A reflection on Tertullian

So many people have learned so much from Tertullian, even despite his eventual capitulation to an early heresy. So many people also regard him as the foremost representative of the irrational and the fideist in Christianity. It is easy to see him in bad light, but suppose we give him the benefit of the doubt, just for a moment.

When a great writer such as Tertullian writes something patently absurd, I can think of just two explanations:

1: The "great" thinker is not so great.
2: The great thinker is exploiting paradox or hyperbole for rhetorical purposes.

Consider that Tertullian may be doing something profound with language.

We can certainly say he did not try to preserve an absolute philosophic consistency, sentence by sentence, as if he were practicing mathematics. Suppose furthermore that Tertullian wrote as he pleased, always in the moment, trading away a literal consistency with his past words for something he valued more: the dramatic potential of exaggeration. Nietzsche would agree. And as Adam Smith wrote, if a bow is bent one way it is necessary to bend it too much in the opposite way in order to make it straight. Could this be what Tertullian is doing?

The allegation that he is a fideist originates in two things. First, there is Tertullian's tendency to speak against the pretensions of the philosophers. For example, he excoriates Greek philosophy. Yet he quotes Aristotle often and relies on Aristotelian distinctions. Tertullian was well-read and uses rational argumentation despite his stated disavowal of Greek rationalism. What is going on here? Perhaps it is that someone who understands Greek philosophy very deeply can also understand its limitations. Or, if you are not willing to give up philosophy, consider this: Even if the flight of the intellect is unlimited, as Platonists believe, one may still excoriate Greek philosophy for how commonly it is abused. Greek philosophers were fond of proposing grand and rather silly systems—all is earth, all is water, all is change, etc. Given how well read and how indebted to philosophy Tertullian was, he was aware of these abuses.

Second the claim he is a fideist also originates from his quotation that Christianity "is to be believed because it is absurd." I find the phrase interesting to contemplate because of how absurd it is itself! It proposes we are to believe things that are absurd, that is, unbelievable. This phrase is itself absurd. So there is no contradiction in taking its advice! But due to its self-consistency, could it also be reasonable? Take as an assumption... this is a big one. But take as an assumption that a mind left to its own devices, without the light of the divine Logos, will fall inevitably into despair and madness. Perhaps it is a big assumption but it has precedence, for it is what Nietzsche predicts. Since the mind left by itself will ultimately produce nothing good, in order to identify what is good we ought therefore to believe the opposite of what it thinks of—namely what is absurd! I think Tertullian is providing us a more interesting "food for thought" than some of our contemporary theologians. If you read him thusly, namely if you see him as someone who was well-educated in philosophy, but someone who has lost faith in it and therefore tests its limits at the margins of language, you might see him here not as claiming we should believe what is absurd but rather trying to awaken us from our dogmatic rational slumber through irony and overstatement.

Superfluity in a bookstore

I have been in D.C. for two weeks visiting G and using the change in scenery to motivate myself to write this dissertation. G lives near the Dupont Circle so in between the hours spent checking equations I have wandered through its many used book stores.

Today I found myself looking at The Undercover Economist and thinking about buying it, since it would help me motivate the eventual Econ 101 I want to teach... and then looking at Amartya Sen's popular work on development, since he's someone I "should have read," and thinking I couldn't read them both in the next month since I would be writing a thesis. In fact, the thought occurred, I probably couldn't read one shelf of the books before me in the next year, or a case of them in the next ten years. In bookstore wanderings last week I developed an ambition to read Edith Hamilton's two books on the Greeks and the Romans. Realistically I probably won't have the time for those either, or if I make the time, it will be at the price of something else important. I can't read all these books. Why do I want to? And moreover what good would it do?

People who do mental, primarily abstract work ("cognition") for a living tend by nature to enjoy collecting the fine ideas for sale at a bookstore. We experience pleasure in holding an idea in the mind and peering at it, turning it around, seeing how the light one idea provides might glint off another idea, appreciating their relations, even their contradictions. Uncomfortably the pleasure does not differ too greatly from that of a satisfied pirate, snug in his secret treasure hall and sieving diamonds through his hands. Mental pleasure is pleasure—a higher one but a pleasure nonetheless. All at once I felt Sartre's nausea for himself—watch as I take pleasure in the literary aspects even of my own pain. It's never ending.

