The Puritans’ soul

Stanley Spencer - The Resurrection

It is not generally appreciated, I think, that the Puritans in general adopted Thomas Aquinas’s view (taken from Aristotle) that the soul is the form of the body; as such, the soul invests the body with vegetative, sensory and intellectual powers. A human being is a rational animal, therefore.  And having a rational soul, mankind are made in the image of God, unlike wasps and sheep. Man is not a soul that has a body, as modern followers of the Puritans tend to think, perhaps unwittingly following Descartes - or Plato - at this point. Rather, his soul infuses his body with life.

What's the difference? The vital difference is that for the Puritans the body was essential to the person. But what, you say, of the death of the body and the interval between death and resurrection? Well, the answer they give is a good example of the scholastics adaptation of  Aristotle in the interests of preserving Christian doctrine. Aristotle, of course, did not have a doctrine of the resurrection body. But Thomas Aquinas adapted Aristotle in thinking in terms of two essential incomplete substances, each matched to the other. So at death the human being loses an essential part, only to gain it again in the provision of the ‘spiritual body’ of I Corinthians 15. In this the body and soul are not accidentally united, but essentially so, though prised apart at death.  In the meantime, in the 'interval' between death and resurrection, the person is incomplete, an incomplete essential part. As Peter Geach put it, at death what survives is a ‘mental remnant’ of the person who died. At resurrection the lost essential substance, the body, is, by the power and goodness of God, regained by the soul. The human being is once again complete.

The Dutch Reformed Scholastic Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1656) worked this out in Thomistic terms, following him faithfully. Gisbertus Voetius drew from Aquinas, that the soul and body are incomplete substances which together form a substantial unity, the human being.…..and I believe the Puritan John Flavel thought like this, too, but adopted his language to the needs of his congregation and to their pastoral care. So here he is saying much the same as Voetius, but expressed in his quaint way to their needs.

We can not trace the way of the Spirit, or tell in what manner it was united with this clod of Earth. But it is enough that he who formed it, did also unite or marry it to the Body. This is clear, it came not by way of natural resultancy from the Body, but by way of inspiration from the Lord; not from the warm bosom of the Matter, but from the breath of its Maker.

The allusion is to Genesis 2.7

And here are other expressions of the same thing -

O the Soul and Body are strongly twisted and knit together in dear bands of intimate Union and Affection, and these Bands cannot be broken without much struggling: O ‘tis a hard thing for the Soul to bid the Body farewell, ‘tis a bitter parting, a doleful separation: Nothing is heard in that hour but the  most deep and emphatical Groans; I say, emphatical groans, the deep sense and meaning of which, the living are but little acquainted with…

Its desire of Re-union continuing still with it in its state of Separation,  speaks its love to the Body. As the soul parted with it in grief and sorrow, so it still retains even in glory an inclination to re-union, and waits for a day of re-espousals….The union of Soul and Body is natural, their separation is not. Pneumatologia, a Treatise of the Soul of Man, published posthumously (2^nd edn London, Printed by J.D. for Tho. Parkhust, 1698).

The point is that death is not simply the loss of the body, but it is unnatural, leaving gaping incompleteness in the life of the remaining soul. The disembodied soul is unnatural, incomplete at a fundamental level. And the resurrection is not simply an enjoyment of a heavenly body, but the return of my body to its natural situation, as the body working through this particular soul, this body  now in a glorified and Spirit-filled state.

Consider another Puritan passage. The author is writing of the way in which the soul, a spiritual entity, energises and animates the entire body

[A]s are all the actings and energies of the senses, and of the locomotive faculty, as also what belongs to the receiving and improving of nutriment. These are acts of life as life inseparable from it; and their end is, to preserve the union of the whole [the union of body and soul] between the quickening and quickened principles.  (2) There are such acts of life as proceed from the especial nature of this quickening principle. Such are all the elicit and imperate acts of our understandings and will; all acts that are voluntary, rational,  and peculiarly human.

There are some expressions of life emanating from the soul that are reflex and automatic, to do with eating, walking and growing, for example, which do not arise from particular volitions. But these are equally movings of the soul as are reasoning, making plans to do things, and doing them. These are expressions of ourselves that are brought about in a characteristically human way, by the operations of the understanding and the will.

And what of death? Death is or involves the separation of the soul from the body. The infusing of the body for all that it does, the whole range of actions, ceases. For it is a principle of such life only insofar as  it is united to the body.

