Referring to God: Jewish and Christian Philosophical and Theological Perspectives 0700710795, 0415592577, 9780700710799, 9780415592574

Table of contents :
Cover
Referring to God
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Preface
Notes on Contributors
1 Introduction
2 The Source and Destination of Thought
Response
3 William Alston on Referring to God
Response
4 Identifying God in Experience: On Strawson, Sounds and God's Space
Response
5 The God of Abraham, Saadia and Aquinas
Response
6 Judaic Perspectives on Petitionary Prayer
7 Maimonides and Calvin on Divine Accommodation
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Referring to God

CURZON JEWISH PHILOSOPHY SERIES Series Editor: Oliver Leaman This series publishes books in the general area of Jewish philosophy. A broad interpretation is taken of what Jewish philosophy comprises, and the series is interested in receiving proposals which involve a philosophical treatment of a Jewish thinker or topic, or which look at some aspect of Jewish cultural life from a philosophical perspective. MEDIEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHY An Introduction Dan Cohn-Sherbok FACING THE OTHER The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas Edited by Sean Hand MOSES MAIMONIDES Oliver Leaman A USER'S GUIDE TO FRANZ ROSENZWEIG'S STAR OF REDEMPTION Norbert M. Samuelson ON LIBERTY Jewish Philosophical Perspectives Edited by Daniel H. Frank REFERRING TO GOD Jewish and Christian Philosophical and Theological Perspectives Edited by Paul Helm

Referring to God Jewish and Christian Philosophical and Theological Perspectives

Edited by

Paul Helm

igl~ Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First Published in 2000 by Routledge Richmond, Surrey 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Transferred to Digital Printing 2011 Editorial Matter © 2000 Paul Helm Typeset in New Century Schoolbook by LaserScript Ltd, Mitcham, Surrey All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN1O: 0-7007-1079-5 (hbk) ISBN1O: 0-415-59257-7 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-7007-1079-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-59257-4 (pbk)

Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.

Contents

Preface

Vll

Notes on Contributors

IX

1

1 Introduction Oliver Leaman 2 The Source and Destination of Thought John Haldane Response Mark Wynn

3 William Alston on Referring to God Joe Houston Response Peter Byrne

4 Identifying God in Experience: On Straws on, Sounds and God's Space Jerome Gellman Response Paul Helm

15 34 41 63

71 90

5 The God of Abraham, Saadia and Aquinas Eleonore Stump Response Martin Stone

v

95 120

CONTENTS

6 Judaic Perspectives on Petitionary Prayer Jerome Gellman

7

Maimonides and Calvin on Divine Accommodation Paul Helm

129

149

Bibliography

171

Index

173

vi

Preface

In the mediaeval period there was intense discussion among Jews, Christians and Muslims over matters of common philosophical concern, but there has been little since. As a step in the direction of renewing such dialogue a Conference was organised in King's College London in April 1997 to bring together Jewish and Christian philosophers to discuss problems and possibilities in talking about God. Four of the papers from that Conference, together with the Responses ofthe Commentators, are published here. A version of Eleonore Stump's paper has already appeared in Faith and Philosophy, Vo1.14. No.4, October 1997 with the title 'Saadia Gaon on the Problem of Evil', an issue of that Journal devoted to Jewish Religious Thought. Jerry Gellman's paper 'Judaic Perspectives on Petitionary Prayer' and Paul Helm's 'Calvin and Maimonides on Divine Accommodation' were each delivered at a Session at the American Philosophical Association meetings in Philadelphia, December 1997, a session co-sponsored by the Academy for Jewish Philosophy and the Society of Christian Philosophers. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the generous assistance of the Anglo-Israeli Association, the British Academy and the Spalding Trust. Without this help, the Conference would not have been possible. Thanks also to Oliver Leaman for kindly agreeing to include this book in his Series and for being willing to write the Introduction, and to Jonathan Price of the Curzon Press for his encouragement and help in bringing this book to the birth. Paul Helm

vii

Notes on Contributors

Peter Byrne is Professor of Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion, King's College London. Jerome Gellman is Professor of Philosophy, Ben Gurion University. John Haldane is Professor of Philosophy, University of St. Andrews. Paul Helm IS Professor of the History and Philosophy of Religion, King's College London. Joe Houston is Senior Lecturer Glasgow.

III

Theology, University of

Oliver Leaman is Professor of Philosophy at Liverpool John Moores University. Martin Stone is Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King's College London. Eleonore Stump is Professor of Philosophy, St Louis University. Mark Wynn is Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion in the School of Religion and Philosophy at the Brisbane Campus of the Australian Catholic University.

ix

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction Oliver Leaman

T

here is a close historical connection between the three religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is more than historical, though, and the religions themselves accept the existence of some sort of link, albeit the nature of that link is often highly disputed. Judaism is the earliest and provided the context out of which Christianity, and in particular Jesus the Jew, emerged. When we come to slightly later Christian figures such as St Paul who try to set themselves determinedly against both Judaism and their own Judaism, we still have to acknowledge the role of Judaism in the characterisation of the new religion. Even Christians who were hostile to Judaism included the Old Testament in the canon, as a series of texts which point to Jesus and the New Testament. This logic of emergence finds its fullest description in Islam, of course, which accepts the validity of both the Jewish and Christian revelations, arguing that these were superseded by the final prophecy of Muhammad. Although Christianity and Islam are very obviously, and selfconsciously, different religions, the close links which exist between them lead to the interesting question as to whether the Jew, Christian and Muslim actually pray to the same God. Or, to ask a slightly different question, do they mean by 'God' the same person? Could a God who is a trinity of persons be the same God as one who is not? It would be interesting if this is the same God, since we are well aware of millennia of conflicts between these religions, conflicts which continue today despite the politeness of their theologians when they meet together. We need to distinguish here between a number of different ways of talking about the same thing. But before we look at

REFERRING TO GOD

these distinctions, it is worth wondering whether these religions could really be talking of the same God given the long histories of conflict which have existed, and continue to exist, between them. If they are really talking of the same God, one might think, then the point of such conflicts is lost. It might seem to be rather like the argument between the optimist, who suggests that his glass is half full, with the pessimist, who insists that it is half empty. This sort of vacuous dispute is accurately characterised by Swift in Gulliver's Travels in his account of the protracted warfare between two nations, the Bigenders and the Little-enders. These names originated from an original argument as to which end of a boiled egg one ought to open before eating it. The point that Swift was alluding to here is that theology consists of rather nice distinctions which can have terrible consequences. Within Christianity, for example, one thinks of the conflicts which have existed between different theological schools over the nature of the Trinity, conflicts which have resulted in whole cities and communities being destroyed. These are conflicts within a religion, not even between religions, and if such conflicts can occur within a religion, presumably the idea is that even within a religion individuals may mean something very different when they talk of ' God'. In that case it seems even harder to argue that those in different religions are referring to the same being when they use that name. The satirical approach to such theoretical differences in religion is not really a critique of religion itself, but rather of theology. During the Enlightenment, for example, there was a movement for a type of rational religion, a religion which eschewed theology and went to the essence of faith itself, belief in God. 1 The assumption was that the deity in question was the same for all the faiths, or at least for all the Abrahamic faiths. Lessing's Nathan the Wise is perhaps the perfect example ofthis, and is touching in its support for a general religious pluralism surrounding a basic, and common, belief in God. It is interesting that this should be an Enlightenment idea, since the other important religious strand which also often advocates a form of pluralism comes at the other extreme from the Enlightenment, 1 lowe this point to a very helpful intervention by Farila Hasan of Ain Shams University.

2

INTRODUCTION

and that is mysticism. Many mystics are prepared to accept that the mystical, and obviously similar, experiences of those of other faiths could well constitute genuine connection with the divine, or some aspect of the divine. Mter all, the sorts of instructions which map the mystical path are so similar in so many different faiths that it is difficult, although not impossible, to argue that those paths are all to somewhere different. Once one accepts this then yet again theology seems to be placed in abeyance. Although of course many mystics criticize an antinomian strategy, and often insist on a strict application of religious law and custom, if it is the case that mystical experience is rather similar across religions, then the precise rules of theology and ritual do rather shrink into the background. As with the Enlightenment religion of reason we seem to be coming to a religion without a theology, a religion purified of its localized and specific accretions. How important is theology in a description of God? If it is important, then given that different religions have different theologies, they might be taken to be referring to different notions of God. Indeed, given that even within a religion there are often entirely divergent theologies in operation, these might be taken to be referring to different notions of God also. This is linked with a logical point about reference, about what is necessary for reference to be successful. For example, I have three daughters, and two are at the moment away at university, while one still lives in my house. Someone might ask me while I am at work who is now at home, and I might say 'my daughter', meaning my youngest daughter who still lives at home. Yet perhaps, unbeknown to me, one of the older daughters has returned home, while the youngest one is out of the house, and so what I say is literally true even though the person I mean to refer to is not in fact the person to whom I actually refer on this occasion. My wife might know precisely which daughter is in the house, and when she answers the same question she also says 'my daughter', and what she says is also true, and not only true but also in line with the person she means. Are we referring to the same person? In a sense we are, since we both assert that our daughter is in the house, and we even both express true propositions. But it is far from clear that in my case I really do refer to my daughter, since the daughter I mean is not the daughter who appears in the true proposition. 3

REFERRING TO GOD

Would we say that when my wife and I refer to 'my daughter' in this case, we are referring to the same person? I intend to pick out a different individual than the individual whom I do in fact pick out, but the fact that I have a different intention does not mean that I am wrong in thinking that I have referred to 'my daughter'. As readers of the following essays will see, there are a variety of ways of describing this and similar situations, some of which will allow that I have referred to 'my daughter', and some which will deny this. An approach to meaning which might be helpful is that which is most frequently associated with the views of the later Wittgenstein, the approach that would argue for the looseness of our language on the question of reference. On this view it is hardly surprising that there are situations in which it is difficult to say whether an attempt to refer succeeds since what we are doing when we talk about reference is a number of different things, some of which contrast with each other. There are ways of referring where it is not important that one picks out precisely who one intends to pick out, since a generic description will do. In such cases what is important in reference is not which precise daughter is picked out, provided that it is a daughter. If one sees language as a system of loosely connected language games then reference itself will cross some of these language games and will be variously describable as succeeding, or otherwise. It would not then be surprising ifthere seems to be no clear answer in all such cases as to whether the reference succeeds, since it would be a mistake to look for an account of reference which applies to all language games. This brings out some of the problems in asking whether the name 'God' refers to the same being in the three Abrahamic religions. Does 'God' have the same function in all the religions, is it being used in the same way? Talking about reference seems to be a way of leaving this question behind, since talking about reference is very different from talking about sense, about the connotations which words have. Clearly the sense or meaning of 'God' in the different religions is distinct and peculiar to each religion (although doubtless there are similarities as well as dissimilarities, and even perhaps a common core of meaning). This way of talking about God is certainly there in what we have called rational religion, and many forms of mysticism. At the kernel of religion is a particular being, and that being gives each religion its transcendental significance. It is rather like the way 4

INTRODUCTION

in which one individual may change her clothes and seem different on different occasions, but beneath all the clothes she is the same person, and when we speak of her as being the same person despite her different outfits, we are speaking of the person who is the bearer of the clothes, as opposed to the clothed person. Reference is to the essence, to the basis of fact on which different accounts of meaning cling. What is interesting about this sort of view is that it does not really matter that different people do not realise that one thing is being named by different descriptions. In such cases sense varies while reference remains constant. The famous example is that of Frege in pointing out that Venus may be referred to variously as the morning star and/or the evening star. We might think of God in this way, as being the essence of the different faiths, and not just the Abrahamic faiths, while at the same time being variously described. Within Islamic philosophy there is a tradition of seeing the deity in this way, something particularly easy to do given the historical development of Islam out of Judaism and Christianity. The latter two religions represent what at their time was the divine message, a message which has been extended and finalized by Islam. Jews and Christians were, and indeed still are, right to think that many of their prophets were prophets, and correct in thinking that the messages of those prophets came from the same source as the final message of the Prophet Muhammad. What makes the final message final is not that it comes from God, since all the messages come from God, but that it is God's final message. Jews and Christians who do not accept that message as final are not thereby cut off from any genuine contact with God, they keep this through their acceptance of his earlier messages, but their contact is necessarily limited by the rather antiquated ideas of God which they refuse to exchange for more efficient products. Now, this is just one view of one religion about other religions. What cannot be emphasized enough is that there is nothing to be said for presenting 'the Islamic view' of other religions, as though there exists one view which is shared by all Muslims. All religions contain a variety of interpretations of that religion, and trying to work out what the right view is should not detain us. Working out the orthodox position in each religion is in itself a minefield, and even if we skirt that minefield without coming to harm, it is not at all clear that an unorthodox belief is not 5

REFERRING TO GOD

nonetheless a belief which can be classified as falling under the religion. We not only have problems in knowing what is involved in referring to God, we also have problems in knowing what is involved in referring to a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim, and so on. When philosophers talk about religion they tend to simplify to an extent which would make a theologian weep.2 One might think that any variety of view of whether the same God is referred to in the three religions is irrelevant in any case. After all, when it comes to reference it might be argued that it does not matter what people think they are referring to, what matters is what they in fact refer to. If in fact they are referring to the same person, then whatever their views on this are they are not relevant to the question of the object of the reference. If the person known to me as Amy is always, in my experience, dressed in jeans, and the person known to you as Mary is always dressed in a frock, and that person's real name is Jill, then when I talk about Amy and you talk about Mary we are really talking ofthe same person, even if we do not recognize her in the clothes with which we are unfamiliar. We may not be able to grasp that Amy and Mary are the same person even when she shows us that she is, because we are so used to seeing her in a particular way. Whose problem is this? It is not Jill's problem, it is our problem, and shows why our views of who she is are not decisive, or even perhaps relevant. As well as examining some of the problems of referring to God across the three religions, we should also look at the problems of referring to him within one of the religions. This is because it is far from obvious that all co-religionists share the same idea of God when they refer to him. Many believers, for example, have in mind a highly anthropomorphic concept of the deity, perhaps someone like a king sitting on a throne, or a man with a long white beard. Much of the language in the three religions encourages this idea, and it is hardly surprising that many believers accept the language at face value (a useful phrase in this context) and interpret God as rather like us. Other believers take different attitudes, and insist on God as a gender-free individual, or take the injunctions within Judaism and Islam 2 For more detail on the links between philosophy of religion and theology see my chapter 'Philosophy of Religion' in Oliver Leaman (ed) (1998) The Future of Philosophy, London, Routledge, pp. 120-33.

6

INTRODUCTION

against idolatry to mean that he cannot be described in any way like us. So the language about God is sufficiently flexible to encompass both sorts of views, and many permutations along the way. This is hardly surprising, and even those philosophers like Maimonides and ibn Rushd (Averroes) who take a firmly hostile attitude to anthropomorphism recognize the point of anthropomorphic language. It is used, they argue, to explain to everyone in the community, including those rather weak intellectually, what the nature of basic truths about reality is. Many people find it difficult to realise that the point of prayer is not that a particular individual listens to the prayer and considers responding directly to it. God cannot literally listen to prayer, since he has nothing to listen with, being without physical organs, yet for many believers such a conception of God would make the institution of prayer vacuous. They expect when they pray that their prayers are heard, or at the very least could be heard, and their actions observed and noted for eschatological purposes. But according to Maimonides and ibn Rushd this could not literally be the case. God is not a person like us who could listen to what we say and see what we do. Our scriptures do sometimes describe him in this way, though, because those texts are designed to convey the truth to those who find it impossible to accept in its pure form. They require it to be dressed up in imaginative language. Does this mean that the ordinary believer accepts something which is literally false? It is literally false that God is a person rather like us, but it is not false that he is able to find out what we get up to, and the point of the imaginative language of scripture is to get this message over to the community at large. Most people are better able to think of God imaginatively, only a few intellectuals can consider him entirely rationally, and the interesting question which then arises is whether the imaginative route to God and the rational or philosophical route to God are both routes to the same person. Certainly the ways in which ibn Rushd and Maimonides speak of these different routes implies that they are routes to the same destination, to the same person. But what we should notice about their accounts is that the personhood of God drops out of the description of the way things really are. For both of them talking about God is really equivalent to talking about the world. They defend the continuing significance of religion in terms of explaining to the 7

REFERRING TO GOD

community at large where its duties and obligations lie, while at the same time giving some imaginative information about the real nature of things. They defend the religious acceptability of what they argue on the basis of the injunctions against idolatry in both Islam and Judaism. The Talmud goes so far as to claim that anyone who denies idolatry is to be counted as a Jew (Megillah 13a), and Islam is not exactly reticent in criticizing shirk or idolatry, which is generally defined in terms of identifying God with finite properties. Their critics are no less hostile to idolatry than are ibn Rushd or Maimonides, of course, but they claim that one can avoid idolatry and yet hold onto much traditional religious language as ordinarily understood. Critics of philosophy such as al-Ghazali, for example, claim with some justification that whatever else may be said about the arguments of the philosophers, they do not leave a significant role for God in the universe. The term 'God' seems to be used to describe a way in which events unfold, and what is behind their unfolding in that way is implicit in the nature of the events themselves. According to al-Ghazali, there is no point in using a term like 'God' unless that term is taken to refer to some being, as opposed to some general and rational arrangement of nature. According to Maimonides and ibn Rushd, once you use a term like 'God' to refer to an individual in the same sort of way that our normal referring terms refer to individuals, one is in danger of associating God with us, of committing idolatry. So the question of whether those of different religions are referring to the same God would be like the question of whether those within the same religion are referring to the same God, and would depend on how far they were able to put idolatry aside and link what they call 'God' with the rational organization of nature and the way we should act. Since only the philosophers manage to understand the way things really are, on this view, it looks like most people are stuck with inaccurate and confused views of God, and certainly views which cannot be of the same person, since each person will have different ways ofthinking about him. Yet these different ways of thinking are not necessarily equivalent to ways of thinking about a different being, since they could just be different ways of going about the same activity, referring to the same being. There is a tendency to think that these different ways of describing God may relate to the same being if there is something essential 8

INTRODUCTION

that the different descriptions have in common. For example, the Jewish feminist who thinks of God as a She and the Christian fundamentalist who adopts a literal understanding of the language of the New Testament may have very different ways ofthinking about God, but in so far as they both, perhaps, regard God as the creator of the world, they might be thought to share some essential feature of a referring expression which they could then be taken to apply to the same being. It would often be difficult to find this essential attribute which different groups accept they share, though, and again we return to the fact that the actual diversity of beliefs even within a religion surpasses the brief and clear-cut distinctions which philosophers make when outlining what are taken to be the basic beliefs ofthe faith. But surely, it will be argued, there are particular ideas and principles which are essential to the different religions, so that one could not allow that anyone is a member of a religious group unless they adhered to those basic and axiomatic principles. What those within a religion differ on are not the main principles, but the more superficial aspects offaith, and it might even be argued that the three Abrahamic religions themselves all agree on certain points. This is a deceptively simple point, deceptive because in fact it is not simple at all. There has been a long controversy in Judaism, for example, as to whether one can list the basic propositions on which the religion rests, as opposed to the argument that all the propositions of the religion are equally significant. This argument grew out of a prior Islamic controversy about the attempt to distinguish between the usul (basic principles of faith) and the furu (the branches). Many Jewish thinkers argued against Maimonides that there is no basic set of axioms in Judaism, but that all the rules and beliefs are equally important. This seems a plausible thesis. One of the major problems with seeking a basic set of principles is that they do not come with a single interpretation. For example, the Islamic profession offaith 'There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet' can mean all sorts of things. For one thing, the sort of monotheism which this implies is highly controversial. The great mystical philosopher ibn al-'Arabi took it to mean that nothing exists apart from God, so that what we take to be the everyday diverse events and objects of our ordinary world are in a real sense misleading. There only really exists one thing, God, and 9

REFERRING TO GOD

everything else which appears to exist is merely an aspect ofthat one thing. Yet most Muslims who claim to uphold the principle of taw hid or the unity of God do not really think that everything is merely an aspect of God, since being able to see our experience in that way is only attainable through a long and difficult path, a path moreover on which God has to help us to travel. The project of cleansing religion of theology might be less plausible than it seems. The notion of referring to God is closely linked with the sorts of descriptions of God which exist within the various religious traditions. There are problems in thinking of God as some sort of pure notion of a being which is then almost irretrievably dressed up in competing concepts. If we could only get behind the appearance of God we could approach the reality, one might think, or we might say that the different religions and different schools of thought within each religion are really thinking about the same basic being, albeit in different ways. In the chapters which follow we shall see how complicated this project is. John Haldane produces an intriguing argument which uses the philosophy of language to conclude that if there is thought then there must be a First Thinker, i.e. God. The structure of the argument is very similar in form to the Cosmological Argument found in Aquinas, but it really borrows from both Aquinas' and Maimonides' accounts of how thought is possible. The argument starts by suggesting that our concepts get a grip on the world, and so there must be some link between that world and how we think, and yet the nature of the world itself is incapable of explaining how this is possible. Our concepts are more abstract and thicker than the world, and can only have come about through a cause which is itself a thinker, ultimately, a First Thinker. This is of course to object to the physicalist project, which links our concepts to the natural order, and which then has to account for the many non-equivalent ways of thinking about the same object. How can this be explained if there are different ways of thinking about the same thing? If that thing is the cause of the concepts which are applied to it, how can we explain the varieties of referring here? In addition, the naturalist would find it difficult to explain why we have such a variety of concepts when a restricted number would do to describe the limited number of natural causes which are taken to be their ultimate source. 10

INTRODUCTION

Maimonides, Aquinas and the Islamic philosophers all appreciate that God provides both the source of our thought and its ultimate end. Nature should not be regarded as the source of our ideas, but rather as a means of communication between us and God. Although the philosophical machinery which gets the argument going was first constructed by Aristotle, his Jewish and Christian followers apply it to their analysis of the nature of reality and human thought. Thinking only takes place if there is something to think about and something to do the thinking itself, a point which Maimonides in particular emphasized frequently. Christianity and Judaism have the additional advantage of being able to produce a theory as to why our ideas actually manage to get a grip on the world, since the monotheist religions can use the concept of a divinely established harmony. William Alston has had a significant impact on the philosophy of religion with his application to it of causal theories of reference, and Alston's underlying aim is undoubtedly the dethroning of theology from its hitherto crucial role in defining the nature and identity ofthe deity. Joe Houston attacks Alston's approach on a number of grounds, but perhaps the most significant charge is that the theory of reference which he uses is too limited to do justice to the wide variety of ways in which reference takes place. According to Alston, descriptions of God in various religions are to be linked to what it is that believers think about when they refer to the object of their devotion. As Houston shows, Alston's point might be strengthened by an analysis of reference such as that of Donnellan according to which how believers think about God is not important, what is important is that the varying descriptions which different religions employ are used referentially to pick out what is causally the source of the religious traditions and practices. The main problem is that Alston wishes to argue that the three monotheistic traditions refer to the same God in their faiths, and so he has to keep the concept of that God as pure as possible to prevent any accretions which might limit the sense of the term to a particular religion. The trouble is also that his rather naive notion of responding to contact with God presupposes that we are able to distinguish between genuine such contacts and mistaken events. It is not as though such contact is empty of theological implications either, not only in the sense 11

REFERRING TO GOD

that we can discuss such events theologically, but more crucially that we often appear to need the theology to understand whether and how these events have taken place. The concept of having experience of God is also discussed by Jerome Gellman. He deals with the familiar objection to the acceptability of such experience which rests on God's role as something very different from a particular thing which can be perceived. God, of course, has no spatio-temporallocation, and so we cannot regard experience of him as like experience of something objective. Gellman counters by suggesting that God has an inner life, and this is enough to constitute an objectively existing being who may be described. Yet how can we have contact with something which we cannot perceive? The answer Gellman produces is that we frequently have contact with things which we cannot (directly) perceive, and the case of God is just like these. The question arises, though, as to how secure we can be in our impression that two separate experiences which we think are experiences of God are indeed experiences which refer to the same being. Can we re-identify something which is not a physical object? Gellman here makes use of Strawson's notion of a mastersound providing the criterion for the location of other sounds in a world which consists entirely of sounds, where they cannot be spatially located. Even without a master-sound, Gellman argues, there could be a re-identification process which was based on regularities in experience and which would allow the subject to weave an objective path through his experience. This is especially the case when we are considering the nature of experiences of God and the Jewish tradition according to which God is called the place of the world. We could then compare God's role with the master-sound, as not one thing among others, but rather as what it is that makes all things possible and perceptible. Eleonore Stump is sceptical of the idea that pluralism, the principle that all religions have as their aim the same ultimate truth, really describes the attitudes of the religions themselves. She suggests that a more fruitful strategy would be to compare the religions and see what claims they make about the deity, and if enough of those claims are shared then there is some justification for claiming that those religions are referring to the same God. The religions she considers are Christianity and Judaism, and the relevant philosophers are Aquinas and Saadia 12

INTRODUCTION

Gaon. She suggests that if we consider a particular theological topic, that of evil, we can see whether the two thinkers are really operating in the same sort of area. Aquinas explains the degree of suffering which Job has to endure as reflecting Job's virtue, and he is to be rewarded in the next life for the suffering he has faithfully accepted in this life. Suffering has a therapeutic purpose, it is designed by God to enhance the spiritual health of the individual. For both Aquinas and Saadia suffering of the innocent is devised to prevent a greater evil, as compared with bringing about a greater good. Both thinkers are in agreement on the point that the world is ruled with justice by God who has a purpose in mind in bringing about innocent suffering. Although the specific directions in which Aquinas and Saadia take the argument are different, since the religions within which they are thinking are different, it is clear that there is enough resemblance between their conceptions of God and God's responsibility for suffering of the innocent for it to be justifiably claimed that they are talking about the same God. Philosophers have often criticized the notion that God could or would respond to prayers by his creatures. Within the Jewish tradition, as Gellman reports, there have also been many thinkers and traditions who disapprove of the notion of petitioning God, and expecting him to respond to our requests. Mter all, if we deserve to be rewarded or helped, then we shall be rewarded or helped anyway through divine providence, and if we are the sort of person who is destined to be helped by God, then this will happen, regardless or not of whether we importune him. Yet there are several references in the Rabbinic literature to God wanting us to petition him through prayer. The point of such prayer is to bring about intimate contact between God and his creatures. But this seems hardly to justify God's making life difficult for us with the aim of getting us to pray to him. Gellman responds that this would certainly be wrong were it to be done by a human agent, but not by God, since what is at question here is communion with God and the world to come. The reward is so great that a little unpleasantness along the way to bring it about is surely justified. There are also regular intercessionary prayers which seem rather strange, in that one might be praying for something which is happening anyway, such as general providence or grace. 13

REFERRING TO GOD

Gellman argues that such prayers have a point in that they can establish a personal act of God towards us, and underline a closeness with God which is based on far more than the provision of material benefits. The regular recitation of some prayers is designed to encourage us to establish a deeper relationship with God. It is a familiar feature of religion that it speaks to its audience in a language which is comprehensible, and yet which may be inappropriate to encapsulate the tremendous difference between God and his creatures. Maimonides emphasized this in his negative theology, according to which we can only talk about God positively when we refer to his actions. When we refer to his essence we can only make negative claims. Paul Helm criticizes this doctrine as doing nothing more than emphasizing the transcendence and unknowability of God. Calvin also argues that we cannot have knowledge of God's essence, yet he held that God have revealed a great deal about himself in the Bible. Divine accommodation means that if we are to respond to God, then he must represent himself as someone to whom response is possible, which is equivalent to being someone who acts in time. God wishes to bring about certain ends, and to realise these ends he is prepared to express himself in a particular way. This makes what God does look rather like a pragmatic strategy, but it is more than that. It is a logical aspect of the possibility of dialogue between humanity and God that the participants in the dialogue should appear to act and react in time. So if dialogue with God is to be possible, he must accommodate his eternity and immutability in such a way as to make it possible for his creatures to relate to him. Helm argues that Calvin presents a far more inclusive notion of contact with God than does Maimonides. The latter restricts such contact largely to prophets and philosophers, and emphasizes the role of intellect in our ability to link up with divine grace. For Calvin, by contrast, everyone is in principle capable of receiving divine grace, which is not restricted to those of welldeveloped intellects. One aspect of this is Calvin's acceptance of anthropomorphic language as a genuine guide to how we should relate to God, whereas for Maimonides it represents a dangerous slippery slope towards the encouragement of idolatry.

14

CHAPTER TWO

The Source and Destination of Thought John Haldane

T

hen God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness .. .' [Then] out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature that was its name. (Genesis 1: 26 & 2: 19) The case of the intellects of the heavens, that of the existence of separate intellects, and that of the representation of the acquired intellect, which is also separate, are matters open to speculation and research. The proofs with regard to them are well-hidden, though correct ... I have shown you that the intellect which emanates from God unto us is the link that joins us to God. You have it in your power to strengthen that bond, if you choose to do so. (Maimonides, Dalalat al-Ha'irin [Guide for the Perplexed] 1. 72 & 3.51).

1. Introduction This essay comes in four parts of which this introduction is the first. In part two, I rehearse an argument concerning the source of thought. 1 My present interest is in speculating about 1 The argument was originally presented in J. Haldane & J.J.C. Smart, Atheism and Theism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, rp. 1997) and most of section one is drawn from parts of that work. 15

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thought's destination. In order to prepare for this, however, I need to set out why I believe that our thinking is a special and distinctive aspect of divine creation. The argument of the next section aims to do just that. Part three consists of a sketch of the further speculations about the intellectual activities of the human soul; and section four attempts, in brief, to relate the whole endeavour to ideas canvassed in passages of Moses Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed. This attempt at intellectual-bridge building is itself speculative. My knowledge of the Guide is very limited and I am relying entirely on my own attempt to understand the relevant passages. If this interpretation should prove flawed then the reader may prefer to regard the exercise as an attempt to link certain ideas abstracting from the issue of their authorship. I might add, however, that I am enthusiastic about the possibility of further dialogue between Christian and Jewish philosophers, and I believe that interpreting the thought of figures from the medieval period may provide an important occasion for this. It is well known to readers of Aquinas (12241274) that he acknowledges debts to Maimonides (1138-1204). It is less well known, however, that in his Tagmule ha-Nefesh ('The Rewards of the Soul') Hillel Ben Samuel of Verona (1220-1295) adapts the arguments of St Thomas's De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas ('On the Unity of the Intellect') in order to argue for the individuality of human intellects. Ironically, in article three of his Quaestiones disputatae de anima ('Disputed Questions on the Soul') St Thomas quotes a principle of Maimonides which might seem to support a contrary conclusion. I hope we may see a return of such intellectual exchange between Christians and their 'Elders in Faith'. For one thing it could not but encourage mutual respect.

