Surely the anguish of losing the things that matter most to us and render our lives meaningful is one of the principal things motivating religious belief. William James says that at the heart of religious faith is the belief that “perfection is eternal,” that is, that the best things are the more eternal things, so that ultimately goodness has the final word in cosmic history. The atheist alternative is to say that the best things – love, goodness, beauty – are temporary and fairly recent aspects of cosmic history and will ultimately disappear without a trace, swallowed up by an indifferent universe.

Some philosophers, like William James, think that religious belief is warranted because our lives are made richer, more purposive, and more meaningful by believing that “goodness is eternal.” Others, like Friedrich Nietzsche, heap scorn on this as weakness and cowardice in the face of reality. For Nietzsche, Plato emblemizes this sort of cowardice: Plato longs for the “ideal” (Goodness Itself) and devalues the “real” (life as it is here and now). In a revealing passage in his Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche tells us, “My recreation, my predilection, my cure for all Platonism has always been Thucydides” (and also Machiavelli). What Nietzsche likes about Thucydides is his brutal, uncomplaining, matter-of-fact honesty in describing and accepting the world as it is. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounts the Athenians responding as follows when other Greeks criticized Athenian imperialism: “It has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger… calculations of interest have made you take up the cry of justice – a consideration which no one has ever yet brought forward to hinder his ambition when he had a chance of gaining anything by might. … the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”  It is surely this passage and others like it that Nietzsche has in mind when praising Thucydides. Nietzsche contrasts Plato and Thucydides as follows: “Courage in the face of reality is…the point of difference between natures such as Thucydides and Plato. Plato is a coward in the face of reality – consequently, he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has control over himself – consequently he also has control over things.”

Are Plato and William James really just cowards who can’t deal with reality? Hardly. In fact, they are careful thinkers who strive, in their very different ways, to be attentive and faithful to a central aspect of human experience. To love something or someone is to be committed to that value or that person. This attitude of commitment is logically incompatible with any attitude of indifference to, or any devaluing of, the thing or person in question, with merely shrugging one’s shoulders when that value or person is violated. Nietzsche’s contempt for Plato (and Christianity), and his glorification of Thucydides and Machiavelli, mean that he has contempt for the justice that was violated so cynically by the Athenians and for the human lives that have been destroyed in every unjust war ever waged. To love is to feel anguish at any violation of what one loves. To renounce such anguish as cowardice is to reject the commitment that is its flip side.

Of course, it is possible to reject Nietzsche’s repugnant cynicism while not embracing theism. One could be an agnostic or atheist who affirms the importance and objectivity of moral norms. Derek Parfit and Albert Camus both fall into this category. Yet I cannot help but think that such a view must leave one constantly vulnerable to despair. Indeed, for Camus the contrast between the strength of his moral commitments and the indifference of the universe was a paradigm case of absurdity. If the universe is absurd, why should we care so much about it? How can one care so much about it and avoid despair, unless one believes that “perfection is eternal,” and thus that absurdity is only the appearance of things and not the ultimate reality?

We should all welcome these reminders of the duty to treat others with respect and charity. And yet it is also important to resist and preempt mistaken interpretations of multiculturalism and its associated virtues (tolerance, respect, charity). Some people seem to think that tolerance for cultural diversity requires denying that any culture or religion is superior to others in any way. Cultural relativists assert that one can make moral judgments only from the standpoint of one’s own culture and that one must therefore never make moral evaluations of cultures other than one’s own. Such evaluations, when negative, will often be criticized as manifestations of pernicious biases or of imperialistic designs on other lands (“demonizing the non-Western Other”).

The problem with cultural relativism is that it undermines the very case for tolerance that it wishes to strengthen. Charity and respect are moral values, after all, and if one must not “impose” one’s moral values on other cultures, then one has no grounds for condemning intolerance and imperialism when these are sanctioned by custom in other countries. To condemn oppression of religious or ethnic minorities or of women in foreign lands, for instance, is not to engage in intolerant or “imperialistic” thinking. It is, rather, to follow the logical implications of the very moral principles that lead us to condemn such practices in our own culture. Taking morality seriously means recognizing that it is more than just a set of arbitrary cultural prejudices. If the gospel of Christian love is a mere cultural prejudice, then we would be very foolish indeed to make any serious sacrifices in order to abide by it, let alone be martyred for it.

