Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 198 - Grace Notes - Eriugena and the Predestination Controversy .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 and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Grace Notes, Ariugina and the Predestination Controversy. Loyal listeners will remember my sister. You know a fair bit about her already, her career as a trapeze artist, her short temper, the help she gives me writing these podcasts, and the fact that she doesn't exist. One thing I haven't mentioned about her yet is that she's an atheist. She is annoyed that God hasn't allowed her to exist and has decided to return the favor. Like I say, short temper. Most other atheists you meet will give more conventional reasons for their disbelief. They may say that modern science has managed to account for all the features of the world, formerly inexplicable without reference to a wise creator. In light of this, we no longer have good evidence for the existence of God or any supernatural being. Or the atheist may invoke the notorious problem of evil. The God worshipped in the Abrahamic religions is meant to be all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing. How then can the world be so full of suffering and evil? Why would God allow this, since He is clearly in a position to put a stop to it, and being good would certainly want to do so? The standard response from the theist is the free will defense. God allows suffering and evil because He must do so if He is to give freedom to His creatures. In giving us meaningful freedom of choice, He must give us the chance to do wrong, but doing wrong means doing evil and causing suffering. In the Christian tradition, especially since Augustine, the origins of sin were traced back as far as the first humans. The original sin of Adam and Eve has been passed down to all their descendants, and the human condition is one of congenital weakness. As Oscar Wilde put it, we can resist anything except temptation. In particular, we can resist God's mercy, literally embodied, when He became a human and sacrificed Himself for us. This act of sacrifice has held out a promise of rescue from the state of sin, but according to Augustine, we were not thereby restored to the even more original sinlessness of Adam and Eve through Christ. Rather, humans have retained a tendency towards evil, and only a further gift of divine grace can give us the strength to be good. We cannot, in other words, merit salvation on our own power, but need God's help in order to be saved. Of course, you know all this, and whether you are an atheist or not, you probably regard it as theology and not philosophy. But, as we'll be seeing in this episode and in episodes to come, the Augustinian position on grace led to agonized debate among medieval philosophers. In fact, whether or not you are an atheist, your understanding of free will has probably been indirectly shaped by centuries worth of reflection on this thorny theological problem. A moment's reflection of our own shows why this problem is so, well, problematic. Augustine insisted, on the one hand, that sin is the result of free will. Not just the original sin of Adam and Eve, but all human sin is a perverted use of the freedom God has given us. This is why it is just that God should punish us for our misdeeds. On the other hand, Augustine also insisted that, born into sin as we are, none of us can be good without God's help. To say otherwise would be to fall into the position of the rival theologian Pelagius, which Augustine attacked ferociously in the mature phase of his career. Given Augustine's authority, medieval's standardly took the Pelagian view to be heretical. So for them it was a basic ground rule that humans need grace from God in order to be good. It is up to God, not us, whether any of us will receive that gift. But in that case, it looks like God is like a man standing at the edge of a lake, who sees a group of drowning people who cannot swim. He has plenty of life preservers on hand, but throws them only to a select few, letting the others sink to their doom. Surely we would not praise this man for saving the lucky ones, but rather accuse him of heartlessness for ignoring others he could have helped. In the same way, one might say to Augustine and the medieval's who followed his lead that their God is not merciful but arbitrary, unjustly letting some of his creatures go to eternal torment when he could have given them salvation. Besides, on this Augustinian picture, humans in this state of sin turn out to lack meaningful free will after all. If we aren't able to be good without God's help, then any freedom we have seems to be useless, nothing more than the ability to decide exactly which sins we will commit. These were bullets that one 9th century medieval thinker was ready and willing to bite. He was a monk named Gottschalk, who set forth a doctrine known as double predestination. His idea was a simple one. God has decided in his inscrutable wisdom which of us will be saved and which condemned. The decision was made already before any of us were born, and there is no court of appeal. It's an