than another, brute not just in the sense that explanation stops here, but in the more uncomfortable sense that there is nothing in which there being one fact of this sort as vs. another fact of this sort consists. In this world we have a simple God who makes it true that P. In another world we have the same simple God, in no specifiable way different save that He somehow makes it true that ¬P. This looks uncomfortably like declaring the problem solved by magic. I suggest therefore that Stump’s response won’t do. We’ve come, then, to this point. We’d like it to come out contingent and intrinsic that God willed what He did. Thomas in at least one text makes it contingent but extrinsic that He did so. This, however, generates unintuitive consequences: and so far, then, we have no good way to keep (V) from excluding any contingency or freedom in God’s will. However, Thomas has another move to offer. GOOD MANNERS Thomas believes that what God primarily and necessarily wills is His own being and goodness.42 In consequence, Thomas holds, God wills all else that He wills in willing this.43 So for Thomas, the right answer to “what

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Page 35 does God will?,” at one level, must be “that He exist and be good.” God wills anything else, and in particular anything contingent, in willing this and for the sake of His being and goodness.44 He wills other things as a way of willing His being and goodness: He wills it to be in others as well as in Himself.45 The way or manner in which He wills His goodness is: as in others as well as Himself. Let’s explore a way Thomas can use the notion of a way or manner of willing. Consider an account of cross-world event-identity broadly along Kim’s lines: events are the same just if they are the same subject having the same property at the same time.46 Now some properties are not just had, but had in certain manners. I run from point A at t to point B at t* . I run gracefully; I do the running gracefully; gracefully is the manner in which I do the running; doing the running is having the property of running; so gracefully is the way I have the property of running. One might say that there is in addition or instead a property of running gracefully which I have simpliciter, without reference to manner. But it’s not at all clear that properties should be individuated with so fine a grain, or generated in such abundance. Suppose we adopt a Kim-style account of events but a less fine-grained account of property identity, one exclusive of manners. Then it would be possible for an event in one world to be identical with an event in another even if the property involved is had in different manners in the two worlds. On such an account, the manner of having the property doesn’t render events distinct. Would it have been the same run had I started and finished at just the same time and place but run a tiny bit more clumsily? This would just consist in the event’s having had some slightly different parts: in place of a smooth arm-motion, it would have had at one or two points one slightly jerkier (say). That these are the same event would be just a case of the Kim account, with coarser-grained properties, letting the times involved be extended. Material objects need not have had the precise composition they in fact had: it would have been this table, not another, had a small bit been gouged out of it. Runnings might just be four-dimensional material objects. Even if they are not, events do have parts, and it is not clear that all their parts are essential to them; it would have been the same Battle of Waterloo had its last shot not been fired. Thus if the Kim account is plausible and attributes are individuated with a coarse enough grain to let manners count as a category distinct from attribute exemplified (rather than modifying one attribute to generate another), there is some intuitive plausibility to the claim that different manner does not defeat a cross-world event-identity claim. Now it is not obvious that the category of event, understood Kim-style, applies to Thomas’ God at all. Thomas’ God is atemporal, and so there is no time at which He has any property. I’ve argued elsewhere, though, that “eternity” functions as a date-term in talk of a timeless being, so I suggest that there is no real problem here.47 Again, Thomas’ God is simple, and so in His case, there is no distinction between the subject having an attribute

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Page 36 and any attribute had. However, Thomas lets himself talk of God’s essence and attributes even with DDS in the backdrop, secure that he can always explain, “when I say ‘divine essence,’ what I really mean is that reality, whatever it is, that really is the referent of ‘deity’.” We can do the same, and so let ourselves use the event terms and a Kim-style account of the identity-conditions of whatever these terms denote. One move Thomas can make, then, is to say that cross-world, the identity of God’s willing depends only on its subject (God), its time (none) and the attribute exemplified in it, being a willing of His being and goodness. He can then treat God’s willing to create as a manner of willing His being and goodness. On this account, the event occurs in all possible worlds; God’s volition is had necessarily. But it is not necessary to being that volition to have the creature-related content it has, since this is just a manner of willing, and so it is contingent that God will what He has about creatures. The content-difference between a divine act of will which creates and one which does not does not render the acts distinct cross-world. If God wills not to create, He wills that He be, willing it in the solo manner; if He wills to create, there is the same willing that He be, but it is in the accompanied manner. “In the accompanied manner” may sound odd, but adverbial accounts of volition are no odder than adverbial accounts of perception. If it makes sense to speak of perceiving redly, it makes no less to speak of willing accompaniedly. On this move, then, we say the following: God’s willing = His essence. He has both necessarily. But His willing (and so His essence) isn’t necessarily in the accompanied manner. Saying so, we court a question. The willing is necessarily there. The manner is not. If the same event could have taken place in a different manner, one could have the event without the manner. So event and manner can’t be just identical, it seems. So mustn’t there be some real distinction in God between the willing and the manner, and how is this compatible with divine simplicity? There either is or is not something in which it consists for the willing to be in the one manner or the other. If there is, it seems that that something must be there contingently, and so we introduce internal complexity in a simple God. If there is not, we are no better off than we were with Stump’s simple solution: we seem to solve the problem by magic, though in this case the magic aspect of it takes a bit longer to emerge and is a bit more precisely located. We thus must try another tack. That, however, is too long a story to begin here. NOTES 1. See, e.g., De Veritate 24, 3. 2. This is so whether or not Thomas holds that others have, can have or need this sort of freedom. Anthony Kenny argues that Thomas is a compatibilist and a soft determinist in regard to human freedom (Kenny, 1993, 77–8). Eleonore Stump reads him as an incompatibilist libertarian who does not think morally significant freedom requires having alternate possibilities of action at the time one acts (Stump, 2003, 277–306).

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Page 37 3. At least, this is the capsule view at ST Ia 25, 3. For some complications see SCG II, 25. 4. SCG II, 22–23. 5. ST Ia 10, passim. 6. A timeless God can do one thing and then later in our lives do something else, for His actions can be composed of a timeless bit plus events in time the timeless bits cause. 7. For Thomas’ commitment to seeing eternity as having a present, see again ST Ia 10. 8. So, e.g., ST Ia 3, passim. 9. SCG I, 73. 10. DP 3, 15 ad 20. Actually it’s not clear whether “will” in this passage refers to a faculty or an act of volition, but for Thomas, courtesy of DDS and God’s pure actuality, there is no distinction between the two, and so I take him to assert (V). 11. DP 3, 15 ad 18. 12. Thomas makes a related move at ST Ia 19, 3 ad 3. 13. S. Thomae Aquinatis Quaestiones Disputatae (Turin: Marietti, 1931), v. 4, De Veritate 23, 4 obj . 6, 171. 14. Ibid ., ad 6, p. 173. 15. Ibid ., ad 7. 16. Loc. cit. 17. This further argument might be in the backdrop of ad 6. Thomas there implies that God’s having His volition differs modally from His having His being, but does not say what the modal difference is. So it could be the one I next discuss, of types of necessity. 18. SCG I, 81. 19. SCG I, 85. 20. ST Ia 25, 3, 174a 45–8. 21. See also ST Ia 46, 1 ad 1; DP 3, 1 ad 2 and 14. Thomas does not reserve the term “absolute necessity” for his strongest necessity: at SCG II, 30, he calls the existence of incorruptible creatures absolutely necessary even though it is not a contradiction for these not to exist. For Thomas, “absolute” modality contrasts with conditional, and some things are absolutely impossible which do not involve selfcontradiction, because their being impossible is not conditioned on anything outside themselves. 22. I speak of propositions for convenience only; I take no stand on what Thomas thinks truth-bearers are. 23. ST Ia 25, 4c et ad 1. Thomas’ example does not include the time-indices, but adding them makes his meaning clearer. 24. SCG II, 25. 25. ST Ia 25, 4c et ad 1. 26. Corp. Translated from the text online at http://www.corpusthomisticum. org/iopera.html. 27. In I Sent., d. 42 q. 2 a. 2 ad 3. Translated from the text online at http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/iopera.html. 28. ST Ia 25, 4; DP 1, 3 ad 9; Quodl . V, q. 2, a. 3. 29. ST Ia 25, 3. 30. ST Ia 3, 6. I believe that the consequence follows, but we see below that Stump raises a doubt about it. 31. If Stump is right and it is also the case that the contingent intrinsics include alternate divine initial states, the modal picture remains basically as I suggest, but becomes slightly more complex in one respect: there are many trees, each forking outward from some divine initial state. Given that God is actu-

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Page 38 ally in just one of these states, and the modality is TL, no tree involving a non-actual divine initial state represents an actually possible set of worlds: as of God’s timelessness, which necessarily is causally prior to the appearance of any time, these other trees are already ruled out. But all represent possibly possible worlds. An interesting question is how to represent in these terms the possibility that God not create, to which (as we’ve seen) Thomas is committed. The answer, I think, is that there must be some way to represent the initial state of things which is God alone, causally prior to creating: perhaps by a Ø between God and the first appearance of creatures. If there must, we can have a possible-possibility “tree” consisting of just God and the Ø. 32. For each possible divine initial state. 33. This will do if all trees begin from possible divine initial states. If there are trees representing only possible possibilities, it defines necessary necessity, and the definiens must instead be that at all points on all trees representing possibilities, P. 34. ST Ia 2, 1. 35. Op. cit ., 125–6. 36. A text Stump does not cite. 37. Aquinas, In I de Interpretatione , in S. Thomae Aquinatis In Aristotelis Libros Peri Hermeneias et Posteriorum Analyticorum Expositio, ed. R. Spiazzi (Marietti, 1964), l. 14, #197, 73–74. 38. Stump (2003), 125. 39. See Brian Leftow (2005). 40. Op. cit. , 113. 41. Stump (2003), 111–5. 42. SCG I, 74 et 80. 43. SCG I, 75–6. 44. SCG I, 75. 45. Ibid . 46. Jaegwon Kim (1976). It is not clear that Kim means his account to work cross-world, but it’s hard to see why it would work only intra-world. 47. Brian Leftow (2001).

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Page 39 3 The Real Presence of an Eternal God Thomas D. Senor INTRODUCTION In the second half of the 20th century, analytic philosophy of religion was born. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, philosophers such as Nelson Pike, Anthony Kenny, Basil Mitchell, Antony Flew, A. N. Prior, Kai Nielsen, William Alston, and Alvin Plantinga wrote on topics related to the serious, philosophical study of religious claims. Among the specific theological issues discussed was God’s relationship to time. Should God be considered to be “outside of time” (whatever, precisely, that might mean)? This had been the view of nearly all influential Christian thinkers from the Patristics through the Reformers, and continues to be the dominant view in more traditional theological circles. Or should time be understood as a bedrock feature of reality which even a being than which none greater is possible must simply take as a given? It is fair to say that analytic philosophers of religion were in agreement: timelessness might be fine for Platonic forms but not for a being with genuine causal powers, much less for a being who interacts with the temporal world and reveals himself to human beings. It was in this context that Eleonore Stump’s and Norman Kretzmann’s paper “Eternity” was published in the Journal of Philosophy in 1981. While it would be too much to claim that the paper reversed the consensus, it is no exaggeration to say that the burden of proof had been altered: whereas before “Eternity” the reasonable position in analytic philosophy of religion was that the doctrine of divine timelessness was likely incoherent, after Stump’s and Kretzmann’s paper appeared the major objections to the very possibility of an atemporal being had largely been answered. Naturally, their paper didn’t convince everyone, but it made the philosophical theological community reconsider a doctrine that had long been thought hopeless. In the last twenty-five or so years, divine timelessness has had other able defenders: Brian Leftow, William Alston, Paul Helm, and Katherin Rogers among others. Yet while each differs with Stump and Kretzmann on certain points, all are doubtlessly in great debt to the pioneering work of the authors of “Eternity.”

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Page 40 The purpose of this chapter is to explore the view of divine eternity developed by Stump and Kretzmann, and to consider a serious objection to it that has been presented in numerous places by William Hasker. As we will see, Hasker’s challenge is serious but, in the end, can be answered by Stump and Kretzmann. Or so I will argue. BOETHIAN ETERNITY The Stump and Kretzmann (hereafter “S-K”) account of eternity takes its primary inspiration from the work of Boethius, who defines eternity as “the complete possession all at once of illimitable life.”1 As SK unpack this definition, they find four key features. An entity is eternal only if that being has life, is illimitable, has duration, and is atemporal. Let’s briefly explore these aspects of the Boethian account of eternity beginning with the last and then jumping back to the first. To be atemporal is to be without temporal extension and duration; it is to be in a mode of existence that is neither locatable in time nor stretched out over a span of time. There can be no temporal succession in the life of an atemporal being; there is nothing before or after anything else. A timeless being exists in a tenseless present. The having of life in this context is obviously not a condition that requires the subject to be biological and hence material; having a cognitive life and being capable of action is sufficient for being alive in the relevant sense. Because of the fourth condition, this life must not contain any temporal sequence: the entity cannot do anything before it does something else or perceive an effect after it perceives that event’s cause. Yet because having life is a condition of the S-K account of eternity, abstracta are not eternal even if they are timeless. To say that an eternal life is illimitable is to say that it is beginningless and endless; it is impossible that there be any limit on its life. But because of the fourth condition of eternity, the beginningless/endless life of the eternal being cannot be life that is spread out infinitely over all points on a timeline that is infinite in both directions. S-K distinguish two ways that a timeless life might be illimitable: either by failing to have extension (there can be no limitations on that which isn’t had at all) or by having extension and unlimited, infinite duration. Yet what kind of duration is an atemporal being capable of? This brings us to the final point in Boethius’s definition that S-K illuminate. They believe that “any mode of existence that could be called a life must involve duration, and so there may seem to be no point in explicitly listing duration as an ingredient of Boethius’s concept of eternality.”2 Whereas the temporal present is a “durationless instant, a present that cannot be extended conceptually without falling apart entirely into past and future interval,” the eternal present is “an infinitely extended, pastless, futureless duration.”3

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Page 41 This idea that eternity requires an atemporal extension and duration has been controversial. While Brian Leftow has substantially agreed with it, Paul Fitzgerald and Katherin Rogers have argued that atemporal eternity should be seen as unextended and durationless.4 Although these matters are important, I don’t propose to get into them here. What we will do instead is briefly examine a nest of objections that, collectively, had been thought to be fatal to the doctrine of divine timelessness. PROBLEMS FOR THE DOCTRINE OF TIMELESSNESS As mentioned at the outset, the doctrine of timelessness has been objected to on a variety of grounds. For example, the events in an atemporal God’s life cannot precede anything and yet it has often been thought to be a conceptual truth that causes precede their effects. If that is right, then God cannot be a cause and so cannot be a creator. Even if this claim about causation is rejected, there remains the difficulty that temporal events occur at times and so are presumably brought about at those times. For example, it looks as though the theist will claim that when the earth was formed roughly four billion years ago, it was God who did the forming, and hence that God brought the earth into existence four billion years ago. But if God acts at times, then there is a temporal location to God’s action and God isn’t timeless. Furthermore, even if these difficulties have solutions, there are problems about how an atemporal being would ever interact with or respond to temporal beings. For example, how can an atemporal God’s static, eternal action be a response to the prayer I prayed last night? Suppose, for example, I pray for a friend who will be having surgery tomorrow. If God’s perception of the temporal world is timeless, then God’s awareness of my prayer is, from the divine perspective, simultaneous with the birth of my friend, my prayer for my friend, my friend’s surgery, and the two-year anniversary of my friend’s surgery. How is it possible for God to respond to my prayer if all of this is happening at once ? More problematic still is the matter of how a timeless being could be a person at all. For many features of personhood involve mental processes—willings, intentions, perceptions, deliberations, etc. are arguably necessarily temporal.5 Although all of the aforementioned difficulties are to a degree serious, none is as puzzling or potentially crushing for the doctrine of divine atemporality as what it seems to imply about time. The friend of divine timelessness will either have to say that time is real or illusory. The latter would entail that there is no genuine temporal succession or relations; despite appearances, nothing temporally precedes or follows anything else. Indeed, nothing happens simultaneously with anything else either since simultaneity is a temporal relationship. The bald implausibility of these claims has convinced most divine atemporalists to argue that time is real and not

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Page 42 illusory, but is simply not something that constrains God’s existence. God has complete access to events that happen in time, but his knowledge of such events has itself no temporal succession. That is, although God knows what temporal events happen and knows all there is to know about them including the temporal relations between such events, his mode of knowing doesn’t include any temporal succession; what God knows, God knows tenselessly. A natural, if not unavoidable, way of describing (at least initially) God’s mode of knowing is to say that for God, there is no past or future; there is only an eternal present, a timeless now. It would seem that the best temporal beings can do to get a cognitive grasp on an atemporal being’s mode of knowing is to compare it to our grasp of the present. In something like the same way that the book sitting on the table in front of me is present to my consciousness, so too are all temporal events timelessly before the mind of God. Put this way, it seems that all temporal events are perceived as simultaneous in the mind of God. But surely God perceives things as they are; his apprehension of facts is perfect. Yet this apparently implies that all events are really (somehow) simultaneous. The problem with this is made clear in Anthony Kenny’s justly famous statement of an important objection to the timelessness doctrine: The whole concept of a timeless eternity, the whole of which is simultaneous with every part of time, seems to be radically incoherent. For simultaneity as ordinarily understood is a transitive relation. If A happens at the same time as B and B happens at the same time as C, then A happens at the same time as C. If the BBC programme and the ITV program both start when Big Ben strikes ten, then they both start at the same time. But on [the atemporalist] view, my typing of this paper is simultaneous with the whole of eternity. Therefore, while I type these very words, Nero fiddles heartlessly on.6 Clearly, something has gone wrong. For if all temporal events are somehow simultaneous, then there is no temporal succession among temporal events. And this implies that temporal events are not temporal after all. For while there is no difficulty in the idea of a set of temporal events amongst which there is no temporal succession (because they all happen at once), it would seem that the claim that the entire set of temporal events is this way is equivalent to the thesis that there are no temporal events and hence no time (since nothing ever comes before or after anything else). So it looks as though the atemporalist is committed to denying the reality of time after all. The problem, then, is a big one. For it is one thing if the doctrine of timelessness requires the theist to say something deeply mysterious (like, for example, that an atemporal being is causally responsible for the temporal world); that is to be expected when trying to describe the metaphysical nature of the Being than which none greater can be conceived. But if there

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Page 43 is a quick and compelling argument from the atemporality of God to the unreality of time, then quite apart from whatever element of mystery is ascribed to the internal life of God, the theist is now saddled with as wildly an implausible thesis as one can imagine: that there is no temporal succession in the events of our lives. The big difficulty isn’t what divine timelessness implies about God, but what it implies about us. ET-SIMULTANEITY Before “Eternity” no one had seriously addressed the simultaneity objection and what it entails about the nature of time. In their groundbreaking paper, S-K present a definition of what they dub “ETsimultaneity” that gives them the means for a serious reply to Kenny’s objection. Taking their cue from aspects of the special theory of relativity, S-K note that even temporal simultaneity is not as straightforward as one would naively suppose. In fact, no two events are ever simultaneous simpliciter. All simultaneity claims must be understood as implicitly relative to reference frames. Two lightning strikes on a train moving at 6/10ths the speed of light that are simultaneous from the reference frame of one standing by the track watching the train pass will not be simultaneous relative to the reference frame of one who is traveling on the train. In light of this, S-K offer the following definition of relative simultaneity. (RT) RT-simultaneity = existence or occurrence at the same time within the reference frame of a given of a given observer.7 What is needed to respond to the simultaneity objection is an account of a type of simultaneity in which one of the relata is a temporal event and the other relatum is an atemporal event. Furthermore, to be of any use for resolving the problem, the relation so defined must not be transitive. That is, it must not imply that if temporal event A is simultaneous with atemporal event B and B is simultaneous with temporal event C, then A is simultaneous with C. To this end, S-K present their definition of ETsimultaneity (ET): For every x and for every y, x and y are ET-simultaneous iff (i) either x is eternal and y is temporal or vice versa; (ii) for some observer, A, in the unique eternal reference frame, x and y are both present—i.e., either x is eternally present and y is observed as temporally present, or vice versa; and (iii) for some observer, B, in one of the infinitely many temporal reference frames, x and y are both present—i.e., either x is observed as eternally present and y is temporally present, or vice versa.8

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Page 44 What makes eternal event, E, and temporal event, T, ET-simultaneous is that there is an eternal perspective in which E occurs and from which T can be observed as present, and there is a temporal perspective in which T is occurring and E is observed as eternally present. That their definition preserves at least something of the common concept of simultaneity can be seen in the fact that E and T are “neither earlier nor later than, neither past nor future with respect to [each other].”9 So, as S-K have it, eternity is an atemporal mode of existence had by God. Every event that happens in eternity is eternity-simultaneous with every other event. That is, eternity is the unique reference frame in which there is no succession of events. In contrast to this, there are infinitely many temporal reference frames. What each temporal reference frame has in common is that every temporal event in every frame is ET-simultaneous with every atemporal event. Yet because ET-simultaneity as defined can hold only between a temporal event or entity and an atemporal event or entity, the fact that all temporal events are ET-simultaneous with every atemporal event doesn’t entail that all temporal events are ET-simultaneous with each other. In fact, the definition of ET-simultaneity simply won’t allow any two temporal events to be ET-simultaneous since that relation can hold only when one of the relata is temporal and one atemporal. So the apparent problem that Kenny so clearly articulated has been undercut: even if there is an atemporal being for whom all events in time are eternity-simultaneous in eternity, it doesn’t follow that all temporal events are temporally simultaneous. A PAIR OF RELATED PROBLEMS: COEXISTENCE AND PRESENCE Let’s pull back and look at the bigger picture. In fleshing out their account of eternity, S-K make it clear that they see an entity’s relationship to time as a fundamental characteristic of that being’s existence. Indeed, early on they write: “Eternality—the condition of having eternity as one’s mode of existence …”10 and they use that locution (“mode of existence”) repeatedly throughout not only their original essay but in subsequent papers that clarify the concept, respond to objections, and (to an extent) modify their original position. Similarly, temporality is treated as a mode of existence. But exactly what qualifies something as a distinct mode of existence (as opposed to merely qualifying a given mode of existence) is unclear. One thing S-K do say is that the two modes of existence that interest them are irreducible : eternal existence can’t be reduced to temporal existence nor can temporal existence be reduced to eternal existence. So while S-K are never fully explicit about what precisely they mean by the phrase “mode of existence,” two things are reasonably clear. First, a mode of existence is a fundamental way of being at least in the sense that two entities with different modes of existence differ greatly in fundamental ways. Second,

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Page 45 and because of the first point, there is at least a prima facie problem in how entities that differ in their modes of existence are nevertheless able to be present to each other. Although in their initial article, SK claim that “what is temporal and what is eternal can co-exist,”11 they say virtually nothing there about what such coexistence comes to. Clearly, they intend for eternal beings and temporal beings (e.g., God and humans) to not only be able to coexist but to be present to each other (this becomes particularly apparent in a later paper12). And it is important for traditional Christian theology that temporal entities and events be present to atemporal entities and events (and vice versa). In order for God to have the perfect knowledge typically ascribed to him, God’s knowing must be immediate; and for God to be the source of comfort and aid to the soul that Christian tradition emphasizes God to be, God must not only have the ability to produce effects in time but to be present to the afflicted. In this section we will look at what coexistence and presence can come to on the view that God’s mode of existence is eternity while ours is temporality. Coexistence S-K argue that ET-simultaneity can be used to show how an entity existing in the eternal mode of existence and an entity in the temporal mode of existence can “coexist.” What they don’t say, however, is what coexistence comes to in this context. And it is far from clear what it might be since we don’t typically talk of entity’s not being able to coexist with another entity—at least not in philosophical contexts. While I might say of someone with whom I have personality conflict that I “just can’t coexist with him,” I do not mean to imply that one or the other of us will have to stop existing. What would it be to say of entities A and B that they couldn’t coexist? Here’s one possibility: we think about A and we think about B each under a description that cannot be conjoined without contradiction. So if A is “the largest of many objects in the room at t ” and B is “the sole object in the room at t ,” we can see that A and B can’t coexist since, with respect to a single room, it can’t contain (at the same time) many objects, one of which is the largest, and a single object. Since on this way of construing coexistence, failure to coexist entails logically inconsistent descriptions of the objects, coexistence between two objects must be simply that the description of each in isolation is logically consistent and that one can conjoin descriptions without producing a contradictory description. Even if the preceding sense of coexistence is clear enough, it is easy to see that S-K want something more. Surely, when they say that an eternal God can coexist with temporal creatures they intend to say something more than that the description of God as eternal does not rule out the possibility of the existence of beings that can be truly described as temporal. Again, the sort of coexistence they clearly have in mind is one that either entails

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Page 46 some variety of significant presence or at least is strongly suggestive of it. So what are other, more helpful options for understanding what is meant by coexistence? There are myriad ways of understanding what coexistence can come to other than what was sketched earlier. The problem, though, is that it isn’t clear that any of them will do S-K any good. For instance, when we talk about a pair of temporal entities coexisting, we might mean a number of things: they exist spatially contiguously, they exist in (relatively) close spatial proximity, or they exist during overlapping temporal intervals. None of these ways of coexisting can be true of an immaterial, eternal being and a material, temporal entity. What we need is a sense of coexistence that doesn’t imply temporal or spatial relations. One way to abstract from space and time that might be helpful is to focus on modality. Perhaps we should think of coexistence as the inhabiting of the same possible world. So entity A and entity B coexist iff each actually exists. A and B can coexist iff there is a possible world in which A and B each exist. Finally, A and B cannot coexist iff there is no world in which A and B exist.13 While this modal account has some similarities with the ‘consistent descriptions’ account given previously, it is somewhat different because the present definitions concern the coexistence of objects and not simply the compatibility of descriptions of the objects. Put slightly differently, the present account allows that two objects coexist as long as their essential properties are both realizable in the same world; the former account implies nothing about essential properties of objects. While this account might be more metaphysically substantive than the aforementioned descriptions account, it doesn’t come close to providing what S-K need. For on this understanding of coexistence, two entities may coexist even though it is not possible for them to have causal contact with or knowledge of each other. For example, suppose a given world contains a pair of universes that are not spatially/temporally connected to the other. Entities in each world coexist and yet they can have no causal influence on or knowledge of the other. The sense in which they coexist, then, clearly does not entail any nontrivial kind of presence. I don’t mean to make too much of the S-K claim of coexistence. For whatever precisely they had in mind in their use of that term, what matters much more to them is presence. Let’s give a bit of thought to what the relevant sense of presence is for this discussion Presence However “coexistence” is best defined in this context, it is clearly not sufficient, on the theist’s perspective, for God and humanity to merely coexist. A deistic divinity would coexist with its creation and yet would be wholly absent from it. By contrast, the theist insists that God’s is present in creation. But what does such presence amount to?

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Page 47 Just as with our discussion of coexistence, we can see pretty quickly what presence comes to if it is spatial presence that is at issue. To be present in this sense is be spatially near or contiguous. But as with coexistence, this kind of quick and easy definition isn’t available when one of the relata is aspatial. Rather than fumble around trying to construct a set of enlightening necessary and sufficient conditions for aspatial presence, I think it is important to note a distinction between metaphysical and epistemic presence. We can say that X is epistemically present to Y just in case Y has direct awareness of X (or would have if X so directed her attention). Epistemic presence requires that here be no object that epistemically mediates between X and Y. In a parallel fashion, we might think of metaphysical presence as requiring that there be no causal intermediary between X and Y. There can be direct causal relations between X and Y. Now just what causal immediacy comes to here is not particularly clear. However, for our purposes we needn’t worry too much about the specifics. I certainly don’t want to limit causal directness to what action theorists call “basic actions.” My moving my hand is a causally immediate act but so is my picking up the book. One reason that we needn’t sweat the details here is that since we are primarily interested in applying these concepts of presence to God and, typically, God’s actions do not have causal intermediaries, God will turn out to be metaphysically present. Yet this metaphysical understanding of presence might very well not be strong enough, for metaphysical presence might not be enough to guarantee epistemic presence. And it is here that S-K have been subject to criticism in the literature. William Hasker has claimed that an implication of S-K’s conception of eternity, and their definition of ET-simultaneity, is that there is an important gulf between God and humanity. In particular, Hasker has argued that to be directly aware of temporal facts requires the cognizer to be temporal; hence if God is eternal, God’s knowledge of temporal events is indirect or mediated. In what follows, I will look at Hasker’s objection, S-K’s reply, and then finally at Hasker’s counterreply. In the end, I will argue that Hasker’s objection can be defeated. HASKER’S OBJECTION, PART I Hasker reports that after reading through the S-K account of ET-simultaneity, two questions come immediately to mind: What are we to make of the clause “ x and y are both present” when one of the relata is temporal and other is eternal? And how can an eternal x be present in time? Hasker thinks that S-K have a kind of answer to these questions: in their original formulation of ETsimultaneity, they require that if an eternal x and a temporal y are to present to one another, then from the eternal perspective, x is present and y is “observed as temporally present.” Similarly, from the temporal reference frame that includes y, y is temporally present and x is “observed as eternally present.” What the locution “is observed

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Page 48 as eternally/temporally present” must mean here, Hasker avers, is not “is observed as, and is in fact” but rather is observed as, but is not in literal fact.”14 That is, Hasker takes ET to imply that from the temporal view, eternal events appear as present in time even though they really aren’t present in time; and from the eternal view, temporal events appear as present in eternity even though they really aren’t present there. Hasker thinks that the fact that eternal events are not themselves temporally present (but are only apparently so) need not be particularly problematic for the atemporalist. For she can maintain that the Christian tradition has always invoked the transcendental nature of God and the fact that we know him imperfectly (because we know him as he appears temporally rather than as he is in eternity). However, what is a difficulty is the implication for God’s knowledge of temporal events and of God’s lack of presence. If God’s knowledge is of the events not as they are but only as they appear to be in eternity, then haven’t we compromised God’s knowledge? In short, Hasker asks, “How is it possible that God, existing in eternity as a timeless being, has a full and accurate knowledge of temporal realities?”15 According to Hasker, the timelessness advocate has an answer to this question. The short of it is that she can say that God’s knowledge of temporal events is indirect. Hasker writes: How then can a timeless God know temporal realities? The answer is, he knows them by knowing, in timeless representation, the content of each moment of temporal existence, as well as the order of the moments—an order that he knows to represent temporal sequence, though it cannot be such for him.16 Hasker is here claiming that the theory of perception known as representative realism is true for divine knowledge. God’s knowledge of temporal events is indirect; what God has immediate contact with, what is literally present to God, are not the temporal events themselves but rather atemporal representations of temporal events. Yet, unlike the representationalism of Isaac Newton and John Locke, according to which only some of the qualities of the representation resemble properties in the mind-independent, indirectly perceived object, the representations in the divine mind perfectly convey all and only those qualities had by the temporal objects. Naturally, the divine ideas are not themselves temporal but there is no reason that atemporal representations can’t represent all of the temporal content atemporally. While Hasker believes that the defender of the traditional doctrine of eternity is able to explain how such a being could have complete knowledge of temporal reality, he nevertheless thinks that the only way an atemporal being could have such knowledge is via representationalism. What Hasker thinks is impossible is for an eternal being to have direct or intuitive knowledge of temporal events. His most straightforward expression of the argument comes in his paper “Yes, God Have Beliefs!”:

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Page 49 Just how is it … that temporal events are directly present to God? Temporal events exist in time as the medium of temporal succession, so it would seem that a being which experiences them directly must itself exist in time and experience temporal succession—but of course, this is just what a timeless being cannot do … The same argument can be put in a slightly different way. Let us assume that some temporal reality is literally immediately present to a timeless God. But of course temporal realities are different from moment to moment, whereas a timeless God cannot experience things differently at different moments; in the life of such a being there are no different moments. So we may ask, which momentary aspect or “temporal cross-section” of the temporal entity is present to God? The answer, of course, is that all of the temporal aspects of the entity are present—literally present—to God, not successively but simultaneously . But for an entity to have a number of apparently temporally successive aspects present simultaneously is precisely what it is for that entity to be timeless rather than temporal. So if an apparently temporal entity is literally immediately present to a timeless God, that entity really is timeless rather than temporal.17 Later, we’ll have a look at Hasker’s argument in more detail (in fact, the argument we will examine was published some fourteen years after these quotations were written). For now it is enough to emphasize that Hasker’s view is that, in the end, S-K have an answer to the questions that he said leapt out at one upon reading their original account of ET-simultaneity. Yet that answer isn’t all one might have hoped for because it requires understanding God’s knowledge of the temporal world as mediated by atemporal representations. So while Hasker grants that the answer he proposes for S-K is coherent, he expresses “resistance” to the account because it seems to entail God’s inability to genuinely “see” (where, I guess, that means “directly see”) temporal events. STUMP’S AND KRETZMANN’S REPLY In “Eternity, Awareness, and Action,” S-K respond directly to Hasker’s claim that their earlier account of ET-simultaneity requires that God’s knowledge of temporal events is indirect. In short, they reject as a stone the offer Hasker intends as bread. S-K put Hasker’s objection like this: The definition of E-T simultaneity suggests that an eternal God could “observe” human beings as present to him but couldn’t actually share their present. In general, Hasker thinks, (H) To be directly aware of temporal beings requires being temporal oneself.18

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Page 50 S-K believe that the only support for (H) is another, more general principle (GP): x can be directly aware of or epistemically present to y only if x and y share the same mode of existence.19 Yet S-K point out that (GP) entails that even if God were temporal but was, as virtually all theists claim, aspatial, then God would not be able to be directly aware of events in space/time. For aspatial beings (if some there be) have a different mode of existence than their spatial counterparts. So if God is aspatial and we are spatial, then (GP) implies that God cannot be present to us (nor us to him) and that God cannot be directly aware of events in space/time. Yet theists have traditionally thought that God is both aspatial and yet has direct knowledge of spatial events; hence the differing modes of existence provide no good reason to reject the possibility of an eternal God’s having direct knowledge of temporal events —or if it does, then theists’ belief about an aspatial God’s having knowledge of spatial events is in the same boat. S-K recognize that their formulation of ET-simultaneity might have been misleading in “suggesting a gap of presentness that is bridged by no more than ‘observation.’ ”20 In light of this, they propose an amended definition of eternal-temporal simultaneity that they take to be less misleading. Here, then, is the revised definition: (ET') For every x and every y, x and y are ET-simultaneous if and only if (i) either x is eternal and y is temporal, or vice versa (for convenience let x be eternal and y temporal); and (ii) with respect to some A in the unique eternal reference frame, x and y are both present—i.e., (a) x is in the eternal present with respect to A, (b) y is in the temporal present, and (c) both x and y are situated with respect to A in such a way that A can enter into direct and immediate causal relations with each of them and (if capable of awareness) can be directly aware of them; and (iii) with respect to some B in one of the infinitely many temporal reference frames, x and y are both present—i.e., (a) x is in the eternal present, (b) y is at the same time as B, and (c) both x and y are situated with respect to B in such a way that B can enter into direct and immediate causal relations with each of them (and if capable of awareness) can be directly aware of each of them.21 There are a couple points I’d like to make about ET' before we look more closely at Hasker’s argument (as presented so far) and what S-K can say in response. Note that to this point, the only substantive reply to Hasker’s charge is S-K’s assertion that it is grounded in a broader metaphysical principle (GP) and that if that principle is true, then the very same issue

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Page 51 regarding difficulties of presence would apply regarding divine aspatiality. Their alteration of ET into ET' is intended to be more a stylistic than substantive change since it is motivated not by the belief that ET got something wrong but only that it was misleading. As Hasker reports regarding ET, there are questions that ET' calls to mind immediately. First, can the problem that Hasker thinks he has found with ET be dealt with simply by defining in actual presence? Hasker thinks he has an argument (more on that following) to show that temporal events cannot be literally present to an eternal being and that events in eternity cannot be literally present to a temporal being. S-K claim that they see how their earlier definition might have made it seem that this was a problem, so they revise their definition by building into it that such literal presence is possible after all. But, obviously, if Hasker was onto something in his reaction to ET, then revising the definition as they do will not be a satisfactory way of dealing with the issue. The appearance of impropriety here is, however, itself misleading. S-K understand that Hasker’s problem won’t go away by adding real presence to their definition. As I noted earlier, the substantive response they make is the point about parallels between atemporality and spatiality. So their inclusion of the presence in ET' is not questionbegging because it isn’t intended to solve Hasker’s worry. This doesn’t mean, however, that there is nothing critical to be said about ET'. One odd feature of ET' is the claim that ET simultaneity is realized only when there is an eternal entity and temporal entity each capable of entering into “direct and immediate causal relations” with both event relata. We have noted (and will later discuss further) the issues involving directness and immediacy, so let’s now put them aside. I’m here interested in the requirement that both entities can enter into causal relations with both events. Now if it is the case that God is the only possible entity that can occupy the eternal mode of existence, then I suppose this condition will be satisfied trivially: as the creator and providential director of all that is other than Godself, God has causal control over all events in eternity and in time. However, let’s consider temporal entity, B, and his relation to the eternal event x. Since every temporal event is ET-simultaneous with every eternal event, let’s suppose that, in this case, the eternal event x is God’s intention to create a universe and temporal event y is my getting a beer from my refrigerator on a given evening. Surely these two events will turn out to be ET-simultaneous since they are fairly typical events of their type, and the intention behind ET-simultaneity is that each temporal event is ET-simultaneous with all eternal events. So as I get the beer from my fridge, condition (iii) of ET' tells us the following must be true: (a) x is in the eternal present; (b) my getting the beer is at the same time as I am—i.e., I exist at the time I get the beer; and (c) both God’s eternal intention to create and my getting the beer are situated with respect to me in such a way that I can enter into direct and immediate causal relations with each of them, and (since I am capable of awareness) I can be directly aware of each of them.

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Page 52 Clauses (a) and (b) are unproblematic. But I can satisfy (c) only if I can enter into causal relations with, and become aware of, God’s eternal intention to create. Now I’m not altogether sure how to understand this, but whatever it means it surely isn’t right. The claim, as best I can make it out, is that simply in virtue of (i) the temporality of both the event of my getting the beer and my own existence, and (ii) the eternality of God’s intention to create the universe, I am thereby able to come into causal and epistemic contact with God’s eternal intention. My reactions to this are two: first, I have no such causal or epistemic contact with God’s atemporal intentions, and second, it seems absolutely unnecessary that I have such contact in order for my temporal action and God’s eternal intention to be ET-simultaneous. SK have developed their account of simultaneity on the model of temporal simultaneity. Here is the definition of relativized temporal simultaneity glossed in their original paper on this topic: RT: RT-simultaneity = existence or occurrence at the same time within the reference frame of a given observer.22 The requirement that there be perceivers who have the ability to causally interact with each pair of simultaneous events has no part in this definition. What is crucial to the concept of simultaneity is that there be a pair of events that are in some sense co-present in a way that is at least analogous to temporal co-presence; there is no strong connection between such a concept and the existence of entities that can interact causally with these events. Having said all this, I don’t mean to suggest that I can see how to give an account of ET-simultaneity that gets around this difficulty. Perhaps one could make some headway not by appealing to actual observers/causal agents but rather to possible observers/causal agents. For example, maybe we could replace (iii) with: (iii)' with respect to a possible observer B in one of the many temporal reference frames, x and y are both present—i.e., (a) x is in the eternal present, (b) y is at the same time as B, (c) both x and y are situated with respect to B in such a way that B can enter into direct and immediate causal relations with each of them, and (d) B can be directly aware of each. This gets the requirement of an actual causal agent out of the story, and in that way is an improvement over the ET' condition. Yet it still seems too strong. For it requires that it is possible for there to be a temporal being who has causal relations with any eternal event, and that it is possible that there is a temporal being who is capable of awareness of every eternal event. Yet both of these requirements seem to me to be too strong for ET-simultaneity. Might it not be possible that eternal events are simply unobservable by temporal beings even though temporal events are ET-simultaneous with eternal events?

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Page 53 To be clear: I’m not denying that there are philosophical or (more likely) theological reasons for wanting to insist on the possibility of literal presence of each kind of event to beings in each mode of existence. My main point here is just that such considerations seem extrinsic to the concept of ET-simultaneity. I would think that if there is an eternal being, then a good definition of ET-simultaneity should imply that every temporal event is ET-simultaneous with every eternal event even if there is no temporal entity that has (or even can have) causal relations with any (much less every) eternal event. HASKER’S OBJECTION, PART II In a paper that is in part a response to S-K’s reply to his earlier objection, William Hasker offers a twopronged reply to S-K.23 First, Hasker directly addresses their claim that the problem he elucidates would be equally problematic for aspatiality, but since aspatiality isn’t thought to have this difficulty, then it must not be a problem for atemporality. Second, he presents a more detailed and formal argument for the conclusion that an eternal being cannot be directly aware of temporal events. In the present section of this paper, I look at each of Hasker’s responses and defend the claim that an atemporal being could have direct awareness of events and entities that are in time. Let’s look at each prong in order of appearance. S-K claim that if one is committed to the conclusion of Hasker’s argument, then one should also be committed to the following (I’ll leave the claim with the numeric designation it has in Hasker’s paper): (9’) If God is nonspatial, God is not directly aware of spatial beings. Hasker objects on a few grounds. First, he says, a traditional theist might happily accept (9’). Hasker believes that no less a traditional theist than Thomas Aquinas might well have held a representationalist thesis and that, Hasker thinks, would require him to accept (9’). Second, Hasker says the theist might accept that (9’) but think that the way in which God is nonspatial is importantly different from the way in which he is nontemporal. God is not spatially bounded or spatially divisible … nor is he essentially spatial, all of which distinguishes him sharply from ordinary spatial things. But it might be true all the same that, as suggested by the traditional doctrine of divine omniscience, God is present in space in such a way as to make direct awareness of spatial beings possible.24 Finally, Hasker thinks that S-K haven’t really offered a compelling reason for thinking the relevant parity between direct awareness/timelessness and direct awareness/aspatiality exists. Hasker notes that he has offered

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Page 54 an argument for thinking that atemporality and the direct awareness of temporal events is impossible while no parallel argument for the incompatibility of aspatiality and direct awareness of spatial events has been given. Taken as a unit, these replies are not without force. However, it can scarcely be denied that there is a prima facie case for thinking that any potential difficulty for a timeless being’s interacting with the temporal world will have a parallel potential difficulty in the relationship between an aspatial being and the spatial world. And while Hasker may have said enough to defeat the prima facie reasonability of the parity claim, that is surely a judgment call. Better, I think, to look more carefully at his more detailed argument to see if he makes his case. If the argument appears to be very strong, then perhaps we can take the prima facie reasonability of the parity claim to have been defeated. So it is to his explicit argument that we must now turn. HASKER’S ARGUMENT The argument Hasker gives is somewhat complex. After presenting it, I will go through it step by step and argue that it is unsound. Here’s the argument: (1) If God is directly aware of a thing, that thing is metaphysically present to God. (Premise) (2) If God knows temporal beings, God knows all of their temporal stages. (Premise) (3) If God is directly aware of temporal beings, all of their temporal stages are metaphysically present to God. (From 1–2) (4) If the temporal stages of a temporal being are metaphysically present to God, they are present either sequentially or simultaneously. (Premise) (5) If God is timeless nothing is present to God sequentially. (Premise) (6) If God is timeless and is directly aware of temporal beings, all their temporal stages are simultaneously metaphysically present to God. (From 3–5) (7) If the temporal stages of a temporal being are simultaneously metaphysically present to God, those stages exist simultaneously. (Premise) (8) The temporal stages of a temporal being do not exist simultaneously. (Premise) (9) If God is timeless, God is not directly aware of temporal beings. (From 6–8)25 Let’s now have a look at the argument to see what should be said about the premises. Step (1) is in no way obvious and, depending on the sense of ‘direct’ meant in the antecedent, isn’t necessarily true. For if ‘direct’ here means epistemically direct, it is by no means obvious that epistemic directness implies metaphysical directness. It seems imaginable that there be an

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Page 55 epistemic agent who has a connection with an object such that the person has direct knowledge of that object’s properties even though the object is not metaphysically present. Perhaps God just builds an epistemically direct mechanism between subject S and object O such that S has perfect knowledge of O at all times that both exist. We might suppose that O is at a great spatial distance from S. Suppose both O and S are in our universe and are billions of light-years from each other. There is, I take it, no good sense in which there is metaphysical directness but, as the case is described, there is epistemic directness. Be that as it may, one might respond, (1) doesn’t make a claim about every possible epistemic agent (that is, it isn’t a conceptual claim about epistemic agency) but is instead a restricted claim about divine epistemic agency.26 That may be so, but one wants to know why it would be true of God but not true of God in virtue of being an epistemic agent. Of course, one could claim that (1) is simply a material conditional and hence true so long as the consequent turns out to be true. Yet surely Hasker has a stronger relationship in mind than that between the parts of (1). So there is good reason for thinking that (1) isn’t a conceptual or even necessary truth. However, the traditional theist will surely want to say that God’s relationship with creation is suitably intimate; in traditional theological terms, God is not only transcendent, but immanent as well. Such an indwelling in creation requires that temporal entities must not only be epistemically direct but metaphysically direct as well. There must be real, literal presence. So we should grant that, according to standard theism, (1) is at least contingently true.27 Step (2) can sensibly be denied by the open theist—that is, by the theist who thinks that divine foreknowledge is inconsistent with free will, and who therefore doesn’t think God has knowledge of what such creatures will freely choose to do in the future. Of course, for any present or past stage of a temporal being, God will have perfect knowledge; but of their future free actions, even God doesn’t genuinely know what they will do. Even though (2) will thus be denied by some relatively traditional theists, it presumably will not be denied by the atemporalist. For according to her, all of time is eternally present to God; therefore, there are no temporal acts yet to be shown on the divine stage: all temporal events are eternally before God. Therefore, anyone who cares to defend divine timelessness will grant (2). Step (3) follows from the first two premises which I have granted, so it can’t be reasonably resisted. Problems begin to arise at step (4). The claim here is that there are two ways that the temporal stages of a temporal being can be metaphysically present to God: either they are present sequentially or simultaneously. Now it seems to me that there are two ways of understanding this premise. One might emphasize how they are present to God or how they are in their presence to God. The former emphasizes their mode of metaphysical presence to God and the latter the way the entities are themselves even as they

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Page 56 are metaphysically present to God. Let’s take the first interpretation first. On this way of seeing the matter, there should be three options, not two: temporal things may be metaphysically present to God sequentially, simultaneously, or atemporally. To claim that temporal things could be present to God in only temporal modes would be to beg the question against the atemporalist. So inasmuch as the emphasis here is on how things are present to God, the atemporalist will insist that temporal things are present atemporally. So on this interpretation, (4) is false. Now it might be thought that the claim that there are two ways of understanding step (4) is to obscure a claim that is really pretty clear. For since the relevant kind of presence here is metaphysical, what’s important is not the way temporal entities are experienced but is instead the way they actually are in themselves. And, qua temporal entities, their stages must either exist sequentially or simultaneously— that exhausts the options for temporal beings. Understood as a claim about the mode of existence of the entities that are metaphysically present to God, step (4) is correct. However, while this reading saves (4), it causes problems at step (5). Step (5) is true provided that it is understood as follows: “If God is timeless nothing in God’s awareness is present sequentially.” That is, God’s timelessness rules out a temporal succession in God’s awareness. However, if (5) is understood as ruling out the possibility that nothing can be sequential and in God’s presence, then the question has been begged, since what is at issue is precisely the question of the consistency of claiming that God is atemporal yet directly aware of temporal objects. Yet it is this second, question-begging understanding of (5) that is required to generate the conclusion of (6). Furthermore, while an atemporal being’s awareness of temporal events will be atemporal, there is no reason for S-K to concede that all temporal stages are simultaneously metaphysically present to God; indeed, S-K will insist that the temporal stages of temporal beings are metaphysically present to God just as they are—sequentially. But with step (6) shown to not follow from (3)–(5) and to be in fact false, step (7) might be regarded as true but irrelevant (although its truth is by no means obvious). For the atemporalist will deny that anything is simultaneously present to an eternal God. Similarly, (8) is certainly true but again not to the point since the timelessness advocate thinks that the stages are eternally present to God, not that they are simultaneous. Finally, step (9) doesn’t follow from (6)–(8) once (6) is understood as a disjunction. So Hasker’s argument against the possibility of real, metaphysical presence of temporal entities to a timeless being fails. WHY HASKER’S ARGUMENT FAILS Having argued that Hasker’s more formal argument fails, I want now to have a look back at what seems to me to be the heart of his conviction that

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Page 57 an atemporal God can’t be directly aware of a temporal being. The passage quoted earlier from “Yes, God has Beliefs!” seems to offer the following thought: if something is metaphysically present to God, then that thing is present before God as it is. Temporal things have their careers in successive stages. So if temporal things are metaphysically present to God, then they are present to God in successive stages. But if God is timeless, there are no successive stages to God’s awareness. So God’s awareness of temporal things is not an awareness of those things as they are. That is, God’s awareness must be an awareness of representations of temporal objects and not of the objects themselves. Therefore, temporal objects are not metaphysically present to God. So there is metaphysical presence in this case only if there is direct awareness. But there can’t be direct awareness because God is not aware of temporal objects as they are. That there is something seductive about this argument cannot be denied. And it is a general line of reasoning that should sound familiar to someone with even a modest background in modern philosophy or epistemology. The mug I’m looking at appears to be red and, from my perceptual angle, to have an elliptically shaped mouth. However, the phenomenal redness that I see and the apparent shape of the mug’s mouth are not, in fact, qualities of the mug at all. Yet (or so it’s been claimed) I can’t deny that the most immediate object of my perceptual awareness is phenomenally red with an elliptical mouth. Therefore, the object that I directly perceive is distinct from the physical mug; it is, rather, the representational mug that is the direct object of my awareness. While tempting, the conclusion that the object of my direct awareness is a representation rather than the mug itself can and should be resisted. From the premise that the object genuinely appears to be different than it actually is (no matter how hard I attend to my experience, the mug really does look phenomenally red and its mouth elliptical), it simply does not follow that it is not that object that I am directly seeing. Direct perception doesn’t entail accurate (much less perfect) perception; it requires only that perception not be mediated by another perceived object. So one can have metaphysical directness and epistemic directness even when one’s awareness is not of the object as it really is. Suppose for a moment that, contrary to an assumption of the mug case, colors of objects are not secondary properties but are instead primary (i.e., mind-independent) properties of physical objects. (This assumption is needed for the case I’m about to describe but is otherwise irrelevant to the use I want to put the case to.) Now suppose we have a person, Mike, who is completely color blind; Mike sees the world monochromatically. He is, then, not seeing objects as they are (they are colored but he sees them in monochrome). However, it is clear that the objects are metaphysically present to him if they ever are to those of us who see in color; furthermore, there is no reason to posit a representational realm of objects as intermediaries between the colored external objects and his direct awareness.

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Page 58 The same lesson applies to the case of a timeless God and temporal objects. From the fact that the temporal objects are metaphysically present to, and within the direct awareness of, an atemporal being, it doesn’t follow that a timeless God’s awareness of them must be temporal (i.e., in successive stages) as well. Granted, God’s awareness of temporal objects is not an awareness of them as they are. And if God were not to know how they are, were God not to know that they are temporal and the ordering of their various stages, then God could not be omniscient. But, as Hasker himself grants when explicating the representationalist view, God’s inability to experience temporal beings temporally doesn’t stop him from knowing everything there is to know about them. The problem, as Hasker sees it, is the epistemic and metaphysical distance that the representational view puts between God and the temporal world. Yet the atemporalist need not take the representational approach. Temporal objects can be metaphysically present to God and the objects of God’s direct awareness even though that awareness is atemporal. One final note. It might be thought that although what was said earlier does show that an atemporal God and a temporal creation can be both metaphysically and epistemically present to one another, God’s inability to be aware of things as they are entails that God’s mode of knowledge is not all it could be. Wouldn’t the greatest possible knower have an awareness that is appropriate to the mode of existence of the object known?28 The answer to this query is: Yes, where it is possible. But what our discussion of Hasker’s objection strongly suggests is that it is simply impossible that an atemporal being have a temporal (i.e., sequential) awareness. God is the being with the greatest array of compossible great-making properties. Being capable of an awareness of temporal beings as they are is not a property that could be instantiated by an atemporal God. So provided that there are good reasons for thinking that, on the whole, atemporal existence is greater than temporal existence, the fact that God can’t be aware of temporal beings as they are is not an imperfection. CONCLUSION The work of Stump and Kretzmann on the subject of atemporal eternity is truly of first importance for the philosophical theology. Their writing clarified the doctrine as it had never been clarified before; and their responses to the standard objections are ingenious and compelling. Yet in making vivid the contours of the eternal mode of existence, one objection to the doctrine was made somewhat more forceful: the idea that an atemporal God would be a remote God. No one has given voice to this concern more forcefully than William Hasker and we’ve seen that his development of it is detailed and subtle. However, in the end it can be seen to rest on a principle that not only can but should be rejected: objects that are metaphysically present and of which one can have direct awareness need not appear as they really

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Page 59 are. Epistemic immediacy requires only that the object not be perceived in virtue of the perception of a distinct object. And we’ve not been given a reason to think that a divine eternal being cannot be directly and eternally aware of temporal objects. NOTES 1. Boethius (1999), book V, prose 6. 2. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (1981), 433. 3. Ibid. , 435. 4. See Paul Fitzgerald (1985), Brian Leftow (1991a), Leftow (1991b), and Katherin Rogers (1994). 5. While it is not in the agenda of this paper to get into these matters, part of the genius of the original S-K article is their response to these problems of the last couple paragraphs. For example, they reply to the objection about how God can be the cause of temporally locatable events by making a distinction between God’s eternal, timeless act and the temporal consequences of that act. God timelessly acts and one effect is that Earth comes into existence approximately four billion years ago. Furthermore, S-K argue that while some mental states are necessarily temporal, there are others for which this isn’t clear; for example, knowledge is not obviously dependent on a temporal process nor is it always done at a time for humans. Willings and desires would also seem to be compatible with a tenseless existence—or at least arguably so. Each of these claims remains controversial, but S-K certainly deserve credit for giving voice to these plausible lines of reply to these objections and others in Stump and Kretzmann (1981). 6. Anthony Kenny (1969), 264. 7. Stump and Kretzmann (1981), 438. 8. Ibid ., 439. 9. Ibid . 10. Ibid ., 430. 11. Ibid. , 436. 12. Stump and Kretzmann (1992). 13. Strictly speaking, this condition and the one that follows probably should be couched in terms of creaturely essences and the possibility of mutual instantiation. 14. William Hasker (1989), 165. 15. Ibid. , 166. 16. Ibid ., 169. 17. Hasker (1988), 389. 18. Stump and Kretzmann (1992), 475. 19. Ibid . 20. Ibid ., 476. 21. Ibid. , 477–478. 22. Stump and Kretzmann (1981), 438. 23. See Hasker (2002). 24. Ibid. , 189. 25. Ibid. , 186. 26. This point was raised by Kevin Timpe. 27. Of course, if it is a necessary truth that God is immanent in any creation he brings about, then (1) will be necessary too. 28. This objection was raised by Kevin Timpe.

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Page 60 4 The Metaphysics of Divine Love William E. Mann Some time ago the State of Vermont’s Department of Motor Vehicles refused to issue a “vanity” license plate that read JOHN316. The grounds for the refusal were that the plate contravened the state’s policy not to allow license plates that are obscene or offensive, or that promote a particular political or religious viewpoint. Be assured, Gentle Reader, that I have not just transmitted an obscenity. The plate manqué conveyed a religious message by alluding to chapter 3, verse 16 of the Gospel According to John, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” I shall not discuss the merits of the DMV’s policy; mentioning it was a transparent attempt to capture your attention. My focus instead is on the John 3:16 text, and only a part of it at that. John describes an immensity of love that beggars human comprehension. I shall concentrate on a seemingly simple, preliminary question, trying to establish a beachhead, not to chart a limitless territory. Why does God love us at all? The question is not intended to prompt an inquiry into what it is about us that God finds lovable. It is, instead, a question about the metaphysics of divine love. How is it that a perfect being can love beings that are conspicuously imperfect? SOME PRELIMINARIES In what follows I shall assume a conception of God according to which God is a perfect being. The conception includes but is not limited to ascriptions of omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect goodness. It is fair to ask whether and how attributes like these might be related to love. It would help to further the inquiry if we provide some rudimentary account of love. I shall list some claims made in the recent philosophical literature. The philosophically fastidious, who hanker for definitions that pass Socratic muster, should avert their eyes. Some, perhaps all, of the claims are controversial. I am inclined to think that five of the six claims are defensible. For considerations that will emerge shortly, I am less convinced about the sixth.