A further point is that educational institutions are devoted to the pursuit of truth. Following evidence and logic wherever they might lead is central to what teachers and students do. Pursuing the truth about culture, religion, or morality can lead one to conclusions that might make others (including the Other) uncomfortable, or even angry. Pursuing understanding (in the sense of knowledge) might undermine understanding (in the sense of sympathy or cordial relations with others). As we seek to promote understanding in the latter sense, it is important for us to remind ourselves that sometimes understanding in the former sense is the more fundamental value at an institution devoted to the pursuit of knowledge.

Branding with the Cross:
Flannery O’Connor on the Comedy of Christian Formation

Bean Lecture delivered on October 28, 2010 at Saint Anselm College

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Professor Wood’s Homepage: http://homepages.baylor.edu/ralph_wood/

Aphorisms of G.K. Chesterton: http://bearspace.baylor.edu/Ralph_Wood/www/chesterton/chesterton_aphorisms.pdf

Selected poems of G.K. Chesterton: http://bearspace.baylor.edu/Ralph_Wood/www/chesterton/cp.pdf

It seems to me that Anselm’s view of hell as having beauty can only be understood in the context of his understanding of heaven, and from that perspective, hell as a place of eternal punishment does have, as strange as it may seem, a necessary beauty.  For Anselm heaven is the model of right order.  There are three kinds of order in heaven: first, heaven is a moral order in that sin and punishment are precluded from being there; second, heaven is a salvific order in that heaven is the reward granted to those who persevere in the faith; third, heaven is a mystical order in that it is inhabited by a perfect number of beings.  You can read my remarks about these three orders of heaven in The Saint Anselm Journal Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall2008) at:

http://www.anselm.edu/Documents/Institute%20for%20Saint%20Anselm%20Studies/Abstracts/4.5.3.2a_61Fortin.pdf

The sharpest contrast between the saved and the damned in the writings of Anselm I think is found in De humanis moribus. In this work Anselm set out four-fold conditions to which human nature was susceptible: to be miserable [miser], the condition of those who live in the world; to be most miserable [miserrimus], the condition of those who are permanently fixed in the fires of hell; to be happy [beatus], the condition of those who enjoyed the earthly paradise before the fall, viz., Adam and Eve; to be most happy [beatissimus], the condition of those who reside with the saints in heaven.  The beatus condition no longer obtains and the miser condition is limited to this life.  Thus at the end of time, all rational beings will exist either in a state of beatissimus or miserrimus.  Those who order their lives according to the will of God will enjoy the condition of beatissimus.

Earlier in the same work, Anselm had set out fourteen opposed pairs of beatitude and misery.  The first set of seven belongs properly to the body: beauty and ugliness; agility and slowness; strength and weakness; freedom and servitude; sanity and insanity; calmness and anxiety; long-lived and short-lived.  The second set of seven belongs properly to the soul: wise and foolish; friendly and unfriendly; agreeable and disagreeable; honorable and shameful; powerful and impotent; peaceful of mind and fearful; joyful and sad.  Those in heaven will enjoy the fullness of all fourteen beatitudes and are most blessed, while those in the underworld will be cursed with the fourteen miseries and will be most miserable.

With this brief background, let us try to approach Anselm’s understanding of hell.  Anselm offered no tour through hell à la Homer or Virgil or Dante.  Except for one instance he did not describe what awaits those who deserve eternal death.  With the exception of two occasions in which Anselm spoke of hell as the place where all souls went prior to Christ’s redemption act, all other references to hell simply referred to the place of eternal damnation.  Anselm used three terms to refer to hell: the most frequent term was infernus, but in a few instances he used the Scriptural term Gehenna and the pagan term Tartara.  While the three terms are scattered throughout his writings, it is in Meditation II: A Lament for Virginity Unhappily Lost that one finds his most concentrated references to hell and in which, incidentally, all three terms are used.

