If you’ve spent any time at all studying classic Stoic texts, or even if you’ve merely spent time on Stoicism’s periphery consuming present-day content, you know that the Stoics place a high value on four cardinal virtues: wisdom (or prudence), justice, courage, and temperance (sometimes called “self-control”).

Unless you devote considerable effort to reading and rereading ancient Stoic thinkers or spend time with the contemporary interpreters who have done that themselves, you probably have a rather vague conception of what these four terms mean for the Stoics. They all sound like good character traits to cultivate and to act upon, but what do they actually encompass and include? That’s where a lot of people get mixed up (one reason, incidentally, why I’m currently researching and writing a book on that very topic).

Confusion about the virtues manifests itself in a variety of manners, and one of the most common ways I’ve seen over the years is a worry that these four virtues don’t go far enough, that they leave out other desirable character traits that are important to being a good person.

“Why don’t the Stoics talk about kindness?” Is one ever-recurring question. Or: “Why isn’t honesty in their list?” “Where’s a sense of compassion?” “What about being a hard worker?” “Or being trustworthy and faithful?” We could go on with many other examples people bring up of what seem from a first glance to be omissions of important good traits of character on the part of Stoics.

This is an avoidable beginner-level mistake, but an eminently understandable one, given the sources people tend to draw upon for developing understanding of the complex, systematic philosophy Stoicism happens to be. On the one hand, there’s a plethora of not well-informed (and sometimes erroneous) blog posts, podcasts, videos, inspirational quotes, or infographics that just churn out superficial takes on the virtues, sometimes just listing the four off.

On the other hand, the two actual Stoic texts beginners are most likely to read, Epictetus’ Enchiridion and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, don’t provide much discussion about the virtues that is useful on their own (though if you read them in relation to more substantive Stoic texts, that’s not the case).

If you really want to know what the Stoics thought the virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance involved, included, and extended to, there’s absolutely no substitute for reading more deeply and widely in the available Stoic literature. If you, for example, peruse Arius Didymus’ Epitome of Stoic Ethics, you discover that each of the four cardinal virtues includes a number of subordinate virtues, which he provides short explanations about.

Prudence encompasses six subordinate virtues, courage five, and justice and temperance each four. Arius’ listing of the subordinate virtues is not a definitive or comprehensive one, and has to be supplemented by similar lists that Diogenes Laertius provides, as well as discussions of or references to virtue provided by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius (among others).

Where’s kindness? It falls under justice in Arius’ Didymus’ listing, where it gets defined as “knowledge that knows how to do good” (5b2). Cicero devotes a lot of discussion to kindness, generosity, and beneficence in On Duties book 1, where these comprise a significant part of justice. Read Seneca attentively, and you’ll see him discussing it as well.

If you’re looking for honesty or truthfulness, that’s part of justice as well, at least as something we owe to others (one might also see courage and prudence as involved in truthfulness). Epictetus and Seneca often use terms that we can translate as “faithfulness” or “loyalty”. That too is a part of justice.

Courage doesn’t just mean standing up to fear for the Stoics. It also includes magnanimity, or if you prefer a more literal translation, greatness of mind or soul. Looking for a virtue corresponding to hard work, perseverance, or possessing a work ethic? Arius Didymus uses the term philoponia, literally “love of toil”, and places that under courage. Patience? Read Seneca and Cicero and you’ll find that patientia (particularly in relation to anger) falls within courage.

There are a number of other virtues one might think the Stoics leave out, and then find them encompassed within the wide scope of the other two cardinal virtues, prudence and temperance.

I should mention, however, that there will be some “virtues” that the Stoics don’t include within the cardinal virtues. A prime example of this would be one several other virtue ethics traditions (e.g. Platonist, Aristotelian, some early Christians) do include among the virtues, namely right anger (aka gentleness, mildness, or good temper). And there’s a reason for that omission, which is that the Stoics don’t consider anger to ever be virtuous. So it’s only “missing” from the Stoic account of the virtues if you fundamentally differ from them in thinking it is a good state.

This piece first appeared in the April 2025 issue of the online magazine The Stoic. If this piece has you now interested in Stoicism, and you would like to know what to read next, this might be helpful for you.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

I came across this post a week or so back, and screenshotted it, then posted that along with a short message expressing my own thoughts in various social media platforms. Why? Because if you know who these two guys are (and it’s quite possible you don’t, even if you identify as a metalhead), and you know when this is from, you recognize how ludicrous the accusation of “selling out” referenced there is.

There’s a longer lesson to be culled out and articulated from this, one applicable to all (or at least most) of us, and that’s what I intend to do here. First, though, I’m going to share a set of other screenshots that also involve heavy metal and exhibit a funny sort of attempted one-upsmanship. Again, it’s all right if you don’t know who the main person mentioned is (that’s what search engines, wikis, and websites are for, right?), so you’re not 100% sure where the humor lies.

You’ve got Dee Snyder there, the lead singer and frontman of a monster heavy metal band, Twisted Sister, who presumably would know something about the history of a musical genre that he not only enjoyed listening to but actually made important and lasting contributions to, being -”splained” to about music history and terminology by some guy on Twitter. And who is only partly right about even his assertion about what was called “acid rock” in 1978. I can’t resist showing you Snyder’s response:

He’s right. And he is an expert both in the sense of having a vast base of knowledge and in the sense of being an expert practitioner with decades of experience within a genre.

One might look at these and focus on, let’s not put too fine a point on it, the entitled or clueless dumbassery displayed on the parts of people who would claim Metallica in their early heyday had “sold out” or that Dee Snyder needed correction about the history of “heavy metal” as a term. That’s likely a recipe for getting yourself upset or worked up, which you can do if you want in these cases (it’s a free country), but you don’t really need to. You definitely don’t know the people who were criticizing Metallica back in 1986, and odds are you don’t know Erik Solomonson either.

What would be better to focus on? That’s where we get to the lesson to learn and reflect upon. It’s a sort of a fortiori argument, but in a way turned backwards.

In the heavy metal community, you have an up-and-coming Metallica who had already earned their place in the developing thrash pantheon, putting out a third massive album (and it’s hard to say which of those three first albums deserves to be considered the absolute best) in greater continuity lyrically and sonically with the second than the second was with the first. And somehow, you have people who consider themselves metalheads who for whatever reason not just arrive at a clearly erroneous, even perversely wrong judgement, but who thought it was a good idea not just to keep it to themselves, but to express it.

40 years later, you still have the same kind of know-it-all who wants to correct, lecture, and judge. Nothing wrong with judging by the way. But what is wrong is making one’s judgements poorly, based on faulty assumptions and quite likely an inflated sense of competence and self-worth. There are people who probably could out-argue Dee Snyder on metal matters, for example if Ronnie James Dio were still around. But it’s certainly not remotely that yahoo. And yet, he and others like him will try their hand.

Whatever level of knowledge, expertise, competence, or achievement you’ve made it to, even if plenty of people do acknowledge it, you’re going to run across the detractors, the complainers, the “I know better” types, and they’re going to say things intended to put or pull you down. In fact, sometimes you won’t just happen to stumble into you. They’ll seek you out. If Metallica and Dee Snyder have to deal with these sorts of people, why should it be a surprise that you might have to as well.

The more you succeed, in whatever measure matters to you, the more of those types you’re likely to encounter. That’s just a function of scale, you could say.

Myself, in my own field of philosophy, I’d say I’m nowhere near the analogous level of talent or reach that the musicians of Metallica were at in 1986 (in fact, Cliff Burton was one of my bassist heroes, long into the 1990s, years after his early death) or where Dee Snyder is today. But I can tell you that as, for example, my philosophy-focused YouTube channel has grown over the last 15 years, or my academic and popular writings have reached a wider readership, I’ve had more people like that cross my path.

There’s a heathy perspective granted in realizing that even people whose indisputable talent or expertise you know in your very bones end up dealing regularly with this sort of second-guessing, unwarranted criticism, and condescension. Without lapsing into pessimistic cynicism, you can view it as just an inescapable aspect of the human condition. And if you do that, it might not get to you as much, or in some cases even at all. And then you can redirect your focus that was temporarily drawn, back to doing what it is that you do, if not well let alone brilliantly, at least well enough.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

It has been remarked that in modernity, discussions about faith and reason, especially when carried out by philosophers, are very often framed in principally epistemological terms, and focus narrowly on epistemological concerns (even when, as in early modernity, the underlying concerns were moral, but epistemology was how they were dealt with).

This is not to say that this is only the case in modernity, nor that this is always the case in modernity. Nor do I mean to suggest that there is anything wrong with epistemology, its terms, its concerns, or its practitioners. Knowledge, not to mention wisdom, is, after all a very great good, one which we naturally desire and pursue, and truth is also a very great good. Anselm clearly thinks that these are goods, and thinks we should strive to attain them. He also recognizes the value of something essential though not exclusive to the activity of epistemology, the reflective posture in which the human mind reflects upon itself and its activities.

Self-knowledge is a good, even a duty, in Anselm’s view, and this must necessarily include orientation by some epistemological concerns: what truth is; what intellectual perfections such as knowledge or wisdom are; what our modes of access to reality are; the capacities and limitations of our intellect or reason; modes of error and our remedies for addressing them. In any Christian philosophy or theology deserving of the name, Christian faith must play some central role in all of this, and the grand and recurring problem of the relations between faith and reason arises.

There is great risk, particularly in the intellectual culture of modernity, of carrying out reductions and truncations of this problem and of its components by following the temptation to focus exclusively on epistemological concerns. Faith and reason come to be framed either as alternate and somehow complementary modes or generators of knowledge, or one form or another of the varieties of rationalism or fideism is adopted.

The sole questions on which investigation of the relationship between faith and reason turns are those like: Which one of these should we trust to provide us certainty, truth, or knowledge? What should we do when conflicts inevitably arise between religious teachings and reasoning’s dictates or results? Can reason legitimately start from, interpret, understand, or further elaborate religious faith?

In these, faith is construed as primarily doxastic, by which I mean that the prime focus is placed on its capacity to supply or substitute for knowledge, to provide certainty or conviction. Reason is understood as simply theoretical or speculative reason or rationality. Both faith and reason as realities are much broader in scope, however, and there is great risk of imposing impoverishing conceptions upon them which then inevitably result in inadequate understanding of faith, reason, and of their possible, actual, or desirable relations.

In interests of space and time, rather than further elaborating and arguing these well-worn points, I will instead make another set, and then lead directly into our itinerary. We do not, and faith and reason do not just fit within and address, solely epistemological concerns, let alone the even more narrowed concerns and assumptions of epistemologically-driven-enquiry. We possess, or are possessed by, additional and perhaps more encompassing concerns. Some of these are describable as metaphysical, anthropological, or aesthetic, but those I concentrate on here are better described as moral.^[1]

Faith and reason take up, respond to, and are articulated in relation to matters of moral values and norms, human nature and development, community and relationships, and our final end or ends. Practical reason, or value-and-action-oriented rationality, engages, articulates, and guides us in commerce with, these concerns. The type of enquiry driven by these concerns is broader in scope, more fundamental, and more vital than epistemologically-driven enquiry, and necessarily involves, indeed partially embodies and enacts, practical reason.

The rich relationship between faith and reason needs to be worked out in both theory and practice through this type of enquiry, which is what Anselm himself does, albeit never systematically. In this paper’s four main parts, my aim is bring out and lend some rigor to faith’s and reason’s dialectical relationship in Anselm’s thought, works and life.

I. Senses of Faith and Reason

What does Anselm mean by reason or by faith? Before discussing the relation between faith and reason in Anselm’s thought, examination of what he means by these words is needed. In an Anselmian perspective, grasping the full meaning of words or concepts carries us beyond mere lexicality into the reality of the thing signified or conceived, so this examination will also lead into brief investigation of what those things are.

Let us start with faith, fides, which possesses a number of interlocking senses. Anselm uses it to mean Christian belief, both as the state of believing, and as what is believed, i.e. the content, the Christian revelation, “what the Catholic Church believes in its heart and confesses with its mouth.”^[2] This can be expressed in and does involve propositional content, but is not identical to it. “Faith,” Anselm says, “is from that, which the mind conceives through hearing; it is not that the mind’s conception alone that creates faith in the human being, but rather that faith cannot be without a conception.”^[3]

Faith is also a theological virtue,^[4] and thinking in such terms leads us beyond viewing faith as simply propositions believed in, belief in those propositions, or the habit of such belief. For Anselm, faith more complexly and progressively enmeshes a human being with reality (both created and divinely creative) through three main aspects.

First, faith involves “striving” (tendere), which in Monologion is explicitly framed as striving towards God, but which could also be towards created things in God, or towards truth, or any other of the divine attributes in God.^[5] Living faith necessarily takes on flesh in actions and volitions oriented by^[6] justice or rectitude. “[T]hat faith which love accompanies and comes together with, when the opportunity of acting is given it, will not be idle but will exert itself with great frequency to actions [operum],” Anselm writes, leading into the second aspect by adding, “which it will not be able to do without love.”^[7]

Faith incorporates love, and this involves a relationship not just between believer and believed content, but between persons. It involves trust and belief, but also questioning and seeking, progressive deepening and unfolding of the relationship. For Anselm, faith will thus be closely bound to hope and even friendship, as well as love.

The third aspect is that faith is transformative of the faithful person in ways relevant even to rationality. Although faith is by its very essence, “of those things that are not seen,”^[8] it also provides some experiential knowledge (experientus scientia) of those things, for Anselm a precondition of adequate knowledge or understanding of those things.^[9] Faith practiced over time on the one hand “cleanses the heart,”^[10] and on the other provides the “spiritual wings” or the “ladder,”^[11] needed for raising the fallible and at times feeble human rational mind to the divine.

Anselm uses “reason” or its cognates in a number of ways. Here, I pass over uses of ratio, where it simply means something like “the reason for” or “the reason that.” We are concerned with four uses here.

First, Anselm uses ratio to designate a power or faculty of the human soul. He uses it, second, for what it is that reason produces or grasps, intelligible accounts of realities. Third, he employs the cognate of ratio, rationalis, of the human (and angelic) being or nature, mind, will, and actions. Finally, ratio is also a divine attribute. Let us note just in passing that for Anselm the divine reason is both reason itself (i.e. the supreme reason) and is what God is substantially. Of the third, let us note that rationality is an essential dimension pervading the whole of the human being.^[12] Our intellectual and free volitional life, capacities, and activities flow from this inextricable dimension,^[13] and reason in his third, and broader sense extends so far as do these.

In the first, more restricted sense reason, as a power (vis) of the soul, is something distinct from will, and from at least some other faculties or powers, such as bodily sense and (corporeal) imagination, inner sense, and probably memory (at least insofar as memory is of corporal images, or of non-corporeal pleasures, pains, and desires).

Anselm does not rigorously distinguish reason, as a faculty or as an activity, from thought, and in Monologion for instance, the reason of the human maker contains “something of the thing to be made, a pattern so to speak, or better said a form or likeness or rule.”^[14] He also does not distinguish reason from “understanding,” whether in the sense of the activity, intelligere, or in the sense of a faculty, intellectus.^[15]

Anselm does tell us some key things about the power of reason in relation to will. First, the rational being always possesses both reason and will, the latter free because the will of a rational being.^[16] Second, neither reason nor will are the whole of the soul, but rather something(s) in it,^[17] beings but not substances.^[18] Third, the soul uses them like instruments to carry out its proper acts (velut instrumentis ad usus congruos), reason’s proper activity being “reasoning” (ratiocinandum).^[19] Fourth, both reason and will are not simply instruments, since both “individual instruments possess their being as such [hoc quod sunt], their aptitudes, and their uses or acts [usus].”^[20] Reason and will in the latter two senses can be defective or fail, and require guidance, training, and right intention to function well in their proper activities.

Reason in its second sense actually signifies two distinct kinds of things that, however, can and should converge. On the one hand, it signifies the products of the activity of human reasoning, whether in the more true medium whereby “the things themselves” are expressed “inwardly in our minds, by imagination of bodies or reason’s understanding [rationis intellectu] corresponding to [pro] the diversity of the things themselves,”^[21] or the less faithful ones of mental signs, speech, or writing.^[22] Often, ratio in this sense gets translated as “argument,”^[23] as “reasoning,” or “account.”^[24]

On the other hand, Anselm also writes of the “reason of faith,” or of “deeper reasons” for some matter of the faith rationally explored and investigated in his works. The first expression appears in Proslogion^[25] as a description of Monologion, and in Cur Deus Homo^[26] as a characterization of that work’s project. In that work, Anselm uses the second expression explicitly,^[27] and maintains: “the rational basis [ratio] of the truth is so rich [ampla] and deep that it cannot be exhausted by mortal beings.”^[28]

Similar expressions appear in his other works.^[29] Realities, particularly the most real ones faith gestures towards, possess an intelligibility which exceeds, but is penetrable and partly understandable by human reason, which generates its own reasonings in course of attempting to grasp and act within reality. God’s reason of course, knows, or better put, encompasses these realities perfectly.^[30]

II. Practical and Theoretical Reason: Enfolding

Philosophers frequently distinguish between theoretical (or speculative, or even “pure”) reason, concerned with what is, what is true, and what is known, and practical reason, concerned with what is good or valuable, what should be, and what should be willed or done.^[31] Typically, fields of philosophy are apportioned along these lines, metaphysics, epistemology, and logic to theoretical reason, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics to practical reason. The bulk of philosophy of religion, a main locus for study of the relationship between reason and faith (though at times operating with moral concepts and categories), seems to be a concern of theoretical reason.

Philosophy per se is all too easily identified with theoretical reason, its activity, concerns, and products,^[32] the effect being that where practical reason comes into play (particularly if anything of Christian faith accompanies it), we are now just doing moral philosophy, etc, something to be done after or in addition to the real philosophy which does not need to learn anything on the way from moral philosophy. And yet (as numerous thinkers have pointed out from different vantage points), theoretical reason’s activity and concerns (whether the reasoners realize it or not) are situated, oriented, and informed by those of practical reason.^[33] One can go even farther than simply noting this, and adopt a much stronger position, a claim that the concepts and realities practical reason engages are already inextricably rooted at the very core of the intelligibility of those theoretical reason studies (including reason itself, in epistemology, philosophical anthropology, and in the metaphysics of knowledge).

Anselm does not in point of fact distinguish between theoretical and practical reason. For him there is just reason, whose tasks and objects, while they may be theoretical, are always situated in practical horizons. He does recognize great (indeed in God supreme) value to knowledge, reason, understanding, and wisdom,^[34] all of which are goods, but pursuing these solely for their own sakes without reference to God, and one’s relationship with God in ethical life oriented by rectitude, would to him be a mistake.^[35] As G. R. Evans points out: “Anselm did not see the improving of the mind as an end in itself, but rather as a necessary concomitant of the process of getting to know God. A man who exercised his reason was using a God-given instrument for its proper purpose.”^[36]

Human reason also takes in and studies the breadth of created being, both the world, and the human being itself with its cognitive powers, but for Anselm adequate knowledge of these will require relating these to God, and to rectitude. Practical reason challenges, situates, but also extends theoretical reason to its full range. Investigation of understanding of what is becomes truly enabled when one recognizes that value is as just primordial as being or truth, that their absolute locus lies in God, that what is or what is true is shot through and through in its very core and tissues by moral normativity and teleology,^[37] and that the very activity of reasoning is already imbued with moral quality and directedness.

Without attempting to enter here into a full exposition of what reason is and does for Anselm, I would like to focus very briefly on one of reason’s key characteristics for Anselm: its discernment of values. “For [a] rational nature,” he tells us in Monologion, “being rational is nothing other than being able to distinguish the just from the non-just, the true from the non-true, the good from the non-good, and the more good from the less good.”^[38] Rational natures’ discernment of truth comprises a range of rectitudes that “rational reflection [rationis . . . contemplatio] grasps,”^[39] including justice.^[40] In Anselm’s own practice we witness reason discerning other such values of things, relationships, even reasonings: the good as such (honestum), the useful, the beneficial (commodum, quod expedit), the necessary, the befitting, the useful, and the beautiful, just to name a few.^[41]

Three points need be made about this function integral to reason. First, reason not only discerns, but itself possesses a teleology wired into it by its Creator,^[42] which argues theoretical reason’s dependence on and orientation by practical reason. Second, reason does not discern these categories or qualities unmediatedly, let alone infallibly, pointing towards a dependency and need for development on reason’s part, this again a matter of practical reason. Third, while on the side of the subject, theoretical and practical reason might be distinguished by what they discern, on the side of the object, whether in God in whom the attributes attain identity, or in the beings and relationships of the created universe permeated by normativity, or within the human mind and its products, the qualities or dimensions discerned remain inextricably bound together.

In three of her articles, Marilyn McCord Adams makes points about reason in Anselm’s work useful to raise at this point:

If for Anselm, intellectual inquiry is but one of several avenues along which human beings seek goods/the GOOD/God, it does not follow that for him practical reason expels theoretical, or that the latter is merely instrumentally related to the former. Anselm neither notes nor observes this Aristotelean distinction. Rather as one among other human powers, reason’s exercise is partially constitutive of the search for the whole self . . .^[43]

In Anselm’s thought, theoretical reason is, we might say, enfolded into practical reason, incorporated by it and enabled to its full exercise, purpose, and goods. Again contrasting Anselmian and Aristotelean approaches, she makes a second point:

Anselm’s cognitive psychology contrasts with that of later medieval Aristoteleans, because it denies the existence of “unaided natural reason” and treats all creative problem solving as essentially collaborative: the creature seeks, the Creator discloses, the creature articulates what it has seen.^[44]

This collaboration is not solely between the creature and God. Adams writes of Scripture’s and Tradition’s “[a]uthority as tutor and guide,”^[45] and discerns an “insistence on the on the human duty to interact with authority by seeking understanding,” residing “at the center of Anselm’s Christian pedagogy.”^[46] I agree, but expand this even farther in the fourth section.^[47]

Adams repeatedly elaborates an important third point, the interconnection between reason and other powers of the human soul. “Because our powers are few,” she writes, “we cannot afford to leave any out.”^[48] Accordingly, where “advanced topics are concerned,” in approaching mysteries of faith and problems arising out of them, or even in understanding created beings,^[49] “intellectual expertise does not suffice for progress.

Rather the focus of the whole self is important, the coordination of intellectual effort with disciplined exercise of the soul’s other powers, is necessary. . . the soul who trains will and emotions as well as reason will be capable of a clearer approach, a clearer view.”^[50] She points out a last facet of the relationship between reason and the other powers: “In human beings, cognitive and affective powers interact. Just as the soul cannot will what it in no way thinks, so its ability to see is affected by its loves and choices.”^[51]

III. Cooperation Between Faith and Practical Reason

In Anselm’s view, faith and reason can be truly antagonistic only when the faith is not adequately understood or when reason remains underdeveloped. Fides quaerens intellectum through reason represents a project working, and measuring its success, by cooperation and concord between faith and reason. As Henri de Lubac puts it, Anselm’s “extreme rationality does not signify an effort of intellect detached from the faith that is its origin and continues to carry it.”^[52]

Now, given practical reason’s priority in his thought, how does Christian faith contribute to, cultivate, and cooperate with practical reason? It does so through several modes, corresponding to the senses of faith distinguished earlier. I consider it helpful to set these within a framework articulated by Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain during the 1930s Christian philosophy debates, who understood it principally in terms of faith making contributions to human reason in the concrete, historical reality of the philosophizing subject. I have argued elsewhere that Anselm’s thought fits and even expands their conceptions of Christian philosophy,^[53] so I eschew detailed analysis here, and simply note a few modes of “revelation generative of reason” in Anselmian thought and practice.

How does Christian faith contribute something to reason? As belief in a revelation, or as the revelation itself, the content of belief, faith provides the rational and reasoning human being with a number of conceptions, claims, principles, valuations, and rules. In some cases, these lie beyond what reason could ever have attained on its own. In others, reason could have attained them, but on its own did not. It yet others, reason had some grasp or prefigurations of them, and Christianity confirms and clarifies, rather than straightforwardly provides.

Each of these involves fides quaerens intellectum, exemplified in Anselm’s narration of his reception and working out of the unum argumentum. Maritain called these “objective contributions,” and distinguished them from “subjective reinforcements” Christian faith provides the human subject, removing what are essentially moral obstacles to reason’s full exercise, generating or supporting proper moral habits, inclinations, and valuations, and strengthening the person in their right exercise of reason. Now, how do these objective contributions and subjective reinforcements by Christian faith to human reason play out in practical reason and in Anselm’s works?

One must be careful in answering this, not to set too great stress on originality (as perhaps Gilson and Maritain did), on the very first provision of a new idea, experience, or conception by Christian faith to human reason, or to human reason’s first grappling with or elaboration of what faith provided it. Though more reasons could be given for this, three suffice here.

First, though his thought is bejeweled by great moments of original thought, Anselm himself did not seek for or seem to value human originality.^[54] Second, what is key in the interaction between Christian faith and practical reason is not simply when reason first encounters faith’s objective contribution, but how deeply it delves into it. On that account Anselm may have gone further than many of his predecessors and even his successors.^[55] Third, for reasons we will elaborate later, when faith and reason cooperate in a human subject, they do so continually. Faith does not simply provide, and then reason wholly take over. Instead, reason continues to be enriched by faith’s contributions.

In addition to functioning as a negative index for human reason,^[56] Christian faith also contributes new moral conceptions to it. Consider as examples just four typical elements of moral theories and reasoning: understandings of virtues and vices; other key moral conceptions; fundamental orientations and valuations; and, the fabric of specific moral rules and authorities. Through Christian faith, new virtues are set out and exemplified, vices are identified, even at times in what human reason had previously (or in our post-Christian modernity, afterwards!) mistook as virtues.

Anselm himself coins no new virtues, but stresses those whose value Christian faith imparts to the rational being, and sets practical reason the tasks of understanding, applying, and inculcating. Among those Anselm discusses specifically are humility, obedience, patience, peace or concord, faith, hope, charity, and justice, and through practical reasoning, he does make contributions to fuller understanding of these.^[57] His treatment of justice as architectonic to moral life and practical reasoning illustrates in a particularly powerful way how Christian faith’s cooperation with practical reason goes far beyond merely providing new content for reason to work over. As Dom Pouchet rightly stresses, “rectitudo voluntatis propter se servata. . . appears, alongside . . . id quo maius cogitari non potest, as one of Saint Anselm’s most central thoughts [intuitions majeures].”^[58]

Anselm reexamines and reworks justice’s very conception in the light faith casts on it. Other key moral notions are similarly more fully examined and worked out in his works, for instance freedom, intention, happiness, and weakness of will. Christian faith also adds or at the very least consolidates additional moral notions. Among those Anselm labors over are: original sin, sin as offense against God, redemption, divine providence, and God as love. Faith also informs practical reason about the proper orientation and needed reorientation of the human person to goods and evils, teaching for instance that God is to be loved above all other things, indicating where happiness truly resides, or revealing the horror and evil of sin.

Practical reasoning thus informed can, and in Anselm’s work does, discover and demonstrate that rectitude of will is to be preferred to other goods for its own sake, and that anything interfering or likely to interfere with this is to be rejected, even if otherwise good.^[59] One striking example is supplied by charity’s priority over knowledge, invoked and expounded in Ep. 85.^[60] Christian faith also supplies a rich tissue of specific moral injunctions, prohibitions, examples,^[61] even determinations about cases,^[62] which practical reason then examines, assimilates, analogizes, applies, and perhaps systematizes.

Christian faith as belief, and as what is believed, aids reason in another manner, which ties in with each of the senses of reason distinguished earlier. Faith not only gives over to practical reason some content which ought to be more fully understood. It lays into reason’s lap deep problems, their stakes raised and intensified by faith, which in its turn insists that at least some solution must be possible for reason in the sense of the faculty to produce as a rational account, which would in some way approximate to the deep rational structures of faith, leading us further into the supreme reason, God.

As my fellow panel-member Montague Brown puts it, “Along with supplying the revealed teachings for reflection, faith tells us that these teachings, although they surpass human reason, are not absurd. . . . these teachings are not contradictions, but matter for ever deeper reflection and analysis.”^[63] Gillian Evans writes that Anselm’s faith “forced him to look for solutions outside the range of standard logical manipulation of accepted ideas.”^[64] Eileen Sweeney provides a startling but appropriate formulation: “Faith as the desire to traverse the gap between what faith believes and what reason understands.”^[65]

A number of examples specifically engaging practical reason leap out from Anselm’s works: how anyone (e.g. the Devil) could use a good and God-given will to choose and become evil; why God would permit his Son to die for human beings and how that Atonement could restore justice; how ability to sin or not to sin is not freedom in its fullest sense; how our fullest and most natural happiness lies in God and voluntarily participating in the providential ordering; how human freedom is compatible with divine foreknowledge.^[66]

The harmony between divine justice and mercy provides a particularly good instance, even in the less elaborately worked out Proslogion discussions. “Though it is difficult to understand in what manner your mercy is not missing from your justice, it is nevertheless necessary to believe that it is in no way opposed to justice,”^[67] and so Anselm is led several times to keep rationally seeking a solution to what appears an irreconcilable contradiction, gradually discerning what actions are juster and juster yet,^[68] culminating in a rational account, which records the rational being’s striving to penetrate into the rationality of God’s justice (ratio. . . justitiae), the hidden reason for God’s gentleness with sinners,^[69] and also determines what in God’s reason, specifically set in the providential ordering, cannot be understood by human reason.^[70]

Within this Anselmian use of reason in faith, two other key things happen. He calls upon God several times to aid the progress of this reasoning,^[71] and he reasons to practical conclusions, culminating both in his action of invocation of mercy and in determination of what the right affective response is.

