More on Reduplication

Bill Vallicella has a response to my The Maverick on Reduplication post which helps to clarify a bit. I see from the response that Vallicella accepts Morris's criticisms of reduplication; this is the primary difference between our positions. I think Morris fails to characterize the traditional view of reduplication properly. In particular, the traditional view of reduplication is that reduplicative phrases may restrict the application of the predicate to the subject or clarify the subject; Morris's criticisms, as far as I can see, ignore the former, possibility, which is the relevant one. If this is so, Morris's criticisms fail if they are given as reasons for rejecting the traditional view of reduplication.

My comments on Vallicella's comments follow.

1) To my denial that being human entails being mortal, Vallicella said:

BV: This strikes me as a very weak response, being a merely ad hoc maneuver. Brandon is simply helping himself to (presupposing the truth of) the doctrine the coherence of which he ought to be explaining.

Suppose we consider a different example. Being human entails a capacity for suffering, just as being divine entails an incapacity for suffering. Will Brandon deny the entailment here as well and say that Christ's being human does not in his case entail a capacity for suffering? An orthodox defender of the Incarnation cannot do this since he cannot deny (consistently with orthodoxy) that Christ suffered and died on the cross. He really suffered, with a real human body, as opposed to a phantom or shadow body as the Docetists maintained.

So even if Brandon were right about being human not entailing being mortal -- which I do not grant -- the same problem can be raised for the reduplicative strategy using the opposites 'capable of suffering'/'incapable of suffering,' not to mention others.

I don't see how the claim "'X is human' does not entail 'X is mortal' unqualifiedly" presupposes the issue at hand; for one can reject (and, I imagine, many do) the claim that being human entails being mortal without any acceptance of the doctrine of Incarnation, the Chalcedonian definition, or reduplicative analysis. For to say that 'X is human' entails 'X is mortal', simply speaking, also entails that it is impossible for even divine omnipotence to make someone human immortal as well; this is a strong claim for which I have never seen a plausible argument. If, however, divine omnipotence can make a human to be immortal (by forever preventing them from dying), then it follows that 'X is human' does not entail 'X is mortal' except under conditions - and these conditions can, at least in principle, be violated. It is certainly true that this claim doesn't prevent heretical Christologies; but I don't think a Christology that denies that being human entails being mortal is wrong for that reason. Incidentally, the same is true of suffering. As Vallicella notes, none of this supplies a reason for preferring orthodox Christology over others, since the Council of Ephesus insists that Christ is mortal and does suffer. But the reason for this element of orthodoxy is not that being human entails mortality; it is that salvation requires that Christ be mortal and suffer, and Christ was given that we might be saved. The chief problem with heretical Christologies is that, if true, we would not be saved, not that they are all logically incoherent (although some of them perhaps are). The only case in which I can imagine that a real contradiction could be drawn along these lines would be with 'created' and 'uncreated'; but neither conciliar Christology nor (with a few important exceptions) heretical Christologies require us to say that Christ is created.

When this is recognized, the only Christologies that still have work to do in the face of the alleged contradiction are Ephesian, i.e., Christologies that follow the Council of Ephesus (e.g., Monophysite, Chalcedonian); this is because, as noted above, they do insist that Christ did actually suffer and die, and so we need to look at the other entailment.

2) To my claim that "Being God does not entail being immortal simply speaking, but not being subjectible to death in the respect in which it is God," Vallicella responds:

BV: What does this verbal fluff accomplish? 'Subjectible'? What does 'it' refer to? It is a necessary truth, indeed an analytically necessary truth, that anything divine is immortal.

Well, 'subjectible to death' might not be the best phrase (its primary relevance is not for here but later in my original post), but the primary point of the sentence is this: 'X is divine' entails 'X is immortal in the respect in which X is divine'. In other words: anything divine is immortal in the respect in which it is divine. I am willing to grant that this is indeed an analytically necessary truth (although I think to show this we would need to be much more specific about what counts as mortality). We can only say, however, that 'X is divine' entails 'X is immortal', where this latter is taken without any qualification, if we can show rigorously that 'X is divine' entails 'X is divine in every respect'. If a sound argument were put forward for it, it would in itself be a refutation of any doctrine of the Incarnation, since every theory of Incarnation, heretical or orthodox, entails the rejection of the claim that "'X is divine' entails 'X is divine in every respect'". (It would not be in itself a refutation of every Christology, since some heretical Christologies deny the doctrine of Incarnation.)

Thus, for the alleged contradiction to work we need to show that it is in fact impossible for God to have predicates in a non-divine way; and this means that to show that this contradiction is a real contradiction for Chalcedonian or any other Christology, one would already have to have in hand a proof of the impossibility of any Incarnation at all. The claim that Chalcedonian Christology runs afoul of this contradiction, therefore, is either superfluous or question-begging.

The brilliance of reduplicative analysis is that it makes it easy to recognize this. The contradiction requires us to keep the predicate univocal: Christ is mortal and Christ is immortal, in the same respect. This 'in the same respect' would insure that the predicate is immortal [that should read: univocal--ed.]. But the orthodox Christology holds that Christ is immortal in one respect and mortal in another respect; when someone who accepts Ephesus says, "The Immortal God was mortal" he is not committed to saying that God was mortal in the same respect in which He is immortal, nor that God is immortal in the same respect in which He is mortal. Rather, he merely has to hold that God is immortal-as-X and is mortal-as-Y; and this can only be a problem if X and Y themselves create a contradiction. That is, in this case, there can only be a problem if being both God and man is contradictory. In other words, to show that this contradiction is really a contradiction, you have to show that it is impossible for anything to be both God and man, because otherwise the reduplicative propositions 'God as God is immortal' and 'God as man is mortal' are not contradictory (the reduplicative phrase modifies the predicate and prevents them from being univocal; if so, the alleged contradiction is a case of the fallacy of equivocation). It only becomes a contradiction if you have already shown the Incarnation to be impossible by showing that God cannot be both God and man.

3) On my point about being God not entailing anything about being man, Vallicella says:

BV: Confused. Whether being God entails anything about being human is not the issue; the issue is whether one avoids contradiction by saying that Christ is mortal (limited in power, etc.) in respect of his being human but not these things in respect of his being divine.

'X is immortal insofar as X is divine' is only contradicted by 'X is mortal insofar as X is divine', or something entailing it. 'X is mortal insofar as X is man' is only contradicted by 'X is immortal insofar as X is man', or something entailing it. This means that there is no contradiction between 'X is immortal insofar as X is divine' and 'X is mortal insofar as X is man' unless one can show that either 'X is immortal insofar as X is divine' entails 'X is immortal insofar as X is man' or 'X is mortal insofar as X is man' entails 'X is mortal insofar as X is divine'. Unless I have accidentally confused reduplicative phrases at some point, this all follows by traditional reduplicative analysis; thus my original statement, "Being God doesn't entail anything about being human even if what is God is also human" is relevant. I would have to see the analysis of the reduplications under which it wouldn't be relevant before I could comment further.