Marilyn McCord Adams

Ockham on Identity and Distinction

In the middle ages, what a philosopher thought about identity and distinction would largely determine his position on a wide range of philosophical and theological problems such as the problem of universals, of the unity and plurality of substantial forms, of the relation of intellect and will in the soul, of how to reconcile divine simplicity with a plurality of divine attributes and ideas, and of how to give a clear and intelligible formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. For instance, many thought that divine wisdom and divine goodness must be distinct attributes of God. But what is the nature of their distinction? It cannot be that they are distinct real things, for this would compromise the divine simplicity. Perhaps it should be said that while divine wisdom and divine goodness are identically the same thing, they are distinct because they are conceived of by means of distinct concepts. If so, their distinction would be a product of intellectual activity, so that prior to or apart from any such activity they would not be distinct. Yet, it seems that if divine wisdom and divine goodness are distinct attributes, they would be distinct even if — per impossibile — no one throught so. Perhaps, then there is some distinction that is not a distinction between real things, which nevertheless obtains in reality prior to any intellectual activity. But questions arise as to how this sort of distinction should be conceived of. In tackling such problems, medieval philosophers thus came to appeal to various sorts of identity and distinction of which three — real sameness and distinction, sameness and distinction of reason, and formal sameness and distinction — rose to prominence in the fourteenth century. Of course, not all philosophers made use of these notions; and there was no perfect unanimity as to how any of them should be understood. But it was on their legitimacy, intel-

Hell and the God of Justice

Christians have often held that on the day of judgment God will condemn some persons who have disobeyed him to a hell of everlasting torment and total unhappiness from which there is no hope of escape, as a punishment for their deeds up to that time. This is not the only way that hell has been or could be conceived of, but it has been the predominant conception in the Christian church throughout much of its history and it is the one on which I shall focus in this paper.

Ockham on Will, Nature, and Morality

Among other things, Ockham is notorious for his doctrine of the liberty of indifference: the notion that created willpower is power to will, to nill, or to do nothing with respect to any object. By contrast with his great medieval predecessors, many estimate, Ockham has staked out a position fraught with disadvantages. First, it cuts will off from nature. The liberty of indifference turns created wills into neutral potencies unshaped by natural inclinations. Second, it “frees” will from reasons rule: no matter what reason dictates, created willpower can disobey. To some, such consequences have seemed momentous for ethics because they are inconsistent with a kind of naturalism. For example, Maurer writes that the scholastics prior to Ockham looked upon goodness as a property of being. Saint Thomas, for example, speaks of goodness as the perfection of being that renders it desirable. Because God is all-perfect and supremely desirable, he is supremely good. A creature is good to the extent that it achieves the perfection demanded by its nature. Moral goodness consists in man’s acting in accordance with his nature, with a view to attaining his final end (happiness), which is identical with the perfection of his being. For Saint Thomas, therefore, morality has a metaphysical foundation, and it links man with God, giving him a share in the divine goodness and perfection. Ockham, on the other hand, severs the bond between metaphysics and ethics and bases morality not upon the perfection of human nature (whose reality he denies), nor upon the teleological relation between man and God, but upon man’s obligation to follow the laws freely laid down for him by God.

Anselm on faith and reason

INTRODUCTION When contemporary philosophers probe the relation between faith and reason, their focus is on the propositional content of religious belief. They ask whether doctrinal propositions can be proved by sound arguments from premises acceptable to unbelievers, or, failing that, whether adherence to such theses can be rationally justified. Christian philosophers often see themselves as responding to pressure from the outside to defend the rationality of Christian faith. In the waning years of the Roman empire, St. Augustine, too, was preoccupied with defending the faith, first externally, against its pagan competitors (not only but principally the Manichaeans); then against heretics (Donatists and Pelagians) within. St. Anselm’s eleventh-century situation was different from both of these. He spent most of his life in the Benedictine Monastery at Bec. Most of his works were penned for and at the behest of his monastic brother-students. Their overarching common aim was to become persons who could see and enjoy God’s face. Their intellectual pursuits were integrated into that project. Anselm’s written investigations of non-theological subjects were all occasioned by the exigencies of their doctrinal inquiries. These facts about Anselm’s career have left deep imprints on his philosophical theology, not least on his method. If he was eventually drawn into polemical contexts and confronted with real non-Christians, Anselm continued to see the drive to understand Christian faith by reason alone ( sola ratione ) as predominantly internal, arising not simply from his own monastic vocation, but from the natural teleology built into human nature itself.

