Noel Coward, "There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner".
Friday, June 10, 2022
Thursday, June 09, 2022
Mar 'Aphram Suryaya
Today is the feast of St. Ephrem the Syrian, Deacon and Doctor of the Church. From the First Discourse to Hypatius:
For the Deity gave us Speech that is free like Itself, in order that free Speech might serve our independent Freewill. And by Speech, too, we are the likeness of the Giver of it, inasmuch as by means of it we have impulse and thought for good things; and not only for good things, but we learn also of God, the fountain of good things, by means of Speech (which is) a gift from Him. For by means of this (faculty) which is like God we are clothed with the likeness of God. For divine teaching is the seal of minds, by means of which men who learn are sealed that they may be an image for Him Who knows all. For if by Freewill Adam was the image of God, it is a most praiseworthy thing when, by true knowledge, and by true conduct, a man becomes the image of God. For that independence exists in these also. For animals cannot form in themselves pure thoughts about God, because they have not Speech, that which forms in us the image of the Truth. We have received the gift of Speech that we may not be as speechless animals in our conduct, but that we may in our actions resemble God, the giver of Speech. How great is Speech, a gift which came to make those who receive it like its Giver! And because animals have not Speech they cannot be the likeness of our minds. But because the mind has Speech, it is a great disgrace to it when it is not clothed with the likeness of God; it is a still more grievous shame when animals resemble men, and men do not resemble God. But threefold is the torture doubled when this intermediate (party between God and animals) forsakes the Good above him and degrades himself from his natural rank to put on the likeness of animals in his conduct.
Tuesday, June 07, 2022
Renaissance Popes: A Study in Reform (Index Post)
I knew that reform was going to be a big theme going into the series, but as it went on it became clear that it was in a sense the only theme -- the entire Renaissance, whether conciliarist or papalist or Protestant, was obsessed with the idea. Thus I've subtitled the whole series, 'A Study in Reform'.
At some point in the series I got off-count with the number of popes, so I've corrected that here.
8. Innocentius VIII (1484-1492)
10. Pius III (1503)
12. Leo X (1513-1521) [Part I]
Renaissance Popes: Conclusion
The Renaissance is an Age of Reform. Church reform is a consistent theme in the career of every pope, every Holy Roman Emperor, every French or English king. In order to understand the Renaissance papacy better, both in its strengths and in its weaknesses, it is useful to think a bit more abstractly about reform. I think this is often not done today, even by people who talk about reform, and it shows. I think as well that it can be shown that many of the corruptions that today are associated with the Renaissance papacy were byproducts of attempts at reform. Reform is easy to talk about. But reform done badly, or misconceived, or improperly supported, often breeds its own corruptions.
Reform is practical, and therefore has to be understood in terms of ends and means. In particular, reform consists of capabilities exercised in means to achieve remedial ends. Not every such exercise of capabilities is reform; admonition, rebuke, and mitigation, for instance, are all remedies to a problem, but considered on their own fall short of reform. Reform requires that the remedial end be actual correction of the problem. If you haven't corrected the problem, you haven't completed the reform.
If reform is a particular kind of exercise of capabilities in means for remedial ends, there are certain things that always need to be considered, with respect to all three elements here, end, means, capability. Since the end always defines the action, we start with the end.
First, the end must be appropriate to its context (which, in cases of reform tends to be a specific set of problems as it intersects with a specific set of cultural and material resources).
Second, the means must be proportionate to the end. That is to say, the means need to be something that can actually achieve the end.
Third, the means themselves must be appropriate to their context.
Fourth, the means must be feasible given one's actual capabilities.
Fifth, the capabilities that are exercised must be appropriate to their context.
Things often go wrong when there is failure in any of these matters. For instance, the end must be appropriate to its context. This means, among other things, that it must be something that can genuinely be a reforming end in context. One way in which people violate this is that they take something that was once a subordinate end -- that is, an end that is an end because it is also a means to a higher end -- and they give it a sort of zombie longevity, in which they keep aiming at this end even when its time has passed. The Renaissance suffered from a general bedazzlement with the idea of a general council directly and immediately reforming the Church "in root and branch" or "in head and members". But a general council is a Church instrument (more specifically, it is the Church using itself as a society to address problems); it can be an end, but it is not an end in its own right. But people especially in the early part of the Renaissance kept insisting on calling general councils even when it was clear that they had no definite idea of what problems they would be used to solve. People insisted on it without regard for whether it was appropriate. Vast sums of money were wasted on attempts to call general councils (often unsuccessfully) for things that would obviously have been better handled in other ways.
A major form of problem is also found in other agendas, that is, some end that is not remedial but is in fact governing the choices made. The Christian powers throughout the Renaissance keep talking about reform, but when you look at their actions, their decisions, and often their explicit reasoning, it is clear that the end governing much of their policy with regard to church reform is to redirect funds from the Church (especially the papacy) to themselves. Now, there is no sense whatsoever in which 'church reform' can be stretched so far as to mean 'redirecting money away from ecclesial ministries to Christian kings fighting wars against other Christian kings'. Yet over and over this is what happens, and the reason it happens so consistently is that this was one of the goals. The Christian kingdoms of Europe systematically stripped the Church in order to increase their revenues. When Protestant Sweden or Protestant England literally seized and sold off their monasteries to expand their treasuries, they were engaged in only an extreme form of what the Catholic kingdoms (including themselves) had long been doing already. When Catholic, princes had to be more indirect about it, but they did the same where they could. And this end, which is not a remedial end at all, is often dictating the 'reforms'. Why did the Christian princes keep insisting on general councils? There were several reasons, but one very central one was that the Council of Constance accidentally taught them that they could use a general council to redirect funds from the Church to themselves under the label of 'reform'.
Likewise, the means must be proportionate to the end. One of the continual problems of the Renaissance is that people keep trying to make means work even if they repeatedly fail. The defense of Christendom against the Turks is an excellent example. Over and over again, people try to use the method of crusade. The very most competent organizers among the popes are just barely able to pull something together for a very short while, and yet again and again, the lesson was not learned. (What actually defended Renaissance Christendom from the Ottoman Turks was the Muslim Safavid Empire to the east of the Ottoman Empire, a relatively organized state whose border with the Ottoman Empire was long, was highly contested, and involved no major geographical features that could prevent large armies from invading. It's not that Europe wasn't a high priority for the Ottomans, but Europe was a minor threat, while the Safavids were a major one. And later, what actually blocked Ottoman advance into Europe was not crusade but holy league, the ad hoc, mostly defensive organization that had been adapted to good effect by Alexander VI and refined by Julius II.) What's most remarkable is that crusades had only rarely achieved their goals for centuries. If you wanted to defend Europe against the Ottomans, relying on crusades was not a reasonable means, but it's the one that they kept trying to repeat.
The means must be appropriate to their context. Despite their many failures, the Renaissance popes were mostly men who were very good at this. Even so, we see occasional failures on this point. Adrian VI, for instance, attempted to weed out corruption by removing, left and right, the worldly cardinals that he held lived too luxuriously. You could very well imagine that this would in some contexts have been an excellent to do. What actually happened was that all curial business suddenly collapsed to a crawl. Yes, some of the cardinals under Leo X had grown very worldly. That did not mean that they weren't doing anything important, or that they were doing it incompetently. The Renaissance in fact is unusual in that popes and cardinals tended to be extraordinarily competent people. The cutthroat of Renaissance politics meant in general that if you got that far, you were extremely good at something important. Most bishops in history have been relatively mediocre -- not especially talented, not especially good at organizing, not especially good with money. But there are periods where this is not the case, and the Renaissance is one of them. The curial officials Adrian inherited may sometimes not have been very good at living devout lives, but they were very good at doing their jobs, and when he got rid of them all of a sudden, nothing worked properly.