2. The source of thought

In order to act an agent must be able to deliberate, evaluating the pros and cons of alternative courses. In doing so he or she is not reflecting upon actual events but possible ones. Possible occurrences are always types; the only token events there are are actual ones. So in thinking about what one might do one is entertaining general descriptions: 'writing an essay', 'cutting the 16

THE SOURCE AND DESTINATION OF THOUGHT

grass', 'polishing the silver', 'changing the baby', 'phoning a friend', and so on. Unless we could think in terms of types we could not deliberate and without being able to deliberate we could not act. It is also true that when we think about the present and the past we consider events through the mediation of general categories. Even where the object of thought is a particular, the content of the thought will be constructed out of general concepts (whether thoughts are wholly general in content is a matter of ancient and current dispute). Thinking about the future is only ever thinking in general terms and thinking about the present involves bringing individuals under general types. In short, thinking involves universal concepts. This fact creates problems for materialism and for the effort to show that human beings could have developed by physical processes from non-thinking species. Where do concepts come from? Traditionally there have been two main answers to this question: innatism and abstractionism. According to the first the ability to classify things under general categories is something one is born with. According to the second the mind derives concepts from experience by selectively attending to relevant features and ignoring other aspects of the things in question. In the late 1950s Peter Geach produced a powerful argument against this latter thesis. 2 The suggestion that the concept square, say, is acquired by experiencing a variety of square objects and attending to their squareness while bracketing their other aspects, is absurd, for in order to selectively attend to the squareness of square objects you must already have the concept square. Attending to an instance of a feature F is itself an exercise of the concept f. Innatism is well-placed in this regard since it claims that all normal human beings do have the concept square and many more concepts besides. But this quickly gives rise to problems of its own. How many concepts do we have - 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000? how are they related? are we born with the concept square and the concept rectangle or just the one and, if so, which one? are our innate geometrical concepts Euclidean or nonEuclidean? how could we be born with concepts of things that didn't exist at the time? did cavemen have the concept telephone

2 Peter Geach, Mental Acts (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958). 17

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but just never have occasion to use it? how did innate ideas get there? To defend innatism you have to be willing to make large claims - such as that our ideas were given us by God who implanted the right number, of the right sort, at the right time. In the past this is what many famous innatists maintained. More recently, the fashion has been to rely on evolution, but even those who take a naturalistic materialist point of view and are willing to invoke evolution to explain our existence are generally doubtful that it can offer an explanation of innate ideas. 3 Where does this leave the issue? We certainly have general concepts but if we were not born with them and we did not acquire them by abstraction how did we come by them? One answer is suggested by the later writings of Wittgenstein when he emphasises again and again the fact that we are language users whose understanding is shaped by our participation in forms of life that are not of our own making. Wittgenstein never explicitly presents a theory of anything (depending upon one's attitude therein lies his wisdom or his pretension); and in order to develop the possibility that may lie in what he has to say it will be useful to bring in Aquinas who also has interesting suggestions about the origin of concepts. 4 For Wittgenstein we learn to think as we learn to speak. The ability to structure experience is acquired through the learning of general terms. A child is enabled to think cat by being taught the word 'cat' (or an equivalent). On this account, therefore, the concept is not innate, the child had to be taught it; and nor is it abstracted, she was not able to attend to cats as cats prior to being instructed in the use of the concept. Bringing Aquinas into the picture enables one to see how something of this sort may not just be an alternative to innateness and abstractionism but a via media. In order for something like the Wittgensteinean explanation to work it has to be the case that the child has a prior predisposition or potentiality to form concepts under appropriate influences; and 3 See, for example, D. Dennett 'A Cure for the Common Code?' Ch. 6 in Dennett, Brainstorms (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985), and H. Putnam, 'Does Evolution Explain Intentionality?' Ch. 2 in Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 4 For further discussion of Aquinas' views see J. Haldane, 'Aquinas on the Intellect', Philosophy, Vol. 67, 1992. 18

THE SOURCE AND DESTINATION OF THOUGHT

it also has to be the case that the influence in question is itself already possessed of the concept. The child will not pick up the meaning of the term 'cat' unless she has a relevant potentiality, unless the structure of her receptivity is of the right sort. By the same token that potentiality will not be actualised except by an intellect that is already active in using the concept, her older brother, for example. This vocabulary of 'actuality' and 'potentiality' is drawn from the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, as is the less familiar terminology of the mind's 'receptivity' and 'activity'. Aquinas himself speaks of the active and passive intellects as powers of one and the same thinker which raises a question as to whether he is overly individualistic in his conception of the mind. In any event here I am forging a link with Wittgenstein's linguistic-communitarian account of the origins of thinking in the individual and that suggests dividing these aspects of the intellect, at least in the first instance, between the teacher and the taught. In these terms one may say that the learner's intellect is receptive to, or potentiality informed by, the concept cat, while the mind or intellect of an older child who has already mastered the use of the term is active with or actually informed by this concept. In teaching the word, the older child imparts the concept and thereby actualises the younger one's potentiality. This picture grants something both to innatism and to abstractionism. On the one hand, in order to explain possession of concepts a native power has to be postulated; but on the other it is allowed that, in a sense, concepts are acquired through experience. Notice two features of this explanation. First it seems to give rise to a regress, and second and relatedly it instantiates the structure of Aquinas's primary proof of the existence of God. In the Summa Theologiae he writes: The first and most obvious way is based on change. For certainly some things are changing: this we plainly see. Now anything changing is being changed by something else. This is so because what makes things changeable is unrealised potentiality, but what makes them cause change is their already realised state: causing change brings into being what was previously only able to be, and can only be done by something which already is. For example, the actual heat of fire causes wood, able to be hot, to become 19

REFERRING TO GOD

actually hot, and so causes change in the wood ... what is changing can't be the very same thing that is causing the same change, can't be changing itself, but must be being changed by something else ... But this can't go on for ever, since then there would be no first cause of the change, and as a result no subsequent causes . . . So we are forced eventually to come to a first cause of change not itself being changed by anything, and this is what everyone understands by God (et hoc omnes intelligunt Deum).5 This is a cosmological proof, that is to say it argues to God-asCause from the mere fact of existence - here the existence of change or motion. Note that while the coming-to-be of a conceptual power in the mind of a child is certainly a change, and hence qualifies as a starting point for the first way, the particular change in question suggests a more specific proof. To bring this out consider the regress arising within the 'Wittgensteinean-Thomistic' account of concept formation. A human child possesses a power that parrots lack, for while a bird may pick up a sound and repeat it - quicker and more accurately than the child - no amount of 'instruction' will teach the parrot the meaning of a term. The child's innate power is in fact a second-order one; it is a power to acquire a (conceptual) power. Another human being - her brother, say - already has the first-order power; he uses the term meaningfully and thinks thoughts with the same conceptual content. Through instruction his sister's hitherto unrealised potentiality is made actual through his own activity. But as Aquinas says, this cannot go on forever. The brother's conceptual ability calls for explanation and the same considerations as before lead to the idea of his instruction by an already active thinker/language user, an older 5 See Summa Theologiae, la, q. 2, a. 3 as translated by McDermott in Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings. In the Guide Maimonides gives an abstract statement of the principle upon which this argument rests. He writes: 'Everything that passes over from a state of potentiality to that of actuality is caused to do so by some external agent; because if that agent existed in the thing itself, and no obstacle prevented the transition, the thing would never be in a state of potentiality, but always in that of actuality'. (II, Proposition XVIII). Here and subsequently all quotations from Maimonides are from The Guide for the Perplexed (trs.) M. Friedlander (New York: Dover, 1956).

20

THE SOURCE AND DESTINATION OF THOUGHT

sister, say, whose ability is itself the product of an innate potentiality and an external actualising cause. The Wittgensteinean proposal that concepts are inculcated through membership of a linguistic community suggests an interesting escape from the dilemma posed by the innatistlabstractionist dispute, but it is not itself ultimately explanatory because for any natural language user it requires us to postulate a prior one. This regress will be halted ifthere is an actualising source whose own conceptual power is intrinsic; and, that of course is precisely what God is traditionally taken to be. The cosmological argument itself is often described as the argument to a 'Prime Mover'; but the particular adaptation I have been concerned with might better be termed the argument to a 'Prime Thinker' or even, though metaphorically, to a 'Prime Sayer'. So put, one may be reminded of two well-known Hebrew and Christian reflections on 'beginnings' - those of the first chapters of Genesis and of the Gospel of John: Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness .. .' [then] out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature that was its name. (Genesis 1: 26 & 2: 19) In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. (John 1: 1-4) Wittgenstein was a cautious thinker and held back where his reasoning neared the limits of experience. Consequently I am not sure to what extent he can be said to be a philosophical naturalist. He is reported to have said of himself 'I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view'6 and it is clear that he had respect for religious sensibilities. At the same time, these attitudes can be 6 This comes from notes of a conversation made by M. Drury, a former student of Wittgenstein. See Rush Rhees ed. Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) p. 79.

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interpreted in ways compatible with atheism. It is difficult to say, therefore, what his attitude to the problem I have posed might have been. Whatever about Wittgenstein's own view of it, however, the language learning account of concept-formation might seem to escape the regress if it can show how at some earlier point the sequence of concept-conferring exchanges could have arisen. Any such account faces two difficulties: first that arising from the dialectic between innatism and abstractionism, and second a regress. If the linguistic view is to be a genuine alternative to the other theories it cannot revert to them in explaining earlier stages in our conceptual history. It cannot say, for example, that Adam's (and Eve's?) concepts were innate though the child's were acquired. If innatism and abstractionism are incoherent they are not made any more intelligible by being introduced to halt a regress. This sort of difficulty will be generally acknowledged; what is less likely to be conceded is the second objection, namely that no history of thought or language can be philosophically adequate if it tries to meet the genesis problem by postulating 'fading conceptuality'. Though it is not put in these terms, or indeed very often discussed at all, something of this sort is presumably part of a naturalistic version of Wittgenstein's linguistic theory. On this account the history of concept-formation and use, is the history of language; a history that leads back to pre-linguistic activities, back further to pre-mental life, to pre-replicating life and ultimately to pre-animate matter. It is unnecessary for me to elaborate my objection. What needs to be accounted for is a natural transition from the nonconceptual to the conceptual and that is not the same distinction as one between degrees of conceptual complexity. Doubtless Stone Age cave dwellers made fewer and less abstract discriminations than a contemporary physicist, but that is irrelevant; the point is that the ability to make any general classifications is a conceptual power. Let me add a further consideration. Thus far I have cast my argument concerning the nature of thought in terms of the genesis of concepts. However there is an additional difficulty for the naturalist so far as concerns the relation between concepts and the objects and features that fall under them. Consider again the concept cat. Setting aside issues having to do with its non-specificity and possible indeterminacy (e.g. there are

22

THE SOURCE AND DESTINATION OF THOUGHT

significant differences between species of cats and there may be animals concerning which it is an issue whether they are cats) let us say that the extension of this concept (the things of which it is true), or of the corresponding term 'cat' and its equivalents in other languages, is the set of cats. It is natural to think that the concept cat designates not only actual cats but future and 'counterfactual' cats. That is to say, one might contemplate and discuss with others the prospects for cats in the environment of Chernobyl thirty years hence, or consider what would have been done with the kittens that Mother Cat might have had had she not been neutered. Thus there is a problem with the attempt to give the 'semantic value' ofthis term, or concept, by reference to actual material objects. Additionally, it is easily imaginable that the members of the set of actual cats fall under another concept, let us say that of being the most-commonfour-Iegged-animals-whose-average-weight-is-N, call this the concept 'maxifourn'. In this situation the extensions of the concepts cat and maxifourn are identical: they have all and only the same members. Nonetheless, it is natural to say that the property of being a cat is not the same as that of being a maxifourn. Little Felix would still be a cat even if, because of population changes, he were no longer a maxifourn; meanwhile in the same situation though Derek the dachshund might then be a maxifourn he would thereby not have become a cat. The point is clear: concepts distinguish objects in virtue of their properties and even where two concepts are co-extensive have all and only the same instances - the properties they designate may differ. This is so even where the properties in question are not merely co-extensive but necessarily so, i.e. where, unlike the catlmaxifourn example, there is no possibility of their extensions diverging. Every triangle is a trilateral and vice versa, and in some sense possession of the one property necessitates possession of the other. Yet triangularity and trilaterality are not the same attribute and it takes geometrical reasoning to show that these properties are necessarily coinstantiated. This latter possibility raises what for the empiricist is the spectre of a priori knowledge, i.e., true, appropriatelywarranted belief that does not require to be verified in experience - because it could not fail to be. These are various aspects of a general problem for the naturalist. Our concepts transcend material configurations in

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space-time. As was observed earlier to think of an item is always to think of it via some conception. A naturalistic account of experience and thought will need to relate such ways of thinking to the nature of the objects in question and very likely add that the genesis of our concepts derives (in whole or in part) from the causal influence on us or on earlier generations of particular material objects. The trouble with this is brought about by the trilateral/triangular example. To the extent that he can even concede that there are distinct properties the naturalist will want to insist that the causal powers - as he conceives them - of trilaterals and triangulars are identical. Thus he cannot explain the difference between the concepts by invoking causal differences between the members of their extensions (as one might seem to be able to account for the difference between the concepts square and circle). For any naturally individuated object or property there are indefinitely many non-equivalent ways of thinking about it. Otherwise put, the structure of the conceptual order, which is expressed in judgements and actions, is richer and more abstract than that of the natural order, and the character of this difference makes it difficult to see how the materialist could explain the former as arising out of the latter. Naturalism in its modern materialist versions has negative and positive aspects. It precludes certain sorts of explanations on the grounds that they are incompatible with physicalism, and it presumes the availability, in principle, of wholly adequate naturalistic accounts of reality. I have been arguing that its positive claim is demonstrably false in respect of one important feature of the world. Let me add a final point in this section. The presuppositions of scientific realism are that there are things the existence and nature of which are independent of our investigations, and that we possess intellectual powers adequate to their identification and description. (This claim allows that not all that exists may be mind-independent and not all that is may be knowable by us). There is nothing inevitable about this; the world might not have been intelligible and we might not have had the kind of intelligence that is shaped to understanding it. The fact that there is a harmony makes it possible for us to have knowledge of some of the most profound features of the empirical order. From astronomy to zoology via chemistry, physics and the rest of the natural sciences, we have discovered an enormous amount about 24

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reality (not to mention non-empirical orders of logic, geometry, mathematics and so on). This is improbable even granting naturalism, and if my earlier arguments against materialism are right it is entirely inexplicable on that basis. I reasoned that there cannot be an evolutionary account of conceptual powers; but even if there could be that would not account for our having the kinds of concepts we do, ones that go beyond practical utility and so cannot be explained in terms of adaptive value. One might here appeal to the fact that present day biologists do not claim that every significant characteristic is an evolutionary adaptation. That, however, is a move away from the possibility of giving a natural explanation of the harmony of thought and world. It would be within the power of an intelligent creator to effect such a harmony, and indeed there would be something fitting in creating a universe that had within it the power of its own understanding which is what in one sense empirical knowledge involves. I offer this as one interpretation of the JudaeoChristian-Islamic idea that a human being is made in the image, indeed is an image, of God (imago Dei). The hypothesis of theism explains the existence of an orderly universe, of rational animals and of the harmony of thought and world. Scientific materialism explains none of these things.

3. Thought and its objects

So much for the general argument. Recall its conclusions which I now present in reverse order: I Scientific realism presupposes that there is harmony between the structure of thought and that of the world, but it is not itself capable of explaining this. II The content of thought consists in part or in whole in general ideas the principles of individuation of which are ineliminably intensional; thus they cannot be accounted for extensionally. The conceptual order is richer and more abstract than the natural domain. III The conceptuality of thought is only explicable in its genesis on the basis of an actualising source that is itself a thinker; the regress may only be halted by positing a Prime Thinker. 25

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Next I wish to press further the question of how thought is possible, as this is understood in the tradition to which Maimonides and Aquinas both belong and to which I also subscribe. According to Aristotle's de Anima the soul is the first principle of animal life, 'the first actuality of a natural body which has organs' (De Anima 402 a S). It is rarely observed that elsewhere, in an oft-omitted passage of the de Caelo, he offers a different definition. This is not a mere notational variant but a distinct account, for he writes that the heavenly bodies are be-souled and possessed of principles of self-movement though they have no organic parts (de Caelo, 292 a 18-21). More radically still, in Metaphysics Zeta he attributes life to God though by his own reckoning god is wholly immaterial (Metaphysics, 1072b 2S). These apparently troublesome inconsistencies may best be dealt with by a doctrine of analogical predication, of the sort that is embryonic in Aristotle's own notion of focal meaning and is further developed in Maimonides' reconciliation of scripture and philosophy in Part I of the Guide, and perhaps further still in Aquinas. 7 At any rate, so far as the de Anima is concerned the soul is what makes animals (i.e. living things) to be alive. It is their souls that give them their structure and functional organisation, in a sense of 'giving' related to that in which one may say that it is its shape that gives a triangle its geometrical properties. In characterising the different categories of living things Aristotle deploys the principle that acting follows upon being ('agere sequiter esse'), and thereby derives an account of the various kinds of animate substances from identifications of their distinctive powers, these latter being revealed in their actions upon, and in response to, the environment. This is good scientific methodology and, I believe, sound metaphysics. What it yields with regard to 'be-souled' substances is a hierarchy of forms of life exhibiting powers of nutrition, growth, and generation (vegetative souls); locomotion, appetite, and perception (sensitive souls); and memory, will, intellect 7 For an authoritative account of Aquinas on analogy, taking issue with the long-standing interpretation and systematization authored by Cajetan in his De nominum analogia of 1498, see Ralph McInerny, Aquinas and Analogy (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996).

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(rational souls). As Aquinas was keen to point out in opposition to some of his contemporaries, this taxonomy does not imply that rational animals have three souls: vegetative, sentient and rational as such. Instead there is an order of subsumption. What constitutes the hierarchy is that some types of soul possess the powers of others but not vice versa. We may say then that a human being is a nutrient-taking, body-growing, generating, loco mating, appetiting, perceiving, remembering, willing, intellecting animal. Thus we may also say that a precondition of thought is having an animate power of cognition. In the present context it is this last power that is of special interest. For Aristotle, his commentators in Arabic, Maimonides and Aquinas, intellection is a very special activity. Correlatively its objects are very special entities. In thought, the thinker engages actually intelligible structures. I say, 'actually' to mark a contrast with 'potentially' intelligible structures which is what, on this view, the natures of things are prior to their being cognized. For, notwithstanding occasional neo-Platonic leanings, the medieval Aristotelians hold to the thesis of the 'Philosopher' that the proper objects of thought are abstract forms which do not exist as universals in nature but are constructed in the intellect through reflection upon instances encountered in perception. In the Guide, Maimonides refers to this fact as follows: It is an established fact that species [general forms] have no existence except in our minds. Species and other classes are merely ideas formed in our minds, whilst everything in real [i.e. extra-mental] existence is an individual object, or an aggregate of individual objects. (III, 18)

The corollary of this is that prior to the act of intellectual comprehension the thinker is also in a state of potentiality. Again I quote from Maimonides. When a man comprehends a thing, e.g. the form of a certain tree which is pointed out to him, when he abstracts its form from its substance, and reproduces the abstract form . . . he comprehends not merely potentially but in reality. (I. 68). These relations of mutual dependence and realisation are analogous to a marriage. Prior to it, one party is a potential 27

REFERRING TO GOD

husband and the other a potential wife; then by one and the same act of union the two potentialities are actualised. There is no becoming a husband without someone else becoming a wife, nor vice versa. Likewise, there is no coming-to-be-actuallythought, without another entity coming-to-be-a-thinker. There are no thinkables without thinkerables; and this in the strong sense that what are thought about, viz. universal natures, only exist through being thought about, and thinking only exists in so far as it has these objects. In the previous section I argued that the power of conceptualisation needs to be actualised by an external agent, and that this consideration leads to the conclusion that there is a Prime Thinker. In this section I have outlined a view according to which any thinker is also an actualiser of the intelligibility of what he or she thinks of. For example, if in considering a series of mineral samples a geologist comes to a certain conclusion about their common crystalline structure, and having arrived at this goes on to think further about it, then we may say that what before was only potentially intelligible - that abstract structure - has now become actually so, and that what previously was only an intellectual potential has also been rendered actual. The upshot is that the potentiality inherent in the soul of a rational animal to think about the natures of things is realised from two directions: so to speak, from behind and from in front. Behind the thinker-to-be lie other thinkers communicating their conceptualising power, paradigmatically through language. In front of the thinker-to-be lie objects possessed of individual natures, from the experience of which may be drawn appropriate universal concepts. The two directions of realisation are united in a subject's intellectual cognition of reality. Additional to a pre-disposed animal nature, the preconditions of thought, therefore, are conceptualising power and natures suitable to be conceptualised. Having argued that the former comes from God let me now suggest that in contemplating natures one's thought is also directed back towards the Creator; and moreover that this condition provides warrant for speaking of man (homo sapiens) as being in the image and likeness of God. Towards the end of the previous section I noted that the world might not have been intelligible and we might not have had the kind of intelligence suitable for understanding it. The latter makes the issue sound one of competence, but as the current

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discussion indicates the very possibility of intellectual cognition of reality depends upon a metaphysical harmony of mind (as conceptualising power) and world (as domain of natures apt to be conceptualised). The question as to how there could be the required harmony is answered for the theist by saying that God made it to be so. Pursuing this line of thought the following scene comes into view. Picture to one side a human being, previously induced into conceptuality by others of his kind and currently engaged in an enquiry into the nature of various natural objects. God is already in the picture three times over: as ultimate source of the thinker's conceptual activity; as author of the harmony of mind and world, and thus of the possibility of union between the thinker and the objects of his thought; and as creator of the particular substances upon which the thinker's intellectual gaze is directed. Turning now to the last of these contributions, it is axiomatic in the philosophies of antiquity and the middle ages, be they Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian or Islamic, that what God makes to be in nature pre-exists (not necessarily temporally) in God's mind; for how else would it be explicable that creation was a matter of design and not of divine accident? It cannot be said that the natures of the individuals studied by the human enquirer pre-exist as individuals in the mind of God, otherwise we would have to say that God is partly composed of, or populated by, the natures of particular things - and, moreover, by ones that came into being (and passed out of being) at certain times. And since it certainly belongs to the natures of many individual substances to be material, and in the Aristotelian scheme all individualisation is due to matter, we should be saying that God contains material multitudes. Rather than fall into what would at best be a form of panentheism, we should follow the pathway well-worn by the ancients and medievals and say that what exist 'eminently' in the mind of the Creator are not individual natures but abstract universal forms. That having been said, the scene expands: to the right as before stand human beings but to their left occupying the middle ground are particular things, cats, dogs, mineral samples, quantities of vapour, and the plurality of kinds that compose the natural order. To their left is the mind of God in which preexist the forms that define these kinds. Put more directly: to 29

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right and left we see minds, in which natures exist, abstract and universal; and between them stand things in which those natures are made particular. The world may now be viewed as an intermediary between minds, human and divine. Nature is the book which God writes and which we read. It is a means (but not only that) of communication. God enables us to think (teaches us to read), provides a medium for enquiry (creates the book of nature) and offers a goal (attainment of the essence of the narrative as it exists in the intellect of the author). It is in this sense the mind of God is both the source and the destination of human thought.

4. A link that joins us to God Rabbi Moses ben Maimon has already been invoked in the previous section. In this brief concluding part he is the object of undivided attention. As will be clear from the quotations concerning the exclusively mental existence of species and the actualisation of the human intellect in thought, Maimonides is a pretty regular Aristotelian. Yet he is also a monotheist and a Jew. What Judaism has, to an extent unmatched among other theistic philosophies, is a sense of continuing and mostly mundane communication between God and man. By mundane, of course, I do not mean trivial but world-situated. Judaism has a mystical tradition but that is not the greater part, neither in scriptural times nor since. Quite the contrary; the patriarchs, the prophets and the rabbis emphasise that God's dealings with, and directions to men, are communicated through the things and conditions of the world. What Maimonides teaches is that we need not view creation and Creator, or nature and intelligence in uncompromising opposition. Instead, we should see them as dynamically related through a series of actuality/potentiality relations. So far as present interests are concerned the main point is to illustrate what he has to say about intellectual cognition as a route to God. In Part I of the Guide he writes as follows: You are acquainted with the well-known principle of the philosophers that God is the intellectus [intellect], the ens intelligens [the thinker] and the ens intelligible [the object 30

THE SOURCE AND DESTINATION OF THOUGHT

of thought]. These three things are in God one and the same, and do not in any way constitute a plurality. . .. Even among those who imagine they are wise, many find this subject difficult .... whenever the intellect is found in action, the intellect and the thing comprehended are one and the same thing; and also the function of all intellect, namely the act of thinking, is its essence. (1, 68) This is in harmony with the Aristotelian position outlined in the previous section. Intellect is not an object but a power actualised in thinking; that actuality consisting in nothing other than the universal nature or object of thought being entertained. Speaking humanly, if I think of the nature of a tree as being that of an oak, then my intellect is nothing other than the thinking of that thought, and its content is nothing other than the abstract genus oak (the essence of Quercus). Speaking divinely, the fact of there being oak trees is nothing other than God's expressing his essence in creatively thinking of that very same nature. In Maimonides' description He and the things comprehended are one and the same thing, that is to say, His essence; and the act of comprehending because of which it is said that He comprehends, is the intellect itself, which is likewise His essence. God is therefore always the intellectus, the intelligens, and the intelligible.' (1, 68) So far as the conclusions of the previous section are concerned about nature being a channel of communication, and God being the source and destination of intellectual activity - Maimonides seems to be in agreement. Indeed, he carries matters further and in a direction that some readers will find uncomfortable. For he suggests that there is a direct link between intellectual and spiritual status. His route into this is by way of asking why human beings should be favoured among the animals of the earth and the seas. Why should God select mankind as the object of His special Providence, and not other living beings? For he who asks this question must also enquire, Why has man alone, of all species of animals, been endowed with intellect? ... I hold that Divine Providence is related and closely connected 31

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with the intellect, because Providence can only proceed from an intelligent being, from a being that is itself the most perfect Intellect. Those creatures, therefore, which receive part of that intellectual influence, will become subject to the action of Providence in the same proportion as they are acted upon by the Intellect. (III, 17) Thus far this may seem unchallenging, though possibly fallacious. Purposeful attention calls for intelligence; God is the creator and the supreme intelligence; He endows human beings with intellect; hence, they are best qualified to be objects of special Providence. One might ask why that which, in possessing intelligence, is most alike to God should therefore be the main beneficiary of Divine order. At this point, however, I am less concerned with the cogency of the reasoning than with the extent to which Maimonides seems disposed to carry it. In the following chapter he writes: Hence it follows ... that the greater the share in which a person has obtained ofthis Divine influence ... the greater must be the effect of Divine Providence upon him, for the action of Divine Providence is proportional to the endowment of intellect, as has been mentioned above. The relation of Divine Providence is therefore not the same to all men; the greater the human perfection a person has attained, the Greater the benefit he derives from Divine Providence. (III, 18) Following this and in a later chapter Maimonides develops the point so far as to claim that Moses was the most blessed among the prophets, spending forty days and forty nights in the company of the Lord (Exodus. 34. 28), because he had attained so much knowledge and concentrated his thoughts on the idea of God. If this strikes a theist reader as absurd it is interesting to ask why that should be so. No doubt many factors might be cited but prominent among them is likely to be the thought that sanctity cannot be measured in intelligence. Have there not been holy fools and have not the clever been wicked and far from God? No doubt both things are true, but Maimonides' position is not thereby refuted. For one thing, although he certainly does relate membership of the class of prophets to perfection in metaphysics, he also suggests that the point of the latter is to learn how 32

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God rules things, and it could be that, so far as human affairs are concerned, inarticulate wisdom may serve as well or better in discerning the Divine order than theoretical reflection. Second, he may argue that even where someone retains the aura of intellectual accomplishment it is a mark of their having become intellectually derailed that they have violated the Law of God. Whatever about these refinements and qualifications, Maimonides is clear that 'the intellect which emanates from God unto us is the link that joins us to God' (III, 51). I hope that the arguments of preceding sections have gone some way to establishing the same conclusion on grounds acceptable to Jew and Gentile alike.

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Response Mark Wynn

I

shall start by offering some remarks on the First Thinker argument, and then say a little about Maimonides and the idea that knowledge of the world offers a route to God. John Haldane's First Thinker argument seems to me an insightful and genuinely original way of bringing together various issues in contemporary philosophy of language and a range of concerns which are familiar from the writings of Aquinas. I would like to make two general observations on the argument. First I shall say a little about the kind of explanation which it offers, and then note one line of argument which a critic might seek to develop in reply. It is well known that in Aquinas's view, philosophical reasoning cannot settle the question of whether the world had a beginning in time. (This is a position he shares with Maimonides, incidentally.) So it is clear that his argument for a first mover does not depend on identifying a chain of things moving other things which had a beginning in time. Now John Haldane's argument seems to differ on this point: it appeals to a temporal regress, and depends on the thought that there was a first case of human concept use. If this is so, then the theist seems to have a choice between two possibilities: either (i) 'Adam and Eve' acquired their concepts through the natural order of things, allowing that the functioning of this order points to the sustaining activity of God; or (ii) God intervened in the natural order 'miraculously' in order to give them certain concepts. Let's look at these possibilities a little more closely. It seems that the first possibility, according to which Adam and Eve acquired their concepts through the natural order of 34

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things, is excluded by the First Thinker argument, assuming that Adam and Eve's natural capacities do not differ in any fundamental respect from our own. After all, if we suppose, in agreement with the First Thinker argument, that later generations of human beings are able to acquire concepts within the natural order only through the agency of other human concept users, and ifthere are no human beings who pre-exist Adam and Eve, then there is nothing within the natural order which could account for their acquisition of concepts. So it seems that the First Thinker argument is inviting us to suppose that Adam and Eve's acquisition of concepts involved some sort of suspension or 'topping up' of the natural order. If this is the right way to understand the first case of human concept acquisition, it suggests an interesting contrast with the case of other emergent phenomena. For instance, we might well want to say, within a theistic framework, that once the brain has reached a certain level of organisation, consciousness will follow on naturally, that is, in virtue of the natural properties of brains and their environments as these have been created by God. The First Thinker argument is asking us to suppose, it seems to me, that concepts do not arise in this sort of way. While an appropriate brain structure may ensure, in terms of the natural order, that Adam and Eve have the potentiality to acquire concepts, in the absence of any natural concept users, there is nothing within the natural order which has the capacity to actualise that potential. In short, the First Thinker argument seems to invoke God not so much to undergird the natural order, and the relationships between secondary causes which make up that order, but rather to suspend or supplement the normal operation of secondary causes, in order to bring about an effect which they alone cannot secure. If that is so, then the explanation offered by the First Thinker argument is of a rather different kind from the explanation which figures in Aquinas's First Mover argument. But if we adopt this understanding of the first case of human concept acquisition, then it is natural to ask: in what way did God intervene? The most obvious suggestion is perhaps that God simply implanted various concepts in the minds of Adam and Eve. But this proposal appears to be too close to innatism for John's liking. As he says: 'To defend innatism you have to be willing to make large claims - such as that our ideas were given 35

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us by God who implanted the right number, of the right sort, at the right time' [po 18]. But if God did not simply implant certain concepts in the minds of the first human concept users, and if they did not acquire those concepts through the workings of the natural order, how did they acquire them? These comments are not intended fundamentally as an objection to the First Thinker argument, but rather as a request for further detail concerning the kind of explanation which is being offered. My second general comment has to do explicitly not with the particular form of any theistic explanation of concept acquisition, but with the appropriateness of looking for such an explanation in the first place. A naturalist might well concede (and ought to concede, in my view) that there cannot be (logically cannot be) a complete naturalistic explanation ofthe existence of natural concept users. Of course, a naturalistic account can show how earlier phases of the evolutionary process in various respects paved the way for natural concept users. For instance, we will presumably want to say that there is some sort of naturalistic account of why conceptual thought is a capacity of human beings and not of daffodils or of ants. However, granted that concept use involves more than a quantitative extrapolation from phenomena which are evident in earlier phases of the evolutionary process, there is a ready sense in which the capacity for conceptual thought must elude any purely naturalistic account of the nature of things. However, the naturalist could grant all of this while still doubting whether the proper response is to look for a theistic explanation of the existence of natural concept users. The naturalist may urge that any worldview must leave certain facts 'dangling', and that the unexplained emergence of concept use within the history of the world is as satisfactory a stopping point for explanation as the existence of a transcendent reality whose powers of concept use are intrinsic, and whose existence is also ultimately unexplained. Of course, this reply takes us on to broader issues, beyond the scope of John's discussion, to do with divine necessity and the prior probability of theism. However, I mention this response because it seems to me the most plausible reply available to the naturalist, and the one which naturalists are in practice most likely to make. It is a response, in brief, which grants the basic thrust of John Haldane's case (naturalism cannot provide any deep explanation of the existence of natural 36

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concept users), but doubts whether this fact can bear the weight which the Prime Thinker argument wishes to place upon it. So far I have identified two possible issues for discussion when we consider the First Thinker argument: what kind of explanation is offered by the argument, and what reason have we to suppose that the admitted failure of naturalistic explanations of human beings' conceptual powers justifies the introduction of a theistic explanation? I shall now add a few remarks about the place of Maimonides in this discussion. In Sections 3 and 4 of his paper, John Haldane offers some comments about how our coming to know the world provides a way of being related to God. As John has noted, various themes in Maimonides seem to throw some light on this general issue. I shall pass comment on just one. Maimonides is well known as an advocate of negative theology, and accordingly he supposes that our knowledge of God (provided above all by the Scriptures) cannot be knowledge of the transcendent God in himself, but must in some way be knowledge of the world. In particular, knowing God's attributes, such as his kindness and vengefulness, turns out, in Maimonides' scheme, to be a matter of knowing the general tendencies of the world in some respect or other. For instance, Maimonides writes that one knows of God's kindness through the development of the child both in the womb and after birth. (See I 54 of the Guide.) In sum, human beings' knowledge of God (including Moses' knowledge of God) proves to be knowledge of God's attributes, which in turn is knowledge of his actions, which in turn is knowledge of the world from what we might regard as a scientific point of view. (This aspect of Maimonides' thought, along with others, has obvious spinozistic resonances.) So here is one way in which we might develop, in Maimonidean terms, the idea that knowing the world provides a way to knowledge of God. Here the key theme is his negative theology, and his idea that our only knowledge of God is therefore a knowledge of the world as the sphere of God's creative activity. In these remarks, I have tried to put two questions to the First Thinker argument, concerning the kind of explanation a theist might offer of human concept use, and the need for such an explanation in the first place. And I have noted one theme in Maimonides which relates to the general issue of knowledge of the world as a route to God.

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There are two further issues I shall raise. First of all, I have a question about the relation between John Haldane's First Thinker argument and another argument, advanced by Ralph Walker in his book on Kant, l which also takes human concept use as the basis for a proof of the existence of God. Walker's argument does not start from the mere fact of concept possession, but rather from the particular character of the concepts we use, and the fact that they prove so fruitful in predicting the course of the world. (There are echoes of such an argument in John's comment that our concepts 'go beyond practical utility and so cannot be explained in terms of adaptive value'.) In particular, he is interested in the question of why the world should conform to concepts which we take to be natural (concepts such as green) and not to other concepts, such as 'grue' (where 'grue' is defined as, say, 'green before midnight tonight and blue thereafter'). I would be interested to know what John Haldane makes of Walker's argument. For if! read him correctly, John has argued in other contexts (in his paper 'Mind-World Identity Theory and the Anti-realist Challenge') that the conformity of the world to our concepts reflects the causal role of the world in shaping those concepts. (More exactly, it reflects the fact that the natures of things in the world are the formal cause of our concepts.) If there is such a causal link running from the nature of the world to the nature of our concepts, then it may be that there is an adequate naturalistic account of the adequacy of our colour concepts, and other such basic concepts. In sum, I suggest that Walker's argument might in principle be dovetailed with the First Thinker argument, to provide an overarching theistic argument from human beings' powers of conceptual thought. However, the prospect of such an overarching argument may not appeal to John Haldane, given the particular form of his realist epistemology, which seems to leave open the possibility of a naturalistic explanation of the fit between (at least some oD our concepts and the world. In concluding, I shall return to Maimonides' intellectualist spirituality. A second relevant theme (in addition to the theme of negative theology) is the one which John has picked out in his discussion of Section I, Chapter 68 of the Guide. Here 1 Ralph C.S. Walker, Kant (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).

