Mononoetism

Every so often I come against someone who is defending a Christological view I want to call “mononoetism”: that Christ has only one mind. While the Third Council of Constantinople condemned the errors that Christ has only one will (monothelitism) or only one natural operation (monoenergism), I do not know of any conciliar condemnation of mononoetism. Nonetheless, I think the reasoning behind the condemnations of monothelitism applies to mononoetism.

Mononoetism could in principle come in three sorts: Christ has only one mind and it’s a human mind; Christ has only one mind and it’s a divine mind; Christ has one hybrid human-divine mind. I think the first and second options are non-starters. If Christ has only a human mind, he’s not consubstantial with the Father. If Christ has only a divine mind, he has not taken on the human nature. So we should only consider the hybrid human-divine mind view.

But a hybrid human-divine mind view seems to be the kind of “confusion and mixture” between human and divine natures that the Council of Chalcedon objects to. Indeed, the letter of Pope Agatho, approved by the Council, shows that the opposition to monothelitism is just a working out of the teaching of earlier Councils, and Agatho’s reasoning applies just as much to the mind. Just replace “will” with “mind” here:

While if it is asserted that there is but one will in him (which is absurd), those who make this assertion must needs say that that will is either human or divine, or else composite from both, mixed and confused, or (according to the teaching of all heretics) that Christ has one will and one operation, proceeding from his one composite nature (as they hold). And thus, without any doubt, the difference of nature is destroyed, which the holy synods declared to be preserved in all respects even after the admirable union. Because, though they taught that Christ was one, his person and substance one, yet on account of the union of the natures which was made hypostatically, they likewise decreed that we should clearly acknowledge and teach the difference of those natures which were united in him, after the admirable union. Therefore if the proprieties of the natures in the same our one Lord Jesus Christ were preserved on account of the difference [of the natures], it is congruous that we should with full faith confess also the difference of his natural wills and operations, in order that we may be shown to have followed in all respects their doctrine, and may admit into the Church of Christ no heretical novelty.

Next, let’s think about the Trinity, and ask if there are three minds or one in the Trinity. On the mononoetism under consideration, Christ has to have the hybrid mind without also having a divine mind (or else he would have two minds: a hybrid one and a divine one). Then if all three Persons have one mind, it follows that the Father and Holy Spirit also have a hybrid human-divine mind, which is plainly absurd—it implies a partial Incarnation by the Father and by the Holy Spirit. So the mononoetist has to hold that each Person of the Trinity has a distinct mind. Mononoetism about Christ implies trinoetism about God.

Trinoetism about God seems to violate divine simplicity, but a trinoetist about God is likely to deny that, holding that mind does not go with the single divine substance or ousia but with the three Persons or hypostases. But let’s think this through. The argument from mononoetism about Christ to trinoetism about God is a special case of a general principle that what there is one of in Christ there is three of in God and vice versa. If the general principle holds, then we have to hold that there is one will in God. For if there were three wills in God, we would have one will in Christ, and that’s the condemned heresy of monothelitsm about Christ. Furhermore, the idea of three wills in God requires a story about why it is metaphysically impossible for these wills to disagree (for if they could disagree, then the three persons couldn’t each be omnipotent!). The best story would be a subordinationist one—the Son and Holy Spirit’s wills are obedient to the Father. But this seems contrary to the equality of the Trinity.

So let’s take it that God has but one will. Mononoetism about Christ has, however, led us to the idea that God has three minds. How does one will in three minds work? A will decides between options presented by a mind. But now things start to fall apart again. Even if the contents of the allegedly distinct minds of Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the same, there is still the question of which mind is the one that is informing the one divine will. If only one or two minds are informing the divine will, we lose the equality of Persons in the Trinity—one or two Persons are partly left out of decisions. So probably one has to say that the one divine will, uniquely, is equally and overdeterminately informed by three minds. This doesn’t seem right. For a person’s will looks to the person’s own mind. (Objection: If Alice loves Bob, she looks to Bob’s mind in her decisions. Response: Yes, but only indirectly by mirroring the contents of Bob’s mind in her mind.) And, besides this, it seems that divine simplicity requires that the divine will and the divine mind are the same thing, which completely rules out the idea of one will with three minds.

We can repeat the argument of the previous paragraph with operations or energeiai. Monoenergism about Christ is condemned. Christ has two operations. On general principles, then, we would expect one operation in the Trinity, just as one will. But if there are three minds, it seems there are three operations, since a mind operates (its operation grounds the thinking of the person or persons who with the mind).

Next, let’s think about the alleged hybrid human-divine mind of Christ. In forming this hybrid mind, the divine mind of Christ seems to have changed—it has hybridized. For if it has not changed, then we still have the divine mind in addition to the hybrid one. But divine minds cannot change, since God cannot change! Indeed, the divine mind is presumably timeless. If it is timeless, it eternally exists. Thus it seems that on mononoetism Christ does have two minds after all, and so we do not have mononoetism: he has the hybrid mind and the eternally existing divine mind. This is, however, a kind of difficult argument to run. Can one not make the exact same objection to the Incarnation? How can the divine Person not change in the Incarnation? Well, orthodoxy says that the divine Person remains a divine Person. But on the hybrid human-divine mononoetism, the divine mind does not remain a divine mind, or else Christ would have two minds.

