No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Relations in Creation and Christology: A Response to Porter
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
In a recent, provocative essay (“Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” New Blackfriars (February, 2018)), Philip Porter criticizes Augustine's habit of drawing analogies between the embodiment of concepts in language and the Incarnation of the Word as Jesus of Nazareth, suggesting that his distinctions encourage us to drive a wedge between God the Son and the human being, Jesus, whom he is. Porter worries that Augustine succumbs to the linguistic and then theological fantasy that we might peel away the word's flesh, to attain to the Word beneath. He proposes to dissolve this fantasy by way of a Wittgensteinian revision of Augustine's linguistic Christology, eschewing the distinction between the “verbum mentis” and the “verbum vocis,” the better to safeguard the unity of Christ. In what follows, I suggest that while Augustine is indeed tempted toward Christological error by an inappropriate extension of the linguistic analogy, Porter's proposed corrective both neglects important resources from the developed Chalcedonian tradition, and has as its unhappy outcome that “God is robbed of his transcendence, and creation of its true gratuity.”
- Type
- Original Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2018 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Porter, Philip, “Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” New Blackfriars (February, 2018)Google Scholar.
2 Hart, David Bentley, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), p. 157Google Scholar).
3 In Evangelium Iohannis Tractatus (PL 35; http://www.augustinus.it/latino/commento_vsg/index2.htm) 1.8). Unless otherwise noted, translations from Latin are my own.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Philip Cary suggests that Augustine's “innovation is the notion that to speak is to give signs” (Outward Signs, 75). For a strikingly similar account of language in Plotinus, however, cf. Enneads (LCL 440; ed. A.H. Armstrong; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) I.2, 3.30-34, V.1, 3.9-10, and discussion in John Heiser, Logos and Language in the Philosophy of Plotinus (E. Mellen, 1991), esp. pp. 20-21.
7 De doctrina Christiana (PL 34; http://www.augustinus.it/latino/dottrina_cristiana/index.htm) 2.2.3.
8 That silent thought doesn't, for Augustine, consist in verba mentis is clear in the opening of De catechizandis rudibus: “ille intellectus quasi rapida coruscatione perfundit animum, illa autem locutio tarda et longa est, longeque dissimilis, et dum ista volvitur, iam se ille in secreta sua condidit; tamen, quia vestigia quaedam miro modo impressit memoriae, perdurant illa cum syllabarum morulis; atque ex eisdem vestigiis sonantia signa peragimus, quae lingua dicitur vel Latina, vel Graeca, vel Hebraea, vel alia quaelibet, sive cogitentur haec signa sive etiam voce proferantur; cum illa vestigia nec Latina, nec Graeca vel Hebraea, nec cuiusque alterius gentis sint propria, sed ita efficiantur in animo, ut vultus in corpore” (PL 40; http://www.augustinus.it/latino/catechesi_cristiana/index.htm; 1.2.3).
9 In Ev. Ioh. Tract. 1.9.
10 De Trin. 15.11.20.
11 Ibid. Cf. Porter, “Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” p. 7.
12 Cf. Cyril, , “Scholia on the Incarnation of the Only Begotten,” §8, in John McGuckin, Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy, Its History, Theology, and Texts (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir's Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
13 Porter, “Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” p. 7-8.
14 “Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” p. 13-14, quoting Augustine, , “On the Catechising of the Uninstructed,” in St. Augustine: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises, trans. Nicene, S. D. F. Salmond and Post-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1978), 2.3Google Scholar.
15 “Quaerebamus inter nos apud praesentem veritatem quod tu [sc. the LORD] es dum loquimur et inhiamus illi, attingimus eam [sc. Sapientia] modice toto ictu cordis” (Conf. 9.10.24). Notice – they attained to wisdom in a flash of insight (toto ictu), while they were speaking (dum loquimur). Cf. Philip Cary's comments in Outward Signs, 184.
16 Interestingly, Porter seems not only to share Augustine's ambivalence about natural language, but to radicalize that ambivalence by construing natural language as such as an artifact of the Fall, e.g., “Our linguistic failings are not failures of language, but failures of humanity. These failures are attributable to, are a product of, Original Sin. Viewed in this way, we can see language for what it is, a fallen human activity” (“Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” 15). For Augustine's reflections on Hebrew as the language spoken in Eden, cf. De civ. Dei 16.11.