uncompromising view, but one that looks pretty reasonable within the Augustinian framework I've just been talking about. After all, if my salvation requires God's intervention, and if he decides not to intervene, then he has effectively decided that I will be damned. From this point of view, Gottschalk was simply drawing the obvious conclusion of Augustine's teaching. Indeed, he was able to quote from the works of Augustine in support of his own position. From another point of view though, Gottschalk's teaching was dangerous and deviant and needed to be stamped out. His two main critics were fellow clerics, one a student of Alquin and Gottschalk's former abbot, Urbanus Maudus, the other an influential bishop named Hinckmar. Both of them worried that anyone convinced by Gottschalk would lose any motivation for being good. After all, if God has already decided I'm going to hell, then there's nothing I can do about it, and I may as well have some fun first. Even better if God has placed me among the elect, since I'm sure to keep my place, no matter how many sins I commit. All this was happening during the reign of Charlemagne's grandson, a monarch by the name of Charles the Bald. To get an idea of what he might have looked like, go to Google Images and search for Peter Adamson. In the year 849, Charles the Bald decided that the predestination debate was unlike his hair, he'd had just about enough of it. Hinckmar had the ear of the king, so Gottschalk was not likely to find favor once Charles stepped in. Indeed, Gottschalk was imprisoned and his writings burnt. Here we see again, as with Charlemagne, that secular rulers could, and did, try to settle theological controversies, weighing in with a kind of authority not even Augustine's texts could provide. Still, things didn't end there. Even as Charles himself discussed the problem of free will with his advisors, Gottschalk's sympathizers continued to espouse the double predestination doctrine. What was needed was a more convincing account, one that would preserve the teaching of Augustine while also preserving human freedom. For this purpose, Hinckmar turned to the sharpest mind of the time, which belonged to John Scotus Eriugena. He hailed from Ireland, one of numerous scholars who found their way from there to mainland Europe in the Carolingian period, presumably fleeing from Viking raids. In fact, both Scotus and Eriugena mean someone from Ireland, so his name rather redundantly means John Irishman Irishman. Watch out by the way that you don't confuse him with the more famous medieval thinker Duns Scotus, who was Scottish. I've actually been in libraries where books by one Scotus were shelved amidst the books by the other Scotus. We know of Eriugena's presence at Charles the Bald's court by the 840s. He supposedly enjoyed a warm relationship with the sovereign. Reports to this effect are borne out by the fact that he was entrusted with the task of translating a precious text sent to the court as a gift by the Byzantine emperor Michael the Stammerer. Did monarchs have fantastic names in the 9th century or what? The manuscript contained the works of the Pseudo-Dionysius, a late ancient Christian theologian strongly influenced by pagan Neoplatonism. We covered him back in episode 105. Eriugena was ideal for the task. He had facility with Greek, very rare even among well-trained scholars in the Latin West. Equally important, he had a taste for bold speculative philosophy, which was exactly what he found in Dionysius. The results would be fully revealed only in Eriugena's masterpiece, a sprawling philosophical and theological dialogue entitled the Periphusion. For now though, Eriugena did as Hinkmar requested, producing a strident refutation of Gottschalk's theory of double predestination. It did not end the debate, but had at least one salutary effect by teaching Hinkmar to be more careful what he wished for. Eriugena's distinctive taste for bold speculation was all too clear from the arguments he aimed at Gottschalk. Hinkmar was alarmed and disowned the treatise entirely. It would eventually be condemned in the year 855, about five years after it was written, even though Eriugena was writing in support of what would turn out to be the victorious side in the debate. Two more theologians leapt into the fray to attack Eriugena, who withdrew from the controversy without further attempts to justify his stance, albeit that some of the ideas he put forward in this early treatise do reappear in the Periphusion. Eriugena would have had cause to feel bitter about the reception given to his treatise on predestination, because the most fundamental point he wanted to make was one already put forward by Hinkmar and Urbanus Maurus. If we want to be good Augustinians, we must posit an asymmetry between goodness and sin. In our fallen state, we are capable of sinning, but incapable of being good. For that, we need the help of God's grace. The Pelagians were unacceptable because they placed both good and evil within the scope of human power, and thus left insufficient room for grace. Gottschalk strayed too far in the other direction by effectively making God