The means must also be feasible given our capabilities. I think of all the requirements, this is the one we ourselves perhaps struggle most with. For this series I read a lot of commentary, both scholarly and unscholarly, about the Renaissance papacy, and one of the most common things I found was people criticizing the Renaissance popes for not doing something that, if they had done it, would obviously have been disastrous. I think there is a common view that the way you handle (say) hoarding of benefices is by just stopping people from doing it. But corruptions arise from conditions. The reason why there were so many corruptions with regard to benefices and sell of offices is because the demands of reform and society meant that none of the cardinals ever had enough money to do all the things that they were supposed to be doing. So, naturally, like every human being, they looked for ways to have enough money. The result is what these things were locked in; you could not stop them without shifting the incentives that guaranteed that they would always be arising.
In the Renaissance, the big issue with feasibility was almost always money. This is something that they appreciated very well (perhaps at times to the detriment of appreciating other things) and that for some reason we understand very poorly. The Renaissance popes all have really fancy things. They collect statues, paintings, jewels, fine clothes, and so forth. And over and over you find them criticized for it. In so many cases, I felt like someone needed to sit the critics down and have a little dialogue with them:
*****
ME: OK, so imagine that we have a time machine and you jump back in time and convince the popes to sell off all the art and get rid of Pius II's gemstone collection, and so forth. What then?
CRITIC: What do you mean?
ME: Well, obviously you can't just have piles of money lying around. It's Renaissance Italy; if you have piles of money, it will be get stolen by bandits or something. And you can't give it to a bank, because the bank has a similar problem.
CRITIC: Of course, the point is not to have piles of money but to give it away to the poor.
ME: Ah, noble goal. And then?
CRITIC: What do you mean?
ME: What happens when you have a major expense?
CRITIC: What do you mean?
ME: Exactly what I said. You need a large sum of money. Maybe you need to travel somewhere distant, or hire extra soldiers or guards, or pay a ransom. Or maybe you are hit with plague or famine or invaders and suddenly there are large numbers of people in need. You don't have piles of money lying around, so you have to get it from somewhere.
CRITIC: I guess you'd have to borrow it.
ME: Yes, you'd have to take out a loan, which needs collateral, or, if it were a really serious emergency, you'd have to pawn something, which requires collateral. So, tell me, what would work? It needs to be something easy to transport, something that people tend to want, something that can be used as collateral for very large sums. Do you know of anything that is small, in high demand, and very expensive? It would be useful to have something like that.
*****
It's by no means necessary to deny that all these luxuries were capable of having a corrupting influence. But that doesn't imply that simply eliminating them was a genuine option in the Renaissance, when popes constantly had to take out loans for major expenses and pawn things for emergency expenses. I suspect people have an aversion to thinking that they themselves could be in danger of being corrupted by what they literally find unavoidable, but in reality corruptions often arise because of the things we cannot avoid. They are often rigged-up solutions for dealing with problems that are otherwise usually insurmountable.That is why reform is often so difficult. Renaissance nepotism arose because the demands made on popes repeatedly exceeded the resources that were offered to them, so starting at the beginning with Martin V, they had to fall back on family, and once they dipped into that well, they couldn't stop as long as the incentive structure stayed the same. (The Tridentine papacy's attempt to stamp out nepotism would become almost comical as pope after pope tries to eliminate nepotism and in papacy after papacy has to appoint family members to important positions to get essential things done. Maybe the Renaissance popes should have worked harder to solve the problem, but when after Trent we get a whole string of popes who do try very hard, we discover that it was not as easy as one might have thought.)
The capabilities that are exercised must also be appropriate to their context. A good example of failure on this point is the repeated tendency of the Christian princes, in the name of reform, to try to do things that they did not have the authority to do. It was obviously inappropriate for France and the Empire to wreak havoc with so many papal conclaves in an attempt to get a pope who would do what they wanted; and yet again and again they tried, sometimes to extremely detrimental results for everyone.
All of this is very negative, so it's worth looking at a clear Renaissance success. Nicholas V establishes a project of evangelizing and inspiring devotion by means of books and buildings. Except perhaps for Adrian VI and Paul IV, all of the Renaissance popes after him were on board with this. There are obvious limits to books-and-buildings evangelism, but I think history has clearly shown since that they were right, and that this was a genuine way to evangelize and inspire Christian devotion -- and that is undeniably a reasonable end for church reform, pursued by an effective means. Not only did they have the capability for it, the Renaissance had an unusually great capability for it; things were feasible for them in matters of architecture and related fields, that would probably not be possible for us. They had the enthusiasm, the well-funded systems of artists' workshops, the artist in constant interaction and competition with each other, the continual discovery of new methods and techniques that they were eager to try out, the humanist vision that, inspiring in itself, could awe when translated to stone and paint, the brilliant minds funneled to the right places and given the means to work on their craft for decades and decades in the most extraordinary circumstances. And the capabilities were being fueled by everything in their society, so everything they did on this basis integrated with all sorts of other things in their society. If you were to propose building big, beautiful church buildings and nice palaces for ecclesiastical use today, people would reject this out of hand; we know this because, the 'big, beautiful church buildings' people are around, and they are constantly mocked by other devout Christians on social media. Perhaps that's right; we certainly don't have Renaissance capabilities in this area, and our capabilities arguably lie in a very different direction. But for Renaissance reformers, it was church reform, and they did it as church reform, and, excelling on every single point -- capabilities, means, and end -- it was a reform that has been unbelievably successful, and continues to be successful. Whatever our own capabilities, we have not done anything that can compete with its success.
It is worth keeping in mind, also, that we are not so clever as we think. When you look at the Renaissance papacy, the customs and culture may be somewhat different, but the mistakes are recognizable, because we continue to make similar ones -- confusing means and ends, advocating ends while simultaneously eliminating the available means for it, not developing the appropriate capabilities for what we intend to do, mismatching means and end in such a way that we end up creating incentives for corruption in the name of reform. We do it all. It is very difficult to argue, though, that we manage to be as impressive in making such mistakes as the Renaissance popes were.
******
Obviously I am not a historian of the Renaissance. The following historical works I found to be especially helpful (although I often disagree with the evaluations of the authors):
Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes, Volumes I to XVI, various publishers, 1899-1951. This is still the best way to get the overall view, and I've largely followed him with occasional supplementation or adaptation. The entire forty-volume set is available on Internet Archive; Wikipedia helpfully has the links.
John W. O'Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council, Belknap Press (Cambridge, MA: 2013).
Christine Shaw, Julius II: The Warrior Pope, Blackwell (Cambridge, MA: 1996).