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Maimonides talks of 'the numerical unity of the intellect, the intellectually cognising subject, and the intellectually cognised object' (in Pines' translation) and he notes that this unity 'does not hold good with reference to the Creator only, but also with reference to every intellect'. This raises two questions: 1. In speaking of the 'numerical unit' of 'cognising subject and the intellectually cognised object', how far does Maimonides slip towards a pantheistic identification of the world and God (since God has knowledge of the world after all)? 2. How far does Maimonides' explicit comparison of the human and divine intellects call into question his negative theology? Both of these questions are relevant to the idea that our knowledge of the world offers a route to God. If the world is identified with God, at any rate in so far as it is intelligible, then human knowledge of the world will clearly be bound up with knowledge of God. Secondly, and still more radically, in so far as human knowledge of the world implies that human beings are, like God, to be identified with the world (contrary perhaps to the drift of Maimonides' negative theology), then it seems to follow that divine and human intellects are in turn to be identified with each other, in so far as each is identified with the world. This suggests that coming to knowledge of the world is not only a matter of coming to knowledge of God (in so far as God is identified with the world in virtue of knowing it), but also a matter of becoming like God (who is like us in being a knower of the world), and even in some sense a matter of becoming identified with God (in so far as human beings and God are both properly identified with the world as an object of which they have knowledge). Thus the discussion of 168 provides a variety of ways of developing the theme that knowledge of the world provides a way to God.

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CHAPTER THREE

William Alston on Referring to God Joe Houston

A

round 1970, philosophical reflection about reference acquired a fresh vitality; new suggestions were made and new questions raised as previous views were radically attacked, or resourcefully defended; and third ways or compromises were explored. The principal impetus to all this has been Saul Kripke's work, especially his Naming and Necessity (1971 and 1980).1 Many philosophical parts have been, and are being reached by these developments. Reference to God is one such. And, notably, W.P. Alston has aspired to gain some advantage from Kripkean ideas, in his paper 'Referring to God' (1989). My aspiration now is to gain a better view of some issues, and to raise some pertinent questions, by developing or qualifying, or explaining my reservations about, this Alston-out-of-Kripke doctrine, or picture.

II

Kripke is cautious, or modest, in Naming and Necessity, in that he disclaims ambition(s) to offer a theory, or theories, about referring by the use of names. He claims to present a better picture than that commonly presented by the descriptivists whom he attacks. According to

1 A citation is due also to such as Keith Donnellan. See, e.g., Donnellan 1977.

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them, roughly, when a name is used it secures its reference only by way of at least some, comprising it may be said, an adequate proportion, of those definite descriptions which are both associated with the name and uniquely describe whatever is referred to, the referent. According to one species of this doctrine, distinguished by Kripke, these descriptions are 'associated' because they are believed by the user of the name uniquely to identify the owner of the name, and they constitute the name's meaning (? to its user). On another species of this descriptivism, the descriptions simply belong to that cluster of definite descriptions associated with the name by its user as uniquely identifying the owner of the name, and so as being available to pick out its referent when the name is used and so perhaps define it. 2 This theory of naming in both versions is found wanting by Kripke. Several 'theses' are listed by him. These give the descriptivist picture of naming. Whether all of them (six theses, plus a condition which must be satisfied if any of the theses is to be satisfied) require to be satisfied for the theory of naming to hold, and if not all how many, is something which we may not need to settle, because it seems clear that if the following three fail, the theory also fails. And Kripke argues that these three do plainly fail. • Of the properties which the user of a name believes to belong to the bearer ofthe name, one, or some conjointly, are believed by the user to belong uniquely to some individual. • If most, or most of the most important ('important' because they matter maximally for the securing of this reference)3 of the properties which a name's user thinks belong to the bearer of the name do in fact belong to one particular thing alone, then that is the name's bearer, referent. • If no object uniquely possesses an adequate preponderance of the properties (as these are weighted for importance) which are believed by a name's user to belong to what she takes to be the name's bearer, then the putative name does not refer.

2 Kripke does speak on occasion of defining, here. 3 At this point, Kripke is I think attempting to speak of a qualification which he thinks cluster theorists about naming should make, but which he does not himself explain or fill out because of the sort and source of wrongness which he locates elsewhere in the cluster theorists' whole picture.

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The satisfaction condition which applies to these three theses, as to each ofthe other three, requires that the properties which are associated with the name by the name's user are not understood only in a way which involves yet another instance of uneliminated and unaccounted-for referring; the object of the exercise, after all, is to give an account of referring-by-name-use, and if an account is offered in terms of a property which is itself understood in terms of name use, there will be a vitiating circularity in that account. The treatment will be more manifestly circular4 if, as in one of Kripke's counter examples, the very name whose use is supposedly being explained itself reappears in use in the offered explanation. So Kripke suggests that a person who uses the name 'Einstein' might be able to associate with it only the identifYing description 'the man who discovered relativity theory', but be able to say of relativity theory only that it is Einstein's theory. In these circumstances, the satisfaction condition which advocates of descriptivist theories of naming will wish to stipulate is failed when someone says, but in the way described can say no more than, 'Einstein discovered relativity theory'. Andyet, it is Kripke's point that a person who says this does refer to Einstein. That is, we have a use ofthe name, where reference does take place by the use of the name, but where the terms set out in the first descriptivist thesis are not met except circularly. And such is not genuine conformity to the thesis. Nevertheless, in such a case, reference to Einstein does take place. A further counter-instance to the first thesis: a user of a name who can only offer, as an associated property, some (nonidentifying) property which is insufficiently specific to pick out any individual uniquely, may still refer by the use of the name. So, someone who holds of Feynman only that 'he is a physicist or something' nevertheless succeeds in referring to Feynman by using his name (saying, e.g. 'Feynman may be a baseball fan' my example). 4 I wonder, here, whether what the descriptivist is guarding against is circularity, or whether it is, rather, tautology, pleonasm. I also find Kripke's discussion of this circularity requirement, which he considers that the descriptivist is bound to accept or impose upon himself, to raise further questions. But it will not best advance our present cause to pursue these questions now.

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As counter instances to the second thesis, Kripke proposes first a case where the most weightily associated definite description, believed by most of its users to belong uniquely to the bearer of some name, in fact uniquely picks out someone else. Suppose that Godel is not the author (or first discoverer) of the theorem proving the incompleteness of arithmetic but that an unknown, Schmidt, was the author, and that Godel his friend, on Schmidt's death procured the manuscript and published the theorem with no acknowledgement to Schmidt. And suppose most of us users of 'Godel' being unaware of this historical curiosity, this little known fact, take the associated definite description 'the author/discoverer of the theorem proving the incompleteness of arithmetic' to be such as to outweigh any or all other identifying descriptions in reference-securing importance. According to the second descriptivist thesis, when we say, e.g. 'Godel was a Yorkshireman' we are actually referring to Schmidt. But we are not. We are referring to Godel. Kripke is surely correct that analogous examples could be multiplied indefinitely. He offers several telling ones himself. One of these can serve the alternative purposes of: either further showing the wrongness ofthesis two, or the wrongness of thesis three. Einstein was often popularly thought of exclusively or weightily and uniquely as the inventor of the atomic bomb. If any individual was the bomb's inventor, it was someone other than Einstein. Perhaps it was Peierls. If it was, then, when people holding that popular concept of Einstein say, 'Einstein treated women badly', the second thesis would have it that Peierls is the person being referred to. So much the worse for the second thesis. If, more plausibly, we hold that there was no such person as the bomb's inventor, then according to the third thesis those who say 'Einstein treated women badly' fail to refer to anyone. Again, even though there has been nobody of whom any of the things popularly believed about Jonah is true, Biblical scholars tell us that there was an historical Jonah about whom the Jonah story was told. According to thesis three, all of us who know nothing of that biblical scholarship, whose only beliefs about Jonah are the popular ones, fail to refer if we say 'Jonah was a pessimist', or 'Jonah was a landlubber.' But actually we do then, in these circumstances, refer to Jonah. So much for thesis three.

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As an alternative to any descriptivist picture of reference, Kripke advances his chain, of practice, or tradition, or bequest, or inheritance (or something of the kind) picture of the referential usage of a name. According to this, a name comes to be attached to that of which it is a name; this usage is accepted and passed on amongst those who come into sharing this use, by continuous transmission from the outset of the particular naming-practice. 'Causal theory' is less specific and less true to Kripke's own emphasis and terminology than 'chainof-communication-theory'. Perhaps 'communication' nowadays suggests, misleadingly here, that some item of information bearing a truth-value is what we are concentrating upon as being passed on. And 'chain' (singular) could be misleading. The justified use of the name can spread from the first use in many directions at once, like a ripple; it is by our looking back from the vantage point of some particular use which is made possible and normal by the practice of this name's usages having been conveyed appropriately, that we see a chain, one particular historic thread of transmission, connecting the first fixing of the name to this later use. 'Conveyed specifying practice theory', or 'metathetic moniker theory' might do? Kripke's 'picture' is, as he concedes, a sketch, in that much desirable detail is omitted: we would like to have more about what sorts of circumstances weld the name to its owner in such a way that the practice of using the name to refer to that entity can be conveyed from there to others; and we would like to know more about the conveying. Kripke thinks that a name whose reference we do not (yet) know can have its reference fixed for us by the use of a uniquely identifying description. But (I think that this is his thought) it will not follow that, thereafter, we utilize the name to refer, only by means of the descriptiveness of that introductory reference-fixing description which is now supposed to attach to the name. Kripke says little about any role for definite descriptions, or beliefs about uniquely possessed properties, in the conveying or sustaining of the practice of the use of a name.

III

Alston draws upon Kripke's work, first in portraying a sort of referring which he calls 'direct reference', and which is strictly

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non-descriptivist. Alston affirms that some sorts of referring may take place which do use definite descriptions in association with names. But direct reference is an alternative to descriptivist reference not merely because it denies that names are only ever used to refer by our exploiting their associated uniquely specifying descriptions; direct reference is a type of referring which takes place without any use of definite descriptions. It is 'the alternative in which not only derivative reference along the chain of social transmission, but also the initial 'baptism' (to reverse the theological order of priority) is secured otherwise than by the unique satisfaction of some predicate.' He thinks of this sort of direct reference to God '. . . as secured by labeling (sic) something presented in experience'. That God can be perceived as an object of our experience, is, of course, most recently and fully argued for by Alston in his Perceiving God, (Alston 1991). Direct reference to God is made possible by a person's perceiving God, and attaching the name 'God' to what she thus meets in experience. Such experience often occurs when the person has participated in the distinctive activity of the community which, e.g. worships, prays, and receives the sacraments: a person like this will have grasped what it is to speak of God and, without yet experiencing or perceiving God, will have been enabled to refer to God because she will have had that specifying practice conveyed to her through the community. If, further, she (Alston's word) attains 'some first hand experiential acquaintance with God' she can then for herself attach God's name to God so that there is another point of origin from which this referring practice can be conveyed. There may for a time be some doubt in this about whether direct reference as Alston conceives of it is possible for a person who has not, or not yet, had vouchsafed to her the experience of perceiving God, but who can refer to God by reason of her involvement in the community which refers to God, having had this referring practice conveyed to them from at least some of those who have perceived God. I am fairly sure that his usage, when he comes, as he does, to argue for the primacy of direct reference, indicates that he intends any reference to God which is recognized and explained by this account of a name-using method and procedure for referring, to count as exemplifying direct reference. And that will include one's referring as a 46

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member of a community, some of whose members have perceivingly encountered God and have been enabled by this to set up lines of communication (at the first when God is first perceived, and then from further, later encounter - perceptions,) for the conveying of the specifying practice, without oneself having perceived God or being an originator of any of these lines. Alston's picture aims to sideline or at least marginalize the use of definite descriptions, uniquely specifying descriptions, within the life of such a name-using theistic community as he characterizes. If perception-encounter with God happened, in some such community of direct referrers, only to a single Founding Mother or Father, and that only on one formative and uniquely foundational occasion, Alston's aim might stand its best chance of success. But as he in fact develops it, it is clear that his picture is less austere and that he envisages many further perceivings of God by members of the community. From each new perception/encounter, the one community-in-whichGod-is-referred-to is given a new originating point for the further spread of the referring practice. Yet such perceivings require, surely, that God be recognized as God? How is this to happen? Alston skates over, slides past, that issue when he should not have done. He should not have done because recognition of God as God will seem to many of his readers most likely to be secured by the employment of uniquely specifying descriptions. If that is indeed how the essential recognition of God as God is to be supposed to happen, then descriptions specifying God will have to be developed, and must play a vital and recurring role in the life of Alston's theistic community. Now, it may be that if we had a fuller account of the means whereby the vital referring practice, which takes its rise from perception-encounters with God is conveyed from earlier to later referrings and people, we might then have available a nondescriptivist way of understanding how, in ever new perceptionencounters with God, people may know him to be the one who has previously been referred to. But, lacking that filled-out analysis of how the non-descriptivist referring procedures or mechanisms work, a descriptivist explanation will reasonably be favoured, and Alston's picture added to in ways which run counter to his aims. I will have more to say as the implications of this point unfold.

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Similarly, other difficulties which I have over Alston's account of what direct reference is are best left to emerge in the course of further discussion of Alston's claims about, and for, direct reference.

IV

He argues that direct reference is more fundamental than descriptivist reference, and that in more ways than one. His first claim is that descriptivist reference always or nearly always presupposes prior non-descriptivist referring. Two reasons are offered for this: it is rarely that we can use an individuating description to identify something without that description's containing some component referring expressions and Alston suggests that it is 'unlikely that a person could make enough references with purely qualitative descriptions to furnish an adequate foundation for our further descriptions that contain singular terms.' More than that, our use of a description to pick out something, its referent, presupposes our already being able to refer; no one can use a description to refer without grasping what it is for something to fit a definite description, and that entails having already made some singular references; if we supposed all ofthese to be made by descriptions, whose successful use in turn presupposes referential capacity, the resultant regress would be unacceptably infinite. The regress is to be halted at some point by our concluding that we sometimes, and fundamentally, make singular references in some other way than the descriptivist. These are, however, inadequate arguments for the establishing of Alston's conclusion. Suppose, to take the former claim, that we concede the impossibility of securing reference by means of purely qualitative descriptions, will it follow that when non-purely-qualitative descriptions are used to secure reference some priority attaches to the impurely descriptive, or indexical, or context-fixing component? Perhaps in such referring by non-purely-qualitative description a descriptive component and an indexical, context-placing component or function are jointly necessary? In that case, there is no reason to assert a priority of the one over the other. And Alston does not exclude that case.

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In the latter of Alston's claims or arguments we are being asked to accept that the ability to refer by use of a uniquely identifying description requires the prior ability to refer without the use of a description. Let us first ask what the exercise of this prior capacity would be like. Presumably the successful use of 'this' or 'that', so that the speaker's intention is correctly grasped by a hearer would do? Or gesturing, say pointing or laying one's hand upon the referent? Or using a name? But might we not, with as much justification as Alston, rehearse his protest, but now in respect of these and claim that unless we already (i.e. before we say 'this', or point) know what it is for something to be identified and already are able to make, or, (stronger,) have made, some singular reference, necessarily by some other method, we cannot know what it is to refer by indexical word, or gesture, or name? (Let me add that I am not conceiving of reference by 'this' as a case of identifying something by its fitting some such description as 'The thing which I indicate as "this"'. And the analogous disavowals in relation to reference by gestures and by names are also implied. I do not here assimilate these sorts of referring to descriptivist referring. But, I ask people of an Alstonian tendency, if only to clarify the issue, to explain why what Alston says about descriptivist reference should not be said about any other mode of reference. Failing a satisfactory explanation, Alston's argument fails, or at best yields a not proven verdict about the primacy of direct reference in this first respect. As Alston recognizes, more needs to be said here. The second sort of basicality to which Alston lays claim for direct reference concerns what counts as the referent, or how the referent is determined and picked out, in any problematic case where more than one mode of reference is employed. Alston's answer is: 'it is direct reference that determines the referent'. (Alston 1989:110.) This primacy of direct reference comes out and is confirmed, Alston holds, when the uses of the distinct modes or mechanisms of reference yield discrepant results, different referents. As we saw, Kripke himself deploys some sorts of cases of this general type in order to undermine descriptivist accounts of naming; and Alston sees himself as now applying somewhat Kripke-style arguments drawn from that setting to the case of referring to God. The outcome is not, however, mainstream

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Kripkean. As we consider what is being said and why it is being said, we shall not only see better the point of what each of these writers says, but also what referent we do identify in distinct sorts of circumstances which are considered in inter- and intrareligious debate and reflection, and (at least as important) what the question 'What is being referred to?' might variously mean. Two sorts of cases are given attention: There is, first, that in which the believer, or the worshipping community, has experential contact with (maybe even 'perceives', so long as one can perceive what one badly misunderstands, and so in terms of another usage misperceives as ... ) someone other than God who successfully poses as God, and is a successful enough imposter to induce members of the community to think of and describe him in terms prominently, including uniquely referring descriptions, appropriate to God. And, second, there is that in which devotees in the community have experential 'perceiving' contact with God, but they so misconstrue what has thus been given to them that they use referring descriptions intending them to be about the one they encounter(ed) when in fact these descriptions are not true of God, and may be true of some other referent. In each of these kinds of case, there is direct reference to one thing, while specifying descriptions would dictate reference to something else. Alston's contention is that unclarity on our part about what is being referred to, if anything, will properly be resolved thus: direct reference has the casting vote, wears the trousers, settles the issue. What direct reference refers to is the referent. So, taking the first sort of case, if Satan disguises himself as God, manifests himself to people who experience him and, misperceiving him in the way he intends, taking him at his word, believe him to be God, the weightiest definite descriptions which they apply to him will be specifying descriptions of God. Alston goes on 'I think the right thing to say here is that our dupe is really speaking of Satan when he says "God told me to put all unbelievers to the sword.'" (Alston 1989: 110.) In a way, no doubt, Alston's recommendation here does give a primacy to direct reference. But it does so in a way which sits ill with the main gist of Kripke's doctrine, a way excluded by the central focus of Kripke's picture about naming and reference; and to the extent that we share the intuitions of Kripke, which are the grounds for his picture, we shall be less than content 50

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with Alston. Kripke is concerned with the reference of names and his gist is that the referential power of a name determines the referent in a mode of operation which has been handed on and comes down to the name's user as a conveyed specifying practice; particularly, this way of referring by names functions without benefit of the descriptiveness of each uniquely identifying descriptions as may be associated with the name. Presented with Alston's example, Kripke will surely say 'God told me to put all believers to the sword' refers to God. The respective uses of the names 'God' and 'Satan', like the uses of the names 'Peano' and 'Dedekind' are on the Kripkean account conveyed to us as the Kripkean picture indicates. In the situation which is dealt with in this Kripke example, we being unaware of Peano's acknowledgements to Dedekind might say 'Peano taught us these highly significant axioms for number theory'; but even though the main definite description we associate with 'Peano' is 'discoverer of these axioms in number theory: ... ' we are not then referring to Dedekind, though it was in fact he who established the axioms. Both he and Peano will, in the required ways, have been perceived, encountered in the community which is thereby able to use their names. I might note that Alston, rather than speaking of the dupe mainly as 'referring to' Satan, says that he is 'really speaking of Satan', and then I might take one inviting route, which is to suggest that Alston is trading on an equivocation. Perhaps, that is, more or less implicitly he takes 'speaking of' and 'referring to' to mean the same thing, and then takes 'speaking of' to mean 'saying things which are true about'; so that 'saying things which are true, about Satan' is equivalent to 'speaking of Satan' is (implicitly) equivalent to 'referring to Satan'. Well, it is reasonable to suspect that Alston's playing down of 'refer' here may betoken an unease about what language is quite appropriate. And it is possible that 'really speaking of' is preferred to 'really referring to' because the idea that the dupe is really referring to Satan, when he says what he does, is more strikingly counterintuitive, certainly to a person in step with Kripkean ideas, than the less precise conception that what he says is of Satan, about Satan. But that suggested way of seeing Alston's thought fails to do justice to the directedness, according to Alston, of what is believed and spoken: it is not that it is believed to hold true of someone and then merely happens, turns out, to be true about 51

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Satan. It is believed and spoken as being true specifically of the one who confronts or confronted the dupe, in experience, and is/ was perceived, the one who is in fact Satan, though believed by the dupe to be God, and spoken of accordingly. The judgement that Alston's account is at odds with the main import of Kripke's reasoning is both borne out and qualified by the content of Kripke's footnote 3, Kripke 1980, being also Reference 3, Kripke 1972. There Kripke in effect recognizes, albeit in a non-theological context, that there is a point in saying the sort of thing Alston says. The closeness of the cases discussed and of the view taken of them is even brought out by a linguistic awkwardness confessed to and addressed by Kripke, and having the same source as Alston's unsteadiness in his use oflanguage describing being about. Kripke asks us to consider an example: Two men glimpse someone at a distance and think they recognize him as Jones. "What is Jones doing?". "Raking the leaves". If the distant leaf-raker is actually Smith, then in some sense they are referring to Smith, even though they both use 'Jones' as a name of Jones. In the text, I speak of the 'referent' of a name to mean the thing named by the name - e.g., Jones, not Smith - even though a speaker may sometimes properly be said to use the name to refer to someone else. Perhaps it would have been less misleading to use a technical term, such as 'denote' rather than 'refer'. My use of 'refer' is such as to satisfy the schema, 'The referent of ''X'' is 'X', where 'X' is replaceable by any name or description.' Kripke says that space limitations do not allow him to explain his view more fully than by a ' ... brief remark: Call the referent of a name or description in my sense the "semantic referent"; for a name, this is a thing named, for a description, the thing uniquely satisfying the description.' Then the speaker may refer (italicised) to something other than the semantic referent if he has appropriate false beliefs.' In Kripke's terms, then, Alston, in discussing the case ofthe dupe of Satan should not be claiming (and if we are to be charitable should not be taken to be claiming) that the dupe makes semantic reference to Satan when he says 'God told me to put all unbelievers to the sword.'. Rather, the dupe should be taken to

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refer (italicised) to Satan. Since I cannot easily indicate italics in speech, I shall call 'Wrong-address reference' what Kripke calls reference (in italics). And the 'appropriate false beliefs' ofthe two men watching the leaf-raker, and ofthe dupe, which justify us in calling these examples of wrong-address reference will respectively be: that Jones was raking leaves; and that God addressed him (i.e. the dupe). Someone might question my assimilating of the sort of reference which Alston is bringing to our notice in this dupe of Satan case to Kripke's italicized reference, wrong-address reference in my terms, on the following grounds. In Kripke's example of the mis-identified leaf-raker, the onlooker's beliefs about this distant figure are, so far as they are presented to us, true but insufficient even on a descriptivist view of reference to secure reference to either Jones or Smith, whereas the dupe of Satan has many false beliefs about that which was perceived by him yet sufficient, when their corresponding definite descriptions are used to pick out one, i.e. God, who was not in fact the one encountered. This difference reflects the different purposes of Kripke and Alston in ways that I shall shortly indicate. But it is important to recognize the sort of referring in which the content of beliefs which are held about the referent are irrelevant to the specifying of the one referred to. What does matter is the actual identity of the one perceivedly encountered even when the perceivers or (wrong-address) referrers are mistaken in their identification. Alston's example is better suited, as it is intended to be, to convince those of a descriptivist tendency, whereas Kripke's is presented in order to introduce, recognize and register a type of referring (i.e. italicised), which is distinct from that other sort of reference which is Kripke's main concern. 5 5 Kripke could easily have worked up his example to convince descriptivists: Suppose that one of the onlookers is Jones's physician, and he is aware that Jones has a grumbling appendix. The leaf-raker becomes aware of these toffs watching him, and, hoping for a tip prompted by sympathy, holds the side he imagines his heart to be on and sits down. The doctor takes him to be 'the park attendant with the grumbling appendix' and mis-identifies him as Jones. On that modified version of Kripke's example, we would have the circumstance, apt to convert descriptivists, of a reference which is manifestly not determined by the descriptiveness of the descriptions, but by the identity of the one present and perceived.

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Alston's interest in referring is generated at least as much by concern to understand what it will be to be rightly oriented religiously as it is to get clearer about central matters in the philosophy of language or logic. He cares about the devotion of the heart, the rendering of prayer, and worship, and love; and he takes it that these attitudes and practices will be directed properly if it is God to whom we refer in our talk and if these attitudes and practices are directed towards the one to whom we thus refer. Our inquiry so far indicates that we might fail to make semantic reference to the one to whom we actually direct our descriptions, and our devotion(s), but still be addressing, worshipping and speaking about that one by way of, in a way which exemplifies, wrong-address reference. Alston's religious example concerns the dupe of Satan. But we could, congruently with his view, actually have encounter/perception knowledge which is in fact of God, and hold many true and important beliefs about this being such as to generate for us many definite descriptions which are true about God, but confusedly identify it as something other than God: e.g. as the Good (the Platonic Form), or as Big Mac (the Scottish collective-ancestor Spirit) or Pan. It need not then be merely the sentimentality of soft-headed liberals which leads us to hold that people may serve the true God, under a false name. This would not entail only that a different name (i.e. than 'God') was used, but also that some things which are supposed to be true of whatever is the bearer of this false name are not true of God. If we are still sufficiently representing his mind, Alston might be criticised here for neglecting, as might be said, to explain how persons of one religion can recognize the God who is served and proclaimed by (possibly distant) persons of another religion as being their own God; and he might be challenged to say how that could be done without the use of definite descriptions. He might then reply to the effect that in this paper he has aimed only to show that people of different religions can engage in wrong-address reference to the same God, but that whether they or we can justifiably conclude that they actually do is a distinct further issue. Even so, there are strong prima facie reasons to think that as and when he does turn to this 'further issue', descriptivist ways of identifying God will have to play an essential part in his account. The second sort of case to which Alston turns our attention is that where something is perceivedly encountered in experience, 54

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and we know it and refer to it (semantic reference, here) by the conventional, correct name, but our beliefs and the identifying descriptions which we would endorse about herlhimlit are untrue, even wildly so, of herlhimlit. So we, or someone who conveys a specifying practice to us may perceivingly encounter God but have beliefs, and employ definite descriptions, about him, which are grossly false. In such a case, Alston contends, the situation should be described as being: that we have false beliefs about the encountered thing which is referred to, rather than, as in wrong-address reference, that we have beliefs about something which we have misidentified. And this accords with his claim that direct reference is basic or primary in determining what it is that is referred to. The reference involved in this 'second sort of case' is Kripkean orthodox semantic reference. However Alston's further discussion of this sort of case serves to bring two problematic points to our attention. Alston remarks that the descriptions believed to be mostly true of God might either pick out nothing whatever, or might mostly be true of something other than God: 'In either case, assuming that the religion originated from some real contact with God and is sustained by continued experiential encounters with God, I think we would have to say that the people are referring to, addressing prayers to, worshipping, God, but, unfortunately, are radically misinformed about his nature and purposes.' (Alston 1989: 111) I If the religion is to be 'sustained by continued experiential encounters with God', believers must be able to recognise God as who He is, at least sometimes, when He gives himself in such encounters. How is this to be done other than by our employing identifying descriptions? Insofar as these sorts of encounters can 'provide still another start for chains of reference', (Alston 1989:109), they are represented as being like the very first perception-encounters with God, at the first source(s) of the tradition; but insofar as they are treated as further perceptions of God the question recurs of how the identification of God is to be effected in experiential acquaintance except by means of uniquely fitting, definite, descriptions. II The possibility of a religious group which is experientially in touch with God, but wrongly supposes that most ofthe stock of identifying descriptions which it uses of God actually apply to

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him, raises the possibility of a further sort of reference. Where two people share beliefs about something, and take the related identifying descriptions to pick out that thing, they may successfully enable one another to grasp that that thing is the object of their concern; but they do so by using definite descriptions (rather than, say, a name), these being descriptions which it does not in fact fit, which do not actually apply to it. And that opens up two further points: Firstly: if reference is successfully accomplished by the use, in the manner just described, of false 'identifying' descriptions, what we have is by the standards of official descriptivism, or Kripkeanism, a deviant sort of referring. Yet in that it involves a speaker's enabling his hearer, as he intends to do, to grasp what is the subject of the discourse, or remark, it might rather be regarded as an example of what reference essentially is. And it is obvious, when once mentioned, that reference, understood simply as getting one's audience to grasp what is being spoken about, can be accomplished in many many ways besides those to which Kripke or Searle, say, attend. So people thusly refer by nods, gestures, or directing of the eyes; the use of 'thingummy' or 'whatsisname' together with some predicate indicates that something is being referred to, and the predicate not only says something about it but provides further clues about the identity of the referent, certainly on the assumption that the speaker is attempting to tell us the truth; the use of the wrong name can succeed, especially where the hearer can see why that name might have been used to refer as the speaker intended to refer; and the use of an identifying description which does not actually fit the intended referent can in an analogous way be understood by a sympathetic hearer to refer to that which the speaker intended to pick out. All of which can fairly prompt us to ask what phenomena theories of reference are supposed to be describing. Or are they aiming to do something else: such as to set forth - i.e. describe and perhaps recommend - a means currently in use which will guarantee successful reference, perhaps amongst well-informed, competent language users? If that is what theories of reference are doing, it will not follow that if some thing cannot be referred to in one of these secure ways for the competent, that they cannot be referred to in some other less official, 'alternative' fashion.

