Brett Fawcett

Concordia University of Edmonton

First Published February 13, 2018

The last few years have seen a spike in popularity of the character of Sherlock Holmes, who currently headlines blockbuster films set in his original era, television series like Sherlock and Elementary which set him in modern day, and even comic books like Watson and Holmes which depict him as contemporary African-American operating out of the ghetto. These diverse settings for this timeless character reveal how attractive and relevant he is to many different demographics.

Not coincidentally, these years have also seen a surge in popularity of what might be called “popular devotion to science”, with a kind of fetishism for scientific inquiry—particularly as a supposedly more reliable alternative to religion—sweeping the culture. This phenomenon is particularly widespread on the Internet and amongst enthusiasts of popular secular spokespeople like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye. The Sherlockian craze is almost certainly, at least in many cases, an expression of this scientism and skepticism.

The culturally alert Christian, however, should notice analogy between the culture that rediscovered the Holmes character and the individual who created him. Both, it can be argued, sought in the scientific method he signifies a source of truth and stability as a replacement for a never-fully-forsaken Christianity. Both equally experienced the limitations of the Baconian project and ultimately must strain to look beyond it, and specifically into the existential abyss of death. This paper will not only consider this historical parallel, but will also argue that the Holmes mythology provides fodder for the Christian to use in communicating with such a culture.

The Use of Literature in Christian Apologetics

C.S. Lewis famously held that art had a great value for Christian apologetics. His own imagination had been “baptized”, in part, by the fantasy fiction of his youth. The works of George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and even his own Narnia stories aim to evoke a sense of the “truth” that myth pointed to, namely the truth of Christianity.

Normally, it is fairy tales and fantasy stories that play this role: in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, poor Eustace Scrubb, with his modern books of science, is hopelessly unprepared for the magic hovering around a dragon’s treasure hoard. But there is also the suggestion that detective stories are the sort of literature that equip one for magical worlds, which, to Lewis’ thinking, means they are the sort of literature that prepares one for the Gospel. Edmund, “the only one of the party who had read several detective stories”, is the first to deduce what magic is afoot on Goldwater Island.1 In another genre, Lewis’ Space Trilogy depicts a character whose conversion to Christianity is signified by his re-discovery of the stories he loved as a child, whereas “grown-up stories…now seemed to him, except for Sherlock Holmes, to be rubbish”2 (italics in original). Here, Lewis pays the Holmes stories the ultimate tribute of lumping them together with children’s fairy tales.

Nor is Lewis the only scholar to link the stories to fantasy and even to Scripture. The scholarship of the Holmes stories—often dubbed the “canon” in a deliberate religious allusion— was largely pioneered either by Christians such as Dorothy Sayers and Fr. Ronald Knox or by the offspring of myth scholars: William S. Baring-Gould was the grandson of clergyman and folklore scholar Sabine Baring-Gould, and Richard Lancelyn Green was the son of Robert Lancelyn Green, another scholar of mythology and fellow-traveler with the Inklings.

The Lutheran theologian and apologist John Warwick Montgomery suggests that Holmes is a “mythopoeic” figure in the vein of Tolkien’s subcreation, a kind of Jungian embodiment of the hope for a mythic triumph of reason over epistemological darkness.3 W.H. Auden, a friend and encourager of J.R.R. Tolkien, goes further in suggesting that there is something mythic about the genre of mystery fiction, posting that the detective story indulges in “the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law”, a “daydream” he sees as fuelled by our own sense of “guilt”.4 In this reading, detective stories tap into the same intuitions of greater worlds that fairy tales do, and we may take this as our warrant for treating the Holmes stories as preparatio evangelica.

Doyle’s friend and amiable rival, G.K. Chesterton, saw much of Doyle’s literary output, particularly in defense of his belief in ghosts, as being less an attack on materialism and more of an attempt to replace the Church in which he was raised: “By a deep and true ancestral instinct with him, he knows that this is ultimately the one Thing to be either attacked or defended…”5 The mythic universe of the Holmes stories, as will be shown, also reflect this effort to come to terms with Doyle’s religious struggles. The modern post-Christian world is similarly struggling with this attempt to find a satisfactory replacement for the Church, and the philosophical arc of the Holmes canon which our contemporaries have recently re-discovered is therefore a useful guide to both the aesthetic power of this worldview and the existential dissatisfaction with it that its adherents experience.

Doyle and the Hound of Heaven

“In a recent contribution to Nash’s Magazine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle remarks very truly that the modern world is weary and wicked and in need of a religion.” –G.K. Chesterton6

Arthur Conan Doyle came from an Irish Catholic family of artists, and it seems like this Catholicism was more than nominal. For example, his uncle Richard Doyle was an illustrator for Punch magazine who quit that publication because of its jokes at the expense of the Pope.7 Young Arthur himself received his early education from the Jesuits at Stonyhurst, where he studied under figures like the Reverend Thomas Kay, whose mannerisms and erudition may have served as an influence for Holmes’ personality.8

However, his father was not a shining role model to Doyle. Charles Altamont Doyle was also an artist, but was not as successful as some of his family members, and consequently fell into depression and alcoholism and ended up in a series of mental institutions, finally dying in one of them. until he died in one of them. With this figure at the head of his Catholic upbringing, it is perhaps unsurprising that Arthur left the Church as a young man, though he never became an atheist.9

Michael Coren, perhaps recognizing some of his own trans-denominational pilgrimage in Doyle’s story, notes that while Doyle rejected Catholicism and even persuaded his mother to also renounce her faith10, he continued to long for something to believe in, “in both a secular and temporal way. Country, flag, empire, family, honour, religion… if the Church was to be abandoned he had to look to an alternative.”11 In fact, there is evidence that Christ and the Church continued to haunt him, like one of the ghosts in which he would come to believe. Coren notes that, while Doyle briefly described himself as a Unitarian, this was “no more than a convenient halfway house. The charm, beauty and seductive ritual of Catholicism had not quite let him go. He had abandoned the substantial but not the cosmetic aspects of his baptismal faith.”12

It is important at this stage to see the parallel with modern secular society. In America as of 2016, although belief in God’s existence and traditional religion was declining, fascinatingly, belief in an afterlife was rising, especially among millennials.13 The trend is away from religious orthodoxy but in the direction of new forms of spirituality which are seen as more practical and relevant to life in the modern age, which New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has identified as a national turn to what would traditionally be identified as “heresy”.14

Doyle’s particular search for a new faith can be divided into two stages: His worldly hope in science and empire in this life, and his otherworldly hope in the existence of the afterlife. Although Holmes was created primarily as a representative of the first stage, he also came to serve as an expression of the dissatisfactions with it that led him to look to another world.

Doyle famously based Holmes primarily on his medical instructor at Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph Bell, a famous pioneer of what would today be called forensic science. Dr. Bell, it should be noted, was a devout Christian who unfailingly attended St. George’s Free Church each Sunday, sometimes attending both services, and who expressed admiration for several Catholic priests, who “are Saints on earth, and shame our ministers with their self-sacrificing lives.”15 Bell’s Christianity is arguably always “behind” the Holmes character.

The presence of an analogue of Joseph Bell is not the only note of autobiography in the stories. At the beginning of The Sign of Four, Holmes correctly deduces that Watson’s older brother once had great prospects but squandered them and ended up dying a drunkard. Here Doyle is being painfully honest about his own father, albeit altering the relationship for the novel. But Holmes’ deductions also suggest another function of the stories: Holmes represents an orderly, rational situation in contrast to the instability Doyle would have experienced growing up in a home led by a mentally unstable alcoholic. There is an almost religious comfort in Holmes’ methodical cosmos. In this connection, it is interesting that his sidekick, Dr. John H. Watson, shares his name with the Canadian philosopher John Watson, whose “speculative realism” asserted that the universe is rationally accessible and humans as rational beings are therefore capable of mastering the world and of devising a morality and a faith which is identical to reason.

This may provide a hint as to why Holmes, and the scientific triumphalism he symbolizes, is so appealing to our contemporary society, where depression, widespread family breakdown, and existential angst are becoming more and more commonplace. Citing Maslow’s psychology, E.F. Schumacher suggests that “the pursuit of science is often a defence…a security system, a complicated way of avoiding anxiety and upsetting problems.”16 In this sense, scientific certitude often serves as a surrogate for the consolations of religion in an uncertain and agnostic era. This sort of religious undercurrent runs through A Study in Scarlet. The title of Holmes’ monograph arguing that the whole universe is internally organized by a network of logical connections is “The Book of Life”, a phrase which recalls the Apocalypse of St. John and the image of God sitting in judgment over all humanity.17 This eschatological hope has been translated into an immanent goal of scientifically-accomplished justice in history.

The Holmes stories must therefore be read in the light of what Butterfield famously called the Whiggish interpretation of history18, which saw history as a gradual progression forwards and upwards out of superstition and ignorance into the enlightened scientific and rational future, represented, in this case, by the British Empire. Often this belief appeared in Deistic language which presented this progressing as the will of Providence guiding human history towards its civilizational apex. Holmes, the scientist solving problems that baffle the official police, is an embodiment of this Baconian optimism. The general tenor of the stories is that uncultivated nature is dangerous, wild, and in need of humanity to impose technological civilization upon it.19 Even during the Great War, when society’s technology and intellectual advantages seem to be used to wreak violence rather than effect progress, Holmes, in his chronologically final adventure (His Last Bow) describes the War as “God’s own wind” blowing over the land.20 This attitude—which C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery”—is altogether common today. One frequently hears that certain moral attitudes or religious dogmas have no place in the modern world, or that those who oppose certain social trends are “on the wrong side of history”. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau justified his cabinet decisions with the flippant line, “Because it’s 2016,” as though living at a certain time committed one to certain values that were implicitly superior to those held in the past.

But even if Holmes is a scientist, he does not rely on strict technological and scientific reasoning. Science furnishes the data, but another instinct furnishes the conclusions. For example, in The Solitary Cyclist, Holmes notes that a client has “spatulate finger-ends”, which is consistent with repeatedly tapping on either a piano or a typewriter. Note how he deduces that she is a musician: “There is a spirituality about the face,” he remarks, “which the typewriter does

not generate.”21 “Spirituality” is not the sort of thing that can be detected through a microscope,

but it is a legitimate clue all the same.

Importantly, for Holmes, this intuitive and aesthetic instinct is not something that hinders him from accessing the objective truth. In conjunction with his observations, it makes him more susceptible to the truth. Having all the facts is necessary, but not sufficient. The communications and technology theorist Marshall McLuhan identified this as the difference between Holmes and Scotland Yard: the latter exemplifies instrumental reason working through bureaucracy, and while “[t]he Yard technology is serial, segmented, and circumstantial”, Holmes’ “intuitive genius” is that, like an artist, he thinks in totalities.22

The Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan phrased McLuhan’s observation differently in the opening lines of the preface to his text on Insight:

In the ideal detective story the reader is given all the clues yet fails to spot the criminal…he can remain in the dark for the simple reason that reaching the solution is not the mere apprehension of any clue, not the mere memory of all, but a quite distinct activity of organizing intelligence that places the full set of clues in a unique explanatory perspective.23 (emphasis added)

Lonergan identifies the epistemic and existential procedure of arriving at truth as a method consisting of four admonitions: “Be attentive”, “be intelligent”, “be rational”, and “be responsible”. Having an “insight” is a function of being intelligent, but one must then vet that insight with rationality. The Scotland Yard detectives in the stories are often attentive, and even intelligent, but Holmes’ creativity and rationality enable him to both refute their mistakes and come up with better explanatory hypotheses.24 Lonergan freely confessed his intellectual debt in this matter to Holmes’ contemporary, John Henry Newman. Newman’s defence of religious belief, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, introduced the concept of the “illative sense”, meaning “the intellectual capacity in a particular case (hence sense rather than faculty) to come to a conclusion about complex or disparate evidence.”25 Since Newman holds that the “illative sense” is what leads us to the knowledge of God,26 Holmes is, perhaps, not far from the kingdom of God.

“Now Comes the Mystery”27

As dismissive as Holmes may be of Watson’s poetic flights and fancies, we see him often waxing philosophic in a way that seems to anticipate the existentialists of the 20th century (and which echoes Hamlet and Macbeth, which is consistent with Holmes’ theatrical proclivities). Based on the evidence of Holmes’ experience in this world, all is hopeless: In a “melancholy and philosophic mood” at the beginning of The Retired Colourman (the last Holmes story to be published), Holmes wonders aloud: “[I]s not all life pathetic and futile? We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow–misery.”28 Holmes cannot overcome the sense of futility in this life, made all the worse by its abrupt but inevitable conclusion. There is a similar note struck at the end of The Cardboard Box, an especially gruesome and nihilistic case, except that here Holmes’ instincts seem to revolt against the conclusion:

“What is the meaning of it, Watson? What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”29 (emphasis added)

Holmes’ reason comes up against the mystery of human suffering, and his intuitions rebel against the idea that it is all for naught. Nevertheless, he concedes that the answer must lie somewhere beyond reason, at least reason based on empirical inference. For all this, Holmes, like his creator, cannot seem to quite become a full-fledged unbeliever. Despite recommending Windwood Reade’s aggressively secular text The Martyrdom of Man in The Sign of Four and even citing it to Watson later in the novel, the quotation is preceded by Holmes describing labourers leaving their gruelling work as “[d]irty-looking rascals, but I suppose every one has some little immortal spark concealed about him…A strange enigma is man!”30 It is noteworthy that what fascinates Holmes is the thought that each of these men has something immortal about them. He even conscripts an anti-religious author (Reade) in the service of a religious instinct. Between these two quotes, we begin to sense Holmes’ dilemma: This world seems to be full of misery, and the only solution seems to be something beyond this world, and there must be something in humans that survives beyond this world.