Monday, June 06, 2022
Renaissance Popes XVII: Pius IV
Birth Name: Giovanni Angelo Medici
Lived: 1499-1565
Regnal Name: Pius IV
Regnal Life: 1559-1565
Giovanni Angelo Medici was born on Easter Sunday, 1499, in Milan to a rather poor but respectable family. Despite the name, they were not Medici in the sense that we normally mean by 'Medici' in the context of the Renaissance. While the Medici of Milan tended to assume that they were related to the Medici of Florence and so used a similar coat of arms, there is no actual evidence of this. Thus, for instance, Giovanni's oldest brother, Gian Giacomo Medici, who became a famous condottiere, was known by the nickname Il Medeghino, the Little Medici, to distinguish him from the more famous Medici. Giovanni himself was a bright young man and went on to study law at the University of Bologna. He entered the Roman Curia in the papacy of Paul III, who entrusted him with ever-increasing responsibilities in the Papal States and made him a cardinal in 1549. As a cardinal, he got considerable experience on diplomatic missions. All of this practical background would come in handy in his papal career, because he inherited a papacy in considerable disarray but also saw the conclusion of the Council of Trent and thus become the first pope to start figuring out the best ways to implement the conciliar reforms.
Paul IV died on August 18, 1559. Rome had burst into riot as soon as it became clear that he was dying, due to the harshness of his reforms; soldiers had to be brought in and for a while Rome was effectively under something like martial law. The cardinals in the conclave had immediately to decide what to do about Cardinal Morone, who was still in prison. Since, despite having been there for years, he hadn't ever been convicted of anything and, for that matter, hadn't even been formally charged with anything specific, they let him out of prison to participate in the conclave.
The fundamental problem faced by the 1559 conclave was that there were too many possible candidates. Each of the three major factions, the French, the Spanish, and the Italian, had several possible candidates, and had difficulty making up their minds about which ones they wanted to put forward. The Spanish also ended up complicating the situation by trying to get one of their early favorites, Cardinal Carpi, elected by acclamation before all of the French cardinals had arrived. They fell short of the votes required, and their attempt made the French even less likely to compromise with them. In all future voting, there would be the recurring problem of the vote being split so many ways that no candidate could reach the threshold for becoming pope. Then the secular princes kept interfering; the French and the Empire were in constant contact with their factions and also kept messing with the vote by trying to make deals with members of the Italian faction. As vote after vote after vote was hung, all the factions started proposing compromise candidates, but the same problem arose: no compromise candidate could get enough votes, given all the competing compromise candidates. As months dragged by, the conclave began to experience attrition as one cardinal died and several others became sick in ways that prevented their participation. This almost broke the deadlock on its own; the French were hardest hit by illness, so the Spanish just narrowly missed making Cardinal Pacheco pope in early December. Even this, however, was not enough. As Christmas drew near, the cardinals began to think that they were handling the matter in the wrong way. The leaders of the factions met to try to come up with one name that they could at least all tolerate. One of the names that came up was Cardinal Medici, and he was elected on Christmas Day, taking the name Pius IV, and crowned on Epiphany.
Pius, despite his age, was a very energetic man, which is fortunate, because an energetic man was necessary. He had to begin immediately repairing diplomatic relations with the major powers, which had deteriorated in Paul's reign. There was a very long list of things that needed to be done with regard to reform. Pius set up a commission of cardinals for reform of morals in the clergy. He opened an inquiry into the situation of Cardinal Morone, which formally concluded that the entire process had been based on inadequate evidence and had been improperly conducted. He stripped the Roman Inquisition of all the additional kinds of cases that Paul had piled on it, which had gravely overloaded it, and restored it to its proper bounds. Nonetheless, in dealing with Paul's immoderate and sometimes disastrous reforms, Pius always preferred, if he could, to maintain a more restricted version of Paul's reforms than to undo them entirely. For instance, he kept Paul's Index, which had been greeted with derision and shock throughout the Church, but reworked it on much more limited principles, taking into account many of the criticisms. In another instance, Pius had the problem of what to do with all the vagrant monks that Paul had arrested for living outside their monasteries. There were literally hundreds, and Paul's attempt to apply a strict enforcement was clearly unworkable. Many monks were in situations where it was not practicable for them to go immediately back into their monasteries, and there were too many to keep jailed. Even monks who were willing to comply were often not able to do so under Paul's very strict interpretation, and they had nowhere to go if anything prevented an immediate return to the monastery, because Paul had made it illegal for anyone to provide shelter to them. Pius, quickly assessing the situation, settled on the solution that was likely the best one: he gave a blanket amnesty for all past irregularities and set up a process for case-by-case assessment of unusual situations.
There were other ways in which Pius had to clean up the mess in which Paul's administration had left things. He had to figure out what to do with all of the rioters who had been arrested for rioting as Paul died; in May 1560, he declared a blanket amnesty for them as well, which was very popular. And he opened an investigation into the Carafa family; evidence of along series of crimes, including murder, was uncovered. They were put on trial; Alfonso Carafa was pardoned because of his youth, but the other two were (despite some cardinals advocating clemency) executed -- Carlo Carafa was strangled and Giovanni Carafa was beheaded. The cardinals were not happy at the execution of a fellow cardinal, and Pius took considerable criticism over it, but the pope justified himself on the ground that not only were the crimes involved quite serious, it was absolutely essential not to set a precedent of cardinal-nephews being able to get away with anything. Another major confidant of Pope Paul, Scipione Cardinal Rebiba, was arrested on the accusation of having repeatedly been negligent in his duties; he was eventually set free on the request of almost the whole College of Cardinals.
Pius also restored an aspect of the Renaissance reforms that Paul had largely left in ruins, namely, the books-and-buildings-and-music approach to evangelism. This seems to have been important to him -- Ludwig von Pastor suggests that it was because he wanted to prove himself a true Medici. Pius actively supported Palestrina and the polyphonic style. He supported the Accademia Vaticana that was organized by Carlo Borromeo, expanded the Vatican Library, gave patronage to scholarship of all kinds. He poured money into architecture and art, supporting Vasari and Michelangelo and others, particular with projects that also had practical use, like fortifications or city improvements. Michelangelo particularly benefited; Paul had stripped him of his pensions, but Pius restored them and actively continued to support Michelangelo until the aging artist's death. None of this was easy -- papal revenue was not what it had been (and a large portion of it went in any case to paying off debts contracted by Paul), and some of Paul's reforms had tightened it further by reducing possible sources of revenue -- and there were plenty of artists who still complained about the slim pickings. All in all, however, much was accomplished, and Pius managed to leave the papal finances in a much better state than he had received it, although he did so by raising taxes (which made him unpopular throughout the States of the Church) and selling offices.
Pius had a very large family, and continued the practice of distributing honors among them. However, the practice was ameliorated by the sheer numbers -- he had so many family members, that he had to be quite selective and limited about what he handed. There was very little danger of most of them exercising an outsized influence. The two exceptions, who were especially favored by Pius, were well chosen, because they were both talented men: his nephews from the Borromeo family. Carlo Borromeo, whom he made cardinal and Apostolic Protonotary, was especially competent. He was also quite a decent man, but in 1562, the other Borromeo nephew, Federigo, died suddenly, and Carlo was devastated by the loss. It led to him changing his life; he received holy orders in 1563 and began living much more strictly and ascetically -- indeed, enough that Pope Pius was concerned that he was being excessive. However, all of these things would contribute to St. Carlo Borromeo becoming one of the primary architects of the new, post-Renaissance reforms.