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Secondly: the possibility that we may succeed, in the way described, in referring by non-accurate referring descriptions, apparently undermines, or is at least problematic for, descriptivist, Kripkean and Alstonian theories. It seems to undermine descriptivism because here we have something picked out, for a hearer or reader by a speaker or a writer, by the use of descriptions which are false descriptions as applied to the referent. It seems to undermine Kripkeanism, because it is a prominent (even if tentatively advanced) Kripkean argument that where a reference is secured and the available identifying descriptions do not apply to the referent, the explanation of this referential success lies in the employment of a name, effective by virtue of the specifYing power given to it within the inherited practice in which is it used. But in this case, no name is employed. And it is apparently problematic for Alston's view ofthe basicality of direct reference. In this sort of case, inaccurate referring descriptions are used, e.g. 'this wretched man' said of a man who is evidently not at all wretched. Where what is referred to is present and perceived, and its presence makes a decisive contribution to the successful uptake, viz. the identification of the intended referent, by the hearer(s), the presence of the referent seems to contribute to the securing of the reference in this case just what the acquaintance/perception of a named entity contributes to securing reference when a name is used, i.e. in the sort of case Alston treats as involving that 'direct reference' which has a primacy for him. Now, in this 'false descriptions' sort of case, descriptions were used but did not secure reference by their descriptiveness; yet since no name is employed we do not have direct reference either, and so the referent is not identified by the sort of referring which Alston treats as determinative, basic, particularly in just those circumstances in which the inaccuracy of definite descriptions prevents descriptivist referring. If something of what Alston seemingly wishes to assert still remains, his assertion of the primacy of direct reference appears to have been diminished to this: that when the acquaintance/ perception of something makes the decisive contribution to its identification as the referent, then that acquaintance/perception makes that decisive contribution. If more remains of Alstonianism, how so? The following example serves to underscore the decisive contribution to determining a reference which can be made by 57

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the presence of the referent while again undermining both Alston's thesis of the basicality of direct reference, to which the use of proper names seems central, and descriptivist claims. A group is moving round an art gallery with their guide. He is in fact an emergency stand-in, substituting in an anxious and flustered way for the proper guide who has suddenly taken ill. The substitute, a student on a seasonal job, is doing his best on the basis of some very hurried homework. The group moves and settles round its next painting as the guide says: 'Now, "Citrus", ... the most noted work of the Crimean landscape school, by Sergei Sushkov.' He pauses, and then goes on to say a good deal; some little of it true; but it gets wilder and vaguer by turns. Now 'Citrus' was the name of a picture seen two galleries back. This one is called 'Where lemon trees bloom' and it is in fact Spanish, by Jose someone. Still, although neither the name used nor the most weighty definite description used applies to it, there is no doubt what is being referred to: that painting before them. Another example both casts doubt further upon Alston's claim for the primacy of direct reference and, more radically, raises problems about our appeals to our intuitions over what is being referred to, and as a consequence raises questions over whether we have a proper grasp of what it is to refer, what it is for our discourse to be about some particular thing. Edinburgh's distinguished medical men of the nineteenth century included (for a time) Joseph Lister who first practised antiseptic surgery, and James Young Simpson who first employed chloroform and so might be definitely described as the Father of Modern Anaesthetics. Simpson lived in a house in Queen Street. Suppose a plaque is erected on that house, for the benefit of tourists, but someone in the touristl'heritage' agency bungles, and it says 'Joseph Lister, (comma) the Father of Modern Anaesthetics lived here', (comma); and there is a little profile of Simpson, with his dates. (full stop) If our intuition is that of Kripke and Alston, we will say (l think) that reference here (semantic and direct reference, respectively) is to Lister, about whom false things are said. Suppose, now, that the plaque uses the same phrases in a different order. So it says: 'The Father of Modern Anaesthetics lived here,' (comma) then there is the Simpson title profile with Simpson's dates, (comma). And then it says: 'Joseph Lister.' (full stop). 58

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In that case, is your intuition the same as mine: that this refers to Simpson, but that they got his name wrong? If so, or even if there is some doubt about it, merely, it will consequently be doubtful (i) whether direct reference, rather than descriptivist reference, determines the reference, (ii) whether, if there seems no reason why the order of phrases should make a significant difference, our intuitions about what is referred to in these cases are reliable, and (iii) whether when we try to decide which intuition is correct we find that we hardly know what to say because we are not sufficiently clear what referring is, what it is for discourse to be about something. If, more optimistically, phrase-order does contribute to determining what is referred to, problems (ii) and (iii) will be avoided, but we will still have a (further) reason why Alston's primacy of direct reference thesis will have to go.

v In the final section of his paper, Alston lays out some of the religious and theological implications of what has gone before. Among my earlier points, a damaging criticism for this part of Alston's case is that he neglects the need for recognition of God. On his construction, as we saw, the transmission within the theistic community of a practice of specifying (something, someone) must either have its source in a single experiential point of origin, or the community includes more than one person, who (come(s) to) have the experience of perceiving God such that their experience is the initiating fix for a further thread of referential transmission. On the former supposition, there is no possibility of the community's contact with God being widened or devotionally strengthened by new perception-encounters. Epistemically it will also lack the bolstering which new encounters could presumably provide. But on this austere conception of the community's tradition, no problem presents itself of our recognizing that which is newly perceived as being God. Alston, however, asserts that in the major theistic traditions the latter supposition obtains. Accordingly, questions can arise about whether we are dealing with the same God, or the same God is dealing with us, as between one and other cases of our putative perceivings of God. It is on this latter supposition that

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claims caJ.1 be made, as Alston suggests they may be, that it is the same God who is known in perception-experience throughout Jewish and Christian and Islamic traditions. Or perhaps if Alston's seeming ecumenical optimism here is justified we might justifiably speak of the one tradition. For this supposition to be actualized there has to be recognition of God as God. And to secure recognition requires the recognizer to be in possession of, i.e. to know of, individuating characteristics of God and to have descriptions at his disposal which provide specifying descriptiveness. So not only do definite descriptions return to the picture in an important role, but also, and as a result, seekers of inter-religious ecumenism will require to address questions about the appropriateness of particular definite descriptions to the God whom we in our community already (think we) know, and to the one encountered/perceived by some other person. Appealing to the primacy of direct reference will not exclude theological debate about what to say of God, from inter-religious rapprochement, or inter-denominational, inter-faction, coming together within a religion. Alston's hope that 'fancy theological descriptions' (Alston 1989:115), can be avoided by those who themselves experience God, or as I would caution, think they do, is unfounded, because he has overlooked their need to recognize God. For this purpose, some theological description is called for. The 'weak and foolish' for whose religious condition Alston is concerned can without benefit of theological description join in with the referential practice and experience of others. But unless their community's thread of communication of the specifying practice is of the austerest, that community, containing many weak and foolish, perhaps exclusively composed of them from some viewpoint, will need to attempt some theology, somewhere. Because the picture of reference to God which Alston develops in his paper is matter enough for this paper, I have said nothing about how the descriptions of God which, as we now see, require to be employed, are first to be properly generated or justified. It does not seem likely that they can be simply read off God as an individual perceives him, and then used by that individual or, especially, by another, to recognize God. That does not seem likely, both because experience of God as it is generally reported is seldom sufficiently determinate, having features which are

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able to be discriminated, and because in the major religions, knowledge about God is thought to be derived in other ways, e.g. from singular public events, by 'signs', by incarnation, by interpretation of a long history. Alston takes up the issue elsewhere. I must leave what he says for attention at another time. People who are not necessarily weak and foolish may be religiously deprived in that among them God is not perceived, and may not have been perceived for generations (there being no 'open vision'?). Yet the possibility of the sort of theistic community in which a specifying practice is conveyed makes it also possible that people who belong to it may themselves have no acquaintance-perception of God and yet be able to refer to God while knowing almost nothing about Him. An extreme analogy might be provided by a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls who comes across the name 'Reuben' in a fragment. He knows nothing of Reuben; but he can now refer to Reuben, because Reuben's nearer contemporaries could and did. Thus due to somewhat Kripkean referential mechanisms there can be a close relative of what theologians call 'implicit' faith at work in referring to God. Alston contends that the theological enterprise looks different from a descriptivist perspective compared to how it looks from his own in which direct reference has priority. On a 'direct reference' conception we need not take certain descriptions as non-negotiable 'given' characterisations of God: rather what is given is the perception of God, or God as perceived. Alston exaggerates, because he gives no attention to the recognition of God as God which will both (i) be required in any but maximally austere specifying-practice-conveying theistic communities, and (ii) will require us to determine which descriptions fit God so as to recognize him. Accordingly, theology will not, even on Alston's assumption that 'direct reference rules' be as different as he makes out from theology on descriptivist lines. Alston considers it necessary to concede one negative (as he sees it) implication of his direct reference picture as it applies to reference to God. Following Richard B. Miller, Alston thinks that if we adopt a direct reference understanding of these matters, 'naturalistic' genetic arguments against theism such as those offered by Freud or Marx will be damaging, as they will not be on other non direct-reference views. It seems that this is because 61

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these arguments will controvert the identity of the one encountered, if any 'one' is encountered, and so, given the basicality of direct reference, and the crucial importance of the identity of the one referred to in direct reference, they will strike at the basis of theistic talk, belief and practice. (Alston 1989: 115, discussing Miller 1986). This seems open to question, as follows: We are to suppose that some genetic explanation (say a psycho-analytic or Marxist account) of people's having the theistic religious beliefs they have might both be a true account and be compatible with the truth ofthis (version) of theism, assuming a non direct-reference account of referring to God; perhaps, even, the genetic explanation shows us how God brings people to their true theistic beliefs. If, next, we are employing genetic explanation in relation to direct reference, we are presumably explaining how people come to have the experience they have which believers treat as perception of God, labelling what they encounter 'God'. In that case why should we not say, in a way parallel to the previous (non direct reference) type of case, that what we now have is an explanation of how God discloses himselfto us, so that while there is a naturalistic explanation of our experience, it is still God who is perceived? If, however, the anti-theistic argument is to the effect that whatever supposedly perceived thing it is or is not that theists attach the name 'God' to, it is not any such thing as God, this is not a genetic argument, but is an argument about identification or recognition. Alston's sole example of an entity with which, on a naturalistic genetic account, God is confused, is a superego. However, the ontological status of superegos is not, shall we say, middle of the road. Is a superego an entity, or, rather, a hypostatisation of a complex disposition (or something such)? I want to ask: whether Alston slides too easily from talk of genetic accounts to talk of identifications, perhaps led to do so by the uncertain or even ambiguous ontological status of superegos? If he does (as I believe) stride too quickly over matters which call for closer study, such as how if at all genetic issues affect identification issues, it may be that his direct reference picture of referring to God does not after all have this (from Alston's standpoint) negative implication.

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Response Peter Byrne

J

oe Houston's paper raises issues of both a specific and a general kind. The specific issues concern how far he has accurately summarised and fairly criticised Alston's paper on reference and God (Alston 1989). The general issues concern the debate between descriptive and causal/non-descriptive accounts of reference in current philosophy oflanguage and philosophy of science and how far such debates throw light on questions in the philosophy of religion. I have little to say on the specific issues. On his chosen territory, Houston is in my view successful. He demonstrates that Alston's application of non-descriptive theories to issues in the philosophy of religion is beset with unclarities and unanswered questions. However, such success in the critique of Alston has few implications in my view for the general debate on whether causal theories of reference are superior to descriptive accounts or on the connected argument about the utility of such theories for the philosophy of religion. One of the reasons behind the verdict that Houston's diagnosis of Alston's shortcomings has few implications for the general issues pointed to is the following: Alston operates on a very narrow base, using only one source of causal notions of reference (Kripke). Yet causal theories of reference have been developed by a number of writers subsequent to Kripke and in ways which take account of some of the concerns Houston raises (see for example Devitt 1977). Moreover, they have been developed in the context of the philosophy of science as well as in semantic theories about the meaning of proper names. Their development in the philosophy of science has enriched them

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greatly. Further still, they have been applied to the philosophy of religion in other places than in Alston's paper and in ways which show the relevance of the philosophy of science material (see Martin Soskice 1985 and 1987). Houston notes that Alston has some important religious goals behind his account of reference. If Alston is right, it is not important for a community to have a body of correct and uniquely identifying descriptive knowledge ofthe divine in order for its key cognitive states and attitudes to truly latch onto the divine (I have in mind such things as: belief, faith, devotion, prayer and worship). Important consequences would follow in turn from this. First, thoroughgoing scepticism about theology would be possible whilst some of the sting of such scepticism would be drawn. (I am not saying that Alston shares this scepticism.) Scepticism of this kind could be based on traditions on the extent to which favoured styles of theological description seem to come and go with intellectual fashion and the vagaries of taste and custom. The sceptic might well conclude that substantive, positive descriptions of the divine reflected anthropocentric concerns and images rather than the realities of the transcendent. Second, Alston's claims would have major implications for our views about the possibility of co-reference to the same God or Absolute across diverse religions or the diverse theologies of one religion. Divergence between descriptions of the divine across more than one religion (or part of one religion) imply that at least one ofthose religions errs in its account ofthe divine. But should Alston be correct, this would not entail that continuity of reference (where this was a matter of cognitive contact shown in belief, faith, worship, prayer, and the like) was impossible. Houston argues that the mistakes in Alston's particular appropriation of one strand of the family of causal theories of reference show the importance of theology for reference to God, presumably the importance of getting our theology right in order to guarantee that attitudes putatively directed to God latch onto the divine. Those who are impressed by the case for a sceptical, agnostic attitude toward the many theologies of human religious life will hope that Houston is wrong on this point. They will be impressed by the reasons noted above for being sceptical of the likely accuracy of any theological descriptions of the divine and for supposing that the theologies of the religions show any 64

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progress toward an ever more accurate account of the divine. So they will be interested in the question of whether there is life in application of causal accounts of reference after Houston's critique. The target of many causal accounts of reference is the following picture. The reference of a name depends on what information, what descriptions, a community associates with the name. The information conveyed in the descriptions associated with a name both give the sense of the name and thereby fix its reference. Reference is a function of sense. A sufficient amount of descriptive information, a suitable number ofthese descriptions, must be true of the referent to enable reference to succeed. On this descriptive theory a name denotes an object only if its user believes truly a number of descriptions which serve to identify it, and thus distinguish it from other things. Reference on this account is a function of descriptive knowledge of objects. It can be argued that correct description is neither a necessary nor a sufficient account of successful reference. It is not a necessary condition because it fails to take account of the many examples where folk use a name to refer but have mistaken ideas, or no very clear ideas at all, as to how to identify the object of reference. The argument that successful description is not a sufficient condition of reference depends on the point that reference must at heart be a mode of contact, epistemic and cognitive, with things. Yet I might believe a set of descriptions to be true and these descriptions might be uniquely true of something in the real world without those descriptions thereby establishing cognitive contact between me and that object. It might just happen that I have come to these beliefs which by chance are uniquely true of this thing. Ifthey do not arise out of contact with the referent or lead to further contact with it, it is implausible to say that I refer to it. We are here supposing that there has to be a causal element in the notions of cognitive contact and reference. Reference has to be grounded in some way in the referent and the notion of true description does not suffice to explain that grounding. In other words, we point through the notion of reference to the fact that our language hooks onto the world at some points. There must be semantic and epistemological links between human subjects and reality if there is successful reference. Yet 'believing true descriptions' does not suffice for establishing semantic and epistemological links -

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'hooks' - to reality. True beliefs can arise in all manner of ways and if they arise in a way which is not related, however loosely, to the existence and character of the object of reference, then they do not constitute semantic and epistemological links between speaker and reality. The causal theory of reference is revealed by the above arguments to be linked to causal theories of knowledge and perception. In its development post Kripke it is also linked to the idea that many scientific terms are introduced and their reference fixed by the explicit notion of a postulated cause for a given effect. For example, the name 'virus' was coined before researchers had the ability to observe viruses with the aid of the electron microscope. The word was coined to refer to the cause of a range of effects - symptoms of disease. 'Virus' referred to whatever it was that was the explanation of these effects. This is still causal grounding in a referent. The name is anchored in what it names by virtue of a causal link, running via observed effects back to the referent. It is also important to note that this causal link is a cognitive tie because coiners of the term had some rough and ready notion of what kind of thing the effects of which they were observing. They were looking for something in the category of 'micro-organism', something analogous in some respects to bacteria only, to put it crudely, smaller. So, through naming by way of a thing's effects and some classifactory ideas that were roughly right, experience was anticipated. Reference was made to that which was not yet directly encountered. For all that early ideas about what a virus was underwent change as explorations to fix the precise character of the referent of 'virus' proceeded, we can say that later researchers discovered what was true and false of the thing that earlier biologists referred to. In the process of discovery some of the earlier sense of 'virus' would have been altered. Yet the reference of the word did not change with changes of its sense. As Rom Harre notes 'However, reference to a referent, once secured, can be maintained through massive deletions from and additions to the corpus of beliefs we hold to be true of that referent' (Harre 1986: 66). Janet Martin Soskice has applied just this analysis of how reference is fixed from its home in the philosophy of science to the philosophy of religion. In Metaphor and Religious Language she contends that the primary way in which names for the divine have their reference determined is through introducing 66

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them as names for whatever it is that is the cause of effects in the life of the believer or is manifest in crucial experiences formative offaith (Soskice 1985: 151). Tradition and history can play a large part in this. If we are influenced by her account, then we might accept that the primary determinant of the reference of 'God' in our culture will be its use to pick out whatever was manifested to key figures in our religious traditions such as Abraham, Moses and the like. Such an account obviously raises the question over which Alston and Houston have some disagreement: what would be the implications if we were able to discover that the thing which had manifested itself in the life of formative figures like Abraham had none of the key properties of the divine as these have been described in theological tradition? Such would be the case, if it were found that repressed memories of the father figure were behind these effects. Encounter with the human father figure, as filtered through the lens of the subconscious, would be the causal origin of human uses of 'God' if the Freudian story of religion is true. On an undiluted causal theory, we might draw the implication that the human father figure was thus what was referred to by 'God' and its cognates. And this indeed is the conclusion Alston hints we should draw (Alston 1989: 110-11). Houston states that we need an element of recognition of an object if an initial grounding reference of a name for it really is to succeed. This thought might seem to be implied by a tempting reaction to Alston's reading of our state if the Freudian account of the origin of the use of name 'God' were to prove correct. We might say that it would turn out that 'God' referred to nothing at all, since that in which the name is causally rooted has none of the presumed properties users of the name thought God had. But note that we can cope with this intuition by making a much more modest concession to descriptivism. We can agree with Devitt that a necessary condition for causal contact with an object (be it directly through perception or indirectly through its effects) establishing a grounding reference to that object is that the person making the grounding reference correctly place it in some rough category or kind (Devitt 1981: 64). If the initial, rough categorisation of the object encountered or manifested in its effects is too wayward, then no grounding reference has been made. But such a concession is still compatible with Harre's point that 'reference to a referent, once secured, can be

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maintained through massive deletions from and additions to the corpus of beliefs we hold to be true of that referent'. So it still allows us to be very highly sceptical oftheology as an enterprise which intends to give us rich, substantive and accurate accounts of the divine nature. The reply offered by the causal theorist here implies an answer to Houston's repeated challenge that perception of God must entail recognition of God. All that is sufficient for someone truly to be said to have perceived God is that they have an appropriately caused experience of God accompanied by an ability to place the object of perception in a correct category. So Jewish and Christian mystics genuinely perceive God despite their different descriptions of God if, presuming that they have experiences caused by God, they agree in some rough categorisation of what they perceive (as: 'creator of all things', 'holy One' or whatever). A mystic of one tradition will naturally view those in the other as having experiences of the divine that are accompanied by much error and an inability to recognise fully what was encountered, but this need not entail that the mystic must regard the believers of another tradition as unable to perceive God. Houston refers in passing to the work of Donnellan. Much of what it is at issue in debates concerning how important true and accurate descriptions of the divine are for fixing the reference of names for God can be brought out through considering Donnellan's distinction between attributive and referential uses of definite descriptions (Donnellan 1977: passim). On the descriptive account of reference names refer because they are associated with descriptions which their referents are found to satisfy. But Donnellan notes that we may use a description to refer to an item even though the description is false and its details dispensable. In such cases the identifying description is used referentially, in Donnellan's terms. It serves to help to pick out something in context while being false. If, in contrast, I use a description attributively I use it to refer to whatever it may be that matches it, perhaps having no specific thing in mind that will fit that bill. Now Alston and Soskice are in effect claiming that descriptions of the sacred associated with 'God' are used referentially by the various religious traditions. Adherents have 'something in mind' when they refer to the sacred: the thing encountered in religious devotion and whose operations transform the life of the believer. The means they employ to

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describe it are quite dispensable in this task. So when Christians refer to their God as 'omnipotent, omniscient, three-in-one' and so on, they do not intend to mention whatever it may be that has these attributes. Rather these descriptions are used referentially to help pick out something which is fundamentally the being that is encountered in worship and was encountered at the start of the tradition. If all descriptions of the sacred are used referentially in the faiths, then they are all in like manner dispensable. If there is reason to suppose that there is but one reality causally responsible for the referential practices of these traditions, then that thing would be referred to by all of them, regardless of how they described it. No doubt so extreme an application of Donnellan's distinction to descriptions ofthe divine can be faulted. It runs counter to the intuitions many of us would have faced with Alston's Freudian scenario and foul of the thought that some correct, albeit rough and ready, classification of the object of reference is required for causal and contextual factors genuinely to establish reference. The descriptions associated with 'God' thus acquire some role in helping reference to be established and maintained. However, the examples from the history of science which antidescriptivist theorists of reference present, and the kind of reflections on theological agnosticism and religious diversity I have alluded to, might suggest that very many of the descriptions of the divine which are associated with the name 'God' are to be understood referentially. In context, and given certain causal factors, they help to point to what the faithful have in mind when the speak of God. But they do not have to be true of God to succeed in their referential task. They do not have to be part of a correct, accurate theology to work (see Byrne 1995: 3155 for a fuller presentation of this case). Just such a view of the descriptions of God in the Christian tradition could presumably be held without intellectual strain by Jews and vice versa. Furthermore a representative of a third tradition, such as a follower of the Advaita Vedanta, could construe the Jewish and Christian traditions in this manner as well. Christians and Jews would, for this thinker, be in fairly gross error in how they described the Non-Dual Reality which is the ground of all things. But they would refer to it nonetheless - in large measure despite their theologies not because ofthem. Causal and contextual factors would trump intended descriptions.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Identifying God in Experience: On Strawson, Sounds, and God's Space Jerome Gellman

S

everal contemporary philosophers of religion believe that experiences of God provide evidence for God's existence. I count myself among them. Objections commonly centre around the issues of the lack of sufficient inter-personal checks, reductionist explanations, and problems arising out of the diversity of world religions. These objections aim to show that alleged perceptions of God do not provide evidence for God's existence. I have argued elsewhere that these objections are not successful, and I will not repeat my responses to them (see Gellman 1997a). Instead I want to examine an objection that aims to show not only that alleged experiences of God do not provide evidence of God's existence but that in principle they could not. I have in mind arguments advanced on a few occasions by Richard Gale, arguments based principally on the work of P.F. Strawson (see Gale 1994, 1995, pp. 326-343). Gale presents a mixture of what he calls 'metaphysical' and 'epistemological' objections, but fails to keep them strictly apart. I want to separate the metaphysical from the epistemological strands in Gale's thinking, by presenting first a metaphysical argument and then an epistemological one that I find embedded in Gale's writings. I will call these, 'Gale's arguments'. Before beginning, I preface my discussion with three presuppositions of my approach to the subject. The first is that professed experiences of God are phenomenally of an object, perceived, usually in a non-sensory way, to be other than or external to the experiencing subject. This is similar to the feel of 'externality' of physical objects, and different from that of pains, which lack the phenomenal feel of 71

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an outer object. The externality feature gives an initial reason for supposing that in experiences of God one is experiencing what is not just an inner state. A second supposition is that in the religious life, 'God' is most typically used as a proper name. I understand proper names along the lines of a modified Millian theory. On this conception, proper names are rigid designators applied in what I call 'naming games'. Naming games implicitly provide conditions for the kind of being an object must be in order for an intended name to 'stick.' These conditions are not given in definite descriptions. So proper names can fail to designate not only because there exists no object to be named, but also because the object that is intended to be named is not the appropriate kind intended in the naming game. For example, that which is intended by the biblical name 'Jonah,' need not be truly described by the biblical story in order for the name to 'stick,' as pointed out by Saul Kripke. However, 'Jonah', in that context, must be at least the name of a person. Suppose someone discovered that what was thought at the 'initial baptism' to be a person when seen only from afar, turned out to be a large piece of driftwood carried up onto the beach, and that the stories about 'Jonah' grew up around that vaguely human-shaped driftwood. It then would be false to say that 'Jonah was a piece of wood.' (Although it might be in order to say: "'Jonah" was a piece of wood.') Instead, the initial baptism will have failed. That's because the naming game being played was one of naming some person or other. I propose that in the religious life typically the naming game with the name 'God' requires that the object named be at least what we may call 'a supreme being.' A 'supreme being' is: (1) The most perfect actual being (2) very high in perfection, (2) much higher in perfection than any existing competitor, and (4) one on whom all other beings are dependent. This is not a 'definition' of God but a requirement of the naming game for God. Nor would just any being that fulfilled these conditions be 'God.' It would have to be that very being that people intended to so name, intended through experience at some point (see Gellman 1997, Chapter One). Third, I place no a priori restrictions on what people can know by experience. We should look at what people have claimed to experience, and build our theories from there. This is especially 72

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so for reported perceptions of God that are so different from perceptions of physical objects. We ought not restrict from the start what the phenomenal content of purported experiences of God may be like. I take an 'empiricist' approach here, and take declarations of apparent experiences of God as data from which philosophy begins. I turn to what I am calling 'Gale's metaphysical argument,' which Gale also calls a 'conceptual' argument, for the conclusion that there is a conceptual incoherence in supposing God to be a 'perceptual particular,' that is: a substantive, enduring being which is an object of perception. According to the metaphysical argument, in order for us to have a coherent concept of an object, 0, as a perceptual particular: I We must be able to understand what it means for 0 to exist when not perceived. II 0 must be able to be the common object of different experiences. and III We must be able to understand the distinction between

numerical and qualitative identity with regard to O. That is, we must be able to give meaning to the distinction between o being perceived on different occasions and objects qualitatively identical to 0 (objects that 'look' like 0), but numerically distinct from it, being experienced instead. We need these requirements to distinguish between perceptual particulars and what we may call 'phenomenal particulars,' private to one's experience. A 'phenomenal particular' cannot exist unperceived. A perceptual particular can. A phenomenal particular cannot be the common object of different experiences, whether of one subject or several subjects. A perceptual particular can. Finally, since each occurrence of a phenomenal particular presents a particular numerically distinct from one presented in any other occurrence, there is no application to phenomenal particulars of the distinction between qualitative and numerical identity. Gale looks to sensory perception of physical objects for the paradigm of perceptual particulars. Physical objects can be perceptual particulars because they have spatial-temporal

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location. This makes possible the very idea of a physical object, P, existing when not perceived. For when nobody is perceiving P it can be thought of as existing then in a specific place. And it is space and time that make possible the perception of P in different perceptual acts. P can be perceived by different people at the same time because they are all perceiving P at the same place, it being a conceptual truth, says Gale, that 'two material objects ofthe same kind cannot spatio-temporally coincide' (Gale 1994: 872). And a person can be said to perceive the numerically identical object P at different times because there exists a contiguous spatial trail through which the object travels, giving content to the notion of its being the same object on different occaSIOns. So it is spatial-temporal location that gives content to the very notion of a sensory perceptual particular. So, concludes Gale, by analogy if God too is to be a perceptual particular, God must have spatial-temporal location, or something analogous to it. However, God does not have a spatial-temporal location, or anything analogous. Hence, God cannot be a perceptual particular. What we have in alleged experiences of God is nothing more than 'Goddish' phenomenal particulars. Gale considers briefly the possibility that God can be a perceptual particular because 'experientially identified' by some definite description. Gale rejects this possibility. Now, while Gale is right that spatial-temporal location is sufficient to give meaning to the notion of an object's existing unperceived, it is hardly necessary. In God's case in particular it is not necessary. After all, God is conceived of as having an inner life. So to say that God exists when not perceived implies that God's inner life continues when God is not being perceived by anybody. That is sufficient to give content to the concept of God's existing unperceived, without benefit of placing God into anything analogous to space. I am well aware that some philosophers have objected to the notion of a being not possessing a body having an inner life. However, I find little of value in such objections. I need not argue that point here, though, because if these philosophers were right, this would show not only that God could not be a perceptual particular. It would show that God, as usually conceived of, does not exist. The point of the present argument, however, is not to show that God does not exist, but that if God

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does exist He could not be a perceptual particular, could not, that is, be an object of perception. So I will simply bypass the stronger arguments here and declare Gale's argument unsound concerning his first requirement. Similar remarks apply to Gale's other requirements. In order for an object, 0, to just be the common object of different experiences, it is not necessary that anyone know this of O. And the same for there just being a distinction between numerical and qualitative identity. To possess the concept, in particular, of God being the common object of different experiences, it is sufficient that we understand that an object possessing a certain inner life is perceived by several persons. It is not necessary that we be able to know when this is true. Finally, in order for God just to be a perceptual particular it is not necessary that God be identifiable by a perceptual definite description, as Gale suggests. To have the concept of God, any definite description will do. So the 'metaphysical argument' against the very idea of God's being a perceptual particular fails. However, there lurks nearby what may strike some as a metaphysical puzzle about God's being a perceptual particular. The puzzle arises if we take physical objects as paradigm perceptual particulars. What does it mean to say that a physical object 0 is a perceptual particular? Trying to remain neutral regarding naive realism, it means at least this: that 0 is so constituted that in the 'proper' medium and with a subject's senses functioning in the 'right' way, 0 will appear in an 'appropriate' way. Now God has no body. A being with no body, it might seem, cannot 'be so constituted' so as to bring about a perception of it itself. It has no inherent feature that can appear to anyone. So perceiving God would be like someone else perceiving my mind, not just receiving some of my thoughts by telepathy or the like, but my very mind. How is this possible? Well, could not God simply decree that a certain perceptual content would count as a perception of him? No, because that would not constitute a perception of God analogous to a perception of a physical object. For a physical object, we need only the object, the medium, and a sensory apparatus, for it to be appropriately perceived. Nothing more. If God decreed a perceptual content, that would not make God himself a

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perceptual particular. At best it would create a representation of God. So what sense can we give to the idea that God is a 'perceptual particular'? I reply that it is not an analytic impossibility to perceive God himself, in a non-sensory way. That one cannot somehow perceive the mind of another is something we learn from experience. It is not an a priori truth. That you might not be capable of imagining what it would be like to perceive God himself, is not an objection, since we are talking about what is admitted at the start to be a non-sensory perception quite unlike ordinary, sensory perceptions. If this reply stretches your credulity, perhaps another will be more acceptable. We give a sense to the locution'S perceives X,' when what S senses is not X itself, but something else which X produces in what we might call a 'nomically-standard' way. An example would be hearing someone's voice over the telephone. We find it natural to say that we have heard her voice, although what we actually heard was an electronic transmittal. So God could have created a 'nomically-standard' way of perceiving God, and then we could say that'S had perceived God,' in just that way. One might protest that the resemblance between the phone sounds and her voice is what makes the phone voice her voice. And in general, 'nomically-standard' perceptions of X count as perceptions of X only if they resemble the way X itself is perceived. So we are back to the problem with which we began: How could there be an experience of God Himself? My reply is twofold. First, resemblance is not necessary. Suppose I am in a jail cell. In the next cell is another inmate. Suppose further we have never met. At exactly 10:00 every night he knocks three times on the wall between us to say goodnight. I find it appropriate to say that I hear him every night at 10.00, even though there is no resemblance between the inmate next-door and the sound I hear. In any case, even if we insist on relevant resemblance, there is no a priori reason why nomic ally standard perceptions of God cannot resemble God in an appropriate way. This idea is suggested by a passage in the Talmud on the 'shekhinah', the immanent presence of God in the world. Rabbi Gamliel explains how the shekhinah can be at many places at the same time, 76

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when there is only one 'Holy One Blessed Be He.' The answer is that the shekhinah stands to God as the rays of the sun stand to the sun. (Sanhedrin 39b). The sun is one, but its rays fall at different places simultaneously. The rays, of course, bear a significant resemblance to the sun. Similarly, we should not rule out the possibility that a nomic ally standard perceptual content decreed by God resembles God in some appropriate way, so as to count as a perception of God. I conclude that the metaphysical 'puzzle' raises no insurmountable problem about the coherence of God's being a perceptual particular. The failure of Gale's metaphysical argument is small comfort to one like myself who thinks that experiences of God provide evidence that God exists, and that the accumulation of such experiences in different religions adds strength to the evidence. The epistemological version of Gale's argument poses a direct challenge to that position, and I now turn to it. Here is my reconstruction of Gale's epistemological argument: I In order for an experience to be evidence that someone perceived an object 0, it must be possible for there to be evidence that 0 is the common object of different perceptual experiences. II It is possible for there be evidence that 0 is the common object of different perceptual experiences only if it is possible to distinguish perceptions of 0 from perceptions of (other) objects that are perceptually identical to 0 (that 'look' like 0).1 III It is possible to distinguish perceptions of 0 from perceptions of (other) objects that are perceptually identical to 0, only if 0 has spatial-temporal location, or something analogous. IV However, God does not have spatial-temporal location, or anything analogous. V Therefore, no experience can count as evidence that someone perceived God.

1 Although Gale puts the argument in terms of perceptual or 'qualitative' identity, it is not necessary that the objects be perceptually identical. It is sufficient that observers on a given occasion not be able to distinguish between them perceptually.

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The idea is that unless it were possible for there to be evidence that 0 is the common object of different perceptual experiences, one could not be justified in thinking one had experienced a substantive, 'perceptual particular' rather than a mere 'phenomenal particular,' private to one's own experience. One could be so justified only if 0 purportedly has spatial-temporal location. It follows that there can be no evidence in favour of experiencing God rather than having experienced merely a 'Goddish' phenomenal content. Now one might be tempted to think that Gale's first premise is easily satisfied by an object that lacks spatial-temporal location. After all, as I said earlier, perceptual experiences have the phenomenal feel that one is being appeared to by an object external to oneself. This feature is what sets up the presumption that a perceptual particular is appearing to one. The experience, therefore, supplies evidence for one's being appeared to by a perceptual particular. Admittedly, this is not very strong evidence, but evidence nonetheless. However, this reply does not touch the epistemological objection. For that objection requires not only that it be possible for there to be evidence that an alleged object can be a common object of perceptual experience. It requires that it be possible for there to be evidence that the object in fact is a common object of different experiences. The epistemological argument applies, that is, to the reidentification of an object, X, on more than one occasion. The argument is that if there is no way to apply in practice the distinction between numerical identity and mere perceptual identity, then we can have no evidence that what is now perceived is numerically identical with what is perceived on other occasions. Re-identification is possible only if the alleged perceptual particular exists in something at least analogous to space and time. Being in the same space at the same time implies numerical identity, as well as does a series of contiguous positions in space and time. Being in different spaces at the same time or lacking a series of contiguous positions in space and time implies numerical distinctness even if there is perceptual identity. However, God does not exist in anything analogous to a spacetime grid. Thus, there can never be evidence that what is experienced at two times is the same being: God.