I cast around for a justification. (It must be in one of these books.) For a while I had justified myself saying I read books for the same reason an athlete runs laps. The mental workout mirrors a physical workout; I am ready to "contribute more mental work." But Edith Wharton is not going to make me a better economist, and I am not employed as a humanist. Perhaps some of it will make me a better person, more mindful, more prayerful even—but merely reading St. John of the Cross won't make me a better Christian. I've read Christian mysticism enough to get the idea; what more I have read has been for the pleasure of understanding it more fully. And I struggle to pray ten minutes. Further reading about the interior castle will not make me explore it.

Something else not a justification came to me. Sometimes in these moments you remember something someone once said to you, or something you once read and never quite understood or even had rejected. I recalled the Enneagram type 5 (which I suppose would have to be my type). The enneagram lists under the type 5 attributes my "characteristic" sin: greed. Greed? How could type 5, the thinker, one born with no envy for these... I don't even know, that's how refined I am... these fine cars and chocolates and jewels and money bags, and who is losing even a desire for technology, how could I possibly be characterized by greed? Now it makes sense. It is a greed not for things but for thoughts. Already I have quite a book collection; G talks about reserving a room in our house for a library.

Franny said it best reflecting on her school days:

"I got the idea in my head—and I could not get it out—that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth [Matt. 6:19] and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven's sake. What's the difference whether the treasure is money or property or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping—and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge—when it's knowledge for knowledge's sake anyway—is the worst of all. [The highest resembles the lowest.] The least excusable certainly. I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a while—there was some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time!"

When we die our charming divine philosophy, "not harsh and crabbed as some fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute, and a perpetual feast of nectared sweets," will die with us.

It is hard to adopt and to keep a regime of prayer, especially when there are so many juicy ideas to pick and to consume.

Maximizing freedom for private appetites

George Will on conservatism and libertarianism—and this, in 1981:

Many conservatives  insist that America's great problem is just that government is so strong it is stifling freedom. These people call themselves "libertarian conservatives"—a label a bit like "promiscuous celibates." Real conservatism requires strong government.

The overriding aim of liberalism, properly understood, is the expansion of liberty. (American "liberals" long since became what Europeans call "social democrats," preoccupied with equality.) Conservatism, properly understood, rejects the idea of a single overriding aim.

Real conservatism tries to balance many competing values. Striking the proper balance often requires limits on liberty, and always requires resistance to libertarianism (the doctrine of maximizing freedom for private appetites) because libertarianism is a recipe for the dissolution of public authority, social and religious traditions, and other restraints needed to prevent license from replacing durable, disciplined liberty.

The truly conservative critique of contemporary American society is that there is too much freedom—for abortionists, pornographers, businessmen trading with the Soviet Union [Iran?], young men exempt from conscription, to cite just four examples. ...

Professor James Q. Wilson of Harvard wonders, reasonably, how conservatives can reconcile their idea that government should do less with the desire for the nation to play a more assertive role internationally, a role that may require, in addition to more weapons, more government activism in the management of international trade.

On forensic/juridical theories of the atonement

Here is Timothy Ware:

In the words of an Orthodox Christmas hymn, `Sharing wholly in our poverty, thou hast made divine our earthly nature through thy union with it and participation in it.' Christ shares in our death, and we share in his life; he `empties ourself' and we are `exalted'.

As Christ said at the Last Supper, `The glory which thou hast given to me I have given to them, that they may be one, as we are one: I in them and thou in me, may they be perfectly united into one'. By assuming our humanity, Christ who is Son of God by nature has made us sons of God by grace. In him we are `adopted' by God the Father, becoming sons-in-the-Son.

This particular notion of salvation as sharing implies two things in particular about the Incarnation. First, it implies that Christ took not only a human body like ours, but also a human spirit, mind and soul like ours. If Christ did not have a human mind, then this would fatally undermine the second principle of salvation, that divine salvation must reach the point of human need. The importance of this principle was re-emphasized during the second half of the fourth century, when Apollinarius advanced the theory — for which he was quickly condemned —that at the Incarnation Christ took only a human body, but no human intellect or rational soul. To this St. Gregory the Theologian replied, `The unassumed is unhealed'. Christ, that is to say, saves us by becoming what we are; he heals us by taking our broken humanity into himself, by `assuming' it as his own, by entering into our human experience and by knowing it from the inside, by being himself one of us. Had his sharing of our humanity been in some way incomplete, then man's salvation would be likewise incomplete. If we believe that Christ has brought us a total salvation, then it follows that he has assumed everything.

