Benevolence towards God

The best kind of love involves benevolence. But how then can a love for God be of the best kind? Aquinas answers this problem basically by saying that we can do good to God by doing good to those God loves--namely, our neighbor. This is a good answer, but I also got another Thomistic answer from my friend Richard Sisca on Saturday: we can rejoice that God enjoys perfect beatitude. For Aquinas there are two ways of having the other's good in one's will: (a) by willing that good things should happen to the beloved; and (b) by mourning the evils and rejoicing in the goods that the beloved suffers or enjoys.

Eternal happiness and finitude

Let us think what full happiness would be like. This isn't just partial happiness, but it is a happy state involving nothing unfortunate for one, nothing unhappy. Full happiness need not be maximal happiness. It is prima facie coherent that one might be fully happy at t₁, but happier yet at t₂, though the lesser amount of happiness at t₁ would not have to involve any kind of unhappiness at the fact that it is not yet t₂.

Full happiness has both mental and extra-mental components. To be fully happy requires a certain level of awareness of the events that make one be happy. No one in a coma is fully happy. But purely subjective states are insufficient. Being loved by others is surely a part of full happiness, but thinking and feeling that one is loved by others is not enough. The falsehood in thinking and feeling one is loved by others when in fact they despise one is clearly something unfortunate for one. Both the subjective component and the objective are essential to full happiness.

Next, for the sake of the argument, let me assume that there is a finite number N such that there are at most N subjectively different conscious states that are possible to one of us. At this point, I want this assumption to be ambiguous between different senses of "possible" (practical, nomic, physical, causal, metaphysical, logical, etc.) For instance, it seems plausible that there is such a number if mental states supervene on brain states and there is a limit on the possible size of the brain of one of us (maybe brains just couldn't function—or at least couldn't function as our brains—if they were more than a light year across), since although an analog system like the brain possibly is can have an infinite number of states, states that are too close together would not be subjectively distinguishable.

Now, it seems to me that a part of the concept of being fully happy is that the state of being fully happy forever is desirable. Let us take that assumption.

I will individuate mental state types in terms of subjective difference (feeling hot and smelling wintergreen are subjectively different, but smelling synthetic wintergreen and smelling natural wintergreen need not be subjectively different).[note 1]

The following seems plausible: Every qualitatively normal human state—i.e., every state of the same qualitative type as our normal, everyday human states—is such that to be in that state forever would be somewhat unfortunate. When we find ourselves feeling really happy, we wish that the moment could go on forever. But in fact, in the case of normal human states, this would be unfortunate. The wish of the lovers to sit on the bench watching the autumn foliage forever might be romantic, but if a fairy froze the lovers in that subjective state for eternity, we would see the spectacle as deeply sad. We might see it as preferable to many other states, but it would not be a fully happy state.

Neither would it be a fully happy state for a person to oscillate, with or without a repeating pattern, between a finite number of normal mental states. Granted, if the person in the state may be unaware that she has already experienced the blissful state 10¹00 times, she may not feel any ennui in having the state for the (10¹00+1)st time. But remember that happiness involves not just a subjective state, but an objective one. It may or may not be good to unaware of the infinite repetition of states, but such repetition is itself unfortunate.

But if there is only a finite number of normal mental states (distinguished subjectively) possible to us, then anybody who experiences only normal mental states will either cease having mental states (due to death or coma) or will eternally oscillate (with or without a repeating pattern) between a finite number of states. Since it is unfortunate if happiness is not to last forever, the person who would cease to have mental states was not fully happy (whether or not she was aware of the impending end of consciousness). And the person eternally oscillating between a finite number of states is also undergoing something unfortunate.

Consequently, assuming what has been assumed above, such as that there is a finite upper bound on the number of mental states possible to us, it follows that full happiness is impossible to us if we are limited to normal human states. The sense of "impossible" here matches the sense of "impossible" in the claim that it is impossible for us to have more than N subjectively different mental states.

From the above, an argument could be constructed that our full happiness would require either a supernatural mental state (such as the vision of God) or our going through an infinite number of different mental states (e.g., due to unbounded growth in knowledge).

In either case, the following seems interestingly true: Full happiness is impossible as long as naturalism is true. This might yield a desire-based argument against naturalism if we add the theses that any rational desire is possible to fulfill, that the desire for full happiness is rational, and that if naturalism is true, then it is impossible for naturalism to cease to be true. This requires some kind of a physical causal or nomic sense of "possible".

The above is just a sketch. Working it out would require carefully examining the different modalities and trying to find one in respect of which all of the premises of the argument are plausible. Something like nomic modality might do the trick. But this is all left as an exercise to the reader.

Imputed righteousness

Reformed Christians believe that justification—the event by virtue of which a person comes to be saved—consists in the juridical imputation of righteousness. This is distinguished from God's sanctifying the person, where righteousness is induced in the person. Reformed Christians, of course, believe that sanctification comes along with justification, but want to maintain a distinction between the two.

What would justification consist in on such a view? What is the difference between being justified and not being justified? In this post I want to clear the way for further discussion by rejecting some accounts that I think are particularly problematic. While I myself reject the Reformed distinction between justification and sanctification, I want to offer these arguments in a friendly way to my Reformed brethren.

Problematic account 1: Justification consists in predestination.[note 1] On this account what makes Patricia justified is that God has predestined her for salvation. Thus, her being justified is not grounded in any intrinsic property of hers, but in a property of God—that God intends to save her.

