"How to Fix Thought on God" – Aquinas Lecture at UDallas

Dr. Michael Gorman, professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America, speaks on “How to Fix Thought on God.” Gorman walks through a logical progression, defining modes and degrees of thought with relevant examples and then applying those terms to the more complex matter of thinking about God. Employing the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and references to scripture, Gorman compels us to understand the ways that God makes Himself available as an object of cognition for humanity.

The annual St. Thomas Aquinas Lecture hosted by the UDallas Philosophy Department honors the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, celebrated Jan. 28, and continues the UDallas tradition of engaging with the Angelic Doctor’s profound contributions to philosophy and theology.

Transcript

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Good evening, everyone. My name is Christopher Mearsen. It's my honor to be serving this year as chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Dallas. On behalf of my colleagues, I welcome all of you to the department's 42nd annual Aquinas Lecture. And I wish you may have had a happy feast of St. Thomas yesterday. Thank you to all for your enthusiasm and flexibility in turning out on a day that was not planned for, except by powers beyond our ken. I'd like to just reflect on the spirit of St. Thomas a little bit as we begin the evening. And there are two images that are going through my mind. One is one that we discussed this morning, which is that in St. Vincent Farrer Church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where the Dominican fathers of the Eastern Province have their priory, there is a triple lancet, a stained glass window. In the middle, there's a big old picture of Albert the Great, and on his left is St. John the Apostle holding a copy of his gospel. And on his right, there's a whole stained glass window for Aristotle holding a copy of the metaphysics. Looking for all the world like he's got a halo on. But we were looking at the um at the photo this morning, and and Mrs. Gorman said, you know, I think that looks like uh like a laurel wreath. And we looked at it, and that's why the halo is greenish. You know, it's got a sort of greenish, uh a greenish tinge to it. And that just strikes me as emblematic in some way of what we're doing with these human efforts of ours at a philosophy lecture associated with the feast of St. Thomas, right? That that Aristotle, um St. Thomas's greatest philosophical influence in many ways, um, on the one hand, he's very conspicuous in the fact that when you look closely, his halo is not actually a halo. It's a wreath made of corruptible leaves. Um, on the other hand, he's there in the church. That's very medieval. He's there in the church, you know, uh, just like as the medieval guild might have its window in a church and with with with images of its trade and so forth. Um, so that's one. The other image also came up in conversation today. St. Thomas was a man, if you if you have read about his life, heard stories about him, he was a man who knew very deeply and intensely the exhilaration of human intellectual discovery, of understanding. He knew the aha moment. He had lots and lots of them that were exciting. Uh he he you can you can see it coming through sometimes, and certainly in the anecdotes about him, you can hear it. And yet, this very same man with equal sincerity wrote uh in his prologue to the prologue to his commentary on the Apostles' Creed, that the human manner of knowing is so weak that no philosopher can ever fully track down the nature of a single fly. Hence the story that one philosopher spent 30 years in solitude getting to know the nature of a bee. Um so there's this sense of incredible confidence and exhilaration in the use of human reason and the ability to step back from it and say, you know what? It's not in the end all that we are looking for. And so on this occasion, each year, the department seeks to recognize and foster the intellectual virtues in and through which St. Thomas's holiness of life so brightly shone. And certainly one of those is the virtue of humility, uh, which was completely compatible with an intellectual confidence that in almost anyone else would have been egotistical. Both of those. And we do so not only by hosting this lecture, but by just bestowing the department's Aquinas medal on a distinguished thinker who works in the spirit of St. Thomas, a spirit of deep commitment to the tradition coupled with openness to new ways of appropriating it. This year's Aquinas lecturer and Aquinas medalist, Dr. Michael Gorman, holds advanced degrees from the Catholic University of America, from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and from Boston College. That's a licentiate and a couple of doctorates, one in philosophy and one in theology. He is a fellow of the Catholic University's Institute for Human Ecology. He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow, a scholar in the Templeton Foundation's working group, Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life. He has taught at the Catholic University of America since 1999, and currently holds the Father Kurt Pritzel OP Chair in Philosophy.

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Dr.

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Gorman's primary academic interest is metaphysics, especially the metaphysics of essence, substance, and normativity, and on applications of metaphysics in areas such as theory of mind, Christology, action theory, and ethics. He has a particular interest in the intersection between analytic philosophy and medieval philosophy, with a view to both historical sensitivity and philosophically fruitful exchange of ideas and modes of thinking. He is the author of Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union and a contemporary introduction to Timistic Metaphysics, as well as over 40 scholarly articles. In virtue of, in view of his distinguished contributions to philosophy, the Timistic tradition, and the Catholic intellectual tradition, the University of Dallas Philosophy Department is delighted to bestow its Aquinas Medal on Dr. Michael Glenn.

