Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 258 - Here Comes the Son - The Trinity and the Eucharist.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich – online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode – Here Comes the Sun – The Trinity and the Eucharist. Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass contains a scene in which Alice, in discussion with the White Queen, says that she cannot believe impossible things. The Queen responds, I dare say you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. That's why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. From which you might infer that the White Queen would have felt quite at home in the Middle Ages, and not just because she was royalty. Medieval philosophy is notoriously intertwined with Christian theology, and some Christian doctrines may seem to involve embracing the impossible. In modern times, philosophers have sometimes taken this to be a great virtue. Søren Kierkegaard put the notion of the absurd at the center of Christianity, arguing that we should not, and indeed cannot, rationally accept the idea of God's incarnation as a human – it can be believed only by faith. The medievals were far more inclined to think that reason goes hand in hand with faith. By this stage, I've hopefully managed to disabuse you of any notion that medieval thinkers spent all their time thinking of nothing but faith, ignoring the deliverances of natural reason. We've also seen that, when they did think about theology, they often took a highly rationalist approach. In this episode, we're going to look at issues that posed a particularly stern test for that approach. We won't live up to the example set by the White Queen – I, for my part, have already had breakfast – and we will be trying to wrap our minds around only two apparently impossible beliefs. These are the Trinity, that is, the doctrine that God is one and simple, yet three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – and the Eucharist, that is, the doctrine that bread and wine can turn into the body and blood of Christ. However hard these things may be to believe, medieval thinkers insisted that they are not, in fact, impossible. Men like Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Duns Scotus pushed reasoning to its limits in order to show that the Trinity and Eucharist are indeed possible and even, to a large extent, rationally comprehensible. This project led them to investigate topics of more general interest, like philosophy of mind, the metaphysical status of relations, and the connection between substances and their properties. Of course, Christian thinkers had been using philosophy to grapple with these matters since long before the late 13th century. We mentioned a while back that in the 11th century, a bitter dispute erupted in which Lanfranc of Beck attacked Berengar of Tours for holding that the Eucharist is merely symbolic in character and that in the 12th century, Abelard and others convinced themselves that pagan philosophers like Plato had managed to understand the Trinity. These discussions lived on in the memory of later medieval thinkers. Aquinas actually refers to Berengar's position as a heresy in his Summa Theologiae. But when it came to the Trinity, they took their cue above all from an even earlier author, Augustine. In his work entitled On the Trinity, he suggested that we can glimpse something of God's Trinitarian nature in the workings of our own minds. When we think about something, there is a three-way relationship between the object of our thought, the act of thinking about that object, and the will, or as Augustine puts it, love of the mind by which it directs its thinking towards that object. Yet the mind remains, despite this complex inner structure, a single immaterial entity. This is an image of the way that God can be simple, yet a trinity of persons. This theory had great appeal for the medievals. Could it be found in authoritative Church Father? Did it offer the opportunity for subtle exploration of the human soul? Did it show how philosophical reasoning could support a central dogma of the Church? The answer was like the endgame in a chess match, check, check, and check again. We duly find Aquinas and Henry of Ghent presenting and refining Augustine's account, applying the theory of mind that was current in their own day. The Latin translations of Aristotle and Arabic philosophical works encouraged 13th century thinkers to adopt what we might call a faculty-based psychology. By this I mean not that the Scholastics worked in the arts and theology faculties, though that's also true, but that they thought about the soul in terms of a range of powers, or faculties. In this case, the relevant faculties were the intellect and the will, which were associated respectively with the begetting of the Son and the production of the Holy Spirit, called spiration. As Aquinas explains, the relation between the Father and Son is one of intellectual understanding. The second person of the Trinity is begotten when God grasps Himself intellectually. In general, when the mind understands something it forms a word, which may actually be verbally uttered but may just remain in the intellect, what Aquinas calls an interior word. This is pretty handy, since in the Bible the book of John speaks of a logos, or word, who is God's Son incarnated as Christ. But God will not be just two persons, He will be three. This is because will is distinct from intellect, or to put it another way, because loving something is distinct from understanding it. Since God does love Himself, as well He should since He is the highest good and thus the most lovable thing, we have a further act which is associated with the production of the Holy Spirit. And by the way, the Holy Spirit is produced by an act of will that involves mutual love between the Father and the Son. This point was made already in the 12th century by Hugh of St. Victor. Now it is emphasized by Henry of Ghent as a way to refute the theory of the Byzantine Greek theologians who had the Spirit proceeding from the Father alone. In applying this psychological analysis, Aquinas and Henry need to steer between two heresies, namely Arianism and Sibelionism. Arius held that God is three substances and not only one, while Sibelius denied real plurality among the persons. Against Arius, we can say that God is truly one, because even in humans, never mind God, there is no difference in substance