The question of the reform council, which was one of Pius's fundamental resolutions, was tangled. Many people wanted the Council of Trent continued; others thought that, as it had been so long delayed, it would make more sense to open a new council. The French wanted the decrees so far passed to be recognized and formally implemented; the Empire and the Protestants wanted everything so far to be scrapped and everything to begin again. Of course, there was the perpetual problem that France and the Empire could be guaranteed not to agree on the time and place. The French were also causing trouble; they had in the past repeatedly threatened to convoke their own national council, and now they were already making plans to do it. Pius, once informed of this, realized that there would be no end of trouble if the Gallican bishops succeeded, and resolved to make the general council happen no matter what, in order to forestall a Gallican council. Finally, after endless negotiation, Pius published a bull of convocation on November 29, 1560. The council was to take place at Trent, but, despite the fact that he clearly considered it a continuation, he deliberately avoided taking an explicit position of whether it was formally a continuation or a new council. Pius attempted to get everyone on board over it, but most of the Catholics were mostly vague in their commitments and all of the Protestant cities in the Empire refused to accept it. It was not clear whether the council would actually get off the ground again.
Pius, however, immediately began turning to the question of organizing it. He had some difficulty in getting a papal legate, particularly since he wanted several to represent a wide variety of the Church; he offered the position to Cardinal Morone, but Morone declined. Cardinal Gonzaga tried to decline as well, but the pope was able to convince him, and soon the legates were chosen: Gonzaga, Puteo, Seripando, Hosius, Simonetta. Gonzaga was primarily a diplomat, Simonetta and Puteo were canon lawyers, and Hosius and Seripando were theologians; Hosius had a reputation as a conservative and strict reformer, Seripando as more liberal and willing to compromise.
The third phase of the Council of Trent opened on January 18, 1562, and, despite the fact that there had been every reason to expect that it would be poorly attended, over a hundred bishops were already in Trent when it opened. There was a crisis almost immediately. The Spanish wanted it formally declared a continuation; the legates were under instructions to avoid doing this. Finally, the Spanish were willing to back down, once the legates made clear that they would avoid any indication that it was not a continuation, and that it if it were feasible there would be an official declaration of continuation in a later session. The reason the continuation-or-not was such an important one was that the decrees of the prior phases were in an ambiguous territory as to how authoritative they were, because while often implemented, the popes had not yet formally recognized them as decrees of a general council, for the simple reason that the council business had not yet finished; if, however, the newly convoked council was a continuation of the prior council, the prior decrees would be given the same formal stamp as the new decrees when the council officially closed.
Pius's plan was to tie up all the loose ends with a few doctrinal decrees, but he ran into the problem that the Christian princes (and therefore their representative bishops) wanted practical reforms. One point of reform was particularly thorny, namely, the question of how best to proceed with the requirement that each bishop reside in his diocese; the bishops were heavily divided on the basis for such a requirement, and therefore could not come to an agreement about how it should be handled. What is more, a significant number of bishops were inclined to refuse to consider any other reforms or doctrinal matters before the residence reforms had been completed, which threatened to bring the council to a complete standstill. Extensive negotiations were required to get the easier decree on communion handled first. This ended up being wise, because the decrees on holy orders and residence took several months of argument, and the council was nearly suspended in the process when disease killed Gonzaga, Seripando, and others. Pius, however, came to believe it would be a severe mistake to suspend the council rather than carry it through to completion, and so he replaced Gonzaga and Seripando with Morone and Navagero. Both were major Church diplomats, and Morone had been working with Borromeo to help organize the council from the pope's end, so he was second only to Borromeo in understanding the pope's intentions. Choosing Morone was a stroke of brilliance; due to his prior career, he had an excellent relationship with the Emperor Ferdinand, and he was able to convince the Empire, whose support up to this point had been lukewarm and suspicious, to back the pope somewhat more fully, despite the slow progress and the Emperor's belief that the pope was meddling too much in it. Morone was also able slowly to navigate the assembled bishops through the questions of holy orders and residence, carefully setting aside any issue (like papal supremacy) on which the bishops could not come to a definite agreed formulation; this he did under instructions from Pius, who held that it was generally better to have no decree at all than a half-decree that caused only confusion.
As the council slowly began to pick up pace, Pius was able, through his legates, to insist that the council must also consider reform of the Christian princes and the laity. Unsurprisingly, the Catholic powers protested this vehemently. But it was a crucial issue. Since the Council of Constance, the Christian powers had actively meddled with reform, and they had done so for a very clear reason: revenue. The princes had been so insistent on reform the whole time, in fact, because they saw it as a way to redirect revenue that was going to the Church to their own coffers. Now, to be sure, they also had genuine concerns elsewhere. But when you look at the corruptions and problems faced by the Renaissance Church, it is remarkable how many of them were due in great measure, and sometimes wholly, to the meddling of the princes. The Christian princes had been obsessed with ecclesial reform through the entire Renaissance; but they never meant reform of themselves. Because of the opposition, the reform of princes that was proposed by the legates was eventually very mild, but even that was not acceptable to the Emperor and to the French king. The French went so far as to declare that the council had not authority to reform the state. Nonetheless the bishops were broadly in support of it. Nobody knew better than they how hampered they had often been due to civil interference. So Pius did some horse-trading; Ferdinand's son Maximilian had been elected King of the Romans, and Pius offered to recognize the election if Ferdinand would back down enough to let the council finish its work. The council produced doctrinal and reform decrees on matrimony, and then another decree on matters relating to ecclesiastical governance, including mild and restricted versions of the proposed limitations on civil interference. While there were a few people who wished to prolong the council, pointing to the many things that had still not been discussed, there was a general feeling that the end was in sight. And it was; the council had one more session hurriedly and briefly dealing with miscellaneous subjects in both doctrine and reform, and closed. Many things were left on the table, either only partially dealt with or not dealt with at all. But the Council of Trent, in all three phases, was confirmed, and this is a reasonable place to mark the end of the Renaissance period of the Church and the beginning of its Tridentine period, although the transition from one period to another is always a bit blurred and fuzzy.
Both the variety of reforms and the fact that many reforms were only partly done meant that Pius IV and his immediate successors would have an immense importance in implementing it. Many of the things that are associated with the Tridentine or Counter-Reformation period of the Church were not directly due to Trent, but were really the particular ways in which the popes, and bishops like Borromeo under whom the see of Milan became the widely copied standard model of a Catholic diocese for the next several hundred years, decided to implement the rather flexible reform decrees. But this is as it should be; the problem the Renaissance reform councils had always had was that events moved much too swiftly for them to micromanage. By establishing a more flexible framework and allowing the popes and bishops to fill in the details to meet the challenges they found in implementation, Trent succeeded as a reform council in a way that none of the others had. In many ways, Constance and Basel had been outright failures, with Constance's primary achievement (the solution to the Western Schism) really being due to the pope rather than anything it had done. As the Council of Florence, the Council of Basel had been turned by Eugene IV into a successful union council, but as a reform council in itself, Basel was a complete disaster and created another schism. The Fifth Council of Lateran was more successful, but it was an anemic success because it could not provide anything that was adequate to the swiftly changing landscape of its time. Only the Council of Trent, which during its entire duration had seemed likely to fail, succeeded. It did not succeed at everything, because it could not cover everything. But it laid down principles and guidelines that could be effectively used in a wide variety of situations and (a not unimportant point) often working out how to pay for and organize the implementation, and for the next several generations 'church reform' no longer meant what it had through most of the Renaissance but instead meant 'implementing the council'. The popes filled in the details -- summarizing council doctrine in the Tridentine Creed (which Pius did shortly after the end of the council), reforming the Index, creating the catechism, regularizing the missal and the breviary, establishing regular seminaries on Tridentine principles.
