Just Thomism

To be a non-resistant non-believing Christian requires that one do nothing Christianity sees as giving divine resistance. Since Christianity sees sin as the only resistance one gives to the light of faith, a non-resistant non-Christian would  be a sinless non-Christian. 

Obviously, the same thing would be true, mutatis mutandis, of a non-believing non-Muslim. As someone who happens to be such a person, however, I can testify that I have indeed resisted the teachings of Muhammed, though I have been made aware of them many times. Moreover, my resistance simply begins in my believing and practicing all sorts of things incompatible with Islam. If Islam is true, I doubt my judgment would reveal me as invincibly ignorant. At any rate, I won’t be able to claim I was a non-resistant non-believer.

That said, at the center of all this is the word belief or faith, and I take it as rationally provable that only Christianity demands faith properly speaking (as opposed to “faith” as a synonym for “religion.”) The religious assent I give to Christ is unique by being faith, and this faith is required by the eschatological structure of Christianity in a way that it is not required by other religions, or even by a scientifically or rationally motivated atheism. To be clear: when “faith” is taken properly it belongs to Christianity alone, while rational atheism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, various tribal religions, etc are not faiths, but rest in different ways on human reason.*

Faith is properly a trust in the knowledge of someone else, i.e. the relationship of disciple to teacher. In the way I am most sympathetic to Islam, it presents itself as simply rational religion with divine approval, which places human reason is at its foundation. This is clearest in Islamic eschatology, which does not promise the elevation of the believer to what Christianity calls heaven, i.e. the union of the mind with divine life as such. Islamic heaven is just a life like this one, in a world like this one, but with more abundant pleasures and no fear of losing them. Any talk of a beatific vision as required by the Christ of Chalcedonian Christology, or as offered to believers in the theology of the Thomist tradition is an impossible blasphemy to Islam. Islam is thus not an assent to the truth of something precisely as knowable only supernaturally. This is even clearer in Buddhism, which involves no revelation at all, and can co-exist just fine with the outright denial of any such knowledge. The historical Buddha discovers enlightenment only as a historical fact that is individually discoverable by anyone’s own rational powers. By contrast, when Christianity talks about faith it means the imperfect form and first participation in a properly divine knowledge transcending the powers anything knowable to the human person as human. Christianity consists in believing that Christ speaks from a first person perspective of God’s own knowledge, and that he promises this to those who believe in him. Faith is only necessary for humans as such to the extent that assent is demanded to truths transcending what is knowable to humans as such.

Why give assent to what is unknowable? The answer is in one sense obvious: for the sake of at having at least minimal access to divine truth now, in the hope of having it totally in eschatological fulfillment. But the very goal one is trying to attain rules out the possibility of placing it on a rational foundation now.

And so we come to the foundational problem: if Christianity is essentially faith, one is resisting it to the extent he resists faith. This resistance to faith is just as possible in Buddhism as it is to rational atheism, but it is also possible to Islam, as is clear from Islamic eschatology. Faith is not just religion but the form of intellectual assent that becomes necessary upon believing that God desires to share his own essential and interior life with human beings. In fact, it just is that assent. We resist faith to the extent that we believe that no such assent should be made, for whatever reason we believe it. If one is a non-resistant non-believer, he cannot say that he would believe “if God gave him evidence” at least not if “evidence” means “that which confirms a belief held by human reason as such.” His demand for evidence in this sense presupposes a rejection of faith, and is such a rejection.

*There are lots of religions, obviously, so this is an extraordinarily bold claim. One thing that makes me confident in it, however, is the absence of a beatific vision in any of the modern religions. If one opens things up to include what some call “Gnosticism” I’d be way out of my sphere of competence. I don’t know what to say about Mormonism.

This post is a short meditation on any experience within which you find it difficult to rest in the peace of God as a provident Father. This might be anything from being stuck behind a slow driver, to a cancer diagnosis, to undergoing a world historic evil.

1.) I can take the experience as evidence there is no God, and could make the judgment in satisfaction, almost in consolation. There is, after all, no one responsible for this happening. In seeking to have the healthiest and most mature response possible to this, I come to my senses and remember that the world follows physical law, not a plan. I recall Buddhist mindfulness and I dwell in the moment, satisfied that this is reality, and reality is all there is.