We find that Holmes has a complex relationship with death. Running through the stories is the suggestion that there are certain mysteries that can only be solved from the other side of death. There is, of course, the obvious fact that, in solving murders, Holmes allows the dead to speak; like Abel, the victims, being dead, yet speaketh (an image which takes alarmingly literal form in The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax). But there is a deeper significance to the role of death in these stories. On one level, this is because of the hope that there must be a resolution in the afterlife. As he muses in The Veiled Lodger, “The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.”31 The language of “jest” reminds us of Albert Camus, who argued that death renders human life meaningless and our broken world “unreasonable”.32 Holmes’ hope for justice in another world is strong enough for Holmes to act upon: he allows a dying murderer to go free in The Boscombe Valley Mystery because the killer will soon face “a court higher than the Assizes”.33 Holmes seems to be moved by the sort of argument that Immanuel Kant made: Ultimate justice does not exist in this world, but our intuitions insist that ultimate justice must exist; therefore, there must be another world wherein dwelleth righteousness.34 We must again recall that more Americans today believe in life after death, even as traditional religiosity wanes, and consider whether the rationale for this is not similar to Holmes’.

Related to this, Holmes knows that the solution to the problem of our mortality is not a cure for death. In a fascinating story which slips into science fiction, The Creeping Man, a “mad scientist” injects himself with primate glands in an attempt at rejuvenation. Commenting on this scheme, Holmes remarks: “When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it. The highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny.” Here he sounds like Pascal’s rumination: “Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.”35 And, in musing on what would happen if scientists ever were to develop such an elixir, Holmes has premonitions of a dystopian future and an anthropological catastrophe:

“There is…a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?”36

Philosopher and apologist Peter Kreeft, noting legends like the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman, observes: “Mere unending life is not a blessing but a curse…Unending life without God is not heaven; it is hell.”37 Not only does this constitute an argument for an afterlife, since our natural desire for immortality cannot be satisfied by unending life in this world, it also suggests that there are limits to what technology and science have to offer human nature. Today, there is the possibility of medical procedures which can dramatically increase the human lifespan, but Pew Research reveals that over half of Americans think that allowing people to live to 120 would be “bad for society”, in apparent agreement with Holmes.38 The sense is that, while death cannot be the end, unending life in this world is not the solution: we must look to another world.

But what is this “something higher” Holmes refers to, which beckons the spiritual upwards? Is there anything in the universe which gives a positive evidence its existence, rather than simply the negative evidence of the world’s futility? There is one piece of evidence Holmes identifies: Beauty.

The Naval Treaty was the last story published before The Final Problem, in which Holmes apparently died in his confrontation with Professor Moriarty. It may be that The Naval Treaty depicts a Holmes aware that a fatal encounter with his archenemy is immanent and is therefore reflecting on his own mortality39, which is why he stops his investigations abruptly to express his awe over the beauty of a rose:

“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”40

As we have discussed, Holmes’ method employs the illative sense Newman and Lonergan both said that the illative sense is also a sense of beauty.41 Holmes’ comments may be off-putting to some Christians, both because of his suggestion that theology “can be built up as an exact science” (which smacks of baroque theology or neo-Scholasticism) and because he seems to be building a natural theology in the vein of the Metaphysical poets rather than on the revelation of Christ. But it is important to recall that Hans Urs Von Balthasar spends the opening of the first volume of his “theo-aesthetics” arguing that beauty should be recognized as a theological category, governed by the “form” (Gestalt) of Christ, Whose Incarnation is the basis for the analogy of being.42 Similarly, Balthasar’s friend, the Reformed theologian Karl Barth, interpreted the beauty of Mozart’s music as a response to “the problem of theodicy” presented by the Lisbon earthquake. “Mozart,” he writes, “had the peace of God which far transcends all the critical or speculative reason that praises and reproves” and his music constitutes “a clear and convincing proof that it is a slander on creation to charge it with a share in chaos…Mozart has created order for those who have ears to hear, and he has done it better than any scientific deduction could.”43 Note Barth’s language: The beauty of Mozart’s music constitutes a proof of order in spite of the apparent pointlessness of the world, a proof transcending scientific deduction, just as the rose constitutes proof for Holmes.

In our day, people are addicted to both music and to the outdoors, and it is common to hear people speak of their spirituality as being closely related to the beauty of a sunset to anything they find in church. would be well advised to consider whether this does not constitute a chink in the armour of materialistic philosophy which the evangelist ought to exploit. This contention is strengthened by the fact that several young people in England are reportedly converting to Christianity because of the beauty of church buildings.44

Conclusion: The Importance of the Resurrection

Summarizing Holmes’ observations, we find that this world tends towards seeming randomness and hopelessness, but the presence of beauty is strong evidence of a greater goodness and purpose; but this purpose can only be known on the other side of death. The only way to solve the mystery of the universe, therefore, would be to pass over death and come back with your findings. And, in a way, Holmes accomplishes this, triumphing over death and returning three years later in The Empty House. Notice that the story is set in springtime, at the beginning of April, implicitly in Eastertide. That there is meant to be something Christological and Cruciform about this is suggested by the fact that the only disguise he dons to elude Moriarty in The Final Problem—before he lays down his life to defeat him—is that of an Italian priest; that is to say, a minister whose life is dedicated to the imitation of Christ.45

Another way of putting this is that, for Doyle, since reason alone could not disclose the mystery of reality, this mystery could only be solved by an encounter or an event. To put it another way, the only way to access noumena (Kant) is through the numinous (Otto). This held true in his own life. He moved from agnosticism to Spiritualism, he always explained, because in his own experience of séances he had heard the spirits reveal things that no other mortal could have known. This is a common reason cited for belief in the paranormal: a 2009 Pew survey revealed that one in five Americans believe they have been in the presence of a ghost.46 Even Michael Shermer, who for decades has made a career as a debunker and the executive director of the Skeptics Society and editor of Skeptic magazine, wrote an article admitting that he and his wife had an apparent experience of her father’s ghost that was so inexplicable it “shook my skepticism to its core”.47

But, as Chesterton pointed out, even an indisputably supernatural encounter is not a guarantee that the information one gleaned from that experience reveals the truth about the universe. “A message touching a secret,” he explained, “need not come from the dead because it is about the dead….it might be a devil.”48 In other words, demons may be masquerading as ghosts and using secret knowledge to deceive people; an experience of the supernatural is not necessarily an experience of truth.

Doyle was right that an encounter or event is necessary to reveal the ultimate truth about reality, but, as Barth said, this must be based entirely on an encounter with the revealing Christ. The Word of God is what is reliable, not our experiences which are so vulnerable to idolatry.

It becomes clear how important the Resurrection of Christ is as a response to Holmes’ quest to solve the mystery of human existence: Jesus is the One Who has gone over to the realm of death and returned triumphant. Christian apologists, such as Montgomery, often present a sort of legal argument for the Resurrection based on the historical evidence surrounding the Empty Tomb, an argument which persuaded such formidable lawyers as Simon Greenleaf and Lionel Luckhoo to become Christian believers.49 Such a presentation of the evidence for the Resurrection often feels like a kind of murder mystery turned on its head, or a reverse locked-room (or locked-tomb) mystery.50 The 2016 movie Risen, featuring a Roman soldier investigating the disappearance of Jesus’ body, was structured like a police procedural and captured something of this style of apologetic. Montgomery even suggests that Holmes himself would have been persuaded by the evidence for the Resurrection, which his real-life contemporary, Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Robert Anderson, presented in a book titled The Coming Prince.51

The question then becomes why Doyle himself never returned to mainstream Christianity. The answer, as for so many other people in his day and ours, seems to boil down to the Church’s moral teaching on sexuality. In his case, the specific issue was divorce, a controversy which may have had personal significance to him as someone who fell in love with another woman while his wife was still alive.52 Doyle felt so strongly that divorce should be socially and legally permissible that for ten years he was president of the Divorce Law Reform Society.53 There is even reason to believe that, while Doyle denounced the Church for her religiously-based opposition to divorce, his own belief in divorce also had a religious colouring. A character in the Sherlock Holmes story The Abbey Grange fulminates against divorce laws in prophetic language: “It is a sacrilege, a crime, a villainy to hold that [an abusive] marriage is binding. I say that these monstrous laws of yours will bring a curse upon the land – God will not let such wickedness endure.”54

Notably, even during his criticism of the Church, Doyle’s attraction to the figure of Christ continued unabated. Doyle denounced those who believe that “because Christ protested against the lax marriages of His day therefore two spouses who loathe each other should be forever chained in a life servitude and martyrdom”, claiming that this is “to travesty His teaching and to take from it that robust quality of common sense which was its main characteristic” (the capitalization of the pronoun referring to Jesus is in the original text).55

Doyle instead reacted with the second major stage in his effort to replace the Catholicism of his youth, Spiritualism. That this belief in the existence of ghosts was prompted, at least in part, by psychological need for some sort of proof of the afterlife can be seen in the fact that, when his friend Harry Houdini debunked the phenomenon of séances, it was their friendship that ended rather than his attachment to Spiritualism. That this attachment to Spiritualism is related to his desire for Christ can be seen in the fact that he saw supernaturalism as a return to the early church, writing that “spirit communion was a familiar idea” to the early Christians based on the references to “the spirits” in the Epistles.56 He even attempted to persuade the Spiritualists National Union to adopt a resolution encouraging the imitation of Jesus Christ.57

The picture that emerges is of someone who could not shake a desire to return to his childhood Christianity, but who rejected its moral strictures, and who found an alternative which could fill that Pascalian “God-shaped hole” and clung to it in the face of evidence to the contrary. Christians ought to be alert to the fact that the contemporary world is much like Doyle in this respect: in many ways profoundly intelligent, and ultimately longing for Christ, but rejecting the moral demands of the Church so fiercely that they will ignore evidence that refutes all their replacements. The answer is encounter, or revelation, though this can be done while using reason and science as a prolegomena.

In the light of that, Christians must not only be willing to present the propositional arguments for the Resurrection (which may be called the arguments to the modern mind), but also what may be called the subjective argument for the Resurrection of our own sanctity (arguably, an argument which appeal to the postmodern mind). The Catholic storyteller Flannery O’Connor concludes her dramatic story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by having her murderous character the Misfit declare that he would gladly abandon his criminal lifestyle and follow Jesus, if only he could be sure that Jesus rose from the dead. Unfortunately, because he was not there, the Misfit cannot be sure that the miracles of Jesus really happened—an argument not dissimilar to Lessing’s idea that a great historical ditch separates us from the Gospels and prevents us from being certain about their accuracy. “I wisht I had of been there,” he snarls, for “if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.” But right before he kills the story’s rather self-righteous protagonist, she suddenly has a moment of clarity and reaches out to him in forgiveness—an experience which startles him and, while the ending is ambiguous, perhaps begins to convert him.58

One way to interpret this is that the woman’s utterly unselfish act of love towards the Misfit in a way constitutes a kind of proof of Jesus’ Resurrection, just as the unselfish love of Mother Theresa constituted a proof of Christianity to Malcolm Muggeridge, or the sanctity of Father Zosima constitutes a proof of Christianity in Dostoevsky’s metaphysical murder mystery, The Brothers Karamazov. In that story, it is the innocent monk, Alyosha, rather than the analytical intellectual Ivan, who effectively solves the murder of their father, a suggestion that it is actually sanctity and not mere cleverness that gives one privileged access to reality.59 If there is any takeaway from the Holmes stories for the Christian evangelist, then, it is expressed in the words of the old revivalist hymn: Take time to be holy.

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58 Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 133.

59 G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown character is an obvious model of this, and in a story which seems to be an explicit response to the Holmes stories, “The Man With Two Beards” (which features a beekeeping detective character whom Brown outwits), the sleuthing cleric contrasts criminology with hagiography, “the study of holy things, saints and so on. You see, the Dark Ages tried to make a science about good people. But our own humane and enlightened age is only interested in a science about bad ones.” The Complete Father Brown (London: Penguin Books, 1963), 482.

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Nichols, Aidan. The Shape of Catholic Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991. O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Translated by W.F. Trotter. Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 2003.

Pascal, Janet B. Arthur Conan Doyle: Beyond Baker Street. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Schumacher, E.F. A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Sphere Books, 1986.

Spielmann, Marion Henry. The History of “Punch”, Volume 1. London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1895.

Tekippe, Terry J. What is Lonergan Up to in “Insight”?: A Primer. San Francisco: Liturgical Press, 1996.

Footnotes

1 C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 124.

2 C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1965), 359.

3 John Warwick Montgomery, The Transcendent Holmes (Ashcroft: Calabash Press, 2000), 110-4.

4 P.D. James cites this insight and notes in this connection that the detective story largely had its origins in Protestant countries, with the often-celibate detective serving as a priestly figure who extracts confessions. Talking About Detective Fiction (New York: Random House, 2009), 170-1, 180.

5 The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume 3 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 274.

6 The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume 20 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 159.

7 Marion Henry Spielmann, The History of “Punch”, Volume 1 (London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1895), 456.

8 Owen Dudley Edwards, The Quest for Sherlock Holmes: A Biographical Study of Arthur Conan Doyle (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Company, 1983), 66.

9 “[My] agnosticism never for an instant degenerated into atheism, for I had a very keen

perception of the wonderful poise of the universe and the tremendous power of conception and sustenance which it implied. I was reverent in all my doubts…” Memories and Adventures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 32.

10 Michael Coren, Conan Doyle (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), 31.

11 Coren, Conan Doyle, 27.

12 Coren, ibid.

13 These were the results of a study done by San Diego State University, Florida Atlantic University and Case Western Reserve University. Maggie Fox, “Fewer Americans Believe in God — Yet They Still Believe in Afterlife” (NBC News, March 21, 2016). Available at https:// www.nbcnews.com/better/wellness/fewer-americans-believe-god-yet-they-still-believe- afterlife-n542966 (as of November 15, 2017).

14 Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013).

15 Ely M. Liebow, Dr. Joe Bell: Model for Sherlock Holmes (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 57.

16 E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Sphere Books, 1986), 72.

17 Stephen Kendrick, Holy Clues: The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes (New York:

Pantheon Books, 1999), 85.

18 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965).

19 The Hound of the Baskervilles is the preeminent example of this: Henry Baskerville, the heroic young heir to his dynasty, wants to modernize Gothic Baskerville Hall with “a row of electric lamps”, while the evil characters are regressions: The brutish Selden seems to be almost a literal caveman, and the villainous Stapleton is described by Holmes as “a throwback, which appears to be both physical and spiritual” to a diabolical ancestor of the Baskerville line. See Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume II (New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1986), 121.

20 Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes II, 457.

21 Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes I, 728.

22 Marshall McLuhan, “Sherlock Holmes vs the Bureaucrat,” in The Essential Marshall

McLuhan, ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (New York: BasicBooks, 1995), 192-3.

