On the Supposed Perpetual Virginity of the θεοτοκος.

As Michael Knowles points out, most of the Reformers shared with their Romanist opponents the opinion that Mary's virginity was perpetual (but unlike the Romanists, the Reformers treated this opinion as simply that, a pious opinion, not de fide). In response to a reply asking for the basis for the doctrine, Knowles directs us to an article, saying that it, "provides a good rundown on the scriptural account, which convinced not only the Church Fathers and doctors of the Church but also most of the leading Protestant reformers" The article contains seven arguments.

The first is an entirely unconvincing argument from silence. Since siblings aren't relevant to the story in Matthew of Jesus in his boyhood in the Temple (his "Father's house"), there's no particular expectation that they would be mentioned, if they existed; so this silence betokeneth nothing. And even if the non-existence of living siblings at that time were proved, that would be at best a pretty weak argument for Mary's virginity -- on the one hand, miscarriages and childhood deaths are not uncommon; but also, wives who've never had natural children are not presumptively virgins. Other causes of infertility exist.

The second is simply not an argument for the proposition. It's only a refutation (a good one) of an argument against it. Biblical mention of Jesus siblings might or might not refer to literal siblings. Nothing one way or the other can be derived from the mere mention of adelphoi of Jesus.

The third and fourth arguments are the same: refutations of counterarguments at best, not positive reasons for believing in Mary's perpetual virginity.

The fifth is is perhaps the best argument. But it's unconvincing. First, it's somewhat speculative to say Jesus "wouldn't have" entrusted Mary to John's care if he had brothers who were both living and able to take care of their mother. Granted there is some probability here, but it's not something we know for sure. Conjectures about what Jesus would or wouldn't do are not the most solid ground on which to build a doctrine. Secondly, and more important, it no way follows from the fact that none of Jesus' siblings were (1)male, (2)living and (3)able to care for their mother at the time of his crucifixion that he never had siblings of either sex, let alone that his mother was then still a virgin.

The sixth and seventh arguments are again mere refutations.

In the case of the sixth, the refutation doesn't even work. It only refutes an overstatement of an objection to the doctrine: granted, the word "until," in the assertion that Joseph "knew her not until she had bourn a son" does not necessarily entail that he did know her afterwards; nevertheless, it typically suggests that very thing. This verse, thus, lends support to the presumption that we have anyway that a wife will unite with her husband in the sense of them becoming one flesh in accordance with God's design for marriage.

The claim here is not that there couldn't possibly be any exception to this rule. The claim is just that this is the rule, so there stands a presumption in favor of it covering any particular case. Weighty positive reasons are needed to overcome this presumption. Nothing of the sort has been presented.

Knowles pointed to this article as expressing the sort of thing that "convinced" the Fathers/Reformers. But it ends by essentially conceding the doctrine isn't taught in Scripture: "It's true that Scripture doesn’t come right out and explicitly state that Mary was a perpetual virgin. But nothing in Scripture contradicts that notion." As we have seen, it isn't just that Scripture doesn't "explicitly" state this. Judging by this summary, nothing in Scripture can be remotely construed as teaching the doctrine, even implicitly. The only place that genuinely addresses the question of Mary's virginity after Christ's birth (Matthew 1:25) suggests (though it does not prove) the opposite.

No actual reason for the doctrine has been given. At best there's some indirect reasons to think that Jesus perhaps didn't have living siblings at certain points in time. Such passages can't be construed as teaching anything about Mary's virginity after Christ's birth. Virginity is not even the most common reason a wife produces no natural children, and those passages don't teach that Mary had no natural children, they at best indirectly suggest none were living at the time. Even if everything is granted to these arguments, they still don't overcome the prior presumption that when a man and woman marry, they will become one flesh. That's the natural way of things. If I'm to believe that an exception to this exists in a certain case, I need some actual reason to think so.

For Romanists, "the church says so" functions as a reason. For Protestants, the agreement of Fathers and Reformers could potentially be a good supporting reason: we recognize an obligation to heed humbly the teaching of our fathers in the faith. But we want to know what their reasons were. It is, after all, their understanding of the apostolic deposit that we defer to, not their bare unsupported opinions. We give deference, but not blind deference.

I'd be happy to be convinced if I find any actual reasons that make some kind of sense. But everything I've read either has the same failings as this article or relies on highly analogical readings of e.g., the Song of Solomon, passages which in themselves give no grounds to think they are even about the mother of Christ.