the author of both goodness and sin, in that both are predestined. Neither of these views preserved asymmetry. Hinkmar, Urbanus, and Eriugena all saw this point. They secured the needed asymmetry by saying that God predestines the redemption of those He elects to receive effective grace, but He does not predestine the damnation of sinners. Of course, it's one thing to say these things and another to argue for them. Step forward, Eriugena. He begins his treatise with a mission statement that could apply to his whole career, stating that, True philosophy is true religion, and true religion is true philosophy. He then adds some rather swaggering remarks to the effect that his expertise in the liberal arts of dialectic and rhetoric will enable him to clear up the whole predestination debate. Eriugena even quotes some technical terms in the original Greek, advertising the unprecedented level of intellectual firepower he's bringing to this fight. By contrast, Gottschalk is routinely convicted of muddled thinking, which has seduced him into deviation from true religion. At one point, Eriugena aims the philosopher's ultimate insult at his opponent, saying that Gottschalk's position doesn't even manage to be false, because for that it would have to have a misleading resemblance to the truth. Gottschalk's position is so incoherent that it falls short of this modest goal and remains nothing but empty words. One mistake Eriugena claims to find in Gottschalk is a confusion between God's foreknowing that I will do something and his predestining that I will do it. As Boethius had already argued in Late Antiquity, knowing that something is going to happen doesn't mean causing that thing to happen. Thus God can foreknow sin without predestining it. When making this distinction, Eriugena quotes Augustine's definition of predestination as the arrangement before time began of all that God is going to do. This is only one of many quotes from Augustine in the treatise, a reminder that this was not just an abstract theological debate, but an argument over how to interpret this authoritative father of the church. In fact, there are chapters of Eriugena's On Predestination that consist almost entirely of quotation from Augustine, a technique Eriugena will reuse later in his Paraphysion, which includes long-verbatim citations of Greek and Latin authorities. Bear in mind, by the way, that this sort of extensive quotation made more sense in the 9th century than it would today. Eriugena can't assume his readers will have access to the text he refers to, and lengthy citation is not just a way of borrowing Augustine's authority, but also making those passages readily available to his audience. Yet Eriugena offers arguments as well as quotations. He complains that, in addition to that fundamental confusion between God's knowing a thing and causing it to happen, Gottschalk has ascribed a double predestination to a God who is purely one. It's an early sign of his Neoplatonic leanings that Eriugena hammers relentlessly on this point. Gottschalk's position would require that God exercises two distinct and contrary kinds of predestination towards his creation, and this is inconsistent with God's simplicity. Instead, everything that God does proceeds from one essence. You might wonder whether Eriugena's argument makes sense here. After all, he does want to say that God foreknows not just two things, but everything that will ever happen with his single, simple act of knowledge. So why couldn't God also predestine two kinds of things, choosing the elect for salvation and the unredeemed sinners for punishment? But Eriugena has a good answer, in that his argument turns on the kind of causation exercised by simple things. On Gottschalk's theory, God would be the cause of two contrary things, predestining both salvation and damnation. This is something a cause with multiple parts might be able to do. Take the humble pencil, for instance. Its business end can put marks on a page, while the eraser at the back can take marks off a page. The reason it can have these two contrary effects is that it has more than one part. But God is not like this. He is utterly simple. Maybe though this isn't the only way for a cause to have contrary effects. It might act at different times. Consider a murderous doctor who saves someone's life one day by performing an operation only to kill that same person with poison on the following day. Could God perhaps do the same, dealing out eternal life at one time and eternal punishment at some other time? Not according to Eriugena. Again, taking over ideas found in Augustine and Boethius, he thinks that God is eternal and does not change from one moment to the next. Divine foreknowledge and predestination already occurred before time even began and never altered thereafter. In fact, Eriugena says it is misleading to talk about God's foreknowing. He even questions whether past, present, and future tense verbs can be applied to God as they are to temporal things. This gives us another reason why we cannot imagine God exercising two opposite kinds of causation. He would have to use both in his timeless eternity