As a consequence of these [ceasings], there is in the body an impotency for and an inaptitude unto all vital operations. Not only do all operations of life actually cease, but the body is no more able to effect them. There remains in it, indeed, “potentia obedientialis,” a “passive power” to receive life again, if communicated unto it by an external efficient cause.

He cites the resurrection of Lazarus as a case in point.

Who is this?  Certainly not a country parson. But John Owen, of course.

Owen is sometimes impatient with scholasticism, but here we see him (as an illustrative aside in his exposition of regeneration), in full cry as an unabashed scholastic, endorsing a central feature of scholastic anthropology. (Works, III 284-5)

We don’t think like that any more, like both Flavel and Owen did. The modern person who is ‘a follower of the Puritans’ (as we say)  follows them only selectively. Generalising, we think the body is one thing, and the soul another. And they are linked to form a unity, being detached at death and reattached at resurrection. So ‘I have a soul that can never die’ (as the Child’s Catechism teaches) and a body that can die, and will, for a time linked accidentally to the soul.  The typical ‘Puritan’ (the word can be used in various ways, of course), as we have seen, taught that a person is  more of a unity than this, and at death he or she is  fractured, becoming disabled and bereft in soul by the death of the body. As the bereft soul awaits the resurrection there are fewer things that it can do than it once did.  

By contrast, modern Puritan-followers if they think at all of the relation between body and soul, attribute less and less to the soul, and more and more to the body , including its brain, a kind of super-computer. The 'soul' has become a deep-down 'inner' self, a person's religious centre,  which bears a person's eternal destiny, for good or ill. The body is everything else about a person, including especially his brain and nervous system. I'm inclined to think that both Johns, Flavel and Owen, would silently shake their heads at this reconfiguration of the ancient position.  But at present, of course. neither has a head to shake.

Compatibilism and two-way contingency.

‘For no-one is known to another so intimately as he is known to himself, and yet no-one is so well known even to himself that he can be sure as to his own conduct on the morrow.’ (Augustine)  

This is a brief post on contingency, as a follow up on ‘Who’s the magician?’. ‘Contingency’ is a term that has various meanings. Here I shall disregard its most general meaning, that of being in some way dependent on someone or some thing, as in “The physical world is contingent/dependent upon the activity of God”. Of course it does not follow that what brings about the physical world,  must itself be contingent. God’s existence is not contingent, nor dependent on another, and yet God’s action may be. That’s another question, or rather, set of questions.

That leaves two other senses of contingent; first, two-way contingency or alternativity as we may call it, and epistemic contingency, as when the unexpected, the fortuitous or the surprising occurs. It is these two senses that I wish to reflect on a little. First, two-way contingency.

Two-way contingency

Here we are chiefly if not exclusively concerned with contingency and intelligent action, with human contingency. All I will say about divine agency here is that many postulate that two-way contingency is characteristic of divine activity even if human action is never a case of two-way contingency, and the converse of this is also possible.

Two-way contingency is  what free human agents possess, according to libertarians or indeterminists or incompatibilists, and that such contingency is necessary and sufficient for the possession of ‘free will’. This indeterminism entails the following: that If A freely chooses to do X then, given that the world  in all respects, the inner and outer worlds of A,  were identical to that in which X was chosen, not-X could have been chosen, or Y could have been chosen, rather than the X that was in fact chosen by A. Hence this  is two-way contingency, or alternativity. To be more precise, the two-way contingency is two way simultaneous contingency. This idea of simultaneous two-way contingency goes back to at least to the Jesuits of the 16th century. As Molina put it  ‘with all the prerequisites for acting posited, [one] is able to act and able not to act, or is able to do one thing in such a way that it is able to do some contrary thing’. The Arminians borrowed it. (Where did Molina get it from? I'll leave that question for homework.)

I shall not rehearse the arguments pro and con of this position. I am not a libertarian but a compatibilist, for theological and philosophical reasons. Though baldly stated, compatibilism may be consistent with all manner of different determinisms. Again, I do not wish to select a preferred determinism or determinisms. But whichever one selects rules out two-way contingency.

Epistemic contingency

The second view of contingency is  epistemic. It arises for the agent in cases of his ignorance; and it is a characteristic of human action.  If it is not a necessary feature of it, then it is most certainly a deeply embedded fact about it, as Augustine reminds us. Certainly it is a necessary condition of choice.  Stressing the importance of states of such contingency is significant, for it identifies a central feature of human life, and not a freak case. It underlines a kind of two-way contingency that falls short of the metaphysical contingency beloved of the libertarians.