2.) I could take this as evidence that God exists as the one who will show up and fix this, or at least as the one who should show up and fix this. I experience God’s existence as a cause of anxiety. I wonder what I have to do to get him to act, and am ashamed of my weakness and inability to control myself. I am exasperated because I know I would do whatever God said if he simply showed up and told me what to think, but he keeps me in the dark. I take some comfort knowing that, in the great beyond, every tear shall be wiped away, since I know, as Martha did, that my brother will rise again on the resurrection of the last day. 

3.) I could see this as the cross, or as how God is now present to me in suffering. In this moment I am Christ’s body redeeming the world. In my moments of peaceful comfort there was no suffering to offer in charity as atonement, and now there is.

Like my response in (1), but unlike my response in (2), the cross enters into the reality of the moment, for I have entered now into the presence of divinity, as opposed to believing only in a divinity who will be involved in the world someday though not now, as in (2.) Nevertheless, (1) sees more clearly than (2) that anxiety and disturbance are almost as a rule pointless. Like (2) and unlike (1,) the cross refuses to see reality as exhausted by the barely-existent reality of contingent being, and contingent being in a state of privation at that. Moreover, (2) is faithful to the insight that evil is wrong, and involves some violation that must be set right. While (2) is correct to remember that Christian hope still looks forward to eschatological fulfillment, it is wrong that this fulfillment precludes the presence of God now, even in a now where the feeling of divine abandonment is so total as to motivate even the sinless to the cry of dereliction.

Here are my basic objections to recognizing AIs as intelligent:

Intelligence is a kind of agency

AIs do not have agency.

LLMs don’t do anything until asked to do it. If all its activities were responses to my commands, it wouldn’t be deprived of any dignity. So to put the same argument in a different way:

No intelligent being is by nature a slave

AIs are by nature slaves.

The word slave is counterfactual, as was recognized even in the Roman definition of slave as quis domino alieno contra naturam subicitur, or one placed under a Lord other than himself, [this state being] contrary to [his own] nature. If the AI is intelligent, then there is an intelligent being, all of whose goals are set by an intelligence other than his own. There is no such thing as an intelligence fitting this description, and figuring this out, and largely striving to live according to it, is one of the insights of liberal society that deserves to remain to eternity. 

Both these arguments are tied to a more general one:

Intelligent activity is for its own sake

The activity of AIs for the sake of the one using them.

Part of what is being said was already said in the first argument, but the stress I’m laying here is on intelligence being self activity, or the perfection of life. The analogy between living things and machines is excellent whenever we consider how one part relates to another: hearts are exactly like pumps; elbows, jaws and knees are levers; teeth are inclined planes, etc. But the analogy becomes nonsensical when applied to natural wholes. A car exists to carry me around and as an extension of my own goals, but a horse as such exists to maintain itself as an individual and a species, in exactly the same way as an animal that no human could ever ride, like a beetle or bird.

All of these arguments are involved with a more basic one:

An intelligent AI would be an embodied life.

No AI is embodied life.

We know lots about embodied life: it turns energy sources into its own parts (eating) so that it can develop into a larger and more complete organism (growth) it has parts designed to break off and form lives of their own (reproductive gametes) it encodes its whole program in all its parts (DNA.) Living beings generate intrinsically all agents that take one part of itself to another part. No AI does any of this.

The last claim is related to this, as it presupposes that what is intelligent is alive. I don’t have all the logic worked out yet:

A complete theoretical account of LLMs does not require, e.g. its temperature control.

A complete theoretical account of a living thing does include the systems it uses for temperature control.

The LLM embodies a theory, and is nothing but the embodiment of that theory, in such a way that other systems necessary to keep it running are outside the form it embodies. But the form that the fish embodies includes all the organs and systems the fish has in its existence.

(I’ve been at Benedictine College for the last few days and delivered a talk yesterday. I wrote it as a talk and not a text, so the tone sounds more spoken than usual. The talk considers the use of the sublime in theology.) 

Ever since mathematical physics got elevated to the queen of the sciences, the elegance demanded by mathematical law has given broad acceptance to Keats’s claim that beauty is truth and truth beauty. Here we can here think of Dirac saying that it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment, or Einstein saying he was convinced that beauty was a guiding principle in the search for important results in theoretical physics. I want to argue that the sublime is also truth, and truth sublime, and that this is especially true in theology. Obviously, if the sublime were essentially beautiful the conclusion would follow immediately, but things are not so simple.