23 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), ix. He made a similar analogy when discussing history as a functional specialty of theology: “Like a detective confronted with a set of clues that at first leave him baffled, the historian has to discover in the clues, piece by piece, the evidence that will yield a convincing account of what happened.” Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 186.

24 Terry J. Tekippe dedicated chapter 6 of What is Lonergan Up to in “Insight”?: A Primer (San Francisco: Liturgical Press, 1996) to the Holmes stories as an explanation of Longergan’s thought.

25 S.A.M. Adshead, Philosophy of Religion in Nineteenth-Century England and Beyond. (Hampshire: Macmillan Press Ltd., 2000), 31.

26 “These fragments of experience and argument then act as signals that points us in the direction of a true conclusion…Newman’s suggestion is that we can defend belief in God by putting together a number of experiential signals and lines of thoughts, which converge on the conclusion that there is a God.” Aidan Nichols, The Shape of Catholic Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 60.

27 This section takes its title from the last words of Henry Ward Beecher before his death.

28 Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes II, 649.

29 Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes II, 340.

30 Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes I, 175. This language sounds intriguingly close to Kierkegaard

31 Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes II, 632.

32 Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (New York: Random House, Inc., 2004), 154-8. The chapter on “The Victorian Crisis of Faith” is also illuminating about Holmes’ broader milieu.

33 Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes I, 288.

34 Kant’s argument is found in his Critique of Practical Reason. Kant’s argument is close to the structure of Holmes’ thought: Reason itself cannot disclose the ultimate reality (as Kant had already argued in his Critique of Pure Reason), and the sole persuasive argument for God’s existence is that it is necessary for ethics.

35 Blaise Pascsal, Pensées, trans. W.F. Trotter (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 2003), 99.

36 Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes II, 605.

37 Peter Kreeft, Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 23. Doyle seemed to recognize this, for his fiction often depicts unending life on earth as a curse. His story “The Ring of Thoth” (published the same year as the first Holmes story and featuring a Holmes-like protagonist) depicts a mournful living corpse from ancient Egypt; this tale was one of the influences for the Universal film The Mummy.

38“Living to 120 and Beyond: Americans’ Views on Aging, Medical Advances and Radical Life Extension”. Pew Research Center, August 6, 2013. Available at https://www.pewforum.org/ 2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-americans-views-on-aging-medical-advances-and-radical- life-extension (as of November 15, 2017).

39 I owe this insight to Fr. David Hogman.

40 Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes I, 624.

41 See, for example, William A. Mathews, Lonergan’s Quest: A Study of Desire in the Authoring of Insight (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2005), 45. For Lonergan, aesthetic judgments deal with responsibility (the fourth stage his method), in which the subject makes decisions with regard to values. This is the stage where conversion occurs. Method in Theology, 13.

42 The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthethics, Volume I: Seeing the Form, translated by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982).

43 Quoted in Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 78.

44 Olivia Rudgard, “One in six young people are Christian as visits to church buildings inspire them to convert” (The Telegraph, June 17, 2017). Available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ 2017/06/17/one-six-young-people-christian-visits-church-buildings-inspire (as of November 15, 2017).

45 Today, some of the most popular media are superhero movies, in which the protagonists frequently die and experience some form of resurrection. This has happened so frequently that the phrase “comic book death” has entered the popular lexicon as a reference to a character whose death will certainly be undone. This could reflect a similar instinct, or subconscious attraction to somehow overcoming the spectre of mortality.

46 “18% of Americans Say They’ve Seen a Ghost”. Pew Research Center, October 13, 2015. Available at https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/30/18-of-americans-say-theyve-seen- a-ghost (as of November 15, 2017).

47 Michael Shermer, “Anomalous Events That Can Shake One’s Skepticism to the Core”. (Scientific American, October 1, 2014). Available at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ anomalous-events-that-can-shake-one-s-skepticism-to-the-core (as of November 15, 2017).

48 The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume 34 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 78.

49 See Ross Clifford, John Warwick Montgomery’s Legal Apologetic: An Apologetic for all

Seasons (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2016).

50 Alister E. McGrath suggests that the evidence for the Resurrection constitutes not so much a “whodunit” as a “Whowasit”; see Studies in Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997), 38.

51 Montgomery suggests that Holmes’ early attraction to Buddhism was cured after meeting the Dalai Lama during his Great Hiatus (Transcendent Holmes, 87-95) and depicts Holmes as an apologist for Christianity in a dialogue with Watson (ibid. 119-135).

52 Janet B. Pascal, Arthur Conan Doyle: Beyond Baker Street (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 94-5.

53 Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 62

54 Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes I, 884.

55 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Vital Message (New York: Sheba Blake Publishing, 2014), 16.

56 Doyle, The Vital Message, 128.

57 Geoffrey K. Nelson, Spiritualism and Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 149.

Published in the Canadian Journal for Scholarship and the Christian Faith (journal.ccscf.org) on 2 March 2016

Natural law reasoning has largely fallen out of favor among Protestants. J. Daryl Charles has observed that “…there exists across Protestantism a broad consensus that rejects the natural law as a metaphysical notion rooted in divine revelation.”[1] This rejection of natural law among Protestants is due in no small part to the influence of Karl Barth. Stephen J. Grabill maintained that Barth’s influence was one of three factors that caused many Protestants to reject natural law during the twentieth century.[2] While it is outside the scope of this paper to provide a complete response to Barth’s opposition to natural law, the purpose of this paper is to respond to one of his objections, namely, that natural law elevates human reason too highly.

Certainly we should be careful about putting too much confidence in our fallen human reason. But was Barth correct, does natural law elevate human reason too highly? The thesis of this paper contends that the modern version of natural law does elevate human reason too highly but the pre-modern does not. [3] Thus Barth’s rejection of natural law in toto was mistaken because he failed to distinguish between these two versions of natural law, the modern and the pre-modern. By ignoring this distinction, Barth mistakenly rejected both whereas he should have only rejected the modern version.

In order to make this argument, I will first make a brief biblical case for using natural law reasoning in the public square so as to set the context for the discussion. In part two I will explain Barth’s key objection to natural law, that it elevates human reason too highly. Finally, in part three, I will respond to his rejection, showing that the modern version of natural law does make this mistake but the pre-modern version does not.

A Biblical Case for Natural Law

In this section I will make a brief biblical case that using natural law reasoning is an appropriate method of trying to influence the public square, that is, of trying to influence fallen governmental leaders to adopt and enforce morally good laws. In Rom. 13:1-4, Paul wrote that government is an “authority… established by God” which is supposed to “praise” those who “do what is good” and to be a “cause of fear… for evil [behavior]” (Rom. 13:1-4).[4] Peter also wrote that the functions of government include the “praise of those who do right” and the “punishment of evildoers” (1 Pet. 2:14). Paul explained that government is a “minister of God” for suppressing evil and administering justice; it “bears the sword” to discourage evil behavior through the threat, and application, of punishment and is “an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil” (Rom. 13:4).

These verses imply that fallen governmental leaders can know enough about morality such that they can, even without Scripture, correctly praise good behavior and punish evil behavior. In the above verses both Paul and Peter were referring to the Roman government, a government which was certainly not founded on biblical principles. Morris noted that “Paul is writing about the existing state, not some ideal state that he hoped would appear.”[5] How is it then that such fallen governmental leaders, without Scripture, could know enough about morality such that they could be “minister[s] of God” in praising good and punishing evil?

The answer is found earlier in Romans where Paul explained that “Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law… they show the work of the Law written in their hearts” (Rom. 2:14-15). What is translated here as “instinctively” is the Greek word φύσει, which BDAG defines in this context as “the regular or established order of things, nature.”[6] Hence this moral knowledge that Scripture attributes to fallen humanity has often been called natural law. In Robert Mounce’s explanation of these verses, he wrote that “…[w]henever Gentiles by natural instinct did what the law required, they demonstrated the existence of a guiding principle within themselves… their conduct revealed a general knowledge of God’s requirements for a principled and virtuous life.”[7]

John Calvin affirmed this understanding of natural law, that it provides sufficient moral knowledge to fallen humanity such that they can develop good moral laws. He wrote:

Since man is by nature a social animal, he is disposed, from natural instinct, to cherish and preserve society; and accordingly we see that the minds of all men have impressions of civil order and honesty. Hence it is that every individual understands how human societies must be regulated by laws, and also is able to comprehend the principles of those laws. Hence the universal agreement in regard to such subjects, both among nations and individuals, the seeds of them being implanted in the breast of all without a teacher or lawgiver.[8]

While arguing against those who thought every society should base their laws on the Law of the Old Testament, Calvin explained that societies were able to craft good laws without the Old Testament. In the midst of his explanation he appealed to the notion of natural law:

As constitutions have some circumstances on which they partly depend, there is nothing to prevent their diversity, provided they all alike aim at equity as their end. Now, as it is evident that the law of God which we call moral, is nothing else than the testimony of natural law, and of that conscience which God has engraved on the minds of men, the whole of this equity of which we now speak is prescribed in it. Hence it alone ought to be the aim, the rule, and the end of all laws. Wherever laws are formed after this rule, directed to this aim, and restricted to his end, there is no reason why they should be disapproved by us, however much they may differ from the Jewish law, or from each other.[9]

If Rom. 13:1-4 implies that fallen governmental leaders can have true moral knowledge, and if this knowledge is explained by natural law as seen in Rom. 2:14-15, then it is reasonable to conclude that natural law reasoning would be effective in influencing fallen governments to correctly praise what is good and punish what is evil.

What does an appeal to natural law look like? First of all, it is not an argument merely for the term natural law. The term itself is incidental; what matters is the concept behind the term. In fact, because the term natural law has been used to describe so many different things, some of which are diametrically opposed to one another, Russell Hittinger recommends the term higher law, as employed by Martin Luther King, because it “indicates the more than human ground for the public moral order.”[10] In other words, an appeal to natural law is an appeal to a moral order that is above us, that is, greater than our own personal preferences and man-made laws, something to which all persons and man-made laws are accountable to and should be judged by.

Evaluating a moral issue from a natural law perspective can include, but is not limited to, considering the utilitarian consequences of the behavior in question, both for the individual and for society. It is appropriate to consider these factors because God has built moral consequences into the fabric of the universe such that we reap what we sow (Gal. 6:7). Thus we should expect immoral behavior to lead to ill effects. Though consequences are important to consider, ultimately natural law arguments are an appeal to the objective moral law that is written on fallen hearts (Rom. 2:14), something we as Christians know is there even if they do not.[11] In this sense, appealing to natural law is simply reminding people of what God says they already know.

It is important to note that natural law proponents are not against using special revelation in the public square as well. Here I am only making the case for the use of natural law but it is important to remember that this is not mutually exclusive with also using special revelation. Special revelation is superior in many respects, but, if it is not recognized by the government you are trying to influence, then natural law may possibly be more effective in such a context. For example, William Edgar wrote:

…an appeal to Scripture in the public square is not always a wise strategy. But this is a strategic choice, not the preference of one kind of revelation over another… The basis of our hope is not that one kind of revelation will ‘work’ better than another but our knowledge that this is Christ’s world and that, whether magistrates like it or not, they are appointed by him to do his will. To work in politics with this assumption does not mean awkwardly to draw the sword of the Bible at every point but to remind fellow politicians of what they know already, by virtue of general revelation.[12]

Of course we should be careful lest the church become distracted from its primary mission of making disciples. Whereas government’s mandate concerns external behavior, the church should be focused on the heart, that is, on winning people to faith in Christ and helping them love and obey Him. Christ instructed the church to “make disciples of all nations” by evangelism (entailed in “baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit”) and by discipleship, that is, by “teaching them to observe all that I [Christ] commanded” (Matt. 28:19-20). Though Christians should primarily be involved with the church, helping it accomplish its mission of making disciples, they should also be concerned that the government fulfills its God given purpose of providing order and stability to society.

I am only arguing that Christians in general should want to see the government fulfill its God given task. Of course each individual Christian’s involvement in the government, just like their involvement in the church, will vary based on their specific gifting and calling. Christians who have been called to this specific ministry should be involved in informing and influencing fallen governments about what is right and wrong so as to help society be as safe and stable as possible. Other Christians should support and encourage them in this, not only for their own benefit, but to be a good neighbor to those around them. This is especially the case when it comes to protecting innocent people from harm and caring for those who cannot care for themselves, as Christ taught us through the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk. 10:25-37). According to Rom. 13:1-4 and Rom. 2:14-15, natural law would seem to be a plausible approach for trying to influence fallen governmental leaders to adopt and enforce good moral laws.

