Re: "On the other side it repels theories like idealism or dualism, which either treat matter as illusory (only ideas really exist!), or else draw wide separation between matter and soul. (Cartesian dualism, for instance, treats the human body like a kind of ship which the soul can fly like a pilot. Hylomorphism rejects that. You are your body, but not just a body. You are, in a sense, a soul made flesh.)"
So it seems like you're positioning hylomorphism as the "Christian" philosophy here, and Cartesian dualism as... not.
I don't see how you can regard Cartesian dualism as less Christian-compatible than Aristotelian-style hylomorphism. "You are your body?" Then how can we say that the soul is immortal when the body dies? I assume the Aristotelians have some answer to that; far from pre-condemning it, I assume it's a bona fide faithful Christian opinion and all that, though I don't understand it. But it seems like a lot of things become problematic when you adopt this form of hylomorphism that have never seemed problematic for me, because I've always been more of a Cartesian dualist since that's always what the word "soul" seemed to mean. And it always seemed obvious to me that the real you is the part of you that thinks, the mind, the soul, and yes, your body is more like a vehicle than like your *self.* It's inconceivable to exist without your mind or soul; it's very conceivable to exist without your body.
Were the ancient Church fathers really "hylomorphist" in any articulate way?
So this is fascinating, but the big question I have to ask is: what does this have to do with Christianity?
Christian compatible, yes. But "Christian philosophy?" It happened that these ideas were worked out by certain Christians, particularly Thomas Aquinas. But why should we think that's anything more than historical accident? Why not speak of Christian physics because Newton was a Christian, or Christian chemistry?
What would clarify that this is actually *Christian* philosophy, in some more or less essential way, would be a rigorous derivation of these ideas from scripture or from early church councils that nearly all modern Christians accept as authoritative. I wouldn't even know where to begin to argue this from scripture.
That said, I think there is a roundabout way of arguing for something like hylomorphism (though it's a term I've never heard before this chat) as being especially Christian, by negation. If you're seeking a coherent worldview, you have to somehow unify a lot of disparate things. Christianity offers one way to do that, which doesn't pin down a lot of philosophical pre-commitments. Without Christianity, the search for coherence tends to drill down into ontology and epistemology end in reductionism. Let that stand as a placeholder for a longer argument.
As it is, though, I think the weakness of this piece is that you assert that you're describing Christian philosophy, but the philosophical arguments you put forward, while plausible, seem crazily disconnected from anything that any normal person recognizes as specially Christian.
And the dog example makes the problem sharpest, by going out on an uncomfortable limb. Some dogs don't fetch sticks. That's not actually bad. We could quibble over the specific traits of a "good" dog, but that seems rather silly, gratuitously arbitrary, and symptomatic of a philosophical error that makes a high stakes philosophical question out of something that should be subjective and innocuous. The apple tree example works better, but only because hylomorphism is clearly standing in for sociobiology. An apple tree that doesn't bear fruit is defective because its kind could not persist in the world. There's no union of form and matter that needs to be postulated to explain this, or to give a warrant for its extension beyond life.
I think there is a need for something like hylomorphism in order to address the problem of induction. Aristotelian telos conflates a philosophical move that is ultimately needed to skepticism with a broad generalization taken from biology that modern evolution fully supplants.
Of course, that's a much larger topic. But my critique here, again, is the total lack of any justification for the claim that these philosophical moves are specifically Christian.
As a matter of intellectual history, we can clearly see a progression from the Patristic to the Scholastic eras of brilliant Christian thinkers building a philosophical tradition in which they mapped out a deeply Christian worldview in a harmonious way. I'm not here undertaking to argue that every single piece of it is obligatory for every Christian to believe, but this entire edifice is *Christian philosophy.* The Christian philosophical tradition. And it was absolutely transformative to the West (and by extension the world) no matter what you think of it.It would be very silly I think to object to calling it that, though I'm happy to acknowledge that what I'm saying right now isn't meant as a catechism, nor does one have to be Christian to buy into it. Certainly a non-Christian could accept both hylomorphism and natural law.
My objective right now is to explain its interior logic. The logic of Christian philosophy. I think the benefits of buying into that tradition are massive, especially for a Christian, but I'm not hunting heretics right now, merely trying to show how that philosophical tradition cultivated such magisterial reach.
By the way, this is another instance of your take being more Catholic leaning than you may realize, and thereby jeopardizing a larger thesis that has to be pan-Christian to be plausible.