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Page 61 Intrinsic Value. Many have supposed that loving is a kind of valuing, in particular, valuing the beloved for his/her/its own sake, and not merely as a means to some extrinsic end.1 A point closely related to this supposition, if not an entailment of it, is that the beloved is, in the eyes of the lover, non-fungible. If the beloved has or is a physical body, no molecule-for-molecule replacement of the beloved would satisfy the lover. Non-fungibility is distinct from alienability. A person may love her collection of authentic pre-Columbian pottery but be willing to part with it if the price and guarantees of preservation are right. (It does not follow that she would or should be similarly willing to part with her child.) Beloved’s Good. Love involves desiring the good for the beloved. This desire does not entail a desire to adopt the beloved’s interests as one’s own. Those interests may not in fact be good for the beloved.2 Relationship Value. A lover values not only the beloved, but also the “ongoing history that one shares” with the beloved.3 Reciprocation. Some kinds of love, for example, romantic love, friendship, and parental love, flourish or are perfected only when the beloved responds, in an appropriate way, to the lover’s love.4 Involuntariness. It “is a necessary condition of love that it is not under our direct and immediate control…. [W]hat we love and what we fail to love is not up to us.”5 Vulnerability. Love “arrests our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person” and “disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us vulnerable to the other.”6 Here are a few observations about the first three claims: I shall defer discussion of Reciprocation, Involuntariness, and Vulnerability until the end of the chapter. If we were somehow to discover that God uses us merely as interchangeable and ultimately dispensable pawns in some sort of cosmic chess game that he plays solely for his own amusement, then, invoking Intrinsic Value, we should conclude that God does not love us. I suspect that by appealing to Beloved’s Good, we would come to the same conclusion were we to find out God could not care less about our happiness or flourishing. If God’s mode of eternal existence entails that nothing is past or future to God, that the whole span of an individual’s life is simultaneously present to God’s awareness, then it will take some work to apply Relationship Value to God’s love for time-bound beings. In this case only the beloved has an ongoing history . So it is incumbent on anyone who wants to maintain God’s eternality along with Relationship Value to explain how God can participate in a relationship that is ongoing.7 Finally, to add a claim that will be discussed immediately, No Reason. When people are asked to explain why they love someone, they founder for answers. If they cite praiseworthy attributes of the beloved, their answers sound like ad hoc rationalizations, not genuine reasons. Moreover, their list of attributes lays them open to the criticism that consistency demands that they should also love anyone else who has the

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Page 62 same attributes. According to one recent account, the proper diagnosis of this manifestly poor performance is that love is not founded on reason. Being in love provides the lover with reasons to act in various ways, but being in love is based on any number of vagarious, nonrational causes.8 A weak version of this claim maintains that one can love without having reasons for loving. A strong version maintains that one must not have reasons if one’s love is genuine. ARATIONALISM Perplexity would rise and confidence fall had John 3:16 concluded with “But God has absolutely no reason to love you.” Does God have reason to love us? What explains his love for us? Long ago Plato shrewdly observed that love is connected to various modes of creative activity, such as sexual reproduction (erotic and familial love), the transmission of knowledge to children (a kind of propagation of one’s soul in one’s offspring), and the discovery of new ideas (love of wisdom).9 Let us extend Plato’s idea and suppose that God’s creative activity results in the world we inhabit, and that this creation is an expression of God’s love. If so, did God have reason to create? I want to examine two answers to this question that take opposite stances on No Reason. It is safe to say that Harry Frankfurt is a staunch defender of No Reason. On his account of love, it is important to distinguish having a reason and giving an explanation. There is an explanation one can offer for God’s loving us. But the explanation makes no appeal to reasons. Love, according to Frankfurt, does not essentially involve reason. In particular, love need not be a rational response of the lover to something antecedently inherent (or believed to be inherent) in the beloved. The lover does not detect value in the beloved; the lover’s love confers value on the beloved.10 Consistent with this view, Frankfurt paints the following picture of God’s creative love. On some accounts, the creative activity of God is mobilized by an entirely inexhaustible and uninhibited love. This love, which is understood as being totally without limit or condition, moves God to desire a plenum of existence in which everything that can conceivably be an object of love is included. God wants to love as much as it is possible to love…. To say that the divine love is infinite and unconditional is to say that it is completely indiscriminate. God loves everything , regardless of its character or its consequences. Now this is tantamount to saying that the creative activity in which God’s love of Being is expressed and fulfilled has no motive beyond an unlimitedly promiscuous urge to love without boundary or measure. Insofar as people think of God’s essence as love, then, they must suppose that there is no divine providence or purpose

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Page 63 that constrains in any way the sheer maximal realization of possibility. If God is love, the universe has no point except simply to be.11 Many philosophers will resist this picture because of its necessitarian implications. God had no reason to create—just a primordial, irresistible urge—no choice about whether to create, no choice about how much to create—as much as possible—and no choice about whether to love what he creates. Nonetheless the picture meshes well with Frankfurt’s account of love. Many would grant his thesis, expressed in Involuntariness, that love “is not under our direct and immediate voluntary control.” Without a special explanation to the contrary, Frankfurt is entitled to maintain that this involuntariness extends to divine love. His depiction of divine love needs more than this, however. The nagging thought remains that involuntariness is an imperfection, a constraint, something that is incompatible with a conception of God as perfect. The elements of a reply may reside in Frankfurt’s claim that the kind of necessity under which lovers operate has its source in their will: “It is by our own will, and not by any external or alien force, that we are constrained.”12 Frankfurt has famously distinguished between freedom of action and freedom of will.13 A person has freedom of action if she is doing what she wants to be doing. She has freedom of will if she wants what she wants to want, that is, if her first-order desires are in harmony with and endorsed by her second-order desires. If God loves creatures because of an “unlimitedly promiscuous urge to love,” then his loving creatures is an exercise of freedom of action. And if God has this urge to love because he wants to have it, then he has freedom of will. One might protest that if the urge is an essential feature of God, a part of God’s nature, it seems mistaken to say that he has it because he wants to have it: this second-order desire appears to be doing no causal or explanatory work. It can be replied on Frankfurt’s behalf that one can want to retain what one already has, what one has never lacked, what in fact one could not separate from oneself even if, per impossibile , one wanted to.14 Frankfurt seems within his rights to suppose, then, that God’s will is so perfectly integrated that he recognizes his primordial urge to create and to love what he creates, recognizes the urge’s centrality to and inseparability from what he is—his Godhead—and takes delight in that recognition. RATIONALISM Frankfurt’s account of creation is a robust application of No Reason to God’s creative activity. No Reason is inconsistent with any philosophical program that maintains that everything has a reason. When one thinks of such a program, one’s mind turns lightly to Leibniz. Leibniz certainly has much to say about God and creation. But Leibniz’s God does not immediately conjure up images of love. Yet Leibniz and Frankfurt agree on one

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Page 64 big thing, that the kind of world God can create is delimited by God’s nature. They disagree on what the delimitation is and how it works. For Frankfurt, love leads God to create as many objects, or as much stuff, as he possibly can. Frankfurt does say that whatever God creates must “conceivably be an object of love,” but that appears to impose no constraint, since “God loves everything , regardless of its character or its consequences.” All that is crucial is that there be as much, or as many. For Leibniz, the delimitation imposed by God’s nature is different. As supremely knowledgeable, powerful, and good, God must create the best world possible. There are infinitely many possible worlds that are suboptimal, but there is a kind of necessity that prevents God from creating any of them. Had there been two or more worlds tied for the title of best, God could not have created more than one of them, since each possible world corresponds to a maximally consistent state of affairs, and not even God can violate the Principle of Non-Contradiction. But neither can Leibniz’s God violate the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the thesis that for every state of affairs that obtains, there must be a sufficient reason for why that state of affairs obtains. If any two possible worlds were tied for first place, God would have no reason to choose to create one over the other. In that case God would not create any world.15 The kind of necessity that prevents God from creating a suboptimal world is described by Leibniz as moral, not metaphysical. Perfect goodness imposes performance standards on its possessor that are moral in character. Writing in explication of Leibniz, Robert Merrihew Adams says that “it is necessary that if God did not choose the best, God would not be perfectly good.”16 Call this Leibniz’s counterfactual. If God is perfectly good, then modus tollens on Leibniz’s counterfactual yields the result that God chooses to create the best possible world.17 There are two problems with Leibniz’s counterfactual, even if we allow Leibniz the Principle of Sufficient Reason to rule out ties. One is well known. What reason do we have to believe that there is a best possible world? Might there not be an endless chain of possible worlds, each successive one better than its predecessor, with no final link in the chain? Leibniz’s answer is that in such a case, God would have had no sufficient reason to create one world instead of the other, and so would have created nothing. In that case, nothing would exist now. But something does exist now. Therefore God created the best possible world. Skeptics will be happy to work the argument in the opposite direction. It is much easier to believe that this world exists than that it is the best of all possible worlds. Therefore it is easier to believe either that God did not create this world or, if he did, that God was not conforming his creative behavior to the Principle of Sufficient Reason.18 The second problem is this. Leibniz’s counterfactual is silent on the question why God should choose to create at all. Would God be less than perfectly good if he decided to create nothing? On the hypothesis that there

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Page 65 is no end of better and better possible worlds, this problem is especially poignant. For any world God might create, there would then be infinitely many worlds infinitely better than it. Put more shockingly, whatever world God might create would then be infinitely worse than infinitely many worlds God could have created. Why create in those circumstances?19 But the problem remains even if there is a best possible world. Consider an analogy. Suppose it is true that if Antonio the luthier chooses to make a violin, he will make the best violin he is capable of making. It does not follow that Antonio will choose to make any violin. Perhaps he is absorbed in playing bocce. So even when we concede that if God chooses to create a world, he will choose the best world that he can, and that the best world that he can create is the best possible world, we still lack an account of why God chooses to create any world at all. One might hope to find the right kind of explanation in an argument that dates back to Plato’s Timaeus . Plato suggests that if God did not create, he would guilty of the character fault of phthonos , usually translated as envy or jealousy.20 The standard translation does not help. It is hard to see how one can be envious or jealous of what does not exist, especially when one controls whether it comes into and stays in existence or not. Perhaps, then, we should try a different understanding of phthonos . We could suppose that what a Platonist means is that God would exhibit the character fault of miserliness , understood as an unwillingness to share a good one has in abundance, were he not to create. Since we are supposing that God is perfectly good, a being who has no character faults, God cannot be miserly. We now have one candidate for an explanation of why God is required to create. Beware, however, lest the explanation become a sorcerer’s apprentice. Miserliness is the sort of fault that comes in degrees, a fault that a perfect being cannot possess to any degree. Now suppose that there is a sequence of possible worlds, W1, W2, … Wn, … such that each successive Wi+1 is better than its predecessor, Wi. Then for any pair of worlds, Wi and Wi+1, in the sequence, God would be less miserly were he to create Wi+1 instead of Wi. If there is a best possible world, then avoidance of miserliness will lead God to create it. But if the sequence is upwardly unending, then God can never clear himself of the charge of miserliness. This Platonically inspired account suffers from two difficulties, to be mentioned now, to be discussed shortly. First, it proceeds negatively, by specifying what God’s goodness must preclude , rather than specifying positively what God’s goodness might include. Second, as a consequence of the first difficulty, the question whether God is to be charged with miserliness depends entirely on the value structure of the hierarchy of possible worlds: if it is upwardly endless, God cannot escape the charge; if it terminates in a best possible world, then God is morally required to choose the best one in order to escape the charge. To put it bluntly, the possible worlds are in the driver’s seat, not God.

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Page 66 TAKING STOCK Let us take stock. Frankfurt’s voluntaristic picture of an indiscriminately loving God has no problem answering the question “Why did God create?” That is just what God does , on Frankfurt’s view: the world is a maximal expression of God’s will, a will besotted with love ( willingly besotted, to be sure) unmediated by God’s intellect. Nor does Frankfurt’s God have any worry about selecting just the right world from among a class of rivals. Any world will do (as long as it is chockablock with stuff), because it will acquire its value from God’s will. Leibniz’s God creates a world that Leibniz takes to be the maximal expression of reason , a world that is the best possible, as Leibniz puts it, in virtue of being “the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena.”21 An uncharitable soul might think that for Leibniz’s God, creation is very much like finding an elegant solution to a mathematical problem. Frankfurt’s account is strong where Leibniz’s account is weak, namely, as a response to the question “Why would God create anything?” Conversely, Leibniz’s account is strong where Frankfurt’s is weak. If, as Frankfurt maintains, things in general have no value independent of the attitudes others take towards them, then we have no way to account for what many theists believe, that God is not good because we admire him, nor even because he admires himself. Perhaps by now you harbor the suspicion that the world that Frankfurt’s God creates just is the same world as the world that Leibniz’s God creates. I can point to nothing to allay that suspicion. Even if the suspicion were confirmed, it would remain true that Frankfurt and Leibniz disagree about how the mind of God operates in creating. As can happen with philosophical disagreement, however, the disputants share a common assumption that spawns the disagreement and that in itself is questionable. I shall use exposure and rejection of this assumption as the first step to what I take to be a more satisfactory account of God’s love for his creatures. SIMPLICITY The common assumption I impute to Frankfurt and Leibniz is what can be called the separation thesis. It maintains that the will and intellect are two separate (but interacting) modules, one responsible, roughly, for desires, the other, roughly, for beliefs. Because the separation thesis has been so pervasive in philosophical and psychological accounts of human mental structure and behavior, it is natural to project it onto the divine mental structure and to suppose, therefore, that divine behavior results from God’s will interacting with God’s intellect. Although the separation thesis is neutral about questions of domination, philosophers have found it hard to resist speculation as to which module is, or should be, in charge over the other. (Think of the difference between Plato and Hume on the relation

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Page 67 between reason and the passions.) So it is here: Frankfurt assigns priority to God’s will; Leibniz, to God’s intellect. They thus offer differing accounts of what prompts creation even though the accounts might converge on the same world being created. In rejecting the separation thesis in the case of God, I do not take myself to be rejecting a part of folk psychology. I am presenting instead a picture of God in which God is not like ordinary folk. The picture is inspired by the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS), according to which God, unlike ordinary creatures, has no parts. Robust versions of the DDS assert that God has no spatial parts (as befits a spiritual being), no temporal parts (no past or future distinct from an eternal present), and no metaphysical parts (no distinction between essential attributes and the subject of which they are attributes).22 For present purposes all I need is a modest segment of the DDS, namely, a denial of the separation thesis to the divine mental architecture. Leibniz’s will may be a module distinct from Leibniz’s intellect, but no similar modular plurality is to be found in God. Frankfurt’s preferred mode of speaking favors (1) The world is an outpouring of a supremely loving will. Leibniz endorses (2) The world is an expression of a supremely rational intellect. From the viewpoint of the DDS, (1) and (2) necessarily make the same claim: an outpouring of the divine will just is an expression of the divine intellect. To put the point differently, consider this analogy. When Jones says that the highest mountain in the world is Everest while Smith counters that the highest mountain in the world is Chomolungma, we can say that the dispute between them is merely verbal, or merely epistemological: Jones and Smith are necessarily reporting the same fact (if they report a fact at all). The dispute evaporates once one realizes that Everest = Chomolungma. In similar fashion a defender of the DDS can regard (1) and (2) as saying the same thing. Even so, the analogy is not perfect. Jones and Smith both say something that in itself is accurate and unproblematic. The DDS defender will insist, however, that the language of (1) and (2) encourages continued and unwarranted application to God of the separation thesis. It would be better to invent less misleading terminology and fuse (1) and (2) into something like (3) The world is an outpouring of a supremely loving and rational wintellect. The DDS is not the sort of doctrine that commands everyone’s immediate assent. Its philosophical acceptance depends on what light it might

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Page 68 shed on various issues in philosophical theology. In the present case it helps to resolve the weaknesses pointed out earlier in Frankfurt’s and Leibniz’s accounts. It was a weakness of Frankfurt’s account that it had no plausible way to explain God’s goodness. On one of the more robust versions of the DDS, God is goodness itself, a goodness independent of all attitudes and the source of goodness in all other beings. Leibniz’s weakness was the inability to provide a reason why God would bother to create anything. But if God knows that he is goodness itself, knows that goodness entails loving-kindness, and knows that loving-kindness is best realized by sharing the gift of goodness with others, then God has all the reason (= all the will) he needs to create others on which to bestow goodness. SATISFICING Earlier I had planted two red flags next to the Platonic account of God’s motivation to create. The first flag signaled a complaint that the account proceeded negatively, not positively. Avoidance of miserliness —the signature element of the Platonic account—does not convey what loving-kindness does. To create out of loving-kindness is to be spiritually invested in what one creates. Mere avoidance of the charge of miserliness does not entail anything about the psychological relation between the creator and the thing created. Suppose that Antonio the luthier makes violins solely because he does not wish to be regarded as a kind of willful underachiever. It does not follow that Antonio cares about the violins he creates, except insofar as they tend to insulate him from a charge of being a slacker. It might be that he is not fazed by news of his violins being used as props to be destroyed ignominiously in Hollywood B movies. Things are different for Antonio’s fellow luthier, Andrea, who cares deeply about the careers of the violins he creates. Knowing the beautiful sound they can produce, Andrea wants his instruments to be in the hands of the best violinists interpreting masterpieces in the violin literature; country and western fiddlers need not apply. Andrea’s desire is agent-centered . Although it would be wonderful, from his point of view, if there were excellent violins in existence, it would be even more wonderful if there were excellent violins in existence because he has made (at least some of) them. A person does not have to be a Marxist to believe that not to care about creating, and not to care about what one creates, is to be alienated from one’s labor, thereby jeopardizing one’s flourishing.23 To be sure, in sending his violins out into the world Andrea has become more vulnerable than Antonio. Unlike Antonio, it matters to Andrea that his violins not fall into the hands of B movie directors or hack fiddlers. But at the same time, under Andrea’s guidance Andrea’s violins are given a chance of having their potential more fully realized than do Antonio’s violins. As a consequence, Andrea himself stands to have his life thereby enriched in a way in which Antonio does not. If alienation is a

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Page 69 condition that implies an agent’s involuntary lack of control over a set of circumstances, we may suppose that it is not a condition that can affect God. It does not follow, however, that God is invulnerable, a topic to which I return below. The second red flag was this. An omniscient, omnipotent being who is out simply to dodge a charge of miserliness is doomed to failure should any possible world that he creates be such that there are better possible worlds than it. It might seem that a similar liability confronts a being who wishes to create a world that is an object and expression of divine love, namely, that there might always be other worlds which that being could have created that would have been better objects and expressions of divine love. The two cases are not parallel. In theological contexts the notion of grace is frequently and specifically described as divine assistance required for human salvation. There is a more generic notion of grace, however, that is relevant for our present purposes. Adams characterizes this notion as “love that is not completely explained by the excellence of its object,” adding that “It is commonly and plausibly thought that the love of an infinite, transcendently good being for finite beings could not be anything but grace in this sense, on the ground that no finite excellence could deserve the love of such a transcendent being.”24 In order to test the case I wish to develop, let us suppose that there is no greatest possible world. And let us suppose further that not even omnipotent God can create beings that are infinitely excellent. (It can be argued that this latter supposition follows from the notion of creation.) Under these suppositions omniscient God will realize that it is impossible for him to create the best, because there simply is no best possible world to be created. Should this be the occasion for divine languor? No. Suppose that Andrea is crafting a violin with the intention that it be used for classical music. He believes that he could make a better violin, in terms of tonal quality, than the one he is making. But he also believes that the tonal superiority of the better violin is beyond the threshold of human hearing. Not even the most discerning musician or rabid audiophile would be able to tell the difference between the two instruments. Suppose further that there would be no extra expense to Andrea, in labor or materials, in making the better violin. He would in fact make the better violin if he intended it to be put to some quasi-scientific purpose for which the tonal superiority was relevant. But in the circumstances described, Andrea has no dispositive reason to make the better violin. He will craft a violin that is very good, adequate or more than adequate for the purpose to which it will be put. Andrea will thus satisfice . Satisficing can occur in a situation in which one may choose one from a number of courses of action whose outcomes can be ordered on some scale of increasing intensity. The chooser has some goal that she seeks to bring about. Specification of the goal and the chooser’s desires set a floor on the scale below which she will not choose, but the specification does not identify the floor with the (or a) ceiling, that is, there are points on the scale above the floor that the chooser

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Page 70 can rationally neglect. Satisficing is not to be confused with cost/benefit optimizing. Settling for a ninedollar payout when one could have had ten dollars is an example of optimizing if, under the circumstances, getting the extra one dollar would have required a two-dollar investment of resources. But taking the nine-dollar payout in these circumstances would not be satisficing. Now there would be nothing wrong with Andrea’s choosing to optimize in his situation. But neither is there anything wrong or irrational with his consciously rejecting optimization and choosing to satisfice. No doubt you see where I intend to go with the analogy, and you may wonder whether identifying the Great Artificer with the Great Satisficer borders on blasphemy. I think not, for reasons that emerge from reflecting on analogical similarities between divine creation and Andrea’s case, along with counterfactual variations of the two cases. First, the putative similarities. Andrea’s crafting and God’s creating are cases of purposeful production.25 In both cases a product comes into existence as a result of conscious, goaldirected activity. Thus, the cases differ from the way in which the Colorado River produced the Grand Canyon. Unlike Antonio, the cynical luthier, Andrea is emotionally invested in the violins he makes. Their flourishing in the ways in which a violin can flourish is a source of joy to him. We may argue similarly that a deity who fabricated a world simply to test the extent of his power, without any regard for the well-being of his creatures, has nothing to care for as a result of his exercise, nothing whose flourishing can be a source of joy to him. Such a being would not be perfectly good. Andrea is not to be faulted for making the violin he makes even though he believes that he could have made a better one. We have supposed that God could have created better worlds than the world he did create. Andrea gets off the hook because the better violin he could have made would not have served his purpose nor the interests of listeners any better that the violin he did make. We must ask, then, whether the better worlds that God could have created would have fulfilled his purpose or the interests of his creatures any better than the world he did create. In order to deal with this question I suggest that we consider some counterfactual variations of the two cases. Suppose that Andrea finds himself in a world in which human auditory acuity is better than it is in the actual world, better enough so that it can detect tonal qualities that pass by unnoticed in the actual world. If Andrea’s intentions remain fixed between these two worlds, then Andrea will not make the violin that satisficed in the actual world. He will make the better violin because it now makes a musical difference. The analogy suggests that we can suppose that God’s relevant intentions remain constant across possible worlds. We can also suppose that God’s relevant intentions are agent-centered, in particular, that it matters to God not only that he create but that he create. (That an agent knows that no one else is able to do what the agent can do does not disqualify the agent’s intention from being agentcentered.) As for the content of God’s intentions, we

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Page 71 may hazard the conjecture that they include the intention that the world be an expression of his love by being a manifestation of his goodness to the creatures that inhabit that world. Put stress on the clause “to the creatures that inhabit that world”: the fitness of a world as an expression of God’s love depends on the competencies of the denizens of that very world, and not, say, on the competencies of beings in some other possible world. To a limited extent Andrea calibrates his productive skills to fit the competencies of those who will appreciate his products. It is this phenomenon that allows him to satisfice in the situation as I described it. There is of course this difference between human violin-making and divine creating: Andrea has no say about the design and specification of human auditory capacities. He can make violins but he cannot make the audience that will hear them. God chooses the world to create and, in so choosing, chooses the world’s inhabitants. God’s task of calibrating a world to its inhabitants is, at bottom, a matter of creating a world that, at a minimum, matches its goodness to the sensory and cognitive capacities of its creatures. God’s intention that the created world be an expression of divine love does not constrain him to infuse into the world types or degrees of goodness that could never be detected or appreciated in that world. God’s love allows for satisficing. DOUBTS One should anticipate at this point the following series of ruminations. They signal the onset of the Problem of Evil, a problem I cannot begin to address adequately in this chapter. Objection the First: “I agree that there would be no point to embellishing the world with types and degrees of goodness that could never be experienced. But God could endow a world—he could have endowed our world, to take one pointed example—with fewer of the sorts of evils its inhabitants can experience.” Reply: perhaps. But it could be that God tailors a world in the way that loving parents behave towards their children, as described by Frankfurt: Parents who love their children take great care, if they are sensible, to avoid being indulgent. Their love does not motivate them to give their children whatever the children happen most to want. Rather, they show their love by being concerned about what is genuinely important to their children—in other words, by aiming to protect and to advance their children’s true interests.26 As for what appears to be a surplus of evil in the world, much of it could be owing to the misuse of human freedom. The dialectical moves and countermoves to be made here are as familiar as they are inconclusive. I have no resolution to offer.27

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Page 72 Objection the Second: “God could have created a souped-up alternative to the actual world, containing the types and degrees of goodness not found in the actual world and populated by us with our sensory and cognitive competencies enhanced to savor these exotica.” Reply: there are two considerations here that should be examined before one endorses this objection. First, in virtue of its having smarter inhabitants with more refined sensitivities, the alternative world may contain more horrendous evils than the actual world. Pace Plato, not all evildoing is attributable to ignorance. Will and intellect may be one in God, but they are not in humans. Second, it may be impossible, even for God, to upgrade our competencies or alter our wills while keeping our personal identities fixed. The inhabitants in the souped-up world might simply not be us. In light of these considerations, it is not clear that God would have expressed his love for us any more appropriately by having created the alternative world. Objection the Third: “If the only constraint that God’s goodness imposes on his creative choice is that the world be an adequate expression of God’s love for its inhabitants, then the world need not contain any sentient creatures. God could focus his loving attention exclusively on the growth of healthy plants, or the intricate arrangement of rock formations.” RESOLUTION Reply: now is the time to recall Reciprocation, Involuntariness, and Vulnerability. Many theists claim that creatures like us, who have reason and will, image God more closely than rocks and plants do. A world devoid of creatures like us could very well be adequate expression of God’s love for its inhabitants but not to its inhabitants. Add rational, willful creatures and you get a world, some of whose inhabitants may be capable of realizing that the world is an expression of God’s love and, in that realization come to love God in return. If Reciprocation is true, God’s love for these creatures will flourish only if they return that love in a way appropriate to them. Now think of the quandary that God might face should he want to create such beings. It might be that the separation thesis depicts a necessary feature of their mental architecture. That is, it might be that not even omnipotent God can create them with a ‘wintellect.’28 If so, then no matter how much of God’s goodness the world presents to their intellects, the wills of some of them might fail to respond with love for him. Their love must be given freely if it is to be given at all. This last claim may seem to contradict Frankfurt’s Involuntariness claim. And there seems to be something correct about Involuntariness; love is famously beyond our direct and immediate control. But here is Frankfurt’s diagnosis of why this is so:

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Page 73 Now the necessity that is characteristic of love does not constrain the movements of the will through an imperious surge of passion or compulsion by which the will is defeated and subdued. On the contrary, the constraint operates from within our own will itself. It is by our own will, and not by any external or alien force, that we are constrained.29 As Frankfurt understands Involuntariness, what makes love impossible to lodge (or dislodge) directly or immediately is the fact that love entails the endorsement of a suite of the lover’s first-order desires. Lovers love to love what they love. I shall leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine whether Involuntariness is at odds with giving love freely. What is clear is that if God chooses to create beings like us, seeking reciprocation of his love, he exposes himself to the risk of unrequited love. Or does he? Not so, according to Frankfurt; God is immune from Vulnerability: “For an infinite being, whose omnipotence makes it absolutely secure, even the most indiscriminate loving is safe. God need not be cautious. He runs no risks.”30 In reply, let me call in Andrea one last time. Let us suppose that once Andrea lets go of one of his prized violins, he cannot guarantee that it will not be misused. But if he hoards it to himself, it will never have the opportunity to flourish in its own proper way, and he will lose the opportunity to rejoice in its flourishing. Still, there is always the palpable risk that as he monitors a particular violin’s vicissitudes, Andrea will experience anger, disappointment, regret, perhaps even grief over what might have been but never will be. God faces similar vulnerabilities in creating willful beings who may or may not return his love. And recall that returning God’s love includes loving one’s neighbor. Andrea might take some small consolation in the fact that his instruments are incapable of despoiling or destroying themselves or other instruments. Omnipotence confers many immunities, but not immunity from a heavy heart. A GLIMPSE BEYOND It remains to be explained how creatures are supposed to return God’s love. For obvious reasons it cannot be the kind of solicitous love that craftspersons might have for their products or parents for their children. It seems simultaneously presumptuous and inadequate to suppose that creatures might befriend God. Presumptuous, if Aristotle is right, because if the disparity in virtue, vice, power, or anything else is too great between two parties, then the weaker party cannot expect to befriend the stronger.31 Inadequate, because, according to Scripture, we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength: I doubt that friends can or should muster that kind of intensity towards each other.32 In Finite and Infinite Goods,

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Page 74 Adams has argued for a conception of love of God as admiration of excellence. There is something attractive about this conception.33 I am inclined to think, however, that its account of motivation needs further support to show how admiration can be turned into allegiance. That is a subject for another chapter.34 NOTES 1. Variations on this theme are to be found in J. David Velleman (1999), Niko Kolodny (2003), and Harry Frankfurt (2004). 2. Eleonore Stump puts forward this view, in exposition of Aquinas, in (2006b). Frankfurt appears to endorse the adoption of interests version; see Frankfurt (2004), 37 and 80. Beloved’s Good is denied by Velleman (1999), 353. 3. Kolodny (2003), 136. Stump argues that valuing a relationship is neither necessary nor sufficient for love. It is not necessary in cases of unrequited love at first sight, for example, Dante’s love for Beatrice. It is not sufficient in cases in which a relationship is valued but in which love is absent, for example, Dante’s long-distance relationship with his wife. See Stump (2006b), 26–27. 4. Reciprocation appears out of place in some cases of love as the admiration of excellence, because the object of love, for example, an artwork, may not be the sort of thing that is capable of responding. See Robert Adams (1999), passim. Frankfurt denies Reciprocation; see Frankfurt (2004), 42. 5. Frankfurt (2004), 44 and 46. 6. Velleman (1999), 361. See also Kolodny (2003), 151–152. 7. See, for example, Stump and Kretzmann (1981). 8. See Frankfurt (2004), 38–39. 9. Plato, Symposium , 206b–209e. 10. Frankfurt (2004), 38–39. 11. Ibid. , pp. 62–63. It is not clear from the text that Frankfurt endorses this picture, as opposed to simply admiring it. One account that approximates Frankfurt’s description takes as its point of departure the “Dionysian Principle,” that “Goodness is by its very nature diffusive of itself and (thereby) of being.” The name and this statement of the principle is to be found in Norman Kretzmann (1999a), 217. If God is essentially goodness itself and goodness itself entails limitless love, then, by the Dionysian Principle, God cannot help but bring into existence creatures as subjects upon which to lavish his love. 12. Frankfurt (2004), 46. 13. Frankfurt (1971). 14. The thesis that desire does not entail the absence of the object of desire is endorsed by Robert Adams (1999), 133–135, and is attributed to Aquinas in Stump (2006b), 28. Another example is provided, if Aquinas is correct, by God’s being necessarily existent and essentially good: as such, God wills his own being and goodness necessarily; Summa contra Gentiles , 1.80. 15. For further discussion of Leibniz and references to relevant texts, see William E. Mann (1991). 16. Robert Adams (1994), 22. 17. Counterfactual modus tollens is valid, but not counterfactual contraposition. It might be that Leibniz’s counterfactual is equivalent to “It is necessary that if God was perfectly good, then God chose to create the best possible world.” If so, however, that will depend on the modal status of “God is perfectly good” and “God chooses to create the best possible world,” along with a determination whether counterfactuals with impossible antecedents

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Page 75 are always true and whether counterfactuals with necessary consequents are always true. See David Lewis (1973a), 35–36. 18. For a recent discussion of related issues, see William Rowe (2004). 19. These points are discussed penetratingly in Kretzmann (1991b). 20. Plato, Timaeus , 29e. Plato’s demiurge is ill suited to fill the role of God, but is as close a candidate as anything one can find in Plato’s writings. 21. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics , sec. 6 in Leibniz (1989), 39. 22. See, for example, Mann (1982), Stump and Kretzmann (1985), and Stump (2003), Chapter 3. 23. See Frankfurt (2004), Chapter 3 for related remarks concerning the relations between love for others and self-love. 24. Robert Adams (1999), 151. 25. We may regard fabrication, invention, artistic composition, and creation as species of purposeful production, with the understanding that instances of the species may nonetheless work in radically different ways. In particular, many theists will insist that divine creation is production ex nihilo . 26. Frankfurt (2004), 78–79. 27. One particularly frisky move is to ascribe all evil in the world, including the so-called natural evils, to the misuse of freedom, whether human or demonic. For a classic statement of this move, see Alvin Plantinga (1967), 149–151. 28. I use the term ‘wintellect’ to emphasize that according to one strand of the doctrine of divine simplicity, there is no distinction between will and intellect in God. 29. Frankfurt (2004), 46. 30. Ibid. , 62. 31. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , 8.7, 1159a33–35. 32. Deut. 6:5, Matt. 22:37, Mark 12:30, Luke 10:27. 33. See, for example, Mann (2005), 293–295. 34. An earlier version of this chapter benefitted from comments by Kevin Timpe.

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Page 76 5 Narrative, Liturgy, and the Hiddenness of God Michael C. Rea Next to the problem of evil, the most important objection to belief in God is the problem of divine hiddenness.1 This latter problem starts from the supposition that God exists—after all, God is hidden only if God exists—and then reduces that supposition to absurdity by pointing out that if God exists, then the following mutually inconsistent claims are true: P1. God has allowed himself to remain hidden from many people. P2. It would be bad for an omnipotent, omniscient God to remain hidden from anyone. P3. God, being perfectly good, cannot do anything that is bad. In defense of the first premise, something like the following two (alleged) facts are standardly cited: INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE: For many people, the available a priori and empirical evidence in support of God’s existence is inconclusive: one can be fully aware of it and at the same time rationally believe that God does not exist. ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: Many people—believers and unbelievers alike—have never had an experience that seems to them to be a direct experience or awareness of the love or presence of God; and those who do have such experiences have them rarely. Obviously not everyone will agree that these two claims are true. At the same time, many atheists and agnostics, and some theists, would insist that they are not only true, but understated. For purposes here I’ll grant that they are true and I won’t explore the question of whether stronger versions might be defensible as well. Plausibly strengthened versions of these claims—e.g., that the evidence for most people or even for all people is inconclusive at best—wouldn’t affect the main argument of this chapter. But using them here would make it more difficult to motivate the problem, it would make it harder to get away with simply granting

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Page 77 that they are true, and it would open me up to the charge of attacking an unsophisticated target. One might wonder whether the obtaining of INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE and ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE really implies that God is hidden. I’ll take up this question in the next section. But, obviously enough, nothing of great substance hangs on this matter either. The proponent of the hiddenness argument might simply replace talk about divine hiddenness with talk about the obtaining of INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE and ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. The new argument would then proceed with much the same force as the original. Let us for the moment concede that INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE and ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE together imply that God is hidden. What now of the second premise? The basic problem with divine hiding is that it seems inconsistent with the following thesis: DIVINE CONCERN: God strongly desires to promote the well-being of all of his rational creatures, both now and in the afterlife. The reason is straightforward. All of the major theistic religions agree that belief in God is vital for our present and future well-being. But a world in which God is hidden is one in which God is doing far less than he could (if he is omnipotent and omniscient) to promote rational theistic belief. Hence, it is one in which God is doing far less than he could to promote our well-being. Moreover, divine hiddenness is a source of suffering in believers, who often feel abandoned, neglected, unloved, or rejected by the being to whom they have devoted their lives and whom they have been taught to regard as their loving heavenly Father. Of course, it is conceivable that God have a good reason for remaining hidden. Suppose, for example, that divine hiddenness promotes some greater good for humanity that God rightly desires more than he desires the well-being of the individuals from whom he is hidden. Or suppose that, contrary to initial appearances, for every individual S from whom God is hidden, God’s hiddenness from S promotes S’s well-being. Then the apparent conflict with DIVINE CONCERN disappears. So the problem of divine hiddenness remains only if we suppose that divine hiddenness does not promote any good the promotion of which would justify God in permitting whatever bad things come from divine hiddenness. In simpler terms: The problem remains only if we suppose that divine hiddenness does not promote any ‘God-justifying good’. Not surprisingly, once we set aside attempts to deny P1, the bulk of the remaining literature on divine hiddenness is aimed at identifying possible God-justifying goods.2 The presumption in this literature seems to be that the only viable candidates are human goods (e.g., freedom, the cultivation of certain kinds of virtue or prevention of certain kinds of vice, etc.).3 Though various other considerations might just as easily motivate the

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Page 78 presumption, at least one powerful motivation is the fact that it is a logical consequence of the following general principle endorsed by various prominent writers on the problem of evil: BENEFIT TO THE SUFFERER: God is justified in allowing undeserved suffering to come to an individual X for the sake of greater goods only if among those greater goods are goods that benefit X .4 If BENEFIT TO THE SUFFERER is true, then it looks like human goods have to be included among the goods (if any) that justify God in allowing INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE and ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE to obtain. In the present chapter, however, I want to defend a rather different line. In particular, I want to defend a response to the problem of divine hiddenness that is consistent with the following claim: NO HUMAN GOOD: It is not the case that God permits INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE and ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE in order to secure human goods. NO HUMAN GOOD is consistent with the claim that God permits INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE and ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE in order to secure greater goods . It is also consistent with the claim that the obtaining of INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE and ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE in fact promote human goods (that may or may not count as ‘greater’, God-justifying goods). What it rules out is the idea that whatever human goods may be promoted by divine hiddenness are the goods for the sake of which God remains hidden. Drawing in part on recent work by Eleonore Stump and Sarah Coakley, I shall argue that even if NO HUMAN GOOD is true, divine hiddenness does not cast doubt on DIVINE CONCERN. My argument will turn on three central claims: (a) that ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE and INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE are better thought of as constituting divine silence rather than divine hiddenness , (b) that even if NO HUMAN GOOD is true, divine silence is compatible with DIVINE CONCERN so long as God has provided a way for rational creatures to find him and to experience his presence despite the silence, and (c) that there is some reason to think that Biblical narratives and liturgical acts are vehicles by which we might find and experience the presence of God. Each of these claims will be defended, in turn, in the three sections that follow. DIVINE HIDDENNESS AND DIVINE SILENCE Consider the following biconditional: H1: God is hidden ↔ God permits INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE & ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE to obtain.

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Page 79 I don’t think that H1 has been explicitly affirmed by anyone writing on the problem of divine hiddenness. But it seems to be largely taken for granted in the literature.5 My goal in this section is to provide reasons for rejecting H1. In doing so, I don’t take myself necessarily to be arguing against widely held views about the nature of hiddenness. Rather, I take myself simply to be providing reasons to reject a widely accepted terminological convention. Still, I think that the argument of this section matters; for our terminology colors the way in which we think about the problem at hand. If God hides from his creatures, then it seems he ought to have a good reason for doing so—a reason that somehow involves their good and not just his own personal preferences. But if God is merely silent , then it is not at all clear that he needs to have any human-oriented reason for doing so. At any rate, so I will argue later on. The problem with H1 is just this: It is equivalent to the conjunction of two conditionals, one true and the other false. The true conditional is the left-to-right one: H1a: God is hidden → God permits INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE & ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE to obtain. If INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE were false, then there would be empirical or a priori evidence for the existence of God in light of which atheism would be irrational. In that event, we would want to say that God is not hidden, but manifest in the empirical or a priori evidence. Likewise, if ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE were false, then God would be manifest to most people by way of private, subjective experience. Perhaps God would be hidden from some; but it wouldn’t make sense to say that God is hidden simpliciter. Thus, God is hidden only if God permits INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE and ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE to obtain. But now consider the other conditional involved in H1: H1b: God permits INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE & ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE to obtain → God is hidden. This one is open to a rather obvious objection. Suppose there’s an object—a car, perhaps—that is in plain sight in Wilma’s driveway but which Wilma can’t see because her eyes are closed. The car isn’t hidden from her; she’s just not looking. Indeed, even if someone had put the car in her driveway knowing that she wouldn’t be looking, we wouldn’t want to say that the person had hidden the car from her. Now suppose there’s something analogous to ‘opening our eyes’ that we all can do that would allow us to receive experiences or other evidence of the presence of God. And suppose that, as it happens, most of us haven’t opened our eyes in this analogous sense.6 In that event, INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE and ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE might well be true, and true by divine permission; but there seems to be no reason (yet) to say that God is hidden.

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Page 80 Admittedly, more information might change the verdict. Suppose Fred knows that the one place in the world that Wilma can’t bear to look is her own driveway—she always closes her eyes when she approaches it. Suppose further that Fred has put the car there in a deliberate attempt to conceal it from her. In that case, the car is hidden—hidden in plain sight, as it were. What matters here is the intention to conceal. Likewise, if we think that ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE is due to some deliberate intention on God’s part to conceal himself, then (given INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE) we have reason to say that God is hidden. Or maybe there is some other bit of information that we could acquire that would lead us to say that God is hidden. My point here is simply that the obtaining of INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE and ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE by divine permission is not enough.7 The term I would prefer to use in characterizing what we seem to know about God’s self-disclosure to the bulk of humanity is, therefore, not hiddenness but rather silence. To say that something is hidden implies either that it has been deliberately concealed or that it has been concealed (deliberately or not) to such a degree that those from whom it is hidden can’t reasonably be expected to find it.8 This is why divine hiddenness would seem to require justification. If God cares about our well-being, one would think that, absent special reasons for doing otherwise, he would put us in circumstances such that we could reasonably be expected eventually to find him. But INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE and ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE don’t imply that God is deliberately concealing his existence from us; nor do they imply, on their own, that we can’t reasonably be expected eventually to find him. What they do imply is that God hasn’t made a special effort to ensure that most of his rational creatures detect (as such) whatever signs of his existence there might be or whatever messages he might be sending us. I don’t mean to suggest that talk of divine hiding is categorically inappropriate. Indeed, various Biblical writers talk explicitly of God hiding his face and concealing his presence, and Isaiah exclaims outright, “Surely you are a God who hides himself!”9 But in all of these cases the suggestion is not that God has so obscured his presence that, for the most part, people cannot reasonably be expected eventually to find him. Rather, the suggestion is simply that God has made his presence less obvious, so that seeking is required in order to find him. In other words, the suggestion is that God is, at most, partially hidden, not that he is hidden simpliciter. I also don’t mean to suggest that INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE and ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE imply that God is totally silent. Both are compatible with God’s having delivered special revelations to select people—for example, the authors of scripture, the prophets, witnesses to the miracles of Jesus, and so on. Nor do I mean to suggest that God isn’t, even now, sending ‘messages’ to all of his rational creatures that could be accessed if only we would do something analogous to ‘opening our eyes’. The point,

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Page 81 again, is just that God is evidently not making any special effort to ensure that most of us receive communicative content from him. A man who chooses to whisper rather than shout instructions to his children, knowing all the while that they cannot (yet) hear him over the racket they are making, is being silent toward his children in the sense that I have in mind. Given INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE and ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, it seems that we can safely conclude that, in just the same sense, God (if he exists) is being silent toward most of us. Henceforth, when I speak of divine silence I will be speaking simply of the fact that INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE and ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE both obtain. As I understand it, then, divine silence is compatible with God’s having provided some widely and readily accessible way for his creatures to find him and to experience his presence, albeit indirectly, despite his silence. DIVINE SILENCE AND DIVINE CONCERN The question, now, is whether divine silence casts any doubt upon DIVINE CONCERN, given NO HUMAN GOOD. In other words: Assuming divine silence doesn’t contribute to our well-being or to any greater human good, does the fact of divine silence give us any reason to doubt that God cares about us? It is easy to see why one might think that it does. Consider, for example, this excerpt from the private writings of Mother Teresa: Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The child of your love—and now become as the most hated one—the one You have thrown away as unwanted—unloved. I call, I cling, I want—and there is no One to answer—no One on Whom I can cling—no, No One.—Alone. The darkness is so dark….. The loneliness of the heart that wants love is unbearable.—Where is my faith?—even deep down, right in, there is nothing but emptiness & darkness.—My God—how painful is this unknown pain. It pains without ceasing…. I am told God loves me—and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul….. The whole time smiling—Sisters & people pass such remarks.—They think my faith, trust & love are filling my very being & that the intimacy with God and union to His will must be absorbing my heart.—Could they but know—and how my cheerfulness is the cloak by which I cover the emptiness & misery.—What are You doing My God to one so small?10 Mother Teresa devoted the bulk of her life to the service of God and, if we can believe her own assessments of her own inner life, loved and longed for union with God throughout her life in a way that was deeper, more fervent, and more authentic than most of the rest of us even aspire toward,

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Page 82 much less attain. Yet here, toward the end of her life, she is driven to absolute despair and misery by persistent silence on the part of God. And this experience of hers is hardly unique: many religious believers experience, to varying degrees, precisely the same sort of misery and despair, the same feelings of abandonment and isolation, and the same heartrending cosmic loneliness in the face of what they take to be unrelenting silence on the part of the God they serve and worship. What loving father would treat his children so? How could a compassionate God refrain from answering the cries of Mother Teresa and others like her? Wouldn’t any human parent—flawed and selfish as we are—find it irresistible to draw near to his child and whisper words of comfort and affection? Shouldn’t we expect at least as much from a being whose love is supposed to be perfect? The objection implicit in the rhetorical questions is altogether natural; but it is flawed. It is flawed in just the same way in which complaints about the behavior of human persons are often flawed: it depends on a particular interpretation of behavior that can in fact be interpreted in any of a number of different ways, depending upon what assumptions we make about the person’s beliefs, desires, motives, dispositions, and overall personality. A senior member of your department doesn’t greet you in the hallway. Is he offended by you? Does he think you’re beneath him? Is he depressed and having a bad day? Or is that just him , a little preoccupied and not really noticing his surroundings? You’re on a day trip with a colleague from another country. You try a few times to strike up conversation, but it never takes off and shortly you find that over an hour has passed in almost total silence. Is your colleague disrespecting you? Is she playing a power game, trying to force you to carry the conversation or some such thing? Does she find you boring, or intimidating? Or is the silence an indication of nothing more or less than the fact that she is somewhat introverted and doesn’t happen to have a whole lot to say (to anyone) at the moment? Answering questions like this with any reliability requires substantial information about what sort of person one is dealing with—about the person’s cultural background, about what sorts of social norms he or she is likely to recognize and respect, about his or her views about what various kinds of behavior (both verbal and not) communicate to others, about his or her general ‘style’ of interacting with other people, and so on. But if this is what it takes to interpret the behavior of an ordinary human person, imagine how difficult it must be to interpret the behavior of an invisible and transcendent divine person. Seen in this light, the suggestion that divine silence in and of itself somehow indicates disinterest or lack of love and concern on God’s part is absurd. Even granting the complete reliability and transparency of Biblical testimony about God, we have precious little by way of clear and reliable information about God’s personality and about his general ‘style’ of interacting with others; and to ask about God’s “culture” or about what sorts of social norms God would likely recognize and respect seems to border

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Page 83 on the overly anthropomorphic. God is as alien and “wholly other” from us as it is possible for another person to be. Thus, it is hard to see how we could say with any confidence at all what his silence indicates. Indeed, even to suppose that divine silence is unlikely given divine concern seems to me to involve quite a lot of unwarranted assumptions about the degree to which divine modes of interaction would likely resemble 21st-century human modes of interaction. Granted, divine silence would indicate a lack of concern for rational creatures if we had good reason to think that God had provided no way for us to find him or to experience his presence in the midst of his silence. This would indicate a lack of concern because it would indicate that God is trying to prevent us from finding him, or at least doing nothing to help, and thus bringing about something that is both intrinsically very bad for us and totally beyond our control. In the next section, however, I’ll argue that, in fact, there is reason to think that God has provided ways for us to find him and to experience his presence in the midst of his silence. The point of this section thus far, then, might be summed up this way: Silence is an interpretable kind of behavior; and, as with any other person, God’s behavior doesn’t wear its interpretation on its sleeve —it can be understood only in the light of substantial background information. To be sure, divine silence could be an indication of divine rejection or lack of concern. But that interpretation is entirely optional, given our evidence. Divine silence might instead simply be a reflection of the fact that God prefers to communicate with us and to draw us into his presence in ways other than ones that would render either INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE or ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE false. It might just be a reflection of God’s personality, so to speak. The pressing question, of course, is what to do with the fact that God’s silence is painful for us. Many believers experience crippling doubt, overwhelming sadness, and ultimate loss of faith as a result of ongoing silence from their heavenly Father. On the assumption that God exists and that a loving relationship with God is a great good, it would appear that many people have been positively damaged by divine silence. Isn’t it just this that leads us to take divine silence as evidence of God’s lack of concern? Perhaps silence is just an outgrowth of God’s personality; but then, the objector might say, God’s personality is just that of a distant, unconcerned ruler rather than that of a loving and attentive parent. The problem with this objection is that it completely ignores the fact that sometimes our being pained by another person’s behavior is our problem rather than theirs—due to our own dysfunctional attitudes and ways of relating to others, our own epistemic or moral vices, our own immaturity, and the like. In such cases, it is our responsibility to find a way out of our suffering rather than the other person’s responsibility to stop behaving in the ways that cause us pain.11 As it happens, in cases like this we can benefit if the other person exercises her right to persist in her behavior: we can

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Page 84 grow in maturity or in our ability to relate to others, for example. But if we are indeed unreasonably pained by her behavior, then her right to persist in her behavior is independent of this potential benefit: she can persist regardless of whether she believes that the benefit is at all likely to be realized (indeed, even if she somehow knows that it will not be). To suppose otherwise—to suppose that she would have to stop if there weren’t some benefit to persisting that somehow outweighed or defeated our suffering— is, I think, just to deny that it is possible for one person to be unreasonably pained by the behavior of another. Those who do deny this cannot make use of the response I am offering to the problem of divine hiddenness; but, to my mind, denying it is wholly implausible. Let me be clear here about terminology. As I am using the term, unreasonable suffering refers to suffering that is (among other things) the result of vice, immaturity, or some other disposition on the part of the sufferer for which the sufferer is morally responsible, and which consequently places no general demand upon the person causing the suffering to stop her problematic behavior. So in cases where X is suffering unreasonably in response to the behavior of Y , it will be wholly appropriate for Y to persist even if no greater goods come to X or to other people as a result of her doing so. Compassion for X might require that Y do something to help X get past her suffering. But it will not require that X desist from her behavior. The suffering of others should always move us, of course; but it is simply not true that compassion, love, or any other virtue requires us to submit unboundedly to manipulation by the unreasonable responses of others. Moreover, if the problematic behavior is silence, compassion will not even require that Y explain her behavior or act in other ways that make it clear to X that she is trying to show compassion; for doing either of these things is incompatible with maintaining silence. Thus, if it is possible for one person to suffer unreasonably in response to the silence of another, then it is possible that there be persons X and Y such that X is pained by Y ’s silence, but it is wholly appropriate for Y to remain silent even though her silence promotes no greater good for X or for anyone else, and even if it appears (falsely) to X and to others as if she is making no effort at showing compassion toward X . Indeed, not only might it be wholly appropriate for Y to remain silent under these conditions, but her doing so might be consistent with the supposition that she has perfect love for X . For to suppose otherwise is to suppose that her remaining silent is a failure of love on her part, which implies that X ’s suffering, no matter what the ultimate explanation for it might be, places an automatic demand upon Y to desist from her silence, which, in turn, implies that X ’s suffering is not unreasonable after all. Obviously the suggestion here is that believers who are pained by divine silence might be in just this sort of situation with respect to God. That is, it might be that our suffering in the face of divine silence is unreasonable, due more to our own immaturity or dysfunction than to any lack of kindness on God’s part. Perhaps it results from our own untrusting, uncharitable

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Page 85 interpretations of divine silence, or from an inappropriate refusal to accept God for who God is and to accept God’s preferences about when and in what ways to communicate with us. Perhaps there are ways of experiencing the world that are fully available to us (either as we are now or as we would be if only we would strive for maturity in the ways that we ought to) and that would allow us to be content with or even to appreciate the silence of God in the midst of our joys and sufferings. It helps, in this vein, to be reminded of a fact about God and a fact about ordinary human relationships. The fact about God is that the most enigmatic, eccentric, and complicated people we might ever encounter in literature or in real life are, by comparison with God, utterly familiar and mundane. The fact about human relationships is that experiencing the silence of another person can, in the right context and seen in the right way, be an incredibly rich way of experiencing the person—all the more so with a person who is sufficiently beyond you in intellect, wisdom, and virtue. A wise and virtuous person who is utterly beyond you intellectually and silently leads you on a journey might teach you a lot more about herself and about other things on your journey than she would if she tried to tell you verbally all of the things that she wants to teach you. In such a case, objecting to the silence, interpreting it as an offence, or wishing that the person would just talk to you rather than make you figure things out for yourself might just be childish—an immature refusal to tolerate legitimate differences among persons and to be charitable in the way that you interpret another’s behavior. And there is no reason to think that the person would owe it to you to cater to these objections—even if her decision to be silent was arrived at not for the sake of your greater good, but simply because that’s who she is, and that’s how she prefers to communicate with people like you.12 I imagine that some might be tempted to caricature the view I have been developing as follows: SILENT FATHER: God, on this view, is like a man who neglects his children, leaving them bereft and unloved while he sits in stony silence thinking “I just gotta be me.” The suffering that results from this sort of behavior is intense, and (if it truly promotes no human good) entirely gratuitous; for, just as it would cost a man nothing to break his silence momentarily to whisper words of love and encouragement to his children, likewise it would cost God nothing to deviate from his own preferred mode of interaction to communicate divine love more widely and fully to all of creation. But there are at least two problems with the caricature that, I think, undermine its force as an objection against my view. First, the Silent Father analogy is apt only if God’s behavior toward the world is more like the God of deism than the God of classical theism. The

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Page 86 deistic God is highly non-interactive; the God of classical theism, on the other hand, is intimately involved with creation, active in revealing himself (albeit not as clearly as many of us would prefer), and —according to the Christian story—concerned enough about creation to become incarnate, suffer, and die on a cross for the sake of humankind. Of course, the objector will complain that we do not have enough evidence even about God’s existence, much less his behavior, to be sure that these claims on the part of theists are true. But the relevant point here is that neither do we have enough evidence to be sure that they are false. There are, in other words, no grounds for saying with any confidence that if God exists, he is neglectful of creation in the way that the Silent Father is neglectful of his children. Second, the caricature fails to take seriously the possibility that God might have a genuine, robust personality, and that it might be deeply good for God to live out his own personality. One odd feature of much contemporary philosophy of religion is that it seems to portray God as having a “personality” that is almost entirely empty, allowing his behavior to be almost exhaustively determined by facts about how it would be best for others for an omnipotent being to behave. But why should we grant this portrayal, or anything like it? God is supposed to be a person not only of unsurpassable love and goodness, but of unsurpassable beauty.13 And it is not at all clear that God could be that sort of person if the portrayal of God as (effectively) a cosmic, others-oriented utility-maximizing machine were correct. For it is hard to see how a person could manage to be unsurpassably beautiful, or even very beautiful at all, without having a highly complex personality and motivational structure. But if we grant that God has a highly complex personality and motivational structure, and if we also grant that it would be deeply good for God to live out God’s personality, then even straightforward utilitarian calculations might rule in favor of God’s persisting in silence despite the suffering that it causes (provided God is behaving compassionately toward his creatures in other ways, and so on). Or the goods and evils here might be incommensurable: it might be good for God to be who God is, and bad for us to suffer; and there might be no metric for comparing the good with the bad. Either way, if it is deeply good for God to live out the divine personality, and if our suffering is furthermore unreasonable, the result of immaturity or other dysfunctions that we can and should overcome anyway, then I see no reason why even perfect love would require God to desist from his preferred mode of interaction in order to alleviate our suffering On the view that I am developing, then, it is not true that the suffering produced by divine silence is gratuitous; for it is not true that divine silence serves no good whatsoever. If, as I am suggesting, divine silence is an out-growth of the divine personality or of God’s preferences about how to interact with creatures like us, then divine silence is plausibly thought of as good in and of itself, or good as a means to the expression of the perfectly good and beautiful divine personality. Moreover, if, as I have suggested, there are

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Page 87 ways of experiencing divine silence that we would find non-burdensome or even beautiful, and if God’s persisting in his silence provides opportunities for us to grow in maturity or in our ability to relate to others, then divine silence might even be good for us. My point is simply that it need not be good for us in order for God to be justified in persisting in silence; for divine silence might promote goods without promoting human goods. The question now is whether it is really plausible to suppose that our suffering in response to divine silence is the result of something like immaturity or dysfunction that we ought to overcome on our own. Can we really say such a thing about Mother Teresa, for example? Initially we might balk at saying such a thing. Mother Teresa was widely revered in her lifetime as a woman of great wisdom and virtue.14 Isn’t it implausible at best (perhaps even scandalously offensive or worse) to suggest that her relationship with God was marred by dysfunction and immaturity? Moreover, even if one can say such things about Mother Teresa, isn’t it simply incredible to suppose that everyone who suffers in response to divine silence does so as a result of some sort of dysfunction and immaturity? Here we must remember our dialectical context. We are assuming that if God exists, then God is perfectly good; we are also assuming that if God exists, divine silence is not permitted for the sake of greater goods or for the prevention of comparable or worse evils. So our only alternatives here are to say (a) that something like the story I have just offered is true, (b) that God does not exist, or (c) that some alternative story consistent with the assumptions laid out in the introduction of this paper is true. Option (a) posits widespread cognitive or emotional dysfunction, even in the likes of Mother Teresa; but, notably, so does option (b). If God does not exist, then the religious experiences that led Mother Teresa to found the Missionaries of Charity and to devote herself to work in the slums of Calcutta were nonveridical, probably hallucinatory;15 the cognitive faculties responsible for the maintenance of her religious belief are (probably) unreliable;16 and her ongoing cries to God to break his silence are ultimately just one-sided conversations that express a longing for her childhood hallucinatory experiences to return and both validate and reinforce her ongoing devotion to a being that does not (and probably cannot) exist.17 More or less the same would hold true for the rest of us who suffer in response to “divine silence” as well. In short, religious believers who suffer in response to divine silence suffer from serious cognitive dysfunction on both of the main options that this paper has in view; so the fact that (a) posits serious cognitive dysfunction in the likes of Mother Teresa can’t be a reason for preferring (b) to (a). It could, I suppose, be a reason for preferring (c) to (a). But that reason is defeated, I think, by the fact that no viable alternative (consistent with all of the assumptions laid out in the introductory section) is yet available. And, in any case, option (c) isn’t something that an atheist can accept, so it’s not something that helps those who want to use the problem of divine hiddenness as an argument against the existence of God.