On Patriarchy

Historically, most societies have been patriarchal, agreeing that a man rightly has rule over his family, which includes being in authority over his wife; and this not merely in the sense of primus inter pares; rather, a wife is subordinate to her husband. This contradicts both egalitarian feminism, which denies male headship, and complementarianism, which allows a sort of authority to husbands but interprets this as the authority of a first-among-equals.

Abandoning patriarchalism was a mistake. Women are in fact inferior to their husbands. This is not demeaning to women any more than it is demeaning to a lieutenant to be inferior to a general. In defense of this I propound three arguments: two from Scripture, and a third from the consensus gentium.

First Argument: Wifely submission is the submission of an inferior.

The sum of my first argument is that the Scriptural requirement of wifely submission is an implicit confirmation of a husband's superiority. Why do I say this? Is is because I think the mere word "submission" implies inferiority, as if it is impossible to submit to a first-among-equals? No. I allow that there are different varieties of submission. In some contexts telling someone to "submit" would not imply that the one being submitted to is a superior. But in other contexts it would imply that. Submission does not always and everywhere imply inferiority. However, the two notions are not just accidentally associated. Submission is among the essential duties (along with such things as honor & deference) that inferiors owe to superiors. Such duties define what it means to be a subordinate; they constitute the nature and quiddity of social inferiority. Because of this, when one who is in fact inferior is instructed to submit to a superior, it is to be presumed that the submission being talked about is the very sort owed by an inferior to a superior as such, and not some lesser sort of submission. To be sure, a lesser degree of submission may be appropriate toward one who is only a first-among-equals; nevertheless, we are probably not talking about that lesser degree of submission when we tell an inferior to submit to his superior.

The same holds when submission is urged upon someone falsely believed, in a society, to be inferior: those who urge this are presumably talking about the kind of submission that inferiors owe to superiors (they just happen to be wrong in thinking that that kind of submission is owed in this case). Regardless of whether the society's belief is right or wrong, what matters when it comes to determining what kind of submission is presumably being talked about is what is generally believed in that society.

I say "presumably" because, of course, a presumption can be overcome: if an author indicates that he rejects society's attribution of inferiority to those being told to submit, the presumptive interpretation would be undercut. But where he does not, the presumption stands. Not everyone agrees with what society thinks. But in general people do. That's what makes it the general belief of that society. So unless an author tells us otherwise, it is reasonable to expect the meaning of his statements to align with how they would generally be understood in his society. 

Accordingly, I argue as follows:

Prior to reading Stephen Wolfe's The Case for Christian Nationalism, I thought I would be disagreeing with the "nationalist" part. Not because of the facile and specious identification of nationalism with fascism that is so common among the small-minded chatteratti. I was never in danger of that mistake. When I think of nationalism I think of the 19th century phenomenon, which denigrated the classical cultural unities that held together Christendom as a civilization, and which shifted the basic locus of culture to the vulgar ethnicities, while simultaneously drawing power to the top of each ethnostate through national bureaucracies, undermining traditional local authorities. As you can probably tell, I take an ill view of this sort of thing. As it turns out, however, this has nothing to do with Wolfe's project. What he wants are Christian societies governed by Christian laws. He is not a nationalist in the sense in which I use the term. And I am a nationalist, and a Christian nationalist, in the sense in which he uses those terms.

All the same, I can agree with his conclusion while criticizing his arguments. And that is what I will do here. I have loaned my copy of his book to a friend, so I'm going to criticize an article of his where he makes the case more briefly: "The Church among the Nations," at American Reformer. 

Love is Like a Red, Red Rose.

Edward Feser responds appreciatively to Philip Goff's articulation of "Galileo's Error." And he critiques the panpsychism that Goff proposes as an alternative, preferring to maintain the Aristotelian common-sense realism that Galileo mistakenly rejected. (I am in fundamental agreement with Feser's position here.) Goff responds to Feser by directing us to his response to Liu (another "naïve realist") and elaborating further. Feser does not say anything about the response to Liu, and I'm not happy with how he responds to the further elaboration. I don't see that he has really engaged with the particularities of what Goff says about why hallucination presents a problem for direct realism. He seems to be responding more to a generic "argument from hallucination" than to what Goff actually wrote. And then, rather than defend direct realism at length, he tries to do an end run around the argument, by claiming that indirect realism can also support secondary-quality realism. Maybe he's right about that, but I think it's important to defend direct realism from the initially plausible-seeming argument Goff makes against it. Which is what I propose to do.

In preparation for that, note that there are two ways of more precisely characterizing the Galilean move (the contention that naïve common sense mistakes qualities of conscious experience for qualities in things). On the one hand, the claim may be that those very features which I naïvely take to be manifest qualities of things in the world (colors, sounds, etc.) are in fact in my mind subjectively whenever I seem to perceive objects that seem to have those qualities. Secondary qualities really exist, I only mislocate them. 

