Wound of Knowledge
by Rowan Williams
I've been thinking some more on the Buddhist notion of anātman (or no-self; also seen as anatta in some texts). I feel the need to deal with it, because so much practical advice given in Christian circles sounds similar. I don't mean simply trendy, pop-psych advice, but even the advice of great saints throughout history in both their lives and their thoughts. This is even separate from the Biblical admonitions to deny one's own self, to crucify it, to die with Christ and let him live within oneself. Holiness of any sort comes through a denial of self, and there must be some ontological feature of the self that allows this.
However, I have trouble within a Christian context speaking of non-self. If we are not enduring entities in some fashion, then who is saved? There would be a causal chain connecting "me" now to "me" in heaven, but this would not be the same person. I also would think that this would have ramifications for the Incarnation and the Atonement, but I won't get into that now (in short, if what is saved must be assumed, and there is now such thing which could be assumed, what could be saved?).
This is why I offer the view of "openness" instead. It is not that we do not exist as selves, but that our existence as selves necessarily implies an openness to the world around us and the world's continual influence. While this could be taken in a mystical direction, let me put forth some prosaic examples. Right now, I occasionally hear my pet rabbit doing something or other in the kitchen. Sometimes I might even need to respond. This is not a response to something inside of myself, but something which is not-me. I may have all of my own concerns, but then my wife comes home and has the things that she wants to do. In order to deal with that, I must open myself up to new ways of valuation, caring, and seeing the world.
To be closed, by contrast, is to engage in selfishness and hatred (one could probably make a case for each of the seven deadly sins; maybe in another post when I'm bored and putting off thesis-writing). Intellectually, it is to force all information through tightly controlled categories which can never be readjusted. Volitionally, it is to assert one's own will and to seek to avoid feeling the force of anyone else's. In trying to make oneself a self-contained self, one is actually becoming less. It is in letting go of this construction that one can have peace, freedom, love, and holiness.
But, while this construction of the closed self bears some resemblance to the Buddhist's notion of a constructed self, the answer is not to deny any reality whatsoever to the self. We simply need a new category to allow for a type of being which is fundamentally open to the world and which increases in fullness of being as it increases in openness, while nevertheless enduring.
15 comments:
I like the way you use being open vs. being closed to explicate virtues of community and self-giving love to vices of utter selfishness and egoism.
I think that what of our being endures through the salvation process must include the imago Dei, although there must be accomodation for individual distinctiveness as well, or as a part of the imago Dei in each individual. We are neither God nor identical copies of God. We are diverse creations of God, which are inspired by His own nature and self-knowledge.
It seems plausible that "openness" is a divine characteristic, and a proper part of our imago Dei; hence, a virtue of the human soul. God's own "openness" may be expressed both in His act(s) of Creation and in His acts of Redemption. In the former case, God creates other beings in His image so that He can have community with us, and interact with us. The the latter case, God interacts with us to the radical extent of becoming Incarnate and suffering (a) at our hands and (b) for our sake.
I like your linking of "openness" to the Redemption; it's certainly necessary to keep our model of virtue Christ rather than an abstract idea, no matter how exalted.
As far as creation is concerned, I would think that it is somewhat indicative of God's "openness" without being constitutive of it. After all, I want to affirm creation as a completely contingent act; God would have been complete and "open" in the requisite fashion without having created.
For this reason, I would like to explicate it in terms of the Trinity; what are your thoughts?
God's Creation is an expression of the overflow of His openness. The Community of the Trinity provides adequate context for expression of God's openness. As such God does not *need* other beings to exist.
However, I am not sure whether or not I want to say that God's openness is expressed *fully* in the Trinity. Creation is superfluous, but such superfluous-ity (is that a word?) is an inherent part of God's nature. God is magnanimous.
It is not unnatural for God to create, although it may perhaps be "supernatural" in a sense?
I'm trying to figure out a way of dividing up those two elements without completely separating them. For Scotus, God is necessarily good, without this entailing anything about how God treats creation (or whether God creates). However, God is also gracious and so not only has created, but has created in a way such that the world fits together harmoniously (thus yielding a natural law ethic out of a divine command ethic).