This mode of cooperation between faith and practical reason also generates and is reflected in a fundamental attitude of the rational being, bringing us to yet another mode of cooperation. In its more dynamic, active sense rooted in the person and going beyond propositions and belief in them, Christian faith also engenders in the rational human being what Maritain termed “subjective reinforcements.” As noted earlier, living faith for Anselm involves and incorporates striving, action, love, relationship, each of which is not only studied and structured by practical reason, but also enables and furthers the full development and use of that practical reason. It is thus transformative, purifying and strengthening the human person in whom reason is a power.

Within the matrix of faith, and attentive to the intricate connections between reason and the will, Anselm generates what I have elsewhere termed an “ethics of the use of the mind.”^[72] One general tenet of this is that adequate understanding of justice will be conditioned in a variety of ways by the justice or injustice of the rational person’s will.^[73] Justice in the will assists the reasoning person from being led astray by the carnal appetites (which for Anselm cover a very wide ground), from ignoring reason altogether, subordinating reason to their satisfaction, or cutting reason’s activity short.^[74] It also restores to the human being a proper orientation to and valuation of goods, rectifying practical reason, permitting it to carry out its function of discernment better. If it does not restore this in full, it at least enables more proper understanding, willing, and affective disposition towards this orientation and valuation.^[75]

A dynamic and ongoing interaction between objective contributions and subjective reinforcements structures Christian faith’s cooperation with practical reason, so that faith remains continually involved and drawn upon by reason. On one pole, fides as belief calls to intellectus, which then goes to work, and both gives back to it what it gave now more fully understood and draws from it what it yet other things used in the very process of reasoning and understanding. On another pole, fides as lived and living gives intellectus its orientation and support, and in turn counts on proper practical reasoning both as activity and as products.

These set the human person in the condition where the dynamic of the first pole can fruitfully occur, and in turn, what is thus understood is then put to work in the second pole, for after all, the conclusion of practical reasoning is ultimately in action. In the course of this dynamic, faith also progressively reveals, and reason (both theoretical and practical reason) comes to discover and understand the very purposes, values, and natures of the human faculties, including reason and will, but also memory and imagination, and even the appetites. This is what we find carried out in Anselm’s writings.

This dynamic is complex, precisely because the human person is, and the realities it wishes to engage in its knowledge and action are, at least on our end. Moral notions corresponding to genuine realities are complex enough and require unfolding, weighing, following out, elaboration, often in light of, and within a matrix of other notions contributed by faith. In this process they inevitably lead us, and our reasons, further into a transcendent, divine, and eminently personal reality for which we could never finish questing and questioning.^[76] Ultimately, Christian faith offers to human reason a deeper understanding of its nature, norms, and telos, and of the fact that it has an ultimate reference point not in itself or in the cosmos but in a God who is supreme reason.

IV. Three Other Aspects of the Interaction Between Faith and Practical Reason

For Anselm, while the instrument of reason is not in itself affective, our rationality is not something entirely extricable from our affectivity. Although he does not say this, since he never specifically studies reason as usus or as affectio, it is not contrary to the spirit of his thought to suggest that these concrete actualizations of the instrument could, perhaps even should, involve affectivity. In fact proper affective response not only may enable or sustain reason in its activity, it even provides a measure for the adequacy and depth of understanding attained by reason.

Numerous passages exhibit affective responses occurring in fides quaerens intellectum’s course, not least of which is the joy (gaudium) with which Anselm grasped the unum argumentum and hoped to offer to his readers,^[77] leading De Lubac to write of anselmian “reason’s joy in the understanding of faith.”^[78]

Properly functioning reason also determines and culminates in affectivity. Cur Deus Homo contains one particularly rich passage:

in this mortal life, there should be such love, and – prayer pertains to this – desire of arriving at what you were created for [ad quod factus es], and sadness because you are not yet there, and fear lest you not reach it, so that you should not feel any joy except about those things that either give you assistance or the hope of arriving [at what you were created for].”^[79]

In Monologion reason arrives at seeing that “the rational creature ought to devote all of its capacities and its will [posse et uelle] to remembering and understanding and loving the Highest Good.”^[80] Such loving requires that the “human being should endeavor towards that good by loving and desiring with its whole heart, whole soul, and whole mind,”^[81] and that it cultivate hope and faith.^[82]

Likewise, in De Concordia, “reason, by which we understand rectitude, teaches that this rectitude is to be kept our of love for that same rectitude.”^[83] Reason’s ongoing dynamic is awakened and sustained by affectivity, for instance through the intense yearning expressed in almost bodily terms in Proslogion, or the “charity and religious zeal” motivating Anselm’s audience’s request to approach questions of the faith through reason, mirrored throughout the work in his pupil’s desire.

Lastly, Anselm writes in some places as if affectivity is not merely consequent upon, but integral to reason’s work. In the Meditation on Human Redemption, one is to think, understand, and love, and to “rejoice,” “be glad,” and “delight” in each of these respectively.^[84] The overarching goal is to introduce proper affectivity into reason’s work: “make me to taste by loving what I taste by knowing. Let me sense by affection what I sense by understanding.”^[85]

In Ep. 5, writing about mutual love, Anselm counsels: “let us, enjoying their affection with reasonable pleasure, prepare ourselves to enjoy them with joyful reason.”^[86] One might disregard this as merely use of the rhetorical trope of chiasm, but in the Prayer to Saint Paul, several characteristic and very suggestive Anselmian passages appear. As in other places, one consequence of a human being’s sins and vices are their interference with reason’s proper discernment of moral values, direction of the will away from salutary lines of thinking and reasoning and towards harmful ones, and even interference with reasoning.

Here, Anselm laments the disconnect between what reason and faith tell him is his case and what his sins lead him to think: “this crowning unhappiness – that while it is all true, yet it does not seem so to me.” What is particularly interesting is that he realizes affectivity is the index of true grasp of his situation. “In fact, if I did see the reality, I should not feel it or be moved by it. Reason teaches this, but my heart does not grieve.”^[87] Later in the prayer, he writes again that he did not grieve because : “I knew through my rational nature, but I did not understand.”^[88] Christian faith and practical reason meet and interact fruitfully through affectivity.^[89]

Another important aspect of the relationship between faith and reason is divine grace’s involvements. As Anselm begs off from a full treatment of grace in De Concordia,^[90] so do I here. After noting that reason is an integral constituent of the “free choice,” Anselm demonstrates to “coexist with grace and to work with it in many ways,”^[91] I will merely point out three ways in which grace more fully enables practical reason and in turn is partially intelligible to practical reason.

First, as Adams noted, God is not merely an object but a collaborator in fides quaerens intellectum. Anselm’s mentions of invocations of God in the course of inquiry are too frequent to even cite representative examples.^[92] None is more apt here than Anselm’s resolve in De Concordia: “let us study grace and free choice, that very grace assisting us.”^[93]

Second, although by free choice human beings can prefer and preserve justice, once it is lost, only divine grace restores it. Without justice in the will (sometimes even with it!) human beings face innumerable obstacles to full and proper use of practical reason, particularly in their discernment, understanding, and reasoning about justice and injustice. Christian faith in each of the senses discussed earlier does not produce justice, but contributes to well-functioning practical reason’s grasp on it.

Third, Anselm is clear that grace is bestowed making full use of the providential ordering, and particularly of human intermediaries. The restoration of justice, and the aid to practical reasoning typically comes through those of the Christian faith, both believing and practicing it. These sow and cultivate seeds of right thoughts and volitions in human hearts, which are to then produce further fruit, bearing further seeds.^[94] And, “since what develops from [descendit ex] grace is a grace,” preaching, hearing, understanding what is heard, and rectitude of willing are all instances of graces.^[95] Human collaboration with God, in which Christian faith informs practical reason, takes place precisely through other human collaborators.

This brings us then to a last aspect, for as it turns out, faith is not simply an attitude of belief, nor the content believed in, but rather as pointed out earlier, relationship, striving, love transformative of the rational human being. Further though, it takes form not simply through a putatively unmediated relationship with God,^[96] but through determinate human relationships, institutions,^[97] communities in which Christian faith is embodied, inculcated, modeled, even debated and developed. Because of our human weaknesses, both those stemming from sin and those inherent in our finite nature, the practical reason of one needs the practical reason of another, so that “if the one falls, the other will lift up his companion” (Eccl 4:10).

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Anselm’s Letters, in many of which he gives advice about practical reasoning, two typical lines of which are particularly interesting. The first depicts and enacts a clash of reasons, between diabolically suggested “toxic reason”^[98] arguing for something subversive or deleterious to faith and justice, and a faith-informed and supported practical reason by which among others, “the wise monk can refute and destroy [the] cunning cajolery.”^[99]

The second, by which I close here, speaks for itself:

We should take great care not to follow our own will excessively against all other advice, even if it appears to us to be right. For what is right to a single person may not be right. . . . [A] man should in no way commit himself to ordering his way of life according to his own unqualified judgement but should diligently weigh all things, lest he oppose the judgement of many, particularly the wise, or oppose obedience or mercy, or finally charity.^[100]

^[1] Because they refer to God, to a created order, to a normativity oriented by and towards God, and to a human nature affected by the Fall and redeemed by the Incarnation and Atonement, these concerns might also be called “religious,” but I avoid using that term here. It implies that there is a religious sphere or dimension discrete and separable from these other spheres, a cultural assumption of modernity which Anselm would certainly consider untrue.

^[2] De Incarnatione Verbi 1, p. 6. All translations from Anselm’s treatises are the author’s (I have consulted those of Hopkins and Richardson, McKeon, Deane, Williams, and Charlesworth) and are from S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archepiscopi opera omnia, ed. Dom F. S. Schmitt, O.S.B. 5 vols (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons. 1940-1961), or from Liber Anselmi de Humanis Moribus, in Memorials of St. Anselm, R.W. Southern and F. S. Schmitt, O.S.B., eds. (London: Oxford University Press. 1969). All citations of Anselm’s texts provide the chapter number (prefaced where appropriate by the book number), and the page number of the appropriate volume of the Opera Omnia or Memorials Each text will be cited with these abbreviations.

M Monologion
P Proslogion
DV De Veritate
DL De Libertate Arbitrii
DCD De Casu Diaboli
CDH Cur Deus Homo
DCV De Conceptu Virginali et de Original Peccato
DC De Concordia Praescientiae et Praedestionis et Gratiae Dei cum Libero Arbitrio
DI De Incarnatione Verbi
DM Liber Anselmi Archiepiscopi de Humanus Moribus per Simulitudines
DA Liber ex Dictis Beati Anselmi

For reasons exceeding the scope of this paper, I follow Schmitt and Southern in considering the last two works to be reliably Anselmian.

Passages from Anselm’s letters are from The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, 3 vols. trans. Walter Froelich (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications. 1990-94), and are cited with the abbreviation E, followed by the letter number and page number from the appropriate volume.

^[3] DC 3.6, p. 271

^[4] In DI 1, Anselm writes of the “firmness of faith”(soliditatem fidei), p. 7. A tenet enunciated constantly in his writings is that the Christian faith is or should be held so strongly that, even if it is not understood, seems contrary to reason, or seems to contain contradictions in itself, one will nevertheless cleave to it.. Cf. M 76, P1, DI 1, CDH 1.1, also Ep. 136. In DC 3.9, he argues that faith (as well as hope), which is “of those things which are not seen,” are needed in order for humans to fully merit heavenly beatitude, “by the merit of faith and hope we might more gloriously attain to the happiness we desire,” p. 276. Anselm does not discuss virtues systematically in his works, but very clearly thinks in terms of virtues and vices, mentioning them too many times in his letters to cite individual instances. In DC, he touches on a controversial position about the basis for “the entire efficacy of the virtues,” 3.1, p.264. Cf. also DHM 2-3 90, 96, 119, 133-135, where Anselm discuses virtues in a somewhat more systematic (though regrettably not comprehensive) fashion.

^[5] Clearly the human being living out an Anselmian ethic would strive in this manner after justice, truth, goodness, beauty, unity, simplicity, wisdom, reason, and blessedness. Indeed we see Anselm and his interlocutors engaged in precisely such efforts in his treatises, in Eadmer’s Vita, and in the Letters.

^[6] By “oriented by”, I mean that the person subjects their volitions, actions, and thoughts to the norms of rectitude, and that they thereby seek rectitude. Seeking can mean seeking to understand more fully, to uncover the genuine norms, to discern their deeper structures, to judge rightly how to understand rectitude in a condition of moral conflict. It can also mean seeking, as in seeking out those who one can say have rectitude, or situations, relationships, institutions which have and convey rectitude. It can further mean the desire for and love of rectitude. It reaches a culmination in seeking the very source of rectitude.

^[7] M 78, p. 84. Cf. also DC 3.2: “nor is he said to have any but a dead faith, who does not will to act rightly according to the faith, on account of which [right willing and acting] faith is given,” p. 265.

^[8] DC 3.9, p. 276.

^[9] DI 1, p. 9

^[10] DI 1, p. 8

^[11] DI 1, p. 7

^[12] In fact, it gives rational creatures a dignity unparalleled by the rest of created being. Not only does rationality add a higher level of being (cf. M 31), it gives the rational nature a certain sublimity, and Anselm declares “it is recognized that God created nothing more precious than rational nature,” CDH 2.4, p. 99.

^[13] Only a rational nature can have a genuinely free will (able to determine itself, rather than simply determined by its appetites or the being’s nature), and only a rational nature can thus keep, and ought to keep justice. Cf. DV 5,12, DLA 3-4, 12, DCD 12, 16, CDH 1.9, 1.15, 2.1, DCV 3, DC 1.3, 1.6. Anselm considers infants not to actually have a rational will until they come to possess rationality, DCV 7, DC 3.2.

^[14] M 9, p. 24

^[15] Some Anselm interpreters have attempted to import into or impose upon Anselm’s writings a strong distinction between ratio and intellectus, e.g. Edward J. O’Toole: “Intellectus and ratio are distinguished by Anselm and for that matter by all Christian philosophers. Intellectus stands for spirit; it is the structural dynamism between each man and his God,” (he does not tell the reader what by contrast ratio is), “Anselm’s Logic of Faith,” Analecta Anselmiana, v. 3, p.149.

Victor W. Roberts, O.S.B., marshaling Schmitt, makes a more subtle distinction: “The term ratio is Anselm can have several meanings. It can mean the higher, or intellectual part in man. . . and more particularly the faculty whereby the mind can reason about reality. Corresponding to this faculty and also designated by ratio is the objective ground on which this activity is exercised. . . [Schmitt] distinguishes between ratio and intellectus and applies this distinction to faith: ‘Ratio and intellectus are distinguished in the following way: ratio is the objective ground of a thing; intellectus is the insight into this ground. Thus ratio fidei is the objective ground, accessible to reason, the why of a truth of reason; intellectus fidei is the insight into this ground, its evidence.’ Thus it is through the exercise of a faculty of ratio that the mind comes to grasp the ground (ratio) of a reality, and in this grasp the insight (intellectus) into the reality, which is the goal of cognition, takes place.” Notice however, that even if Schmitt’s interpretation is unquestionedly accepted, ratio and intellectus are clearly not distinguished as faculties, but rather are contrasted as follows: ratio is the faculty by which intellectus (a mode of operation of ratio) grasps the ratio (as what reason can grasp) of truths of the faith.

In point of fact, while granting some plausibility to Schmitt’s interpretation, in my view Anselm seems to use ratio and intellectus as activities and in the sense of “rational account” fairly interchangeably. Not only does he roughly equate spiritus, mens, and ratio in DC 3.13, p.285, he is recorded in a provocative passage from the Dicta Anselmi, as having taught: “there are many names of the soul, certain of which, though they appear to possess certain specific properties [proprietates], still are found to have been set in place of the soul itself in different places. For it is called spirit, mind [mens], mind [animus], reason, intellect, the interior man” DA 17, p. 175. De Lubac evinces a similar skepticism on textual grounds about distinguishing ratio from intellectus, Recherches dans la foi: Trois études sur Origène, saint Anselme, et la philosophie chrétienne (Paris: Beauchesne), p. 100-3. Cf. also Pierre Michaud-Quentin, “notes sur le vocabulaire psychologique de saint Anselme,” Spicilegium Becenesse, v. 1.

^[16] Cf. DV 5, DL 5.

^[17] DC 3.11, p. 279

^[18] DCD 8, p. 245

^[19] DC 3.11, p. 279

^[20] DC 3.11, p. 279

^[21] M10, p. 25. These nevertheless remain mediated to some degree through mental or verbal signs. In M 62, Anselm observes: “in the thought of a human being when he or she thinks of something which is outside of his or he mind, the expression [verbum] of the thing thought is no bon from the thing itself, since it is not present to the gaze of our thought, but [it is born] from some likeness or image of the thing that is in the memory of the one thinking, or perhaps at that time he thinks, it is being borne to the mind from the present thing by a bodily sense.” Even in one’s own mind’s reflection on itself, this is mediated by an image which does not perfectly coincide with its object, M 33. In M 36, we find that “created things exist much differently in themselves than they do in our knowledge of them. For in themselves, they are through their essence, but in our knowledge, it is not the essences of those things, but rather likenesses to them,” p. 55.

^[22] M10, p. 24-5.

^[23] While translators obviously do not intend to mislead, rendering ratio as “argument,” rather than “reasoning” lends itself to confusion with Anselm’s relatively infrequent uses of argumentum or verbal cognates. This generates a problem, for example, in determining how far the scope of the unum argumentum in Proslogion extends,

^[24] A passage in which such a translation occurs (in Hopkin’s and Richardson’s) is DCD 20: “your argument is so bound together by true, necessary, and clear reasons that I do not in any respect see how what yo say can be undone,” Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Anselm of Canterbury (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press. 2000), p. 249. Compare the Latin: “Sic tua disputatio veris et necessariis apertisque rationibus concatenatur, ut nulla ratione quod dicis dissolui posse videam,” p.264. This passage is illustrative of the problem and need for translation close to Anselm’s own terminological uses. Ratio is used twice, with arguably different, but clearly analogically related senses. “Argument” here translates not argumentum or ratio, but disputatio.

^[25] P Pro, p. 93 (twice.)

^[26] CDH Com, p. 39 (twice), 1.3, p. 50.

^[27] CDH 2, p. 50. Anselm also uses the expression altior, translatable as “higher” or “deeper” for such reasons, eg. in DCV 21, p. 161.

^[28] CDH Com, p. 40.

^[29] M 64-65 and P 14-16 may be seen as thematizing this. In DI 1, one reads of “deeper” or “higher” things of faith.

^[30] Though this is a topic far exceeding this paper, participation for Anselm means not only having a determinate quality corresponding to, caused by, modeled after a divine attribute. It also means that one is in God. For example, all truths are in some way in truth itself, DV 7, 10,12. In P19 and even more explicitly in M 14, we find all things are in, i.e, have their being in, God’s being. By being within an inescapable providential ordering, which encompasses and turns even evil and injustice to divine ends, all justice and wisdom is likewise in God’s wisdom and justice.

^[31] It is also possible to differentiate them not only by their objects or ranges of objects, but by their functions and activities. Thomas Aquinas does this, for instance in ST II-II, q 83, art. 1, in a discussion about prayer and reason: “Now the speculative and practical reason differ in this, that the speculative merely apprehends its object, whereas the practical reason not only apprehends but causes.” There is a tension in the very notion of practical reason from the start, arising already in Aristotle’s discussions of the practical syllogism, which purportedly has its conclusion not in knowledge, but action. Yet, practical reasoning, concerned with moral values, clearly generates and works by accounts and arguments which do not themselves terminate in action, but which could be applied in action.

^[32] We see this even during the Christian philosophy debate which I will be using to illuminate faith’s contributions to practical reason in Anselm’s work. In An Essay on Christian Philosophy, Maritain, who held out for the possibility of an essence of philosophy independent of any philosophy’s embodiments and formations in concrete historico-cultural states, and who held thus that philosophy per se could develop adequately independently from Christian faith, denied this for moral philosophy. This led to criticisms of his position from two sides.

Antonin Sertillanges accused him of inconsistency: “Is moral philosophy no longer philosophy? Moreover, how can one dissociate, so as to judge them different from a formal point of view, disciplines as connected as moral philosophy itself, psychology (even speculative, the metaphysics of the soul), and metaphysics in general, any more than in another sense from sociology and to politics?” “De la philosophie chrétienne,” Vie Intellectuelle, v. 24. n. 1, p. 17. In Sertillanges’ view, Maritain errs in dispensing philosophy per se from what applies to moral philosophy.

Fernand Van Steenberghen makes the opposite criticism: “The truth attained by philosophy is a partial, but in no way provisional or hypothetical truth, as it seems sometimes to be insinuated. . . Revelation does not come to suppress the conclusions of a true philosophy: it completes them, as grace perfects nature. Let us note lastly that, contrary to what Mr. Maritain thinks, all of this goes for moral philosophy as well as for theoretical philosophy. The conclusions of moral philosophy are not weakened, but confirmed and completed by revelation.” “La IIe journée d’études de la Société Thomiste et la notion de ‘philosophie chrétienne,’” Revue Néo-scolastique de Philosophie, v. 35, p. 546 ftnt. 20

^[33] Just looking to the history of philosophy, one might think of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche in the 19^th century (as well as their numerous epigonesin the 20th), and among numerous thinkers in the 20^th, Maurice Blondel, Max Scheler, Dietrich Von Hildebrand, Alasdair MacIntyre.

^[34] By its very nature, for Anselm (as for most in the Christian tradition going back to the early Fathers), wisdom is practical as well as theoretical or contemplative. And thus, if philosophy is understood to be the love, desire, or quest for wisdom, it will likewise be an activity which remains practically oriented. Even knowledge of God through contemplation must sometimes be situated within a more directly practical framework, and Anselm writes to candidate who wishes to avoid the office to which his community calls him: “I consider it more advantageous to you to preserve the peace of contemplation by love in your mind and the obedience of brotherly charity in your actions than to wish to choose contemplation alone by despising the prayers and the need of others,” Ep. 345, p. 74.

^[35] DHM 26- 36 contains very interesting discussion of curiosity, as one of three main currents of vice stemming from self-will (propria voluntas), productive of “restlessness, murmuring, detraction, and other such vices,” 36, p. 50.

^[36] “St. Anselm and Knowing God,” p. 443.

^[37] Englebert Rechtenwald interprets Anselm’s thought as: “When something is known as as-it-should-be [gesollt], then at the same time it becomes known that this Should [Sollen] is not itself a temporal entity, which arises and vanishes with that which becomes as-it-should-be. . . . Whatever either actually is as being or can be thought can and must always be thought as standing under a Should which already is before it.” “Das id quo maius cogitari non potest als rectitudo: Anselms Gottbeweis im Lichte von De Veritate”, in Twenty-Five Years of Anselm Studies, ed. Frederick Van Fleterern and Joseph C. Schnaubelt (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen. 1996) p. 138.

^[38] M 68, p. 78. Cf. also CDH 2.1, p. 97.

^[39] DV 11, p. 191

^[40] DV 12, p. 192, DLA 4, p. 214.

^[41] Jorge J. E. Gracia and Jonathan J. Sanford develop a skeletal account of this function of discernment: “but how does reason operate and how does reasoning make us understand the good, the true, the just, and so on? There seem to be three aspects to this process. The first is the formation of concepts that correspond to realities; the second is the formulation of judgements; and the third is the development of arguments that support these judgements,” “Ratio Quaerens Beatitudinem,: Anselm on Rationality and Happiness,” in Rationality and Happiness: From the Ancients to the Early Medievals, Ed. Jiyuan Yu and Jorge J. E.Gracia. (Rochester: University of Rochester Press. 2003), p. 206 Although in my estimate their account unduly deforms Anselm’s thought by forcing it exclusively into somewhat too-restrictive and rather un-anselmian (rather Scholastic) categories (e.g. concepts, arguments), they are on the right track in attempting to correlate different intellectual value-engaging acts and functions with each other.

^[42] Cf. M 68, 69, DLA 4, DI 1, CDH 1.1, 2.1 , DCV 10, DC 1.6, 3,2, and also Dicta Anselmi ch.17.

^[43] “Fidens Quarens Intellectum,” p. 414.

^[44] “Praying the Proslogion,” p. 37. Earlier she makes a claim with which I am in entire agreement: “Anselm takes for granted that human understanding is a work of collaboration, involving reciprocal initiative and response: the soul strives and seeks, thereby bringing the image of God that it is into clearer focus, tuning its instrument of knowledge as best it can; then God presses in and discloses; and the soul works to put into words what it has seen,” p. 19.

^[45] “Fides Quaerens Intellectum,” p. 415.

^[46] “Fides Quaerens Intellectum,” p. 426.

^[47] Adams might seem to be advocating what I do here in writing “Because our powers are feeble, necessarily reaching for what they cannot grasp, our exercise of them needs a teacher.” “Elegant Necessity,” p. 370. She continues: “‘Like is known by like’ inspires hope for progress. For we are made in God’s image, and pull ourselves into ever sharper focus the more we exercise our powers aright,” p. 370. She does follow up briefly on the human-human interaction in “Fidens Quaerens Intellectum,” seeing in Anselm’s dialogues that “student/teacher relations model those of the human investigator to God,” p. 415. She also examines the teaching dialogues in “Elegant Necessity,” p. 381-384.

^[48] “Elegant Necessity,” p. 370

^[49] We should remember Anselm attempting to beg off from the study in CDH because it would entail full study of several other very deep topics.

^[50] “Fides Quaerens Intellectum,” p. 418.

^[51] “Praying the Proslogion,” p. 17

^[52] Recherches dans la foi, p. 93

^[53] “St. Anselm’s Fides Quaerens Intellectum as a Model for Christian Philosophy,” The Saint Anselm Journal, v. 4, n. 1. Also cf. Spicilegium Beccense, v. 1, in which three articles dealt with the issue of Anselm and Christian philosophy: André Hayen, “Saint Anselme et Saint Thomas: la vrai nature de la théologie et sa portée apostolique”; Ramon Hernandez, “Les caractères foundamentaux de la philosophie de Saint Anselme”; and Philippe Delhaye, who writes in “Quelques aspects de la morale de S. Anselme”: “one could say that [Anselm’s] outline of the groundwork of ethics is an prime example of ‘Christian philosophy’. It is philosophy because one discusses, reasons, and deduces. The treatises to which we have referred here are disputationes, essays of dialectical reflection, emerging from a need for systematization and rational clarity. But their psychological origin is the reading of Holy Scripture and the problems that it raises,” p. 409.

^[54] As pointed out earlier, Anselm considers curiosity a vice, defining it as: “eagerness for lingering over examining [perscrutandi] those things that there is no usefulness in knowing,” DHM 26, p. 47. Even while departing in format from the established theological practices of citing authorities, he nevertheless stresses and measures the value of his works by continuity with Patristic authorities. As he tells us in P proem, and Eadmer amplifies in VA 1.19, one of his most original conceptions, the unum argumentum was for a period regarded by him as “uselessly impeding my mind, by occupying it, from other matters in which I could make some progress,” p. 93. For Anselm, the most important value an idea possesses is not whether it is original, or even interesting. It is whether it is true and useful.

^[55] This touches on an interesting point, fuller exploration of which would require an article. I will accordingly simply note it here without providing the needed exegetical and argumentative support. In thinking about the contributions Christianity made to intellectual culture, particularly in an by the Middle Ages, one may assume that core ideas and experiences of Christianity were simply absorbed and taken for granted, so that intellectual life operated in an uncritically accepted and unquestioned horizon of Christian faith. What gets left out in is the fact, stressed by Maurice Blondel during the Christian philosophy debates, that Christianity can never be simply naturalized into a set of cultural acquisitions and assumptions. Put in terms of culture and society, even Christian ones remain in constant need for further, deeper, and ever-renewed Christianization.