17 De Doct. Chr. 1.34.38.
18 “Patebunt etiam cogitationes nostrae invicem nobis” (De civitate Dei (PL 41; http://www.augustinus.it/latino/cdd/index2.htm) 22.39.6.
19 Aquinas is much better about this, and never more so than in the final stanza of his Adoro te devote: “Jesu, quem velatum nunc aspicio, / Oro, fiat illud quod tam sitio: / Ut te revelata cernens facie, / Visu sim beátus tuæ gloriæ. Amen” (Textum Matriti, 2007; http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/pat.html). Cf. also Julian of Norwich: “Than shall we ale come into oure lorde, ourselfe clerely knowing and God fulsomly having; and we endlesly be alle had in God, him verely seyeng and fulsomly feling, and him gostely hering, and him delectably smelling, and him swetly swelwing [swallowing]” (A Revelation of Love in The Writings of Julian of Norwich (Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (eds.); University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006) §43, p. 259).
20 Porter observes, “While it's true that this approach to language can be employed to make a proper distinction between the natures, it's also true that the intellectual habit that desires to separate the pre-linguistic and linguistic word can introduce a division precisely where there ought not to be one” (Porter, “Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” 15). Perhaps the substance of the analogy matters less than how far it's extended.
21 For suggestions about the importance of concepts and propositions (“mental language,” broadly construed) in accounting for translatability and synonymity, cf. Paul Vincent Spade, Thoughts, Words, and Things, pp. 95-100.
22 “As a caterpillar, having come to the end of one blade of grass, draws itself together and reaches out for the next, so the Self, having come to the end of one life and dispelled all ignorance, gathers in his faculties and reaches out from the old body to a new” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad [trans. Easwaran Eknath; Nilgiri Press, 2007] 4.4.3).
23 De Trin. 5.5, 5.9; cf. Porter, “Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” pp. 7-8.
24 “Domine, refugium factus es nobis” (Ps. 90:1).
25 De Trin. 5.17.
26 Ibid., cf. Porter, “Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” p. 8.
27 “Creatio in creatura non sit nisi relatio quaedam ad creatorem, ut ad principium sui esse; sicut in passione quae est cum motu, importatur relatio ad principium motus” (Summa Theologiae (Textum Leoninum, 1888; http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/iopera.html) 1.45.3).
28 Summa Theologiae 1.45.3. Elsewhere, Aquinas appeals in this connection to Augustine's discussion of divine-creaturely relations in De Trinitate 5.16: “Augustinus dicit, quod creator relative dicitur ad creaturam, sicut dominus ad servum” (De potentia (Textum Taurini, 1953; http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/qdp1.html) 7.8 s.c.).
29 Tanner, , God and Creation in Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1988), p. 103Google Scholar.
30 “Pater non dicitur nisi a paternitate, et filius a filiatione. Si igitur paternitas et filiatio non sunt in Deo realiter, sequitur quod Deus non sit realiter pater aut filius, sed secundum rationem intelligentiae tantum, quod est haeresis Sabelliana” (Summa Theologiae 1.28.1 sc).
31 Porter, “Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” p. 9.
32 Ibid., p. 7.
33 Cf. also his claim, “The relation between the second person of the Trinity and Jesus of Nazareth is a real relation between God and a creature, but without change” (Ibid., p. 10).
34 Cf. a passage we'll consider again below: “The relation God has to Jesus of Nazareth is part of who God is. This is not to say that the divine and human natures are in any way confused, but that the particular relation between the divine nature in the second person of the Trinity and the human nature of Jesus of Nazareth obtains eternally” (Ibid., p. 10).
35 “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations (trans. Anscombe, Hacker, Schulte; Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) §115Google Scholar).
36 Cf. esp. his talk of a “susceptio quae Deum hominem faceret et hominem Deum” (De Trin. 1.28).
37 Augustine was invited by the Emperor Theodosius to attend the Council of Ephesus (431), but died before the invitation arrived (cf. Anna Crabbe, “The Invitation List to the Council of Ephesus and Metropolitan Hierarchy in the Fifth Century,” Theological Studies 32.2 (Oct 1981), pp. 369-400, here p. 369). A fascinating piece of theological fan-fiction remains to be written, imagining Augustine's response to the debate between Cyril and Nestorius.
38 E.g., “It is by assuming it, not by being consumed into it, that both our word becomes sound and that Word became flesh” (De Trin. 15.11.20).
