Harriet Beecher Stowe on Tendency to Positive Belief

The human mind can not long subsist merely on protest and denial. Enthusiasm can not long be kept up simply by not believing. By a power as inevitable as gravitation, the human soul is always tending, after every such era of revolutionary free inquiry, to fall back exhausted into the kindly arms of a positive belief. He who teaches a positive and definite faith, which he believes with undoubting certainty in every part, has therefore an infinite advantage in any such crisis of opinions as that which Dr. Beecher found in Boston.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, quoted in The Autobiography, Correspondence, etc. of Lyman Beecher, vol.2, p. 111. The 'crisis of opinions' was the struggle between the Unitarians and the Congregationalists over the major institutions of Boston; the Unitarians had the upper hand, holding most of the cards, until Lyman Beecher came to Boston, rallied the Congregationalists, and spearheaded their revival.

Aquinas on Women

One of the issues incidental to the main discussion between The Anglican Scotist and myself is his claim, casually made in the original post, that Aquinas held that woman is a defective male. It's incidental to the main discussion, I say; but I regard it as more important generally, because it really is a claim that charity and justice require us to kill. I do, however, want to be very clear about what I actually said:

Incidentally, in an aside at the end, Bates brings up the old claim that Aquinas holds that the female is a defective male. In fact, it is Aristotle as received in the Latin who holds that the female is a defective male; Aquinas on the contrary argues that the only thing this can reasonably mean is the Aristotelian view that males result from the semen, as the 'male' principle, overpowering the female principle and that females result from a defect in such power, as a result of which the female principle wins. He denies it any more significance than this. There definitely are important points at which one can say that Aquinas's reasoning is incomplete because he uncritically takes a male perspective; but this is not one of them.

(It should be noted, incidentally, that this is not quite right; I shouldn't have talked about 'female principles' here, since, while Aquinas holds there is such a thing, it doesn't play much of a role in this type of discussion. But this doesn't affect what follows.) One of the puzzles with which Aquinas had to deal in handling Aristotle was Aristotle's claim that woman was (in the Latin translation) occasionatus and imperfectus, i.e., by chance and incomplete. The place where he most clearly discusses the text is ST 1. 92.1, where he is faced with the objection that, because woman is occasionatus and imperfectus, it was inappropriate for her to be made prior to man's sin. To which Aquinas replies by confining the Aristotelian claim entirely to the field of biology. That is, it's not a normative claim about women, but a claim about how women are generated:

"To the first it must be said that with respect to the particular nature, the female is something deficiens et occasionatum, because the active virtue which is in the seed of the male, is disposed to produce (intendit producere) its perfect likeness, according to the masculine sex, but for the female to be generated is due to a weakness in the active force, or to some indisposition in the matter, or even to some transmutation from something extrinsic, like the south wind, which is humid, as is said in the book on the Generation of Animals. But with regard to the universal nature, the female is not something occasionatum but is according to the disposition of nature to the orderly work of generation. But the disposition of the universal nature depends on God, who is the universal author of nature. And thus in instituting the nature He produced not only male, but also female."

The "particular nature" here, as is clear from elsewhere, is the particular nature of the semen, which in Aristotelian fashion he treats as the virile principle disposed to produce men. Deficiens applied to products of processes also clearly means not 'defective' but 'unfinished, incomplete'. He also considers in ST 1.99.2 the claim that because the female is occasionatus she is unnatural; which Aquinas denies on the same grounds.

Earlier in the Commentary on the Sentences he had dealt with a similar use of the Aristotelian claim in which it was argued that it was inappropriate for women to be resurrected; he had responded with exactly the same point, and, moreover, with regard to another argument to the same conclusion, based on the idea that nothing defectus will be resurrected, he goes on to say that in the resurrection no one will be defectus because of their sex.

So when Aquinas addresses the claim that the female is a defective male, he confines it to a purely biological claim about generation, and makes clear that there is nothing inherently defective about the female sex and that women are essential to the completion of human nature. Aquinas raises the claim in each case to deny that it has significance outside of the subject of human generation.