^[56] Anselm discusses this in DC 3.6, where he provides a way to tell if reasoning in line with Scripture. “If we say something by reasoning [ratione] that we cannot show to be clearly in the words of Scripture, or to be proved from them, we know in this way by means of Scripture whether it should be accepted or rejected: If it is worked out by clear reasoning and Scripture in no manner contradicts it – since Scripture, just as it opposes no truth, favors no falsity – by the very fact that it does not deny what is said by reasoning, that then is upheld by authority. But if Scripture undoubtably opposes a view of ours [nostro sensui], even though by our reason it appears to us to be unassailable, nevertheless we must believe that it is not supported by truth. And thus in this way, Sacred Scripture, since it either clearly affirms or in no way denies it, contains the authority for every truth that reason derives,” p. 271-2. At least for his own writings (and presumably he would extend this to other thinkers), Anselm also invokes the thought of the Church Fathers as a criterion in a similar way in M, proem, Ep. 77, DI 1, CDH, com, 1.1, 1.3.

^[57] Justice is treated in one way or another in nearly all of the treatises, and a number of letters.. For a few examples of Anselm’s teachings on these virtues cf. on Obedience, Ep. 233, 403; on Peace, Ep. 332, 450; Patience, Ep. 39, 73, 343; on Humility, DHM 101-8, DA 1-2, Ep. 285; on Charity, Ep. 112, 434

^[58] “Existe-t-il,” p. 6. Christian faith and thought not only provides the background to the conception of justice as rectitudo vountatis propter se servata, as Pouchet demonstrates in considerable detail. (La rectitudo chez Saint Anselme, chs. 1-4), it also provides rectitudo vountatis propter se servata with robust determinate content which prevents it from being evacuated and degenerating into an empty, purely formal notion. On this, cf. Dom Paschal Baumstein, O.S.B., “Anselm on the Dark Night and Truth”Cistercian Studies Quarterly, v. 35, n. 2; Baumstein “Saint Anselm and the Prospect of Perfection,” Faith and Reason, v. 29; Phillipe Delhaye,”Quelque aspects de la morale de saint Anselme,” Spicilegium Beccense, v. 1 (Paris: Vrin. 1959); Donald Duclow’s “Structure and Meaning In Anselm’s De Veritate,” American Benedictine Review, v. 26, n. 4.; and my “Divine and Human Rectitude: Meeting Anselm’s God through Moral Life,” in Essays on St. Anselm On the Occasion of the 900 Year Anniversary of His Death, Fr. John Fortin, O.S.B. and Ralph McInerny, eds. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2009).

^[59] DC 1.6. Correlatively, practical reason also finds out when what appear to be evil things are not really evil things. Punishment, chastisement, and satisfaction provide prime examples, and Anselm discusses such examples where what appears evil is really to one’s good in e.g. DHM 77, 81, and Ep. 233. On this, Cf. G Mansini, “St. Anselm, ‘Satisfactio,’and the ‘Rule’ of St. Benedict,” Revue Benedictine, v. 97, n. 1-2, and my “Non Modo Verbis Sed Et Verberibus: Saint Anselm on Punishment, Coercion, and Violence,” forthcoming in Cistercian Studies Quarterly.

^[60] p. 221.

^[61] There are the examples of the Saints and Mary of course, elaborated dramatically in Anselm’s Prayers, and with respect to St. Elphege in Vita 1.30, but even more the example of Christ Himself, mentioned specifically, e.g. in CDH 2.11, 2.18.

^[62] Anselm inherits, and expects his readership, to inherit and make use of the moral norms, principles, distinctions, and reasoning found in Scripture and in the tradition of Christian thought. Consider, for example, ch. 4 of the Rule of Saint Benedict, a short compendium of scriptural injunctions providing “the instruments of good works.” Anselm takes Scripture’s usefulness for moral understanding as a given. “In what way one is to approach participation in such a great grace, and in what way one is to live under it, everywhere Sacred Scripture teaches us,” CDH 2.19, p.131. He tells the widow Basilia: “the whole of Holy Scripture, if you have it explained to you, teaches you how you ought to live,” Ep. 420, p. 191. In the Meditation on Human Redemption, Anselm acknowledges to Christ: “you illuminated me, and showed me what I was, for when I was unable to see this, you taught others the truth on my behalf and you showed it to me before I asked it . . .You have set me upright and raised me to knowledge and love of yourself,” p. 236.

Anselm also invokes the “law of Christianity,” e.g. Ep. 424, p. 197, and the “law of God,” e.g. Ep. 210, p. 157 (where the phrase is actually “the law and will of God.” Eadmer reports Anselm as having asked King William Rufus for “revival of the Christian law which was being violated in many ways, and for the reform of morals which every day and in every class of people showed too many corruptions.” VA 2.8, p. 69. Cf. also Eadmer’s broader use of “law” in discussing Anselm’s mode of moral instruction in VA 1.31. As Raymonde Foreville points out, however: “the divine law is not always explicitly formulated. In a number of cases. . .there is no clear, direct, and immediate reference, whether to divine precepts as they are contained in the Gospel or the Decalogue, or to the expression of the divine will as formulated in the apostolic decretals,” “L’ultime ‘ratio’ de la morale politique de Saint Anselme: ‘rectitudo voluntatis propter se servata,” Spicilegium Beccense, v. 1, p. 435.

^[63] Brown, “Faith and Reason in Anselm: Two Models,” p. 20.

^[64] Evans, “The ‘Secure Technician’,” p. 11

^[65] “Anselm’s Proslogion: the Desire for the Word,” p. 23.

^[66] Of this problem, whose full treatment is deferred to De Concordia, Anselm has his student say: “Now I am reminded of that very well known question about divine foreknowledge and free choice. For although it is asserted with so much authority and held with so much utility that in no way should it on account of any human reasoning be doubted that divine foreknowledge and free choice are compatible with each other, still so far as they appear to reason’s consideration, they appear to be in strong disagreement [insociabiliter. . . dissentire],” DCD 21, p. 266.

^[67] P 9, p. 108

^[68] For fuller discussion of this, cf. my “Mercy and Justice in Saint Anselm’s Proslogion.” The progression Anselm articulates in fact sets new flesh on the bones of the formula quo maius cogitari non potest. “You are so good that you cannot be understood to be any better [nequeas intelligi melior], and work so powerfully that you cannot be thought to be more powerful [non possis cogitari potentius]. For what is more just than this?” P 9, p. 108. “It is just, that You are so just that You cannot be thought to be more just [iustior nequeas cogitari],” P 11, p. 109.

^[69] P 9, p. 107

^[70] P 11, p. 109. He also acknowledges several times that God’s goodness itself cannot be fully comprehended

^[71] P 9, p. 108 (twice)

^[72] I suggest this in “Freedom, Inclinations of the Will, and Virtue in Anselm,” p. 100. Dom Baumstein has gone in this direction in his articles and his yet-unpublished manuscript Vita Veritatis: Saint Anselm on Monastic Character (archived at the Institute for St. Anselm Studies and at Belmont Abbey). Following his leads, I attempt to draw out an Anselmian ethics of the use of the mind in a more systematic manner in a volume I am currently writing on St. Anselm’s moral theory.

^[73] Already in saying: “It is clear that the rational creature should expend all of its ability [posse] and will [velle] on remembering and understanding and loving the highest good,” M 68, p. 79, the will is already determinately involved in intellectual activity. In DHM 3, only when the will is conjoined to God, is it “opened to the disposition of the virtues and to willing what should be preferred [volendum optanda], memory to the remembering of things that should be remembered, thought to the thinking of things that should be thought upon, understanding to distinguishing what is to be willed or remembered or thought.” Disorder of the will has intellectual consequences, which then feed back into the will, since the soul “ can neither keep nor possess [justice] unless it is understood [non intellecta]” DCV 8, p. 149. One can “be sunken by one sin after another even into the bottomless abyss of sin. . . .so that the good is even turned for him to something hateful”, DC 3.8. p. 275. “Without faith and obedience to God’s commandments. . . sometimes by good conscience being neglected, the understanding [previously] given,” DI 1, p. 8. “[T]he soul that is weighted down by the body which is corrupted cannot even understand [justice]”, and this introduces a major problem, since that justice “cannot be kept nor had when not understood,” DCV 8, p. 149.

^[74] In DC 3.12, Anselm frames this as uprightness favoring the spirit against the flesh.

^[75] Anselm exhibits precisely this in several of his prayers, e.g. “I have prayed, Lord, as I can, but I wish I could do more. . . . ear me always with your favor, not as my heart wills or as my mouth asks, but as you know and will that I ought to wish and ask,” Prayer for Enemies, p. 219.

^[76] Anselm’s Proslogion provides a prime example here, in its movement into the lux inaccessibilis, where ultimately the personal Triune God is found in c. 23 As Delhaye observes: “Saint Anselm addresses a call to continual going-further-beyond [dépassement],” “Quelque aspects de la morale de S. Anselme,” p. 412. He has in mind texts such as Ep. 131 or 231. “Reflexive philosophers’” (e.g. Paliard, Forest, Rassam, Schur) interpretations of Anselm, and the interpretation of Coloman Viola have particularly stressed this inextricably ethical aspect of Anselm’s thought. Cf. in particular Viola, “St. Anselm, the theologian of the greatness of God,” Hermathena, v. 166. It must also be noted that the personal relationship with God also determinately involves the Christian subject with salvation history, the church, and the community of the saints, the cloud of witnesses, the mystical body of Christ.

^[77] P, proem, p, 93. Eadmer writes that “unmeasurable joy and jubilation filled his entire inmost being,” p. 30.

^[78] De Lubac, p. 87.

^[79] CDH 1.20, p. 87. Cf. Bernd Goebel and Vittorio Hösle, “Reasons, Emotions, and God’s Presence in Anselm of Canterbury’s Dialogue Cur Deus Homo”, Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie, v. 87 (2005)

^[80] M 68, p. 79

^[81] M 74, p. 83

^[82] M 75, p. 83, 76, p. 83.

^[83] DC 1.6, p. 257

^[84] p. 419

^[85] p..426

^[86] p. 84

^[87] p. 143. Even further, affectivity is the hinge in this rational being between reason and the proper response in volition and action. If only he could feel and cry, Anselm continues, “perhaps I might hope; hoping, I would pray; praying, I might obtain. When truly, because of my wretchedness, feeling and grief are not in me, how can I hope? Without hope, how can I pray? And, without prayer, what can I obtain?” p. 143 Practical reason can tell him that he ought to do and have these, but affectivity is needed, and practical reasoning within the matrix of faith reveals to him this further need.

^[88] p. 149

^[89] On the other hand, affectivity can also in myriad ways interfere with and stultify reason, particularly practical reason, in its orientation towards and understanding of the good. A prime example of this is found in Anselm’s criticism of the abbot who attempted to correct his young charges through more and more and more beatings: “being thus injudiciously oppressed, they harbor and welcome and nurse within themselves evil and crooked thoughts like briars, and cherish these thoughts so passionately that they doggedly reject everything which could minister to their correction. Hence, feeling no love or pity, good-will or tenderness in your attitude towards them, they have in future no faith in your goodness but believe all of your actions proceed from hatred and envy against them. The deplorable result is. . . their hatred increases, along with their apprehension of evil, and [they wind up] ever inclined and bent towards the vices,” Vita 1.22, p. 37-8. Notice that Anselm’s intervention and judgement here is an instance of practical reason cooperating with faith, which rectifies the reason of the other abbot, whose response is at once intellectual, affective, and volitional.

^[90] At least in one respect. “Since it does this in multifarious ways, I am not up to enumerating the ways in which grace aids free will,” DC 3.4, p. 267

^[91] DC 3.1

^[92] I believe these passages may be categorized into four main types. First, there are cases where Anselm prays directly to God for assistance in the inquiry. Second, there are cases where Anselm or his interlocutor states or hopes God (at times as a divine attribute) will help in the inquiry. Third, there are cases where it is asserted that God has revealed something in the course of inquiry. Last, there are the relatively rare passages which show Anselm reliant on the Augustinian divine illumination concept.

^[93] DC 3.1, p. 263

^[94] DC 3.6, p. 272-3 Originally the seeds, like all created beings, come from God, so that “without human teaching He miraculously caused the hearts of the prophets and the apostles, and no less the Gospels, to be fertile with salvation-bringing seeds,” p. 271.

^[95] DC 3.6, p. 271

^[96] For Anselm, even on a purely intellectual plane (if there is such a thing), there is no relationship with God unmediated by images, signs, words. And, until we exist in eternity, since a human being in not what he is all the time, even a relationship with God seemingly more immediate through affectivity, will, or action, remains mediated.

^[97] Particularly in Anselm’s view, Benedictine monasticism.

^[98] Ep. 37, p. 134, (replicated in Vita); .cf. also Ep. 101, 185, 230. It need not be the Devil, however; it can also be the world, or the flesh (the carnal appetites) as it is in Ep. 121.

^[99] Ep. 37, p. 136

^[100] Ep. 62, p. 175-6

My monthly AMA sessions are generally a place where I get put on the spot to do some useful reflection as I respond to questions that my viewers ask me. I’ve decided that some of them really merit having the responses more widely shared here in Substack. I like to think that what I have to say is decently thoughtful enough to be repeated in writing, but I also expect that in many cases, expanding upon, clarifying, or providing examples for what I came up with in that moment would make for more fully-worked-out responses. So this is the first of what will likely be a long series of such posts.

The question that I got asked in my most recent AMA (which you can watch here) is a more sophisticated variation on a fairly common sort:

Which philosophers of the past would we love to have a discussion with together, as in Aristotle talking to Kant about his critique, assuming that language is not a problem?

Why would I say this is a instance of a common type of question? Fairly routinely people ask questions along the lines of: “If you could have a conversation with any philosopher from time, who would you pick, and why?” or “If you could have dinner with any philosopher”, understanding I think you’d enjoy a conversation with them over the meal. I’ve answered those many times in multiple ways, sometimes pointing out that some authors whose thought we admire, value, find useful, or even love, might make poor companions or conversation partners.

This particular question is more complex. It isn’t about whose brain you’d like to tap, or which intellectual rockstar you’d like to go backstage with. It’s about who you would bring into conversation, a discourse that you might not even have to take part in, and might perhaps just listen to. The example would be a meeting of two major philosophers, with something fairly definite in mind, one of Kant’s three Critiques.

We could well imagine the two of them squaring off, or engaging in dialogue, about the theoretical philosophy of the Critique of Pure Reason, the practical philosophy of the Critique of Practical Reason, or perhaps even the various topics (teleology perhaps, or what taste involves) in the Critique of Judgement. Alternately, we might imagine the two of them focusing on a work by Aristotle, with the earlier philosopher responding to the criticism of the later, bearing upon his Categories, which he dismissively termed a “rhapsody” in his Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics.

We could even imagine philosophers closer in time, whose works are more intrinsically connected. What if instead of Aristotle, it was a writer from the modern period who Kant engaged much more closely, like those offering differing models of idealism, Rene Descartes or George Berkeley? Or what if on the issue of causality, we brought together Kant with the David Hume who famously roused him from his “dogmatic slumbers”?

There’s no reason to assume that we could only bring two philosophers into conversation, though. Why not arrange a conversation with three, or four, or a dozen? Picture a panel discussion about what Existentialism really means that brought together Jean-Paul Sartre with Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Miguel de Unamuno and Nishitani Keiji. Wouldn’t that be something? Or the nature of Christian philosophy with Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, and Blaise Pascal. The possibilities for combinations of this sort are pretty much endless, aren’t they?

My response in the session was very direct:

That would not have any interest to me like Aristotle and Kant talking about his critique. . . I mean, we do that already, right? We place them into discussion with each other in ways that probably are better than bringing Aristotle out of the past to talk to so and so in the present time, as we read, and understand, and reinterpret their works. There’ nothing really special about the person themselves. we might catch them on a bad day when they’re not inclined to talk about philosophy. So that’s actually kind of an interesting idea. I would actually say maybe we don’t want that.

I’m reminded of several remarks made by Lev Shestov, in his early work All Things Are Possible, about the mistaken ideas people tend to harbor about what it must be like meeting and spending time with the authors of works that one enjoys, finds insightful. One of these is that people find pleasure (usually of an intellectual sort) in reading a work that an author laboriously produced, and they think to themselves: if the work itself is so pleasurable to me to read, the creative activity of writing it must have been even more pleasurable for the writer! Not so. We get the fruit, the end-product of a lot of seemingly wasted effort, dead-ends, scrapped lines of thinking, anxieties over whether one actually has anything to say. Another is that when we are fortunate enough to meet a famous writer, they’re apt to disappoint, as they turn out to offer their amazing insights only sporadically to the rest of us (and to themselves).

Who’s to say that, pick any two philosophers you like, when we put them together for a conversation, that’s an activity they will be interested in carrying out? Or that, even setting aside not just the language barrier but all the other sorts of things that might separate people (Aristotle held pretty strong views about non-Greeks, i.e. barbarians, and their capacities for reasoning and moral development). What if they had something like what we vaguely call a “personality conflict”? Would everyone who claims some sort of intellectual heritage tracing back to great-granddaddy Socrates really be cool with his irony and seemingly endless questioning? Maybe not.

It’s an at-first excellent-sounding imaginary prospect, these “bring-X-and-Y-together” scenarios. But once you start thinking it through a bit more, you see there might be all sorts of issues that rear their heads, and steer that situation from the awesome meeting-of-the-great-minds you were anticipating.

There’s another and different reason why I’m less enthusiastic about putting authors who I myself particularly like into a forced conversation with each other, and it’s a rather different one than one would probably expect. To me such a hypothetical and idealized meeting in the flesh seems rather superficial but also superfluous. Why? We already possess the capacity to experience conversations between at least some of the great thinkers of the past who have left behind a legacy of their thought in texts, but we have to do so in a different way than just pulling off the philosophical equivalent of setting up a blind date or engineering an intellectual meet-cute.

We ourselves have to provide the locus for the encounter between one thinker and another, making the space within our own minds, perhaps aiding our imagination and intellects by working our thoughts out on paper, or recording our own verbal conversation. This could be an individual practice, but we might also do it together with others as well, so long as they are suitable partners in the undertaking. For you see, it’s not something everyone can do, at least at their current levels of philosophical development, knowledge, and experience in reading philosophers.

I’ll come back to that restriction in a moment, but there’s another that we need to signal as well. Not every philosopher would really be suitable for these imaginary conversations. Why not? In order to be good prospects, we have to possess what you might call a critical mass of their writings, or at least writings by others about them. Lacking that, we’re really more juxtaposing vaguely imagined beings, more reflective of whatever it is we want to read into them, than robustly developed thinkers.

I’d say, for example, that we really don’t have enough of Heraclitus’ works (all we have are fragments) or testimonies about him (even assuming that they’re all true) to have anything more than something shadowy Heraclit-ish thing to bring into the conversation. We have more by him than, though, than we do from either Catherine of Alexandria or Hypatia of Alexandria, both of whom likely were real people. We don’t really know if any of the things other authors tell us about either of those philosophers were really the case or not.

As a side-note, we are in a rather unenviable position with respect to many philosophers of ancient times by comparison to someone like Seneca, who talks in a number of his works about hosting conversations in his own mind with philosophers who had died by his time, but whose minds lived in in their works. Seneca could being Heraclitus in for a conversation if he wished to, since his work was readily available back then (in fact, it appears Seneca took it for granted philosophical works would always be so). If we are attracted to Stoicism, we can’t really bring Zeno or Chrysippus or Posidonius into the spaces in our minds prepared for conversation, as we can Seneca himself, or Epictetus, or even Marcus Aurelius.

Coming back to the other restriction, being able to provide a part of whatever you want to call it, your soul, your mind, your head- or heart-space, enough to house a robust enough reflection of a philosopher to be able for them to engage with at least a bit of the world, maybe show your their own viewpoint on it, to think out responses to new situations that draw upon their already articulated thoughts, that’s not something everyone is capable of. Even among those who are capable, we’re not all equally capable. There are some capacities one has to have or in certain cases to have developed.

I won’t try to provide some sort of exhaustive listing of those at present, but I’d say that at an absolute minimum, one would have to have spent a good amount of time reading around in that thinker’s available works, and not just reading but reflecting upon them. For example, one might have read Rene Descartes’ Meditations, which is a great work that, read rightly, definitely leads you through some very interesting arguments, considerations, lines of reasoning, distinctions, at the heart of the Cartesian project.

But that’s not quite knowing Descartes. It’s just a start. He has many other works one would want to read, for example the Discourse on Method, those Objections and Replies appended to and much longer than the Meditations, lots of correspondence, including late in life with the brilliant Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, which led him to write The Passions of the Soul. There’s more of course, but spend time with those works, thinking along with Descartes, and maybe you can bring something Descartes-like into being within yourself that would be fit for conversation with yourself or with another.

Just having the collected works of someone loaded into your memory isn’t enough though. You’re going to need some decently developed capacities of imagination, perhaps empathy of sorts, judgement, and quite likely some other things I haven’t even given a name to at this point. This is something we do, or become able to do, some of us, at some point, perhaps not even realizing when we’ve crossed the threshold into that capacity. It takes a while, to say the least. But when you can do it, you can fairly reliably say things like “Here’s how Aristotle would respond to this situation or objection or issue” and you can be relatively on-point in doing so.

It might be that you can do that with just one philosopher period, or that you can do it with only one philosopher at a time and not bring another into conversation with them, but it might also be possible for you to have two in something like a conversation with each other. In fact, you might have a whole set taking up space, rent-free in your head, as the saying goes, that occasionally chime in or that take a more active role in discussions that you provide the site for. That might even emerge in the writing projects where you bring those philosophers back to life in a certain sense.

There’s a good bit more that could be said about this matter, and probably ought to be as well, but I’m going to end this here for the time being. If you’ve got your own thoughts on the matter, of course, you can leave them as comments.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

It’s very common, especially while you’re in the course of your early education in philosophy, when encountering and then engaging in study of a philosopher (or even a school or movement), to find yourself responding very positively to their thought and work. It might happen for all sorts of different reasons, which could compete with or even reinforce each other. And frankly, it is normal. But it can also lead you, if not precisely astray, into places that might turn out to be less productive for you. Looking back on my own meanderings of that sort, some of them, I’ll admit, are even upon retrospect a bit embarrassing.

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Strictly speaking, from the classic Stoic perspective, feeling guilt, or other closely related emotions such as shame, embarrassment, regret, and remorse, would be something bad. When it comes to emotional states, Stoic philosophy is clear and categorical. The majority of the emotions they discuss, those they will call pathń or perturbations, are bad. They are divided into four main categories, depending on whether they involve judgments about something being good or bad, present or not: pleasure, pain, desire, and fear.

Stoics also identify good emotional states (eupatheiai), which are rationally felt. There are three main categories: rational desire (boulēsis), often translated as “wish”; rational fear (eulabeia), frequently rendered as “caution”; and rational pleasure (kharis), typically termed “joy”. The ancient Stoics didn’t think there was any eupathic correlate to the main category of pain. Lupē, pain or distress, is always something bad from the Stoic perspective. These points are probably familiar to anyone who has learned about the Stoic theory of emotions, but since many readers don’t know that theory, it is worth spelling them out.

It’s also useful to clarify what these terms “good” and “bad” mean when applied to emotions, especially since many people in our contemporary culture get told, and then parrot, a perspective any virtue ethics would view as deeply mistaken: “Emotions aren’t good or bad. It’s how we express them that can be good or bad.”

The Stoics would disagree with that dogmatic declaration, and regard any person making it as deeply mistaken. From their perspective, emotional states and responses are in fact good or bad, and in multiple ways. Good emotional states are something good in themselves. They are good for a person to feel. And feeling them contributes to making a person him- or herself good. It works the same way for bad emotional states.

The classic Stoic authors don’t talk specifically about the spectrum of emotional states that we call by the name “guilt” in the present day. They do share a common psychological vocabulary of the ancient world that includes some of those “closely related” emotional states mentioned earlier, in particular shame (aidos), regret (metameleia), and repentance (metanoia).

If we were going to place them into the Stoic fourfold classification, they would all fall under the category of pain. All of them would share a common set of objects and judgments about them, namely one’s past actions, and the view that one’s actions were bad. Whether through guilt, shame, or regret, one feels bad because one judges that one has done something bad, and there is arguably a connected judgment that one is oneself bad, at least in being responsible for that action.

One objection naturally arising in response to the Stoic view that guilt would always be a bad emotion would be this: Feeling bad about one’s own past actions, and by extension about one’s own messed-up motivations, priorities, and habits on the one hand, and one’s mistaken judgments, assumptions, and assents, on the other hand, can actually prove to be something good. Wouldn’t this be the case if it leads a person to recognize how messed up they are and to resolve to change themselves for the better?

Feeling emotions like guilt or shame could certainly play a part in a person’s story of moral reformation. Perhaps it’s even a necessary experience for those who have gone down wrong paths and damaged themselves, if they are going to engage in self-improvement.

Here is where we need to make a distinction. It is certainly possible, indeed often the case, that something generally bad ends up producing or playing a part in something that happens to be good in a particular case. That doesn’t mean that what’s bad ceases being bad. In some sense it is better for a person to feel guilty over moral lapses than to not feel guilty, let alone to feel that they did the right thing, since it reflects a right judgment that they did wrong (assuming they actually did something wrong). But it would be better not to feel guilt because one doesn’t do things that are bad or wrong. Of course, for us non-sages, we are going to fail sometimes, feel bad about that, and then hopefully use that bad feeling to steer us away from that failing.

I’ll close with something several of my inmate students said to me, when I was teaching philosophy classes at Indiana State Prison. It was a maximum security prison, so nearly everyone incarcerated there had been convicted of serious crimes and had long sentences to serve. “This is a terrible place,” they would say, “but this is what I needed. I was a bad man, and I’m still not a good one, but I’m making progress. And being put in here is what I needed for that to happen.” Perhaps we ought to look at the guilt, or shame, or regret we feel in an analogous manner.

This piece first appeared in the August 2024 issue of the online magazine The Stoic. If this piece has you now interested in Stoicism, and you would like to know what to read next, this might be helpful for you.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

This is an invited talk that was given at the Windmoor House in South Bend, Indiana. In it, I discuss my views and reflections upon moral education in the Indiana prison system, based on my experiences and observations teaching Philosophy and Religious Studies in Ball State University’s B.A. program at Indiana State Prison.

Indiana, like each of the other 49 United States of America, has a Department of Corrections that manages a system of prisons and prison programs ranging from minimum security facilities to the highest maximum security prisons where inmates are locked down for all but 30 minutes of the day.

Prisons, like police and military forces, systems of law and administration, and other coercive institutions, are necessary parts of modern civil society, not least because modern society, like practically all other types of society, has to protect its members, most often from each other, and because there are always those who not only will be tempted by, but will plan, and do acts that at the very least violate the letter of existing laws, at worst engage in horrific evil, with a wide range of wickedness, perversions, destructions, or deprivations of goods, common and individual, culpability, malice, viciousness, and the like in between.

There are many explanations of crime, but two classic ones that we ought to take very
seriously are the following. First, a point from moral philosophy: there are many ways to go wrong with respect to doing, knowing, and sharing the good and preventing, avoiding, or ameliorating evil, and in point of fact, these many ways of going wrong exist and are embodied in people and structures of community. Second a point from Christian doctrine: we are fallen creatures, and we are all marked by original sin, and original sin is not an abstract concept, but a concrete reality whose effects we can see and experience but never fully understand.

Of course, these are very short statements, quite general, clearly only starting points for thinking and discussion, but they are relevant and necessary starting points, and when it comes to prisons, criminals, and moral education, any thinking or discussion that does not in some way grapple with these, and work itself out including
these in its premises or principles, in my humble view, is at best sentimental fluff and nonsense.

To be sure, as Jacques Maritain, who certainly didn’t believe in setting Christian doctrine aside, noted, it is not necessary to be a Christian to realize our human nature as weak, fallible, given to vices, to violence, to fraud, to lies, to abuse, and exploitation, perhaps inextricably involved in these both in each individual soul and in the fabric of human relations and society. And, to be sure, it is quite easy to get mistaken in one’s concept of original sin.

To express to oneself intellectually that there is original sin is not the same as to experience one’s grasp of its only partial graspability, to approach the awful mystery of evil, which is always concrete, always real, but never confined to only one place, or thing, or notion, or act. Having correct first principles from moral philosophy and Christian doctrine hardly means that everything immediately, simply, and clearly falls into place. But, it is unmistakably better than not having correct first principles, which always means having some other, incorrect first principles.

Corresponding to the philosophical point that there are many ways to go wrong, and the Christian doctrine’s point that we are all marked by original sin, there are two other
corresponding points.

Philosophy, if we are attentive to its history, and enter into dialogue with its better voices, tells us that there are better and worse ways to live, and that development and employment of the mind, education if you will, is needed for understanding and following the better ways.

In Christian doctrine, corresponding to the left‐to‐itself truly terrible fact of the Fall and original sin, is the only thing that could make it into a felix culpa, Redemption, forgiveness of sins, the giving of grace by a loving and merciful God who takes on human flesh, accepting suffering, anguish and death for us and all sinners. We are given the promise and the possibility of a new life, not simply after this one, but also in this one as well, through Christ’s transforming power.