39 Cf. Aquinas, De potentia 7.8 ad 5, and Summa Theologiae 3.2.7 c.
40 We can illustrate just with reference to his “Scholia on the Incarnation of the Only-Begotten”: considering what the name “Jesus” refers to, Cyril writes, “We ought to speak only of one Son of God, who is Christ, and Emmanuel, and Jesus” (McGuckin, The Christological Controversy, p. 296). Explaining “how Christ is one,” he observes that Paul says that all things are made through “one Lord Jesus Christ” (Ibid., p. 298, cf. 1 Cor 8:6). Later: “The one Lord Jesus Christ must not be divided up, as if there was a distinct man and a distinct deity” (Ibid., p. 307). And so on.
41 Summa Theologiae 3.4.2. We find the same point in Bonaventure, Breviloquium (Quarrachi, 1891; vol. V, p. 242) 4.2.2.
42 Cf. Summa Theologiae 3.62.5. This too is an idea which goes back to Cyril: “The body was made his very own through a true union and thus served the function of an instrument in order to fulfil those things which it customarily does, sin alone excepted” (“Scholia on the Incarnation of the Only-Begotten,” §14).
43 Summa Theologiae 3.2.7 obj. 1.
44 Ibid.
45 Summa Theologiae 3.2.7.
46 The key is not to prematurely resolve the apparent tension between these two positions, lest we be forced to seize either horn of Arthur Lovejoy's dilemma regarding the “motive” for the act of creation: “There were only two possible consistent views – that of Duns Scotus [inscrutable voluntarism], on the one side, that later represented by Bruno and Spinoza [blind emanationism], on the other” (The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 81).
47 Cf. Summa Theologiae 3.46.12.
48 For theandric cooperation with respect to Jesus’ knowledge, cf. ST 3.9.1 ad 2; with respect to Jesus’ will, cf. ST 3.18.5. Cf. also Bonaventure, Breviloquium 4.6-7. For this problem in Maximus, cf. Opusculum 6, in Blowers, Paul and Wilken, Robert Louis (trans.), The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir's Press), p. 173-74Google Scholar. For helpful discussions of theandric action in Aquinas's thought, see White's, Thomas Joseph Incarnate Lord (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), pp. 246-56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; in Maximus's thought, see Bathrellos, Demetrios, The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of Saint Maximus the Confessor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 163-68Google Scholar.
49 Porter, “Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” p. 9.
50 Summa Theologiae 3.1.2.
51 Ibid.
52 Summa Theologiae 1.43.4.
53 Marshall, Bruce, “Religion and Election: Aquinas on Natural Law, Judaism, and Salvation in Christ,” Nova et Vetera 14.1 (2016), pp. 61-125CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 113, with copious references to Aquinas's texts.
54 Cf. Porter, “Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” p. 11, quoting “Concilium Constantinopolitanum I,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner, Norman P. and Alberigo, Giuseppe (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), p. 24Google Scholar.
55 Karl Rahner, The Trinity (trans. Catherine LaCugna), p. 40). He's referring to Aquinas's failure to mention Jesus until the last question of the so-called “Tractatus de Deo Trino (Summa Theologiae 1.27-43). Fully accounting for this apparent bug in Aquinas's thought would take us too far afield; suffice it to say that it seems to me to have nothing to do with the substance of Aquinas's Christology, but rather with his determination to adopt a particular “ordo disciplinae” in his treatment of topics (cf. ST proemium). The first part of the Summa is about God, both in se and as creator; the second part of the Summa is about humanity, as the self-directed image bearers of God; and the third part is about the God-man, Jesus, and about his body, the church. Aquinas's plan of attack requires that the reader have some things to say about the LORD and about human beings before he turns to the human being who is the LORD.
56 In Symbolum Apostolorum (Textum Taurini, 1954; http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/csv.html) Art. 2, my emphasis.
57 In Ev. Ioh. Tract. 1.9, my emphasis.
58 For this reason, I can't see that it does any good for Porter to suggest that “the Word's becoming flesh is an atemporal fact about God” (“Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” p. 11). From the LORD's standpoint, all that he creates is created a-temporally, isn't it? And if we take the further step, with Paul Griffiths, of affirming the “folding” of every point of space-time around the flesh of the Incarnate One, so that's the Incarnation's “duration” is in some sense equivalent with the duration of creation, we ought to do so as a statement about the relations among creatures (one of one whom is God), not as a statement about the relation between divinity and humanity in Christ. (For this position, cf. Griffiths, Paul, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015), §16.Google Scholar)
59 Ibid., p. 13.
60 “It is by assuming it, not by being consumed into it, that both our word becomes sound and that Word became flesh” (De Trin. 15.11.20).