The Orthodox don't lionize Aristotle at all. Sometimes they see the Catholic embrace of Aristotle as the first step down a wrong path that led to modernism. And it is odd that the most vocal champions today of a philosopher who was definitely pagan our conservative Catholics. Scholasticism, by this account, is the first stage of surrender through modern rationalism. That's certainly not a perspective that I buy into fully. But my sense is that the entire Orthodox world largely rejects Western medieval scholasticism while embracing the patristics.
Protestants, meanwhile, also tend to reject scholasticism as part of the corruption of the medieval church against which they rebel. A philosopher like John Locke is far more influential in the Protestant world than Thomas Aquinas. And of course, John Locke was a Christian, which Aristotle was not, so prime facie he's a more promising founder for Christian philosophy to hitch its star to.
John Locke certainly believed in natural law. I'm not sure whether he believed in hylomorphism. I guess my sense is that he never engaged with it directly, but the character of his thought would make it difficult to take that on board.
I think I have the landscape pretty well in view. In the book proposal I take readers through the Patristic and Scholastic periods and then give respectful hearing to two critics, one Protestant and one Orthodox, who want to walk back aspects of the Christian philosophical tradition as misguided and distortions of the original Christian message. (Lossky and Kierkegaard were my chosen representatives.) Which is really what it amounts to in a historical sense.
Scholasticism was magisterial; its influence on the trajectory of Western history (especially philosophy) was immense. You might have principled reasons for embracing, say, Christendom’s political-theoretical innovations or social innovations (the religious orders and canon law and so forth) and taking a more rejectionist view of the Western philosophical tradition, but Scholasticism is not *in principle* any more specifically Catholic than the Two Swords theorizing or the Knights of St John. Nothing about my approach demands that everyone affirm everything in the Christian story. I’ve already explicitly made clear that I am *not* arguing that “if you don’t believe in hylomorphism or natural law you’re not a Christian.” I am characterizing a tradition. Necessarily that involves speaking in generalities, and it’s also inevitable that various people will at various points object that “I don’t feel fully included in this characterization.” Again, fine, I’m happy to explore differences, and since I am for the most part conducting the entire project on the level of natural reason, it’s not necessary to treat every deviation from the tradition as a matter of heresy. I myself have already made an argument that a body of theory *not* distinctively Christian in origin (classical liberalism) can offer something meaningful that the Aristotelian position misses (or at least doesn’t handle particularly well)! So that’s fine, but, the broader thesis calls for an illustration of Christianity’s breadth and explanatory power, and the concepts I’ve presented here do, I believe, help to explain that.
This ultimately is my answer to people like Lossky and Kierkegaard, btw. They’re doing some interesting things, sure. Keep doing it! I don’t want Christianity to stop with Scholasticism! But their grumpiness about the medievals is a bit of an eyeroll to me. I think they’re resting in the shade of the Scholastics far more than they realize or want to acknowledge. It’s easy to be comfortably cranky about Aristotle and modernism etc etc when you’re already enjoying all the stabilizing cultural-historical benefits of the spectacular Scholastic success bridging faith and reason. Some nice armchair quarterbacking is always fun. But the bridging of faith and reason is in fact an immense project, and extremely important, for enabling the faith to answer questions and respond to new circumstances without either losing integrity or tacking into fundamentalism. Scholasticism as I see it is neither more nor less distinctively “Catholic” than, say, Benedictine monasteries or the military orders or gothic architecture. It was all “Catholic” and I do at the end of the day see the Catholic Church as the most concrete embodiment of the Universal Church, the pillar of Christendom. But I’m not stingily exclusionary. I’m willing to share all the things, to the extent that others want to. When they don’t want to, okay, we can discuss differences genially, that’s fine too. But I can’t reasonably promise to articulate a view that explains Christianity’s adaptability and success *and also* guarantees that no Christian ever wishes to dissent. That’s an unreasonable target.
Very wise words, and I tend to agree. But I guess I still have a bee on my bonnet about "you are your body." I've never thought that; I was always more of a Cartesian dualist, or CS Lewis with his idea of husband as "amphibians"; and if "you are your body" then how can you still exist when your body is dead? The soul is not a material entity, that's why it outlives the body. The idea of the body as a vehicle and the soul as a pilot seems to fit pretty well, better than "you are your body."
Ah right, I never addressed the dualism point. I was wondering whether to get into it in one of next week’s essays; still sort of figuring the shape those.