So, there are two things we ought to know about how we go wrong, and there are two things we ought to know about how we go right, or, perhaps more properly said, are aided so that we can go right. If the great Christian philosophers of our tradition are correct, these are not two entirely separate sets of matters, philosophy as opposed to Christian faith and life, the natural as opposed to the supernatural, nature as opposed to grace. That is not the way things work.

As many of the Church Fathers realized, if a philosophical idea or doctrine or even systematic approach is true and good, we Christians can and should make use of it.
And, in turn, to use several expressions of Etienne Gilson, Christianity is a “revelation
generative of reason”, it fertilizes the use of reason, and the Christian is one who is
convinced that this fertilization can never be exhausted.

Now, what, after this digression into talk about first principles and philosophy and
Christian doctrine, does all this have to do with prisons and moral education? A great deal, actually, and, although I don’t intend to offer anything like a rigorous and detailed argument here, hoping instead for a congenial but serious discussion taking certain points for granted, what I’d like to say is that people are in prisons in large part because of a lack of moral education, that this is a major problem within our wider American society, which on the whole is indifferent, allergic or even genuinely hostile to the general notion of moral education, let alone to ways of life, institutions, and people that embody actual traditions of genuine moral education.

I’d also like to say that moral education can and does take place in prisons, and the title of my talk specifies Indiana prisons not because I think that what I’ll tell you about, what you’ll ask questions about, and what we’ll discuss only has reference to
Indiana prisons, but because the Indiana prisons are the only ones I know. To be quite
honest, since I only teach at Indiana State Prison, I really only know one prison in the strict sense, and the others only through conversations with inmates, other professors and DOC staff. Nevertheless, I’m quite willing to assert that what I can tell you about the inmates of Indiana State Prison is true of inmates elsewhere.

I would also like to say a few things about how moral education takes place concretely, drawing on my experience and pertaining to the classes and students I typically teach.

So, my claim is that a lack or deficiency of moral education is greatly responsible for people being in prison, and that means that I’m also claiming a cause of that the crimes they committed, and more broadly, a cause of the crimes people at any given time commit, or even more broadly, a cause of the evil, wicked, vicious, tragic, or just plain bad things people do is a lack or deficiency of moral education.

This is a large claim, and ought to raise some objections right from the start, particularly because of the ambiguous way I’ve articulated it. To start, one ought to wonder whether I’m not letting criminals or wrongdoers more generally off the hook for their crimes or wrong deeds, and worrying about that point, rather than complacently agreeing with the seductive notion that people really aren’t responsible for their behavior if they haven’t been educated or informed, or if they have been but poorly or wrongly, worrying about that point is either a sign that one is the kind of person marked by the opposite kind of error, the person who unreasonably and
perhaps bitterly holds everybody responsible for everything, or that one actually has good moral bearings.

Put in another way, worrying about that problem can be a sign that one has had a decent moral education. Notice the entrance of what certain philosophical traditions call “reflexivity” here. Having had a decent moral education means having some
idea about what moral education is and worrying when somebody seems to say that those who lack it aren’t responsible for their bad actions.

There is another sort of reflexivity, and making it evident should clear up any worries that I’m dismissing or diminishing the responsibilities of criminals or wrongdoers. Except for extreme cases, one is always to some degree responsible for the state of one’s moral education, and the related totality of one’s habits and attitudes, thoughts and feelings, the actions, interactions, speeches, conversations, relationships, even one’s place in institutions that make up one’s moral life. If one has had a bad or deficient moral education, many of the reasons laid and lie out of one’s responsibility and control, but many other reasons, quite often interacting with the reasons one can’t control, are within one’s own control and responsibility.

One does have choices, and choices unavoidably weave the fabric whose confines other later choices must enter. Our range of choices is always limited, but is
nevertheless a range of choices. All of our choices entail consequences, whose full effects sometimes we are mercifully permitted to evade, but entailing consequences is simply essential to the nature of moral choices. We rarely have perfectly clear choices to make between the unmistakably good and the unmistakably evil, or involving easy comparisons between different goods or different evils.

It is almost never the case that our choices and actions, the ends we pursue and the means we select to pursue them, the relationships we enter into, conserve, transform, or even cut off, the attitudes we adopt, fit even approximately any of the moral theories one typically encounters in ethics classes or textbooks. And, thank God for that, casting a glance at the majority of the theories that do get taught. To be sure, living and structuring one’s moral life as a committed Utilitarian or Kantian, for
example, would be unmistakably better than just floating on (or perhaps sinking
underneath) the waves and eddies of a materialistic, opportunistic, consumer‐culture that one cannot even say is in love with the notions of rights and autonomy, since genuine love would in fact be an improvement. Even to be a classical Epicurean would be much better.

But, although these moral theories have the virtue of being fairly easy to teach, to learn, and to apply, or rather precisely because of this simplicity, they are incapable of providing genuine moral education. Interestingly, those theories were intended and developed as much more than mere fodder for ethics textbooks. They were intended to provide a moral education presumably lacking, to set it on a completely clear and unshakable ground. Much more useful in moral education is contact with the kind of reflection that takes place in the kinds of moral theory that we typically call “ethics of virtue” or “ethics of character”, of which Aristotle’s is perhaps the finest western non‐Christian example.

That sort of contact, but also with Christian doctrine, life, and community, which can come and be sustained through a myriad of ways, is even more fruitful. Actually, what I’ve observed in the prison is that genuine engagement in the serious thought, the dedicated life, the rituals, traditions, and communities of other religions, as opposed to simply playing at a non‐Christian religion, can bear great fruit for one’s moral life and character; as a Christian, of course, I think and find Christian doctrine and life more fruitful, having more to offer. And, if we take Christianity seriously, there will be an ultimate priority of Christian doctrine over virtue ethics just as much as over any kind of philosophical moral theory. In that perspective, Christianity will not be reduced to something useful to or a part of moral education, where the real goal, the real good would be moral education. On the other hand, Christianity does not simply efface and replace all of our natural ways of thinking about, coming to know, doing and preserving the good. Grace, after all, perfects, builds on and builds up nature.

Why is it, one might ask, that moral education comes about more fruitfully and more fully in contact with moral philosophy, or even simply a perspective informed by moral
philosophy, that stresses virtue or character, and even more in contact with Christian
doctrine, life, and community? There are good reasons for this rooted in the fundamental nature of human beings.

First, through these movements of thought and life, moral education, reflection, and action is brought in contact and remains in contact with the concrete reality of moral life in all of its elements: human beings, actions, intentions, consequences, relationships, passions, habits, characters, volition, freedom, rules, and the roles, responsibilities, and involvement of the intellect in all of these. A fundamental
realism is at work, not the sense of realism that really just means cynicism about human beings and moral values, but rather realism meaning taking moral phenomena seriously, thinking there are in fact valid and objective moral norms though recognizing that discernment and judgment of them is not always easy, recognizing a complexity to human life, a variety of often competing and incompatible ends and goods, but refusing to allow recognizing this complexity preclude making determinate choices and definitive judgements.

This realism brings us to the second reason, namely that moral education is necessarily reflexive. Moral education does not mean simply learning facts about moral life and moral theories, nor even putting a better and more adequate theory in the place previously occupied by a worse theory, or perhaps in a place where there was nothing with the consistency and intelligibility of a theory, but only impulses, opportunistic rationalizations, vague notions. Moral education involves constant reference both to the one being educated and to the one educating, for moral education is about the moral condition of human beings.

Unlike certain other subjects where the process of education is rightly viewed as a
progressive and systematic acquisition of information by a human subject, the information acquired in moral education is information that bears on the human subject acquiring it, weighing and judging its value, its applicability, its relevance, rejecting it or systematically and progressively assimilating it to his or her life, thought, and action. It also bears on all the other human beings that person is in relationship of one kind or another, potentially everyone.

But, here is the most interesting thing about the reflexivity of moral education, the third reason. Moral education always involves some realization or awareness of one’s moral state, and this always involves some realization or awareness of how bad one’s moral state currently is, how one’s actions, ones words, one’s thoughts, one’s choices, one’s habits, one’s character, one’s relationships miss the mark, even lead to and produce further missing the mark. The fuller, the deeper, the more adequate, one’s consciousness of the good, the beautiful, the true, the just, becomes, the more one realizes one’s own weaknesses, deficiencies, failures, even perversity and wickedness.

Of course one can also readily see these in others, but realizing where one oneself has gone wrong and goes wrong, and what factors play into this is absolutely integral to moral education. One way of expressing this is to say that one must have a theory of error, of going wrong, that can take account of the fact that the one employing the theory him‐ or herself has gone astray, perhaps radically so, in ways difficult to discern let alone change, rooted now in one’s very soul and in one’s body. At the same time, a theory of error must also indicate directions towards improvement, perhaps even giving further directions at each new and better destination one attains. Put very simply, whether this word is used or not, there must be some sense of what Christians call Redemption.

Three points need to be made to avoid misunderstanding this third reason. First,
recognizing the deficiencies of one’s moral state does not necessarily imply that one
overlooks or even diminishes the goods in one’s life or even in one’s person and moral
state, for that sort of pessimism, despair, or false humility is another way of going astray. One is not realistic if one is only realistic about the bad but not the good, any more than if one does the opposite.

Second, there are myriad ways to avoid really reflecting on one’s own moral state, to repress and obscure this, whether wholly or partly. These are among the impediments to moral education, and the process of moral education is in great part overcoming, removing, or transforming these impediments.

Third, although I have used the word “theory,” this should not be taken to mean that moral education is entirely, or even primarily a strictly discursive and intellectual process. Moral philosophy of virtue or character, and even more Christian life, doctrine, and community, have long traditions of rich systematically articulated thought to offer. And, in truth, cultivation, right exercise and right application of the intellect accepts and develops one of the finest gifts God has graced us with, making it an essential part of our nature. Yet, alongside of discursive knowledge, there is also another kind of knowledge called by different related names: knowledge by
connaturality, affective knowledge, knowledge by right inclination.

Much of moral life and much of moral education inevitably relies and draws upon this kind of knowledge, at the same time more obscure, more personal and subjective, but also in many cases more appropriate or even necessary. The realism, the reflexivity, and the realization of one’s moral state all involved in moral education can, and do, take place affectively just as much as discursively. The sort of restlessness of the heart, cor inquietum, Saint Augustine speaks of, which leads us towards God, is a good example of this sort of affectivity. Developing the sort of habitual good sense or practical wisdom that Aristotle called phronesis, which allows one to grasp when to apply a certain rule or not, but which is irreducible to rules, is another example. Moral education is education of affectivity, of sensibility, of passions and of the will just as much as of the intellect, and quite frequently, in determinate situations, the explicitly intellectual element plays a small role.

So, you might ask, after all this talk about moral education, what does this have to do with Indiana prisons? Well, moral education goes on in prisons, just as it does everywhere else, and it is needed in prisons, just as it is needed everywhere else, but the conditions under which moral education takes place are, of course, quite different than those we are typically used to in the institutions of school and university, families, churches, voluntary organizations, workplaces, and other institutions.

One of my students, in a paper discussing moral issues in prison life, gives a listing of some of the groups dangerous to associate with: “gang members, newly arrived prisoners, homosexuals, snitches, pedophiles, drug dealers, and drug users.” In addition, prisoners are not only in a very different setting. They are also to some degree quite different people, for all of them have been convicted of at least one felony, and are doing hard time. Being in prison, living under its regime, changes one’s sense of time, of space and place, of privacy, in comparison to life on the outside.

Some of the men in my classes will reenter society relatively soon, some at
the end of the semester, other in a year or several years. Some have sentences so long that, even with time‐cuts and what is called “good‐time” they will never leave prison. Others have another 10, 15, 25 years, and some of these men begin their university education in their forties or fifties.

The overall approach towards prison education programs, rehabilitation, and moral
education is inconsistent. The Indiana Department of Corrections lists rehabilitation of
offenders as one of its goals, but of course, other than staying out of prison after release and refraining from making trouble while in prison, there is practically no institutional agreement as to what rehabilitation would be. College or university education plays some role. The general recidivism rate for Indiana prisons is around 66%, and this drops to 12% for prisoners who earn an associates degree in prison, and 6% for those who earn a bachelors. Clearly education does something, but the causality involved is very complex, and I have yet to see any good general explanation for the drastic reduction in recidivism.

Of course, our program as a whole suffers the typical fragmentation, wide variance of
standards, expectations, teaching methods, methodological presuppositions, theories, and even meanings given to terms endemic to American higher education. Many of the college professors openly hold and teach doctrines that on one, low level are conducive to genuine moral education, but on another, higher level become impediments. A good deal of moral education actually takes place, in my view, despite the educators, often through the material the students are coming in contact with and reflecting on, through associations, particularly certain religious associations, the students are involved in, and through the efforts of students themselves, motivated by a perhaps difficult to express hunger and thirst for knowledge, for truth, for goodness, for justice, even for redemption.

Simply deciding and following through on the decision to go to school is, for many
prisoners, the product of long reflection on their condition, conclusions of lessons in the proverbial “school of hard knocks.” Many prisoners have been incarcerated for years before they decide to apply, or even consider applying, for school, and many of them have to attend classes and earn a GED before going on to college. Once they are in the college program, they have to live a more ordered life, one of particular choices and habits, which in fact is an integral part of their moral education.

Being in college entails being disciplined, keeping a schedule, doing assigned work and reading, learning in a wide range of subjects with a great deal of usually unfamiliar content, and staying out of the many kinds of trouble one can easily find in the prison. For many, it means giving up recreation time, trying to study and read in difficult and trying conditions. Due to the prison schedule, all of the classes meet once a week, in theory for the standard 2 ½ hours, but in some cases less, as little as 1 hour of actual contact time per week.

Lockdowns due to executions, fights, beatings and stabbings, and other security concerns cut into the semester. Most of the prisoners take five or six classes per semester. Many of them also hold jobs within the
prison, some working full time while attending school full time. Simply attending school under those circumstances presents prison students with everyday moral decisions not typically faced by students outside the walls.

The classes I teach are in the fields of philosophy and religious studies. The response I typically get when telling people this for the first time is that teaching in prisons must be very interesting, that it must be very rewarding being able to teach them religion and introduce them to critical thinking and great philosophical systems and figures. Some even liken it to mission work. They are not entirely off the mark, but as I remind them from the start, I teach in the prison because I am paid to teach in the prison.

The discipline of religious studies deliberately adopts a model that involves and requires no actual religious commitments, and can barely even be called ecumenical. The discipline of philosophy in contemporary America, particularly as one finds it reflected in textbooks, has become allergic to the notion of objective truth, objective moral norms that would not be derived solely from reason alone or unquestioned presuppositions of modern culture, and especially to regarding religion, especially Christianity, and traditional communities and cultures as resources for philosophy.

I cannot let my students know that I am a practicing Catholic, both because there is a great deal of prejudice, often of the most ignorant kind, against Catholics, and because some Catholic students would try to use our shared faith to attempt to wheedle academic favoritism from me. In philosophy as in religious studies, the
prevalent assumption, both in prison, and in the larger American culture, is that one who is committed to, and allows oneself to be formed by a particular philosophical or religious tradition is no longer capable of objectivity and critical detachment, that their teaching will be little better than indoctrination – which, I hasten to add, is a genuine, though much misunderstood and exaggerated, danger.

All that said, some moral education does take place in my classes, much of it in an oblique manner. Two frequent sources of frustration for my students are the pluralism of viewpoints and perspectives classes in religious studies and philosophy inevitably involve, coupled with my refusal to give or accept oversimplified answers to questions about complex matters. Learning to deal properly with these frustrations is in fact part of one’s moral education, a good portion of which involves overcoming impediments to dealing with them, some of which are emotional reactions, some bad intellectual or moral habits, some false and simplistic doctrines students have either imbibed from the larger society, in the prison, or in other classes and from books.

Here the realism I spoke of earlier is central. In order to do well in my classes, both in the academic sense of getting a good grade and in the more important sense of becoming further educated, students have to come to understand, not, I repeatedly stress, to agree with or appreciate, but only to understand a wide range of perspectives that disagree with each other on some major points. For instance, in a Religion in American Culture class, we not only examine different views on relationships between church and state, religious and society, but also the rituals, beliefs, and histories of a range of religions and groups within religions. In classes in Moral Philosophy and in the History of Philosophy classes, we examine different well‐articulated philosophical perspectives on a variety of issues and problems.

Students often express frustration that there is not a set of simple completely correct answers that they can just be taught, get straight in their minds, and then repeat and rely on in class and out of class. Instead, what seems to be a confusion of too many competing and overlapping answers confronts them. This rightly frustrates them, because it does give the impression that there is no way to decide between competing perspectives on the very important matters of faith and morals,
an impression only reinforced by the messages they get from much of modern society, in the prison culture, and from other professors.

If this were all education could offer them, a smorgasbord of different notions, theories, ideals, and justifications that one picks and chooses according to one’s own perhaps very poorly formed and directed desires, or our society’s pseudo‐values of “what works”, “established policy”, or “appropriateness”, that frustration would be the end‐point of what would pass for moral education, alleviated only by an irrational existential choice. Now, dealing with this frustration, or rather reflecting
on and deciding how to deal with this frustration is an important part of one’s moral
education. In the now‐realized absence of simple clearly true, good, right answers, does one give up on truth, goodness, rightness, justice, or does one start to seek these where they can be found? Even more important, does one not only adopt a realistic perspective, but also make the transitions to one that is reflexive, and one that recognizes one’s own moral failures but also that there are ways to remedy them?

None of these matters, of course, are as simple as this presentation makes them out to be. Moral education is shot through and through with contingency. There are no sure‐fire recipes, nothing that necessarily works in all or even in most cases, but this is due precisely to the fact that moral education has to do with human beings, whose moral lives are complicated, whose thoughts are always partly hidden and partly all too transparent to other human beings and to themselves, and most importantly beings that God endowed with freedom. Moral education can take place, at a low or preparatory level, primarily through compulsion, for instance in the disciplining of young children.

Although it is sheer nonsense to speak of a condition of pure freedom where no compulsion, attraction, or pressure would motivate a human being’s choices, since even the perfect Good exercises its attraction by its very nature and by the nature of the human creature, it must be recognized that moral education becomes more and more a matter of freedom the further along one gets. Whether or not a student reflects on him‐ or herself, evaluates him‐ or herself and others rightly, avoiding the many temptations to misevaluate them, whether a student makes not only the decision to change their moral state, but the many subsidiary decisions
required to bring about that change and to engrave it into their character, that has a great deal to do with their own use of their freedom, their own free choice, and relatively little to do with their teacher.

One might be tempted to say that it is a matter of what some moral philosophers call
“moral luck”, or to attribute it to luck, chance, or fortune more generally. This would be, however, a mistake. It is really a matter of providence, of how God orders the complex tissue of the world in such a way as to even encompass the depths of our freedom. As Saint Thomas Aquinas says, the exercise of our reason is the way in which we humans participate in, do our part in the providential ordering of all things, God’s eternal law. I have often been struck by, and have come to realize more and more, the fact that the ways in which I intervene in the lives of my prison students, in class and outside of class time, both escape my ability to predict their effects and bring about effects that could not derive from myself alone, nor, I am convinced from simply myself, the student, and whatever subject matter we were discussing, debating, or examining.

One has little idea of the good effects of one’s teaching until the student shares them in communication. For instance, a student I had my first semester, a young Sunni Muslim former Gangster Disciple, who several semesters later related to me that my telling him early on in the semester, in a rather quick and offhand way, something like “your opinion isn’t right just because it’s your opinion. Opinions only matter insofar as they are actually correct,” brought about a long and radical rethinking of things on his own part.

To bring this talk to a conclusion, I’d like to briefly touch on the notion of impediments that I’ve been referring to throughout this talk. Much of the actual process of moral education is simply overcoming all the contingent obstacles that students throw up in the way of their education – often deep‐rooted, some puzzles, sophisms, others enigmas yet others, but also genuine mysteries, for instance the awful mystery of evil. Getting students to recognize these as problems is half the battle, getting them to see how they can be resolved, and how far they can be resolved, for demanding that a problem be solved further than it can be is itself yet another stumbling‐block.

Some of these stumbling‐blocks are habits of thought, some are passions such as pride, anger, envy, even despair, both of these kinds of impediments eventually leading to but also sometimes stemming from vices in established characters. This, as I know both theoretically and experientially, applies just as much to the educators as those being educated.

One has to ask oneself, as one teaches, whether one is not bringing additional stumbling‐blocks, for instance, at times refusing to discuss certain issues, at times discussing them too much or inappropriately, in refusing to bend on rules, limits, or principles when one ought to, or in compromising them when one ought not to, when the student needs them. Moral education, as noted earlier, is something that we do not only discursively, but also by example, by relationship, through affectivity. It is also something that we are permitted or privileged to do through providential grace, where our failures and weaknesses are taken up as lessons for our students by a much finer teacher, the Holy Spirit, who in ways we do not grasp offers them conclusions they can assent to or reject, offers them a choice between different paths, even infuses virtues that we educators not only cannot produce ourselves, but ourselves require in order to do our part in moral education.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

This is part 4 of the transcript of an invited talk examining a complex and often misunderstood Stoic doctrine, that of the “indifferents”, provided to the 52 Living ideas community. Here we finish the Q&A portion. You can watch or listen to the talk in full here.

Question: I really appreciate it actually, that this topic is coming up because there’s something here that for me is always a confusing thing about Stoics. I guess I’m wondering about like the deeper physics or the metaphysics behind this question of virtue versus indifferents. It seems to me like the things that matter, the things that are good and bad have to do with the use of our freedom, and the things that are external in some way end up being indifferent. For me that all opens the question of the difference between mind and body for the Stoics.

There isn’t one. They’re materialists.

Question: Right, I’ve heard that. But then how do they make the difference then between the sense of an inner world, or an inner freedom, Marcus talks about this for example going within

Oh yeah, the inner citadel right? Epictetus also talks about inner citadels but there were the vices, so not all the inner citadels are good.

I think it’s better to look at it as the human being is kind of this thing inside, and there’s like a membrane, whatever we want to call it, between them and the external world.. But then there’s all these ways in which the external world penetrates into us and we’re connected with it. Our desire goes out to meet things, so it’s not like there’s like a little boundary made of iron, and everything inside is our freedom area and everything outside isn’t. It’s more like we’re this this messy boundary that sometimes extends itself further out than it should, and then gets taught an object lesson: “don’t do that”. But then, in a lot of cases has to do that.

We were doing a Stoic parenting meetup earlier today and one of the things that we all talked about is how when you have kids, whatever you want to call it, your region of vulnerability to the world vastly increases because you’ve got these little creatures that almost seem hell-bent on injuring or killing themselves, or doing stupid thing and you have to wait until they develop some guidance systems on their own.

The Stoics are materialists. They think that you can use terms like soul and body, but what you’re really talking about is something that’s a continuum of substance. I think what they’re saying fits in very well with materialist ways of looking at things now. You think about our brains or anything, they are up here, but look at what we’re doing right now. We’re in this communication with each other. It’s not like we’re just these isolated things that are passing signals back and forth. There’s something more happening. Every time that that happens, we become vulnerable. So I think the Stoics are teaching us how to manage that more effectively, if that makes sense.

Question: My question is essentially is there some major chasm between Epicureanism and Stoicism? In our world Epicureanism is usually associated with just wanton gluttony and you know living the “good life”, but in the ancient world for Epicureans at least all you need for a good time is a bowl of figs and conversation with friends. It’s not quite Stoicism.

There were there were some real big differences between the Stoics and the Epicureans on some key issues. The Epicureans, they they genuinely thought that pleasure or freedom from pain and trouble is good ,and everything else has to be centered around that, and that would guide your practical reasoning and decision-making. The Stoics said pleasure is a preferred indifferent. It’s nice if you have it, but you don’t actually need to have it. And what’s most important is the honestum, the morally good, the noble if we want to translate it.

That led to different ideas about how you ought to live your life in relation to other people. The Epicureans deliberately withdrew as much as possible from what we translate as politics, but really it means social life. It means engagement with your neighbors, people like that. Now modern-day Epicureans, and there’s a there’s a large neo-Epicurean movement out there, I think they’ve they’ve put quite a bit of that aside. They they are quite often involved in neighborhood groups or in local politics or things like that. But the classic Epicureans withdrew as much as possible from that

Although it’s interesting. There is a discussion of it Cicero’s On the Ends book one where this this one epicurean tries to make the case that you everything that these other virtue ethics perspectives, like the Aristotelians or Stoics, everything that they do we we’ve got that too. But it’s all because one needs it to have a more pleasant life. I don’t know that anyone was really that convinced by it. Cicero takes a book to to deconstruct all of that afterwards.

The Stoics thought that you really need to be involved in your community, not in such a way that you’re constantly jockeying for power, things like that, but they thought that you live within a matrix of relationships, and those have duties, and you shouldn’t try to withdraw from it. There were a lot of polemics between the Stoics and the Epicureans on that very point. So I think you can say that there are some points of similarity, but even the notion of tranquility isn’t the same from the Stoics to the Epicureans.

Question: What is your opinion on having standards. Isn’t having a standard a form of pride which is a dispreferred indifferent?

No. . . I mean, having standards isn’t necessarily prideful. I think there are a lot of people who are sort of egocentric. They impose their standards in prideful ways. But the old saying goes: the abuse doesn’t negate the proper use of a thing. Everybody’s got standards of one form or another, even if it’s just what’s good is what’s good for me, a pure egoist. So I don’t I don’t see how you can get away from having standards. The question is whether you can get better and better standards or not

It’s interesting to bring up pride. I’m going to totally shift gears here. So one of the other people that I do work on is John Cassian, this monastic author. He’s he’s one of the people that we eventually get the seven deadly sins from in Christian literature, which were originally the eight capital vices in the Desert Fathers with Cassian and Evagrius Ponticus. He talks about pride as being this really problematic thing, because it can use even the virtues as raw material for its its activities. If I’m a courageous person, I could be prideful about my courage. So there is there is a danger to look out for there. Maybe the Stoics aren’t sufficiently attentive to that.

One of the common criticisms of the Stoics made, not in ancient times but in the Renaissance and early modern period, was that they were too prideful about the capacities of human beings, that they didn’t take into account our, at that time they called depravity, what we could call our our usual state of screwed-uped-ness. May be the Stoics weren’t sufficiently attentive to that, but I don’t think that having standards by itself is prideful.

Question: My question is about fun, because that’s in that middle of good and bad, that you don’t measure. But fun is a little bit different. What you call indifference has always been a bit cold to me, so I find to be more of an Epicurean, to have fun. And I see between your smile and your sparkling eyes that you are having fun with the Stoic, finding that’s fun.

Some people think I joke around too much! That’s a great question. If we look at the classical Stoics, some of them we can say were definitely not fun people. Cato was a great example, areally wonderful guy, but I do not think there was anything fun about him at all. With Epictetus there’s some humor going on there, but you’ve got to really dig into it to find it.

This is actually a great question, because it’s come up when we eat, when we have this annual Stoicon every year, which unfortunately is going to be virtual this this time around because of the Covid crisis. We all get together and we have presentations, and we talk about things, and we do indeed have a lot of fun together. And then some people come along, and they’re like: You’re not being properly Stoic. Or if I say: I’m excited to go to Stoicon, well that’s not Stoic either. I think that this is one of the areas where the classical things are not not that helpful for us. And where modern Stoicism has to forge a new path.

Interestingly I’ll tell you they do this psychological assessment stuff with Stoic Week every year. One of the categories that Tim Lebon found that the greatest rise in is what was called “zest”. It’s not the same thing as fun, but it’s closely related to it. That’s like capacity to get enjoyment out of life. He was like: That’s kind of a weird result. Why would doing Stoic practices lead to this? And the answer, we never really did figure out the answer, was maybe there’s something about doing the discipline that liberates a space in you. You can do that, because having fun requires spontaneity and a certain kind of freedom not to take things so seriously. But this is a very good thing to think about

Question: If what we’re interested in was creating an imaginary utopia, other than Plato’s Republic, would you recommend any other philosophers who study utopia or talk about the ideal?

Well as it so happens, Zeno wrote a book called The Republic as well, and we just don’t have it unfortunately. It could be good for the reputation of Stoicism that we don’t, because apparently not only did he advocate free love, but that may be cannibalism is okay. Nobody quite knows what to make of that. In ancient philosophy, there’s literary stuff some of which is kind of silly like Lucian of Samosata. I don’t know if you’ve ever read him. He’s a very fun author. He’s a satirist and he’s also the first science fiction author with his True History, but I don’t know that anything he does is serious, like let’s sit down and try to come up with a blueprint for the perfect society sort of thing.

