In defense of a changing beatific vision

It is widely taken in the Thomistic tradition that:

1. Different people in heaven have the beatific vision to different degrees, corresponding to the saints’ different levels of holiness.

2. The beatific vision does not change with time for a given individual.

I think there is a tension between these two claims which is best resolved by dropping the no-change thesis (2). Dropping the difference thesis (1) is not an option for Catholics at least, since it’s a dogma taught by the Council of Florence.

To see the tension, note that the fact that different saints have holiness to different degrees implies that those saints who have a lesser holiness have not maxed out what human nature makes possible. And holiness is attractive to the holy, and infectious. If one saint is less holy than another, it seems likely that given a sufficient amount of time, we would expect the second saint’s greater holiness to inspire the first to even greater holiness. And then we would expect the beatific vision to increase.

We also have one New Testament case where it seems likely that a person’s level of beatific vision has increased. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes of knowing someone who, fourteen years ago, was caught up to the third heaven. It is common to take that to be a modest reference to Paul himself, and the “third heaven” to be a reference to the beatific vision. Now, eventually Paul died and experienced the beatific vision again. It seems very implausible to think that the significant number of years between Paul’s first experience of heaven and his final experience of heaven did not result in Christian maturation and growth in virtue. Thus, it seems quite plausible that Paul had greater holiness when he died than when he was first caught up to heaven, and hence by the correspondence thesis (1), he had a greater degree of beatific vision at death than at the earlier incident.

Note, too, that a Catholic cannot say that the level of holiness is fixed at the time of death, since then purgatory wouldn’t make sense. And, intuitively, we would expect heaven to be inspiring of growth in holiness!

Now, one could insist that the level of holiness is fixed at the time of entry to heaven. But if so, then we couldn’t really say that the death of a saint is always something to rejoice at. Imagine that Paul had died at the time of his first experience of the beatific vision. Then on the no-change view of the beatific vision, he would eternally have had a lesser beatific vision than in actual world where he continued to grow in holiness for over decades more.

A picture of continual growth in holiness and the beatific vision fits better with our temporality. One may worry, however, that it takes away from the picture of resting in God. However, rest is compatible with change. One of the best ways to rest is to read a good book. But as one reads the book, one grows in knowledge of its content. And if one worries that the thought that one will come to have a greater happiness should induce in one a present sorrow of longing, I think it is plausible that with perfect virtue one would no more find the expectation of greater future happiness to be a source of sorrow than a lesser saint would find the observation of greater saints a source of envy. And, coming back to the book analogy, when one reads a good book, there need be no unhappiness at the fact that there is more of the book yet to come—on the contrary, one can rejoice that there is more to come. (In some cases, there may be a weak negative emotion as one longs for the author to reveal something—say, the solution of a mystery. But not every genre will generate that.)

Furthermore, there is good reason to think that change is not incompatible with rest. Since we will have bodies in heaven, and we will flourish in body and soul, while bodily flourishing involves change, heavenly rest must be compatible with change. And plausibly some of the bodily activities we will engage in will involve a variation in the level of happiness at least in some respects. Thus, eating is an episodic joy, and music, I take it, involves much in the way of anticipation and change.

Reproduction and the holiness of God

1. Necessarily, every finite person is in the image and likeness of God.

2. We should not make something in the image and likeness of God except when we have good positive reason to think God gave us permission to do so.

3. The only case in which we have good positive reason to think God gave us permission to make something in the image and likeness of God is through marital intercourse.

4. So, we should not engage in either in-vitro fertilization or the production of strong Artificial Intelligence.

The philosophically difficult task here would be to analyze the concept of “image and likeness of God”. The main controversial premise in the argument, however, is (2). I think it somehow follows from the holiness of God.

A characterization of naturalism

It's hard to define naturalism. After all, even if there were souls and the like, naturalists could still treat them as natural phenomena.

Maybe a better way to characterize naturalism is that it is the view that objectively speaking in itself there is nothing numinous: Nothing holy or sacred, but only the good or right; nothing sinful or unholy, but only the morally wrong; nothing uncanny or eldritch, but only the unusual or the scary; nothing aweful, but only the impressive; nothing mysterious, but only the puzzling or the strange; nothing fascinating, but only the attractive; nothing sublime, but only the beautiful.