Substance dualism is still a thing. There are contemporary philosophers of religion, mainly Protestant, who take that line. (Orthodox philosophers like Lossky, if I understand them rightly, think hylomorphism is bad and dualism worse. It seems to me they don’t really want to do metaphysics in a way fully accessible to natural reason; it trends rapidly into mysticism for them.) You have identified what I think most dualists do see as a major win for their view: it handles the problem of death and the separation of the body quite neatly. The Thomists basically say that the soul survives death but in a somewhat diminished or handicapped form; it needs to be reunified with the body to be whole again. I guess you could reply, “OK, but if it survives at all then separation is surely *possible* and is your corpse *still you* to the same extent as the soul is?” My inclination is to say, maybe not as much, but yes, your corpse really is “dead you” at least in a way. These are hard questions though, I acknowledge, which dualism perhaps makes easier.
But at a real cost. Because if you see the physical world as fundamentally mechanistic then you inherit a lot of the problems of materialism, even if you do allow the world of soul/spirit/ideas to “sneak in” in various places. Problems of being and becoming, and maintaining the identity of non-humans. Problems of normativity and meaning. Basically there are just a lot of hard metaphysical problems that hylomorphism solves really gracefully and well, and trying to recapture them by gluing a “spirit world” to your mechanistic universe at discrete connection-points is a much clunkier and less satisfying alternative. But maybe we can get into this more sometime soon.
By the way, Locke is interesting to place here, because:
1. He's both an epistemologist & metaphysician AND a moral and political philosopher.
2. In the epistemologist & metaphysician role, he's far lengthier, subtler, and more original-- and wrong. He starts down a path that leads to Hume. And a dash of hylomorphism, or some other way of taking on board the reality of forms and ideas, may be exactly the antidote he needs. I still appreciate his rigor but he needs correction.
3. As a moral philosopher, he's very beneficent and useful and right, but much less rigorous and original. He's a believer in natural law, in a manner that he thinks is just Christian common sense, but which I think owes much to medieval scholasticism, more than he understood or liked to acknowledge, partly because it was mediated through institutions. English institutions reflected centuries of scholastic influence, and Locke's theory borrowed from practice.
Re: "On the other side it repels theories like idealism or dualism, which either treat matter as illusory (only ideas really exist!), or else draw wide separation between matter and soul. (Cartesian dualism, for instance, treats the human body like a kind of ship which the soul can fly like a pilot. Hylomorphism rejects that. You are your body, but not just a body. You are, in a sense, a soul made flesh.)"
So it seems like you're positioning hylomorphism as the "Christian" philosophy here, and Cartesian dualism as... not.
I don't see how you can regard Cartesian dualism as less Christian-compatible than Aristotelian-style hylomorphism. "You are your body?" Then how can we say that the soul is immortal when the body dies? I assume the Aristotelians have some answer to that; far from pre-condemning it, I assume it's a bona fide faithful Christian opinion and all that, though I don't understand it. But it seems like a lot of things become problematic when you adopt this form of hylomorphism that have never seemed problematic for me, because I've always been more of a Cartesian dualist since that's always what the word "soul" seemed to mean. And it always seemed obvious to me that the real you is the part of you that thinks, the mind, the soul, and yes, your body is more like a vehicle than like your *self.* It's inconceivable to exist without your mind or soul; it's very conceivable to exist without your body.
Were the ancient Church fathers really "hylomorphist" in any articulate way?
So this is fascinating, but the big question I have to ask is: what does this have to do with Christianity?
Christian compatible, yes. But "Christian philosophy?" It happened that these ideas were worked out by certain Christians, particularly Thomas Aquinas. But why should we think that's anything more than historical accident? Why not speak of Christian physics because Newton was a Christian, or Christian chemistry?
What would clarify that this is actually *Christian* philosophy, in some more or less essential way, would be a rigorous derivation of these ideas from scripture or from early church councils that nearly all modern Christians accept as authoritative. I wouldn't even know where to begin to argue this from scripture.
That said, I think there is a roundabout way of arguing for something like hylomorphism (though it's a term I've never heard before this chat) as being especially Christian, by negation. If you're seeking a coherent worldview, you have to somehow unify a lot of disparate things. Christianity offers one way to do that, which doesn't pin down a lot of philosophical pre-commitments. Without Christianity, the search for coherence tends to drill down into ontology and epistemology end in reductionism. Let that stand as a placeholder for a longer argument.