Despite his apparently inexhaustible energy, Pius IV was getting on in years, and suffered occasional health problems. He was particularly susceptible to attacks of gout, which came with increasing frequency, and in early December of 1565 was sick more often than not. He died December 9. He had been very much a Renaissance pope in many ways, but he oversaw the transition to something new, laying the foundations on which his successor, St. Pius V, and his nephew, St. Charles Borromeo, would stabilize the new approach to reform. Pius V would very much not be a Renaissance pope but a Tridentine one; and he was in many ways what Paul IV hoped to be but failed to be, severe and not temperamentally inclined to moderation in reform, and some of what he did would have to be moderated by his successor, Gregory XIII. But the tenure of Pius IV had established something very important, which was that moderate reforms often worked better than stringent ones, and for the next several generations even severe popes like Pius V would at least make an effort to incorporate leniency and balance into their implementations.
Sunday, June 05, 2022
Links of Note
* John Danaher, Darwin's Logical Argument for Natural Selection, at "Philosophical Disquisitions"
* Samuel Reis-Dennis and Abram Brummett, Are conscientious objectors morally obligated to refer? (PDF)
* Raff Donelson, Natural Punishment (PDF)
* Eric Wiland and Julia Driver, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, at the SEP
* Stephen T. Asma, Imaginology, at Aeon.co
* Also at Aeon, Philip Freeman, Aristotle Goes to Hollywood.
* Charles Goldhaber, Hume's Real Riches (PDF), discusses Hume on cheerfulness.
* Neri Marsili, Towards a Unified Theory of Illocutionary Normativity (PDF)
* Stephane Serafin, Kerry Sun, & Xavier Fouccroulle Menard, Notwithstanding Judicial Specification: The Notwithstanding Clause within a Juridical Order (PDF)
* Jeffrey Whittaker, The Many Traditions of Tolkien
* Yuan Yi Zhu, The Mystical Power of the Monarchy, reflects on Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee.
* Andrew Stephenson, Existence and Modality in Kant: Lessons from Barcan (PDF)
* Katherine Cassesse interviews Zena Hitz at the APA Blog.
Saturday, June 04, 2022
The Mystery of Piety 1.4.1&2
1.4.1 On Divine Uniqueness
It is a grave error to think that beings are wholly disparate and unconnected. There are ways in which being is linked to being, and by considering three of these, to wit, potentiality, participation, and tendency, we kept coming to the conclusion that there was some first that a reasonable person would consider divine. This suffices for the question of whether anything divine actually is. However, it is worth pausing to consider, since long historical experience has shown it to be the first question that is asked, and because it is useful for consolidating the argument, whether we are in each of these cases reaching the same divine.
We have seen, then, that there is reason to conclude, from change, that there is a prime mover; from composition, that there is a first efficient cause; and from what we have called limited ability, that there is a cause with unlimited ability to be. In each of these ways, we are considering potentiality in a different context of thought, and in each of these ways, the potentiality of beings requires actuality from another, which cannot infinitely regress and thus must ultimately be due to something that is pure act.
We have seen likewise, that when we begin with things that have present in them something shared or in common, in such a way that they are graded, that this indicates participation in some way in something primary that communicates what is in common. There are, however, things that are attributed in the manner of a transcendental, so that they are in some way presupposed for those things to be classifiable at all. First of these is being, which, shared in a graded way, involves participation in what communicates being, which is that which is unparticipating, subsistent being itself. There are other transcendental attributions that are convertible with being, however, and therefore, each traces back to being itself under some convertible aspect. Thus there is gradation of unity, which must be due to the one itself, which must be being itself; there is gradation of truth, which is due to the true itself, which must be being itself; there is gradation of goodness, which is due to the good itself, which must be being itself; there is gradation of beauty, which is due to the beauty itself, which must be being itself; there is gradation of nobility, which is due to the noble itself, which must be being itself; and there is gradation of order, which is due to what is first in order, which must be being itself. Without doubt, there are many others that could be chosen. None of these transcendental terms are synonymous with being, and each has its own quirks that must be navigated, but they are all convertible with being when properly understood, and therefore they all are communicated by subsistent being itself.
We could, in fact, give additional arguments to this same conclusion in each case, based on the particular aspects of each. For instance, actual being is the good of each being; but God not only has actual being, He is subsistent being itself, and therefore is also goodness itself. Likewise, we could give additional arguments for the same conclusion based on considering the disjunctive transcendental terms related to each convertible transcendental. But by considering the matter in terms of participation of convertible transcendentals, we see immediately that subsistent being itself must be subsistent good itself, and so forth.
And finally, we considered the nature of causing, which ultimately depends on the final cause, and therefore we considered the tendency to an end in the three narrowing bands of nature, intellect, and love of wisdom as the natural expression of our intellectual nature. As there are natural ends, we can identify for a given chain of ends an ultimate superordinate end; this is true as well of the natural end, whose end is the infinite intelligible; this infinite intelligible is the architectonic wisdom that sets all things in order.
From everything that has been said, we can connect more of these conclusions and recognize that pure act must be subsistent being itself, and vice versa. Nothing is more properly called being than what is actual, so nothing more properly called being itself or subsistent than what is purely actual and thus not dependent on anything else. Likewise, what involves potentiality participates actual being; and all actual being with potentiality thus participates what is purely actual, which is that which has in pure form what is shared by participation by everything else. Thus pure act is being itself. And on the other side, being itself must be purely actual, because if it had potential being this would indicate that it participates something that more purely is, which is absurd.
Likewise we can see that pure act must be supremely architectonic wisdom, and vice versa. It can be argued that since God is pure act and any material cause is, as such, potential, that God is immaterial spirit; but immaterial act is the ground of intellectual operation, because it is able to take universals as objects. Further, being a first mover seem to be an intellectual property, because we find nothing so capable as intellect of using all other things directly or indirectly as instruments, and thus as moved movers. The prime mover is a universal source of change; every source of change aims at some form in its act of changing something else, so it would seem that the prime mover would aim at some universal form, but direction to universal rather than particular form is something distinctive of intelligence. It seems there can be nothing more architectonic than pure act, on which all other act depends, and therefore pure act must be wisdom, that is, architectonic intelligence, and it is first in its order, so it is supremely so. Similarly, as act it must be intelligible; but act is only limited by potential, so pure act must be infinite. Therefore pure act must be an infinite intelligible. On the other side, what is an infinite intelligible must be actual to be intelligible, since nothing is intelligible except insofar as it relates to what is actual, and to be infinitely so, nothing can limit it, so it must not be restricted by potentiality, and therefore is pure act.