Henry of Ghent (or at least, an interpretation of him given by Juan Carlos Flores) wants to tie together creation and Trinity by saying that the Trinity is the reason why the creation of the world is so free and gracious. Strict, non-trinitarian, monotheism leads to emanation, as God (being the perfect being) must use his intellect and will, and something must proceed from them. In the Trinity, by contrast, the procession of the divine persons exhausts God's necessary processions, leaving God completely free in creation, which is nevertheless a Trinitarian activity coming out of the cooperative action of the persons. Maybe you wouldn't care for the details of his view, but there's something to the sentiment, I think.
I think that Barth has something closer to what you want to say, but as I am not in the middle of my Barth class anymore, I don't think that I could explicate him well. Maybe I'll look that up when I need some other means of procrastinating my thesis.
I have serious problems with the notion that God's necessary goodness does not entail anything about how he treats his creation. At least it should entail the condition: "If God creates, then God will treat His creation XYZ." God could not, for example, choose to cause suffering for no purpose (and not for just any purpose, either!), and still be essentially and perfectly good, in my view.
I do find that view which completely separates God's goodness and his relation to creation to be a bit disturbing myself, but I think that it also preserves some important intuitions. For one thing, it emphasizes the absolute graciousness of grace; it is in no way, shape, or form necessitated, though God can freely bestow his favor as God wishes. For another thing, such a view highlights the ontological difference between us and God. We really are absolutely nothing compared to God, in such a way that, on a logical level, what God does to us has no impact on what God is. However, God's identity as revealed to us is a God who mysteriously and graciously loves us despite our nothingness.
If Molinism were to be true, or at least counterfactuals of freedom, then one could perhaps put the situation like this: God is perfectly good in every possible world, there are logically possible worlds in which God causes suffering for no reason, but God always would be gracious. No matter what world God would have decided to create, God would not have actualized the worlds of suffering.
I think you're stating the view clearly, however I persist in strongly rejecting it as such.
I do think it is logically impossible for God to cause His creation to suffer for no reason.
I would say that our inherent moral worth is dependent upon our status as being created for God, by God, and in the image of God. This is to say, however, that our moral worth is essential to our nature as human beings and not something that God can choose to ignore or take away from us.
Gah! I feel caught between intuitions. It seems like I either anthropomorphize God's power or God's being.
Here's another view which I've seen, though even I don't agree with it. Keith Yandell holds that God could possibly do evil. His fear is that otherwise, God's goodness would be merely an aesthetic attribute and not a moral one. However, he seems to distinguish between the referent of "God" as we use it, and the identity/title "God." So while the former could be evil, it would not then have the identity "God"; it would not be a being worthy of worship. Further, he thinks that this identity is what is important, such that God would be committing deicide if God were to do evil.
It doesn't quite satisfy me, but maybe there's something in there which can help settle to difficulty....
I guess I'm too much of a Russellian to be able to make much sense of prying apart the referent of "God" and the defining attributes that dictate our application of that name.
Besides, since God's attributes are all supposed to be essential--at least, moral perfection is an essential property of God--then it must be impossible in some sense for the referent (g) to lack the set of attributes (G).
What exactly is involved in committing deicide? Does Yandell mean that God (g) would cease to exist if God were to do evil? Or does he mean that God (g) would be dethroning himself and giving up godhood (G), but continue to exist with some other set of properties?
Either possibility would undermine the ontological argument and surely all perfect being theology. (Hence, the existential cosmological argument should disprove Yandell's hypothesis as well.)
If it's possible that g do evil and thus give up instantiating G, then it is not necessary that God (some being instantiating G) exist. Likewise, if its possible that g annihilate g's existence, it is not necessary that God exist.
I suppose someone could suggest a crazy theory as follows: G=godhood, including moral perfection; g=whatever entity presently instantites G (godhood). g may at any time do evil and thus cease to instantiate G; yet since it is necessary that some being instantiate G, whenever this happens there must exist some other entity (h) which at that moment instantiates G.
It seems we would run into some temporal problems here, regardless of the other evident absurdities.
I expect that any disagreement on this point--whether or not God can do evil--has to do with our being mired in modal confusions.
I wonder whether it all comes down to confusion too. I think that the dilemma as presented here here is preventing access to a reasonable solution, however.