It is noteworthy, in fact, that Aquinas always confines the claim to the biological claim of generation. He does not regard woman as a defective male insofar as she is woman, but insofar as she is thought to be in Aristotelian biology the incidental product of a biological process of generation disposed to produce males.

Aquinas does, of course, think that men are perfectior, more complete. And he does not confine this to biology, because he thinks men are perfectior not simply relative to this biological process of generation, but also relative to 'vigor of the soul'. He also thinks the male sex the naturally supereminent sex. There is no question that Aquinas is sexist in this way. But even where he is very clear about this (e.g., Super I Cor., cap. 11), he treats the claim that the female is occasionatus as having to do only with how the woman is produced in a generation process assumed to be disposed toward the producing of males.

So, again, in all charity and justice, the claim needs to die. In fact, the claim, which is simply false of Aquinas, and utter nonsense in light of the actual texts, simply obscures the real issues of sexism here. More on that later. First I want to address a passage (De Veritate 5.9 ad 9) that Bates, rather mysteriously, thinks supports his case:

Nisi ergo esset aliqua virtus quae intenderet femineum sexum, generation feminae esset omnino a casu, sicut et aliorum monstrorum.

Which Bates translates (again, mysteriously) as:

If it were not for some [divine] power that wanted the feminine sex to exist, the birth of a woman would be just another accident, such as that of other monsters.

But this is assuredly not right. 'Intenderet', for instance, does not mean 'wanted'; something that 'intends' in the scholastic sense disposes something to some end. Further, it's pretty clear that it's not divine power that's in view in this particular context, but the power of the celestial bodies as universal causes. So the real meaning here is something like: Were it not that some power aimed at the feminine sex, the generation of woman would be wholly by chance as with other monsters. But this is easily understood. If nothing disposed things so as to produce females, females would be wholly accidental, like other things that are produced contrary to natural dispositions (monstrosities). But Aquinas, in fact, believes, and insists very clearly, that something does intend females; it is, in fact, very important for him to deny that women are omnino a casu like monsters. I don't see how this can be misunderstood. It's right there in the text when read as a whole.

If you read what I wrote in my original response (which I quote above) I did not in fact deny that there were sexist aspects to Thomas Aquinas, although perhaps I could have been a little more clear about that. But proper understanding of them requires that we separate the blatantly false accusations from the more subtle accusations. To reflect seriously on sexism in Aquinas there is no need to libel him.

The issue of sexism in Aquinas is actually very complicated. It's clearly there, but the precise character of it is difficult to pin down. It goes roughly like this:

(1) Aquinas clearly regards women as subject to men (when he discusses it explicitly he also always confines it to domestic life). He insists that this is not a servile subjection but a wardship. He's clearly sexist in this regard; but it's a carefully limited sexism.
(2) He does indeed, as Bates notes, say that the reason women are subject to men is that "naturally in man a greater discretion of reason abounds." Since Aquinas holds elsewhere that it is the passions that affect discretion of reason (distinctio rationis, in fact, probably being simply the distinctness of reason from the senses), this is very likely the age-old claim that women are more 'emotional' or more 'ruled by passion' or more 'affected by sensibility' than men. However, he elsewhere also says men and women are both in the image of God, inasmuch as in the mind they both possess no sexual distinction.
(3) He holds that man is the 'nobler sex', which is, he says, why Christ became a man; but also says that Christ was born of woman in order to show that women should not be despised.
(4) Aquinas holds that women cannot become priests precisely because they are naturally subject to men, due to the kind of spiritual authority priests must have; but in arguing this he also insists that they can have higher spiritual authority, as prophets, if God grants it to them; delegated spiritual authority (as is the case with abbesses); and temporal authority to judge and rule in the world.
(5) He further denies that woman will be subject in the world to come, since the world to come will be based not on biology but on merit, and if women burn with greater charity than men, they will receive greater glory than men.

So it's a complex matter requiring careful discernment of distinctions. We must beware of a dismissal of Aquinas that throws the baby out with the bathwater, and ignores the things he gets right in order to make exaggerated claims about what he gets wrong. That he does get some things very wrong is not an excuse. One of the very crucial functions of history of philosophy as a discipline is justice-based critique; and we must be extraordinarily careful not to damage the credibility of this type of task by making accusations that don't stand up in close examination of the evidence. Claims like those above, that Aquinas holds that women are defective monstrosities, are exactly the sort of thing that give justice-based critique a bad name. And doing that is a great disservice to everyone.