And, of course, for similar reasons, subsistent being itself must be supremely architectonic wisdom, and vice versa. Since being itself is good itself, it must be ultimate end, and therefore all things both depend on it and are ordered by it. Likewise, an ultimate end would need to be good per se, without limitation by another end, and therefore would be coextensive or convertible with being itself. Furthermore, it seems that to be an end in some way is itself a transcendental, since everything actual is an end of some actual thing, either itself or another, and therefore by the argument noted above, end itself is being itself. Likewise, everything is intelligible insofar as it is, and many things are intelligible in various gradations. Thus they participate what is more intelligible, and indeed, what is most intelligible, that is, what is intelligible infinitely or without limit, and as everything is intelligible insofar as it is, this infinite intelligible must be being itself, and vice versa, and the infinite intelligible, as we have seen, is architectonic wisdom.
A good thing that is not its own good is good by participation, and derives its goodness from some more complete goodness. Good, however, has the nature of an end, so the more complete goodness is the end of the participating goodness; and there cannot be an infinite regress among final causes, so there must be some first and most complete goodness, which will also be the superordinate end of all things that are good. But everything that is good is so insofar as it is, and therefore it will also be being itself. Therefore being itself must be a superordinate end for all of nature, including intellectual nature. Likewise, anything can be something to which another tends only insofar as it is an end; but goodness has the nature of being with this character of tendency -- we call good most properly things that have the nature of end or more broadly things that are ordered to an end. Thus the most superordinate end will be that from which all things will have the fact that they are good, and therefore it will be, as St. Augustine says (DT 8.3) the good of every good.
Given this, we can note that pure act, subsistent being itself, and supremely architectonic wisdom must be that than which no greater can be thought, and also that that than which no greater can be thought is not multiplied into different instances. As Bonaventure says (Sent 1.8.1.2), God, or the highest truth, is being itself, than which nothing greater can be conceived. Considered simply in itself, being is infinite, since there are finite and infinite modes in which being can be had. Thus if some being is finite, it must be limited by something other that is somehow its cause; but if there is uncaused being, there is nothing to limit it. But if there is nothing to limit it, there can be nothing greater. Since we cannot conceive the unintelligible, we cannot conceive anything greater than the infinite intelligible, and what is supremely architectonic has no superior. That than which no greater can be conceived, however, cannot be multiplied, because all multiplication requires that there be some limitation to the divided individuals, which there cannot be in that than which no greater can be thought. It would, of course, make no sense to say that there could be many different instances of being itself, or to say that there is not merely truth itself but also another truth itself.
Therefore, given any of these divine titles, we can reach the others.
All of this is as one would expect; if there are many divines, then they share divinity in common, which seems to require that there be some divinity itself which all these different and differently divine things participate. We would also expect this on other, dialectical grounds. The divine would seem to be something that has especially full of being; from which we would expect, as Stein notes (PA 38), that the divine essence, encompassing all fullness, cannot exist in more than one instance. It also seems that multiple partial causes cannot by themselves be disposed to one effect unless either there is some unifying higher cause, or they are intelligent. If there are many intelligent first causes working cooperatively, either each of these causes is incapable of producing the whole universe without the help of others, or, if they could, they have nonetheless agreed to divide the effect among themselves. If the first, it follows that each cause is limited; but in that case it could not have as its effect actual being. And if there were a multiplicity of first causes, they would seem to be defective and inadequate even in the aggregate, because what is due to aggregation is to that extent limited and defective. Further, the world seems unified, and people have often concluded from this that there must be a unifier for it, because things that are diverse only combine in a unity when there is a unifying cause of order. It seems likewise that positing many things that are divine is something that should not be done without reason; as Aquinas says (SCG 1.42.4), What is accomplished adequately through one supposition is better done through one than through many, and (In Phys 1075), Finitely many principles are better than infinitely many, and one is better than many.
The primary dialectical reason why one might not expect a unique primary divine is that this is not immediately obvious when one reflects on various purported experiences of the divine. These purported experiences are often very different, so it can be difficult to see in what way they could be one thing. This objection is correct in recognizing that there are many 'divine things' as far as experience is concerned. But even if one assumes that there are many different divine things, it would not follow from this that there was no primary divine thing on which all other divine things depended. Thus, given the above arguments, even if we assume polytheism, there must be something supremely divine. We can think of it in this way. Just as, in approaching metaphysics, it is reasonable and natural to begin with the material cause, so it is reasonable and natural in first approaching religion by reason to begin materially, and in this way one would not immediately assume that all divine objects of experience are the same. In this way, and to this extent, we can recognize polytheism as having a kind of dialectical priority, an immediacy of salience in inquiry analogous to that of the material cause. However, just as it becomes clear that material causes alone cannot be a fully adequate explanation of what we find in the world, so too it is clear that polytheism cannot be a fully adequate explanation. If there are many gods, they share divinity in various ways; this communion requires participation in that which is divinity itself. But divinity itself is that than which nothing more divine can be conceived. Very much the same reasoning applies if we appeal to diversity of sects rather than diversity of experiences.
Thus we may say of God, uniquely divine, that God is incomparable. Divine incomparability is indeed the primary thrust of Scriptural claims about divine unity; that is to say, the primary interest is authority as divine, not on counting. Even in Scripture we find things sometimes described as divine in looser senses than that which applies to the one Lord God; this does not, however, in any way make God comparable to other things. We see this very clearly when we look at, say, Baruch, which argues against idolatry on the ground that it is beneath us; that is to say, we have, in at least some indirect way, a proportion to the ultimate divine, so that to worship in the full and proper sense to lesser things is to denigrate ourselves.
1.4.2 On Arguments Against the Existence of God
In arguing that something does not exist, one argues by identifying an impediment to any conclusion that it is, which will involve some defect or lack of what would be required for it to be. Such a defect might be a defect of internal coherence or intelligibility, so that it involves a contradiction or intrinsic compatibility; or it might be a defect of external coherence, so that features of what is otherwise known to be are recognized to be incompatible with its actual being; or it might be a defect of needfulness, so that nothing requires it to be. People have attempted to argue in each of these ways against the claim that God actually is, and indeed atheistic arguments in general will fall into these three families. Each of the supposed kinds of impediment are worth considering.
I. The Supposed Impediment of Defect of Intelligibility. One way in which one may object to the conclusion that God exists is by arguing that such a conclusion is unintelligible. We may regard something as unintelligible in several different ways. One way a thing is unintelligible is due to a lack of intellectual ability for understanding it, either simply or due to lack of the relevant training or skill. This kind of unintelligibility may be set aside here, since an atheist will want to argue that the defect is on the side of the claim that God exists, not on the side of his own mind.
The most common family of arguments based on this supposed impediment of unintelligibility in the claim that God exists, is the family of arguments that are sometimes called incompatible properties arguments. These arguments attempt to derive a contradiction from some definition or description of God. There are potentially endlessly many of these, because, given any two properties of a thing, one may with appropriate additional assumptions derive a contradiction. Thus attempts are made to derive contradictions from virtually all combinations. One will try to argue that immutability is incompatible with omniscience, another that it is incompatible with omnipotence, another that it is incompatible with divine freedom; and so it will go in every combination of all things attributed to the divine.
There is initial reason to doubt that this kind of argument is viable, in that it requires that one say that many intelligent people, reasoning actively on these matters, have not found this supposed conceptual dissonance. This at least raises the question of whether arguments like these may simply involve misunderstanding of the concepts involved. This is particularly true given that any argument of this kind would need to rely on additional assumptions beyond the concepts themselves, from which there follows the possibility that any incompatibility may actually be imported by a flawed assumption. But looking closer, we may find a more serious problem that would need to be surmounted.