Some naturalists will have an error theory about the holy, sacred, sinful, unholy, uncanny, eldritch, aweful, mysterious and fascinating. Others will say that such that such predicates can be rightly applied, but they indicate in large part our attitudes to these things, rather than indicating the intrinsic characteristics of things that make those attitudes appropriate.

(It is also interesting that even some of the de-sacralized replacements—especially the good, the right, the wrong and the beautiful—are troubling to many naturalists.)

The holiness of the Church and clerical scandals

Does gravely immoral activity by the clergy detract from the holiness of the Church as it is on earth, the Church militant? It sure seems so. But I want to argue, very speculatively (and I will withdraw the claim if it turns out that the Church teaches otherwise), that it directly detracts no more—or at least not significantly more—than equally gravely immoral activity by similar numbers of laity would.

Consider the three features we desire the Church as found on earth to have: doctrinal orthodoxy, liturgical integrity and holiness of life.

The doctrinal orthodoxy and liturgical integrity of the clergy does indeed especially contribute to the doctrinal orthodoxy and liturgical integrity of the Church. If a priest or especially a bishop is unorthodox, all other things being equal, that in itself detracts more from the orthodoxy of the Church on earth than when a lay person is unorthodox, simply because of the teaching role of the clergy. Similarly, if a priest or bishop engages in liturgical anarchy, say by changing some prayers at Mass, that detracts from the liturgical integrity of the Church more than if a lay person does so, all other things being equal.

But when a deacon, priest or bishop (including a pope) is wicked, that no more (and no less) directly detracts from the holiness of the Church than when a non-cleric person is wicked, when the degree of wickedness is the same. We can see this by considering the happier flip-side. Think of a non-cleric like St Teresa of Avila (she was a nun, of course, but a nun is a non-cleric[note 1]) and a priest like St John of the Cross. The holiness of their lives directly contributed to the holiness of the Church. But it would, I think, be mistaken to say that St John's holiness contributed more, or was a more central contribution, than St Teresa's just because St John was a priest and St Teresa was not. To say that would be to engage in clericalism, and is perhaps a species of the same error that leads to Donatism. The clergy's activity makes a special constitutive contribution to the Church's orthodoxy and liturgical integrity. But a layperson's holiness is just as constitutive of the holiness of the Church as the holiness of a deacon, priest or bishop. Mary makes a greater direct contribution to the holiness of the Church than any deacon, priest or bishop—not counting Christ the High Priest—ever did or would.

Of course, wickedness in a deacon, priest or bishop (and especially when the bishop is pope) typically has a greater negative effect on the Church's holiness, because it is more likely to scandalize others, leading them either to imitate the wickedness or abandon the faith. This indirectly detracts from the Church's holiness.

Suppose every single Catholic priest next year committed some particular grave and scandalous sin. That would be a terrible thing, would have a very unfortunate negative effect on the Church, and may God preserve us from this disaster. But it would no more directly detract from the Church's holiness than if some other group comprising 0.04% of the world's Catholic population committed an equally grave sin.

That said, a sin that is otherwise of the same sort may be graver when committed by a cleric, because (a) the cleric bears a responsibiity for avoiding the further negative effects and (b) is less likely to be excusable through ignorance. The above assumes we are dealing with sins of equal gravity.

Christ promised that the Church would be holy. The above argument shows that an argument based on clerical crimes that the Catholic Church cannot be Christ's Church because Christ's Church is holy is no stronger than argument based on equal numbers of non-clerical crimes would be. But an argument based on the crimes committed by non-clerics would fail: we do not expect the Church's holiness to imply the sinlessness of her members. The Church while holy as a body—the body of Christ—is yet a Church for sinners who need Christ's reforming grace. Thus the argument based on clerical crimes also fails.

And then, of course, there is always Boccaccio's argument.

Holy envy

I came across this in St. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul (Chapter 7):

If any envy accompanies charity, it is a holy envy by which they become sad at not having the virtues of others, rejoice that others have them, and are happy that all others are ahead of them in the service of God, since they themselves are so wanting in his service.

The context was a discussion of beginners and the spiritual versions of the seven deadly sins.