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Page 88 Note, however, that everything I’ve said so far about why divine silence need not conflict with DIVINE CONCERN has been said under the supposition that the following claim is true: DIVINE SELF-DISCLOSURE: God has provided some widely and readily accessible way of finding him and experiencing his presence despite his silence. If that supposition is false—if there is no divine self-disclosure whatsoever—then most of what I have said in this section falls flat. For in that case, most of us have been entirely cut off from God’s presence; and if we have been entirely cut off from God’s presence, then I can’t very well argue that divine silence might possibly be interpreted as a result of God’s desire to communicate with or be present to us in other ways. If we have been entirely cut off from God’s presence, God then has done or permitted something that is both devastatingly harmful to us and totally out of our control, and it is much harder to make plausible the suggestion that God has taken reasonable steps to be compassionate towards us in the midst of our suffering. Thus, there is a more serious, perhaps even intractable problem reconciling God’s behavior with NO HUMAN GOOD and DIVINE CONCERN. Thus, in the next section I will argue that there is good reason to think that DIVINE SELF-DISCLOSURE obtains despite the fact that God is silent. This will complete my defense of the claim that divine silence is compatible with the conjunction of DIVINE CONCERN and NO HUMAN GOOD. NARRATIVE, LITURGY, AND THE PRESENCE OF GOD My goal in this section is to defend DIVINE SELF-DISCLOSURE. The literature on divine hiddenness seems largely to take it for granted that DIVINE SELF-DISCLOSURE is true only if either INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE or ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE is false. Presumably the idea is that the presence of God is widely and readily accessible only if either there is conclusive empirical or a priori evidence of the existence of God, or many people are having subjective experiences that at least seem to be direct experiences of the presence of God. What this supposition ignores, however, is the possibility of mediated experiences of the presence of God through media that are themselves widely and readily accessible. In order to make a case for the conclusion that this possibility ought to be taken seriously, I’ll first have to explain what I mean by ‘mediated experiences of the presence of God’; then I’ll have to provide plausible candidates for media through which those experiences might be had. The difference between mediated experiences of an object or event and direct experiences of the same thing is like the difference between Parfit-style quasi-memory of a thing and direct perception of it. As Parfit

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Page 89 characterizes them, quasi-memories, or ‘q-memories’, are apparent memories that are genuinely about someone’s experiences, though not necessarily about experiences of the person having the qmemory.18 So, for example, if I step into a duplication machine, my duplicate will have q-memories of my life, but not genuine memories (since they will ‘feel like memory’ for him, without being genuine memories of his experiences). The crucial thing to note here is that q-memory provides a person with roughly the same sort of information about a thing as direct experience of it would provide, and it can do so even if the person has never in fact had a direct experience of the thing. In q-memory, you experience to an attenuated degree what it is like to be in the presence of the event or object that is qremembered without ever having to experience its presence directly. There is a well-known and controversial thought experiment in the philosophy of mind the upshot of which is supposed to be that firsthand experiences of sensible properties (like redness) convey information that could not possibly be conveyed by even the most complete physical descriptions of the property, things having the property, or what is involved in experiencing the property. In short, the thought experiment invites us to imagine a woman (Mary) who has never experienced redness but who has come to be in possession of a maximally complete physical description of everything pertaining to the phenomenon of redness and the experience thereof. We are then invited to consider the question whether she would learn anything upon coming to experience redness for the first time. At least initially, it is hard to resist the intuition that she would, and that the information she acquires is just information about what it is like to experience redness.19 Suppose this is right. (For present purposes I’ll ignore the fact that this conclusion is controversial.20) The thing to notice is that even if it is true that the information Mary acquires couldn’t have been gotten by way of physical descriptions, it seems clear that it could have been acquired by means other than being in the presence of something red. Implanted q-memories of redness would do it, as would Matrixstyle virtual experiences of redness. The case of q-memory is the one that interests me most, however, because there is no question that q-remembered experiences of redness would be and feel different from direct experiences of redness. (This isn’t so clear in the case of Matrix-style virtual experiences.) Importantly, in q-memory of redness we get some even if not all of the very same non-propositional information about redness that we get through direct experience thereof. It is in precisely this sense that q-memory is a way of having mediated experiences of redness. I turn now to the question of what sorts of things might plausibly be thought to mediate experiences of the presence of God. In her recent work on the problem evil, Eleonore Stump has pursued the project of theodicy by way of extended literary-critical treatment of a variety of Biblical narratives.21 Rather than treating, say, the story of Job or the story of Abraham and Isaac as brief toy examples that illustrate particular principles that

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Page 90 then go on to get discussed in the analytic mode, she presents these and other stories in detail, tries as much as possible to help us understand the motives, desires, and experiences of the characters involved, and aims in so doing to show us that we can learn useful things from the narratives that simply cannot be expressed propositionally. What matters for theodicy is the philosophical usefulness of what we learn from the Biblical narratives; but what matters for present purposes is more their subject matter. I’ll begin with some terminology. According to Stump, the Biblical narratives that she discusses—the story of Job, the story of Abraham and Isaac, the story of Samson, and so on—are second-person accounts of the events they relate. A second-person account, in her terminology, is just a narrative that communicates the content of a second-person experience . A second-person experience is, roughly, a conscious experience of another conscious person as a person. A conversation with your child, an exchange of glances at a coffee shop, a hug—these are paradigm instances of second-person experiences, to be contrasted, say, with a surgeon’s ‘objectifying’ experience of an unconscious patient on an operating table or with your own conscious awareness of yourself.22 According to Stump, second-person experiences provide a particular kind of non-propositional knowledge, very much like whatever sort of knowledge Mary acquires upon coming to experience redness for the first time. Indeed, the example that she uses to illustrate and defend this point is just an adaptation of the Black-and-White Mary thought experiment. She considers a woman who has never experienced the presence of her own mother, but who has access to as much propositional information as you please about her. On Stump’s view, when the woman meets her mother for the first time, she acquires new knowledge: namely, the non-propositional awareness of what it is like to experience her mother. Stump then goes on to argue that second-person accounts are able to communicate roughly the same knowledge that one gets from a second-person experience by making that experience available to us through the narrative. Note too that the claim that second-person accounts make second-person experiences “available” to us is to be taken quite seriously and robustly. Her view, I take it, is that the accounts make the experiences available not by giving us mere propositional information about the experiences (although they in fact do this too), but by somehow putting us in touch with the experience in a way analogous to that in which q-memory might put us in touch with an experience.23 Thus, putting (what I take to be) her view into my own terminology, I’d say that second-person accounts mediate second-person experiences, just as q-memories mediate sensory experiences. This is why attention to Biblical narrative figures so importantly in Stump’s theodical project. Many Biblical narratives —in particular, the ones Stump considers in her manuscript—are second-person accounts of suffering human beings’ second-person experiences of God. On Stump’s view, attention to the narratives provides us with (what I would call) mediated

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Page 91 experiences of God’s goodness; and the knowledge we acquire by way of these mediated experiences can be put to philosophical use in formulating a theodicy. How exactly the theodicy might go is, of course, tangential to my present concerns, so I’ll pass over that for now. What matters is just the fact that, if Stump is right, attention to Biblical narrative is one way of acquiring mediated experiences of the divine presence. Note, too, that, a second-person experience is, by definition, a conscious awareness of another person as a person. Second-person experience is thus to be distinguished from what one might be tempted to label ‘third-person’ or ‘objectifying’ experience of another person: e.g., the sort of experience one might have of another if one regarded her as a mere object. The import of this for present purposes is that a certain kind of ‘seeing as’ is a necessary condition for experiencing the presence of another person as such: one has to consciously regard the other as a person. Experiencing the person while seeing her as nothing more than a cleverly contrived automaton, for example, would be a wholly different kind of experience. Likewise, then, one would expect that a similar sort of ‘seeing as’ would be involved in having mediated experiences of the presence of another person. Thus, for example, if one were to read a story about Fred’s second-person experiences of Wilma while failing to see Wilma as a (real) person— perhaps regarding her as a fictional character, or a figment of Fred’s imagination—the experiences conveyed by the narrative would be different and, in that event, there would be no reason to think that the narrative would in any sense be mediating Wilma’s presence. If this is right, then whether Biblical narratives mediate the presence of God will depend importantly upon whether one takes those narratives to be reporting real experiences of God. Something similar might be said about liturgical actions.24 Gestur-ing roughly in this direction, Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that liturgical acts are primarily commemorative acts, and that commemorative acts are importantly linked to memory. Thus, he writes: Commemorations are meant to produce the memory of something in someone, or intensify the memory, or keep the memory alive; or to bring the remembered entity actively before the mind for a while, etc…. [T]o do something in commemoration of a certain event is to bring it about that the action signifies, or stands in for, that event; and … to produce something as a commemoration of some entity is to bring it about that the object signifies, or stands in for, that entity.25 Liturgical acts, like the Eucharist, he argues, are commemorative of past events, like the Last Supper. Moreover, many (though not Wolterstorff, exactly) are inclined to see commemoration as a way of actualizing, or making present the things commemorated. Describing this view, Wolterstorff writes:

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Page 92 Over and over in our century it has been said that the saving events of God which are commemorated in the liturgy are made present, or actualized , by way of the performance of the liturgy. The acts of God commemorated are not just acknowledged as having present significance; in some way the commemoration makes them actually present. One finds this position espoused, for example, in the comments of [Sigmund] Mowinckel and [Brevard] Childs on the liturgy of biblical Israel. Here is what Childs says in one place: “When Israel observes the Sabbath in order to remember the events of her redemption, she is participating again in the Exodus event. Memory functions as an actualization ( Vergegenwärtigung) of the decisive event in her tradition.”26 In the end, Wolterstorff rejects the position described here as obviously false if taken literally. “God does not bring it about that the resurrection of Christ occurs when the liturgy is performed,” he writes.27 But my own inclination is to think that what Childs and other adherents of the commemoration-asactualization view are gesturing at is just the idea (which I have been articulating here) that, like qmemory, and like certain kinds of narrative, commemorative events, in the right context and undertaken in the right ways, mediate the presence of the events which they commemorate. If this is right, then liturgical acts, too, can be ways of experiencing the mediated presence of God. As with Biblical narratives, a certain amount of ‘seeing as’ will be required for the divine presence to be mediated at all. For example, if the function of (some) liturgical acts is indeed to commemorate (or something like that), then, at the very least, one will have to see the liturgy as a vehicle for putting us in touch with historical events in which God himself was an actor. Moreover, it might be that one’s ability to experience the presence of God in the liturgy requires practice and training. Thus, for example, in the course of arguing for the conclusion that there might be some sense in which a liturgy might aptly be characterized as true , Sarah Coakley writes: … it could … be that the deeper ‘truth’ at stake in the liturgy is not propositional at all, but ‘truth’ in the particular sense intended by Christ when he said, according to John, that he was himself ‘the way, the truth, and the life’. The intersection of liturgy and ‘truth’ would then consist in the liturgy’s capacity to train one’s sensibility to the presence of Christ in the same liturgy, and to knit one more deeply into his ‘true body’ through sacramental ingestion, attention to his Word, and the sharing of his communal love in the Spirit.28 She goes on to argue that “what is distinctive to liturgical ‘knowing’ … is the way that bodily movement, sensual acuity, affective longing, and noetic or intellectual response, are intricately entwined and mutually implicated

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Page 93 in what is occurring, and indeed are being trained over time to intensify and deepen their capacity for response to the risen Christ.”29 I must admit that I find it very difficult to see what the concepts of liturgical truth and liturgical knowing really amount to. But I have reproduced Coakley’s remarks here because I think that they are at least suggestive of the sort of view that I have been developing: namely, that (a) the right sort of participation in liturgical acts mediates the presence of God, and (b) the extent to which the divine presence is mediated depends importantly upon the (trainable) sensibilities that one brings to the experience. If the foregoing is correct, then (given that Biblical narrative and the right sorts of liturgical forms— whatever those might be—are readily and widely accessible) DIVINE SELF-DISCLOSURE is true. And if DIVINE SELF-DISCLOSURE is true, then (so I have argued) divine silence is unproblematic. But we can go a step further, I think. I suggested earlier that there might be ways of experiencing divine silence contentedly, and perhaps even appreciatively—even while enduring suffering. I think that this suggestion is more plausible in light of the arguments just given than it is on its own. For if liturgy and Biblical narrative mediate the presence of God, it is easier to see what the source of contentment and appreciation might be. Suffering human beings longing for the presence of God can go to the scriptures and the liturgy and find it—in small and mediated ways to be sure, but nevertheless in ways that provide them with the resources to see themselves not as lost and abandoned by God but rather as living daily in the presence of a loving but silent God.30 NOTES 1. There is dispute in the literature over whether there is a problem of divine hiddenness that is genuinely separate from the problem of evil. Peter van Inwagen, for example, argues that there is, whereas Jon Kvanvig argues that there is not. Cf. the chapters by van Inwagen and Kvanvig in HowardSnyder and Moser (2002). See also the last chapter of van Inwagen (2006). 2. For a variety of such responses, see the essays in Howard-Snyder and Moser (2002), particularly those by Michael Murray, Laura Garcia, William Wainwright, and Paul Moser. See also Moser (2008). Note too that one might posit God-justifying goods without attempting to identify them. In the works of his just cited, Paul Moser identifies various God-justifying goods that might result from divine hiddenness, but he also denies that the goods he identifies explain every case in which God is hidden from someone. Nevertheless, his view seems to be that every case in which God is hidden from someone is justified by some good that God aims to promote. 3. I assume that the prevention of evils equally bad or worse is a good. So, in other words, if it turns out that God permits ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE and INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE to obtain simply because preventing them would result in human evils as bad as or worse than the suffering they cause, then, by my lights, the point of divine hiddenness is still to promote human goods. This is a terminological point, not a substantive one.

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Page 94 4. See, e.g., Stump (1985) and Stump (1990). For critical discussion of this principle, along with references to other philosophers who endorse it, see Jordan (2004). I think that a suitably qualified version of BENEFIT TO THE SUFFERER is plausible when the suggestion in view is that God might be allowing someone to suffer for the sake of human (or other creaturely) goods; but the unqualified principle here seems to me to have counterexamples (along the lines discussed in section 2). 5. At any rate, this is so on the assumption that God’s providing strong evidence of his existence would imply the falsity of either ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE or INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE. See especially Schellenberg (1993), 4–6 and 83–84. Many writers follow Schellenberg’s lead in formulating the problem of divine hiddenness, and so are plausibly taken as endorsing roughly the same views about what divine hiddenness consists in. 6. The idea that something like “failure to open our eyes” explains why God’s existence is not more obvious is present in many writers. (See, for example, Wainwright’s contribution to Howard-Snyder and Moser (2002) and Moser (2008), especially Chapter 2.) But I think that if this sort of story is really correct, then it is incorrect to say that God is hidden unless the story is fleshed out along the lines suggested in the next paragraph. 7. I assume here that divine omniscience and omnipotence do not obliterate the distinction between what God deliberately brings about and what God merely permits. The assumption isn’t problem-free; but it is standard nonetheless. Dispensing with it would push us toward the view that every event is a divine act, and so it would require substantial reframing of the present discussion in terms of whatever distinctions we would then use to separate purely divine acts from those divine acts that also count as natural events and acts of non-divine creatures. 8. Note too that hiddenness comes in degrees. Word search puzzles and Easter egg hunts, for example, are typically constructed so that the hidden items can reasonably be expected to be found after a certain amount and kind of effort . In cases like this, I think that we’d want to say not that the items are entirely hidden, but that they are merely partially hidden. Items that could be found only by sheer luck or extraordinary (unexpected) skill are the ones that count as completely hidden. 9. Is. 45:15. See also, e.g., Ps. 10:1, where the psalmist asks, “Why, O LORD do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” and Job 13:24, where Job asks, “Why do you hide your face, and count me as your enemy?” (Translations are from the New Revised Standard Version.) 10. Mother Teresa (2007), 187. 11. Note that the view being articulated here is not quite the same as the view that ‘divine hiddenness is due to human blindness’. According to the latter view, INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE is false, and the relevant evidence for God’s existence could be seen if only we weren’t blinded to it by our own sin. (For a full presentation of this view, see Wainwright in Howard-Snyder and Moser (2002).) On the view that I am presenting, however, INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE is taken for granted, our own faulty interpretation of divine silence is what is to blame for our finding it objectionable, and sin is only one among several possible explanations for why we interpret divine silence in the way that we do. (You might not be culpable for your own present immaturity, for example, even if you have a responsibility to overcome it.) 12. Admittedly, leading on a journey is a communicative act; so the person in this example is not totally silent. Is this a relevant disanalogy? I don’t think so. Recall, for one thing, that, though I have granted ABSENCE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE and INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE, I have not conceded that God

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Page 95 is totally silent. But, more importantly, the illustration could be modified to get rid of the disanalogy. Drop the supposition that the person is leading you on a journey , and suppose instead that you are touring a museum with the following background beliefs: (a) the curator has arranged things in the museum with you in mind, and wants very much to show you things about yourself, about life, and about his personality via the arrangement; and (b) the curator, though in fact silent and invisible, is nevertheless watching as you tour, can be talked to, can talk with you at any time, and can alter things in the museum in response to your communications. (I have heard roughly this sort of analogy in a variety of sermons over the years. If it has an original printed source, I am unaware of it.) 13. Or a tri-person, depending on what brand of theism (or even what brand of Trinitarian theism) you subscribe to. But let us ignore this complication for now. 14. Though not universally so. For a radically different perspective, see Hitchens (1995). 15. Mother Teresa (2007), especially page 3 and Chapters 3–6. 16. Different religious epistemologies will yield different results on this score. Someone who thinks that Christian belief is produced and maintained by ordinary evidential reasoning, and that we might (though probably wouldn’t) have the same evidence we have even if Christian belief is false, wouldn’t necessarily be committed to thinking that false Christian belief would have to be produced by unreliable mechanisms. Someone like Alvin Plantinga, however, who thinks that Christian belief is likely produced and maintained by the operation of something like John Calvin’s sensus divinitatis—a faculty whose proper function is to detect the presence of God—would be so committed. (Cf. Plantinga, 2003, 170– 186). 17. If, as many theists think, God exists necessarily if at all, then if God does not exist, God cannot exist. 18. Parfit (1971), 15. 19. The example is due to Jackson (1982). For discussion, see the essays in Ludlow, Nagasawa, and Stoljar (2004). 20. The controversy doesn’t matter much for present purposes. What ultimately matters is the much less controversial idea that there is a sui generis quality to experiencing a thing that is lost in mere descriptions of it but that can be mediated by something like q-memory. 21. See, especially, Stump (forthcoming) and Stump (2009). 22. On the concept of ‘objectifying’, cf. Rudolf Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology: The Problem of Demythologizing the New Testament Proclamation” in Bultmann (1984), and Bas van Fraassen (2002), Chapter 4. 23. So I interpret her, anyway; she doesn’t herself invoke the concept of q-memory. 24. This idea was inspired by a paper (quoted here later on) given by Sarah Coakley at the Philosophy and Liturgy Conference at Calvin College, May 2008. The paper is “Beyond ‘Belief’: Liturgy and the Cognitive Apprehension of God.” However, the paper doesn’t argue for or even assert the claim that liturgy mediates the presence of God, and the remarks therein that are suggestive of that view are not really fleshed out enough for me to attribute to her the sorts of views that I’m developing here. 25. Nicholas Wolterstorff (1991), 136 and 139. 26. Ibid ., 153. 27. Ibid ., 155. 28. Coakley (unpublished), 4. 29. Ibid ., 15.

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Page 96 30. Work on this paper was supported in part by a grant from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame. An earlier version of this paper was read at the “Religious Experience and Knowledge of God” conference, Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2008. I am grateful to the participants in that conference—especially Mylan Engel, Alvin Plantinga, and Bruce Russell—for helpful comments and conversation, and to Michael Bergmann, Jeff Brower, and Kevin Timpe for valuable advice and criticism on the penultimate version of the paper.

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Page 97 6 Fittingness and Divine Action in Cur Deus Homo Thomas P. Flint INTRODUCTION What are we to make of appeals to fittingness to explain divine actions? This is a question that can reasonably be raised concerning many philosophers and many works. In this essay, though, I intend to limit myself to one philosopher (St. Anselm) and (for the most part) to one work—his famous investigation of the Incarnation still commonly known by its Latin title Cur Deus Homo (henceforth simply CDH ). As we shall see, the precise connections Anselm intends to draw between what is fitting and what God does are not easy to discern, especially if one wishes to ascribe to Anselm a view that is philosophically coherent and theologically tenable. A quick word on language. Like many translators, I’ll use the English word fitting for the Latin conveniens and its relatives. Other translations— appropriate or proper or apt—might be equally good, but I’ll generally stick with just fitting. PAINTING ON CLOUDS: FROM FITTINGNESS TO TRUTH Fittingness considerations make their appearance early in CDH . The question at the center of the work, Anselm tells us, is this: “by what reason or necessity did God become a human being and, as we believe and profess, restore life to the world by his own death, when he could have accomplished this through some other person, whether angelic or human, or even by his own will alone?” (I, 1).1 Critics of Christianity argued that it was neither rational nor necessary for God to endure the indignities of birth, suffering, and crucifixion in order to save mankind. Such unbelievers, says Anselm, fail to see how appropriate all of this is: If they attentively considered how fitting a way this was to accomplish the restoration of humankind, they would not deride our simplicity but join with us in praising God’s wise benevolence. For it was fitting that just as death entered the human race through the disobedience of a human being, so too life should be restored by the obedience of a human being. It was fitting that just as the sin that was the cause of our damnation had its origin from a woman, so too the author of our justice and

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Page 98 salvation should be born of a woman. And it was fitting that the devil, who through the tasting of a tree defeated the human being whom he persuaded, should be defeated by a human being through the suffering on a tree that he inflicted. And there are many other things that, if carefully considered, demonstrate the indescribable beauty that belongs to our redemption, accomplished in this way. (I, 3) Boso, Anselm’s rarely clownish monastic interlocutor, begins the next chapter by stating that he isn’t convinced. Anselm’s appeal to fittingness has provided us with a beautiful picture, he suggests, but when we merely paint a picture not supported by solid argumentation, “it is as though we are painting on a cloud.” Something much more substantial is needed before appeals to fittingness can safely be employed: one must first demonstrate the rational solidity of the truth: that is, the necessity that proves that God should or could have humbled himself to the things that we proclaim about him. Only then should one expound on considerations of fittingness as pictures of this truth, so that the body of truth, so to speak, might shine all the more brightly. (I, 4) Most readers, I suspect, will feel much sympathy for Boso’s complaint. An extreme example might bring the point home more clearly. Imagine how we might react to someone propounding some clearly heretical claim—say, There are exactly seven Persons in God . Why, we would probably ask, should we accept so astonishing a claim? Suppose we were told: Because it’s especially fitting that there be exactly seven divine persons. Consider the ubiquity of sevens in so many areas of life: the seven days of the week, the seven colors of the rainbow, the seven sacraments, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the seven cardinal virtues, the seven seals (and heads and crowns) of Revelation (not to mention all the other sevens of scripture), and, of course, the lucky seven beloved by those who roll dice. Would it not, then, be aesthetically pleasing, beautiful, harmonious—in a word, would it not be fitting that there be seven persons in the deity? The natural response, I think, would be that—well, yes, all of this might indeed be fitting, if we had a genuine philosophical, theological, or scriptural argument for the claim that there are seven persons in God. Concerns with fittingness, or beauty, or harmony might play a role in our appreciation of theological truths, but we need to get to those truths first, and get to them by a safer route than that offered by amorphous appeals to fittingness. Even if we agree with Boso that “ x is fitting” does not, by itself, seem to entail “ x is true,” many intriguing questions about fittingness remain. Most obviously: What exactly are we saying when we say that something is fitting? Only slightly less obviously: Even if fittingness doesn’t entail truth , does it at least entail possibility? Does it increase the probability of that which is fitting? (I.e., should our conviction that x is fitting alter our appraisal of the likelihood of x’s being true?) Does fittingness come in

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Page 99 degrees? If so, can something rank as most fitting? And, if it can, does the fact that something is most fitting give us any reason to think it true? OUT OF THE CLOUDS: FROM TRUTH TO FITTINGNESS Some of these questions, as we shall see, are addressed (at least implicitly) in other parts of CDH . But Anselm’s immediate response to Boso doesn’t directly address any of them, nor does it really respond to his “painting on a cloud” criticism. Rather, it assumes an answer to a rather different question. Here is what he says: Does not this seem to be a sufficiently necessary reason that God ought to have done the things we say: that the human race—such a precious work of God—had utterly perished, and that it was not fitting that God’s purpose for human beings should be completely annihilated, and that his purpose could not be brought to fulfillment unless the human race were liberated by its Creator himself? (I, 4) So, since it wouldn’t be fitting for God to allow the human race to perish altogether, it follows necessarily that he will not fail to do what is needed to effect our restoration. Note that what Anselm seems to be assuming in reaching this conclusion is different from the assumption that appeared implicit in Chapter 3. He seems to be assuming, not that truth follows from fittingness, but that non-truth follows from non-fittingness. To put this less obscurely: he doesn’t seem to be affirming (1) F x x (where the double-line arrow represents strict implication and “Fx” stands for “ x is fitting”). Instead of (1), Anselm appears to be embracing (2) ~Fx ~x which of course is equivalent to (2*) x Fx .2 This is hardly the only place in CDH where Anselm employs the assumption that a lack of fittingness entails a lack of truth. In Chapter 12 of Book One, for example, Anselm asks “whether it is fitting for God to forgive sin by mercy alone, without any repayment.” Anselm gives three reasons (which we needn’t discuss here) for thinking that it wouldn’t be fitting. His conclusion: “given that it is not fitting for God to do anything unjustly or inordinately, it does not pertain to his freedom, kindness, or will that he should leave unpunished a sinner who does not repay God what he took

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Page 100 from him.” So, again, from the fact that x is not fitting, we can conclude that x is false—i.e., that (2) is true. THE FITTING AND THE POSSIBLE In fact, two chapters earlier (i.e., in Chapter 10), Anselm had suggested a slightly stronger principle: “an impossibility follows from anything unsuitable in God, however slight.” The “unsuitable” translates the Latin inconveniens here; hence, we again have a fittingness argument. But here the argument isn’t that mere falsity follows from unfittingness; rather, that which is unfitting is impossible .3 In other words, the principle on which Anselm is here relying would seem to be one we can formulate as (3) ~Fx ~◊ x. Now, accepting (3) once one has accepted (2) makes a lot of sense. For one might plausibly think that fittingness (or its lack) is not a contingent feature of that which has it (or fails to have it). Suppose we agree that it’s not fitting for God to forgive sin without repayment. If it’s not in fact fitting, how could it be fitting? If the property of fittingness is thus essential to things that exhibit it, and similarly with unfittingness, it follows that (4) ~Fx □~Fx. And if (2) and (4) are accepted, (3) cannot be rationally rejected.4 But (3) does open the door to a potentially troubling ramification. For isn’t it also plausible to think that (5) ~◊ x ~Fx is true as well? If it’s not so much as possible that something be, how could it be fitting that it be? On the surface, then, (5) seems reasonable. But combined with (3), it leads to a consequence some might find disturbing. (3) is, of course, equivalent to its contrapositive—i.e., to (3*) ◊x F x. Similarly, (5) is equivalent to (5*) F x ◊x. But (3*) and (5*) together entail that fittingness and possibility are logically equivalent properties: something is fitting if and only if it’s possible. And one might well wonder if that’s a result that Anselm would happily endorse.

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Page 101 FROM FITTING TO MOST FITTING Indeed, Anselm introduces an argument just a bit later—in Chapter 16 of Book One—that suggests (in, as we’ll see, a rather roundabout way) that he might well not be committed to the equivalence of fittingness and possibility. Anselm is considering here the implications of the claim (a claim he had defended in his earlier work De Casu Diaboli) that humans were created in part to take the place in heaven of the fallen angels. Anselm takes it as evident that there is a certain set number of inhabitants of heaven, a number that is in some way special, and that God from the start planned on having exactly that number of paradisial created rational beings. But why think there is such a “perfect number,” a number N such that, if there are N inhabitants of heaven, all is well, but if there are either (N–1) or (N+1) inhabitants, all is less than well? Anselm explains: We must not doubt that God foreknew the number of rational natures who either are or will be happy in the contemplation of God, a number so reasonable and complete that it is not fitting for it to be greater or smaller. After all, either God does not know the number of such natures that it is most fitting for him to establish, which is false; or else, if he does know, he will establish those natures in the number that he understands to be most fitting for this purpose. (I, 16)5 Anselm at least appears to be making two major assumptions here. First, that fittingness comes in degrees—e.g., certain numbers (of the saved) can be more fitting than others, and one number can be the most fitting of all. And second, if we can establish that something is most fitting for God to do, it just follows that he does it. From the simple fact that God knows that N is the most fitting number for creatures in heaven, it just follows that N is the number he brings to that end. This appeal not simply to what is fitting, but to what is most fitting, is made (or at least strongly suggested) repeatedly in CDH , especially in the second book. In Chapter 8, Anselm discusses how the human being to be assumed by the Son should itself come to be. Four possibilities suggest themselves. First, this special human being could have been generated in the way most humans are generated, via the sexual union of a man and a woman. Anselm and Boso seem reluctant even to entertain this possibility; surely, says Anselm, “this human being will be procreated in a purer and more honorable way,” and Boso (whom one pictures trying to shield his imagination from the very thought) concurs with a curt “Sufficit” (i.e., “That’s enough”). The remaining, less unsavory possibilities are generation (a) from neither a man nor a woman, (b) from just a man, with no woman involved, and (c) from just a woman, with no man involved. But options (a) and (b) have already been used by God, the former for generating Adam, the latter for generating Eve. Only the final option, (c), remains:

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Page 102 So in order to prove that this last way was within his power and had been held in reserve for this very deed, nothing was more fitting than for him to assume the human being whom we are seeking from a woman without a man. (II, 8) After Boso expresses his agreement, the dialogue takes a slightly surprising turn by taking us back both to the substance and to the imagery of Boso’s earlier objection: Anselm: Is what we have said solid? Or is it something insubstantial, like clouds, as you said unbelievers claim in their objections against us? Boso: Nothing could be more solid. Anselm: Then paint, not on an insubstantial fiction, but on the solid truth, and say that it is altogether fitting that just as human sin and the cause of our damnation had its beginning from a woman, so too the cure for sin and the cause of our salvation should be born from a woman. And so that women will not despair of membership in the company of the blessed because so great an evil proceeded from a woman, it is fitting that so great a good should proceed from a woman so that their hope might be restored. Paint this too: given that it was a virgin who was the cause of all evil for the human race, it is all the more fitting that it should be a virgin who will be the cause of all good. And paint this as well: given that the woman whom God made from a man without a woman was made from a virgin, it is altogether fitting that the man who will come to be from a woman without a man should likewise be made from a virgin. But let these be enough for now of the pictures that can be painted on the fact that the God-man ought to be born of a virgin woman. Boso: These pictures are exceedingly beautiful and reasonable. (II, 8) At first glance, Boso’s response seems rather astonishing. After all, he had castigated Anselm (back in I, 4) for arguing from fittingness to truth, and had compared such arguments to painting on clouds. As we saw, Anselm never directly counters this criticism. Yet now, when Anselm again at least appears to be arguing from fittingness to truth, and even reminds Boso of the cloud-painting imagery Boso had used, Boso caves in, accepting the pictures Anselm draws as not only “exceedingly beautiful” (even the Boso of Book One would have agreed with that assessment), but also “reasonable.” If moving from fittingness to fact wasn’t reasonable then, why is it reasonable now ? The answer, I suspect, is that Anselm isn’t arguing from mere fittingness to actuality. As in the “perfect number” case, the argument is really that what is most fitting must be actual. Nothing that Anselm says here suggests that it would actually be unfitting for God to use one of those methods he had used to generate Adam or Eve. His point is that using the heretofore unemployed method of generation from a woman (with no man involved) is more fitting than any of the alternatives—that it was the most fitting means

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Page 103 of creating this very special human being. And because is was the most fitting alternative, it was of course the one that God selected. At the risk of citational overkill, let me briefly mention two other places in Book Two where Anselm seems to be making this same most-fitting-means-actual assumption. In Chapter 9, Anselm argues that since inescapable reason has led us to the conclusion that it is necessary that divine and human nature come together into one person, and that this cannot be done in more than one divine person, and that it is evident that it is done more fittingly in the person of the Word than in the other persons, it is necessary that God the Word and a human being come together into one person. (II, 9) Finally, in Chapter 16, he contends that it was fitting for God to arrange things so that at no time since humans came on the scene was the world “so bereft that it did not contain a single person from the human race who attained the purpose for which human beings were created”—i.e., at no time did the human community include no member of the elect. But Anselm argues that we can go further than mere fittingness here: We can conclude that this is not merely fitting but indeed necessary. For if this is more fitting and more reasonable than the opposite (namely, that at some time there was no one in whom God’s purpose in making human beings was realized), and if there is nothing that undermines this argument, it is necessary that at every time there has been someone who belonged to the aforesaid reconciliation. (II, 16) Again, the argument seems to be that the option that was more fitting than any of the alternatives— i.e., that which was most fitting—must have been chosen by God. What we see, then, is repeated recourse to a principle that what is most fitting must come to be—a principle of the form (1*) MFx x, where “MF x” stands for “ x is most fitting.” If this is the principle upon which Anselm is in fact relying, then his reminding us of Boso’s cloud-painting metaphor, along with Boso’s change of heart, suddenly becomes less perplexing. For that metaphor was meant to discredit (1), the claim that mere fittingness entails truth. Perhaps Anselm never directly responds to the cloud-painting metaphor because he agrees with Boso that (1) is false. Perhaps Anselm alludes to the metaphor in Chapter 8 of Book 2 so as to subtly suggest to Boso (and to the reader) that it is (1*), not (1), that his arguments in fact presuppose. And perhaps Boso finds the new “paintings” of Chapter 8 not only “exceedingly beautiful” but also “reasonable” because he recognizes their reliance on the true (1*) rather than on the false

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Page 104 (1). In short, what seemed a surprising reminder of an unanswered objection becomes a deft introduction of a stronger principle if we see this passage as emphasizing the distinction between (1*) and (1). THE MOST FITTING AND THE NECESSARY If (1*) is true, though, a slightly stronger principle also follows, namely: (6) MFx □x. To see that (6) follows from (1*), consider that (1*), being an entailment and thus a necessary truth, is itself entailed by any proposition whatsoever. So it follows from (1*) that (7) MFx (MFx x) . Now, we argued earlier that fittingness is plausibly seen as essential to those things that possess it. A similar point seems to hold with regard to the property of being most fitting. If something is most fitting, wouldn’t that have to be a necessary truth about it? Aren’t whatever criteria that are relevant for determining fittingness (harmony, beauty, parallelism, etc.) going to hold in every world if they hold in any? If so, then it follows that (8) MFx □MF x. From (7) and (8) it follows that (9) MFx [(MFx x) & □MF x]. But if every MFx-world were an x-world, and every possible world were an MFx-world, then every possible world would be an x-world. That is, (10) [(MFx x) & □MF x] □x. And from (9) and (10), it follows (by transitivity) that MFx entails □x—i.e., it follows that (6) is true. (6) is remarkably advantageous for Anselm in one significant respect: It allows him to deny that whatever is fitting is possible—i.e., to deny (5*)—and thereby deny that the fitting and the possible are necessarily coextensive. The move from (1) to (1*) assumed that something could be fitting but not most fitting. Suppose that something (call it a ) were like this, fitting but not most fitting. I.e., suppose that F a but not MFa . If a is not most fitting, then presumably there’s some alternative to a (call it b) such that b is most fitting. That is, from ~MF a , it follows that MFb & ( b ~a ). But (6) tells us

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Page 105 that if something is most fitting, it’s necessary. So, since b is most fitting, b is necessary. But if b is necessary, and ( b ~a ), then it’s necessary that ~a. And if ~a is necessary, then a is impossible. We began with the assumption that a was fitting. It follows, then, that a is both fitting and impossible. So once we accept (6), we can logically conclude that (5*) is false. And this means that we can safely conclude that fitting is not necessarily coextensive with possible , and hence that Anselm is not committed to the collapse of the distinction between possibility and fittingness. THE THREAT OF MODAL COLLAPSE Still, (6) is a mixed blessing. For though it allows us to elude this collapse, it seems to force us to accept another, and arguably a more implausible, one. The argument of the previous paragraph shows that, if (6) is true, then anything (such as our a ) that isn’t most fitting isn’t possible. That is, it follows from (6) that (11) ~MF x ~x. Transposing (11), we get (12) ◊x MFx. But then, by transitivity, (12) and (6) give us (13) ◊x □x. And since (14) □x ◊x is also obviously true, it seems to follow from (6) that the distinction between possibility and necessity has collapsed: if (13) and (14) are both true, something is possible if and only if it’s necessary. Modal collapse of this sort is, of course, widely seen as wildly implausible. Our intuitions regarding possibility and necessity may be far from perfect, but they seem sharp enough for us to see that (13) is false. Many things that are possible are not even true, let alone necessarily true. If (13) were true, then, since (15) x ◊x is also true (i.e., what’s actual is indeed possible), it would follow that (16) x □x.

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Page 106 That is, it would follow that whatever is true is necessarily true. Contingency would disappear, and the actual world would be necessarily actual—i.e., it would be the only possible world. And as the only possible world, creating it would be the only creative action God could have performed. Since all of these consequences are so unpalatable, and since they seem to follow from (6), we seem to have Anselm painted into a rather inhospitable corner. ESCAPING THE COLLAPSE: SOME UNFITTING ALTERNATIVES Are there plausible ways for Anselm to escape? On the surface, it’s hard to see that there are. Consider the prime candidates: Can one reject (1*)? Our troubles in a sense began with (1*), the thesis that what is most fitting is true. My own inclination, for what it’s worth, would be to get off the Anselmian train right here at the start. But, as we saw, this principle is employed too clearly and too repeatedly by Anselm for him to renounce it wholesale; too little of the argumentative structure of CDH would remain if it were simply abandoned. Can one reject (6)? (1*) led to trouble because it appeared to entail (6), according to which what is most fitting is necessarily true. But the argument (offered above) from (1*) to (6) is clearly valid, and the only premise one might question is (8), the claim that most-fittingness is essential to that which exemplifies it. One can imagine questioning this premise. Still, I have my doubts that Anselm would have seen rejecting (8) as an attractive option. Can one reject (11)? If (6) is accepted, modal collapse occurs unless we can find a way to block the argument from (6) to (11), the claim that whatever is not most fitting is not possible. Here, too, ways of blocking the argument are conceivable. For example, the argument assumes that, if a is not most fitting, something else (we called it b) is. Why couldn’t this assumption be false? Why couldn’t it be that, in some cases, nothing is most fitting, or that several alternatives ( c and d, say) tie for the highest ranking with respect to fittingness? These are reasonable questions, and each deserves more attention than I can offer them here. Yet I must confess that I can’t see a means of escape here that I think Anselm would find appealing. His endorsement of there being a “perfect number” in paradise suggests (as do other passages in his works) that Anselm would have trouble saying that there are cases where nothing whatsoever is most fitting. And the suggestion that a number of alternatives might be equally most fitting doesn’t in fact allow us to escape the move from (6) to (11), since (as a careful examination of the relevant paragraph will show) the argument still goes through even if we think of b as equivalent to a disjunction of, say, c and d.

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Page 107 ESCAPING THE COLLAPSE: A MORE FITTING POSSIBILITY? So much for the obvious suspects. One intriguing possibility remains.6 Couldn’t it be that Anselm, without flatly rejecting any of the principles we have ascribed to him, would insist that they have a more limited scope than we have been assuming? After all, Anselm rather consistently uses fittingness considerations when discussing specifically what God will do. It’s not fitting that all humans suffer damnation; hence, God will see to it that some are saved. It’s most fitting that heaven have exactly N creaturely inhabitants; therefore, God will save exactly N creatures. It’s more fitting for the Son to be incarnate than for either of the other divine persons to assume a human nature; so, God becomes incarnate via the Son. That Son’s being born of just a woman, with no male involvement, is more fitting than any of the alternatives; therefore, God will arrange for the assumed human being to have been born of just a woman. And so on. What all of these examples suggest, one might argue, is that Anselm is committed to thinking that, for example, (1*) is true, not in general, but only when restricted to God’s activity. That is, what’s really true is not (1*) in its unrestricted generality, but rather something on the order of (1**) MF(God does x) (God does x). But (1**), being restricted as it is to God’s actions, doesn’t lead to the type of wholesale modal collapse engendered by (1*). Even if (1**) means that God has no alternatives, that he needs always to perform the most fitting action, it doesn’t entail that we free creatures have no alternatives. And, in fact, it surely appears that we do; we often fail to do what’s most fitting. So the truth of (1**) doesn’t entail that possibility and necessity are coextensive, or that this is the only possible world. Hence, the dire consequences we sketched for Anselm can indeed be averted. Many philosophers with libertarian predilections regarding freedom would no doubt respond that this is a cure nearly as bad as the disease. The suggestion is that Anselm can use (1**) to do all that he needs done in CDH , and can tolerate as a consequence that God has no alternatives to doing what he does. But if God has no choice but to do what is most fitting for him to do, how can he be free? And what does it profit a man to preclude modal collapse at the cost of divine freedom? Hence, these libertarians would conclude, this would not be a plausible means for Anselm to deal with our problem. I have to confess a great deal of sympathy for this response. Still, my guess is that it would not move Anselm or his supporters. For, unlike many (perhaps most) contemporary libertarians, Anselm does not view the ability to do otherwise as a necessary condition for freedom. It may be true that we wayfaring humans are free only if we have the power to do otherwise, but this is not because of a strict conceptual connection between the very

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Page 108 notions of performing a free action and having alternatives. Again, this is an extremely controversial position; I and many other libertarians find it hard (well, impossible) to swallow. But there are numerous self-identified libertarians in our midst who embrace it, and in doing so, I think they are following in Anselm’s footsteps (though substantiating this claim would require a considerable journey through Anselm’s other works and thus would take us too far afield).7 So though he might well have been misguided on this point, I don’t think that Anselm would view the move to (1**) as incurring any unacceptable price with respect to divine freedom. Are there other grounds for believing, not that some of us, but that Anselm himself would have harbored doubts about (1**)? Perhaps. Let me mention two reasons to think that a fully reflective Anselm might well have been hesitant to claim that the move to (1**) solves all his problems. First, consider God’s overarching creative decision. Suppose there is a most fitting creative action that God can perform. Suppose he sees, logically prior to creation, that creating this set of creatures in this set of circumstances is the most fitting creative action he could perform. Call this action A. According to (1**), recognition that A is the most fitting creative action he can perform entails that God performs A. Now, if A determines that a specific possible world (say, W ) becomes actual, then W is in fact the only possible world, and the dreaded modal collapse returns. So collapse is prevented only if God’s performing A is compatible with a variety of different possible worlds’ being actualized, while which one is in fact actualized is determined (presumably) by the free actions of God’s creatures. The question, then, is this: Does God, when (eternally) performing creative action A, do so with the full knowledge of just which possible world will result from his creative action? Clearly, if God has middle knowledge—if he knows, when creating, how any free creature would freely react in any situation in which it might be placed—his knowledge of which world would in fact follow from his performing A would be beyond doubt. But (alas) Anselm never mentions (and, a fortiori, never explicitly embraces) middle knowledge, and most Anselmians think of it as foreign to his thought. The only alternative, though, seems to be to say that God acquires knowledge of which world has come to be by eternally seeing what in fact occurs. But such a picture, it seems to me, fits uneasily with the God of Anselm’s Monologion , whose Word (which is, of course, nothing other than God himself) is “the first and sole cause … sufficient for its Artisan to bring his work to completion.”8 Anselm uses the metaphor of the craftsman who knows exactly what he is producing before he produces it: “when a craftsman is going to make some work of his art, he first says it within himself by a conception in his mind.”9 And this mental conception, being the Word himself, cannot be imperfect or incomplete in any way: “what they [creatures] were going to be, and what sorts of things, and how they were going to be, was in the reason of the supreme nature before all things

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Page 109 were made.”10 It would, I think, be exceedingly difficult to reconcile the notion of such a God with the picture of a deity who discovers what he has wrought only by passive observation. A second reason for thinking that Anselm might on full reflection have been troubled by (1**) and its entailments can also be found in the Monologion . Repeatedly in that work, Anselm considers what would have been the case had God decided not to create at all.11 Nowhere in these discussions is there even the faintest hint that Anselm believes he’s discussing counterpossibles here; the hypothesis that God create nothing is treated, it seems to me, as a genuine possibility. But it’s not easy to square this assumption with (1**). For just as (1*) entails (6), so (1**) entails (6*) MF(God does x) □(God does x) . If (6*) is true, it follows that (17) MF(God creates something) □(God creates something). But, as we’ve seen, the Monologion appears to be assuming that (18) ~□(God creates something). And (17) and (18) together entail (19) ~MF(God creates something). But it’s hard for me to think that Anselm would be comfortable with (19). If we know anything at all about fittingness, mustn’t we say that for a God who is himself love, a God who enjoys the perfection of interpersonal relationships within himself, it is more fitting to share that love and to foster that relationship with creatures than not to create at all? Furthermore, if creating something isn’t most fitting, creating nothing (i.e., not creating at all) must be. So if (19) were true, so too would be (20) MF(God creates nothing). But (6*) and (20) appear to entail (21) □(God creates nothing). Now, (21) says that no possible world contains any creature whatsoever—a claim that I feel confident Anselm would find implausible. And its non-modal base, i.e., (22) God creates nothing,

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Page 110 is scarcely less plausible, since we Christians think we have fairly solid evidence that God has in fact created things. So, again, the move to (1**) seems, all things considered, much less attractive to an Anselmian than it first appeared. CONCLUSION Where does that leave us? I’m not sure. I have argued that what Anselm says about fittingness in CDH seems to lead to a major problem, that of modal collapse. We have looked at a number of responses to that problem, and I have tried to show that none of them would probably be seen by a consistent Anselm as fully satisfactory. I don’t take this as showing that no response by Anselm is possible. Readers might well differ from my appraisal of the responses I have discussed, or might feel that some other solution is available to them. And I certainly don’t take my examination as in any significant way detracting from Anselm’s status as a philosophical theologian of great interest and ingenuity. But it does, I think, point to some of the difficulties that arise when we try to bring considerations of fittingness into our speculations concerning God’s creative choices.12 NOTES 1. References are made to book and chapter (so here, “I, 1” refers to Book One, Chapter One). All translations are by Thomas Williams, in Anselm (2007). 2. For ease of presentation, I am leaving the universal quantifiers out of (1), (2), (2*), and similar symbolizations. I should also note that, like Anselm, I will assume that fittingness may well apply to entities of different ontological categories—to propositions, to actions, to states of affairs, and so on— and hence that the consequents (1), (2), and the like will need to be seen as implicitly referring to correspondingly different properties—to being true, to being performed, to being actual, and so on. All of our numbered propositions should thus be read as permitting a degree of plasticity in interpretation. 3. For other places in CDH where Anselm seems to be assuming that the unfitting is impossible, see I, 20; I, 25; and II, 5. 4. The argument that supports this claim parallels one that will be given more explicitly in the text later. For those who just can’t wait: If (2) is true—if ~Fx entails ~x—then ~Fx also entails (~F x ~x). So, given (4), it follows that ~Fx entails the conjunction [(□~Fx) & (~F x ~x)]. But this conjunction entails □~ x, which is equivalent to ◊~ x. Hence, assuming (2) and (4), it follows that ~Fx entails ~◊ x—i.e., it follows that (3) is true. 5. It is, perhaps, worth noting that the “most fitting” of the Williams translation is a tad loose; the actual terms used in the Latin original are melius and decentiorem . Still, as an earlier translator (Janet Fairweather) had noted, the context makes it reasonable to assume that Anselm is using the comparatives in a superlative sense. See note 9 on page 290 of her translation in Anselm (1998). The “most fitting” also is found in the well-known 1903 translation by S. N. Deane. It’s also worth noting in passing that one might well wonder

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Page 111 about the logical force of Anselm’s argument in this passage. But that issue, of course, is not our concern in this chapter. 6. The possibility mentioned here is discussed by Sandra Visser and Thomas Williams in Chapter 13 of their (2008). 7. For a full discussion of this point, see Williams and Visser, Chapter 11. 8. Monologion , Ch. 11. The translation is by Thomas Williams in Anselm (2007). 9. Ibid ., Ch. 10. 10. Ibid ., Ch. 9. 11. Ibid ., Chs. 15, 33, and 53. 12. I would like to express my gratitude to the faculty and students of Franciscan University, at which an earlier draft of this paper was presented, for their thoughtful comments and questions. Thanks are also due to Thomas Williams and to Kevin Timpe.

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Page 112 7 Conservation, Concurrence, and Counterfactuals of Freedom Jonathan L. Kvanvig Canonical Molinism identifies God’s providential control over the world in three logical stages. Stage one involves God’s knowledge of necessary truths, and is termed by Luis de Molina God’s “natural knowledge.” The final stage at which God knows as a result of what he crafts is termed “free knowledge,” and in between is where counterfactuals of freedom are found, which is called “middle knowledge.”1 The second stage bridges the gap between knowledge of necessities and knowledge of created contingencies, that knowledge that covers everything resulting from the exercise of God’s will. The bridge involves knowledge of counterfactuals of indeterminacy, including those about what would happen were God to choose to create in one way rather than another. When these three stages are combined with God’s knowledge about his own actions, all resources are in place for complete knowledge of the actual world, including knowledge of whatever future contingents there might be. This view can be carved into two parts. The first part is that there are counterfactuals of freedom or indeterminacy, and the second part is the location in the logical space of the deliberational model of creation used by the Molinist. The first part is required in order to preserve a strong doctrine of providence characteristic of traditional Christianity. The second part plays a role, however, that can only be explained by appeal to a worrisome objection to any appeal to such counterfactuals. The objection claims that such counterfactuals are contingent and hence if true must have a truth value that depends on God’s creative activity. And if they are true in virtue of God’s creative activity, then there is a problem. For the kind of freedom in question is libertarian freedom, and libertarian freedom is typically held to obey the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP), according to which a person is free only if they could have done otherwise. But if we assume that God makes the counterfactual true, there is no ability to do otherwise, since that would contravene the counterfactual in question, and thus given God’s creative activity, there is no possibility of having done otherwise. Hence, the story goes, if the counterfactuals of freedom are going to do the work Molinists need done, the counterfactuals of freedom cannot be true in virtue of God’s creative activity. They must be, as it is usually put, divinely

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Page 113 prevolitional, and in being so, they occupy a place in the logical space of the deliberative model of creation between God’s knowledge of necessities and his knowledge of the contingencies that result from his acts of will. Here I will question this need to find a middle position in such logical space. I will assume that there are counterfactuals of freedom, that they are contingent truths, and that the notion of freedom involved in them is libertarian freedom requiring explication in terms of PAP. Though PAP has been under attack ever since Frankfurt’s counterexample to a related version of the principle concerning moral responsibility,2 I will ignore these issues here, for two reasons. First, it is far from clear that the literature shows that there is no acceptable interpretation of PAP, but second, nothing in the reservations I have about middle knowledge requires throwing out PAP. If PAP were false, the motivation for endorsing the idea that there is such a thing as middle knowledge would disappear, though perhaps other motivations might surface in the process. But since I don’t think the motivation given earlier is adequate even given the truth of PAP, there is no reason to question that principle here. I will argue that the aforementioned motivation for adopting the theory of middle knowledge is an artifact of deistic tendencies. Thus, I will argue that a properly theistic understanding of God’s relationship to his creation undermines the objection that gave rise to the theory of middle knowledge in the first place. I begin by characterizing the differences between theism and deism. I then show how a deistic understanding makes the objection answerable only by the positing of middle knowledge. I then turn to the substance of my paper, which is to argue that if full theism is true, there are reasons to think the objection mistaken. THEISM AND DEISM Both theism and deism maintain the doctrine of creation, according to which God is responsible for the initial existence of the universe, and both are free to adopt the doctrine that God is responsible for the universe by creating it out of nothing. Where they differ concerns further doctrines, the first being the doctrine of conservation. The doctrine of conservation maintains that God is responsible not only for the initial existence of the universe, but also for its continued existence, and he is responsible for the continuation of the universe not in any remote way involving some purported transitivity of causation that would imply that any earlier cause is at least partially responsible for every later occurrence, but rather in an immediate and direct way of the same sort of immediacy and directness involved in the initial creation itself. Various versions of theism can be identified once the doctrine of conservation is in place, versions that arise when we inquire concerning the

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Page 114 existence and nature of causal power in the created order itself. All theists insist that a deist conception of nature is inadequate, a conception on which God’s responsibility for later stages of the universe is merely remote, deriving from his initial creative act which instituted initial conditions and dispersed causal powers to the created order itself, causal powers that are sufficient in themselves and in interaction with each other to explain fully the transitions from one moment to the next. Theists deny the possibility of such causal explanations, and insist on the doctrine of divine conservation, but they differ on the ramifications of endorsing the doctrine of conservation in addition to the doctrine of creation. Occasionalists (of the historical sort) insist that God is involved in the continuation of the universe in precisely the same way that he was involved in its origin, in such a way that there can’t be any power other than God’s power. Denials of this strong version of occasionalism appear in two forms, both insisting that there are causal powers in nature. One type of non-occasionalist insists that God’s conservation involves the being of the created order only, so that the causal powers in nature can themselves be responsible for the character though not the being of (objects involved in) successor states. The other type of non-occasionalist theist insists on a further doctrine, the doctrine of concurrence, according to which God is an active, direct, and immediate cause of everything that happens in nature, but not in such a way to make impossible causal relations within the created order itself. Instead, the picture is one of concurrence between the primary causal activity of God and the cooperative activity of secondary causal powers in the created order itself. On this account, God must not only conserve the things themselves together with their causal powers, but must in addition cooperate with creation in order for earlier stages of the universe to give way to later stages. Here I will refer to the latter position as “concurrentism” and the former as “conservationism,” with the caveat noted that conservationism may be better termed “mere conservationism,” since concurrentists embrace the doctrine of divine conservation as well. Here, though, I will ignore this point, optimistically assuming that the caution itself is sufficient to prevent misunderstanding. It is fair to say that concurrentism is the dominant position in traditional Christianity. Occasionalism can be found in a few thinkers, such as al-Ghazali, Malebranche, and Berkeley, but it is hard to locate a defender of conservationism outside the 14th-century Dominican William Durandus.3 One reason to slip from conservation to concurrence is that a fully general conservationism is already very close to concurrentism. If the doctrine of conservation has fully general scope, applying to every item in our full ontology, then God will be held to conserve in existence not only the ordinary objects of human experience (trees, lions, skyscrapers, etc.), but also such things as events, actions, states, and tropes. It is difficult, however, to see how to sustain a given action in existence while leaving its nature up to the human being in question. For example, one cannot sustain in existence

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Page 115 the action of swimming the English Channel without sustaining its character as an act of swimming, so when conservationism extends to actions as well as individuals, it becomes much harder to maintain the picture that God sustains only the being and not the character of things. The conservationist is pushed in this way to a more restrictive position, according to which God’s sustaining activity is limited to items more basic to the ontology. Actions and other events have objects as logical components, but not vice versa, and a conservationist might avoid the foregoing worry by favoring the more basic over the less basic when it comes to displays of the power of divine conservation. The logical end of this restriction strategy will be to hold that God’s sustaining activity is directed only at the basic units of a given ontology, leaving the remainder as the province of secondary causes. Such a position has the potential to be at least mildly embarrassing to those theists who deny that human persons are both the special object of God’s plan and also composed out of physical parts, and such discomfort may help move one from conservationism to concurrentism. Other concerns about conservationism focus on the role of miracles in the story of the universe, and whether it is fitting to conceive of God as in conflict with his creation in the process of bringing about some miraculous event. Just as there is some intuitive notion that it is worse to kill than to let die, it may be thought that it is somehow less disturbing to imagine God merely abstaining from concurring with ordinary causal powers of things in order, for example, to keep the fire from burning the three Hebrews thrown into the furnace rather than having actively to interfere to stop the fire from having its usual effects. The strength of these reasons is a bit hard to assess, and I will not undertake such an effort here. My intention is only to point out why the slide from conservation to concurrence is understandable, and to register the need for the conservationist to say why less divine activity in the story of the universe is better than more. Given the presumption these reasons create in favor of concurrentism, I will begin by exploring what happens to the doctrine of middle knowledge on concurrentist account of God’s relationship to nature. In the next section I will outline the best account of concurrentism in the literature and argue that it undermines the motivation for the doctrine of middle knowledge, and I will then argue that the reasons for this fact are not limited to the particular precise version of the view in question but are rather perfectly general, applying to any version of concurrentism. CONCURRENTISM The most explicit account of concurrentism in the literature is that of Alfred Freddoso. Freddoso characterizes the difference between concurrentism and conservationism in terms of two principles:

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Page 116 (MC) Necessarily, for any entity x and time t , if any created substance produces x at t as an immediate and per se cause, then God is a (merely) remote cause of x at t and not an immediate and per se cause of x at t . Concurrentists deny (MC) and affirm the following principle of divine general concurrence: (DGC) Necessarily, for any entity x and time t , if any created substance produces x at t as an immediate and per se cause, then it is also the case that God is an immediate and per se cause of x at t.4 The difference between MC and DGC concerns the concepts of immediate and per se causation. The key notion of the two for our purposes is the notion of immediacy, which Freddoso defines as follows: x is an immediate cause of y at t if and only if (a) x exists at t , (b) x is an active cause of y at t , and (c) there is no set M such that (i) neither x nor y is a member of M, and (ii) each member of M is an active cause of y at t , and (iii) x is an active cause of y at t only in virtue of the fact that x causally contributes to the members of M existing at t* (at or before t ).5 It is clause (iii) of this definition that is supposed to do the work of distinguishing immediate from remote causation, since it is intended to rule out causation through intermediaries. Freddoso does not explain the key notion involved in clause (iii), the notion of one thing being a cause only in virtue of the fact that it works through intermediaries, and we will need some understanding of this notion. I propose that this notion can be understood as follows. Suppose we think of plans as quite general, requiring implementation by sequences of more particular means. We can then characterize God’s providential control over creation in terms of some overarching plan and some more particular means aimed at achieving such a plan. A complete strategy for carrying out a plan devolves into sequences of individual steps to be taken in realizing that plan, and we can call these individual steps the basic activities involved in the complete strategy that will achieve the plan. The dispute, then, that is meant to be captured by the aforementioned clause (iii) is that, while conservationists wish to insist that God’s only needed basic activity is that of sustaining things in existence, concurrentists insist on more, so that God’s basic activity includes causing any and all effects involved in the entire history of his creation. We can characterize basic activities in terms of the intentional object of the will involved in undertaking such an activity, allowing us to characterize the dispute in terms of God’s willing the existence of things in this basic way or God’s willing in this basic way the entire character of things as well. This explanation elides a central issue, however, the issue of the relationship between the steps involved in a complete strategy and the overall plan

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Page 117 in question. The natural interpretation of this relationship, when we think of human plans and our attempts to realize them, is in terms of causal explanation. We carry out a plan by taking the steps involved in realizing the plan, with the hope that these steps will be causally sufficient for success. In the present context, however, a mere causal interpretation of the relationship between the plan and its details is less than ideal, since we will then lack a full explanation of God’s continued relationship to the ongoing story of creation. Instead, the kind of explanation we are seeking is a metaphysical one, so that the connection between the steps taken by God and the realization of his plan is metaphysically necessary. Since the most plausible account of mere causation doesn’t require such a strong modality, it is best to interpret the key phrase in the aforementioned (iii) concerning causation only in virtue of a given fact in terms of metaphysical necessity rather than mere causal necessity. Given this discussion, we can then say that the notion of immediacy addresses the question of whether God’s basic activity metaphysically requires as its intentional object a reference only to the existence of things or to the character of things. Conservationists maintain the former position, while concurrentists maintain the latter position. This interpretation leaves an unfortunate gap, however, between the two positions. For suppose one insists that God not only must conserve things in existence in order for the continued unfolding of the cosmos, but that he must as well conserve them with the causal powers that he originally gave them at creation. The idea behind such a position is that there is a nice match between laws of nature and causal powers (at least under the assumption of determinism, an assumption we will make for the moment in order to motivate this position), and it isn’t enough for God to set things in motion and then merely conserve things in existence in order to make the unfolding perfectly predictable. He must, in addition, ensure sameness of laws throughout such a history, and to do so, he will need to conserve things together with whatever causal powers he gives them. Or, what is the same general idea, he must keep the laws the same from beginning to end. Humeans about laws will snort at this suggestion, since they view the laws as nothing beyond best summations of local, particular fact. The most interesting version of such a view is David Lewis’s best systems account of laws. Lewis writes, Take all deductive systems whose theorems are true. Some are simpler, better systematized than others. Some are stronger, more informative, than others. These virtues compete: an uninformative system can be very simple, an unsystematized compendium of miscellaneous information can be very informative. The best system is the one that strikes as good a balance as truth will allow between simplicity and strength…. A regularity is a law iff it is a theorem of the best system.6

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Page 118 The Humean/Lewisian idea is that the laws must supervene on the local facts, in the sense that given the same local facts, we get the same laws. Moreover, on this picture of laws, the laws are a subset of universal regularities (that subset defined in terms of the best compromise between competing theoretical virtues), with the result that it is incoherent to suppose that the laws might change throughout the history of the cosmos. Such a picture of laws, however, gives the occasionalist all the ammunition needed to win the dispute with conservationists and concurrentists. All are agreed that what is metaphysically fundamental requires divine explanation, and on the Humean story about laws, what is metaphysically fundamental is local particular fact. There is no possibility of any kind of divine sharing of explanatory locus, for once we leave the realm of the relation between God and his creation, we find nothing beyond one particular fact after another and the coded summaries of this mosaic of local particular fact. All agree that a display of power is necessary for an adequate account of the cosmos, and a Humean metaphysic insists that there is no real imputation of power into the created order at the level of fundamental metaphysics. Powers, perhaps, emerge in the coded summaries of the fundamental level, but that is ersatz power only. Creation on the Humean picture could be nothing beyond a direct and immediate display of divine power that fixes the entire spatiotemporal panoply itself, for there are no nonderivative powers that could be the immediate, intentional objects of basic divine creative activity. To put it pointedly, God couldn’t know of causal powers in nature by knowing his basic acts of will alone, but rather only by inferring such powers from what results from these basic acts of will. The alternative is that among the basic elements of creation are the causal powers imputed to things, and that this real sharing of power must be conserved in things just as much as existence itself must be conserved to ensure the continued unfolding of history. Because of the assumption by non-occasionalists that at the fundamental metaphysical level, creation involves a real sharing of power by God with the things he creates, there is an intermediate position between conservationism and concurrentism as clarified previously, a position that denies that God’s responsibility is limited to sustaining things in existence, but denies as well that the only alternative is the entire character of things. This intermediate position leaves to nature itself such explanatory work, involving God as the indirect cause of the entire character in virtue of sustaining things in existence together with their causal powers. Given this divine sustaining activity, the rest is up to nature herself. This intermediate position will become more important as we see a difficulty that plagues concurrentism, to which I now turn. A DIFFICULTY FOR CONCURRENTISM Concurrentists insist that there is a problem with any position weaker than one that requires God’s immediate causal involvement in every aspect of

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Page 119 any effect produced in nature. In so insisting, concurrentists imply that natural causes are metaphysically insufficient for their effects, regardless of whatever other conditional relationships might obtain in virtue of the causal relation. Perhaps causes are of a type that is materially necessary for the given type of their effects, or perhaps they are counterfactually necessary (in the sense that if the cause were absent the effect wouldn’t occur). Or perhaps causes are INUS conditions for their effects.7 But whatever else is true in terms of the relationship between causation and conditionals, causes are not metaphysically sufficient for their effects. Thus, in order to get a complete, fully satisfactory explanation, adverting to God’s concurrent activity is metaphysically necessary. In order for this concurrentist story to be satisfactory, however, God’s concurrent activity must not only be metaphysically necessary, but must complete the account which is metaphysically sufficient as well. That is, given whatever displays of power are to be found in the natural order, once we add to these the divine activity, we get a complete, fully satisfactory explanation. Such an explanation will leave no modal space for the cited facts to leave open some metaphysical possibility that the effect fail to be present. The problem arises when we focus on the concurrent divine act itself. What shall we say about it? Shall we say that it, too, just like natural causes, is perhaps necessary for the effect but metaphysically insufficient for it? Shall we, that is, allow for the possibility that God could act with the direct intention to produce a given effect and this divine activity be frustrated by the failure of nature itself to cooperate? Merely formulating the thought reveals the inadequacy. To claim that God is fully sovereign over nature, and yet that nature could frustrate the divine purposes in this way, is incoherent; and at least when we stick with fully deterministic assumptions, as we are at present, there is full agreement that no such limitation on divine sovereignty is appropriate. It is instructive in this context to notice that one of the arguments for concurrentism over conservationism insists that it is demeaning to divine sovereignty to imagine that God must struggle with causal powers in nature in order to perform certain miracles. A favorite example here is the failure of the Hebrews to be burned when thrown into the fiery furnace.8 Concurrentists get to say that the miracle is a result of God’s omission of his usual concurrent activity, whereas conservationists must envision God opposing and overcoming the powers in nature that lead us to expect the fire to harm the Hebrews. The argument is not compelling, but we need not pursue that point here, for the point to note is that it is much worse to imagine God losing to nature than to imagine him opposing and overcoming nature. Whether or not the latter is unbefitting his sovereignty over nature, there is no question that the former is. What follows, then, is that for any basic divine activity, concurrentists must hold that it is metaphysically impossible for God to so will in the particular way he does and for his will to be frustrated. In short,

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Page 120 God’s specific concurrent activity is metaphysically both necessary and sufficient for any and every effect in nature. Such an admission opens the door to occasionalism. If God’s own activity is metaphysically necessary and sufficient for every detail of creation, there is no room left for any causal power in nature itself, the occasionalist will say. One might hold out hope for such by appeal to causal overdetermination, insisting that the spatiotemporal manifold is overdetermined by both God’s activity and nature herself. But such an appeal is multiply troubling. First, it is controversial whether overdetermination is a type of causation at all,9 and even if it were a type of causation, it would be entirely otiose for God to impart such redundancies in nature. A worse problem, however, concerns the relationship between causation and entailment. It is one thing to imagine the convergence of the two in the divine created activity, but when entailment is present, natural causation is absent. The summing of two and two doesn’t cause the result of 4; being a bachelor doesn’t cause one to be unmarried; and being H2O doesn’t cause a substance to be water. Entailments leave no room for causation, so once the entailment is in place, not only is there no need to posit any type of causation in nature, it is incoherent to do so. That is the argument from concurrentism to occasionalism: God’s amazing power overwhelms any possibility of causal power in nature precisely because it is entailing power. Given the typical conflict between entailment and causation in nature, the occasionalist seems to be in an enviable position. I will argue later that this argument for occasionalism can be resisted by denying the claim that entailment and causation are incompatible, but before doing so, I want to consider in the next section the options for concurrentism to deny the entailment point. POSSIBLE ESCAPES Concurrentists will not at this point go away silently, for there are two possible avenues for attempting to evade this entailment result. In cryptic form, the options are either to split the effects or unite the actions. One might hold God and nature responsible for different aspects or features of a single unitary effect, or one might, in some way, hold that there is no distinguishable divine action from the action of nature herself, but only the single unified cooperative action of God and nature combined. Either way, we don’t get God’s display of power rendering otiose any contribution from nature. The least plausible of these escape routes, to my mind, is the idea that one can interpret cooperative action in terms of a single unified action of God and nature combined. My concern is not that there isn’t such a thing as a cooperative action, for there surely is. When we contribute to charitable causes to provide famine relief, and the result is that people survive who

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Page 121 would have died without our efforts, there certainly is a cooperative action to be found. The issue isn’t the existence of cooperative action, but the non-existence of separable actions on the part of each individual agent in question. Whatever cooperative actions are, their existence supervenes on other things, including separable actions by individual agents. When two soldiers help a fallen comrade to his feet, there is a cooperative action the existence of which supervenes on aspects of nature that include individual actions by each individual soldier. When two magnets attract an object that requires both magnets to move, there is a cooperative force that has supervenient existence on a collection of more basic features of the cosmos, features that include the individual and isolable powers of each magnet. In particular, each magnet exerts a force of attraction that would have some effect on the object in question, even if it would not cause a change in spatial location to the object. Moreover, in the first example, if the fallen comrade could not be lifted by either soldier individually, each action would nonetheless have some effect, if only causing the fallen comrade to lean in one direction or be more easily dislodged by some smaller additional force. In short, collective actions have a compositional structure to them involving displays of causal power on the part of each agent in question, and this point remains even if, in some way or other, cooperative action is not reducible to individual action. So long as there is an isolable, individual action on God’s part, the question can arise as to whether this action can fail to bring about its intended purpose because of some failure of nature to cooperate. To retain the doctrine of divine sovereignty one cannot allow such a possibility. So the only attractive option remaining for the concurrentist in attempting to avoid the problem of entailment is to split the effect. Aristotelians might wish to hold God responsible for the matter and nature for the form; God gives the determinable and nature the determinant. Others may wish to divide the effect in others ways that separate something more general from something more specific. Such proposals sound promising initially, but prove problematic when examined carefully. In particular, we must ask about the individual actions of God and nature in producing a given result: not the types of actions in question, but the token actions. And not just any token action, for those who think that in doing anything, we do many, many things; instead, let us focus on the most specific token individual action in question: the one that entails the presence of all the others. The crucial difficulty is that to avoid the entailment from divine activity to fulfillment of the divine plan encoded in the specific token description in question, the concurrentist has to describe a world in which this very precise token divine activity occurs without the effect occurring. Yet, to avoid relinquishing divine sovereignty, one must deny that nature can frustrate the divine purpose that underlies the choice of that particular action. As I see it, the only possible response to this untoward conception of God as at the mercy of nature is to explain away the gap between God’s

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Page 122 affective side (which includes his intentions) and reality by citing some difference on the cognitive side. Here the doctrine of double effect provides a model. We might try to say that there is a difference in W* concerning what God knows to be the case that would explain how the same complete account of God’s intentional activity A could result in E in W but in something else in W* . God is not surprised, and the doctrine of providence uncompromised, by the difference. In the first world, God knows that his own activity, together with the activity of nature, will result in E; in the second world, he knows that something else will result. But he doesn’t intend both E and something different in the two worlds, since such a difference in intention would undermine the claim that the token complete individual activity in the two cases is the same. It is this last feature where we find the rub. Notice that to sustain such a picture of the divine activity, God can’t intend at all the effect which is the unitary effect of the concurrent activity of both God and nature. God and nature combine, it is held, for water to boil in the presence of the flame; but the most specific description of God’s token concurrent activity here does not include an intention on the part of God for the water to boil. Instead, all he intends is something else more general, knowing that nature will behave in a particular way as well, and that the result will be the boiling of the water. One problem here, though, is that God’s activity is no longer, then, an immediate cause of the boiling of the water. It is aimed elsewhere, and indirectly results in the boiling of the water. This problem leads to another. Recall that we are still assuming a deterministic picture of creation, leaving aside whether full sovereignty can be maintained once we give up such a fully deterministic picture (the theory of middle knowledge being brought in to allow such retention). Here, however, full sovereignty is already compromised, even without abandoning determinism. God’s plan does not cover every minute detail of creation; it would be a mistake to claim that the numbering of the very hairs of our head fall within that plan. For the plan is generic in character only. So, on the account in question, one of two deadly bullets must be bitten: either full sovereignty and providential control go out the window or the problem of entailment remains. The token activity of God must involve the intention to produce the effect in question in order for it to be an immediate cause of that effect, and if it involves this intention, it is not possible for the cause to be present and the effect not. For whatever God aims at, all things considered, he hits; his direct and immediate intentions with which he acts are not frustrated. What to say once we remove our deterministic assumptions is another matter, one that we will be able to address after seeing what effect the entailment problem has on the debate between occasionalists and other theists. Concurrentists may wish to insist that their position has been misportrayed, that God’s exercise of power in concurring with natural causes only entails the results in question in combination with those natural causes.

