 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 and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Virgin Territory. Peter Damian on changing the past. Suppose a Roman citizen captures a bear and brings it to the capital to be used in gladiatorial combat. Before the bear has a chance to perform, it breaks loose, runs through the streets, and kills an innocent passerby. Is the person who captured the bear liable for the death? This question was discussed by Ulpian, who wrote in the early 3rd century AD and is a major source for our knowledge of ancient law. In case you're curious, his answer is that there is no liability, since as soon as the bear escapes captivity, it reverts to its status as a wild animal. You might assume that this must have been a response to an actual event, and perhaps it was. But legal scholars did frequently work with hypothetical examples too, using imaginary scenarios to illuminate the fine points of law. This was a practice that would have been well known to the early medieval schoolmen, because they were trained in a curriculum that culminated in theology and law. Indeed, the emergence of scholasticism in the 11th and 12th centuries went hand in hand with the development of medieval law, which was deeply influenced by the Roman legal tradition. From early on in the Middle Ages, hypothetical cases were used in other areas of intellectual endeavor. Consideration of such scenarios could help to determine points of church doctrine and to clarify philosophical issues. Suppose for instance that a man has sex with a woman he mistakenly believes to be his wife. Has he committed the sin of adultery? Or suppose that the devil transforms himself so that he looks like Christ. Would a Christian who is convinced by this deception and worships the devil be committing a sin? Commenting on this phenomenon, the historian of early medieval society, Richard Southern, has remarked that, This is a fact of no small importance for the history of philosophy. A penchant for creative hypothetical reasoning is still visible in later thinkers like Descartes, as we see with his skeptical evil demon hypothesis. Nowadays, when contemporary philosophers discuss, say, a scientist named Mary who knows everything there is to know about the color red apart from what it looks like, or the possibility of zombies, physically identical copies of humans with no inner consciousness, they are unwitting heirs to an originally medieval habit of mind that in turn may have derived from Roman legal culture. All of which should help to explain why I'm going to spend this episode on the question of whether God can restore virginity to a woman after she has had sex. Clearly, this is not exactly a problem of pressing practical importance, but it led Peter Damian, a theologian of the 11th century, to contemplate the nature of God's power more generally. His reasons for doing so were theological. Yet Damian's treatment of the question touches on a fundamental philosophical issue, the nature of possibility itself. Again, this is typical of the medieval age. A love of hypothetical thought experiments goes very nicely with a conviction in the existence of an all-powerful creator. You can introduce pretty well any scenario, no matter how baroque, with the words, This sort of thing happened in the Islamic world too. It may seem that invoking God's power in this way is just a quaintly medieval way of getting at possibilities that we don't find in the actual world. After all, calling God omnipotent seems to mean just that he can do anything that can be done. The idea of a human being is a very important part of the Christian tradition. The idea of a human being is a very important part of the Christian tradition. To put this in more technical terms, omnipotence would be the capacity to bring about any possible state of affairs. From this point of view, asking whether God can do something is just a medieval way of asking whether that thing is possible. Could God, for instance, create a color without a body in which the color resides? Could he create a human the size of a mountain? Could he indeed restore virginity after it has been lost? But this overlooks alternative definitions of omnipotence. God may be so powerful that he can even do impossible things. He might, for instance, be able to create a round square to make 1 plus 1 equal 3, or make me both bald and not bald, which would be a 50% improvement over the current situation. A different opposing option would be to say that there are some things which are indeed possible, but which God cannot do. For instance, one might suppose that God cannot sin. Peter Abelard held this view, as we'll see in an upcoming interview episode. The upshot is that medieval discussions of God's power and the medieval thought experiments involving God's use of that power do tell us a lot about medieval notions of possibility, but we also need to bear in mind that the scope of God's power may be narrower, or wider, than the scope of what is possible. We especially need to bear it in mind when we look at Peter Damian's discussion of whether God can restore lost virginity. Damian is not primarily interested in clarifying the philosophical notion of possibility. His concern is rather to understand, and above all, not to disrespect, God's majestic omnipotence. He approaches the issue as a theologian, indeed as a theologian with a powerful distaste for abstract disputes with no religious motivation or foundation. His influential role in shaping the intellectual scene of the 11th century was not due to a love of dialectical inquiry, but his deep commitment to the religious life. He was born in the year 1007 in the northern Italian city of Ravenna, incidentally a major center for the study of law in the early Middle Ages. Over the coming century, the Normans would be extending their power throughout Europe. I hold all of Italy by the end of the century, and I probably don't need to tell you that William the Conqueror successfully invaded England in 1066, though I bet you didn't know that this is the same year that Peter Damian would write his discussion on God's power to restore virginity. In his early years, Damian