Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 212 - Like Father, Like Son - Debating the Trinity.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London, the LMU in Munich, and Riese's Peanut Butter Cups online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Like Father, Like Son – Debating the Trinity. I don't know if you're familiar with Riese's peanut butter cups. They were nearly invented in the 19th century by George Washington Carver, who was credited with the idea of peanut butter itself. Amazingly, he stopped there, rather than taking the next natural step of coating a small puck of peanut butter in chocolate and wrapping the result in luridly orange plastic. As Dirk Gently said, it takes a genius to render the previously non-existent obvious, and in this case, the genius in question was H.B. Riese, who devised the peanut butter cup in 1928. When I was a kid, they were marketed with commercials that are emblazoned upon my memory. At a cinema, a boy is eating a chocolate bar and a girl is enjoying peanut butter straight from the jar, as one does at the movies. Both jump at the horror movie playing on screen with the result that the chocolate lands in the peanut butter. The result? Surprisingly delicious. They turn out to be, as the 1970s tagline put it, two tastes that taste great together. Why am I bothering you with this? This episode isn't really being brought to you by Hershey, the maker of Riese's peanut butter cups, though if they'd like to send me a year's supply in thanks for their free publicity, that wouldn't go amiss. Rather, my thinking is that debates over the Trinity were the Riese's peanut butter cup of medieval philosophy. Some have a taste for the rational inquiry of philosophy, others for their revelatory truth claims of religion. Many assume that the two don't mix, that they are like oil and vinegar. But they turn out to be more like chocolate and peanut butter, two tastes that taste great together. Anti-Christians were convinced that they could find evidence for God's Trinitarian nature in the Bible. Augustine's On the Trinity devotes several books to the scriptural basis of the doctrine, which is, of course, central to Christian theology. But Augustine goes on to show in his On the Trinity that the conceptual tools of philosophy can help us see how it is possible for one and the same substance to be three persons. The core of the Trinitarian dogma is the claim that the three divine persons differ from one another while being the same God. But what does this mean? A first thought might be that each thing is the same as itself and different from any other thing. This makes the Trinitarian doctrine look problematic. But further reflection will show that there are many ways of being the same or different. For instance, the Marx brothers were four things, so not the same as each other in every respect, but they were the same in respect of being human. The problem of universals, which we looked at a few episodes back, is really just the difficulty of how things are able to share this sort of sameness. Then there is the problem of sameness over time. Am I the same as the boy who watched those Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercials? That boy was different in many ways. More hair, but less interest in philosophy, albeit that an enthusiasm for peanut butter cups has remained undiminished through the years. Or what about a thing and its parts? Is a peanut butter cup the same as its peanut butter center plus its chocolate coating? It may seem so, but consider that in that case anything that loses a part of itself would cease to be the same thing. Do I really make a peanut butter cup no longer the same thing by taking a bite out of it? Or make myself no longer the same thing by trimming my fingernails? As we can already see then, consideration of the Trinity leads directly to fundamental issues in metaphysics. The same is true for epistemology. While Christians did invoke passages in the Bible to support their Trinitarian doctrine, they were also tempted to think that human reasoning can establish God's triune nature without any help from revelation. Anselm already made a case for this in his Monologion. In the 12th century, a number of thinkers went so far as to say that pagan philosophers had reached an understanding of God's Trinity even before the time of Christ. Yet medieval thinkers frequently hastened to remind us that God lies beyond the grasp of reason. This might seem to apply especially to the mysterious, even paradoxical notion that he is somehow three despite being one and even simple. The Trinity duly became a kind of litmus test for how far medieval thought that reason can take us in understanding God. It was a test that Peter Abelard failed, according to Bernard of Clairvaux. When Bernard and his allies summoned Abelard to the city of Sainz to face trial in the year 1141, the accusations concerned his teaching on the Trinity. Bernard wrote to the Pope about Abelard, He is ready to give reasons for everything, even for those things which are above reason. Bernard had been alerted to the offensive nature of Abelard's teaching by William of Saint-Héry, who had compiled a list of his erroneous claims in theology. Abelard