Perhaps, though, the mononoetist can try for a “smaller” version of the Incarnation: just as the divine Person comes to take on humanity, so we have one Person with two personal natures, human and divine, the divine mind comes to take on human mentality, so we have one Mind with two mental natures, human and divine. Perhaps ths would allow one to avoid the rather monstrous sounding “hybridization” that I have been assuming earlier. But here is a problem. By divine simplicity, the only distinctions in God are relational distinctions between the Persons. If God has one mind, that mind is identical to God. As argued earlier, if there is one mind in Christ, there are three in God, one per Person. But by the only-relational-distinctions principle, the mind of each person must be identical to the Person. If then the divine mind of the Logos comes to take on human mentality, so that it is both a human mind and a divine mind, like the Logos taking on humanity so that the Logos is both human and divine, then since the divine mind is identical with the Person, the Logos, it follows that the Person also takes on human mentality. Thus, the Logos is now three things: God, human and a human mind. We can say that the Logos became man, but we can also the Logos became a man’s mind. This requires a kind of inhuman relationship between the man and the man’s human mind: Jesus is Jesus’s human mind (which on this version of mononoetism is also identical with Jesus’s divine mind). Of course, Cartesians who think you are your mind won’t think there is anything strange about that. But they are wrong! And it would be very odd if Cartesianism were true about Jesus but about no one else. That would seem to undercut the idea that Jesus is like us in all human things but sin.

It is thus quite difficult to hold to mononoetism about Christ while rejecting monothelitism and monoenergism. And in any case there is a neat inductive argument: two wills, two operations, so probably two minds.

The three big mysteries of the concrete world

There are three big mysterious aspects of the concrete world around us:

• the causal

• the mental

• the normative.

The three mysteries are interwoven. Teleology is the domain of the interplay of the causal and the normative. And the mental always comes along with the normative, and often with the causal.

There is no hope of reducing the normative or the mental to the causal. Some have tried to reduce the normative to the mental, either via relativism (reducing to the finite mental) or Plantingan proper functionalism (reducing to the divine mental), neither of which appears particularly appealing in the end. I’ve toyed with reducing the mental to the normative, but while there is some hope of making progress on intentionality in this way, I doubt that there is a solution to the problem of consciousness in this direction.

Theism provides an elegant non-reductive story on which the three mysterious aspects of concrete reality are all found interwoven in one perfect being, and indeed follow from the perfection of that perfect being.

I wonder, too, if there is some way of seeing the three mysteries as reflective of the persons of the Trinity. Maybe the Father, the ultimate source of the other persons, is reflected in causality. The Son, the Logos, in the mental. And the Spirit, the loving concord of the Father and the Son may be reflected in the normative. But such analogies can be drawn in many ways, and I wouldn’t be very confident of them.

Self-locating beliefs in the Trinity

Here is a difficulty for the doctrine of the Trinity that I don’t remember coming across before:

1. The Father and the Son have the numerically same divine mind.

2. If x and y have the numerically same divine mind, then x and y have the same divine beliefs.

3. The Father has an “I am the Father” divine belief.

4. So, the Son has an “I am the Father” divine belief. (1–3)

5. An “I am the Father” divine belief in the Son would be false.

6. There are no false divine beliefs.

7. So, the Son has no “I am the Father” divine belief. (5–6)

8. Contradiction!

Here, premise (1) follows from the heuristic that what there are two of in Christ, there is one of in the Trinity: there are two minds in Christ, so one mind in the Trinity. Non-heuristically, if there are two minds in Christ—the human and the divine mind—the mind must be a function of the nature, and as there is one divine nature in the Trinity, there is one mind in the Trinity.

There is a quick way out of the paradox: Restrict premise (2) to propositional beliefs rather than de se or self-locating beliefs. The belief that would be expressed in English by “I am the Father” is a de se or self-locating belief. There are corresponding propositional beliefs, such as the belief that the Father is the Father and the Son is the Son, but these are unproblematically had in common by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

However, while this quick way gets one out of the argument, it nonetheless leaves raises the difficult question of how it is the Father knows de se that he is the Father and the Son knows de se that he is not the Father, while yet there is one mind.

The solution had better be in terms of the relations between the divine persons, for there is no difference between the persons of the Trinity except the relational. I am reminded here of Thomas’s discussion of creation and the Trinity:

And therefore to create belongs to God according to His being, that is, His essence, which is common to the three Persons. Hence to create is not proper to any one Person, but is common to the whole Trinity.

Nevertheless the divine Persons, according to the nature of their procession, have a causality respecting the creation of things. For as was said above, when treating of the knowledge and will of God, God is the cause of things by His intellect and will, just as the craftsman is cause of the things made by his craft. Now the craftsman works through the word conceived in his mind, and through the love of his will regarding some object. Hence also God the Father made the creature through His Word, which is His Son; and through His Love, which is the Holy Ghost. And so the processions of the Persons are the type of the productions of creatures inasmuch as they include the essential attributes, knowledge and will.

Thus, each divine person is fully the Creator, but is fully the Creator in a way that takes into account the relationship that defines the person in the Trinity: the Father creates in a Fatherly way, the Son as the Logos through which creation is done, and the Spirit as the Love in which creation is inspired. What makes it be the case that the Father creates in a Fatherly way is just that the Father creates and he stands in the relations that constitute him as Father; what makes it be the case that the Son creates in a Filial way is just that the Son creates and he stands in the relations that constitute him as Son; and similarly for the Holy Spirit.

We might thus imagine the following story. There is a state F of the divine mind such that the Father’s Fatherly instantiation of F constitutes F into a belief that he (de se) is the Father. The Son instantiates the numerically same state F in a Filial way. But while a Fatherly instantiation of F is correctly described in English as constituting an “I am the Father” belief, a Filial instantiation of F is not aptly so described. Perhaps, a Filial instantiation of F is aptly described as a believing of “I am the Son of the one who is the Father.” Thus, the de se beliefs of the persons of the Trinity are constituted by mental states common to the Trinity and the relations constituting the persons.