so that we would have a simple cause doing two contrary things simultaneously. And this is clearly absurd. Another problem with the double predestination doctrine, according to Eriugena, is that it fails to preserve divine justice. If God is to issue commands to us and justly punish us when we fail to obey, then he must give us freedom rather than pre-determining us to sin. Likewise, it would make no sense for God to reward us for doing things if we had no choice whether to do them. But on this score, there is another problem. Eriugena has to avoid falling into the Pelagian heresy which gives humans not just free will, but the capacity to merit salvation without any involvement from God. Of course, he refuses to go so far as gut-shocked by making God predestine all human actions, both good and sinful, but he accepts that God does exercise predestination over some of us. He has, from eternity, decided which of us will be offered effective grace and thus obtain salvation. Here we come back to the point about asymmetry. God must get some of the credit for helping us to be saved, but none of the blame, when we sin and are damned. Eriugena's way of achieving this is to say that human freedom is exercised in both good and bad actions. In the case of bad actions, God knows beforehand that sin will occur, and after the sin has been committed, he administers just punishment. Apart from that, he stays out of it. The case of good actions is different. Here, God must step in to assist the person who is choosing freely. Divine grace is, as Eriugena puts it, cooperative. Without it, a person who is freely choosing to do good would be unable to succeed. Let's go back to our analogy of the drowning swimmers. When I described this before, I gave the impression that the swimmers were going under through no fault of their own. That is not how Eriugena sees things. Rather, God would be like someone on shore who has generously offered to save everyone in the water. Some of the swimmers are ignoring this and in fact making every effort to drown themselves, eagerly weighing themselves down so that they will sink. Clearly, there is no obligation to save these fools against their will. Meanwhile, others are doing their best to stay afloat, and gratefully accept the offer of assistance. If they get help from the men on shore, their own efforts will enable them to avoid drowning. Analogously, it is just for God to punish those who freely sin, and both free choice and grace are involved in salvation. To this extent, Eriugena was basically following the line already suggested by Gottschalk's other opponents, Hinkmar and Urbanus Maurus. Eriugena does indulge in his distinctly philosophical style and pushes hard on points like God's utter unity, but it's really only as he develops his argument that he goes beyond what Hinkmar could accept. In another premonition of his Neoplatonic leanings, Eriugena brings up the late antique idea that evil is privation or non-being. This notion was already pioneered by Plotinus, and we find it in some of Eriugena's favorite authors like Augustine and the Pseudo-Dionysius. Here Eriugena finds another point he can use against Gottschalk. How can God predestine sin or cause evil and sin if evil and sin are nothing at all? In fact, how can God even foreknow sin, the point on which Gottschalk relied so much? There's quite literally nothing to know. Pondering this puzzle, Eriugena concludes that God knows sin the way we see darkness, in other words by being aware of the absence of goodness or light. A further radical, and therefore Eriugena's contemporaries unacceptable implication is that God does not after all directly cause the punishment of the damned. Their suffering is an evil, and evil is non-being, or nothing. Eriugena understands it as a failure on the part of these souls to attain salvation and happiness. God's role in this process is merely that he sets up a just order of laws governing the universe under which sinners fall short of the salvation that God actively offers to others who seek his help. Although Eriugena was going out on a limb with these arguments, it would be wrong to treat him, as historians often do, as an entirely marginal figure, a man out of place and time whose interests and theological views were radically different from those of his contemporaries. Admittedly, his magisterial paraphyseon is like nothing else written in the period. Ambitious, massively long, and full of ideas taken from the Greek thinkers to whom Eriugena had such unique access, it is the most sophisticated philosophical text of the Carolingian period. Yet there are many connections between the paraphyseon and the intellectual climate in which Eriugena lived. In a future episode, we'll see that less renowned, sometimes even unidentified, thinkers of the period engaged with Eriugena's ideas and commented upon many of the philosophical issues he raised. Still, it's a pretty remarkable book and deserves an episode all to itself. Like Charles the Bald, I'll be tearing my hair out if you don't join me next time for Eriugena's Paraphysion, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.