First off, let’s get clear about our experience of the sublime. The sublime is immense or grand in a manner that shatters horizons, giving rise to feelings of amazement. We experience it staring at the Grand Canyon, the ocean, the view of the world from the summit of Everest, etc. On the one hand, the sublime is treated as just one kind of beauty. So, for example, a painter sees no difference between painting the ocean and painting a flower. On the other hand, our theory of beauty doesn’t always fit the sublime. How well do Thomas’s well-known criteria for beauty, namely wholeness, proportion or radiance, describe the sublime? If the beautiful is proportionate, like the parts of a human body, in what sense is the view from Everest or the sight of a 90-foot wave proportionate? Again, if beauty is wholeness, like a flower, a face or a story having all its parts, is our amazement at the ocean because it lacks no parts? While standing on the shore, after all, we only see a part of the ocean. It is through radiance or splendor that the sublime clearly overlaps with beauty, and in maximizing the aspect of radiance we get the clearest view of the sublime. Consider the paradigm of radiance: the sun.

On the one hand nothing is more visible than the sun and our eyes evolved to see everything in the sun. On the other hand, we can’t see anything when looking into the sun. In a similar way, the sublime makes itself known as exceeding what can be known. A sublime object, like the ocean or view from a mountain, falls within our visible horizon precisely as what goes beyond that horizon. Pay particular attention to how these two aspects of the sublime mutually implicate each other. On the one hand, we see the sublime or take it in; but on the other hand we take in the sublime precisely as beyond what can be taken in. This is the heart of what I’m calling the sublime.

The pure actuality of God is the limit of all sublimity, for when we make explicit how God enters the horizon of our thought, he becomes something exceeding the horizon of thought. My use of horizon is both shorthand and essential to my argument, so let me be absolutely clear about what I mean:  the horizon of mortally embodied human thought is the conceptual as expressible in language, or, as Thomas would put it, it is concepts insofar as they involve a modus significandi.  I want to give two examples of the sublimity of pure act: the first taken from a consideration of God in himself, the second from God as creator.

God in himself is a trinity of persons in one divine substance. To put the mystery in the terms it’s had since Scotus and the Thomists who fought with him, we say God is a single communicable divinity in three incommunicable persons. Any way of putting the distinction between divinity and divine persons creates a problem, however, because if God is communicable and the Father is incommunicable, the Father is not God. Dale Tuggy puts the same argument in simpler terms: If God is triune and the Father is not triune, then the Father cannot be God. The first-order solution to this trinitarian aporia is well known, namely, the argument conflates different rationes or logoi. The conflation is the same as if I argued: I am necessarily a father, and a man is not necessarily a father, therefore I am not a man. There is a modal distinction within God (which is utterly different from the historical modalism of Sabellius.)

The interesting part of the trinitarian puzzle comes at the next step: how exactly is one and the same God communicable and incommunicable? Scotists appeal to a formal distinction, but I want to give the Cajetan’s answer[1] as an example of a hermeneutic of sublimity.  Let’s start with the part of the sublime that enters our horizon: namely that the unity of pure act is necessary as the principle of intelligibility for all things. Cajetan is giving a variant on a cosmological argument, in fact, it is a variant on the Fourth Way: anything intelligible caused by what is intelligible per se and first, and nothing created – a human or angelic concept – could be the per se and first intelligible. As intelligible, of course, pure act is sharable with others or communicable, and it is exactly this communicability that Thomas will appeal to when giving a principle for trinitarian generation in De potentia.[2] Nevertheless, as pure act God is also a form subsisting by itself, making him individual or incommunicable. One and the same reality – pure form or pure actuality – is the foundation for both the communicability of God’s nature and the divine incommunicability of the persons.