The memory theory of personal identity and the Incarnation

Memory theories of personal identity don’t work for the Incarnation. For Christ’s human mind cannot remember what Christ’s divine mind thought, as it infinitely exceeds the capacity of a human mind.

Objection 1: The Catholic tradition holds that Christ always had the beatific vision. In the beatific vision, the simple God becomes the object of contemplation, and since the simple God is identical with his thoughts, God’s thoughts become the object of contemplation as well.

Response: That’s not memory. And if it were, then memory theories would imply that the blessed in heaven are one person with Christ.

Objection 2: It is not necessary that Christ as human remember Christ’s divine thoughts, but only that Christ as divine see Christ’s human thoughts.

Response: If Christ’s divinely seeing Christ’s thoughts makes for an identity of persons, then absurdly God is also identical with all of us, since God sees all our thoughts.

Objection 3: Memory theories concern identity across time. But Christ’s human and divine natures exist at the same time, if God is omnitemporally eternal, or Christ’s human nature exists in time and the divine nature exists outside of time. In neither case does we have identity across time, and so the memory theory of diachronic identity is unaffected.

Response: If God is omnitemporally eternal, we have another counterexample. Orthodox theology holds that there is one divine mind. Thus, the Son’s thoughts at t₁ the Father’s thoughts at t₁, and hence what the Father remembers at t₂ of what he had thought at t₁ is just as much a memory of what the Son had thought at t₁, which implies the heretical conclusion that the Father at t₂ is identical with the Son at t₁. So, the suggestion in the objection only has a hope if God is outside of time.

Next observe Christ is like us in all things but sin. In particular, he is as capable of amnesia as we are. Suppose Christ suffered amnesia at t₂, so that at at a later time t₃ he did not remember what he thought at an earlier time t₁. But the metaphysical bond between the divine nature and the human nature would surely not be broken by amnesia. So the human being named “Jesus” at t₃ would be the same person as the Second Person of the Trinity, and the human being named “Jesus” at t₁ would also be the same person as the Second Person of the Trinity. Thus, by symmetry and transitivity of identity, the human being named “Jesus” at t₃ would be the same person as the human being named “Jesus” at t₁, despite there being no memory connection, and hence contradicting the memory theory of personal identity.

Perhaps, though, it can be claimed that the Incarnation would of logical necessity be terminated by amnesia. But surely if the Incarnation were terminated, the Second Person of the Trinity could become incarnate once again. In this subsequent incarnation there need be no memories of the first incarnation. Yet if the first-incarnate Son were the same person as the Second Person of the Trinity, and the second-incarnate Son were the same person as the Second Person of the Trinity, it would follow that the first-incarnate Son would be the same person as the second-incarnate Son, once again leading to a case of diachronic identity that contradicts the memory theory of personal identity.

Three levels of theological models

There are three kinds of metaphysical models of a theological mystery—say, Trinity, Incarnation or Transubstantiation:

• realistic model: a metaphysical story that is meant to be a true account of what makes the mysterious doctrine be true

• potential model: a metaphysical story that is meant to be an epistemically possible account of what makes the mysterious doctrine be true

• analogical model: a story that is meant to be an epistemically possible account of what makes something analogous to the mysterious doctrine be true.

For instance, Aquinas’s accounts of the Trinity, Incarnation and Transubstantiation are realistic models: they are meant to be accounts of what indeed makes the doctrines true. Van Inwagen’s relative identity account of the Trinity or his body-snatching account of the resurrection, on the other hand, are only potential models: van Inwagen does not affirm they are true. And the history of the Church is filled with analogical models.

A crucial test of any of these models is this: Imagine that you believe the story to be true, and see if the traditional things that one says about the mystery (in the case of a realistic or potential model), or analogues of them (in the case of an analogical model), sound like reasonable things to say given what one believes.

For instance, consider a time-travel model of the Incarnation. Alice, currently a successful ultramarathoner and brilliant geologist, will live a long and fruitful life. Near the end of her life, she has lost most of her physical and mental powers, and all her knowledge of geology. She uses a time machine to go back to 2020 when she is in her prime. If we thought this story was true, it would be reasonable to find ourselves saying things like:

• Alice is a successful ultramarathoner and barely able to walk

• Alice understands continental drift and does not not know what magma is

• Alice is young and old

• Alice is in the pink of health and dying.

These things would sound like a contradiction, but the time-travel story shows they are not. However, these claims are also analogous to claims that constitute an especially mysterious part of the mystery of the Incarnation (and I suppose a mysterious part of a mystery is itself a mystery): Christ suffers and is impassible; Christ is omniscient and does not know everything; Christ is timeless and born around 4 BC.

Of course nobody should think that it’s literally true that the Incarnation is to be accounted for in terms of time travel. But what the analogical model does show is that there are contexts in which it is reasonable to describe a non-contradictory reality in terms that are very similar to the apparently contradictory incarnational claims.

Reality is strange

The doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation and transubstantiation initially seem contradictory. Elaborate theological/philosophical accounts of the doctrines are available (e.g., from St. Thomas Aquinas), and given these, there is no overt contradiction. But the doctrines still seem very strange and they feel like they border on contradiction, with the accounts that remove contradiction sometimes looking like they are ad hoc designed to remove the contradiction from the doctrine. This may seem like a good reason to reject the doctrines.

