[Given the substantiveness of Alexander's last comment from the Onward Christian Spaceman thread I'm giving it its own post. -Matthew]
Let's try this tack. Let's forget all about this high-flown metaphysics, and just ask what a double incarnation would have to be like, given what we know about a single incarnation.
To do this, I will assume something that I do not actually believe: that some objects have parts. I think some of the things I say will work without that assumption, with some modifications, but in any case I am not going to inflict my weird ontology on people here.
Suppose two incarnations. It is true, as Justin and I have pointed out, that we don't want to say that Aslan and Smith are proper parts of one person. However, we ought to say that Aslan's leonine body and Smith's human body are proper parts of one person. My body is a proper part of me--here I assume that materialism is false, of course. Surely it would likewise be true that Aslan's leonine body is a proper part of Aslan, and Smith's human body is a proper part of Smith.
Since Aslan=Smith, it follows that the leonine and human bodies are each a proper part of the same person. We can now ask whether the leonine and human bodies are numerically identical. Suppose so. Then what about the parts of the bodies? One option is that each leonine part is identical with a corresponding human part. So there is only one heart, which is human in one place and leonine in another. This move seems implausible. After all, what do we do with the tail? And what do we do if one human limb is lost but all four leonine ones stay. OK, so we should reject the view that each part of the human body would correspond with a part of the leonine body.
So now we have two remaining views in front of us: (1) there is only one body, containing a complete set of leonine organs as well as a distinct complete set of human organs; and (2) there are two bodies, one containing only leonine organs and the other containing only human organs.
I think the defender of the double incarnation should go for (2) instead of (1). A body is an interacting organic unity. That is not true on (1). Moreover, even if (1) is true, if there is composition, it seems plausible we could compose all the human organs into an entity that we call a "human body*" and all the leonine ones into a "leonine body*" (this does not assume unrestricted composition; we are composing complete sets of organically interacting organs). And so we have two distinct material objects, each with a set of organs. This is all that my arguments below will need, I think, but I will stick with (2), both for simplicity, and because it seems the more plausible view.
We now have an important lesson: There is a disanalogy between "standard bilocation" (as in time travel cases or St. Pio being in two places at the same time) and double incarnation. For in standard bilocation, we have a single material object--the body--that is wholly present in two places at once. In a double incarnation, we have two material objects--the human and leonine bodies--that are each present in a different place. (If (2) is the right story, then there is one body, but it is a scattered and not bilocated object.)
Nonetheless, we do have a bilocation of sorts: the same person is present in two places. However, it is arguably false that the same person is wholly present in two places, since some of the parts of the person (say, the tail) are present in one place but not the other.
Plausibly, what make a person be present in a place is that the person's body is there. (It seems plausible that the soul's and the person's location is derivative from that of the body.) So in the case of a double incarnation, the person is present in one place in virtue of one body being present there and in another in virtue of another being present there.
At this point it should be clear that some of the contradictions that Mike refers to are not there. For there is no contradiction between roaring with one organ and not roaring with another. Indeed, that is typically how we roar: we roar with one organ (the mouth) and with other organs (say, the feet) we are not roaring). Smith/Aslan thus sometimes roars with his leonine mouth while being silent with his human mouth. There is no contradiction there. And while doing that, he is noisy simpliciter and not silent simpliciter. Again, no contradiction. One body can be noisy while a numerically distinct one is silent.
We can use this example as a general strategy to resolve contradictions based on contradictory bodily predicates.
What about mental predicates? Here things get significantly more difficult. But first note if a single incarnation is possible, then it is possible for a person to have two numerically distinct wills (the denial of this forces one into the monothelite heresy, condemned by Constantinople III). By the same token, it should be possible for a person to have two numerically distinct minds. (Similar considerations presumably apply as in the case of the mind. Moreover, it would be odd if there were two wills and one mind.)
So there should be nothing absurd about the Logos being in pleasureless pain with one mind and in painless pleasure with the other. As long as we say that there is a human mind distinct from a leonine mind, we can say the same thing about mental predicates as we said about bodily ones.
And indeed if the bodies are two in number, the souls have to be two in number, and the mind is an aspect of the soul. Indeed, the distinctness of souls may just follow from the distinctness of bodies if the soul is the form of the body. But even absent that, the defender of a double incarnation can just suppose it.
