The Octavius of Minucius Felix

My previous comment about intimations of design arguments reminds me of the beautiful little work by Minucius Felix, called Octavius , which really should be more widely known. It is beyond the shadow of a doubt the best written of all the second-century Christian apologetic works. Snippets from Chapters 17 and 18:

For what can possibly be so manifest, so confessed, and so evident, when you lift your eyes up to heaven, and look into the things which are below and around, than that there is some Deity of most excellent intelligence, by whom all nature is inspired, is moved, is nourished, is governed? Behold the heaven itself, how broadly it is expanded, how rapidly it is whirled around, either as it is distinguished in the night by its stars, or as it is lightened in the day by the sun, and you will know at once how the marvellous and divine balance of the Supreme Governor is engaged therein. Look also on the year, how it is made by the circuit of the sun; and look on the month, how the moon drives it around in her increase, her decline, and decay.....Wherefore should I speak of the multiform protection provided by animated creatures against one another?--some armed with horns, some hedged with teeth, and shod with claws, and barbed with stings, or with freedom obtained by swiftness of feet, or by the capacity of soaring furnished by wings? The very beauty of our own figure especially confesses God to be its artificer: our upright stature, our uplooking countenance, our eyes placed at the top, as it were, for outlook; and all the rest of our senses as if arranged in a citadel.

It would be a long matter to go through particular instances. There is no member in man which is not calculated both for the sake of necessity and of ornament; and what is more wonderful still, all have the same form, but each has certain lineaments modified, and thus we are each found to be unlike to one another, while we all appear to be like in general. What is the reason of our being born? what means the desire of begetting? Is it not given by God, and that the breasts should become full of milk as the offspring grows to maturity, and that the tender progeny should grow up by the nourishment afforded by the abundance of the milky moisture? Neither does God have care alone for the universe as a whole, but also for its parts....Now if, on entering any house, you should behold everything refined, well arranged, and adorned, assuredly you would believe that a master presided over it, and that he himself was much better than all those excellent things. So in this house of the world, when you look upon the heaven and the earth, its providence, its ordering, its law, believe that there is a Lord and Parent of the universe far more glorious than the stars themselves, and the parts of the whole world.

Looking over the translation again (it's been quite a while) requires me to modify my previous comment somewhat. I had said that these intimations of design arguments "are put forward as presupposing that we've already proven that there is an intelligent cause, and are used to argue that this intelligent cause is involved in the operation of the world"; this is true of some such arguments, but I was thinking largely of design considerations in the scholastics. In Minucius Felix, however, the argument certainly is an argument to an intelligent artisan; in the sentence just prior to the one I note, he shows that he has in his sights the Epicurean position that the world is constituted entirely by the chance meetings of atoms. I hadn't really been thinking of that; but of course in the earliest versions this would be the bugbear in view. It's providence (the involvement of the deity in the basic operation of the world), however, that's in question here; the dialogue is between a pagan who believes that all things, even the gods, are explained by chance conjunctions of atoms, and a Christian who believes that on the contrary it is divine providence that explains the conjunctions of atoms.

One of the things, by the way, that makes the Octavius so good is that the pagan position is put forward in a very fair way; the occasional odd arguments were standard pagan arguments against the Christians, as can be seen from other cases. Here is Caecilius the pagan talking about the Christians:

The lonely and miserable nationality of the Jews worshipped one God, and one peculiar to itself; but they worshipped him openly, with temples, with altars, with victims, and with ceremonies; and he has so little force or power, that he is enslaved, with his own special nation, to the Roman deities. But the Christians, moreover, what wonders, what monstrosities do they feign!--that he who is their God, whom they can neither show nor behold, inquires diligently into the character of all, the acts of all, and, in fine, into their words and secret thoughts; that he runs about everywhere, and is everywhere present: they make him out to be troublesome, restless, even shamelessly inquisitive, since he is present at everything that is done, wanders in and out in all places, although, being occupied with the whole, he cannot give attention to particulars, nor can he be sufficient for the whole while he is busied with particulars.

The description, "they make him out to be troublesome, restless, even shamelessly inquisitive, since he is present at everything that is done" is delightful; I can't help but find it genuinely funny, because, of course, there is a sense in which Christians believe exactly that: troublesome, restless, even shamelessly inquisitive. The response to it is fairly obvious, and Octavius makes it; but the way it's put forward is a nice touch.