This meditation is, as the title indicates, a lament on his own failings as a sinner despite his religious profession (i.e., his virginity).  Anselm opened the meditation with a pitiful statement of his present condition as a sinner, and not only a sinner, but a sinner who had professed religious vows: “Once I was washed with the whiteness of heaven,” he wrote, “given the Holy Spirit, pledged with the profession of Christianity; I was a virgin, I was the spouse of Christ.”  But now because of his sins, the one to whom he had made his pledge and vows was now longer “the kind spouse of my virginity, but the terrible judge of my impurity.”  He derided himself who was once “the spouse of the king of heaven and with alacrity you have made yourself the whore of the tormentor of hell [tartarorum].”  Anselm continued to develop this rhythmic and balancing effect in his prose between what he once was and what he is now with similar metaphors.  For example, he declared that he wanted nothing to do with consolation, security or joy unless the forgiveness of sins brought them back to him: “Be far from me before death, so that perhaps mercy will give you back to me after death.”  He meditated on hell, “the land of darkness and the shadows of death,” in order to exhort himself to return to the Lord.  Here, and only here in Anselm’s works, do we have some brief graphic description of hell: sulphurous flames; flames of hell, eddying darkness, swirling with terrible sounds; worms living in fire; devils that burn with us, raging with fire.  The meditation ends with a plea to the Lord to hear his prayer for mercy and forgiveness as he takes full credit for his sins:

Lord, you do not lie; would it be truly not “to desire the death of a sinner” to bury into hell [Gehenna] a sinner who cries out to you?  Is to thrust down a sinner into hell [infernus] to “desire not the death of a sinner”?  Surely it is rather that “I will that the sinner turn and live.”  Lord, I am indeed the sinner….  Good Lord, do not recall your just claims against your sinner, but remember mercy towards your creature.

Hell was what it was, in Anselm’s thought, and as that which was the absolute rejection of divine grace and beatitude was not deemed worthy of any more than what one might call almost casual mention.  It was the epitome of the disorder and chaos caused by disobedience toward and rejection of the reign of God and his Christ.   As such it was the opposite of heaven, wherein right order reigns.  Heaven being the only logical goal of every rational being, hell’s beauty in the plan of creation then lay in providing a place for those who chose total disorder and irrationality.  In the eternal design of God, whom truth and beauty surround, hell had its proper place.  Lacking the rebellious sin of angels and humans, hell need not have existed.  But given sin, hell takes its place, however unfortunate that is, within the beauty and order of creation.  Right order requires that rational creatures who have utterly and completely rejected God cannot abide where there is perfect moral, salvific, and mystical order.

Thus hell is, by inference, disordered in all three modes.  It is moral disorder because there can abide in those who inhabit it grave sinfulness and moral turpitude along with a desire to have nothing to do with the grace that could set them free from the slavery of sin.  They will to be separate from the will of God and the order of life and love.  Further, hell is salvific disorder in that the promises of God for the eternal happiness of his rational creatures have been rejected and thus cannot be realized or experienced by those in hell.  They choose to be outside the order of salvation which was open to them and generously offered to them in the saving action of Christ.  Finally, hell is mystical disorder, because there can be no perfection there.  There cannot even be perfect suffering for the suffering in hell had no goal or purpose beyond itself; it is conceived of as a timeless and utter separation from all that is perfect and perfecting of angelic or human nature.

But hell, like sin, cannot lie outside the purview of God’s power and justice and mercy, for God’s omnipotence and omniscience cannot allow that to be.  Thus it is part of the created order, however internally disordered it be, and thus has a beauty in that it was fitting and right and true for those who fully and completely in both intellect and will abandon (dare one say “hate”) the God who had created them for the joys of heaven.

So, what do you think?  Should we speak of hell as having some necessary beauty or is such a concept just plain wrong-headed?  Discuss this next to your favorite carved pumpkin “on a dark and stormy night.”  And Happy Halloween!

Department of Philosophy Harvard University

The Evolution of Meaning

Bean Lecture

and 2010 R. Peter Sylvester Keynote Address of the Northern New England Philosophical Association (NNEPA) Meetings on October 15, 2010 at Saint Anselm College

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In his new book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking, together with co-author Leonard Mlodinow, argue that the quest to find the answers to life’s biggest questions is no longer the charge of philosophers, but scientists.  But why would Hawking, a renowned physicist, sound the death knell for a field of study that he has no expertise in?