So, two bodies, two souls. The defender of a double incarnation here has the ingredients to counter just about all the contradictions that an opponent can throw.
But there is a crucial difficulty here. Isn't a human person composed of a human body and a human soul, and a leonine person of a leonine body and a leonine soul. But if the human person and the leonine person are the same entity, then the human body plus the human soul equals the animal body plus the animal soul. Assuming bodies are material and souls are immaterial, it follows that the human body is identical with the leonine body and the human soul is identical with the leonine soul, contrary to what I said above.
Here there is a deep issue that helps illustrate why the Christian tradition, including (or so I've heard) St Athanasius, calls Christ a "man" but is cautious about calling him a "human person". This issue comes up for a single incarnation.
For consider the following argument against a single Incarnation: "The human person is precisely body and soul. Christ is a human person. Hence, there is nothing in Christ but a human body and a human soul. But there is divinity in Christ. Hence, divinity is a part (proper or not) of the human body plus human soul in Christ. But this absurd, for instance because the human body and human soul is finite, and the composition of two finite objects is finite, and the part of a finite object is finite, so it follows that the divinity is finite. Etc." If this argument is sound, a single incarnation is impossible. But a single incarnation happened, hence is possible, and hence the argument is unsound.
How to get out of the argument? I think one must maintain that in Christ the body and the soul did not constitute a whole person. For if they constituted a whole person, that whole person either was the whole Christ, in which case we have the above reductio, or was a part of Christ, in which case we have two persons, Christ and the human person consisting of body and soul, which is heretical.
So while in us, body and soul constitutes a whole person, this is false in Christ. He has a human body and a human soul, but these have an incompleteness in his case--they are not an individual, on their own they lack hypostasis. How to spell out this lack is difficult.
In exactly the same way, it has to be false that in a double incarnation the human body and human soul would constitute a whole person and that the leonine body and leonine soul would constitute a whole person.
Lessons (hopefully) learned:
1. A double incarnation would involve two bodies and two souls, rather than a bilocated material object.
2. Various apparent contradictions can be resolved.
3. There is a serious difficulty for both a double incarnation in that the human body and human soul cannot be said to constitute a whole person, but this problem arises equally for a single incarnation. This is not an issue the tradition is ignorant of (I thought I saw it in Aquinas, but I can't find it now).
I don't know who the "we" refers to, but I want to say that they are spatial parts (or stages) of one person in the same way that me yesterday and me today are temporal parts of me. I don't know how to talk about spatially bilocated 3D objects witout contradicting myself.
In a double incarnation, we have two material objects--the human and leonine bodies--that are each present in a different place.
This is word-play, as far as I can see. If God is incarnated twice then he hs fully God and fully human. He is fully there as that human being. And he is fully God and fully leonine. So he is fully there as that lion (not just lurking inside the lion body). This, I think, is what makes an incarnation an interesting problem. So he's bilocated.
At this point it should be clear that some of the contradictions that Mike refers to are not there. For there is no contradiction between roaring with one organ and not roaring with another.
The contradictions are not hard to find, though we've been through this several times. Suppose Aslan is looking at his tail and Smith is not. Perfectly possible. Except Aslan is Smith is God. So God is both perceiving his tail and not percieving his tail. Obvious contradiction. Now the strategy of introducting new organs misses the point entirely. I know you can introduce extra mouths and extra pairs of eyes, and extra tails and lungs and whatever. But the fact is that Aslan has a certain set of organs and so does Smith. Given the organs they have, a contraction is forthcoming, even though there would not be that particular contradiction if we added a few organs to each.
"This is word-play, as far as I can see. If God is incarnated twice then he hs fully God and fully human. He is fully there as that human being. And he is fully God and fully leonine. So he is fully there as that lion (not just lurking inside the lion body). This, I think, is what makes an incarnation an interesting problem. So he's bilocated."
I think the "fully" is problematic. If the "fully there" means "every spatial part is there", then the defender of a double incarnation will deny that, since no human part is present in Narnia and no leonine part is present on earth. And the problem comes up for a single incarnation, as I've tried to argue before. God is fully in every place. But we do not want to say that Christ's human body is fully in every place.
" Suppose Aslan is looking at his tail and Smith is not. Perfectly possible. Except Aslan is Smith is God. So God is both perceiving his tail and not percieving his tail. Obvious contradiction."