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Page 123 But logic betrays them. It is well-known that entailment is monotonic: adding additional information never undermines an entailment relation. So if being a bachelor entails that one is unmarried, no matter what additional information one cares to provide about the individual in question, it will still follow that the individual is unmarried. Even if we add something impossible, the result still holds. So God’s activity alone metaphysically guarantees the result, and this is not changed by adding some purported activity by nature herself. The entailment is not hostage to this additional information, and the entailment holds even if the presence of the entailment makes the additional information impossible. In the face of these obstacles, retreat might seem the best option. One might move toward conservationism, and in abandoning full concurrentism, one might still wish to retain the name: “confined concurrentism,” we might say. Or one might wish to call the new position “supplemented conservationism,” thereby admitting that concurrentism is abandoned once one restricts God’s actions in such a way that nature herself contributes something independent on her own. Retreat isn’t an option, however. To see that it isn’t, we need to attend to the difference between conservationism and concurrentism. That difference concerns whether God is responsible in an immediate (and per se) way for every aspect of creation. The full concurrentist says “yes,” and any weaker position that moves toward or endorses conservationism will say “no.” Supplemented conservationism thus hopes to escape the problem of entailment by refusing to claim that God’s responsibility for the entire created order is equally immediate for every aspect of creation. It is immediate when it comes to the conservation of things and their causal powers, but it is mediate when it comes to the specific outworkings of displays of the causal powers in question. Notice, however, that moving some divine effects from the category of immediate effects to the category of mediate effects does not change the entailment relations in question. There may be a distinction between what is the immediate result of a display of God’s power, or alternatively, we may abstract away from the entire overall description of what God is doing to the metaphysically fundamental display of divine power that grounds the truth of the overall description. We may then claim to be able to distinguish between two aspects of God’s relationship to the world. But it is all for naught, if our sole purpose is to provide a way of avoiding the entailment in question. The entailment issue concerns God’s all-things-considered intentional activity, and even if there is a proper subpart of this activity that does not entail the result in question, it still remains true that the total intentional activity does entail the activity in question. The problem of entailment is thus inescapable, and the only question concerns the significance of the problem. As we have seen, occasionalists see the problem as one implying the truth of their own position. In the next section, I explain how to avoid this implication. In so doing, we will

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Page 124 see how the existence of counterfactuals of freedom comes apart from the theory of middle knowledge. In slogan form, you don’t need middle knowledge if occasionalism can be avoided. ENTAILMENT, OCCASIONALISM, AND THE SUPERFLUITY OF MIDDLE KNOWLEDGE What is needed to respond to the problem of entailment is to insist that metaphysical entailment isn’t always and everywhere incompatible with causal power distinct from the metaphysical entailer. To see how this might work, imagine a deterministic world, and that causation is transitive. Then, to sustain the idea that causes are difference-makers, one can’t just imagine what would happen if the cause were absent. The cause can’t be absent without changing the entire history of the world up to the point where the cause actually occurs. So, in a deterministic world, we get the difference-maker idea by imagining both the absence of the cause and the absence of whatever aspects of the past led to the presence of the cause (though we aren’t allowed to consider worlds with different laws of nature), and then we imagine what the world would be like in such a situation, a situation that now includes the absence of the cause. This is the intuitive idea behind the counterfactual theory of causation, though we needn’t endorse that theory in order to appreciate the point that causes are difference-makers and difference-making in a deterministic world won’t show up without imposing the right controls on the total history of the world leading up to the purported cause in question. The crucial element of this story is that you can’t understand causation in a deterministic world simply in terms of imagining a situation in which the cause is absent. You have to be imagining a world assumed to be different in other ways as well, on pain of the world in question being an impossible world. So, in defense of concurrentism, one can insist that in order to understand causes in nature, you can’t just take the natural cause away and then look for a difference. You also have to take other things away. Among these other things is the cooperative activity of God. In slogan form, difference-makers only show up when the proper imaginative controls are in place. Moreover, even if this response to occasionalism counts as question-begging in some way, it is of an unproblematic and fully expectable sort in philosophical discussions. It is a response motivated by extension from a well-known and mundane point about ordinary causes in deterministic contexts: difference-making won’t show up without the proper experimental controls in place. The one thing we are not allowed to do when trying to understand what counts as a difference-making cause in the natural order is to let the laws of nature vary. In a deterministic world involving no miraculous intervention, the laws plus the past entail the future. So, if we hold fixed the laws plus the

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Page 125 lack of miraculous intervention, there is no metaphysically possible world in which only the cause itself is absent. So causation can’t be found if we hold fixed the entire past up to the point of the cause, including the laws of nature plus the lack of miraculous intervention, since there is no world like that, lacking the cause in question. Concurrentists can use this point to suggest that the same holds for how we may legitimately avoid occasionalism. If we hold fixed God’s displays of power, we can’t find a world in which the natural causes and effects are different than they actually are. Rather than confirming the truth of occasionalism, however, this point simply reinforces the well-known fact that causes can’t be found without appropriate experimental controls. We have to know what to hold fixed and what not to hold fixed in order to understand what legitimately counts as a difference-making cause and what doesn’t. Finding secondary causes in nature is thus no more impossible than finding causation in deterministic worlds: you just have to pay attention to the need for controls. Moreover, this same point holds for conservationists as well. The issue doesn’t turn on anything having to do with immediacy of causation, so long as the entailment from God’s plan to entire history remains. Without appropriate controls, the occasionalist wins; but the occasionalist wins only if the analogy about controls fails. There is thus hope for denying that the problem of entailment requires the truth of occasionalism. We are now in a position to see the payoff of this discussion for the theory of middle knowledge. In escaping the problem in this way, the need for middle knowledge disappears. The usual worry about human freedom conceived of in terms of libertarian theory is that if God acts in such a way that metaphysically guarantees that I mow my lawn tomorrow, then a defining condition on freedom is violated—namely, that I do not have the ability to do otherwise. But this argument is not relevant any longer, once we have used the preceding escape route from the problem of entailment. On that escape route, we only find power in the created order once the appropriate controls are in place, and if that point is correct with respect to ordinary causal powers in natural objects, the same point can be made when searching for libertarian powers as well. Finding an ability to do otherwise requires not holding fixed God’s entailing power, just as much as finding the power in the fire to cause water to boil requires not holding fixed God’s entailing power. Once we refuse to hold fixed God’s continued involvement in the created order, we are in a position to investigate what kinds of power are found in that created order, and the results of our investigation might be that the world is fully deterministic or that it is not. Neither conclusion is ruled out by the fact that God’s continued involvement in the created order has the character that it has, and only occasionalists are in a position to insist otherwise. This point can be made in a different and more metaphysical way, using the distinction between intensional and hyperintensional space. Whether one thing entails another is a fact about intensional space, and what we

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Page 126 have seen is that the search for secondary causes in nature will come up empty, on a theistic metaphysics, if we limit our search to intensional space. There is, that is, no escape from occasionalism if there is no metaphysical space other than intensional space; within such space, there is no room for any power other than God’s power. To find such room, we must attend to hyperintensional space. We must, that is, be able to distinguish between two displays of divine power, both of which entail the result in question, but only one of which leaves the result totally and completely up to God. If we are able to do so with respect to secondary causes in general, then the objection launched against libertarian freedom on the assumption that God’s knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom results from his creative activity, rather than constituting middle knowledge, loses its force. If secondary causation in nature is a hyperintensional fact about the cosmos, there is no reason to suppose that libertarian power is not also a hyperintensional fact. If so, however, one cannot show that libertarian power is absent merely because of intensional facts about various existing conditions metaphysically entailing the particular display of libertarian power in question. In the interests of full disclosure, this point leaves open the possibility that there is some other reason why God’s knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom has to be middle knowledge. I have no idea, however, what other reason could be given, and it would seem that no one else does either, since the explicit reason Molinists give for requiring middle knowledge is to retain libertarian freedom and the associated principle of alternative possibilities. The argument here shows that no such defense of middle knowledge is needed, so the burden is thus on the standard Molinist to find some other reason for it. NOTES 1. See Luis de Molina (1988). 2. Harry Frankfurt (1969). 3. See de Saint-Pourçain (1571), II dist. 1, q. 5. For discussion of the dominance of concurrentism in medieval Christianity, see Freddoso (1991). 4. Alfred Freddoso (1991), 567. 5. Ibid ., 559. 6. David Lewis (1994), 478. 7. For discussion of the relationship between causation and conditionals of various sorts, see J. L. Mackie (1980). For more recent discussion, see Ned Hall, L. A. Paul, and John Collins (2004). 8. See Freddoso (1991), 572–578, for a discussion of this argument and the use of this example. 9. David Lewis, for example, denies that it is, and also argues that no theory of causation should be driven by an assumption one way or the other on whether overdetermination is a type of causation. See his (1973b).

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Page 127 8 More on Molinism John Martin Fischer In this relatively brief chapter, I wish to clarify and perhaps to consolidate my views on the role of Molinism in understanding God’s Providence and the relationship between God’s omniscience and human freedom.1 In the first part of the chapter I shall summarize the views I have sought to present elsewhere, attempting to situate Molinism in its intellectual home and highlighting the main features of my position. I then turn to an interesting challenge presented by Thomas Flint; in addressing Flint’s worries, I hope to help us to gain a clearer understanding of the role—and limitations—of Molinism. MOLINISM AND ITS ROLE Here I shall take “Molinism” to be a position that is based on the writings of Luis de Molina, but I do not make the claim that they are Molina’s views exactly; nor do I suppose that they are Molina’s only relevant views. My aim here is not to do history of philosophy or textual exegesis, but, rather, to lay out and philosophically evaluate a certain set of views.2 Molinism presupposes that for an act to be free (and thus for the relevant agent to be morally responsible for it), the agent must be free to do otherwise, and, further, that the act must not be causally determined by prior events. Thus, the Molinist holds that the freedom relevant to moral responsibility is “freedom to choose/do otherwise,” and that such freedom is incompatible with causal determinism. Additionally, the Molinist posits what might be called three (logical, not necessarily chronological) “moments” in God’s knowledge: (i) His prevolitional (i.e., prior to God’s willing to actualize any particular possible world) “natural knowledge” of metaphysically necessary states of affairs, including the capacities of all possible free creatures, (ii) His prevolitional “middle knowledge” of conditional future contingents (including knowledge of what creatures would freely do in all possible circumstances), and (iii) His “free knowledge” of the total causal contribution He himself wills to make to the created world plus what He knows via natural and middle knowledge.3

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Page 128 The Molinist is an incompatibilist about causal determinism and human freedom (in the relevant sense), but a compatibilist about God’s omniscience (foreknowledge) and such freedom. (Molinism and Ockhamism share this particular dialectical niche.) The Molinist thus disagrees with both the compatibilist about causal determinism and human freedom to do otherwise (the “Multiple-Pasts Compatibilists” and the “Local-Miracle Compatibilists”) and also the Theological Fatalists. Molinism, with its doctrine of Middle Knowledge, provides an elegant model of Divine Providence. If we posit Simple Foreknowledge—that God knows in advance unconditional future contingent statements that state that some individual will freely perform some action in the future—it appears as if God is severely limited in his providential powers; after all, the future free behavior of human agents is “given to Him,” as it were.4 But on the doctrine of Middle Knowledge, God can employ the relevant conditionals and his Natural Knowledge (of initial conditions) in the process of deciding which possible world to actualize. Molinism, as opposed to Simple Foreknowledge, provides a model of Divine Providence; as such, it is an important view both philosophically and theologically. But some have evidently thought that Molinism’s role includes more than providing a model of Divine Providence. More specifically, some philosophers have thought that Molinism stands on a par with the major answers to the problem of theological fatalism; that is, they have thought that Molinism somehow provides a distinctive answer to the basic argument for the incompatibility of God’s omniscience and human freedom.5 The main point I have made in previous work on Molinism is that whereas Molinism does indeed provide a model of Divine Providence, it does not provide a distinctive view about the relationship between God’s omniscience and human freedom.6 More specifically, my view is that it does not in any way provide a distinctive way of responding to the fundamental argument for the incompatibility of God’s foreknowledge and human freedom. To help to see this point, I shall offer a simple and streamlined version of what I take to be the challenge posed by the theological fatalist (the incompatibilist about God’s omniscience and human freedom in the sense of freedom to choose/do otherwise).7 First, I assume here that “God” is a name that picks out an essentially sempiternal and omniscient individual. Whatever else omniscience involves, it entails that an omniscient agent believes that P just in case P is true. I now formulate a principle designed to capture the intuitive idea of the fixity of the past: (FP) An agent S has it in his power (in the sense relevant to moral responsibility) to do X only if it is possible that X be an extension of the past (relative to S’s situation). (FP) seeks to crystallize a basic and intuitive idea, but it is a bit vague. The notion of “possibility” in question must be thought of as something like

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Page 129 “compatibility with the logical truths and truths about essences,” or something like that; in any case, it is not the same notion of possibility as freewill possibility (“having it in one’s power”). Here is a slightly more explicit formulation, which employs the “possible-worlds” apparatus: (FP*) An agent S has it in his power (in the sense relevant to moral responsibility) at (or just prior to) t to do X at t only if there is a possible world with the same past up to t in which S does X at t .8 Now the argument for incompatibilism can be presented. Suppose that God (as envisaged at least in part as stated previously) exists, and that S does X at t2 , where X is some ordinary act such as raising one’s hand. It follows that God believed at t1 that S would do X at t2 . Given God’s essential omniscience, God’s belief at t1 entails that S does X at t2 . Thus, in all possible worlds in which God believes at t1 that S will do X at t2 , S will do X at t2 ; so in any world in which S does not do X at t2 , God doesn’t believe at t1 that S does X at t2 . It seems to follow from (FP*) that S does not have it in his power at or just prior to t2 to refrain from X -ing at t2 , and thus that S’s doing X at t2 isn’t free.9 Call this the Basic Argument for the Incompatibility of God’s Omniscience and Human Freedom (or the “Basic Argument,” for short). There are various ways to respond to the Basic Argument (in addition to simply accepting it as sound). Open Theism comes in various forms, but the Open Theists unite in denying that it follows from S’s doing X at t2 that God believed at t1 that S would do X at t2 . Perhaps the Open Theist will follow Arthur Prior in deeming such statements as “ S will do X at t2 ” as false at t1 .10 Or an Open Theist might follow Aristotle (on some interpretations of Aristotle) in saying that such statements as “ S will do X at t2 ” are neither true nor false—but are instead indeterminate in truth value —prior to (say) t2 . Alternatively, an Open Theist might argue that God chooses not to believe (or perhaps cannot believe) the propositions expressed by such statements as “ S will do X at t2 ” because believing such propositions would rule out human freedom, and He had to create free creatures (given His nature).11 The Atemporalist will also deny the implication from S’s doing X at t2 to God’s believing at t1 that S would do X at t2 , but for a different reason. The Atemporalist contends that God is outside time—on this picture, God’s eternality is not sempiternality, but atemporality. Thus, although God timelessly knows and thus perhaps timelessly believes that S does X at t2 , He does not hold such a belief at any particular time. This view is associated with Boethius and Aquinas. In contrast, an Ockhamist will accept the implication denied by the Open Theist and the Atemporalist, but go on to deny that (FP*) applies to all features of the past. The Ockhamist will say that (FP*) only applies to the temporally nonrelational or “hard” features of the past, and further

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Page 130 that God’s beliefs are not such features. For instance, an Ockhamist might contend that “God believes at t1 that S will do X at t2 ” expresses a temporally relational or “soft” fact about the past, which is thus not fixed at subsequent times (at least, not fixed in virtue of an application of [FP*]).12 In contrast to the Ockhamist, the “Multiple-Pasts Compatibilist” contends that God’s beliefs may well be temporally nonrelational or hard facts about the past, but such a theorist denies that even hard facts need be fixed at subsequent times—and thus the Multiple-Pasts Compatibilist denies (FP*).13 The foregoing simply indicates in a sketchy way—without suitable elaboration—the kinds of responses to the Basic Argument that are available. And, no doubt, there are more responses than I have mentioned. But what should be evident is that each of the responses takes the Basic Argument seriously and seeks to pinpoint a place—an assumption or premise, an inference—to be resisted. My contention is that Molinism does not provide such a response; more precisely, my claim is that Molinism in itself does not provide a distinctive response to the Basic Argument. Thus, I think that Molinism is not on a par with Open Theism, Atemporalism, Ockhamism, and Multiple-Pasts Compatibilism in providing a response to the Basic Argument. As I stated previously, Molinism is a model of Divine Providence, not a response to the Basic Argument; perhaps it presupposes such a response, but it is not itself a response to the Basic Argument. MOLINISM IS NOT A RESPONSE TO THE BASIC ARGUMENT To explain.14 On Molina’s theory of middle knowledge, God is said to know in advance a large set of conditionals of the form, “If in circumstance C1 , agent A would freely do X ,” “If in circumstance C2 , agent A would freely do Y ,” and so forth. Given Molina’s assumption about the relationship between acting freely and freedom to do otherwise, truths of the form, “In circumstance C1 , agent A would be free to do other than he actually does ( X ),” “In circumstance C2 agent A is free to do other than what he actually does ( Y ),” and so forth are simply assumed to be knowable by God prior to the relevant times (the times of the actions). It should be clear that in the dialectical context (in which the incompatibilist’s Basic Argument is under consideration), it would be question-begging (or at least not dialectically helpful at all) simply to bring forward (without explanation) the claim that God does know in advance truths of the form, “At some future time agent A will be free to do other than he actually does ( X ).” This simply posits that in the actual world God knows in advance that some human agent will in fact be free to do otherwise; but this is precisely what is called into question by the Basic Argument. I

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Page 131 contend that it would be similarly question-begging (or at least not dialectically helpful at all) to claim that God can know in advance truths of the form, “If agent A were in (possible) circumstance C1 , A would be free to do other than he actually does ( X ).” Note that God is assumed by the Molinist to know (via His natural knowledge) that (say) C1 is possible. So God knows that there is a possible world in which C1 obtains. Since (according to the Molinist) He also knows (via His middle knowledge) the conditional, “If agent A were in (possible) circumstance C1 , A would be free to do other than he actually does ( X ),” it follows that God knows that there is a possible world in which A is free to do other than he actually does. (Obviously, God’s knowledge is closed under known implication.) Molinism here simply posits that it is possible that God knows in advance that a human agent is free to do otherwise. But the incompatibilist’s argument putatively establishes that God’s foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom to do otherwise—and thus that is it impossible — there is no possible world—in which God knows in advance that some human agent is free to do otherwise. So it appears that the Molinist is committed to a set of propositions that presupposes that the Basic Argument is unsound. I have contended that the mere assertion of those propositions does not in itself provide a helpful response to the Basic Argument. Now of course if Molinism were to accept the Ockhamist’s claim that God’s beliefs are temporally relational (hard) facts about the relevant times and thus not fixed at subsequent times, then it would have a response to the Basic Argument; but then the response would simply be Ockhamism! That is, Molinism would not in that case be a distinctive response to the Basic Argument; rather, it would be a model of Divine Providence that presupposes a quite separate response to the foreknowledge problem posed by the Basic Argument. Note that if a Molinist embraces Ockhamism as a solution to the foreknowledge problem, this in no way vitiates its elegant and important contribution to understanding Divine Providence. It thus does not diminish the theological or philosophical importance of Molinism. My point is not that a Molinism that presupposes Ockhamism is untenable or insignificant; rather, it is that we need to understand precisely what Molinism’s role would be. Here what is doing all of the work in addressing the Basic Argument is Ockhamism; Molinism then comes into play as a model of Divine Providence, but not an answer to the incompatibilist’s challenge (as captured by the Basic Argument). Note, additionally, that a Molinist (as understood previously) apparently cannot adopt Multiple-Pasts Compatibilism as a response to the Basic Argument. This is because the Molinist is an incompatibilist about causal determinism and the relevant sort of freedom (freedom to choose/ do otherwise). A Multiple-Pasts Compatibilist is willing to concede that God’s beliefs are temporally nonrelational (hard) facts about the relevant

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Page 132 times, but he goes on to state that they are nevertheless not fixed at subsequent times. But such a move opens the door to compatibilism about causal determinism and the relevant sort of freedom. Indeed, it is difficult for me to see how one could be a Multiple-Pasts Compatibilist about God’s foreknowledge and human freedom, but not about causal determinism and human freedom. I shall return to a more detailed and careful discussion of this possibility below. Now if we prescind from the commitment to incompatibilism about causal determinism and human freedom (of the relevant sort), the Molinist could adopt Multiple-Pasts Compatibilism. But in this case nothing in the distinctive doctrines of Molinism—in particular, nothing about the counterfactuals of freedom that constitute Middle Knowledge—would help to justify or explain this response to the Basic Argument. There are philosophers who have defended Multiple-Pasts Compatibilism, but nothing in Molinism helps in this defense. Now someone might say that he has good reasons (perhaps stemming from considerations pertinent to God’s Providence) to adopt Molinism, and he adopts Molinism with the assumption that there is some suitable response to the Basic Argument. Perhaps such a person simply does not think the Basic Argument is compelling or provides a genuine challenge, or perhaps he does take the Basic Argument seriously, but puts it aside for the time being and simply assumes that there must be some adequate response. After all, this seems fair—we can’t solve all interesting philosophical problems at once! (Indeed, it sometimes seems as if it would be miraculous if we could solve just one !) There is absolutely nothing objectionable here, but it is (again) important to see that Molinism is not doing any work in replying to the Basic Argument. I am not claiming that anyone who adopts Molinism needs to address the Basic Argument, or, more generally, that anyone who holds any theological doctrines that are relevant to free will (or even that presuppose certain views about free will) must address the Basic Argument. It is quite all right simply to put the Basic Argument aside, perhaps for a rainy day. But then one should be willing to admit that this is what is happening—that Molinism is playing no role in addressing the Basic Argument and thus that Molinism is not on a par in this regard with (say) Ockhamism (or Aristotelianism or Open Theism). I wish to emphasize that I do not in any way want to “demote” or denigrate Molinism; I simply want to identify its niche more precisely in dialectical space. FLINT’S CRITIQUE I turn to a challenging critique of my position offered by Thomas Flint.15 In order to lay out Flint’s critique, I need to introduce a bit of technical apparatus. Consider the conditional, “If agent A were in (possible) circumstance

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Page 133 C1 , then A would be free to do other than he does ( X) .” Let’s symbolize such a conditional as “If C1 , then ( X and P~ X ),” where “P~X ” is to be read as “ A has the power to do (is free to do) other than X .” Also, “Pos( R)” is to be read as “It is possible that R.” Now my argument against construing Molinism as providing a response to the Basic Argument can be laid out as follows. The Molinist is committed to thinking that God, by His natural knowledge, knows that Pos(C1 ). If the Molinist also can, in this dialectical context, assume that God knows the relevant conditionals, then God would by His middle knowledge know “If C1 , then ( X and P~ X ).” From these two bits of knowledge, it would follow that God knows that it is possible that A is free to do other than he does; in other words, it would follow that God knows that there is a possible world in which A is free to do other than what he does in that world. But this is dialectically unfair, since the ingredients in the incompatibilist’s argument (the Basic Argument) appear to imply that God’s foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom, and thus that there is no possible world in which some human agent is free in the relevant sense. Flint asks us to consider my argument, as sketched earlier. Slightly more explicitly, I claim that the two premises (1) God knows that Pos(C1 ) and (2) God knows that (If C1 , then [ X and P~ X ]) imply the conclusion (3) God knows that Pos(X and P~ X ), which I claim to be dialectically inappropriate in the context of evaluating the Basic Argument. Flint’s first worry is that what (3) claims that God knows is, if true at all, a necessary truth (assuming something like an S5 system of modal logic), and hence something that God would know by His Natural Knowledge, not his Middle Knowledge. Since “Pos( X and P~ X )” is necessary, it is known by Natural Knowledge, not Middle Knowledge. Given that what (3) attributes to God as knowledge is a necessary truth, Flint finds it “very odd” that one who affirms (3) would be guilty of begging the question or some similarly suspicious dialectical behavior. Flint points out that even anti-Molinists such as William Hasker would presumably accept (3), and thus it would be wrong to suppose that the affirmation of (3) would in itself be dialectically unfair to the incompatibilist. This point leads to another of Flint’s reservations. Flint says:

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Page 134 [Fischer’s] argument suggests that it follows from (3) that (4) Pos(God knows in advance that a human agent is free to do otherwise). Now for (4) to be “dialectically unfair” from an incompatibilist point of view, it would have to be seen as elliptical for the claim that God can know temporally beforehand both that a human agent will in fact act in one way and that the agent will be free to act in some other way—i.e., something along the lines of (4*) Pos(God knows in advance that [X & P~X]). But there’s good reason to think that (4*) doesn’t follow from (3). Note first of all that many of [Fischer’s] fellow incompatibilists (e.g., again, Hasker) would defend (3) but reject (4*). More importantly, their position seems fully consistent. (3) really just says that God knows that there are possible worlds in which people do things but could have done other things. (4*) says that there are possible worlds in which God knows temporally beforehand which of two available options a certain free human will choose. There simply is no obvious inconsistency in affirming the former but denying the latter.16 REPLY TO FLINT I am very grateful for the thoughtful and penetrating critique by Flint, and I hope that my reply will help to clarify not just our disagreement, but the nature of my views about the role and dialectical niche of Molinism. First, if what is claimed to be known by God by (3), “Pos( X and P~ X ),” is indeed necessary, then, according to the Molinist, it is known via God’s Natural Knowledge. Flint contends that it therefore cannot be known via Middle Knowledge. I argued earlier that it can in fact be known via what can be known through Middle Knowledge, Natural Knowledge, and the closure of (God’s) knowledge under known implication. It would seem that propositions could be knowable by God via different channels, and that the proposition in question, “Pos( X and P~ X ),” would be just such a proposition. But let us simply stipulate here, for the sake of the discussion, that on Molina’s view, God would know that Pos(X and P~ X ) via Natural Knowledge, if He knows such a proposition at all. Now of course the problem is that to suppose that Pos(X and P~ X ) is part of God’s Natural Knowledge might appear to beg the question against the proponent of the Basic Argument. At least it should be clear that to suppose that God can know such a proposition via any channel, including Natural Knowledge, is going to be highly contentious within the context of a consideration of the Basic Argument. Further, it is evident that to make this sort of supposition is not to provide a response to the Basic Argument in the sense of Open Theism, Atemporalism, or Ockhamism; all of these

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Page 135 approaches pinpoint some premise in the argument that they find problematic, and they explain why they reject the relevant premises. In contrast, to suppose the God can know a proposition such as “Pos( X and P~ X )” in any way appears simply to deny the conclusion of the Basic Argument without explanation. So even if Flint is correct that the proposition in question would be part of God’s Natural Knowledge, it does not follow that it would be fair to require a proponent of the Basic Argument to accept that God could have Natural Knowledge, so construed. The problem gets pushed back, so to speak, to Natural Knowledge. But what exactly is the problem? I agree with Flint that Hasker and in general the Open Theist would accept (3). This is because Hasker (or the Open Theist in general) does not accept the total package of ancillary assumptions that are in fact accepted by the Molinist. Specifically, the Molinist accepts a picture that includes first that in advance of creating any specific world, God knows that possibly C1 . Further, on the Molinist picture, God can use information such as this on the basis of which He decides to actualize a particular possible world. Suppose that God decides to actualize the world according to which C1 is true. Now God is “inside” that world, so to speak, and given that He knows that C1 and He knows that (If C1 , then ( X and P~ X )), He knows (in advance) that X and P~ X . So there is a possible world in which God knows in advance that X and P~ X . So given the Molinist’s picture—the total package of Molinist views—one can get from (3) to (4*). That is, one can, as it were, push God’s knowledge inside the scope of the possibility operator by noting that on Molinism, God decided (say) to actualize the world according to which C1 . (It might well be that God decided to actualize the world according to which C1 precisely in order to actualize a world according to which X and P~ X .) It is as if you are deciding which movie to watch, and you have already seen all of them. You know that if you watch this one, such and such will happen, and if you watch that one, something else will happen, and so on. Then you choose this one. It seems to follow that you now— once you’ve chosen the movie—know what will happen.17 Hasker and other Open Theists do not accept elements of this picture, and thus they can accept (3) without thereby being committed to (4*). For example, Hasker does not accept that prior to actualizing a particular world, God could have both Natural Knowledge of initial circumstances and Middle Knowledge of the relevant conditionals (so-called “counterfactuals of freedom”). Given that Hasker does not accept this Molinist apparatus, he can accept (3) without thereby accepting (4*). But the Molinist cannot accept (3) without also accepting (4*), which is dialectically problematic within the context of an evaluation of the Basic Argument. I suppose one could resist my argument by imagining that once God actualizes a particular possible world, He no longer knows that C1 will obtain. But then this collapses into a version of Open Theism. Or perhaps one could say that once God actualizes a particular possible world, He somehow “forgets” that if C1 , then X and P~ X . But this is highly implausible,

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Page 136 if it is even consistent with His omniscience. So, given that He knows the antecedent and the conditional, it follows via Modus Ponens that He knows the problematic consequent. BERGMANN’S CRITIQUE Earlier I stated that it is difficult to see how someone could adopt Multiple-Pasts Compatibilism about God’s foreknowledge and human freedom (in the relevant sense) and yet maintain incompatibilism about causal determinism and such freedom; as I put it, Multiple-Pasts Compatibilism, with its signature contention that even indisputably “hard” or temporally nonrelational (as regards the future) facts need not be fixed or out of our control subsequently, “opens the door” to compatibilism about causal determinism and human freedom. In very helpful and insightful correspondence, Michael Bergmann has suggested a way of defending Multiple-Pasts Compatibilism about God’s foreknowledge and human freedom but not compatibilism about causal determinism and such freedom. Bergman says: Consider these three kinds of facts about the past: past facts about future contingents, past facts about God’s beliefs in future contingents, and past facts about events that causally determine my acts. It’s very common to think I’ve got counterfactual control over past facts (a billion years ago) about future contingents (e.g., p will be true in 2007): even if I render p true in 2007, I am able now in 2007 to do otherwise; and if I did do otherwise, I would thereby be doing something such that if I did it, a billion years ago it was the case that p will *not* be true in 2007. In short, it’s common to think I’ve got counterfactual power over past future contingents—I could do something such that they’d always be otherwise. Notice what’s going on in that case: (i) That past fact about a future contingent is explained by my current actions, not vice versa. That past fact is what it is because of what I do now, not vice versa. Now the same thing is true about God’s past beliefs about future contingents: (ii) God’s beliefs in future contingents are what they are because the past future contingents truths are what they are and (by the transitivity of ‘because’) because of what I’m doing now, not vice versa.18 (It’s because God’s beliefs are knowledge that we think he holds them because their contents are true.) But things are different when it comes to past facts that causally determine my acts:

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Page 137 (iii) It’s not the case that that past fact, which causes my current acts, is what it is because of my current act. Instead, it’s the other way around: given that that past fact causally determines my current act, my current act is what it is because of that past fact. And now we can see why it’s [acceptable] to think I have counterfactual control over my some past facts and not others: I have counterfactual control over past facts so long as those past facts are what they are because of what I now do (and not vice versa). And it turns out that past facts about future contingents and past facts about God’s beliefs are true because of what I do now. And it turns out that past facts about events that causally determine my current acts are not what they are because of what I do now; rather, I do what I do now because of those past facts. So the Foreknowledge/Freedom compatibilist has a principled reason for denying the fully general Fixity of the Past Principle (thereby avoiding the argument for Foreknowledge/Freedom incompatibilism) while at the same time allowing a Fixity of the Past Principle which denies counterfactual power over past facts which cause our acts (thereby defending the Consequence Argument for Determinism/Freedom incompatibilism against Altered-Past compatibilists who reject the Fixity of the Past by claiming to have counterfactual power over the past).19 Bergmann’s suggestion is both ingenious and illuminating. Let’s call past facts that depend on our present behavior “dependent,” and those that do not so depend, “independent.” His suggestion is that one can have a restricted Fixity of the Past Principle—a principle restricted to the independent facts. But whereas this is formally an open possibility, it seems highly implausible. More carefully, the restriction seems highly implausible if one takes seriously the idea that those past facts that are temporally nonrelational (as regards subsequent times) are “over-and-done-with” and thus fixed at subsequent times. The problem for the view that invokes a restricted Fixity of the Past Principle is that all temporally nonrelational facts—all “hard facts”—are over-and-done with, and thus all such facts should be considered fixed, if fixity stems from “over-and-done-with-ness.” So it would be completely ad hoc to restrict the Fixity of the Past Principle to dependent facts. This suggests that a theorist who wishes to apply a restricted Fixity of the Past Principle in the context of the debate about God’s foreknowledge must not accept that fixity stems from over-and-done-withness. Rather, the view would be that fixity flows simply from pastness plus independence. This would leave the door open to be a compatibilist about God’s foreknowledge and human freedom while being an incompatibilist about causal determinism and human freedom (of the relevant sort). Note, however, that this view depends on an insistence that the relevant notion of “because of” must be asymmetric. Recall Bergmann’s

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Page 138 statement, “ … it turns out that past facts about events that causally determine my current acts are not what they are because of what I do now; rather, I do what I do now because of those past facts.” But on some views of the relevant counterfactuals, if causal determinism is true and I actually perform some action X , the following “backtracker” is true: “If I were to refrain from X , the past would have been different all the way back.” Thus, on this sort of view of the counterfactuals, there would indeed be a counterfactual dependence of the past causal facts on the behavior in question, so it would not be obvious that the relevant notion of “because of” would be asymmetric. Further, even if the position in question—the adoption of a restricted Fixity of the Past Principle, compatibilism about God’s foreknowledge and human freedom, and incompatibilism about causal determinism and human freedom—is genuinely open, it in no way depends on what is distinctive of Molinism. That is, the signature features of Molinism involve the three moments of God’s omniscience— Natural Knowledge, Middle Knowledge (involving the so-called counterfactuals of freedom), and Free Knowledge. As far as I can see, these Molinist ideas do not play any role in motivating or defending the view in question, and, in particular, the view that some indisputably “hard” facts about the past are not fixed. As I stated previously, here Molinism would be playing no role in helping to stake out or defend the view as an answer to the Basic Argument for Incompatibilism about God’s omniscience and human freedom. The view in question may be open to a Molinist, but it is not a view that is in any way explained by Molinism qua Molinism. Thus, as earlier, the point is that Molinism in itself does not constitute an answer to the Basic Argument, whatever its other virtues may be. CONCLUSION The Basic Argument employs certain ingredients, such as the Principle of the Fixity of the Past, to get to the conclusion that God’s omniscience is incompatible with human freedom (in the sense of freedom to do otherwise). That is to say, the argument purports to establish that in any possible world in which God has foreknowledge of future human action, the relevant agent could not have done otherwise. Now there are various ways of addressing this argument by calling into question the various ingredients. Open Theism, Atemporalism, Ockhamism, and Multiple-Pasts Compatibilism do precisely this—they all pinpoint some putatively problematic assumption or “input” into the argument. But Molinism is not on a par with these other approaches in identifying some specific problematic premise of the argument (and explaining why the premise is allegedly indefensible). Rather, Molinism assumes from the outset precisely the denial of the conclusion: it assumes that there exists a

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Page 139 possible world in which God knows in advance that some agent does X and is nevertheless free to do otherwise. So Molinism is an elegant model of Divine Providence, but it is not an answer to the Basic Argument; rather, it presupposes such an answer.20 NOTES 1. John Martin Fischer (2008). 2. For a classic translation and commentary on Molina, see Alfred Freddoso (1988) and Luis de Molina (1988). 3. Freddoso (1988), 23. 4. It is, however, contentious whether simple foreknowledge is indeed providentially useless. David Hunt has argued against this position; see, for instance, David Hunt (2009). 5. Many people with whom I have discussed these matters have (at least initially) indicated that they think Molinism provides such an answer to the argument for incompatibilism. Robert Kane has explicitly stated this view in print: The third solution to the foreknowledge problem originated with another later medieval thinker, the Spanish Jesuit philosopher and theologian Luis de Molina…. Like Ockham, Molina rejected the timeless solution to the foreknowledge problem of Boethius and Aquinas. But Molina sought a better answer than Ockham was able to give about how God can foreknow future free actions. To explain this, Molina introduced the notion of divine ‘middle knowledge’. (Kane, 2005, 157) 6. Fischer (2008). 7. It is important to see that the incompatibilist’s argument can be given in different forms; the form I employ here is based on my presentation in Fischer (1994), 88–90. 8. To be a bit more careful, there should be a “triple” indexation in the principle: indexation to a time of the having of the power, the time of the relevant action, and the world in which the power is possessed: (FP**) An agent S has it in his power (in the sense relevant to moral responsibility) at (or just prior to) t in possible world p to do X at t only if there is a possible world p* with the same past as that of p up to t in which S does X at t . 9. The argument is presented in Fischer (1994), 87–93, and it is based on Nelson Pike’s classic version of this ancient argument: Pike (1965), reprinted in Fischer (1992), 57–73. 10. Arthur Prior (1962) and (1968). 11. I’m assuming that God’s perfect goodness requires God to create free creatures. If one disagrees with this claim, one can adjust the text to include “ … and he created free creatures.” 12. For discussions of Ockhamism, see Fischer (1992) and Fischer (1994), especially 111–130. 13. See Fischer (1994), especially 78–83. 14. I present the following argument in greater detail in Fischer (2008); the exposition of my argument in the text here (in the next few paragraphs) closely follows my presentation there. I am here deeply indebted to helpful and probing questions by Eleonore Stump on a previous version of the earlier paper; her questions helped me in how to present the argument in a sharper way.

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Page 140 15. Flint, personal correspondence, October 2007 through January 2008. I am very much indebted to Flint for his thoughtful and probing critique. 16. Flint, personal correspondence, January 2008. 17. For this analogy I am indebted to Neal Tognazzini. 18. A similar claim is advanced in Kevin Timpe (2007a). 19. Personal correspondence, September 21, 2007. 20. I am grateful to correspondence with Tom Flint and Michael Bergmann. Thanks also to very helpful comments by Neal Tognazzini and Kevin Timpe. I am honored to be included in this volume, and I wish to express both my admiration for Eleonore Stump’s intellectual contributions and my gratitude for her generous support over the years.

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Page 141 Part II Preacipue de Hominibus

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Page 143 9 The Supervenience of Goodness on Being John E. Hare Eleonore Stump, in the second chapter of her magisterial book on Aquinas, makes the claim that for Aquinas, “goodness supervenes on the natural property of the actualization of a specifying potentiality; moral goodness supervenes on the actualization of rationality, which is the specifying potentiality for human beings.”1 She does not intend this as an account of Aquinas’s use of the term ‘supervenience,’ though Aquinas does use the term in other contexts.2 Rather, she is taking the term from contemporary discussion, especially from the work of Jaegwon Kim, and she thinks it is helpful in understanding the relation Aquinas has in mind between goodness and being.3 I myself am not a scholar who specializes in Aquinas, and I have for many years made a practice of avoiding attribution of beliefs to him. In the present case, I will proceed by noting two things he says about the relation between goodness and being in ST Ia.5.1, first that ‘being’ and ‘goodness’ are the same in reference but differ only in sense, and second that the formula of the good consists in this, that something is desirable. I will then try to show that neither the notion of ‘weak supervenience’ nor the notion of ‘strong supervenience’ that Kim develops can capture what Aquinas apparently wants. I will then suggest an alternative notion of supervenience that does a better job of capturing the two insights, although it is not consistent with everything Stump says about Aquinas in the chapter. It is a notion that I have developed out of Duns Scotus’s use of the term, and that has affinities with the usage by R. M. Hare (who is acknowledged by Kim as the person who reintroduced the term into philosophical discussion in the twentieth century) in the context of explaining the relation between evaluation and description. My intention is not to attribute to Aquinas a particular usage of the term, but to show that this usage could save some important things he wants to say. JAEGWON KIM I will start with Kim. Then I will return to Aquinas, constructing a character called ‘Stump-Aquinas’ who represents Stump’s view of how he sees

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Page 144 the relation between goodness and being. I will ask which, if any, of Kim’s accounts of supervenience fit Stump-Aquinas. Then I will describe the similarities and differences between Kim’s account and R. M. Hare’s, and I will end by returning to Aquinas, and asking which concept of supervenience fits better the two things he says in ST Ia.5.1 that I quoted in the first paragraph. Kim’s intention in making the distinction between weak and strong supervenience is to establish that the formal accounts offered by many contemporary users of the term are inadequate to perform the tasks that those authors want the term to perform. He starts from an initial conception of the supervenience relation that he finds in G. E. Moore, though Moore does not use the term. Moore says, I should never have thought of suggesting that goodness was ‘non-natural,’ unless I had supposed that it was ‘derivative’ in the sense that, whenever a thing is good (in the sense in question) its goodness (in Mr. Broad’s words) ‘depends on the presence of certain non-ethical characteristics’ possessed by the thing in question: I have always supposed that it did so ‘depend,’ in the sense that, if a thing is good (in my sense), then that it is so follows from the fact that it possesses certain natural intrinsic properties, which are such that from the fact that it is good it does not follow conversely that it has those properties.4 This passage shows that the supervenience relation Moore has in mind is asymmetric; that is, if A is supervenient on B , B is not supervenient on A. Kim acknowledges this, though he does not build this feature into his definitions of the various forms of the relation. He says, In most cases of interest supervenience seems in fact asymmetric; for example, although many have claimed the supervenience of valuational on non-valuational properties, it is apparent that the converse does not hold. Similarly, although psychophysical supervenience is an arguable view, it would be manifestly implausible to hold that the physical supervenes on the psychological. This asymmetry of supervenience may well be the core of the idea of asymmetric dependence we associate with the supervenience relation.5 Kim here makes it plain that interesting supervenience is a relation of dependence, in which one kind of thing depends upon another, but not vice versa. Thus in addition to the example of value properties and natural properties, Kim mentions that philosophers have used supervenience to describe the asymmetric relation of the mental to the physical. Kim proceeds from a notion of supervenience he thinks he takes from R. M. Hare, “the moral is supervenient on the natural in the sense that if two objects (persons, acts, states of affairs, and the like) are alike in all natural

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Page 145 respects they must of necessity be alike in all moral respects. That is to say, things cannot differ with respect to some moral characteristic unless there is some natural property with respect to which they differ.”6 From this he develops a definition of what he calls ‘weak supervenience’: “ A weakly supervenes on B if and only if necessarily for any x and y if x and y share all properties in B then x and y share all properties in A—that is, indiscernability with respect to B entails indiscernability with respect to A.” Kim then shows that weak supervenience is too weak to do the job that many philosophers have used the term to do. In particular, weak supervenience is not invariant across possible worlds, and so cannot support claims that changes in the subvening base (the family of properties on which the supervenient properties supervene) necessarily require changes in the supervening properties. To take an artificially constrained example, suppose the goodness of persons supervenes only on their being courageous (C), benevolent (V) and honest (H) (though these are odd candidates for ‘natural’ properties). There are eight possible complete combinations of these virtues or their complements. Within each world, goodness or not-goodness will be associated with each of these combinations, and these associations will be exceptionless universal conditionals. But in another possible world, the associations may be different, in fact incompatible with these ones. In another world exactly like this one in respect of the distribution of these virtues, no man might be good, and the combinations that in this world make a man good, might in that world make him evil. So weak supervenience falls short of securing that fixing the base properties of an object fixes its supervenient properties. But it is clear that Moore, for example, wanted this fixing by the base, when he said, “if a thing is good (in my sense), then that it is so follows from the fact that it possesses certain natural intrinsic properties.” On the other hand, if we strengthen supervenience so as to get the kind of dependence on the base that these philosophers wanted, we are unlikely to be able to preserve the kind of autonomy of the supervening properties that these philosophers also wanted. Kim develops what he calls ‘strong supervenience’, which he defines as follows: “ A strongly supervenes on B just in case, necessarily, for each x and each property F in A, if x has F , then there is a property G in B such that x has G, and necessarily if any y has G, it has F .” The key difference here between strong and weak supervenience is the second ‘necessarily’ in this definition. If we return to the same artificially constrained example as before, if St. Francis is a good man, there must be some combination of these three virtues (say, honesty and benevolence) that is such that St. Francis has it, and anyone who has it must be a good man. In virtue of this difference, strong supervenience entails weak supervenience, but weak supervenience does not entail strong supervenience. Kim shows that strong supervenience is equivalent to what he calls ‘global supervenience’: there could not be two worlds that are indistinguishable in every non-moral detail, and yet differ in some moral respect. Then he

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Page 146 shows that this implies that each supervenient property has a necessarily coextensive property in the base family, and this in turn means entailment between the supervening and subvening families of properties. This is not an epistemological claim about our knowledge of the two families, since we may not have epistemological access to one of the two families or both. It is also not a claim about reducibility, for the same reason. Finally, it is not a claim about inter-definability, since the notion of definition “carries certain semantic and epistemological associations, and even if we could identify the underlying naturalistic coextension of goodness we cannot expect these associations to hold for it.”7But strong supervenience does tell us that the necessary equivalences are, so to speak, there to be discovered. We can see Kim’s article, therefore, as presenting a dilemma to someone like Moore who wants both to affirm that the supervening properties (in particular goodness) follow from the subvening base (the natural properties) and that the subvening base is not entailed by the supervening properties. Either Moore means weak supervenience, in which case we do not get the right implication from the base to the supervening properties, or he means strong supervenience, in which case we do not get the right denial of the implication from the supervening properties to the subvening base. STUMP-AQUINAS It is fairly clear that what Kim calls ‘weak supervenience’ is not going to fit Stump-Aquinas. But I will try to show that what Kim calls ‘strong supervenience’ will not fit either. The problem with weak supervenience is that Stump-Aquinas wants to show that the actualization of the specifying potentiality of a human being makes any human being who has that actualization good. This is supposed to be a necessary connection. Every species has a specifying potentiality, and for humans it is rationality. Stump-Aquinas uses the terms ‘human goodness’ and ‘moral goodness’ interchangeably.8 So moral goodness or human goodness is rational activity, and this would be true in any world that had humans in it. Because whatever actualizes a thing’s specifying potentiality thereby also perfects the nature of the thing, what is good for a thing is what is natural to it, and what is unnatural to a thing is bad for it; in fact, on Aquinas’s views of the metaphysics of goodness, what is evil cannot be natural to anything. As for human nature, since it is characterized essentially by a capacity for rationality, what is irrational is contrary to nature where human beings are concerned.9 But if goodness weakly supervenes on rationality, as weak supervenience is described in the previous section, this is consistent with human beings being rational in some other possible world and not good.

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Page 147 Does human goodness or moral goodness strongly supervene on rationality? Here the answer is not so clear, but I think it has to be negative. A complication here is that Stump-Aquinas, “on the face of it, recognizes other species of things—angels, for example—which are, apparently, rational.” The qualifications here are due to the fact that Stump-Aquinas also distinguishes between the kind of rationality that is characteristic of humans (namely discursive rationality) and the kind angels employ. But this does not matter for our present purposes, because the key question is not whether angels and humans share rationality, but what it would tell us about supervenience if they did. Stump-Aquinas tells us the following, Nonetheless, (some sort of) moral goodness (or badness) is a characteristic of all beings whose nature involves freedom of choice, whether or not they are human. And so not even moral goodness is necessarily coextensive with the actualization of reason, the specifying potentiality for human beings. Goodness as an X will, for every X , consist in the actualization of an X ’s specifying potentialities, but there is no natural characteristic such that goodness (or even moral goodness) is identical with it (where identity of properties is taken to require at least necessary coextension).10 Stump-Aquinas has already told us that moral goodness supervenes on a natural characteristic, “Goodness supervenes on the natural property of the actualization of a specifying potentiality; moral goodness supervenes on the actualization of rationality, which is the specifying potentiality for human beings.”11 When we add these passages together, we can see that the kind of supervenience StumpAquinas has in mind is consistent with the supervening property not being necessarily coextensive with a property in the subvening base. But if moral goodness strongly supervenes on rationality, as strong supervenience is described in the previous section, this requires that the supervening property is necessarily coextensive with the property in the base family on which it supervenes. There is a difficulty, however, in understanding Stump-Aquinas at this point. Stump-Aquinas has a particular reading of what Aquinas means by saying that being and goodness are the same in reference but different in sense. Stump-Aquinas distinguishes between an ordinary sense and a special sense of ‘being’ and an ordinary and a special sense of ‘goodness’. The ordinary sense of ‘being’ is existence simpliciter, which does not admit of degrees, and is construed as the presence or absence of some substantial form.12 “The ordinary sense of ‘being’ is being considered absolutely, that is, a thing’s mere existence as the instantiation of a thing with a substantial form conferring a nature that includes the specifying potentiality. On the other hand, the actualization of a thing’s specifying potentiality is also the being of a thing.”13 This second kind of being, however, comes in degrees. For Stump-Aquinas the ordinary and special senses of ‘goodness’ are reversed.

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Page 148 “The ordinary sense of ‘goodness’, however, has to do with this actualization of the specifying potentiality,’ and it is only in the extended sense that we can say that anything that exists is good.”14 We can now see that understanding Stump-Aquinas presents us with a dilemma. If we are talking about the ordinary senses of each, the reference of ‘being’ and ‘goodness’ are not the same. To establish this first horn of the dilemma, it is sufficient to take an example of something that is not good in the ordinary sense but has being in the ordinary sense. Stump-Aquinas gives us the example of Hitler. Here the reference is not the same. The groups picked out by the phrase ‘things having goodness’ and by the phrase ‘things having being’ will not be the same group, since the second will contain Hitler but not the first. But if we are talking about the ordinary sense of ‘good’ and the special sense of ‘being’, then it is hard to see why the senses as well as the references are not the same. This difficulty arises because we do not, in contemporary philosophical usage, have the special sense of ‘being’. It is hard to think of ‘being’ coming in degrees. But the most plausible way to get our minds to think like this is to construe being, as Aristotle did, teleologically. If that is right, we do not have two different properties, some degree of being and some degree of perfection (and so goodness), where the first is the criterion for but not the same property as the second. We are tempted to think that way only because we have in mind the sense of ‘being’ where being does not have degrees. Perhaps an analogy will be helpful here. There are other terms that have both evaluative and non-evaluative senses, and it can be hard to sort these out in particular cases. A cup of tea can be too sweet, meaning that it has too much sugar in it. Here ‘sweet’ is being used descriptively. But ‘sweet’ can also be used (the Oxford English Dictionary tells us) as “an emotional epithet expressive of the speaker’s personal feeling as to the attractiveness of the object.” The dictionary quotes Thackeray, “Honourable Tom Fitz-Warter, cousin of Lord Byron’s; smokes all day; and has written the sweetest poems you can imagine.” If we ask whether ‘good’ and ‘sweet’ have different senses, the answer will depend on which sense of ‘sweet’ we have in mind. In the evaluative sense of ‘sweet’ to call something sweet is already to commend it, to call it ‘good’ (but not vice versa). In the same way in the teleological sense of ‘being’ to say that something has a degree of being is already to mean that it has that same degree of goodness. We seem to be in a quandary here, if we do not want to make Aquinas’s doctrine that being and goodness are the same in reference but different in sense depend on an equivocation. But there is an alternative conception of supervenience that would not have this result. R. M. HARE Kim rightly credits R. M. Hare as the philosopher who reintroduced the term ‘supervenience’ into twentieth-century discussion. He also thinks

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Page 149 that R. M. Hare meant to be talking about what Kim calls ‘weak supervenience’.15 I think it is better to say that R. M. Hare’s notion resembles weak supervenience in one way and strong supervenience in another, but is not the same as either one of them. Kim has not understood the expressivist intention of R. M. Hare’s theory, which is an analysis of moral judgment and not, primarily, of moral properties. About the ‘real’ existence of value properties, R. M. Hare was what Simon Blackburn calls ‘a quietist,’ meaning that no important issue can be built around the question whether moral values are ‘real’ or not.16 He held that the important issue, by contrast, is whether evaluative judgments are standardly prescriptive. In The Language of Morals he said that an utterance is prescriptive if it entails an imperative, descriptive if its meaning is given by the factual conditions for its correct application. This view of value judgment is expressivist, because it holds that a fully-fledged value judgment expresses the commitment or desire or will of the person making the judgment. To say ‘You ought’ is to say ‘If I were you, I would.’ The function of moral language about conduct is to guide conduct. It is prescriptive, in the sense that it is designed to answer the question “What shall I do?”. R. M. Hare is not saying here that value judgments are imperatives, but that they entail imperatives of a particular kind, namely universal imperatives addressed to everyone, and not making any reference to individual persons or times or places. An analysis in terms of prescriptions is also different from another form of expressivism, sometimes called ‘emotivism,’ which holds that what is expressed in value judgments are emotions. Prescriptions can be entirely rational and unemotional. Hare quotes the builder’s instruction, “Supply and fit to door mortise dead-latch and plastic knob furniture.” R. M. Hare’s prescriptivism already creates a divergence from Aquinas, for R. M. Hare does not conceive the possibility of a set of facts that are, by the nature of being, evaluatively charged. For Aquinas (and for StumpAquinas) to say that a thing is completely a human, or that it has fully actualized the specifying potentiality of a human being, is both to state a fact about it and already to evaluate it favorably. I am going to claim that this difference from Aquinas does not destroy the usefulness of R. M. Hare’s account of supervenience for understanding Aquinas. More generally, I have argued elsewhere that claiming that moral judgments (or value judgments) are prescriptive is consistent with claiming that there are ‘really’ moral (or value) properties independent of our judgments, and I have called the view that combines these two claims ‘prescriptive realism’.17 But substantiating this claim for the case of Aquinas’s version of realism will be the purpose of the final section of this paper. In the present section, I will confine myself to laying out R. M. Hare’s account of supervenience. On his theory, if I use the sharpness of a knife as a criterion for commending the knife, as most people do, I am endorsing this standard of the community to which I belong. This endorsement is itself what he called ‘a decision of principle,’ namely the principle that knives are good when they

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Page 150 are sharp. R. M. Hare was responding here to the changed situation in Britain after the Second World War (in which he fought, in India and then as a prisoner of war of the Japanese). Suppose one generation has become settled in its evaluative practices, which have become so far second nature that they seem to constitute the meaning of the moral words. If the next generation finds its situation radically changed (as the British did in 1945) and if it has been taught that the correct use of the language of morals is just the application of the old criteria, it may abandon moral language as inadequate to its experience. If the meaning can be separated from the criteria, the new generation can then use words like ‘good’ and ‘right’ with the same prescriptive meaning as before but decide upon new criteria for application. R. M. Hare reintroduced into twentieth-century philosophy the medieval term ‘supervenience’ to describe the relation between prescriptive meaning and descriptive criteria.18 He claimed that the goodness of a thing is supervenient or consequent on the thing’s descriptive properties. Once we say that a strawberry (which is sweet, juicy, firm, red, and large) is good, we are committed to saying that any other strawberry that shares just those properties is good as well; but saying that a strawberry is good does not yet (before a decision about criteria) entail that it is sweet or juicy or firm or red or large. R. M. Hare thus repeated Moore’s pattern of assertion and denial about the relation of natural and value properties, the pattern that Kim found so obscure, but with the addition of an explanation that makes this pattern intelligible. Like Moore, R. M. Hare asserted that the strawberry is good because it is juicy etc…., but denied that its goodness entails its juiciness etc…. He also said that a person who has not yet made the decision of principle (the decision about criteria) is not, when he says the strawberry is juicy, implying that it is good. The relation of supervenience accounts for what Moore got right with his ‘open question’ argument. We want to commend things that have the descriptive properties on which we hold that goodness supervenes. If we simply identify the goodness with the descriptive properties (as reductive definitions do), then if we say the juicy strawberry is good we are simply repeating ourselves. Although many evaluative terms have descriptive meaning as well as prescriptive meaning, R. M. Hare thought prescriptive meaning was primary for a term like ‘good’. For terms like ‘tidy’ or ‘industrious’ (sometimes called ‘thick’ terms in the later literature) he agreed that descriptive meaning may be primary. A sign of this is that we have no difficulty saying that someone is ‘too tidy.’ The general principle is that the more fixed or accepted a set of criteria become, the more descriptive information is conveyed by the corresponding value term. But it does not follow that prescriptive and descriptive force are inversely proportional. R. M. Hare gave the example of ‘good sewage effluent,’ where the criteria are clear and the evaluative force is fully maintained. He used to have on his wall a diagram from a farming journal, labeled ‘a good pig,’ which detailed the required joints and their proportions for the butcher’s trade. Sometimes, however, evaluative or prescriptive

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Page 151 force can be entirely lost. This happens when a value term is used in an ‘inverted commas’ sense to allude to the value judgments of other people, and the standards they apply, as when Satan says, in Paradise Lost , “Evil be thou my good.” Satan is using ‘evil’ descriptively, to refer to what God proscribes, but ‘good’ prescriptively, to express his own commendation. Finally, the supervenience of value means that all value judgments are at least implicitly universal. This is because the subvening base (the sweetness, juiciness, firmness, redness, and largeness of the strawberry) consists of universal properties, in other words properties that could be held by more than one object. The value judgment commending the strawberry thus commits the person making the judgment to commend any other thing that is like the strawberry in the relevant respects. The relevant respects are just those properties on which the goodness supervenes. Some of the properties of an act or a person we judge to be good will not be relevant to the judgment, but there may still be a very large number of properties that are, and we may be able to make the judgment without being able to specify them or even to separate them clearly one from another. HARE-AQUINAS In this final section of the paper I am going to imagine a mythical creature, somewhat like a chimaera. Constructing Stump-Aquinas was comparatively easy, because we have the text of Stump’s magisterial volume to guide us. But R. M. Hare was not a Thomist, and his system was in some ways deliberately set up in opposition to Thomists in general, and Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe in particular. I am going to try the experiment, nonetheless, of seeing whether a Hare-Aquinas can be put together. He will be someone who wants to agree with R. M. Hare about supervenience, and with Aquinas “that ‘being’ and ‘goodness’ are the same in reference but differ only in sense,” and that “the formula of the good consists in this, that something is desirable.” Why should the coherence of such a position be of interest, given that it is certainly not the position of R. M. Hare and probably not the position of Aquinas either? I think the importance of showing coherence here is that the basically Augustinian picture that Aquinas recapitulates, according to which a thing is good of its kind to the extent to which it is in actuality, is still attractive to many intelligent and well-informed people, such as Eleonore Stump. I myself do not understand it well enough yet to know whether I agree with it or not. To the extent that I do understand it, it seems to me to be true that degrees of realization are one of the things that make something good, but there can be many others.19 Regardless of whether the Augustinian picture is true, I want to explore the possibility, using and extending some distinctions from the texts of Duns Scotus, that we might accept this picture but deny the entailment from natural properties to evaluative ones. This will have

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Page 152 the side benefit of allowing us to say that goodness supervenes on being, without depending on an equivocation. The primary text of Scotus I have in mind is the following, The moral goodness of an act consists in its having all that the agent’s right reason declares must pertain to the act of the agent in acting. This description is explained as follows: Just as the primary goodness of a being, called ‘essential’ and consisting in the integrity and perfection of the being itself, implies positively that there is no imperfection, so that all lack or diminution of perfection is excluded, so the being’s secondary goodness, which is something that comes over and above ( superveniens) or is ‘accidental,’ consists in its being perfectly suited to or in complete harmony with something else— something which ought to have it or which it ought to have.20 The key to this passage, for our purposes, is that Scotus says that the secondary goodness (of which moral goodness is one type) is perfectly suited to or in complete harmony with our nature, but he does not say that it can be deduced from it. To explain the passage, we need to go over some background doctrine, though it is not the intention of this paper to give a large-scale exegesis of Scotus.21 The first point to make is that the distinction between primary and secondary goodness in this passage relies on the same Aristotelian background as the distinction between what I called in the second section of this paper the ‘ordinary’ sense and the ‘special’ sense of ‘being’. A substance has primary goodness when it lacks nothing that is necessary to its being the substance it is. Every substance has this kind of goodness, and this goodness is, Scotus says, “convertible with being.”22 Primary goodness does have a hierarchy, since some kinds of substance are more perfect than others. But it does not come in different degrees to different members of the same species. An angel has more of this kind of being and goodness than an armadillo, but all armadillos have the same amount. This kind of goodness needs to be distinguished from secondary goodness, which is in substances that can continue to exist whether they have it or not. Primary goodness is not in substances, but constitutes them as substances. A virtue such as courage is a secondary goodness. A human can have everything necessary to be human substance, and be a coward, so that if a human is courageous this is a kind of accident.23 Scotus then divides secondary goodness itself into two: A thing can be good because it is appropriate to another thing, or because it has a second thing. He uses examples from Augustine: Health is good because it is appropriate to an animal, and a man’s face is good if he has regular features, a cheerful expression, and a glowing color. The moral goodness of an act is a secondary goodness of this second kind. The act is morally good because it has “all that the agent’s right reason declares must pertain to the act or the agent in acting.”