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So I'd like to start by uh expressing my gratitude to um Dr. Mearis and the whole philosophy department at the University of Dallas for inviting me here and uh for honoring me in this way. When I look at the list of people who have previously given this lecture, I see a lot of um some colleagues of mine, some mentors, some teachers, some former teachers of mine, and it's um it's sort of um forces itself on my attention how much I have received from all those people. Uh and if I'm able to, if you come here and have anything to say, it's only because I've been given so much already. Um so I want to acknowledge all of those gifts from all of those people. And also my family. Um academic families contribute more to the academic venture than is obvious from the outside. Especially my wife, who's here. Thank you, Emery. Of course, we all know the one and only ultimate source of every good thing. And that's important to keep in mind, too. So why don't we talk about that? My title is How to Fix Thought on God. Philosophers and theologians spend a lot of time wondering how we should characterize God. Is God omniscient, omnipotent, merciful, simple? These are all good questions to ask, but there's a prior question to consider. How is it that we are thinking about God in the first place? How do we lock our minds onto Him? One reason to ask this question could be a worry that we cannot do so, and that our discussions about what God is like have never gotten off the ground. Such a worry might arise for someone who believes that human reason cannot get beyond what is sensed. Or it might arise for some other reason. I do not share the worry. I think we can and do think about God. But how do we do it? The question, as I mean to pursue it, is fairly narrow. I am asking not how God can think about God, or how angels can think about God, but how we, rational animals, can think about God. Further, I'm asking not how we humans could think about God before the fall, or how we can think about God in the next life, but how we fallen humans can think about God in this life. My title again is How to Fix Thought on God. The question of how we do it is distinct from the question of whether and how we can refer to God, how we can direct someone's attention to God by means of language. These two questions, the question about thought and the question about linguistic reference, are closely related. So closely, in fact, that they are difficult to disentangle. It seems plausible enough that we cannot refer to something without thinking of it. But on the other hand, it is sometimes, at the very least, easier to think of something if someone has already referred to it in conversation with us. So while thinking about God will be our main topic, we will also end up engaging the question of referring to God. I will proceed in four main steps. First, I will discuss the question of how we think not about God, but about individual material things. Second, I will explain how these ordinary ways of thinking aren't as helpful as we might wish when applied to thinking about God. Third, I will explain ways in which we can overcome these shortcomings. Fourth, I'll briefly mention some other issues. Okay, so section one. Fixing thought on material individuals. How do we fix thought on material individuals? In my view, this is the right place to start because thinking about material things is most natural to us rational animals. To the extent that we are good at thinking at all, it is this kind of thinking that we are good at. Only later will I ask how we can do something more out of the ordinary, like think about God. Importantly, I do mean thinking about material individuals and not just about kinds of material individuals. Great-tailed grackles, for example, are individuals. But we can and often do think about them generically or universally. We say that great-tailed grackles are blackbirds, for example. Such generic thinking is valuable, obviously, but it's not what I'm talking about here. I'm interested in how we think about individuals, like the great-tailed grackle I saw most recently at DFW. To work out how we think about material individuals, I will first distinguish between fixing thought on them by sensation and fixing thought on them by description. Second, I'll introduce a different distinction between having something as a primary object of cognition and having it as a secondary object of cognition. Third, I will discuss how those two distinctions work together, spelling out a natural-sounding thesis that will turn out to be too strong. Fourth, I will discuss an initial way to qualify the too strong thesis. Fifth, I will give reasons for thinking that having something as a primary object of cognition is in some sense better than having it as a secondary object. That's all just the first part, but it's got five subparts. Okay, so 1.1, sensation and description. My first distinction is between fixing thought on an object by sensation and fixing thought on it by description. I'll begin by laying out the distinction in a preliminary way, and then I'll go into some details. You here in this room can sense the lectern that I'm standing at, and you can fix thought on it precisely in virtue of doing so. Most likely it's in virtue of seeing it that you fix thought on it. That's an example of fixing thought on something by sensation. But you can also fix thought on something in a different way. Think, for example, of whatever it is that Michael Gorman most recently bought. You don't know what it is, of course, but that's okay. You are thinking of whatever fits the descriptive phrase item most recently bought by Michael Gorman. This is an example of fixing thought on something by description. It's description, not sensation, that accounts for the fact that you are thinking about a certain item. The difference here is not in and of itself a distinction between two kinds of thing. It's a difference between two ways of thinking about things. That this is so would become maximally clear if I surprised you by announcing that my most recent purchase was, in fact, this lectern that I'm standing on. I bought it just before the lecture began. If that were the case, then the object that you were fixing your thought on by sensation and the object you were fixing your thought on by description would be, in fact, the very same object. Even though the two thoughts would be distinct. This shows that what makes the thoughts different isn't the object, but again, the way of thinking about the object, the mode of access to it. On the other hand, there does seem to be a connection between how an object can be accessed in cognition and what kind of object it is. Numbers, for example, if numbers really exist, are surely not available to sensation. Now, I would like to make a few comments or clarifications concerning this distinction. To begin with. When I speak of objects that are thought about by means of sensation, I mean to include not only objects currently being sensed, but also objects sensed in the past and now only remembered. Next, it's natural to think of this distinction as a distinction along a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum are cases where we are simply sensing something as you are sensing the lectern. At the other end of the spectrum are items for which we have what I'll call pure descriptions. That's to say, descriptions that are devoid of sensory content. If numbers are rightly thought of as objects, again, I have my doubts, then the description, the 57th digit of pi, would be a good example. But many cases seem to fall somewhere in the middle. When introducing the sensation description distinction, the distinction between knowing by sensation and knowing by description, when introducing that distinction, I gave as my example Gorman's most recent