HISTORY, CULPABILITY, AND PANTHEISM
This is my attempt at a response. Well, sort of. This is also my third blog post this week haha. Busy week, but also exhausting. As strange as it is to say, I’m doing this to relax and distract myself from depressing schoolwork.
Anyhow, Ed Feser responded to Hart’s (In my opinion, hilariously accurate) criticism of Feser’s own very bad review of Hart’s book on universal salvation. It’s safe to say I’m on Hart’s side on this one. All of Feser’s responses are off. So that I don’t lose track of why they are off, I’m typing this.
Feser begins with:
“First let me reply to the two substantive points Hart makes in his response. In my review, I noted that it was “centuries” after the time of Christ before universalism was floated within Christianity. Hart says I am wrong and cites as among “the earliest witnesses” (whether friendly or hostile to universalism) Gregory of Nyssa, Basil, Jerome, and Augustine – all fourth or fifth century writers. For the reader whose math is rusty, that would place them… centuries after the time of Christ. Of course, above all others we have to consider Origen, who was a third century writer. Which, if your math is still rusty, would put him… centuries after the time of Christ.”
First of all, Hart’s retort that Feser didn’t read the book sticks here. For one, Hart considers St. Paul to be a Universalist, which means Universalism is pretty much, in Hart’s mind at least, rooted in the very beginnings of Christianity. Also Hart’s actual words are:
“…all the historical evidence suggests that the Universalist faction was at its most numerous, at least as a relative ratio of believers, in the church’s first half millennium.”
Hart doesn’t say the earliest witnesses are in the fourth and fifth century, he was using the testimony of people like St. Augustine to make a point as to how widespread it was at that time, while making another point that it was widespread long before that time. I suggest Feser at least read Ilaria Ramelli on this.
Moving on, Feser goes on to say:
“What I said is that Hart infers, from the fact that as rational creatures we are made for God, that we are not culpable for “any choice against God” specifically. That is to say, he infers that we cannot be culpable for a sin of the kind that would damn us, of the kind that would separate us from God forever.”
I will ignore that bit that says “any choice against God”, since he clarifies what it means, and Hart does imply that there is no culpability that merits eternal hell. Feser then clarifies what he thinks Hart mixes up:
“Hart puts heavy emphasis in his book on the irrationality of acting contrary to an end toward which our nature directs us. Of course, he is right about that much. The trouble is that he fallaciously reasons from this correct premise a mistaken conclusion about culpability, because he persistently fails to distinguish:
(a) an end the pursuit of which is in fact good for us, given our nature, and
(b) an end the pursuit of which we take to be good for us (whether it really is or not)
Now, acting against either (a) or (b) would be contrary to reason, but not in the same sense. In particular, a person might act against (b) because of confusion, duress, passion, or something else that clouds reason. And that can certainly affect culpability. For example, suppose that you say something extremely rude and uncalled for to your mother, because she just roused you from a deep sleep or because you are heavily medicated and not thinking straight. We would not hold you culpable for such behavior, because we know you weren’t thinking clearly. If you had been, you would never have done such a thing, because you yourself take it to be good to be respectful of your mother.
But suppose instead that you are fully awake, stone cold sober, and calm, but that you nevertheless say something extremely rude and uncalled for to your mother. Here we typically would regard you as culpable, and we might be even more inclined to do so if you refused to admit that you had done something wrong but tried to rationalize it. Now, here too you would be acting contrary to reason or irrationally, but not in the same way as in the first example. In particular, your act would in this case be contrary to reason in the sense that it conflicted with what is actually good (as opposed to what you’d fooled yourself into falsely thinking was good). But your act would not be irrational in the sense that it resulted from confusion, duress, passion, or other factors of the kind that prevent clear thinking. And that is why we would regard it as culpable.
Hart’s mistake is conflating these two sorts of case. He thinks that since choosing to reject God would be irrational in the sense in which any action that is contrary to (a) would be, it follows that it would be irrational in the sense that would mitigate culpability, as actions that are contrary to (b) often are. But that doesn’t follow. And this erroneous conflation would also entail that we would not be culpable for any bad action that we commit, since any bad action (and not just explicitly rejecting God) would be contrary to (a).
To forestall misunderstanding, let me again make it clear that I am not saying that Hart explicitly or knowingly makes these fallacious inferences. I am saying that his discussion of rationality and freedom implicitly and inadvertently trades on such fallacies. And that is one reason I said that his book is a “mess” philosophically.”