A Common Objection to Natural Law

One of the most common objections that Protestants have raised against natural law is that it elevates human reason too highly. Jean Porter notes that this was a primary concern for Karl Barth in his “well-known critique of natural theology, which implies a rejection of any version of a natural law theory.”[13] Porter continued by summarizing Barth’s objection as follows:

…we cannot attain reliable knowledge of God’s creation, and for this reason, we cannot draw reliable ethical conclusions from our partial and flawed knowledge of the created world… any moral system (whether pre-reflective or philosophical) that claims to offer clear, systematic, and self-contained guidance on matters of good and evil is fundamentally an expression of pride. It presupposes a degree of independent discernment that the human person cannot attain, and it reflects the human desire to attain justification and security independently of God, over against God.[14]

Nigel Biggar also noted that “[o]ne (typically Protestant) reason that Barth gives for this [rejecting natural law] is epistemological. The concepts to which he refers are, he believes, tied to a high estimation of the power of human reason to apprehend the command of God the Creator directly in ‘reality’… Natural reason cannot perceive ‘with increasing certainty and clarity’ the order or many orders of creation, both because ‘reality’ is too obscure and because natural reason is too feeble.”[15]

Barth often labeled natural law as a Roman Catholic doctrine, which had the effect of frightening many evangelicals away from it. For instance, he wrote that the “idea of a synthesis and continuity between nature and supernature” was “an idea which ruined the ancient Catholic Church and which signified a repenetration of the church by paganism.”[16] He was concerned that this elevation of human reason had crept into Protestantism. David VanDrunen noted that Barth’s critique was “forged most immediately by his own rejection of the nineteenth-century Protestant liberal theology or culture Protestantism in which he was trained. He saw the earlier tradition’s acceptance of natural law and two kingdoms doctrines as serious flaws that had opened the door to many fundamental errors of recent Protestant theology.”[17]

Barth viewed the revelation in Christ as the sole authority for theological understanding, seeing anything outside of that framework as a threat to Christ’s supremacy. Claiming to find truth through any means but Christ was heretical; Biggar described Barth’s view well when he wrote that “…only when we know about the grace of God in Jesus Christ do we know for certain what creation is, who the Creator is, and what it means to be the creature of this Creator.”[18] Trying to understand creation apart from Christ elevates human reason and draws attention away from Scripture. Charles summarized this aspect of Barth’s theology as follows: “The preoccupation with ‘nature’ and ‘reason’… prepares the soil for a secularized humanism that empties Christian faith of its substance and undermines or denies the absolute lordship of Christ… it facilitates the emergence of a ‘natural religion’ and ‘natural theology’ that serve as a substitute for a ‘Word of God’ – centered and christocentric faith.”[19]

For Barth, it made no difference that natural law proponents affirmed special revelation and even developed their view from Scripture. In his Church Dogmatics, concerning natural law, he wrote:

It is no help… that it tries to pay attention not only to the natural light of reason, but also to the light of revelation, and therefore from the very outset to give the desired theological shape and finish to the determination of man. Nor, again, is it any help… that it tries to focus attention on the light of revelation and only incidentally attends also to the natural light of reason… everything is compromised by the fact that revelation is not really accepted as revelation, but is constantly set against the light of reason with its independent, if limited, illumination.[20]

If human reason is included then somehow this invalidates revelation; he wrote that “[g]race which has from the start to share its power with a force of nature is no longer grace… revelation which has from the very outset a partner in the reason of the creature, and which cannot be revelation without its co-operation, is no longer revelation.”[21] Barth went so far as to claim that such a view is not even Christian when he wrote that this system of thought “thinks it can combine and co-ordinate the Christian and the human far too easily. To achieve this combination and co-ordination it has emptied out what is Christian.”[22]

Barth’s disdain for natural law is most clearly seen in his critique of Emil Brunner’s argument for natural theology.[23] Charles noted that “[e]ver since the Barth-Brunner controversy Protestant theology has been riddled with suspicion and skepticism vis-à-vis natural law. In this regard, it would appear that the influence of Barth has been dominant.”[24] For example, Barth’s influence can be clearly seen in the work of Jacques Ellul; he wrote that “[i]f one adopts a strictly biblical view, then it would seem that one could hardly do otherwise than to follow Karl Barth on the subject of the impossibility of the natural knowledge of God by man, which leads to the same impossibility for the knowledge of the good.”[25]

A Response to Barth’s Objection to Natural Law

In this section I will argue that Barth’s rejection of natural law came in part from a failure to distinguish between the modern version of natural law and the pre-modern version. Just because human reason was elevated too highly in the former does not mean we should therefore reject the latter.

The distinctive element of a pre-modern view of natural law, exemplified by Thomas Aquinas, is that morality is ontologically grounded in God’s nature. Aquinas used the term eternal law to describe the overall order and purpose which originates in God and governs all of His creation. He wrote that “it is evident that all things partake somewhat of eternal law in so far as, namely from its being imprinted on them, they derive their respective inclinations to their proper acts and ends.”[26] This eternal law was imprinted by God on everything He created, including human beings, giving each individual thing an inclination towards its proper purpose. Aquinas explained that natural law comes about when people correctly perceive elements of this eternal law and act according to it. In reference to Rom. 2:14, he continued:

Wherefore it [the rational creature] has a share of the Eternal Reason, whereby it has a natural inclination to its proper act and end: and this participation of the eternal law in the [very nature of the] rational creature is called the natural law… the light of natural reason, whereby we discern what is good and what is evil, which is the function of the natural law, is nothing else than an imprint on us of the Divine light. It is therefore evident that the natural law is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law.[27]

Understood this way, natural law is a form of general revelation; it is truth that originates from God and is revealed to us internally through the moral law on our hearts and externally through the order of His creation.

The important thing to note is that, in this pre-modern view of natural law, moral precepts do not originate from human reason. We can only know moral truth because, first, God wrote it on our hearts, and second, our God-given reason allows us to discern the proper purposes He imprinted on His creation. The pre-moderns were very clear that they believed God was the author of these moral precepts, not human reason or ingenuity. Just because our reason helps us discover them, this does not mean human reason is first in the causal order of their existence. We can discover this moral truth through reason, at least to some degree, because God gave us this ability and because He revealed it to us generally in His created order.

This is in contrast with a radically different view of natural law which developed later during the modern era. As western intellectual history progressed, more and more emphasis was placed on what could be known by human cognition alone. By the time of the Enlightenment, many thinkers were appealing first and foremost to the authority of human reason, i.e. what was first in the mind. These men separated natural law from its theistic ontological foundation and yet tried to build similar moral principles purely from autonomous human reason. To them, human reason, from which moral knowledge comes, is autonomous in the sense that it is not necessary for it to be grounded in, or even connected with, God and His work in creation. They thought human reason would still function reliably, and hence be able to develop moral principles, even if God did not exist. For example, Hugo Grotius wrote that the ability to understand justice “would have a place even were we to accept the infamous premise that God did not exist or did not concern himself with human affairs.”[28]

During the modern era, the concept of natural law became interwoven with autonomous human reason, i.e. the belief that human beings are able to know truth on their own apart from God. For example, Thomas Hobbes explicitly taught that we ourselves make the principles of morality:

Politics and ethics (that is, the sciences of just and unjust, of equity and inequity) can be demonstrated a priori; because we ourselves make the principles—that is, the causes of justice (namely, laws and covenants)—whereby it is known what justice and equity, and their opposites injustice and inequity, are. For before covenants and laws were drawn up, neither justice nor injustice, neither public good nor public evil, was natural among men any more than it was among beasts.[29]

As this view of ethics gained dominance, natural law became associated with the idea that people should be free from all laws except those they impose on themselves. Hittinger explained that “[v]irtually all of the Enlightenment ‘state of nature’ scenarios make this move. In Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, man is considered in an ‘original’ position, under the authority of no pope, prince, or scripture. If there is a God, he governs through no mundane authority. Authority will have to make its first appearance in the covenants of individuals constrained to reach a consensus on the basis of what is (or seems) self-evident.”[30]

Thus we see an explicit and key difference between these two views of natural law, the pre-modern and the modern. Those who hold to a pre-modern view of natural law acknowledge that there is a proper role for human reason in discovering what is true whereas modern natural law proponents elevate reason to such an extent that it becomes the authority for deciding what is true. Charles explained that “[h]uman beings cannot avoid or deny their true nature, which due to the imago Dei seeks order. Natural theology, then, properly understood, concerns creation and cosmic reality, not human autonomy.”[31]

Barth failed to recognize this important distinction in his most scathing polemic against natural law when he critiqued Brunner’s position, which is more reflective of a pre-modern view.[32] Brunner wrote that “[e]ven fallen man still has — thanks to the ‘portion’ of the imago that he has retained — an immortal soul, a conscience, in which the law of God is indelibly and irremovably implanted. But he also has an inclination towards truth and a capacity for recognizing truth.”[33] In spite of Brunner’s explicit explanation to the contrary, Barth repeatedly accused him of claiming that man is the one who decides what is right or wrong.[34] Barth confused the issue when he argued that attributing to fallen man any ability to know moral truths makes him the decider of what is good and evil.[35] He also associated Brunner’s emphasis on rationality with the rationalism of modernism, seeing him as “a representative of the ‘rational orthodoxy’ of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century who had risen again and was speaking to us in modern terms.”[36]

Barth mistakenly associated Brunner’s pre-modern position on natural law with the modern view of it. This is a common occurrence by Protestants who object to natural law; Mark Liederbach noted that reluctance among Protestants to embrace natural law:

…is largely due to how the doctrine of natural law eventually developed in light of some of the epistemological claims of Modernity… The Christian view that human rationality is embedded in the created order and directly dependent upon a coherence with the mind of God was eventually replaced by a view of autonomy and an over-simplified view of the ability of humans to reason and discover ‘truth’ apart from God. This is significant because so many of the modern preconceptions about natural law ethics assume that what is meant by a ‘natural law theory’ is a system of morality that claims a moral authority in nature that is somehow distinct from God himself. That is, there is a tendency to associate natural law with a kind of moral rationalism that excludes any appeal to direct theological grounds.[37]

One of the reasons Barth saw pre-modern natural law and modern natural law so closely connected is because he thought the former was the root cause which led to the latter.[38] Barth tried to draw a straight line from Aquinas, through the Enlightenment, to modern Protestantism. He wrote:

…[the Reformers] were not in a position to foresee all the reservations with which Roman Catholic theology has since, i.e. since the rediscovery of St. Thomas, learnt to surround its (materially unchanged) definitions. For the substance of these definitions has since, in an idealist form, i.e. in that of a secularized Thomism (which has found its mature form in Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehr—E.T. The Christian Faith), but without consciousness of its real connections, become part of the armoury of modernist Protestantism.[39]

I agree with Barth that modern natural law—that man through reason can decide what is true—is dangerously wrong, the very height of sinful fallen pride, and something that we should always be on guard against. But I disagree that the blame for this modern view can be placed upon pre-modern natural law, as exemplified by Aquinas, which held that man can merely discover truth to some degree. Pre-modern natural law did not inexorably lead to the exaltation of human reason as seen in modern natural law. Instead, the key breakdown occurred later when modernism broke nature away from its theistic metaphysical roots. In other words, the only reason that pre-moderns thought people could discover truth in nature was because they believed it was created by God. This is a most reasonable assumption and, as I argued above, what Scripture itself teaches.

One reason the modern movement exploded so powerfully was because people really did discover some truth in nature, as Scripture indicated they should. These thinkers were able to discern moral principles to some degree through reason and nature, as explained by Rom. 2:14. But the mistake of modernism, which came to full fruition in the Enlightenment, was to think that nature would still communicate moral truth even if God had not created it, that is, even if God did not exist. Daniel Heimbach noted that “rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries… severed natural law from supernaturalism.”[40] He continued by noting that “[t]his enlightenment version of supernaturally detached natural law philosophy… venerated reason.”[41] It was not the pre-modern concept of natural law, but this Enlightenment view of nature, as completely autonomous from God, which have birth to modern natural law.

Barth and other Protestant theologians who rejected natural law were not the first to set up a dichotomy between faith and reason. It was the philosophers and writers of the early modern era and the Enlightenment who first established this dichotomy, over-emphasizing the side of reason. Barth and company mistakenly adopted this false dichotomy but instead over-emphasized the other side, the side of faith. They correctly discerned that too much emphasis had been put on reason but instead of rejecting the dichotomy, they overreacted and in turn put too much emphasis on faith to the exclusion of reason. They should have rejected the dichotomy altogether and returned back to the pre-modern synthesis between faith and reason found in Aquinas and the Reformers.

With Barth’s methodology, experiential faith is emphasized to such a degree that it becomes disconnected from objective reality, including any attempt at natural theology. He accused Brunner’s position, i.e. connecting faith with objective reality, of being unspiritual, as though reason and rationality are unspiritual.[42] He also praised Kierkegaard and Heidegger, thinkers who spearheaded this methodology of revelatory experience.[43] This method of emphasizing the subjective experience over objective reality substantially alters the definition of what truth is. It leads to a separation of historical and scientific truth, truth which is objectively true for everyone, from religious truth, which can be true for one person and not true for another, a view now rampant throughout western culture. Faith has become for many just a subjective feeling that is separated from objective reality, as though faith was merely a personal spiritual experience.

Conclusion

According to Scripture, government helps stem the tide of evil in society, evil which flows from our fallen hearts; for “out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders” (Matt. 5:19). One of the important functions of government is to quell this destructive behavior by praising good and punishing evil. Christians should be concerned that the government perform its role well, not only for their own benefit, but so that society at large can enjoy greater safety and stability. In addition, Scripture indicates that fallen governmental leaders know enough about morality in order to perform their tasks. A reasonable explanation for their moral knowledge is the notion of natural law, as described by Paul in Rom. 2:14-15. Thus it seems that using natural law reasoning should be an appropriate and effective method of trying to influence fallen governmental leaders to adopt and enforce morally good laws.

The objection to natural law that I have considered in this paper, that it elevates human reason too highly, is certainly justified when it comes to the modern version of natural law which sees human reason as the decider of what is right or wrong. But it is a mistake to associate all natural law positions with this modern view. It is an overreaction to reject the pre-modern view of natural law because of modernism’s distortion of it. Certainly we should guard against elevating fallen man too highly, but we do not want to go to the other extreme and denigrate him more than Scripture does lest we, as Charles warned, bury the wrong corpse.[44]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aquinas, Thomas. A Summa of the Summa. Edited by Peter Kreeft. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990.

Balz, Horst, and Gerhard Schneider, eds. Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament. 3 vols. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1990.

Barth, Karl. Ethics. Edited by Dietrich Braun. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. New York: Seabury Press, 1981.

———. The Doctrine of God. Edited by Bromiley, G.W. and Torrance, T.F. Vol. II, part 2. Church Dogmatics. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957.

Biggar, Nigel. The Hastening That Waits: Karl Barth’s Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Brunner, Emil, and Karl Barth. Natural Theology: Comprising Nature and Grace by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply No! By Dr. Karl Barth. Translated by Peter Fraenkel. Eugene, Or.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2002.

Budziszewski, J. What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide. Rev. ed. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Translated by Henry Beveridge. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008.

Charles, J. Daryl. Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2008.

Danker, F. W., W. Bauer, W. F. Arndt, and F. W. Gingrich. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3d ed. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Edgar, William. Evangelicals in the Public Square: Four Formative Voices on Political Thought and Action. Edited by J. Budziszewski. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2006.

Ellul, Jacques. To Will and to Do: An Ethical Research for Christians. Translated by C. E. Hopkin. Philadelphia, Penn.: Pilgrim Press, 1969.

Grabill, Stephen J. Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006.

Grotius, Hugo. Right of War and Peace in From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought 100-1625. Edited by Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan. Grand Rapids, Mich: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999.

Heimbach, Daniel. “Natural Law in the Public Square.” Lib. Univ. Law Rev. 2:305 (2008): 685–701.

Hittinger, Russell. A Preserving Grace: Protestants, Catholics, and Natural Law. Edited by Michael Cromartie. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997.