between intellect and will. And against Sibelius, we can say that God is truly three, because there is obviously a difference, what Aquinas calls an opposition, between the intellect and what it understands, or the will and what it loves. In this respect, the persons have a genuine multiplicity unlike God's other attributes. There is no opposition between, say, God's power and His wisdom, but there is a difference between Father and Son, because the Father begets while the Son is begotten. Furthermore, the act of intellect must accompany and precede the will. You have to understand something before you can direct your will towards it. Even if I effortlessly and inevitably desire amanquasants as soon as I think about them, the two acts are different, and my thinking about them is presupposed by my desiring them. This is why there is an order of precession among the persons, even if the persons remain one in substance and therefore equal to one another. At the core of this philosophical explanation of the Trinity is the idea of a relation, which is reasonable enough. Still today, when philosophers want to talk about relations, they're apt to give the example of the relation of paternity that holds between a father and a son. In late antiquity, Boethius had already proposed understanding the Trinity using Aristotle's ideas about relation. But do we want to go so far as to say that the Trinitarian persons just are relations? Well, if we're Aquinas, then that's exactly what we want to do. In created things, relations are accidents that belong to the things that enter into the relation. Consider, if you will, the Marx brothers. Harpo is Groucho's brother, but Harpo is not the same thing as a relation of brotherhood. In God though, things are different. According to Aquinas, when we talk about God the Father having a relation of paternity to God the Son, we are not talking about an accidental property that belongs to God, the way Harpo's brotherhood belongs to Him accidentally. Rather, the relation of paternity just is God, or the divine essence. This is what it means when Christian theologians talk of the Trinitarian persons as hypostases in God, that they refer to relations in the mode of substance. Some thinkers of the next generations followed Aquinas's basic line of thought without necessarily following him on every detail. These included Giles of Rome and Godfrey of Fontaines. But others, including Henry of Ghent and Franciscans like Duns Scotus, found themselves doubting Thomas. These critics were more than happy to make use of the psychological analysis of the Trinity based on God's acts of intellect and will, but they found it incoherent to say that the Trinitarian persons are nothing more than the relations that arise from God's self-understanding and self-love. Instead, they saw the persons as having more fundamental properties that underlie those relations. The Father is distinguished by His primacy as the divine person who is unbekotten and ungenerated. Aquinas alludes to this proposal, it was already put forward by his contemporary Bonaventure. But Aquinas rejects it on the basis that it is a purely negative way of characterizing the Father. This would be like saying there is nothing more to being tall than not being short. Aquinas's rivals, though, were not short of objections they could press against his theory. Scotus pointed out that relations presuppose the things that enter into the relations. Conceptually speaking, there must in some sense be a Father and Son before the Father can be related to the Son, just as I cannot be taller than you unless you and I both first exist, and even then, given my stature, it's rather unlikely. Henry of Ghent, meanwhile, complained that a relation has no reality over and above the thing that enters into the relation. Rather, it just means that we are considering one thing in respect of another. Harpo's relation of brotherhood to Groucho is not another real thing in addition to Harpo. It's Harpo who is real, and we say he is a brother simply because we are considering him in respect of Groucho. If this is right, then Aquinas's view could collapse into Sibelionism. If the persons are only relations, and relations are nothing real, then Aquinas is failing to distinguish the persons from one another at all. On the other hand, there was also a danger in distinguishing the persons from one another too sharply and straying instead into the Arian heresy. The goal then is to show that the distinction of persons is not just a matter of our point of view, a merely notional distinction like that between Harpo and Groucho's brother, without saying that the persons are entirely separate things like Harpo and Groucho are. It was in part to solve this difficulty that Scodis introduced what he called a formal distinction. His idea is that we sometimes make a distinction within a single thing, where the contrast is genuinely grounded in features or aspects of the thing itself. The two aspects are always found together, but have different definitions and can be imagined as appearing in isolation from one another, even though they never do. We might say that one thing is formally distinct from another if it is not separate, but separable in principle. What would be an example of this? Scodis mentions several cases, one of which is the difference between intellect and will. Though they have different functions, they are simply faculties or operations of one and the same soul, so we don't have two separate things here, and will is never found without intellect or vice versa since every intellectual being is also capable of voluntary choice, but we could in theory imagine an intellectual being that has no power of will. Of course, it's no coincidence that the intellect and will are precisely the powers mentioned in the psychological account of the Trinity, and of course, the persons of the Trinity too are formally distinct. This is a particularly clear case where theological speculation spurred philosophical ingenuity. The same thing happened in debates over our second theological topic, the Eucharist. As with the Trinity, one could easily risk courting heresy by offering philosophical explanations of the Eucharist, but our schoolmen didn't let that stop them. They eagerly tried to explain how exactly wine and bread can really, and not just symbolically as Berengar had claimed, become the blood and body of Christ. Clearly, this is a miraculous event, and not one detectable to