There’s Thomas More’s Utopia of course, and there’s a lot of stuff coming after that about perfect societies. You might say there was actually a kind of cottage industry. There is an interesting thing from a feminist perspective, Christine de Pizan’s Book of Ladies which advocates an ideal city in which women don’t have quite the hard time that they have on the outside, because of all the stuff that the men are doing and take seriously. That’s actually a good question. I don’t have a very good sort of synoptic view on utopian literature unfortunately.

Question: I just wanted to ask do you see any parallels in the notion of indifference with Deleuze’s notion of difference? Would you say they’re both against the trope of identity?

I have to I have to punt on because it’s been a long time since I’ve been reading anything other than Logic of Sense when it comes Deleuze, and I don’t want to get things wrong.

Question: You mentioned briefly before that more progress or moral development is a preferred indifferent. Can you clarify what you mean by that? It seems like an indifferent is a thing we could do without. Can we do without moral development?

Not if we want to get to virtue. But by itself, and this is something where you ask: Can I clarify it? Not not too well, because we’re not quite sure what the Stoics meant by saying it. We get this one offhand remark,and then we get all this other stuff where the Stoics are constantly stressing how important it is that we devote ourselves to moral development. It’s coming from Diogenes Laertes, who’s not himself a Stoic but is reporting on what the Stoics standard doctrine was.

The best understanding that I am at it is that they had to place it in there because it wasn’t yet at the point of having attained the virtues. It’s good if you can do it, but it doesn’t in and of itself get you there. And that’s a weird thing to say, because if anything gets us to the virtues, wouldn’t it be making the continual effort from developing? So it may be one of those areas where the Stoics are actually just incoherent, but I don’t you know. I don’t quite know what to make of it at this point.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

This is part 3 of the transcript of an invited talk examining a complex and often misunderstood Stoic doctrine, that of the “indifferents”, provided to the 52 Living ideas community. Here we shift to the Q&A portion. You can watch or listen to the talk in full here.

Question: I’m going to ask just one clarification question I’m gonna not use the term indifferent and try to pose the same question. So Stoic ethics is a virtue ethic, and the alternative to that is a value ethic.

Well . . . I don’t accept that.

Question: Let me complete the question and then you can disagree. So most people kind of automatically start thinking in terms of value ethic, of saying is this a value to me or is this nota value to me. It looks like the term “indifferent” is saying that it has nothing to do with virtue. Indifferent is something that has nothing to do with virtue directly, but at the same time it seems to say that there are values. So values are being expressed as preferred indifferent, as opposed to. So mapping this Stoic terminology of indifference, this is the way I see it, mapping into virtue ethics and value. Is that fair?

Well I’ll say this. I usually resist these kind of dichotomies splitting things down the middle, because when we get into substantive looks at things, most virtue ethics are quite complex. You have all sorts of value aspect. A lot of ethics with value, Max Scheller for example, there’s plenty of room for virtue in what he’s saying.

But let’s say we accept that sort of split. I guess that could wor. There probably aren’t any better ways of talking about what the Stoics call the indifferents. This was a problem even back in their own time. They coined this terminology.

But I will say about what you’re proposing, these wind up being technical terms, and we have the same challenges as we’re using them. There isn’t any nice intuitive (at least in English maybe there is in other languages) way to reexpress this that gets it across That’s kind of a shame a

Question: Do opinions that other people have of you do, like a public opinion like about something about you, is that indifferent or not indifferent?

So that’s a great question and we can talk about it in terms of the individual, and then sort of like larger scale, what what your society thinks about. We could call it social status, or public opinion of one’s self. That’s a preferred indifferent. It’s better if people like you. It’s worse, but not in the sense of like leading to happiness or misery, if people think that you’re a bad person when you’re not. A lot of our judgments about other people are whether they’re good or bad people, in what respects. So you can say that about the individual thing

So if my my daughter comes up here to college, and let’s say she decides she starts taking some classes, and she’s like: “I think my professors are way smarter than my dad. I’m not gonna listen to him about anything. He’s an idiot.” Those are very strong judgments and opinions about me. The Stoics would say that’s still within the realm of the indifferents. And if I want to be happy, it’s probably better not to care too much about that.

Now on her part, as the individual that she is, it’s not indifferent, because it’s not good to have wrongheaded ideas about things. Maybe it’s not wrongheaded. Maybe the the professor she has will be better than me.. In that case it would be quite good but if I have the wrong view about you, that’s an indifferent to you from the Stoic perspective, but that’s not an indifferent where I’m sitting because I’m the one who’s actually in some respect damaged or harmed by having wrong wrong views about things.

Think about products. So if I don’t like a certain brand of butter and I won’t buy it, that’s within the realm of the indifferents. But if I’m so fixated on it, then if I need to use butter to make omelets or something, and I won’t use it because it’s the only one in the refrigerator, I’m kind of badly off all right.

Question: My question is mostly personal. I’m very interested in what keeps you internally motivated, especially in philosophy, and how do you learn about all of these philosophers, these concepts and how do you explain them so clearly to people?

Those are actually really good questions. Some of them, I don’t actually know the answer to. I’ve been studying philosophy either as a student or as a professor for 30 years now, and so some of these things become a matter of habit. It’s hard to get a good sense of what I did back then. I don’t really remember. I know that having to go through the the really rigorous comps and preliminary exams that we had back in the day. Those no longer exist because they were kind of academic hazing. But they were incredibly helpful for me, because I had to learn mass amounts of the history of philosophy and store it all in my head. It’s sort of like going through an intensive exercise regimen Your body still retains quite a bit of it later on.

I don’t really think that hazing is a great idea for people! What I can talk about is the passion for philosophy. I can talk about like being able to talk about it in a accessible way. I would say in a way, I’m kind of coasting on other people’s achievements. I don’t do a lot of original work of my own, nor do I want to. I tell people I’m a salesperson. I’m selling Aristotle, or I’m selling the Stoics, and the product if I do a good job it sells itself. I really enjoy the things that I study. People ask: who’s your favorite philosopher? I don’t I don’t have one, because I like to read so many different people, and I see applications to ordinary life

I think it also helps that I didn’t come from an academic family, and I didn’t intend originally to go to college. I worked, and then went in the military and came out, and worked, and then finally went to college. My first main teaching job was teaching in a maximum-security prison, and I’ve always taught what are called service classes. So Intro to Philosophy, Ethics, Critical Thinking. A lot of professors view those as kind of like slumming, wasting their time with these non majors. I want to be teaching my graduate level class on Hegel.

You don’t get to teach graduate level classes, but the the real apprenticeship for doing philosophy in a way that can connect up with ordinary people are those service classes, because you have a whole class of people who don’t want to be there, and they have no idea what philosophy is. Or if they if they do, it’s probably they got it from some high school teacher who may have been cool or may have been a jerk You’re going to have to make these things connect with them.

So doing that year after year after year turned out to be really good for me. It developed those skills. I think it’s one thing to teach graduate students or even philosophy majors. They’re already sold on the thing that you’re doing, and they know the terminology, and they can come up with examples and they’re all kinda go-getters anyway. Being able to talk to business majors, fashion majors, culinary arts majors, people like that, that’s where you really test yourself, whether you can get ideas across.

And it’s fun too. I like teaching those kinds of majors because you can use their experiences and what happens in their field for raw material. Can Plato actually say something about this? Maybe. If not, then screw Plato!. Usually it turns out they can once once we dig deep enough.

Question: I have two questions. I’ll keep keep them brief. So the first one is if you can expand a little bit about them idea that what is good is what in accordance with nature. I would love to hear what that means. The second one, I’m not sure if I understood it correctly but it seems as if there’s a spectrum of good on one hand, and bad on the other, and then indifferent in the middle, and we can have the freedom to make use of either good or bad and what’s in the middle, and they’re indifferent. I’m thinking, can’t we say that about the entire spectrum, that we can decide what used to make out of everything?

Well, you can’t make good use out of vice, so it’s not all on the same level. And if you are genuinely virtuous, you’re not going to make bad use out of courage or wisdom or things like that. You could think of it, if you want to represent it visually, it’s like you’ve got virtue, vice and the other associated things that are genuinely good or bad on a higher level. And then you can say there’s a spectrum beneath it of the indifferents. But nothing, none of the values, across that spectrum wind up leaping to the level of the good or the bad

This “in accordance with nature” is a very complicated idea. It’s one that I’m actually writing a book about because it gets used a lot, and there’s a lot of different discussions of it running throughout the Stoic texts. In sort of a thumbnail sketch of it, everything that exists has its particular nature, and you could say its principles of development. In this respect the Stoics are kind of similar to the Aristotelians or other philosophers who think there’s a teleology to things. As opposed to the other animals, because we’re rational animals, at a certain point we we move to a different level, and we begin to recognize something that transcends the natural impulses that we we have as animals, towards for example staying alive and doing certain things with our own kind.

We recognize according to the Stoics the the value of truth understood not just as something useful but but having intrinsic value in itself, and we come to understand in some dim way the right and the wrong as not just being what produces what we might call lower-level good outcomes or bad outcomes. That’s that’s one place where the Stoics kind of differ from from other thinkers like the Epicureans

So developing that nature is part of what it means to live in accordance with nature. A lot of it involves living, choosing, acting in accordance with the virtues. And it gets more complicated yet, because when we have the virtues usually we don’t have them fully developed. So we’re kind of figuring it out as we go along. The picture gets clearer and clearer the more virtuous that we become. Correspondingly the more vicious we become, the more unclear it gets. Or we have the wrong sort of clarity. We think we have everything figured out, and we actually have some quite wrong.

Question: I know you have covered MacIntyre in the recent past on your YouTube channel. Can you compare and contrast the Stoic concept of virtue being the proper use of indifferents, or parenthetically playing the game well, and MacIntyre’s concept of gaining internal goods within a practice?

Well I would say that’s only part of what virtue is, but we can talk about proper use of of indifferents. Virtue also uses the things that are genuinely good, like say friendship. Now MacIntyre, the notion of, you want to say gaining, he would say lachieving or attaining, internal goods within the practice. Internal goods are those that can only be realized within a particular practice or an analogous practice. So he uses the example of chess. It’s not the only game that you can develop certain goods of strategic thinking. You could probably also do it with go, but you probably can’t do it with checkers or backgammon in the same way. There’s all sorts of other practices that he talks about as well.

I would say that there’s a lot of overlap there but that we have we have a different emphasis. MacIntyre doesn’t think that virtues are just about achieving internal goods either. There’s actually there’s so much overlap between MacIntyre and Stoics, Anthony Long wrote a piece specifically saying: Hey MacIntyre, you’re talking about the Aristotelian tradition and all of these interesting elements of it. Stoicism also has this as well. So I would say that if you look at what MacIntyre himself has to say about Stoicism, you you come away with the idea that he didn’t read as deeply as he probably ought to have.

I say this as somebody who actually loves and respects MacIntyre. I got to study under him years ago, and I’ll tell you that when it comes to virtue ethics he’s the genuine deal. He actually practices what he preaches. I don’t want to say he’s a sage, but he’s pretty pretty darn close, but even sages have some blind spots to them. So I would say that there isn’t that much contrast between the. They’re emphasizing different aspects.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

This is part 2 of the transcript of an invited talk examining a complex and often misunderstood Stoic doctrine, that of the “indifferents”, provided to the 52 Living ideas community. You can watch or listen to the talk in full here.

So how do we clarify the value that they have? That’s one of the central questions for the Stoics. One of the terms that they use, that again I think a lot of people get mixed up about is, they use this framework of “in accordance with nature” or “in contradiction to nature” or “out of harmony with nature”, however you want to translate it, “contrary to nature”.

So this is actually a very complex notion for the Stoics, and when they’re using this notion of in accordance with nature, they don’t just mean accepting you the universe as it is, because we’re also part of that nature. Human beings in our capacity for development are part of that nature. They don’t mean nature in the sense like when we see somebody doing a bad thing, and we say “Ah that’s human nature, you know, people are jerks.” That would actually be contrary to nature for the Stoics.

So think about what a fully developed fully realized human being would be like, and that provides us with a model for what is in accordance with nature. Arius Didymus tells us that some things can be in accordance with nature as such, others by participation. So he gives us examples of that. Having a steady hand and a healthy body. It’s the way things want to be developing. But you could still be happy without having a hand that doesn’t shake, or a body that’s not in the best shape entirely

Seneca in Letter 119 tells us that what is good is what is in accordance with nature, but what is in accordance with nature is not immediately good as well. There are some things that are that are in accordance with nature, that stem from the kind of creatures that we are and our interface with the world ,that aren’t automatically good. What’s going to make them good is some sort of connection to the version Diogenes Laertes tells us, that indifferents that are preferred contribute to what he calls harmonious living.

He also tells us that some preferred indifferents are there for the sake of something else. There’s something useful. So we might think here about money, which we’re going to talk about again a little bit later. Money is not a bad thing . It’s not a good thing either. It’s an indifferent from the Stoic perspective. But it’s a preferred indifferent, because when you have money you can use it to purchase things that you need. You can use it to accomplish tasks that actually are your duties or moral obligations. It can be used within the service of virtue.

They can also be misused, right? A vicious person with money is in a bad state. It’s probably better that they don’t have too much money, because they can accomplish much more harm with it. But money can can actually be quite useful. It can be conducive to other types of things that could in fact be genuine goods, or it can be good for purchasing other preferred indifferents, or keeping at bay other rejected indifferents.

Interestingly, another thing that they talk about as being a preferred indifferent, and I think this helps to give us a bit of perspective, is moral progress or moral development. In Greek it’s prokopē, and we get the the word prokopton meaning the person who’s not yet a sage (if there are indeed any sages), the person who’s in the process of development or studying Stoicism. That is also a preferred indifferent according to the Stoics, because it’s not yet there in terms of virtue and vice.

Seneca later on in Letter 82 talks about death, and he says that death is an indifferent, and he recognizes that it is a hard sell. He says that it’s among the things that are not bad, but they have a semblance of badness. There’s all these things that we, in our normal natural attitude, view as bad by themselves, even though if we analyze them perhaps they’re not. So he says it’s not something that we can easily ignore.

The last thing I’ll say about the value of the indifferents is that those that are either preferred or rejected, they do have a value. You might call it exchange, for a transaction in relation to each other. Diogenes of Babylon, and then again this is in Cicero’s On The Ends, says again wealth is quite good because you can in fact use it to purchase things that will make you healthy (if you think about buying medicine), or you can use it for other things that are preferred indifferents.

The one thing that you can’t do with it, well actually two things he can’t do with it, one of them is you can’t become virtuous just by purchasing something. And you also can’t keep yourself from being vicious by accumulating wealth and spending it. But it’s very useful for all sorts of other things. And we can say similar things about our capacities or our skills that we learn, or our bodily attributes. All of these things are in fact valuable in some sense they’re just at that lower tier.

So if we think about what we’re supposed to do with indifferents, one of the things that I mentioned a little bit earlier that’s quite important for the Stoics is what they called khrēsis in Greek, and in Latin it’s usus, and we translate this typically by the word “use”. It’s a little bit misleading, because it also means dealing with, or the attitude that we take to things, or the application that we make of them.

Epictetus is actually one of the best people in talking about this there’s there’s an entire chapter in his Discourses, it’s book 2, chapter 6 that is devoted to, it’s called “On Indifference in Things”, just adiaphoria in Greek, indifference as opposed to indifferents with the plural. He gives you an example of the hypothetical syllogism. So I don’t know if any of you have ever done logic or not. Probably quite a few of you can. People do get worked up about logic, believe it or not, in philosophy classes and other venues as well. A lot of times that’s probably misplaced because in itself, who cares?it’s not that important of a thing, the hypothetical syllogism, but the judgments he says that we make about them, they’re not indifferent

So we can have something that in itself is indifferent, but the attitude that we take towards it, the approach that we have ,the use that we make of it, is not indifferent Epictetus tells us that we really need to be careful not to be lackadaisical. There’s a way we can translate it. His term there is ameleis. It’s not giving care to something. We don’t want to be careless when it comes to different things, because the use of them is not indifferent. So we’ve got things that are indifferent, but what we do with them, the uses that we make of them is definitely not indifferent, and has a great effect on us morally speaking

In an earlier chapter, five of book two, he says that the materials that we work with are indifferent, but the use that we make of them is not indifferent. And he suggests that what we want to do is imitate those who play games. He has in mind a dice game. We don’t know exactly what game it is. It clearly it involved counters of some sort. So maybe it was like backgammon .Then he also talks about playing the ball game, and he uses Socrates defending himself in the law court as an example of somebody who’s playing the ball game well. The game itself doesn’t matter as such, but playing it well that is up to us, and that is something important.

So there’s all these things that are indifferents, and in themselves they don’t have value, but we give them value by what we do with them. It can be positive value or it can be negative value. The things that are indifferents could be used well or badly. So wealth is an example. We can also think of physical health. It’s nice to be healthy. I mean in this time of coronavirus, we’re very concerned with it. We wash our hands, socially distance. I wear a mask when I go outside. I know a lot of my fellow citizens here in Milwaukee don’t. Maybe they have a very different attitude towards physical health. It’s something that we can decide to use well or use poorly

I could use my vitality to rob banks. I mean probably not. I probably would be a bad bank robber, because it’s not in my skill set. But there are some who randomly accost people on the street and knock them down ,or things like that. So health can be used in all sorts of ways. And we can talk about all sorts of other examples as well.

This brings us to the issue of virtue. The Stoics are virtue ethicists, and we’ll talk about the specific virtues in a bit. One common mistake that gets made, not just in the present but also the ancient world, was thinking that because virtue is good and indifferent things are not good, they’re indifferent, that virtue would not be concerned with things that are indifferent. But to be virtuous would actually be to push those things away. Don’t get too entangled with them. Don’t focus on those things at all.

In fact the opposite is the case for Stoics. iI wasn’t the case for some other philosophers, including somebody who was very close to Zeno the founder of Stoicism. He had a student called Aristo, or maybe an associate, we’re not quite sure whether they were you know on a parallel or one was a student. Aristo said that virtues the only thing that matters and indifferents, we don’t have to care about them at all. As a matter of fact, so long as we’re virtuous that’s great. The only thing that could possibly be bad would be being vicious.

So the Stoics rejected what we can call ‘indifferentism”, thinking that anything that’s indifferent it’s all really on the same level. None of it matters very much. Cicero has Cato tell us, and there’s no reason to think that this wasn’t Cato’s view, and Cato’s would just be the orthodox Stoic view: “if we maintain that all things were completely indifferent, the whole of life would be thrown into confusion, and no function or task could be found for wisdom ,since there would be absolutely no distinction between the things that pertain to the conduct of life, and no choice need be exercised among them.”

See for the Stoics, in order to exercise wisdom, you have to evaluate things. You can’t be totally detached from them. You can be detached in the sense of recognizing that indifferent things are indifferent, that they’re not genuinely good or bad, but that doesn’t mean withdrawing from them. That doesn’t mean putting up a wall and saying I don’t think about these sorts of things. If you think about the people who do that, it’s usually motivated by some sort of rejection on their part, this we might call it hyper-ascetic attitude that isn’t genuine Stoicism. It wasn’t genuine Stoicism back in the day. It’s not genuine Stoicism for modern Stoicism.

Seneca in Letter 92 talks about pursuing and using preferred indifferents, and he says that taking them as an exercise of good judgment — and some of the examples that he gives are putting on clean clothing, taking a walk in the proper way, and dining as as we should — he says that the key thing there is an intention of maintaining proper measure that pertains to reason. You see what he’s saying there is that the wise person uses any natural tools at his disposal or her disposal in order to accomplish the right things.

There’s actually a nice discussion there about these working for the human being, and if you think about this, you can say (we’ll use Stoics I think): why do you care whether I’m in rags that are dirty and falling apart, or putting on a nice clean shirt and taking a shower every so often? Why does that matter at all? Isn’t that totally indifferent? Yes it is indifferent, but you’ve been getting the body you’ve been given the things you ought to use in the right way.

Letter 82 where he’s talking about courage, he says, and this is very interesting, that nothing is glorious that does not involve indifferents. “Illness, pain, poverty, death none of these are glorious in itself ,but nothing is glorious without them.” They give us, you could say, the ballast against which we can we can push off. Or they give us something to fight against or resist. He says that the virtue meets these and handles them. Another thing that he says in that letter is that each object takes on a splendor not its own when virtue is added to it.

So it’s not suffering as such that somehow ennobles us. It’s displaying courage in relation to suffering that is what ennobles us. A lot of people tend to treat being victimized today as if that somehow is heroic, and the Stoics would say: No, bad things can happen to you, and you can have responses to them that are that are not virtuous but rather vicious, for example just placing it onto other people and repeating a cycle of abuse. That would actually be a bad use of those things.

In On The Happy Life, a really nice short work, if you haven’t read that work by Seneca it’s well worth taking a look at, he talks again about wealth. I mentioned we would get back to wealth, He says that the the virtuous person and the foolish person might both pursue and use wealth. Seneca was a rich guy right and he drew upon his contacts in order to make his money. A lot of people criticize him and say: How could you be a Stoic when you were so rich?

What he had to say, and you can you can decide whether you think that he’s entirely consistent with this or not (I think that the general point is quite good) is that the virtuous person and the foolish person both could pursue and use wealth, but in the case of the wise person, wealth is in servitude. It’s being used as a tool. On the part of the foolish person, wealth is in command. So the desire, what we often call greed, which the Greeks recognized as a major problem back then, even had a special term for it, pleonexia, wanting more than you deserved, or thinking that money by itself is going to provide you with security or with happiness, these are the things that will will take people off track.

The Stoics recognize that when people do that it’s because they’ve got some vicious dispositions. They may be foolish. They may be unjust. They may be cowardly, and courage and cowardice doesn’t just have to do with fear. It can also do with willingness to endure toil, it’s called philoponia or “industriousness”. Or with magnanimity, rising above things, and then with self-control.

So one of the things that I think we want to think about when we’re talking about the indifferents, and much of our life is really concerned with these indifferents. Whether Zoom works or not? Indifferent. Whether I turn the lights on or off? Indifferent. The coffee is is an indifferent. All these things that were surrounded with, we want to think about how do the virtues, you might say, not just command from on high but penetrate into all the aspects of our lives. That’s what a Stoic would say is important.

Correspondingly, if we find that we have vices we will usually discover that they have also managed to penetrate deep roots into all the parts of our life. I don’t know if any of you do any gardening There are some plants that when you’re weeding, you can’t just pluck it out. You have to slowly ease it out, and get the root system, and then you discover that there’s more of that there, and you come back the next week and find that there’s new sprouts for that kind of plant. These these sort of analogies I think can be quite helpful in thinking about virtue advice.

So with each of the Stoic virtues they will remind you what they are. Wisdom, which not only has to do with thinking about heavenly things, but very much about earthly mundane everyday things. What’s good for us, what’s bad for us. How we ought to treat other people. Motivational structures, and all sorts of things. That all falls in wisdom.

Justice: how it is that we want to be treating other people in practice, realizing our our social nature, following through on commitments that we’ve made. Those are all aspects of justice. Courage I already talked about that quite a bit. And then temperance or self-control, which isn’t for the Stoics just about bodily desires. It pertains to all sorts of other things as well that we could have wrongly oriented or wrongly structured desires for.

Versions about each of these can apply to indifferents, and if we do it well according to the Stoic sort of narrative, we eventually become happy, or at least happier, less miserable. And if we screw it up or we do it in a lackadaisical way, and don’t pay attention to what we’re doing, or tell ourselves all sorts of false stories about how courageous we are when we really aren’t, we’re going to be miserable, because of the way in which we’ve used indifferents.

The last thing I want to talk about that I think kind of ties this moral side together about use and virtues, is that many people when they first read Stoic authors like Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or Seneca, they come away with this sense that the Stoics are very duty driven. That’s all they talk about. Duties to do things you’ve got to follow throughout. Now again you might say: This stuff is really indifferent. Who cares? Why should I have these duties to fulfill?

Most of the duties that we do in fact have, or “appropriate actions” (if you don’t like the word “duty” because it’s got too much of a moralistic sense just use appropriate action. Thats a perfectly good legitimate translation of the Greek kathēkon) the Latin officium), most of these have to do with things that are within the realm of the indifferent. So I’ll go a little bit further with that.

Stoics would actually say that our family, our neighbors are strictly speaking indifferents to us as well. We have to qualify that pretty heavily. They are persons. They do matter as persons. They are like their own little worlds onto themselves. But even the people that I have been I’m closest to, my immediate family, my long-standing friends, colleagues who I hold in great respect, they are something external. They are something indifferent. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have all sorts of important relations to them

This is where the Stoics say (there’s actually a really wonderful book by Brian Johnson called The Role Ethics of Epictetus that goes into this quite quite well) that that we have a whole panoply of moral obligations that are essentially arising from the relationships that we either found ourselves in, or have willingly placed ourselves in. Fulfilling those is often a matter of how we use indifferents.

I’ll give you just an example from my own life. My daughter is 18 now and is going off to college. She’s actually coming up here to Milwaukee to go to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and enroll in the musical theater program which she was accepted into. There’s all sorts of decisions that have to be made, many of which have to do with finances, and filling out paperwork, and stuff like that.

Now a Stoic would not actually say none of that stuff matters, that’s all just indifferents. How I actually do those things Do I do them diligently? Do I plow through all the different things that I have to do, and try to help her with finding financial aid, trying to model for her what following through on these phone calls would look like?These are all within the scope of what it means to be a parent. I suppose you could say all of those things bear on indifferents, but they have the possibility of creating virtue for her as a developing human being, and also expressing (I mentioned the emotions earlier) what the Stoics would call familial affection, philostorgia, which they thought was incredibly important. Marcus will also talk about love quite a bit.

These are things that can be done with differents within the framework or the fabric of our relationships, and so what we do with them is not indifferent. What we do with them is either good or bad or a mixture of both.

To bring this to a close, what we can see is that the whole notion of the indifferents is quite a bit more complicated than its it’s sometimes presented, where there’s good that’s virtue, bad that’s vice, and everything else doesn’t really matter. It’s all indifferent. Just withdraw yourself from it. That’s not a Stoic point of view, and you won’t find that being espoused in Seneca or Marcus or Epictetus, or and these other works that I’ve mentioned. So duties or moral obligations, virtues, use, these are all you might say lenses through which we can see the right path at each moment that we need to take with respect to these indifferents

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

This is part 1 of the transcript of an invited talk examining a complex and often misunderstood Stoic doctrine, that of the “indifferents”, provided to the 52 Living ideas community. You can watch or listen to the talk in full here.

The topic that I wanted to talk about is one that’s really central to Stoic philosophy in practice, and sometimes gets misunderstood. So I thought this would be a useful opportunity to do some clarification. And it’s very simple: what’s good, what’s bad, and then what’s indifferent, which sounds like a very simple trichotomy to work with.

It’s not just an important aspect for Stoicism as such, but virtue ethics in general. People are mixed up about what’s good and bad, and how to choose and prioritize between them. But the Stoics introduced this wrinkle into it, using this term the indifferents. That was really a distinctive to them

So what I’m going to do here is giving an overview of what the classical and canonical Stoics thought and taught about what’s good, and what’s bad, and what’s indifferent, which is a little bit more complicated than some of the ways in which it gets presented. Then here and there, I’m going to try to address some common misunderstandings of these, particularly about the range of the indifferents.

So what’s good and what’s bad from a Stoic perspective is what I’m going to start with, and then we’ll talk about how it’s connected to other key concepts, and then we’ll talk about this this whole realm of the indifferents. And why do they pick this term the indifferents? Then we’ll talk about the different ranges of value within the indifferents. You might say some indifferents are less indifferent than others, either towards the good or towards the bad. And then we’ll talk about something that the Stoics called “use”, and it’s how we translate this very important term khrēsis. I’ll talk about and that’ll lead into discussion the virtues and their relationship to the indifferents. And then finally, I’ll talk about what gets translated as duties or appropriate actions, and how those bear upon the indifferents.

So if we’re thinking about what’s good and what’s bad — again if we think about virtue ethics in general, we can also say this about religious traditions and about psychotherapy, which you know has very early roots in ancient philosophy as well in some cases — part of what the big project is, is helping people understand and move towards genuine not just apparent goods, and away from genuine bads or evils and not just apparent ones, to extricate themselves from from what’s really bad .So that’s an important thing to bring in.

Another key thing is to be able to frame things in terms of higher or lower, or greater or lesser, goods and evils, goods and bads. This is a matter of prioritization that’s just as important to ethics as figuring out what it actually is good and bad. So if we get away from the Stoics, and we think about pleasure for example, the Platonists and the Aristotelians would say that pleasure is a good. It’s not the good. So we have to figure out, where does it fit into how we ought to structure our lives? We don’t want to reject it entirely. But we don’t want to be dominated by the desire for pleasure.

Stoics have a different view on pleasure, which we can talk about in a bit. And Stoicism seems kind of like an outlier among ancient philosophy, since they use this term the indifferents and they work a lot of things into it. So on one side, we have the things that are genuinely good, and the other side things that are genuinely bad. And then we have this vast space in between.