Hobbes, Thomas. Man and Citizen. Edited by Bernard Gert. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991.

Liederbach, Mark. “Natural Law and the Problem of Postmodern Epistemology.” Lib. Univ. Law Rev. 2:305 (2008): 777–92.

Morris, Leon. The Epistle to the Romans. The Pillar New Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988.

Mounce, Robert H. Romans. NAC 27. Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1995.

Porter, Jean. Natural and Divine Law: Reclaiming the Tradition for Christian Ethics. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999.

VanDrunen, David. Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009.

[1] J. Daryl Charles, Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2008), 111.

[2] Stephen J. Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006), 21–54.

[3] Certainly there were several versions of natural law in pre-modern times, as well as in modern times. But for the purpose of this paper, I will use the terms ‘pre-modern natural law’ and ‘modern natural law’ broadly in order to highlight the pertinent differences between (i) what most pre-modern versions share in common and (ii) what most modern versions share in common.

[4] All scriptural references are taken from the NASB version unless otherwise noted.

[5] Leon Morris, The Epistle to the Romans, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988), 459.

[6] Danker et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3d ed. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1070.

[7] Robert H. Mounce, Romans, NAC 27 (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1995), 95.

[8] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), 166.

[9] Ibid., 980.

[10] Russell Hittinger, A Preserving Grace: Protestants, Catholics, and Natural Law, ed. Michael Cromartie (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997), 29.

[11] J. Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide, Rev. ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011).

[12] William Edgar, “Francis Schaeffer and the Public Square,” in Evangelicals in the Public Square: Four Formative Voices on Political Thought and Action (ed. J. Budziszewski; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2006), 185.

[13] Jean Porter, Natural and Divine Law: Reclaiming the Tradition for Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), 169.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Nigel Biggar, The Hastening That Waits: Karl Barth’s Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 54.

[16] Karl Barth, Ethics, ed. Dietrich Braun, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (New York: Seabury Press, 1981), 14.

[17] David VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 318.

[18] Biggar, The Hastening That Waits, 54.

[19] Charles, Retrieving the Natural Law, 128.

[20] Karl Barth, The Doctrine of God, ed. Bromiley, G.W. and Torrance, T.F., vol. II, part 2, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957), 533.

[21] Ibid., 531.

[22] Ibid., 534.

[23] Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, Natural Theology: Comprising Nature and Grace by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply No! By Dr. Karl Barth, trans. Peter Fraenkel (Eugene, Or.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2002), 1.

[24] Charles, Retrieving the Natural Law, 131. For specific examples of how Barth influenced Protestant theologians against natural law, see p. 134 concerning Jacques Ellul and p. 139 concerning John Howard Yoder.

[25] Jacques Ellul, To Will and to Do: An Ethical Research for Christians, trans. C. E. Hopkin (Philadelphia, Penn.: Pilgrim Press, 1969), 6.

[26] Thomas Aquinas, A Summa of the Summa, ed. Peter Kreeft (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 504.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Hugo Grotius, Right of War and Peace in From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought 100-1625, ed. Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan (Grand Rapids, Mich: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 794.

[29] Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991), 42–43.

[30] Hittinger, A Preserving Grace, 9–10.

[31] Charles, Retrieving the Natural Law, 153.

[32] Brunner and Barth, Natural Theology, 68, 72.

[33] Ibid., 42. Emphasis mine.

[34] Ibid., 86. See other examples on 109, 118, 120, and 121.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid., 110.

[37] Mark Liederbach, “Natural Law and the Problem of Postmodern Epistemology,” Liberty University Law Review 2:305 (2008): 783.

[38] Brunner and Barth, Natural Theology, 94.

[39] Ibid., 101.

[40] Daniel Heimbach, “Natural Law in the Public Square,” Liberty University Law Review 2:305 (2008): 694.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Brunner and Barth, Natural Theology, 128.

[43] Ibid., 114.

[44] Charles, Retrieving the Natural Law, 153.

Marilyn McCord Adams

The Center for Philosophy of Religion, Rutgers University, Australian Catholic University

Published in the Canadian Journal for Scholarship and the Christian Faith (journal.ccscf.org) on 22 October 2015

Preamble:

John Duns Scotus is above all a philosophical theologian. For Scotus, the subject-matter of theology is not human experience or cultural practices. The subject-matter of theology is God. To begin to honor its subject, theology will have to be systematic. Just as a heap of things does not constitute a universe, so a handful of claims do not make a science. If–for Scotus–a universe has to be held together by essential orders of excellence and dependence, a science is organized by logical relations and by unifying themes or ideas. In any rich system, there are doubtless many themes that are overlapping and interwoven. My aim in this lecture is to display how perfect productive power is one such theme in Scotus’ thought. First, Scotus argues cosmologically that perfect productive power is the ultimate explainer of the existence and causal interactions of things here below. Next, Scotus articulates how perfect productive power explains God’s triunity. Finally, perfect productive power goes some way towards explaining Divine policies in creation and strategies in redemption. It is only logical if–like all of Gaul–my remarks are divided into three parts!

I. Perfect Productive Power Ad Extra:

1.1. Perfect Productive Power, Actual and Necessary: Scotus launches his inquiry into the being of God with a cosmological argument. There are many features of the world from which philosophical theologians reason to a single source of the being and well-being of everything else. Scotus’ starting-point is carefully selected: ‘something is produced’. Scotus tries to show how this statement combines with distinctive but widely agreed and commendable metaphysical assumptions to yield his preliminary conclusion: ‘something is perfect productive power’.¹

Looking back, we can recognize how Scotus’ initial claim is already theory-laden. Surely, experience does not acquaint us with production, but with the bare-bones fact that something–cows and flowers and chemical compounds–comes to be. Scotus begs to differ. Observation shows patterns of coming to be: e.g., that whenever A’s are present, B’s come to be; and when A’s are not present, B’s do not come to be. Scotus takes for granted the axiom ‘ex nihilo nihil fit’² and Aristotle’s consequent contention that always-or-for-the-most-part regularities require to be explained in terms of the possession and exercise of productive power. B’s come to be when A’s are present and not otherwise, because A’s have productive power to produce B’s. It is not only that cows and flowers and chemical compounds regularly come to be. They are produced, because something has and exercises the power to produce them.

Already, in describing the datum from which his cosmological argument rises as production, Scotus shifts attention from particulars to natures. That N’s are producible by N_k’s, that N_k’s have N-productive power, that N_k’s are or are not independently productive, are–for Scotus–features that pertain to natures essentially and of themselves. A nature N_k’s productive power is dependent, if N_k’s depend for the exercise of their productive power on things of some other and higher kind Nm: in Scotus’ words, if N_k’s depend on N_m’s in causing. Conversely, N_k’s productive power is independent, if N_k’s do not depend for the exercise of their productive powers on anything else. Scotus’ explanatory model in philosophy–nothing comes from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit), no circle of causes, no infinite regress– underwrites his inference from ‘some nature is essentially producible and/or dependently productive’ to ‘some nature is essentially unproducible and independently productive’.³

Once again, Scotus takes ‘nothing comes from nothing’ to be self-evident and axiomatic. Likewise self-evident is the real distinction of producer and product: nothing can produce itself.⁴ But causal circles would make each member of the circle indirectly productive of itself. Scotus defends the ‘no infinite regress’ principle with several arguments to the effect that series of causes themselves require an explanation, either in a first member whose existence and activity does not require to be explained in terms of the existence and activity of anything of a different kind, or in the existence and activity of something outside the series.⁵ But Scotus exposes his bedrock metaphysical intuition in a concluding persuasio: productive power is a pure perfection.⁶ A pure perfection is a good-making feature that entails no bad-making features. All creatable natures are finite goods and so entail good-making features. But creatable natures are finite goods and often also entail bad-making features. For example, lion-nature entails physical strength but also animal mortality and lack of intelligence.⁷ Scotus maintains that productive power of itself is a good-making feature that entails no bad-making features, an excellence that of itself involves no defects. If so, Scotus infers, a version of productive power that exists apart from any bad-making features is possible. Perfect productive power is possible; it essentially pertains to some nature. But dependence on things of other kinds in causing is a bad-making feature. So perfect productive power would be independent–both in being and in causing–of productive causes of other kinds.⁸

Thus, Scotus’ Aristotelianism allows him to move from patterns of coming to be to the conviction that something and therefore some nature is “externally” producible (i.e., its instances are producible by something else of another nature), and that something else and some nature is essentially productive. Scotus’ model of explanation takes him from a nature that is essentially externally producible and dependently productive, to a nature that is essentially independently productive (i.e., doesn’t depend for its exercize of power on anything else) and not externally producible (i.e., not producible by anything else of another nature). Scotus reasons: the former is possible because it is actual, and the former is possible only if the latter is possible. So a nature that is independently productive and not externally producible, is possible. But where a nature does not actually exist, its possibility depends on the actual existence of something of some other nature with power to produce it. In other words, the only non-existent natures that are possible are ones that are externally producible. Scotus concludes: since perfect productive power is possible but not externally producible, it must be actual and indeed necessarily actual.⁹

1.2. Triple Primacy: The nature that is perfect productive power is suited to be the first efficient cause of external producibles of whatever sort. Actually and necessarily extant perfect productive power is the first efficient cause of the external producibles that actually exist. In all four versions of his cosmological argument, Scotus goes further. In a chain of efficient causes in which the posterior depends on the prior in causing, the posterior and dependent is of a different and less excellent nature than that on which it essentially depends. But the first efficient cause is independently productive by nature, and is essentially that on which the other dependently productive efficient causes ultimately depend in causing. Scotus concludes that the nature that is the first efficient cause is also the nature that is pre-eminent in excellence.¹⁰

Scotus takes another page from Aristotle when he agrees that the actual universe is teleological: in particular, that genuine efficient causes produce their effects for the sake of an end. Natural agents act for the sake of their own well-being: e.g., elements seek their natural place, animals eat and walk for the sake of health. Scotus declares: if an agent and that for the sake of which it acts are non-identical, then the end for which it acts is of a different and nobler nature than the agent. But perfect productive power is a nature of pre-eminent excellence. Consequently, the first efficient cause which ultimately orders all things to an end, must not act for the sake of an end other than itself. The first efficient cause is also the first final cause, the nature for the sake of which all effects are produced.¹¹ Perfect productive power is thus a nature of pre-eminent excellence, which does what it does and orders other causes to do what they do, for its sake.

1.3. Perfect Productive Power as Intellect and Will: Avicenna agrees that perfect productive power tops the Great Chain of Being. Perfect productive power, the pre-eminent nature, is not externally producible but necessarily actual. All other natures are of themselves externally producible. Avicenna’s philosophical assumption is that perfect productive power acts by natural necessity to emanate a nature that is as perfect as it can be and still be externally producible. Perfect productive power acts immediately only in the production of this perfect effect. The cooperation of other causes–of themselves both externally producible and dependently productive–is required to explain the existence of less perfect effects. All extant natures exist necessarily, because the first efficient cause exists and acts necessarily, whether immediately or mediately, to produce them in existence and to activate their productive powers. Only perfect productive power, the pre-eminent nature, is self-existent and selfactivating. ¹²

Scotus is instructed by Avicenna’s picture.¹³ Nevertheless, Scotus counters that perfect productive power acts contingently to produce what is externally producible. Most famously, Scotus argues from our putative experience of contingency here below, every time we exercise our own free choice of will. If the first cause acted necessarily, whether immediately or mediately, to produce what is externally producible and to activate their productive powers, then there would be no contingency here below.

Scotus takes the divide between natural and voluntary productive power to be metaphysically fundamental. Natural productive power functions deterministically: in any given set of circumstances, it is determined to one type of effect. Voluntary power includes self-determining power for opposite objects without succession: where finite goods are concerned, voluntary power is the power to will them, the power to nill them, and the power not to act at all. Will-power alone is capable of acting contingently. Contingency here below means that perfect productive power includes will-power. But will-power cannot act unless objects are presented to it by the intellect. Contingency here below means that perfect productive power includes both intellect and will. Cognitive powers are natural powers: where the proper object is present to the power, there is–by natural necessity–a cognitive act. Scotus’ conclusion is that perfect productive power spans the divide to include both natural and voluntary powers.¹⁴

Significantly, Scotus also defends this conclusion–that perfect productive power includes intellect and will–with a pair of arguments from teleology based on a trio of Aristotelian assumptions. The first is that all genuine agents act for the sake of an end. Scotus has already reasoned that perfect productive power would do whatever it does for its own sake. So either that pre-eminent nature would love itself naturally, or perfect productive power would love itself voluntarily. On Scotus’ reading of Aristotle, natural appetite aims at the being and well-being of the nature, and does or desires other things that promote that end. Thus, natural appetite drives earthen things to move downward to reach their natural place. By contrast, the pre-eminent nature is self-sufficient: it exists necessarily and needs nothing else for its own continued existence and well-being. So if its self-love were merely Aristoteliannatural, it would not produce anything else for its sake. The result would be that nothing else existed– which is contrary to experience.¹⁵

Again, Scotus notes with Aristotle how natural agents always-or-for-the-most-part act to the limit of their powers to produce their effects. Here below they can be obstructed, but–given Aristotelian optimism–obstructions are rare. The behavior of natural agents of itself is end-blind. Therefore, Aristotle concludes, if natural agents act for the sake of an end–as they do here below, by the first Aristotelian assumption–it is because some voluntary agent orders them to an end. But the first efficient cause is what ultimately orders things to an end. Therefore, perfect productive power must–in producing the universe–act by intellect and will.¹⁶

1.4. Perfect Productive Power as Infinite: Human beings have intellect and will-power. But human beings are not always actually understanding and willing. If intellect and will-power perfect human nature, human beings are further perfected by actual acts of understanding and willing, and indeed most perfected when human beings understand and will the best object that they can. Intellect and will are what Aristotle calls functional powers, because their acts remain within the agent that has them, by contrast with the carpenter’s building-power whose exercise results in the production of something outside the carpenter–e.g., a house. Scotus argues that–in human beings–these functional powers are also productive powers, insofar as they are active causes of those acts of understanding and will that– while they remain within the human being who is their subject–are really distinct from the powers themselves.

