Edward Feser is a United States philosopher who is well-known for his work promoting the Aristotelian-Thomistic alternative to modern philosophy. It’s good work; Feser is a professional philosopher who writes well and enjoys teaching. Challenging false philosophies at this level and engaging in debate with those who promote them is surely a great achievement and one could only applaud such a vocation.
The title of this blog makes it clear that there are problems with the ideas being promoted. Nothing could be more Thomist than the Five Ways and full marks to Dr. Feser for defending them so well. However there is so much else that comes with his Thomism that is personal, extraneous to Thomism and opposed to Thomism that this blog with its self-explanatory heading has been necessary.
The aim is not personal attack or denigration. Doc angelic doesn’t know Edward Feser and can only assume him to be an exemplary Catholic. Likewise he makes no pretensions to being a philosopher. But he is a Catholic, aware that the ideas of Dr. Feser are being promoted among Catholics without the slightest hint of how radically they depart from traditional Thomistic views in many ways. The ideas are so bizarre that as more learned men are too busy or good-humoured or distracted to do anything, those less learned and more bad-tempered must step in. Let’s look at some of his ideas.
I Big Problems with a Personal God.
We live in an age where the main anti-religious tendency is the denial of a personal God, which comes about for all sorts of reasons – but the result is immediate: God is reduced to some kind of ”force”, good of course, why not – but something that has almost no effect on the way people behave. It is the death of religion.
However it now seems that the Church and the world is besieged by ”theistic personalism”. In a post on his blog concerning William Craig, Edward Feser’s concerns are far from Thomist. While Craig’s view is mistaken, it is surely enough to point out why. Instead, ”Thomists” are marshalled into a ”classical theism” versus ”theistic personalism” war without end. The terminology is misleading. Feser himself admits that the term theistic personalism seems to have been invented a few years ago. Of course Thomists can and do engage in debates that may not have been news when St. Thomas was alive but presumably they should do so using his ideas and not contradicting them.
In his post, Feser displays his discomfort with the term personal God. It was unpleasant to see the use of the ”God is not a (one)person because there are three persons in the Trinity” argument. Yes of course, but how does the Trinity diminish personality? As he admits, personality used of God is done analogically (Craig tended not to see this entirely) just as causality is also analogical when applied to God.
It goes against the emphasis which Thomas Aquinas gives to a personal God, affirming that not only is He personal, but the perfection of personality. It isn’t necessary to provide quotes and links here to the Summa but it can be done many times over. St. Thomas never limited himself to the God that Aristotle had been able to sense, who of course was famously lacking in personality. He always defended the God of revelation, the God of Abraham, God as He showed Himself to be. I’m not sure who these ”classical theists” are who dislike the term personal God, but if you exclude the Catholics, Muslims, Jews etc there won’t be many ”theists” of any kind left.
It’s the difference between saying that a mother is something that gives birth to you or saying, here is your mother. Religion is not knowing that God exists, it’s a relation of worship and love. It is truly bizarre to see this distaste for the personality of God when the term has been used from earliest times in the Church in definitions of the Faith and in the liturgy. It’s time for Dr Feser to enthusiastically use the term personal God in the positive light which the Church and St. Thomas always gave to it.
II Strange ideas on Original Sin.
From an unanswered comment on Edward Feser’s blog: ”In the Modern Biology and Original Sin post on this blog we read that the “…penalty of original sin was a privation, not a positive harm inflicted on human beings but rather the absence of a benefit they never had a right or strict need for in the first place”… “The penalty was the loss of the supernatural gifts they had been given and that their descendants would have been given, and a fall back into their merely natural state, with all its limitations”… “This is the situation Adam, Eve, and their descendants would have been in had God left the human race in its purely natural state”.
However nowhere does St. Thomas Aquinas seem to refer to the consequences of original sin as non-positive damage. Instead he uses the terms wounding, corruption etc. St. Thomas terms it an habitus. There is also something very strange about the idea that Adam and his descendants might “fall back” into or “be left in” their merely natural state, as if this state – which has always been called man after the fall, could have existed chronologically before the fall at some stage. But man was created in the state of justice. Is there something missing here?
This section of the Summa seems at odds with the post: http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/sum222.htm :
“Whether weakness, ignorance, malice and concupiscence are suitably reckoned as the wounds of nature consequent upon sin?” His reply “…all the powers of the soul are left, as it were, destitute of their proper order, whereby they are naturally directed to virtue; which destitution is called a wounding of nature” … “Accordingly these are the four wounds inflicted on the whole of human nature as a result of our first parent’s sin.”
On whether the benefits of original justice were needed or not, he also differs.