But to reject the doctrines for this reason alone would be mistaken. For similar points can be made about Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics. To say that simultaneity is relative or that a physical object has no position but rather a probability distribution over positions borders on contradiction, and the philosophical moves needed to defend these seem ad hoc designed to save the theories. If we’ve learned one thing from physics in the 20th century, it is that the true physics of the world is very strange indeed.

Nor are theology and science the only places where things are strange. Similar things can be said about the mathematics of infinity, or even just common sense claims such as that there is change (think of Zeno’s paradoxes) or that material objects persist over time (think of the Ship of Theseus and the paradoxes of material composition).

We can, thus, be very confident that created reality is very strange indeed. And hence, shouldn’t we expect similar strangeness—indeed, mystery—in the Creator and his relationship to us?

The Trinity, sexual ethics and liberal Christianity

Many Christians deny traditional Christian doctrines regarding sexual ethics while accepting traditional Christian Trinitarian doctrine. This seems to me to be a rationally suspect combination because:

1. The arguments against traditional Christian sexual ethics are weaker than the arguments against the doctrine of the Trinity.

2. A number of the controversial parts of traditional Christian sexual ethics are grounded
   at least as well in Tradition and Scripture as the doctrine of the Trinity is.

Let me offer some backing for claims 1 and 2.

The strongest arguments against traditional Christian sexual ethics are primarily critiques of the arguments for traditional Christian sexual ethics (such as the arguments from the natural law tradition). As such, these arguments do not establish the falsity of traditional Christian sexual ethics, but at best show that it has a weak philosophical foundation. On the other hand, the best arguments against the doctrine of the Trinity come very close to showing that the doctrine of the Trinity taken on its own terms is logically contradictory. The typical Christian theologian is the one who is on the defensive here, offering ways to resolve the apparent contradiction rather than giving rational arguments for the truth of the doctrine.

There are, admittedly, some arguments against traditional Christian sexual ethics on the basis of intuitions widely shared in our society. But we know that these intuitions are very much shaped by a changing culture, insofar as prior to the 20th century, one could run intuition-based arguments for opposite conclusions. Hence, we should not consider the arguments based on current social intuitions to be particularly strong.
But the intuition that there is something contradictory about the doctrine of the Trinity does not seem to be as dependent on changing social intuitions. The merely socially counterintuitive is rationally preferable to the apparently contradictory.

Neither the whole of the doctrine of the Trinity nor the whole of traditional Christian sexual ethics is explicit in Scripture. But particularly controversial portions of each are explicit in Scripture: the Prologue of John tells us that Christ is God, while both Mark and Luke tell us that remarriage after divorce is a form of adultery, and Paul is clear on the wrongfulness of same-sex sexual activity. And the early Christian tradition is at least as clear, and probably more so, sexual ethics as on the doctrine of the Trinity.

I am not saying, of course, that it is not rational accept the doctrine of the Trinity. I think the arguments against the doctrine have successful responses. All I am saying is that traditional Christian sexual ethics fares (even) better.

Yet another theory of ineffability

There is a long-standing tradition of trying to explain (!) the attribute of divine ineffability. Theories that are metaphysical in flavor rule the roost:

1. The only true assertions we can make about God are negative. (Eastern tradition)

2. The only true assertions we can make about God are analogical. (Aquinas)

3. The only true assertions we can make about God are non-fundamental. (Jacobs)

I want to add one more theory to the mix, one that can either be stand-alone or a complement to (1)–(3). This one is more epistemological:

4. The only assertions we can make about God are misleading.

One can illustrate the misleadingness of true, and even literally true, statements by examples.

• “Alice did not treat minorities as badly as Hitler” (when Alice was in fact an exemplary promoter of social justice).

• “Bob is somewhere in this building” (when he is standing right behind you).

• “I saw Carl in a car on I-35 this morning” (but the car was being towed by a truck).

• “Davita passed some of her exams” (when she passed all of them).

• “On a good day, Roger Bannister could run an 8 minute mile.”

Note that while (1)–(3) are limited to true statements, (4) does not have this restriction. After all, all false statements are misleading.

For concrete theological examples, think of how the doctrine of the Trinity shows that the doctrine of the unity of God is misleading, or the doctrine of the Incarnation shows that the doctrine of the transcendence of God is misleading. In a similar same way, when the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation are taught apart from the doctrines of unity and transcendence, they are misleading. But by (4) something more pessimistic is true: even when we teach Trinity and unity (or Incarnation and transcendence) together, we still mislead. I suspect that in heaven we will learn something that changes our understanding of unity and Trinity at least as much as the doctrine of the Trinity changed our understanding of unity.

Alvin Plantinga gives this counterexample to the thesis that we cannot say anything literally true of God: “God is not a bicycle.” If (4) is true, even this statement is misleading. In what way? Well, maybe it leads us to forget the intimate link between all reality and God: that all the reality in a bicycle is a participation in God.

Note that if (4) is true, then it is misleading. But that’s not a refutation.

One could also restrict (4) if one wanted to. For instance, one could restrict (4) to non-negative statements, or to non-analogical ones, or to non-fundamental ones.

I don’t know if (4) is true.

The mystery of God

Suppose you have never heard music, and you are watching a video of a superb ballet, with the sound turned off. And then someone turns the sound on. You now know a dimension of the dance you wouldn’t have expected or thought of. It transforms your understanding of the ballet radically.