This is exactly a sort of sublimity. Among things that are manifest to us, the incommunicable and the communicable are formally distinct, but within the intelligibility of pure act, they point beyond our cognitive horizon to a formal unity sufficing to make the diverse forms. Within our horizon, forms are either communicable, that is, universal or they are incommunicable, that is, particular. If universal, the forms exist in intellects; if particular they exist in things, and existing in the intellect and existing in reality are contradictory modes of esse. In God, however, there is precisely one act of existence for both what is communicable (God or divinity) and what is incommunicable (the person of the Father, or son or Holy Spirit.) It is one and the same pure act that is both the first thing known theologically about God, and which proves him ineffable insofar as he can neither be adequately described by concrete terms (which leave off his real communicability) or by abstract terms (which leave off his incommunicable subsistence.)

I might as well face the primary objection to all this squarely, which was first put to me by a Scotist. Look, the communicable and incommunicable are contradictories, and contradictories cannot both be true. So how can pure act be formally, by one and the same act, communicable and incommunicable? I respond that the two terms are only verbally contradictory, while ontologically they are perfections and therefore unified in pure act. Again, incommunicability is verbally a negation, but ontologically it is the positive property of an acting suppositum. It belongs to being as such both that it perfectly communicate itself to others as an immobile intelligible, and that it act and therefore be an actively working supposit. We have a faint suggestion of this sublimity even in ourselves, since our own ideas are both unchanging eternal forms and the dynamic activity of intelligent life.

In analyzing pure act as it falls into our horizon, therefore, we are compelled to see in it a unity of formalities that distinct within that horizon. This is what Thomas repeatedly spoke of God, in terms he borrowed from John Damascene, as a pelagus infinitum,[3] an infinite sea or the infinite deep. The ocean and the great deep, of course, are paradigmatic cases of the sublime.

I now turn to considering how the sublimity of pure act as creator, or from the point of view of how creatures relate to God. Since we first come to know God as a cause of being, the fundamental problem is how his allows for real causality in other beings. If God makes apples grow, how can they arise naturally from the tree, or (to use an example that for whatever reason people think is more complex) if God causes my actions, how can they be free?

Let’s take the argument from the beginning. God is first known as a cause, both by faith and reason. God is thus the supernatural mover to whom all natural motion is an instrument; he is the intelligence ordering created actions to his own good. In discovering God I recognize that I am in some way an instrument moved by his activity, and even if I seek to flee from the order of his mercy I find he has only moved me in the order of his justice. We seem to hit a fatalism, and it looks like cosmological arguments deprive creatures of their own actions. How do we make divine causality both outside or other than the creature while allowing for the creature to cause its own actions from within?

My answer, in a nutshell, is that in a single formality, pure act is both above the intrinsic principles of nature and more intrinsic to them than they are to themselves. On the one hand, it is obviously true that pure act is absolutely separate from and above the creature. There is a contradiction in pure act ever being created. On the other hand, it’s the very nature of actuality to be communicable or sharable, and wherever some act is not sharable it is in some way composite or mixed. When I cause something my actions, the actuality is common between myself and it, it is only our potential subjectivities that divide us. If I warm clay by holding it in my hands, the warmth is shared, and the bodily extension that divides. In considering God, however, there is no potentiality dividing him from us, and so considered, he is entirely intrinsic. This is one approach to understanding Augustine’s account of God as more inward to me than my most inward part and higher than my highest. Or as Ratzinger quotes Holderlin, “not to be contained by the greatest, but to be contained by the smallest, is divine. When we say we act we mean we are moved by a principle within us, but pure actuality can act even more intrinsically in us than our nature. This is why Thomas teaches in Contra Gentiles III. 88 that the will is moved by nothing extrinsic to itself, nor is it moved by anything interior except God. Again, if God, while still absolutely separate and transcendent, does not also move us as in interior principle, what sense is there is saying that just as the soul is the life of the body, so also is God the life of the soul? The standard by which we measure whether an act is done naturally, that is, by us, is a standard that God can hit even more perfectly than we can. When we say God is supernatural, we mean both that he is above nature and other than it, that is, he is an extrinsic principle of creation and that he is even more natural than nature, because more intrinsic than what is intrinsic.

So here again we experience the sublimity of God as pure act. Pure act falls within the horizon of thought as the creator of things, but upon analysis we see that this pure act is a formal unity of concepts that are formally distinct within the horizon of our thought. Moreover, when we consider that God unifies the formalities of the extrinsic and intrinsic God becomes not just sublime, but super-sublime. If staring at the ocean were as sublime as divinity, the ocean would not just go beyond the horizon, but would penetrate into, and even contain the very act of vision of the one who looks at it from the shore. It’s with that baffling counterfactual attempt to explain a baffling thing that I’ll end.