61 Porter, “Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” p. 15.
62 Confessions (trans. J.G. Pilkington; in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 1; ed. Philip Schaff; Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887.; http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110101.htm), 1.8.13, quoted in Philosophical Investigations §1.
63 Philosophical Investigations §1.
64 Philosophical Investigations §32.
65 As I suggested above, it's not clear to me that this is Augustine's position, but it's worth noting that even philosophers and linguists living after Wittgenstein have found it credible. Particularly worthy of mention in this area are Jerry Fodor's account of “mental language” in The Language of Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), and Noam Chomsky's proposals to root all natural languages in a “universal grammar” – cf. Chomsky, Noam and Berwick, Robert, Why Only Us?: Language and Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.
66 Porter, “Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” p. 18.
67 Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn, pp. 24-5.
68 Robert Brandom is particularly interesting on this score. “For a response to have conceptual content,” he suggests, “is just for it to play a role in the inferential game of making claims and giving and asking for reasons. To grasp a concept is to have practical mastery over the inferences it is involved in – to know, in the practical sense of being able to distinguish (a kind of know-how), what follows from the applicability of a concept” (Articulating Reasons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 48). So, “the parrot” which has been trained to be a reliable differential responder to red objects “does not treat ‘that's red’ as incompatible with ‘that's green,’ nor as following from ‘that's scarlet’ and entailing ‘that's colored’” (Ibid.).
69 Ibid., p. 26.
70 For “the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says,” cf. Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” p. 169. McDowell, John juxtaposed this normative state to “the space of nature…the realm of law” (Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. xiv-xvGoogle Scholar).
71 Quine, W.V.O., “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 45Google Scholar.
72 Ibid., pp. 18-19.
73 Ibid., p. 10.
74 Ibid. Cf. also his later comment on “the relation between the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ” (Ibid. p. 19).
75 Ibid.
76 Stephen Webb, who endorsed this eccentric view, summarizes it as follows: the Monophysites “concluded that [Jesus’] human nature must have also been divine in some way. Moreover, he must have received all that he has from the Father, so that even his human nature was an implication of the Trinitarian relations. The best way to express all of this, at least for some Monophysites, was to say that he brought his human nature with him when he came down from heaven” (Jesus Christ, Eternal God: Heavenly Flesh and the Metaphysics of Matter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 102, my emphasis).
77 Porter, “Inheriting Wittgenstein's Augustine,” p. 19.
78 Ibid., p. 20.
79 Jenson, Robert, “The Holy Spirit,” in Jenson, Robert & Braaten, Carl (eds.), Christian Dogmatics (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), vol. 2, p. 169Google Scholar.
80 The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 163.
81 “Sin and evil belong to God's intent precisely – but only – as they do appear in Christ's victory over them” (Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 73). To be fair, Jenson goes on to acknowledge, “Presumably God could have been himself on different terms…but, of this possibility, we can assert only the sheer contrafactual” (Systematic Theology, v. 1, p. 65). Of this God, however, we presumably know, and can know, nothing, not even that he is good.
82 Aquinas, of course, affirms the possibility of sinless worlds in which the Son was not incarnate, cf. Summa Theologiae 3.1.3. This is by far the majority view in the theological tradition; it's mistaken if you take it that, as Maximus the Confessor put it, “This mystery [of the Incarnation] is the preconceived goal for which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing” (Ad Thalassium 60, in Paul Blowers & Robert Louis Wilken (eds.), The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir's Press, 2003), p. 124). Is this what St. Paul had in mind in saying, “He is before all things”? (cf. Col. 2:15). We ought to keep in mind that saying that every possible world includes Christ Incarnate is still not as strong a metaphysical claim as saying that there must be some actual world in which Christ is incarnate, at least if it's possible for no possible (created) world to be actual.
83 David Hart, “The Lively God of Robert Jenson,” First Things October 2005. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2005/10/the-lively-god-of-robert-jenson (Accessed 4/12/18).