As it is, though, I think the weakness of this piece is that you assert that you're describing Christian philosophy, but the philosophical arguments you put forward, while plausible, seem crazily disconnected from anything that any normal person recognizes as specially Christian.
And the dog example makes the problem sharpest, by going out on an uncomfortable limb. Some dogs don't fetch sticks. That's not actually bad. We could quibble over the specific traits of a "good" dog, but that seems rather silly, gratuitously arbitrary, and symptomatic of a philosophical error that makes a high stakes philosophical question out of something that should be subjective and innocuous. The apple tree example works better, but only because hylomorphism is clearly standing in for sociobiology. An apple tree that doesn't bear fruit is defective because its kind could not persist in the world. There's no union of form and matter that needs to be postulated to explain this, or to give a warrant for its extension beyond life.
I think there is a need for something like hylomorphism in order to address the problem of induction. Aristotelian telos conflates a philosophical move that is ultimately needed to skepticism with a broad generalization taken from biology that modern evolution fully supplants.
Of course, that's a much larger topic. But my critique here, again, is the total lack of any justification for the claim that these philosophical moves are specifically Christian.
As a matter of intellectual history, we can clearly see a progression from the Patristic to the Scholastic eras of brilliant Christian thinkers building a philosophical tradition in which they mapped out a deeply Christian worldview in a harmonious way. I'm not here undertaking to argue that every single piece of it is obligatory for every Christian to believe, but this entire edifice is *Christian philosophy.* The Christian philosophical tradition. And it was absolutely transformative to the West (and by extension the world) no matter what you think of it.It would be very silly I think to object to calling it that, though I'm happy to acknowledge that what I'm saying right now isn't meant as a catechism, nor does one have to be Christian to buy into it. Certainly a non-Christian could accept both hylomorphism and natural law.
My objective right now is to explain its interior logic. The logic of Christian philosophy. I think the benefits of buying into that tradition are massive, especially for a Christian, but I'm not hunting heretics right now, merely trying to show how that philosophical tradition cultivated such magisterial reach.
By the way, this is another instance of your take being more Catholic leaning than you may realize, and thereby jeopardizing a larger thesis that has to be pan-Christian to be plausible.
The Orthodox don't lionize Aristotle at all. Sometimes they see the Catholic embrace of Aristotle as the first step down a wrong path that led to modernism. And it is odd that the most vocal champions today of a philosopher who was definitely pagan our conservative Catholics. Scholasticism, by this account, is the first stage of surrender through modern rationalism. That's certainly not a perspective that I buy into fully. But my sense is that the entire Orthodox world largely rejects Western medieval scholasticism while embracing the patristics.
Protestants, meanwhile, also tend to reject scholasticism as part of the corruption of the medieval church against which they rebel. A philosopher like John Locke is far more influential in the Protestant world than Thomas Aquinas. And of course, John Locke was a Christian, which Aristotle was not, so prime facie he's a more promising founder for Christian philosophy to hitch its star to.
John Locke certainly believed in natural law. I'm not sure whether he believed in hylomorphism. I guess my sense is that he never engaged with it directly, but the character of his thought would make it difficult to take that on board.
“More Catholic leaning than you realize.”
I think I have the landscape pretty well in view. In the book proposal I take readers through the Patristic and Scholastic periods and then give respectful hearing to two critics, one Protestant and one Orthodox, who want to walk back aspects of the Christian philosophical tradition as misguided and distortions of the original Christian message. (Lossky and Kierkegaard were my chosen representatives.) Which is really what it amounts to in a historical sense.
Scholasticism was magisterial; its influence on the trajectory of Western history (especially philosophy) was immense. You might have principled reasons for embracing, say, Christendom’s political-theoretical innovations or social innovations (the religious orders and canon law and so forth) and taking a more rejectionist view of the Western philosophical tradition, but Scholasticism is not *in principle* any more specifically Catholic than the Two Swords theorizing or the Knights of St John. Nothing about my approach demands that everyone affirm everything in the Christian story. I’ve already explicitly made clear that I am *not* arguing that “if you don’t believe in hylomorphism or natural law you’re not a Christian.” I am characterizing a tradition. Necessarily that involves speaking in generalities, and it’s also inevitable that various people will at various points object that “I don’t feel fully included in this characterization.” Again, fine, I’m happy to explore differences, and since I am for the most part conducting the entire project on the level of natural reason, it’s not necessary to treat every deviation from the tradition as a matter of heresy. I myself have already made an argument that a body of theory *not* distinctively Christian in origin (classical liberalism) can offer something meaningful that the Aristotelian position misses (or at least doesn’t handle particularly well)! So that’s fine, but, the broader thesis calls for an illustration of Christianity’s breadth and explanatory power, and the concepts I’ve presented here do, I believe, help to explain that.