Epistemic contingency can never be characteristic of God who has no states of ignorance, it being the case that all things are naked and open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do. However, I shall suggest that it is a vital ingredient in human action, both from the point of the creatureliness of it, and of the freedom of it. I don’t suppose this to require much argument. At this point I do not think that the language of determinism and even of ‘compatibilism’ serves this view, the denial of the crucial feature of libertarianism mentioned earlier, vey well.  ‘Determinism’ and ‘compatibilism’ unglossed suggest to many people some relentless monocausalism, whereas our lives are full of known unknowns both trivial and weighty, and the lines of causal influence are from being monocausal, like a kettle boiling but criss cross in complex ways. Jonathan Edwards offered this against this monocausal misunderstanding:

But the dependence and connection between acts of volition or choice, and their causes, according to established laws, is not so sensible and obvious. And we observe that choice is as it were a new principle of motion and action, different from that established law and order in things which is most obvious, that is seen especially in both corporeal and sensible things; and also that choice often interposes, interrupts and alters the chain of events in these external objects, and causes ‘em to proceed otherwise than they would do, if let alone, and left to go on according to the laws of motion among themselves.

(Freedom of the Will, Yale Edn, 158-9)

Exceptionless chains of events are often invisible,  because our determined choices interrupt them, stop certain of them, changing their character,   sending them in a different direction.

So Joe has a new yellow tie. Is he going to wear it when his Aunt calls this morning? He cannot make up his mind what to do, even though it’s already 10 am. Then at 10.10 he remembers that the new tie is in fact a gift from his Aunt. That settles it. At 10.10 he decides to wear his new yellow tie. Up until 10.10am Joe has been in a state of two-way epistemic contingency with regard to what he shall wear around his neck. But he is brought out of it, made decisive, by a sudden memory. That occurrence was not chosen by Joe, it suddenly came to him. But it gives him a good reason, perhaps the best reason, to choose to wear the tie. (This business is not mechanical in any literal sense, but Joe immediately recognises in the propositional content of the memory a good reason to wear the tie.)

This is a characteristic feature of the human condition; not knowing what to do. Mercifully, not all occasions that call for action are like this,  but sufficient of them are to make this a characteristic feature of human agency. Necessarily, we choose when we don’t already know what to do. They have some additional features that are worth pointing out.

Intrinsic to Joe’s situation is the belief that he could choose to wear his new yellow tie or some other tie, or be tieless. Programmed or drugged or drilled or amnesiac individuals, or someone who has rigid rules of dress, do not – or shall we say, to avoid complications - may not. Nor do sheep or squirrels, much less bees and ants. To humans some of the future at least is open.  And this is intrinsic to living a life. To know the future would be already to have made up one’s mind, or to have had one’s mind made up. If Joe knew at 10 am that he would wear his new tie to please his Aunt, then his mind is already made up., and the future in respect of tie wearing, closed. The future is open in that with respect to some features of it his mind is not already made up until he remembers, or some other factor occurs. 

This epistemic alternativity, I repeat, is not a way of trying to smuggle in metaphysical alternativity, which I personally do not hanker after. But it nevertheless carries with it the belief that the future world is shaped for alternative decisions. The future comes to us, day by day, as calling for choices. Of course, one can adopt a policy of shutting down alternatives. We develop habits, over time, our characters develop contours which make certain kinds of indecision infrequent or impossible. Hume was impressed by such features. Such habits apart, we carry with us the belief that having done A in some situation, we could have done B instead. We have this as a well-formed belief. We could have decided thus, because we have decided thus on other similar occasions, and because there are people sufficiently like us who choose the way we have rejected  on  this occasion. Occasionally we choose knowingly against the odds, and sometimes out of pure whimsy. So though we do not face the open universe of the Open Theist, say, we face a universe that resembles it, and has features in common with it. Though not, to repeat, a future that is metaphysically open, thank God.

Who's the magician?

The aim of this short piece is to emphasise a point about the conflict between libertarianism and compatibilism, that there cannot be a plausible ‘argument from experience’ for libertarianism.

Think about the following case, which is meant to favour libertarianism, from a leading proponent,  the libertarian Robert Kane. He is countering the frequently-made criticism made by compatibilists that such libertarianism is indistinguishable from randomness or whimsy.  He supposes a woman driving to work who meets an accident and realizes that if she stops she will be late, but if she does stop she may nevertheless be able to lessen the distress of those involved in the accident. Kane says

[U]nder such conditions, the choice the woman might make either way will not be “inadvertent,” “accidental,” “capricious,” or “merely random” (as critics of indeterminism say) because the choice will be willed by the woman either way when it is made, and it will be done for reasons either way—reasons that she then and there endorses…So when she decides, she endorses one set of competing reasons over the other as the one she will act on. But willing what you do in this way, and doing it for reasons that you endorse, are conditions usually required to say something is done “on purpose,” rather than accidentally, capriciously, or merely by chance. (Robert Kane,  ‘Libertarianism’, in J.M. Fischer, R. Kane, D. Pereboom, & M. Vargas (eds) Four Views on Free Will (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing), 5-43. (29, emphases in the original)

Some of this is reminiscent of the late C. A. Campbell’s view of contra-causal freedom, a free act being one that is done from duty and against the causal flow of desire. I won’t go into that view here.  