purchase, but that description is impure and that has a sensed element, namely me. There might be some difficulty in deciding whether a particular description is pure or impure, but for my purposes at the moment, it doesn't matter. That's because the line I want to draw, at least for now, is between grasping an object solely via sensation and grasping an object via description of any sort, whether the descriptions are pure or involved, an admix perceptual element. If an object is grasped in a way that is even a little bit descriptive, then I'll say that it's grasped by description. Let me make two final remarks about this sensation description distinction. First, it's true that I could never have had descriptive contents like most recent or purchased if I had never sensed anything in my life. But that doesn't mean the distinction disappears. We start with sensation, yes, but we go beyond sensation to form concepts. And when we do this, we use them to pick out individuals via descriptions. Second, if we are really fixing thought on an individual by description, then the description has to be one that catches hold of that individual no matter what. Or to use the dangerous phrase common in analytic philosophy, the description has to be one that applies to that individual in all possible worlds. The description must be, as Saul Kripke would say, rigid. Now, if Aquinas and Kripke are right, entirely generic descriptions of material objects, descriptions that express forms only, descriptions like that will be non-rigid. No matter how detailed your description of a material individual is, there can always be another individual that fits that description. There can be two cars, two cars that are minivans, two cars that are gray minivans, two cars that are gray Kia minivans, etc., etc. If a description is going to narrow things down to just one material individual, regardless of circumstances, it needs to be an impure description, like the minivan belonging to the person I'm currently listening to. The question of purity and impurity of descriptions will come up again later. Okay, so that was 1.1. Now we're up to 1.2. Don't panic, the sections are not all equally long. So, primary and secondary objects of cognition. This is a different distinction. What I say will be inspired by some ideas in Peter Strawson's 1959 book, Individuals, although what I will be proposing is also in an important way rather different. Different enough that I won't mention Strawson further. Consider two items, this lectern again, and my minivan. All of you here can think about this lectern without relying on thoughts about anything else. You can think about it directly. But almost no one here can think about my minivan in that way. Almost everyone here can think about my minivan only on the strength of thinking about me. You think about it as Gorman's minivan. Let's call the lectern a primary object of condition of cognition, and my minivan a secondary object of cognition. The minivan is secondary because you can't think about it except in virtue of thinking about something else. What's primary and what's secondary is relative to the cognizer. My minivan is a secondary object to you, but it's a primary object to me. Also worth noticing is that what's secondary can become primary. If you're ever in Maryland, you can visit me. And at that point, my minivan can become a primary object of cognition for you. A final clarification is that there are tertiary objects of cognition, quaternary objects of cognition, and so on. The northernmost rock embedded in the left front tire of my minivan as a quaternary object for you. To think of it, you must first think of me, then of my minivan, then of that van's left front tire, then of one of the rocks stuck in it. But for present purposes, we could call everything either primary or secondary. Just lumping tertiary and the rest together. Under the heading secondary. I thought of calling it non-primary, but that seemed so pedantic. So you can think of yourself as being at the center of a circle. Inside the circle are your primary objects of cognition. The individuals you fix thought on directly outside the circle are the individuals you fix thought on only on the strength of having fixed thought on primary objects. These are your secondary objects of cognition. Okay. Now, section 1.3. Putting the distinctions together, here comes a strong thesis. The first distinction was between objects recognized by sense and objects cognized by description. Objects cognized by sense and objects cognized by description. The second was between primary objects of cognition and secondary objects of cognition. Now one way to put the distinctions together is in the form of a rather strong thesis. A thesis that is, as we shall see, too strong. The strong thesis is that objects cognized by sense are primary objects of cognition and vice versa, while objects cognized by description are secondary objects of cognition and vice versa. If I'm cognizing something by sense, then it's a primary object for me. Also vice versa, if it's primary, I'm cognizing it by sense. If I'm cognizing something by description, then it's a secondary object for me, and vice versa. I can see this lecture right now, and it's a primary object for me. I have never seen President Sanford's house, but I can grasp it via a description and it's a secondary object for me, known only on the strength of my knowing President Sanford himself as a primary object. 1.4. A final qualification, uh I mean a first qualification of the strong thesis. So I want to propose, yeah, an initial qualification or weakening of the strong thesis just presented. There will be other qualifications later. If I saw Mickey and cognized him by sensation, then he was a primary object of cognition for me. If later, I'm talking to Professor England, and he has never seen or heard of Mickey, I could tell him about a cat named Mickey. If this were to happen, then he would not, just by that very fact, have access to Mickey by sense. I mean, obviously, just my my telling him about a cat doesn't make him see the cat or feel the cat or whatever. But Professor England would, I wish to claim, nonetheless be able to have Mickey as a primary object of cognition rather than as a secondary object of cognition. That's because Professor England would be able to fix thought on him by name. This idea came to me through reading Saul Kripke. Whether it's actually what Kripke holds is a somewhat complicated question that I'm not going to get into here. What I'll do instead is simply unpack the idea itself. The idea is that if I refer to something by name and you are thereby led to think of that thing, then your thought is led to the thing in a way that does not require passing through any description of it, your thought is led directly and immediately to the thing. If you or Professor England hear the name Mickey, you do not think descriptively or of whatever was, let's say, Gorman's childhood cat. No, you think directly of Mickey. You think directly of him. Now, if your thought of him does not depend on any mediating content, then, offward Yuri, your thought does not depend on an individual distinct from him in a way that would make him a secondary object for you. Were Professor England to think of Mickey by name, then he would not be thinking of him on the strength of thinking of any other particular, but instead just directly. Mickey would be a primary object of cognition for him. Names thus provide a way of extending the range of primary objects of cognition. On the original strong thesis, your only primary objects were your objects of sense, current sensation or remembered sensation. But on this new thesis, your primary objects included not only your objects of sense, but also things you can think about by name, even if you have never sensed them. The reason why I say that