Moral Endowments

ACPQ arrived today, and it looks a lot more interesting than most of the recent issues have been. I'll probably have a few posts on various issues brought up by it. Currently I'm reading "Kant and Moral Imputation: Conscience and the Riddle of the Given" by Jason J. Howard. A nice passage:

In the Metaphysics of Morals Kant states that conscience, moral feeling, love of human beings, and respect for oneself are "moral endowments" (moralische Beschaffenheiten) that serve as the foundations for the possibility of moral obligation in general. These moral endowments are not the result of social interaction, but are subjective preconditions that allow the subject to feel the force of the moral law, providing the receptivity to duty that is needed in order to be genuinely ethical. Kant surmises that these endowments arise as a direct result of the mind's awareness of the moral law--as a state arising from the effect the supremacy of the moral law has upon human consciousness--without which we would be "morally dead." Of these four moral endowments, conscience stands out as the most immediate expression of our moral heritage, compelling us to confront our self-image as rational free beings and take responsibility for our action. Moreover, unlike the other endowments, conscience is more than just a feeling, although it admittedly appears in this guise, for it adjudicates to what extent we have lived up to the moral law or fallen short of it. It is percisely this power of conscience to intervene, through either guilt or admonition, which places it in a position altogether different from that of the other moral endowments.

J. Howard, "Kant and the Moral Imputation: Conscience and the Riddle of the Given," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly vol. 78 no. 4 (Fall 2004): 613-614.

UPDATE: I came across this interesting and related article on conscience (damîr) and Christian-Muslim Dialogue: Knowing by oneself, knowing with the other.

Readworthy

Most but not all are theological in nature:

* Foolish and Slow at "Blogging Pastors"

* Understanding Genesis 2:15 at "Ralph the Sacred River"

* Messiah: The Talmud on Messianic Prophecy at "CADRE Comments"

* "The Logical Meme" discusses the philosophical thought of Karol Wojtyla.

* Dominican Iconography at "Cnytr". How to turn a generic picture of a Dominican into just about any Dominican saint you can imagine. The Aquinas icon is particularly useful; have a nice day.

* The discussion on personhood continues. See Soulless Materialism at "Philosophy, etc." and Person as an Analogous Term at "Vomit the Lukewarm". I've enjoyed this discussion, by the way; the primary reason for this weblog is to work out my thoughts more clearly, and this discussion has forced me to do so. [UPDATE: Also see Ghost in the Machine at "North Western Winds".][UPDATE 2: Chris responds at "Mixing Memory" to my last response in Higher Brain Death and Personhood Revisited.]

* "Vomit the Lukewarm" also has an argument that certainty presupposes a divine mind in The First Certain Things.

* An interesting editorial on science and ethics in Nature (reflecting on scientific work in Nazi Germany), called Uncomfortable Truths. (hat-tip: 3 Quarks Daily)

* An interesting discussion at Pharyngula sparked by an editorial in Science called "Twilight for the Englightenment?" This sentence from the editorial gives me a headache, though:

We owe this tradition [of acceptance of skepticism and of confidence in science] in part to the birth of the Scottish Enlightenment of the early 18th century, when the practice of executing religious heretics ended, to be gradually replaced by a developing conviction that substituted faith in experiment for reliance on inherited dogma.