Similarly, but more radically, when we humans learned that the perfectly one God is three persons, we learned something that we would not have expected, something that not only we wouldn’t have thought of, but something that we would have likely denied is at all possible. It is something that should radically (in both the etymological and the common senses of the word) transform all of our understanding of God. Of course, what we learned turns out to be logically compatible with the doctrine of God’s unity, but that it was compatible is a part of the surprise.

I suspect that similar transformations of our understanding of God await in heaven. Doctrines that are related to our doctrinal understanding of God as the doctrine of the Trinity is to the unity and simplicity of God. Experience that are radically different in kind from anything we have had.

But is it not plausible that God is such that any finite understanding of him is subject to such transformation? If so, then this gives us one way of countering the “eternal ennui” worry about heaven. For such transformations of our understanding of, and hence of our loving relationship with, God could occur for eternity then.

A Trinitarian structure in love

On my view, love has a three-fold structure:

• benevolence
• appreciation
• union.

This three-fold structure has certain Trinitarian parallels. The Father is the benefactor: he gives being to the Son and thereby to the Holy Spirit. The Son admires the Father, is the Logos that reflects upon the Father’s goodness. The Holy Spirit unites the Father and the Son.

Life

Accounts of biological life characterize it by lists of features such as “reproduction, metabolism, functional organization, growth, responsiveness to the environment, movement, and short- and long-term adaptations” (SEP s.v. life). But Jewish, Christian and Muslim theists have reason to worry about such accounts of life in the light of the fact that our scriptures present God as the paradigm of a living being.

Here are some options:

Option 1: Modify one’s theology to make God fit with something pretty close to one of the biological accounts of life. Mormonism is a fairly radical example of this. A more moderate version might be some version of process theology, though one may need to jettison some features, like metabolism and growth.

Option 2: Trinitarians have this option available: The Son proceeds from the Father and the Spirit from the Father and/through the Son and these processions could count as reproduction. Moreover, because Trinitarian processions multiply persons but the resulting persons are one God, Trinitarian reproduction has an internality that might count as a kind of growth—not that the divine essence grows, but that the number of persons of the one God grows. This solution would have the important consequence that the Old Testament texts that present God as living are proto-Trinitarian. Obviously, this solution is unlikely to be attractive to Jews and Muslims, though there may be some Kabbalistic analogue that might appeal to some Jews. Moreover, unless one adopts some version of process theology, this solution still requires one to drop a number of the features in traditional accounts of biological life, such as metabolism, movement and adaptation.

Option 3: Replace the biological accounts of life with something radically different which makes God a paradigm instance of life. Here are three such possibilities for characterizing life:

A. Living things are ones that have some mental property like consciousness or purposefulness.

B. Living things have teleology.

C. Living things are ones that have a well-being, that are capable of being well.

Suboption A is pretty radical: it requires either saying that plants have a mental life or that plants aren’t alive. I think it’s not that crazy to say that plants have something like mental life. Maybe they are aware of their environment in a way that goes robustly beyond the mere data processing of a digital thermometer. And it seems plausible that one can ascribe a certain kind of purposefulness to plant processes.

Suboption B is pretty close to the purposefulness variant of suboption A, but teleology is a more general concept than mental purposefulness. For me, the main difficulty with suboption B is that I think all substances have teleology. And I don’t want to extend life to elementary particles. But those who do not think that teleology extends to all substances might like Suboption B.

Suboption C is, of course, related to Suboption B. I have the same worry about C as about B: I think all substances that have teleology have a well-being. Elementary particles have well-being—the only difference between them and organic substances is that as far as we can tell, elementary particles are always well. This is of course very controversial, and those who do not accept it may like C.

There are, no doubt, other options and suboptions. I am attracted to Options 2 and 3A.

A Trinitarian structure in love

In One Body, I identified three crucial aspects in every form of love: benevolence, appreciation and unity. But I did not have an argument that there are no further equally central aspects. I still don’t.

But I now have some suggestive evidence: There is a Trinitarian structure to these three aspects. The Father eternally conferring his divine nature—the nature of being the Good Itself—on the Son and, through the Son, on the Holy Spirit. The Son in turn eternally and gratefully contemplates the Father. And the Holy Spirit joins Father with Son. This makes for benevolence, appreciation and unity, respectively, all perichoretically interconnected. That there are only three Persons in the most blessed Trinity is thus evidence that these three aspects are what love is at base.

The possibility of multiple incarnations

A classic theological question is whether it was possible for one person of the Trinity to be simultaneously multiply incarnate. The question is particularly important if it turns out that there are other non-human rational animals--namely, aliens--in need of redemption.

Here is an argument for this possibility:

1. An incarnation of a divine person is possible.
2. If an incarnation of a divine person is possible, multiple sequential incarnations of one divine person are possible.
3. If multiple sequential incarnations of one divine person are possible, multiple simultaneous incarnations of one divine person are possible.
4. So, multiple simultaneous incarnations of one divine person are possible.

Premise (1) is this: according to revelation an incarnation is actual, hence it is possible. Premise (2) is, I think, quite plausible. After all, if an incarnation is possible, it would also be possible for this incarnation to come to an end--a divine person could become incarnate as a mortal being, which perishes qua that kind of mortal being. But then it is very plausible that another incarnation could follow. And so on.

That leaves premise (3). Here I have two lines of thought. The first is the intuition that since God is outside of time, it really shouldn't matter with respect to possibility whether multiple incarnations are in sequence or simultaneous--in each case, the multiple incarnations create a relationship between a timeless being and several locations of spacetime. The second involves time travel. Suppose that there are two sequential incarnations. Then the rational animal that results from the second incarnation could travel back in time and meet the rational animal that results from the first incarnation, and then there would be two simultaneous incarnations.