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Page 153 There is a distinction in this passage between ‘good’ and ‘right,’ though it is not the familiar distinction as these terms appear, for example, in John Rawls’s dictum that the right is prior to the good.24 Rawls, taking himself to be Kantian in this, says that we have to give priority to the rule (the imperative) that establishes the equality of persons. Even if some action proscribed by this rule produces more good, understood in a utilitarian way as preference-satisfaction, he holds that action is not morally permissible. Scotus does not see a possible tension of this kind between good and right. There is, however, a different distinction that he does make. Moral goodness is unlike other kinds of secondary goodness in that it requires intellect and will. Just after the passage I quoted at the beginning of this section, he says, “the goodness in the act of an agent without intellect and will is merely natural.” An agent must actually pass judgment upon the act himself, Scotus says, and carry it out in accord with that judgment, or else he does not act ‘rightly.’ Scotus concludes, “And so it appears clear how the moral goodness of the act lies in its suitability judged according to the agent’s right reason.” The agent’s right reason, however, gets only to what is perfectly suited to or in harmony with our nature. It does not get to principles that are deducible from our nature. This makes Scotus’s view of the relation between morality and nature similar in structure to R. M. Hare’s view of supervenience, which has both a negative side and a positive side. The negative side is that we do not get an entailment from evaluation to description or from description to evaluation, unless there has been a ‘decision of principle’. The positive side is that none the less the evaluation derives from the description; we say the strawberry is good, because we see it to be sweet and juicy etc…. In Scotus, the negative side is seen in his refusal to count the second table of the Decalogue as Natural Law strictly speaking. The principles that forbid stealing and lying are, indeed, ‘exceedingly in harmony’ with natural law, but they are not themselves natural law strictly speaking, because they are not ‘known from their terms,’ nor do they follow from principles known from their terms.25 Scotus is led to this view in part because he thinks Scripture teaches that God can ‘dispense’ from the second table, as in the case of the command to Abraham to kill Isaac, and if the second table were necessary, or deducible from human nature, it would be binding also on God, so that not even God could command humans to do anything contrary to it. Scotus insists that these commands of the second table are binding on us, so that “a created will must be conformed to these truths if it is to be right.” But “this still does not say that the divine will wills in accord with them; rather because it wills accordingly, therefore they are true.” The positive side in Scotus is that right reason does see that the commands of the second table are appropriate and fit our nature exceedingly well, so that when we follow them we flourish. I will conclude by returning to the two insights of Aquinas from ST I.5.1, and finally to Kim. Aquinas says that the formula of the good consists

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Page 154 in this, that something is desirable. He goes on to refer to Aristotle, “And so the Philosopher ( Ethics I) says that the good is what all desire.” ‘Desirable’ is a term of notorious difficulty. Something can be desirable in the sense that it is able to be desired, or that it tends to be desired, and in those senses its desirability follows from the fact that it is desired. But in a different sense something is desirable if it is worthy to be desired, and in that sense it can be desired but not desirable. I am not going to try to interpret Aristotle here.26 I am also not going to try to discern what Aquinas in fact means by ‘desirability’ or how he thinks the inference runs in the sentence I quoted at the beginning of this paragraph. But I am interested in showing the consistency of one interpretation of desirability with what I have been saying about supervenience. If we take ‘desirable’ to be a value term here, we can interpret Aquinas as saying that the good by definition is what we desire and ought to desire. Elsewhere I have defined the good as what draws us and deserves to draw us.27 Defining ‘good’ in such a way is not a reductive definition of the kind Moore thought was guilty of the naturalistic fallacy, because it does not attempt to define a value in terms of something purely descriptive. Now we can go on to Aquinas’s point about the good and being. They are the same in reference, he says, but different in sense. If I think something worthy of desire to some degree, it may indeed have the corresponding degree of being. Let us grant what I called earlier the Augustinian picture, according to which my thought that something is worthy of desire is only true if that thing has the corresponding degree of being. Still, I am, in making this judgment about the thing, that it is good because it has that degree of being, adding my subscription, adding what R. M. Hare calls a ‘neustic.’ I have, in R. M. Hare’s term, made a decision of principle. This addition is why the value judgment that a thing is good does not, without the decision of principle , entail the judgment that the thing has the corresponding degree of being. The same is true the other way round. Without the decision of principle, the judgment that a thing has a certain degree of being does not entail the judgment that it has the corresponding degree of goodness. When Aquinas says that ‘being’ and ‘good’ have the same reference, he will be saying, on this interpretation, that degrees of being give the correct criteria for degrees of goodness. The term ‘criteria’ here is tricky, because, as I said earlier, R. M. Hare’s distinction of meaning and criteria does not allow a set of facts that are, by the nature of being, evaluatively charged. He accepts that evaluative meaning pervades our language, so that it is hard to find pure, value-free premises, but he also accepts a dichotomy between fact and value. Criteria, on his theory, are supposed to be purely descriptive. But Hare-Aquinas, the chimaera, is not so restricted. When he says that ‘being’ and ‘goodness’ are different only in sense, he will be saying that we can use ‘good’ in the sense of ‘desirable’ without yet being committed to the criterion provided by degrees of being, and the subscription to this criterion has to be added in intellect and then in will. To make use of Scotus again, we do not get ‘right action’ until both the intellect has

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Page 155 seen and the will has willed. It would be possible for the intellect to ‘see’ the correct criteria for goodness, but the will to turn away and not love in the way the intellect suggests it should. What R. M. Hare calls a decision of principle will be, in Scotus, a basic orientation of the heart or the will, which can be either towards God (and so, on the Augustinian picture, towards being) or away from God. If it is away from God, the person may still love things sub specie boni , but her loves will not be properly ordered because the proper criteria will not be in place in the person’s choices, even if they are properly contemplated in the intellect. Whether Aquinas also thinks all this is possible is beyond the competence of this chapter, and this author, to decide. On this interpretation we will end with a position that combines something of what Kim holds to be a relation of weak supervenience and something of what he holds to be a relation of strong supervenience between goodness and being. The relation will be one of weak supervenience to the extent that there is no entailment from a judgment about the subvening base to a judgment about the supervenient property, without the decision of principle. On the other hand, the relation will be one of strong supervenience, because once the decision is in place, the entailment from the base goes through. NOTES 1. Eleonore Stump (2003), 71. 2. I have looked at all the uses of ‘supervenient’ and its cognates in Summa Theologiae , and some of the uses in Summa Contra Gentiles . Aquinas seems to use the word in the same way as Scotus, to refer to one thing coming in addition to another, where the first thing is not essentially related to the second, but is accidental to it. For example, at ST IaIIae.19.8.obj.3, he talks of obstacles that supervene, preventing someone from going to Rome. The emphasis on the accidental quality of the supervenient is clear at ST IIaIIae.26.8.obj.3, where natural origins of a friendship are more stable than other unions which supervene and may cease altogether. It is interesting that none of the texts I have looked at give evidence of the sort of asymmetrical dependent relation between supervening property and subvening base that Kim holds to be characteristic of the interesting cases. I am grateful to Scott Cleveland for this research. 3. The article she cites is Jaegwon Kim (1984). 4. G. E. Moore (1942), 588. 5. Kim (1984), 166. 6. Ibid ., 157. 7. Ibid., 174. 8. It is a slightly inelegant consequence that Stump-Aquinas has to use ‘moral goodness’ and ‘moral virtue’ differently, since he distinguishes moral virtue from other human virtues, for example in the following passage: “in human beings there are only two principles of human action, namely intellect or reason and the appetite [or will], for these two are [principles of] movement in a human being, as is said in De Anima . Consequently, every human virtue must perfect one of these principles. If it perfects the speculative or practical

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Page 156 intellect to yield a good human act, it will be an intellectual virtue. But if it perfects the appetitive part, it will be a moral virtue” ( ST IaIIae.58.3, quoted in Stump, 2003, 70). 9. Stump (2003), 70. 10. Ibid ., 72. 11. Ibid ., 71. 12. Because I am not, in this chapter, in the business of attributing views to Aquinas himself, I will not raise the question of whether there is for Aquinas (unlike Aristotle) an ordinary sense of ‘being’ which is not already a ‘being as’. Stump-Aquinas concedes that for Aquinas all being is being as, but nonetheless insists on an ‘ordinary’ sense of being that is existence simpliciter. 13. Stump (2003), 67–68. 14. Ibid ., 73. 15. Kim says, “According to Haugeland’s report of a conversation with Hare (in John Haugeland, ‘Weak Supervenience,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1982): 93–103) it seems likely that what Hare had in mind is only my weak supervenience. This impression is confirmed by Professor Hare’s inaugural address to the Aristotelian Society entitled ‘Supervenience’ (forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 1984), of which he has kindly furnished me with an early draft. The notions of ‘supervenience’ and ‘entailment’ as Hare explains them in his address turn out to correspond, roughly, to my weak and strong supervenience, respectively” (Kim, 1984, 161). My own account of R. M. Hare’s use of the term ‘supervenience’ is taken from John Hare (2007a), 207–219. 16. Simon Blackburn (1993), 153. See R. M. Hare (1997), 56: “I hope [I have] shown how little grasp of these issues those people have who think (as many beginner students are taught to think) that it is sufficient to distinguish between what they call cognitivist and non-cognitivist theories by saying that they give opposing answers to the question ‘Can moral statements be true or false?’ The answer to this question is that they can, but that the important issue between descriptivists and non-descriptivists is not settled thereby.” 17. John Hare (2007b). 18. In R. M. Hare (1999), he acknowledged that Scotus had used the term for a similar concept (77). In addition to the passage from G. E. Moore quoted earlier, see also W.D. Ross (1930), 121–123 where he identifies goodness and beauty as ‘consequential’ attributes (as opposed to ‘constitutive’ attributes, like yellow), and remarks, “if A is good, right, or beautiful, anything exactly like A will be equally good, right, or beautiful.” 19. See John Hare (2007a), 251–260. 20. Quodlibet q.18, quoted in Allan Wolter (1977), 169. 21. I have given a fuller interpretation of some relevant texts of Scotus in John Hare (2001), 49–85 and (2007a), 87–121. 22. Reportatio 2.34, q.u. n.18. 23. Courage is a per se accident, or what Aristotle calls kath’ hauto in the secondary sense ( Posterior Analytics II, 73a34f). That is to say, ‘courage’ does not appear in the definition of ‘human,’ but ‘human’ does appear in the definition of ‘courage’. 24. John Rawls (1971), 449. 25. Ordinatio III, supp., dist. 37, AW 203. 26. See John Hare (2007a), 34–43. 27. Ibid ., 253.

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Page 157 10 The Second-Person Account of the Problem of Evil Lynne Rudder Baker Throughout her distinguished career, Eleonore Stump has neatly combined the traditional with the innovative. So, it is not surprising that she roots a novel approach to the problem of evil in the work of Thomas Aquinas. Unlike many other philosophical writers, Stump does not treat the problem of evil simply as an intellectual problem.1 For many, believers and nonbelievers alike, the question of why there is so much suffering—and why it is distributed so incomprehensibly—is a deeply personal one. Although I believe that it is beyond human powers to give a fully satisfactory answer to this question, Stump takes an important new tack based on personal relations of love, both human and divine, and of obstacles in the way of love. This chapter has two main sections: In Section I (“Stump’s Second-Person View”), I sketch out Stump’s view, beginning with her discussion of what makes the problem of evil a problem, and how it should be approached. Her treatment of the problem of evil—or, more accurately, of the problem of suffering—is rooted in her account of second-person experience and the narratives needed to communicate secondperson experience. Within this framework, Stump interprets familiar biblical narratives about suffering and God’s relation to it. In Section II (“Strengths of Stump’s View”), I comment on some of the strengths that I see in Stump’s treatment of the problem of evil. STUMP’S SECOND-PERSON VIEW The Problem of Evil The purely logical problem addressed by analytic philosophers as a metaphysical puzzle is too narrowly gauged to be fully satisfying. Solutions that address only the logical problem simply do not begin to suggest an appropriate response to evil and suffering. In her forthcoming book, Wandering in Darkness, Stump casts the problem of evil, not merely as a logical puzzle, but as a problem of interpersonal relations that are understood in terms of second-person experience

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Page 158 and second-person biblical accounts.2 The main relations in question are those between an omnipotent and provident God and his creatures who are allowed to suffer without apparent reason. The question is this: How can an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God allow the suffering that exists in the world? Although I doubt that the question has a complete and satisfying answer that we can understand, Stump looks for a (perhaps partial) answer in the relations between God and human beings. The logical problem of evil may be understood as an argument from suffering that takes as a premise the existence of suffering and concludes that an all-powerful, all-good God does not exist. Although she does address the logical problem, Stump’s treatment departs from standard treatments in several ways: First, she focuses on the sufferers of evil, human persons, rather than on the causes of evil. Second, she emphasizes encounters between persons, “second-person experiences” as she calls such encounters. Third, since second-person experiences are incommunicable in standard expository prose, she appeals to narratives to communicate the knowledge gained by second-person experiences. More particularly, Stump sets out Aquinas’s worldview and theodicy, together with an interpretation of biblical narratives, and takes the result to be a description of a possible world. So, Stump’s response to the logical problem is to describe a possible world in which suffering and God coexist.3 We have reason to believe that the coexistence of God and suffering is possible, because “religious experience, reason, and the testimony of authoritative narratives about God converge on the conclusion that God is good; and if he is good, then he does not break his promises.”4 And if he keeps his promises, then our faith that his goodness is compatible with human suffering is not misplaced. The description of the relevant possible world focuses on a description of interpersonal relations. Understanding the will is central to understanding interpersonal relations. The relevant knowledge of another person is second-person experiential knowledge that is not knowledge-that; Stump calls such knowledge “Franciscan.” There is also third-person knowledge that is knowledge-that; Stump calls such knowledge-that, the knowledge yielded by expository prose, “Dominican.”5 Although there are some “Franciscan” elements in Stump’s analysis of the will, Stump’s discussion of the will is largely in “Dominican” terms.6 The suffering relevant to the problem of evil cannot be equated with physical pain: the pain voluntarily undergone by women who choose natural childbirth does not raise issues about evil. Although physical pain (when it is gratuitously inflicted, say) may sometimes raise the problem of evil, the suffering relevant to the problem of evil is more complex than mere physical pain.7 Suffering has an objective and a subjective side. What will make a human being flourish is an objective matter. Objectively, anything that diminishes one’s flourishing is an evil that one suffers. Subjectively, anything that interferes with what one values—the desires of one’s heart—is

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Page 159 an evil that one suffers. On both the objective and subjective sides, one may suffer without realizing it —just as one may be in ill health without feeling bad. What needs justification is suffering, where suffering is understood as something that diminishes one’s flourishing or keeps one from having the desires of her heart, or both. Not only may one suffer without being aware that one is suffering, but so too, may one have benefits that somehow defeat the suffering without knowing it. Such a benefit would enhance flourishing or contribute to the satisfaction of one’s heart’s desires. It would be a morally sufficient reason for God to allow the suffering. Even if God has morally sufficient reasons for allowing suffering, we cannot really expect to know (many of) them. So, Stump does not aim to give a theodicy. Her aim is only to give a defense, which will show only a possible morally sufficient reason for God to allow suffering generally. If the explanation for why God allows sentient creatures to suffer could lie in the interpersonal relations between God and human persons, Stump must explore the nature of knowledge of persons.8 Many philosophers would not see knowledge of persons as a special topic; isn’t it just another case of propositional knowledge, knowledge that such and such is the case? No, argues Stump vigorously. Some knowledge (“Franciscan”) cannot be reduced to knowledge-that: If we say, “She already knew the melody,” it is difficult or impossible to express what she knew in propositional terms. You may also know a face without knowing any identifying description of it. And, argues Stump, what you know in a certain way about particular persons cannot be translated without loss into propositional terms. Stump has a wonderful thought experiment that is a variation on Frank Jackson’s famous story about Mary. The story about Mary concerns what it’s like to see red, but Stump shows that the lessons to be learned need not be confined to qualia. Suppose that Mary, isolated, learns language by means of a computer program. She subsequently reads all the science books, from physics to sociology, and learns everything that can be transmitted by expository prose. However, she has never had a conversation with anyone, never had a face-to-face encounter with anyone. When Mary is finally released from her isolation, she meets her mother, who loves her dearly. Although Mary knew propositionally that her mother loved her, she had never been hugged by anyone, or surprised by anyone; she had never detected anyone else’s mood. What Mary learned when she met her mother concerns “personal interaction with another person,” the “complex give-and-take of interpersonal interactions.”9 Stump concludes that Mary acquired nonpropositional knowledge that she did not have before her second-person experience of her mother. She could not have acquired that knowledge by means of expository prose in science books. We have second-person knowledge when we see anxiety on a student’s face or hear a giggle or a groan, and this knowledge is fundamentally different from knowledge-that.10 Moreover, without this kind

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Page 160 of nonpropositional (“Franciscan”) knowledge of persons, “we miss something crucial in our understanding of persons.”11 Stump garners empirical support for these conclusions from psychological studies of autistic children, who, though quite able to acquire knowledge-that, differ from normally developing children precisely in their inability to have experiential knowledge of the mental states of others. The deficits of autistic children point to the importance of second-person experience. Further empirical support comes from neurobiological work on mirror neurons that “allow us to directly understand the meaning of the actions and emotions of others by internally replicating (‘simulating’) them.”12 Second-person experience affords us direct experiential grasp of another that is not mediated by reflection. Stump discusses neurobiologists who claim that the knowledge of persons that the mirror-neuron system subserves is based on a distinctive second-person experience in which one person is directly and immediately aware of another person as a person. In first-person experience, I’m directly and immediately aware of a person, but only myself. In third-person experience, I can be directly and immediately aware of a person, without being aware of her as a person. (Suppose that you are a neurosurgeon attending closely to a patient’s brain, without being aware of her as a person.) Secondperson experience of a person is both different from first- and third-person experience and important. Stump gives three necessary conditions for a second-person experience:13 Paula has a second-person experience of Jerome only if: (1) Paula is aware of Jerome as a person (call this ‘personal interaction’); (2) Paula’s personal interaction with Jerome is of a direct and immediate sort; and (3) Jerome is conscious. Since a second-person experience does not yield knowledge-that, it cannot be communicated by means of expository prose. However, we can share it with others to some extent by telling stories. Narratives can be second-person accounts of second-person experiences. And that is exactly what we find in biblical narratives, like God’s speeches to Job, which re-create a picture of God’s relation to his creatures. In short, Stump’s methodology rests in important ways on second-person experience and second-person accounts (biblical narratives). Love and Impediments to Love The possible world that Stump develops to show that God and suffering can coexist is a world in which Aquinas’s worldview is embedded. (Remember that Stump is not asking us to believe that Aquinas’s

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Page 161 worldview is true, only that it is possible.) Central to Aquinas’s worldview is an account of love as what we do and should care about, along with the obstacles to loving relations. I cannot begin to do justice to Stump’s delicate and nuanced account of love here; I can only recommend her book when it appears. What follows is only a skeleton. According to Aquinas, the ultimate proper object of love ( caritas ) is God. On the doctrine of simplicity, God is identical to God’s goodness. God’s goodness, and hence God himself, is reflected in every human person. So the proper object of love includes human persons. “Love is primarily love of persons.”14 Love—both between human persons and between God and human persons—consists of two interconnected desires: (1) desire for the good of the beloved, and (2) desire for union with the beloved. A key idea in the account of love and the impediments to love in human beings is the idea of ‘internal integration around the good.’ To elucidate this idea, Stump draws on Harry Frankfurt’s hierarchical view of the will and on Thomas Aquinas’s view of the good. Following Frankfurt, Stump distinguishes between a desire for something and a desire to have that desire, and between willing something and willing to will it. To care about something is not only to desire it, but to be committed to desiring it. Internal integration—wholeheartedness—is structural harmony in the will among first- and second-order desires and volitions. An internally integrated person is not divided against herself; she wills and desires what she wants to will and desire, and does not have incompatible volitions or desires. Although Frankfurt holds that one’s will can be integrated around any sort of desires, Aquinas held that one’s will can be integrated only around the good. Here’s why: Aquinas held that there are objective moral standards that can be known by reason, and hence that no one can be wholly ignorant of the good. Anyone who wills evil must have a conflicted set of desires and volitions; such a person is doubleminded, hiding a part of one’s mind from oneself. “[I]nternal integration is possible only for a person singlemindedly understanding and wholeheartedly desiring the good.”15 So, on Aquinas’s view, internal integration can only be around the good. Only a person internally integrated around the good can truly love. Let me canvass some of the reasons that Stump gives for holding (with Aquinas) that only those who are internally integrated around the good can truly love: (1) Consider “self-love,” understood as a desire for internal integration. On Aquinas’s view, a human person cannot love God or anyone else unless she loves herself. That is, she must desire the (objective) good for herself, and she must desire union with herself. Stump elucidates the relevant desires in terms of internal integration around the good: For a person to desire the (objective) good for herself is for her to desire union with God or what contributes to union with God, and union with God (as we shall see) requires internal integration around the good. For a person to desire to have union with herself is to desire to be internally integrated by willing

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Page 162 what she wants to will and by not willing anything incompatible with what she wants to will. She must be wholehearted, and, according to Aquinas, to be wholehearted is to be internally integrated around the good. (2) Consider a human person’s love of God. For a human person to love God, she must desire the good of God, and she must desire union with God. Although there is no good that God lacks, a human person can desire the good of God by desiring what God desires as good. God desires union with his creatures, and (as I mentioned) union with God requires internal integration around the good. (3) In the case of God’s love of human persons, the two desires collapse into one: Since the ultimate good of every human person is union with God, God’s desire for the good of his beloved is a desire for union with his beloved.16 This has implications for forgiveness. Forgiveness requires some kind of love for the one who needs forgiveness. God can unilaterally forgive a wrongdoer. But the desire to be united with the wrongdoer is “inefficacious” unless the wrongdoer has “at least enough repentance to be willing to accept forgiveness. Even the love and forgiveness of God, then, have to be responsive to the beloved.”17 (I shall comment on this point later.) So, a divided self is an obstacle to God’s love and forgiveness. Friendship is the genus of personal love: friendship encompasses all the various kinds of love between persons. (Stump confines her discussion of love among human beings to love among normally functioning adult friends.) The appropriate union requires significant personal presence and mutual closeness; and these both require internal integration around the good. Minimal personal presence is the result of a second-person experience and shared attention. First, consider shared attention. Again, Stump considers the psychological literature. With respect to joint attention, again, autistic children are impaired. In dyadic shared attention, the object of Paula’s awareness is simultaneously Jerome and their mutual awareness (Jerome’s awareness of Paula’s awareness and so on). So, second-person experience is an ingredient in personal presence, which in turn is a condition for the union of friends. Significant personal presence includes mutual closeness.18 Next, consider closeness. Unsurprisingly, propinquity, even with conversation and general benevolence, does not suffice. (Think of a cocktail party.) If Paula is close to Jerome, then (1) Jerome shares with Paula the thoughts and feelings that he cares about and that are particularly revelatory of him; and (2) Paula is willing to receive his self-revelation and is comprehending of it. Closeness also requires a kind of need on the part of the person to whom one is close. The kind of need in question is not rooted in any inadequacy or defect. Paula is close to Jerome only if Jerome needs Paula, where Jerome’s needing Paula is “a matter of Jerome’s having a great desire for Paula and Paula’s being necessary for Jerome’s fulfilling his desire for Paula but not for anything else lacking to Jerome.”19 (Even God can need his creatures in this

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Page 163 way.) This kind of need makes for vulnerability: Paula is close to Jerome only if Jerome makes himself vulnerable to Paula. Closeness requires internal integration around the good. Paula is close to Jerome only if Jerome reveals himself to Paula. If Jerome is alienated from himself, part of him is hidden from himself; and he is in no position to reveal himself. So, Paula’s ability to be close to Jerome depends in part on Jerome’s integration around goodness. So, we have two necessary conditions for closeness. Putting these conditions in the characteristic way of an analytic (and “Dominican”) philosopher: x is close to y only if: (i) y shares his particularly revealing thoughts and feelings with x; and (ii) x willingly and comprehendingly receives y’s self-revelation. (i) and (ii) are spelled out in terms of three necessary conditions for them. (i) and (ii) hold only if: (a) y needs x, where need indicates no inadequacy; (b) y is vulnerable to x;20 (c) y is internally integrated around the good. The union desired in love requires mutual closeness as set by these conditions. It also requires significant personal presence which is a product of a second-person experience and shared attention, together with mutual closeness. Union is possible only between two beings, each of whom is internally integrated around the good.21 One noteworthy feature of this account is that x does not have sole control over whether or not she is close to y. This is so because x’s being close to y entails that y reveal himself to x and that y be internally integrated around the good. Let me mention two of Stump’s comments: (i) “[A]lthough it is entirely up to Paula whether or not she loves, it is not entirely up to Paula whether she has what she desires in love”—i.e., union with the beloved.22 (ii) Similarly, for God. “[I]f Jerome is not integrated within himself, then [God’s] ability to be close to him is limited or inefficacious, no matter what [God] chooses to do.” Or again: “To the extent to which a human person is not integrated in the good, to that extent even God cannot be close to him, or consequently, significantly present to him.”23 What is worse is that we fallen creatures prefer power and pleasure to greater goods, and so we do not will to be internally integrated around the good. As Stump puts it, “the post-Fall human condition carries with it a kind of willed loneliness.”24 Since the greatest obstacle to love is to fail to be internally integrated around the good, the question of how to achieve internal integration around the good is acute.

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Page 164 Redemption The Christian answer to the question of how to achieve internal integration around the good involves redemption. Internal alienation results in a propensity for wrongdoing. Aquinas took the propensity for wrongdoing to be a universal, post-Fall defect in the will, and the remedy is to alleviate the internal fragmentation.25 One cannot simply choose to have a will integrated around the good: “If Paula could successfully choose to be integrated in will, she would already be whole-hearted; her lack of internal integration is just her inability to unify herself in will.”26 Paula cannot achieve internal integration on her own. The remedy, on the standard Christian view, is justification and sanctification. Stump’s discussion of sanctification precedes her discussion of justification.27 She appeals to cooperative grace, whereby “God is cooperating with the human being’s own higher-order desires.” Even if a person cannot bring her first-order volitions under the control of her second-order desires, she may be able to form a first-order volition to ask God to strengthen her will. And God may respond by altering her first-order volitions to bring them in accord with her second-order desires. To operate on a will when the person has a second-order volition that God do so “does not undermine free will but instead enhances or evokes it.”28 The process “in which God cooperates with a human person’s higherorder desires for a will which wills one or another particular good is the process of sanctification.”29 The process of sanctification that aims at full integration of a will around moral goodness is a lengthy one, extending into the afterlife, according to Christian doctrine accepted by Aquinas. Stump points out the anti-Pelagian cast of Aquinas’s views on sanctification: The person “abandons the attempt by strength of her own will to make her will be what she wants it to be. Instead, she recognizes her own impairment in will and her need for help. Rather than striving for what she wants, she in fact lets go of the struggle and seeks God’s aid.”30 But sanctification is not the whole story of redemption; it is only the second part, predicated on a stillhigher-order general will to have a will that wills the good.31 Where does this global higher-order will come from? If one cannot just will the good, or even will to will the good, then how could one will to have a will that wills the good? The answer lies in the doctrine of justification. Although justification is a highly contested doctrine, Aquinas (along with many Christians) holds that we are justified by faith alone. As Stump puts it, “Aquinas takes faith to consist in a free act of will, in which a person hates his own moral wrong and desires the goodness which is God’s…. [I]t is a desire, of one degree or another, for God to aid the will by making it good.”32 The will of faith, the global second-order desire for God to help one have a will that wills the good, is accompanied by the belief of faith, the belief that God will help if one does not resist.

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Page 165 Initially, we are in a state of refusing God’s help. We are impotent to move our own wills from refusal to acceptance. However, according to Stump, there are three possible states of the will, not only refusal and acceptance, but also quiescence. Our state of will can change from active resistance to inactivity or quiescence. “When and only when the will is quiescent in this way, God infuses grace into the will.”33 On this interpretation of Aquinas on justification, “the will of faith is brought about in a human willer by God; but the human willer is still ultimately in control of her will, because it is up to her either to refuse grace or to fail to refuse grace, and God’s giving of grace depends on the state of her will.” Stump points out that there is probably greater disagreement on how to understand free will in Aquinas than on any of his other views. (In the last section, I’ll discuss free will further.) With this account of justification and sanctification, we can see how one can be in a process of internally integrating his will around the good—and thus of removing the obstacles to love and to union with God. On Aquinas’s view, love, as we have seen, requires internal integration around the good. Such integration is acquired only with difficulty—“and never without surrender to the care of God.”34 Both justification and sanctification require a passivity, a letting go. In sanctification, one stops striving to have the will she wants to have by her own efforts; in justification, one lets go of activity in the will altogether. “She abandons her resistance to divine grace by lapsing into quiescence in the will, so that God can reform her will without breaking it.”35 The Story of Job Stump’s plan is to weave together Aquinas’s theodicy with her interpretation of biblical narratives—the stories of Job, of Samson, of Abraham and Isaac—into a defense against the argument from suffering. I cannot begin to do justice to the delicacy of Stump’s interpretations; so I will just give a taste of Stump’s interpretation of the book of Job, and urge the reader to read the interpretations himself. Stump sees the book of Job as a set of nested second-person accounts—an account of God’s interactions with nonhuman parts of creation, nested in God’s dialogue with Job, which is part of a dialogue between God and Satan on God’s relations with Job, which in turn is nested in a framing story about God and Satan. If we see the book of Job in this light, we see that Job actually got what he wanted: reassurance of God’s goodness. Job had “wanted bare justice, but his face-to-face experience with God goes past justice to love,” to which Job responds appropriately: “So I recant and repent in dust and ashes.”36 “ How Job knows what he knows—that his suffering is at the hands of a good and loving God—is hard to explain to someone who was not part of the same second-person experience.”37 All that can be done is to turn the second-person experience into a second-person account by means of a story.

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Page 166 God’s speeches to Job make no theological claims about creation; rather, they are story-like, conveying impressions of God in personal interaction with nonhuman parts of creation. God controls the sea by addressing it in personal terms “as if the sea were a rambunctious and exuberant child of his … who can understand and respond to him.”38 The reporting of the speeches are second-person accounts that invite us to participate, to see what the sons of God were rejoicing about when they saw the morning stars singing together. The implication, says Stump, “is that if we see it, we also will be inclined to rejoice.”39 It is a mistake, Stump tells us, to think of God’s speeches to Job as merely demonstrating his power. Rather, they show God in personal interaction with his creatures. We can infer from God’s speech about nonhuman parts of creation that, if an innocent person suffers, God will produce from the suffering a good for the sufferer which the sufferer would not have had without the suffering. But Job, being a righteous man who is addressed by God, has a more direct, second-person experience, in which God is present to him, as if face-to-face. This second-person experience shows Job that he, too, is encompassed by God’s love. The framing story, which shows God and Satan in their second-person relations, suggests a further explanation of Job’s suffering—a third-person explanation not available to Job. The framing story suggests that, in the nesting story, Job is the primary beneficiary of his suffering, which makes him a great person. Moreover, in the framing story itself, Satan is the primary beneficiary, as God aims at Satan’s good and keeps the distance between himself and Satan as small as Satan will allow.40 Stump remarks that the book of Job is to second-person accounts what a fractal is to mathematics. The fractal pattern allows us to make sense of, say, the suffering of Job’s children: Yes, they are a means to an end in Job’s story, but there will be another story in which they are the primary beneficiaries.41 In the narrative of Job, Stump concludes, “divine providence succeeds in its aims not by determining what creatures do, but by outsmarting them.”42 Putting the interpretation of biblical narratives in the context of Aquinas’s worldview and theodicy, we do not just have the logical compatibility of God and suffering; we can see in detail how it is possible that God and suffering can coexist. For this purpose of defense, we need not actually endorse any Christian doctrines or Aquinas’s worldview. However, Stump leaves such endorsement as open to the reader. STRENGTHS OF STUMP’S VIEW Libertarianism Not Required The main feature that I take to be a strength of Stump’s account—and there will be disagreement that it is a strength—is this: although Stump herself

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Page 167 is a libertarian about free will, her theory, I believe, does not require libertarianism. Since it is controversial whether one should be a libertarian or a compatibilist about free will, I want to discuss this (as I think) strength at some length. I’ll take libertarianism to be the view that we have originative power over our free actions or decisions. This originative power requires that our choices and actions (at least those for which we are morally responsible) not have their source or origin in anything beyond the agent’s control: No outside agency can bring about a free action or decision; a free action or decision is not the result of anything originating outside the agent.43 To put it another way, on the libertarian conception, an act or decision is free if and only if it has no sufficient condition that is beyond the agent’s control. I’ll call this construal of freedom ‘libertarian free will.’44 According to libertarians, free will is incompatible with determinism. I’ll take determinism to be the view that, at any moment, there is only one causally possible future. The alternative to libertarian free will that is relevant here is the view that free will is compatible with determinism.45 I’ll call a conception of free will that holds that free will is compatible with determinism ‘compatibilist free will.’ It is important to remember two things about compatibilism: First, compatibilists agree that we deliberate, choose and have free will; they just have different accounts of free will from libertarians;46 and second, compatibilists need not be determinists.47 Libertarianism and compatibilism are different theories or conceptions of free will. I’ll use the unmodified ‘free will’ to mean the phenomenon that libertarianism and compatibilism are theories or conceptions of.48 Eleonore Stump and Robert Pasnau are two of the most sophisticated contemporary commentators (by standards of analytic philosophy) on Aquinas. They agree on the importance of the will in Aquinas, and they agree that Aquinas appealed to higher-order volitions. Yet they disagree about whether Aquinas was a compatibilist about freedom and determinism. Pasnau says yes; Stump says no.49 I am not in a position to take sides on the interpretation of Aquinas, but I do want to argue for two claims: (i) the views that Stump presents in her book on second-person accounts do not require libertarianism; (ii) not requiring libertarianism is a strength of her views. (i) I want to show that even if libertarianism is false (as I think it is), Stump’s account stays afloat. In the first place, Stump explicitly characterizes ordinary freedom without regard to libertarianism: even if Paula is internally divided, she is free in the ordinary way if she “performs some act of her own will, without any external coercion.” To underscore that ordinary freedom is compatible with causal determinism, Stump includes as a footnote: “Libertarians may add here ‘and which is not causally determined’.”50 So on Stump’s view, ordinary freedom is compatible with compatibilist free will. But in addition to (compatibilist) ordinary freedom, Stump appeals to “freedom in the strenuous mode.” Freedom in the strenuous mode is freedom

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Page 168 with the obstacles to pursuing one’s true good removed.51 In other words, one has freedom in the strenuous mode only if one is internally integrated around the good. Similarly, for love in the strenuous mode, closeness in the strenuous mode and union in the strenuous mode—all these come in two modes, and only beings whose desires are nonconflicting and harmonious are capable of anything in the strenuous mode. The strenuous mode is necessary for what we yearn for in freedom, as well as in love, union and closeness.52 Now, does freedom in the strenuous mode require libertarianism, any more than ordinary freedom does? The answer depends on whether internal integration around the good requires libertarianism. Internal integration around the good is the ultimate end of the process of sanctification, which is not complete in this life. Freedom in the strenuous mode does not require libertarianism if and only if it is possible for someone to get started on the process of being internally integrated around the good in a world in which libertarianism is false. Getting started on the process is a matter of justification. In her Wandering in Darkness, as well as in Aquinas , Stump tries to avoid the compatibilist reading by showing that the will has three, not two, possibilities with respect to grace: not only may the will accept or refuse grace, but also it may move from refusal into a state of quiescence. Quiescence is a state of neither rejecting nor accepting. We all begin in a state of rejection of God. There are two steps to justification. The first step is the movement of the will from a state of rejection to a state of quiescence; the second step is the movement of the will from a state of quiescence to a state of acceptance. I shall argue that libertarianism is not required for either the first or second step.53 Step One: I do not doubt that there is a state of quiescence of the will, and I agree that refraining from willing does not require an act of will. What I doubt is that getting into a state of quiescence as regards justification can have any libertarian element whatever. Either one gets into a state of quiescence by an act of will or not.54 Suppose that one gets into a state of quiescence by an act of will. In that case, the act of will is not an act of libertarian free will. Here’s why: an act of libertarian free will does not have its ultimate source outside the agent’s control. Libertarian free wills, by definition, operate on their own. Nothing, not even God, can turn a libertarian free will one way or another.55 But the will with which one stops refusing grace manifestly does not operate on its own, on pain of the Pelagian heresy. No one with a fallen will can arise from her bed of sin apart from God’s grace. It follows that no act of will with which one moves from rejection to quiescence is an act of libertarian free will, if an act of will is involved at all. So, suppose that moving from a state of rejection to a state of quiescence does not require an act of will.56 In that case, God’s grace alone suffices for the change of state, which is outside the person’s control altogether. If moving from a state of rejection to a state of quiescence does not require any act

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Page 169 of will, then it cannot require an act of libertarian free will. So, whether the move from rejection to quiescence requires an act of will or not, libertarian free will is excluded from Step One of justification. Step Two: When the will is quiescent, it stops actively resisting God. A person whose will is in a quiescent state neither accepts nor rejects God’s offer of saving grace. God’s saving grace, offered to all, produces in the quiescent person the will of faith. “When and only when the will is quiescent … God infuses grace into the will.”57 At that time, the human person forms the global higher-order desire for a will that wills the good. In her magisterial Aquinas , Stump says: “According to Aquinas, the second-order act of free will in justifying faith is produced in a person by the divine infusion of operating grace; the will does not cooperate with God in this act but is simply moved by him.”58 This view rules out libertarianism. If the “second-order act of free will in justifying faith is produced in a person by the divine infusion of operating grace,” and if “the will does not cooperate with God in this act but is simply moved by him,” then the second-order act of free will is not an act of libertarian free will by definition. The person is not the ultimate source or originator of an act of will produced by God. Indeed, there is a sufficient condition (God’s grace) for the act beyond the control of the person, whose will is “simply moved by [God].” If the will is simply moved by God without any cooperation from the will, then the movement of the will logically cannot involve an act of libertarian free will. So, the act of will that moves one, having been infused by grace, from quiescence to acceptance is not a libertarian act of will; it has grace as sufficient cause. This latter point is explicitly affirmed by the Lutheran-Catholic Concordat, which has been officially endorsed both by the Lutheran and Roman Catholic Churches and seems compatibilist throughout: “When Catholics say that persons ‘co-operate’ in preparing for and accepting justification by consenting to God’s justifying action, they see such personal consent as itself an effect of grace, not as an action arising from innate human abilities.”59 Thus, Pelagianism is avoided since the acceptance of faith is produced by God’s grace itself, not by the person on her own. Not only is Pelagianism avoided, but so is libertarianism: the quiescent will, for which the person bears no responsibility, is caused by God’s saving grace to move from quiescence to acceptance. So, Step Two also does not require any acts of libertarian free will. Hence, the truth of libertarianism (if it is true) has nothing to do with either step of justification. My point here is only that the libertarian interpretation is not required for the second-person response to suffering. It is open to us to take Aquinas to be right about justification, and yet to reject libertarianism. It follows that Stump’s view does not require libertarianism. (ii) Let me draw on what I have already argued to show that not requiring libertarianism is a strength of Stump’s view.

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Page 170 The problem for the libertarian is to avoid various forms of Pelagianism. For example, semi-Pelagianism is characterized by Stump as follows: “God awards grace in response to the initiative … of human free will, which is sufficient of itself for initiating the process of justification that God’s grace then continues.”60 There is a trilemma in the offing for libertarians: Either (1) the process of justification is initiated by an act of free will that is produced by God, or (2) the process of justification is initiated by an act of free will that is not produced by God, or (3) the process of justification is not initiated by an act of free will at all. If (1), then semi-Pelagianism is avoided; but, an act of free will produced by God has a sufficient condition beyond the agent’s control, and hence is not an act of libertarian freedom, but only of compatibilist freedom. If (2), then if we took the act of free will to be an act of libertarian free will, we would have semi-Pelagianism and a violation of the orthodox doctrine of justification. This is so, because if God required that a person stop refusing grace on her own before he offered grace, then his offer of grace would be a response to her surrender. If (3), then the agent has no control over initiating the process of justification and libertarianism plays no role at all in initiating the process of justification. So, it seems that there is no logical room for libertarianism without violating the orthodox (non-semiPelagian) doctrine of justification. It seems to me that, logically speaking, the only way for an orthodox Christian to avoid the trilemma is to accept a compatibilist view: God can bring about a state of will in a person without interfering with her free will. If that is so, then, by definition, libertarianism is false. And if libertarianism is false, then it is indeed a strength of Stump’s view that it does not require libertarianism.61 Other Strengths of Stump’s Second-Person Account There are further strengths of Stump’s Second-Person approach to the problem of suffering. In addition to compatibility with compatibilism, I want to mention three more features that are distinctive strengths of Stump’s account: The next feature of Stump’s approach that I take to be a distinctive strength concerns the kind of explanation of evil that we can expect. It is only rarely (e.g., in the interpretation of the book of Job) that we can know a morally sufficient reason for suffering in a particular case; and even there, the ‘morally sufficient reason’ is advanced only as a possibility. Still less does Stump offer a global explanation for why God permits evil at all.62 The kind of explanation of evil that can be expected is only a second-person experience of God that assures the sufferer of God’s love and faithfulness. But this turns out to be a rich response to the problem of suffering, prized out of biblical narratives about human suffering and God’s relationship to suffering human agents.

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Page 171 The third feature that I take to be a strength of Stump’s account is that it offers a unified account of evil: it does not treat moral evil caused by human agents differently from natural evil. By shifting focus from kinds of evil (e.g., natural and moral) to the sufferer, Stump opens the way to a unified response to evil. Indeed, in the case of Job, God “is at least actively collaborating in Job’s suffering, not just allowing it.”63 If Stump can take care of Job’s case, in which God is actively collaborating in suffering, as I think she does, then the other kinds of cases—of natural evil and of moral evil—will readily fall into line. The final strength of Stump’s approach that I want to mention is that Stump does not try to domesticate evil or suffering. Nothing removes the dreadfulness of suffering—not the assurance of God’s love and faithfulness to us, not anything.64 And some evils (e.g., the Holocaust) are too vast and overwhelming to be fit subjects for academic debate. “For such evil, speech should fail,” says Stump. “It is enough for me that I am a member of the species that perpetrated this evil. Stricken awe in the face of it seems to me the only response bearable.”65 The deep mystery remains. CONCLUSION Since evil is a deep mystery, the best that one can do, I believe, is to show (as Stump has done) how an all-powerful and all-good God can coexist with suffering, and to show how we are to respond to evil. We are to respond to suffering with the faith that God does not break his promises, however things seem to us from our limited perspectives. This traditional Christian answer to the problem of suffering is not “bland and disappointing.” On the contrary, Stump says, “it is tough, deep and comforting.”66, 67 NOTES 1. Marilyn McCord Adams (1999) also is sensitive to the personal aspects of the problem of evil. 2. Stump has generously allowed me to quote from a draft of her forthcoming manuscript, Wandering in Darkness. 3. Although she thinks that the actual world is such a world, Stump is not arguing for the stronger claim. 4. Eleonore Stump (2001), 549. 5. Stump introduces these terms in Stump (2000). “Dominican” is shorthand for the analytic philosopher’s discursive, propositional approach to all knowledge, and “Franciscan” is shorthand for Stump’s alternative. Franciscan knowledge is based on the claim that there is some philosophically significant knowledge that is difficult or impossible to express in non-narrative form. Dominican knowledge is propositional, and Franciscan knowledge is narrative. 6. These suggestive uses of the terms ‘Franciscan’ and ‘Dominican’ knowledge exemplify Stump’s use of tradition in an innovative way. Another example

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Page 172 is Stump’s uses of the names ‘Jerome’ and ‘Paula.’ St. Jerome and Paula are historical characters who had a correspondence. 7. Physical pain itself is extremely complex, and little understood by philosophers or physicians. 8. It is unclear to me how Stump’s account applies to the suffering of nonhuman animals. 9. Stump (forthcoming), Chapter 3, 18–19 in manuscript. 10. It would be misleading to call this kind of knowledge ‘non-conceptual.’ If I know that you are grateful by seeing gratitude on your face, I must have the concept gratitude. 11. Stump (forthcoming), Chapter 3, 26 in manuscript. 12. Ibid. , Chapter 4, 9 in manuscript. 13. See Stump (2001), 501. 14. Stump (forthcoming), Chapter 5, 10 in manuscript. 15. Ibid ., Chapter 6, 24 in manuscript. On Aquinas’s view, the will is an appetite for the good and cannot choose anything that is not presented as good by the intellect. 16. I believe that God’s desire for union with his creatures is more closely connected to the Franciscan than to the Dominican tradition. 17. Stump (forthcoming), Chapter 5, 26–27 in manuscript. 18. So, as Stump points out, to say that union is the product of significant personal presence and mutual closeness is pleonastic, since significant personal presence entails mutual closeness. Ibid ., Chapter 6, 25 in manuscript. 19. Ibid ., Chapter 6, 11 in manuscript. 20. Stump points out that in the incarnation, God made himself vulnerable to human beings. Ibid ., Chapter 6, 31 in manuscript, note 44. 21. Ibid. , Chapter 6, 26 in manuscript. 22. Ibid ., Chapter 7, 26 in manuscript. In Ch. 7, Stump distinguishes between love, union, closeness and freedom “in the ordinary mode” and “in the strenuous mode.” The strenuous mode requires internal integration around the good. I am eliding the distinction here, and just assuming that the strenuous mode is the relevant mode. 23. Ibid. , Chapter 6, 12 and 26 in manuscript; emphasis mine. 24. Ibid. , Chapter 6, 26 in manuscript. As Stump points out, we do not have to believe in original sin to recognize the propensity of human beings to moral wrongdoing. There are plenty of secular accounts of the unhappy propensity—evolutionary, genetic, sociological. Ibid ., Chapter 8, 5 in manuscript. 25. Ibid. , Chapter 8, 7 in manuscript. Stump further points out that the alleviation of the human propensity to moral wrongdoing also is an antidote to shame. Insofar as shame and the propensity to moral wrongdoing “are the only obstacles to love in the strenuous mode between God and a human person, alleviating the human propensity to moral wrongdoing is therefore also sufficient for love in the strenuous mode, on Aquinas’s worldview.” 26. Ibid ., Chapter 8, 10 in manuscript. 27. The order of her presentation suggests that in fact sanctification precedes justification. I was brought up to think that justification precedes sanctification in the order of salvation. 28. Ibid. , Chapter 8, 13 in manuscript. 29. Ibid. , Chapter 8, 12 in manuscript. 30. Ibid. , Chapter 8, 15 in manuscript. 31. Ibid . 32. Ibid. , Chapter 8, 16 in manuscript. 33. Ibid. , Chapter 8, 19 in manuscript. 34. Ibid. , Chapter 8, 23 in manuscript.

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Page 173 35. Ibid . 36. Ibid. , Chapter 9, 23 in manuscript. 37. Ibid. , Chapter 9, 58 in manuscript. 38. Ibid. , Chapter 9, 15 in manuscript. 39. Ibid . 40. Ibid. , Chapter 9, 52 in manuscript. 41. Ibid. , Chapter 9, 54 in manuscript. 42. Ibid. , Chapter 9, 60 in manuscript. 43. This is a standard construal of libertarianism. For example, Roderick Chisholm says: “If we are responsible, and if what I have been trying to say is true, then we have a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we act is a prime mover unmoved . In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing—or no one—causes us to cause those events to happen” (Chisholm, 1966, 23). Robert Kane says, “[T]o will freely … is to be the ultimate creator (prime mover, so to speak) of your own purposes” (Kane, 1996, 4). 44. ‘Libertarian free will’ is shorthand for ‘a libertarian conception of free will,’ just as ‘Newtonian simultaneity’ is shorthand for ‘a Newtonian conception of simultaneity.’ Peter van Inwagen has complained vehemently about my use of a term like ‘libertarian free will’; so, I am stipulating what ‘libertarian free will’ is to denote. Since ‘free will’ is a term of philosophical art, it does not ( pace van Inwagen) have an unambiguous pre-theoretical meaning. ‘Libertarian free will’ and ‘compatibilist free will’ are as innocent as ‘Newtonian simultaneity’ and ‘Einsteinian simultaneity.’ All these terms are clear and unambiguous. 45. There are a variety of ways to spell out what free will is, so that it is compatible with determinism. Some interpret Aquinas as a compatibilist. See Robert Pasnau (2002), Chapter 7.4; also see Thomas Loughran (1999). 46. An important secular source of resistance to this view comes from the influential Consequence Argument, formulated by Peter van Inwagen. But see Lynne Baker (2008). 47. For example, I am a compatibilist who is not a determinist. Indeterminism is not sufficient for libertarianism. 48. ‘Free will’ is to ‘libertarian free will’ as ‘simultaneity’ is to ‘Newtonian simultaneity.’ The former in each case denotes the phenomenon; the latter denotes a particular conception or theory of the phenomenon. 49. See Pasnau (2002), Chapter 7.4, and Stump (2003), Chapter 9. 50. Stump (forthcoming), Chapter 7, 8 and 28 (note 9) in manuscript. 51. This reminds me of Martin Luther in On the Bondage of the Will : We are able (free) to pursue the good only by the grace of God, who removes the obstacle to our pursuit of the good. 52. Stump (forthcoming), Chapter 7, 12 in manuscript. 53. Stump may well go so far as to say that libertarianism is not required for her account of justification. She may hold that no act of will (and hence no act of libertarian free will) is required for the step from rejection to quiescence. Although she thinks that Aquinas is a libertarian, she argues only that it is possible to interpret Aquinas as a libertarian—thus leaving open the possibility of theological compatibilism. See Stump (2003), 389. 54. In Timpe (2007b), Kevin Timpe has a clever argument that aims to avoid both Pelagianism and theological determinism. He holds that one has control over getting into a state of quiescence in an indirect way. His view requires that there be an act of libertarian free will that interferes with “the natural disposition to choose contrary to God.” Such interference, which is independent of God’s grace, sounds too Pelagian to me. See Timpe (2007b), 294.

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Page 174 55. According to Molina, libertarian free wills are beyond God’s reach altogether. This is so because, according to Molina, although counterfactuals of freedom are contingent, God has no control whatsoever over which ones are true. 56. I believe that both Aquinas and Stump take this alternative. See Timpe (2007b). 57. Stump (forthcoming), Chapter 8, 19 in manuscript. 58. Stump (2003), 389. 59. Joint Declaration on Doctrine of Justification by the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church (1998), 4.1.20. This document, I believe, remains controversial among both Protestant and Catholic theologians. 60. Stump (1989), 193. 61. For further arguments, see Lynne Baker (2003). In Baker (2006), I argued on grounds independent of theological issues that libertarianism is false. 62. An explanation of evil in terms of original sin would still leave suffering like Job’s or an ebola victim’s unexplained. 63. Stump (forthcoming), Chapter 9, 63 in manuscript, note 33. 64. Perhaps the suffering of saints is transformed by the assurance of God’s love and faithfulness, but the pain and awfulness of the suffering remain. Cf. Stump (2001), 549–550. 65. Stump (forthcoming), Chapter 1, 18 in manuscript. 66. Stump (2001), 550. 67. I would like to thank Eleonore Stump for allowing me to use a draft of a manuscript of Wandering in Darkness, her forthcoming book on the problem of evil. Also, I appreciate comments on a draft of this paper by Gareth B. Matthews, Katherine Sonderegger, and Kevin Timpe.