By contrast, perfect productive power is ever-ready: it eternally actually understands whatever is externally producible: not only natures in general, but each and every one of the infinitely many producible individuals. Because perfect productive power is altogether uncausable, there is no real distinction between nature, power, and act, as if some efficient cause had to produce the latter in the former as in a receiving subject. Likewise, perfect productive power eternally wills whatever it wills, so that there is no real distinction between nature, will-power, and will-act either. Perfect productive power is really the same as its eternal act of understanding and its eternal act of will. But–Scotus reasons–an act of understanding is the more perfect, the more objects it can take in all at once. Since perfect productive power understands infinitely many producibles in the now of eternity, that act of understanding must be intensively infinite.¹⁷ Perfect productive power is itself infinite being!

Scotus has difficulties with philosophical arguments for the infinity of perfect productive power from the alleged infinity of actually produced effects.¹⁸ Because the philosophers do not admit infinitely many species, Scotus reckons, they will have to be assuming a numerical infinity of effects. Because all agree that a simultaneously existing actual infinity is impossible, they will be presupposing a numerical infinity that come into and go out of existence successively. Leave aside the fact that they can get infinitely many in succession only if–contrary to Christian theological consensus–the world exists without beginning. Scotus doubts that power to keep on producing finite beings successively, one at a time, would require infinite power.

Scotus concedes: if an agent can do many things at once, where each thing needs some perfection proper to itself, then the more it can produce at once the greater the productive power required. It follows that if the first efficient cause had power to produce infinitely many simultaneously, then its power would have to be intensively infinite. The trouble is that, for better and worse, philosophers have agreed on the metaphysical impossibility of a simultaneously existing actual infinity. Surely, there is no power in the universe to do what is metaphysically impossible!

Scotus’ final attempt to “fix” the argument from efficient causal power, is to describe the power counter-factually. Perfect productive power is ever-ready. It includes all of the causal power it would take to make infinitely many exist at once, if they were simultaneously producible. Scotus clarifies his suggestion: the impossibility does not arise from the side of the pre-eminent nature that has–in the now of eternity–enough power to produce each and all, but from the side of the effects, infinitely many of which are incompossible with one another.¹⁹

When all is said and done, Scotus concludes that perfect productive power can be shown to be infinite by unaided natural reason. But Scotus thinks there is more to perfect productive power than unaided natural reason can prove. He arrives at infinite productive power via cosmological reasoning, by positing a first efficient cause at the originating end of a series of dependently productive causes. But what is thus shown to be productive power to produce whatever is externally producible, is not thereby proved to be power to produce any and all of them immediately, but rather immediately or mediately, via the cooperation of others. Theologians go further to insist that perfect productive power is power to produce whatever is externally producible immediately, without the cooperation of any other efficient cause.²⁰ If perfect productive power acted by natural necessity–as Avicenna assumes–and were omnipotent in the theologian’s sense, then it would act to the limit of its power to produce whatever is externally producible immediately. Nothing else in the universe would get to exercise any productive power. For his part, Scotus insists that perfect productive power is omnipotent in the theologians’ sense. Dependently productive causes are also at work, because perfect productive power acts voluntarily and contingently in producing what is externally producible. In producing what is externally producible, omnipotence definitely does not act to the limit of its power. ²¹

II. Perfect Productive Power Ad Intra:

Scotus’ cosmological reasoning moves from the assertion that some nature is essentially externally producible and dependently productive to the conclusion that some nature is essentially independently productive and not externally producible. Scotus takes himself to have demonstrated that perfect productive power is necessarily actual, that it is the most excellent of natures, that it is the end to which all products are ultimately ordered as well as the power that orders them to that end. Moreover, Scotus contends, not only that perfect productive power is found in only one nature, but also that the nature is of itself numerically unmultipliable. It can be demonstrated not only that perfect productive power is infinite being, but also that the nature is essentially numerically one–in Scotus’ language, “of itself this.”²²

By contrast, Scotus takes it on ecclesial authority (some otherwise unidentifiable Canturbury articles) that Trinity cannot be demonstrated by evident inferences grounded in uniformly evident premisses.²³ Unaided natural reason could not persuade Avicenna and Averroes that God is three in One, because arguments advanced for the conclusion inevitably rest on contentious philosophical assertions. Where the Trinity is concerned, the theologian’s task is not so much proof as philosophical formulation, analysis, explanation, and systematic coherence. Nevertheless, arguments are the venue through which, perfect productive power is the rubric under which, Scotus articulates his understanding of these doctrinal claims.²⁴

2.1. A General Argument for Production Ad Intra: In centering his account on perfect productive power, Scotus takes his cue from Bonaventure.²⁵ Where the cosmological argument asks whether natures are externally productive or externally producible, Scotus now tries to motivate the conclusion that perfect productive power is internally productive as well. Taking a page from Avicenna, Scotus maintains that perfect productive power would produce a perfect product. Since necessary being is more perfect than contingent being, necessity would be a good-making feature in a product. Taking another page from Avicenna, Scotus concludes that perfect productive power would necessarily produce a perfect product. But a perfect product would be one that was adequate to the power. Departing from Avicenna and turning to Bonaventure, Scotus maintains that only an intensively infinite effect would be adequate to infinite productive power.²⁶ So perfect productive power would necessarily produce a product that is both necessary and infinite. But no creature is either necessary or infinite. So the perfect production of perfect productive power would have to be production ad intra.

How can this be possible? Nothing produces itself.²⁷ Products are really distinct from their producers. But perfect productive power is a nature that is of itself numerically unmultipliable,²⁸ and that nature is the one and only one infinite being. Moreover, it is metaphysically impossible for that nature to be a product, because it is essentially not externally producible. How could the product be necessary and infinite and yet really distinct from its producer?

Following Bonaventure²⁹, Scotus’ answer is that natures themselves do not act; rather it is the substance individuals or supposits that exist through the natures that act. Humanity does not drink the hemlock. Not even this humanity does. Rather it is Socrates, the individual who exists and functions through this human nature, who drinks the hemlock. What the cosmological argument ultimately establishes is not the existence of an independently productive and not externally producible nature, but rather the existence of at least one supposit of that nature that acts as first efficient cause of everything else. Likewise, it is not natures, but rather supposits of natures that are produced. If perfect productive power necessarily produces a perfect product, it must be that one supposit acts through that nature to produce another supposit of that very same nature. The product supposit is not only of the same kind (the way Beulah the cow shares the common nature of bovinity with her parents Elsie and Ferdinand), it shares numerically the same nature with its producer.³⁰

Thus, Scotus’ view is that the pre-eminent nature itself is neither externally nor internally producible. Supposits of the pre-eminent nature are essentially not externally producible (i.e., not producible by supposits of other natures). But some supposit of the pre-eminent nature not only is but must be internally producible (i.e., producible and produced by a supposit of numerically the same nature) and some internally productive (i.e., productive and producing a supposit of numerically the same nature), because perfect productive power necessarily produces a perfect product.

2.2. The Internal Productivity of Intellect and Will: Scotus brings these intuitions to bear on the conclusion derived from his cosmological argument: that perfect productive power essentially includes both intellect and will-power. Once again, Scotus insists that there are two fundamentally different ways in which powers operate: natural and voluntary. Intellect is natural, while will-power is voluntary. So perfect productive power is power to act in each and both of these ways. We have already seen how in creatures, it is one thing to have power to understand and power to will; another, actually to exercise those powers. We have already noted how intellect and will are functional powers insofar as acts of understanding and will remain within and perfect the powers’ possessor. But in creatures intellect and will are also productive causes, because acts of understanding and will are really distinct from intellect and will-power and intellect and will-power are efficient causes in the production of those acts.³¹

Scotus now forwards the thesis that if F-ness is a formal productive principle in something in which it exists, then it is a formal productive principle by nature and so a formal productive principle in anything and everything in which it exists without imperfection.³² Scotus infers that since intellect and will are productive principles in creatures, infinite intellect and infinite will are also formal productive principles in the Godhead. The tag ‘perfect productive power necessarily acts to produce a perfect product’ gets applied to yield the conclusion that some supposit of perfect productive power produces an act of understanding adequate to infinite intellect and some supposit (or supposits) of perfect productive power produce an act of willing adequate to infinite will-power. But the only act of understanding adequate to infinite intellect would be an intensively infinite act of understanding infinite being (= the Divine essence); the only act of will adequate to infinite will-power is an intensively infinite act of loving infinite being (= the Divine essence). So there is at least one producer-supposit, and at least two productsupposits of the Divine essence.³³

Scotus considers an objection. Intellect and will are productive in creatures, only because creatures are not always actually understanding and willing. Intellect and will-power are really identical with the soul, but acts of understanding and willing are accidents really distinct from the soul (and/or from intellect and will-power) which is the subject in potentality to receive them. By contrast, Scotus’ own cosmological argument claims to prove that the Divine act of understanding and willing is eternal and really the same as the Divine essence. Why not conclude that intellect and will-power are only functional powers in God, and that they are also productive in creatures only because of creaturely imperfections?³⁴

Scotus replies by distinguishing between the soul’s (angel’s) passive power to receive an act of understanding (willing) and the intellect’s (will’s) productive power. Passive power is an imperfection but productive power is a pure perfection which does not find its reason for being in any imperfection. In conceiving of the Divine intellect and will, Scotus’ rule is to discard the imperfections that accompany intellect and will in creatures and to map up the perfections. Productivity in the created intellect and will alert us to productivity in the Divine intellect and will. Put otherwise, they remind us that intellect and will are dimensions of perfect productive power.³⁵

2.3. Necessary Will-Production? Scotus considers a further objection. Intellect is a natural power. If the cognitive power and its object exist necessarily, and the object is necessarily present to the power, it is not surprising if the power acts necessarily to produce a necessary product. But Scotus has insisted that will-power is power of a fundamentally different kind, a self-determining power for opposites that can act contingently to produce its effects. How can will-power in the Divine essence fund necessary action to produce an infinite act of love for infinite being?

Scotus’ answer does not so much explain as rehearse the assumptions that drive his conclusion. Will-power is a pure perfection in an agent. Necessity is a perfection in a production.³⁶ Power to produce a perfect product through a perfect production is a perfection in the producer. Perfect productive will-power will therefore act necessarily to produce a perfect will-act. Since all pure perfections are compatible, will-power and necessary production must be compatible, too.³⁷

For Scotus, reflection on infinite will-power reveals something unexpected about the nature of will-power. Finite will-power is a self-determining power for opposite acts and opposite objects without succession. In Scotus’ estimation, finite will-power is power for contingent action and does not act necessarily with respect to any object. Mapping up the pure perfection, we maximize the good-making features and drop the defects. Evidently, restriction to contingent action is one of those limitations that pertains to will-power in creatures. Infinite will-power includes power to act contingently with respect to finite objects but necessarily with respect to infinite being. If you demand to know how perfect willpower can include both, Scotus replies that it is the nature of will-power to do so. Scotus repeats Aristotle’s uncharitable dodge: only foolish questioners fail to recognize where explanations come to an end!³⁸

2.4. Essential versus Notional Acts: In creatures, there is no distinction between functional acts and produced acts of intellect and will. But there is in the Godhead. There are the functional or–what Scotus calls–the essential acts of understanding and loving the Divine essence. Essential acts of understanding and willing are really the same as the Divine essence. Essential acts perfect each Divine person the way the exercise of functional powers always perfects their subject. But the produced or– what Scotus calls–notional acts of understanding and willing reach beyond the producer-supposit: they do not perfect the producer-supposit, but express the perfect productive power of the producer-supposit in the product-supposit. Nevertheless, Scotus insists, the essential acts do not cause notional acts; rather they are related as prior and posterior effects of the same productive principle.³⁹

Scotus takes it to be a primitive truth about the Divine essence that there is one and only one absolutely unproducible⁴⁰–producible neither externally by something of another nature nor internally by a supposit or supposits of numerically the same nature–producer-supposit, and that intellectual production is prior to will-production.⁴¹ Following tradition, Scotus identifies the absolutely unproducible producer as the Father; the notional act of intellect with the Son; and the notional will-act with the Holy Spirit. Likewise, he labels the production of the intellectual notional act “generation” and the production of the notional act of will “spiration.” Scotus attempts to clarify relations between essential and notional acts, by laying out the following table of natural priorities and posteriorities:

n₁: the Divine essence exists per se and includes the formal productive principles of generation (=Divine intellect + immanently present object) and spiration (= Divine will-power)

n₂: the Father exists and possesses the formal productive principles of generation (= Divine intellect) and spiration (= Divine will) the Father understands and loves the Divine essence by an essential act and is made happy thereby;

n₃: the Father begets the Son (produces a notional act of understanding whose object is the Divine essence); the Son possesses the Divine essence and Its formal productive principles; Father and Son understand and love the Divine essence by an essential act and are thereby made happy;

n₄: Father and Son spirate the Holy Spirit (produce a notional love-act whose object is the Divine essence).⁴²

Note: the Divine essence includes the formal productive principles for producing the Son and the Holy Spirit at n₂, but the Divine essence does not produce them at n₂, because the Divine essence is not a supposit and only supposits act. Because producers are prior to their products, the Father exists and possesses the formal productive principles of generation at n₂, but the Son (= the product) does not exist until n₃. Likewise, Father and Son possess the formal productive principles of spiration at n₃, while the Holy Spirit does not exist until n₄. Moreover, like essential acts notional acts (= the produced supposits) are really the same as the Divine essence but unlike essential acts notional acts are really distinct from the producer and from each other.⁴³

     Scotus recognizes that all three Divine persons share numerically the same Divine essence, and so share any and all of the formal productive principles it contains. Scotus finds it important to distinguish between possessing power and having the opportunity to exercise it. The Son does possess generative power, and the Holy Spirit possesses spirative power. But it is metaphysically impossible for the Son to beget anything and metaphysically impossible for the the Holy Spirit to spirate anything, because each formal productive principle has one and only one adequate product: intellect, the Son; and will, the Holy Spirit. Because nothing can produce itself, because producers are prior to their products, each of the Son and Holy Spirit is on the scene “too late” ever to exercise generative power and spirative power, respectively.