had differentiated the divine persons in terms of their distinctive properties, ascribing power especially to the Father, wisdom especially to the Son, and love especially to the Holy Spirit. William and Bernard took exception to the suggestion that the persons were not equal in respect of power and wisdom. For Bernard, Abelard also placed too little emphasis on the role of grace in human redemption. He seemed to suggest that Christ was merely an ethical example for us to follow. This goes well with Abelard's moral teaching and his claim that virtue involves forming the right intentions which lie wholly within our power. Unfortunately, at least in Bernard's opinion, it didn't go so well with Christianity. Abelard was coming dangerously close to Pelagianism, the heretical doctrine that humans can merit salvation without divine grace. Abelard refused to answer to his critics at Sainz, instead appealing to the Pope. But Bernard prevailed when the Pope took his side. Abelard was excommunicated, confined to a monastery, and forced to burn his writings on theology with his own hands. Eventually, Bernard and Abelard were reconciled, and the Pope lifted the excommunication, but the damage was done. Abelard later recalled the episode as a humiliation worse in some respects than his earlier castration. In the longer run, though, these events have done more harm to Bernard's reputation than to Abelard's. Historians of philosophy, like me, tend to see him as an anti-rationalist and pig-headed obscurantist, incapable of appreciating the subtlety of Abelard's superior mind. It doesn't help that Bernard evidently didn't bother to examine Abelard's works for himself, largely just following the accusations of William of Saint-Héry. Worse still, Bernard was a repeat offender. He went on to make accusations against another of the leading philosophers of the era, Gilbert of Poitiers, and succeeded in getting Gilbert to recant some of his theological claims. There's an important lesson here. If you want historians of philosophy to look kindly upon you, be kind to philosophers. But Bernard of Clavaux was far more than an anti-philosopher. It's appropriate that his preaching played a role in the launching of the Second Crusade in 1146, because he was nothing if not a crusader. He was a leading member of the reformist Cistercian order, distinguished by their white clothing and strict observance. The name Cistercian comes from the Latin name of the city of Citeau, where Bernard arrived in 1112 to join a community who followed the rule of Saint Benedict. He became a critic of other orders and communities, such as the one at Cluny, which was Abelard's first stop after his excommunication. He would spend the rest of his life there and at another Cluniac priory. The purpose of the austere Cistercian rule was of course to bring the monks closer to God. Bernard and his brethren were convinced that a rigorous, spiritual life could even provoke a direct vision of the divine, a mystical approach that contrasted sharply to the argument-based approach of the schoolmen. Bernard's devotion to monastic spirituality and his critique of Abelard and others for what he saw as vainglorious abuse of reason did not mean that he was wholly opposed to the intellectual tools provided by the secular liberal arts. The historian G. R. Evans has written that Bernard was Abelard had strayed into errors. Bernard and William of Saint-Hervie worried that those errors might be passed on to other, simpler believers who did not have the tools to diagnose where Abelard had gone wrong. Before we get too indignant on Abelard's behalf, we should also bear in mind that he attacked his own teacher, Roscelin, for, wait for it, an erroneous teaching on the Trinity. Following the account of names he found in classical works on grammar, Roscelin assumed that, if the divine persons have three different names, they must be not one but three things. Abelard attacked this assumption, turning against Roscelin his own strategy of distinguishing the level of words from the level of things. The persons cannot be different things, as Roscelin claimed. That would be to fall into the heresy of tritheism, a belief in three gods rather than one. Rather, Abelard argued, the persons differ in respect of their properties, like the father's power as opposed to the son's wisdom. Hence, the accusation Bernard leveled at Abelard that he failed to acknowledge the equality of the persons in respect of power and wisdom. But if God really is one and not three, how can he have different properties from himself? To deal with this question, Abelard developed a systematic account of how things are the same as and different from each other. He wasn't the first to do this. Aristotle and his followers had already distinguished between various sorts of sameness and difference. The most obvious way of being the same is to be numerically the same. For instance, you are numerically the same as yourself. This means that if we count, we find that there is only one thing here, whereas if we counted you and me, we would have two things, In other words, you and I are numerically distinct people. Yet, we are still the same in other respects. We are the same in form or in species, for