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This epistemological challenge is deeper than the objection of William Forgie to experiences of God. Forgie has argued, against Nelson Pike, that the identification of God in experience requires a 'wealth of background beliefs,' and that a person cannot identify God just by reading that fact off from a particular experience (Forgie 1984, 1994; Pike 1992). Forgie argues that there can be no experience that is 'phenomenally of' a specific object X in the sense in which the experience can only be an accurate perception of X and could not be an accurate perception of something else. Forgie argues that we must always invoke background knowledge to make such a determination. I think Forgie might be right about this. Elsewhere I have argued that in the case of God such background knowledge is available from an accumulation of experiences of God (Gellman 1997: Chapter One). However, if Gale is right, no amount of similarity would be sufficient to make possible the re-identification of God in experience. For since God does not exist in space, there is no way to have evidence that the same object, God, is being experienced, rather than an object perceptually similar but numerically distinct from God. There cannot even be evidence that it is probably the same object experienced on different occasions, since there is no way of reckoning the probabilities when not having any way to distinguish between numerical and perceptual identity. My response to the epistemological version of Gale's argument consists in pointing out that the epistemological argument is what I would call a 'skeptical' attack upon the possibility of experiencing God. This is because it rejects the possibility of there being a 'holistic practice' specific to the re-identification of God, parallel to the holistic practice of re-identifying physical objects. Re-identifying physical objects is 'holistic' in that we must make the determination of the space an object occupies relative to re-identification of surrounding objects, while at the same time re-identification of surrounding objects depends on a judgment as to what space is occupied. As Peter Strawson has put it: ... the identification and distinction of places turn on the identification and distinction of things; and the identification and distinction of things turn, in part, on the

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identification and distinction of places. There is no mystery about this mutual dependence. To exhibit its detail is simply to describe the criteria by which we criticize, amend and extend our ascription of identity to things and places (Strawson 1964: 37). Strawson goes on to describe our practice of re-identifying physical objects, in a way that uses the interplay between qualitative features and relative positions to determine both location and identity. The judgments we make are not empirically determined. They reflect, rather, a holistic practice of making re-identifications. There is no reason why the re-identification of God cannot take place within its own holistic practice, with its criteria of identification, not beholden to the practice involved in reidentifying physical objects. We need not link the very notion of a 'perceptual particular' to the specific holistic practice of reidentifying physical objects. To refuse to acknowledge this is not an argument against the possibility of God's re-identification in experience, but a skeptical stance towards that possibility. It will be instructive to compare what I am claiming for experiences of God to Gale's critique of Strawson's 'world of sounds.' In the second chapter of Individuals, Strawson presents a scheme in which a subject locates objective sound particulars according to their 'position' as determined by the gradually changing pitch of what Strawson calls the 'master-sound.' Being heard together with a certain pitch of the master-sound fixes the location of a sound without the aid of any spatial features. Different locations at the master-sound yield distinct sound particulars. Strawson is thus able to provide a way to distinguish between numerical and qualitative identity in a purely auditory world, on the basis of the pitch of the mastersound. Here is part of Strawson's description of his world of sounds: Suppose ... a certain unitary sound-sequence, to which we may refer as M (M being the name of a universal) is being heard at a certain pitch-level of the master-sound - say at level L. Then suppose the master-sound changes fairly rapidly in pitch to Level L' and back again to L; and then M is heard once more, a few bars having been missed. Then

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the sound-particular now being heard is reidentified as the same particular instance of M. If during the same time, the master-sound had changed not from L to L' and back to L, but from L to L", then even though M may have been heard once more, a few bars having been missed, it is not the same particular instance of M that is now heard, but a different instance (Strawson 1964: 77). In this scheme, qualitatively identical sounds are distinguished by their relationship to the pitch of the master-sound. Now, if perceptual sound particulars can be numerically re-identified without benefit of space, then space is not required to apply the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity for perceptual particulars. In that case, God could be a perceptual particular even though there exists no analogue of spatial position for God. Gale, who understands Strawson to be denying that perceptual particulars must be located in space, criticizes Straws on's treatment of sounds. Here is the problem as Gale sees it: The position of every sound, S, other than the master-sound is determined by the pitch of the master-sound along with which S is heard. It is the difference in the pitch of the master-sound between when S is heard and when S' is heard that determines that Sand S' are numerically distinct even if Sand S' are perceptually identical. However, counter-argues Gale, Sand S' are never perceptually similar in such situations, because they have different perceptual quality, and relations to that quality are perceptually discernible. Hence, in Strawson's scheme each case of complete perceptual qualitative identity must yield numerical identity. The case is different for spatial objects, since being in a certain space is not a perceptual quality of an object. Space is not an empirically detected realm. Perhaps I can put Gale's objection to Strawson a bit differently. With spatial particulars, it makes sense to think of a particular changing place. However, Strawson's sounds cannot change place. Strawson declares that if Sand S' are perceptually identical they are nevertheless numerically distinct if they are heard at different pitches of the master-sound. But, we may ask, why can't the same sound move from being heard at one pitch of the master-sound to being heard at another pitch of the master81

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sound? The answer is that the distinctness of sounds is guaranteed by the perceptual quality of being heard at different pitches of the master-sound. This leaves no room for the idea of the same sound moving about on the pitch scale of the mastersound. If that is so, then we really do not have a concept of a sound being a perceptual particular, since we have no way of giving conceptual content to the numerical distinction between perceptually identical sounds. Strawson has not given us a nonspatial explication of a perceptual particular. So Strawson's world of sounds is of no help as a counter to Gale. Now Strawson is well aware that in his individuation of sounds there are disanalogies to the individuation of physical objects in space. One disanalogy he mentions is that in the world of sounds one cannot hear different sounds together as located by the master-sound, whereas we can apprehend distinct spatial objects together. Another disanalogy we might mention is that the locations of sounds, that is to say: pitches of the mastersound, are not determined holistically. The master-sound is simply given, as the master-sound. Spatial locations, on the other hand, are only identified holistically. And other disanalogies have been pointed out (See Glouberman 1975). Strawson declares that there is simply no over-arching standard by which we can determine whether his sounds are 'really' objective particulars (Strawson 1964: 81). Straws on writes of his scheme of sounds: The resultant conceptual scheme ... is not compelling. We could adopt a different scheme ... which allowed for reidentifiable universals but not for re-identifiable particulars. What we cannot do is, as it were, to appear to accept a scheme which allows for reidentification of sound-particulars and then to say that, of course, particular-identity would always be in doubt .... This would be the position of philosophical scepticism about the identity of sound particulars (Strawson 1964: 77). Straws on's point is that one could refuse to adopt a conceptual scheme in which particular sounds were re-identified as they are in his sound-world, and then speak only of re-instantiations of sound-universals. But of course we can say the very same for our ordinary world of physical objects. One could adopt an ontology in which there were only universals and their instantiations, or

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in which there were only processes, ruling out abiding perceptual physical particulars altogether. Now, I have no vested interest in defending Strawson's view of this world of sounds. What does interest me, though, is his insight that there can very well be different conceptual systems each giving different criteria for perceptual particular-hood in that system. There have been a number of objections to Strawson's treatment of sound particulars that are not relevant to the point being made here. For example, Strawson himself questions the coherence of an objective auditory world on the grounds that the observer would have a concept of herself at a certain place and so possess spatial concepts. However, my concern is not with whether there can be an observer who possesses no spatial concepts, who possesses nonetheless the concept of a non-spatial perceptual particular. For my purposes it is sufficient if we can possess a concept of a specific kind of perceptual particular without importing spatial concepts into the understanding of such. In a penetrating examination of Strawson's chapter on sounds, Gareth Evans raised a number of criticisms that do not apply to the case of God (Evans 1980). Here are a few examples. Evans argues that Straws on's sound scheme is open to a phenomenalist reduction, to saying merely that 'if the master-sound were at pitch 1, then a sound of a certain sort would be heard,' rather than that there was a substantive sound particular. Also, Evans argues that Strawson cannot distinguish between objective particular sounds and objective sound-processes in his scheme, thus driving a wedge between objectivity and particularity. Third, Evans argues that sounds cannot be conceived of as perceptual particulars at all, since sounds give only secondary, perceptual qualities and not primary, enduring qualities. As Evans puts it: We can think of sounds as ... phenomena that are independent of us, and that can exist unperceived because we have the resources for thinking of the abiding stuff in whose changes the truth of the proposition that there is a sound can be regarded as consisting (Evans 1980: 104). To get a perceptual particular in a world of sounds, declares Evans, we must import an enduring physical object to which the sound belongs. 83

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Now these objections do not apply to the case of experiences of God. The experience of God is commonly a perception of someone possessed of an inner life. This makes difficult any phenomenalist reduction of God's appearances. It counts against reducing God to mere possibilities of our having experiences of a certain kind. For the same reason, experiences of God make difficult an interpretation of God as a process rather than a particular. Finally, even if we were to be restricted to secondary properties of God, such experiences suggest that the substance that has these secondary properties has an enduring inner life. In God's case we need not posit a spatial particular in which the secondary properties abide. One point made by Evans (and by Jonathan Bennett (Bennett 1966: 37» relevant here is that Strawson could have made do without the master-sound altogether (Evans 1980: 81-82). In place of the master-sound could come a sufficient regularity of experience that supported generalizations of the form: An experience of kind K will intervene between any experience of kind K' and kind K". A subject could then, in a holistic way, make a distinction between the changes in the world and changes in her position in the world, in a way that could generate the notion of re-identifiable particulars. This could be done without any master-sound. This could be especially effective, asserts Evans, if the subject had a notion of a 'block' that could account for her not perceiving a perceptual particular on a particular occasion. Now something analogous to Evans' suggestion is possible in the case of experiences of God. Since God is perceived to have an inner life it is possible for there to be a series of occurrences that can be attributed to a series of events in God's inner life. For example, on one occasion it seems that God is promising to do A, and on another occasion it seems that God is telling someone that God has brought about A, and so on. This could give a sequence that a subject could attribute to a particular that persists between experiences. This is especially possible if the subject had a sense of something blocking the having of an experience of God. Such a block can be found in the idea that the possibility of one's experiencing God depends to some degree upon what Merold Westphal has called a 'decentring' of oneself (Westphal 1984). To decentre oneself means to move oneself away from being the centre of one's ultimate concern, and

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opening oneself to God. An inability to decentre oneself would tend to block one's ability to be aware of God's presence. Of course we would have to apply holistically the patterns of experience and the blocks. But in that there is nothing new. I conclude that in principle, for experiences of God there could be a holistic re-identification practice parallel to Evans' reidentification practice for perceptual sound particulars sans master-sound. So, with or without the master-sound, the epistemological objection fails for not having recognized the possibilities of different holistic schemes in which we could have evidence for the existence of non-spatial perceptual particulars. I would not like to stop there, however. For all I have argued is that in principle there could be a re-identification practice for experiences of God. And while that may be sufficient to turn back the epistemological argument, which says that in principle there could not be a re-identification practice, this says little about the actual historical practice of re-identifying God in experience. The question I now want to ask, then, is this: What are the phenomenal features in actual experiences of God, in a particular religious tradition, say, which play the determining role in the practice of re-identifying one perceptual particular, God, as opposed to a multiplicity of similar particulars? I can think of several such features, if we treat the reidentification of God much like the re-identification of other objectors. Here are some of them: the sense of externality, the constancy of God's character, the serial nature of revelations from God, and the sense of being blocked from perceiving God, all mentioned earlier. Add to these the phenomenon of 'autoidentification,' where God identifies himself to the subject of the experience, as the same one who appeared to others, rather than God having to be recognized. Of course all of these, plus others, do not 'prove' that it is ever the same being appearing twice, but by now it should be clear that this is not the issue. I will not elaborate here on these features. Instead I wish to concentrate on one feature ofthe experience of God that is unlike that of the experience of other objects. In the Jewish tradition, beginning at least in the Tannaitic literature (the first two centuries of the present era) God is frequently referred to as 'HaMakom' or 'The Place.' For example, a Mishnah states: 'Rabbi Shimon says, "when you pray do not 85

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make your prayer routine, but supplication for mercy before HaMakom, Blessed be He.'" (Avot: 2:13).2 And a Midrash says: 'Blessed is HaMakom, Blessed be He, who knows all from beginning to end . . . and in His wisdom and understanding created His world and prepared it and afterwards created Adam . . . . (Eliyahu Rabah, Section A). The late Judaic scholar Efraim Aurbach has argued that HaMakom, 'The Place,' occurs in contrast to calling God, 'Shamayim', or 'Heaven.' God is called 'The Place,' when God's nearness is being emphasized, and is called 'Heaven' when God is thought of as distant (Aurbach 1975: Chapter 4). However, nowhere in the Tannaitic literature is the term explained. The later, Amoratic literature contains several passages that give an interpretation of the name HaMakom, 'The Place,' as in this representative text: Rabbi Huna said in the name of Rabbi Ami: Why is the Holy One Blessed Be He called by the name 'HaMakom?' Because He is the place of the world and His world is not His place. So it is written, 'Behold place is with me. (Exodus 33:21),' to tell us that He is the place of the world and His world is not His place. (Bereshit Rabah, Section 68) The prooftext in Exodus, reading in King James: 'there is a place by me,' appears where Moses asks to see God's presence and God passes his glory before him. Moses sees only God's back. He does not see God, because God has no place. God, on this Midrash, is himself The Place of the world. Aurbach maintains that this interpretation of 'The Place' is a departure from an earlier understanding. His thinking is that in earlier times when the Rabbis were in Palestine, HaMakom was a way of referring to God's presence at a certain place, the Temple. When the Temple was no longer standing, the Rabbis wanted to weaken the connection between God and a particular place. Hence the reinterpretation. I do not find this proposal convincing. The Amoratic Rabbis taught regularly that it was the shekhinah, God's 'immanent presence,' rather than God Himself that rested on the Temple, and in the Amoratic literature the shekhinah continues to have

2 Throughout, translations from Hebrew texts are by the author (J.G.).

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a place, at the Temple site, or in exile with the Jewish people, or filling the world. In addition, they generally kept the shekhinah separate from HaMakom, as when a Midrash says that 'HaMakom showed the shekhinah to Ezekial' (Seder Olam Rabah, Ch. 26). Whether or not the later teachers knew the original significance of the name 'HaMakom,' I suggest they meant to distinguish between the shekhinah, which they thought of as a localized manifestation of God, and God himself. The shekhinah can have a place. God himself cannot. But that is not all. Place exists in God. What can this mean? This statement no doubt has a mystical intent: that the world is somehow included within the reality of God. Understood as a mystical pronouncement it served as a prototype for mystical ideas of the later kabbalah, such as that the Infinite One contracted to its 'sides' to make 'room' for the creation. On the other hand, Maimonides, the arch rationalist, gives a nonmystical understanding of the term 'place' used of God. He writes: Originally the Hebrew term makom (place) applied both to a particular spot and to space in general; subsequently it received a wider signification and denoted 'position' or 'degree,' as regards the perfection of man in certain things . . . . In the verse, 'Blessed be the glory of the Lord from His place,' (mekomo) (Ezek. 3:12), makom has this figurative meaning, and the verse may be paraphrased, 'Blessed be the Lord according to the exalted nature of His existence,' and wherever makom is applied to God, it expresses the same idea, namely, the distinguished position of his existence, to which nothing is equal or comparable. . .. (Maimonides 1956: 1.8). According to Maimonides, then, there is an evaluational meaning to 'makom' when used of God. So, calling God 'HaMakom,' 'The Place,' would be asserting God's incomparable status or 'place' in the order of things. I want to suggest that calling God 'The Place of the world' has implications for the re-identification practice attached to experiences of God. What I have in mind is this: Remember that in Straws on's sound world, the location, and hence the identity, of every sound other than the master-sound is determined by the pitch of the master-sound at which it is

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heard. The location, and hence the identity, of the mastersound itself is not determined by anything. In fact, the mastersound has no location in Straws on's world of sounds, and its identity as the master-sound is simply a given in the conceptual scheme. It is that in virtue of which all location is assigned. All else is measured by it. The role of the master-sound in the world of sounds simply doesn't allow for such questions as 'Is that still the master-sound?' or, 'Is that the master-sound again?' to arise. As a feature of perceptions of God, perceiving God as 'The Place' of the world implies experiencing something as being not another particular within a scheme of particulars, but as that in reference to which all particulars have their existence and find their value. To say that God is 'HaMakom,' 'The Place' of the world, is to make God the master-sound, as it were, of the world. I am suggesting, then, that the re-identification of God across experiences takes place within a practice that recognizes an ontological-valuational centre around which all existence becomes organized and understood. The question of whether it is the same centre from occasion to occasion just does not arise. In the practice being considered, it just is the same centre. That's the way God functions in the conceptual scheme attached to experiences of God. And experiences of God tend to give rise to just such judgments. This suggestion is reflected in a dominant feature of experiences of God, alluded to earlier. Such experiences are thought to be available generally only to those who are capable of a 'decentring of the self.' It appears to be a phenomenal feature of perceptions of God that the object in question is experienced to be the value centre of one's life, to one degree or another. The decentring of the self and the perception of God as the centre are elements of the re-identification practice for God across experiences that may make the re-identification of God different in kind from the re-identification of other perceptual particulars. I wish to stress that nothing I have said is supposed to prove that one object, namely God, rather than distinct, similar objects is perceived in alleged experiences of God. Rather, my point is that the re-identification practice for God may be radically different from the re-identification practice for physical objects. In that event, the epistemological argument 88

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fails for not having appreciated the peculiar nature of theistic experiences. I conclude that whether or not we take the re-identification practice for God to be much like that for other objects, the epistemological argument fails to show that in principle there could not be evidence from experience for the existence of God. 3

3 I am grateful to William Alston and Eleonore Stump for their helpful comments.

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Response Paul Helm

P

rofessor Gellman is interested in experience as providing evidence that there is a God and his paper is a defence of the experience of God against two sorts of objection against God being a 'perceptual particular', the metaphysical and the epistemological objections, each of which is raised by Richard Gale. On the metaphysical objection, Gale argues that fundamental conditions for something's being a perceptual particular cannot be fulfilled by God, in particular those conditions which enable the distinction between the merely phenomenal and the real to be maintained, such conditions as what count as the existence of 0 when not perceived. There is nothing analogous to space and time for God. Professor Gellman counters that God is conceived of as having an inner life, and it is this that provides the necessary objectivity. While I have broad sympathy for Gellman's position, there seem to me to be difficulties with it. As it happens, each of the difficulties that I shall raise centre around this idea of God having an inner life, and in particular the idea of God's existence being constituted by that inner life. I shall first look at how Professor Gellman invokes this idea in answering what he calls Gale's metaphysical objection, and then the epistemological objection. Having glanced at some difficulties in his responses to these objections I shall ask whether the materials to formulate a way out of the epistemological objection are not already present elsewhere in Professor Gellman's paper.

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The metaphysical objection

The idea of an inner life that continues when unperceived comes down to the claim that it is possible that God knows that he exists though unperceived by us, and that if this possibility is actualised then this is sufficient for the required objectivity. My difficulty with this is that invoking God's inner life to meet the objectivity requirement looks as if it might amount to a petitio. For in order for God to have an inner life in the required sense he must, in ~j:l non-spatial, non-temporal world that he occupies, be able to distinguish for himself the real from the apparent, the merely possible from the actual. One cannot invoke divine omniscience to make this distinction, because the distinction between the real and the apparent is one of meaning, a conceptual distinction. This is a petitio because one answers the objection about the need to make the distinction between the objective and the subjective by invoking a being the metaphysical character of whom requires the making of that very distinction. Conversely, of course, if the distinction between the real and the apparent can in some way be made out by God in his inner life then that is a reason to suppose that it can be made out by us. Perhaps Professor Gellman would be better advised meeting Gale's metaphysical objection by an appeal to God's necessity.

The epistemological objection

I have difficulties with Gellman's account of the experience of God, but if those difficulties can be overcome he has a readymade answer to the epistemological objections of Gale. Professor Gellman's account of what it is to experience God presents some difficulties. On the one hand he takes the experiencing of God in a strong sense, something like 'X experiences God only if he experiences God himself'. At other places Professor Gellman says things that look to be inconsistent with this strong view; for he argues that no relevant resemblance between God himself and what we experience as the experience of God is necessary, though such a resemblance is possible. How would one know that an experience was of something that resembled God? To know by experience that X 91

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is a resemblance of Y one needs to have some knowledge of Y. Professor Gellman refers, at one point, to what he calls secondary properties of God without (I think) specifying what these might be. Something else which Gellman says about the experience of God which I find odd is that it is 'commonly a perception of someone possessed of an inner life' and (not quite the same thing) 'God is perceived to have an inner life'. Professor Gellman's view is that there could be a nomicallydecreed resemblance of God, or even perhaps no resemblance at all, but a purely conventional link, as in his prison-cell example. But in either case how do we know that it is God who has decreed the resemblance, or who has set up a connection of a purely conventional kind, (ifthat is what the prison-cell example is intended to show)? The final section of his paper is concerned with the identification of God in practice. Here it seems to me, in (as he says) treating the reidentification of God much like the reidentification of other objects, Professor Gellman departs even further from his original account of experiencing God. He cites 'the sense of externality, the constancy of God's character, the serial nature of revelations from God, the sense of being blocked from perceiving God, and the "auto-identification" of God'. But such general features would not serve to distinguish our experience of God from our experience of some human beings. This is something with which Professor Gellman might agree, for he then, in the final pages of his paper, cites one feature of the experience of God that is unlike the experience of other objects. If I have understood what he says here, it is that in the Jewish tradition God is himself the Place of the world, that is, God himself cannot have a place, but place exists in God. Just as in Strawson's world of sounds the master sound determines the location and identity of every other sound, itself having no location, but is that by which all location is assigned (so Professor Gellman suggests) that in experiencing God one is not experiencing another particular but that by virtue of which all particulars have their existence and find their value; he is the master-sound of the world. In his interesting but to me unfamiliar remarks about the Jewish tradition of calling God 'The Place ofthe world' Professor Gellman makes the proposal that this is to be understood as 'experiencing something as being not another particular within 92

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a scheme of particulars, but as that in reference to which all particulars have their existence and find their value'. The suggestion that he makes here is that there is a certain basicness to God's place such that the issue of re-identification posed by Gale does not arise, but that in the practice of experiencing God it just is the same centre. This is a suggestion that I think that he can make even more of, at least if I understand him correctly. However, my difficulty with this as it stands is that there appears to be a conflation of metaphysical and epistemological considerations. It is one thing to think of God as that in reference to which all particulars have their existence and find their value; it is quite another to propose that one might have an experience of God described as 'that in reference to which all particulars have their existence and find their value', such that something carrying this description forms the cognitive content of that experience. But perhaps there is such a way, an experience of a sort such that it grounds all other experiences, and gives rise to a unique reidentification practice. And if there is such a practice, then I wonder whether Gellman need take Gale's argument quite so seriously, given his understanding of what it means to experience God. Gale demands that one distinguish experiences of God from those that are qualitatively identical from them. But what could be qualitatively identical to an experience of God, if such an experience has a unique cognitive content of the sort that Professor Gellman appears to favour? Let me put my point in this way; Professor Gellman is bothered by the issue of reidentification. But why is not the reason for thinking that what I am now having is an experience of God himself sufficient to adjudicate between any real and any apparent experience of God in any subsequent occasion? The problem of reidentification is highlighted, I believe, because of the threat of subjectivism in experience, and of mistaken perception. This is a threat in our ordinary senseexperience, in experiencing the particulars of sensory perception. And the reasons for this are that we experience many particulars with different lifespans, particulars sharing some of qualitatively the same properties, and that we are subject to certain kinds of sensory limitation through the conditions in which we perceive, including a tendency to hallucinate and to be subject to various kinds of misidentification. But this could not

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be so in the case of the experience of God as Professor Gellman understands this, as an experience of that in reference to which all particulars have their existence and find their value. Such an experience is by definition unique and incorrigible, an experience of God as God. An experience that was qualitatively identical to such an experience of God must be an experience of God. Ordinary sense perception arises in situations in which there is reason to think that there are other perceptual particulars than the particular I am experiencing, or think that I am. But this could not be so in the case of God. So why is there a problem?

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CHAPTER FIVE

The God of Abraham, Saadia and Aquinas Eleonore Stump

I

Introduction

t has become fashionable in some quarters to maintain that the world's differing religions in fact all refer to the same ultimate ground of reality, for which 'God' is the traditional designation. This is the view now commonly designated 'pluralism'. The motivation for maintaining pluralism is said by some of its proponents to be respect for all religions since, on this view, no one religion can claim to be the true one and all religions are in touch, in one way or another, with God. One problem for pluralism has to do with the justification for the claim that all religions refer to the same God. Differing religions make differing and incompatible claims about the nature of the deity. So, for example, Christians assert and Muslims deny that God is triune. Since one and the same thing can't be both triune and not triune, it would seem that Christians and Muslims are not referring to the same God. The pluralist idea seems to be that none of the positive claims a religion makes about God are true, but that they are all equally groping towards the truth, which none of them has yet attained. But unless the pluralists have some privileged epistemic access to the nature of God, it is hard to see on what basis they would know such a claim about the world's religions to be true. That is, unless the pluralists are wrong and there is in fact one true account of the nature of the deity present in the world, namely, their own, it is hard to see on what basis they could support their central claim that all religions are only groping towards the same ultimate reality.

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Furthermore, and for somewhat the same reasons, it is hard to see in what way a pluralist attitude towards the world's religions really is a more respectful attitude than that of a religious believer who rejects pluralism and adheres to one religious tradition. So unregenerate an anti-pluralist as Matteo Ricci, who attempted to convert the Chinese to Catholicism in the sixteenth century, supposed that, although Confucianism as a worldview is false, nonetheless not all Confucian beliefs about the nature of ultimate reality are false. But for pluralists all Confucian claims about ultimate reality are, strictly speaking, false; the ultimate reality to which Confucianism is somehow referring with its false claims is the same for all religions and is not appropriately characterized by any of the claims made about it by Confucianism or any other particular worldview. For Ricci, all Catholicism's claims about the deity are true, and only some of the claims Confucianism makes about ultimate reality are true. For pluralists, on the other hand, all their own claims about the nature of ultimate reality, but none ofthe claims about it made by Confucianism or any other religious worldview, are true. It is consequently not easy to see that we do in fact gain in respectfulness towards other religions by adopting the attitude of pluralism. For these reasons, pluralism does not seem to me a promising way of arguing that differing religions refer to the same God. A more laborious road to the conclusion that two or more religions are referring to the same God is to examine those religions in some detail and to compare the claims that they make about the nature of the deity. If a significant number of the claims we take to be sufficiently important about the deity are shared by the religions being examined, then we have some warrant for supposing that those religions are referring to the same God, however much they may vary regarding certain of the deity's characteristics or actions. In what follows, I will examine the views of God held by two highly influential Christian and Jewish philosophers, Thomas Aquinas and Saadia Gaon, who are separated not only by their different religions but also by a great gulf of time and culture. I will argue that there is enough overlap between their views of the deity to take seriously the suggestion that they are referring to the same God, and that the God Saadia claims to be devoted to is the same as the God Aquinas claims to worship.

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In one sense, one might suppose that there is nothing to investigate here. The most fundamental divine attributes, omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect goodness, are accepted by Judaism and Christianity alike. So all that can be at issue in asking whether both religions are referring to the same God is whether agreement on such fundamental attributes is enough for sameness of reference. But I think that such an attitude is somewhat naive. It may perhaps be the case that what philosophers and theologians mean by 'omniscience' and 'omnipotence' varies only slightly, but there can be vast differences in what is meant by 'goodness' as applied to God. Perhaps the quickest way to compare the views of these two thinkers regarding the goodness of God is to consider what they have to say about the problem of evil and in particular what they take to be the correct account of the sufferings of Job. For both Jews and Christians, Job is the paradigm case of a person whose suffering raises the problem of evil in its classic form. It is an explicit and much emphasized part of the story that Job is entirely innocent, that his suffering in no way constitutes punishment for wrongdoing. It is equally obvious that his suffering isn't anything that he has chosen; it is simply inflicted on him, by marauding evildoers, by nature, and, in some sense, by God. For many contemporary thinkers, evil such as that endured by Job is evidence against the existence of God. But for committed theists, such as Saadia and Aquinas, what is called in question by the suffering of unwilling innocents is not God's existence but the attributes traditionally assigned to him, and in particular his providential goodness. In the story, Job himself questions God's goodness with some passion. How a committed theist deals with Job's suffering thus reveals something about his attitude towards the nature of God's goodness. So examining the views of Aquinas and Saadia on this score is one helpful way to begin comparing their understanding of the nature of the deity. Unfortunately for my purposes, there is a widely held view about Saadia's interpretation of Job and his position on the problem of evil which strikes me as simplistic and inaccurate; I will therefore have to deal with this standard view before I can compare Saadia's interpretation with Aquinas's. In what follows, then, I will first give a brief summary of Aquinas's reading of the 97

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story of Job. Next, I will present Saadia's interpretation, as Saadia is commonly understood. I will then argue that this common understanding of Saadia's views is inaccurate, or at least not required by the texts. If we look carefully at Saadia's theodicy in his Book of Beliefs and Opinions, which, according to contemporary scholars, contains generally the same view of the problem of evil as his commentary on Job does, we can see that his view is subtler and more sophisticated than has been generally supposed. Finally, I will argue that, interpreted in the way I am arguing for, Saadia's theodicy is much closer to Aquinas's than at first appears. Seeing why their positions are as close as they are gives us considerable insight, I think, into their views of the goodness of God. Those views are similar enough to make it reasonable to believe that these two representatives of Judaism and Christianity are referring to the same God, however much their religious views may differ in other respects.

Aquinas on Job

Aquinas approaches the book of Job with the conviction that God's existence is not in doubt, either for the characters in the story of Job or for the readers of that story.1 On his view, those who go astray in contemplating sufferings such as Job's do so because, like Job's comforters, they mistakenly suppose that happiness and unhappiness are functions just of things in this life. Aquinas, on the other hand, takes the book of Job to be 1 Aquinas's commentary, Expositio super Job ad litteram, is available in the Leonine edition of Aquinas's works, vol. 26, and in an English translation: Thomas Aquinas, The Literal Exposition on Job: A Scriptural Commentary Concerning Providence, trans. Anthony Damico and Martin Yaffe, The American Academy of Religion. Classics in Religious Studies (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). The commentary was probably written while Aquinas was at Orvieto, in the period 1261/2-1264. See James Weisheipl, Friar Thomas D'Aquino: His Life, Thought, and Works, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1983), p. 153; see also Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings, ed. Simon Tugwell, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1988), p. 223. Although I have preferred to give my own translations, I have found the Damico and Yaffe translation very helpful, and I will give references to this work both to the Latin and to the Damico and Yaffe translation.

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trying to instill in us the conviction that there is another life after this one, that our ultimate happiness lies there rather than here, and that we attain to that happiness only through suffering. 2 On Aquinas's view, all human beings have a terminal cancer of soul, a proneness to evil which invariably eventuates in sin and which in the right circumstances blows up into monstrosity. The pure and innocent among human beings are no exception to this claim. When the biblical text says that Job was righteous, Aquinas takes the text to mean that Job was pure by human standards. By the objective, uncurved standards of God, even Job was infected with the radical human tendencies toward eviI.3 No human being who remains uncured of this disease can see God. On Aquinas's view, then, the primary obstacle to union with God, in which true and ultimate human happiness consists, is the sinful character of human beings. Aquinas thinks that pain and suffering of all sorts are God's medicine for this spiritual cancer,4 and he emphasizes this view 2 See, for example, Expositio super Job, chap. 7, sec. 1, Damico and Yaffe, p. 145; and chap. 19:23-29, Damico and Yaffe, pp. 268-71, where Aquinas makes these points clear and maintains that Job was already among the redeemed awaiting the resurrection and union with God. Someone might wonder whether it is possible to maintain this approach to suffering when the suffering consists in madness, mental retardation, or some form of dementia. This doubt is based on the unreflective assumption that those suffering from these afflictions have lost all the mental faculties needed for moral or spiritual development. For some suggestions to the contrary, see the sensitive and insightful discussion of retarded and autistic patients in Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Summit books, 1985). 3 Aquinas, Expositio super Job, chap, 9, secs. 24-30; Damico and Yaffe, p. 179. 4 I have explored and defended Aquinas's approach to the problem of evil in different ways in 'The Problem of Evil', Faith and Philosophy 2 (1985) 392424; 'Suffering for Redemption: A Reply to Smith', Faith and Philosophy 2 (1985) 430-435; 'Dante's Hell, Aquinas's Theory of Morality, and the Love of God', The Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16 (1986) 181-198; 'Providence and the Problem of Evil', in Christian Philosophy, ed. Thomas Flint, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), pp. 51-91; and 'Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job', in Reasoned Faith, ed. Eleonore Stump, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 328-357. (This section on Aquinas is largely taken from 'Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job'.) In those papers I discuss and defend Aquinas's claims that a good God would create a world in which human beings have such a cancer of the soul, that suffering is the best available means to cure the cancer in the soul, and that God can justifiably allow suffering even though it sometimes eventuates in the opposite of moral goodness or love of God.

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repeatedly. 5 Arguing that temporal goods such as those Job lost are given and taken away according to God's will, Aquinas says, 'someone's suffering adversity would not be pleasing to God except for the sake of some good coming from the adversity. And so although adversity is in itself bitter and gives rise to sadness, it should nonetheless be agreeable [to us] when we consider its usefulness, on account of which it is pleasing to God .... For in his reason a person rejoices over the taking of bitter medicine because of the hope of health, even though in his senses he is troubled. '6 For Aquinas, then, what justifies the suffering of an unwilling innocent is that the suffering acts as a spiritual chemotherapeutic agent, keeping the spiritual cancer of the soul from killing the patient. Aquinas thus sets fairly strenuous standards for theodicy. The morally sufficient reason for God's allowing unwilling innocents to suffer consists in a benefit which comes, largely or primarily, to the sufferer and which consists in warding off a greater evil for the sufferer. So, for example, commenting on a line in Job containing the complaint that God sometimes doesn't hear a needy person's prayers, Aquinas says, 'Now it sometimes happens that God hearkens not to a person's pleas but rather to his advantage. A doctor does not hearken to the pleas of the sick person who requests that the bitter medicine be taken away (supposing that the doctor doesn't take it away because he knows that it contributes to health); instead he hearkens to [the patient's] advantage, because by doing so he produces health, which the sick person wants most of all. In the same way, God does not remove tribulations from the person stuck in them, even though he prays earnestly for God to do so, because God 5 One shouldn't misunderstand this claim and suppose Aquinas to be claiming that human beings can earn their way to heaven by the merit badges of suffering. Aquinas is quite explicit that salvation is through Christ only. His claim here is not about what causes salvation but only about what is efficacious in the process of salvation. It would take us too far afield here to consider Aquinas's view of the relation between Christ's work of redemption and the role of human suffering in that process. What is important for my purposes is just to see that on Aquinas's account suffering is an indispensable element in the course of human salvation, initiated and merited by Christ. 6 Thomas Aquinas, Super ad Hebraeos, chap. 12, lee. 2.

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knows these tribulations help him forward to final salvation. And so although God truly does hearken, the person stuck in afflictions believes that God hasn't harkened to him.'7 In fact, on Aquinas's view, the better the person, the more likely it is that he will experience suffering. In explicating two metaphors of Job's,8 comparing human beings in this life to soldiers on a military campaign and to servants, Aquinas makes the point in this way: 'It is plain that the general of an army does not spare [his] more active soldiers dangers or exertions, but as the plan of battle requires, he sometimes lays them open to greater dangers and greater exertions. But after the attainment of victory, he bestows greater honour on the more active soldiers. So also the head of a household assigns greater exertions to his better servants, but when it is time to reward them, he lavishes greater gifts on them. And so neither is it characteristic of divine providence that it should exempt good people more from the adversities and exertions of the present life, but rather that it reward them more at the end.'9 Underlying Aquinas's point here is the conviction that there are degrees of glory in heaven, just as there are degrees of bodily health in this life; those persons who are better are given more suffering so that when they are saved from their own evil, they are in the process brought to a more robust state of spiritual health. In their case, the point of their suffering is not only for salvation but also for the sake ofthe concomitant greater glory in the afterlife. Someone might suppose that on Aquinas's views he ought to say not that better people suffer more but rather that worse people, who need more suffering, suffer more. But an analogy with chemotherapy is helpful here. Sometimes the most effective kinds of chemotherapy can't be used on those who need it most because their systems are too weak to bear the treatments, and so the strongest kinds of treatment tend to be reserved for those who aren't too old or too advanced in the disease or too riddled with secondary complications - in other words, for those who are (apart from their cancer) strong and healthy. 7 Aquinas, Expositio super Job, Chap. 9, secs. 15-21; Damico and Yaffe, p.174. 8 Only one ofthe two metaphors is in the Revised Standard Version, the King James, and the Anchor Bible. 9 Aquinas, Expositio super Job, chap. 7, sec. 1; Damico and Yaffe, p. 146.