I appreciate Feser on his clarity here. My question would be that, despite it being clear, is this the right example? Are we ever so “fully awake, stone cold sober, and calm” that we can see God as He is in His bodiless fullness and be “rude” to Him, or “Her”? The example as presented doesn’t stick for me. I think what Feser misses here is the great “superiority” of God with respect to His children, and also that God as such is not an "entity", like a human mother, that we are “rude to”. In other words, I think Feser overemphasizes the similarity of the analogy at the expense of its far greater dissimilarity. The result of this is the false inference that Hart’s position means (as Feser, not Hart, infers) that we cannot be culpable for any act against God. On the contrary, as every existing thing is itself a theophany, every evil act against them is also against God, but not God “as such”. In Hart’s view, and I’m sure Feser would agree, (a) is the very reason (b) is possible, or, (a) is the “horizon” of (b). The only reason we can erroneously pursue a false end as if it is good is because we already intuit that there is an end which is good. As Hart himself says in the book (God please let Prof. Feser sit down with this book!):
“But God is not an “entity.” Neither, for that reason, is he some sort of particular object that one could choose or reject in the same way that one might elect either to drink a glass of wine or to pour it out in the dust. He is, rather, the fullness of Being and the transcendental horizon of reality that animates every single stirring of reason and desire, the always more remote end present within every more immediate end. Insofar as we are able freely to will anything at all, therefore, it is precisely because he is making us to do so: as at once the source of all action and intentionality in rational natures and also the transcendental object of rational desire that elicits every act of mind and will toward any purposes whatsoever.” (pg. 183)
What this means is that I can say, concerning the scenario, that it is inadequate as Feser uses it, and he should know this. The way I would reconfigure it is that, concerning the first example where one is not in their right mind, it at its best corresponds to our lives here in this short life span, and in hell, where the “wheel of vanity”, with its destructive effects on the soul, turns ever faster. We are all “asleep” with respect to the knowledge of God that is resurrection. As James Cutsinger said, “Real life hasn’t even begun, and in fact it won’t till we die”. The second scenario, concerning the “calm and sober” rudeness, is within the first, as its consequence. We are rude to God’s representatives and “images”, and therefore rude to Him (as the parable of the sheep and goats shows). Not to Him in himself, but Him in his presentation in a finite receptacle, and we get the corresponding punishment within that sphere of “jurisdiction” and expected knowledge. This is an explanation of what it means to say there is no act against God worthy of eternal Hell. Sure, there levels of culpability, severe ones even, but they are all ultimately done in ignorance, and the “punishment” is precisely meant to deliver from that, at least according to Clement of Alexandria (Who is quoted in Ramelli’s book on early Christian Universalism, which Feser should read).
I’m going to skip the “ad hominem” claim by Feser because I don’t think it’s worth replying to. I personally do not think Hart is too harsh in his rhetoric. For one, he did not call anyone a heretic, unlike Feser and many of the other negative reviewers. Also, it doesn’t change the core arguments of the book anyway. So, moving on.
Feser says Hart’s statement are “hard to distinguish from pantheism”. He singles out some quotes, especially this one:
“We belong, of necessity, to an indissoluble coinherence of souls. In the end, a person cannot begin or continue to be a person at all except in and by way of all other persons… Yes, the psychological self within us – the small, miserable empirical ego that so often struts and frets its hour upon the stage of this world – is a diminished, contracted, limited expression of spirit, one that must ultimately be reduced to nothing in each of us if we are to be free from what separates us from God and neighbor; but the unique personality upon which that ego is parasitic is not itself merely a chrysalis to be shed. There may be within each of us (indeed, there surely is) that divine light or spark of nous or spirit or Atman that is the abiding presence of God in us… but that light is the one undifferentiated ground of our existence, not the particularity of our personal existences in and with one another. As spiritual persons, we are dynamic analogies of the simplicity of the divine life of love, and so belong eternally to that corporate identity that is, for Gregory of Nyssa, at once the “Human Being” of the first creation and also the eternal body of Christ.
But, then, this is to say that either all persons must be saved, or none can be. (pp. 154-55)
Feser writes:
“I think it should be obvious why these passages imply a kind of mitigated pantheism that collapses the distinction between God and the human race (even if they don’t go the whole hog of collapsing the distinction between God and the world in general).