The Virtue of Good Guessing

According to Aquinas and, I would dare say, any virtue theory that seriously considers human nature and what it needs to excel, there is a virtue of good guessing, called eustochia. More precisely, eustochia is the developed disposition to swift and likely conjecture, the aptitude for rapid discovery of congruities and incongruities. Not all conjectures, of course, are equal, and there is one form of conjecture that makes eustochia an especially interesting virtue. Reasoning, as we know, proceeds from a starting point to a terminal point, but it can't just be a series of stages. "The switch was flipped; the light must have gone on" is not an inference or bit of reasoning; it's just a series of claims. Reasoning or inference generally requires that we move from one claim to another by something conjoining them, whether explicit or not; this is called the middle term, and it's simply the means of getting from premise to conclusion. Thus, in "The switch was flipped, so the light must have gone on" there is an implicit middle term (or series of middle terms, it makes little difference) that links flipping the switch with the light going on. This middle term is the means of drawing a conclusion from the original premises or data. Eustochia is the virtue of being good at guessing; its most important form is being good at guessing what the best means of drawing a good conclusion is (Aquinas calls this form solertia, which is often translated as 'shrewdness', sometimes 'acumen').

There's no question that eustochia is a virtue, i.e., a disposition to excellence; but there are dispositions to excellence that one might consider only barely virtues, in that their excellence, although genuine, is in some sense secondary. One might consider modesty of dress an example; it's genuinely good, but it's a very context-sensitive goodness, and one might question how important it is in the grand scheme of living a life of moral and intellectual excellence. What puts eustochia very firmly in the virtue camp is that it is a form of excellence required by prudence, and prudence, as the good application of reason to action, is a foundational virtue. Prudence can't exist if we aren't, so to speak, ready for the unexpected, and the virtue of eustochia is precisely one of the ways we are. In that sense, it's worth our time to dwell a bit on eustochia and consider how it can be cultivated.

When virtues are linked to other, more important, virtues as being at least to some degree required by them, the associated virtues are called 'integral parts' of the more important virtues. Thus eustochia is an integral part of prudence. Because integral parts are drawn into a unity by the virtues to which they are annexed, as a general rule the integral parts of a virtue faciliate each other's operation and development. A good place to start our attempt to understand eustochia, then, is to look at how other integral parts of prudence contribute to it, and how it contributes to them; and also how they can compensate for deficiencies with regard to each other. One might divide the integral parts of a virtue in slightly different ways, but a good, standard version of such a division is that of Aquinas. On this view there are seven other integral parts of prudence: memory, understanding, docility (teachableness), reasoning, foresight, circumspection, and caution. I will only actually look at the relation to the first of these, memory.

Acting with prudence in a given case requires being able to draw on a good range of relevant memories. In this sense, we can think of a virtue of memory, i.e., the developed aptitude for retaining experiences in order to learn from them. This is a virtue we tend to play down because we are so reliant on external memory of various sorts; but in this we are fairly unusual. From ancient times across many different cultures this sort of disposition has been recognized as a virtue, and there is no question that it is integral to prudence: to apply reason to action well requires drawing on experience, which requires having relevant experiences to draw on, and memory is the virtue involved in having those relevant experiences. It's clear that memory plays an important role in facilitating conjecture; conjectures, however tenuous they may be, are never made out of nothing. If I am trying to figure out how to solve a new math problem, it's obvious that I am helped in doing so if I have solid experience with a wide range of other math problems. While I can't guarantee that any of them will be wholly relevant, there is a reasonable chance that these other types of math problem will have something in common with this new one, and that therefore what I've already experienced can provide at least an oblique guide -- a rough and read preliminary guide -- to what is completely new.