III. Perfect Productive Power and the Ends of Creation:

3.1. The Dictates of Right Reason: Perfect productive power is the first efficient cause that ultimately orders all other things to an end as well as the first final cause that is the end to which all other things are ultimately ordered. Just as it pertains to natures of themselves that they are (or are not) externally producible and dependently productive, so it pertains to natures of themselves that they are suitably orderable to ends of another nature or suitably orderable as an end of things of another kind. Scotus locates the criterion of suitability in the dictates of right reason. What right reason looks to in matching means to ends and prioritizing one end over another is natural excellence.

Perfect productive power includes infinite intellect that distinctly conceives of all producibles and infallibly knows all true propositions. Perfect productive power includes will-power, will-power of the most perfect possible kind. When it comes to will-power, Scotus maintains that justice and the affection for justice (affectio iustitiae) are pure perfections. But the affection for justice is an appetite to follow what right reason dictates. Scotus infers, an infinite will is always right.⁴⁴ Right reason issues what Scotus takes to be a self-evident dictate: that infinite being (= infinite good = the Divine essence) is to be loved above all and for its own sake.⁴⁵ Divine persons necessarily love the Divine essence above all and for its own sake by an essential act. Likewise, the Father and the Son necessarily activate infinite will-power to produce a notional act of loving the Divine essence above all and for its own sake. Both the functional and the productive acts of infinite will in loving an infinite object, are necessary and necessarily right.⁴⁶

What else would right reason dictate? Back in the late fifth or early sixth century, Pseudo- Dionysius forwarded the suggestive thesis that Goodness is by nature self-diffusive, that it naturally shares itself out up to the full capacity of the receiver to receive. Neo-Platonists deployed this principle to represent the universe as a hierarchy of necessary emanations resulting in a Great Chain of Being and Goodness in which Goodness necessarily spills Itself out into a series of containers of ever-decreasing size, with each level conferring on the next lower level as much goodness as it can receive. Bonaventure held to the contingency of creation but reapplied Pseudo-Dionysius’ principle: Goodness does necessarily diffuse itself maximally, not in creation, but in the necessary emanation of Divine persons.⁴⁷ By contrast, twelfth century theologians saw Goodness sharing itself out by conferring on contingent creation the highest good it is able to receive: viz., hypostatic union with a Divine person! Self-diffusing Goodness would become Incarnate whether or not Adam sinned!⁴⁸ Scotus does not appeal to Pseudo- Dionysius in any of these contexts, but he does count generosity and liberality among the considerations that perfect productive power weighs in deciding what to create and how to organize it.

In expounding the doctrine of the Trinity, Richard of St. Victor⁴⁹ draws on a different paradigm, that of Ciceronian friendship. Benevolence and charity drive a lover to share with the beloved as much of his/her substance as possible. Benevolence and charity urge lovers to produce a common love object to whom they can jointly give as much as they can. Scotus rejects this strategy for explaining the Trinity, because it accounts for both internal Divine productions in terms of acts of love. Scotus insists, on the contrary, that the only way to secure two distinct internal productions is by recognizing intellect and will as fundamentally distinct kinds of production, each of which necessarily produces its own adequate act.⁵⁰ Scotus does, however, see friendship as a factor in the creative aims of perfect productive power.

3.2. Creative Policies: Scotus’ own view is that right reason under-determines Divine policies in creation, because creatable natures are only finite goods. Finite goodness furnishes God with a reason to love it, but it is always a defeasible reason. There are also reasons not to love finite goods enough to create them, or not to love them enough to create them instead of creating something else. Creatable natural excellence is motivating, but not compelling.⁵¹ Perfect productive power takes it into consideration, because the infinite will is always right. Perfect productive power is the most organized of lovers. But Divine priorities do not merely reproduce the excellence hierarchy, because perfect productive power is free in relation to creation. If perfect productive power always loved creatables in proportion to their natural excellence and always treated like cases alike, it would look as if God acted by natural necessity in creation, as if God necessarily loves things in proportion to the excellence of their natures. Scotus concludes that in forging creative policies, perfect productive power strikes a balance between advertising contingency and respecting excellence.⁵²

In Scotus’ estimation, the key to God’s reasons for creating anything at all are to be found neither in Pseudo-Dionysius nor in Cicero, but in Augustine’s conception of friendship love (amor amicitiae). Not only does friendship-love love the beloved for his/her own sake. Friendship love is not jealous, but desires that the beloved should be loved by others as well.⁵³ Each Divine person friendship-loves the Divine essence immeasurably and without jealousy. Each Divine person is happy for the Divine essence also to be loved by the other two. God’s principal reason for creating anything at all is the contingent but congruent desire for more co-lovers. Since there cannot be more than three Divine persons, the desire for more than three lovers is a desire for created co-lovers, pre-eminently the desire for some creature to love the Divine essence as perfectly as it is possible for a creature to do. To fill this role, perfect productive power elects the soul of Christ rather than an angel, to show that–where finite goods are concerned–God does not have to love greater natural excellence more. But perfect productive power fits the soul of Christ for this role by willing its hypostatic union with God the Son, so that an angel will not have to be subordinate to a merely human being.⁵⁴ Perfect productive power also wills for the soul of Christ graces and virtues that both enable its knowledge and love-acts and make them acceptable to God.

Christ has two natures.⁵⁵ In His Divine nature, Christ joins the Father and the Holy Spirit in willing created co-lovers. But God the Son is hypostatically united to the human soul of Christ, so that some created will can love Godhead as perfectly as any creature can. The soul of Christ is thus destined to have friendship-love for the Divine essence, and so to love It without jealousy. The soul of Christ will be glad that the Divine essence is also loved by the Divine persons. But human non-jealous love of the most perfect type would also express itself in a desire not to be the only creature, not even the only human being, that friendship-loves the Divine essence. The Trinity that created and elected the soul of Christ to be the most perfect of created co-lovers, would anticipate and support its non-jealous love by desiring more created co-lovers as well.

Because the infinite will is always right,⁵⁶ because the Trinity is the most well-organized of lovers, the Trinity could not be true to itself in desiring a mob of created co-lovers any more than it could be in willing into existence a mere heap of things. Just as the universe must be ordered by relations of essential dependence and excellence, so rational creatures loving God above all and for God’s own sake must be organized into a body politic. Just as creation must be unified by being ordered to one source and end, so the community of co-lovers is suitably organized monarchically, with Christ as head. Perfect productive power fits those co-lovers for their destiny by willing for them suitable complements of grace and virtues.

Moreover, because human souls as parts of hylomorphic composites are metaphysical fragments, right reason recommends, and perfect productive power sees fit to provide for their metaphysical completion. Because human beings are rational animals, perfect productive power wills to create the material world, so that human souls can lead a natural and embodied human life. Already Aristotle taught that the material world is made for the sake of humankind. What Aristotle did not foresee is that the whole of creation exists for Christ’s sake, twiceover: because Christ is God, and everything else exists for God’s sake; and because Christ’s is the human soul that Godhead destined to friendship-love the Divine essence as much as any creature can. Other co-lovers and what it takes to enable them, exist to satisfy Christ’s Divine and human desires.⁵⁷

This scenario–which Scotus provisionally embraces (sine praeiudicio)–has a startling consequence: that perfect productive power acts out of liberality and friendship-love for the Divine essence to purpose Incarnation and indeed to predestine the entire community of co-lovers to grace and glory, prior in the order of explanation to any consideration of sin. Surely, Incarnation is the most remarkable of God’s moves in creation. Surely, it would be contrary to right reason for the best thing that God did for creation, most especially for the human race, to find its motivation in the worst that creatures have done. The notion that Incarnation is motivated by Divine desire for created co-lovers provides an alternative rationale for the twelfth century speculation that God would have become Incarnate anyway, even apart from Adam’s fall!⁵⁸

Scotus’ scenario also stipulates that perfect productive power predestines the elect prior in the order of explanation to Divine permission of human free choice and its exercise. This means that perfect productive power does not take foreseen (or middle-known) moral track-records into account in predestination. In considering Peter and Judas, Scotus makes clear, the Trinity regards two that are exactly alike in human nature. That perfect productive power is maximally well-organized, would suggest waste-avoidance and tell in favor of universalism. Wouldn’t right reason counsel Divine creation only of those humans and angels the Trinity elects to grace and glory? Wouldn’t right reason dictate Divine predestination of any and all of the humans and angels the Trinity chooses to create?⁵⁹

For Scotus, balancing considerations explain why this did not happen. Treating like cases alike would advertize perfect productive power as an agent that acts by natural necessity to respond the same way to all situations of like value. Generosity is already shown in the Divine decision to include some human souls and angels in the Trinitarian friendship circle. Divine freedom is reasserted when God elects Peter to grace and glory and simply omits to elect Judas. Hosts have no obligation to invite everyone to their dinner parties. To be sure, omission makes permanent exclusion inevitable.⁶⁰ Nevertheless, Scotus insists, perfect productive power is not cruel, because God is not a punisher before creatures are sinners. Right reason dictates that Divine damnation of Judas come later in the order of explanation and be based on Judas’ lamentable but freely chosen career.⁶¹

For Scotus, it is not the Incarnation but the passion of Christ that depends on Adam’s fall. Posterior in the order of explanation to predestination, perfect productive power permits rational creatures to exercise their free will, and perfect productive power sees Adam’s fall and human sin. The Trinity eternally agree to accept Christ’s suffering and death as the meritorious cause of saving grace for sinners. Not that the passion of the God-man was metaphysically necessary to solve the sin-problem! Pace Anselm, Scotus denies that Divine Justice is bound to demand something of infinite intrinsic worth by way of compensation, for the simple reason that such compensation is metaphysically impossible. Nothing that a creature could be or do is intrinsically of infinite worth. The doings and sufferings involved in Christ’s passion occur in His human nature, which is just as finite as any other human nature is. The Trinity had many options for dealing with the problem of sin in the elect. Why, then, choose the suffering and death of Christ, the best beloved? Wouldn’t right reason tell against it? On the contrary, Christ’s self-offering expresses the steadfastness (firmitas) of His non-jealous love for the Divine essence, of His human desire not to be the only human co-lover of the Divine essence.⁶²

3.3. The Great Chain of Sanctification: Christ’s passion opens heaven’s doors by meriting saving grace for the elect. But Scripture and tradition reveal, reason and experience suggest: God does not give grace to the elect in equal measure. Instead, Trinitarian grace-distribution among Adam’s descendants results in an excellence hierarchy, a great chain of sanctification in which some individuals anticipate our post-mortem destiny more than others. Where Christology and Mariology are concerned, Scotus’ methodological maxim is “better to praise too much rather than to little.” The correlative hypothesis is that perfect productive power would perfect the human natures of Christ and Mary as much as possible, compatible with the Trinity’s agreed soteriological plans.

The human soul of Christ comes tops. Besides the grace of hypostatic union, Christ receives maximal infused grace and the gift of impeccability–freedom from original sin and perpetual freedom from actual sin–from the first moment of foetal animation. Christ’s human nature receives as much perfection as human nature can possibly hold and still suffer and die on the cross. The last qualification means that, not only in His Divine but also in His human nature, Christ wills to take on mortality and passible flesh to make His passion and death possible.

Then-current theological consensus⁶³ had it that Mary, along with Jeremiah and John the Baptist, were cleansed from original sin in the womb. But Bernard of Clairvaux and others had argued that only sinners need a savior. If Mary did not begin her intra-uterine existence in original sin, she would not need a savior–which would detract from Christ’s excellence as Mediator between God and humankind. Bonaventure countered with a distinction: there is a difference between always having a trait (in this case, freedom from original sin) and having that trait independently.⁶⁴ Mary could be free from original and actual sin from foetal animation onwards, and still owe this to Christ’s saving work. All agree: Christ the Savior is to be praised when He reverses our condition from offending and offensive to acceptable and accepted by God. Scotus joins other Franciscans in contending that if reversal is excellent, prevention would be even more impressive. Maximal excellence would be shown in maximal mediation.⁶⁵ Christ’s performance as savior would be more to be praised, if He prevented the soul of the Blessed Virgin Mary from ever contracting original sin and so from ever being offensive in the first place. Controversy keeps Scotus from giving this conclusion his unqualified support, but he does insist that it is not incompatible with Scripture and tradition.⁶⁶

When it comes to approximating the state into which the elect will be redeemed, Marian privilege places her below Christ but above the rest of humanity. She is sinless, but not impeccable. If Christ voluntarily assumes a mortal and passible human nature the better to accomplish His saving work, Mary’s mortality and vulnerability is not something she chooses, although her suffering and death are invariably occasions for earning merit.67 Traditional exegesis places John the Baptist a little lower, contracting original sin at the moment of foetal animation but freed from it before birth. Throughout his life, the Baptist is kept from mortal sin and cleansed from habits inclining him to venial sin. Slightly lower, the prophet Jeremiah begins in original sin but is cleansed in the womb and prevented from mortal but not all venial sin throughout his life. At the next level come the great penitents like Mary Magdalene and Francis, who were born in original sin and committed actual sins, in Mary Magdalene’s case even mortal sins, but repented and crucified the flesh with all of its desires. Lower down are hoi polloi struggling against sinful tendencies towards various degrees of virtue.

Once again, unequal grace distribution to members of Adam’s fallen race demonstrates the freedom of perfect productive power. Further inequalities result in part from the response of created free choice. Overall, the great chain of sanctification is not meant to stir resentment in the lower-downs, but to confirm Divine intentions to raise the elect up to their future destiny, not only by show-casing the distant goal (e.g., the human souls of Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary) or the shining achievements of heroic discipleship (e.g., Mary Magdalene or St. Francis), but by illustrating more proximate levels that are within an ordinary person’s reach. For their part, real saints will not look down with contempt, but seize the opportunity to demonstrate their non-jealous friendship-love for the Divine essence by advocating for those still struggling on life’s way.

Concluding Coda:

Historical theology is a way of doing theology. Exploring the many and various ways faith has sought understanding, enables us to learn from their discoveries, to avoid their mistakes, and to use more intelligence in our own inquiries into who and what God is.

Full of technicalities as Scotus’ program is and needs to be, it illustrates how wrong it is to dismiss first-cause theology or to protest with Pascal that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God of the philosophers cannot be the same. Cosmological reasoning does not yield sterile abstractions, because what sort of explainer is called for is a function of what has to be explained. There is method in Scotus’ madness. Scotus begins with production, with his inference from what is externally producible and dependently productive to what is independently productive and not externally producible. Then, having introduced us to perfect productive power, Scotus becomes more specific: what needs to be explained here below includes contingency and teleology. Freedom and purpose require an ultimate explainer that functions by intellect and will. It is the fact that perfect productive power is intelligent voluntary agency that makes it easiest to prove its infinity. But the infinity of intellect and will is what enables Scotus to argue that–because each power is internally productive of an infinite adequate object– God is a Trinity.