As for Yandell, he doesn't believe that God is a necessary being and thinks that perfect being theology is a bad way to do theology. So he can get around the problems easily enough. He wouldn't agree with the ontological argument, but he does have a tweak to the cosmological argument (it is not the case that there can be g and yet creatures; the only world without g period would be the possible world with only abstracta. There could be many worlds without G, though). We don't exactly see eye-to-eye on metaphysics, and I think he throws away far too many useful concepts, but he is generally very good at logical consistency.
I guess I can provisionally accept the logical possibility of a world without any existents, God or otherwise.
But for all practical purposes (invoking the "anthropic principle", little understood as it is) any world with minds doing philosophy of religion is going to have God in it. Perhaps this is closer to Plantinga's version of the ontological argument than Anselm's.
If we reject perfect being theology then I think we have to give up on natural theology altogether-at least I don't know what the alternative basis for natural theology would be. Some days, certainly, I feel like doing that. Revealed theology is better, from the perspective of a biblical theologian. But perhaps biblical theology reveals a God who is a necessary and perfect being.
The conclusions of PBT need to be open to some weaking on occasion, but I still think it is a good way to go, if a fallible one.
I guess I can provisionally accept the logical possibility of a world without any existents, God or otherwise.
But for all practical purposes (invoking the "anthropic principle", little understood as it is) any world with minds doing philosophy of religion is going to have God in it. Perhaps this is closer to Plantinga's version of the ontological argument than Anselm's.
If we reject perfect being theology then I think we have to give up on natural theology altogether-at least I don't know what the alternative basis for natural theology would be. Some days, certainly, I feel like doing that. Revealed theology is better, from the perspective of a biblical theologian. But perhaps biblical theology reveals a God who is a necessary and perfect being.
The conclusions of PBT need to be open to some weaking on occasion, but I still think it is a good way to go, if a fallible one.
I like PBT myself, though I think that it really only works given certain ontologies. "Perfection" needs to viewed as "completeness," rather than "whatever stuff I happen to like," in order to make sense in metaphysics. Otherwise, we just argue back and forth over whether we like a God who suffers, or is impassible; an immutable God, or a constantly changing (though perhaps constant) God-in-act.
Yandell himself pretty much limits natural theology to proofs of God's existence (or at least for believing that it is rational to hold that God exists), and providing logically coherent (though usually non-explanatory) accounts for doctrines such as the Trinity and Incarnation. When it comes to filling out the doctrines, he pretty much sticks to Biblical scholarship; for my class on philosophical theism, for instance, he assigned a book by Richard Bauckham (God Crucified) on New Testament exegesis concerning what it means for Jesus to be God (good book, btw). He then proceeded to say that that was how theology ought to be done.
I think I agree with you about completeness. Although I am not entirely sure that it makes as much difference in practice as I am inclined to think at first. I haven't sat down to do any PBT myself, so I don't know. The closest I've gotten recently is skimming Katherin Rogers' book-and I focused mainly on her chapter on goodness.
It sounds like I would probably agree with Yandell in practice. Although I wonder...how much room is there in proving God's existence for talking about God's nature? You have to have a conception of God that you are asserting to exist. Not every property of God must be accessible to natural reason. But some essential properties must be, or we wouldn't know that it was God we had shown to exist.
Unless, I suppose, you do natural theology after revealed theology (which I guess most of us should). In which case you might limit natural theology to justifying our epistemic permission to accept the revelation we have, and the coherence of doctrines of God's attributes as revealed.
If you're going to have a class called philosophical theism, why would you end up studying exegetical theology?
Well, Yandell isn't against natural theology per se. He actually gets somewhat miffed with those theologians who dismiss it out of hand. He simply thinks that it is of limited value, and doesn't like the Greek influence which has played a role historically.
As for why we were using an exegetical book in a philosophical class, I think it was mainly due to metaphilosophical reasons. First, how should we go about talking about God? and Second, do we actually need a whole lot of metaphysical machinery to do the job? Also, all of us students like putting together theology and philosophy, and Yandell enjoys the chance to meet with a class that actually believes that God exists (he comes down from U. of Wisconsin-Madison), so this together with his laid-back attitude toward the material which has to be covered in any given class leads to some interesting tie-ins.
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