Now sometimes you’ll hear people trying to summarize stoicism and they’ll say that Stoicism teaches that virtue is the only good. That’s not quite true. The Stoics did recognize other things as being good besides virtue, but virtue is you might say paramount among what’s good. So if you look at Cicero in the Stoic Paradoxes, the very first Stoic paradox is only what is noble, or only what is right is good, in Latin quod honestus est solem bonum, right? So virtues fit in there but they’re not the only thing that’s that’s good. And the opposite of the virtues, vices, are bad but they’re not the only thing that’s bad.

Before I jump into talking about all this, I do want to say a little bit since people may or may not have a lot of exposure to Stoicism. If you want to see relatively systematic summaries of what the Stoics did in fact think, the places to go to are Diogenes Laertes’ Lives of the Philosophers book seven, Arius Didymus’ Epitome of Stoic Ethics some of Cicero’s works like On Ends, On Duties, and Tusculan Disputations. And then we have some of the big heavy hitters that people dive into in their reading about Stoicism, Seneca and Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations are a really wonderful book, but they don’t present things in a very systematic way at all. So if you want to do a deeper dive, Epictetus and Seneca are the places that you go.

So coming back to talking about virtues, virtues are definitely on the side of the good, and vices are definitely on the side of the bad. The Stoics recognized four main types of virtue. They associated these with what we call the cardinal virtues: wisdom or practical wisdom depending on how you translate it, temperance, justice, and courage. And their corresponding vices are folly or foolishness, sometimes translated stupidity, lack of self-control or self-indulgence, cowardice, and injustice. And those things are considered to be definitely good and definitely bad by the Stoics.

Each of them is divided into, you might call, them sub-virtues or different modalities of virtues. So for example earlier today, we were talking about courage and Stoics divided courage up into a number of different things, only one of which actually has to do with dealing with fear. Being able to get through the daily slog or grind, and persevere, that’s another part of that virtue of courage So these are good things for us.

What else are good? Well, the Stoics thought that certain emotions or passions were good or bad. Actions are good or bad, very often reflecting virtues or vices. People themselves can be classified as good or bad. Friendship and hatred, as we’re going to talk about in a bit, are good or bad. Then of course there’s certain things that, you could call them the overarching states that we’re aiming at like happiness, tranquility, freedom, good things. Misery, being disturbed by things, slavery or a lack of freedom those are bad.

So the Stoics talked about a wide range of things, and they talked about them in a variety of ways. Sometimes they framed it in terms of means and ends, or being productive of things, or being things that were good in themselves. Sometimes they use the term “participation”, which is always a little bit murky when we try to figure out what it means.

I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the other things besides virtues that are good and bad, because that’ll help us then see what’s neither. So the emotions I mentioned that the Stoics think that some emotions are good and some emotions are bad. A common misunderstanding of the Stoic says that the Stoics think that we should get rid of our emotions or repress them. That definitely is not what they taught. But they thought that some of our emotional states and emotional reactions are subversive of reason, or resistant to reason. They lead us off into tracks that are not good for us and very often vicious. So those would be considered bad

But there are some good emotions the eupatheiai, and those would be for example caution, instead of feeling irrational fear or anxiety. There are some cases where we want to feel some fear because it’s genuinely rational to do so. Or joy, another very important thing. The Stoics are not joyless, or loveless, or anything like that. That is an integral part of it, so the emotions can fall into both sides. We can also talk about actions themselves. Are they in accordance with our social nature, aligned with virtue?

And the Stoics made some distinctions we can go into, if you’d like to, later on between things that are totally virtuous, and then actions that are just in accordance with virtue. Kind of similar to what Aristotle does in the Nicomachean Ethics

Epictetus a very important late Stoic thinker talks about good and evil for human beings lying within the scope of our faculty of choice, or sometimes it’s translated moral purpose, the prohairesis, the part of us that does the choosing ,which which for Epictetus is basically the same as the ruling part of ourselves

Another thing that’s classified is as good or bad in a real sense is friendship. Friendship and its opposite, hatred or enmity, this is where we get to something quite interesting. Friendship is is classified strictly speaking as something external to ourself. It makes sense, right? Our friend is not us, however we may talk about being one soul in two bodies. Is there any of that Aristotelian stuff? The Stoics recognize that our relationships are between separate people. But friendship is indeed something that that is quite good, and so friends are classified among good.

There are things that are not friendship in a full sense, for the sake of what we might call common benefit, where I give you something and you give me something. But where it’s genuine friendship, that is something that is good both in the relationship and in the state that I have within myself of being, and friendly with the other person

So what then is the middle part? We’ve got the good on one side and the bad on the other side. The Stoics talk about indifferents and that’s a translation of the Greek term adiaphoria, literally meaning the things that don’t make a difference. There’s a lot of different characterizations of this but one of them coming from Diogenes Laertes is that these are things that are neither good, nor evil or bad things, that don’t benefit or harm a person.

He clarifies that the Stoics actually say there’s two different meanings to this term. There are things that don’t contribute at all to our happiness or unhappiness. We can be happy or unhappy without them, but the use of them in certain ways contributes to happiness or misery.

A great example this would be wealth, which we’ll talk about a bit later. You can pile up as much money as you want and it won’t make you happy. If you’re already a miserable person, as a matter of fact, it might make it easier for you to be miserable in new and exciting ways. And vice versa, if you’re poor and you are a good person, somebody who is free, who’s untroubled, being poor is not going to make things worse but you can use that money in such ways that it conduces to good things. So no amount of wealth, or pleasure, or bodily health, or physical attractiveness is going to tip you over the scale into happiness, but it can be it can be used for that. We’re going to get back to that in just a moment. Then there’s things that are, you might say, even more indifferent things, that have no power to stir our inclinations or choices towards or against them.

If we look at examples, the Stoics stock ones are wealth versus poverty, pain versus pleasure, health versus illness, living or dying, high social status versus low social status, being given great positions being in menial positions, physical attractiveness physical ugliness. All of those things fall in the realm of the indifferent, and why are these indifferents? They can possess a certain value, but they don’t possess enough value, no matter how many of them you you pile up or connect with each other, to make us happier and miserable in the genuine sense. As persons, they don’t make us good or bad either.

Epictetus actually has a really nice sort of deconstruction of mistaken lines of reasoning when he says: people say to themselves, I have more money than you, therefore I’m better than you, when really the only thing that you can draw as a conclusion is that they can buy more things than you can. These these are not actually connected. So part of Stoic analysis is disentangling these things from each other and seeing indifferents as indifferents.

Now there’s kind of a common mistake, I think that’s largely due to our language. We we see this term “indifferents” ending in the plural, and we think that that means we automatically ought to feel indifferent towards those things. That doesn’t actually follow for the Stoic philosophy. There were some ancient philosophers who did see things that way, but they weren’t the Stoics.

There’s also a tendency to map certain categories onto each other. Once you start learning about Stoicism you learn about the dichotomy of control, what’s in my power what’s not in my power. You learn about internals and externals. It’s really easy to say: “Well those all connect up with each other.” What’s indifferent is what’s external, is what’s not in my control. Not completely. Those those are overlapping categories, but they’re not, you might say, coinciding categories.

So we have to think about whether indifferents have any sort of value at all. The Stoics say that they do, some of them do at least. Some of them don’t. There are some genuinely indifferent matters and I’d invite you, as I go through these examples, to think about things that you don’t care about one way or another, and it’s not because you’re pushing it away and rejecting. It just doesn’t matter to you at all.

Some of the classic examples that the Stoics give are whether the number of the hairs on your head is even or odd. Who cares? That doesn’t make a difference to anything that we could possibly think of. You could construe some situation in which that might matter, like let’s say the government decides that all the even-numbered hair people are going into one field and all the odd are going into another, and then people who don’t have any hair I suppose in a third category. But that’s so artificial it doesn’t it doesn’t really connect up with us. Whether your finger is straight or bent, they say. Who cares? It doesn’t matter. Picking up something along the way, like a twig or a leaf, is another example that they give. Now that applies to a lot of things. They really are genuinely indifferent. We have no stake in them at all.

Here’s where it starts to get tricky. There’s things that are indifferent, and the Stoics were willing to say that they were indifferent, but they have some sort of value. The word that’s used there in Greek is axia, meaning something that has some some sort of stake, some sort of value. It’s worth something. They talked about what we translate as “preferred “ and “rejected” indifferents. These could have positive or negative value, but they weren’t going to be the sort that would actually cross the the threshold into what’s genuinely good or bad

The place, by the way, if you really want to see the best discussion of this to go to, is in Cicero’s work On the Ends where he’s having Cato the great Stoic stateman and philosopher presenting the Stoic doctrine on this. That’s probably one of the best places to go to, book three of that work. So a lot of these indifferents do in fact have some value, some positive or negative value. They don’t have the same kind of value.

You might actually think about it like a two-tiered system where you’ve got what’s genuinely good or bad up here. It can really determine whether we are happy or miserable. Then we’ve got everything else down here, and there are higher and lower, and we can trade them off against each other. But no matter how much of that we we accumulate or you know manage to get rid of, we’re not going to be happy or miserable on account of that.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

Just a few years back, we lost the last member of the “four-legged family” who my wife adopted, when they were two kittens and two puppies, in 2020. Our 19-year-old cat Sassy outlived her sister (they were the two survivors from their litter) and her canine brother and sister. She was an assertive, curious, loving old girl.

Sassy was both my wife’s and my cat, but for over a decade she picked me out as her person, and we developed a close, deep, and rich relationship. There’s more that could be written, but I’ve done that elsewhere. Suffice it to say that Sassy’s death, like the death of anyone close to us, presents a challenge for practicing Stoicism.

You can correctly say that when it comes to the emotions, the Stoics view grief as something bad. It’s bad to the person who suffers it. Grief also feels bad, washing over you with waves of pain, loss, loneliness, yearning, and sadness. It can lead to isolating oneself, brooding, ruminating, especially if one moves in circles where after sympathy dies down one is encouraged to put the death in the past, to “get over it”.

For Stoics, grief is also problematic because like other types of “pain” or “distress” (one of the main genres of emotion), it arises from and reflects mistaken conceptions and reasoning processes. The grieving person views the loved one’s death, their absence, and the loss of the ongoing relationship — all of which are strictly speaking indifferents — as bad things. So in some respects, the official Stoic “party line” might be that grief is bad and that we should try to avoid or cut it off as much as we can.

How would we do that, though? Should we take Epictetus’ seemingly austere advice in Enchiridion chapter 3, and when we kiss our child, our spouse, or our pet, remind ourselves that they are mortal? Then when they die, we won’t be upset or troubled? One might read this and mistakenly think the Stoic approach is one of avoiding attachments.

Don’t get too close, or you might get hurt!

Don’t develop affection, let alone love for others, because that makes you vulnerable to a world that will inevitably snatch them away!

But that’s actually not what Stoics suggest. In that very passage by Epictetus, he writes of “those who you feel affection towards” (stergomenōn). The assumption is that, if you are a decently developed human being, you will become attached, you will feel and display affection, and you will come to love (in whatever form that takes).

Would the legendary Stoic sage feel grief? Probably not, but noting that isn’t particularly helpful for those of us who are just studying and practicing without unrealistic hopes of attaining sagehood.

Is there any helpful Stoic advice then about grief over those we love and lose? Seneca offers some, telling Lucilius who has lost a friend, that it is to be expected that one will feel some grief, and even express it, but that it is possible to do so in a way that remains within some rational limits.

Extravagant gestures, words and wailing, those don’t serve the person who has died, the person feeling grief, or anyone else for that matter. Many people mistakenly assume that, if you cared for a person, you show it by the amount and intensity of grief you display, but a Stoic would easily recognize that as a mistaken opinion, judgment, or assumption.

What if you do find yourself overcome by sadness and grief? Should you just push it away? Some people might think that’s what Stoicism requires of them, but they’re labouring under a misconception. Instead, one should pay attention to what one is feeling, and then examine it, unravelling the impressions, appearances, or imaginations (phantasiai) that are involved, assessing and evaluating them.

One can recognize what right, good, or true elements go into producing the grief one feels, while identifying what other thoughts one might do better to suspend or reject. Two months in, I still grieved for my cat companion, to the point of feeling sadness and shedding tears, but I could also begin to deliberately choose to shift my mind’s focus to the wonderful memories of the portion of life we shared together.

This piece first appeared in the July 2022 issue of the online magazine The Stoic (and has been slightly updated here). If this piece has you now interested in Stoicism, and you would like to know what to read next, this might be helpful for you.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

“[A]round the definition of Christian philosophy there has been a good deal more of deductive than inductive reasoning – and especially we may add, in Christian quarters” — Etienne Gilson

“This is what is happening: Catholic rationalism is waging a lively offensive at the moment when skeptical, or naturalist, rationalism is transforming itself in its depths, so that what the former retains of reason and values corresponds to what the latter reduces to the rank of purely verbal dialectic.” — Raymond Fenandez¹

A debate took place in 1930’s France over the possibility, actuality, and nature of Christian philosophy, an important debate because it involved several major philosophers and theologians, whose positions, arguments, and claims are both well-articulated and of continued relevance today. A good deal of the debate involved making and arguing claims about reason or rationality and philosophy as an activity or product of reason, and tying these claims into judgements about the relationships between Christianity and philosophy. That there was a debate about this at all, of course, stemmed from the interlocutors holding and articulating quite different and in many cases incompatible positions, coherent in their own right and in their own terms to be sure, but varying considerably in their capacity for philosophically engaging their opponent’s positions in dialogue. In the case of certain interlocutors vis-à-vis each other, they viewed their positions as incompatible when perhaps they are really compatible or even complementary.

Alisdaire MacIntrye’s work in moral philosophy can be used to illuminate this debate, particularly his understanding of how philosophical conflicts between rival traditions, within traditions, and in the development of traditions, stem in part from rival conceptions of rationality, and how in modernity new currents and conditions of thought emerge, both hostile to and susceptible to becoming traditions of their own, but also, due to their form and development, incapable of adequately conceptualizing and promoting practices, virtues, and traditions. Bringing MacIntyre to bear on the Christian philosophy debate admittedly involves relocating some of his key concepts and distinctions from their usual context in moral philosophy, primarily concerned with the nature of practical rationality, practices, and the virtues, most notably justice. But, in my view, this relocation is not a forced one, but rather one suggested by a virtue of his work in moral philosophy, namely that in order to make sense of positions in moral philosophy it explores and extends to the connections between moral philosophy and philosophy conceived more generally.

In return, using MacIntyre’s thought to interpret the Christian philosophy debate raises several questions. Can Christian philosophy, in at least some of the ways its notion is articulated in the debate, be understood as a tradition or traditions in MacIntyre’s sense of the term in After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? , or as Tradition in the related sense it takes in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry ? Can MacIntyre’s own philosophical effort be understood as a kind of Christian philosophy, in a stronger sense than that of the mere sociological category² of philosophy done by a Catholic Christian³, namely in one or more of the senses of the term articulated by the main Catholic interlocutors in the debate? And, do certain critiques made in the course of the debate problematize this interpretation of MacIntyre’s work?

These questions are answered in the course of this paper, but the paper is not structured according to these questions. Rather, the first part of this paper interprets the debate in light of MacIntyre’s thought on tradition, rationality, and modernity. The second part presents Gilson’s and Maritian’s positions, rasing and answering the motivating questions at appropriate points. The third and last part presents Blondel’s position, which critiques Gilson’s position, in the process raising and resolving some questions about MacIntyre’s philosophy and the supernatural order.

I.

The 1930s debate, often wrongly summed up in Anglophone literature as the Bréhier-Gilson debate⁴, actually involved (depending on how one interprets it) at least six and perhaps as many as ten different main interlocutors,⁵ a host of minor interlocutors and commentators, and ranged from 1931 to 1934 in a host of Francophone journals and societies. Calling it a debate may give the mistaken impression that there were two clearly defined positions debating a clearly defined topic, with a definitive resolution in favor of one side, when none of these conditions actually held.

First, while the figures involved can be divided into Catholics and largely secular Rationalists,⁶ the debate, almost from the start, developed into an intra-Catholic debate. The rationalists made their contributions early on, and in the course of the debate, some figures intervened with similar positions,⁷ but the rationalist position(s) gained little traction, and the debate evolved into deep disagreements articulated among the many Catholic interlocutors. If any binary disjunction is possible and useful here, it was between Gilson and Maritain on one side, and Blondel on the other. Making that disjunction, however, raises other problems, for then one would have to oppose to all three of these figures the interlocutors and later commentators that regarded these positions as not only compatible but complementary.⁸ One might put a cap on this by simply noting that the “Catholic position” in the debate was overdetermined.

The topic was not clearly determined prior to the debate, except as a term, for a variety of reasons. First, as Bréhier noted from the start, it involved normative as well as factual issues.⁹ Or as Bréhier did not realize, the possibility and nature of Christian philosophy involves many normative as well as factual issues. Simply defining the meaning of the terms was already contentious, not least because one’s definition already involved determinate commitments for or against Christian philosophy.

Second, the major Catholic interlocutors themselves disagreed about the meaning(s) of the term,¹⁰ a disagreement also affecting the resolution of the debate. Resolution is not the correct term, however, for none of the major contending interlocutors ever admitted that any of the other interlocutors forced them to alter their position. The debate, at least as far as its institutional expression in journals, simply petered out,¹¹ but, interestingly, each of the positions in the debate has (often, particularly in the cases of the Rationalists, without these proponents being aware of their intellectual pedigree) contemporary proponents. No resolution took place, one is tempted to say, because these interlocutors were not really interlocutors, in the sense of sharing a common set of concepts and ways of resolving disputed philosophical issues.

This raises an interesting issue that can be formulated explicitly through themes central in MacIntyre’s work. The spectacles of Gilson and Blondel, both prior to the debate and in the beginning of the debate, mutually misunderstanding each other’s position,¹² of Blondel and Maritain doing likewise and taking jabs at each other through the 1930s, and, most importantly, that of observers, not only after the debate (e.g. de Lubac), but in its midst (e.g. Sertillanges, de Solages, Marcel) regarding the positions not as incompatible, but as complementary, or to use de Solages’ metaphor, as three paths ascending a single mountain with three neighboring peaks,¹³ evoke a familiar theme of MacIntyre’s work, confrontation between philosophical standpoints in disagreement, between differing accounts, embodiments, and employments of rationality.

Philosophers differ on major issues, for instance the possibility and nature of Christian philosophy, at times within a single tradition or community of inquiry, but at other times from fundamentally incompatible or even incommensurable standpoints. The differences in these cases involve not only varying views on the issue ostensibly under debate, but different views on what constitute valid rules or forms of inference, what counts as evidence, the scope and nature of rationality as well as what rationality opposes itself to, the legitimacy of appeals to authorities, authorities themselves being conceived in different ways, the relationships between morality, moral dispositions (e.g. the intellectual and moral virtues and vices) and truth.

Typically, those debating each other in these latter situations are not entirely conscious of and reflective about these more fundamental differences.¹⁴ Often, interlocutors grounded in different positions will do precisely what MacIntyre describes in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, simply attempt to translate best as they can the statements and discourses of the other interlocutors into the vocabulary and fundamental assumptions of the position the interlocutor is grounded and works within. This typically involves a reduplication of the differences already in play, which, to be sure, is even the case to a lesser extent when one imaginatively enters into the other interlocutor’s position, trying to see it from the inside.

The 1930s Christian philosophy debate displays incommensurability in two very different ways. First, the debate did originate officially as a debate between Catholic philosophers and Rationalist philosophers¹⁵ in a French setting where the state schools (e.g. the École Normale) were dominated by the latter, but where Catholic institutions still had a very significant role. Interestingly, the most important Catholic participants in the debate (Gilson, Maritain, Blondel, Marcel) were all lay Catholic philosophers who had their post-secondary philosophical formation in the secular state institutions. They also had significant contacts within clerical circles, and participated in Catholic intellectual life, not only in France, but in Italy and the Anglo-American countries.

Two of them, Gilson and Blondel, were what we would now call “cradle Catholics”, while the other two, Maritain and Marcel, were converts, in the latter’s case quite recently in relation to the debate. All of these major Catholic interlocutors were in a condition similar to that which MacIntyre ascribes to Thomas Aquinas (a condition that also applies to MacIntyre himself), of being conversant with two rival institutionalized intellectual traditions and viewpoints on rationality, a modern, secular, rationalist view, and a view grounded within and by Catholicism.¹⁶

The two Rationalist philosophers participating in the debate, Emile Bréhier and Léon Brunschvicg, argued positions that held that Christian philosophy could not be philosophy in the proper sense, and examining their texts indicates that they clearly fall within the set of interrelated perspectives, both philosophical and theological, that MacIntyre calls Enlightenment in After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?and Encyclopedia in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. In brevity’s interest, I cite only a few points in their texts.

Bréhier argued that “Christian philosophy” could have only two meanings. It could be a philosophy “in agreement with dogma” as defined by some particular religious authority.¹⁷ But then, it is not really philosophy, since reason is subordinated to the irrational and arbitrary. Alternately, Christian philosophy could be philosophy in which “Christianity, as such, insofar as revealed Dogma, has been the starting point of any positive philosophical inspiration.”¹⁸ This, astonishingly for a historian of philosophy, Bréhier entirely denies, contending that all that is philosophical in purportedly Christian philosophy really derives from pre-Christian Greek philosophy.¹⁹

The other Rationalist participant in the debate, Brunschvicg articulated a much subtler position,²⁰ essentially making two main points. First, he argued that, prior to the 17th century, reason was immature, and he thereby disqualifies all of the pre-17th century claimants to the title of Christian philosophy, precisely because, on that understanding they cannot really be philosophy. It is worth noting that this would also disqualify Bréhier’s own rationalism, based in a pre-Christian Hellenic conception of Logos.²¹

Brunschvicg then poses a trilemma. One who is first a philosopher may also be a Christian, but that does not make that person’s philosophy Christian philosophy. Alternately, one can be a Christian before and rather than being a philosopher, but then one’s thought is Christian but outside of philosophy. Brunschvicg takes Pascal as the model of this “way of philosophizing that is not that of philosophers.”²² Last, there is a position, represented by Malebranche, where a philosopher concludes that philosophy cannot resolve the problems it raises, so that one then accepts solutions from Christianity, again leaving behind philosophy in the properly rational sense.

These two Rationalist positions represent the sort of rationality characteristic of Enlightenment or Encyclopedia. But, who is counterposed to them? Catholic thinkers, to be sure, but what exactly do they represent philosophically? In the lecture “Too many Thomisms?” MacIntyre points out that Catholic thought, even Thomist thought, can often be articulated from within an Enlightenment perspective rather than a perspective of Tradition.²³

Gilson, Maritain, and Blondel point out in their works, focusing particularly on contemporary neo-Scholastics, how accepting Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment perspectives²⁴ as starting points for the articulation of one’s philosophical position concedes too much and leads to a position mirroring, opposed to, but impotent in the face of secular modernity dismissive of any invocation of, let alone appeal to, supernatural revelation. In the course of the debate, Gilson notes the underlying similarity of perspective “pure rationalism”, “pure theologism”, and certain types of neo-Scholasticism share. Blondel pointed this out long before the debate, during the Modernism Controversy, but he reiterates this in his critical response to Van Steenberghen.. Maritain for his part discerns a need to distinguish himself from the neo-Scholastics Gilson criticizes.

What these discussions point out is that, over the course of the Christian philosophy debate, the positions of the Catholic thinkers do not all fit MacIntyre’s characterizations of Tradition, but included several making significant concessions to the type of thought he calls Enlightenment or Encyclopedia. Van Steenberghen’s neo-Scholastic contribution, and Noël’s phenomenological contribution²⁵ to the debate fall within these portions.

However, what is most interesting, and what MacIntyre’s thought offers a productive way to understand, is that the most significant disagreement of the debate (continuing long afterward) was not between the Catholics and Rationalists, nor an intra-Catholic division between those who were called neo-Scholastics at the time and Gilson and Maritain (called neo-Scholastics today), but between Gilson and Maritain on one side and Blondel on the other. And, filling out both this interest and MacIntyre’s discussions are the commentators who realized these three thinkers’ compatibility and complementarity.

These three interlocutors fall within different traditions in one sense, but fit within a common tradition in another sense. The paradigm of Tradition as opposed to Enlightenment, not only for MacIntyre, but for Gilson and Maritain, is the thought of St. Thomas and his interpreters.²⁶ But, Blondel²⁷ and Marcel do not fit this mold, nor, however, can they be easily set within the Augustinian tradition either. They could be placed under the rubrics of Christian existentialism or phenomenology, although these titles would be anachronistic applied to Blondel.²⁸ Such placement opens up another long-developed possibility, however, since phenomenological and existential philosophy employed and developed by Catholic philosophers have arguably come to be acknowledged as a second major source of both content and methodology for Catholic thought.²⁹

The Fides et Ratio of the late Pope John Paul the Great³⁰ might be productively contrasted with the Aeterni Patris functioning as the paradigm document for Tradition in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Such a contrast would be anything but forced, given MacIntyre’s account discussing how Pope Leo XIII could issue the Aeterni Patris precisely because he had been the Gioacchino Pecci formed in the heart of a long-developing pre-encyclical Thomist revival, an account that corresponds to Pope John Paul the Great being at one time the Karol Wojtyla formed through the Lublin School not only in Thomism but also in what phenomenology had to offer Christian thought. One would not have to stretch MacIntyre’s characterizations very far to construe this as part of the ongoing and continually renewed Tradition, thereby bringing Blondel explicitly into a common tradition with Gilson and Maritain, a common tradition that seems to be presupposed and participated in by the interlocutors who saw complementarity rather than irreconcilable conflict in their positions.

All of these interlocutors were in agreement about the importance of three basic issues. First, there was a modern world, formed by the changes that took place in modernity, particularly modern philosophy, that had to be addressed. Second, there was something antedating and continuing on through the adventures, successes and failures of modernity, Christianity, best understood and lived through the Catholic Church, which had produced not only a way of living, but ways of thinking. Third, fruitful interpretation of Christian thought could not be allowed to degenerate into something static, nor could they be simply fit into the categories of modernity.

The interlocutors understood differently what addressing the situation of modern thought required. Gilson, as a historian of philosophy, delved into the thought of the long-dismissed medieval philosophers. Maritain engaged particularly with the thought of St. Thomas, articulating it in often startling but fruitful ways. Blondel attempted to derive and deploy a new method specifically designed to engage modern thought on its own ground and lead it elsewhere, into contact with Christianity.³¹ Yet, all of them were engaged in the ongoing project of rearticulating Catholic thought in relation to modernity, making use of modernity’s resources (e.g. the modern university, publishing), and all of them were deeply involved, personally and publicly in the intellectual life of the Church and the University. In the end, despite more than merely surface appearances of discord, they all fit into the Tradition MacIntyre speaks of, a tradition that remains vital not least because of discussion at times (for instance between these three) quite antagonistic, but ultimately made sense of within and using the resources (some of which are past, some appropriated from and through the present) of that tradition.

II.

The positions articulated in the debate, both pro and contra Christian philosophy, productively engage MacIntyre’s thought in three ways.

First, as noted already, the rationalists’ positions provide an example of MacIntyre’s contention that there are fundamentally differing understandings of rationality and that the types of rationality predominant in modern philosophy have not understood, or been able to understand, rival rationalities in this case, those of Christian philosophy, as rational. The rationalists, defining philosophy and reason in ways ruling out any relation to Christianity where Christianity would influence, motivate, or even generate philosophies that would nevertheless remain philosophies in the full sense, never effectively engage their Catholic opponents’ positions.

Second, Gilson’s and Maritain’s positions provide different though compatible articulations within the viewpoint MacIntyre has called Tradition.

Third, certain criticisms that Blondel addresses explicitly to Gilson and implicitly to Maritain would also address MacIntyre’s work, if it is used to interpret the debate as a conflict between Tradition and Enlightenment and as a conflict within Tradition. My assessment is that, although MacIntyre does not explicitly address the problems Blondel raises, their solution is implicit in his work. For reasons of space and focus I discuss here only the second and third sets of positions.

Gilson provides several different but complementary characterizations³² of Christian philosophy in the course of the debate. He provides the first two in a portion of his summary of his presentation to the S.f. P.

It is a matter of knowing this: whether Christianity has played an observable role in the constitution of certain philosophies? If there exist philosophical systems, purely rational in their principles and in their methods, whose existence is not explained without the existence of the Christian religion, the philosophies that they define merit the name of Christian philosophies. This notion does not correspond to a concept of a pure essence, that of the philosopher or that of the Christian, but to the possibility of a complex historical reality: that of a revelation generative of reason.³³

The second sentence supplies his first characterization, and it emphasizes three key aspects. Christian philosophies must be purely rational in their principles, which means, practically speaking, not only their first starting points, but also other principles brought in during the course of philosophical exploration, articulation, and argumentation. They must also be purely rational in their methods, not only in the way that they ultimately systematize, but also in their operations of inference and classification. Third, explanation of their existence must require reference to the existence of the Christian religion. This last aspect is stated better in the first sentence, where Christianity must have played an observable role in these Christian philosophies.