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So, on Aquinas's view, Job has more suffering than ordinary people not because he is morally worse than ordinary, as the comforters assume, but just because he is better. Because he is a better soldier in the war against his own evil and a better servant of God's, God can give him more to bear here; and when this period of earthly life is over, his glory will also be surpassing. Even the dreadful suffering Job experiences at the death of his good and virtuous children becomes transformed on this account from the unbearable awfulness of total loss to the bitter but temporary agony of separation, since in being united to God in love in heaven, a person is also united with others. The ultimate good of union with God, like any great good, is by nature shareable. Aquinas recognizes that his position will seem counterintuitive or worse to some people, and he takes this difference in attitude to stem from a more general difference in theological worldview. 'If there were no resurrection of the dead,' he says, 'people wouldn't think it was a power and a glory to abandon all that can give pleasure and to bear the pains of death and dishonour; instead they would think it was stupid.'lO His theodicy seems as reasonable as it does to him because it is set in a whole web of religious beliefs not only about God's existence and attributes - goodness, in particular - but also about God's dealings with human beings and the means by which they are brought to union with him.

Saadia's account of Job

Saadia accepts the same basic account of the story of Job as Aquinas and most other readers of the story do. He agrees that Job is morally innocent, that he suffers horribly, and that his suffering is in no way deserved, contrary to the position ofthe illnamed Comforters. Like Aquinas, he also supposes that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. Given these views of Saadia's, it is obvious that from his point of view the story of Job, which stands as representative for all the suffering of unwilling innocents, requires some theodicy.

10 Super I ad Corinthios, chap. 15, lee. 2.

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Like Aquinas, Saadia has strenuous requirements for theodicy. He says, 'God's creating suffering, sickness, and injury in the world is also an act of beneficence and in the interest of humanity.... What is true of sufferings felt without affecting the body is true also of those that do affect it - the Creator does not so afflict His servant except in his [the servant's] own interest and for his own good.'ll So Saadia, like Aquinas, thinks that the benefits which justify God in permitting suffering must go primarily to the sufferer. There are three ways in which this can occur, on Saadia's view. First, there is the sort of suffering which constitutes training and character-building. Saadia says, 'Although these may be painful for human beings, hard, wearying, and troubling of mind, all this is for our own good. Of this the prophet says, the chastening of the Lord, my son, despise not . ... we know from our own experience that one who is wise does burden himself with late hours and hard work, reading books, taxing his mental powers and discernment, to understand. But this is no injustice and not wrong in the least on his part.'12 Here the idea seems to be that just as it is not wrong for the scholar to afflict himself for the sake of excellence in scholarship, so it is not wrong for God to afflict a person for the sake of the excellence of that person's character. Second, there is 'purgation and punishment'. If the first case can be thought of as making a basically good person better, this second case can be thought of as keeping a person who has done something bad from getting worse and rectifying his accounts so that he is not in moral debt any more. Those familiar with John Hick's theodicy might suppose that these two categories of Saadia's would be enough to construct a theodicy. The second case could account for all those sufferers who aren't innocent, and the first case could then be made to accommodate the suffering of unwilling innocents such as Job. But, on Saadia's view, to explain such suffering as Job's we need yet a third category: 'The third case is that of trial and testing. An upright servant, whose Lord knows that he will bear 11 The Book of Theodicy: Translation and Commentary on the Book of Job tr. Len Goodman, (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988) pp. 124-125. 12 Goodman 1988, p. 125.

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sufferings loosed upon him and hold steadfast in his uprightness, is subjected to certain sufferings, so that when he steadfastly bears them, his Lord may reward and bless him. This too is a kind of bounty and beneficence, for it brings the servant to everlasting blessedness.'13 That is why, Saadia maintains, one kind of goodness that God shows his creatures is 'recompense for tribulations with which He has afflicted us and which we have borne with fortitude .... For the tribulations are not on account of some past sin on the servant's part. They are spontaneously initiated by God. Their purpose, therefore, lies in the future .... The Allwise knows that when we are visited with sufferings they are abhorrent to our natures and harrowing to us in our struggle to surmount them. So He records all to our account in his books. If we were to read these ledgers, we would find all we have suffered made good, and we would be confirmed in our acceptance of his decree.'14 According to Saadia, then, God permits suffering to come to an unwilling innocent in some cases just for the sake of rewarding him in the afterlife for his having endured such suffering. The sufferings of Job, in Saadia's view, fall into this third sort of case, and what Job calls into question with his complaints is only God's recompense for the sufferings of the righteous. Supporting Elihu's side in the disputation, Saadia says, 'Elihu denies ... Job's claim that God has caused him to suffer . .. without affording him any recompense in the hereafter.'15 Sometimes it seems as if Saadia postulates the third case just because it is needed to cover the sorts of suffering of unwilling innocents which would be difficult to construe as characterbuilding. So, for example, in describing the various species of suffering that are included in the third case, Saadia says, 'there are three kinds of trial: by way of property, by way of body, and by way of soul. Two of these ... are called tests. But the third, by way ofthe soul, is not called a test, because when suffered to the full it results in death. Rather it is called immolation .... This too God may inflict upon the righteous without any prior offence but with subsequent recompense - as He did with the infants at 13 Goodman 1988, pp. 125-126. 14 Goodman 1988, p. 127. 15 Goodman 1988, p. 357.

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the flood, the infants of the seven (Canaanite) nations, Job's children, and others.'16 Punishing infants for sin seems morally absurd, and it is not much more plausible to suppose that infants who die in their sufferings are allowed to suffer for the sake of developing their character. So Saadia is right to suppose that the suffering of infants would be hard to assimilate to either of his first two cases.

Objections to Saadia's theory of suffering as trial

Although Saadia's third case covers instances of innocent suffering which his position would otherwise be hard-pressed to account for, there is nonetheless something morally distressing about this third case as it is commonly understood. If one of the purposes of theodicy is to show that the evil in the world is compatible with the existence of a God who is good, it isn't at all clear that Saadia's theodicy succeeds in this regard. Maimonides, for example, rejects it with vehemence. He reads Saadia's interpretation of Job into the views of one of Job's comforters, Bildad the ShuhiteP According to Maimonides, Bildad's line to Job comes to this: 'If you are innocent and have not sinned, the reason for these great events [Job's sufferings] is to make great your reward. You will receive the finest of compensations. All this is good for you, so that the good that you will obtain [will] in the end be increased.'18 Maimonides thinks that this view is common, vulgar, stupid, and impious. He says, 'What is generally accepted among people regarding the subject of trial is this: God sends down calamities 16 Goodman 1988, pp. 161-62. Why Job's children are in this list is not easy to say, since they were adults, or at least old enough to be capable of serious sin, at the time of their death. 17 Although Maimonides doesn't explicitly associate this view with Saadia, it is clear that he is aware of Saadia's philosophical and theological positions, and he is generally taken to be opposing Saadia here and also elsewhere. See, for example, Oliver Leaman, Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Cambridge Studies in Religious Traditions, voL 6, p. 77; and Colette Sirat, A History of Jewish Philosphy in the Middle Ages, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), p, 175 and p. 211. 18 Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, tr. Shlomo Pines, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963; reprinted 1974), III. 23, p. 493. 105

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upon an individual without their having been preceded by a sin, in order that his reward be increased. However, this principle is not at all mentioned in the Torah in an explicit text. . . . The principle of the Law that runs counter to this opinion, is that contained in his dictum, may He be exalted: A God of faithfulness and without inquity. Nor do all the Sages profess this opinion of the multitude, for they say sometimes: There is no death without sin and no sufferings without transgression. And this [the quoted view of the Sages] is the opinion that ought to be believed by every adherent of the Law who is endowed with intellect, for he should not ascribe injustice to God, may He be exalted above this, so that he believes that Zayd is innocent of sin and is perfect and that he does not deserve what befell him.'19 Even those commentators who think Maimonides's own account of suffering needs some detailed, explanatory apologetic are inclined to accept his evaluation of Saadia's position. So, for example, Oliver Leaman says, 'It is not just that Saadya represents God as rather like a judge, a very human judge, but also that as a judge he seems to be particularly unpleasant. He makes it all right in the end, but seems to torment people for no other reason than to test them, or for no reason at all, with the ultimate promise that compensation will be available .... Is this how we should view the deity?,2o What gives rise to the sort of complaint made by both Maimonides and Leaman is an important difference between Aquinas's theodicy and Saadia's, if Leaman and Maimonides understand Saadia correctly here. On Aquinas's view, suffering is medicinal for the cancer of the will innate in all post-Fall human beings. Unless that cancer is cured, human beings cannot be united to God in the afterlife, and not being ultimately united to God is the worst evil that can befall a human being. Undeserved suffering, then, is allowed by God in order to help ward off a greater evil. On Saadia's view, however, the situation is different, at least on the interpretation being considered here. For Saadia, undeserved suffering is allowed by God for the sake of a greater good for the sufferer - the compensation God will give to the innocent sufferer in the afterlife - and not to ward off a greater evil. 19 ibid., III. 214, pp. 497-498. 20 Leaman 1995, p. 78.

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If Maimonides and Leaman are right about the nature of Saadia's position, then, there are two problems with Saadia's theodicy. In the first place, the benefit looks as if it could be brought about without the suffering. But if God could give the benefit without the suffering, is it morally right of him to allow the suffering just for the sake ofthe benefit? If nothing about the sufferer's circumstances or choices means that the benefit can't come to him without the suffering, isn't the suffering entirely gratuitous? And in what sense is God good if he allows entirely gratuitous suffering? Secondly, even if there were the requisite sort of connection between the suffering and the benefit, it isn't clear that it is, in general, morally right to bring it about (or allow it to occur when one could readily prevent it) that an innocent person suffers unwillingly for the sake of some greater good for that person. It is, of course, not always easy to make a distinction between acting to produce a greater good and acting to ward off a greater evil. 21 But we do often make a rough and intuitive distinction of this sort, and we are willing to conscience suffering induced or allowed to ward off a greater evil although we are not in general inclined to approve suffering induced or allowed just for the sake of a greater good. That is why Leaman's criticism, that Saadia makes God into a morally unattractive judge, seems warranted. So if the difference between Aquinas's account of suffering and Saadia's appears to highlight the divergence in their understanding of the nature of God's goodness.

Saadia's theodicy reconsidered

This evaluation is based, of course, on the assumption that interpreters such as Maimonides and Leaman have understood Saadia's position correctly.22 and here, I think, there is room for dispute. 21 There is also some difference in our moral intuitions between cases of inflicting suffering and cases of allowing suffering which arises from elsewhere. In what follows, for the sake of brevity, I will give examples just concerning inflicting suffering. 22 See also, for example, Isaac Husik, A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy, (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1944), pp. 42-43.

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To see why this is so, it is important to set Saadia's theodicy within the context of his broader philosophical and theological views. To begin with, like Aquinas, he supposes that God has created human beings with a body and a soul and that these can be separated. At death, the body rots, but the soul persists. Mter a certain time, the soul and the body are reunited, and the resurrected individual lives forever. Not only does Saadia hold this view, but also, in his opinion, every Jew does. He says, We ... do not know of any Jew who would disagree with this belief.'23 Additionally, in the afterlife, human beings will be divided into two groups, those receiving reward and those receiving punishment. Rewards and punishments will be meted out to resurrected individuals, and they will be perpetual. Nonetheless, the punishments or rewards will be graded: 'even though the reward and the punishment ... will be everlasting, their extent will vary according to the act. Thus, for example, the nature of a person's reward will be dependent upon whether he presents one or ten or one hundred or one thousand good deeds, except that it will be eternal in duration. . . . Likewise will the extent of a person's punishment vary according to whether he presents one or ten or a hundred or a thousand evil deeds, except that, whatever the intensity of the punishment may be, it will be everlasting .'24 Furthermore, there is no change from one state to another in the afterlife; an individual remains forever in whatever state he was in when he entered the afterlife. 25 Next, although he thinks that the afterlife admits of gradations of reward and punishment, Saadia recognizes only two groups in the afterlife, those who are unendingly rewarded and those who are unendingly punished. He has a less stern notion of the requirements for being in the group of the righteous, however. The completely righteous person is someone who has always fulfilled all the commandments, but Saadia feels he has to argue for the possibility of there being such a person, 23 The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, tr. Samuel Rosenblatt, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), p. 264. 24 Rosenblatt 1948, pp. 347-348. 25 Rosenblatt 1948, p. 247. 108

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on the theoretical grounds that God's commandments would otherwise be futile, The chance of there actually being such a person is extremely remote, in his view, The group of the righteous in the afterlife is therefore not populated, largely or entirely, by people from this category. Instead, the righteous in the afterlife will consist of sinners who have repented their sins. By repentance, Saadia explains he means '(a) the renunciation of sin, (b) remorse, (c) the quest of forgiveness, and (d) the assumption of the obligation not to relapse into sin.'26 In Saadia's view, most Jews fall into this category, or are very close to it.27 So the group of the righteous who are unendingly rewarded in the afterlife will consist largely of ordinary people who have repented their sins. In explaining this third category of suffering, the trial of a righteous person, Saadia makes a point which at first glance looks only lamentably ridiculous. He says, 'the sufferings to which the virtuous are subjected in this world fall into two kinds. One of these constitutes the penalties for slight [unrepented] failings, as I have explained previously. The second consists of incipient trials with which God tests them, when He knows that they are able to endure them, only in order to compensate them for these trials later on with good.'28 There is something apparently absurd and unjust about God's testing an individual only when he is sure of the outcome of the test and only for the sake of compensating the wretched and innocent victim of the test afterwards. Maimonides's diatribe against this view seems entirely warranted. But if we look more closely, Saadia's third category of suffering becomes more complicated and more interesting. Even repented sins leave a stain on the soul, on Saadia's views,29 So, he says, 'obedience [to God's commandments] increases the luminosity of the soul's substance, whereas sin renders its substance turbid and black.'3o I'm note sure to what extent Saadia means this point literally or metaphorically, but his general idea is not hard to grasp. Any 26 27 28 29 30

Rosenblatt Rosenblatt Rosenblatt Rosenblatt Rosenblatt

1948, 1948, 1948, 1948, 1948,

p. 220. pp. 221-222, p. 213. p, 205-207. p. 246,

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instance of moral wrongdoing carries with it two problems for the wrongdoer, one as regards the future and one as regards the past. Doing a wrong act has some influence on character; it increases the likelihood that one will do such a wrong act again in the future. The solution for this future-oriented problem lies in repentance, which to some extent unravels the twist in the character produced by doing the wrong act. But even if the wrongdoing is repented, there remains a problem for the wrongdoer as regards the past: he is a person who has done such a wrong act. If Goebbels, for example, truly repented and reformed, became a new person entirely, there would still be a problem because of what occurred in the past. What he has already done has turned him into something from which other people want to shy away; and this remains the case even if people were to know that Goebbels regretted his past evils. Because of the evil he has perpetrated, Goebbels, even in a repentant state, is turbid, as Saadia says - stained or polluted, in Saadia's idiom; psychologically maimed and disturbed, in ours. The solution to this backwards-looking problem for the wrongdoer, in Saadia's view, is suffering. This way of thinking about Saadia's third category of suffering also helps explain his distinction between this category and the first one, where the suffering is for the sake of character-building. Saadia thinks of the righteous as comprised mainly of those who are struggling with their own moral wrong-doing: sinning, repenting, and then sinning again. Building character, as suffering in the first category is said to do, will be a matter of strengthening a person in this struggle, so that the suffering brings him to repentance or confirms him in his repentant resolve not to sin again in that way. Suffering that builds character thus helps to overcome the future-oriented problem of a person's wrong-doing. But the backwards-looking problem remains. When suffering helps solve this problem, the suffering serves not so much to build character for the future as to purge the polluted state of soul the sinner has already acquired. Using suffering as an antidote to pollution takes God's omniscient providence, since only God can see the heart and can understand what pollution is there and how suffering can cure it. So Saadia says, 'Now He that subjects the soul to its trials is none other than the Master of the universe, who is, of 110

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course, acquainted with all its doings. This testing of the soul has been compared to the assaying by means of fire of [lumps of metal] that have been referred to as gold or silver. It is thereby that the true nature of their composition is clearly established. For the original gold and silver remain, while the alloys that have been mingled with them are partly burned and partly take flight. . . . The pure, clear souls that have been refined are thereupon exalted and ennobled.'31 That is why God allows suffering as a test only for those people he knows can endure it. If those tested lacked strength for the test, then in the process of testing they would succumb to further sin, and the test would make them worse, rather than purging the stains from the soul. Like Aquinas, then, Saadia thinks that those like Job who experience perplexing, agonizing suffering which they do not deserve do so just because they are better servants of God and more able to sustain the rigours of therapy than God's weaker, smaller servants. For the same reason, Saadia says, 'if the pain to which the servant of God is subjected constitutes punishment and he asks his Master to enlighten him thereon [and explain to him why he is suffering], it is a rule with him to do so .... On the other hand, if the pain to which the servant of God is subjected serves as a form of trial and he asks his Master to inform him why He has brought this trial upon him, it is a rule with him not to inform him .. , when Job asked: Make me know wherefore Thou contendest with me ... , no explanation was offered to him.'32 If it was clear to the sufferer that the suffering was for cleansing of the soul and its subsequent rewards, then, in Saadia's view, the suffering would lose some of its therapeutic value, since then one might endure the suffering simply for the sake of the reward. So, examined more closely, Saadia's third category of suffering looks very different from the way it is presented by some of its interpreters. In the first place, the righteous who are suffering are, in general, not those who are entirely without moral wrongdoing, but rather are those who have repented their

31 Rosenblatt 1948, pp. 246-247. 32 Rosenblatt 1948, pp. 213-214.

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wrongdoings, or most of them. Furthermore, the suffering isn't gratuitous or only accidentally related to the benefit. On Saadia's view, the suffering is in some way instrumental in bringing about the benefit. The stain on the soul brought about by wrongdoing is removed by suffering, and nothing in Saadia's account suggests he supposes that the stain could be removed just as well in some other way, for example, by omnipotent God's acting directly to remove it. Finally, the feature that initially seemed to render Saadia's theodicy so different from Aquinas's and which seemed to show how different his notion of God's goodness is from that of Aquinas is now called into question. It is no longer so clear that, for Saadia, the benefit which justifies God in allowing the suffering of unwilling innocents is a greater good for the sufferer, as distinct from the warding off of a greater evil. On Saadia's account, the perpetual rewards in the afterlife are distributed in accordance with an individual's state of soul. A righteous individual who enters the afterlife with certain stains on the soul will forever lose part of the reward he might have had if he had purged those stains. For all time to come, he will be less or have less than he might otherwise have been or had. Perhaps, because the afterlife is supposed to be a state of bliss, the righteous person in this diminished state won't mind it, as the souls in Dante's Paradiso explain to him that they don't mind not being in the top rank of those in heaven. A loss can be a loss, however, even if one doesn't mind it. The cancer patient not accepted for bone marrow transplant, which holds out the only hope of a cure, might well not mind, considering the difficulty of the therapy and the suffering it occasions. But he would have lost something anyway. All the more so, then, if what is at issue is not some temporary state of physical health but a permanent state of spiritual wellbeing. On this way of interpreting Saadia's account, then, the benefit which justifies the suffering in the third category, of tests and trials, is not the acquisition of a greater good for the sufferer but the warding off of a greater evil. One might suppose that there is one group of human beings whose sufferings Saadia assigns to the third category but for whom my revised interpretation of this category is bound to fail. This is the group of those children who die in their suffering. Saadia says, for example, 'We are confronted by the 112

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fact that God, the just, ordered the killing of the young children of the Midianites and the extermination of the young children of the generation of the deluge. We note also how He continually causes pain and even death to little babes. Logical necessity, therefore, demands that there exist after death a state in which they would obtain compensation for the pain suffered ... 33' Here, one would suppose, Saadia must adopt the line attributed to him by Maimonides. But, in fact, when Saadia elaborates on the suffering of children, he makes remarks of this sort: 'I will go still further and say that it is even possible for a completely guiltless individual to be subjected to trials in order to be compensated for them afterwards, for I find that children are made to suffer pain, and I have no doubt about their eventual compensation for these sufferings. The sorrows brought upon them by the All-Wise might, therefore, be compared to the discipline that their father might administer to them in the form of flogging or detention in order to keep them from harm, or to the repulsive, bitter medicines that he might make them drink in order to put an end to their illness.'34 Here the two examples given to illustrate God's purpose in allowing the suffering of children are both examples in which a father causes suffering to this children in order to ward off greater evil - 'harm', in the first example, and continuing illness, in the second. Whether Saadia's position here is consistent is not clear, since he says in the same passage that the children are completely guiltless, but what is more noteworthy for my purposes here is the fact that when he considers the suffering of children in any detail, he seems to suppose that allowing their suffering is justified just because their suffering prevents a greater harm to them. Looked at in this way, then, Saadia's theodicy appears very different from the way it has been taken by some of its interpreters. In fact, although Saadia and Aquinas are separated by a great divide of religion, time, and culture, and although Saadia certainly repudiates Christianity with

33 Rosenblatt 1948, p, 330. 34 Rosenblatt 1948, p. 214.

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vehemence approaching scorn,35 Saadia's account of the suffering of unwilling innocents looks very close to that of Aquinas. 36

Saadia's Judaism

I don't mean to suggest that the difference in religion makes no different at all to the theodicies of Saadia and Aquinas. There is one very notable difference, but it doesn't have to do with their understanding of the nature and actions of God. It has to do with their attitude towards evil. Aquinas thinks largely or exclusively of the sufferings of individuals. Saadia, on the other hand, is concerned as well with a higher level of organization; he focuses also on communal suffering, the afflications and tribulations of a whole people.

35 In discussing the Christian view that the Mosaic law was divinely abrogated by the advent of Christianity, Saadia considers the claim made by some Christian of Saadia's acquaintance that the miracles associated with the spread of Christianity confirm its divine origin and its claim to be the successor to the Mosaic law. In response, Saadia says, 'our reply to him [Saadia's Christian acquaintance] should be the same as that of all of us would be to anyone who would show us miracles and marvels for the purpose of making us give up such rational convictions as that the truth is good and lying reprehensible and the like. [After hearing this reply, the Christian was] ... compelled to take refuge in the theory that the disapproval of lying and the approval of the truth were not prompted by reason but were the result of the commandments and the prohibitions of Scripture, and the same was true for the rejection of murder, adultery, and stealing. When he had come to that, however, I felt that I needed no longer concern myself with him and that I had my fill of discussion with him.' (Rosenblatt 1948, p. 164) 36 It is, of course, always possible that Saadia meant to be espousing only the simple position Leaman and others have attributed to him and that in finding evidence of a more complicated and palatable position in his work I've shown only that he was inconsistent and confused. It would take more historical scholarship in ninth-century philosophical thought than I can muster to sort out with any confidence what exactly Saadia himself meant his position on the problem of evil to be. But if, as Maimonides seems to think, the simple position generally attributed to Saadia is both stupid and impious, then the principle of charity might also be invoked here in support of my interpretation of him.

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Everyone knows, Saadia says, that when there is some disaster that overtakes a whole people, the suffering of that disaster can plausibly be construed as punishment only for some of those involved; for the others, it is a trial, that is, suffering in the third category: 'This is, as it is well known, a rule that applies to every universal catastrophe occurring at different times, such as famine, war, and pestilence. These serve as punishment for some and as a trial for others.'37 This is true also of the sufferings of the Jews, according to Saadia: 'God is just, doing no injustice, and He has already subjected this nation to a great and long-protracted trial, which undoubtedly serves partly as punishment and partly as a test for us ... [such operations] cannot proceed endlessly. Once, then, the end has been reached, there must needs be a cessation of the [this-worldly] punishment of those punishable and compensation for those subjected to trial.' In fact, on Saadia's view, the Jews have had a larger share of suffering than other peoples. Just as Job, who was one of God's better, stronger servants and so better able to endure the rigours of the spiritual therapy of suffering, experienced much more suffering than most ordinary individuals, so the Jews have had more to bear in the way of trials than other peoples. For this reason, the resurrection of the dead will begin with the Jews, at the time of the Messianic redemption, and only subsequently will other peoples be resurrected as well. Saadia says, 'Now let me ask this general question: "Do not we, the congregation of monotheists, acknowledge that the Creator, magnified be His Majesty, will resurrect all the dead in the world to come for the occasion of their retribution?" But what is there in this that would contradict the view that this nation [the Jews] would enjoy an advantage in being granted an additional period during which our dead would be resurrected by God prior to the world to come, that new life of theirs being extended by him up to the time of the life of the world to come? ... why should it not be considered as a mere act of justice whereby whoever has been tried receives compensation in proportion to his trials, since this nation of ours has been subjected by God to great trials, as Scripture says: For Thou, 0 God, hast tried us; Thou hast refined

37 Rosenblatt 1948, p. 295.

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us? ... It is most fitting, therefore, that He should grant to it this additional period prior to the world to come so that it might have an advantage over all those [others] who have conducted themselves well in this world, just as its patience and its trials have exceeded those of the others.'38

Conclusion

If Saadia's views on the suffering of children leave him open to moral vituperation, his views of the communal suffering of his people and its rewards render him vulnerable to ridicule, and he knows it. What he says in his own defence is interesting for our purposes. He says, '[You will find the Jews] patiently awaiting what God has promised us, not entertaining any doubts concerning it, nor worrying or despairing. On the contrary, our courage and tenacity increase constantly, as is expressed in Scripture: Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all ye that wait for the Lord . ... Now whoever sees us behaving in this fashion may be surprised at us or regard us as fools for the simple reason that he has not experienced what we have nor believed as we have believed. He resembles a person who has never seen how wheat is sown, wherefore, when he sees someone throw it into the cracks of the earth in order to let it grow, he thinks that that individual is a fool. It is at the time of the threshing, when every measure yields twenty or thirty measures, that he first realizes that it is he who has been the fool.'39 The sort of criticism Saadia is concerned with here is represented also among the contemporary commentators on his views. So, for example, Leaman says, 'It is a shame that the innocent suffer ... , but it is a fact in the sort of world which we inhabit. The Book of Job represents the terrible things which happen to people as brute facts, things which just happen and which we can often do nothing to prevent. Saadya cannot accept this at face value ... he thinks of the events of the world falling under an objective standard of justice which must regulate the balance between innocent pains and pleasures. If the innocent

38 Roseblatt 1948, pp. 284-285. 39 Rosenblatt 1948, p. 292-293.

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do suffer, then they must eventually be compensated for their suffering, If they are not thus compensated, then the situation is unjust. Of course, he has great difficulty fitting such a theory of justice onto the Book of Job, since it is precisely the message of the Book that that theory of justice is vacuous, There is no evidence of such justice in this world, and little reason to hope for it in another life,'4o According to Leaman, our evidence and our reason are against Saadia's position, that the world is ruled by a just God, Leaman begins with a fact that Saadia also grants, namely, that in this world the innocent suffer, For Leaman, to accept this fact at face value is to reject the claim that the suffering of the innocent is somehow justified or rectified, So Leaman begins with the fact of innocent suffering in the world, adds the belief that there is no morally sufficient reason which justifies such suffering, and concludes that the world is not ruled justly or by a just God, By contrast, Saadia's position, and Aquinas's as well, constitute what William Rowe has labeled a 'G,E. Moore shift' on the sort of argument represented by this quotation from Leaman. The sort of theodicy adopted by Saadia and Aquinas turns Leaman's argument on its head. They begin with a firm belief that the world is ruled justly by a just God and conclude that there must be a morally sufficient reason for God to allow innocent suffering. The theodicy they adopt is an attempt to figure out, by reason, revelation, and religious tradition, what sort of benefit might plausibly constitute such a morally sufficient reason. This is no doubt why, contrary to expectations, their two theodicies are so much alike in their general outlines, despite the vast differences which separate the Jewish from the Christian thinker. They each begin with a commitment to belief in the existence of God, and they share many views about his nature. They take God to be omniscient, omnipotent, and the creator of the world. They both suppose that God has created human beings with a body and a soul and that at some point after death human beings will experience a bodily resurrection. Unlike the fourteenth-

40 Leaman 1995, p. 61.

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century Jewish philosopher Gersonides, for example, who seems to think that God's providence doesn't extend to all individual human beings, Aquinas and Saadia also assume that God knows and cares about individual human beings.41 In addition, they both take God to be good, and it is clear that their views about the nature of divine goodness converge. They don't suppose that God's will constitutes morality, so that anything that God wills is good just because he wills it. Instead, they take God to be good by some objective standard, and they suppose that there is at least some strong analogy between divine and human goodness. Furthermore, they also suppose that a good God is justified in allowing some unwilling innocent to suffer only in case the benefit that justifies the suffering goes primarily to the sufferer. In trying to explain how it is that God is justified in allowing Job to suffer, both of them look only for benefits that accrue solely or primarily to Job; neither of them entertains the possibility that God might be just in allowing Job to suffer because of benefits which come to, say, Elihu or others who might learn from what happens to Job. Finally, both of them appear to suppose that if God is good, then the benefit for the sufferer which justifies God in allowing that person's suffering when God could readily prevent it is must be a matter of warding off a greater evil, rather than producing a greater good. Because neither of them is willing to sustain belief in such a God by denying the plain fact of the suffering of unwilling innocents in the world, they look for ways in which God's 41 See, for example, Levi ben Gershom, The Wars of the Lord, tr. Seymour Feldman, (New York: The Jewish Publication Society, 1987), Book Four, chapter iv, p. 174: 'it is evident that individual providence must operate in some people but not in others .... It is evident that what is more noble and closer to the perfection ofthe Agent Intellect receives the divine providence to a greater degree and is given by God the proper means for its preservation .... Since man exhibits different levels of proximity to and remoteness from the Agent Intellect by virtue of his individual character, those that are more strongly attached to it receive divine providence individually. And since some men never go beyond the disposition with which they are endowed as members of the human species ... such people are obviously not within the scope of divine providence except in a general way as members of the human species, for they have no individual [perfections] that warrant [individual] providence. Accordingly, divine providence operates individually in some men ... and in others it does not appear at all.' 118

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bringing about or allowing suffering is the best means available to keep a greater harm from happening to the sufferer, and their theodicies consist in different ways, consonant with their differing religions, of spelling out such a benefit. What is striking, however, is the degree to which they see God, and God's goodness, in the same way. For these two thinkers, and for those Jews and Christians whose views of God they represent, it seem not unreasonable to suppose that they are referring to the same God, however much they may differ otherwise.

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Response Martin Stone

I

n the modern age in the West there has been a great falling off of religious faith, because although Jesus Christ and a deluge of sophistical theology did much to improve God's image for a few centuries, Job is still winning the argument, and the Book of Job is still insidiously subversive. If God is omnipotent, we cannot blame anything on the Devil, and if God is no help, we have to do His work for Him. He has still failed to appear in court, and we construe His absence either as non-existence, hubris, apathy, or an admission of guilt. We miss Him, we would dearly like to see Him going to and from in the earth and walking up and down in it, but we admire tyranny no longer, and we desire justice more than we are awed by vainglorious asseverations of magnificence. Louis de Bernieres As I am broad agreement with the principal argument of Professor Stump's innovative and intelligent paper, I shall restrict my remarks to two main issues. First, I would like to present some further reflections on Saadia's theodicy in order to support Stump's reading of the relevant texts. Secondly, I shall make a general suggestion concerning how reflection and discussion upon thinkers within different and opposing traditions, may cause us to reconsider whether that old chestnut within the philosophy of religion, viz., the so-called 'Problem of Evil', can ever be formulated in terms which suggest that it has always been a 'problem' with a historically continuous identity. 120

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Saadia's Theodicy

Further arguments for Stump's novel interpretation of Saadia's attempt to reconcile the ways of God with the mind of man can be found in the Gaon's translation and Commentary on the Psalms.! Saadia divides his commentary on the sacred texts into five parts. First, there is what he refers to as the 'appeal', when God spoke to man and said to him 'Listen!'. This is followed by the 'question' which is not intended to teach us something that was not known before but to draw our attention to a truth which we can not understand. Here, Saadia proffers the example of Deuteronomy 30: 12-24 concerning the Torah: 'Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us?' The third part, Saadia terms 'narrative', and this deals with the past, the present and future. The fourth is the commandment and the prohibition. This is the basis and centre, Saadia believes, of the revealed text. The fifth is prayer and supplication. For Saadia, if God has to vary these five modes of discourse it is because human beings are different; their natures and sentiments are different. Some humans are sensitive to threats and others to promises. At all events, he maintains, the central purpose of the Torah is to give expression to the divine commandments. Now, the aim of commandments, Saadia believes, is to make human beings perfect and to guide them to salvation. The question then arises: Why did God create human beings as they are, that is free to obey and disobey, and consequently free to be saved and not saved? Would it not have been more appropriate for divine justice to have created human beings that are totally good? We know through reason, Saadia affirms at the outset of Book III of the Book of Beliefs and Opinions (Amanat wal-i tiqadat), that the agent who affirms the good by his free acts is twice as meritorious as the agent who has omitted to act: God wished that the former agent should deserve the highest praise and reward. It was with the same intention, Saadia claims, that God ordained the commandments and the prohibitions. These are divided these into two classes: (i) those commandments which of necessity would have been shown to us by reason

1 Commentary on the Psalms, Edited by J. Kafih (Jerusalem: 1966).

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without the aid of revelation; and (ii) those which, without contradicting reason, are only taught by revelation. The prohibition of murder, adultery, theft and lying are considered as rational by the natural law, while the Sabbath and holidays, the dietary laws and the existence of the priestly caste are held to be made known by revelation. This, Saadia considers, does not signify that the latter commandments are inferior in importance to those of the former. The Gaon emphasises that the commandments of revelation permit the faithful to merit reward. Seen from this perspective, one can conclude that an essential feature of Saadia's philosophical and theological writings is their didacticism. Saadia is more often than not concerned with pedagogy. Pedagogy is there in order to explicate and illuminate those aspects of providence and divine justice which do not easily avail themselves to reason. The role of philosophy, therefore, is to make the ways of God intelligible to the minds of men. We have good reason - reasons confirmed by Stump's interpretation - to see Saadia's suggestive remarks on the plight of Job in this context. Many early Jewish Philosophers who preceded Saadia philosophers who for the most part had been influenced by Aristotle 2 - had argued that the Book of Job was an exposition of different philosophical conceptions of providence. Saadia was opposed to such a reading. In the Book of Job Saadia saw a description of divine goodness and justice, which in any final reckoning always acts in man's good. The misfortunes that human beings suffer in this world have three reasons: (i) the instruction that God gives his creatures; (ii) the punishments of faults; and (iii) the suffering inflicted by love. One must not pass too hasty a judgement on the events that occur in the life of a man, he says, for humans do not desire necessarily divine wisdom, and the acts that cause humans to rejoice are not those which are truly good. Experience, and reflection upon 2 See Colette Sirat, A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages, (Cambridge University Press 1985), pp. 141-156. See also Norbert M. Samuelson, 'Medieval Jewish Aristotelianism: An Introduction', in Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (eds.), History of Jewish Philosophy, (Routledge History of World Philosophies, Volume 2), (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 228-244.