Secondly, this notion of salvation as sharing implies — although many have been reluctant to say this openly — that Christ assumed not just unfallen but fallen human nature. As the Epistle to the Hebrews insists (and in all the NT there is no Christological text more important): `We do not have a high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but he was in all points tempted exactly as we are, yet without sinning' (4:15). Christ lives out his life on earth under the conditions of the fall. He is not himself a sinful person, but in his solidarity with fallen man he accepts to the full the consequences of Adam's sin.

St. Paul goes so far as to write, `God has made him who knew no sin to be sin for our sake'. We are not to think here solely in terms of some juridical transaction, whereby Christ, himself guiltless, somehow has out guilt `imputed' to him in an exterior manner. Much more is involved than this. Christ saves us by experiencing from within, as one of us, all that we suffer inwardly.

Bad words

fierce critic
daunting task
apt metaphor
while i applaud that
sorely disappointed
mildly amusing
if you had told me, i would never have believed you
precious little
vibrant community
nothing compares

An isomorphism: Arguments against gay marriage and industrial capitalism

Take the dispute over gay marriage as a representative of the "traditional" values commonly espoused by the right wing, which today believes both in traditional values and—I think unaccountably—in industrial capitalism. Here is the most common line of argument against homosexual marriage:

• Assumptions:
• Marriage—the monogamous, conjugal, legal bond—is not merely a private relation but is also an institution.
• All institutions by definition have social effects. Let's call these effects the externalities.
• Man causes institutions to exist in order to secure certain goods. Call the good an institution seeks to secure the object of the institution.
• Now, if the object of an institution is unseemly, we expect its externalities to be unseemly. This is due to the similitude of cause and effect. Essentially, bad causes lead to bad effects.
• The special object of gay marriage is sodomy. Sodomy is unseemly, therefore the institution of sodomy has unseemly externalities.

Let's not dwell on the soundness of the argument, but instead just examine its validity taking the premises for granted. Whatever one might think of its truth, one might grant that it is a valid argument given its assumptions. I think what is interesting is its isomorphism with a common argument against capitalism:

• Assumptions:
• Industrial capitalism—the private ownership of large, mechanized enterprises—is not merely a private relation but is also an institution.
• etc. etc. as before
• The special object of industrial capitalism is pure material gain. This is unseemly, therefore industrial capitalism has unseemly externalities.

I find this isomorphism striking. If the argument is valid that gay marriage is bad because it is institutionalized sodomy, then so too the argument is valid that industrial capitalism is unseemly because it is institutionalized pleonexia. Yet few who make the first argument also make the second, probably because of the long political alliance between social conservatives and industrial capitalists. The alliance has long since passed from the level of mere political convenience; it has now permeated the minds of Republicans, who (in my experience) believe there is ultimately no ideological tension between industrial capitalism and traditional values. The classical intuition of a similitude between cause and effect, the vivid major premise in the above example arguments, is so quickly forgotten when conservatives evaluate the industrial capitalist economic relation. Nevertheless, if an unseemly cause leads to unseemly effects, we must be consistent. If it is dangerous to found institutions on sodomy, even if one cannot trace the precise avenue of bad effect from bad cause, so too it must be dangerous to found institutions on unbounded selfish gain.

Opponents of gay marriage, and Republicans in general, have come to believe in an economic exception to the rule of similitude. What is true for gay marriage, and true in general, is not true for industrial capitalism. A quotation from Adam Smith about the invisible hand usually follows. Where did this idea come from, and how has it infiltrated even the supposed party of conservation? Scandalously, the idea comes from the supposed contrary to the conservative party: liberalism.

Liberal economics—which some of the uneducated think is the only economics—made its intriguing debut by teaching an extraordinary harmony of the general good and unbounded selfishness. Keynes gives a history of the idea:

...[one] would have been hard put to achieve this harmony of opposites if it had not been for the economists, who sprang into prominence just at the right moment. The idea of a divine harmony between private advantage and the public good is already apparent in Paley. But it was the economists who gave the notion a good scientific basis. Suppose that by the working of natural laws individuals pursuing their own interests with enlightenment in condition of freedom always tend to promote the general interest at the same time! Our philosophical difficulties are resolved—at least for the practical man, who can then concentrate his efforts on securing the necessary conditions of freedom. To the philosophical doctrine that the government has no right to interfere, and the divine that it has no need to interfere, there is added a scientific proof that its interference is inexpedient. This is the third current of thought, just discoverable in Adam Smith, who was ready in the main to allow the public good to rest on 'the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition', but not fully and self-consciously developed until the nineteenth century begins. The principle of laissez-faire had arrived to harmonise individualism and socialism, and to make at one Hume's egoism with the greatest good of the greatest number. The political philosopher could retire in favour of the business man—for the latter could attain the philosopher's summum bonum by just pursuing his own private profit. —The End of Laissez-Faire, John Maynard Keynes