It is also plausible to suggest that eustochia facilitates the act of memory. One could perhaps imagine a creature that had an excellent memory storage, being potentially able to remember anything, but poor memory retrieval, rarely actually remembering things, because new experiences would not tend to recall relevant old experiences unless they were very, very alike. Such a creature would be confined to a limited range of action. Another limited creature might have similar excellent memory storage, but problematic memory retrieval for exactly the opposite reason, namely, because every new experience recalled a host of very of memories, many of which were not even remotely relevant. Certainly human beings who tend to diverge too much in either of these directions begin to have trouble functioning. A gift for good guessing has the ability to compensate for some divergence, i.e., slight weaknesses due either to slightly defective or excessive memory retrieval, by introducing a new train of association that might recall memories that are more relevant or by helping to weed out irrelevant ones.

Similarly, we can see again from the virtue of memory the importance of a virtue of happy conjecture. We do not have unlimited memories, and if we did, we could not handle them very well. Being able to guess well lets us get by with a more limited bank of memories than we would otherwise need, by allowing us as it were to compensate for the limitations of our memory and retained experience when the occasion requires it.

One mistake I think we must not make is assuming that guessing the means of inference is a rare thing. In fact, it's fairly routine. What's remarkable about those who have the virtue of eustochia, in the form of shrewdness about middle terms, is not the fact that they guess, which is unavoidable, but the fact that they consistently guess it well. (The requirement, of course, is not perfection but excellence.) The more fully the virtue of eustochia is developed the more guesses relevant to practical life move out of the realm of 'mere guesses' and into the realm of 'educated guesses'. An example might help clarify how eustochia differs from mere guessing.

In a complicated game, like chess, there are desired ends, e.g., to checkmate the king. These ends have certain features (e.g. the king cannot move without being in check by pieces on the board). These features help us to sort out the acceptable means. For instance, a series of plays that make impossible the features required for checkmate is ruled out. The actual path to checkmate must vary depending on your opponent's moves, but some moves are more apt than others to get one closer to the desired result, given the current configuration of the board and the possible and likely moves of one's opponent. Now, the possible moves between the first few moves and checkmate are astronomical (and depend, again, on events to some degree outside one's control, like the moves of one's opponent). Checking through each of them, or even whole sections of them, are not possible. What you need is the ability to guess your best move. This guessing can't be random or arbitrary, however, because it needs to approximate the best move with a good degree of consistency. A beginner lacks this consistency; he is almost random and haphazard. But a more expert chess player may have developed the knack to see what his best bets are even at a glance. He sees immediately the congruities and incongruities of the board, and can then exploit them to achieve the end he has in sight. This comes through extensive familiarity with the game, and an acquaintance with the strongest types of moves in a wide range of types of situation. The analogy is only a crude one. There are other aspects of chess that need to be factored in, and many, many other aspects of life. But shrewd guessing, the unreasoning, rapid selection involved in good guessing about how to get from A to B, is developed for practical life in general in something like the way it is developed in games: practice, and discipline, and building on native talents.

International Orthodox Christian Charities

International Orthodox Christian Charities is an organization of Orthodox clergy and laity devoted to humanitarian activities. It is active in dozens of countries worldwide, including the United States. For instance, it worked with the Orthodox hierarchy in New York to help organize the resources of Orthodox health care professionals for the use of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This response was consolidated into an Emergency Response Network that is still active in other emergency situations. Overseas the organization is responsible for school lunch programs in Lebanon, prescription medicine distribution in Argentina, supporting kindergartens in a number of countries, and emergency food relief in Russia, among many other things. It is also expanding into other countries, like Iraq and Mozambique.

You can donate here.

Previous Posts in this Series
GoodSearch
The Amazing Change
National Religious Campaign Against Torture

Lyman Beecher on Clarke's A Priori Argument for God

About the same time, also, I read Samuel Clarke's a priori Argument for the Being of God, which had generally been considered sound. I read him, and was not satisfied. Read him again, and was still less pleased. Read him a third time, and threw him into the fire.

Lyman Beecher, Autobiography, Correspondence, etc. of Lyman Beecher, D.D. Harper (New York: 1864-1865) p. 49. The book that Beecher was reading was Clarke's A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God. The argument is basically Lockean in character: it argues that, necessarily, something must have always existed, and that this requires a particular something always to have existed; and that this particular something has divine attributes.