Right reason bases itself on natural excellence. Perfect voluntary agency can’t help following what right reason self-evidently dictates: that the Divine essence is to be loved above all and for its own sake. But the “size-gap” between infinite Godhead and finite creatables means that right reason does not require the Trinity to be externally productive. What motivates the Trinity to create is not the intrinsic worth of finite creatable natures but non-jealous love of the infinite Divine essence, non-jealous love issuing in a desire for created co-lovers. For Scotus, the remaining surprises–of Incarnation-anyway, of the God-man’s passion and death, of the election of some but not others, of the immaculate animation of the Blessed Virgin Mary–result from a Divine balancing act that teeter-toters between respecting natural excellence and manifesting Divine freedom and sovereignty over it all. In Scotus’ philosophical theology, perfect productive power is no sterile abstraction, but systematically fruitful. It is remarkable how much he gets out of it. Deo gratias!

Notes

¹Note: the Opera Omnia of Scotus are found in two editions: the 1639 Lyons edition by Lucas Wadding in twelve volumes (hereafter: Wadding, followed by the volume number and page number) and the as yet incomplete 1950-2008 Vatican edition under the direction of Carl Balic (hereafter: Vaticana followed by volume number and page number). Allan B. Wolter has also issued several volumes of Latin text with English translations, sometimes basing his text on independent consultation of manuscripts. Of these, I will refer to the following: Duns Scotus on Will and Morality (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986) (hereafter Wolter Will and Morality followed by the page number); and his Christology question in Franciscan Christology, ed. Damian McElrath (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1980) (hereafter McElrath followed by the page numbers). Wolter also collaborated with Oleg V. Bychov to issue Latin text and translation of a distinctive version of Scotus’ Paris lectures: The Examined Report of the Paris Lecture, Reportatio I-A (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2004, 2008) (hereafter: Wolter and Bychov followed by the volume and page number). Scotus’ commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences (now called his Lectura, Ordinatio in the Vatican edition and Opus Oxoniense in the Wadding edition, and Reportatio) are divided into books, distinctions, parts, questions, and number paragraphs as in the present reference: Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2 n.43; Vaticana II.151-152; De Primo Principio, c.3, nn.1-4; Wadding III.229-231; Reportatio I-A, d.1, p.1, q.1-3, n.12; Wolter- Bychkov I.118.

²Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, n.55; Vaticana II.161.

³Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, nn.43-58; Vaticana II.151-165; De Primo Principio, c.3, nn.1-5; Wadding III.229-231; Reportatio IA, d.2, p.1, q.1-3, nn. 27-29; Wolter-Bychkov I.121- 122.

⁴Scotus, De Primo Principio, c.3, n.1; Wadding III.229; Reportatio IA, d.2, p.3, q.4, n.204; Wolter-Bychkov I.179-180.

⁵Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, n.53; Vaticana II.157-158; De Primo Principio, c.3, n.3; Wadding III.230; Reportatio IA, d.2, p.1, q.1-3, nn.15-23; Wolter-Bychkov I.119-20.

⁶Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, n.53; Vaticana II.158-9; Ordinatio I, d.2, p.2, q.1-4, nn.224, 239; Vaticana II.262, 271-272; Ordinatio I, d.10, q.7, n.8; Vaticana IV.341; De Primo Principio, c.3, n.3; Wadding III.230; Reportatio IA, d.2, p.1, q.1-3, n.25; Wolter-Bychkov I.120-121; Reportatio IA, d.2, p.3, q.4, n.220; Wolter-Bychkov I.184.

⁷Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p2, q.1-4, n.387; Vaticana II.348-349; Reportatio IA, d.2, p.1, q.1-3, n.11; Wolter-Bychkov I.117.

⁸Scotus, Ordinatio I,d.2,p.1,qq.1-2, n.53; Vat II.158-159.

⁹Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, nn.57-58; Vaticana II.163-165; De Primo Principio, c.3, nn.5-6; Wadding III.231.

¹⁰Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, nn.64-66; Vaticana II.167-168; De Primo Principio, c.3, nn.9-10; Wadding III.233; Reportatio IA, d.2, p.1, q.1-3, n.30; Wolter-Bychkov I.123.

¹¹Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, nn.60-61, 68-69; Vaticana II.166, 168-169; De Primo Principio, c.2, nn.2-3, 11; Wadding III.215-216, 219; De Primo Principio, c.3, n.9; Wadding III.233.

¹²Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.42, q.u, nn.10-11; Vat VI.344-345.

¹³Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, n.121; Vaticana II.198-199.

¹⁴Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, nn.79-88; Vaticna II.176-180.

¹⁵Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, n.77; Vaticana II.175-176.

¹⁶Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, nn.76, 78; Vaticana II.175-176.

¹⁷Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, nn.125-129; Vaticana II.201-205; Reportatio IA, d.2, p.1, q.1-3, n.69; Wolter-Bychkov I.135-136.

¹⁸Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, nn.111-116; Vaticana II.189-192.

¹⁹Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, nn.117-118; Vaticana II.192-194; Reportatio IA, d.2, p.1, q.1-3, nn.63-68; Wolter-Bychkov I.133-135.

²⁰Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.1, q.1-2, n.119; Vaticana II.194; cf. Reportatio IA, d.2, p.2, q.u, nn.100-102; Wolter-Bychkov I.145-146.

²¹Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.42, q.u, nn.8-15; Vat VI.342-346.

²²Scotus, Reportatio IA, d.2, p.2, q.u, nn.92-98; Wolter-Bychkov I.142-144.

²³Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.2, q.1-4, nn.242-243, 252; Vaticana II.274, 277.

²⁴For a detailed examination of Scotus’ analysis of the Trinity, see Richard Cross, Duns Scotus on God (Hants, Aldershott: Ashgate, 2005), Part II, chs.9-18, 127-248. See also the fine study by J.T. Paasch, Divine Production in Late Medieval Trinitarian Theology: Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

²⁵Note: Bonaventure’s Opera Omnia are edited in ten volumes by the friars of St. Bonaveture College: Opera Omnia (Florence: Quaracchi, 1882-1902) (hereafter: Quaracchi followed by the volume number followed by the page number). Bonaventure, Sent. I, d.2, a.un, q.2, arg.1; Quaracchi I.53; Quaestiones Disputatae de Mysterio Trinitatis, q.8; Quaracchi V.112-115.

²⁶Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.2, q.1-4, n.239; Vaticana II.271-272; Ordinatio I, d.10, q.u, n.39; Vaticana IV.355-356.

²⁷Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.2, q.1-4, n.202; Vaticana II.252; Ordinatio I, d.10, q.u, n.9; Vaticana IV.341-342; Reportatio IA, d.2, p.3, q.4, n.204; Wolter-Bychkov I.179-180.

²⁸Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.5, p.2, q.u, n.113; Vaticana IV.67-68; Ordinatio II, d.3, p.1, q.1, n.39; Vaticana VII.408; Ordinatio II, d.3, p.1, q.6, n.158; Vaticana VII.469.

²⁹Bonaventure, De Mysterio Trinitatis, q.2, a.2; Quaracchi V.65-67; cf. Sent. I, d.9, q.2; Quaracchi I.182-183; Sent. I, d.19, p.2, a.u, q.2; Quaracchi I.358-359; Sent. I, d.34, p.1, q.1; Quaracchi I.188.

³⁰Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.2, q.2, n.367; Vaticana II.339-340; Ordinatio I, d.10, q.u, n.9; Vaticana IV.341-342; Reportatio IA, d.2, p.3, q.4, n.214; Wolter-Bychkov I.102; Reportatio IA, d.5, p.1, q.1, nn.12-21; Wolter-Bychkov I.262-264.

³¹Scotus, Reportatio IA, d.2, p.3, q.2, nn.166-168; Wolter-Bychkov I.166-167; Reportatio IA, d.2, p.3, q.4, n.202; Wolter-Bychkov I.179.

³²Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.2, q.1-4, n.221; Vaticana II.259.

³³Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.2, q.1-4, n.302; Vaticana II.307-309; Ordinatio I, d.2, p.2, q.2, nn.355-358; Vaticana II.336-337; Ordinatio I, d.10, q.u, n.3; Vaticana IV.341.

³⁴Scotus, Reportatio IA, d.2, p.3, q.1, n.128; Wolter-Bychkov I.153; Reportatio IA, d.2, p.3, q.1, n.174; Wolter-Bychkov I.169.

³⁵Scotus, Reportatio IA, d.2, p.3, q.1, nn.130-131; Wolter-Bychkov II.154-155.

³⁶Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.2, q.1-4, n.239; Vaticana II.271-272; Ordinatio I, d.10, q.u, nn.39, 56-58; Vaticana IV.355-356, 363.

³⁷Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.10, q.u, nn.56-58; Vaticana IV.363; Reportatio IA, d.10, q.2, nn.39-44; Wolter-Bychkov I.398-399.

³⁸Scotus, Reportatio IA, d.10, q.3, nn.51-54; Wolter-Bychkov I.402-404.

³⁹Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.2, q.1-4, nn.324, 326; Vaticana II.320-321.

⁴⁰Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.2, q.2, n.370; Vaticana II.341.

⁴¹Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.11, q.1-2, nn.13-18; Vaticana V.4-7.

42Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.6, q.7, nn.11-21; Vaticana IV.92-99; Ordinatio I, d.11, q.1-2, n.18; Vaticana V.6.

⁴³Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.2, p.2, q.1-4, n.311; Vaticana II.314.

⁴⁴Scotus, Reportatio IA, d.2, p.2, q.u, n.95; Wolter-Bychkov I.143. Allan B. Wolter emphasizes how Scotus’ characterization of the Divine will starts with the human will, abstracts from the imperfections, and maps up the perfections. See Wolter, “The Native Freedom of the Will as a Key to the Ethics of Scotus,” in The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus, ed. by Marilyn McCord Adams (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), ch.7, 148-162, and “The Unshredded Scotus: A Response to Thomas Williams,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 77, no.3, 315-356.

⁴⁵Scotus, Ordinatio III, suppl. d.37; in Allan B. Wolter, Duns Scotus on Will and Morality (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 276, 282.

⁴⁶Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.10, q.u, nn.48, 56-58; Vaticana IV.359, 363.

⁴⁷Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, c.vi; Quaracchi V.310-312.

⁴⁸These positions are rehearsed by Robert Grosseteste and Bonaventure, neither of whom endorses the position: Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, ed. by Richard Dales and Edward B.

King (London: Oxford for the British Academy, 1986), Part III, secs. I.1-II.4, 119-135; Bonaventure, Sent. III, d.1, a.2, q.2; Quaracchi III.20-26.

⁴⁹Richard of St. Victor, De Trinitate, latin text and french translation by Gaston Salet SJ (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1959), Book III, 160-223.

⁵⁰Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.6, q.u, nn.21, 30; Vaticana IV.99, 104; Ordinatio I, d.12, q.1, nn.37-41;

Wadding V.44-48.

⁵¹Scotus, Opus Oxoniense IV, d.46, q.1, nn.8-9; Wadding X.252.

⁵²Scotus, Opus Oxoniense III, d.7, q.3, n.5; Wadding VII.1.204.

⁵³Allan B. Wolter emphasized that–on Scotus’ understanding–friendship love is not only altruistic but non-jealous in his “Introduction” (1-23; esp. 18-19) and in “The Native Freedom of the Will as a Key to the Ethics of Scotus” (148-162; esp. 151), both reprinted in The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus.

⁵⁴Scotus, Opus Oxoniensis III, d.7, q.3, n.5; Wadding VII.204. See also Opus Oxoniense III, d.4, q.4, in Ioannis Duns Scoti Doctoris Mariani Theologiae Marianae Elementa, ed. Carolo Balic OFM (Sibenik, Jugoslavia, 1933), 14-15; Op. Par. III, d.7, q.4, 14-15; Rep. Barcin. III, d.2, q.3, 182-184.

⁵⁵Scotus works out his metaphysics of the Incarnation in detail in Opus Oxoniense III, d.1, qq.1-5, and d.5, qq.1-2; Wadding VII.1.3-56, 122-132. For a detailed discussion of medieval treatments of this subject, see Richard Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). See also my Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch.5, 108-143.

⁵⁶Scotus, Reportatio IA, d.2, p.2, q.u, n.5; Wolter-Bychkov I.143.

⁵⁷Scotus, Ordinatio III (suppl.), d.32 (Assisi com.137, fol. 174ra-va), ed. and trans. Allan B. Wolter, in Franciscan Christology, ed. by Damian McElrath (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1980), 154-157.

⁵⁸Scotus, Opus Oxoniense III, d.7, q.3, nn.3-4; Wadding VII.1.202; Opus Oxoniense IV, d.19, q.u, n.6; Wad VII.1.415.

⁵⁹Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.41, q.u, nn.45-46; Vaticana VI.332-333; Opus Oxoniense III, d.7, q.3 (Balic, 5); Rep.Barcin. III, d.2, q.3 (Balic, 183).

⁶⁰Scotus, Opus Oxoniense III, d.7, q.3, nn.3-4; Wadding VII.1.202; Opus Oxoniense IV, d.19, q.u, n.6; Wadding VII.1.415.

⁶¹Scotus, Ordinatio I, d.41, q.u, n.42; Vaticana VI.333.

⁶²Scotus, Opus Oxoniense III, d.19, q.u, n.7; Wad VII.1.417.

⁶³For an examination of medieval views from Anselm to Aureol, see my “The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary: A Thought-Experiment in Medieval Philosophical Theology,” The Harvard Theological Review 103:2 (2010), 133-59.

⁶⁴Bonaventure, Sent. III, d.3, p.1, a.1, q.2; Quaracchi III.67.

⁶⁵Scotus, Opus Oxoniense III, d.3, q.1, nn.4-8; Wadding VII.1.192-193.

⁶⁶Scotus, Opus Oxoniense III, d.3, q.1, n.9; Wadding VII.1.95.

⁶⁷Scotus, Opus Oxoniense III, d.3, q.1, n.8; Wadding VII.1.93.