this is a qualification of the strong thesis, rather than an outright rejection of it, is that the objects you can think about by name are objects of sense to someone else. Professor England doesn't have sense cognition of Mickey, but somewhere back down the line, someone had to have had sense cognition of Mickey so that they could label him Mickey. So on this qualified thesis, all of your primary objects are sense objects to someone. Either they are sense objects to you, or they are sense objects to someone else, but known to you by name. 1.5. In this section, I will argue that it is better to have something as a primary object than to have it as a secondary object. Suppose you start receiving notes from a secret admirer. It seems to me that this secret admirer would be a secondary object of cognition for you. You know him or her as the person who wrote these notes to me. The notes themselves, those are primary objects of cognition for you, and the person who wrote them is known only by descriptions involving the notes. So they're secondary objects. Now imagine you enjoy the notes and you've become convinced that the person writing them is attractive in several ways. Wouldn't you want to meet that person in person, in real life, as we tellingly say? It seems to me that you would. It's not simply, that it's an easier way to learn certain facts about the secret admirer, such as his or her precise hair color. Quite apart from such understandable epistemic concerns, you just would want to meet the secret admirer in person. If you didn't, that would be a sign that you weren't actually all that entranced by the secret admirer. All other things being equal, at least, having someone as a primary object is better, closer, more intimate, a fuller kind of knowing. Here's another way of getting at the same point. Suppose you accept the distinction between primary and secondary objects of cognition. And suppose you begin by accepting the sorts of examples I have been giving. You think you have, among your primary objects of cognition, items like this lectern. But then let's say you read too much of the wrong works by Bertrand Russell, and you become convinced that the primary objects of your cognition are not ordinary objects but sense data. You know certain color patches primarily, and your awareness of the lectern is only secondary. You know the lectern is what causes you to have these visual experiences, what causes you to have these sort of brown patches in your visual field. Now, depending on how you develop this theory, your cognitive grip on the lectern might be entirely secure. You aren't doubting the existence of the lectern. You're not doubting your ability to re-identify it later, anything like that. But still, the lectern would not be something that you have immediate cognition of, but rather something you had only secondary cognition of. Let's suppose you experience this philosophical misfortune. You were just as confident of the lectern's existence as before, yes, but wouldn't you nonetheless feel a little strange and queasy? Not precisely cut off from external reality, maybe, but at a distance from it and alienated from it. Again, what I'm trying to get to is this. It's better to have something as a primary object of cognition. I'm not claiming that it's bad or inappropriate to have something as a secondary object of cognition. It's far better than nothing. And often it's the best we can do. Either because some things cannot become primary for us, or because life is just too short to do what's needed to make everything that could be primary actually become primary. Even so, I want to claim that all other things being equal, it's better to have something as a primary object of cognition rather than to have it as a secondary object of cognition. And now, it's finally time for me to start talking about the announced topic, namely fixing thought on God. So, section two, difficulties with extending thought to God. I have made a number of points about our ordinary way of knowing individual material things. But these ways of knowing have limits when we try applying them to God. To begin with, God is not an object of sensation. As Scripture teaches, God is spirit. That's John 4.24. No one has ever seen God. That's John 1.18. From this it would seem to follow that God cannot be a primary object of cognition for me, either according to the strong thesis, or according to the qualified version we have seen so far. Instead, God must be a secondary object, something we know only by a description framed with reference to some other object or objects. For example, we can think of God as the maker of heaven and earth. Maybe you've heard that phrase. Now, having God as a secondary object of cognition is certainly something to be grateful for. I'm not complaining. Even so, it might seem somewhat disappointing if our knowledge of God always turned out to be, as it were, secondhand or at arm's length. Is there some way for God to become a primary object of cognition for us? In the remainder of this section, I will discuss a way to do this that is, in my view, real, but still less than what we might actually want. Above, I mentioned pure descriptions, descriptions that do not involve sensed elements. I claimed that thinking by means of such descriptions cannot give us proper access to material individuals. The materiality of material individuals means that such thoughts can never pick them out rigidly. But the case of immaterial individuals would seem to be different. Precisely because they are immaterial, it should be possible for there to be pure descriptions of them that allow us to pick them out as individuals no matter what. This is a reframe of Aquinas' thesis that there can be no more than one immaterial being of a different kind. I say it should be possible. That doesn't mean it's easy. It's not clear, for example, whether we can have such descriptions for individual angels. We have the description, the angel that revealed the incarnation to Mary, but that's not a pure description. Interestingly, however, it seems pretty plausible that we do have such descriptions of God. For example, the uncaused cause, or the being that is pure act, or the being in which essence and existence are really identical. I don't think these descriptions make God a secondary object of cognition. If we know God by these descriptions, there's no other object on the strength of knowing which we are knowing God. So this gives us a second qualification of the strong thesis. And it also gives us a way to have God as a primary object. It's worth noting that these descriptions are rather refined. If you interview your standard mass goer, I'm going to lay money, he doesn't have much to say about the identity or non-identity of essence and existence in God. Aquinas is really right about this. The truth about God, insofar as it's known by natural reason, is known only to a few after much labor and with a significant admixture of error. Now, my point isn't that this approach to God is elitist and therefore bad. If the true account is an elitist one, well, so be it. But it might simply seem false that only a few philosophers can fix their minds on God as a primary object of cognition. If it's false that only a few can do so, then we will have reason to think that the proposal under consideration here, that God can be thought about as a primary object by means of pure descriptions, that this proposal cannot be the end of the story. However, sorry, however that may be, this way of fixing thought on God seems to me inadequate and less than fully satisfying. To bring this out, I would like to discuss a text from Aquinas' discussion of the knowledge had by angels. Aquinas asks whether angels know material singulars. It's a tricky topic because angels lack sensation. So if they know material individuals, it's not going to be