Remember that there are going to be three minds in the case of a double incarnation, just as in the case of a single incarnation there are two minds. So one mind is in the state of perceiving the tail and the is not. No contradiction so far. Now you may ask: Does Aslan/Smith perceive the tail simpliciter? Well, to answer that we have to ask what it means to "perceive simpliciter" in the case of a person that has two or more minds.
A reasonable thing is to say that x perceives simpliciter F iff x perceives F with at least one mind of his. Doesn't that seem reasonable? It's parallel to how we say that Bob sees F simpliciter provided that Bob sees F with at least one of his eyes. Eh bien, when Aslan is looking at his tail, then Smith/Aslan perceives simpliciter his tail. No contradiction.
I wonder if the reason we're not making argumentative contact is perhaps because you have a different view of what an incarnation involves. So maybe I should ask some you questions so we can get clear on what we agree on here:
1. Do you think that in the incarnate Christ, there is a body and soul, with the body being a proper part of him (in some appropriate sense...), and the soul also being a different proper part of him?
2. Do you agree that in the incarnate Christ there are numerically two wills, two principles of operation (energeiai) and two minds?
3. Do you agree that there is such a "thing" as the human phusis and that to be a human being is just to have that phusis, so that Christ has a human phusis, and is a human being precisely because he has it, just as he has a divine phusis?
Maybe the real issue is that while you think what I am describing may be coherent, you just do not think it counts as a case of double incarnation. That may be what you mean by "This is word-play".
But let's see. It seems to me that it is a conceptual truth that:
1. If the Logos is God and is a human being, then the Logos is incarnate as a human being.
It is also a conceptual truth that:
2. If the Logos is God and is a lion, then the Logos is incarnate as a lion.
Do we agree on 1 and 2?
We can try to throw in a "fully" here, but I think that is a red herring. If x is a human being, then x is a human being. I am not sure what it means to say that "x is fully a human being" other than to say (a) "x is a human being" more emphatically, (b) "x is a human being and nothing besides", or (c) "x is a human being and every part or aspect of him is a human part or aspect". But the orthodox defender of a single incarnation will not say that Christ is fully human in senses (b) and (c): for Christ is also God, and hence (b) is false, and Christ's divinity is not something human, and hence (c) is false. Rather, the orthodox defender of a single incarnation will say that Christ is fully human in sense (a).
If I am right, then to have a double incarnation as man and lion it is necessary and sufficient that the Logos be God and also be a man and also be a lion.
So let's ask whether on my account the Logos is truly a man and truly a lion.
Plausibly the following are conceptual truths:
3. Anybody who has a human body and a human soul is a human being.
4. Anybody who has a leonine body and a leonine soul is a lion.
Would you agree?
Since on my account of a double incarnation, the Logos has a human body, human soul, leonine body and leonine soul, and is God, it follows from 1-4 that what I have described is indeed a double incarnation as man and lion.
But perhaps one might think that having a human body and a human soul is not sufficient for being human. One reason one may think this is that one might think that there is some further ingredient, say human spirit or the human phusis (I am a Thomist about these things, so I think the human phusis of Socrates is identical with the substantial form of Socrates which in turn is just his soul). Well, just throw that added ingredient into the mix: suppose the Logos to have an instance of that ingredient as it is found in humans and to have an instance of that ingredient as it is found in lions. My position, thus modified, should work.
However, perhaps one thinks that instead of defining human beings positively by what they have, one should define them negatively by what they don't have. Thus, one might say something like this: x is a human being iff x has a human soul and a human body and there is nothing in x besides that soul and that body and their parts. But I think that is a poor definition: to be a human is defined by what one has and not what one lacks; if by some miracle I would grow to include something besides a human body and human soul (maybe some third kind of thing that we cannot even conceive of), I would not cease to be human--I would just be human and more besides.
Maybe, though, you think that an incarnation as a human being requires not just that the incarnate being have human body and human soul, but that the incarnate being be identical with the human body and soul. That would explain some of your remarks. (There is, by the way, a heretical view in the vicinity that I assume you're rejecting, viz., the Apollinarian heresy that the Logos was Christ's soul.)