So the practice of executing heretics was replaced by a conviction that substituted faith in experiment for reliance on inherited dogma; that's a lot of substitution going on, and I'm not seeing any clear historical line of causality here. In what way were they replacing the execution of religious heretics with a developing conviction? And where are the rationalists and the French in all this? And why would one think the Scottish Enlightenment didn't rely on inherited dogma (since Hume is only an ambiguous representative of the movement)? And was the Scottish Enlightenment really so important (even as a partial cause) to growing faith in experiment? Yes, I know; I quibble. But as I said, the discussion is interesting. One thing that really worries me about the premise of the editorial, though: one can argue that the popularity of design arguments are an Enlightenment product. The favored arguments of the Middle Ages were mostly causal arguments that have a different structure than any modern design argument; even Aquinas's Fifth Way, which is sometimes incorrectly treated as a design argument, is not a design argument, but an argument about the structure of causality itself. Most of the intimations of design arguments prior to the Renaissance are not put forward as arguments that there is an intelligent designer. They are put forward as presupposing that we've already proven or are assuming that there is an intelligent cause; they are then used to argue that this intelligent cause is involved in the operation of the world. [UPDATE: See here for a partial qualification of this last claim.] Design arguments were made popular, I think, by Newton (that it was Newton who made it popular is possibly one of the reasons why Hume's criticism of design arguments is so ambiguous -- Hume considers himself a Newtonian in a broad sense), and this was extended in the English-speaking world by Paley. (But this is certainly not the whole story; there have to be many different threads of thought constituting this historical path. Hume himself may be in part responsible, to the extent that his criticism may have produced counter-responses that otherwise would not have been developed.) The period we tend to describe as "the Enlightenment" produced and developed a lot of things, some of them very admirable, and some of them, like the concept of total war (i.e., the idea that war is not between governments but between nations), not admirable at all. Perhaps what needs to be done is to distinguish between "Enlightenment" taken as a historical label, and "Enlightenment" as an ideal, which was advocated by a handful of intellectuals in this period (the most notable and influential being Kant). But the latter possibly has much more to do with intellectual independence than with faith in experiment.

UPDATE: * John Paul II, Authority, and the Left at "In Medias Res"

* The Ways Christians Can Influence Others at "Rebecca Writes"

Boswell's English Day

Reading Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763 [Pottle, ed. McGraw-Hill (Toronto: 1950)] I came across this interesting passage:

WEDNESDAY 15 DECEMBER. The enemies of the people of England who would have them considered in the worst light represent them as selfish, beef-eaters, and cruel. In this view I resolved today to be a true-born Old Englishman. I went into the City to Dolly's Steak-house in Paternoster Row and swallowed my dinner by myself to fulfill the charge of selfishness; I had a large fat beef-steak to fulfil the charge of beef-eating; and I went at five o'clock to the Royal Cockpit in St. James's Park and saw cock-fighting for about five hours to fulfill the charge of cruelty.

A beefsteak-house is a most excellent place to dine at. Youc ome in there to a warm, comfortable, large room, where a number of people are sitting at a table. You take whatever place you find empty; call for what you like, which you get well and cleverly dressed. You may either chat or not as you like. Nobody minds you, and you pay very reasonably....

I then went to the Cockpit, which is a circular room in the middle of which the cocks fight. It is seated round with rows gradually rising. The pit and the seats are all covered with mat. The cocks, nicely cut and dressed and armed with silver heels, are set down and fight with amazing bitterness and resolution. Some of them were quickly dispatched. One pair fought three quarters of an hour. The uproar and noise of betting is prodigious. A great deal of money made a very quick circulation from hand to hand. There was a number of professed gamblers there. An old cunning dog whose face I had seen at Newmarket sat by me a while. I told him I knew nothing of the matter. "Sir," said he, "you have as good a chance as anybody."... I was shocked to see the distraction and anxiety of the betters. I was sorry for the poor cocks. I looked round to see if any of the spectators pitied them when mangled and torn in a most cruel manner, but I could not observe the smallest relenting sign in any countenance. I was therefore not ill pleased to see them endure mental torment. Thus did I complete my true English day, and came home pretty much fatigued and pretty much confounded at the strange turn of this people.

You can find a post on cockfighting at Early Modern Notes. (In fact, looking over the post, Sharon mentioned precisely this passage in Boswell.) It's interesting that Boswell, a Scot, considers cockfighting to be a purely English thing. One wonders if this is just due to the circles in which Boswell lived in Scotland, or if Boswell is right that it has to do with the 'strange turn' of the English. Scotland didn't outlaw cockfighting until 1895; one wonders if this is because the Scots were just slower to act, or if, as Boswell's passage suggests, it only became an issue for them much later than it did for the English, perhaps as an English import. It brings up all sorts of interesting questions.

If Boswell were to have an English Day now, what would he do? An American Day now? (I'm inclined to think the criticisms in the modern American case would be: selfishness, gluttony, and sloth. Boswell could have quite a vacation on those faults!)