This ultimately is my answer to people like Lossky and Kierkegaard, btw. They’re doing some interesting things, sure. Keep doing it! I don’t want Christianity to stop with Scholasticism! But their grumpiness about the medievals is a bit of an eyeroll to me. I think they’re resting in the shade of the Scholastics far more than they realize or want to acknowledge. It’s easy to be comfortably cranky about Aristotle and modernism etc etc when you’re already enjoying all the stabilizing cultural-historical benefits of the spectacular Scholastic success bridging faith and reason. Some nice armchair quarterbacking is always fun. But the bridging of faith and reason is in fact an immense project, and extremely important, for enabling the faith to answer questions and respond to new circumstances without either losing integrity or tacking into fundamentalism. Scholasticism as I see it is neither more nor less distinctively “Catholic” than, say, Benedictine monasteries or the military orders or gothic architecture. It was all “Catholic” and I do at the end of the day see the Catholic Church as the most concrete embodiment of the Universal Church, the pillar of Christendom. But I’m not stingily exclusionary. I’m willing to share all the things, to the extent that others want to. When they don’t want to, okay, we can discuss differences genially, that’s fine too. But I can’t reasonably promise to articulate a view that explains Christianity’s adaptability and success *and also* guarantees that no Christian ever wishes to dissent. That’s an unreasonable target.
Very wise words, and I tend to agree. But I guess I still have a bee on my bonnet about "you are your body." I've never thought that; I was always more of a Cartesian dualist, or CS Lewis with his idea of husband as "amphibians"; and if "you are your body" then how can you still exist when your body is dead? The soul is not a material entity, that's why it outlives the body. The idea of the body as a vehicle and the soul as a pilot seems to fit pretty well, better than "you are your body."
Ah right, I never addressed the dualism point. I was wondering whether to get into it in one of next week’s essays; still sort of figuring the shape those.
Substance dualism is still a thing. There are contemporary philosophers of religion, mainly Protestant, who take that line. (Orthodox philosophers like Lossky, if I understand them rightly, think hylomorphism is bad and dualism worse. It seems to me they don’t really want to do metaphysics in a way fully accessible to natural reason; it trends rapidly into mysticism for them.) You have identified what I think most dualists do see as a major win for their view: it handles the problem of death and the separation of the body quite neatly. The Thomists basically say that the soul survives death but in a somewhat diminished or handicapped form; it needs to be reunified with the body to be whole again. I guess you could reply, “OK, but if it survives at all then separation is surely *possible* and is your corpse *still you* to the same extent as the soul is?” My inclination is to say, maybe not as much, but yes, your corpse really is “dead you” at least in a way. These are hard questions though, I acknowledge, which dualism perhaps makes easier.
But at a real cost. Because if you see the physical world as fundamentally mechanistic then you inherit a lot of the problems of materialism, even if you do allow the world of soul/spirit/ideas to “sneak in” in various places. Problems of being and becoming, and maintaining the identity of non-humans. Problems of normativity and meaning. Basically there are just a lot of hard metaphysical problems that hylomorphism solves really gracefully and well, and trying to recapture them by gluing a “spirit world” to your mechanistic universe at discrete connection-points is a much clunkier and less satisfying alternative. But maybe we can get into this more sometime soon.
By the way, Locke is interesting to place here, because:
1. He's both an epistemologist & metaphysician AND a moral and political philosopher.
2. In the epistemologist & metaphysician role, he's far lengthier, subtler, and more original-- and wrong. He starts down a path that leads to Hume. And a dash of hylomorphism, or some other way of taking on board the reality of forms and ideas, may be exactly the antidote he needs. I still appreciate his rigor but he needs correction.
3. As a moral philosopher, he's very beneficent and useful and right, but much less rigorous and original. He's a believer in natural law, in a manner that he thinks is just Christian common sense, but which I think owes much to medieval scholasticism, more than he understood or liked to acknowledge, partly because it was mediated through institutions. English institutions reflected centuries of scholastic influence, and Locke's theory borrowed from practice.