Let's see if we can work out a view of the incarnation that works like that. Neither the human body nor the human soul of Christ existed in 100 BC. But the Logos did. So the Logos can't just be a mereological sum of the human body and the human soul. Rather, the idea has to be that the Logos is composed of the human body and the human soul of Christ and of nothing besides, but neither part is essential to him, since he pre-existed both. (We're also going to have to say something about what happened when Jesus was dead. Then the body and soul did not compose a man. Maybe we'd say that then the Logos was composed of just the soul then.)
But now we have some difficulties. The first is finitude: It seems that a human body and a human soul are essentially finite. Moreover, as al-Kindi observed, what is composed of two finite objects is itself finite. Thus the Logos is finite. But the Logos has the fullness of divinity. Hence the fullness of divinity is found in something finite, and so the fullness of divinity is finite, which is absurd.
The second difficulty is the difficulty of total replacement of constituents. It is not clear whether an object can survive the simultaneous replacement of all of its constituents. But the following is plausibly a necessary truth:
5. If at t, an object O is solely constituted by parts P1,P2,...,Pn, and prior to t each of these parts was either non-existent or not a constituent of O, then O underwent simultaneous replacement of all its constituents.
At some time t the incarnation occurred (if it occurred on an interval of times open below, I can modify 5.) Prior to t, neither the human body nor the human soul were constituents of the Logos. After t, the human body and the human soul were the sole constituents of the Logos, on the view in question. Hence, by 5, at t, the Logos underwent simultaneous replacement of all its constituents. On the plausible hypothesis that simultaneous replacement of all constituents is impossible, we get an absurdity.
(One might try to work around this by doing a staged incarnation: Maybe first the Logos takes on a soul, and then a body. But souls don't precede their bodies, and so we would have the Apollinarian heresy being true, albeit only for a while. Or maybe first body, then soul? But the incarnation, according to the Tradition, happened through the soul.)
Maybe, though, sometimes complete replacement of constituents can be survived? I suppose it is conceivable that a witch turns my briefcase into gold, and if there were no gold atoms in my briefcase previously (which is certainly conceivable), all the constituents of my briefcase would be replaced while the briefcase would survive.
Well, but note: The shape of the briefcase remained. Suppose that the magic turned the briefcase into a ball of gold. I think we would not want to say that the ball of gold is the same object that the briefcase was. It is not unreasonable to think of the shape of the briefcase as one of its constituents (it's like form, except that we're dealing with an artifact). But that shape remained, so this is not a total replacement.
Maybe, though, one can say that the in the case of the incarnation, the divinity remains. Yes, I agree that it does. But if it does, then after the incarnation, the body and soul are not the sole constituents, since there is also the divinity.
Or maybe one can deny the claim that neither the body of Christ nor the soul of Christ existed in 100 BC, and hold on to the sole composition claim. The most plausible view one could adopt then would be this: The soul of Christ existed prior to t (the moment of incarnation) and was either identical with or a constituent of the Logos, but was not a soul then. (If the soul of Christ pre-existed the incarnation and was not even a part of the Logos, then this doesn't help with the total replacement problem.) Since the Logos is simple, being God, one would have to say that prior to the incarnation, the soul of Christ was not a human soul but was identical with the Logos. (What if one denies simplicity? Then a bit more discussion has to be done here, but I can still make my argument go through, I think.)
So, the view we have on the table is this: The soul of Christ is an eternal entity, but prior to the incarnation, the soul of Christ was not a soul. It just was identical with the un-incarnate Logos. At the moment of incarnation, this entity became a human soul. But we shouldn't be Apollinarians, even for a moment. So we should say that at the same time the Logos grew by acquiring a body. But now we have a logical difficulty. Let S be the post-incarnation soul. The L be the pre-incarnation Logos. Let C be the post-incarnation Christ, body and soul. Then, S=L, by hypothesis. But L=C, since the Christ is the same as the Logos. Hence, S=C. But S is a proper part of C, since Christ includes not just soul but body. Hence S is a proper part of S, which is absurd.
OK, so that won't do. Maybe we can backtrack a little. Let S be the post-incarnation soul. I rather quickly said that if S pre-existed the incarnation, S would have to have been identical with the Logos, and would not have been a soul then. The argument there used simplicity. But maybe the thing to say is that prior to the incarnation, S was not identical with the Logos, but was the sole constituent of the Logos. (We have to be willing to say such things if we want to affirm that we survive death and that we are not identical with our souls.)