Vanitas

I have recently been reading Thackeray's Vanity Fair (it's quite good--I regret not having picked it up before). Anyway, I jotted down these verses:

Vanitas

The sages say (a truth so clear)
that nothing lasts forever;
and handsome men shall not drawn near
but to pretty girls and clever.
Be as rigidly righteous as you can possibly dare,
your life will still be a show in the Vanity Fair,
for you shall escape it never.

Distinctions

Just a few slight thoughts on various distinctions that sometimes aren't made in disputes over public ethics.

There are two very different sorts of pro-life issues. The first is the inalienability of the right to life. The second is the governmental protection of it. This requires us to make some important distinctions between the way we treat euthanasia and the way we treat abortion.

Although it's not the only issue, the primary issue in cases of euthanasia is very often the inalienability of the right to life. Most euthanasia advocates put forward arguments that would require us to say that the right to life is alienable. That is, they hold positions that entail that we can alienate our right to life, or be presumed to have alienated our right to life, to someone else (friend, family, a doctor, the government). For those of us who believe that it is obvious that the right to life is not alienable, this is necessarily an utterly irrational move.

This can be contrasted with the case of abortion, in which inalienability is virtually never an issue. The primary line of pro-choice reasoning is not that the fetus has alienated its right to life (which would be utterly irrational, as well, and in a sense even more utterly irrational, since it cannot even be made to sound like it makes sense); the primary argument is the Roe argument that the government must be limited in what it can do with regard to the female body. In other words, while other arguments are often put forward, the real issue in the abortion debate is the limits of government. This is not an utterly irrational move; it is certainly true that government must be limited. The only question is whether the line of limitation is being drawn in the right place. Given this, one cannot treat euthanasia and abortion as parallel issues. The one is (in most of its forms, at least) simply perverse. The other, however, raises a genuine issue, even on the assumption that the pro-choice movement is wrong; ignoring this issue (and it is often ignored) opens a major vulnerability in many arguments for anti-abortion laws. This is why, despite being pro-life, I have much, much, much more sympathy for the pro-choice movement than for the euthanasia movement: the pro-choice movement has a real argument that needs to be taken seriously.

A different set of distinctions. We sometimes talk of a right to die with dignity. There are at least two ways to gloss this.

(1) A right to die (so as to preserve dignity)
(2) A right to preservation of dignity (even in dying, or especially in dying).

(2), I take it, is relatively uncontroversial. (1), however, is immensely controversial. Sometimes, however, people talk as if (2) implied (1); which is certainly not true without some controversial assumptions. (2) does, I think, sometimes (if some plausible conditions about impossibility of real treatment are met) bring us to the conclusion that the only thing we can genuinely do for a person is to sit vigil as they die, as many families do every day of the year. There is no shame in dying, and no shame in coming together with family so that a loved one will not die alone; indeed, if human dignity means anything, this is one of the most common ways in which human dignity is exhibited. But this is very different from acting to cause someone's death, as if death as such, rather than humanity in the face of it, were what gave one dignity in certain cases. The two need to be kept quite distinct, by people on both sides; something different underlies each.

Carnivals

* The newest Christian Carnival is up at "Proverbs Daily"

* A new carnival of interest: volume 1 of the Biblical Studies Carnival is up at "Ebla Logs" (Hat-tip: EMN)

*Siris will be hosting the second Poetry Carnival the weekend of April 15. The purpose of the Poetry Carnival is:

(1) to help to make visible to the general blogosphere the work of poets in our midst.
(2) to foster an increased appreciation for poetry.
(3) most importantly, to expose various poets to each other’s work, which will serve to create a creative community intent on always improving itself.

Please send all entries for the second Poetry Carnival to branem2[at]branemrys.org (with a @ for the [at], of course), with the following information:

Title of Blog:
URI of Blog:
Title of Poem (or just the first line or a number):
Permalink URI of the Poem:
Number of Lines:
Key Line or lines (1-4) to excerpt:

So if you have posted any poems of your own devising since the last Poetry Carnival (January 24), send them my way. Even if you aren't the poetry-writing type, if you've posted on poets and/or poems that you feel should be more widely appreciated, send those to me, also. The deadline is midnight (Eastern Standard Time) April 15 (although if you're a little late, there's no harm done).