Relational gender essentialism

It might turn out to be like this: There is no significant difference between matter and antimatter, except insofar as they are related to one another. A proton is attracted to antiproton, while each is repelled by its own kind. Our universe, as a contingent matter of fact, has more matter than antimatter. But, perhaps, if one swapped the matter and antimatter, the resulting universe wouldn't be different in any significant way. If we this is true, we might say that there is a relational matter-antimatter essentialism. It is of great importance to matter and to antimatter that they are matter and antimatter, respectively, but it is important only because of the relation between the two, not because of intrinsic differences.

I don't know if it's like that with matter and antimatter, but I do know that it's like that with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The only important non-contingent differences are those constituted by the relationships between them. (There are also contingent extrinsic differences.)

Could it be like that with men and women? The special relation between men and women--say, that man is for woman and woman for man, or that one of each is needed for procreation--is essential and important to men and women. But there are no important non-contingent intrinsic differences on this theory.

There might, however, be important contingent theological differences due to some symmetry-breaking contingent event or events. Maybe, when the Logos became one human being, the Logos had to become either a man or a woman. If the relation between men and women is important, the decision whether to become a man or to become a woman, might have been a kind of symmetry-breaking, with other differences in salvation history following on it. In itself, that decision could have been unimportant. If the Logos had become a woman, we would have a salvation history that was very much alike, except now Sarah would have been asked to sacrifice a daughter, we would have had an all-female priesthood, and so on.

Or perhaps the symmetry-breaking came from the contingent structure of our sinfulness. Perhaps the contingent fact that men tended to oppress women more than the other way around made it appropriate for the Logos to become a man, so as to provide the more sorely needed example of a man becoming the servant of all and sacrificing himself for all, and in turn followed the other differences.

I don't know if relational gender essentialism is the right picture. But it's a picture worth thinking about.

Christianity and paradox

Suppose we have a religion whose central tenets are paradoxical, verging on the contradictory. What would we expect? We might predict that the religion would be unsuccessful. But that would be too quick. The religion could be successful by adopting strategies like the following:

1. Hiding the central tenets from the bulk of the members.
2. Obscuring the paradoxical nature of the central tenets from the bulk of the members.
3. Downplaying the central tenets as unimportant.
4. Appealing almost only to the uneducated and ignorant.
5. Denigrating reason, and thus appealing to anti-intellectual impulses among uneducated and anti-rational impulses among the educated.

But now consider Christianity. It has central paradoxical doctrines, including Trinity, Incarnation and Real Presence. It does not hide them from the members. Nor is there any attempt to hide the paradoxical nature of these doctrines: that paradoxicality is plain to see, and if anything it is gloried in. Through much of the history of Christianity, the central tenets have been insisted on very publicly and are central to the liturgy. While Christianity has always had a special love for the downtrodden, its appeal has always also included many men and women of very high intellectual stature. Finally, while there are occasional instances of Christians denigrating reasons in history, the main thread of Christianity has been a defender of the importance of reason, even to the point of a significant part of the tradition embracing the Greek idea of humans as distinctively rational animals. How did it do it? Well, in addition to the five strategies above (and perhaps some others) there is also a sixth possibility:

6. Having true central tenets and having God work in the hearts and minds of members and nonmembers.

Why is marriage sacred?

Many religions that disagree on many other things treat marriage as something sacred, not just a contract. Moreover, many non-religious people—though not all—have intuitions that point in that direction. Let's take all these intuitions at face value. Marriage is sacred.

Why?

Well, a paradigm of the uncontroversially sacred—something that we except to see connected to rituals across religions—is life. We are not surprised to see funerals or baptisms in a religion. Maybe at some deep level it is puzzling why human life is sacred (if materialism is true, this may be especially puzzling), but that human life is treated as sacred is not puzzling.

A student pointed out to me this morning that we can attempt to account for the sacredness of marriage by pointing to the sacredness of the new joint life of the couple. They become one flesh after all. Indeed, it is as if a new human life came into existence. And if the analogy is tight enough, that makes sense of its as being sacred.

But while I think this is all true, I suspect that the reason why marriage has been so widely treated as sacred may be a more literal connection to new life: it is a relationship tied to literal new human life, to procreation. Literal new human life is sacred. The sacred infects what is related to it. The message of a book is sacred, so the volume it's in is treated as a holy book. Marriage, on this picture, is tied to procreation.

But of course we and our ancestors know that not every marriage results in procreation and that procreation can happen outside of marriage. So the tie between marriage and procreation has to be carefully formulated. I don't think we want to say it's just a statistical tie. That would undermine the reason for taking marriage to be sacred. Rather, I suspect it's a normative tie. There is more than one way one could expand on this tie.

One option is to say that marriage is a relationship that normally results in children. One would expect a relationship that normally results in something sacred to have something sacred about it.

However, this option has the consequence that a marriage without children is lacking something normal to it, like a three-legged sheep lacks a leg. But is it right to say that a couple who got married in their 60s has a defective relationship? Well, the phrase "defective relationship" leads astray. It suggests that there is something wrong with what the people are doing. And in that sense, the couple who got married in their 60s don't have a defective relationship just because they don't have children. But if we think of it as a defect in the same way that a sheep having three legs is a defect, then that phrase may not be incorrect. A couple who gets married late in life may well have a quite appropriate sadness that they were unable share a larger portion of their life, and in particular a sadness that they were unable to share their fertility. So I don't think the case of elderly couples is a serious problem for the view that the tie between marriage and procreation is that children normally result from marriage. And the view explains why it can feel so tragic to be infertile.