instance, because we are both human. So far, so sensible. The problem is that in being a trinity, God is in some sense not identical with himself, despite being numerically one. That is, when we count how many gods there are, we had better come up with the answer only one. And yet, A tempting option might be to shrug and say, what can I tell you, the trinity is a mystery, so just believe it. But of course, that is not Abelard's approach. Instead, he points out that it actually happens all the time that two things are numerically the same, yet somehow different. Imagine that you are holding a peanut butter cup, and somehow resisting the urge to pop it into your mouth. How many things would be in your hand? The answer pretty clearly is one. Yet we could differentiate within this numerically one thing between the peanut butter cup on the one hand, and on the other hand, the peanut butter and chocolate from which it is made. After all, I can say things about the ingredients that are not true of the peanut butter cup. For example, I can say that the peanut butter and chocolate are what the cup is made of, whereas I cannot say that the cup is what the cup is made of. Unfortunately, God can't be exactly like a peanut butter cup, and not only because being omnipresent, he wouldn't fit into the orange wrapper. It's also because, despite being three persons, he is simple. He has no parts. Nor can he be distinguished into matter and form, the way a peanut butter cup can be distinguished into its succulent ingredients and the delightful shape that has been imposed on them. I particularly like those little ridges on the outside. Still, we have made a step towards understanding what must be going on with the Trinity by showing that a thing can be different from itself. This will especially be the case with the Trinity, because the persons are not, as Abelard puts it, mixed with one another, the way that the properties of physical things can be. A peanut butter cup is sweet and round, so sweetness and roundness are mixed together in it. This just means that the sweet thing is round and the round thing is sweet. The persons are not like this, because they actually exclude one another. The Father begets the Son and is not begotten, so the Father is not mixed with the Son. For this reason, Abelard is in a good position to insist that his account of the Trinity doesn't just reduce to calling one thing by three names. In this case, the difference in words really does express a difference in the thing. Ripping back from the details of this philosophical account of the Trinity, we should pause to notice that it is, indeed, just that—a philosophical account of the Trinity. Abelard was boldly carrying on Anselm of Canterbury's project of applying pure reason to fundamental precepts of Christian faith. It was a trend-setting move. Christians like William of Saint-Héry and Bernard of Clavo remarked with disquiet that, thanks to Abelard, there was a trend throughout France of engaging in rational disputation over the nature of the Holy Trinity. Supporters of Abelard stepped forward to denounce his critics in terms much harsher than those you'll find in any modern-day historian of philosophy. Abelard's student, Beringar of Poitiers, delighted in mentioning Bernard's youthful indiscretions and dismissed Bernard's major commentary on the biblical Song of Songs as derivative and badly written to boot. We also have a number of anonymous treatises preserved in manuscripts, which carry on Abelard's ideas in theology as well as logic. Other anonymous authors sought to reconcile Abelard's views with the ideas found in the other main contributors to the Trinity debate in the 12th century—the Victorines. If I may belabour the central metaphor of this episode just a bit more, the Victorines took a peanut-butter-cup approach to the cultural conflict between the secular teachings of the schoolmen and the rigorous monasticism of the Cistercians. Hugh of St. Victor was the H. B. Ries of the movement, immersed as he was in the liberal arts, while also being deeply committed to a life of spiritual devotion. When he turned his attention to the Trinity, he drew heavily on Augustine's On the Trinity. Augustine had discerned a threefold structure in human thought, insofar as the mind, its act of understanding, and its desire to understand can be distinguished from one another. Hugh points out that this same structure should appear in any rational being. Since God too is rational, we can thus extrapolate from our own Trinitarian nature to God's, without necessarily needing any scriptural revelation to point us in this direction. Given his carefully orthodox and Augustinian conclusions, to say nothing of his commitment to monastic reform, Hugh's rationalist approach to the Trinity provoked no hostility from Bernard of Creveaux. To the contrary, Hugh actually contacted Bernard well before William of Saint-Héry did, expressing his own worries about Avalard's teachings on various topics. Hugh's follower, Richard of St. Victor, set out a more daring exploration of the Trinity. He carried on Hugh's rationalist approach, going so far as to complain that he has nowhere been able to find sufficient proofs of this key Christian doctrine. He