His second characterization is, perhaps because of its concision, one frequently referred to in the literature on the debate. Reflecting on the passage, however, “revelation generative of reason” actually characterizes the Christianity that plays a role in the development of philosophy. There is a risk, which Blondel will later call attention to, of too easily assuming this generation, and even the revelation, into a Christian philosophy. “Revelation generative of reason” describes what Gilson here calls the “possibility of a complex historical reality”, and the notion of Christian philosophy corresponds to this. One might assume that Gilson’s reference to possibility here is disingenuous, since he clearly believes that there are actual Christian philosophies, but there is another (pun intended) possible explanation. Though he does not develop it here, Gilson leaves open the ongoing and continued possibility of the Christian revelation playing a role in contemporary philosophies.

A third characterization emerges from Gilson’s critique of what he construes as neo-Augustinian positions on Christian philosophy. He argues that both Augustinian philosophy and Thomist philosophy are philosophies of the concrete³⁴, but that the Thomist tradition, which he seems to identify with here, is superior because its activity culminates in expressing the real though concepts, which the (neo-)Augustinian tradition rejects. Relevant here, however, is not Gilson’s critique, but his characterization of what is right in the Augustinian position. He argues that it contains an important truth:

the real unity of the elements of the concrete in the subject where they are realized. Whatever may be the doctrine that one identifies with, it is a fatal blow to philosophy to consider the unity of being to be made of the combination of other beings. And, what is true of being is true of thought. If there were in us a faith and a reason, whose being was radically distinct from that of a thinking substance to which they belong, we could not say of any of us that he was a man. In this sense, everyone agrees that faith and reason are rooted in the unity of the concrete subject.³⁵

This leads to another characterization, again, not a precise definition, but an articulation of the relations between philosophy and Christianity in Christian philosophy.³⁶ “[E]very Christian philosophy will be traversed, impregnated, nourished by Christianity as by a blood that circulates in it, or rather, like a life that animates it. One will never be able to say that here the philosophical ends and the Christian begins; it will be integrally Christian and integrally philosophical or it will not be.”³⁷

A fourth characterization emerges from Gilson’s discussion of rationality, deferred here momentarily. “What is peculiar to the Christian is being convinced of the rational fertility of his faith and being sure that this fertility is inexhaustible. That is, if one pays attention, the true meaning of Saint Augustine’s credo ut intelligam and Saint Anselm’s fides quaerens intellectum: a Christian’s effort to draw some of reason’s knowledge from faith in revelation .”³⁸ At that point in his presentation, Gilson makes the important claim that “these two formulas are the true definition of Christian philosophy.” ³⁹

Here, we must pause this sequence of characterizations of Christian philosophy to bring in MacIntyre, or rather highlight a MacIntyrian theme. Gilson, philosophizing about Christian philosophy, at this point exemplifies MacIntyre’s category of Tradition, both in the sense of the Thomist tradition and of the rationality embodied in traditions in general. First, in the latter sense, he makes reference and recourse to the thought and work of past thinkers he clearly identifies himself, not with, but as in a same and continuous tradition of thought.

Second, he mimetically reproduces what is best in the Thomist tradition, exemplified in St. Thomas’ works, a reference and recourse to past Christian thinkers that assimilates them to a more comprehensive and adequate perspective.⁴⁰ In the chapter “Overcoming a Conflict of Traditions” in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? , MacIntyre rightly characterizes Thomas’ effort as dialectic in the proper Aristotelean sense of that much overworked term,⁴¹ and that is precisely what is going on in Gilson’s reappropriation in the Christian philosophy debate.⁴²

Immediately following the passage providing the fourth characterization, Gilson repeats, word for word, his first characterization, but adds important qualifications and amplifications.

They are philosophies, since they are rational, and they are Christian, since the rationality that they have contributed would not have been conceived without Christianity. For the relation between both concepts to be intrinsic, it is not enough that a philosophy be compatible with Christianity; it is necessary that Christianity have played an active role in the very establishment of that philosophy.⁴³

Again, if Christian philosophy is to be philosophy, it must be purely rational. It can be generated and nourished by Christianity, and Christianity can make contributions to it, but it must still be entirely philosophical. But, does this not pose an insurmountable problem, since Christianity would seem to confront philosophy, an irrational confronting a rational? Gilson rightly places this problem of rationality on its proper ground, reflection on the concrete realities of philosophizing subjects, as opposed to deductions from an abstract conception of rationality. He notes that the Christian philosopher’s reason is “not a reason of a different type than that of non-Christian philosophers, but a reason that labors under different conditions.”⁴⁴

This difference of conditions works both ways. The Christian philosopher’s reason labors under different conditions than the non-Christian philosopher, but this does not mean that the conditions that the non-Christian philosopher’s reason works within are an unproblematic and pure norm for philosophy that the Christian philosopher would then differ from, for all philosophical activity is within different determinate conditions. Gilson concedes that the Christian philosopher’s reason works within a subject “in which there something non-rational, his religious faith,”⁴⁵ but this cohabitation with the non-rational is really the normal situation of reason.

Gilson issues two challenges. “I am waiting for someone to show me a pure philosopher, the concrete realization of an unique concept, in whom reason would not cohabit with any irrational of this sort. And, I ask especially whether the philosophical life is not precisely a constant effort to bring what is irrational in us to the state of rationality.”⁴⁶ Both of these provide justification for Christian philosophy as philosophy in the face of typical Rationalist (the debate’s term) or Enlightenment/Encyclopedia (MacIntyre’s terms) critiques.

These challenges bring Gilson close to issues thematized in MacIntyre’s works. Clearly, though he speaks of philosophy being “purely rational”, or later of “pure rational critique”, he does not view any philosophy or philosopher as being purely rational, let alone representing pure reason. Reason only functions, we might say in explicitly MacIntyrian terms, as determinate forms of rationality, supported by communities, practices, narratives, pedagogical institutions. The pretension and promise of Enlightenment was a rationality that would fully embody reason, stripping away and subordinating everything that was irrational, other-than-reason. For Gilson, however, there are two important distinctions that cannot be made adequately within the type of rationality Enlightenment presents and offers. “What is difficult for us is distinguishing between the irrational and the not-yet-rational. And, once one’s choice is made, there is still an issue of knowing the time when the possibilities of the rationality of the non-rational one has chosen are exhausted.”⁴⁷

There are always some things that are genuinely irrational, and making those dominant moments in one’s philosophy vitiates it as philosophy. But, the genuinely irrational is easily confused and distinguished only with difficulty from the not-yet-rational. One must actually make an effort rather than simply applying a methodology or classification.⁴⁸ Here, MacIntyre’s distinction between Tradition and Enlightenment is pertinent, for its implication is that making this distinction well (and it is a distinction that has to be made over and over, in differing circumstances) requires a more robust form of rationality than Enlightenment can offer, in short something like the cultivation of the intellectual and moral virtues, as well as guiding articulations or accounts of them. There is another issue of discrimination as well, knowing when the possibilities of the non-rational have been exhausted. This too, seems to require something like MacIntyre’s Tradition, if it is to be done well.

In a passage cited above, Gilson characterized the Christian philosopher as “being convinced of the rational fertility of his faith and being sure that this fertility is inexhaustible.”⁴⁹ The second conviction has important implications, not least that the Christian philosopher will understand him- or herself as needing to constantly return in their philosophizing to this inexhaustible source. Christianity will never become a mere concept whose content has been fully explored and exhausted, as it is, for instance, in one of the Enlightenment philosophers arguably most convinced of the value and richness of Christianity, G.W.F. Hegel.⁵⁰ More importantly, for the Catholic Gilson, this return will be to a complex revelation and a community.

After all of this exposition of Gilson’s position, what light does it shed on MacIntyre’s work? One might argue that there are two aspects related and important to his work relevant here. From After Virtue on, MacIntyre continuously develops what can be called a general theory of virtues, practices, and traditions, one which is critical of and counterposed to two main currents of modern thought, Enlightenment/Encyclopedia and Nietzsche/Genealogy. To be for virtues and traditions is, of course, not necessarily to be a Christian philosopher.⁵¹

The second moment of MacIntyre’s thought, however, places it within Gilson’s conception of Christian philosophy, for MacIntyre accords a priority to the Christian Thomist tradition. MacIntyre, in short, accepts and fits into Gilson’s characterizations of Christian philosophy. He does so, of course, in the much more visible aftermath of Enlightenment’s failure, in a different historical condition than both Gilson himself and the philosophers he engaged with did. Gilson’s discussions of rationality also fill out MacIntyre’s discussions of the rationality of tradition, but only in the second moment of his thought, where the rationality of the Thomistic tradition, and more broadly the Catholic intellectual tradition not only assumes but explores the endless rational fertility of and afforded by Christianity (an exploration, it should go without saying, returning over and over again to Christian thought as well as Christian life, embodied in texts and communities of interpretation).

Maritain explicitly notes the harmony between his position and Gilson’s, regarding the latter as historical and the former as doctrinal or theoretical.⁵² A key distinction underpins his entire position, a distinction he articulates in Scholastic terms as that between the order of specification and the order of exercise, and in more immediately accessible terms as that “between the nature of philosophy, of what philosophy is in itself, and the state in which it is found factually, historically, in the human subject, and which relates itself to its conditions of existence and exercise in the concrete”.⁵³ The essence or nature of philosophy, he concedes, is an abstraction, but, again making recourse to Scholastic distinctions, he notes that it is not an unreality but an “abstractio formalis , abstraction of the thinkable reality or the complex of the formal notes with respect to the subjects that are as it were their bearers.”⁵⁴

Philosophy is actually found as a reality only in particular states, and Maritain criticizes both neo-Scholastics and Rationalists for having neglected this, for attempting to substitute the abstract essence of philosophy for its actual concrete exercise in and by concrete human subjects. In its essence, philosophy is purely and perfectly rational, extending itself to all of the natural order. In its actual states, however, rationality can not be so easily and immediately presupposed. “[I]n order to acquire in us its full normal development, philosophy demands many rectifications and purifications from the individual, an ascesis not only of reason, but of the heart, and that one philosophize with one’s entire soul just as one runs with one’s heart and one’s lungs.”⁵⁵

The Christian philosopher will philosophize differently from the non-Christian philosopher because they will philosophize in different states. One manner of difference is the conception of philosophy’s own powers. Both the non-Christian and the Christian can realize and even thematize the weakness of our nature, particularly our reason, “although the Christian, knowing that nature is wounded, knows these matters better.”⁵⁶ MacIntyre’s category of Genealogy in fact represents philosophies that thematize the debility of reason in a way radically different from, and radically deficient when compared to Christian thought. The Christian philosopher’s fundamental viewpoint, and the state he philosophizes in is radically different in another set of ways, not only from Genealogy and Enlightenment, but also from pre-Christian traditions.

[T]he Christian believes that grace changes the state of man, by raising his nature to the supernatural order, and by making him know things that reason left to itself cannot attain. He also believes that in order for reason to attain the highest truths naturally accessible to it without admixture of errors, it needs assistance, whether from within by internal reinforcements, or from without by objects being proposed to it, and he believes this from the fact that under the New Law such an assistance has taken on an institutional value that creates a new regime for the human intelligence.⁵⁷

The scope of rationality is expanded for philosophy under a Christian regime, and in several particular ways. Christianity directs philosophy toward objects that, in principle, philosophy could have discovered and investigated independently, but which in fact it did not. In some cases, Christianity illuminates objects that philosophy did not develop, while in others, it allows hesitations and doubts to be overcome, cases where Maritain says it is a case “not of revelation, but of confirmation.”⁵⁸ There are also cases where Christianity proffers supernatural mysteries, which do not in themselves fall within philosophy’s range. But, even these cases are not without import for philosophical development, for precisely by being the handmaid of theology in these matters, philosophy can “learn much in being led in this way along paths that are not its own.”⁵⁹

Like Gilson’s position on Christian philosophy, Maritain’s bears implications for MacIntyre’s work, which can be viewed, in both earlier noted first and second moments, as working within a Christian regime, philosophy in a Christian state. To be sure, some of the traditions MacIntyre discusses and draws upon as sources of his own thought are non-Christian, but they are ultimately appropriated by, articulated through, and understood within a Christian philosophical perspective informed by Thomism. MacIntyre’s work could of course be read in a purely secular way, as simply a philosophical defense of the rationality of tradition(s) and the need for the virtues, neither making nor entailing claims about religion, faith, theology, grace, or the supernatural order. That would be a rather truncated reading, however, for several reasons.

MacIntyre provides a persuasive account of rationality in which tradition(s) and the virtues, and all that they entail⁶⁰ play a central role in philosophical discourse and work, where rationality could not be unproblematically self-defined a priori (as is the case in Enlightenment and Genealogy) through exclusion of texts, notions, institutions, procedures and assumptions of interpretation, and practices deemed “superstitious”, “too religious”, or religious in the wrong way (e.g. Catholicism as opposed to rationalist conceptions of the “true meaning” of religion), or in the case of the most radical secularists, bearing any odor or trace of religion whatsoever. MacIntyre’s philosophical position on rationality at the very least opens the door to philosophical traditions and communities that draw in many ways on Christianity, allowing Christianity to fructify reason and philosophy, to use Gilson’s metaphor, to develop philosophy and the range of reason further through the ways in which this takes place, as Maritain explains, in a Christian state.

All of this bears very important implications for the field of philosophy outside of Philosophy of Religion’s artificial preserve, to which Christian philosophy is all too often banished.⁶¹ MacIntyre’s arguments for the rationality of tradition(s) and humans’ need for the virtues would grant Christian philosophy its place in philosophical discourse, particularly in moral philosophy. But, it would do more than simply restore to it a place that, if the contemporary rhetoric of pluralism were to be more than mere rhetoric, it ought to be granted anyway. It would reintroduce teleological considerations, or, more properly, lay bare the complex of teleological assumptions that are already in play even for philosophical perspectives that attempt to dismiss teleology, and indicate how these have already been articulated by pre-modern traditions in ways that do not seem to have been fundamentally surpassed by modern thought.

The virtues and traditions assume their importance because of the ultimately (even in its absence, its privation, its perversion) unavoidable issue of living or being well (Aristotle’s eu zēn or eu ekhein ), of human flourishing. Christian philosophy articulates this in a radically different and fuller way than the pre-Christian (or, in the case of certain later Christian philosophers, post-Christian) traditions and bodies of thought it draws upon and into new syntheses as well as contrasts itself against. Both Augustinian and Thomist traditions take part in this rearticulation, as do the various positions not only on but also in contemporary Christian philosophy, including MacIntyre’s.

III.

Blondel entered the debate in a polemical manner.⁶² His first contribution was a severe, and in more than one way partly unfair, critique of Gilson’s, and by implication Maritain’s position. ⁶³ Setting aside the issue of fairness, Blondel’s contribution raises some very important issues that, while they may have been off-mark in relation to Gilson, pose problems once MacIntyre’s philosophical work is viewed as a kind of Christian philosophy along the lines suggested by Gilson and Maritain. These problems are, in my view, implicitly resolved, if not explicitly addressed in MacIntyre’s work, but attaining a view on the problems Blondel articulate is worthwhile, since it allows these implicit aspects of MacIntyre’s philosophy to emerge.

Blondel makes four criticisms of Gilson, two largely in passing, and two as “presuppositions” that “invisibly bar the path to the very possibility of Christian philosophy.”⁶⁴ First, Blondel defends himself against Gilson’s interpretation of his philosophy, an interpretation in fact incorrect on several counts. This defense, however interesting it may be for Blondel scholars, is less important than the brief remarks that Blondel makes before moving to the two presuppositions.

In order to call itself Christian, a doctrine, according to the rules of historical method, should have to attach itself directly to the primitive stimulation, not to commentators or to intermediaries. Is it not strange to seek Christian philosophy in philosophers professing a doctrine that bears the restrictive characters of their intellectual personality and their particular horizons? If, in the precise meaning of the term, Christian philosophy can exist, it must be Christ and not a disciple that it invokes; and by this the our problem’s paradox is manifested even better, for Christ is not at all a philosopher or a master of rational speculation. There exactly resides the difficulty to be elucidated, not in the later debates between Augustinians, Thomists, Scotists, or others.⁶⁵

Blondel’s remarks here have to be placed in their proper context, for his position he risks being taken for the (Reformed) Protestant position(s) later taken on the debate.⁶⁶ His criticism bears on a sort of reification of Christian philosophies, in which they are deracinated from their Christian origins, from their living connection with Christ, turned into philosophical systems and methodologies whose use, whether as a whole or in part, could be uncritically assumed to represent Christian philosophy. Simply invoking Thomas, citing passages from his work, employing distinctions he articulates, even if done in a systematic manner, does not by itself assure fidelity to the contours and directions of Thomas’ thought.

Some norms, which for Blondel are embodied particularly in the body and practice of the Church and in Tradition⁶⁷, but also immanently in and essential to the practice of philosophy, must be relied upon and employed in reappropriating Christian thought. ⁶⁸ These norms can be discerned, embodied and governing, within the work of Christian philosophers, particularly Fathers and Doctors of the Church, but this is precisely because Christian philosophy does invoke Christ, degenerating when it only invokes disciples.

Blondel criticizes Gilson on account of two presuppositions he takes Gilson to hold. The first is conceptualism, maintaining:

philosophical doctrines, as diverse as they may be, aim in sum at closing themselves up into closed, sufficient, and exclusive systems; these systems organize themselves and terminate in concepts, and all that does not succeed in being raised into concepts repulses philosophy. But, this is precisely what is in question: can it not be philosophical, is it not “conceivable”, is it not even normal, that philosophy opens ulterior perspectives, holds the trampoline steady, so to say, but orients and stimulates spiritual life’s dynamism by posing inevitable problems whose complete solution it does not provide, even though it should serve to not allow them to be misunderstood nor falsely resolved?⁶⁹

Blondel does not reject concepts, as Gilson charged, nor does he view them pragmatically as merely instrumental, valid only insofar as they terminate in action. He rejects Gilson’s view that a philosophy of the concrete would “use religious experience without concepts like a matter elaborated by life, thanks to the mediation of action, without reflection being able to analyze this mixture of the two heterogenous orders of nature and grace, in short without this confused concrete or this experimental immanence being able to be analyzed and raised to ideas”⁷⁰ In Blondel’s philosophy, thought and action, theory and practice, are coordinated with each other dialectically, and one of the strong points of his philosophy is that he grasps thinking as not only related to, nourished and enriched by action, but as also a type of action. Action, or practice in turn is conditioned by thought and theory, including philosophical concepts and systems.

There is an option in philosophy, of which one term is conceptualism, a term that as a presupposition denies the existence or even possibility of this option for philosophy. The other term of this option is “an open philosophy and one which, at the same time, recognizes its limits, by being ready to accept ulterior data.”⁷¹ This readiness consists in a willingness to accept ulterior data on their own terms, rather than simply within the confines of a system of concepts already taken as final and absolute. It means philosophy, and the philosopher working with it and working it out, being willing to allow ulterior data to call their systems of concepts into question. This does not mean of course that one simply abandons concepts and their often hard-won systematization in this contact with something new, something different, even something old but not previously grasped. Rather, what Blondel describes is something similar to MacIntyre’s characterization of Thomas’ dialectic.

Blondel indicates that this open philosophy is motivated by a general problem, going beyond “an always deficient character of particular systems which . . . remain contingent [caducs] and are always to be surpassed,”⁷² as well as “the perpetual renewal of the philosophical tradition in general, always perfectible because it is always incomplete or inadequate, even where it is sure of itself and grounds its incessant movement on definitive acquisitions.” ⁷³ The general problem poses this question:

yes or no, philosophical doctrines, at whatever degree of development they make it to, can they, should they aim at being sufficient. . . at providing by themselves. . . all the light and all the strength necessary for thought and life, so that they would be, even under their transitory form, the provision for the journey and the supreme explanation? Or, on the other hand, by reason, by duty, constitutionally, if one can talk in this way, must philosophy end up, whatever may be the level of its development, in recognizing how it is normally incomplete, how it opens in itself and before itself an open space prepared not only for its own ulterior discoveries and on its own ground, but for the lights and the contributions whose real origin it is not and cannot become?⁷⁴

This option’s second term, recognition of incompleteness on the part of philosophy, is itself philosophical since it does not “proceed from a revelation”, but is alone “in spontaneous and deep accord with Christianity.”⁷⁵

Recognition of this incompleteness is an ongoing activity of philosophy. The philosopher remains grounded in a context of concepts, texts, narratives, fundamental assumptions and rules of inference, and conception of rationality surrounding and informing philosophical activity, and these are not nullified or cast aside when ulterior perspectives are opened, when philosophy recognizes its limits and takes an attitude of receptivity to further data, or when it opens an empty space within and before itself, to use Blondel’s three formulations. This is how philosophical progress takes place, for this empty space can be, and has often been, subsequently filled by philosophy, for some of the ulterior data or discoveries are philosophy’s own and on philosophy’s own ground, as for example progress in moral philosophy through a better understanding of the passions, for instance when Thomas Aquinas resolves certain difficulties arising from Aristotle’s distinction between anger and hatred⁷⁶.

The perspectives philosophy opens in the course of its own normal activity, and what enters into the empty space it clears, is not all within the orders that philosophy can then reassimilate. Philosophy goes beyond the philosophical, so that recognition of its limits, particularly with respect to the Christian supernatural, involves realization that these limits cannot be established in finished and rigid fashions typical of Enlightenment thought and covertly and continually assumed by Genealogy, as MacIntyre points out. Philosophy discovers itself with one foot on the other side of whatever border it think to establish from its own side between itself and Christianity, or framed in a different way, what it discovers filling or already occupying the empty space it clears is the supernatural.

Blondel’s critique of conceptualism does not apply to MacIntyre’s philosophy, whose reflection on and reappropriation of tradition(s) over against but also within modernity is anything but a philosophy attempting to close itself up and suffice onto itself in systems of concepts that require only application, a characterization that does fit Enlightenment/Encyclopedia. In fact, Blondel’s and MacIntyre’s philosophies share much in common, particularly appreciation of how theory is supported and illuminated by the tissue of practice, without downplaying theory’s role and importance. But, the direction Blondel’s critique takes does raise some issues for MacIntyre’s thought, not so much for its critique of Enlightenment and Genealogy, but for its reappropriation of a Tradition that developed through its fertilization by Christianity, where conflux, conflict, transmission, and modification of traditions was mediated by and within Christianity, which brought its own lights, made its own contributions, imposed its own demands in the process.

Blondel’s criticizes Gilson for a second presupposition, namely that the discipline of history could provide a resolution to the problem of Christian philosophy’s possibility by indicating where Christianity has played a role in the development of philosophical systems, where dogma has “been generative of reason and of philosophical initiatives,” ⁷⁷ thereby indicating the actuality of Christian philosophies. Blondel calls this a “hybridization” that, purporting to reconcile philosophy and Christianity actually “abandons the essential interests of both of them conjointly,”⁷⁸ in two interrelated ways. The first immanentizes, or improperly rationalizes the contributions of Christianity, while the second simply and uncritically appropriates Christianity’s contributions, vitiating philosophy’s rationality in the process.

Historical research, when it seems to adequately address itself to revealed data, to dogma, to faith, the religious life and experience, even to the institution of the Church, modifies the objects of its research, “forcibly stripping them of their supernatural originality.” ⁷⁹ This results in an unacknowledged double use of the revealed data one wants to bring into philosophy through history.

one seems to use them just as they give themselves to be, but really one transsubstantiates this revealed, this supernatural, into human ideas and moral experiences, whereas in order to remain faithful to the Christian view, in these data one would have to respect their specific traits, that is to say, what is neither discovered, nor assimilated, nor acting solely by human lights and forces by themselves. ⁸⁰

This does not mean, of course, that historical research, such as Gilson’s⁸¹, claiming to indicate the historical existence, and further to delineate general traits and themes, of Christian philosophies, becomes totally inadequate to its objects. Although Blondel speaks of “a clandestine mutation, a transvaluation”, what he notes is a risk of “emptying Christian philosophy of the specific signification without which it is only a deceptive brand-name,”⁸² not that this is always and necessarily the case.⁸³ While this risk can be noted and thematized philosophically, philosophy cannot remedy or banish it.

Alternately, when philosophy turns to history in a different way, no longer the discipline of history, but rather directly to historical realities, “wanting to integrate in itself dogmas, ideas, ascetic practice, mystical experiences which come to it from outside. . . by the very care not to alter the supernatural character of Christian data,”⁸⁴ it “introduces into its flesh a foreign body”, something non-rational it cannot assimilate philosophically. This does not mean that philosophy should have no contact with Christianity, let alone not take its data into itself, examine and reflect upon it, but it requires philosophy to have “preliminarily opened it itself this empty space of which we spoke.” ⁸⁵

Where, then, does MacIntyre’s philosophy fit in here? His philosophy does not thematize the problem of relationship between the supernatural and natural orders, but does that mean that his philosophy can avoid this problem, that it can for instance, discuss, interpret, and reappropriate Christian philosophers such as Thomas or Augustine (or their interpreters), as grounded in, nourished and formed by, representing, and developing traditions and bodies of thought that, in Gilson’s characterizations, could not have existed without Christianity, in which revelation was generative of reason? And, raising the two questions posed at the start of this paper in light of Blondel’s critique, can MacIntyre’s philosophy be understood as a type of Christian philosophy, and can his philosophy provide additional (self-)understanding of Christian philosophy?

In terms of Blondel’s critique, the central issue is again which term of the option MacIntyre takes, conceptualism or an open philosophy. An open philosophy allows fruitful contact between philosophy and Christianity, as well as interpretation and reappropriation of such contact. As noted earlier, MacIntyre’s work avoids what Blondel calls conceptualism, and seems in practice not only to possess but to rely upon the openness he describes, although MacIntyre does not thematize it in exactly the same way. This openness of philosophy might be productively viewed not so much as a type of rationality in MacIntyre’s sense, but rather as something involved in rationalities that allows them to continue being rational in a full sense in their activity, rather than degenerating into ideology merely imitating rationality.⁸⁶

Viewed in light of the issue of Christian philosophy, this openness allows philosophy to legitimately extend itself to all of its possible objects, into all of its fields, even to those opened or offered by Christian revelation, instead of closing them off a priori ⁸⁷ as not fitting presupposed conceptual categories or concepts, including conceptions of rationality. It allows rationality its conditions for flourishing. To continue this shift from Blondel’s terms to MacIntyre’s, this openness, particularly with respect to Christianity, is best sustained and articulated, “most open” one might say, in the types and traditions of rationality that MacIntyre calls Tradition. ⁸⁸ And, correlatively, it is in Christian philosophy that Tradition both culminates and finds its most philosophically fruitful expressions, both past and present.

Blondel’s contribution to the S.f.P session is not simply critical, and he articulates this open philosophy (which he prefers to call Catholic philosophy rather than Christian philosophy) in a more substantive, albeit brief, manner. Philosophy raises and uncovers problems which it cannot itself resolve, “inevitable problems that it serves to define, to precise, to turn away from false paths, to equip against abusive extrapolations.”⁸⁹ In its critical activity, philosophy sheds some light on them, showing them “not insoluble, but incompletely resolved by philosophy, whether in the speculative order, or whether for the practical solutions they invoke.”⁹⁰ Precisely at this point, Blondel’s open philosophy becomes explicitly open to the supernatural in a more than merely hypothetical way. The empty space that philosophy opens within and before itself is not a “black hole. . . an ocean for which neither ship nor sail would seem possible,” ⁹¹ nor is it, in terms that apply to MacIntyre’s category of Genealogy, “a chimerical fiction, projection of restlessness, sickness of the soul.”⁹²

The empty space is not amorphous, for it has “contours to discern,” ⁹³ and in fact, it is not even really empty, nor is its content without rational structure. After this empty space has not only been opened but thematized within philosophy, as philosophy of insufficiency, philosophy and the rationality inherent to it do not simply draw themselves up short.

it is not a matter only of a vital immanence whose obscure secret the believer or the practitioner would alone have for himself. . . To the contrary it is a matter of considering, with all of the demands of the most intellectual critique, the advances, the responses, the claims, the interventions of this Supernatural whose possibility one must recognize and about whose reality one must discern whether it in fact is, even under the most paradoxical incarnations; and perhaps then one perceives that the demands, at first disconcerting, correspond intelligibly to the spontaneous requirements of this autonomous and open philosophy we described above.⁹⁴

An open philosophy can enter in a fully philosophical, fully rational, way into the empty space it clears, discovering what is not only there, but what has also been there all along without philosophy being able to grasp it previously. This opens the way to recovery and reappropriation of and within Tradition in a way that remains entirely philosophical.