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Page 175 11 Theodicies and Human Nature Dostoevsky on the Saint as Witness Timothy O’Connor There are many problems of evil. Philosophers occupy themselves with a cluster of theoretical problems of evil, centered around different forms of argument for something like the following general conclusion: widely observed facts about pervasive suffering among humans and animals render the existence of God extremely improbable, if not demonstrably false. A basic version of ancient lineage was famously restated by David Hume (through the mouth of Philo in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion): Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil? In response, theistic philosophers have attempted to identify reasons God might have to permit significant suffering or, failing that, to identify reasons for thinking that we may reasonably believe that God exists even if we cannot give plausible reasons why God might permit suffering. Ordinary people evidently care about these theoretical problems, too, but they do not always sharply separate them from more practical problems. I rather suspect that many people would dismiss the terms in which philosophers discuss these matters as ‘bloodless’—as to some degree evading the ‘heart’ of the matter.1 Many who have moved towards atheism by reflecting on the facts of suffering might not recognize the change within themselves as primarily involving a tendency to assent to the conclusion that the facts of suffering render God’s existence objectively or epistemically unlikely. For them, the problem of evil has a practical, existential dimension. Fyodor Dostoevsky understood this practical dimension well, and it is embodied in his literary treatment of the problem of evil in his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov.2 In what follows, I will interpret the powerful existential repudiation of Christianity based on the facts of human suffering voiced by the antagonist, Ivan. After noting some similarities of Ivan’s case to that given by the French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus in his novel The Plague , I then turn to Dostoevsky’s response, expressed

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Page 176 through the final discourse of the Elder Zossima. My goal here is solely to interpret and to set in a clearer focus the way Dostoevsky approaches the problem of evil. At the end, I briefly note some outstanding issues facing his strategy for resolving it. DOSTOEVSKY’S EXISTENTIAL PROBLEM OF EVIL Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is a large and complex work, whose overall plot line I shall not rehearse here. I remind the reader only that it centers on the patrimony of the dissolute sensualist, Fyodor Karamazov. Fyodor has three sons: Dmitri, an intense, passionate man who is a rival to his father; Ivan, an outspoken socialist and atheist who was educated in the secular thought of the West; and Alyosha, a tenderhearted devout believer who has fallen under the influence of the mystical and widely revered monk, the Elder Zossima. In two early, powerful chapters (“Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor”), Ivan speaks with Alyosha and makes his case against all attempts to interpret the worst forms of human misery in Christian terms. One or the other of these chapters is often reprinted in anthologies devoted to the problem of evil. However, nowhere does Ivan hint at anything resembling a philosophical argument from suffering to a conclusion that Christianity is false or highly improbable. He is making a case of sorts, I believe, but it is to a different kind of conclusion. Here is how he begins: I believe in His Word, toward which the universe is striving … and that, indeed, is God…. it looks as if I were on the right path, doesn’t it? Well, let me tell you this: in the final analysis I do not accept this God-made world, and although I know it exists, I absolutely refuse to admit its existence. I want you to understand that it is not God that I refuse to accept, but the world that He has created—what I do not accept and cannot accept is the God-created world. However, let me make it clear that, like a babe, I trust that the wounds will heal, the scars will vanish, that the sorry and ridiculous spectacle of man’s disagreements and clashes will disappear like a pitiful mirage, like the sordid invention of the puny, microscopic, Euclidean human brain, and that, in the end, in the universal finale, at the moment universal harmony is achieved, something so magnificent will take place that it will satisfy every human heart, allay all indignation, pay for all human crimes, for all the blood shed by men, and enable everyone not only to forgive everything but also to justify everything that has happened to men. Well, that day may come; all this may come to pass—but I personally still do not accept this world. I refuse to accept it! That’s the way I am, Alyosha, this is where I stand. (Book V, Ch. 3) Note Ivan’s way of expressing the problem at the outset: adopting the pose of one who accepts God’s existence and the goodness of his ultimate

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Page 177 purposes, and who believes in the final resolution of the problem of suffering in the afterlife, he nonetheless declares that he doesn’t “accept” that resolution. At first glance, this is an odd thing to say. If one truly believes that there is an answer to be given (even if one doesn’t know it in full), then in what sense can one refuse to ‘accept’ it? Ivan continues by recounting several atrocities, including the stories of an infant who is horribly and senselessly abused by her parents and a young child who is torn to bits by a dog unleashed by a landowner as the child’s mother looks on helplessly. He notes in passing that the suffering of these small children puts the lie to any stern yet facile theodicies that would see all human suffering as retribution resulting from our solidarity in sin. He then says: I can imagine what a universal upheaval there will be when everything up in heaven and down in the entrails of the earth comes together to sing one single hymn of praise and when every creature who has ever lived joins in, intoning, ‘You were right, O Lord, for your way has now been revealed to us!’ The day the mother embraces the man who had her son torn to pieces by the hounds, the day these three stand side by side and say, ‘You were right, O Lord,’ that day we will at last have obtained the supreme knowledge and everything will be explained and accounted for. But … as of now, I do not want to join them. And while there is still time, I want to dissociate myself from it all; I have no wish to be part of their eternal harmony. It’s not worth one single tear of that martyred little girl who beat her breast with her tiny fist, shedding her innocent tears and praying to ‘sweet Jesus’ to rescue her in the stinking outhouse…. And if the suffering of little children is needed to complete the sum total of suffering required to pay for the truth, I don’t want that truth, and I declare in advance that all the truth in the world is not worth the price! And finally, I don’t really want to see the mother of the little boy embrace the man who set the hounds on him to tear him apart! … She may not forgive him, even if the child chooses to forgive him himself…. No, I want no part of any harmony; I don’t want it, out of love for mankind. I prefer to remain with my unavenged suffering and my unappeased anger—even if I happen to be wrong . I feel, moreover, that such harmony is rather overpriced. We cannot afford to pay so much for a ticket. And so I hasten to return the ticket I’ve been sent. When Alyosha replies, “That’s rebellion,” Ivan issues him a challenge: “Tell me yourself—I challenge you: let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and

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Page 178 that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it? Tell me and don’t lie!” “No, I would not,” Alyosha said softly. (Book V, Ch. 4) The force of Ivan’s “I don’t accept it,” I take it, is this: Every human being who steadily considers the worst elements of human suffering is confronted with the practical problem of how they might go on to live in a way that brings into harmony their ethical/religious views concerning suffering and their deepest moral impulses in response to it. Ivan is saying that the Christian message cannot be honestly lived, because it is in some sense incompatible with having basic human sympathies towards the oppressed and afflicted. His challenge to Alyosha—“would you agree?”—is one that every Christian believer must confront. What do I understand the Christian message concerning suffering to be? Can I ‘internalize’ it and integrate it into my behavior, viewing every episode of intense suffering I encounter through its lens, without becoming morally calloused in a way that from my present perspective would be deeply repugnant? Ivan declares that he doesn’t want to have his outlook transformed (in Christian terms, to become sanctified) in such a way that he comes to terms with human suffering, accepting it as something that God has ordained en route to a final harmony of all things. The only way this transformation of outlook could occur, he is implying, is for him to cease to have the appropriate sympathy for and solidarity with victims of oppression. Ivan then tells Alyosha the allegory of The Grand Inquisitor. It is set in 16th-century Spain, at the height of the Inquisition. Jesus appears in their midst and the Inquisitor recognizes him and, ironically, imprisons him. He gives a long soliloquy in which he reviles Jesus for his message. For the Inquisitor has come to doubt it and to embrace a different ideal—to “correct” the original Christian message. Reminding Jesus of his temptation in the desert by the devil, the Inquisitor says Judge for Yourself, then: who was right, You or the one who questioned You? Do you remember the first question? It was worded differently, but this is its meaning: “You wanted to come into the world and You came empty-handed, with nothing but some vague promise of freedom, which, in their simplemindedness and innate irresponsibility, men cannot even conceive and which they fear and dread….” And now, do you see those stones in this parched and barren desert? Turn them into loaves of bread, and men will follow you like cattle, grateful and docile. (Book V, Ch. 5) Bread is here taken as a symbol of what humans most naturally seek after. The Inquisitor notes that Jesus, however, offered us something altogether different—‘heavenly bread,’ which requires “man’s love, so that He would follow You of his own free will, fascinated and captivated by You.” And

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Page 179 the basic problem with this message is that most are unable by nature to receive it: You promised them heavenly bread but, I repeat, how can that bread compete against earthly bread in dealing with the weak, ungrateful, permanently corrupt human species? And even if hundreds or thousands of men will follow You for the sake of heavenly bread, what will happen to the millions of men who are too weak to forego their earthly bread? Or is it only the thousands of the strong and mighty who are dear to Your heart? … But we are concerned with the weak too! You wanted their freely given love rather than the servile rapture of slaves subdued forever by a display of power. And, here again, You overestimated men, for they are certainly nothing but slaves, although they were created rebels by nature. Look around and judge for Yourself. Fifteen centuries have passed. Examine them. Whom have You raised up to Yourself? I swear that man is weaker and viler than You thought! How could he possibly do what You did? By paying him such respect, You acted as if You lacked compassion for him, because You demanded too much of him—and that from You, who love him more than Yourself! Here, then, is a second facet of the practical problem of evil voiced by Ivan. The goal of the original Christian message—that for which human suffering is permitted in the first place—is unattainable for most human beings. It fails to account for our manifest foibles, the inescapable weaknesses of our nature. The Christian message, in Ivan’s view, is simply not suited for ordinary human beings. Thus, Ivan’s challenge to the Christian is not that one should provide an abstract, possible justification of God’s permitting the suffering we observe and experience. Instead it is concrete and practical, and has two prongs: (1) show how it is possible for a human being to absorb the message that God will ultimately bring all things into lasting harmony—including countless cases of the oppressor and his victim—without becoming morally calloused in the process; and (2) establish that, contrary to appearances, the Christian calling of self-renunciation for the sake of freely given love towards God is attainable by ordinary, weak human beings. What form may an adequate response to these challenges take? ALBERT CAMUS ON PROVIDENCE AND SUFFERING Before turning to Dostoevsky’s response, let us observe the way a real-life Western atheist, the French philosopher Albert Camus, sought to convey much the same dilemma facing the morally sensitive Christian. His novel The Plague depicts a town that is quarantined by the government in order

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Page 180 to contain an outbreak of a deadly plague.3 Dr. Bernard Rieux, whom we eventually discover to be the narrator, is an agnostic doctor who struggles to do what he can to help those ravaged by the disease. He and Jean Tarrou (“a young, financially independent observer”) embody and express the secular humanism Camus advocates. Their religious counterpart is Father Paneloux, a “learned and militant Jesuit” priest. Early on, the narrator tells us that his goal is to give an objective description of events, one that forces us to put off all comforting illusions about what is taking place, while maintaining a strong commitment to humanity (p. 12). And though we don’t usually think of our lot in such extreme terms, Camus intends the desperate plight of the plague-ridden town to symbolize the essential human condition: we all suffer to varying degrees—some in horrifying ways through chance misfortune—we aspire to something much greater than what we experience, and we all will die. Much of the first third of the novel is devoted to depicting the effects of the town’s isolation and doom on its inhabitants: on the one hand, a feeling of deprivation, exile, and lack of long-term purpose sets in (pp. 72–3, 182–3); on the other hand, there is a newfound freedom to serve their own purposes (p. 121). Over time, all illusion about their terrible lot falls away, and they are said to perceive the human condition more clearly (p. 193). (At the end of the novel, when the plague ceases and they are liberated, many again fall into illusion, preferring not to dwell on what they witnessed and learned during the ordeal.) Father Paneloux conveys Camus’ understanding of the Christian message concerning suffering in a sermon: Thus from the dawn of recorded history the scourge of God has humbled the proud of heart and laid low those who hardened themselves against Him. Ponder this well, my friends, and fall on your knees…. For plague is the flail of God and the world his threshing-floor…. You fondly imagined it was enough to visit God on Sundays, and thus you could be free on your weekdays. You believed some brief formalities, some bending of the knee, would recompense Him well enough for your criminal indifference. But God is not mocked. These brief encounters could not sate the fierce manner of His love. He wished to see you longer and more often; that is His manner of loving, and, indeed, it is the only manner of loving. (95) In discussing the sermon afterwards with Tarrou, Rieux first expresses a dilemma the theist faces: Rieux said … that if he believed in an all-powerful God he would cease curing the sick and leave that to Him. But no one in the world believed in a God of that sort; no, not even Paneloux, who believed that he believed in such a God. And this was proved by the fact that no one

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Page 181 ever threw himself on Providence completely…. “After all,” the doctor repeated, “ … since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards the heaven where he sits in silence?” (127–8) He goes on to say that, for his part, suffering taught him his secular humanistic outlook. In a similar vein, Tarrou says that ‘comprehension’ of the human condition moves him to action, apart from any religious or philosophical code (pp. 129–30). The pivotal event of the novel is the protracted and tortured death of a young child, witnessed by Father Paneloux. Forced to see the suffering firsthand, Paneloux realizes the impossibility of an adequate theodicy along the lines he envisioned in his sermon. Instead, he cries out, “My God, spare this child!” After the child dies, Paneloux delivers a second sermon. In one respect, his tone softens, as he exchanges “we” for “you.” But while no longer condemnatory, his message changes into something even more grotesque. The right perspective, he tells the assembled audience, is that of “the All or nothing,” a complete humiliation before an all-powerful God who does as He pleases: My brothers … the love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God’s will ours. That is the hard lesson I would share with you today. That is the faith, cruel in men’s eyes, and crucial in God’s, which we must ever strive to compass. (228) In Camus’ view, this is what a consistent Christianity would declare, embracing just what Dostoevsky’s Ivan said he could not accept. And to underscore the point, Camus has Father Paneloux himself contract the plague and reject any medical aid as “against his principles” (231). Tarrou later says the central problem is: “Can one be a saint without God?” Through the outlook of Tarrou and Rieux, Camus goes on to paint a secular alternative to religious morality: one that embraces human love (261, 291–92, 301–2) while recognizing that true peace is impossible, given the continual suffering that must be struggled against (290, 308). DOSTOEVSKY’S SOLUTION: THE SAINT AS MORAL WITNESS How, then, is the Christian to respond to the challenge posed in different ways by Dostoevsky’s Ivan and Camus’ Rieux and Tarrou? Is it possible to embrace a broad perspective on God’s providence through sometimes

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Page 182 horrific suffering while maintaining a deep empathy for and solidarity with the sufferer? Is there an alternative to the callousness of Paneloux in the first sermon (“God’s flail”) and the abasement of human personhood he espouses in the second? Dostoevsky’s own response is most clearly expressed through the life and teaching of a revered Orthodox monk, the Elder Zossima.4 Although Zossima dies less than midway through the novel, before some of the main dramatic episodes, his influence on Alyosha is seen throughout, and his final symbolic action towards Dmitry foreshadows the novel’s dramatic climax and ties it to Zossima’s own teaching on the meaning of suffering. To fully appreciate Dostoevsky’s response to Ivan’s challenge, one must consider not only Zossima’s teaching but also his life and character. I begin with Zossima’s teaching on the meaning of suffering, delivered to an audience of monks a few hours before his death. The first thing to note is that he says nothing at all that would attempt to explain why God has chosen to create a world in which human suffering is so prominent. In particular, he nowhere hints at the view of Camus’ Father Paneloux that our suffering is ultimately divine retribution for human sin. Instead, he is solely concerned to address the Christian’s response not only to the one who suffers but also to those who cause suffering in others. The key, he believes, lies in our understanding of our freedom. Ivan embodies the main secular alternative, which stems from the Enlightenment ideal. On this view, applying the detached objectivity of scientific methodology to our understanding of human beings will lead to human progress and increased happiness. But in fact, Zossima says, this hasn’t happened. And the central misstep taken by the secular European culture was a wrong view of human freedom: “To consider freedom as directly dependent on the number of man’s requirements and the extent of their immediate satisfaction shows a twisted understanding of human nature, for such an interpretation only breeds in men a multitude of senseless, stupid desires and habits and endless preposterous inventions” (379). This inevitably leads to fragmented, isolated human beings (378–79), who lack a basis in their picture of things for serious moral concern and whose science has merely made more efficient the means of inflicting pain on others. We should note that Camus represents a significant strand of secular thought which embraces the view of freedom Zossima criticizes while agreeing with Zossima in his emphasis on the need for human solidarity. But we may reasonably question whether there is anything within Camus’ larger understanding of human existence that would reliably lead those who are comparatively comfortable to live in solidarity with those who suffer profoundly. Camus’ Jean Tarrou says the desire for such solidarity comes from simple ‘comprehension’ of the common human plight. Perhaps this is true of some individuals. But the question concerns what the prevailing reaction to the suffering of their fellows will be among human beings who have embraced the Enlightenment approach to progress and its secular understanding of

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Page 183 freedom. Broad trends in secular culture since Dostoevsky’s time may well provide ample grounds for doubts on this score. (“Who is more likely to conceive a great idea and serve it: the isolated rich man or the man freed from the tyranny of habits and material goods?” 380) In any case, our concern is to understand the alternative that Zossima proposes. He maintains that true freedom comes through pursuing the monastic ideal of minimizing unnecessary individual desires. Such desires distort our focus and blunt our concern for the other. Becoming free in this way, we are led to embrace the oneness of and “divine mystery within” all things (385)—to understand in a profound way that the entire realm of nature is a unified divine creation that is destined for reunion with God once the pervasive flaw of human sin is healed. The most significant moral consequence that Zossima draws from this view is that we are led to see ourselves as “responsible for everyone” (362): For everything is like the ocean, all things flow and are indirectly linked together, and if you push here, something will move at the other end of the world. It may be madness to beg the birds for forgiveness, but things would be easier for the birds, for the child, and for every animal if you were nobler than you are—yes, they would be easier, even if only by a little. … Above all, remember that you cannot be anyone’s judge. No man on earth can judge a criminal until he understands that he himself is just as guilty as the man standing before him and that he may be more responsible than anyone else for the crime. … you were guilty for having failed to show the light to the wicked, as a man without sin could. For if you had done so, you would have lighted the path for the sinful, and the criminal might not have committed his crime. And even if you lighted his way but still did not manage to save the evil-doer, keep the faith, never doubt the power of the heavenly light, and have faith that if they are not saved now, they will be saved later. And if they are not saved later, their children will be saved, for, although you yourself may be dead by then, the light you shed will remain. (387–9) Zossima had enacted this teaching on an earlier occasion, when he was asked to meet with the Karamazov clan and mediate an inheritance dispute between Dmitry and his father. The meeting descends into acrimony and Dmitry questions whether a despicable man such as his father should be allowed to live. Zossima later tells Alyosha that he glimpsed something frightening in Dmitry’s look and was “filled with horror at what that man was preparing for himself.” In response, Zossima moves closer to Dmitry, kneels down, and then bows to the ground before him. Rising to his feet, he then bows to each person, begging his forgiveness: “For a few seconds, Dmitry stood there like a man stunned by a blow. The elder bowing to the

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Page 184 ground before him—what was this? Suddenly he cried, ‘Oh, my God,’ covered his face with his hands, and rushed out of the cell” (86). But what of our reaction to intense suffering? Rieux and Ivan both declare that the moral person can (and should) never come to accept the horrible suffering of innocents as part of any overarching divine plan. Speaking of Job, who loses his children (along with his health and fortune) and yet later finds happiness in a new family, Zossima says: But how could he possibly love these new children of his when the others are no longer there, when he has lost them? Can he be completely happy when he remembers his dead children, however dear to his heart his new children may be? But he can be happy, he can know happiness again, because a mysterious process gradually transforms an old grief into a quiet happiness; seething youth is replaced by gentle and serene old age…. Over everything there hovers the Lord’s truth and justice that moves our hearts, reconciles everything, and is all-forgiving! My life is coming to an end—I know it, hear it. But with every day that is left in me, I feel that my earthly life is already blending into a new, infinite, unknown, future life, anticipation of which sets my soul atremble and makes my mind glow and my heart weep with joy. (351–2) In sum, his message seems to be that by accepting the fact of pervasive suffering and taking responsibility for it, the Christian is with time softened and reconciled to it—even seeing in it glimpses of the overarching providence of God, encompassing the victim and the murderous alike. Zossima concedes that what he is saying flouts our ordinary moral and human perspective and only seems to underscore the Grand Inquisitor’s complaint concerning the morally weak millions as against the mere thousands of the strong. Although “the whole world has been running on false ideas for so long,” so that such a view seems absurd to most of us, some have managed to embrace this view and stand as witnesses to a happier form of life (363).5 The point of dispute is not whether such a vision of life is presently impossible for at least most people as they are now, but whether it is forever impossible: whether ‘the millions’ could not become simultaneously joyful and more deeply compassionate through striving to live in a way that reflects Zossima’s vision. Here, Zossima’s own life and character are crucial. Zossima recounts his transformation from an angry, self-absorbed soldier to his present state as an elderly monk. As a young man, seized by a sudden realization of his own folly, he backs down from a duel he had deliberately provoked, apologizing instead for his unjustified actions. Eventually, he takes the drastic step of turning to the monastic life, to the predictable scorn of his fellow soldiers. The older Zossima with whom the reader becomes acquainted is a man of exceptional patience, kindness, and compassion, one to whom peasants travel from great distances to receive his blessing and hear his counsel.

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Page 185 The trajectory of Zossima’s life, Dostoevsky is telling us, indicates the possibilities even for frail human beings who are not naturally disposed towards saintliness. And his fundamental reply to those of Ivan’s or Rieux’s persuasion is that it may indeed be impossible to show them—or, in truth, most of us as well —how it is possible to embrace divine providence, understand God to be perfect love itself, and experience joy, while living in solidarity with the one who suffers deeply. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to believe that it is possible, because it is reasonable to accept the testimony of the living saint .6 If this version of the problem of evil with which we struggle is practical in nature, then we must judge the alternatives, asking ourselves which overarching vision is capable of fostering the greatest moral strength in a pain-wracked world. Here the saint stands as an expert moral witness, someone in a position to see what the rest of us presently cannot. For we are in a ‘period of isolation’: Today everyone asserts his own personality and strives to live a full life as an individual. But these efforts lead not to a full life but to suicide, because, instead of realizing his personality, man only slips into total isolation. For in our age mankind has been broken up into self-contained individuals, each of whom retreats into his lair, trying to stay away from the rest, hiding himself and his belongings from the rest of mankind, and finally isolating himself from people and people from him. … But an end to this fearful isolation is bound to come and all men will understand how unnatural it was for them to have isolated themselves from one another. This will be the spirit of the new era and people will look back in amazement at the past, when they sat in darkness and refused to see the light. And it is then that the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the heavens … But until that day we must keep hope alive, and now and then a man must set an example, if only an isolated one, by trying to lift his soul out of its isolation and offering it up as an act of brotherly communion, even if he is taken for one of God’s fools. This is necessary, to keep the great idea alive. (366) DOSTOEVSKY’S SOLUTION AND A NEW SET OF EPISTEMIC ISSUES Dostoevsky’s solution to the practical problem of evil expressed by Ivan is indirect: we have reason to believe that it is possible for ordinary human beings to fully integrate Christian teaching concerning suffering, even horrific suffering, into a life of active compassion towards sufferers because that is the testimony of certain saintly figures whom we may reasonably trust. The problem Dostoevsky addresses does not raise the vexed epistemic issues that are central to the more familiar theoretical problems of evil, yet

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Page 186 his response to it plainly opens up others. In closing, I wish to highlight two such issues. Assessing the plausibility of Dostoevsky’s commitments on these issues is not a distinctively philosophical exercise, as they require judgments concerning largely empirical matters. I shall not, in any case, suggest here what forms of evidence might exist or in what direction the preponderance of the evidence might point. First, we must ask whether saints of the sort Dostoevsky envisions reliably gauge the interaction between their theological views and their moral responses to suffering. Might they instead be mostly deluded through one complex cause or another in thinking that they grasp a difficult-to-communicate harmony between their theological and moral outlooks? And a similar question arises concerning the causal relationship between the saint’s providence-imbued vision of the world and of the moral order and their developing commitment to and capacity for compassionately responding to suffering: is there true integration, such that the latter grows out of and is sustained by the former to a significant degree? Or is it, as Ivan would suspect, mere conjunction that actually depends on their being ‘compartmentalized’ (or to use the language of contemporary cognitive science, ‘encapsulated’)? On these questions, we cannot simply assume that the saint has an authoritative perspective, regardless of the sincerity of their convictions. We must instead assume that here, as with other matters of deeply rooted psychology, self-deception is a very real possibility. Assuming that there are real people roughly approximating Dostoevsky’s character Zossima, the second issue is whether they represent an achievable possibility for typical human beings. The assumption underlying the Inquisitor’s contrast between the ‘thousands’ capable of receiving the Christian message and sincerely acting upon it and the ‘millions’ who are not is that it is morally repugnant to suppose that a perfectly good and just God would have so ordained an order of things that is filled with suffering if only a minority of persons would be capable of attaining—freely—the end for which they were created. (And note that on this point, the practical problem of evil shades into a theoretical variety facing a distinctively Christian theology: a clear implication of the Inquisitor’s charge is that the ‘original’ Christian message is unlikely to be true: because it is morally repugnant, a perfect Creator would not craft a plan of salvation that is incongruent with our basic tendencies.) Presumably, underlying Dostoevsky’s assumption that, appearances to the contrary, the intended end is attainable by the ‘millions’ is an eschatological commitment: for many, the goal can and will be attained only by a process that stretches beyond their earthly lives, a process that, while eventuating in dramatic transformation from beginning to end, preserves psychological and causal continuity throughout. This appeal to the afterlife is not ad hoc, as it is integral to Christian theology. But it is also not a blank check as far as Ivan’s problem goes. One might well wonder how psychological continuity can be maintained for the

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Page 187 required transformation within persons badly disfigured, psychologically, by horrific circumstances, even where the transformation is guided by a divine Healer. Plausible attempts to show that such outcomes are possible are less likely to come from empirical psychology than from vivid imaginative depictions of future Dostoevskys.7 NOTES 1. Terrance Tilley presents just such a criticism in Tilley (1991). 2. Quotations from the text will be from Andrew MacAndrew’s translation; see Dostoevsky (1981). 3. Page references in the text are to the translation by Stuart Gilbert; see Camus (1991). 4. Having just finished the preceding chapter for serial publication, Dostoevsky wrote an August 24, 1879 letter to K. B. Pobedonostev in which he remarked: “ … my reply to all these atheistic propositions hasn’t yet appeared, and it must be made. That’s precisely … my worry now and all my disquiet lies in that. For I propose to make the sixth book, The Russian Monk, which will appear August 31, the answer to that whole negative side. And for that reason I tremble for it in this sense: will it be answer enough? The more so as it’s not a direct point for point answer to the propositions previously expressed (in the Grand Inquisitor and earlier) but an oblique one” (Dostoevsky, 1976, 762.) 5. Compare C. S. Lewis (1996), 56: “there are those odd people among us who do not accept the local standard, who demonstrate the alarming truth that a quite different behaviour is, in fact, possible.” 6. On June 11, 1879, Dostoevsky wrote to N. A. Lyubimov: “The next [chapter] will cover the Elder Zossima’s death and his conversations with friends before he dies. It’s not a sermon but rather a story, the tale of his own life. If it succeeds I shall have done a great deed: I shall compel them to recognize that a pure, ideal Christian isn’t something abstract but is graphically real, possible, obviously present….” (Dostoevsky, 1976, 759). 7. No doubt with an assist from theological resources. On this, see Marilyn Adams (2006). And there is perhaps no better place to send the reader wanting to assess the value of philosophically sensitive readings of narrative for illuminating the many problems of evil than Eleonore Stump’s extraordinarily wide-ranging Wilde lectures, Wandering in Darkness (forthcoming).

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Page 188 12 Do Human Persons Persist between Death and Resurrection? Jason T. Eberl INTRODUCTION Thomas Aquinas presents an account of human immortality and bodily resurrection intended to be both faithful to Christian Scripture and meta-physically sound as following from the Aristotelian view of human nature. Unfortunately, while we have the benefit of several presentations of Aquinas’s arguments for a human soul’s persistence beyond its body’s death,1 Aquinas died before completing the final part of the Summa theologiae , and so we lack what would have been his most mature thinking on the doctrine of bodily resurrection. Instead, a supplementum —appended by his secretary, Reginald of Piperno—reproduces the latter half of Aquinas’s commentary on Book Four of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which is one of Aquinas’s earliest works.2 Due to this lack of a definitive final statement on the matter, it remains an open question for contemporary Thomistic scholars how Aquinas’s view of the resurrection’s metaphysical mechanics may have developed from his earlier treatment.3 One central question is whether a human person4 persists between death and resurrection by virtue of her soul, given Aquinas’s hylomorphic account of human nature and assertion that a human person is not identical to her soul. Robert Pasnau contends that only a part of a person exists between death and resurrection; whereas Eleonore Stump argues that a person substantially exists, albeit deficiently, during the interim period as composed of, but not identical to, her soul. In this essay, I will adjudicate this dispute through textual and metaphysical analysis. HUMAN POSTMORTEM EXISTENCE5 Aquinas’s account of human postmortem existence has two components. First, at death, the rational soul,6 which is the substantial form of the human body, separates from its body but continues to exist and function intellectively and volitionally, since the intellect and will do not require a bodily organ in order to function.7 After the soul’s separation, the body—now a

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Page 189 corpse—no longer has substantial unity, but is reduced to its constituent elements that will separate from each other as the body decays.8 The second component is the body’s resurrection, in which the soul re-informs its body to compose the numerically same human being in her perfected state.9 Aquinas argues that resurrection is metaphysically necessary insofar as the separated soul does not have per se the complete nature of the human species; for the human essence includes both the soul and the material body it informs in order to exercise its vegetative and sensitive capacities in addition to its intellective capacities. Aquinas thus conceives of the separated soul, due to its essentially being the substantial form of its body, to have a natural “longing” for reunion with its body;10 accepting as a basic principle of Aristotelian metaphysics that no natural desire can persist forever in vain, Aquinas concludes that the soul must be reunited to its body at some point.11 He even asserts, “If the resurrection of the body is denied, it is not easy—indeed it is difficult—to sustain the immortality of the soul.”12 Nevertheless, Aquinas contends that since matter per se does not have the capacity to reunite itself with its substantial form, nor does the soul have the capacity to efficiently cause its body’s reunification, the matter for the resurrected body must be provided to the soul by God.13 Once provided with matter to inform, however, the soul functions as the formal cause —the “blueprint”—for the qualitatively and numerically same body to be resurrected out of this matter. Aquinas is quite clear that, for the numerically same human being to exist post-resurrection, the numerically same soul must inform the numerically same body: “Since the rational soul remains numerically the same, it is united again to the numerically same body at the resurrection.”14 One interpretive issue is whether the resurrected body, in order to be numerically identical to the premortem body, must be composed of the numerically same micro-level constituents that had composed the body at death or some other point during its earthly life; or whether any matter informed by the numerically same soul thereby composes the numerically same body. Robert Pasnau, at first, places the metaphysical onus on the resurrected body to be numerically the same in order that it may be informed by the numerically same soul: “God, therefore, if he is to bring me back to life, must go to the trouble of reassembling my old body.”15 Silas Langley affirms this view: “some degree of material overlap is therefore necessary to maintain the body’s, and therefore the person’s, particular identity.”16 The “material continuity view,” as Langley terms it, is supported by several passages in which Aquinas affirms that the elemental constituents that compose one’s body at death persist insofar as they remain subject to quantitative dimensions; hence, even if they come to compose some other substance between death and resurrection, they remain available for God to use in reassembling one’s body: It is evident that the matter of this human body, whatever form it may accept after the human being’s death, escapes neither divine power nor

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Page 190 knowledge. Such matter remains numerically the same, insofar as it is understood as existing under quantitative dimensions according to which it can be termed this matter and is the principle of individuation. Therefore, if this matter remains the same, and from it a human body is restored by divine power, and if also the rational soul, which remains the same since it is incorruptible, is conjoined to the same body, it follows that the numerically same human being is restored.17 I have previously argued for what Langley terms the “formal continuity view” insofar as Aquinas contends that any matter, by virtue of being informed by a human being’s rational soul, becomes constitutive of that human being’s body: A natural thing is not what it is from its matter, but from its form. Hence, although that matter which at one time was under the form of bovine flesh, rises again in a human being under the form of human flesh, it does not follow that the flesh of an ox rises again, but the flesh of a human being.18 That a quantity of matter composes a human resurrected body is sufficiently formally caused by its being informed by a human soul, due to the soul’s essential function as the “blueprint” for its body: “whatever appears in the parts of the body is all contained originally, and in a way implicitly, in the soul.”19 The soul’s formal plan for its body guarantees that the matter provided to compose the resurrected body conforms to “the truth of human nature”: What is in a human being materially is not ordered toward the resurrection except in accordance with what belongs to the truth of human nature, because in accordance with this it is ordered to the rational soul. Now all that is in a human being materially belongs indeed to the truth of human nature insofar as it has something of the species, but not all if the totality of matter is considered, because all the matter which was in a human being from the beginning of life all the way to the end would exceed the quantity due the species…. And so the whole of what is in a human being will rise again if the totality of the species is considered, which is attendant upon quantity, shape, place, and the order of the parts; but the whole will not rise again if the totality of matter is considered.20 Aquinas thus explains why a resurrected body need not be composed of all the matter that had previously composed it throughout its earthly life. This is still in line with the material continuity view. Aquinas, however, also allows for matter to be used for the resurrected body which had never previously composed the body pre-mortem:

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Page 191 For just as God does not recover all of the matter that was in a human being’s body in order to restore the risen body, so also if some matter is lacking God will supply it. Indeed, nature is able to perform this function so that for a child, who does not have the quantity he should, such an amount is added from outside matter through the assumption of food and drink which suffices for him to have his perfect quantity; nor on this account does he cease to be the same in number as he was.21 A human body, as a living organism, does not suffer from mereological essentialism —the thesis that a numerically identical object persists only if it has the exact same constituents.22 Peter van Inwagen and Peter Unger each discuss ways in which a living organism is able to “assimilate” new matter that becomes “caught up in the life” of the organism.23 Aquinas also notes that the material constituents of a living organism are in continuous flux. Organisms undergo cellular decay, and food is taken in and transformed by digestion into raw material to generate new cells and other bodily components. As long as there is material continuity, then the same substantial form and the same body persist through such changes in micro-level constituents. Aquinas compares the “ebb and flow” of an organism’s constituents to a fire: When some matter is by itself converted into a fire, then it is said that fire is generated anew; but when some matter is converted into a preexisting fire, the fire is said to be fed. Hence, if all the matter loses the species of fire at once, and other matter is converted into fire, there will be a numerically distinct fire. But if, little by little, as one piece of wood burns another piece is substituted, and so on until all of the first piece is consumed, it will always remain the numerically same fire; since always what is added passes into what pre-existed. And the same is understood for living bodies, in which what had been consumed by natural heat is restored from nutrition.24 Of course, a human being loses all of her matter at death, and so there is no continuity of material constituents between her pre-mortem and resurrected body as in the case of a continuously burning fire. Langley thus concludes, “A complete change in the matter from one instant to the next would constitute another human person. The implication is that the persistence of the soul in this new matter is not enough to guarantee the continuing identity of the person.”25 Note, however, that the foundational criterion for a numerically distinct fire being produced is not that there has been a total change of matter, but that “all the matter loses the species of fire at once.” The persistence of the numerically same form is the principle of identity for the numerically same fire. Stump thus asserts the following criterion of substantial identity: “For

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Page 192 any substances x and y, x is identical to y if and only if the substantial form of x is identical to the substantial form of y.”26 The relationship of a human being’s form to the matter that composes her is quite different than that of a fire’s form to its matter; for whereas the form of a fire cannot persist without the matter it informs, a human soul can persist without its body. Therefore, since the soul’s persistent existence and identity does not depend on it informing the same matter, or any matter whatsoever, it does not preclude a human being’s persistent identity if her soul ceases to inform the numerically same matter (at death) and later informs totally new matter (at resurrection). Any matter informed by a human being’s soul consequently composes her numerically same body. Aquinas concludes, “Now it is manifest that the human form can abandon this matter which is subjected to it…. Hence, it follows that [the soul] can come into other matter, thereby changing something else into the truth of human nature.”27 Furthermore, he asserts that matter can be “changed into true human nature” by virtue of being informed by the human soul: “Something is said to exist according to the truth of human nature, because it properly belongs to the being of human nature; and this is what shares the form of human nature.”28 Pasnau states, Since personal identity does not directly rest on the body’s numerical sameness, Aquinas need not explain how numerically the same body can be destroyed and then recreated. The question of whether the resurrected body is the same body or merely a replica does not arise, because sameness of body is accounted for in terms of sameness of form … what preserves identity over time, through death and separation, is the incorruptible essence of the human soul, whose numerical sameness over time is unproblematic.29 Since being informed by the numerically same soul is sufficient for the numerically same body to be resurrected by virtue of the soul informing matter provided by God to constitute the resurrected body, it also suffices for the numerically same human being to persist through time and change: “What is necessary and sufficient for something to be identical to Socrates is that its substantial form be identical to the substantial form of Socrates.”30 INTERIM PERSISTENCE OF PERSONS31 A key interpretive issue concerns whether Aquinas holds a human being to persist as a separated soul during the interim period between death and resurrection. Pasnau contends that Aquinas denies a human being’s substantial existence during the interim period: “the soul’s separation causes death, and death puts an end to my existence…. Death is not a mere biological change, but a substantial change. I—the person, the human being—go out

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Page 193 of existence.”32 A key supporting passage comes from Aquinas’s early commentary on Lombard’s Sentences: The soul of Abraham is not, stricly speaking, Abraham himself, but is a part of him—and the same for others. So the life of Abraham’s soul would not suffice for Abraham being alive … but the life of the whole compound is required—namely, soul and body.33 Rather, Pasnau concludes, a human being exists partially by virtue of her soul’s continued existence: “so my separated soul is not anyone other than I, and in a sense it is I, but it is not fully I, not I in the strictest sense.”34 Stump, on the other hand, contends, “for Aquinas the existence of the separated soul is sufficient for the existence of the human being whose soul it is.”35 She argues that Pasnau’s interpretation does not cohere with Aquinas’s attribution of many “personal” qualities to a separated human soul: Aquinas thinks that after death a human soul either enjoys the rewards of heaven or suffers the pains of hell. He maintains that the separated soul is capable of understanding and choosing. He also holds that after death a human being can appear to the living; for example, speaking of the disembodied soul of a martyr Felix, Aquinas says that Felix—not a simulacrum but the human being Felix—appeared to the people of Nola. He thinks that the souls of the saints know the prayers of the living and respond to them. He claims that the holy Fathers in hell—who are separated souls—were waiting for Christ and were delivered by Christ’s descent into hell. In these passages and many others, Aquinas attributes to disembodied souls properties which he and we take to be most characteristic of human persons, including intellectual understanding and love.36 Aquinas also makes a curious equivocation when it comes to the question of prayer. At one point, he responds to an objection without denying the objector’s claim that “the soul of Peter is not Peter. Therefore, if the souls of the saints pray for us so long as they are separated from a body, we should not request that Saint Peter pray for us, but his soul.”37 But Aquinas clearly asserts at another point that “prayer is a kind of act, but acts are of particular persons.”38 Stump is thus right to raise the following question: Suppose we ask about the separated soul that typical medieval question, quid est?. If the separated soul which thinks, knows, wills, desires, and grieves is not a human being, then what is it? It is clearly a hoc aliquid, a something.39 Stump’s contention that a separated soul “is clearly a hoc aliquid, a something” is apparently at odds with Aquinas’s statement: “now the rational

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Page 194 soul to a certain extent can be called a hoc aliquid, this is supported by its being able to exist subsisting in itself; but because it does not have a complete species, but rather is part of a species, not everything is suitable to it which is suitable to a hoc aliquid.”40 But notice that Aquinas denies only one respect in which a hoc aliquid exists—viz., something having in itself the complete nature of its species. In other words, the soul is not a substance in the full sense of that term. Aquinas does not deny, however, that the soul is a hoc aliquid in another respect—viz., something subsisting in itself: “Therefore, it is granted that the soul is a hoc aliquid, as being able to subsist in itself, not on the grounds of its having in itself a complete species, but on the grounds of its completing the human species, as it is the form of the body.”41 In his early works, Aquinas took the term “substance” to refer to anything that existed on its own without inhering in something else, as opposed to an “accident”; substance equaled subsistence.42 In later works, Aquinas makes a distinction between mere subsistence and subsistence as a substance: “This something” [ hoc aliquid] can be taken in two ways: one way, for any subsistent thing; the other way, for what subsists in its complete specific nature. The first way excludes the inherence of an accident or material form. The second way excludes also the imperfection of a part. Hence, a hand can be called “this something” in the first way, but not in the second. Therefore, since a human soul is part of the human species, it can be called “this something” in the first way, as subsistent, but not in the second—for in this way the composite of soul and body is called “this something.”43 In line with this distinction, at one point when Aquinas refers to a human soul as a substance, he qualifies it as meaning “something subsistent” and nothing more.44 A human soul can thus subsist on its own, but not as a complete substance such that it would be identical to a human being. A soul’s persistent existence, however, is sufficient for the persistent existence of a human being. Aquinas argues that a human soul communicates its existence to a material body such that there is one existence of a composite substance—a human being: “that same being which is in the soul is communicated to the body such that there is one being of the whole composite”45 He further elaborates: The being of the composite remains in the human soul after the body’s destruction; and this is because the being of the form and the matter is the same, and this is the being of the composite. Now the soul subsists in its own being…. Hence, it follows that after its separation from the body it has perfect being, and that it can have a perfect operation; although it does not have the perfect nature of its species.46

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Page 195 The persistent “being of the composite” in the separated soul also partly accounts for the numerical identity of the resurrected body: “Therefore, [the soul’s] being, which was that of the composite, remains in the soul when the body is dissolved; and when the body is restored in the resurrection, it is restored to the same being which has remained in the soul.”47 Aquinas thus concludes, “And so there has been no interruption in the substantial being of a human being, such that it would not be possible for the numerically same human being to return on account of the interruption of his being.”48 But the question remains whether the persistence of “the substantial being of a human being” in the separated soul suffices for the soul to count as the person. John Cooper notes that St. Paul, whose epistles are the primary Scriptural foundation for the Christian doctrine of the resurrection (after the Gospel accounts of Christ’s resurrection), “does not refer to the departed as ‘souls’ or ‘spirits.’ But he always employs the grammar of persons: the ‘I,’ the self, the core person is what continues in unbroken fellowship with Christ during this life, from death to the second coming, and forever.”49 This understanding of St. Paul’s postmortem anthropology, however, must be reconciled with Aquinas’s emphatic statement—assuming Aquinas to be a faithful and accurate commentator on St. Paul—that “my soul is not I.”50 Aquinas adopts the definition of “person” developed by Boethius: “an individual substance of a rational nature.”51 By “individual substance,” Aquinas intends the Greek term hypostasis (Latin: suppositum), which are logically distinct but refer to the same thing in reality.52 Prima facie, this would seem to deny attributing the term “person” to a separated soul since it is not a substance. But note how Aquinas specifies what is entailed by claiming that a person is an individual substance: Therefore, by its being called ‘substance,’ accidents are excluded from the idea of a person, which may not at all be called a person. And by its being called ‘individual,’ genera and species in the genus of substance are excluded, which likewise may not be called persons. And by adding ‘of a rational nature,’ inanimate bodies, plants, and brute animals, which are not persons, are excluded.53 None of the categories of beings which Aquinas excludes from the definition of “person” include the rational soul, for it is not an accident, a genus or species, or an inanimate body, plant, or non-rational animal. Aquinas, however, specifies in the same article, “The separated soul is part of a rational nature —that is, of a human being—and not the whole rational human nature, and thus it is not a person.”54 So, a separated soul partially fulfills the definition of “person” since it is at least something subsistent55 and is clearly rational, but it is not wholly a substance and does not possess in itself the entirety of a human being’s rational nature.56

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Page 196 A tension thus exists in Aquinas’s thought since he explicitly states that a separated soul does not meet the strict criteria for being a person. Nevertheless, the soul possesses in itself a human person’s existence—her “substantial being”—as it subsists on its own after the body’s death; it also has in itself the capacities by which it can act intellectively and volitionally in ways proper to a person, such as engaging in prayer. Stump argues, and I concur, that Aquinas has the logical resource to resolve this tension in that he holds the notion of “composition without identity”: something A may exist as composed of something else B , but A is not identical with B .57 That Aquinas applies the notion of composition without identity to a human being’s relationship to her soul and body is evidenced by his discussion of the attribution of a human being’s capacities and activities. Aquinas contends that a human being’s capacities must be attributed to the human being herself, and not to any of her parts.58 A human being’s soul is the source of her capacities; a human being’s body is the material support for such capacities. A human being, though, is that which has the capacities. And if capacities are properly attributed to the composite substance, then even more so are the activities that follow upon such capacities.59 Of course, Aquinas holds that the capacities for rational thought and volition can be had by a human soul itself. Nevertheless, as Stump points out, “Aquinas thinks that there is something misleading about attributing cognitive functions just to the soul itself. Rather, even such higher cognitive functions as understanding are to be attributed to the whole material composite that is the human being.”60 Even if certain capacities belong to a soul itself, it is still to a human being that their actual operations are attributable—hence Aquinas’s assertion that, because prayer is an act , it is ascribed to particular persons. Aquinas finds this to be important for the sake of a human being’s moral responsibility for her actions: “Operation, properly speaking, is not of the part, but of the whole. Hence, reward [or punishment] is not due to the part, but to the whole.”61 Aquinas thus considers bodily resurrection to be morally, as well as metaphysically, necessary: “Therefore, it is necessary to assert a repeated conjunction of the soul with the body, such that a human being may be rewarded and punished in body and soul.”62 Nevertheless, Aquinas allows for a separated soul to experience reward or punishment on its own prior to the resurrection since the soul has in itself the capacities for intellection and volition from which all moral acts ( actiones humanae ) proceed.63 By adopting the notion of composition without identity, Aquinas can consistently hold that a human being is not identical to her soul and yet persist between death and resurrection as composed of her soul alone. Before death, a human being exists by virtue of being composed of her soul as a part,64 but she is not identical to either it or the matter it informs; for being composed of a set of parts does not entail identity with such parts.65 Furthermore, a composed substance may lose some of its parts without loss

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Page 197 of its identity.66 Just as I normally exist with two hands, as defined by my specifically human nature, I could lose a hand and still exist as the same human being. In the same way, just as a human being normally exists as composed of soul and body, she can lose her body and still be identical to herself. In such a state, a human being exists composed of her soul alone, yet she is not identical to her soul: Therefore, since what makes Socrates this individual substance is the individual substantial form which configures him, and since the substantial form can exist independently of the body, then for Aquinas the existence of the substantial form separated from the body is sufficient for the existence of the human being whose substantial form it is. Socrates can continue to exist when all that remains of him is his separated soul. But it does not follow that Socrates is identical to his soul, because constitution is not identity.67 Nevertheless, given that Aquinas defines a human being’s substantial existence as composed of soul and body, a human being who exists composed of her soul alone is deficient by not having all the parts proper to human nature: “[Aquinas] does in fact believe that a human being falls apart at death. The disembodied soul which persists is not the complete human being who was the composite but only a part of that human being.”68 This situation is analogous to my continuing to exist if my head were severed, but maintained artificially, such that I survive as a conscious, living entity. In such as state, I would substantially exist —that is, it is not the case that I am only partially present (part alive, part dead), or that only my head-part exists but I do not. My existence, however, would be incomplete since I lack the rest of the body that I should have according to my specific nature. The same would be said of real-world cases involving, say, a soldier having both of his legs blown off in combat: it is not the case that he is literally only “half a man,” although he may feel like such since he is missing parts of himself he should have by nature.69 HUMAN ANIMALS WITHOUT BODIES Such a deficient mode of existence does not entail that a human being ceases to be “human”—that is, to exist as a rational animal 70—when she is composed of her soul alone. Christopher Martin claims, “We are animals, and animals are bodies: when this body ceases to exist, I cease to exist.”71 And Patrick Toner asks, “what kind of thing is Socrates identical with after his death?… He is not identical with an animal, since there is no animal present.”72 Christopher Brown properly answers Toner’s question, “Socrates is a particular substance that belongs to the species, rational animal .”73 Brown uses the same analogy I did earlier of a severed head to show how a human

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Page 198 being may lose a significant part of herself and yet maintain her substantial existence. Just like disembodied Socrates, Brown concludes, one’s bodiless head (artificially maintained) “is identical to a particular substance in the species rational animal .” Toner, though, could accept that a bodiless head is sufficient to compose a rational animal since it is still a material object. The more trenchant difficulty Toner raises is how one can conceive of an animal persisting without matter. Aquinas has the resources to provide an account of immaterial animality. First, he contends that the corpse left behind at death is no longer an animal: “And thus it is the case that after death, through which the soul is separated from the body, not only does an animal not remain, but also none of an animal’s parts.”74 While flesh or bone may seem to remain in a corpse, hands, arms, and other parts through which a soul’s operations are manifest in the body are no longer present. This conclusion follows from the fact that a body’s existence as an animal is dependent upon its being ensouled: “this animal, through this soul, is not only an animal, but an animated body, and a body, and also a hoc aliquid existing in the genus of substance.”75 If a human being’s animal body ceases to exist at death, the question arises whether, and if so how, the numerically same animal may be resurrected. Aquinas’s response to this question begins by noting that a human being does not have three souls—rational, sensitive, and vegetative—but rather one soul that has the capacities of all three.76 Aquinas denies, however, that the soul’s sensitive and vegetative capacities, or their operations, persist in its separated state since they require a bodily organ to operate.77 Yet, Aquinas asserts that such capacities “remain virtually in the soul, as in their origin or foundation.”78 Such “virtual” persistence of these capacities is due to the soul’s “ability of producing these powers again if united to the body.”79 As a result, Aquinas concludes that the resurrected body’s “organs will be numerically the same, although the powers be not numerically the same.”80 Aquinas extends the numerical identity of the resurrected body’s organs to those of the pre-mortem body to respond affirmatively to the question of whether the numerically same animal rises again. It is worth quoting at length Aquinas’s two different responses: But if we assert that the same soul in a human being, according to its substance, is both rational and sensible, we shall experience no difficulties in this matter. Because ‘animal’ is defined by means of sense —that is, the sensitive soul—as through its essential form; however, by means of sense—that is, the sensitive power—its definition is known as through an accidental form, which is “the most important part contributing to the knowledge of what a thing is.”81 Therefore, after death the sensitive soul remains, just as the rational soul, according to its substance. But the sensitive powers, according to some, do not remain.

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Page 199 At any rate, since these powers are accidental properties, their variety [numerical diversity] cannot remove the identity of the whole animal, nor even the animal’s parts.82 ‘Sense’ can be specified in two ways. In one way, it is the sensitive soul itself, which is the principle of this sort of powers; and thus through sense an animal is ‘animal’ as through its proper form. For in this way ‘sensible’ is adduced from ‘sense,’ insofar as it is the constitutive difference of ‘animal.’ In another way ‘sense’ is said to be the sensitive power itself; and since it is a natural property, as has been said, it is not constitutive of the species, but follows from the species. In this way, therefore, sense does not remain in the separated soul; but sense specified in the first way remains. For in a human being the essence of the sensitive and rational soul is the same. Hence, nothing precludes a risen human being from being the numerically same animal. Since, for something to be numerically the same, it suffices that its essential principles be numerically the same; but it is not required that the properties and accidents be numerically the same.83 The key distinction at work here is between what is essential to the persistence of the same animal— viz., the same form proper to an animal, which is either the sensitive soul or the rational soul that includes the sensitive soul—that serves as the metaphysical principle of an animal’s existence, and what is accidental —viz., the sensitive capacities and operations—that serve as the epistemic principle by which an animal may be properly classified as such. This conclusion is congruent with Aquinas’s denial that a corpse is an animal: not because sensitive capacities and operations do not persist in the corpse, but because the corpse is no longer informed by a sensitive soul. Conversely, insofar as a sensitive soul may persist after death as part of the essence of a rational soul, animality persists in the separated soul. This is also congruent with the conclusion earlier that the persistence of the same substantial form is the principle of substantial identity, and not any of the nonessential properties which follow from form, such as the actual configuration of matter in the case of the rational soul. James Ross emphasizes this point by drawing a comparison to the “latent powers”—what Aquinas terms “virtual powers”—present in a developing human being, a fetus or infant, or a comatose human being: Humans, like other animals, come to be with their definitive powers actual but latent. Such powers, like reasoning and free choice, emerge by the soul’s developing its matter suitably, and eventually go latent again from the unsuitable matter of senescent or comatose persons, but are not lost to the form or from the substance … the difference of abilities, including the loss of abilities … are not changes of substance, nor are they loss of personhood. Metamorphosis at death may be even

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Page 200 more radical, with the person departed from terrestrial life, but still retaining its whole being…. 84 Hence, although without her body a human being is unable to actualize many of her capacities, she remains a rational animal by virtue of her soul retaining all the capacities—actively, in the case of intellective and volitional capacities, or virtually, in the case of sensitive and vegetative capacities— proper to such a nature. It thus follows that, for Aquinas, a human being—a person—persists between death and resurrection by virtue of being composed of, but not identical to, a rational soul. For the soul not only continues to engage in intellective and volitional operations, but it is also the substantial form of the numerically same animal. Hence, it is sufficient to compose a rational animal, which, as Brown notes, is what a human being essentially is premortem, post-resurrection, and at every point in between. Discussing whether Christ was a human being during the three days between His death and resurrection, however, Aquinas appears to flatly deny this conclusion: When the superior [species] is removed, the inferior is removed. But living, or animated, being is superior to animal and human being; for an animal is a sensible, animated substance. But during those three days of death Christ’s body was not living or animated. Therefore, He was not a human being.85 Aquinas elaborates, “by death [a human being or animal] ceases to be human or animal; for the death of a human being or animal results from the separation of the soul, which is the form of an animal or human being.” Yet, while Aquinas concludes that Christ could not thereby be called “a human being … simply and unqualifiedly” during His death, “it can be said that Christ during the three days was a dead human being.”86 What is the distinction between “a human being simply and unqualifiedly” and “a dead human being”? For Aquinas, the former is clearly a complete substance whose soul and body are united such that the definitive capacities for life, sensation, and rational thought and volition may be actualized. The latter, according to my interpretation of Aquinas’s aforementioned view, is a subsistent rational soul, separated from its body, such that the capacities for rational thought and volition may be actualized, but the capacities for life and sensation persist only virtually. The point of contention is whether existence as “a dead human being” suffices for existence as an animal . Based on the view I have argued earlier, Christ persisted for three days as “a dead human being” by virtue of the persistent existence of His rational soul. In response to an objection which begins with Aristotle’s claim that “each human being is his intellect,”87 Aquinas does not deny this claim; but

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Page 201 he interprets it in such a way as to be congruent with his assertion that a human being is not identical to his soul: A human being is said to be his intellect, not because the intellect is the whole human being, but because the intellect is the more principal part of a human being, in which the whole disposition of a human being exists virtually.88 Due to a rational soul possessing, at least “virtually,” all of a human being’s definitive capacities—his “whole disposition”—as a living, sentient, and rational animal, a human being may exist composed of his soul alone without being identical to it. Furthermore, I contend that this relationship suffices for a postmortem human being to be an animal—albeit a dead animal—since the definitive capacities of an animal persist virtually in a separated rational soul. Hence, during the three days of His death, Christ was neither a human being nor an animal “simply and unqualifiedly,” because His soul alone did not constitute a substance and was unable to actualize all of the definitive capacities of a living, sentient, and rational animal. Nevertheless, Christ existed as a “dead human being”—and a “dead animal”—during those three days insofar as His soul alone possessed the actual capacities for rational thought and volition, as well as the virtual capacities for life and sensation. This analysis is congruent with Aquinas’s assertion that, by death, one “ceases to be human or animal,” if he is referring to being human or animal “simply and unqualifiedly,” or, in other words, if the subject of this assertion is the substantially unified soul/body composite that is corrupted by the soul’s separation from its body at death, and not the person who persists after death. CONCLUSION Returning to the debate between Pasnau and Stump, it should be noted that Pasnau’s interpretation rests upon taking Aquinas to hold that a substance’s existence need not be an all-or-nothing affair: “When [Aquinas] says ‘my soul is not I,’ we should take this to mean that a person’s soul is not entirely that person…. So when I die, I cease to exist, as a whole, but part of me continues to exist, and hence I partly continue to exist.”89 It is not at all evident that this is a position Aquinas holds. Stump’s interpretation, on the other hand, allows for a human being to exist composed of only her separated soul; a human being exists if her soul exists, and does not exist if her soul does not exist. Substantial existence remains, on Stump’s account, an all-or-nothing affair. Thus, while Pasnau has doubts that Stump’s interpretation of Aquinas on this point can be defended,90 she at least has textual support from

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Page 202 Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics that he holds the “composition without identity” relation, even if he does not explicitly apply it to the soul–person relationship. Pasnau’s admits his recommended solution lacks clear textual support as an interpretation of Aquinas; rather, Pasnau states that he offers what may be “Aquinas’s tacit view about the logic of personal identity” or what “should have been Aquinas’s view.”91 To deny either Stump’s or Pasnau’s recommended solutions would be to agree with Peter Geach’s claim: “The existence of a disembodied soul would not be a survival of the person Peter Geach … individual existence seems to require at least a persistent possibility of the soul’s again entering into the make-up of a man who is identifiably Peter Geach.”92 For Geach, there is no interim survival of a human being between death and resurrection, partial or otherwise. The difficulty Geach’s view encounters is how to account for, as Stump points out, the many “personal” activities in which a separated soul may engage. Regardless of whether Stump or Pasnau presents the most plausible interpretation of Aquinas’s account of human postmortem existence, it is clear that—in whole or in part—persons must persist between death and resurrection as the proper subjects of reward or punishment, as well as agents or recipients of prayer, such that the “communion of saints” is ontologically intact. NOTES 1. See Aquinas, Summa theologiae [ ST ] I.75.6; Summa contra Gentiles [ SCG ] II.79–81; Quaestio disputata de anima [ QDA] I; Quaestiones disputatae de veritate [ QDV] XIII.4; Compendium theologiae [ CT] I.84. 2. For the chronology of Aquinas’s writings, see Jean-Pierre Torrell (1996), 327–329. 3. Aquinas does discuss the resurrection in two of his later works: SCG and CT. But, as will become evident, the treatment of the resurrection in these works does not resolve all the ambiguities from his earlier account. 4. Since Aquinas asserts that every human being is a person (see ST III.16.12 ad 1) and personhood is thus essential to human nature, the terms “human being,” “person,” and “human person” will be used interchangeably as I do not discuss nonhuman persons (The Trinity or angels) in this essay. 5. The textual and interpretive groundwork for this section can be found in Jason T. Eberl (2000). 6. The terms “rational soul” and “human soul” will be used interchangeably. 7. See ST I.75.2, 76.1 ad 1, 77.5; Sententia libri De anima [ In DA ] III.7. 8. See QDV XXV.6. 9. In a human being’s “perfected” state, her soul fully informs her body, such that the body is now “glorified” and thereby takes on qualities it did not have during its earthly life due to sin. Hence, there will be some qualitative differences between the pre-mortem and post-resurrection body. Such differences, however, will result neither in the resurrected body being unrecognizable as that of a particular human being, nor in the body being nonphysical in nature. See SCG IV.85–86; ST Supp.81– 85; Commentarium super Epistolam Primam ad Corinthios [ In I Cor ] XV.6. 10. See ST I.76.1 ad 6; CT I.151.

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Page 203 11. See SCG IV.79. 12. In I Cor XV.2.924; Super Epistolas S. Pauli Lectura, Vol. 1, ed. Raphael Cai, 8th rev. ed. (Turin: Marietti, 1953). All translations are my own and, unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Leonine edition of Aquinas’s works: S. Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici Opera Omnia (Rome: Commissio Leonina, 1882–). 13. See ST Supp.78.3; CT I.154. 14. CT I.153. Cf. ST Supp.79.1–2; SCG IV.81; Scriptum super sententiis magistri Petri Lombardi [ In Sent] IV.44.i.1.i; Quaestiones quodlibetales [ QQ] XI.6. 15. Robert Pasnau (2002), 390. 16. Silas Langley (2001), 138. Cf. ST Supp.79.2 ad 2; QQ VIII.3 ad 2, XI.6 ad 4. 17. CT I.154. Cf. CT I.161; ST Supp.78.2, 79.1 ad 3–4, 79.3 ad 2; Quaestiones disputatae de potentia Dei [ QDP] V.10 ad 7. 18. ST Supp.80.4 ad 1. 19. ST Supp.80.1. 20. ST Supp.80.5. Cf. SCG IV.81. 21. CT I.160. Cf. ST Supp.80.4 ad 3. 22. See Roderick Chisholm (1976), Chapter 3. 23. See Peter van Inwagen (1990), 94; Peter Unger (1990), 147–152. 24. ST I.119.1 ad 5. Cf. In Sent II.30.ii.1 ad 4; ST Supp.79.3, 80.4; SCG IV.81; CT I.159; QQ VIII.3 ad 2; In Aristotelis libros de generatione et corruptione expositio [ In DGC ] I.15–16; John Chandlish (1968). 25. Langley (2001), 142. For a similar view, see Sandra Edwards (1979); for a response to Edwards, see Jason T. Eberl (2004), 353–359. 26. Eleonore Stump (2003), 46. 27. ST I.119.1. See Stump (2003), 208. 28. ST Supp.80.4. It is interesting to note that Aquinas here uses the same analogy to a “commonwealth” that David Hume will utilize later to explain how personal identity may be preserved in light of an “ebb and flow” of, in Hume’s case, mental properties. See Hume (1978), 261. Of course, Aquinas and Hume disagree concerning the “substantial” existence of a person to which the commonwealth analogy applies. 29. Pasnau (2002), 393. 30. Stump (2006a), 164. 31. This section includes material derived from Eberl (2004), 337–341. 32. Pasnau (2002), 381. 33. In Sent IV.43.i.1.i ad 2. 34. Pasnau (2002), 389. 35. Stump (2006a), 163. 36. Stump (2003), 52–53. See ST Supp.69.2–5, 70.2–3, 72.2. 37. ST II–II.83.11 obj. 5. 38. ST Supp.72.2 ad 3. Cf. In Sent IV.45.iii.2 ad 3. 39. Stump (2006a), 158. 40. In DA II.1.215. 41. QDA I. 42. This is especially true in the early treatise De ente et essentia . Aquinas sometimes uses such language even in later works, such as CT I.84: “[The rational soul] is a substance subsisting in its own being.” 43. ST I.75.2 ad 1. Cf. ST I.29.1 ad 5; QDP IX.1; QDA I ad 4; Quaestio disputata de spiritualibus creaturis [ QDSC] II ad 16. See Stump (1995), 517. 44. See ST I.75.2 sed contra . 45. QDA I ad 1.

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Page 204 46. ST I–II.4.5 ad 2. 47. SCG IV.81. 48. ST Supp.79.2 ad 1 (emphasis mine). See Christopher Brown (2005), 123–124. 49. John W. Cooper (1989), 156. 50. In I Cor XV.2.924. Cf. ST I.75.4. 51. ST I.29.1. Cf. Boethius, Contra Eutychen et Nestorium III. 52. See SCG IV.38. 53. QDP IX.2. 54. QDP IX.2 ad 14. 55. Aquinas states at one point that a person may be defined as “subsistent in a rational nature” ( ST I.29.3), but also claims that “the substance which is a hypostasis is more closely related to a person than subsistence” ( QDP IX.2 ad 8). 56. See ST I.29.1 ad 5, 75.4 ad 2. Aquinas thus denies that Christ’s human nature can be called a “person”—such that there would be two persons in Christ due to His divine and human natures (Nestorianism)—since it is not a hypostasis or suppositum; see ST III.2.3 ad 2, 16.12 ad 2; SCG IV.38. 57. See Aquinas, Sententia super Metaphysicam [ In M ]VII.17.1674. 58. See QDSC XI ad 20. 59. See SCG II.50; QDA VI ad 14. 60. Stump (1995), 512. Cf. Brian Davies (1992), 213–214. See ST I.75.2 ad 2, 77.5; QDSC II ad 2; CT I.85; De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas [ DUI ]IV; Sententia libri Ethicorum X.6. 61. ST Supp.79.3 ad 3. Cf. In Sent IV.44.i.1.iii ad 3; DUI III. 62. SCG IV.79. Cf. CT I.157; ST Supp.75.1 ad 3. 63. See SCG IV.91; ST I–II.1.1; QQ VII.5.i ad 2–3. 64. As Stump notes, referring to a human being’s soul and body as parts requires an extended notion of “part” than the standard conception of parts as integral to a substance, in the way a roof, walls, and floor are parts of a house. Such parts are composites of matter and form that exist even when they do not compose something else. Soul and body, on the other hand, can be understood as metaphysical parts that do not exist without composing a human being. See Stump (2003), 42 and 209–210. 65. J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae thus misrepresent Aquinas’s view when they claim that “the human person is identical to its soul” in (2000), 205. 66. See Stump (2003), 51–52. 67. Stump (2006a), 169. Cf. Stump (2003), 53. Stump’s interpretation of Aquinas here is similar to the “non-Thomistic hylomorphic account of Purgatory” developed in David Hershenov and Rose KochHershenov (2006). While I agree with the metaphysical account the latter authors present, I disagree that it is “non-Thomistic.” 68. Stump (2003), 211. 69. Thomas Williams does not appreciate this distinction between what is sufficient for a human being to exist , in terms of being fully present, versus what is sufficient for a human being to exist completely, in terms of having all of his proper parts composing him. See Williams (2005), 487. 70. See In M VII.3.1326; ST I.76.3. 71. Christopher F. J. Martin (1993), 254. 72. Patrick Toner (2007), 641. 73. Christopher Brown (2007), 657. 74. In DGC I.15.108; In Aristotelis libros De caelo et mundo, De generatione et corruptione, et Meteorologicorum expositio , ed. R. M. Spiazzi (Turin: Marietti, 1952). Cf. In DA II.2.