Things versus “Hows”, or Ockham on Predication and Ontology

Ockham’s account of the truth conditions for categorical propositions of the forms ‘N is B’ and ‘A is B’ is dictated by his two-fold ontological program: to eliminate universals other than names or concepts and to restrict particular things (res) to the categories of substance and quality.1

The Metaphysics of the Trinity in Some Fourteenth Century Franciscans

Thirteenth and fourteenth century philosophical theologians approached the doctrine of God with a double weight of tradition behind them. Philosophically, they were mindful of Aristotle’s Categories as handled by Augustine in De Trinitate, as filtered through Boethius, and as developed by their own subsequent metaphysical interpretations. Fundamental to Categories metaphysics is the thesis that substance is the first category on which all the items in the other categories depend. Recall how substance itself divides into second substances (genera and species) and first substances or individuals. Second substances are defined by genus and differentia. Those here below are in principle sharable by

Horrors in theological context

Although my book Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Cornell University Press, 1999) takes its polemical starting point from discussions of the problem of evil by analytic philosophers from the 1950s onwards, it has an underlying theological perspective which begins with Job (and shades of 4 Ezra), continues with Christology, and stretches forward to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. My medieval friends – Anselm, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham – reinforce and give philosophical interpretation to Jobs ‘size-gap’ between God and creatures. My youthful wrestlings with existentialist philosophers and neo-orthodox theologians lead me to locate the imago dei in human nature in its alleged capacity for meaning-making rather than its putative potential for moral virtuosity. The goal of reciprocal divine–human identification, so prominent in Francis of Assisi and Julian of Norwich, combines with Matthews Emmanuel-theme and Chalcedon to render the Christology; while the conditions of the possibility of defeating horrors constitute my rubric for interpreting credal commitments and adjusting traditional eschatologies. Throughout the book and my sequel Gifford lectures, I try to rivet attention on the category of horrendous evils because they disrupt conventional approaches to evil in philosophy and theology alike.

Evil and the God-Who-Does-Nothing-In-Particular

In his 1986 Bampton Lectures, Maurice Wiles recognises moral problems, about ‘the character of God’ among others, surrounding traditionally typical claims about divine action in the world. Many — to Wiles’s mind — theologically naive statements make God the direct and deliberate agent of things it would be immoral for us to do (for example, striking York Minster with lightning in retribution for the putative heresies of the Bishop of Durham; given the ability to benefit all, arbitrarily rescuing only some of equally deserving victims).1 The issue of how divine agency is related to ‘the confused pattern of evil and good in human history’2 is raised at a more general level by the problem of evil, which argues for the logical incompatibility of ‘God exists and is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good’ with ‘evils exist’, on the ground that an all-powerful being would be able to prevent or eliminate any and every evil, an omniscient being would know all about them, and a perfectly good being would want to prevent or eliminate them all if it could?

Julian of Norwich on the Tender Loving Care of Mother Jesus

In her book, Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich faces the problem of evil head-on. As a Christian, she maintains, (1) Nothing happens by luck of chance, but all is through the foresight and wisdom of God. (2) Therefore, God in fact does everything. (3) God is all-powerful, all-wise, and all-loving. (4) Therefore, everything that is done is well done.

Which Is It? Religious Pluralism or Global Theology?

Perhaps no one has been more insistent than John Hick that Anglo-American philosophers of religion face the facts: not only one but many ancient and culturally entrenched religions are practiced worldwide. Each has produced saints. Each has had adherents who promoted it as “the one true faith” and justified cruelty and oppression in the name of religion. Liberal that he is, Hick finds the degrading treatment of other human beings to be the acid test of what is absolutely intolerable. In many of his books, but quintessentially, in An Interpretation of Religion,1 Hick seeks to alleviate the practical problem by furnishing a theoretical framework that would make religious toleration reasonable. What liberal theologian, what liberal citizen would not welcome this ‘consciousness-raising’, the many constructive debates that Hick’s books have fostered, and the civil and religious policy changes that they have inspired?