in the way that we know them. Without getting pulled off track into a discussion of angelic cognition, let us consider something from Aquinas' discussion that seems to shed light on our discussion of human cognition. Starting from partway through his review of past opinions on the subject, Aquinas says the following. Others said, this is Aquinas now, others said that an angel has a cognition of singulars, but in the universal causes that particular effects are traced back to. Sorry, as an astronomer makes a judgment about a future eclipse on the basis of how heavenly motions are arranged. But, this is still Aquinas, this position does not avoid the aforementioned difficulties, because to know a singular in its universal causes in this way is not to know the singular itself as singular, that is, as it is here and now. For an astronomer knowing a future eclipse through computations of heavenly motions knows it as universal, in universali, he says. Or as universal, I think that's better, not as a universal. But administration and foresight and moving, okay, that's like what angels do. Administration and foresight and moving have to do with singulars as they are here and now. So that's the Aquinas quotation. In a way that seems to be quite general and not restricted to angels only, Aquinas says that knowing about a singular isn't knowing it as a singular, if you know it only as the result of general causes. Aquinas' remarks here seem to me relevant to our topic. Knowing something as the result of general causes is at least similar to knowing it by way of description. Is it similar enough? It could be doubted. After all, knowledge by description sounds like a broader category than knowledge through general causes. I admit that it sounds broader, but on the other hand, Aquinas uses the language of causality more broadly than we today are inclined to. Perhaps the two eyes, the two ideas aren't so different after all, then. In any case, my point, whether or not it's Aquinas is, is this knowing something by description, even a pure description, isn't the same as knowing it as a singular. Even if the sole member of a set or a class is necessarily the soul member. Still, thinking of something as a member of a set or class is different from thinking of it as itself. Thinking of something as an instance of a kind is not the same as thinking of it in its own singularity. So knowing God by description isn't the same as knowing him as a singular. It's not relevant that we know, if we're good metaphysicians, we know that in truth, God is not an instance of a kind. Where we'll say to ourselves, I mean, if he were an instance of a kind, then he would have to participate in that kind, then he wouldn't be the first being, but he is the first being. Okay, we know all that stuff, but that doesn't actually matter. Because if we think about God in the way that I'm describing here, we're representing him or signifying him as if he were an instance of a kind. And our concern here is precisely with how we think about things. So if we think about God as an instance of a kind, we aren't thinking about him as a singular. And even if at the end we add, of course he isn't really, we're still thinking of him not as a singular, but only as an instance of a kind. So I submit that while this way of thinking about God is better than nothing, it's not the most we might hope for. Even though, again, knowing God through a pure description is knowing him as a primary object, still it's better, all other things being equal, to grasp a singular object as a singular rather than as a member of a set or an instance of a kind. Conceptual mediation isn't the kind of mediation that makes something secondary in the sense I delineated earlier, but it's still a kind of mediation. And hence the cognitive access that it gives us is only, as it were, from a distance at second hand. Section three. Two ways to fix thought on God as a primary and singular object of cognition. In the previous section, we saw various ways of fixing thought on God, but we also saw reason to wish for something better. What would this better kind of thought be like? An impure description would make God secondary, and a pure description would represent God as the member of a class or type, so it seems we're looking for a nondescriptive kind of thought. Before coming to that, however, I want to mention some reasons why one might object to this entire line of inquiry. The first begins with a quotation from Scripture Seek not what is too difficult for you, or investigate what is beyond your power. Cirach 321. To which I say, yes, if it's all we can get. But it's too soon to say. The next thought also begins with Scripture. Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully. That's 1 Corinthians 13, 12. We will have more direct and singular knowledge of God in the next life, or anyway we hope we will. As Aquinas teaches, the saints' knowledge of God in the afterlife will not be mediated at all, because God Himself will immediately be present to the mind. In short, the objection runs, let's not be impatient. To which I say yes, let's aspire to the beatific vision, and let's happily grant that the beatific vision exceeds anything possible in this life. But from this it doesn't follow that there is no way to have God as a primary and singular object of cognition in this life. A third thought is that wanting to go beyond what has been sketched so far might be inconsistent with the task of philosophy or theology. Philosophy and theology, one might argue, are supposed to be sciences. Not in the contemporary sense of that word, of course, where science means something like mathematical descriptions of empirical results, but in the Aristotelian sense of conceptual graspings that can be organized as a deductive system of axioms and theorems. When our thinking about God is scientific, in this sense, one might object, we aim at singulars not as such, but only as captura in concepts. Aquinas, I admit, sometimes gives indications that he approves of this way of thinking about theology. I myself don't see a lot of reason to accept it, but never mind. Let me grant, for the sake of argument, that the philosopher or theologian as such should have no desire for his science to include non-descriptive thoughts of God. Even on that assumption, it is perfectly legitimate for the philosopher or theologian to ask whether it's possible for humans to have such thoughts of God. Even if the having of such thoughts would not form part of the science of philosophy or theology, still, a theory about such thoughts would fit into the science of philosophy or theology. And that's what I'm working out right now. So then, is there a way for humans in this life to have not just secondary thought of God and not just thought of God that represents him as an instance of a kind? I want to consider two ways. The first is this perhaps humans experience God, sensing his presence in the stillness of their hearts in such a way that they thereby think of him, the one present in that way and at that time. I confess to feeling a reluctance, a reluctance to discuss this. It's a private and intimate matter for each of us, perhaps best not discussed at all, or only indirectly, and surely not, in a large room full of people who are to some extent strangers to one another, and of whom some may be scoffers. Some matters should be left undiscussed, at least most of the time. On the other hand, it's clearly related to our topic. With trepidation and caution, then, let me make a few remarks. I think one has to allow that this happens. But one has to be cautious, because we all know that we can be deceived about such things. Careful discernment is required. Just because it happens doesn't mean that we know very well when it happens and when it doesn't. That deception is possible and that discernment is both