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experience, teach us, Saadia contends, these salutary verities, and the successive experiential stages through which all men pass simply confirm and reaffirm the practical efficacy of these truths, Thus against his own will, man passes from one stage to another in his life, and when he is used to a mode of existence he has much difficulty in passing to another the substance of which he has not yet met and which engenders a form of fear in him. For these reasons - reasons that are illustrated within the narrative of Job's dire plight - Saadia considers that man's veritable end cannot be judged by human criteria alone. God's wisdom, a wisdom that Job is eventually permitted to access, can only be the true measure of events. For Saadia, then, even though one should acknowledge God's alterity in terms consistent with the approach of negative theology, one must always recognise the forcefulness of the truth that God acts through human efforts. Even the choice of worship and a life of piety is an act and not a submission. God's salvific plan is therefore intelligible, if only in part, to the minds of men on the basis of simple and continuous reflection upon the nature of the world and the conditions that characterise human life. If these general remarks on Saadia's account of divine providence and its relation to his commitment to a conception of philosophy which is in essence pedagogical show anything, I hope they add to the credulity of Stump's attractive reading. For not only does she attempt to locate Saadia's position within the context of his account of the divine attributes, principally his account of divine goodness and omnipotence, but more importantly she brings out in sufficient detail its philosophical and theological salience, a salience which rightly demands our time and attention. For Saadia, God does what is just because it is just. This view conditions his so-called 'theodicy'3 to the extent that he is concerned to look for ways in which God's bringing about or allowing suffering is the best means available to keep a 3 In many senses to talk of Saadia's 'theodicy' is anachronistic. The term was coined by Leibniz (see his letter to the Jesuit Bartholomew Des Bosses, 6 January 1712) and was expressive of that philosopher's views of humandivine relations, hence the term theodicy from the Greek words theas God, and dike justice. As such, these views do not form a part of Saadia's theological outlook.

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greater harm from happening 0 the sufferer. The task of reconciling the ways of God to the thoughts of men is always to spell out such a benefit.4

The Problem of Evil

By way of conclusion, I think there is a more general point of importance for contemporary philosophy of religion which can be distilled from Professor Stump's paper. Stump's analysis of Saadia's and Aquinas' interpretations of Job's plight demonstrates, albeit implicitly, that any philosophical approach to the so-called 'problem of evil' will be derived from theoretical positions that are directed to an appreciation of a set of much larger issues. As such, these issues will not always straddle the purview of theological topics but will encompass themes and topics that more properly belong to the provinces of ethics, moral psychology and theory of action. This last point is relevant to contemporary philosophy of religion, for we clearly need to confront these larger topics and issues in a manner which will do justice to their complexity and interest, in order to understand just why and how theistically motivated philosophers at different times came to think the existence of evil a 'problem'. One of the main benefits of the history of philosophy in this sphere - benefits which Stump has acknowledged in another context5 - is that it can enable us to appreciate previously ignored or neglected assumptions that philosophers and theologians from other periods have brought to the discussion of divine justice, providence and the existence of evil. It is inevitable that these assumptions will stand, to some extent, in contrast with those of our own age and time. 6 Thus the possibility of a creative conflict exists between the very different assumptions and

4 For further discussion of these points see L.E. Goodman, 'Saadya Gaon on the Human Condition', Jewish Quarterly Review, 67, (1976): 23-29. 5 See 'Aquinas and the Sufferings of Job' in Eleonore Stump (ed.) Reasoned Faith (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 328-357. 6 Cf. the end of the quote from Louis de Bernieres which prefaces this reply: '... but we admire tyranny no longer, and we desire justice more than we are awed by vainglorious asseverations of magnificence.'

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opinions which philosophers at different times and places bring to bear in their discussion of the phenomenon of evil and its relationship to speculative thought about God. As I see it, reflection upon the role and bearing of history in these matters prompts us to consider a simple question. Can we really assume, and ought we to assume, that philosophers as intellectually diverse and historically distinct as Augustine, Saadia, Avicenna, Aquinas and Leibniz - to mention some of the obvious names that are associated with the subject within the history of the philosophy - are really addressing the same problem or set of issues that we, as modern day philosophers, address under the heading of the problem of evil? While it would be foolish to deny that there are relevant and important similarities of approach between the philosophers of the past and contemporary philosophers of religion,7 I would contend that our subject would benefit from a rejection of the assumption that the so-called 'problem of evil' admits of a historically continuous identity in the manner suggested by so many undergraduate textbooks. 8 Instead, we need to inform ourselves of why philosophers and theologians at different times addressed the existence of evil in the manner in which they did, and just what they attempted to bring to bear in their analysis of suffering and moral harm. This in turn, will illuminate the extent to which their analysis of harm and suffering informed or did not inform their picture of a world created and sustained by a benevolent deity. These points can be briefly illustrated by the following example. While it is known that the aptly termed 'Free Will

7 The very fact that philosophers of the past and their contemporary heirs will be part of continuous religious traditions and denominations will clearly play a role of some sort as to how the issues are addressed and discussed. 8 See, Brian Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, Second Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 32-54; Michael Peterson, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach and David Basinger, Reason and Religious Belief An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 92-116, and William J. Wainwright, Philosophy of Religion, (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1988), pp. 66-98, All three books divide the problem into three related but different sub-classes of problems: the moral argument, the logical argument and the evidential argument.

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Defence' championed by the likes of Alvin Plantinga9 and others, has its origins in the works of Augustine of HippO,lO is it true that both Plantinga and Augustine address the same problem of evil? I think there is an important sense in which this question is answered negatively. Now Plantinga as every undergraduate knows, was concerned to argue that the propositions (1) 'God is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good' and (2) 'Evil exists' are consistent if there is a possible world in which both propositions are true. The underlying strategy he adopted was to argue that in order to show that two propositions p and q are consistent, one must find a third proposition r which is consistent with p and, conjoined withp, entails q. Such a proposition would show thatp and q are possibly true together. Hence in order to rebut the inconsistency though to exist by holding (1) and (2) together, Plantinga's approach is to find a proposition whose conjunction with (1) is consistent and entails (2). So he argues that it is possible that God has a morally sufficient reason for creating a world containing moral evil, and provides a scenario in which God brings about a world containing significantly free moral beings because no other moral good can exist without freedom. He further argues that while it is possible that there be a world containing significantly free creatures who only do what is right, it is not within God's power to bring this about: what significantly free beings do is up to them. Hence the logical inconsistency generated by (1) and (2) is resolved and the existence of evil in a world of significantly free human beings is explained. 11 Augustine was not concerned with the 'logical argument' from evil as a way of combating arguments for atheism, in the sense in which Plantinga has been concerned to argue for the coherence of theism against the atheist's attacks. Rather, he addressed the issue of evil as that phenomenon had been described and discussed within the schools of late ancient philosophy. For Augustine, the task of reconciling the existence of evil with the idea of a benevolent deity was directed to a 9 See Plantinga's God and Other Minds, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967); The Nature of Necessity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); and God, Freedom and Evil, (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974). 10 See De libero arbitrio, books 1 and 2. 11 See Plantinga (1974), op. cit., pp. 164ff.

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problem originally posed by Epicurus, and later immortalised by Boethius in the line: Si quidem deus est unde mala? (If there is a God whence comes evil).12 In this respect, the spectre of atheism and the coherence of theism in the light of the existence of evil were not issues for Augustine in the manner in which these concerns have dominated the thought of Plantinga. Augustine was concerned to explain the existence of evil in terms that were always fully consistent with his accounts ofthe mind and human agency. Therefore, what Augustine says about evil is part of his more general understanding of human beings and of their place within nature and of their standing to God; any 'solution' he offers to the problem is not part of a more general attempt to argue for the rationality or reasonableness of theism in light of atheistic recalcitrance. 13 The point, then, is that our understanding of dominant or core issues in the philosophy of religion may well benefit from the more localised and specific activities of historical retrieval and philosophical analysis recommended above. On that score there is still much work to be done. While the tasks themselves will require detailed argument and acquaintance with difficult issues in philosophical theology, the philosophy of human agency and the phenomenology of suffering, they promise much by way of intellectual benefit. For once we possess such accounts, we will be better placed to consider whether the historically distinct but confessionally related thinkers understood notions such as providence, human agency and suffering in ways that can inform our present day context and understanding. It is to the credit of Eleonore Stump that she has provided us with a laudable blue-print as to how to accomplish and achieve a more enriched understanding of an issue whose familiarity can all too often disguise its historical complexity. By beginning from a perspective that fully takes into consideration the differences

12 For ancient sources of this question see Plato Republic 379a and Epicurus Fragment 374. For Christian versions Lactantius, De ira dei, 13, 21. The above quotation can be found in Boethius Philosophiae consolatione, 1.4. 13 For further discussion ofthese points see De libero arbitrio, 1.1; 2.15ff, and 3.3. for helpful commentary see John Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptised, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chap. 7, and G.R. Evans, Augustine on Evil, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), chap, 5.

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that exist between the worlds of Saadia and Aquinas, Stump eventually arrives at a point at which she can then direct our attention to what is germane and relevant in their respective accounts of God, evil and human suffering. At that place we can consider and learn.

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CHAPTER SIX

Judaic Perspectives on Petitionary Prayer Jerome Gellman

M

y topic is 'petitionary prayer' in Judaism. There are two kinds of Jewish prayers we may call 'petitionary.' One kind consists of the fixed, prescribed prayers of the daily liturgy, chiefly in the amidah or 'standing' prayer. These are designated as 'petitionary,' in contrast to prayers of adoration and thanksgiving. Since there has been disagreement in Jewish thought over what should be the illocutionary force of these prayers, I will identify them as 'petitionary' by their form alone. The second kind is comprised of 'free' petitionary prayers individuals pray in their own words, added on to the set prayers or prayed independently of them. These, we may assume, are petitionary by illocutionary force as well as by form. I want to present an 'impetrative' understanding of petitionary prayer, based on Judaic sources. I will be calling the 'impetrative view of petitionary prayer' that view which maintains that: A. When praying a petitionary prayer one is making a request of God, believing that sometimes God grants what has been asked for, in response to one's request; and B. Sometimes God grants what has been asked for, in response to one's request.

(A) pertains to the attitudinal set and beliefs of the person who prays, including that petitionary prayers make requests. (B) pertains to the reality of what happens, sometimes at least, in response to petitions. 129

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For free, individual petitionary prayers, (A) goes without saying, though (B) has been denied in Jewish thought. For the fixed petitionary prayers, both (A) and (B) have been denied. Judaic thought has not always been kind to an impetrative understanding of petitionary prayer. First there was Maimonides. In the Guide for the Perplexed, 3:18, Maimonides asserts that divine providence for an individual is directly proportional to the person's intellectual perfection. This means, for Maimonides, that God is not an agent with regard to individual providence. Rather, a person's intellectual perfection enables him to live in harmony with the world as it goes along its accustomed path. Individual providence is what happens when a person learns how to get along well in that world by tapping into the Divine Wisdom, through the Active Intellect. As I intend (B), it entails that God sometimes acts providentially toward an individual. 80 (B) is unacceptable for Maimonides. For the most part, though, Maimonides saves (A), as a belief necessary to the religious life, as opposed to being a true teaching. Likewise, the impetrative view was rejected in the bestknown discussion of petitionary prayer in Jewish thought, in the Sefer ha-Ikkarim, or, Book of Principles of the 15 th century philosopher, Joseph Albo. Albo poses this question: Either God has determined that a given person shall receive a given benefit, or He has not so determined. If He has determined, there is no need for prayer; and if He has not determined, how can prayer change God's will? ... For God does not change from a state of willing to a state of not willing, or vice versa. (lkkarim, 4:18)1 Albo replies that God's decrees are always conditional upon the spiritual status of the person upon whom the decree devolves. God decrees that 8 shall receive some good, G, at time t, if 8 is deserving thereof at t, or that 8 shall be visited by some evil, E, at t, if so deserving at t. What happens when 8 prays for Gis that 8 may, as a result of turning to God in prayer, improve her spiritual status for the better. If a divine decree then fails to be carried out as a result of prayer, it is not because God has been impetrated to respond. Rather, the decree no longer applies. 80,

1 In this paper, all translations from Hebrew texts are my own.

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Albo rejects (B) of the impetrative view. It is less clear to me whether he also rejects (A). I suspect he does not, at least for most people. Thirdly, the Jewish mystical tradition, kabbalah, has an understanding of petitionary prayer that disallows the impetrative view. That tradition sees 'petitionary prayer' as a meditative, mystical-theurgic exercise. The purpose of the exercise is to activate in an almost mechanical way supernal centers of effluence, which then have their effects upon the world. I say 'almost' mechanical, because the method of triggering supernal energies requires proper piety, intention and belief. This view rejects impetration by prayer because socalled 'petitionary prayer' involves no requests. Instead, kabbalists categorize methods of contemplation as merely efficacious or not efficacious in bringing about a desired result. 2 In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, some Hasidim, too, rejected the impetrative view. This resulted from quietist attitudes in early Hasidism that have been compared to the quietist piety of Molinos, in Christianity. These Hasidim deemed any request made of God to be unseemly. They could have authored Meister Eckhart's parable about the person who traveled a great distance to Rome to see the Pope. Then, after much effort to get an audience with the Pope, the traveler asked for a bean! Instead of appealing for help, these Hasidim said, one should accept whatever God visited upon one, with equanimity, indeed in thanksgiving. They, therefore, replaced an impetrative understanding of petitionary prayer with meditative techniques for saying the words of the prayers. These techniques aimed at bringing to the 'self-nullification' of the person before God. 3 Finally, some recent thinkers in Israel have opposed the impetrative view. The late Yeshayahu Leibowitz argued that the impetrative view turns God into a 'functionary' for serving our own, selfish, human needs. This is bad, he said, because we are to worship God, and not ourselves. 4 This view currently enjoys something of a vogue among religious Israeli intellectuals.

2 For more on the meditative nature of kabbalistic prayer see Kaplan 1982. 3 For the different attitudes of Hasidism to prayer, see: Jacobs 1973. 4 See: Leibowitz 1992.

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Others have argued that a 'modern person' cannot believe that God acts providentially in the world, because 'our' scientific knowledge rules it out. So they too would reject the imperative understanding. I am going to set aside, here, without argument, these deviations from the impetrative view. I will simply assume that: (1) God acts providentially, (2) God's decrees are not all conditional, (3) 'Petitionary prayer' can be other than a contemplative-theurgic exercise, (4) It is not unseemly to ask God for things that are, as Aquinas says, 'expedient to our salvation,' and (5) Science has not disqualified the impetrative view. I set these issues aside, because my present interest is in the moral side of petitionary prayer. That is, I am interested here in a number of questions having to do with God's moral goodness and the institution of petitionary prayer. In recent years, various philosophers, including Eleonore Stump, Michael Murray and Kurt Meyers, and David Basinger have had interesting and important things to say in answer to the questions I want to address, and I have learned much from them. 5 Here though, I am looking for answers from within the Judaic tradition. 6 In particular, I am going to anchor my understanding of the impetrative view in Rabbinic literature, that is, in the Talmud and Midrash. Rabbinic literature tends to be quite pictorial in its theological thinking, and one must be on guard for that in a philosophical discussion. Yet, it should be possible, however cautiously, to find theological commitments there. We might argue for seven days and seven nights over an issue like whether the Rabbis thought God had a body (I do not think they did), or whether they believed God possessed emotions (I think they did). Nonetheless, at some appropriate level of abstraction, we should be able to agree on some of the theological commitments of Rabbinic passages. 5 See Stump 1979, pp. 81-91; Stump 1997, pp. 577-583; Murray and Meyers 1994, pp. 311-330; Basinger 1983, pp. 25-41; and Basinger 1995, pp. 475-484. 6 For an extended previous discussion of petitionary prayer in Judaism see Cohn-Sherbok 1989. I do not agree with the conclusions drawn by the author of this book about petitionary prayer.

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The first question I want to ask is this: 'Why would God want so to relate to his creatures that at times they receive goods or avoid evils in response to requests they have made?' There is no single answer to this in Rabbinic literature. Rather than survey the possible answers, I want to focus on one line ofthought that I will be developing into answers to the questions I will be posing. A characteristic theme about petitionary prayer in Rabbinic literature is this: God desires petitionary prayers. God desires petitionary prayers so badly that He takes steps to weakly bring it about that people will turn to him for help. This theme weaves through Rabbinic thinking in two variations: God desires the petitionary prayers of the people Israel, and: God desires the petitionary prayers of the righteous. Here are a few examples: I When they were in Egypt, God caused the Children of Israel to suffer cruel labour. A Midrash asks: 'Why did God do that to them?' And answers: 'For God desires their prayers.' (Midrash Rabbah, Exodus, Section 25) II When the Children of Israel departed from Egypt, they stopped crying to God for help. A Midrash tells what happened next: 'God took them out [of Egypt], and desired their prayers, but they were not praying. So God roused Pharaoh and his army to run after them . . . Immediately 'The Children of Israel cried to God.' (Midrash Tanhumah, Exodus, Buber, Section 14.) III Here is a delightful Midrash, based on the fact that the Bible (Jonah Chapter 2, verses 1-2) first refers to the fish that swallowed Jonah in male gender ['dag'] and after in feminine gender ['dagah'J:7 'Jonah was in the fish three days and did not pray. So God said, I prepared for him a wide space in the fish and he doesn't pray to me. I will bring a fish pregnant with three hundred and sixty five thousand little fish so that he will be uncomfortable and pray to me .... The [first] fish disgorged him and the [pregnant fish] swallowed him. When he entered the second fish, he felt great discomfort, so that right away he directed his heart to God and prayed.' (Otzar Hamidrashim, Jonah, Eizenstein, Page 217.) 7 I should note, though, that the fish is again masculine in the same chapter, verse 11, which does not fit the Midrashic story. 133

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Consider that the Hebrew word employed to speak of God's 'desire' for prayers is mit'aveh, a word used in Rabbinic writings for carnal desires. It signifies sexual appetite, as well as a desire for food, for example. The term therefore refers to a lusting or craving. It is a lusting for a thing itself and not as a means to something else. God craves or lusts after petitionary prayers. God desires to hear the voice of the petitioner. Passages I have not quoted, compare God's wanting to hear the voice of the petitioner to a King's wishing to hear the voice of a princess whom he desires to marry (Midrash Rabbah, Exodus, Section 21, and Midrash Rabbah, Song of Songs, Section 2). God craves petitionary prayers, we may assume, for the intimate contact they provide with persons who pray. There is great, intrinsic value in the meeting between God and the person who prays. That God craves our petitionary prayers is a reason for us to crave them as well. We too should crave communion with God for its intrinsic value. In addition, from our point of view there can be great extrinsic value in such meetings guiding us to deeper and lasting closeness with God, and in preparing us for the ultimate Divine Beatitude. In Judaism, the craving for petitionary prayer from our side, developed to its fullest with some of the early Hasidic masters. Among the early, seventeenthcentury, Hasidim there were those who would hope their requests of God would not be met, so that they could continue to plead, and so remain intimate with God. And another Hasidic master taught that God sometimes postponed granting a request so that the person would stay with God longer in prayer. 8 From our perspective, they asserted, the best Divine response to our petitions would be in God not granting them, or at least delaying their being granted. In Islam, Sufi literature expresses similar motifs. Abu 1Qasim al-Wushayri (11 th century) writes 'When a servant is supplicating God and God loves that servant, He says, "0 Gabriel, delay my servant's need, for I love to hear his voice.'" And he writes: 'Yahya ibn al-Qattan ... said, 'My God, how often have I supplicated you and you have not answered me!' God said,

8 For this theme among early Hasidim see: Schatz-Uffenhimer 1993, Chapter 6.

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'0 Yahya, it is because I love to hear your voice' (Bakhtar 1997, pp. 257-8). So here we have an explanation for why God would so arrange our lives that there be some goods we receive, and some evils we avoid, through petitionary prayer. The reason is that God desires to 'hear our voice,' desiring a personal relationship with us. God wishes to bring about the intrinsic good of a meeting between God and the person who prays. Our personal relationship with God is most intense and assured when we are in need, and turn to God for help. So at times God withholds that which we need, to weakly bring it about that we pray for it. God sometimes gives what we ask for, thereby reinforcing the practice of petitionary prayer, and also thereby sustaining and deepening an intimate relationship with us. 9

II Having answered the question, 'Why would God want so to relate to his creatures that at times they receive goods or avoid evils in response to requests they have made?' I proceed to my next, related, question: 'If God is all-knowing, then God knows what is best for me. If God is all-good, then God wants do what is best for me, whether or not I ask for help. If God is all-powerful, then God can do what is best for me, whether or not I ask for help. God is all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful. So: whence impetrative prayer?'

9 Maimonides, I should note, rejected such a rationale for petitionary prayer. A Mishnah states that King Hezekiah buried or hid a sefer refuot, a 'medical book.' Maimonides rejects a common interpretation that this book contained cures for every illness. King Hezekiah was concerned that with a cure-all book, people would no longer pray to God to cure them, and would tend to become estranged from God. Maimonides rejects this on the grounds, among others, that users of the cure-all book would be just as inclined to thank God when cured, as they would to call to God when sick. So, had it been a cure-all book, the wise King would not have had to hide it. So, apart from his views on providence, Maimonides would not countenance an explanation for impetrative prayer having to do with God's desire to hear people's prayers. Maimonides' position seems inordinately optimistic. I prefer the Rabbinic understanding. 135

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There are several problems with this. A problem connected to my present discussion here is this: Passages I have quoted, and others like them, portray God as bringing suffering upon people in order to elicit their pleas for help. So it can happen that God will do what is best for me, precisely by taking steps to weakly bringing it about that I ask God for help. So it is not always true that God can or will always do what is best for me, whether or not I ask for help. May we assume, though, that bringing evil upon me so as to weakly bring it about that I petition God can be what is best for me? Are we to believe God would visit suffering upon a person, let alone an entire people, just for the purpose of having them pray to God? Does this not oppose God's perfect goodness? No, it does not. Granted, it might be immoral for an earthly parent to act this way toward her child. Even so, it is not immoral for God to act in this way toward us. We cannot equate communion with God with communion of a child with a parent, or communion between two human persons. If life everlasting consists in enjoying the Divine Glory, then communion with God can be a taste of the World to Come. 10 The value of meeting God is inestimably greater than the most deeply meaningful enjoyment of the presence of another human being. Furthermore, such a meeting can contribute greatly to a person's spiritual development. Consequently, the value of communion with God can be so great that God can be justified in causing a person pain or sadness in order to weakly bring it about. And it just might be what is best for that person at that time. I am not suggesting here a theodicy for all human suffering. God surely has reasons for allowing evils, even horrendous ones, which we cannot fathom, reasons not connected with God's craving prayers. Also, I am not suggesting that any manner or degree of evil visited upon a person could be justified as God's way of weakly bringing about petitionary prayers. I am saying that it can be justified for God to bring about some amount of 10 A Mishnah says: 'One hour with repentance and good works is worth more than all of life of the World to Come.' (Avot, 4:17) An anonymous Hasidic comment has it that this 'hour' is the hour of prayer! Compare, Augustine: 'And sometimes You admit me to a state of mind that I am not ordinarily in, a kind of delight which could it ever be made permanent in me would be hard to distinguish from the life to come.' Augustine 1993, p. 206.

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suffering in order to weakly bring it about that a person turns to God in prayer. Does this not imply, though, that a person might continue suffering just because he has failed to ask God to help him? Can this be justified? I do not concede that God might unjustifiably visit evil upon a person, because wishing, as it were, to weakly bring about her praying, but failing to do so. If God is all-knowing, including knowing what a person will do of her own free will, we can assume God would bring evil upon someone so as to weakly bring about their praying for help, only when knowing that success was assured. If for some reason God cannot know what a person will do of her own free will, perhaps He calibrates the cost-benefit ratios and acts accordingly, with the addition of a compensatory mechanism for those who might suffer from any tries, to make the entire enterprise worthwhile for all involved. Still, one might wonder whether God could be justified in weakly bringing a person to pray for help by visiting calamity on her, because to act in this way would be for God to be 'manipulative' toward that person. Can God's being manipulative in this way be consistent with God's goodness?l1 To call someone 'manipulative' is to judge them negatively. If I can show that God should not be judged negatively for visiting evils upon a person to bring her to pray, then I will have shown that God is not being manipulative in doing so. The first point in my reply to the charge of God's being manipulative is that God's bringing about the praying is good for the person who prays. We consider a person to be manipulative only when she acts for her own goOd. 12 However, this might not be enough for God to avoid the stigma of being manipulative, because we might worry still that one's autonomy as an individual was being compromised by God's manoeuvres. What we need in addition is a payoff that makes the whole affair worthwhile to the person involved. The payoff has to be big enough to justly off-set the compromising of the person's autonomy. This means that were the person to have known that

11 Richard Gale has posed this question to me. 12 lowe this point to Eleonore Stump.

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God was causing her some evil to get her to pray, she would rightly agree to the exchange. In the case of God weakly bringing a person to prayer, this condition can be satisfied because of the great value of communion with God. 13 So we should not judge God negatively for causing evil in order to bring someone to pray. Hence, we should not think of God as 'manipulative' in doing so. Another worry might be this: If a petitionary prayer to God comes about through God's weakly bringing it about, by, say, causing the person to be ill, then how can it satisfy God's desire that we pray to him? It would seem that our prayers would be satisfactory to him only if they did not have to be so carefully 'arranged' by God himself, the one who enjoys the prayers. 14 The value of the prayer is diminished by God's having to set it up for himself. I will make do here with a possible half-concession on this point: it may be that petitionary prayers that God weakly brings about in the way I am proposing are less valuable than others. This, however, does not imply they are without value, or without considerable value. After all, we are assuming that the 'engineered' cries for help are freely made, that they are genuinely felt, and that they do put a person in contact with God. We are assuming, too, that God loves to hear our voices, cherishing the very contact with us. So perhaps God holds more dear those petitionary prayers that He does not have to 'engineer,' yet holds dear the engineered ones nonetheless. In the Rabbinic literature we find God weakly bringing about calls for help only when people are not otherwise praying. When a person is not praying 'unengineered' prayers, God may have to do with the next best.

III Not all petitionary prayers, however, are requests on behalf of the person who does the asking. There are also intercessory

13 We must remember that I am not claiming that God can visit just any degree of evil on a person to get them to pray. 14 Charlotte Katzoff raised this point in discussion with me.

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prayers, where one person prays for the welfare and good of another. Indeed, on the impetrative view I am presenting, intercession occupies a distinguished place in petitionary prayer. That's because intercession demands a closeness to God greater than that for prayers for oneself. In intercession, a person asks God to help another, but asks for that help as a personal favor to her, the person who prays. The degree of closeness required for making such a request reasonable is greater than that required for requests for oneself. Look at it this way: it is one thing for me to ask a close friend to do me a favour, and quite another to ask him to do a favour for my brother-in-law. So intercessionary prayer requires a bit of chutzpah. The question I want to ask about intercession is this: 'Would it be morally justified for God to allow someone to suffer evil just to weakly bring it about that someone else pray for her?' Suppose God visits suffering upon Goldberg so as to weakly bring it about that Rubenstein asks God to help. Goldberg may not be aware that Rubenstein has prayed for her. She might not even know Rubenstein. Even were God to answer the request, it is Rubenstein who would get the net benefit from the entire exchange, not Goldberg. Goldberg pays the cost. Is this not immoral on God's part? My answer is: we do not know enough to say whether it would be immoral for God to do this. For example, Goldberg may now not know that Rubenstein has prayed for her. That, however, does not rule out the possibility that Goldberg will know of this in a later life, and then feel grateful for having been God's instrument in bringing Rubenstein close to the divine glory. If you disagree with this moral assessment, that's O.K., because anyway the impetrative view of intercession does not entail that God would bring adversity to one person to get another to beg for mercy for her. By the 'impetrative view,' I mean only that view that sees petitionary prayer in light of (A) and (B). I know of no Rabbinic text that presents God as bringing evil upon one person just to get another person to pray. That does not mean God might not do something to weakly bring it about that a person pray for someone else. For example, God might make sure to bring Goldberg's plight to Rubenstein's attention, in order to weakly cause Rubenstein to pray for Goldberg. 139

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In any case, we need not worry that when Goldberg is in distress she might continue to suffer unjustly because Rubenstein has failed to pray for her. God in his wisdom will work things out for the best. Think of it this way: Goldberg never need suffer unjustly because Rubenstein has failed to pray for her. However, maybe God would help Goldberg in response to Rubenstein's prayers for her even though Goldberg does not deserve it. God might do so, for example, in cultivating an intimacy with Rubenstein. So at most, intercessionary prayer gives rise to a problem of good.

IV

So far I have been talking about 'free', individual, petitionary prayers. There are also fixed, prescribed, petitionary prayers, mainly in the amidah or 'standing prayer' of the daily liturgy. The amidah has a three-fold structure: adoration, petition, and thanksgiving. Of these, petition is the most basic. One should praise God before petitioning, and thank God afterward. Petition is the point of the exercise. The amidah is a collective prayer of the Jewish people for the Jewish people. Its petitions are all in plural form: 'Forgive us,' 'Heal us,' and 'Hear our voice,' for example, and are prayers for 'all Thy people, Israel.' Also, the daily number and the times of day of recitations of the amidah correspond to what was the number and times of the daily, communal sacrifices in the Temple. The amidah has, as well, the character of a personal prayer. The number and times of day of the daily recitations of the amidah are said to correspond also to personal prayers offered, respectively, by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And the manner of praying the amidah is supposed to have derived from Hannah's way of praying at the Temple that she have a child. The personal and the collective thus overlap in the amidahi prayer. 'What,' I ask in my next question, 'is the purpose of fixed, prescribed petitionary prayers?' There no doubt are several reasons for prescribed petitions. They enhance solidarity with one's people, strengthen one's sense of responsibility for others, inculcate a sense of individual dependence upon God, and teach one what is worth praying for. 140

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Were I simply to extend my previous discussion to the amidah, I would add that it was instituted because God craves our prayers and we crave speaking to God. But that would not explain, in those terms, the fixity of the prayers: why must I pray for peace even in times of peace, and pray for a good crop when I am thoroughly convinced we shall all be enjoying a boom year in the fields? There must be more. To explain what more, I digress to a claim made once by Peter Geach. In an article on prayer, Geach claimed that (Geach 1969, Chapter 7): (G 1) God brought about state of affairs, A, because 8 prayed for A. entails: (G2) God would not have brought about A had 8 not prayed for A. Now, right off we can see that (G1) does not entail (G2). After all, God might have more than one sufficient reason for bringing about A. It might happen, for instance, that both 8 and her friend pray for A, and that the prayer of each is sufficient for God to bring about A. Then, even though God would have brought A about even had 8 not prayed, because 8's friend also prayed, it still is true that God did bring A about because of 8's prayer. To get around this we must change (G 1) to: (G 1') When God brought about A, the only reason God had for doing so was that 8 prayed for A. However, (G 1') too fails to entail (G2). To see this, suppose that prior to 8's praying for A, God has his own, decisive, good reasons for bringing about A (or suppose A would come about because of something else God has his good reasons to bring about), and whether or not 8 prays for A. Then God would have brought about A had 8 not prayed for A. 8uppose, though, that 8's praying for A now somehow changes things. Either the previous reasons no longer apply or God no longer wishes to act on them in light of 8's prayer. 80 now, if God answers 8's prayer, the only reason God will bring about A is solely because 8 prayed for A and not because of God's previous reasons. In such a scenario, although it is true that when God brought about A, he did so solely because 8 prayed for A, it is false that God would not 141

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have brought about A had 8 not prayed for A. 80 (Gl') does not entail (G2).15 The lesson I want to draw from this digression is that you can rationally pray to God to bring about a state of affairs, A, when you believe or know A will come about anyway, provided you want to change the reason why God will bring it about. In particular, this is rational when you pray that A occur for your own special reasons. In such a case, God could bring about A solely for your prayed-for reasons, even though God would have brought A about anyway. Had you not prayed for A to happen for your reasons, though, God would have acted from other reasons. To come a step closer to what I am getting at, I note, next, the distinction between general and individual providence. To receive a good from God's general providence is to be fortunately placed with regard to the accustomed workings of nature. As the Talmud says, 'The rain falls on the good and the wicked together.' To receive a good through individual providence, on the other hand, is to receive it from a personal relationship with God. Now we can point to an example of rationally praying for a state of affairs A to occur that you know or believe it will happen anyway. You could pray (knowing or believing A would transpire by God's general providence were you not to pray) that you receive A from God's individual providence, as God's personal, loving response to your prayers, and not only, or maybe even not at all, from God's general providence. In such a case, God could bring about A (solely) in answer to your prayers, for the reason

15 Here is another counter-example: Consider a situation where 8 and her friend have decided that at least one of them should pray for A. 8 says she will pray for A, and does so. As a result, perhaps culpably, 8's friend does not pray for A, relying on 8 to do so. However, suppose that had 8 not prayed for A she would not have told her friend she was going to do so, and then the friend would have prayed for A. Finally, suppose that God would have brought about A had either 8 or 8's friend prayed for it. In such a situation, while it is true that God in fact brought about A solely because 8 prayed for A, i.e., that was the only reason God then had for so acting, it is false that had 8 not prayed for A, God would not have brought about A. For had 8 not prayed for A, her friend would have, and God would then have brought about A for the sole reason that the friend prayed for A. 80, (Gl'), does not entail (G2). This example is due to Alex Blum. 142

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you requested, even though God would have brought A about anyway. I suggest, then, in line with the thinking I have been developing, that a purpose of the fixed, daily petitionary prayers of the amidah, is to pray to receive what is 'expedient to our salvation' as a personal gift from the Hand of God. This explains how we can pray for a good crop when thoroughly expecting a boom year in the fields. Our prayers are answered not only when we receive a good crop by the accustomed workings of nature, but when we do so by a personal act of God towards us. Seen in this way, on the collective level, the amidah appeals to God to maintain and nurture his personal relationship with his people. As a prayer from the Jewish evening service touchingly entreats, 'Do not remove your love from us, for ever.' As a personal prayer, the amidah is a similar appeal to God for the individual who prays. The compulsory, daily repetition of the amidah surely includes entreaties for 'things' in themselves, such as health and material sustenance, which we fear we might not receive otherwise. However, the compulsory recitation of the petitionary prayers of the amidah are meant to entreat God to provide in a loving, personal way what we believe we might get anyway, but not in that way. The compulsory prayers teach us what we should be praying for above all: to be close, with God. And it also teaches us that when we ask for something and do not receive it, that God's negative reply need not damage the closeness of our relationship with him. It can itself be an expression of that relationship.

v My last question is this: 'How does petitionary prayer work? That is, what determines whether God will be impetrated to answer a given prayer?' In the Judaic tradition, there are two quite different types of petitions to God, and accordingly two different answers to this question. One type of petition appeals to God's obligations toward us, especially to his promises. There is, for example, a long tradition in Judaism of arguing with God, taking him to task for not having fulfilled his solemn 143

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promises to US. 16 The other, more dominant, type of petition appeals to God's mercy. Both types of petition raise problems. What is the point of appealing to God's obligations? Are we to imagine God not fulfilling his obligations on his own? Do we have to remind him what they are? And, what is the point of appealing to God's mercy? Is God not merciful to everyone? If He is not, what difference can asking for mercy make? The Talmud says that God is not indulgent or permissive. If we can arouse God to mercy by pleading, is God not indulgent? Is God just a big softy? Starting with the appeals to God's obligations, I propose we understand them as instances of 'holding someone to a promise.' Holding someone to a promise carries moral weight. Suppose I make a promise to Tzipporah to write a review for the APA Newsletter on teaching philosophy. Later I realize that before I made the promise, I had over-extended myself on commitments to conference papers. So, I inform Tzipporah, let's suppose justifiably, that I cannot write the review, because of excusing circumstances. At this point she tells me she is holding me to my promise. This performative utterance carries serious moral weight. Mter all, I made the promise to her. Consequently, her holding me to my promise increases the strength of my obligation to keep my promise. Depending on circumstances, this could tip the balance back in favour of my having to sit down and write the review. A number of variables determine the moral strength of holding someone to a promise. One variable is the degree of closeness of the relationship between promiser and promisee. 16 There is a good survey of the tradition's arguments with God, in: Laytner 1990. In the last chapter, Laytner, however, goes beyond what the tradition yields up by using it to justify having 'doubts' about God. But no such thing can be found in the traditional forms of arguing with God. The argument is intended to convince God, but God's goodness and justice is never draw into question. Also, Laytner sees in the tradition of arguing with God grounds for 'protest' against God. I am afraid, though, that what he means by 'protest' cannot be grounded in the tradition. The tradition knows of pious, respectful, protest, the way in which a child might respectfully protest the action of an elder person. And the tradition never implies not accepting, on some meaningful level, God's refusal to be convinced by the argument.