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Page 205 75. CT I.154. 76. See ST I.76.3; SCG II.58; CT I.90, 92; QDA XI. 77. See ST I.77.8, Supp.70.1–2. 78. ST I.77.8. 79. ST Supp.70.1. 80. ST Supp.70.1 ad 6. 81. See Aristotle, De anima I.1. 82. ST Supp.79.2 ad 3. Cf. In Sent IV.44.i.1.ii ad 3; SCG IV.81; CT I.154. 83. QDA XIX ad 5. 84. James F. Ross (2001), 7. For further discussion of how a human being’s proper capacities may be present in a developing human being or one who is comatose, see Jason T. Eberl (2005a) and (2005b). 85. ST III.50.4 sed contra . I am grateful to Chris Brown and Patrick Toner for raising this point to me. 86. ST III.50.4. 87. ST III.50.4 obj. 2. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics IX.4. 88. ST III.50.4 ad 2. 89. Pasnau (2002), 388. For a similar claim, see Michael Potts (1998), 344: “Death marks a diminution in the amount of being in a human being.” In one sense, this is true since there is less actualization of a human being’s capacities, insofar as one’s vegetative and sensitive capacities require the body for their operation; but it is not true if Potts intends, as Pasnau clearly does, that a human being partly exists and partly does not exist substantially speaking. 90. See Pasnau (2005), 205–206. 91. Pasnau (2002), 388. 92. Peter Geach (1969), 24. Cf. Davies (1992), 217.

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Page 206 13 Love and Damnation C. P. Ragland Through me to the city dolorous lies the way, Who pass through me shall pains eternal prove, Through me are reached the people lost for aye. ’Twas Justice did my Glorious Maker move; I was created by the Power Divine, The Highest Wisdom, and the Primal Love. No thing’s creation earlier was than mine, If not eternal; I for aye endure: Ye who make entrance, every hope resign! Dante, Inferno, Canto III1 It is plain to see that many people suffer greatly in this life. But this observable pain may be just the tip of the iceberg. Traditional Christian theology posits the existence of even more suffering in the universe, suffering that we cannot (yet) observe: the agony of the damned in hell. If the suffering we see in this life is difficult to reconcile with the existence of a loving, omnipotent God, the supposed suffering of the damned is even more so. For on many traditional views of hell, God does not merely allow the damned to suffer, but actively inflicts their pain upon them. As David Lewis puts it: God has prescribed torment for insubordination. The punishment is to go on forever, and the agonies to be endured by the damned intensify, in unimaginable ways, the sufferings we undergo in our earthly lives. In both dimensions, time and intensity, the torment is infinitely worse than all the suffering and sin that will have occurred during the history of life in the universe. What God does is thus infinitely worse than what the worst of tyrants have done.2 This “torture-chamber view of hell”3 seems glaringly inconsistent with the claim that God is loving. Furthermore, the inconsistency between human suffering and divine goodness seems more intractable in the case of hell than in cases of earthly suffering (where the suffering might be connected to postmortem goods that defeat it).4 Christian philosophers can respond to this “problem of hell” in a variety of ways. Some claim that damnation is impossible because it conflicts

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Page 207 logically with the necessity of divine love. Others prefer to think that some people are—or at least might be—damned. These latter thinkers have (by and large) used two different strategies to argue that there is no real inconsistency between hell and God’s goodness. The first is to claim that divine justice requires hell. The second is to maintain that hell is consistent with, or even motivated by, divine love, and so is a far cry from the eternal torture chamber envisaged earlier. Eleonore Stump pursues this second strategy in her influential paper “Dante’s Hell, Aquinas’ Moral Theory, and the Love of God.”5 Stump argues that a hell of the sort envisioned by Dante—in which the damned experience neverending conscious suffering and are utterly without hope—could be “built by divine power, by the highest wisdom, and by primordial love.”6 At its core, Stump’s view is a free-will theodicy of hell: some people choose not to pursue union with God; God can neither force these intransigent rebels into heaven, nor annihilate them; under the circumstances, the best way God can care for them is by placing them in hell. Stump’s view, like other free-will theodicies of hell, rests on two central assumptions. First, God as a genuine lover respects the free choices of creatures. Second, not even God’s omnipotence can determine or control our free choices. Though these assumptions of free-will theodicy are controversial, in this paper I will grant them.7 My purpose here is to explore their consequences. I will argue that Stump fails in her attempt to defend Dante’s picture of hell, for if hell is motivated by love, then something else about Dante’s vision of hell will have to go: either hell does not involve eternal suffering, or else there must be hope for the damned to be reconciled to God. More generally, I aim to show that seeing hell as a manifestation of divine love (as the free-will theodicies do) forces us to adopt a rather revisionist picture of hell as a state of suffering designed to purge sinners of their vice and draw them back to God. On this view, hell is not designed to be a prison, but a rehabilitation center. It is founded not only on love, but on hope. I begin my approach to Stump’s article by first looking at C. S. Lewis and Richard Swinburne’s suggestions about the relation between free will and damnation. They claim that people have the ability (through consistent vicious choice) to eradicate their own human nature, to turn themselves into “psychic remains.” THE VISION OF HELL IN THE GREAT DIVORCE C. S. Lewis steps away from the torture-chamber view of hell by suggesting that the suffering of the damned is not inflicted on them by God, but rather by themselves. He says: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘ Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that

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Page 208 self-choice there could be no Hell.”8 God is not tormenting unwilling victims, but reluctantly letting sinners have their way. Though they could leave hell, the damned choose to remain separated from God because “there is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy—that is, to reality.”9 Lewis seems to assume that though God could surely transform the damned into saints against their wills, doing so would undermine their freedom and drain any real significance from their subsequent “love” of God. This assumption simply applies the basic ideas of free-will theodicy to damnation: if the aim of preserving or respecting human freedom of choice (understood in an incompatibilist fashion) justifies God in allowing people to perpetrate horrors on earth, then why should it not also justify God in allowing people to damn themselves? Lewis dwells at length on the connection between hell and choice in his little book The Great Divorce. The Great Divorce presents an “imaginative supposal”10 or hypothetical picture of the afterlife. As the story opens, Lewis, the narrator, finds himself in a dingy, vacant town “always in the rain and always in evening twilight.”11 This place is “the Valley of the Shadow of Death.”12 Along with some others from the town, Lewis boards a bus which takes them to “the Valley of the Shadow of Life,”13 a “level, grassy country” full of “light and coolness … like those of summer morning, early morning a minute or two before the sunrise.”14 Lewis witnesses his fellow passengers from the bus, who turn out to be ghosts,15 interacting with saints who knew them on earth. The saints try to convince the ghosts not to return to the gray town, but to come with them to “deep heaven.”16 Lewis’ guide, George MacDonald, tells him that for those who choose to leave the town behind, it will have been purgatory, while for those who prefer the town to heaven, it is hell. When Lewis expresses surprise that there is a way out of hell into heaven, MacDonald says: [B]oth good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all [their] earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell … at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in heaven,” and the Lost, “We were always in hell.” And both will speak truly.17 This passage implies that there is no escape for the truly damned. The denizens of the gray town can cross over into heaven only because they have not irrevocably rejected God’s love. So The Great Divorce, unlike Dante’s famous works, is not primarily a picture of heaven and hell, but rather a picture of a realm in which the unregenerate dead enjoy continued

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Page 209 opportunities for repentance. Nevertheless, Lewis does give us a few glimpses of characters that seem already in the story to be truly damned. Such characters are trapped in compulsive behavior. This first becomes evident early in The Great Divorce, when Lewis hears a story about two ghosts who visited Napoleon in his house millions of miles from the gray town. They found him alone in his mansion, Walking up and down—up and down all the time—left-right, left-right—never stopping for a moment. The two chaps watched him for about a year and he never rested. And muttering to himself all the time. “It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English.” Like that all the time. Never stopped for a moment. A little, fat man and he looked kind of tired. But he didn’t seem able to stop it.18 The psychology of damnation implicit in this picture of Napoleon is made explicit later in the story, when Lewis and MacDonald encounter the ghost of “a silly, garrulous old woman who has got into a habit of grumbling.” MacDonald says of her: “The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble.”19 When Lewis asks how there could be a grumble without a grumbler, MacDonald responds: It begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticizing it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.20 If she is merely a grumble, then the woman is truly damned. Lewis suggests that by making repeated vicious choices, a person can lose altogether the ability to make good choices. Wrong use of freedom leads to slavery. Even worse, it leads to a loss of personhood. Elsewhere, Lewis remarks: “what is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is ‘remains’.”21 In “A Theodicy of Heaven and Hell,”22 Richard Swinburne elucidates the sort of psychological theory that seems to underlie Lewis’ understanding of damnation. Swinburne notes that people often have conflicting desires. To take a trivial example: one might desire the pleasure of eating a doughnut, but at the same time desire to maintain a meticulously healthy diet. In a case of desire conflict, one must choose between what one sees as “overall the best action to do” (for which one has a rational desire) and what appear to be “lesser goods”23 (for which one has irrational desires). The trouble is that one’s strongest desire (in the sense that it takes more effort of will to act against it than it would to act against any alternative desire) is sometimes for what one judges to be a lesser good. In such cases, one must “choose

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Page 210 whether to resist strong desires in order to do the morally good action, or to yield to them.”24 Furthermore, people are creatures of habit: by consistently acting on a certain type of desire, one significantly strengthens that type of desire within oneself. Similarly, if people “systematically resist desires of a certain kind, they will gradually become the kind of person to whom such desires do not occur with any force.”25 Therefore, if a person systematically resists his rational desires, they will cease to occur to him. His ability to act in accord with reason (and hence to act against his strongest irrational desire) will wither away like an atrophied muscle. A man who never resists his desires, trying to do the action which he perceives overall to be the best, gradually allows what he does to be determined entirely by the strength of his desires (as measured by the difficulty of resisting them). That is, he eliminates himself…. There is no longer a “he”; having immunized himself against the nagging of conscience, the agent has turned into a mere theatre of conflicting desires of which the strongest automatically dictates “his” action.26 Swinburne’s claim that such a person “eliminates himself” seems to rest on two ideas. First, the capacity to actively choose between alternatives is lost. With rational desires gone, the person has no alternative to the strongest irrational desire, and so is passively pushed along by it. Swinburne apparently thinks that one is a person only if one has the ability to make a difference in the world through (libertarian) free choice. Therefore, when that ability is lost, so is the “self.” Second, Swinburne follows Plato, Aristotle, St. Paul, Aquinas, and many others in identifying a person’s “true self” with the person’s reason . But a being in whom rational desires cease to occur is a being whose reason has ceased to function. Such a being is no longer a rational animal. It is no longer a person but the “remains” of a person, an insane being with a conscious first-person point of view, but with no capacity to truly grasp or shape reality. On Lewis’ and Swinburne’s pictures of hell, what happens to these remains of a person? Lewis’ answer to this question is hard to discern. Most passages in The Great Divorce suggest that the remains go on existing forever (lining up with the traditional view of hell as everlasting), but some passages can be plausibly read as hints that God will eventually annihilate them. Swinburne states explicitly that neither eventual annihilation nor eternal existence can be ruled out: There seem to be various possible fates for those who have finally rejected the good. They might cease to exist after death. They might cease to exist after suffering some limited physical pain as part of the punishment of their wickedness. Or they might continue to exist forever pursuing trivial pursuits.27

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Page 211 It is not surprising that Swinburne and Lewis remain vague or noncommittal about the fate of the remains, because their truly important point is that persons annihilate themselves when they make that final, fateful choice not to follow reason over their strongest irrational desire.28 The Swinburne/Lewis model of hell is an annihilationist model, in the sense that the damned in hell do not exist as persons, regardless of whether then continue to exist as remains. STUMP ON DANTE’S HELL Dante’s Inferno is often associated with the torture-chamber view of hell. However, Eleonore Stump finds in Dante a vision of hell not all that different from Lewis and Swinburne’s. Stump says: I think it highly unlikely that Dante meant to portray hell as a place where people are being literally burned by real fire … Rather Dante’s idea of hell, which strikes me as philosophically and theologically interesting, seems to have been that the pains a person such as Ulysses suffers are not so much an externally imposed physical punishment as they are an external manifestation of a person’s inner state, resulting from the person’s previous and current free choices.29 Dante’s hell is a state of psychological suffering that “never ends and never eventuates in redemption,”30 a place in which the damned exist entirely devoid of hope. Stump explains how such a hell could be set up by divine love, as understood by Thomas Aquinas. According to Stump, Aquinas’ understanding of divine love is related to his views on the nature of being and goodness. For Aquinas, “goodness” and “being” are two different terms for the same thing.31 Therefore, each substance has a certain amount of goodness simply in virtue of being or existing. Furthermore, each kind of existing thing has a specific capacity which, when exercised, completes or fulfills the thing’s nature.32 This fulfillment of a thing’s nature is both an increase in being (because as the “capacity is actualized, something which was … only potential becomes actual”)33 and an increase in goodness (because a thing is a good example of its kind only insofar as “it has actualized the capacity specific to that kind”).34 For example, rationality is the specific capacity of humans (rational animals); insofar as a human acts rationally, she is both a better human, and is more fully a human being, than she would be if she acted irrationally.35 Stump summarizes the relevant part of Aquinas’ view of love as follows: “for Aquinas, to love something is to treat it according to its nature,”36 or in other words to attempt to promote the full actualization of its nature. Loving a person involves willing that person good: doing what one can to

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Page 212 ensure that the person realizes her capacity for rational action and thereby fulfills her nature.37 And since being and goodness are interchangeable, this means that loving a person involves doing what one can to maximize her being. A loving God, on this view, aims both to sustain humans in existence and to promote human flourishing. Such a God would abandon either aim only for the sake of some greater good. The ultimate good for humans, and the ultimate realization of human being, is union with God (i.e. heaven). But we can receive this ultimate good only if we freely will “only what is in accord with the will of God.”38 Since not even an omnipotent being can “ make a person freely will anything”39 (it is logically impossible for a decision to be both forced and free), “it is not within God’s power to ensure that all human beings will be in heaven.”40 Some people, after a lifetime of persistently bad choices, cross the threshold of death as persons who will not will what they need to will in order for God to be able to unite them to himself in heaven and who by their repeated irrational choices violating their nature have produced in themselves a second, vicious nature.41 This second nature is a settled disposition to act against reason in some way or another. Due to considerations of freedom, God cannot fulfill the human natures of such vicious people. But divine love (as Aquinas understands it) also rules out annihilating them, for To annihilate them is to eradicate their being; but to eradicate being on Aquinas’s theory is a prima facie evil, which an essentially good God could not do unless there were an overriding good which justified it. Given Aquinas’s identification of being and goodness, such an overriding good would have to produce or promote being in some way, but it is hard to see how the wholesale annihilation of persons could produce or promote being.42 Annihilation is inconsistent with the fundamental impulse of divine love: to maximize being/goodness in the beloved. God can neither fulfill nor destroy intransigent rebels. What, then, is God to do? Stump sees Dante’s hell as an ingenious alternative way for God to love the damned: by treating them “according to their second nature.”43 By this, Stump seems to mean two things. First, God “puts restraints on the evil” the damned can do, and thereby holds their second nature fixed, keeping it from any additional moral decay.44 Second, God provides an environment in which the damned can realize the capacities of their second nature. Stump makes this second aspect clear in a discussion of Filippo Argenti, one of the wrathful damned souls that Dante encounters in his journey through hell.

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Page 213 Because of the nature he has given himself, the closest Filippo Argenti can come to the natural functioning of a human being is to act in wrath. By granting him a place in which to exercise his wrathfulness, God allows him as much being, and thus as much goodness, as Filippo is capable of. God does what he can, then, to preserve and maximize Filippo’s being and the being of each of the damned. In so doing he treats the damned according to their nature and promotes their good … by maximizing the good of the damned, he comes as close as he can to uniting them with himself—that is to say, he loves them.45 REMAINS OR PERSONS? We are now in a position to ask an important question about the Dantean view of hell that Stump explores in her paper (I will sometimes call it “Stump’s view of hell” because she appears to endorse it herself46): are the damned still persons with the capacity to govern their irrational impulses, or are they merely the “remains” of persons as described by Lewis and Swinburne? In other words, are the damned able (but unwilling) to repent and leave hell, or are they unable to do so? Stump never answers this question explicitly, and her remarks sometimes point in one direction, sometimes in another. Stump says that Filippo Argenti is not capable of more goodness than his second, wrathful nature allows; this suggests that Argenti has lost his first (human) nature altogether and has only a vicious second nature.47 However, after noting that for Dante, “something in the nature of the human state after death rules out the possibility of any spiritual alteration on the part of the damned,” Stump suggests that Dante could abandon this doctrine “and still preserve the essence of his idea of hell.”48 So it may be that she wants to defend a view on which the damned retain the capacity to repent (a capacity of their first, human nature), though they will never in fact exercise it.49 For my purposes it doesn’t matter much which interpretation of Stump is correct. For my main aim is to show that whether or not Stump claims that the damned are “remains,” some aspect of the view she defends will appear implausible. Either way, if hell is built by divine love, then some part of the Dantean picture of hell must go. REMAINS: ANNIHILATION OR NON-SUFFERING Consider first the possibility that the damned are no longer persons, but are instead merely the psychic remains of persons. Stump argues that it would not be loving for God to annihilate these remains. However, it is not hard to plausibly argue for the just the opposite conclusion—namely,

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Page 214 that annihilating the damned would be more loving than preserving their existence. Consider the commonplace thought that “mercy killing” of animals is sometimes morally obligatory. Even among those who would reject mercy killing of human persons, it is generally agreed that if an animal (a sentient, non-rational being) is in severe pain and cannot be helped, the most compassionate course of action is to “put it out of its misery.” But it seems that the annihilation of the damned (as psychic remains) would be analogous to the mercy killing of animals. For it would seem that the damned suffer intensely, and that they are not persons (on the view we are now assuming). Therefore the most loving course of action would be for God to annihilate them. Stump says that God would not annihilate the damned because it would eradicate their being/goodness without thereby promoting any overriding good. But if the preceding argument is correct, then there is an overriding good to justify annihilation—namely, the removal of the suffering of the damned. Stump would doubtless respond to this objection by appealing to Aquinas’ moral theory. On this theory, which identifies being with goodness, annihilation of being can only be justified by its connection to an overriding good that itself involves the production or promotion of being in some way.50 Because the removal of suffering does not produce being, it could not function as an overriding good. As Kelly James Clark has noted, it is not completely clear that Aquinas would require the overriding good to promote being. Clarke points to the following passage from Aquinas: Not to be may be considered in two ways. First, in itself, and thus it can nowise be desirable, since it has no aspect of good, but is pure privation of good. Secondly, it may be considered as a relief from a painful life or from some unhappiness: and thus not to be takes on the aspect of good, since to lack an evil is a kind of good as the Philosopher says ( Ethic . v. 1). In this way it is better for the damned not to be than to be unhappy…. In this sense the damned can prefer not to be according to their deliberate reason.51 According to Clark, “Aquinas himself concedes that there are some goods that result in a reduction in being,” so that even on Aquinas’ moral scheme, “the annihilation of the damned is rationally preferable to their continued existence.”52 Though I am sympathetic to Clark’s criticism of Stump, I believe his interpretation of this passage from Aquinas is probably flawed. For if it is correct, then this passage is flatly inconsistent with Aquinas’ general principle that being and goodness are convertible (as Clark himself seems to realize).53 I suspect Aquinas here intends merely to suggest that nonexistence can appear good to the damned, so that it can be subjectively rational for them to prefer it to continued existence in hell. He does not mean

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Page 215 to say that objectively speaking, removing being can sometimes promote goodness. If I am correct, then Aquinas’ (and presumably Stump’s) position is that God, by keeping the damned in existence, acts to promote their objective good even though they themselves consider this good evil in comparison with nonexistence. It is logically impossible to realize both what the damned subjectively consider best (viz. their nonexistence) and what is objectively best for them (their continued existence). Faced with this choice, God realizes the objective good. We might wonder: is realizing the objective good in this case really more loving than giving the damned what they prefer (annihilation)? It most certainly is, if love is simply a concern for the objective good of the beloved that takes no heed of her subjective preferences. But this would surely be an emaciated conception of love. As Jon Kvanvig says: “To love someone requires not only willing what is objectively good for that person but also willing what that person desires or wants most deeply (at least when this does not conflict with what is objectively good).”54 This is a point with which Stump seems to agree in recent work, for she insists that love must show concern for the beloved’s “desires of the heart.”55 A more plausible argument against annihilation would rest on the following idea: while love aims to promote both the objective and subjective good of the beloved, objective good has priority. In cases of conflict between what is objectively good for the beloved, and what the beloved herself subjectively takes to be her good, the true lover will seek promote objective good at the expense of the subjective. This idea has a great deal of intuitive appeal. Arguably, loving parents are acting in accord with this principle whenever they make their children eat a healthy diet rather than a constant stream of fast food (which the children would view as subjectively better), or when they restrict the children’s screen time to promote character- or skill-building activities. However, this view does not seem consistent with a free-will theodicy of hell. For such a theodicy tells us that when people prefer the illusions of power found in hell (their subjective good) to the reality of service in heaven (their objective good), and they choose in accord with this preference, the loving course for God is to let them have what they want, i.e., to give their subjective good priority over their objective good. Indeed, the idea that love prioritizes objective good over subjective preferences seems to militate in favor of universalism. If a loving God aims most fundamentally to promote the objective good of creatures, then it seems God would eventually bring everyone to heaven, altering the psychological makeup of those who preferred hell to bring their subjective preferences into line with their objective good.56 It seems to me that love probably does not always prioritize either objective or subjective good. Rather, it seems that love prioritizes the beloved’s subjective preferences as long as the sacrifice of objective good is not too extreme. It is often best to let children “have their way,” even when this will

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Page 216 harm their objective flourishing. However, if the extent of the objective harm is above a certain threshold, it seems wrong to privilege subjective good. For example, it would be wrong of parents to let children have their way, if having their way would result in serious injury or death to the children. Universalists and those who offer a free-will theodicy of hell could both embrace this intuitive principle, but they would have to disagree about where the threshold is. Universalists will say that the objective evils of hell are above the threshold, so that it would be unloving for God to defer to any person’s subjective preference for hell. Free-will defenders of hell will insist that the evils of hell are below the threshold—i.e., not great enough to warrant ignoring (or blocking the effects of) the subjective preferences and choices of the damned. Viewed in light of the foregoing discussion, Stump’s position (as we are now interpreting it) seems to embrace both of the following claims: (1) God would privilege subjective preferences over objective ones, even to the point of allowing people to annihilate their own personhood. (2) If the psychic remains of such persons suffered to such an extent that they would prefer not to exist, God would refuse to annihilate them out of concern for their objective good. This position strikes me as inconsistent. The destruction of personhood seems to be a more significant harm than the destruction of psychic remains (which seems analogous to the destruction of a nonrational animal). Therefore, if—as (1) suggests—the threshold of harm is high enough to allow the annihilation of personhood, then it will also allow the annihilation of psychic remains (which is a lesser harm). If—as (2) suggests—the threshold is low enough to forbid annihilation of remains, then it would also rule out allowing annihilation of persons (which is a greater harm). (1) and (2) cannot both be true because the threshold cannot be in two places at once. If we wish to say that the damned are psychic remains, then we cannot accept (2). We must consider the threshold of harm to be very high, so that it is right for God to privilege a person’s subjective preferences even to the point of allowing the person to cease to exist as a person (that is, to the point of allowing the person to become mere “remains”). And this high threshold will also entail that it is right for God to privilege the subjective preferences that remains may have for annihilation. If the damned are merely psychic remains, and if they suffer in the way that Dante and Aquinas seem to envision, then a loving God would not sustain their existence, but would annihilate them. Love would be more concerned with fulfilling the subjective desire of the damned to escape suffering than it would be to promote their objective good. My conclusion here fits with my original objection concerning mercy killing: it seems more loving to put psychic remains out of their misery than to let them continue suffering.

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Page 217 However, the idea that psychic remains will exist eternally in hell might be plausible if we reject the idea that damnation involves extreme suffering. After all, it would seem unloving toward an animal to kill it in cases where it was not suffering intensely. Let us briefly consider, then, the suffering of the psychic remains as envisioned by Lewis and Swinburne. According to Swinburne, “A man will only be fully happy if he has no conflicting wants; if he is doing what he wants to be doing and wants in no way to be doing anything else.”57 Happiness consists in psychic integration around a single goal, and this is what the blessed enjoy in heaven. A damned soul, by contrast, suffers precisely because he completely lacks such integration, having become “a mere theatre of conflicting desires.”58 Swinburne seems to assume (as Plato did) that irrational desires inevitably conflict with one another. Therefore, those who always act on their strongest irrational desires will inevitably come to regret their actions (for example, a person in the grip of the desire to attract the opposite sex may regret his earlier habitual indulgence in cheesecake). Furthermore, insofar as irrational desires oppose one another, the “person” cannot wholeheartedly engage in any activity, but will always wish to some extent that things were different. The suffering that results from a lack of psychic integration is very real, even if it does not involve physical suffering. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that the prospect of an eternity of such suffering would not drive anyone to wish for nonexistence. However, C. S. Lewis’ depiction of Napoleon suggests an interesting possibility. Unlike the denizens of the gray town, Napoleon’s behavior seems to be determined not by a jostling collection of conflicting desires, but by a single all-consuming compulsion. Might it be that over time, and without the influence of rational desires or free choices, the single strongest irrational desire within the psyche would come to determine action more and more, eventually snuffing out all the other desires? If this is possible, then the damned might enjoy a perverse form of the happiness of heaven, for they would be desiring only one thing, and doing what they most wanted to do. They would achieve a kind of psychic integration around the apparent good. The tragedy, of course, would be that they are missing out on the Real Good. Objectively speaking, their existence would not be worthwhile. But subjectively, they would not be suffering. If psychic remains enjoy this sort of existence, then it is not obvious that God would have reason to annihilate them. Stump appears to follow Dante not only in insisting that hell is motivated by divine love, but also in picturing hell as a never-ending state of conscious suffering. I have argued in this section that if the damned are nothing more than psychic remains, Stump’s claim about the motivation for hell is inconsistent with her Dantean picture of hell. To make her overall view consistent, she needs to give up the idea that hell involves suffering. She could do this either by claiming that hell is ultimately nonexistence (annihilation), or by claiming that “fully damned” psychic remains enjoy a sort of (pathetic) psychic integration.

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Page 218 More generally, my point is this: if we assume both that (1) hell is built by divine love, and (2) the damned are merely psychic remains, then we cannot also maintain that (3) hell involves eternal conscious suffering. Given that Stump seems to accept (1) and (3), she should reject (2). In other words, to be charitable we should interpret her as claiming that the damned are not remains, but persons with the power of free choice. I will explore the implications of this alternative interpretation in the final section of this paper. But first, I want to note that there is a strong independent reason— having nothing to do with commitment to (1) or (3)—to think that (2) is false: it is arguable that a loving God would not create people with the capacity to eradicate their own personhood. CRITICISM OF SWINBURNE AND LEWIS I am deeply sympathetic to Swinburne’s model of human psychology, particularly the connections he makes between psychic integration and happiness, on the one hand, and between disintegration and misery, on the other. And I think that his horrific vision of psychic remains, a vision expressed forcefully also by Lewis, is deeply important for moral reflection. For it expresses, I think, the logically possible end towards which vicious action tends.59 However, there is a difference between what is logically possible and what nature permits. And I doubt that a loving creator would give humans a nature that would allow them to turn themselves into mere psychic remains. Swinburne considers the kind of position I am advancing, and responds to it as follows: It might be urged that no man would ever be allowed by God to reach such a state of depravity that he was no longer capable of choosing to do an action because of its overall worth. But in that case God would have prevented people from opting for a certain alternative; however hard a man tried to damn himself, God would stop him. It is good that God should not let a man damn himself without much urging and giving him many opportunities to change his mind, but it is bad that someone should not in the all-important matter of the destiny of his soul be allowed finally to destroy it.60 Swinburne seems to assume that the freedom to damn oneself (reduce oneself to remains) is intrinsically valuable, so much so that its value outweighs the harm of damnation itself. But I believe this assumption is mistaken. While freedom may have some intrinsic value, it gets most of its value from its relation to love. For it seems that if our decisions to move toward union with God were not free—if they did not flow from our own unmanipulated subjective preferences—then the love between God and creatures

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Page 219 would not be genuine. If we could not say “no” to God, then our “yes” would not be very significant. And it is arguable that our ability to freely reject God would entail an ability to do extremely harmful things. But for our freedom (and hence our possible “yes” to God) to be significant, would God need to give us the ability to utterly annihilate our own personality? I think not. We could retain the power always to say “no” to union with God even if we did not have the power to annihilate our personalities. Swinburne claims that if God did not allow people to damn themselves, the situation would be like that of a society which always successfully prevented people who would otherwise live forever from committing suicide. A society certainly has no right to do that, and plausibly even God has no analogous right to prevent people from destroying their own souls.61 Swinburne’s analogy here does not fit the view I am sketching. I am not suggesting that God as ruler would prevent people from exercising their natural power to damn themselves. Rather, I am suggesting that God as creator would not build that power into their nature to begin with. The phenomenon of habituation on which Swinburne builds his argument62 results from the laws of human nature, not the laws of logic. And we cannot be sure, from our observations so far, what the laws of human nature are in this regard. It may be that our desire for God is necessary to our nature: no pattern of voluntary choice can eradicate it. In that case, God could build us so that we are free to reject God continually, without also giving us the power to altogether exterminate our longing for God. And it seems that God would have no reason not to set this limit to human freedom (since even assuming this limit, our “yes” to God would always have a strong negative alternative). Therefore, I think that a loving God would, and indeed has, set this limit on freedom. The inevitable, ineradicable human longing for God would ensure both the existence of some freedom and the perpetual possibility for repentance, even in the most thoroughly vicious person. PERSONS: HOPE Let us turn, then, to consider the possibility that the damned retain their freedom, but use it continually to reject God. This is the picture of hell that Stump (as one who sees hell as motivated by divine love) ought to adopt, and indeed appears to adopt in some parts of her article. This picture has two important implications. First, this picture seems to conflict with one of Stump’s other central claims. If the damned retain freedom, then they must retain reason, for it is a precondition of freedom. Some vestige of their original human nature, though encrusted and obscured by vice, must still lie within them. Now on Stump’s account, God initially loves each of us by treating us according to our first, human nature. That is, God does everything in God’s power

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Page 220 to get us to freely follow reason and eventually be united with God. If this first human nature persists— even in an emaciated form—in the rebellious dead, why would God not continue to treat the damned according to it? Why would God “give up on them” and treat them according to their second nature, when this is sure not to lead them to union with God? It does not seem that a loving God would do this. So on the assumption that the damned retain freedom, it is not plausible to say, as Stump does, that God (out of love) treats the damned according to their second nature. If there were no first nature left in the damned, then treatment according to second nature might be the best version of love that God could manage, but if the first nature persists, then it does not seem that God’s treatment of it would change. Second, if the argument I have just given is correct, then there would be hope for the damned. Stump can maintain two elements of Dante’s hell, but not the third. She could say that hell will last forever, because it may be that the damned will never repent. Furthermore, she could assert that the damned suffer (they would retain at least some of their rational impulses, which would drive them toward God and oppose their vicious second natures; this conflict between rational and irrational impulses would generate the suffering that goes with psychic disintegration). However, Stump could not retain the thought (also part of traditional thinking) that the damned are genuinely without hope, that there is no possibility for a change in their condition. There would be hope for the damned because they could leave hell if they would but repent, and they could repent if they so willed. Certainly the damned might feel hopeless, or believe that they had no hope, but it seems a loving God would want to help them to overcome such beliefs and feelings. Contrary to Dante’s vision, God would not encourage such subjective hopelessness by placing a sign at the door: “abandon all hope.” Some might think that Dante’s vision is vindicated because the damned are beyond the reach of grace. Though they have (in a sense) the capacity to repent, they will remain forever unable to exercise this capacity due to God’s withholding of grace from them. But if my previous argument is correct, then God’s treatment of the damned would be no different from God’s treatment of living sinners: God would extend grace to them all, would continue to lure even the damned toward goodness. A more plausible argument on behalf of Dante’s vision goes like this: the damned should abandon hope because though they are able, they will never in fact repent. God foreknows this, some say, and has revealed it. I might raise worries here about whether foreknowledge of future contingents is possible, even for an omniscient being. But I will not. Let us assume that God foreknows that some will for all eternity refuse to repent. My point is this: even if such a future will certainly be actual, it is still possible for the damned to repent, and in ordinary parlance this implies hope for the damned. When we ask whether there is hope that things may get better,

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Page 221 we are asking first and foremost whether it is legitimate to dream of the possibility of a brighter day. Furthermore, if God successfully encouraged the damned to believe that they would never repent, this would undermine the freedom of their non-repentance. For it seems that if we are to make a free choice between repenting and not repenting, both options must be epistemically possible for us—that is, what we know already must not entail the falsehood of either event occurring. It is only because we don’t know the future that we see both options as “live possibilities” worthy of deliberation. So if we already know that we are not going to repent, then we cannot make a free choice to repent or not. Because the Dantean view supposes that each choice to reject God is free, it cannot be that God would seek to reveal the future in this way to the damned. Further considerations about foreknowledge show that there is an important sense in which hell as Stump envisions it must be built on hope, just as much as on love: not the hope of the damned for their own escape, but rather God’s hope for their homecoming. We must distinguish between the temporal order and the explanatory order. In the temporal order, God already knows, we are supposing, that the damned will never repent. Why does God know this? Only because God is present to each moment in the future, in which the damned souls choose to go on resisting grace. And why are the damned still there in that future moment? Because God, from before the foundation of the world, resolved to sustain in existence any soul for whom the enjoyment of God’s presence is either actual or possible . In the order of explanation, divine hope for the repentance of the damned would be more fundamental than divine foreknowledge of their recalcitrance. This hopeful view of hell is quite nontraditional for three reasons. First, on this view, the purpose of hell is essentially the same as the purpose of purgatory in Roman Catholic theology. Both would be environments designed to purge sinners of their vices so that they can become capable of union with God. Hell, on this view, would not be a prison (as on the traditional view), but more like a drug rehabilitation center: clients must remain there until they have overcome their addictions, but leave when they have changed in the right ways. Now imagine that all the addicts in the world are at one particular rehab center, and that none of those outside the center can ever fall into addiction. In that case, the center would remain open only so long as there were clients inside struggling with their addictions. If some clients went on struggling forever, the center would remain open forever, but only because there was still hope for the clients’ recovery. Second, in contrast to the traditional view of hell as a final or inescapable destination, hell on this hopeful view would be like Lewis’ gray town: a place that could turn out not only to be similar to purgatory, but to be purgatory. On this view, whether or not there is any real distinction between hell and purgatory depends on the free choices of creatures.

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Page 222 Finally, this hopeful view leads quite naturally to belief in a certain type of universalism. Because the hopeful view of hell posits the existence of libertarian freedom, it is inconsistent with the claim that, necessarily, all are saved in the end. However, the basic assumptions of the hopeful view can be used to construct a plausible argument to the effect that all will in fact be saved. For if the desire for God never goes away (as I argued previously in section five [“Criticism of Swinburne and Lewis”]), and if there are a finite number of other desires which might compete with it, then it is hard to believe that (given an indefinitely long period of postmortem existence) people would not eventually figure out the path to True Happiness. To be clear, the hopeful view does not by itself entail universalism. Non-universalists— those who believe (perhaps based on their interpretation of scripture) that, in fact, some sinners will never repent—can still accept the basic assumptions of the hopeful view. So can universalists, as well as those who are agnostic about whether universalism is true. Nevertheless, in the absence of other theological considerations, it seems to me that a picture of hell as motivated by divine love and hope creates a strong presumption in favor of universalism. CONCLUSION I have argued that Stump’s model of hell can be interpreted in two different ways. On the first interpretation, the damned are no longer persons but rather psychic remains, as described by Swinburne and Lewis. I showed first that if we assume this view, a correct understanding of divine love will force us to give up either the claim that the damned exist forever, or the claim that the damned suffer (resulting in a revisionist view of hell). Next, I argued that a loving God would not give people the power to reduce themselves to psychic remains; therefore, the first interpretation of Stump’s view, while interesting, is not plausible. Finally, I considered the second, more hopeful interpretation of Stump’s view, according to which the damned retain their freedom and personhood. This view of hell, I claim, is once again quite revisionist. It requires us to give up the traditional idea that there is no hope of escape from hell, and thereby blurs some of the traditional distinctions between hell and purgatory.63 NOTES 1. Quoted from the translation by James Romanes Sibbald (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1884), 17. 2. David Lewis and Philip Kitcher (2007), 28. The Harpers article is an edited excerpt from Lewis (2007). 3. Kelly James Clark (2001), 16. 4. On such defeat, see Marilyn McCord Adams (1990). 5. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16:2 (June 1986), 181–198.

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Page 223 6. Stump (1986), 181. 7. For what I consider a very forceful argument against such free-will theodicies of hell, see Marilyn McCord Adams (1993), especially 313–314. 8. C. S. Lewis (1943), 72. 9. Ibid., 69. 10. C. S. Lewis (1946), 8. 11. Ibid ., 11. 12. Ibid ., 67. 13. Ibid . 14. Ibid ., 26–27. 15. Ibid ., 27. 16. Ibid ., 67. 17. Ibid ., 67–68. 18. Ibid ., 20–21. 19. Ibid ., 74. 20. Ibid ., 75. 21. C. S. Lewis (1943), 113. 22. Swinburne (1983). 23. Ibid ., 47. 24. Ibid . 25. Ibid ., 48. 26. Ibid . 27. Ibid ., 52. 28. Swinburne suggests this when he says “it is bad that someone should not in the all-important matter of the destiny of his soul be allowed finally to destroy it” ( ibid., 49, my emphasis). 29. Stump (1985), 401. 30. Stump (1986), 194. 31. Ibid ., 187. 32. Ibid ., 188–189. 33. Ibid ., 189. 34. Ibid . 35. Ibid ., 188–189. 36. Ibid ., 192. 37. Ibid ., 191–192. 38. Ibid ., 194. 39. Ibid ., 195. 40. Ibid ., 194. 41. Ibid ., 195–196. 42. Ibid., 196. 43. Ibid., 196. 44. Ibid., 196–197. 45. Ibid., 197. 46. See Stump (1985), 398–402. 47. Reading Stump in this way might also inoculate her view from certain objections. She suggests that God prevents the damned from undergoing further psychological disintegration, but this would seem to require inhibiting their freedom to make bad choices (see Jonathan Kvanvig, 1993, 127). But if God is willing to limit or override freedom, why doesn’t God do it much earlier, before the damned become significantly vicious? However, if the damned are unable to change (for the worse or the better) not because God somehow blocks the exercise of their capacity for free choice, but rather because the capacity itself has vanished along with human nature, then this problem does not arise.

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Page 224 48. Stump (1986), 196, note 40. 49. Jon Kvanvig reads her in this second way, and then raises the objection discussed previously in my footnote 47. I suspect that even assuming the damned enjoy continued freedom, Stump could get around Kvanvig’s objection by simply jettisoning her claim that the damned are morally “frozen” in hell. She could do this without losing the core insight of her view of hell, which is that keeping the damned in existence is the best way for God to love them. 50. Stump (1986), 196. 51. Aquinas, Summa Theologica Suppl. Q. 98. art. 3, quoted in Clarke (2001), 25. 52. Clarke (2001), 25. 53. Ibid ., 27. 54. Kvanvig (1993), 123–124. 55. See, for example, Stump (2008), and Chapter 1 of Stump (forthcoming). 56. This is the position Thomas Talbott takes in his influential paper (1990). See in particular his definition of divine love on page 25, and his claim that “everlasting separation is the kind of evil that a loving God would prevent even if it meant interfering with human freedom in certain ways” (38). 57. Swinburne (1983), 40. 58. Ibid ., 48. 59. Lewis’ principal aim seems to be to stimulate not speculation on the nature of eternity, but rather moral reflection on the trajectory of our choices. He has MacDonald say that “Ye can know nothing of the end of all things … It may be, as the Lord said to the Lady Julian [of Norwich], that all will be will, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it’s ill talking of such questions” (1946, 124). The purpose of Lewis’ dream-visit to the afterlife is to “see the choices a bit more clearly than ye could see them on earth” (127). 60. Swinburne (1983), 49. 61. Ibid ., 49. 62. According to which “A man who never resists his desires, trying to do the action which he perceives overall to be the best, gradually allows what he does to be determined entirely by the strength of his desires” ( ibid., 48). 63. Thanks to Robert Adams, Jonathan Kvanvig, Thomas Talbott, and Kevin Timpe for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Page 225 14 Friendship in Heaven Aquinas on Supremely Perfect Happiness and the Communion of the Saints Christopher Brown Consider the following objection to St. Thomas Aquinas’s manner of speaking about perfect human happiness. Aquinas’s account of human beatitude has it that God alone is the object of perfect human happiness.1 But such an account of human happiness seems to offer either a distortedly individualistic account of human happiness or else one that is inconsistent with religious and philosophical traditions that Aquinas himself accepts as true. For example, Aquinas accepts Aristotle’s description of human beings as the social animal par excellence,2 and Aquinas the Biblical commentator is acutely aware of the fact that both the Old and New Testaments are ripe with communal metaphors to describe the state of human blessedness. Both Aristotle and the Bible would seem to suggest that a human person’s perfect happiness entails that such a person is part of a perfect human community. So Aquinas’s account of beatitude will seem either wrong-headed to us—given our sense that perfect happiness involves having a relationship with other human beings, not only our loved ones but our enemies too— or flatly inconsistent—that Aquinas’s own body of philosophical work must fall prey to the charge that is often leveled at Cicero’s oeuvre, namely, that of eclecticism. In this chapter I intend to defeat the aforementioned objection by doing two things. First, I show that Aquinas’s own account of perfect human beatitude does include a place for human community. I do this by drawing not only on Aquinas’s discussion of beatitude in his more systematic works, but also by noting what he has to say about the next life in his Biblical commentaries. Second, I argue that Aquinas’s way of speaking about the proper place for human community within an account of human beatitude is philosophically advantageous in that it successfully synthesizes two incomplete models of blessedness, models I will refer to as the erotic conception of heaven and the communitarian conception of heaven, respectively. According to the erotic conception of the afterlife, human happiness consists solely in a private communion with God.3 This view has both an advantage and a clear disadvantage. The advantage for this view is that it unquestionably makes God not only central to human happiness, but more strongly, makes God the sole object of human happiness. For if God

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Page 226 and a human community were both constitutive parts of the human good, then God would not be identical to goodness itself, but simply one finite good (albeit presumably a great good) among many. But many theists have the intuition that God is infinitely and perfectly good. The disadvantage for the erotic view is its inconsistency with God’s creating human beings as social creatures, i.e., creatures who not only depend upon other creatures for their existence and perfection, but, more specifically, depend upon other creatures belonging to their own kind for their existence and (at least this-worldly) happiness. Indeed, the erotic conception of human happiness seems flatly inconsistent with orthodox Jewish and Christian ways of speaking about human blessedness—both of which describe human blessedness as entailing life in a perfect human community, e.g., life in the city of Zion, being invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb, etc. By contrast, the communitarian conception of the next-life has it that human happiness consists in one’s living as an integral part of a perfect human society that is (merely) overseen by a good and gracious God. The advantage for this view is its consistency with the religious intuition that human blessedness is a life lived in community with other human beings. It is thus also consistent with God’s creating us as a member of a species (in this, Aquinas thinks, we are unlike the angels), and a species for which its members find it natural to be social. Its disadvantage: the communitarian concept of heaven seems inconsistent with the view that God is the absolutely perfect creator of the universe. The communitarian view makes God (or some fact about God) merely a constitutive part of the human good. Thus, the communitarian view is either committed to a rather anthropomorphized conception of God, i.e., that God is merely one good among many, or else it fails to take seriously the human desire for the infinite. In responding to the objection for Aquinas’s views that I raised earlier, I want to show why Aquinas takes the following proposition to be false: (1) If perfect human happiness consists in God alone, then human community in heaven is irrelevant where human happiness in heaven is concerned. The defender of the erotic view accepts (1) and takes both its antecedent and consequent to be true. The defender of the communitarian view accepts (1) and takes both its antecedent and consequent to be false. In this paper I want to make sense of Aquinas’s attempt to carve out some conceptual space between (what I’m calling) the erotic and communitarian views of heaven. AQUINAS’S THEOCENTRIC ACCOUNT OF HUMAN HAPPINESS IN SUMMA THEOLOGIAE Aquinas clearly holds the following view:

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Page 227 (2) God alone makes human beings happy. He defends his acceptance of (2) in many places,4 but his most mature defense of (2) comes in his last systematic treatment of the subject in Summa theologiae ( ST ). Aquinas’s so-called ‘treatise on happiness’ in ST is composed of five questions. If we are to understand precisely what Aquinas means by (2) and why he thinks (2) is true, we need to take a look at some arguments and distinctions that Aquinas makes in ST , particularly in the Prima Secundae , questions 1–3. Question one in the Prima Secundae consists of a discussion of what Aquinas calls the “ultimate end” of human beings. This is an important expression for Aquinas and it will pay some dividends to get clear on just what he means by it. Aquinas argues that in order to make sense of any genuine action in the universe we must distinguish its end or goal from the various means that a being employs in order to achieve such an end. Say that John is wealthy but hasn’t always been so fortunate. Now, as it happens, John achieves his wealth by way of the following means: (i) he intentionally befriends the son of a very wealthy man and (ii) he earns the trust of that wealthy man, thereby (iii) landing a high-ranking position in that man’s company. John might have employed any number of different (or additional) means in order to achieve the end of wealth, e.g., (iv) he might have learned to rob banks, or (v) he might have gone to college, worked hard, entered a good law school, and landed a position at a prestigious law firm. Obviously (i)–(v) are each conceivable as ends in themselves, i.e., goals the accomplishment of which would require the pursuing of various means in order to achieve such ends. So, for Aquinas, an end of human action is something (call it ‘ x’) such that one treats x as a good and not simply as a means to achieving something other than x. In Aquinas’s action theory, a means to an end refers to something (call it ’ y’) such that one desires y for the sake of something other than y. But some ends are what Aquinas calls ‘ultimate.’ An ultimate end is an end of action such that one desires it merely for its own sake, and not also as a means to some further end. Now for Aquinas, although wealth might be treated as an end relative to the means that a person employs to achieve it, it is obvious that wealth is not an ultimate end, and even more clearly, wealth is not the ultimate end. This distinction between an ultimate end and the ultimate end is important and does not go unnoticed by Aquinas. He is willing to take seriously the possibility that human life might have several ultimate ends.5 For example, we might think that knowledge, virtue, and pleasure are each ultimate ends of human life, i.e., things we desire for their own sake and not also as means to some further end. But Aquinas thinks it is clear that a human being really has only one ultimate end. This is because the ultimate end—as Aquinas understands the term—is more than something we seek merely for its own sake; it is something such that all by itself it entirely satisfies one’s desire. Say that John desires

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Page 228 pleasure and virtue as ends in themselves, and pleasure and virtue do not necessarily come and go together (some things that are pleasant are not compatible with a life of virtue; sometimes the virtuous life entails doing what is unpleasant). So neither of these could be equivalent to the ultimate end for John; for John’s having one without the other, there would still be something that John desires, and possession of the ultimate end sates all of one’s desires. If pleasure and virtue are both ends in themselves, then at most they must be component parts of an ultimate end construed as a complex whole. So each and every human being has one ultimate end. But do all human beings have the same ultimate end? Aquinas thinks so, and he believes that, in one sense, this shouldn’t be controversial. All human beings think of happiness as the ultimate end of human beings. Of course, Aquinas recognizes that to speak about the ultimate end as ‘happiness’ is still to speak about the ultimate end in very abstract terms, or, as Aquinas puts it, to speak merely of the “notion of the ultimate end” ( rationem ultimi finis ).6 Four people might agree that their goal in life is to be happy but disagree with one another (greatly) about the precise contours of a perfect human life. Although people certainly disagree about what happiness is in the concrete,7 Aquinas wants to maintain that there really is only one object that can satisfy the desires and longings of human beings. If we take Aquinas’s manner of speaking about human happiness in ST as demonstrative of his own position—what we have here, after all, is one long chain of arguments—Aquinas also thinks that it is possible to offer a convincing argument for what it is that fulfills a human being qua human being.8 But Aquinas also shows sensitivity to the role that our moral habits play in forming our beliefs—and so which arguments we will find convincing—regarding the nature of the good life for human beings.9 Before leaving the subject of the ultimate end of human action, we should note two other respects in which Aquinas thinks the expression ‘ultimate end’ (or ‘happiness’) is ambiguous. First, it is one thing to speak about the happiness that human beings can possess in this life, what Aquinas sometimes calls ‘imperfect human happiness,’ and another to speak about the happiness possessed by God, the angels, and the blessed, which Aquinas considers to be perfect.10 Second, Aquinas recognizes two different kinds of questions we might wish to raise when we think about the nature of human happiness. When asking about the nature of human happiness, we might be asking about the status of the person who is happy. As Aquinas puts it, this is to focus our attention on the use , possession, or attainment of happiness by the one who we are describing as happy.11 So to speak about happiness in this sense is to make claims about what has to be true about the soul of the person who is happy, e.g., that it is an activity of the soul and not merely a state of the soul or an emotion,12 that it is a speculative rather than a practical activity,13 that this activity does not require a body,14 etc. But in asking about the happiness of human beings, we might rather be asking about the

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Page 229 object of happiness, or as Aquinas puts it, “the thing itself in which is found the aspect of good.”15 For example, the end of a thirsty man in the sense of the object of his desire is drink ; the end of the thirsty man in the sense of attainment is drinking.16 For Aquinas, then, one’s attainment of happiness is not necessarily the same as the object of one’s happiness. In fact, this is strikingly the case for Aquinas when it comes to human happiness, since the attainment of happiness exists in the human being who is experiencing the state of being happy whereas the object of human happiness is something other than that human being, namely, God. In this sense (as well as others), Aquinas rejects the Stoic idea that human happiness is a matter of becoming self-sufficient.17 Where Prima Secundae , question one provides a framework for talking sensibly about human happiness, question two goes on to discuss with precision what it is that makes human beings happy, i.e., the object of human happiness. Aquinas’s account here takes a cursory look at some of the candidates for human happiness discussed by historically important sources such as Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, and Boethius, e.g., wealth, power, sense pleasure, some good of the soul, etc. and finds various reasons for rejecting each of these as plausible candidates for the object of human happiness. The body of the eighth article contains an argument defending the thesis that no created thing can be the object of human happiness. The argument runs as follows: happiness is the perfect good for a rational being, i.e., it is one that satisfies human appetites altogether. But just as the object of an intellect is the universal true , the object of the will is the universal good . In contrast to creatures that merely enjoy particular sensations of the world—and so have no desires for what lies beyond these particular objects of sense—intellectual creatures can conceive—at least abstractly—the notion of knowing it all, and in turn, having every conceivable and realistic good . So the human good cannot consist in this particular good—unless this particular good can provide every conceivable and realistic good—since although such a good might be very satisfying, it will not leave us at rest but in the state of still desiring something else. The universal good is not to be found in any creature (or set of creatures), since any creature (or set of creatures) is simply a certain finite participation of the universal good. A creature (or set of creatures) would simply be one particular finite good among many others, and would fall (far) short of the universal good, i.e., the perfect good for an intellectual creature. Therefore, no created good can be that in which happiness consists. That may appear to leave only the Creator as a possible candidate for object of human happiness. But what about the following possibility: that some set of created goods together with God is the necessary (and sufficient) condition for human happiness? Although we might admit with Aquinas that human beings won’t be happy until they achieve a certain kind of union with God, perhaps human happiness crucially depends upon things other than God, e.g., enjoying relationships in heaven with some of the human

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Page 230 beings upon which our this-worldly happiness seems so crucially to depend. I’ll have more to say about the relevance of human relationships for human happiness in the sequel. For now, let me say that Aquinas agrees with the Augustinian dictum that “the one who enjoys God has no less than he who enjoys some creature in addition to God.”18 For Aquinas (as for St. Augustine), God is the perfect good,19 the universal good,20 goodness itself, infinite goodness. All finite goods are, as it were, certain images, reflections, or participations of the absolutely perfect goodness which is God. This doctrine that God is infinite goodness has interesting implications for determining the proper object of human happiness. We all want to be happy. But as intellectual creatures, we aren’t satisfied with the possession of any finite thing, no matter how wonderful that good thing might be. Because we have an intellect, and our intellect conceives of the universal good, i.e., that good the possession of which would bring our desire to rest so that we no longer desire goodness that we don’t possess, we desire such a universal good. In fact, we can’t help but desire such perfect goodness.21 Someone might say to herself, “there is no perfect good; only finite goods exist. So I will be content with possessing these (and only these) finitely good things.” But this person’s actions will eventually betray her real desires. In this life, we never stop moving, changing, searching, thinking, etc. We really do want it all. Now consider the sorts of things we desire in this life: seeing one’s children prosper, enjoying intimacy with one’s spouse, finding pleasure in being virtuous (not to mention being recognized for one’s virtue), experiencing beautiful things, or receiving and giving love to God. All of these good things are themselves certain reflections of the absolutely perfect God. As Aquinas says in one place, “whatever good we attribute to creatures, pre-exists in God, and in a more excellent and higher way.”22 The desire that one has for finite things finds its perfect realization only in God, in whom all of these perfections exist, albeit in a higher way that we can’t quite grasp in this life. We know that finite goods exist in some way in God since they are real perfections, God is the first cause of all finite, particular, participated being and goodness, and because God is the universal good. But again: why not think that happiness comes in having God plus the images? For Aquinas, this hypothesis treats God as though He is merely one good among many. And this is simply to misunderstand the nature of God. God is infinite goodness, the universal good, the perfect good. No finite good adds anything to the infinite goodness which is God. So if we come to enjoy union with God as the universal good, no other good will be necessary for us. This is why Aquinas thinks that “man has the entire fullness of his perfection in God,”23 or in another place, “God alone constitutes man’s happiness.”24 As we’ll see, however, Aquinas’s view that human happiness essentially consists in union with God—that God alone is the object of human happiness—does not entail that creatures have no role to play in the human possession of the object of human happiness. It’s interesting to note that Aquinas’s account of perfect human happiness in ST is a theocentric and not a Christocentric one. Although Aquinas’s

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Page 231 description of how we possess perfect happiness—by way of having a vision of the essence of God 25— is everywhere rooted in Scripture,26 the account itself is one that a non-Christian Platonist might be happy with. What’s interesting here is not so much that Aquinas is defending a view that is common to Greek, Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions. For, as is well known, Aquinas is often anxious in a theological work to articulate and defend a position that reason can establish without making appeals to revelation. But we might think that here—deep in Aquinas’s magisterial theological work, the ST — Aquinas should be giving us a comprehensive account of the afterlife, one that defends not only a position that one can already find sketched by Plato,27 but one that goes beyond what reason can say about the afterlife. One might think that Aquinas’s views on the afterlife owe more to neoplatonism— and its erotic conception of the next life—than they do to the Christian tradition. But this would be a hasty conclusion to draw from what Aquinas has to say about blessedness in ST , Prima Secundae . Recall the exitus-reditus structure of the ST , the three parts of which have Aquinas speaking about the salvation of human beings as a story with three parts. Prima Pars treats the metaphysical and spiritual beginning of all things in God as Creator and goes on to talk about the nature of those things, particularly (given its theological focus) spiritual creatures such as angels and human beings. Secunda Pars treats human beings as images of God, i.e., as beings provident over their own actions, i.e., as moral beings, who by nature want to return (be united) to God, the ultimate source of their being and goodness. But human beings are broken as a result of sin, and so also find themselves desiring to will in opposition to their Creator. The Tertia Pars completes the story of human beings as creations of the absolutely good God by speaking of the means by which human beings can return to God, i.e., by benefiting from Christ’s passion through the faithful reception of the sacraments. By receiving the grace of Christ through these material means human beings can walk in newness of life and so will in union with God’s will. Such human beings can be united to God in heaven. Thus, the more natural place for a comprehensive account of the next life would have been at the very end of ST , and (as is well known) Aquinas left off writing the ST before he could get to that part of the work that would handle such eschatological matters with Christian precision. So we shouldn’t find it at all surprising that Aquinas’s account of human happiness in Prima Secundae lacks some details important for a Christian account of the next-life. Aquinas’s account of happiness in Prima Secundae is as detailed as his purposes in that context—talking about ethical theory and practice—require. AQUINAS ON THE AFTERLIFE AS LIFE IN HUMAN COMMUNITY Does Aquinas ever articulate a more explicitly Christian conception of the afterlife? The answer to this question is ‘yes.’ For example, in commenting

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Page 232 on the marriage at Cana in the Gospel of St. John, Aquinas has an occasion to point out that marriage has been given a mystical sense by the Apostle Paul (in his letter to the Ephesians, Chapter 5), so that Christ stands in relation to the Church as a whole as a husband stands in relation to his wife. Aquinas goes on to note that this mystical marriage begins in the womb of the Virgin “when God the Father united a human nature to his Son in a unity of person.”28 The marriage of Christ and the Church was made public “when the Church was joined to him by faith.”29 Finally, and most important for our purposes, Aquinas speaks of the consummation of this mystical marriage between Christ and the Church “when the bride, i.e., the Church, is led into the resting place of the groom, i.e., into the glory of heaven.”30 Aquinas cites here a favorite passage from the book of Revelation: “Blessed are they who are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:9).31 What is important to see for our purposes is that Aquinas believes that the Church lives on in heaven. Heaven for Aquinas is thus not tantamount to the soul’s private encounter with God. Although aspects of the wedding feast for Aquinas are clearly metaphorical, e.g., the physical eating and drinking, one of the literal truths communicated by way of the metaphor is that heaven involves a deep communion between Christ and the Church, and the Church for Aquinas is itself a perpetual community of human (and nonhuman) persons.32 Consider also Aquinas’s comments on St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, Chapter four, the fourth verse. Recall that the chapter begins with St. Paul’s exhorting the Ephesians “to walk [in a manner] worthy of the vocation in which you are called” (verse 1). In the succeeding verses St. Paul goes on to say in some detail what this would look like: “With all humility and mildness, with patience, supporting one another in charity; careful to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace; one body and one spirit; as you are called in one hope of your calling .” In commenting on the second clause of verse four (which I’ve italicized in the preceding), St. Thomas states: When he says ‘as you are called in one hope of your calling’ he points out the reason for this unity. We notice when persons are called together to possess something in common and mutually enjoy it , they usually live and travel together. Thus, in a spiritual way he says: Because you are called to one and the same reality, namely the final reward, you ought to walk together with a unity of spirit ‘in the one hope of your calling,’ tending toward the one reality you hope for as a result of your vocation (emphasis mine).33 As Aquinas notes here, when persons are “called together to possess something in common and mutually enjoy it” they naturally work together to possess it. In explaining the passage from St. Paul, Aquinas thus implies that the one hope of a Christian’s calling—the final reward in heaven—is something that the saints “possess … in common and mutually enjoy.”