When the situation is described, as Kane or Campbell describe it,  as one having reasons or conditions, the compatibilist freely claps his hands with glee.  It is obvious that the situation as described by Kane is easily incorporated into compatibilism. For compatibilism has no difficulty at all in allowing for conflicts in the self between one set of desires and another, or of a stalemate between the two settled in time by the preference for one of them; of willing a course of action as a result of settling the claims of competing reasons; of sudden decisions following periods of hesitancy and even of decisions, which when made, surprise the agent. All these are what we may call the phenomena of conscious choice, and cannot be used as an argument in favour of libertarianism. They  are equally open to the compatibilist and the libertarian; when they are described as Kane describes them above then this is obvious. 

But there is more. Libertarianism has the following that it has because it is claimed that it provides a clear criterion of human responsibility, a necessary and sufficient condition of it. But the usefulness of this criterion for that purpose, establishing that a person is morally responsible and what he is responsible for, is in fact impossibly difficult. For such a choice is weird, an instance of human beings having the power in a situation in which A is preferred to choose B instead of A, all other states of affairs except the choice being exactly unchanged. Claims of this type are empirically unverifiable and require us to believe that each of us possesses and exercises such a power when not the least piece of empirical evidence is produced for it. Such evidence as there is is consistent with compatibilism. Can you imagine this criterion of a free choice working in a court of law, or in the family?

This is to underline the point that indeterminism either lapses into an account easily dealt with by the compatibilist, or it is not an empirical theory, verified by an appeal to human experience, but postulates an indeterministic choice a priori, as a metaphysical postulate. But this way of putting things is not equitable.

Jerry Walls (who is not a friend of compatibilism any more than he is a friend of Calvinism) has observed:

Compatibilists, moreover, like Pharoah’s magicians, seem capable of duplicating in their own terms every power and ability that libertarians claim their view distinctively grants to agents. (Jerry Walls ‘Why No Classical Theist, Let Alone Orthodox Christian, Should Ever Be a Compatibilist’, PhilosophIa Christi, 13, no.1 (2011), 75-104. 

The presumption that libertarianism is the default position, so common in current philosophy of religion, is clearly visible here. Compatibilists are said to seem to be able (by their dark arts) to  duplicate the supposed clear-as-daylight alternativity already in place, the status quo, like the  hard-hearted  magicians of Pharoah duplicated Moses's miracles. Presumably, indeterminists are assumed to be friends of the people of God,  like God-fearing Moses.

So I agree with the general point that Walls makes, except that it is back to front. Indeterminists are the hard-hearted Egyptian magicians. It is not that compatibilism does any duplicating, but that libertarianism duplicates with its claims that we that we all have a certain unique power, the power of contrary choice. The trouble with this is that the gift of such choice is so well-wrapped that it is impossible to get at it, and the gift employed and enjoyed. We can never identify an alternative of libertarian choice. Philosophers can define it and some of them hanker after it, but we can never isolate it in practice. The situation is reminiscent of the famous passage in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception… (Bk I,4,6 of A Treatise of Human Nature.)

‘I can never catch myself…without a perception’, Hume said. In the same sense the libertarian says ‘I can never identify textbook alternativity,  without there be a reason for choosing one alternative or the other’. Libertarians cannot give an example of a libertarian choice without falling into compatibilism. It is not that we all know when we experience and use such an indeterminate choice, and then the pesky compatibilists come along and mock it up. The shoe is on the other foot.

Moreover, the operation of a divine decree such as Calvinists maintain does not take away such powers of choice with respect to creaturely causes, because the decreer also decrees that the end should come about by the person making up his mind himself in a state of ignorance as to what his choice may turn out to be.

It may surprise some than no less authentic a Calvinist than John Calvin himself says this:

Hence as to future time, because the issue of all things is hidden from us, each ought to so apply himself to his office, as though nothing were determined about any part. (Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, (1552) trans. J.K.S. Reid, (London, James Clarke & Co. 1961, 171)