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With some possible exceptions, the closer the relationship, the stronger the moral claim. (The exceptions are when a promiser may expect the promisee to show understanding of her predicament.) Another variable is the extent to which fulfilling the promise is important to the promisee. The more it 'means' to her, the greater the moral force of her holding the promiser to the promise. In 'reminding' God of his obligations to us, we are holding God to his promise. This act carries moral force. It strengthens God's obligation to keep his promise to us, where there are otherwise extenuating circumstances. The closer we are to God, and the more God's keeping his promises 'means' to us, the stronger our moral claim on him. Depending on circumstances, that claim can be sufficient to induce God to keep his promise despite otherwise mitigating circumstances. So for this type of petition, God is impetrated to grant the request, by our petitions changing the moral balance of God's obligations in our favour. Paradoxically, petitions appealing to God's mercy, I propose, also work by strengthening God's obligations to us. To see this, I begin with the position of Geoffrey Cupit that in general, sincere, non-frivolous, requests create defeasible obligations in a requestee to fulfill the request (Cupit 1994).17 Cupit argues that in making a request, the asker expresses confidence that the requestee is the sort of person who would be inclined to grant the request. Hence, if the requestee were not to fulfill the request, she would be degrading the requester, making him look foolish for having thought the requestee was a concerned, caring soul. One has an obligation, says Cupit, not to degrade a fellow human being. So the requestee has an obligation not to turn down the request. Now, why in the world should the requestee be responsible for the beliefthe requester has about her? Cupit's answer is that had the requester refrained from making the request, because she did not expect the would-be requestee to grant it, that would have been to treat the would-be requestee as cold and uncaring. That would have involved the requester's degrading of the requestee. So the act of requesting reflects the requester's

17 I have discussed this view in greater detail in Gellman 1997b. 145

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obligation not to do an injustice to the person she subsequently approaches with the request. Therefore, the requestee has an obligation, in turn, not to degrade the requester by making a mockery of the latter's trust. In this dialectic way, says Culpit, requests create obligations. Cupit's argument seems rather weak when applied to people who are strangers to one another or only casual acquaintances. In such cases it is gratuitous to suppose that the requester will assume the requestee to be a caring souL More likely, the requester will pose the request because he hopes this person will help him, having no reason to think otherwise. That is different from assuming she is a person who will help. So, there is no reciprocation called for on the part of the requestee, and Cupit's dialectic does not work. Cupit's position seems right, however, when the requestee has knowingly led the requester to believe she would likely grant the request. An example ofthis is in close, personal relationships. By entering into and staying with a good, close relationship, each person indicates to the other that she is for her a source of care, trust and kindness. Each thereby creates expectations in the other. If one person then makes a request in such a relationship, she does so because she has good reason to believe that the potential requestee will care. The requestee herself has encouraged and nurtured that impression, and the requester is taking her up on it. So here the requestee is responsible for the requester's belief about her. To that extent she is obligated to fulfill the request, everything else being equal, in order not to violate the trust that she, the requestee, herself has encouraged. To refuse the request would be to degrade or do an injustice to the requester. Furthermore, when the requester and the requestee are in a good, close, personal relationship, the request can be as much an expression of love as the help subsequently offered. In the very act of making the request, therefore, the requester enters into a risk, risking the investment of her self into the relationship, a relationship which the requestee has done her part to create and sustain. Hence, to disregard the request would be, in this additional way, to degrade the requester. Finally, the obligation of the requestee to the requester gains in proportion to what we can call the 'appropriateness' of the request to the specific relationship between them. That is to say, 146

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the relationship between them might be such as to have given the asker a reason to believe that the requestee would help with regard to petitions of the present kind. I conclude that the extent to which a person has created the appropriate expectations in another person, as in a good, close, personal relationship, to that extent if one makes a sincere, nonfrivolous request, the request creates a defeasible obligation for the requestee to grant the request. I should note that we might want to exclude here morally indefensible requests. God has created us and sustains us in existence. He has informed us of his love and has invited us to come to him in a close, personal relationship. The kinds of requests we make are especially appropriate to the relationship to which he calls us. God has provided good reason for thinking that he cares to the utmost for our welfare and goodness. It is clear, then, that petitioners are not petitioning God simply on the chance that God might answer. We predicate appeals upon expectations God himself has encouraged. It follows that when we petition God, we create an obligation, defeasible as it may be, on God's part to fulfill our request. The closer the relationship between God and the person praying, the stronger the obligation upon God to meet the request. When the strengthened obligation overcomes counter-indicating circumstances, God is impetrated to grant the request. I suggest that petitions aimed at God's mercy, work in just this way. They create obligations, defeasible to be sure, in God. God is not indulgent. Rather, prayers 'arouse God's mercy' in the sense that what obligates God to grant them is a close, personal relationship between the asker and God. Requests made of God can also deepen that relationship, because entreating involves a self-risk of the entreater in the relationship, creating greater closeness than before. Depending on the nature of the otherwise mitigating circumstances, requests can tip the balance in favour of God's obligation to us. To conclude, petitionary prayers appealing to God's obligations when they work do so by holding God to his promises, and petitionary prayers that appeal to God's mercy impetrate God to act by strengthening his obligations to us. Asking can make a difference. Some might feel a bit uncomfortable explaining the impetrative powers of petitionary prayer in terms of God's obligations. 147

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Obligations sound so cold, so distant, so legalistic. Have no fear. Since the obligations I am talking about impetrate from out of a personal relationship with God, let me assure you that these obligations are quite warm and cuddly.I8

18 This is a revised version of the paper that was read to the Society of Christian Philosophers at the Eastern Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association, December, 1997, and to the colloquium of the Department of Philosophy of Bar-Han University, January, 1998. I am grateful to those whose comments at these events helped improve the contents of this paper.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Maimonides and Calvin on Accommodation Paul Helm

T

his essay is an experiment in comparing and contrasting views about theological language across two traditions, the Jewish tradition in the person of Moses Maimonides, and the Christian tradition in the person of the Reformer John Calvin. I do not claim that these two thinkers represent their traditions in some special way; for me it is sufficient that their views are each interesting, with significant areas of similarity and divergence, areas that may help us to understand some of the issues to do with theological language in a fresh, and even a new light. Nor do I claim any causal connection between their views. As far as one can tell Calvin never read a word of Maimonides; indeed, he may never even have heard of him. Nevertheless, the mediaeval practice of philosophical discussion between Jewish, Islamic and Christian philosophers seems to me to have been a very good thing, and I would be happy to think of the essay that follows as a continuation of that tradition. In titling this essay as I do I am taking certain liberties, particularly liberties with Maimonides. For while Maimonides was no stranger to the idea of accommodation, as far as I am aware he did not use the term of our language about God. He certainly used it ofthe ethical and moral aspects of the Torah, as Stephen Benin shows in Chapter Six of The Footprints of God. 1 Accommodation is what Maimonides refers to as 'a divine ruse', a device according to which God transferred the cultus of idolatry - a temple, an altar, sacrifice - to his own name.

1 Albany, New York, SUNY Press, 1993.

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Through this divine ruse it came about that the memory of idolatry was effaced and that the grandest and true foundation of our belief ... was firmly established, while at the same time the souls had no feeling of repugnance and were not repelled because of the abolition of modes of worship to which they were accustomed and than which no other mode of worship was known at that time. 2 Maimonides' prevailing view of human nature is that it cannot tolerate sudden changes; there is a kind of diachronic accommodation, therefore, as the Lord gradually moves people from idolatry to the worship of himself. Indeed, it can be argued that the Guide is itself an exercise in accommodation in this sense, though not of course divine accommodation. For in it the author seeks to transfer the prevailing positive theology into negative theology, while leaving some of the language of positive theology intact. How Maimonides can, consistently with his negative theology which we shall examine shortly, write of God transferring modes of worship from idols to himself, is a problem about which we shall say a little in what follows. There are undoubtedly striking parallels between what Maimonides calls a divine ruse or device and what Calvin says about the fact that during the Old Testament era the Lord tolerated and even enacted ethical standards which did not truly reflect his own nature, doing so because of the hardness of the heart of the people, as we shall briefly note later. But in this paper we shall not be concerned with such ethical and spiritual accommodation, but with the issue of accommodation in respect of our language of God, and even of God's language about himself. But though Maimonides does not use the term 'accommodation' in connection with theological language, the idea is certainly present, as I shall endeavour to show. Genesis 6.6 reads, 'And it repented the Lord that he made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.' Here are two quotations, one from The Guide of the Perplexed, and the other from the Institutes of the Christian Religion, which may be taken to be glosses on this text, and on others like it.

2 Quoted by Benin op. cit. Pp. 159-60.

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First, Maimonides

Sorrow is an equivocal term. It is a term denoting pain and aching. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. It is also a term denoting anger: And his father had not caused him to be sorry at any time, which means that he had not angered him. For he was sorrowful for the sake of David; he was angry for his sake. The term also denotes contrariety and disobedience: They rebelled and caused sorrow to his holy spirit; And cause him sorrow in the desert; If there be in me any way of causing sorrow; every day they cause sorrow to my words. In accordance with the second or third sense it is said; He sorrowed unto his heart, In accordance with the second sense, the interpretation of the verse would be that God was angry with them because of their evil action ... As for the interpretation of this passage, He sorrowed unto his heart, according to the third sense, its meaning would be as follows: man went contrary to the will of God regarding him. For the term heart is also used to designate the will ... 3 And Calvin What therefore, does the word 'repentance' mean? Surely its meaning is like that of all other modes of speaking that describe God to us in human terms. For because our weakness does not attain to his exalted state, the description of him that is given to us must be accommodated to our capacity so that we may understand it. Now the mode of accommodation is for him to represent himself to us not as He is in himself, but as he seems to us. Although He is beyond all disturbance of mind, yet He testifies that he is angry towards sinners. Therefore whenever we hear that God is angered, we ought not to imagine any emotion in him but rather to consider that this expression has been taken from our own human experience; because God, whenever He is exercising judgement exhibits the appearance of one kindled and angered. So we ought not to understand anything else under the word 3 The Guide of the Perplexed trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1963) I. Pp. 62-3.

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'repentance' than change of action, because men are wont by changing their action to testify that they are displeased with themselves. Therefore, since every change among men is a correction of what displeases them, but that correction arises out of repentance, then by the word 'repentance' is meant the fact that God changes with respect to his actions. Meanwhile neither God's plan nor his will is reversed, nor his volition altered; but what He had from eternity foreseen, approved and decreed, He pursues in uninterrupted tenor, however sudden the variation may appear in men's eyes. 4 As I say, I wish to explore the reasons why each of Maimonides and Calvin says what he says about divine sorrow or repentance. We shall find some significant similarities, but also some significant differences. Among the most interesting difference is one about the relationship between philosophy and faith which should be of general interest to us.

Maimonides

Maimonides' discussion of the senses in which sorrow may be applied to God - sorrow as pain, sorrow as anger, and sorrow as the effect of contrariety and disobedience - is one of a large number of short discussions in the Guide on terms used equivocally of God. Maimonides is well-known for his negative theology, the view that we best speak properly of God when we say what he is not than when we use positive terms about him. However, his view is more nuanced than this, and perhaps harder to defend for that reason. For if Maimonides had simply espoused his negative theology, and left it at that, then such a position is at least defensible on the grounds of consistency. We are left with nothing to say about God; God is a kind of semantic void, a black hole, and that is that. Though even such a consistent account would not be without its difficulties. Perhaps we know positively that God

4 Institutes of the Christian Religion (trans. Ford Lewis Battles, London, S.C.M. Press, 1960) 1.17.13. 152

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is one; but we do not know one what, and perhaps if we do not know what one God is we cannot know that he is one. To be one one has to be one something, and if there is no nonequivocal descriptive term that can be used of God then we can say that God is one, but that is all; we cannot know what he is, because we cannot answer any question about the nature or essence or character of God positively and univocally. So the result is a kind of necessary agnosticism. We may speculate over whether God knows that He himself is one, and we may surmise that He does. But our speculations are cut short when we realise that talk of what God knows is impermissible positive talk about God. How necessary the agnosticism is is a matter of further debate. Is Maimonides saying that the agnosticism is necessary per se, or is he saying that God cannot be known by human beings whose cognitive activity depends upon sensations? ('Matter is a strong veil preventing the apprehension of that which is separate from matter as it truly is').5 We shall return to some of the implications of this distinction in the last section of this chapter. But perhaps these remarks are not altogether fair to Maimonides. For he makes clear that we are not at liberty to use just any negative terms of God, but that there are rules of employment of negative terms - a kind of grammar - set out and determined by the necessity and simplicity of God. The negative attributes that we may employ in our language about God are 'those that must be used in order to conduct the mind toward that which must be believed with regard to him.'6 Such language is 'according to the language of the sons of men,' that is, accommodated language. But besides this well-known negative theology Maimonides had what at first sight seem to be more positive views about certain kinds of divine language. Here I do not have in mind those few puzzling occasions in the Guide (pointed out by Oliver Leaman 7) in which he says, for example, that Moses grasped the essence of God, 8 and that he prayed for the pardon of the people 5 6 7 8

Guide III.9 pp. 436-7. Guide p. 135. Oliver Leaman, Moses Maimonides (London, Routledge, 1990) p. 29. Leaman op. cit. p. 29. 153

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ofIsrael,9 or that the universe is not eternal but created by God lO or that God is omniscient. ll All these passages may be interpreted as Maimonidean concessions to the opposition, as Alvin J. Reines interprets them;12 ways in which Maimonides accommodates himself to the prevailing theological thoughtforms. What I wish to refer to is the more principled distinction he draws between language about the divine essence, and descriptions of divine action. It is plausible to suppose that if negative terms used of God are instances of accommodation for Maimonides, then a fortiori positive terms are, terms such as the various expressions for sorrow and repentance cited earlier. Every attribute that we predicate of him is an attribute of action or, if the attribute is intended for the apprehension of his essence and not of his action, it signifies the negation ofthe privation of the attribute in question. Moreover, even those negations are not used with reference to or applied to him, may He be exalted, except from the following point of view, which you know: one sometimes denies with reference to a thing something that cannot fittingly exist in it. Thus we say of a wall that it is not endowed with sight. 13 (p. 136) So what Maimonides means is something like this: that while negative expressions are the only kinds of expressions that can be used when referring to God's essence, positive expressions can be used when referring to God's action. We might try to elucidate this by borrowing some ideas from Saul Kripke's work on reference. Kripke distinguishes, in Naming and Necessity, between giving the meaning and fixing the reference. To give the meaning is to provide the essential properties by means of what Kripke calls a rigid designator. To fix the reference it is sufficient that one use sufficient of what is contingently true of such a thing to refer to and re-refer to that

9 10 11 12

Leaman op. cit. p. 54. Guide II: 13-25. Guide III. 16. 'Maimonides' True Belief Concerning God' in Maimonides and Philosophy edd. Shlomo Pines and Yirmiyahu Yovel (Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff, 1986). 13 Guide I. 58, p. 136.

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thing by means of what Kripke refers to as a non-rigid or accidental designator. Thus to fix the reference to God it might be sufficient to refer to certain actions which are believed to be true of God, say the action of making the bush burn. To give the meaning of God is to give some or all of the essential properties of God; the more essential properties figured in one's account the more ofthe meaning of 'God' one would be giving. And one might then suppose that one might fix the reference of God by means of the positive expressions, while allowing that one could not give the meaning of God, not even begin to, by the negative terms, on account of his utter transcendence. But could we? What status do these positive descriptions of God's action have? It is not reasonable to suppose that they are straightforwardly descriptive. For then, though we might know nothing of God's essence, we would know lots about his action. And if this were so then perhaps, by implication, we would then know something about God's essence, and Maimonides' position would begin to unwind. For we would know that God's essence is such that it is capable of doing, and has indeed done, actions of particular types. Though we may not know what the essence of God is, yet if God is (on occasion) pained, or angry or his will is flouted, then we would know that his essence is such that he can be angry and have his will flouted. And this would appear to give us positive knowledge of the essence of God, albeit of a rather derived and shadowy kind. If this sort of position is unacceptable to Maimonides (and it would appear to be, and certainly ought to be) in that it appears to give us some knowledge of the unknowable, then the consequence of such an objection would appear to be that though we might, in principle, think we are able to talk of certain divine actions, we can never talk ofthese as God's actions in positive terms. But matters are made better, but also worse, by Maimonides' insistence that the words use to characterise any divine action are quite equivocal. By calling them equivocal, I take it that Maimonides means not merely that such terms are used of God equivocally on various different occasions within the Torah, but also that any use of such terms of God must be equivocal when compared to our non-theological uses. The position is better because this is obviously consistent with his negative theology; we use the word 'anger' of God, of a human person, and of the 155

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sea, but while the word when used of a human being is used literally and when used of the sea may have an analogical meaning, when used of God and of man but there is no relation of meaning between the two. And this is surely worse. 14 How can we fix the reference to God by means of the use of expressions which are wholly equivocal? We might fix the reference to Herod by the expression 'that old fox' but only because we know that while Herod is not literally a fox, he is not equivocally a fox either. Arthur Hyman suggests that if Maimonides is to be consistent at this point an expression of the form 'God is the cause of X' cannot be understood as 'God possesses some positive property by means of which he causes X' but rather 'God is X-causing'.1 5 But it is hard to sew how this helps. Perhaps it is not in virtue of some property that he has that God is X-causing, but to be said to be X-causing is nevertheless to have something positive said about him. Oliver Leaman makes the suggestion that the positive language used about God is not descriptive but regulative. Certainly, Maimonides cannot dismiss such language out of hand, for he has the Torah in front of him, and the Torah is full of such language. He must treat it seriously by giving some account of it. Leaman says Maimonides is quite clear that most people need highly figurative language to help them observe religious rules and understand the principles of their faith, and provided that language does not lead them astray in their practice, there is nothing wrong with it.16 This is a weak sense of regulative; the use of such language does not take us in the right direction, it simply prevents us going astray. But there is something a bit puzzling about this idea that non-philosophers need figurative, equivocal language about God in order better to observe rules and understand principles. How can purely equivocal language provide us with

14 Guide 1. 54-6. 15 'Maimonides on Causality' in Maimonides and Philosophy edd. Shlomo Pines and Yinniyahu Yovel (Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff, 1986) 16 Leaman, op. cit. p. 33. 156

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any understanding of that over which it equivocates? How can the use of such language help us to observe certain moral principles, say? Further, it is hard to see how the practices and rules can be understood, via the use of such figurative language, as being practices and rules required or endorsed by God. But it might be said that the key thing in religion for Maimonides is to appreciate the divine transcendence, and that there are two ways of doing this. One way is the via negativa. The other is the via positiva, using the positive language equivocally, while perhaps not realising that such equivocation is inevitable. But how does the use of positive language, whether its equivocal status is realised or not, aid us in gaining an awareness of transcendence? One possible answer is, perhaps the very insistence on its equivocity gives us an emphatic appreciation of God's wholly otherness in the way in which the presence of an electrified eight foot high fence may suggest that there is something rather unusual and important beyond it, without indicating to us what it is. At this point we might be tempted to think of Maimonides as an Immanuel Kant before his time, or perhaps as an early John Hick. For did not Kant teach that because God is beyond the categories of space and time we are confined to a radical and deep agnosticism about him? And does not Hick claim that the great religions of the world are phenomena pointing to a Divinely Real noumenon which is unknown and unknowable, so unknown and unknowable that we cannot know whether it is one or many, personal or impersonal? Perhaps he is nearer to Hick than to Kant for there is this crucial difference between Maimonides and Kant and Hick; that while Maimonides is, to be sure, agnostic about the nature of God, the nature of God is, so to speak, there; it is not a postulate of pure practical reason, or a postulate of anything else. For it is true that God exists no matter what. His existence is not courtesy of our need to postulate it. However, having said all this, my chief reservations over Maimonides' approach to language about God found in the Torah is not that it is inconsistent, but that it is intellectually inert. In his hands both the language about the essence of God, and that about the action of God, does not serve to do anything except to preserve the utter transcendence and unknowability of God. This is particularly obvious in the case of the equivocal 157

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language. I want to support this claim by contrasting Maimonides' use of scriptural language about God with Calvin's.

Calvin

Recent work on Calvin has shown that his appeal to the idea of accommodation is more ramified than Stephen Benin allows, even granting that he says of Calvin that he is the closest Christian rival to Chrysostom, who uses the idea of accommodation 'seemingly without end'.17 It is possible to distinguish three different contexts in which Calvin makes use of the idea of accommodation. First, the historical. As mentioned earlier the Calvin scholar David Wright has drawn attention to remarkable passages in Calvin in which he argues that due to the hardness of heart of the people of Israel God accommodated himself ethically. Let us call this the indexed sense of accommodation; divine accommodation is always such at a time or epoch. For example, writing about laws governing the marrying of women taken captive (Deuteronomy 21. 10-3) Calvin writes It was better, indeed, that they should altogether abstain from such marriages; yet it was difficult so to restrain their lust as that they should not decline from chastity to the last degree; and hence we learn how much license conquerors allow themselves in war, so that there is no room for perfect purity in them. Wherefore God so tempers his indulgence as that the Israelites, remembering the adoption wherewith He had honoured them, should not disgrace themselves, but in the very fervour of their lust should retain some religious affection. 18

17 Stephen D. Benin op. cit. p. xix. 18 John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses arranged in the Form of a Harmony, (reprinted, Grand Rapids, Baker Book House, 1979) Vol. II. P. 71. David Wright has explored various aspects of divine accommodation in a number of papers: See 'Calvin's Pentateuchal Criticism: Equity, Hardness of Heart and Divine Accommodation in the Mosaic Harmony Commentary', Calvin Theological Journal, 21 (1986) pp. 33-50; 'Accommodation and Barbarity in Calvin's Old Testament Commentaries in A.G. Auld (ed.) Understanding Poets and Prophets.

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As I mentioned at the beginning there may be an interesting parallel here between this sense of accommodation in Calvin, which Benin does not notice, and Maimonides' ethical and legal writings. Second, there is also a sense in which the accommodation works the other way. We must accommodate ourselves to God. 'Thus once we begin to conceive of God as He truly is, that is, in his justice, integrity and righteousness, we will only want to accommodate ourselves to him'19 Let us call this human accommodation. Finally there is the sense for which Calvin is best known, the primary sense, in which according to him God accommodates himself. We may call this the non-indexed sense of accommodation. In what remains we shall be concerned only with this last sense, in drawing a comparison between Calvin's views on accommodation, and those of Maimonides. Calvin, as we have seen, treats the language about divine repentance as figurative non-literal language, as did his mediaeval forbears such as Aquinas. Aquinas is emphatic that God's will is unchangeable. And so, words ascribing change to God, or words ascribe to God which entail change have a metaphorical turn according to a human figure of speech. When we regret what we have made we throw it away. Yet this does not always argue second thoughts or a change of will, for we may intend in the first place to make a thing and scrap it afterwards. By similitude with such a procedure we refer to God having regrets, for instance in the account of the Flood, when He washed off the face of the earth the men whom He had made ... to speak of God as repenting is to use the language of metaphor ... the

Essays in Honour of George Wishart Anderson (J.S.O.T. Supplement Series 152) (Sheffield: J.S.O.T., 1993) pp. 413-427; 'Calvin's "Accommodation" Revisited' in P. De Klerk (ed.), Calvin as Exegete (Grand Rapids, Calvin Studies Society, 1995) pp. 171-90; 'Calvin's Accommodating God' in W.H. Neuser (ed.) Calvinus Sincerioris Religionis Vindex (Kirksville: Sixteenth Century Journal Publisher, 1996/1997) pp. 3-19. 19 Calvin, Sermon on Deuteronomy 5. 8-10, quoted by Guenther Haas, The Concept of Equity in Calvin's Ethics (Carlisle, Paternoster Press, 1997) p.57.

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conclusion to this argument is not that God's will changes, but that he wills change. 2o This account of divine repentance as metaphor, and his endorsement of the Augustinian distinction between willing a change and changing a will, is characteristic of Aquinas, and seems to me to mark a step forward, because Aquinas is beginning to tell us why such language is warranted. But even here - I venture to suggest - there is a kind of inertness. Granted that the language of divine repentance is metaphorical, and that God does not literally and unqualifiedly repent, this seems to lay to rest our qualms as regards consistency, but the explanation does not begin to tell us why there is language of God of this type in the first place. Aquinas simply says; given that there is such language it must (in virtue of divine immutability) be treated by us as metaphorical. It is in Calvin, I believe, that we have at least the elements of a theory of such language in the sense of a positive justification and vindication of the use of such language of God. While Calvin moves beyond Thomas in the account he gives of theological language - as I shall try to show shortly - he nevertheless endorses the familiar scholastic contrast between what God is in himself and what He is to us. There cannot be knowledge of God in his essence, that is, apart from knowledge ofthe divine nature as this is revealed to us in his attributes. All our knowledge of God is a posteriori and not the result of human speculation. 21 The language of the attributes is not nominal, but real; it gives us real knowledge of God, but it is folly to attempt to go behind or beyond these attributes to know God as He is in himself. The reason that Calvin is not an agnostic or a reductionist about the nature of God is that he preserved the distinction between in se and quoad nos and believed that God had revealed much about himself in Scripture. For example, Calvin held that God has revealed that He does not (literally) repent. Believing this, Calvin could hardly be committed to the Kantian thesis that it is a necessary feature of the human mind that it cannot

20 Summa Theologiae 1a. 19, 7 trans. Thomas Gilby (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966) pp. 33-5. 21 cr. Summa Theologiae 1a 12.12.

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understand any of the features of what exists eternally, beyond space and time. It is true that God cannot be fathomed by the human mind, He is unsearchable; nevertheless, though full or comprehensive knowledge of God is not possible, limited but accurate knowledge is. Reductionism is one extreme to be avoided in the interpretation of Calvin's remarks. The other extreme is to think that for Calvin the device of divine accommodation is a mere teaching tool, merely claiming that it is pedagogically useful for us to have God represented to us in these human ways, and nothing more. Calvin does stress this pedagogical aspect: God, he says, lisps like a nurse,22 speaking of himself in human terms to stir us from our natural torpor, for the language of accommodation is vivid and immediate. But this is not all that Calvin has to say in defence of accommodation. If each of these two extremes, regulative language and reductionism, are to be avoided, what is Calvin saying? Calvin's position seems to be something like this: Given that God, the eternal God, has not only decreed the course of history but has himself acted in history, such actions can only be fully understood and, more particularly, can only be responded to, when they are taken to be the actions of a person who is himself in time and who therefore appears to change or vary in his action. So if men and women who are themselves in time, are to respond to God, then He must represent himself to them as one to whom response is possible, as one who acts and reacts in time. Only on such an understanding of divine activity is the divine-human interaction which is at the heart of biblical religion possible. There is much in Calvin to show that he held that some human language is unqualifiedly true of God. Thus, in the paragraph quoted at the beginning, Calvin refers to what God had from eternity foreseen, approved and decreed, and while this language is being used in contrast to the language of accommodation, to the language of divine repentance, there is no suggestion that we have difficulty in understanding it. However, according to Calvin, while we can understand that God literally knows, we cannot fully comprehend all aspects of God's infinite.

22 Institutes, 1. 13.1.

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knowledge. The very fact that we can recognise certain expressions as divine accommodations to our human understanding implies that it is possible to think of God in unqualified or literal ways, though to say that we can do so does not mean that we can fully comprehend the meaning of such expressions when applied to God. Calvin's characteristic way of putting this is to say that God accommodates himself, and this in itself places Calvin in another camp than the negative theologians, and even (perhaps) in another camp than Aquinas on this question. For Calvin is not content, in what we might call his overall account of theological language, to say that we can give a consistent account of such language by which we know of the divine nature by recognising that some expressions attributed to God are metaphorical or analogical, but he emphasises that at least some of the language that we use of God is language that God uses of himself. The direction of fit, so to speak, is not from ourselves to God (as it tends to be with Aquinas, and more so with Maimonides, even when dealing with the very same issue that Calvin deals with) but from God to ourselves. Accommodation is not primarily our theory about theological language, it is an account of what God chooses to say in order to achieve certain ends. Here is part of Calvin's treatment of a particularly hard case for him, the case of Hezekiah, who was told by the Lord that he would die, who prayed for a longer life, and on whom the death sentence was remitted by fifteen years. (Isaiah 38) But it may be thought strange that God, having uttered a sentence, should soon afterwards be moved, as it were, by repentance to reverse it; for nothing is more at variance with his nature than a change of purpose. I reply, while death was threatened against Hezekiah, still God had not decreed it, but determined in this manner to put to the test the faith of Hezekiah. We must, therefore, suppose a condition to be implied in that threatening; for otherwise Hezekiah would not have altered, by repentance or prayer, the irreversible decree of God ... and thus we must suppose an implied condition to have been understood ... nor are we at liberty to infer from it that God used dissimulation by accommodating his discourse to the capacity and attainments of man ... In order to prepare 162

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Hezekiah by a spiritual resemblance of death, and gradually form him to a new life, he keeps back a part of the discourse. 23 Having some moments ago distanced Calvin's approach from that of Kant we might begin to understand Calvin's position by noting that there is a contingent connection between Kant's view that we are necessarily time-bound and space-bound, and his principled agnosticism about God. And we might helpfully see Calvin giving due recognition to our time and space bound existence while denying that this entails agnosticism about God's attributes. It is surely a necessary truth about any human being that she occupies space and endures through time. (Here I exclude from consideration the possibility of disembodied existence). The necessities of these relations to time and space generate necessary truths about us, truths that are true in every possible world, and so these truths, though they are not analytic, are metaphysically necessary, though not necessarily knowable a priori. For example, the truth that if X exists earlier than Y then X can never exist later than Y. Does Hezekiah then have to believe what is false, that God is capable of changing his mind? No, there would be nothing to stop Hezekiah believing.