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Page 233 Again, Aquinas’s concept of the afterlife is anything but isolationist. The saints possess happiness in common; their happiness entails mutual enjoyment in God. Aquinas also has a number of interesting things to say about heavenly life in his Exposition of the Apostles’ Creed . Let me mention two. First, Aquinas thinks (with St. Paul) about the unity of the Church under the analogy of a bodily organism: “As in one man there is one soul and one body, yet many members withal: even so the Catholic Church is one body, with many members.”34 The Church is therefore something more than simply a collection of individual Christians for Aquinas; just as the human body is not identical to the aggregate of the parts that constitute it, so each individual Christian is a member of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. This is important to bear in mind as we examine what Aquinas says in explaining the Creed’s calling the Church ‘Catholic.’ Now let us say that the Church is like an organism and so not simply a collection of individuals. One might admit as much and nevertheless think that the Church is something that God wills merely as a temporary instrument for human salvation, so that the Church comes into existence at some point in time but then disappears, for example, with the advent of the blessed life. Aquinas knows of a position such as this, and he rejects it: We must observe that the Church is Catholic or universal … in point of time. For there have been those who said that the Church was to last until a certain time; but this is false, since this Church began from the time of Abel and will endure to the end of the world: Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world (Matthew 28:10), and after the end of the world it will continue in Heaven.35 Another passage from the Exposition of the Apostles’ Creed has Aquinas explicitly affirming the communal nature of heaven. In explaining what the Creed means by ‘eternal life,’ Aquinas comments that “the first thing to be noted is that in eternal life man is united to God: since God Himself is our reward and the end of all our labors.”36 Aquinas then goes on to describe this union with God. In order, it consists in seeing God perfectly, praising God, the sating of all desire, perfect security, and finally, the pleasant companionship of all the blessed, a companionship that is replete with delight: since each one will possess all good things together with the blessed, for they will all love one another as themselves, and therefore, will rejoice in the happiness of others’ goods as their own, and consequently the joy and gladness of one will be as great as the joy of all: the dwelling in thee is as it were of all rejoicing (Psalm 86:7).37 One last passage will serve further to demonstrate Aquinas’s communal conception of human existence in heaven. In the passage in question,

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Page 234 Aquinas is arguing that human beings are born with original sin. In one of the premises of his argument, Aquinas states that “the end of every rational creature is to arrive at beatitude, and this cannot be save in the kingdom of God.”38 Aquinas goes on to explain what he means by the ‘Kingdom of God’: “the ordered society of those who enjoy the divine vision, in which beatitude consists.” Here again we see that Aquinas thinks that the blessed enjoy God not in an isolated manner, but rather in the company of other human beings, namely, the other living members of the Bride of Christ, the Church. Furthermore, this society is not simply an aggregate of individuals; it remains the body of Christ, an “ ordered society of those who enjoy the divine vision.”39 AQUINAS ON WHETHER HAPPINESS REQUIRES FRIENDS: PRELIMINARY MATTERS We’ve seen that Aquinas agrees with the advocate of the erotic conception of heaven that God alone is the object of perfect human happiness. We’ve also seen that Aquinas thinks that, as a matter of fact, human beings in heaven enjoy a happy and holy fellowship with one another. I now want to turn to the question of the relative importance of human community for human happiness in Aquinas’s views in order to demonstrate the way in which those views allow us to save both erotic and communitarian intuitions regarding God and human happiness. We can see Aquinas addressing the question of the relative importance of human community for perfect human happiness where he discusses the question whether friends are necessary for human happiness. In order to answer a question such as this with the precision it deserves, Aquinas thinks we have to distinguish the different ways in which x may or may not be necessary, or required, for y. In ST Prima Secundae , question four Aquinas mentions at least five such ways. First of all, x might be required for y as a preamble ( preambulum) or as preparation ( praeparatorium) for y. Aquinas’s example here is the way in which teaching prepares the way for scientific understanding. I take Aquinas to mean that science requires teaching in the sense that no one has scientific mastery of a subject without first having a teacher.40 A second way that x might be required for y is in the following sense: x is required for the perfection of y. Aquinas’s example here is a metaphysical one: the relationship between soul and body. For Aquinas the soul perfects the body in the sense that without the soul, we wouldn’t have a living body, and living bodies are more perfect than nonliving ones. So in the sense of required for Aquinas is speaking of here, Aquinas is not so much emphasizing what must come before something else (as in the first sense), but what the perfection of a thing requires, where that thing might exist without the perfection in question. As we’ll see, this sense of necessity or requirement is

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Page 235 important for Aquinas’s way of responding to the question whether friends are required for happiness. Consider a third way that x might be required for y: x is required for y such that y wouldn’t be able to achieve some good g without the help of x, where x is something extrinsic ( extrinsicum) to y. According to Aquinas, x’s being extrinsic to y entails that x is not a part of y. So, although Joe’s soul is not identical to Joe for Aquinas, Joe’s soul is a part of Joe, and so Joe’s soul is not extrinsic to Joe. So the soul is not required for Joe’s existence in the third sense of ‘required for.’ Aquinas’s own example of one thing’s being required for another thing in this third sense is someone’s needing friends in order to achieve some goal. Aquinas probably has in mind Aristotle’s example that the virtuous person needs friends in order to achieve certain political aims,41 e.g., in order to get a law he supports passed in the assembly, John needs friends in the assembly to vote his way. Aquinas mentions a fourth way that x might be required for y:x is required for y insofar as x is something concomitant to y. Aquinas’s example here is instructive: he notes that heat is needed for fire in the sense that whenever we have a fire, we have heat. Whereas none of the other senses of x’s being required for y that Aquinas has distinguished here necessitate that y is never without x, if x is concomitant to y, then one never finds y without also finding x. Aquinas notes that this is the sense in which delight (or pleasure) is required for happiness: although delight does not constitute the essence of happiness, it nonetheless is something that always accompanies happiness.42 In a fifth sense of ‘ x is required for y’ that Aquinas mentions, if x is required for y, then x is something that follows upon y, whether logically, or more to the point for our present purposes, chronologically. So Aquinas will speak about some x being required for y consequently. For example, he argues that the perfection of the body, i.e., the body being such that it is totally subject to reason, is consequently required for perfect human happiness. What Aquinas means is that, if someone is perfectly happy, then that someone will eventually enjoy the perfection of having a perfect body. So are friends necessary for human happiness in any of these senses according to Aquinas? Aquinas thinks that answering this question with precision also depends upon what one means by ‘happiness.’ In Aquinas’s view, Aristotle has offered a good account of the nature of imperfect human happiness in a work such as the Nichomachean Ethics .43 But, as is well known, according to Aristotle the central element of the happy human life is living a life that expresses certain moral and intellectual virtues, and Aristotle thinks that many virtuous deeds require for their performance a society of friends. So Aquinas has the view that friends are required for the sort of happiness that can be had in this life in the following sense of ‘required’: as an extrinsic aid to achieving happiness. But we don’t need friends as an extrinsic aid to happiness in the next life, thinks Aquinas. This is because the object of perfect human happiness is God and we don’t require relationships with friends in the next life in

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Page 236 order to enjoy the vision of God. But this isn’t the end of the story for Aquinas. He notes that “the fellowship of friends conduces to the well-being of happiness” ( sed ad bene esse beatitudinis facit societas amicorum)44 and he cites a passage from St. Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis : “spiritual creatures receive no other intrinsic aid to happiness than the eternity, truth, and charity of the Creator. But if they can be said to be helped from without, perhaps it is only by this that they see one another and rejoice in God, at their fellowship.” Thus, despite his apparent negative answer to the question whether friends are necessary for happiness, given the different ways we’ve seem him disambiguate ‘necessary’ or ‘required for,’ it would seem to be the case that Aquinas is saying that there is a sense in which friends are necessary for perfect human happiness, namely, as an extrinsic aid to achieving the well-being of perfect happiness. Aquinas seems to be making a distinction here between what I’ll call perfect human happiness on the one hand, and supremely perfect human happiness (the well-being of perfect happiness) on the other. Friends are not necessary for the former—since having a vision of the divine essence is the necessary and sufficient condition for enjoying perfect happiness— while having friends in heaven is necessary for the latter. DEFENDING THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN PERFECT HAPPINESS AND SUPREMELY PERFECT HAPPINESS We might well wonder about the coherence of Aquinas’s distinction between perfect happiness and the well-being of perfect happiness. To get started in making sense of the distinction, consider the following example. We might say that a frog is a perfect member of its species—it is, let’s say, a mature and perfectly healthy member of its species—even though that frog does not enjoy the well-being of its perfection as a member of its species until it actually reproduces and contributes to the perpetuation of its species. Making a distinction of this sort is very much in the spirit of the Aristotelian tradition’s treatment of questions pertaining to human flourishing. To take just one interesting example, consider one of Cicero’s complaints about Peripatetic arguments concerning human happiness in his Discussions at Tusculum.45 Cicero’s Aristotelian opponents where apt to agree with the Stoic line (with which Cicero in this dialogue sympathizes) that virtue is sufficient for human happiness. The Aristotelians, however, wanted to make a distinction between happiness on the one hand and supreme or perfect happiness on the other. Virtue, taught the Peripatetics, was indeed sufficient for happiness, but not for supreme happiness, since there are other goods that humans desire besides the moral good, e.g., the external goods of wealth, safety, and health. Cicero mentions a number of problems with this Peripatetic position, but one of these is that the supreme good does not admit of degrees. The Aristotelian disagrees. There is one good, the acquisition of

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Page 237 which is not only necessary but central to human happiness. And although the possessor of this central good is rightly described as happy, she is not necessarily as happy as a human being can be. Aquinas seems to take a position like this a step further in his own discussion of perfect human happiness. God alone is the object of perfect human happiness. Human beings attain perfect happiness insofar as they come to enjoy the vision of God’s essence. Nonetheless, someone can be perfectly happy —having all of her desires sated—while not enjoying this perfect happiness to the extent that is possible for a human being. Such a human being is perfectly happy, but not enjoying the well-being of perfect happiness. Of course, the problem with the parallel I’m attempting to draw between the Peripatetic position to which Cicero is responding and Aquinas’s own position on perfect happiness is that in Aquinas’s view God is not merely the good central to perfect human happiness; God is the universal or perfect good. The virtuous person who suffers in this life does not have everything that she wants, for she wants to be free of pain as well. But the person who enjoys a vision of God’s essence presumably has precisely everything that she could want. I offer at this point three different ways of defending the coherence of Aquinas’s distinction between perfect human happiness and supremely perfect human happiness. I will call these defenses, respectively, the embodiment analogy, the happiness by way of anticipation defense , and the fittingness of friends defense . I begin with the embodiment analogy. The embodiment analogy requires that we first examine what Aquinas has to say about the question, “whether embodiment is a necessary requirement for perfect human happiness?” (For ease of reference, let’s call this question ‘the embodiment question.’) Aquinas’s way of handling the embodiment question gives us a way of making sense of the analogous question regarding the role that human friendships play in a perfect human life. It will be instructive for us to first note that Aquinas’s way of answering the embodiment question changes over time. For example, in his commentary on Lombard’s Sentences, Aquinas asks whether the happiness of the saints will be greater after the judgment than before.46 He argues there that the happiness of the saints will increase in extent after the general resurrection because “their happiness will then be not only in the soul but also in the body.” The idea here seems to be that there will be more of a human being to enjoy God after the general resurrection—when all the saints are again embodied—than before the resurrection. This is because (with the exception of notables such as Enoch and the Blessed Virgin Mary) before the general resurrection the saints’ enjoyment of God does not include embodiment whereas after the general resurrection it does. This idea that the happiness of the saints increases in extent after the general resurrection is one that Aquinas consistently teaches throughout his corpus. But Aquinas goes even further in the commentary on the Sentences to say that the soul’s happiness after the general resurrection will increase in

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Page 238 intensity .47 His argument there for this position is compelling: The human soul is merely a component part of the human being, i.e., the soul is not identical to a human being. For although a human being can survive without a body—the soul by itself being sufficient to preserve a human being’s identity, individuality, not to mention its highest activity, namely, contemplation of the truth—the natural state of a human being is to exist as a soul/body composite. But a part p is relatively imperfect (e.g., in its activity) when compared to the (activity of the) whole of which p is naturally a part, and so p is made more perfect (in its activity) when it is completed by way of being joined to the other parts which make up the whole to which p naturally belongs. Therefore, the body’s union with the soul adds a certain perfection to the activity of the soul. It follows that a human being existing as a separated soul enjoys God less intensively when compared to the same human being who enjoys God as an embodied human being.48 Now Aquinas cites an argument like the one we’ve just been looking at in the ST , but he does so as an objection to his own position.49 At the time that this question in ST is written, Aquinas is at pains to deny that embodiment at the general resurrection increases perfect human happiness intensively. How does he respond to the objection? By pointing out that the objector does not fully appreciate the manner in which the human soul is sui generis as a kind of part.50 As Aquinas notes, generally speaking, when it comes to the part/whole relation, for any given part, either that part will cease to exist when it is separated from the whole to which it once belonged, e.g., as the eyes of an animal cease to exist when that animal dies (since they no longer function as eyes), or , if a part survives the corruption of the whole to which it belonged, then the being of that part will not be identical to the being of the whole to which it once belonged, e.g., a log remains numerically the same even after the dissolution of the log cabin of which it was a part, and that log’s existence is not equivalent to the existence of the log cabin. Now, for Aquinas, the human soul is a part of a human being that can survive the death of the composite human being, while at the same time preserving the being, identity, and individuality of that composite human being. Because the soul’s being is the same as that of the composite human being, and the soul’s activity of knowing and loving God in heaven does not require use of the body—the vision of God’s essence in heaven is an intellectual and not a bodily sort of seeing —the embodied soul’s act of seeing God’s essence is no more intense than that of the separated soul. Therefore, since perfect happiness for a human being consists in seeing the essence of God, the embodied soul’s happiness is no more intense than that of the separated soul. So what is Aquinas’s final position in ST on the necessity of the body for human happiness? His position here is analogous to the one he articulates on the relative need for friends in heaven. Essentially, perfect happiness does not require embodiment. How come? Human happiness (in the sense of attainment ) consists in being intellectually and volitionally united to

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Page 239 God in the most perfect way possible for rational creatures, namely, by way of having a vision of the divine essence. But this vision is essentially an intellectual seeing and not a bodily seeing. So the separated human soul that sees the essence of God is perfectly happy. But human beings are rational animals, after-all. So Aquinas wants to say that the well-being of perfect human happiness requires embodiment. But what precisely does Aquinas mean by this? Now we’ve seen that Aquinas does not want to say that the happiness of St. Paul before the general resurrection is any more intense than St. Paul’s happiness after the general resurrection. Saying that would suggest that St. Paul isn’t really perfectly happy in seeing the essence of God and Aquinas thinks this is contrary to reason and to Scripture.51 What Aquinas does maintain here in ST is something we saw him saying in the commentary on Lombard’s Sentences, that St. Paul’s happiness is more extensive after the general resurrection than before, for at that point St. Paul not only enjoys a vision of God’s essence—which is something he can do without the body—but he also enjoys it as an embodied being. There is more of St. Paul to enjoy God after than before the general resurrection. So in ST Aquinas says: “the soul desires to enjoy God in such a way that the enjoyment also may overflow into the body, as far as possible. And therefore, as long as it enjoys God, without the fellowship of the body, its appetite is at rest in that which it has, in such a way, that it would still wish the body to attain to its share.”52 So for Aquinas perfect happiness itself comes in degrees. Whosoever actually sees God in His essence is perfectly happy. But the perfect happiness of the embodied saint is more extensive than that same saint disembodied since the embodied saint enjoys God both bodily and intellectually, a dual enjoyment which is in accord with the nature of human beings as rational animals.53 Aquinas’s way of explaining the difference between perfect happiness and supremely perfect happiness in the context of talking about human embodiment gives us a way of motivating Aquinas’s position on how friends are required for perfect human happiness. Insofar as we enjoy the vision of God—which we can do as a solitary soul—we are perfectly happy. This is because in seeing the essence of God, we come to enjoy goodness itself. We thereby come to participate in the perfect happiness which God has by His very nature. But perhaps we can say that our happiness increases in extent insofar as we see other human beings—creatures for whom we have a natural desire to will good—happy in God as well. St. Paul enjoying the vision of God before the consummation of the marriage between Christ and the Church is perfectly happy, for he then enjoys the vision of God, the perfect and universal good. But his enjoyment of God is not as extensive as it could be since he could also see God through his friends—the other members of the Mystical Body of Christ—as they enjoy the vision of God. Just as Aquinas wants to say that there is more of St. Paul to be happy after embodiment than before, since there is more of the whole of which St. Paul by grace is a part after the consummation of the marriage of the Lamb than

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Page 240 before, enjoying God in the society of friends affords St. Paul more ways to see the beauty and goodness of God than before, i.e., not only from his own perspective as a ‘foot’ of Christ’s body, but now also from the perspective of a ‘hand,’ ‘eye,’ ‘ear,’ etc. In other words, St. Paul can see God’s essence not only through his own experience of God—naturally colored by his own life’s journey, but also through the eyes of friends in Christ who saw a different aspect of God because of their own distinctive vocations, stories, and crosses. St. Paul’s vision of God is now greater in extent than it was before the consummation of the marriage of Christ and the Church. But because St. Paul has all along been joined to God—the universal good—his happiness at the moment of consummation is no more intense than it was before. Consider a second way of defending Aquinas’s distinction between perfect happiness and supremely perfect happiness, what I’ll call the happiness by way of anticipation of a certain good defense . Aquinas believes that it is possible that some saints will be happier than others in heaven.54 Obviously, this is not because it is possible that the object of human happiness differs from saint to saint. That some saint is happier than another saint in heaven is rather grounded in the possibility that some saints have a greater capacity to enjoy God than do others. In a manner of speaking, one saint can “take in”—or attain—more of the beauty, majesty, and goodness of God than does another. Why can some saints enjoy God more than others? This is because a saint’s capacity for enjoying God is directly related to the extent to which that saint is disposed to the enjoyment of God, and a saint’s disposition for enjoying God is directly related to the degree to which that saint has the virtue of charity at the end of her life.55 In other words: the more that a saint has (by grace) gained a capacity to love God, the greater will be her capacity for enjoying the God that she loves. Now, that some saints love God more than others suggests that some saints are happier than others. But aren’t those who are less happy in heaven jealous of those who enjoy a greater happiness? In canto VI of his Paradiso, Dante has Justinian explain why this isn’t the case: This little star [i.e., Mercury] is ornamented / with righteous spirits, those whose deeds were done / for the honor and glory that would follow. / When such errant desires arise down there, / then the rays of the one true love / must rise with less intensity. / But noting how our merit equals our reward / is part of our happiness, / because we see them being neither less nor more. / So much does living justice sweeten our affection / we cannot ever then take on / the warp of wickedness. /Differing voices make sweet music. / Just so our differing ranks in this our life / create sweet harmony among these wheels.56 Dante has Justinian teach that saints who are less happy than others are not only aware of this disparity between themselves and other saints, but that the awareness of such a disparity is actually constitutive of their

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Page 241 own happiness. Far from being jealous of the greater happiness enjoyed by others, e.g., by St. Thomas Aquinas or the Blessed Virgin Mary, these saints rejoice in the justice and beauty of God’s ordered arrangement of the kingdom of God.57 As we’ve seen, in Aquinas’s view St. Paul disembodied is perfectly happy enjoying the vision of God’s essence, but St. Paul embodied enjoys the wellbeing of perfect happiness. Consider how we might make sense of this by way of comparing the relation between St. Paul disembodied and St. Paul embodied, on the one hand, with Justinian’s awareness in heaven that others are happier than he on the other. Just as Justinian’s awareness of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s greater happiness does not change the fact that Justinian is perfectly happy, so St. Paul’s awareness of his future supremely perfect happiness does not count against him being perfectly happy whenever he is disembodied. How come? St. Paul knows during the period in which he is disembodied that he will eventually be embodied. St. Paul can enjoy the universal good as disembodied, knowing that his desire for embodiment will be fulfilled at the general resurrection. In fact, we might suppose that a constitutive part of St. Paul’s perfect happiness now as disembodied—if we can speak of a ‘now’ that changes from moment to moment in heaven—is that St. Paul is experiencing infinite goodness, with the added anticipation of knowing that he will be able to experience the beauty, goodness, and majesty of God to an even greater extent (can it really be possible?) than he does “now” without a body. But there is a kind of joy associated with the anticipation of a certain good. Justinian is aware that the happiness of the Blessed Virgin Mary is greater than his—in fact Justinian’s (supremely) perfect happiness depends upon his awareness of the justice of God’s manner of so ordering the universe such that the Blessed Virgin Mary is happier than he. In the same way St. Paul’s abstract awareness that he will one day enjoy God to a greater extent when he is able to see and hear the perfected beauty of God’s creatures with a perfected human body does not diminish the perfect happiness he now enjoys, since (without his body) he already rejoices in a vision of God’s essence, a rejoicing which necessarily includes an awareness—the joyful anticipation of—the good of embodiment that is to come. And St. Paul is not at all anxious to possess this future embodiment. Rather, he rests content—perfectly happy—in God’s judicious timing, knowing that God will bring about the resurrection of the dead at just the right time. Now compare the relation between St. Paul disembodied and St. Paul embodied on the one hand with the relation between St. Paul enjoying the vision of God in a solitary fashion and St. Paul enjoying the vision of God in the company of all the angels and the saints on the other. As Aquinas notes, one solitary human soul seeing the essence of God would be perfectly happy, not desiring any additional good.58 Indeed, such a state could not be construed as a lonely one for that solitary human soul, insofar as that human being enjoys the company of the Blessed Trinity. But given that

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Page 242 God has created human beings as social creatures, and more specifically, as social creatures that have a natural desire to be united to members of their own kind, a solitary St. Paul knows that God will at some point unite to himself the Church that is more than simply the sum of its human and angelic parts. St. Paul anticipates that union, even as he enjoys the perfect goodness of God. He is not impatient—or jealous—for that consummation, for he already has every good for which he could ask or imagine. If I’m right, just as St. Paul disembodied enjoys perfect happiness, an aspect of which entails that he even now rejoices in the certain future of his embodiment, so a solitary St. Paul would rest perfectly content in loving God, since even now he would rejoice in a future he knows with certainty: that he will be united to God in the perfected mystical body of Christ, where his love for God will grow in extent because he will then see God through the eyes and souls of his brothers and sisters in Christ. Consider a third way of making sense of Aquinas’s distinction between perfect happiness and supremely perfect happiness. Call this attempt to defend the coherence of that distinction the fittingness of friends defense . There are a number of places in Aquinas’s corpus where he discusses the different senses of the necessary. I highlighted one such place earlier. Another place where he discusses the senses of the necessary is in the context of trying to make sense of Catholic doctrinal confessions regarding the Incarnation.59 Aquinas asks whether it was necessary for Christ to become Incarnate in order to restore the human race.60 In order to answer this question with precision, Aquinas distinguishes two senses in which x is necessary for some end y: x might be necessary for y in the sense that one simply can’t achieve y without x, e.g., as food is necessary for the end of preserving the life of a natural body; on the other hand, x might be necessary for y in the (weaker) sense that, although one can achieve y without x, x enables one to achieve y in a better or more fitting manner than otherwise would be the case. Given the omnipotence of God, Aquinas argues that God could have restored the human race without the Second Person of the Holy Trinity’s becoming Incarnate. So the Incarnation is not necessary for the restoration of the human race in the first sense. But in Aquinas’s view, no other manner of restoring the human race would so help human beings to make progress in doing good as the Incarnation. For God’s becoming a man gives us a surer foundation for our faith, a stronger hope, greater charity, a clearer moral example to follow, and a greater participation in divinity. Furthermore, the Incarnation is fitting insofar as it helps us recognize the dignity of human beings and that we are saved by grace. Finally, the Incarnation is fitting insofar as it overcomes our pride—cured as we are by such a great humility—and it more surely frees us from the bonds of sin. Thus, there is a sense in which the Incarnation is necessary for the restoration of the human race: it is more fitting than other possible ways of restoring a fallen human race.

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Page 243 Armed with this distinction between (a) x’s being necessary for y such that one can’t possess y without x61 and (b) x’s being necessary for y such that y is brought about in a better and more convenient way by x rather than non-x, we can construct a third defense of Aquinas’s views on the relative necessity of friends for perfect happiness.62 As we’ve seen, for Aquinas God is the object of perfect human happiness and our attainment of happiness consists in having a vision of the divine essence. So in one sense of ‘happiness,’ friendships are not necessary for human happiness. As Aquinas states in one place, “perfection of charity is essential to happiness, as to the love of God, but not as to the love of our neighbor. Wherefore, were there but one soul enjoying God, it would be happy, though having no neighbor to love.”63 In commenting on this passage in The Person and the Common Good, Jacques Maritain notes that such a union with God would satisfy the human longing for society because God Himself becomes the common good in which the creature comes to share.64 Of course, such an idea takes on a profounder meaning for the Catholic Christian theist, who believes that, in a real sense, God Himself is a society of persons. So Maritain notes that the adage ‘goods are common among friends’ is even true for the solitary human soul who finds itself united to God. Maritain cites a nice passage from Aquinas to this effect: “God loves his creatures not only as the artisan loves his work but also with a friendly association, as friend loves friend, in as much as He draws them into the community of His own enjoyment in order that their glory and beatitude may reside in that very thing by which He Himself is blessed.”65 But we’ve seen Aquinas maintain that there is a sense in which friends are necessary for human happiness, namely, for the well-being of perfect happiness. Aquinas accepts Aristotle’s view that human beings are social creatures by nature. It is therefore natural for us to desire not only our own good, but the good of others. Indeed, we have a natural desire to befriend other human beings, that is, we want to love other human beings for their own sake and not simply because of what they can give us economically or because of the pleasure their company affords us. And we, in turn, want to be loved by other members of our species in a similarly exalted manner. So we might say that we have a natural desire for human friendship. But friendship requires living together. The solitary soul who is caught up into the society of God can be perfectly happy. But a more fitting manner in which to enjoy God includes embodiment and the society of human friends. St. Paul is not only an individual rational creature but a member of the species rational animal . Although St. Paul certainly exists as a person in his own right, he is also a part of humanity as a whole. More to the point, St. Paul is a living member of the Church, to which he thus also stands in the relation of part to whole. It is thus more fitting that St. Paul enjoy God in a society of friends than that he enjoy God in a solitary fashion. The good of human companionship is not necessary for St. Paul in the sense

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Page 244 that St. Paul couldn’t be happy without it. But friends make for the wellbeing of perfect happiness insofar as this is a more fitting—a better and more convenient—way of bringing about the fulfillment of a creature of St. Paul’s kind. Of course, as we’ve seen Aquinas emphasize, that the saints will enjoy God with other human beings is just what God has promised in Holy Scripture. CONCLUSION The erotic conception of the afterlife fails to take seriously the social dimension of human nature, not to mention the Catholic Christian conception of the Church. The communitarian conception of heaven fails to do justice to the human desire for the infinite. By contrast, Aquinas’s account of human beatitudo , with its distinction between perfect and supremely perfect happiness, preserves both erotic and communitarian intuitions about human happiness. For as we’ve seen, Aquinas’s account of heaven does justice both to the human longing for union with a perfectly happy God —God, the universal good, always remains the sole object of human happiness for human beings in Aquinas’s thought—and to the human desire for human friendship —for Aquinas supremely perfect happiness is attained only in the full communion of the saints. I want to close the chapter by suggesting that traditional forms of worship within the Church offer us a perfect image of the view of the relative importance of human society for perfect human happiness that I’ve been attributing here to Aquinas. I offer this suggestion as a closing argument for the plausibility of Aquinas’s views (and perhaps as an argument for more traditional forms of Christian worship). Consider the manner of those who worship (well) at the Mass. Although there are manifold ways to worship God, many of which are easy enough to accomplish as a solitary soul, the Mass is a fundamentally communal act. The people who gather for Mass see one another (whether they want to or not) and (many) pray in communion with the angels and the saints. Although the Mass thus involves being aware of the presence of other creatures—and particularly other human beings—the attention of the faithful is always directed (by the divine liturgy itself) ultimately to God. In addition, consider a fundamental way that human beings receive grace from God according to Aquinas: in the sacraments. For Aquinas the sacraments simultaneously signify something about the past, the present, and the future. They remind us of the ultimate source of the grace that we can receive in the sacraments, Christ’s passion. They also indicate to us what it is we receive right now by way of partaking of the sacraments, namely, the grace to live a new life. But the sacraments also point beyond themselves to the heavenly banquet. They thus act, according to Aquinas, as a prognostic ( prognosticum) of our future glory in heaven.66 What Aquinas says here about the sacraments acting as a prognostic can be

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Page 245 said of the Church’s worship more generally. The Mass acts as a prognostic, providing for us an image of the supremely perfect happiness of the saints: a society of friends who, though joyfully aware of each other’s presence, all know that they possess their true joy in the ultimate creating, saving, and sustaining Source of that holy fellowship. And with God’s help, these saints are (finally) able to train their gaze (together) on that Holy Source.67 NOTES 1. See, e.g., Summa theologiae ( ST ) IaIIae. q. 2, a. 8. Unless otherwise noted, citations from ST are taken from the translation of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1948). Latin citations from ST are taken from the Marietti edition, 1950. 2. See, e.g., ST Ia. q. 96, a. 4 and ST IaIIae. q. 94, a. 2. 3. By using the word ‘erotic’ here, I intend simply to emphasize the fact that, according to the erotic conception of heaven, human happiness consists solely in a private (rather than in a public, or social) communion with God. 4. See, e.g., Summa contra gentiles ( SCG ) III Chs. 18, 25, and 37. See also Compendium theologiae ( CT) Ch. 104. 5. See, e.g., ST IaIIae. q. 1, a. 5. 6. ST IaIIae. q. 1, a. 7. The translation here comes from Treatise on Happiness , translated by John A. Oesterle (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 13. 7. For Aquinas, this claim is not the same as the claim that human beings choose different means to achieving happiness. Although this is undoubtedly true, what Aquinas means to say here is that people disagree about what the happy life itself looks like, e.g., some think the ultimate end itself is the acquisition of wealth, others enjoying certain pleasures, whereas others think the happy life is equivalent to a life of virtuous activity. To see Aquinas’s point, compare John and Jane, both of whom plan to rob a bank. John (unthinkingly) takes the acquisition of a great sum of wealth to be his ultimate end. Jane realizes that wealth is really merely an instrumental good, and has already planned to retire to a vacation resort, which she (still shortsightedly) takes to be the object of human happiness. 8. It is important to emphasize here that, if one thinks that there are ways in which all of us must live if we are to be counted as genuinely happy, e.g., by displaying and acting in accord with the moral virtues, then one can also think there are nearly an infinite number of ways that we can manifest those virtues, e.g., as doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, mechanics, engineers, priests, laypersons, etc. 9. See, e.g., ST IaIIae. q. 1, a. 7. 10. See, e.g., ST IaIIae. q. 4, a. 5. 11. See, e.g., ST IaIIae. q. 1, a. 8 and q. 2, a. 7. 12. See, e.g., ST IaIIae. q. 3, a. 2. 13. See, e.g., ST IaIIae. q. 3, a. 5. 14. See, e.g., ST IaIIae. q. 4, a. 5. 15. ST IaIIae. q. 1, a. 8. 16. I take the example from Josef Pieper (1998), 32–23. 17. God is self-sufficient where his happiness is concerned, but no intellectual creature is; for all intellectual creatures find the object of their happiness in something other than themselves. In addition, human beings—because they are social creatures—depend upon other human beings in order to achieve

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Page 246 their happiness. For example, Aquinas thinks that a necessary condition for being fulfilled as a human being is having the virtues (see, e.g., ST IaIIae. q. 4, a. 4); the virtue of faith is one such virtue; now (under normal circumstances) the virtue of faith is inculcated by God by way of human mediation, e.g., by receiving the sacraments and hearing the Gospel preached or taught. But we receive the sacraments in the Church and we hear the Gospel preached or taught only where we hear an authorized preacher, i.e., one sent by God, i.e., in the Church. Therefore, God has ordained that the normal way for human beings to receive the graces requisite for heaven is through a human community, i.e., the Body of Christ. 18. See, e.g., Confessions book v, chapter iv. 19. ST IaIIae. q. 2, a. 8. 20. Ibid . 21. Note here that the claim is merely that, by nature, we desire perfect goodness. We may, of course, desire something that doesn’t exist. Although it might give us pause to believe that there is a nearuniversal (i.e., natural) desire that has no actual object. 22. ST Ia. q. 13, a. 2. See also ST Ia. q. 4, a. 2. 23. ST IaIIae. q. 4, a. 8. 24. ST IaIIae. q. 2, a. 8. 25. See, e.g., ST IaIIae. q. 3, a. 8. 26. Aquinas’s favorite Scripture passages come from the Johannian corpus, e.g., 1 John 3:2. 27. See, e.g., Phaedrus 247c–e. 28. Lectura super Evangelium S. Joannis , caput ii, lec. 1, n. 337 (translated by James Weisheipl [Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1980]). I consulted the e-text at www.diafrica.org/kenny/CDtexts/SSJohn.htm. 29. Ibid . 30. Ibid . 31. Ibid . 32. Aquinas believes that the angels too constitute a part of the Church Triumphant. See, e.g., ST IIIa. q. 8, a. 4. 33. In Ephesians , caput iv, lec. 1 (translated by Matthew Lamb [Albany, NY: Magi, 1966], 154). 34. Exposition of the Apostles’ Creed , ninth article (in The Three Greatest Prayers: Commentaries on the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Apostles’ Creed , translated by Laurence Shapcote [London: Burns, 1937], 76). 35. Ibid ., 78–79. 36. Ibid ., 87. 37. Ibid ., 88. These thoughts are also echoed in a prayer attributed to St. Thomas entitled “For the Attainment of Heaven.” Consider the following lines from that prayer: “O most bountiful Rewarder, endow my body / with beauty of splendor, / with swift responsiveness to all commands, / with complete subservience to the spirit, / and with freedom from all vulnerability. / Add to these / an abundance of Your riches, / a river of delights, / and a flood of other goods / So that I may enjoy / Your solace above me, / a delightful garden beneath my feet, / the glorification of body and soul within me, / and the sweet companionship of men and angels around me” ( The Aquinas Prayer Book, translated and edited by Robert Anderson and Johann Moser [Manchester: Sophia Institute Press], 53–55]). 38. SCG IV Ch. 50, n. 10 (translated by Charles J. O’Neil [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press], 214). I discovered this passage reading Henri de Lubac’s (1988). The work is a wonderful mediation on the centrality of a social conception of human beings in the primary sources of the Catholic Christian tradition.

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Page 247 39. For additional argument and textual support for the thesis that Aquinas has a thoroughgoing communal conception of heaven, see John Finnis (1998), 327–334. 40. In ST IaIIae. q. 4, a. 6, Aquinas talks about x’s being antecedently required for y. So, for example, he says that the perfection of the body is required for happiness antecedently , since one couldn’t fully enjoy the vision of God if one’s body were in a condition such that it brought forth desires incompatible with reason. This seems to mean that perfection of the body is required as a preamble or necessary prerequisite of perfect happiness. Thus, I take required antecedently and required as a preamble to mean the same thing for Aquinas. 41. See, e.g., ST IaIIae. q. 4, a. 8. 42. See, e.g., ST IaIIae. q. 2, a. 6. 43. See, e.g., ST IaIIae. q. 3, a. 5. 44. ST IaIIae. q. 4, a. 8. 45. See Discussion at Tusculum (V) in Cicero: On the Good Life , translated by Michael Grant (London: Penguin, 1971), 63–65. 46. See, e.g., ST Suppl. q. 93, a. 1. Since Aquinas never finished ST , some of his disciples added a supplement to it which consists of edited passages from Aquinas’s earlier Commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences. I cite from the Supplement here and elsewhere for the purposes of ease of reference. 47. Ibid . At ST IIIa. q. 1, a. 4, Aquinas says that greater is said in two ways: x can be greater than y intensively , as one instance of whiteness might be said to be more intense than another, or x can be greater than y extensively, as this surface might be greater in whiteness than that surface because this surface is larger than that surface. 48. Ibid . Aquinas repeats this argument in SCG IV Ch. 79 n. 11 and in CT, Ch. 151. That Aquinas comes to think this argument unsound by the time he writes the ST provides some good evidence for the view that CT is not contemporaneous with ST (as was once thought) but is rather contemporaneous with the earlier SCG . 49. ST IaIIae. q. 4, a. 5, ob. 2. See also the first objection. 50. ST IaIIae. q. 4, a. 5, ad 2. See also the answer to the first objection. 51. ST IaIIae. q. 4, a. 8. 52. ST IaIIae. q. 4, a. 5, ad 4. 53. Elsewhere Aquinas explains how having a body will extend one’s vision of God: “Corporeal things … serve man in two ways, first, as sustenance to his bodily life, secondly, as helping him to know God, inasmuch as man sees the invisible things of God by the things that are made (Rom i. 20). . . . [M]an will not need the second service as to intellective knowledge, since by that knowledge he will see God immediately in His essence. The carnal eye, however, will be unable to attain to this vision of the Essence; wherefore that it may be fittingly comforted in the vision of God, it will see the Godhead in Its corporeal effects, wherein manifest proofs of the Divine majesty will appear, especially in Christ’s flesh, and secondarily in the bodies of the blessed, and afterwards in all other bodies” ( ST Suppl. q. 91, a. 1). The passage is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it offers another instance of Aquinas’s view that God’s being the sole source of human happiness does not thereby preclude an awareness of things other than God on the part of the blessed. Second, it suggests that the blessed can enjoy God in a number of different ways in heaven: not only by way of a direct intellectual intuition of the essence of God, but also indirectly, by way of seeing the beauty of God reflected in the things that God has made, e.g., Christ’s flesh, the agile bodies of the blessed, the stars. Cf. CT Ch. 170. 54. See, e.g., ST IaIIae. q. 5, a. 2 and ST Ia. q. 12, a. 6.

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Page 248 55. See, e.g., ST Ia. q. 12, a. 6. 56. Dante, Paradiso VI, lines 112–126 (translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander [New York: Doubleday, 2007]. 57. See also Piccarda’s speech to Dante in Paradiso III, lines 64–90. 58. See, e.g., ST IaIIae. q. 4, a. 8, ad 3. 59. ST IIIa. q. 1. 60. ST IIIa. q. 1, a. 2. 61. This sense of ‘necessity’ seems to be the same as the following sense of ‘necessity’ discussed previously: x’s being required for y as a preamble or x’s being antecedently required for y. 62. The argument was suggested to me by a comment that Aquinas makes in the Commentary on the Sentences: “The carnal eye, however, will be unable to attain to this vision of the [divine] Essence; wherefore that it may be fittingly comforted in the vision of God, it will see the Godhead in Its corporeal effects, wherein manifest proofs of the Divine majesty will appear” ( ST Suppl. q. 91, a. 1; emphasis mine). See note 53 for the context. 63. ST IaIIae. q. 4, a. 8, ad 3. 64. Maritain (1966), 21–22. 65. In Sent. II, d. 26, 1. ad 2 (quoted in Maritain, 1966, 22). 66. ST IIIa. q. 60, a. 3. 67. I am especially grateful to the following people for providing comments on earlier drafts of this paper: Kevin Timpe, Merry Brown, Bryan Cross, Fiona Grooms, Mark Barker, Richard Cain, John G. Trapani, Jr. and the participants at the 2008 American Maritain Conference.

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Page 249 Bibliography Adams, Marilyn McCord (2006). Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ———(1999). Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). ———(1993). “The Problem of Hell.” In Reasoned Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology in Honor of Norman Kretzmann, edited by Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press): 301–327. ———(1990). “Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God.” In The Problem of Evil , edited by Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert Merrihew Adams (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 209–221. Adams, Robert Merrihew (1999). Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press). ———(1994). Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (New York: Oxford University Press). Anselm (2007). Cur Deus Homo. In Anselm: Basic Writings, edited and translated by Thomas Williams (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett). ———(1998). Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, edited by Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Baker, Lynne Rudder (2008). “The Irrelevance of the Consequence Argument.” Analysis 68.1: 13–22. ———(2006). “Moral Responsibility without Libertarianism.” Noûs 40: 307–330. ———(2003). “Why Christians Should Not Be Libertarians: An Augustinian Challenge.” Faith and Philosophy 20: 460–478. Blackburn, Simon (1993). “Errors and the Phenomenology of Value.” In Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 149–165. Boethius (1999). The Consolation of Philosophy: Revised Edition , translated by Victor Watts (London: Victor Penguin Classics). Brown, Christopher (2007). “Souls, Ships, and Substances: A Response to Toner.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 81.4: 655–668. ———(2005). Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus: Solving Puzzles about Material Objects (New York: Continuum). Bultmann, Rudolf (1984). New Testament and Mythology by Rudolf Bultmann, edited and translated by Schubert Ogden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). Camus, Albert (1991). The Plague , translated by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books). Chandlish, John (1968). “St. Thomas and the Dynamic State of Body Constituents.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Applied Sciences 23: 272–275. Chisholm, Roderick (1976). Person and Object: A Metaphysical Study (London: Allen and Unwin).

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Page 251 Geach, Peter (1969). God and the Soul , 2nd ed. (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press). Hall, Ned, L. A. Paul, and John Collins, eds. (2004). Causation and Conditionals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Hare, John (2007a). God and Morality (Oxford: Blackwell). ———(2007b). “Prescriptive Realism.” In Realism and Religion, edited by Andrew Moore and Michael Scott (Aldershott: Ashgate): 83–101. ———(2001). God’s Call (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans). Hare, R. M. (1999). Objective Prescriptions (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ———(1997). Sorting Out Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Harris, James (2002). Analytic Philosophy of Religion (New York: Springer). Hasker, William (2004). “Analytic Philosophy of Religion.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, edited by William Wainwright (New York: Oxford University Press): 421–446. ———(2002). “The Absence of a Timeless God.” In God and Time: Essays on the Divine Nature , edited by Greg Ganassle and David Woodruff (New York: Oxford University Press): 182–206. ———(1989). God, Time, and Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). ———(1988). “Yes, God Has Beliefs!” Religious Studies 24: 385–394. Hershenov, David and Rose Koch-Hershenov (2006). “Personal Identity and Purgatory.” Religious Studies 42: 439–451. Hitchens, Christopher (1995). The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (New York: Verso). Howard-Snyder, Daniel and Paul K. Moser, eds. (2002). Divine Hiddenness: New Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Hunt, David (2009). “The Providential Advantage of Divine Foreknowledge.” In Arguing about Religion, edited by Kevin Timpe (New York: Routledge): 374–385. Hume, David (1978). A Treatise on Human Nature , edited by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Jackson, Frank (1982). “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127–136. Jordan, Jeff (2004). “Divine Love and Human Suffering.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 56: 169–178. Kane, Robert (2005). A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (New York: Oxford University). ———(1996). The Significance of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press). Kenny, Anthony (1993). Aquinas on Freedom (London: Routledge). ———(1969). “Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom.” In Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Anthony Kenny (Garden City, NY: Double-day-Anchor): 255–270. Kim, Jaegwon (1984). “Concepts of Supervenience.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45: 153–177. ———(1976). “Events as Property-Exemplifications.” In Action Theory , edited by Myles Brand and Douglas Walton (Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel): 159–177. Kolodny, Niko (2003). “Love as Valuing a Relationship.” The Philosophical Review 112: 135–189. Kretzmann, Norman (1991a). “A General Problem of Creation: Why Would God Create Anything at All?” In Being and Goodness: The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology , edited by Scott MacDonald (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press): 208–228. ———(1991b). “A Particular Problem of Creation: Why Would God Create Anything at All?” In Being and Goodness: The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics

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Page 253 Mother Teresa (2007). Come Be My Light, edited with commentary by B. Kolodiejchuk (New York: Doubleday). Parfit, Derek (1971). “Personal Identity.” The Philosophical Review 80: 3–27. Pasnau, Robert (2005). “Review of Stump’s Aquinas .” Mind 114: 203–206. ———(2002). Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Pieper, Josef (1998). Happiness and Contemplation, translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press). Pike, Nelson (1965). “Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action.” Philosophical Review 74: 27–46. Plantinga, Alvin (2003). Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ———(1994). “A Christian Life Partly Lived.” In Philosophers Who Believe, edited by Kelly James Clark (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press): 45–82. ———(1967). God and Other Minds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Potts, Michael (1998). “Aquinas, Hell, and the Resurrection of the Damned.” Faith and Philosophy 15.3: 341–351. Prior, Arthur (1968). Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ———(1962). “The Formalities of Omniscience.” Philosophy 37: 114–129. Rawls, John (1971). A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Rogers, Katherin (1994). “Eternity Has No Duration.” Religious Studies 30: 1–16. Ross, James F. (2001). “Together with the Body I Love.” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 75: 1–18. Ross, W. D. (1930). The Right and The Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Rowe, William (2004). Can God Be Free? (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Schellenberg, J. L. (1993). Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Sennett, James F., ed. (1998). The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.). Smith, Quentin (2001). “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism.” Philo 4.2: www. philoonline.org/library/smith_4_2.htm. Stump, Eleonore (forthcoming). Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering . ———(2009). “The Problem of Evil: Analytic Philosophy and Narrative.” In Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology , edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Michael Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 251–264. ———(2008). “The Problem of Evil and the Desires of the Heart.” In Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, edited by Jonathan Kvanvig (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 196–215. ———(2006a). “Resurrection, Reassembly, and Reconstitution: Aquinas on the Soul.” In Die menschliche Seele: Brauchen wir den Dualismus? edited by Bruno Niederbacher and Edmund Runggaldier (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag): 151–171. ———(2006b). “Love, by All Accounts.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 80: 25–43. ———(2003). Aquinas (New York: Routledge). ———(2001). “Faith and the Problem of Evil.” In Seeking Understanding: The Stob Lectures, 1986–1998 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company): 494–550. ———(2000). “Francis and Dominic: Persons, Patterns, and Trinity.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 74: 1–25.

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Page 254 ———(1995). “Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism and Materialism Without Reductionism.” Faith and Philosophy 12: 505–531. ———(1993). “Introduction.” In Reasoned Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology in Honor of Norman Kretzmann, edited by Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press): 1–11. ———(1990). “Providence and the Problem of Evil.” In Christian Philosophy , edited by Thomas P. Flint (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press): 51–91. ———(1989). “Atonement and Justification.” In Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement , edited by Ronald Feestra and Cornelius Plantinga (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press): 178–209. ———(1986). “Dante’s Hell, Aquinas’s Theory of Morality, and the Love of God.” The Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16: 181–198. ———(1985). “The Problem of Evil.” Faith and Philosophy 2: 392–423. ———(1978). Boethius’s De topicis differentiis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Stump, Eleonore and Norman Kretzmann (1992). “Eternity, Awareness, and Action.” Faith and Philosophy 9: 463–482. ———(1985). “Absolute Simplicity.” Faith and Philosophy 2: 353–382. ———(1981). “Eternity.” The Journal of Philosophy 78: 429–458. Swinburne, Richard (2005). “The Value and Christian Roots of Analytical Philosophy of Religion.” In Faith and Philosophical Analysis: The Impact of Analytical Philosophy on the Philosophy of Religion, edited by Harriet A. Harris and Christopher J. Insole (Burlington, VT: Ashgate): 33–45. ———(1983). “A Theodicy of Heaven and Hell.” In The Existence and Nature of God , edited by Alfred J. Freddoso (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press): 37–54. Talbott, Thomas (1990). “The Doctrine of Everlasting Punishment.” Faith and Philosophy 7.1: 19–42. Tilley, Terrance (1991). The Evils of Theodicy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press). Timpe, Kevin (2007a). “Truthmaking and Divine Eternity.” Religious Studies 43: 299–315. ———(2007b). “Grace and Controlling What We Do Not Cause.” Faith and Philosophy 24.3: 284–299. Toner, Patrick (2007). “Thomas Versus Tibbles: A Critical Study of Christopher Brown’s Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus. ” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 81.4: 639–653. Torrell, Jean-Pierre (2003). Saint Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master , translated by Robert Royal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press). ———(1996). Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work, translated by Robert Royal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press). Unger, Peter (1990). Identity, Consciousness, and Value (New York: Oxford University Press). van Fraassen, Bas (2002). The Empirical Stance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). van Inwagen, Peter (2006). The Problem of Evil (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ———(2004). “A Theory of Properties.” In Oxford Studies in Metaphysics vol. 1, edited by Dean Zimmerman (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 107–138. ———(1990). Material Beings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Velleman, J. David (1999). “Love as a Moral Emotion.” Ethics 109: 338–374. Visser, Sandra and Thomas Williams (2008). Anselm (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

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Page 255 Williams, Thomas (2005). “Aquinas in Dialogue with Contemporary Philosophy: Eleonore Stump’s Aquinas. ” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 79.3: 483–491. Wolter, Allan (1977). Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press). Wolterstorff, Nicholas (1991). “The Remembrance of Things (Not) Past: Philosophical Reflections on Christian Liturgy.” In Christian Philosophy , edited by Thomas Flint (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press): 118–161. Zimmerman, Dean (2007). “Three Introductory Questions.” In Persons: Human and Divine , edited by Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 1–32.

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Page 257 Contributors Lynne Rudder Baker is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her most recent book is The Metaphysics of Everyday Life: An Essay on Practical Ontology (Cambridge University Press). Christopher Brown is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He is the author of Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus: Solving Puzzles about Material Objects (Continuum). Jason Eberl is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He is the author of Thomistic Principles and Bioethics (Routledge). John Fischer is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of California, Riverside, where he holds a UC Presidential Chair. His most recent book is My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility (Oxford). Thomas Flint is Professor of Philosophy and former director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Cornell University Press). John Hare is the Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School. Among his many books are God and Morality (Blackwell) and The Moral Gap (Oxford). Jonathan L. Kvanvig is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University. He is the editor of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion (Oxford); his Destiny and Decisions: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion is forthcoming in 2010. Brian Leftow is the Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oriel College, Oxford. He has written and edited numerous

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Page 258 books, including Time and Eternity (Cornell) and Aquinas on Metaphysics (Oxford). William E. Mann is Marsh Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at the University of Vermont. He is the editor of The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion. Timothy O’Connor is Professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at Indiana University. His most recent book is Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of Contingency (WileyBlackwell). C. P. Ragland is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. He has published a number of articles on Descartes, free will, grace, and hell, and is co-editor of What is Philosophy (Yale). Michael C. Rea is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including Analytic Theology: New Essays in Theological Method (with Oliver Crisp, Oxford) and Oxford Readings in Philosophical Theology (2 vols., Oxford). Thomas Senor is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Arkansas. He is the editor of The Rationality of Belief & the Plurality of Faith (Cornell) and has published widely in epistemology and philosophy of religion. Kevin Timpe is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego. He is the author of Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives (Continuum) and the editor of Arguing about Religion (Routledge). Peter van Inwagen is John Cardinal O’Hara Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Problem of Evil (Oxford) and Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil (Eerdmans). Theodore R. Vitali CP is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Saint Louis University. He has published on the ontological argument, theodicy, and the ethics of hunting.

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Page 259 Index A ability to do otherwise, the 21, 25, 28, 107, 112, 125–128, 130–131, 134, 136, 138–139; See also principle of alternative possibilities, the abstract objects (abstract entities, abstracta ) 5–13, 16–19, 30, 40; free 7–9, 18 Adams, Robert Merrihew 64, 69, 74 annihilation 99, 207, 210–217, 219 Anselm of Canterbury 97–110 Aquinas, Thomas 3, 14, 21–36, 53, 129, 143–144, 146–151, 153–155, 157–158, 1601–62, 164–169, 188–202, 210–212, 214–215, 225–244 Aristotle 33, 73, 129, 148, 152, 154, 188, 200, 210, 225, 229, 235–236, 243 aspatiality, divine 47, 50–51, 53–53 Atemporalism 129–130, 134, 138 atemporality, divine 21, 26, 28, 35, 39–45, 48–49, 51–58, 129–130, 134, 138 Augustine 4, 14, 21, 152, 229, 230, 236 B Basic Argument for the Incompatibility of God’s Omniscience and Human Freedom 128–135, 138–139 Bergmann, Michael 136–137 biblical studies xvii, xviii Blackburn, Simon 149 body 61, 188–198, 200–201, 228, 233–235, 237–239, 241–242 Boethius 14, 40, 129, 195, 229 C Camus, Albert 175, 179–182 capacities 71, 127, 199; human 189, 196, 198, 200–201, 212 causation 18–19, 33, 41, 113, 116–117, 119–120, 124–126 Christ 92–93, 193, 195, 200–201, 231–232, 234, 239–240, 242, 244 Christianity 97, 112, 114, 175–176, 181 Church, the 232–234, 240, 242–245; as body of Christ 234, 239, 242; as bride of Christ 234; Roman Catholic 169 Cicero 225, 229, 236–237 Coakley, Sarah 78, 92–93 coexistence 45–47 compassion 84, 86, 88, 184–186, 214 compatibilism 128, 132, 136–137, 167–170. See also Multiple Past Compatibilism composition without identity 196, 202 compulsion 73, 209, 217 concurrentism 114–125 conditional necessity 23, 27–30, 32 conservation 113–119, 123, 125 counterfactuals of freedom 112–113, 124, 126, 132, 135, 138 creation 3–6, 8, 11, 19, 26, 32, 46, 55, 58, 62–63, 66–67, 69–70, 86, 108, 112–118, 120, 122–123, 165–166, 183 criteria and meaning 150, 154–155 Cur Deus Homo 97, 99, 101, 106–107, 110 D damnation 97, 102, 107, 206–209, 217–218

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Page 260 Dante 206–208, 211–213, 216–217, 220–221, 240 De Casu Diaboli 101 death 97, 181, 188–193, 196–202, 210, 212–213, 238 deism 85, 113 Descartes 3 desires, agent-centered 68, 70 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 175–176, 179, 181–183, 185–186 Durandus, William 114 E Enlightenment 182 essence, divine 21–22, 29, 36, 62, 231, 236–241, 243 ET-simultaneity 43–45, 47, 49–53 evil 71–72, 86–87, 102, 145–146, 151, 157–159, 161, 170–171, 175, 212 , 214, 216. See also problem of evil, the F fittingness 97–110; most 101–105, 107, 109 Fixity of the Past Principle 137–138 Flint, Thomas 127, 132–135 foreknowledge, divine 55, 128, 131–133, 136–138, 220–221 forgiveness 99–100, 162 formal cause 189 Frankfurt, Harry 62–64, 66–68, 71–73, 113, 161 Freddoso, Alfred 115–116 free knowledge 112, 127, 138 free will 22, 55, 132, 164–165, 167–170, 207–208 freedom of action 63 friendship 61, 162, 234–240, 242–245 G God, as perfect being 60, 65, 194; as creator 4, 11, 16–19, 41, 51 68, 99, 186 218–219, 226, 229, 231, 236 goodness 146–148, 150–155, 211–215, 220, 226, 230–231, 239; divine 23, 29, 34–36, 60, 65, 68, 71–72, 86, 91; human 146–147, 226, 229; moral 143, 146–147, 152–153, 164, 236 grace 69, 164–165, 168–170, 220–221, 231, 239–240, 242, 244 gratuitous evil 85–86, 158 greater goods 77–78, 84–85, 87, 163, 212 H habit (habituation) 210, 217, 219, 228 happiness 182, 184, 217–218, 222, 225–231, 233–245 hard facts 130–131, 137–138 Hare, R. M. 143–144, 148–151, 153–155 harm 216, 218–219 Hasker, William 40, 47–51, 53–56, 58, 133–135 hell 193, 206–222; as rehabilitation 207, 221 hiddenness, divine 76–80, 84, 87–88 human. See rational soul human being. See human person human freedom 71, 125, 127–129, 131–133, 136–138, 182, 208, 219. See also free will human nature 103, 107, 146, 153, 182, 188, 190, 192, 195, 197, 207, 212–213, 219–220, 232, 244

human persons 82, 158–159, 161–164, 169, 182, 188, 191, 193, 196, 214, 225 human species 179, 189, 194 Hume, David 66, 175 I immortality 188–189 Incarnation, the 97, 242 incompatibilism 128, 131–132, 136–138, 208. See also libertarianism individual substance 195, 197 intellect, divine 66–67, 72 internal integration 161–165, 168. See also wholeheartedness isolation 82, 159, 185, 233 J Jackson, Frank 159 Job 89–90, 160, 165–166, 170–171, 184 justice, divine 207 justification 164–165, 168–170 K Kenny, Anthony 39, 42–44 Kim, Jaegwon 14, 35–36, 143–246, 148–150, 153, 155 knowledge, divine 42, 45, 47–50, 55, 108, 112–113, 127, 132, 134; non-propositional 89–90

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Page 261 Kretzmann, Norman 39–40, 49, 58 L Leibniz, Gottfried 63–64, 66–68 Lewis, C.S. 207–211, 213, 217–218, 221–222 Lewis, David 117–118, 206 libertarianism 107–108, 112–113, 125–126, 166–170, 210, 222. See also incompatibilism liturgy 92–93, 244 love, divine 60–63, 66, 69, 71–73, 85, 162, 166, 170–171, 207–208, 211–213, 217–219, 222; perfect 84, 86, 185 M Maritain, Jacques 243 matter 121, 189–192, 194, 196, 198–199 mercy killing 214, 216 mereological essentialism 191 metaphysical entailment 120–125, 146, 151, 155 middle knowledge 108, 112–113, 115, 122, 124–126, 127–128, 130–135, 138. See also Molina, Luis de; Molinism miserliness 65, 68–69 Mitchell, Basil xviii, 39 modal collapse 105–108, 110 Molina, Luis de 112, 127, 130, 134. See also middle knowledge; Molinism Molinism 112, 127–128, 130–135, 138–139. See also middle knowledge; Molina, Luis de Monologion 108–109 Moore, G. E. 144–146, 150, 154 moral responsibility 113–114, 118, 123, 127–129, 169, 196 Multiple-Pasts Compatibilism 128, 130–132, 136, 138; See also compatibilism N narrative 78, 89–93, 157–158, 160, 165–166, 170 natural knowledge 112, 127–128, 131, 133–135, 138 Nicene Creed, the 3–4, 7–8, 19 numerical identity 195, 198 O occasionalism 114, 118, 120, 122–126 Ockham, William of 33 Ockhamism 128–132, 134, 138 P Pasnau, Robert 167, 188–189, 192–193, 201–202 Paul, St. 195, 210, 232, 239–244 Pelagianism 168–170 personhood 41, 182, 199, 209, 216, 218, 22 philosophical theology 58, 68 Plantinga, Alvin xviii, xix, 39 Plato 18, 62, 65–66, 72, 210, 217, 231 possible worlds, best of all 64–65, 69 power, divine 3–4, 21, 25, 32, 70, 114, 118, 120, 122, 125–126, 128, 171, 180–181, 189–190, 207,

212, 219 powers. See capacities prayer 41, 193, 196, 202prescriptivism 149 presence, divine 44–48, 51–53, 56–57, 76, 78, 80–81, 83, 88–93 principle of alternative possibilities 112, 126; See also ability to do otherwise, the principle of non-contradiction 65 principle of sufficient reason 64 problem of evil, the 71, 76, 78, 157–158, 175–176, 179, 185–186 properties 5, 8–12, 14–16, 18, 22, 30–32, 34–35, 46, 48, 55, 57–58, 144–151, 199; Aristote-lian view of 8, 10–12 propositions 5–7, 11–17, 19, 23, 129, 131, 134 providence, divine 62, 112, 122, 127–128, 130–132, 139, 166, 181, 184–186 psychic disintegration 220 psychic integration 217–218 psychic remains 207, 213–214, 216–218, 222 purgatory 208, 221–222 R rational animal 197–198, 200–201, 210–211, 239, 243 rational soul 188–190, 195, 198–201 Rawls, John 153 reciprocation 61, 72–73 redemption 98, 164, 211 religious experience 76–81, 83, 87–88, 158

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Page 262 repentance 162, 209, 213, 219–222 representationalism 48, 53, 58 resurrection 188–190, 192, 195–196, 200, 202, 237–239, 241 S sanctification 164–165, 168, 178 satisficing 68 Scotus, Duns 21, 143, 151–155 second nature 150, 212–213, 220 second-person account 90, 157–158, 165–167, 170 second-person experience 90–91, 157–160, 162–163, 165–166, 170 separated soul 189, 192–193, 195–197, 199, 201–202, 238 separation thesis (will and intellect) 66–67, 72 silence, divine 78, 80–88, 93 Simple Foreknowledge 128. See also foreknowledge, divine simplicity, divine 21, 23, 28–29, 34, 36, 66–68, 161 soft facts 130 solidarity 177–178, 182, 185 sovereignty, divine 119, 121–122 Stoicism 229, 236 Stump, Eleonore xvii–xx, 29–34, 36, 39–40, 49, 58, 78, 89–91, 143–144, 146–149, 151, 157–171, 188, 191, 193, 196, 201–202, 207, 211–222 substantial being 195–196 substantial form 147, 188–189, 191–192, 197, 199–200 substantial identity 191, 199 suffering 4–5, 77–78, 83–88, 90, 93, 97–98, 157–160, 165–166, 169–171, 175–182, 184–186, 206– 207, 210–211, 214, 216–218, 220 suicide 185, 219 supervenience 143–145, 147–151, 153–155; global 145; strong 143, 145–147, 149, 155; weak 143, 145–146, 149, 155 Swinburne, Richard 5, 207, 209–211, 213, 217–219, 222 T theodicy 89–91, 158–159, 165–166, 177, 181, 207–208, 215–216. See also problem of evil, the Theological Fatalism 128 theology, Christian 45, 186, 206 thoughts in the mind of God 11–16 timelessness, divine. See atemporality, divine truthmakers 33–34 U ultimate end 168, 227–228. See also happiness universalism 215, 222 universals ( universalia) 8, 11–12, 17–18, 34 V virtue 73, 84–85, 98, 145, 152, 227–228, 230, 235–236, 240 volition, divine 21–23, 28–29, 31–33, 36 vulnerability 61, 68, 72–73, 163 W wholeheartedness 161–162, 217

will, the 21–23, 63, 66, 72–73, 153–155, 158, 161–162, 164–165, 167–170, 188, 208–209, 212, 229, 231; divine 22, 29–34, 36, 63, 66–67, 112, 116, 127, 153, 231. See also free will Wolterstorff, Nicholas 91–92

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