So Keynes, when he soon argued for a misalignment between the social good and the private, was playing a much more conservative tune that many realize, and Keynes at least was conscious of it. For other reasons he cannot be considered a friend of traditional values. In short, although he rejects the theory of private and social harmony, he nevertheless accepts the value premise of boundless consumption. But the right never claimed Keynes. On the other hand it does claim Friedrich Hayek, the usual foil for Keynes and the acclaimed friend of the conservative movement, and who accepts both! Hayek was an avowed "Whig" who wrote an essay Why I am not a Conservative. Yet the right claims Hayek as its own, relying on the most exceptional "liberal" ideas of the age.



What is the traditional alternative to industrial capitalism? Note the example argument does not say artisanal capitalism or small-goods capitalism are unseemly. It addresses industrial production, not artisanal production. Making a good for trade in order to win a livelihood is not industrial capitalism but is a universal part of human life and a healthy one. To earn a livelihood is of course not an evil but a good, and to employ one's labor artistically to earn that living is very good. We all carry the moral intuition that small-scale private production for private gain is necessary—"he who does not work should not eat"—and the common morality is not envious but is willing to reward certain artisanal producers with great wealth (athletes, for example).

What is special about industrial production, and what removes the artisan, is the machine. The artisan does not use machines that replace the artistic portion of his labor. There is a difference in quality between private property, one the one hand, and industrial capitalism. What is new is the ownership of mechanized capital used to produce a surplus far beyond one's livelihood and in a way that competes away the artist's product. We all enjoy the products of industrial production, but few of us would agree to participate in their making if we could help it. That's for someone else to do. So many mothers goad her son to be a doctor or lawyer, the two major remnants of the age of the guild, but few of these mothers wish their sons to be mass goods manufacturers. Artisanal capitalism as an institution is therefore seemly.

How could we return to something like it, iPads and all? There is of course no going back. But perhaps the proposal of the distributists might be a starting point. Belloc proposed, with Gandhi and Schumacher, to limit somehow the value of mechanized capital that a limited liability corporation may own (which would also make antitrust unnecessary). If the size of the thing is a problem, it is time we limit size. For the same reason that we limit our individual appetites through moral effort, we should also limit our economic appetite through legal effort. This would raise the prices of most goods and we would not afford as much stuff. But if we are overconsuming anyway, this is a benefit not a cost.

Good words

Meretricious
Canard
Elan
Enervate
Propaedeutic
Cartoonish
Procrustean
Vainglory
Grandfather (as a verb)
Enthusiasm (in the sense of one's "youthful enthusiasms" or "an enthusiasm for politics")

An Anglican from 1909 writes on Patristics

Edward Burton, DD, in The Apostolic Fathers:

Because the right use of the Fathers is a point of late much controverted ... I shall enter into the controversy more distinctly. ...

The first thing to be proved is that the most rational and safest method to understand the Holy Scriptures is to consult the general sense of the Catholic writers in the purest ages of the Church.

The Holy Scripture, then, I take here for granted to be a rule, the only perfect rule of faith and manners; and the perfection of it consists in containing fully and plainly all things necessary to salvation. It is not that it is so perfectly full, in mode of time and circumstance of worship, as to leave no room for any particular laws herein to succeeding governors, nor so perfectly perspicuous as to require nothing of ingenuity and application on the learner's side. For it is evident in fact that the Scriptures are not so absolutely perfect, from the aforementioned difference between two apostolic bishops about the observation of Easter. It is evident likewise from the original languages of the Bible, which require much pain to understand as well to honestly apply them. And St. Peter himself tells us that in St. Paul's epistles some things are hard to understand, things which those who are unlearned and unstable twist, as they do also the other Scriptures, unto their own destruction. And as to matters of policy and discipline, which could not be easily misunderstood in the first ages of the Church, they are now confessedly much less plain from Scripture, as is evident from the unhappy divisions about them to this day.

Nor is it reasonable to expect that the Gospel should be full and plain in every particular, not only because such particulars would swell it to an incredible bulk, but because it is not fitting in this state of darkness and trial that men should have the intuition of angels, and see through the whole mystery of godliness at first sight. It was designed only for a touchstone, as it were, of honest and curable dispositions, and not to break in upon the understandings of wicked men in spite of their wills. Accordingly we find Novatianus interpreting the Word of God one way, Photinus another, Sabellius another, Donatus another; Arius, Eunomius and Macedonius another, etc.