It is pointless to say that something is impossible if we are talking about the cause of a known effect. When once one recognizes that we reach the divine rationally by causal inference, incompatible properties arguments run into the problem that they seem to depend on arbitrary attribution. In reality, when we attribute anything to a cause, we do so on the basis of the causal inference, and whatever is inconsistent with such an attribution, assuming that the causal inference is good, is simply incorrect and to be discarded. However, all arguments that something divine actually is are causal arguments of some kind. The most common attempt to avoid this conclusion is to claim that causation is in some way confined to the purely empirical. As this is clearly not obvious to most people, and is inconsistent with our usual ways of speaking, this claim necessarily depends on the account of causation being assumed In particular, it requires an account of causation that understands cause and effect to apply to sensible appearances, taken as objects of the sensory powers, and not further, the usual form of which is to say that causation is just a regular relation between sensible appearances. This is implausible for a number of reasons, not least that it does not seem to make sense to speak of 'sensible appearances' except as effects of something that is not merely a sensible appearance. Most fundamentally, however, such an account of causation is simply incorrect; causation is fundamentally an action, which is why we most commonly find causation discussed in active terms. Sensible appearances, for instance, are due to actions of things in the world on the sense organs insofar as they are capable of sensing, which lets us conclude that things are not merely sensible appearances.
The most general problem with incompatible properties arguments is that people falsely assume that the divine attributes are arbitrarily chosen -- that, for instance, people have agglomerated independently understood properties together. But this is not true; we attribute things to God on the basis of His effects, whether this be the natural world or revelation, and this causal inference constrains what can be attributed to God, as well as how it is to be understood. When we are determining what to attribute to the cause we recognize to exist on the basis of the effect, the causal inference guarantees the compatibility of the attributions. The only way in which an incompatibility could enter is if we are mistaken about what our causal inference implies; but this does not affect the existence of the cause that we reach by causal inference.
Some people give an argument that is related to the incompatible properties arguments but is not quite the same, and this is the argument that talk about the divine is in itself already meaningless or unintelligible. This runs into the difficulty of what is meant by saying it is meaningless or unintelligible. When we call something unintelligible, it might be relatively so or properly so. An example of the relatively unintelligible would be something that a particular person cannot understand, due to failures of their intelligence, even though some other intellect could find it intelligible. This obviously cannot be what is meant here. In properly unintelligible things, we typically mean either (1) it is inconsistent with the conventions of language; or (2) it is inconsistent conceptually; or (3) it is beyond the bounds of what we can understand.
It is clear, however, that talk of the divine is not unintelligible with respect to linguistic conventions, in the sense that it is inconsistent with how people actually use language, for there are many words in many languages that are used apparently to describe divine things. Thus the person who argues in this way must argue that the appearance of meaningful language is an illusory appearance, and that words like 'God' are meaningless in some way that makes it easy to mistake them as meaningful. Since words express and are signs of concepts, this can only be either if such words actually gather together inconsistent concepts, or if, since human concepts are formed on the basis of experience, there is no possible way to conceive anything beyond some boundary, and that boundary is one beyond which alone divine things may be found. Thus one finds arguments taking each of these paths. Both argue that there is contradiction in talk of divine things, but the first argues that there is a contradiction in the talk itself, while the second argues that there is a contradiction between the use of language in this way and the conditions of any meaningful language use.
It is clear enough that neither suggestion is plausible here. The words in which we talk about the divine are common words; they belong to kinds of words found throughout the world, and endless numbers of intelligent people not only use them but reason with them, discuss them, and closely analyze them without noticing anything indicative of the first path. When we speak of the meanings of words, there is a consensus of people that, at the very least, our languages and our capacities to use them meaningfully extend far beyond what the second path suggests. Thus any argument of this sort would need not only to give reasons for its claim, but also explain how so many intelligent and competent language users, of so many diverse backgrounds that mere cultural prejudice or ideological bias cannot easily be blamed, can be so confused. Consensus gentium therefore establishes that talk of the divine is neither meaningless nor unintelligible.
Nor is it reasonable to respond by rejecting consensus gentium entirely, for it is clear that the general consent of people is relevant to any field that either depends on consent or relative to which general consent can be an effect or sign and therefore evidence. For instance, if someone were to deny that a mathematical principle were self-evident, it would be irrational to reject the response that almost everyone thinks it obviously so, simply on the basis that self-evidence is not a matter of vote. For while it is true that self-evidence or its lack is not a matter of vote, nor is itself affected by how many people note it, the general consent is real evidence that the principle can be taken as self-evident; and where this is wrong, it would require independent argument and an explanation of the error to show it. This is clearly the case here, for the fact that nearly everyone uses it as meaningful is, in the absence of proof showing that this is illusory due to a contradiction, itself evidence that it is meaningful.
Further, the words that are used to talk about the divine are not used in abstraction from all experience. Since experience itself cannot be inconsistent, and anything that can be experienced can at least somewhat be understood, it is clear that religious experience establishes that talk about the divine is neither meaningless nor unintelligible.
On all these grounds we can recognize that meaningless arguments fail; there is no relevant account of meaninglessness or unintelligibility that can apply to all talk about the divine. Further, as we have noted, if anything is intelligible, there must be something divine, because if anything is intelligible, there must be intelligibility as such, which must be being itself, which all call God.
II. The Supposed Impediment of Defective Explanation. A different line of argument is that God is fundamentally defective qua explanation, and therefore there is no point in positing the existence of anything divine. The primary argument for this is what might be called the argument from superfluity. For instance, one might argue that everything that could be explained by God is explained by other things, and as there is no point in positing what is not needed, there is no point in positing the existence of God.
This kind of argument is less straightforward than it might seem. We start with an explanandum; we then recognize that we have an adequate explanans for the explanandum. Let us assume for a moment that it is so for absolutely anything on which one might base an argument for the existence of God. This is not, however, the whole story. The explanans itself might be regarded as in need of an explanation; that is to say, to be an adequate explanans is not necessarily to be a first or primary explanans. Thus this argument could only work if everything to which we appealed as an explanans in these cases were such that it had no features in need of explanation. This is not easy to establish, and, indeed, when people make this argument it seems clear that they are at least usually just guessing that their proposed explanans would be in no need of further explanation.
Further, at least many of these explanations will be causal. But if anything is caused, God exists, as we have argued before, since he is the primary final cause all other causation presupposes. As St. Thomas says (ST 1.2.3 ad2), Since nature works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent, whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its first cause. So also whatever is done voluntarily must also be traced back to some higher cause other than human reason or will, since these can change or fail; for all things that are changeable and capable of defect must be traced back to an immovable and self-necessary first principle. Therefore if anything can be explained by any kind of causal explanation, God must exist.
III. The Supposed Impediment of Defect of Good. Another family of arguments against God's existence is that which attempts to base the rejection on the lack of some good, nobility, or perfection that is taken to be required if God exists, of which the most common forms are known as arguments from evil. There are at least four typical forms, based on four imperfections or failings: moral evil, suffering, unbelief or obscurity of divine existence, and diversity of sects or confusion about divine being. Thus one may argue that, if there were a God, there would be no moral evil, because moral evil is a failing that would not be allowed by God; but there is moral evil, therefore no God. And we can make versions for the other kinds of imperfection or failing, as well.