OK, so for eternity, the Logos had a sole constituent that was distinct from itself. That constituent then became the soul of Christ, on the view under exploration, and simultaneously the body became another cosntituent. What is this sole constituent of the Logos?
There are compositional accounts of the Trinity. Maybe the sole constituent of the Logos is divinity. But the divinity of the Son is identical with the divinity of the Father. Hence, on the view at hand, the divinity of the Father became a human soul. That implies that the Father changed in the incarnation, which is the central problem in the patripassionist heresy.
OK, so it's not divinity. What is it, then? It sounds like it has to be an entity in the same sense in which a soul is, since this this sole constituent of the Logos is identical with Christ's soul after the incarnation. It sure sounds substantial. But there is nothing substantial like that in the Trinity that is not had in common by the three persons.
In summary, it seems to me that if one holds that if an account of the incarnation implies that the body and soul of Christ (and one can throw in spirit, phusis and the like if one wants to) are the sole constituents of the Logos (and Mike hasn't said that), then one falls into either christological or trinitarian heresy. On the other hand, if one takes the orthodox view of the incarnation, then the incarnation is constituted by the Logos taking on human body and soul (and perhaps phusis, if the Thomists are wrong to equate the phusis with the soul), and there is nothing absurd about the Logos also taking on a leonine body and soul at the same time.
Speaking for myself, I find the sheer word-count is distracting dialectically. Maybe it is useful for others. I'll make one point. You say,
A reasonable thing is to say that x perceives simpliciter F iff x perceives F with at least one mind of his. Doesn't that seem reasonable?. ..
Not really. Far as I can tell, this abuses the notion of perceiving simpliciter. You say 'simpliciter' and then you make the perception relative to a mind! You are doing what the 3Dist typically do--add paramenters to your predicates when the going gets tough. Instead of xPy (x perceives y) you now insist on xPym (x perceives y with m). But as far as I can see, this strategy is just ad hoc. Perceiving just isn't a 3-placed relation, and certainly perceiving simpliciter isn't.
Dear Mike,
Sorry about the word-count. I tried to be exhaustive. :-)
If one accepts an orthodox account of the Incarnation, one accepts that it is possible for a being to have more than one mind. Moreover, if it is possible for a being to have more than one mind, then the locution "x perceives F with mind M" makes sense, surely. So now we can imagine four scenarios for a being that has two minds, A and B:
1. x perceives F with neither A nor B
2. x perceives F with A but not with B
3. x perceives F with B but not with A
4. x perceives F with A and B.
Would you agree that:
5. If x has minds A and B, then x perceives F (simpliciter) iff either (2) or (3) or (4) holds?
Alex,
In this treatment of perceiving simpliciter you are treating Aslan and Smith as what I have been caling spatial parts of God. If they are such parts, then it is true that God has any property that either part has. But elsewhere, this is not the position you take. You want to say rather that God is a scattered object, or suggest as much above. If God is a scattered object, then it is false that God has property P iff. Aslan has P or Smith has P. Consider the scattered object O composed one hydrogen atom and helium atom. The hydroygn atom has the property of not being composed of helium. But certainly O does not have that property. So O does not have all of the properties of its parts. But then, to sum up, from the fact that Aslan has the property of perceiving X, you cannot infer that the scattered object God has the property of perceiving X. So the answer to your question is that(5) is mistaken, if God is a scattered object.
Dear Mike,
That's a very nice objection. It does show that there is more of a problem with extending my account to all predicates than I thought.
However, I was not making the general claim that if a part has some property Q then the whole has Q. I was making a specific claim about the predicate "perceives F." I would make a different claim about another predicate. (E.g., a being with more than one mind is singleheartedly desiring F iff it is desiring F with all minds undivided.)
Nor was I even claiming in the case at hand that if a part of x has Q then the whole has Q. That is in general false. In fact, I was carefully staying away from claiming minds think, perceive or anything like that, though I wouldn't be surprised if I slipped up somewhere (the slips should be read as synecdoche). Rather, we perceive and think with our minds.
I think the discussion has to be done on a predicate-by-predicate basis. But so far I have yet to meet a predicate where I can't avoid contradiction in a fairly natural way.