established himself as a teacher of the liberal arts, and may also have been trained in the law. However, he retired to a monastic life, becoming prior of the Fonte of Elana monastery, and after the teaching and spiritual devotion of Vermold of Ravenna, Damian took up the cause of eremitic monasticism. This means that rather than living in a community, monks should seek isolation and live a life of individual prayer, insofar as possible. Damian himself felt the tension between this aspiration and a life helping others through preaching. Ultimately, he decided that living as a hermit would be a more powerful way to serve the cause of faith. In this he was following the example set by antique figures like Evagrius, who said of the hermit, Damian encouraged such punishing practices as sleep deprivation and self-flagellation, tools for suppressing everything else to make room for the love for God. But he also fought for the cause of church reform, railing against corruption and insisting on the need to banish from the church any clergymen who were found practicing sodomy. His letter on this subject is a key source for medieval attitudes towards homosexuality. It's only one of the 180 letters we have from Peter Damian. Another was addressed to Desiderios, a monk at the monastery of Monte Cassino, and contains Damian's discussion on restoring virginity. His point of departure is a remark made by the Latin church father Jerome, While mindful of Jerome's authority, Damian begs to differ. We should not dare to place any limits on God's power. The recipient of the letter, Desiderios, had taken a different view. He defended Jerome's remark on the basis that if God does not want to restore a woman's virginity, then he cannot do so. Damian, who is not known for pulling any punches in his correspondence, dismisses this out of hand. If God is unable to do otherwise than he wishes, then all things would be impossible for him apart from the things that he has actually done. For instance, if God chooses to make it rain, then it would be impossible for him to make it not rain. Here, Damian is setting down an initial point of great philosophical interest. There are some things which do not happen, but remain possible nonetheless. That may seem obvious. Right now you are listening to this podcast but could quite easily be doing something else, though I wouldn't recommend it. But maybe it isn't so obvious after all. Consider this. Assuming you have listened to the podcast up until this point, does it remain possible that you haven't listened to it? It seems plausible to say that you could have refrained from listening to it beforehand, but now it is too late. There are no do-overs, and what is done is done. For some reason, ancient and medieval thinkers, beginning with Aristotle, were attracted to the notion that the past is necessary. The same consideration can be applied to the present. You are listening to the podcast right now, so again, the die is cast, and you can no longer avoid listening to it right now. This leaves only the future to be genuinely open, with different conflicting possibilities available to us. Once the future has become the present and then the past, though, these possibilities will be narrowed down to one actual state of affairs which is necessary in the sense that it is too late to prevent it. Now we can see more clearly what is at stake in Peter Damian's letter on divine omnipotence. If God can restore a woman's virginity, then he can undo the past, so the past is not necessary after all. Well, maybe that is what it means. It depends entirely on what we mean by restoring virginity. Rather than getting straight to the question of whether God can really change the past, Damian insists that God can make two kinds of change to the woman's condition now. He can restore her with respect to merit and with respect to the flesh. The latter simply means putting her body back in the condition it was in before engaging in intercourse, in other words, restoring her hymen. It's quite obvious that God can do this. He can also remove the moral imperfection that, according to Damian, would be involved in the original loss of virginity. For a philosophically minded reader whose concern is solely with God's ability to change the past, all this is entirely beside the point. But it is vital for Damian's wider aim, which is to ensure that God is capable of offering redemption to humankind. At stake here is the possibility of the narrative of Christianity itself, whereby God saves humans from the sin into which they have fallen. To him, this would be a matter of considerably greater importance than clarifying our ideas about possibility and necessity. In this respect, Damian's letter is of a piece with his other activities, such as fighting for the purity of the church and acting as a spokesman for the virtues of eremitic monasticism. Virginity stands for the spiritual purity that he was striving for throughout his career, and its restoration stands for the cleansing of sin through divine grace. For similar reasons, Damian also dwells on the question of what it means to say that God cannot do evil or commit a sin. Anxious as always not to curtail God's power, Damian seeks refuge in the traditional thought that evil is non-being, or nothingness. Thus, even if we say that God is unable to do sin, there is literally nothing, no positive reality, that lies outside the scope of God's power. The discussion of the virginity question is dangerously close to being settled right here. If restoring virginity were an evil, then on that basis alone, we could conclude that it is not something God could do. In that case, we would never find out Damian's view on the broader question of God's ability to change the past, which would be a shame. Fortunately, Damian thinks it is obviously a good thing to restore virginity. Also fortunate is that Damian does still want to tell us not only whether a virgin can be restored physically and morally to a pure state, but also whether God can make it the case that she never lost her virginity in the first place. So far, Damian has said nothing that would settle this issue. As he moves on to deal with the