Another option would be that marriage is a relationship that makes having children morally permissible. It is a relationship that licenses procreation. One shouldn't here have a picture of the state or the church giving one a license to procreate: marriage comes from an exchange of vows between the future spouses, and it is their giving themselves in marriage to one another—something that in principle can happen without a state or a church being involved—is what morally licenses the procreation on this view. It is only with the kind of commitment that is found in marriage that a couple could permissibly tie themselves to each other by having a child together. But it makes some sense that taking up the commitment which makes the production of human life permissible would be infected with the sacredness of human life. Still, in the end this doesn't seem quite to get the full story. For instance, if a married unemployed couple is so poor that they cannot adequately care for their children, then it could be morally impermissible for them to procreate. Getting a job could then render procreation morally permissible. But that doesn't make the job be a sacred thing, at least not in the way marriage is.

In the end, I suspect that all three stories—the story of the new joint life of the couple, of marriage normally resulting in children, and of marriage in principle morally permitting a couple to have children—are a part of the truth. And, as a colleague reminded me, there is the mirroring of the life of the Trinity.

The identity of the act of creation

God is three persons and God has created the universe. How many acts of creation are there here? There seem to be three options:

1. Each person of the Trinity performs his own distinct act of creation.
2. The persons of the Trinity jointly perform an act of creation, and no one person of the Trinity performs an act of creation.
3. Each person of the Trinity performs the one numerically same act of creation.

Option 3 is a special case of the doctrine of the identity of divine activities ad extra. I will argue for option 3 by arguing against options 1 and 2.

Since a divine act of creation is efficacious, option 1 implies three individually efficacious creative acts overdetermining the creation of the universe. Then if we attempt to secure reference to God as the one who has performed the act of creation, we fail since there is more than one act of creation, just as we fail if we attempt to secure reference to a place as the north pole of the moon of Mars, since Mars has two moons. But arguably identifying God as the creator either of the universe as a whole or of some aspect of it is central among the ways in which our ancestors gained reference to God. I suppose one could try to rescue our ancestors' reference to God by saying that they ended up ambiguously referring to the three persons. But if so, then it seems that we should say, if we use the word "God" as they did, that there really are three Gods, just as if our ancestors stipulated "Tyrolia" to be the north pole of the moon of Mars, then we should say there are two Tyrolias.

Option 1, thus, leads to some form of atheism or of tritheism.

Option 2 has the unacceptable consequence that the Creed is wrong when it says "I believe in God the Father almighty, the creator of heaven and earth."

That leaves option 3.

From tropes to the Trinity

Suppose that each cat has its own catness trope, each dog has its own dogness trope, and so on: each thing has its own essence trope. Thus, whenever we have two cats, we have two individuals—understood as bare particulars, bundles, substances, composite wholes, or in some other way—and two catnesses. Now, the question comes: When we say "There are two cats", is the content that

1. There are two individuals each of which is a cat, or that
2. There are two catnesses?

Whenever one is true, so is the other. Moreover, both statements are pretty natural. On a reference magnetism semantics on which the contents of our assertions are determined by charity plus naturalness, the choice between (1) and (2) will be a close one. In fact, it may be so close that it may be indeterminate whether "There are two cats" means (1) or (2). If naturalness favors either reading, it seems to favor (2) slightly, I think. So the choice between (1) and (2) will be a close one, and the answer will be either indeterminate or in favor of (2).

Likewise, does "Felix" refer to the individual or the catness? If the former, then "Felix sits" has the content that this individual has a sitting trope, and if the latter, then "Felix sits" has the content that this catness is coinstantiated with a sitting trope. Again, both candidates are pretty close to as natural. So again, the question whether names refer to individuals or their essence tropes will be a close one on reference magnetism, and maybe the answer will be indeterminate.

Suppose now that by a miracle there came to be two cat individuals that had the very same catness trope. Why not, after all? There doesn't appear to be anything logically contradictory about the supposition. After all, Siamese twins may share a heart. Why can't they share a trope as well?

So now you assign names, Felix and Tiger, and you say: "Felix is not Tiger." While it may have been indeterminate, or at least was close, whether ordinary cat names referred to catnesses or individuals, in the case at hand there is no indeterminacy or closeness. Charity now requires that at least these two names refer to the individuals, not the shared catness, since there is but one shared catness.

But while it is clear that we should say that Felix is not Tiger, it is less clear whether we should say that there are two cats. It is tempting to argue that Felix is a cat, Tiger is a cat, Felix and Tiger are two, so there are two cats. Certainly, there are two each of which is a cat. But are there two cats? Remember that it was indeterminate or close whether in general "There are two cats" referred to a duality of individuals or a duality of catnesses. If it should turn out to have in general referred to a duality of catnesses, then we should say "There is one cat". But even if it was indeterminate whether "There are two cats" refers to a duality of individuals or catnesses, we might reasonably in this very exceptional case settle on duality of catnesses. There is also a significant consideration in favor of describing the case by saying "There is one cat": it lets one say that there is exactly one catness trope per cat.

But now suppose we have three individuals, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, who have one divinity trope. Then charity will make us say that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are three individuals. Should we say that they are three Gods or that they are one God? If in ordinary cases we take counting to go with essence tropes, then we unambiguously have to go for the "one God" reading. If in ordinary cases, counting is indeterminate between individuals and their essence tropes, then we might in the case at hand simply reasonably resolve the ambiguity by speaking in the "one God" way, which then lets us say, as appears right, that there is exactly one divinity trope per God.