The most obvious problem with this account is that then Patricia is justified from the first moment of her existence. But if so, then she does not change in respect of justification when she repents of her sins and accepts Christ as her savior. It seems plausible to suppose that justification does not precede faith. (One argument for this is that according to the Reformed, one is saved by faith, and hence being justified cannot precede faith; this is a bad argument because it neglects the possibility of backwards causation or causation mediated by God's foreknowledge.) It likewise seems plausible to connect justification and the forgiveness of sins. Something changes for the Christian. She was lost, and now she is found. And this change seems tied to justification. The correct thing vis-à-vis Reformed Theology (and probably the truth, too) to say seems to be that prior to receiving salvific grace, Patricia was predestined but not yet justified; after receiving salvific grace, she is predestined and justified.

Problematic account 2: Justification consists in a changing divine attitude. On this account, when Patricia becomes justified, God's attitude towards Patricia changes.

A major difficulty with this approach is that it is difficult to square with divine simplicity or immutability. Perhaps one can square it with immutability by positing that God eternally has one attitude towards Patricia-at-t for t<t₀ and eternally has another attitude towards Patricia-at-t for t>t₀, where t₀ is the moment of justification. If so, then in some sense there is no real change at all in anything at the time of justification—it's simply that Patricia has reached a time at which she is favored, but any change here whether on the part of Patricia or of God is a Cambridge change. Can justification be a Cambridge change? Does it make sense to rejoice in a mere Cambridge change in the way in which one rejoices in one's salvation?

Moreover, this will not take care of problems of divine simplicity. God being omnipotent could, surely, have justified Patricia not at t₀ but at t₁ instead. Consider a world just like this one but where that happens. What is the difference between this world and that world in virtue of which in this world Patricia is justified at t₀ but in that world she is justified at t₁? Since justification is an extrinsic property of Patricia on this view, the difference must lie in God's attitudes: in one world God has one set of attitudes and in the other another. But this seems to violate divine simplicity: it suggests that God is not identical with divine attitudes. There is a way of handling this in general, and that is to suppose that the attitudes are extrinsic properties of God. But this solution raises the question of what properties of creatures are such that in virtue of them it is correct to talk of God having one attitude in one world and the other in the other? Since on the present account Patricia's justification was supposed to be solely a fact about God's attitudes, it does not seem that there is room for such properties of creatures.

Problematic account 3: Justification is a dispositional property: x is justified at t iff were x to die at t, x would go to heaven. Granted, before the time t₀ of justification, it was true of Patricia that she will go to heaven (this is true in virtue of predestination, say). But if t_-1<t₀, it was not true that of Patricia that were she to die at t_-1, she would go to heaven—predestination only ensures the indicative that she will go to heaven, and therefore that she won't die before t₀.

This account has several problems. The first is that on this view, it seems one only has instrumental reason to desire justification: the value of justification consists in going to heaven. Moreover, it is not clear why it makes sense, given predestination, to rejoice at all at having acquired justification. After all, now having this dispositional property is of little value as such (except insofar as now might be the exact time of one's death, which is improbable, especially of the now is instantaneous). What is of value is having this dispositional property at the moment of death. It is true that Reformed Christians generally believe that once you have this dispositional property, you have it for the rest of your life. Thus, evidence for having the property now is equally evidence that one will have it at the moment of one's death. But then one does not have reason to rejoice even instrumentally in the present possession of the dispositional property. The true object of rejoicing is the salvation, rather than the present having of the property of justification. It is true that on some Reformed views one comes to have knowledge that one will be saved at the time that one becomes justified, and it would make sense to rejoice in this knowledge. But the knowledge is distinct from the salvation. Granted, we can talk of Martha rejoicing at the negative results of her HIV test. But it seems that the appropriate object of rejoicing is her being HIV negative, or her knowing that she is HIV negative, though we admittedly transfer our joy to things associated with the primary object of our joy, and so perhaps there is something to the idea that Martha rightly rejoices in the negative results of the test. But, in any case, the joy at being justified should not be joy by association.

Another problem is with the ground of the dispositional property. We can't just "jump into heaven" at our death. "To go to heaven" is to be placed in a heavenly state by God. The dispositional property is not, then, grounded in some kind of a power of the person who has it. Nor, on the Reformed view, is it grounded in the merits of the person. Rather, it seems to be grounded in God's will. But if so, then the problems of Account 2 come back.

Conclusions: These three accounts are problematic, especially for those who accept divine simplicity (as at least some classic Reformed creeds apparently do). What these accounts all have in common is that they make the imputation of righteousness be an extrinsic, Cambridge property of the person being justified. I suspect that this is what is wrong with all of these accounts. Instead, one needs an account on which justification consists in a real, grace-wrought change in the person. From a Reformed perspective, the difficulty with such an account is the danger that the change will then consist in actual righteousness in the person, and hence the distinction between justification and sanctification will be erased. Personally, I don't mind this danger at all—the distinction between justification and sanctification is shaky biblically and pretty much non-existent patristically. But Reformed folks do mind it. I think that what they might do well to do is to adopt a view according to which it is a genuine intrinsic property of a person that the person is guilty or innocent of something (there are suggestions to that effect in Wojtyla's The Acting Person, so it's a view that not just Reformed folks might find congenial), and then hold that in justification God directly produces a change in the person in respect of that property.