Leviticus and a life of liturgy

I finished reading Leviticus. I had never read all of it before. It took a while to get any significant benefit from it, but finally things started coming together. Here are some unoriginal reflections. The text contains a welter of regulations about various aspects of life. In the first century AD, some heretical groups found the regulations so arbitrary that they rejected the Torah as something not fitting to a reasonable God, and some more orthodox Christians tried to find far-fetched allegorical readings of them (the Epistle of Barnabas, while well-meaning, and an interesting early witness to the Christian opposition to unnatural sexual activity, is a particularly egregious example). But textually these regulations are anchored in exhortations that the Israelites should be a priestly people, holy even as the Lord is holy.

Rudolf Otto has famously criticized the modern misunderstanding of "holy" as "superlatively morally good" for leaving out the numinous, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Indeed, if we read "holy" in Leviticus as "superlatively morally good", we will throw up our hands in despair, as the early groups I had mentioned did. The prohibition on eating hares surely is not in itself requires for superlative moral goodness. But neither does it appear right to read the text as simply exhorting us to be mysterious, awe-full and fascinating.

Rather, "holy" in the text tends to carry the connotation of "consecrated": holy to the Lord. A priest is, of course, consecrated to his deity, and his life is a life of liturgical service to his deity. There is no surprise if this liturgical service involves actions that are strange, for instance ordained by ancient tradition, held to be revealed by a deity, and so on. It is no surprise if a priest of a religion should be commanded to wear only certain kinds of clothes, eat only certain kinds of foods, perform special actions on special days, and so on.

What is surprising, however, is the notion of a whole people that is set apart, holy, consecrated in a priestly way, and perhaps also the notion of a service to the deity that encompasses all of the servant's time. But once we have the notion of a priestly people, and of liturgical services that encompasses all of a priestly person's time, that these people should have strange rules is no more surprising than that there should be regulations as to which direction around an altar a priest should proceed, or what material his knife should be made of. Liturgy, the priest's business, is full of rules that are not of the priest's making, rules that go beyond moral requirements. In fact, the existence of such rules seems central to liturgy—a liturgy that is created ad hoc for one occasion is either an oxymoron or at least deeply defective.

One thing we can learn from Leviticus, then, is the idea of a whole life lived as liturgy. And while the specific rules no longer literally apply in the Christian era, the idea of a whole life of service to God, a life of liturgy, is intensified in Christianity, in at least two ways. The first way is through every Christian's participation in the sacrifice of Christ, a participation more intimate than that of the Israelite in the Levitical sacrifices, because Christ the High Priest lives through us. The second, and liturgically very significant, intensification is that in the Eucharist all Christians need to participate, in a completely real way, in the quintessentially priestly action of eating of the sacrificial victim.

At the same time, we also see from Leviticus that even in a priestly people there can be distinctions between priestly roles. The priesthood of all believers does not entail that all believers are priestly in an equal way. Each Christian has a priestly role deeper than that of even the Israelite levites, but this is quite compatible with some Christians being ordained to an even deeper participation in Christ's priesthood. In fact, it seems that hierarchicality is an important part of a priestly people, just as priesthoods seem to be innately hierarchical.

The "more"

Consider such pairs of terms as:

• good — holy
• impressive — awe-full
• immoral — sinful
• promise — vow
• puzzle — mystery
• fearsome — spooky

The second term in each pair implies something of the first. In fact, in many (though not all—the last pair is a clear exception) cases, the second term implies the first in a superlative way. However, there is something "more" to the second of each of these terms, something qualitatively different. Moreover, these pairs are analogous to each other—there is an analogy between the "more" in each case.

Thesis: None of the second terms in the above list would have application if naturalism were true. Something might still seem mysterious, but in fact it would be just be very puzzling. It might still appear that a graveyard is spooky, but in fact it is at most fearsome, and if so, only accidentally (e.g., if there is a vicious dog there).

So if naturalism were true, our experience of the "more" in the second term of each pair will always be mistaken. But that would be really puzzling—how could there be an experience type that is always mistaken? So if the thesis is true, then we have good reason to think naturalism false.

I am not here offering an argument for the thesis—I am here just presenting it as something that seems very clear to me.