“…we must observe that the form of man which is the rational soul, in respect of its incorruptibility is adapted to its end, which is everlasting happiness: whereas the human body, which is corruptible, considered in respect of its nature, is, in a way, adapted to its form, and, in another way, it is not…” “But God, to Whom every nature is subject, in forming man supplied the defect of nature, and by the gift of original justice, gave the body a certain incorruptibility, as was stated in the FP, Q[97], A[1]. It is in this sense that it is said that “God made not death,” and that death is the punishment of sin.”
As St. Thomas says elsewhere, quoting the Old Testament, God made man right. In saying that the human body is in a way not adapted to its form, and that in order to “make man right”, God remedied the defect of nature, he implies that the benefits of original justice did in fact correspond to a kind of need.
The analogy in the post about the vineyard is so far from what St. Thomas has to say on the subject. On one had we have the terms used in this section and many others in the Summa. On the other, it would seem that all that the only not so cheerful thing passed on to us by our First Parents is an empty Christmas stocking”
Edward Feser discusses Original Sin in his blog because he wishes to refute the caricature of Catholic doctrine on original sin often used to ridicule it. The caricature is false of course but Feser goes much further than refutation. He refuses point blank, in a post where he states he is giving a description of the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin, to at any point whatsoever use any of the terms we have all heard so many times in the New Testament, the Catechism, the liturgy and in the Summa Theologica, that characterise the effects of original sin as a wounding or corruption, etc. It would be incredible if Feser was unaware of the countless times in the Summa where the consequences of original sin are described as positive harm yet his post there is not one mention.
His extrapolations are wrong and non-Thomistic to say the least. A thesis along the lines ”What St. Thomas really meant was…” proceeding to propose something contradictory could be interesting in certain circles. But right now, we, meaning catholic readers and the non-Catholic readership he is educating concerning catholic doctrine on the subject, ought to be informed why he has abandoned traditional Catholic and Thomistic language on the subject. Like the Church’s and Thomism’s enthusiastic and repeated use of the term personal when referring to God, its terminology concerning the effects of original sin may not lightly be changed by someone teaching at Pasadena University.
Speaking of our First Father Adam, a superman who had been gifted with immortality, infused knowledge, who walked with God, in his post, ”Knowing an ape from Adam”, Feser describes him and his descendants later on, copulating with hominid animals and how this could be possible:
”…the earliest true humans would not have had anything like the modern civilizational accompaniments of sexual activity, especially given the effects of original sin. Obviously it would be absurd to think of their liaisons as involving smooth techniques of romantic seduction, contemporary standards of personal hygiene, etc. So, the cultural “distance” between primitive true human beings and the sub-rational creatures in question need not have been so great as to make the sexual temptation psychologically implausible. It might have been comparable to a very uncultured and unsophisticated person taking sexual advantage of an even more unsophisticated and indeed very stupid person…The point is that the situation could have been psychologically close enough to that for the temptation to be real.” From Feser’s blog ”Knowing an ape from Adam”.
So our first father Adam is imagined to be so close psychologically to animals (clearly not the good looking but dumb hominids from Planet of the Apes). The problem is not just the raising of animal hominids to a state almost resembling ours. It’s the lowering of Adam to an almost animal state. From Feser’s description of Adam and his immediate family, it is clear they don’t look anything like humans as we know them. His Adam, in order to get along intimately with animals, is mentally retarded brute, a primeval Frankenstein with his hands dragging along the ground, but not as smart. And his neglected wife Eve? Better not to think about it, or refer to Our Lady as the New Eve. This game makes a mockery of the traditional Faith. Adam and Eve are indeed degraded into impossible beings. Even in the case where only their children and descendants are considered (as no catastrophic devolution after the Fall is postulated by Feser) all this animalistic degeneracy in Adam’s descendants would have to be true of him as well.
Are we to believe that the mystery of the Fall and Redemption were brought about because of the actions of two mentally retarded hairy brutes ”psychologically close” to animals? Was the tree of knowledge a banana tree? The kind of science on display here doesn’t square with the Faith. But the good doctor insists on trying to squeeze the glass slipper of doctrine onto the misshapen feet of the ugly stepsisters of scientific fashion. Any child can tell us how the story ends.
Adam is not a metaphor for the first Aristotelian rational animal, he was a person, made by God, venerated as a saint by tradition. As with the uneasiness with a personal God, Feser is unhappy with the personality of Adam on display in Genesis and in tradition. The incomparable outline of creation in Genesis stands alone. It’s not a scientific treatise and doesn’t need colouring in with the repulsive demented sub-humans imagined on Feser’s blog just so a theory devised and sustained by the most ideologically irreligious and unobjective age of science can be forced onto it.