Now in this maze and labyrinth of interpreters the question is: which is the most advisable way to take for the true interpretation of Scripture? For upon this hinge all our controversies turn. Some moderns have been of the opinion that Scripture itself is the law and judge, because the Word of God is said to be "living and active" in Hebrews; but these expositors must first prove the Bible to be literally alive and able to speak for itself before they can prove it to be a rule and interpreter both. Others are for setting up a human infallible judge of controversy, and if they could but tell us where we might infallibly find him, we should be very thankful for the discovery. ... Others are for setting the sun by their own dials, for making pure reason, exclusive of the primitive Fathers, the best interpreter or judge of Scripture. But I am apt to believe that the sense of a law is best understood by those who lived nearest the time of making it. ... Were the Christian religion indeed to be mended after it came out of the hands of Christ and His apostles, and the work expressly left to the reasoners of latter days, there might be something to say for our modern refiners.

A very clarifying post

http://www.kencollins.com/speedbump-02.htm

“All have sinned and come short of the glory of God” is why we quote this passage in the first place, to show that all are sinners in need of Christ. However, have you noticed that it does not say, “All have inherited Adam’s sin and are in a status of sin, even if they haven’t done anything bad in their lives”? Under St. Augustine’s influence, that is what we think this says. Maybe it is even true, but that is not what Paul says. He says, “all have sinned.” In other words, we have all actively and deliberately made sinful choices. We can’t weasel out of this one at all. We have to accept some responsibility for our lives. Does this mean that little babies have deliberately committed sins? On the basis of this passage, we don’t know whether Paul would answer that question ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ We can derive nothing about the spiritual status of infants from this passage, because Paul isn’t writing to infants. They are not his audience.

...

This does not mean that everyone is already saved. It says justified, not saved. The word “justified” simply means that Jesus made it possible for them to choose salvation. It means, in effect, that Jesus has purchased tickets to heaven and has graciously pressed one into the hand of each and every human being. Everyone is predestined to go to heaven. Predestination is not the same as predetermination. For example, if you go down to the bus station, you will notice that all the busses have signs on the front indicating their destination. If you see a bus with a sign that says “New York City,” you could say that the bus is predestined to go to New York City, because its destination has been set in advance. It does not follow, however, that all busses that are marked New York City actually get there.

...

All the early church fathers except St. Augustine disagreed with Calvin’s ideas about free will and predestination. For example, Irenaeus (the disciple of Polycarp, who was the disciple of the Apostle John), wrote an extensive essay on how we have free will.

Rationalism in politics III: Last ramble

Carl has a good commentary and compendium on a topic shared by one of my rambles below. (Unwisely perhaps, he actually quoted from it.)

A money quote from his commentary is that, according to rationalism in politics, "one is rational to the degree that one efficiently fulfills all of one’s irrational desires." (I might have written "arational desires," since the desires do not necessarily demand what is contrary to reason, though they do so often enough.) And another, "that economic thinking is injurious of conventional morality should go without saying." The nominally Christian right wing should take note, especially those who find nothing unseemly in the juxtaposition of Ron Paul with St. Paul. A third: "Judge Posner’s much vaunted application of economics to law is less radical than is supposed. He merely does openly what others do in private." Another good post of his, on a related topic, lies here.

I have one thing to say on one of his selections. I find the quote from Yakuyuki provides a pyrrhic apology for economics (subject to the translation and the selection of course). According to Yakuyuki, when economists speak about rationality, "they aren’t saying something impossible, like for example that person A knows everything, has a model of society, understands economic conditions and so forth, and acts on all that." It's probably true certain economists think this way about economics from time to time. But speaking precisely economists do predicate all their analysis on the behavior of an impossible human being, and what is more, we have to—indeed anything else is less than science. It is true homo economicus cannot exist, but impossibility is not inconceivability. Economic man can be conceived of and compared to actual man even if he does not exist. Indeed that is what we must do if we want to understand incentives. Only by reference to the benchmark of how a perfectly rational man would act can we describe or predict, to any degree, how a partially rational man might act. Prediction depends on the understanding of nature; a thing's nature is given by the class of the thing. "True knowledge is knowledge of the forms."

To say we do otherwise is to abandon the analytic method unique to economists. It would turn economics into something else. Humanists (by which I mean, students of the liberal arts) are often troubled by our method, but we use this style of thinking whenever we abstract—as, again, we must, if what we are doing can be properly described as thinking.