I am not defending this exact theory of the Trinity. One needs to be very cautious talking of individuals that have divinity due to divine simplicity. But I think something like the above is Aquinas' story.

Moral and perfect freedom

Say that moral freedom is the ability to choose between a morally permissible and a morally wrong action. Perfect freedom, on the other hand, is a freedom to choose between morally permissible actions, but with a perfect and infallible directedness at the good of the sort that God and the saints in heaven are said to enjoy.

Morriston (and others before him, like Quentin Smith, but Morriston's piece is particularly well developed) basically offers this dilemma: Either moral freedom is better than than perfect freedom or not. If moral freedom is better, then God has the less valuable kind of freedom, which seems incompatible with God's perfection. If moral freedom is not better, then God should have created beings with perfect freedom, since this way all the evils flowing from our misuse of moral freedom would have been prevented.

I want to make two points. First, the relevant question shouldn't be whether moral freedom is better than perfect freedom, but whether the action of creating beings with moral freedom is better than the action of creating beings with perfect freedom. An action can be better than another, even if its intended effect is no better. For instance, if I promised an editor a paper on modality, and I have the time for only one paper, the action of writing a paper on modality is better than the action of writing a paper on the Trinity, even if the effect of the latter action may be the better.

With this distinction in mind, one notices that there is a difference in value between God's creating a being that inevitably loves him back and his creating a being that gets to choose whether or not to love him back. Even if a being that inevitably loves him back is no better, God's action of inviting someone into communion with him very much has something very significant to be said for it that God's creating someone who will inevitably be in communion with him doesn't.

The second point is this. There is a value to loving someone by choice. Now when God and St Francis love each other, each loves the other by choice. Francis chooses to love God, while being able not to. But God likewise chooses to love Francis, while being able not to. Now you might say: "But doesn't God have to love everyone, given that he is love itself?" I agree (though I know some don't): necessarily, if Francis exists, God loves him. But Francis doesn't have to exist—Francis only exists because God chose to create him. Thus God has freedom whether to love Francis, a freedom he exhibits in choosing to create Francis, something he did not have to do.

Now there is a necessary asymmetry here. Since we cannot have a choice about whether God exists, and once God exists, there is the obligation to love him, our choice requires moral freedom: it is a choice between the good of love and the evil of not loving the supremely lovable God. But for God the choice whether to love Francis was at the same time a choice whether to create Francis. This choice does not require moral freedom, since it is not a choice between good and evil, but only good and good-or-neutral.

So on both sides, the relationship between God and Francis involves a freedom to love or not to love Francis. This freedom is valuable and God has it. But in Francis this freedom, of necessity, is moral freedom. So it is not that moral freedom is more valuable than perfect freedom. Rather, it is that in a creature, freedom whether to love God has to be an instance of moral freedom, while in God, freedom whether to love a creature is an instance of perfect freedom.

Objection: But doesn't Morriston's problem come back when we consider the doctrine of the Trinity? The Father and the Son do not choose to love each over not loving each other. The Son is not a creature, and so the Father does not choose to create the Son rather than the Father. Yet, surely, the intra-Trinitarian love is the most perfect kind of love. So wouldn't a creature that has to love God have a better kind of love than one that has a choice about it?

Response 1: A certain symmetry and equality in love are particularly valuable. In the Trinity, we have a symmetry: no Person of the Trinity has the freedom to fail to love another. But we automatically start off with God having a choice whether to be in a relationship of love with a creature, namely through his having a choice whether to create the creature. It makes for deeper equality and symmetry if the creature also has a choice about how to respond to God.

A love relationship that is chosen on one side but not on another is less valuable through the asymmetry. Imagine a woman who chose to have a baby had a drug that would ensure that the child would love her back. She had a choice, to some degree, whether to love the baby. But she refuses the child a choice about whether and how to reciprocate the relationship.

Response 2: To choose to love makes one intimately related to one's love. But in the Trinitarian case, there is an even deeper relation to love: God is identical with his love.

Parthood, the Trinity and the Incarnation

Some theorists see the three persons of the Trinity as parts of the Trinity. Here is an untoward consequence of this. Parthood is transitive. Ten fingers are parts of Christ. Christ on the view is a part of the Trinity. Hence, the Trinity has ten fingers as parts. Which seems absurd.

Of course, one might worry about a similar problem for more orthodox views of the Trinity. Ten fingers are parts of Christ. But Christ is identical with God. So ten fingers are parts of God. However, the orthodox Trinitarian is used to answering problems of the form: "Christ is A (say, changeable or non-omniscient); Christ is identical with God; so God is A." She may accept the conclusion but block the absurdity by a qua move: "Christ qua human is changeable. So God qua human, i.e., a divine person who is human, is changeable." The parthood-Trinitarian had better not say that the Trinity has ten fingers qua human, because the Trinity is not human. Maybe she can say that the Trinity has ten fingers qua whole that has a part who is human. But by transitivity of parthood, that qua doesn't seem to do much work.

Another move for the more orthodox Trinitarian is to distinguish two different kinds of identity, identity of person and identity of essence, and say that that some predicates only transfer across one of these two identities. I suppose the analogue for parthood-Trinitarian might be to distinguish two kinds of parthood and say that they can't be combined transitivity-wise. That might be the best move for the parthood-Trinitarian.

Finally, the more orthodox Trinitarian can simply deny that there is such a relation as parthood—and in particular that ten fingers are part of Christ.