the senses. The host still looks like bread after it is changed to the body of Christ. So we know about it not through natural reason, but through Scripture. At Luke 22 19, Christ breaks bread and hands it to his disciples saying, This is my body which is given for you. Once you assume by faith that this transformation really happens, philosophical puzzles arise, and this is where reason comes in. Actually, there are far too many puzzles for me to discuss here. How can the body of Christ be in more than one place at a time, for instance? How can it be in a place that is too small for it? What happens when consecrated wine goes bad and turns to vinegar, or consecrated bread goes moldy? All these questions and more were debated by the scholastics. But I want to focus on the most fundamental problem, which is the nature of the change involved in the Eucharist. If you're like I was before I read up on this, you probably think there is a standard view that would have been held by all medieval thinkers summed up by the word transubstantiation. As the word implies, in Eucharistic change, the entirety of one substance is replaced by the entirety of another substance. If that's what you think, then you'll be as surprised as I was to learn that the word transubstantiation seems to have come into Latin discussions of the Eucharist only in the middle of the 12th century, and that the substance-to-substance conception of the change was very controversial. Like several other controversial theses, this one was held by none other than Thomas Aquinas. He argued forcefully that it is not enough for the host's matter to be preserved and gain nothing more than a new form, as some other theologians claimed. This is what happens in natural change. Transubstantiation is something more miraculous, made possible only by divine power. Both the matter and the form of bread are transmuted into the matter and form of the body of Christ, not annihilated and replaced, but really transformed. We can draw a rough parallel here to Aquinas' ideas about the Trinity. In that case, he proposed that in God, relations can be identical to an essence rather than additional to it. Now he proposes that we can have one whole substance becoming another, and that this can be a real change, even though nothing persists, not even prime matter. In neither case could we know that this is true through philosophy, but in both cases we can use philosophy to say rigorously what is happening and show that it is not impossible. Also as with the Trinity, Aquinas' view did not garner unanimous support. Giles of Rome, usually rather close to Aquinas' approach, diverged from him on this issue. He said that matter is in its essence preserved through the change, even if no particular portion of matter survives from the bread to the body. Scodas was even more critical. He argued that the body of Christ, which is in heaven, having ascended to the Father, simply acquires a new external relation by which it becomes present on the altar. This is a strange kind of presence, in which the parts of what is present are not in the different parts of the place where it is present. It's not that Christ's foot is pointing towards one end of the altar and his head pointing it to the other end. Instead, the whole of the body is present to every part of the place on the altar. Of course, there's another far simpler question we might have about Eucharistic change. How is it that the features of the bread survive even when the bread does not, since it has, in whatever way, become the body of Christ? It still looks and tastes like bread, not like human flesh. Here, Aquinas makes another bold proposal, namely that accidents can survive in the absence of the substances to which they belong. Of course, this doesn't usually happen. Harpo's sense of humor, his tendency to chase skirts, and his relation of brotherhood to Groucho all perished along with him when he died. But again, that is the natural way of things. Once God is involved, the survival of accidents on their own is indeed possible. In fact, we can even see rationally that this is possible. God is capable of creating the flavor of bread indirectly by creating bread and allowing the bread to sustain the accident of its flavor in existence. But whatever he can do indirectly, he can surely do directly. This provoked disagreement from a philosopher who is usually thought of as being more of a rationalist than Aquinas himself, his so-called Averroist opponent, C.J. of Brabant. C.J. did accept that God can change bread into the body of Christ while leaving the accidents as they were. But he denied that we can use philosophical arguments to prove that this is possible. Rather, this is one of those times where we must admit that human reason has severe limitations. Just as our unaided minds devise arguments to show that the universe must be eternal and are hard pressed to see what could be wrong with these arguments, so the natural resources of philosophy cannot establish the possibility of a surviving separate accident. This is for the same reason we saw before when looking at C.J., namely that the philosopher must reason on the basis of natural laws, which of course lay down that accidents depend for their survival on the substances that have those accidents. No bread and wine thus means no flavor of bread or wine from the philosopher's point of view. The theologian, by contrast, has a point of view from which he can admit that the flavor or color of bread can survive without the bread. But C.J. did not prevail in this dispute. As we move forward into the 14th century, we will see philosophers invoking God's omnipotence and thinking rationally about the implications of a power that can, quite literally, do anything that can be done. This is already a prominent idea in our next major thinker, who lived from the 13th into the 14th century. We've already mentioned him several times, and he is a thinker of such power and influence that he is going to be worth several episodes more of our attention, John Dunne's SCOTUS. But before we come to him, I want to dwell on the issues raised in this episode a bit longer. Next time I'll be joined by a guest who has written extensively on medieval philosophers and the way that they squared their faith with the dictates of rationality. Join me for a conversation in which Richard Cross will relate some further ideas about philosophy and the Trinity, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.