needed and difficult is due in part to the very inward and even private nature of such contact with God. Maybe I think I sensed God's presence both today and yesterday, but how can I check whether what I sensed the presence of today is the same as what I sensed the presence of yesterday? Maybe I think I sensed God's presence, and you think you sensed God's presence. But how can we check whether what I sensed the presence of is what you sensed the presence of? I don't mean to be deeply skeptical about this. I'm not denying that anyone ever senses God's presence, but there are a lot of issues to be sorted out. Issues related to the fact that this sort of experience is, again, inward and private. Unless you are a Cartesian, inward and private experiences raise worries. One needn't go all the way down the extreme Wittgensteinian path to share these worries, at least to some extent. What's just been said is closely related to the following. In some of my formulations, I've used the word sensing. I've said, I've talked about sensing God. If it makes sense to speak in this, if it makes sense to speak in this fashion, it's clear that our language has undergone some sort of shift. Sensing God or perceiving God is not the same as sensing a lectern or a cat. We would thus seem to have arrived at still another qualification of the strong thesis, according to which something must be sensed in order to be primary. Sensing on this approach would not be just ordinary sensing, but some kind of spiritual sensing. But this very qualification is precisely, again, a source of philosophical worry. When someone claims to perceive something in the ordinary sense of that word, there are a lot of ways to get control over the situation because others can sense the same object. Indeed, when they can't, the claim that something has been sensed begins to look suspicious. In the case at hand, by contrast, external checks are hard to come by. Putting all that on the back burner and leaving it there for the duration, I want to point us down a different path. A path that indeed seems to go in almost the opposite direction. Instead of thinking about what is private, let us ask about what is public. Is there any sense or way in which God can be a public object? And instead of thinking about sensing in some extended and spiritual sense, let us ask about sensation of the ordinary sort. Is there any way in which God can be an object of ordinary perception? Of course, these two questions are interrelated. Paradigm public objects, like this lectern, are at the same time paradigm sensible objects. Earlier, I said that God cannot be sensed, but might I have been going too fast? I quoted John 1.18, but I cut the quotation off. Let's read it more fully. No one has ever seen God. No one has ever seen God. The only God who is at the Father's side, he has made him known. The one who is at the Father's side is, of course, the second person of the Holy Trinity. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. That's John 1.14. That which was from the beginning is now something which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands. 1 John 1.1. In the incarnation, a divine person has become an object of sensation, indeed, a public object of sensation. As the other disciples said to Thomas, speaking in the first person plural, we have seen the Lord. That's John 20, 25. Of course, we personally, those of us here in this room, have not seen the Lord. The ascension happened nearly 2,000 years ago. So Christ cannot be a perceptual object for us now. But recall a point made earlier about names. If someone has encountered something in sensation and named it, then that name can get passed along to us, allowing us to think of the object by name. There is no reason why this would not apply to the name Jesus. The Son of God has become incarnate and received a name from his parents. And this name has been passed along a chain even unto us here in 21st century Texas. That which they have seen and heard, they proclaim also to us. If we can think of him by name, then he is, for us, a primary object of cognition. He is also thereby an object of a singular thought, because thinking of something by name does not pass through descriptive content and therefore does not involve thinking of it as an instance of a kind or a member of a set. You might say that this gives Christians an advantage over non-Christians. But weirdly, it's not as true as it sounds. Even non-Christians do refer to Jesus by name. And when they do, they are referring to a divine person and thinking of a divine person, whether they know it or not. Someone who says Jesus was merely a malcontend from the Middle East, someone who says that is someone who is unwittingly speaking and thinking of a divine person. Just as those without understanding crucify the Lord of glory, so too those without understanding are nonetheless unwittingly speaking and thinking of him. All this brings out an important epistemic effect of the incarnation. It makes it possible for us to have nondescriptive thought of a divine person, because a divine person has become a physical object publicly available to sensation, an object of common reference in a way that is precisely proportioned for rational animals like ourselves. His becoming flesh and dwelling among us facilitates our identifying him, naming him, and referring to him directly and as a singular person. Section 4. Almost done. I'd like to close out by bringing up a few additional issues, even if I can't go into them in any detail. The first point has to do with Trinitarian theology. I have said that those who hear and use the name Jesus can think by name of a divine person, namely the second person, the Son of God. What about the Father and the Spirit? Here is my suggestion. Jesus himself knows them by acquaintance. And he gives us their names when he speaks of the Father and the Spirit. As we can think of the second divine person by means of a name passed on to us from the apostles and ultimately Joseph and Mary, so we can think of the first and third divine persons by means of names passed on to us from Jesus. A second point also relates to Trinitarian theology. I propose a way of thinking about individual divine persons. But can't we also just refer to God? This is hard to answer. Trinitarian theology is excruciatingly difficult. But perhaps some light can be shed by moving on to the final point. The beatific vision has been mentioned already. It is a maximally intense case of having God as a nondescriptive and primary object of cognition. If Aquinas is right, the beatific vision gives us intellectual acquaintance with the divine essence, the numerically one selfsame essence shared by all three persons. Perhaps this is the answer to the worry about fixing thought not only on individual divine persons, but on God. Maybe we can do this in the super direct way, only with the beatific vision. That's not all there is to say about the next life. After the final resurrection, we will have our bodies back, and they will be functioning bodies, so the saints at least will be able to see Jesus in the flesh. This will give them their own sensation-based thoughts of him, not just borrowed thoughts, based on having received his name from someone else who saw him. Revelations 22, 4 says, They shall see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 58:15

Thank you, Dr. Gorman. Let me just give you a quick sketch of the rest of our proceedings. We'll now have a formal response from Dr. Chad Englund of the Philosophy Department, after which uh Dr. Gorman will have an opportunity to briefly respond to the response, and then all of you can respond to the responding and the responding and the responding through a question and answer session that will take us for a while until we conclude with the reception later in the evening. Dr. English.