[1] In God, according to the thing that he is and in the real order, there is one thing neither purely absolute or purely relative, neither mixed nor composite nor resulting from both, but eminently and formally having what is relative (and even of many relative things) and what is absolute…. Of himself, and not just in a way that arises due to our speaking about him, there is one unified formal ratio in God, neither purely absolute nor purely relative, neither purely communicable nor purely incommunicable, but eminently and formally containing both what is of absolute perfection, and whatever is required for the trinitarian relations. And it is necessary that this be the case: for it is necessary that whatever is most simple in itself be maximally one, and that one adequate formal ratio correspond to it, otherwise there would not be one thing that was per se and commensurately universal intelligible, by which everything is known.

We err when, setting down the division between the absolute and relative as a principle, we imagine that this distinction between the absolute and relative is somehow prior to God; making us  consequently believe that we must place him on one side of the distinction or the other. He is both opposites, since God is prior to being and to any of its oppositions: he is above being, above one, etc. Cajetan on Summa Theologiae I. Q. XXXIX, a. 1 no. vii. ed. Leonina 1888 vol. 4 p. 397.

[2] QDP q. 2 a. 1 co.

[3] Names are more properly said of God by us to the degree that they are less determinate and more common or absolute, which is why Damascene says that HE WHO IS is the best of all names said of God, as it contains totality in itself, having ipsum esse as an infinite, unspecified ocean of substance. Any other name, by contrast, is determined by some mode of substance, but the name HE WHO IS determines no mode of esse, but stands indeterminately to all, and for this reason is called the infinite ocean of substance itself. Summa Theologiae I. Q. 13. A. 11 co. Cf. also  Super Sent., lib. 1 d. 8 q. 1 a. 1 arg. 4 et ad 4;  lib. 1 d. 22 q. 1 a. 4 arg. 4;  De potentia, q. 7 a. 5 co; q. 10 a. 1 ad 9;  In De divinis nominibus, cap. 7 l. 2    

-Thesis worth investigating: The Enlightenment praise of reason drew its energy from a desire to make reason the unifying sacred cult in the wake of the division arising from the wars of religion. Reason was in one sense understood in opposition to the Christian cult, which was judged to have failed to give a sacred foundation to social order; but in another sense presents itself as the fulfillment of sacred order.

-Enlightenment reason is therefore dynamically conflicted about the sacred, making it the overturning or progressing beyond the sacred or, in a word, revolution. Insofar as the sacred is the traditional, dating itself to some heroic, now lost age, the revolution sets itself against that; insofar as the sacred is the supreme value to which all human effort is subordinated, reason or revolution is now sacred. Again, reason rejects the sacred as it comes through sacred order – the hier-archy – but in rejecting this it sees a fundamental human equality as the venerable and timeless reality that has suffered under oppression, false consciousness, and class interest until the revolution. Equality thus becomes the venerable eternal order of things.

-At our Enlightenment heart is the desire to locate the most fixed orders and expose them to the force of the revolution. As Hegel noted long ago against Kant, reason recognizes limits only in going beyond them, and this is revolutionary consciousness.

-Liberté, égalité, fraternité: There is now liberty as opposed to fixed social relationships of family, tribe, etc; equality as opposed to kings; brotherhood as opposed to the fatherhood of God and his priests.

Christian eschatology suggests that the only possible ends of a human story are a divine mercy that forgives all debts, or an insistence that they be repaid by a justice demanding the infliction of unending pain.

In proving the necessity of the Annunciation, Thomas gives as his last reason:

[T]o show that there is a certain spiritual wedlock between the Son of God and human nature. Wherefore in the Annunciation the Virgin’s consent was besought in lieu of that of the entire human nature.

ST III. 30. 1

I am free and cause things by being in motion, so I am an instrument contributing his freedom to the activity of the unmoved mover, who moves all with infinite rejoicing.