On the other hand, the claim may be that no such qualities as I naïvely think are in objects exist at all: my naïveté consists in thinking that there is an objective quality there, when the only quality present is a subjective quality of my experience. On this view, the red that I seem to see has no existence, but there is something it is like for me to see it. The qualitative character of what it is like to have such experiences is, in some way, the source of the illusion of secondary qualities in things -- the latter are "projections" of the former, as (in Goff's analogy) the illusion of objective disgustingness in things is (plausibly) a projection of my subjective feeling of disgust -- but, naïve though I be, I am not literally attributing the feeling of disgust to an inanimate object. In the same way I am not literally attributing the qualitative character of what it is like to see something red to the red thing. Instead I am conjuring a fictive quality in the object "on the basis of" a subjective quality present in my seeing it.

 

I think this is the more reasonable interpretation of the Galilean move. But the way Goff argues in response to Liu supposes that naïve common sense is literally attributing the subjective quality of an experience to external objects. He says (and I italicized what I think are objectionable moves):

Clearly when I’m hallucinating a red rose, I’m not in direct contact with the Edenic redness of a physical object, as there’s no red object there. [By "Edenic redness," he means what I prefer to call manifest redness, the quality as common sense takes it to be, in red objects.] In this case, then, [i.e., when I'm hallucinating] the redness must be in my head. So it seems that we must say that when I’m veridically perceiving a red rose, what I’m in contact with is redness out there in the world, whereas when I’m hallucinating a red rose, the redness is in my head. I think there are a number of problems with this position. ... Just to focus on one issue: the mental redness in the hallucination has the same character as the Edenic redness in the veridical experience. How does the cognitive system manage to locate a mental property to use in the hallucination with the same character as the Edenic property of the veridical case? And why have we evolved to create a deceptive experience in hallucination? If the cognitive system somehow ‘knows’ it’s hallucinating (which it presumably must do as it activates the mental redness when and only when there is a hallucination of red) ..." etc.

Why must the redness that isn't in the rose be in the head? The unexpressed assumption is that the redness that seems to be in the hallucinated rose really exists somewhere. Now, the only reason to think that it exists is that it seems to be there, and when I say "there" I mean in the rose: that is where it seems to be, right? But, ex hypothesi, that very seeming is illusory in this case. That's why we call it a hallucination. So there is no undefeated reason to think that that instance of redness exists at all. Goff here begs the question, because he assumes that qualitative redness exists whenever someone has a subjective experience seeming to be of a red object; this assumption is plausible only if you already think that redness is a subjective quality.

Goff might respond by saying that even if the redness in a hallucination does not exist, the appearance of redness does, and that appearance has the same character as genuine redness, leading to all the same problems.

But this would be a confusion. The claim that the appearance has the same character as genuine redness, in the sense in which it is reasonable, means only that the apparent rose seems the same as a real rose: the way the non-existent rose seems, in regard to its color, is just like the way a real red rose seems. But from this statement about how things seem nothing follows about how things are. Or rather, the only thing that follows is that the seeming itself occurs and has the character that it does, which provides us with another way of taking the claim that the appearance has the same character as genuine redness: that the subjective quality of what it is like for me to see the red in the hallucinated rose has the same character as seems to be in a real rose. But in this sense the claim is unreasonable. What the appearance of hallucinated redness is the same as is not genuine redness, but appearances of genuine redness; which is to say that the introspectable quality of the seeming is the same in both cases. But the quality of a seeming is not the same as the quality that seems to be in the thing seen. The latter quality, redness, is known not by introspection, but by extraspection. The former, introspectable, quality, what it is like for me to see red, is not something that ever seems to be in an inanimate object. The naïve realist thinks that extraspection, like introspection, normally puts me in direct contact with its objects and their qualities. But on anybody's view, there is an evident difference between introspection and extraspection. Extraspection at least seems to acquaint me with objects distinct from myself. Introspection never even pretends to do that.

Or does it? It occurs to me that there is a third interpretation of the Galilean move that I have neglected to mention, a historically important one. On this interpretation, whenever I seem to be directly aware by extraspection of a red object, I actually am directly aware of an object, a really existing object, but existing in a kind of mental theater, and I am infallibly aware of the directly perceived qualities of that object. My naïve mistake is in thinking that that object and its qualities have any existence when not being perceived by me. I can infer the existence of other, unperceived, entities that are in causal relation to the perceived furniture of the theater of the mind, but those inferred causes are not themselves perceptible, strictly speaking.