problem, he considers an admirably clear example that doesn't involve the theological and moral complexities of the virginity case. Can God now make it the case that Rome never existed? That's the good news. The bad news is that scholars are deeply divided over how to interpret the solution, or perhaps solutions, that Damian goes on to offer. I'll spend the rest of this episode explaining some of the different interpretations. The simplest reading, and one still frequently associated with Damian, is that he takes the radical position of holding that God can do even impossible things. Even though Rome did exist, God can make it so that it never existed, thus bringing about a contradictory state of affairs. Rome both did and did not exist. Some scholars have connected Damian's supposed embrace of this to his supposed hostility towards dialectic and philosophy, for Damian would be rejecting the most fundamental rule of logic, the principle of non-contradiction, which states that the same thing can never be both true and false. But this interpretation has severe problems. In this very letter, Damian actually claims more expertise in dialectic than his opponents, and he also asserts that God cannot make contradictory things happen, since if he did, he would be thwarting his own will. On the other hand, Damian does clearly seem to be saying that God can bring it about that, if you will, there was no place like Rome. And a moment's reflection will show that this doesn't need to involve bringing about a contradiction. If God now makes it so that Rome never existed, he would not make Rome both exist and not exist in the past, rather he would replace its past existence with its past non-existence. There's nothing impossible about that, unless of course we think that the past is necessary and unalterable. Here, another interpretation presents itself. Damian follows Boethius's lead in holding that God is eternal in the strongest sense of not being subject to time at all. This means that even if Rome's existence is necessary, from our point of view, because it lies in our past, it may not be necessary from God's point of view. He is standing outside of time surveying all things at once, so for him, the past is no more necessary than the future. Given Damian's emphasis on God's timelessness, this reading has some plausibility. But it doesn't really do justice to Damian's insistence that God really can make it such that Rome never existed, even though it did exist. In fact, he says, with his characteristic rhetorical aggression, that someone who denies this deserves to be branded. Simply alluding to the timeless nature of God's power doesn't explain how it is that both options remain timelessly open to him. So, here's a simpler idea. Maybe Damian just wants to reaffirm that God retains the power to do things even when he does not do them, as we already saw with the rain example. All things are subject to God's will, and the fact that they have already happened doesn't mean that they fall outside the scope of his power. If this is all Damian wishes to say, then he is in line with more standard treatments of the question in the later Middle Ages, giving us a less outrageous, but more sensible Peter Damian. We can expand on this interpretation in light of a distinction that Damian makes between two kinds of necessity, which we might call absolute and subsequent necessity. Something is absolutely necessary if it intrinsically cannot be otherwise. For instance, it is absolutely necessary that one plus one is two. By contrast, some things are necessary only on a certain assumption. For instance, if we assume that you will finish listening to this episode, it necessarily follows from this that you will have listened to it, but your having listened to it would not thereby become absolutely necessary. It would remain the case that you could have refrained from listening to it. It's hard to imagine why you'd stop listening now, having gotten this far, but it remains possible in itself. Applying this idea to the past, we can say that once God wills that Rome should exist, it necessarily follows that Rome must exist, given that nothing can thwart God's will. Yet, Rome's existence remains merely possible in itself. God's timeless eternity remains relevant here, in that his relationship to past, present, and future events is always the same, unlike our case, where the future is open and the past and present closed. Whether we talk about Rome's past existence, the present existence of Germany, or the future existence of a nation wisely ruled by a benevolent, giraffe-loving philosopher, we are dealing with things that become necessary only if God wills them to be the case. In this sense, the past is subject to God's will in just the same way the future is. Still, God cannot will anything both to occur and not to occur, so there is no threat that a contradiction will arise. I find this interpretation fairly compelling, but it too has potential problems. Some scholars claim to find in Damien the idea that the principle of non-contradiction itself is subject to God's will, meaning that God simply chooses to avoid bringing about contradictions. If this principle itself is subject to God's will, then after all these subtle interpretive maneuvers, we would be back with something like the traditional reading that God can do the impossible. Setting this aside, though, it's noteworthy that Damien distinguishes between two kinds of necessity. About a generation later, in the same context of the question whether God can change the past, the more famous thinker Anselm of Canterbury will make the same distinction very clearly by contrasting nekessitas praekedens with nekessitas sequens, preceding and subsequent necessity. It's just one example of Anselm's clear-headed approach to the problems that had arisen in the first few centuries of medieval philosophy, an approach which, for some, licenses calling him the first great scholastic philosopher. It's too late for you to avoid hearing all about Peter Damien, but it remains up to you whether you'll learn more about Anselm by joining me next time for The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.