admits that humans are incapable of knowing God fully, but points out that, to some extent, humans are unknowable even to themselves. Somehow, we are single beings composed of two radically different things, a physical body and an immaterial soul. This fact too must remain mysterious, but it points the way towards a similar compatibility of unity and plurality in God. Richard proceeds by establishing God's unity and simplicity first, and then arguing that God is nonetheless three persons. Divine simplicity is secured by reaffirming a claim already made by Boethius. Whereas a human can be powerful or wise, God is his power and wisdom. Furthermore, these features are really identical to one another. Despite our use of several different words, in itself God's power is just the same thing as his wisdom. This could be taken as a quiet criticism of Abelard in that Richard is applying power and wisdom to God as a whole, rather than seeing these as properties that are specially appropriate to one or another divine person. As for the multiplicity of persons, Richard provides an innovative account that revolves around the idea of God's love. In line with Anselm's famous formula that God is that in which nothing greater can be conceived, we can say that God must bear the greatest possible love towards the most perfect object, namely himself. But as Gregory the Great observed, love is ideally directed not at oneself but at another person. So God must love someone else, and this someone else must be himself, since otherwise he would not be loving the most perfect object. So that gives us a God who is two persons. We're two-thirds of the way there. Richard next makes the assumption that in perfect love, a person not only loves someone else but also desires that they love a third person. Hence the need for the Holy Spirit. It provides the Father and Son someone that they can love jointly. Richard's assumption looks suspiciously convenient, and for all his stress on providing convincing arguments he doesn't really make a strong case for it. Why does true love entail wanting the beloved to love some third person? I think one might come to his aid by giving the example of raising children. I don't want to imply that any romantic alliance that lacks children is defective or imperfect, but there is something special and fulfilling in the way that the mutual love of two parents is inextricably bound up with their love for that child. Richard hastens to add that, given God's simplicity, the difference in persons does not amount to a difference in substance. That would lead to tritheism, the accusation Abelard threw at Roscelin. Richard avoids it by drawing a distinction between the being of a substance and what he calls its existence. He calls attention to the ex part of the Latin existere. In Latin, the preposition ex means from. In light of this, we should understand existence to refer not just to something's being, but to where it came from. In the case of the Father, we have a divine person who did not come from anywhere. He exists in and from himself. By contrast, the Son comes from, or is begotten by, the Father, while the Holy Spirit comes from the Father and Son jointly. Though the entire Godhead is a single substance, the three different ways of originating distinguish the persons from one another. Though Bernard of Clairvaux probably wouldn't care to admit it, Richard's account is not all that dissimilar from Abelard's, with the three types of existence in Richard essentially playing the role Abelard assigned to the special properties of the persons. The Victorines also shared Abelard's fundamental aim of using unaided reason to explain this theological doctrine. This is why Hugh of St. Victor, like Abelard, was inclined to admit that the pre-Christian philosophers had intimations of the Trinity. Pagan thinkers like Plato were pretty good at reasoning, after all, so it's only natural to expect that they would have gotten at the truth. That expectation seemed to be confirmed by the one Platonic dialogue known to the medievals, the Timaeus. There we find Plato describing a divine creator who looks to a kind of cosmic blueprint, the forms, which could be seen as playing the role of the second person of the Trinity, or God's wisdom. This creator furthermore fashions a force of life within the cosmos, a soul of the entire universe. For Abelard, this so-called world soul was analogous to the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. Despite accusations to the contrary, neither Abelard nor his closest followers went so far as to say that Plato had fully understood the Trinity, but others were not quite so cagey. In next week's episode, we'll turn to another group of 12th century philosophers who loved Plato, poetry, and peanut butter cups. Well, maybe not peanut butter cups, but unless you're trying to establish the doctrine of the Trinity, two out of three is not bad. Next time is the so-called School of Chartres, which included some of the most intriguing philosophers of the 12th century. The intrigue starts with the question of whether this supposed school even existed. So don't miss another taste of two more tastes that taste great together. History and philosophy without any gaps.