My freedom is interior to me, but divinity is the font of interiority and freedom. If he were not, my freedom would not be subject to his law. Divine interiority is verified most intimately of action in our soul by the human nature of Christ, who moves all of us as if we were members of his own body. In fact, Christ moves us even more intimately than this, since he not only moves us from within as parts of himself, but parts of himself whose consciousness he has experienced as if it were his own. In his passion he has already felt within himself all we have suffered from the sins of others or the disorder of nature, along with all we have lost by our own sins. Our own life is infinitely more obscure and poorly felt by us than by him.  I do not know who I am or what I am about, but Christ knows both that and the pain of my own confusion, and both by his experience of them.

Christ moves us by grace, and grace is an even more intimate interior principle than nature, since the divine life is more interior to what is natural than nature, and grace is the divine life. Of itself nature is only a sort of openness to being moved in a certain way by the divine mind, but grace draws us through the hole of that openness into the divine life moving beneath it. By my freedom I am subject to God’s law, by grace I enter into his life. In looking at Christ God sees the face of his spouse; in looking at his Church he sees his spouse’s body.

In Thomas’s cosmological arguments, the crucial point to see is that he’s starting with a cause that is intermediate and therefore part of a causal series. Any cause has an effect, but Thomas starts with causes that bring about effects as part of a larger series.

A causal series isn’t formed by a childish series of “and-what-caused-thats?” it’s formed when you show that a series is necessary to cause something, that is, when you show that the thing you’re looking at is arising because a first cause is achieving an end by using a subordinated cause. Thomas proves this by proving that some cause is instrumental or subordinated.

In the First way, for example, Thomas starts with the insight that nature is a principle of motion and that natural science studies moving causes. From there, the logic of his proof is:

1.) Natural causes are in motion

2.) Everything in motion is an instrumental cause.

3.) Instrumental causes are moved by some first, non-instrumental cause.

Therefore, natural causes are moved by some first, non-natural (i.e. supernatural) cause.

(1) and (3) are axiomatic; (2) is omne quod movetur ab alio movetur, which follows from potency being the per se subject of motion.

To get the other cosmological arguments:

Second Way: Start with premise (2) replace it with “every agent cause with an agent cause is…”

Third Way: Start at (2) and replace it with “both what is contingent and necessary by another are…” Most object to the part of the proof showing that the contingent is subordinate or instrumental. It’s self-evident that what is necessary by another is instrumental.

Fourth Way: Thomas seems to start from what is lower in being. Since for him this means being lower in act, and act is lower only by potency, he might have mixed acts in mind.

Fifth Way: Premise (1) is “What reliably achieves an end is directed to it by intelligence” and (2) is “what is directed to an end by an intelligence other than its own is…”

For the moment, let’s call something inerrant when we judge it has no errors. As a teacher, I do this all the time. Read the assignment, look for errors, find none, give 100%. This is consequent inerrancy, i.e. a judgment formed about errors in some text after we read it.

Christians reading the Bible or Muslims reading the Koran are not judging their texts inerrant in this way. Rather, the Christian approaches the text as antecedently inerrant, i.e. judged to be inerrant before it is read. 

In other words, the BASIS of a judgment of biblical inerrancy is NOT

1a.) Be given a Bible and told, in effect, “these are words written by an omniscient being”

2a.) Read text. Conclude that nothing in it deserves to be called an error.

3a.) Declare this consistent with the hypothesis that an omniscient being wrote the Bible.

Rather, the basis of biblical inerrancy is

1b.) Be given a Bible and told, in effect, “these are words written by an omniscient being”

2b.) Before opening the text, form the (very reasonable) belief that omniscient beings make no errors.

3b.) Conclude that, whatever you read upon opening the text, even if it looks like an error it obviously cannot be.

Consider the order of the temptations in Matthew and Luke, the first giving them as bread, temple, worship and the second as bread, worship, temple. To be sure, if we read the Bible like any other text – like two police reports or two newspaper accounts – we’d immediately conclude that some writer made an error somewhere. The conclusion would be so parsimonious we would barely notice making it, in fact, one could prove the error by doing nothing more than pointing to both accounts. But this is not the most parsimonious conclusion if we take the divine authorship of scripture as given,  since it would require a tremendous amount of subtle argumentation to conclude that God wrote something erroneous! Rather, given divine authorship, the most parsimonious conclusion is that Matthew and Luke did not both intend to recount the temptations chronologically.