I am starting to wonder whether our disagreement is not merely verbal. With your discussion of scattered objects, it is sounding like you do accept the coherence of the ontological hypothesis I propose (two souls, two bodies, three minds, etc.) However, what you do not accept is that it would count as a "double incarnation." Would that be a fair summing up?
I was not making the general claim that if a part has some property Q then the whole has Q. I was making a specific claim about the predicate "perceives F." I would make a different claim about another predicate.
That's fine. But inferences obviously cannot depend on ad hoc inference rules. Maybe you don't like the rule I advanced as the basis of your inference. But my guess is that whateever rule you adopt, it will license similarly invalid inferences. It will conflate inferences from the properties of parts of scattered objects and inferences from the properties of spatial parts of nonscattered objects. Tell me the rule.
Dear Mike,
Thanks for continuing to press me here. I think I may need to modify my view below, to bring out some things that were implicit.
The basic issue here is to take a predicate that we normally use under certain assumptions--say, that we are talking about someone who has only one mind--and to ask what the predicate should say when applied absent these assumptions. I don't think there are general rules for how to make such extensions.
This issue comes up all over the intellectual arena. Consider, for instance, the predicate "is an event in the future of event E". We normally use this predicate under the assumption that the future of simultaneous spatially separated events pretty much coincides. Indeed, once we thought this assumption was necessarily true (just as before Christianity came along, we might have thought that necessarily nobody has more than one mind). But how to extend the predicate now that we have relativity theory?
In this case, there is a natural extension--we equate the future of an event with the forward light-cone of that event. But is there a general rule for how a temporal predicate that we normally use in a non-relativistic realm should be used in a relativistic realm? I think not.
Nonetheless, as long as the ontology of general relativity is clear, this should not bother us. It may even be that for some predicates there is more than one equally natural way of extending the predicate. That's fine as long as it is clear from a speaker's context just how she's extending the concept.
Likewise, many of our ordinary predicates are normally used under the assumption that the entity they apply to has at most one mind, at most one body, at most one phusis, etc. How these predicates extend beyond that assumption is a hard question. But in a way it doesn't matter, as long as we're sufficiently clear on the ontology (one hypostasis, two or more phuseis, two or more minds, two or more wills, two or more energeiai) and on what exactly is going on.
It doesn't really matter too much whether a situation where Aslan/Smith is aware of F with one mind and is unaware of F with another is to be described as his being aware simpliciter of F or not. We can even settle that by stipulation. For we have a fairly clear idea of what is going on when we say he is aware of it with one mind and is unaware of it with another, and whether we count that as awareness simpliciter or unawareness simpliciter is not a big deal. (Here we may have a genuine difference. For you may say that we cannot understand awareness-with-M prior to understanding awareness simpliciter.)
There may be more than one way of extending. So maybe Bob uses "Smith knows p" to mean that Smith knows p with all his minds, while Jenny uses that phrase to mean that Smith knows p with at least one mind of his. I am not sure much rides on this.
I don't want to dismiss all questions here. There are at least three that are difficult:
1. Is the ontology I described coherent?
2. Does the ontology I described do justice to the (perhaps somewhat imprecise) idea of "double incarnation"?
3. What do ordinary people who interact with Smith in and through his human body, soul and phusis (I think the latter two are identical), and who are unaware of his having a leonine body, soul and phusis mean when they say: "Smith is silent"? What are the truth-conditions for their claims? That's a tough question, and it's not obvious that there is a definite answer. I am inclined to put a lot of weight here on what evidence they make use of to justify their claims. If the evidence for Smith being silent is simply that no sound is proceeding from his human body, and the agents do not even consider whether Smith might have other bodies, then this is some evidence that what they mean by that is that Smith is silent with his human body.
Maybe to make the discussion move ahead we should separate out two questions:
1. Is the ontology I described (three minds and phuseis; two souls; two bodies; one hypostasis) coherent?
2. If a situation had the ontology I described, would it be correct to call that situation "a double incarnation"?
Alex,
My question concerns something you probably don't want to discuss here. However, you made the claim "I will assume something that I do not actually believe: that some objects have parts", which is so strange that I can't resist the temptation to ask you to explicate what you mean by that. You can reply very briefly.
I noticed that too. I just guessed Alex meant that there are no objects with proper parts. I think that's more or less mereological nihilism, i.e., there are only simple objects.