There are at least three initial reasons to doubt whether these arguments are viable, based on the limited nature of each argument, on their tendency to appeal to things that would require omniscience fully to understand, and the fact that the path of proof is often not clear.
First, each argument seems to be of a very limited nature, and therefore unable to rule out anything that might be considered divine. Even if we assumed the arguments to be sound, they would just rule out something divine that was simply and purely inconsistent with that specific failing or imperfection existing in the world. It does not on its own give us any reason to think that this is the only thing that could be considered divine.
Second, it seems we would need to be omniscient to know that these arguments were sound. We know that things may seem imperfect from one perspective and not from another in cases in which the one perspective is missing something relevant. We know that we cannot consider all the different lights in which everything can be considered. Yet the argument seems to require us to say that the failing is such that even omniscience could not think of a good reason for it. As we do not have omniscience, this must either be a mere guess or must be based on some demonstrated contradiction. But there seems to be no contradiction. People will accuse theists of believing that God exists solely for consolation or wishful thinking; this in itself establishes that they, at least, do not think it is self-evident that imperfections imply that God does not exist, because there is no way that God's existence could be a consolation for an imperfection to any number of intelligent people if the imperfection obviously excluded God's existence. What is more, we find moral arguments for God's existence, which again seem to indicate that intelligent people are often not inclined to think that moral failures and imperfections imply divine nonexistence. Thus one cannot merely assume that the one excludes the other; it would need to be established.
A more serious problem can be seen if we consider that all arguments in this family depend on the assumption that some good, being fragile, is not worthy of being. Imperfections and failings arise because the goods of the world are not always able to guarantee their best state; they are fragile and subject to fail. However, it is an error to conclude that because a good is fragile that it is not a good at all. Nor can it be said that it is an imperfection for the world to have fragile goods; fragile goods are good, and they can contribute to the world as such. A flower that dies swiftly does not, from its death, cease to contribute something valuable, and if something were simply incapable of dying, it would not be the same kind of good, and could not contribute to the goodness of the world in the same way. Of some goods it may be said that it is better to have them even if they can fail. Certainly if one wishes to hold otherwise, one must establish otherwise.
A related problem is that arguments in this family generally assume that bad or evil is in some way the contrary of good, whereas in reality bad or evil is opposed to goodness by privation. Failings and imperfections arise from a lack of being, or a lack of order, or a lack of proportion, or some mix of the three. But privation of good in such-and-such way does not affect inferences drawn directly from actual good in such-and-such other way. But the latter is sufficient to argue for the existence of good itself; and since evil or failing is a privation, it is explained by that in which it is a privation, and there is not corresponding evil itself. These arguments that a defect excludes divine existence seem generally to assume a symmetry between good and bad, or perfection and imperfection, that does not exist.
In general we can recognize that the structure of the argument is such that it is difficult to see how it could work. Consider the essential argument:
(1) If God is, this good is.
(2) This good is not.
Therefore God is not.
For this to be sound, the first premise must indicate a necessary connection. A mere probability would not rule out divine existence when combined with (2), and if (1) were a material implication that was not based on a more fundamental necessary connection, it seems it could not be established without already knowing whether God exists; it tells us what goes with God existing, but if it's not doing so on necessary grounds, it must do so on grounds of what actually always happens, which would require knowing what happens in actual cases in which God exists. Thus we either must have experience of what happens in actual cases when there is a divine, or we must have necessary knowledge of what would happen if God exists. The first is useless for arguing against God's existence. The second seems to require that we have a profound understanding of God that we could only have if God existed. It is rare to find any arguments on grounds of evil or defect that even attempt to address these issues properly.
And indeed, if any failure, error, or evil exists, God exists, for reasons that we have previously noted: failure, error, and evil presuppose final causes, from which we can conclude that there is an ultimate end, which all call God. As St. Thomas says (SCG 3.71.10), There would be no evil if the order of good were taken away, since evil is its privation; but this order would not exist if there were no God.
When reasonable people accept arguments that lead to wrong conclusions, there are usually two reasons why people are persuaded. The first arises from human failing, as human assessment of arguments is affected by prior judgments and passions We may, however, set aside this for the moment. The second, and more important for our purposes, is that they each are related to a truth, although either they use this truth in an inappropriate way or they do not quite attain to it, but only to a false semblance of it. When intelligent people go wrong in the pursuit of truth, it is most commonly because they reach for a falsehood that in some way mimics a truth, or they accept a truth in an inadequate way that mingles it with falsehood. In each of the three kinds of arguments mentioned above, we find some truth that sometimes serves as a mask for the error.
There is, for instance, a proper sense in which divine things are beyond human reason and capacity to understand, but the reason is due to the abundance and not lack of intelligibility. As Milton says in Paradise Lost, "Dark with excess of bright thy skirts appear." We are more easily able to say what God is not than what God is, because divine being exceeds our intellectual capacity, but from this it does not follow that talk about God is unintelligible. First, when we are talking about being, we may either denote the act of being itself, or we may indicate the intellectual composition of predicate and subject into an enunciation or proposition. In the first sense our intellect cannot reach to divine being; we have no direct intellectual grasp of God. In the second, however, we may form on the basis of causal reasoning meaningful propositions, such as "God exists." These latter we may refine by removal of anything that would be inconsistent with divine being as it is known from its effects.
Likewise, there is a legitimate sense in which natural things are adequately explained by natural things. If one wishes to explain the bare movement of a ball, it is generally adequate to explain it by its being hit with a stick; this can be true even if the whole movement of stick-and-ball is to be explained as part of the action of another cause, like an athlete. Causes are not necessarily exclusive of each other, and one cause may be instrumental to or subordinate to the causal action of another, in such a way that for many purposes the subordinate cause is all that needs to be considered. When there is a primary cause that makes a secondary cause to cause an effect, as we often start with the effect, we will then move from there to the secondary cause, and only after, and sometimes through a chain of many causes, to a primary cause. Likewise, for most explanations of the natural world, we will be able easily to identify the most immediate secondary causes from the effects, and from this understand a great deal; but we can then push our explanation back further, without detriment to our original explanation in terms of the immediate secondary causes. As we go further back the chain, it becomes harder to gather the evidence required to identify and specify the higher cause. However, as we have already argued, we know, from the very nature of the causation, that there must be a primary cause, regardless of how many intermediaries there might be. Thus for many things identifying the primary cause will in many kinds of inquiry be superfluous to our explanatory needs; but the primary cause is not superfluous simply speaking, because it is a necessary condition for all other causes.
In addition, there is a genuine sense in which defect has a kind of opposition to the divine. But the error, as noted above, is to think that it is contrary to divine goodness rather than a privation in a derivative and more fragile good. As a privation, it presupposes the positive; and the positive requires the divine, as we have seen with truth, with beauty, with goodness, and others.
All these things will be discussed more fully in their appropriate places, but this shall suffice for our current purposes, which is to consider more fully what has been demonstrated in demonstrating that God actually is. Here we have looked at how it leads us to regard arguments against that conclusion; we now must return to what this demonstration lets us know and, since names are instruments of inquiry, how we name what we know.
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