Ultimately, Hawking understands the history of intellectual discovery as a progression from mythology, through philosophy, and finally to science.  On his view, philosophy was a step in the right direction in that it involved a rational attempt to make sense of the universe.   That rational attempt to understand the universe, however, often goes wrong.  For instance, Hawking points to the disagreements among ancient Greek philosophers for whom, “there was no objective way to settle the argument” because they didn’t yet have the scientific method.[ii] Moreover, philosophers are stuck with a classical view of the world and have not “kept up” with modern physics.  According to the classical view, objects exist at one place at one time and every object has a definite history.  But these views are not true, at least on the atomic level.  Quantum mechanics implies that subatomic particles behave in ways that, according to the classical view, are impossible, seemingly popping in and out of existence as we observe them.

Hawking paints a picture of a world where life’s biggest questions are finally being understood by physicists.  Our universe is merely a quantum fluctuation that resulted in a specific set of physical laws, but is only one of many universes in the “multiverse.”  What is more, our understanding of quantum mechanics and general relativity allow physicists like Hawking to claim that there was “no beginning of time” and therefore no need for a God to start the chain of causation:

The issue of the beginning of time is a bit like the issue of the edge of the world. When people thought the world was flat, one might have wondered whether the sea poured over its edge…. Time, however, seemed to be like a model railway track. If it had a beginning, there would have to be someone (i.e. God) to set the trains going…. However, once we add the effects of quantum theory to the theory of relativity, in extreme cases [like the Big Bang] warpage can occur to such a great extent that time behaves like another dimension of space.[iii]

On this view, time, like the shape of the earth, is not “flat” but “curved” in such a way that the concept of the “beginning of the temporal series” makes as much sense as the concept of the “edge of the world.”  For Hawking, this implies the multiverse is a closed system which does not need any explanation from outside of itself.  As Ockham’s razor suggests, where there is no need to posit the existence of a supernatural being, one should not.  The universe, then, is simply the product of purely physical laws.  Hawking claims, then, that physics is finally providing answers to three historically philosophical questions:  “Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other?”[iv] Given this new role for physics, philosophy is not so much dead as it is obsolete.

But, has Hawking really shown that philosophy is obsolete?  I think not.   A charitable reading of The Grand Design would grant Hawking the point that philosophers need to take some of the more bizarre implications of modern physics seriously.  But there are a number of philosophers who do take science seriously and attempt to base their arguments on firm empirical grounds.  Perhaps Hawking hasn’t spent a lot of time with his colleagues in the department of philosophy at Cambridge.

But the best interpretation of Hawking’s arguments, I would argue, is that he himself is doing philosophy in this book.  One common way of distinguishing philosophy from science is this.  Science attempts to use observation and mathematics to discover the empirical truths of the world (i.e. the underlying physical laws, states, and processes) while philosophy , attempts to draw rational non-empirical conclusions from empirical, logical, or other basic truths.  As soon as Hawking begins to infer non-empirical conclusions from quantum mechanics and general relativity, he is in effect, practicing philosophy.  And, just as the philosopher would be required to empirically verify or experimentally test any empirical conclusions he or she makes, Hawking is subject to the methods and measures of good philosophy when he engages in philosophy.

The Grand Design is an excellent book in that it explains cutting edge physics in a way that is understandable for the layman and because it provokes a number of important philosophical questions.  One should be weary, however, when interpreting his conclusions.  As with any argument from authority, we should trust it only when it pertains to the author’s domain of authority.  When your pharmacist tells you not to take medications A and B together because they will have an unfortunate side effect, we should trust that advice.  When your pharmacist tells you to vote for candidate C because of that candidate’s economic policies, we have no reason to trust that advice.  Hawking is, by all accounts, one of the most brilliant scientific minds living today.  Nonetheless, many of the philosophical conclusions in The Grand Design are not empirically verifiable, but rest on philosophical assumptions such as “model-dependent realism” which could certainly be false.   We should trust the scientific claims made in the book, but question the philosophical ones.  Philosophy is not dead, but very much alive, as demonstrated by Hawking himself in the book and hopefully by the reader as he or she reads it.

[i] Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Random House, 2010), 5.

[ii] Ibid, 22.

[iii] Ibid, 134.

[iv] Ibid, 10.

of the Philosophy Department at the University of Connecticut

Hannah Arendt on Conscience, Judgment, and Human Rights

Philosophy Colloquium Delivered at Saint Anselm College on September 22, 2010.

Hannah Arendt on Conscience, Judgment, and Human Rights

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