Family History

Reading the Autobiography, Correspondence, etc. of Lyman Beecher, I was intrigued by the following passage:

It was his favorite plan, during the latter part of his life, to write a history of his own life and times, and more than once the work was commenced, and would have been completed had it not been for the said love of finishing, and the incessant demands of practical responsibilities that never gave him time to finish.

When he had nearly reached the boundary of threescore years and ten, the hope of accomplishing the design vanished, and he appealed to his children for aid.

They gladly commenced the work, and, as the first step, the son to whom he intrusted the chief labor received and arranged his sermons, letters, and other manuscripts.

Then, in a quiet, social way, in the sitting-room of his daughter, Mrs. Stowe, he detailed the recollections of his life, which were taken down as they fell from his lips. If his memory flagged, or any facts were left obscure, he was plied with questions to elicit whatever his children deemed of interest.

Afterward, letters and other documents material to the history were incorporated, and the whole read over to him in the same social manner, drawing forth comments, and accompanied by other questions and answers, some of which were preserved. These were some of the happiest hours of his life. They would constitute by themselves, if any adequate idea could be conveyed of them, one of the most characteristic and striking portions of that life.

At subsequent times, the whole work, or material portions of it, were read over to him when others of his children were present, and their recollections preserved.

Thus the work, especially in its earlier portions, gradually grew into a conversational history by Dr. Beecher and his children. Farther on, conversation yields to correspondence a taste for which may fairly be said to be hereditary in the family. It is only with these qualifications, then, that the work can be called an Autobiography, being based upon a narrative the thread of which winds through the whole.

Lyman and Charles Beecher, The Autobiography, Correspondence, etc. of Lyman Beecher, D. D.. Harper (New York: 1864-1865) Vol. 1, pp. 14-15. It seems to me that this is the way to do an autobiography. I also wish it were more common. Imagine the treasures of memory that could be stored up in this way that otherwise would be completely lost!

A Monster Vile, Whom God and Man Does Hate

Adam Roberts has an interesting post at "The Valve" on the Redcrosse Knight's defeat of Errour, in which he raises a question:

But there’s a problem here, and it’s one that has the potential to unpick the entire project. It’s this: how can it be that Redcross, having slain error, subsequently goes on to fall into error. Because that’s exactly what he does, and not just once, but many times. How can he be fooled into erroneously trusting the wicked Archimago? The falsely beautiful witch Duessa? How can the false knights (such as Sansloy, Sanfoy and Sansjoy) be riding around in a world in which error is dead, defeated, no more? Those three are manifestations of specific varieties of error; but the category itself has already been abolished! How can they persist?

But the fact that they are errors doesn't mean that they are Errour. Errour is foul; Duessa is beautiful. Errour, when she dies, vomits up books and papers. She is the mother of myriad intellectual monsters. She is manifestly loathsome, and hated by everyone; the only danger to her is that she lies hidden. But with the help of Truth's counsel we meet her prepared and be victorious. The insight, I think, is a profound one. A lesser writer of allegory would assume that when Errour is conquered the problems are solved; but in reality, once you have slain Errour you have only begun your path to Holinesse. Then you must face Hypocrisie and the Falseness that leads to Vainglory ultimately Spiritual Pride. The danger of Hypocrisie is not that it lies hidden without the help of Truth but that it creates illusions about the Truth itself; that of Falseness not that it might suddenly jump out at us but that it insinuates itself into our lives and leads us to ruin. They are not universally hated or manifestly ugly; quite the contrary. Errour we can conquer on our own, at least with Truth's counsel; but we have no strength that avails against the doom into which Falseness leads us. We can only be saved from it when that part of us that was nurtured by Glory comes sweeping in like God's grace to oppose vicious Pride with virtuous Magnificence.

So the fact that Errour is called 'Errour' does not mean she is error generally, but that she is error in its crudest and most blatant and straightforward form, the kind that is foul and loathsome. In reading any allegory we must be careful not to read more into the label or name given something than the actual properties attributed to it allow. The Knight of Holinesse, for instance, is not Holinesse per se, but something in quest of it; Holinesse can only be had when we slay the old Dragon, marry Truth, and spend our time in the service of Glory. In Milton's Paradise Lost, Sin is not sin in general but the sin Satan spawns. And so forth.