SPEAKER_02 59:10

And St. Augustine opens his confessions by wondering how we can call upon God and make sure we are not calling upon something or someone else instead. Which is not just a theoretical problem, but a real one. It wasn't until reading the book of the Platonists, he tells us that he learnt to refer to God the creator and not some sham, sorry, substitute in his place. And when St. Paul appeared in Athens, he identified the god he proclaimed as none of the above. Not Athena, not Zeus, not any member of the pantheon of deities. Instead, he mentioned the temple to an unknown god. That unknown God is the god that he proclaims. And who is this god? It is the God of the philosophers in whom we live and move and have our being. It is God the Creator. Dr. Gorman wants to know how we can concretely refer to God. He argues, in my view, correctly, that descriptions do not accomplish this. Even if the descriptions should be definite. That is, referring to a class with only one member. His solution is that thinking about God as a primary object is undergirded by the incarnation. I really like this idea. But I want to propose that the incarnation is only one part of a two-part solution to the issue. I will suggest that we need not only avail ourselves of pointing out, we also need to avail ourselves of pointing out something absent by means of something that isn't. The problem. What is it to fix thought on God? Dr. Gorman says in a footnote that his topic is the sheer ability to lock thought onto an object. Here, fix means something like a fix. We should think here of a laser pointer or tractor beam or homing device. Those of a more phenomenological persuasion might talk following the scholastics of intention. But Dr. Gorman specifies we don't want to figure out how to think about God as a natural kind in some generic way, as an instance of a particular kind. We want to lock onto God in his particularity, in his singularity, as a person and not as a generic thing. Dr. Gorman says that ordinarily we lock onto objects such as this leg turn, which is suddenly a star, just by spotting it. In this way, we intend the thing in its individuated particularity. We can also lock onto something in a less direct way through the eyes of another. We can lock onto Dr. Gorman's car in this way as a secondary object as described by him. This is a less immediate way. We can lock onto his car only filtered through generic attributes, not as it is there in the flesh before us. To point out or ostend something gives it to us concretely. To describe or define gives it to us abstractly. Here's the problem Dr. Gorman raises. Is there a way to lock our thought onto God in his singularity? And here it would seem Dr. Gorman wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to square the circle. But like Kant, who wanted his judgments to be both synthetic and a priori, Dr. Gorman has a solution. Thankfully, for us, it won't take a critique of pure reason to work out in a prologue to popularize. We can't indeed ostend God, says Dr. Gorman, because we can ostend Jesus. To say a name is to enter into the original ostention of the naming baptism. For example, anyone who calls me Chad does so in reference to the original naming baptism accomplished both legally and sacramentally by my parents, Brian and Barbara, and duly registered by the state of Ohio in the parish of St. Ignatius in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Here someone say Chad and lock on to me as the result. The same is true of referring to Jesus. We avail ourselves of the naming baptism that locks onto just that particular person, son of Mary, and, as was supposed, Joseph the Carpenter. Dr. Gorman has, in effect, proposed as the solution to the problem God's own solution by way of the incarnation. Thanks to the incarnation, we can have our cake and eat it too. We can refer to the immaterial and invisible God, not simply through generic description, but also in his singularity, through his having taken on flesh. In phenomenological terms, we can point out God in the flesh for the simple reason that God has indeed taken on flesh and thereby enabled such pointing out. We are all indebted to Dr. Gorman for carefully navigating all these issues for us. I think it's safe to say that something that seems obvious, referring to God, has taken on a more mysterious and wondrous quality as a result of his meditation, which has had the result of drawing us ever more closely into the wonder of wonders, the God man Jesus Christ. In the hopes of rounding out the wonderment concerning what it takes to lock our thoughts onto God, I want to propose a problem that points to a complementary resource for its solution. Kripke raises the question whether, when we refer to Santa Claus, we are really referring to St. Nicholas. Some people are of this opinion. He confesses his own doubts on this topic. The Coca-Cola marketing confection has little to do with a bishop who rescued three girls from poverty. Or considered Dionysius, a name that refused three separate chains in the Middle Ages. There was one, the philosophical convert of St. Paul, two, the first bishop of Paris, three, that Syrian monk who authored the divine names. Chains of transmission can go awry, and there is therefore the documented worry that scholars call semantic drift. Any historical chain is susceptible to this worry as the childhood game of telephone can illustrate. Now, several scholars have applied Krifki's insight to the question of God in the causal chain that is traced back to Abraham. Or Jesus, but without Gorman's focus on the incarnation. How do these thinkers control for the problem of semantic drift? How do we know we at the end of the chain of transmission are referring to the same thing that the origin of the chain referred to? Scholars usually appeal to a description of one sort or another to keep the transmission on track. Megan Sullivan at the University of Notre Dame, however, thinks it's the Holy Spirit that safeguards this transmission. Gorman and Sullivan both appeal to theological solutions to the problem. And I like that approach. But I think it can be complemented by philosophical solutions too. So we come to the proposed resolution with a limitation regarding the solution. Kripke ordinarily anchors his causal chain in a direct ostention, pointing right at something that's right there before you, a direct object, primary object of cognition. But he notices an interesting case of it was posited to exist even without being seen, simply as whatever was the cause of this gravitational disturbance in the other planets. Thus the chain of reference is anchored in effect, in an