One possible factor influencing the early modern philosophers in this direction may have been their failure to reckon with the intentionality of experience. If one tries to explain the relation between the thing perceived and the perceiving of it on the model of transitive actions of the physical sort (as Galileo understood the physical), one discovers that the existence of a transitive action entails the existence of the thing acted upon. If one billiard ball strikes another, the other ball exists. Thus one is led to think that if I hallucinate a rose, the thing hallucinated must exist. Since obviously there is no real rose present, the hallucinated thing, which I take for a rose, must really be something else: the idea, or image or impression of a rose.

It's my understanding that this theory has fallen very much out of favor, and for good reason. I don't think Goff is deliberately trying to revive it, but perhaps it has some residual influence on his thinking. That would explain his twin mistakes: like the early modern philosophers, his phenomenology is, perhaps, innocent of intentionality (maybe that's why he takes for granted that hallucinated redness must really exist somewhere). And, like them, he thinks the character of redness that seems to be in things is really "in the head," perhaps meaning not that it is in the mind subjectively, as what it is like for me to see red, but that it is in the mind objectively, as a feature of a denizen of the theater of the mind; that would explain why he thinks the mental quality in the hallucination has the same character as what naïve common sense takes to be in a rose in veridical experience.

If this is what he is thinking, then what he needs to do to convince the naïve realist is not to explain why redness is in the mind. The naïve realist already agrees with him that redness is in the mind objectively when it is perceived. What he needs to do is to explain why things that are in the mind objectively in this way cannot exist when not perceived.

But I don't think this is really what Goff is up to. In his response to Feser, he writes,

If I’m hallucinating a red rose, then there’s no red rose out there in the world for me to be related to. So when it comes to hallucinations, at least, the experience must be in the head. The direct realist, then, is led to the view that veridical experiences ... are radically different kinds of things from hallucinations: the former are world-involving relationships, the latter are in the head. This view is known in philosophy of perception as ‘disjunctivism.’

Note that now, his premise is not that, in hallucinations, the secondary qualities are in the head, but that the experiences are. The premise of his prior argument (that, in hallucination, redness is in the perceiver), if accepted, would force us naïve realists into a radical disjunctivism in order to maintain our belief that, in ordinary perception, redness occurs in objects existing independently of the perceiver. But we are not forced into such disjunctivism by the claim that the experience is in the perceiver. We already think perceptual experiences are in perceivers. At least the subjective part of an experience is there. Some naïve realists may develop their views by claiming that an experience is an integral whole that includes both subjective and objective parts or aspects. (Since 'experience' is not a term of art in Aristotelian philosophy, Feser and I don't have any prior commitments regarding its "location.") But in any case, there is no need for us to posit a radical difference between what is subjective in the true and the hallucinated experience. Thus our position is untouched by Goff's attack on disjunctivism:

Consider a moment when Sara is veridically seeing a red rose at precisely 2pm. Now let’s imagine a genius evil scientist kidnaps Sara later that day, removes her brain and puts it in a vat, and then fiddles with it so that it’s in the exact same state it was at 2pm that day. Presumably, Sara’s brain in the vat will now be having an internal experience that makes it seem to her that it’s seeing a red rose (even though the brain doesn’t have any eyes, so isn’t seeing anything). But, given that at 2pm Sara’s brain was in the same state, then her brain at 2pm must have also generated an internal experience that made it seem to Sara that she’s seeing a red rose. Strictly speaking this doesn’t rule out direct realism: at 2pm Sara’s brain might have generated an internal experience (that made it seem to her that she’s seeing a red rose) and in addition Sara might have also had a world-involving experience (that also made it seem to have that she’s seeing a red rose). But the latter experience seems redundant ...

There is no "in addition." The naïve realist can say that that very same "internal" experience (as Goff calls it) occurring at 2pm is not merely internal but also world-involving.  What was contributed to the experience by Sara's brain at 2pm was indeed identical (abstracting from how it was related to things outside Sara) with what occurred when she was in the vat. But nothing prevents those subjective realities in Sara from being part of a larger integral whole at one time, and not at another. For what distinguishes merely internal from world-involving experiences depends on more than just what goes on in the brain.

Ike's Advice

As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.

-President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 1961

Latin Composition

Otium neque otiosum neque laboriosum colere laboro. Celere, nullo negotio, vagam in desidiam labor.

Except men give Credit to the principles of natural, they will never believe the Principles of revealed Religion. --Increase Mather

From the Calvinist International, reporting on a recent dissertation.