Aristotle’s definition of man is the truth but not the whole truth. In Genesis, God didn’t create an abstraction, He created Adam. Someone in a coma or with severely limited brain development, or even the subhuman primate-looking creature speculated upon can be a rational animal, but he can’t be Adam, because he was a person, Adam. By the Faith we know enough about his personality to know that he and his family are not creatures so imperceptibly removed from animals and so close ”psychologically” that sexual relations could occur as a matter of course. Even a rather intelligent serpent watching the goings on in Dr Feser’s million year Social Darwinian Eden would barely notice the ”creation” of man. Will the irreligious evolution believer now see the reasonableness of the Faith, or will he just get the impression that it looks so much like what he has always believed that it’s hardly worth taking up the Faith? The other option is taking up a faith that is tailored to his own ideas. ”Knowing an Ape from Adam” is a case of the ugly stepsister giving up and going off to have a glass slipper made that will fit her deformed feet.
The notions contained on the blog are just a grafting of evolution – not just evolution but social Darwinism (the first man is a savage, whereas the Bible and all Christian tradition portrays him as wise, a complete man – St. Thomas says God ”made man right”) – onto the Christian account of the first man, together with contortions of doctrine, the Biblical account and philosophy in order to get the two to fit together. This is not the Catholic way of approaching its main ideological opponent it in this age. It is not the Thomistic way. Evolution is the Nominalism of our age, not just an ideology or a philosophy (and certainly not primarily a science, which historically came last of all), but the religion of all those who reject religion.
In Humani Generis Pius XII did not give an opinion on the possibilities of evolution as a source of matter for the human body. No way did he envisage it being taught as something as credible as mathematics or gravity. The only possibility was that men experienced in science and theology could research and discuss the possibilities ”with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter”. Edward Feser’s blog is not an example of this. Instead, he enthusiastically promotes these ideas and states that he can conceive of no counter to the idea that Adam (or his children) mated with animals – to account for the ideas of geneticists over the number of ancestors of the earliest men.
Dr. Feser says he is no expert in theology or science, leaving us at the mercy of scientific consensus. However, it is naïve in the extreme to believe that science on this subject is objective on such a matter, that researchers are on a level playing field when it comes to funding for research questioning evolution, or that scientists are even interested in such research (as the scientific profession is now inseparable from an almost religious version of political correctness on this subject.
We ought not forget that Galileo had scientific consensus against him. Today the notion of scientific consensus (the famous 97%) has been blown wide open by the theories of climate change. Like evolution, such science is complex and debatable. But the ideological conditioning, browbeating, ideologically driven findings and even outright lies and easy-to-spot distortions must remove from anyone who is not a true believer in evolution the idea of scientific consensus as an objective and authoritative body of consensus on such a matter as evolution.
This is because evolution, unlike the movement of the planets around the sun, has a direct bearing on the Faith, and is indeed the religion of all those who reject religion. The fancy of dealing the master-stroke of ”disarming” evolution and making it the servant of the faith rather than its opponent is mistaken and ineffective here, for the simple reason that science is not objective today, quite the contrary. As with the pagan symbols and holidays appropriated by the liturgy, such a thing is NEVER possible while the social influence of the Church is too weak to apply ITS signification to things which in themselves could be neutral. To have done so before the triumph of the Church would have been confusion for the faithful and suicide for religion. Whatever marvels await us resulting from the full co-operation of science and theology on this topic, now is not the time to point to them, as has been seen. This doesn’t mean that theology runs science, it means that for science to be scientific, its anti-religious blinkers have to be taken off, allowing it to investigate what it does not investigate now. This post is not concerned with the possibility or not of evolution; it aims to draw attention to an attempt to force together certain ideas on science and the Faith in a way that makes them incompatible and is therefore not Thomistic.
(Here is an interesting article which deals in depth with some of the theological and dogmatic issues surrounding evolution: http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt73.html
Here is another article by the same author http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt97.html where we find this declaration by Pope Pelagius I in AD 557:
”I confess … that all men from Adam onward who have been born and have died up to the end of the world will then rise again and stand “before the judgment-seat of Christ,” together with Adam himself and his wife, who were not born of other parents, but were created: one from the earth and the other from the side of the …”)
The strange ideas of Dr. Feser on Adam and apes, Original Sin, and a Personal God, are not random, but intimately connected and cannot exist without each other. This is why it is fair enough to call it a system. Perhaps readers have already worked out how they fit together. This first posting is to create awareness of a problem. Successive posts will continue the look at other elements of feserism and how they work together.