effect, which, as an effect, refers us to its absent or hidden cause. I appreciate what Dr. Gorman does here by pointing to Jesus as mediated to us through a chain of transmission, but I want to suggest that alongside the ostention, the pointing directly, he prizes in the description he rightly finds wanting, there is an essential alternative, uh deferred ostention, uh to borrow a term and repurpose it from Quine. A deferred ostention can be used to fix our thought on something singular, even if we don't spot it, because it is grounded in something that we do see in its singularity. For example, three years ago, I was standing in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, and it was early in the morning, I was there by myself before the Pietat. This fellow comes up to me and he says, he looks over at me, he looks at the Pietà, he looks at me, and he says, Is that something famous? And I said, It's a Michelangelo. Now, suppose you were among the first to see Michelangelo's Piet unveiled 500 years ago in the Old St. Peter's. It's a famous story. You marveled at it, but you didn't know who sculpted it. No one did. Yet you could refer to the cause of this statue. You didn't know anything else about Michelangelo or about sculpting to do so. All you need to know is that the existence of this statue had some efficient cause. Whoever that cause might be, that's who you refer to when you point to the statue and think of its cause. We know about sculptors, just not this one. When we refer to the generator of heaven and earth, we need not have a description. We need not know anything about what it is to make heaven and earth, nor think that we are referring in a generic way to the ultimate source of all. We need only know about responsibility, and that an explanation assigns responsibility. Aristotle in Book Two of the Physics points out that we can refer to a sculptor as the cause of a statue, but we can point to uh this sculptor as the cause of this sculpture. So to assign a cause to this pieta is to fix our thoughts onto its singular sculptor, the very thing the name Michelangelo likewise targets. In fact, as you you can know, and you can all verify this by going over to Cardinal Farrah, our replica uh replicates this detail. Michelangelo was scandalized that people didn't know who had carved this statue. So he uh carved his name across the sash, the only piece of work in his long career that he signed. By the same token, so uh when we point to the cause of this pieta, we're targeting what Michelangelo, the name targets. Similarly, we can talk about the cause of a creation and think of a God, or we can lock into a concrete mode and talk about the cause of this creation, here gesturing to the world we see populated with all these primary objects. And then we can refer to God the creator in his singularity. This takes on heightened salience when we discover that creation is not something that belongs to the past, but something happening now. The existence of anything and anyone, ourselves included, is a pointer to the singular reality of God the Creator. In sum, I applaud Dr. Gorman's fine account. We agree on much, including the importance of ostention for fixing our thoughts on the concrete. My proposal is to complement his fine work by grounding the fixing of thought on God, the Creator, as the ultimate cause of all of this. It is that God who is incarnate as this man, Jesus Christ. For good reason does the Nicene Creed specify that the God of Jesus Christ is the God who created heaven and earth, all things visible and invisible. The faith is nourished on the deferred ostention of God the Creator, knowable by reason. And the ostention of the Son by the Father and the Holy Spirit, reconfirmed each Mass, which is knowable by faith alone in this mortal life.

unknown 1:12:12

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:22

All right. My coming through. So I'll just say a few little things in response and then we'll get the rumble started. So I'm really grateful to Dr. Englin for these remarks, and they've been very thought-provoking for me. I need to think more. Deferred astension, it sounds like description to me. I can be talked out of that. In any case, it seems to me that there's an important difference between, like, point, like in Quine's example, pointing at a gas gauge and talking about the gas, and pointing at creation in the way that you describe. Because in one case you're saying, like, look, the gas is low. But when you point at creation, you're not, you don't say God, you say the creator of this. Um, and it seems to me um that this means is a case of having God as a as a secondary object of cognition rather than a primary object. You're you're thinking of God on the strength of first thinking of the creation. So that doesn't mean it's bad or wrong, um, but it's not um going that extra step that I'm trying to go. So that's the first thing I want to say. I might be missing what your point is. Um, suppose I'm like one million percent right. Okay, from that, and this is a very interesting, and this is what I find, in a sense, most important, um, that wouldn't mean that the proposal I have just supersedes what you say, and it doesn't matter anymore. And here's why. This business that you bring up about semantic drift, this is an important topic. Um we say Jesus. Now the fact is, um, you know, in some languages they name kids Jesus. Um and how do we know that when we say Jesus, it's like the the chain of reference, right? Maybe there was some kid in in 15th century Spain, and his parents just called him Jesus, and that that's the name that got passed on to me, so I've been talking about this 15th century kid my whole life. You know? Um now, I think in fact, um we don't, if we think this through, there's absolutely no reason to panic here. Because there's lots of good reasons to think that when we use the name Jesus to refer to that first century guy, that we actually do successfully hook it up with that first century guy, um, because there's just all this historical tale. Like this this you can draw out those connections, okay? However, in doing that, you're um focusing on that first century guy as a secondary object of cognition. So it may turn out that the idea that I'm proposing, it really does get us God in perhaps a kind of unique way as a primary object of cognition. But the only way to make sure it works is to sort of buttress it up from all sides by thinking of God as a secondary. That would be a very interesting result. Um I'm tempted, like at the moment, I think that's probably right, but I haven't had time to work this out. So anyway, um yeah, that's all I've got.