In the first passage, Hart treats the entire human race as one big blob that only collectively makes up “the body of the Logos,” and without every single part of which Christ’s obedience to the Father is “incomplete.” This implies that the second Person of the Trinity is incarnate not just in the individual human being Jesus of Nazareth, but in the entire human race considered as one lump. What else could it mean to say that only all human beings together make up “the body of the Logos”? How could Christ’s obedience to the Father be incomplete apart from universal salvation, unless all human beings collectively make up his human nature?
In the second passage, Hart tells us that the individual ego must be “reduced to nothing” and that what will remain is a “divine light” or “Atman” that is to be identified with “the one undifferentiated ground of our existence, not the particularity of our personal existences in and with one another.” That sounds pretty much like Vedantic pantheism, right down to the term ‘Atman.’”
Now, that an idea is “hard to distinguish” from pantheism does not mean it is impossible. Apart from that, it is pretty ridiculous that Feser, who should be knowledgeable on philosophy of mind, doesn’t understand what it means to say that the empirical ego must be “reduced to nothing”. If he does understand, then he’s just throwing cheap shots here. If not, well I will explain it here.
A key theme of most authentic mysticism is something that can be called “negation of self” or “silencing of ego” or, in Paul’s words, “Yet not I, but Christ”. The “authentic you” is not your ego. To imply that you are your ego is to negate the very words “image of God” in its truest sense. Professor Feser needs to, if he hasn’t already, read the “On the One and Only Transmigrant” by Ananda Coomaraswamy. “Vedantic Pantheism” does not mean what he thinks it means. It does not collapse the distinction between creator and creation. In fact, they specifically reject such a collapse. If he wants a Christian analogue to the Coomaraswamy paper, check out Jordan Daniel Wood’s “Creation is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor”.
Yes, it means that God is "incarnate" in all humans, and not as one “lump”, but as “one body”. What else does it mean to say we are Christ’s body? Is it an empty cipher, like the “just a symbol” Zwingli theology of the eucharist, or do we actually become His body by his sacrifice? God becoming the animating principle of our person, without ceasing to be God and us ceasing to be men is precisely the end goal of salvation. “God became man that man might become God”. What Hart does is that, following St. Gregory of Nyssa, he takes the logic to its conclusion. There is nothing “pantheistic” here. It doesn’t negate our particularities, it gives them their proper place. Individual intellects, in Plotinus, according to Gerson, do not know each other through “interpenetration of subjectivities”, but through the mutual contemplation of forms, and, through them, God. Dr. Hart, who is a Neoplatonist, would agree.
As for Feser’s retort that:
“The traditional Thomist view, which I have defended elsewhere (see the posts linked to below), is that at death the will of an offender can be locked onto evil in such a way that a damned soul perpetually, freely chooses bad actions. And it thereby merits perpetual punishment.”
He links several articles explaining this, but this one caught my eye.
I can only reply with a thread I made recently:
The idea is pretty simple. Angels, not being psychological entities, cannot be spoken as having those kinds of activities that pertain to psychological human beings, who have potentiality to actualize. Hence the "fall" of "Lucifer” has to be something inherent in the angelic essence itself, and that is found in its "otherness" from God. This makes "Lucifer" not a psychological subject who literally angers and rebels in the psychological sense, but the personification of a tendency of any created essence to "deviate" or "darken". An essence is "totally itself", it cannot change. However, because this "Luciferian tendency" is, like the evil it represents, a privative and shadow aspect of the actually and "really" unfallen angelic essence, just like how Kabbalah Mysticism views Satan/Samael as the "dark side" of Metatron/Michael, it cannot but disappear or be "reabsorbed" into its superior aspect in the eschaton. For human evil however, the situation is somewhat different. Humans are not simply essences, they are form/matter also. To the extent they identify with the "Luciferian essence" (LE from now on), they remain in hell, but the Luciferian tendency itself is not eternal, and the human who identifies with it cannot make it eternal. The intellect that identifies with the LE is simply "not itself", because the intellect is in itself good, and maximally real in union with the divine intellect. Anything less is privation, and a corresponding ignorance, which, like the LE, will eventually disappear.
I think I should stop here, as this is getting too long and the rest is beyond my expertise. The rest of Feser’s objection have to do with scriptural translation, which I think Hart has addressed more than once in the Scientific Postscript of his New Testament Translation and some articles. As for the Heresy charge, it simply does not stick. Hart isn’t catholic, and even then there are catholic construals of universal salvation in line with dogma. Hart is Eastern Orthodox, who do not have a dogma on eschatology beyond the basics (Judgment and Resurrection) that we all assent to. As for the supposed condemnation of Apokatastasis in the early church, it is heavily disputed. Thank you.