If MacIntyre’s philosophy, particularly in its reappropriation of the rationality and the resources of tradition, is understood as an open philosophy, uncovering or recovering the past Christian philosophies informing Tradition as open philosophies, one can interpret his reappropriation of tradition both as a Christian philosophy and as contributing to the (self-) understanding of Christian philosophy, the former not only in the weak senses of a philosophy developed by a Christian or a philosophy compatible with Christian doctrine and dogma, but in the robust and truly philosophical senses that Gilson, Maritain, and Blondel each give it in turn. Without an open philosophy, Blondel argues, “the historical solutions and the Christian teachings could not be philosophically admissible in the organism of rational thought,” ⁹⁵ but he also insists that Christian philosophy must not only be open, it must extend itself philosophically to what it finds in this philosophically uncovered open space, this “gap coming from above.”⁹⁶

Christian philosophy must go further than this starting point necessary to it, but not sufficient from that point on when Christian philosophy considers this speculative possibility as actualized in facts. This is what would have to be examined more closely by making use of historical data in the intellectual organism of philosophy, just as M. Gilson rightly demanded.⁹⁷

In return, what Blondel did not adequately address in any of his interventions from 1931-34 in the Christian philosophy debate, is how this open philosophy has its support, and perhaps even its conditions of possibility in the historical existence of previous Christian philosophies, and in the ongoing Tradition encompassing both them and Blondel’s own fertile philosophical effort.

Notes

1: Etienne Gilson, The Spirit Of Medieval Philosophy (1932), p. 10. Ramon Fernandez, “Religion et Philosophie” (1932), p. 903.

Another observer, Jean Rimaud, points out “a rationalism which is, however, not the whole of modern philosophy, though it often presents itself as such. In the recent debates, we have found it as firm as ever in its intransigence and faithful to its tradition: it defines philosophy by its opposition to any faith.” “Nos préoccupations philosophiques” (1933), p. 153.

2: Jude P. Doughtery employs this term in “Christian Philosophy: Sociological Category or Oxymoron?” The Monist , 1992. His claim is that “‘Christian philosophy’ is a label that may be given to what philosophers do when they deliberately relate their professional work to their religious or ecclesiastical commitments. It doesn’t characterize the philosophy related, it refers only to a relation, a relation observable to an historian or perhaps to a trained sociologist.” p. 290. He claims in the course of his article that his position is “not unlike” Maritain’s and Gilson’s positions, which is clearly incorrect.

3: If there were any doubt as to MacIntyre’s Catholicism, this exchange in a 1993 interview ( Kinesis , vol. 20, no. 2, p. 43-4) settles them:

KINESIS: so how would you depict your own religious faith?

MACINTYRE: I am a Roman Catholic. Period.

KINESIS: In a traditional and orthodox sense?

MACINTYRE: There is no other sense. I believe what I am taught to believe by God, through the Church. And when God speaks, there is nothing to do but to obey or disobey. I don’t know in what other way one could be a Roman Catholic. If Roman Catholicism is a theory of mine, or of some group of people, about how the world might be construed, then it’s not a particularly interesting philosophy.

4: Anglophone literature has been too dependent on Gilson and Maritain’s accounts of the debate and its issues, primarily for two interconnected reasons. Gilson and Maritain spent considerable time in the U.K., U.S.A, and Canada, giving lectures, teaching, and (in Gilson’s case) setting up the Medieval Institute in Toronto. Not surprisingly, their works have largely been translated into English.

5: The six would be: Emile Bréhier, Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Léon Brunschvicg, Maurice Blondel and Gabriel Marcel. This could be expanded to include: Bruno de Solages, Antonin D. Sertillanges, O.P., Fernand Van Steenberghen, and Léon Noël.

6: One can speak of a later, (largely Reformed) Protestant sub-debate, but this debate takes place much later, in the late 1940s

7: Léon Noël argued, invoking Husserlian phenomenology, that there was no Christian philosophy in a rigorous sense. “La notion de philosophie chrétienne”, Revue néoscholastique de Philosophie , vol. 37. F. Van Steenberghen in “La IIe journée d’études de la Société Thomiste et la notion de ‘philosophie chrétienne’”, Revue néoscholastique de Philosophie , Nov. 1933, took up a neo-scholastic position, which agreed with Rationalists that the term “Christian philosophy” had no meaning. Gilson and Maritain had already discussed and critiqued such neo-scholastics, and Blondel responded to Van Steenberghen in “Pour la philosophie integrale”, Revue néoscholastique de Philosophie, vol. 37.

8: Among these interlocutors, one would have to number Bruno de Solages, Antonin D. Sertillanges, O.P. and Gabriel Marcel (noting that Marcel’s position actually represents a fourth major Catholic position in its own right). Henri Gouhier also argued for compatibility between a historical approach such as Gilson’s and Blondel’s positions, on slightly different grounds, maintaining that their projects are so different as to be unable to exclude each other. Among the commentators, one would have to include Henri de Lubac.

9: “One will say perhaps that the difficulty is here is more normative than factual. If is was just a matter of the simple existence of Christian philosophy, would historical experience not give us a sufficient response, by showing us the existence of doctrines that claim that title? But, we will respond, these doctrines must still justify it; and that is an affair for the historian to judge.” Emile Bréhier, “Y-a-t’il une philosophie chrétienne?”, Revue de Métaphysique et de la Morale vol. 38 no. 2 (1931), p. 133. Translation author’s. Note: all subsequent translations in this paper, unless otherwise noted, are those of the author.

10: So much that de Lubac could later write: “According to Mr. Maritian, Christian philosophy is not , cannot want to be specifically Christian. . . . According to Mr. Gilson, Christian philosophy is no longer Christian. . . . As to Christian philosophy according to Mr. Blondel, it is not yet Christian..” Recherches dans la foi: Trois Études sur Origine, saint Anselme et la philosophie chrétienne (Paris: Beuchesne. 1979), p. 142-3

11: Or, rather, gave way to the larger projects of its eminent interlocutors.

12: Fiachra Long’s article “The Blondel-Gilson Correspondence through Foucualt’s Mirror”, Philosophy Today, Winter 1991, narrates these misunderstandings and proposes a theoretical explanation of them, employing Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge. Her account of the disagreements between Gilson and Blondel is superior to Shook’s discussion in his Etienne Gilson , which quite simply misunderstands the pertinence of Blondel’s position, uncritically repeating Gilson’s and Maritain’s criticisms.

13: “In our climb to the domain of Christian philosophy, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have made you come along this far. . . on two itineraries, which I will call, for commodity’s sake, the Gilson itinerary and the Maritain itinerary; it remains for me to make you come along another one, the Blondel itinerary. None of the three lead to the same summit, for our mountain has three summits, but it seems to me that the view that one has from each of them marvelously completes the view that one has from the others, and that all three allow one to make for oneself a sufficiently complex and exact idea of this complex reality” Bruno de Solages, “Le problème de la philosophie chrétienne”, La Vie Intellectuelle, 25 Dec 1933, p. 232.

14: Whether one even ought to be so conscious and reflective should remain an open question. From the perspectives MacIntyre discusses as “Genealogy” in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry , and as Nietzschean in After Virtue, aiming at this would be simply another mask for the will to power.

15: [provide Shook ref. – Gilson’s description of the interlocutors pro and contra ]

16: Cf. Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 166-8. Two points that MacIntyre makes about the Thomistic synthesis are particularly relevant to the situation when “two rival large-scale intellectual traditions confront one another.”

First, he distinguishes two stages in “genuine controversy”, a first stage where “each characterizes the contentions of its rivals in its own terms, making explicit the grounds for rejecting what is incompatible with its own central theses,” and a second where “the protagonists of each tradition. . . .ask whether the alterative and rival tradition may not be able to provide resources to characterize and to explain the failings and defects of their own tradition more adequately than they. . . have been able to do.” Moving from the first stage to the second, MacIntyre claims, “requires a rare gift of empathy as well as of intellectual insight”, a gift that MacIntyre argues Thomas possessed, and which I argue Gilson, Maritain, Blondel, and Marcel possessed, granted to different degrees.

Second, Thomas was fortuitously (or providentially, from a Catholic perspective) “confronted by the claims of two distinct and in important ways incompatible philosophical traditions” after an education that rendered him “trained to understand each from within.” MacIntyre argues that “[p]erhaps no one else in the history of philosophy has ever been put into quite this situation”, and although the conditions of these major Catholic interlocutors is, I argue, analogous, a major difference must be signaled.

The situation for these four with respect to traditions and conceptions of rationality is more complicated, for they work through a conflict between modern secular thought that rejects and marginalizes the Aristotelean, Augustinian, and Thomist traditions, and an ongoing Catholic intellectual tradition rich and varied enough to permit internecine conflicts such as their own.

17: B.S.f.P, p. 50. Bréhier calls this religious authority a magisterium, and argues that “ in every Christian confession, there is, I believe, what is called a ‘magisterium’, which says what is Christian and what is not.” p. 50

18: B.S.f.P , p. 50

19: Bréhier argues for a complete separation of philosophy and rationality from Christianity. “I will conclude that Christianity is essentially the mysterious history of the relations between God and man, a mysterious history which can only be revealed, and that philosophy has for its substance rationalism, that is to say, the clear and distinct consciousness of reason that is in things and in the universe.” B.S.f.P, p. 52

20: In the paragraph beginning his presentation to the S.f.P, Brunschvicg first states that he is far from being an enemy to Christian philosophy, then, second: “I recognize that it is irritating when someone takes the attitude of simply being a philosopher who gives himself the role of an impartial and disinterested observer, when he is perhaps the only one to accept these epithets as applying to him.” B.S.f.P, p. 73. Finally, he concedes: I would not recognize myself in what I think and what I feel if the entire movement of Christianity had not existed”, p. 73.

21: Blondel noted this in a note in his response to Bréhier,“Y-a-t’il une philosophie chrétienne?”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vol 38, no. 4, 1931 p. 601.

22: B.S.f.P , p. 76

23: Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 58-81. From the perspective of the present, we can see as well how some purportedly Catholic positions, which in MacIntyre’s schema (as well as the continuously articulated self-understanding of the Catholic Church) ought to fit into the type of moral inquiry he calls Tradition, actually fall not only into the type he calls Enlightenment, but also Genealogy.

24: In the cases at least of Maritain and Blondel, the case can be made that they were aware not only that the Enlightenment had failed in its aims and promises, but that another kind of thought, both anti- Enlightenment and anti-traditional, but willing to appropriate parts of them (as for instance post-modernism and deconstruction self-consciously and explicitly do), had arisen. In Blondel’s case, this is clear already in the first two parts of Action (1893).

25: Noël bases his position on Husserl’s phenomenology, placing it squarely within the type of moral enquiry MacIntyre calls Enlightenment/ Encyclopedia (Cf. Husserl’s Ideas and Crisis), arguing that Christian philosophy cannot be philosophy in the rigorous sense of the term, rigorous, that is, in the sense that Husserlian phenomenology uses the term. Had he used Heidegger, a case could be made that he was moving into Genealogy. Interestingly regarding Heidegger, Bréhier was later considerably influenced by him. [Blondel and Heidegger’s student Ernesto Grassi]

26: Maritain, of course, is a neo-Thomist, but during the course of the debate, Gilson accords a priority to Thomistic thought over Augustinian thought. “Both St. Thomas’s philosophy and St. Augustine’s philosophy are philosophies of the concrete, but their attitude with respect to the concrete is not the same. St. Augustine always seeks notions comprehensive enough to embrace the concrete in its complexity. St. Thomas always seeks notions precise enough to define the elements that constitute the concrete. In a word, the former expresses the concrete, the latter analyzes it.” B.S.f.P, p. 45

27: Blondel, to be sure, while never an interpreter of St. Thomas, found his later work more and more in consonance with Thomas’ work. Cf. Presentation of 26 November, 1932 Meeting of the Société française de Philosophie: “Le problème de la philosophie catholique”, Maurice Blondel, Les Etudes Philosophiques (1933). Interestingly, a commonplace criticism of and excuse for not engaging with Blondel’s later Tetralogy, made by Blondel scholars who favor his earlier works is that he approaches too close to Thomism.

28: Blondel’s major early works Action (1893) and Letter on Apologetics (1896) antedate both the phenomenological and existential movements, to which resemblances have been noted. [discuss Blondel’s relations with Scheler, Heidegger. Dumery, and Cartier’s interpretations]

29: Interestingly, as Van Steenberghen indicates in the course of the debate, the first Day of Studies of the Thomist Society at Juvisy, 12 September 1932 was dedicated to phenomenology. The second day, 11 September 1933, was dedicated to the issue of Christian philosophy, and saw a contribution by Dom Feuling, O.S.B. “whose technical vocabulary was borrowed from the phenomenological school”, “La IIe journée d’études de la Société Thomiste et la notion de ‘philosophie chrétienne’”, Revue néoscholastique de Philosophie, Nov. 1933, p. 542 Dom Feuling argued a thesis similar to that of Noël’s contribution, “La notion de philosophie chrétienne”, Revue néoscholastique de Philosophie vol. 37, May-Aug 1934.

30: Blondel, unlike the other main Catholic interlocutors in the debate, is mentioned only obliquely in Fides et Ratio, “others produced a philosophy which, starting from an analysis of immanence, opened the way to the transcendent.” (par. 59). For discussions on Blondel’s influence on John Paul the Gret in general and on Fides et Ratio in particular, Cf. Peter Reifenberg, Verantwortung aus der Letzbestimmung: Maurice Blondels Ansatz zu einer Logic des sittlichen Lebens (Freiburg: Herder. 2002), p. 19 nt. 24, and , John Sullivan, “Philosophy as Pilgrimage: Blondel and John Paul II”, The Downside Review, Vol. 117, no. 406 (1999)

31: After the debate, Blondel would explicitly employ a different method, no longer the “method of immanence”, but the “method of implication”.

32: I use the term “characterization” here rather than definition, as a more inclusive term

33: B.S.f.P, p. 39

34: “Both St. Thomas’s philosophy and St. Augustine’s philosophy are philosophies of the concrete, but their attitude with respect to the concrete is not the same. St. Augustine always seeks notions comprehensive enough to embrace the concrete in its complexity. St. Thomas always seeks notions precise enough to define the elements that constitute the concrete. In a word, the former expresses the concrete, the latter analyzes it.” B.S.f.P, p. 46.

35: B.S.f.P, p. 45-6

36: Gilson clearly views this as what is correct in what he takes to be the Augustinian position. “These are not secondary concessions made to the Augustinian position on the problem, but the open recognition of the fact that this position is the true position on the problem and that the reality that it defines is really the reality to be explained.” B.S.f.P, p. 46.

37: B.S.f.P, p. 46

38: B.S.f.P, p. 48.

39: B.S.f.P, p. 48

40: Augustine figures highly in Thomas’s work, as MacIntyre signals by discussing Thomism as a synthesis of the Aristotelean and Augustinian traditions in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry

Anselm also has some place as a productive source for Thomas’ thought. I confine my reference here to the portion of the S.T. dealing with original sin and Thomas’s Commentary on the Psalms , not because these encompass Thomas’s references to Anselm, but rather out of my confessed ignorance on these matters, which I hope to remedy in the near future with an exhaustive study of references to Anselm in the entirety of the Thomistic corpus.

41: Cf. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? esp. p. 171-5.

42: Cf. also Gilson’s “Le problème de la philosophie chrétienne”, La Vie Intellectuelle , 10 Sep 1931 and “Autour de la philosophie chrétienne”, La Vie Intellectuelle , 10 May 1933.

43: B.S.f.P, p. 48

44: B.S.f.P , p. 47. In making this point, Gilson replies in advance to Brunschvicg’s dismissal of the Christian philosopher in the second and third terms of his trilemma.

45: B.S.f.P, p. 47

46: B.S.f.P, p. 47

47: B.S.f.P, p. 47-8

48: Marcel explicitly criticizes Bréhier along these lines. “The separation that Mr. Bréhier crudely effects in Saint Augustine’s works, between his philosophy, that of ‘Plato and Plotinus’, and his Christian faith gives one simply the feeling that this historian, whose knowledge and probity nobody contests, is perfectly incapable of penetrating into a doctrine where precisely the elements that his analysis disassociates are intimately grounded. Mr. Gilson, who in contrast communicates with Augustinianism from the inside, has made the most remarkable effort to show how, in the works of the great Doctors and perhaps above all in Saint Thomas’s works, the notions borrowed from Greek philosophy were affected by a radically new index that deeply modifies their nature. By proceeding simply to inventories, by confronting in isolation terms rather than ideas, one cannot hope to reach this living truth that, even, and perhaps before everything else, for philosophy, is the only important one.” La nouvelle Revue des Jeunes , vol. 4, no. 3, p. 310-1.

49: B.S.f.P , p. 48

50: Cf. the authors’s Hegel and Religion: The Second Enlightenment”, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association , 2000

51: MacIntyre also points out the problems raised by attempting to provide a justification for virtues or traditions while working within Enlightenment/Encyclopedia’s and Genealogy’s conceptions of rationality. WJWR 175-6

52: B.S.f.P, p. 59

53: B.S.f.P, p. 59

54: B.S.f.P, p. 60

55: B.S.f.P, p. 63

56: B.S.f.P, p. 63

57: B.S.f.P, p. 63

58: B.S.f.P, p. 65

59: B.S.f.P, p. 65

60: e.g. communities, pedagogical relationships as well as the many other relationships that make pedagogy possible, narratives, conceptions of what human flourishing means in determinate situations and in general.

61: Gilson notes, “if there are Christian philosophies, one can predict that their fertility will be manifested in the domain of metaphysics, anthropology, and morals more than in any other,” but they will extend also to “accessory types of knowledge the different Christian philosophers will consider as required for the knowledge of God and oneself.” B.S.f.P, p.49

62: For two different views on this, see Shook, and Long

63: Not to excuse Blondel’s criticisms insofar as they are unfair, but to provide some historical context, it must be noted that at the start of the debate, Blondel was (as it turns out unfairly) targeted by both the rationalist Bréhier (as the last possible contender for the title of Christian philosophy) and Gilson (as the representative of contemporary Augustinian philosophy), and that he responded to both in the first part of the debate. Three other points are important.

First, Blondel had been publicly engaged (albeit at times pseudonymously) in some of the issues of the debate for nearly forty years. Cf. Action (1893 ), The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma , the latter of which Blondel refers to obliquely in his criticism of Gilson in terms of “philosophical historicism”, B.S.f.P, p. 89

Second, Blondel, in the 1880s, even before the defense of his thesis and consistently afterwards, had been critical of both rationalists and neo-Scholastics, and seemed (wrongly) to number Gilson and Maritain among the latter.

Third, if Blondel’s lack of full knowledge and appreciation of Gilson’s and Maritain’s positions should be viewed as inexcusable (and Blondel has a better excuse, having gone nearly blind since the late 1920s), their correlative lack of full knowledge and appreciation of Blondel’s position should come under equal censure. In my view it is probably best to extend charity to all of these interlocutors.

64: B.S.f.P., p. 87.

65: B.S.f.P., p. 87.

66: Cf. Roger Mehl, The Condition of the Christian Philosopher trans. Eva Kushner. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1963) and the essays by Jean, Boisset, P Arbousse-Bastide, Paul Ricouer, Edmond Rochedieu, Jacques Bois, and Maurice Neeser, in Le Problème de la philosophie chrétienne (Paris: P.U.F. 1949).

67: For Blondel’s use of this term, Cf. History and Dogma

68: Maritain raises this issue as well, highlighting the necessity for Christian philosophy to genuinely be philosophy. “[I]t goes without saying that philosophies can be Christian and diverge more or less from the nature of philosophy: then it is less a matter of a Christian philosophy than of the decadence or dissolution of it. That is what we have seen, for example, in the time when Occamism reigned in the University.” B.S.f.P., p. 68.

Marcel makes a correlative point, echoing but also going beyond Blondel. “I would be disposed for my part, to think that there is Christian philosophy only there where this paradox, this scandal [of revealed datum, particularly the Incarnation] is not only admitted or even accepted, but embraced with a passionate and unrestricted gratitude. From the moment on when, to the contrary, philosophy seeks by some procedure to attenuate this scandal, to mask the paradox, to reabsorb the revealed datum in a dialectic of pure reason or mind, to this precise degree it ceases to be a Christian philosophy.” Gabriel Marcel, “A propos de L’esprit de la Philosophie médiévale par M. E. Gilson”, Nouvelle Revue des Jeunes, vol. 4, no. 3, p. 312.

69: B.S.f.P., p. 87-8.

70: B.S.f.P., p. 87. Gilson’s criticism, it must be noted, does legitimately apply to Bergson.

71: B.S.f.P., p. 88

72: B.S.f.P., p. 88

73: B.S.f.P., p. 88

74: B.S.f.P., p. 88

75: B.S.f.P., p. 88

76: Cf. ST. ... and Aristotle’s Rhetoric

77: B.S.f.P. p. 89

78: B.S.f.P. p. 89

79: B.S.f.P. p. 89

80: B.S.f.P. p. 89

81: One could argue, relying solely on his presentation to the S.f.F, that Gilson makes a weaker claim, namely that the . . .

82: B.S.f.P., p. 89

83: If that were his position, – similar to those denying Christian philosophy possible. Also an interpretation made of Blondel later by Henri Dumery and Maurice Nédoncelle

84: B.S.f.P., p. 89

85: B.S.f.P., p. 89

86: This fits in well with Blondel’s realization that modern thought has both imposed new demands for philosophy, often by its obtuseness and its conceptualism, and has also opened up some new possibilities, has had some genuine achievements. [Letter on Apologetics].

87: A priori in a degenerate and deceptive sense of the term, for of course, there is no necessity to this, and these impositions are actually a posteriori, as the history of ideas reveals. MacIntyre’s work contributes to revealing where these decisions have been made, as well as the motives for these decisions.

88: It might seem odd to suggest that Blondel would fit into MacIntyre’s category of Tradition. Several remarks are pertinent. First, while he believed that modern thought had imposed or uncovered new exigencies that had to be addressed, Blondel himself discussed Tradition in a very positive light. [History and Dogma and discussion of literal practice in Action (1893)]. Second, it is clear that Blondel himself was formed by tradition. Third, most likely Blondel could not have carried out his philosophical project had he not been formed by tradition. [de Lubac’s remarks p. 135-6]

89: B.S.f.P., p. 90

90: B.S.f.P., p. 90

91: B.S.f.P., p. 90

92: B.S.f.P., p. 90

93: B.S.f.P., p. 90

94: B.S.f.P., p. 90

95: B.S.f.P., p. 90-1

96: B.S.f.P., p. 91. Blondel’s terminology changes here, from an “empty space” [vide] to a “gap” [trou], and this formulation corresponds to Maritain’s in An Essay on Christian Philosophy .

97: B.S.f.P., p. 91.

Earlier this month, I started to make good on a promise to follow up a first post about the twelve remedies for anger that Marcus Aurelius articulates in Meditations book 11, chapter 18, the majority of which he identifies point by point and attributes either to the Muses or to Apollo. In that second post, I explored remedies six through nine, in which he explicitly uses what we can call “anger-language”. I noted that there remained six more remedies to examine in detail, and subsequently decided that I’d write two more posts, each of which would discuss three. This third post will focus on the first, second, and third remedies for anger Marcus sets out for us.

What are these? Here’s the text itself, in in Hayes’ translation:

1. My relationship to them. That we came into the world for the sake of one another. Or from another point of view, I came into it to be their guardian—as the ram is of the flock, and the bull of the herd.

   Start from this: if not atoms, then Nature—directing everything. In that case, lower things for the sake of higher ones, and higher ones for one another.

2. What they’re like eating, in bed, etc. How driven they are by their beliefs. How proud they are of what they do.

3. That if they’re right to do this, then you have no right to complain. And if they aren’t, then they do it involuntarily, out of ignorance. Because all souls are prevented from treating others as they deserve, just as they are kept from truth: unwillingly. Which is why they resent being called unjust, or arrogant, or greedy—any suggestion that they aren’t good neighbors

Notice that none of these three directly refer to anger, or even use vocabulary tied to the range of emotion from frustration to outright rage that we might associate with anger. The closest we come to this is in the third one, where “resent” translates akhtontai, which has the sense of being burdened or vexed, in this case a typical response on the part of other people to being criticized for exhibiting bad qualities.

Instead of bearing directly on anger, each of these passages introduces a consideration or connected considerations that, in Marcus’ mind, would help him avoid, reduce, or end anger that he might otherwise feel. Each of them is intended as a strategy that can help him change his perspective on matters. They are cognitively oriented philosophical practices, or if you like, Nussbaum’s term “therapeutic arguments”. The full structure of them isn’t entirely evident in the text we have, of course, so you might think of them as analogous to enthymemes, where some of the argument remains implicit (through effective), and can be reconstructed, as we’ll do shortly.

Remedy 1: Recalling Our Relationships

Marcus brings up first “my relationship” (skhesis) to the other people (pros autous) with whom he is liable to get angry. When we do get angry, we are focusing upon the aspects of a situation that can lead to that emotional response, for example how someone else is treating us, how they are talking to us, or what attitude they are displaying. We might also be focusing on what we perceive as unfairness or injustice in the situation and their behavior, which might well be a function of what we take as what’s due to us in the situation.

Instead, Marcus suggests focusing on the relationship and two important interrelated aspects to it. We can view the relationship in terms of the Stoic notion that we human beings have come into existence (gegonamen) for the sake of each other (allēlōn heneken). That is, to do good to or benefit each other, rather than to do something the other person will perceive as harming them, the sorts of things we aim to do to those we are angry with. That reminder might be enough to shift a person from feeling and acting upon anger to viewing the other person as someone who might be harmed by one’s anger.

Then again, though, it might not be. Why not? Well, that coming into existence for the sake of each other does go both ways. So if I consider that the other person who has offended me in some way has themself come into being for the sake of others, and I’m after all one of those others, then I could get myself riled up by focusing on how they’re not behaving how they ought to.

Marcus reminds himself of a second aspect of relationships, drawing upon a new line of reasoning (kath’ heteron logon). He came into the world with additional responsibilities towards others, namely to be set over them (prostēsomenos), a term that could be read as being their ruler or their guardian. The first is in fact Marcus’ position, but the second connotation is favored by the analogies he draws, like the ram for the flock or the bull for the herd. If one’s role or function is to watch over and protect others, then anger at them becomes not just counterproductive in that, but could in fact contradict that role. Keeping them from harm or danger entails making sure that one’s emotions don’t lead to those negative outcomes.

This notion of “coming into being for others” as well as being ordained to watch over them might be viewed as a bit of stretch. Marcus steels himself by invoking Stoic doctrine, which doesn’t think the universe is just “atoms” or randomness, but rather a nature that is is providentially ordered and ordering, quite literally managed like a household of the whole (ta hola diokousa), with weaker, lower, or less valuable things (ta kheirona) for sake of the stronger, more valuable, or higher things (tōn kreittonōn), that is, non-rational being for the sake of the rational. But the higher, rational beings, following this ordering of nature, exist for the sake of each other. And we humans are among those higher beings.

Remedy 2: Reminding Oneself What People Are Like

Considering what people are like (hopoioi tines), literally the sort of people they are, their qualities, can prove useful for lessening or curbing the anger one might feel towards them. Notice how Marcus starts this process, suggesting he consider what people are like during activities we all engage in, eating at the table (epi tēs trapezēs) or lying in bed (en tōi klinariōi). There’s on the one hand a common humanity that evokes, which could help one with one’s feelings of anger at them. On the other hand, one could also consider that they do these things in the wrong way, for example in slovenly or ostentatious manners, so perhaps it might not be as helpful.

Then, Marcus shifts the focus to how they are prone to two important ways that they go astray, and suggests this is more important to consider (malista de) what sort of “necessities set down” (hoias anankas . . . keimenas) in their beliefs, or if you like, judgements or opnions (dogmatōn) that these people have. Their views on things are bound to contain errors, and they will necessarily draw erroneous inferences about how they ought to behave. When they wrong us, they do so out of some sort of mistake on their part.

One specific example of this going wrong on their part, but also a sort of confirmation of it as well, comes at the end of this passage. The things that they do, they do so with such “pride” (hoiou tuphou), a term that can also be translated as “vanity”, “arrogance”, or even “delusion”. In fact, that very sense of the term is a technical one for the Cynic school, used to refer to the sort of nonsense or foolishness that many people buy into. They aren’t just mistaken about one thing or another. They’re mixed up about many of the matters of life, and they are so bollixed up that they can actually think they’ve got things right.

When we understand how badly off they actually are, emotionally and cognitively, in the habits they’re stuck with, their lifestyles, their mindsets, the equally messed up people they take cues or advice from, we can realize that they’re more pitiable (as Epictetus said) than objects of anger.

Remedy 3: Whether They Do Rightly Or Wrongly

The third follows up on this theme of error, but also introduces another important consideration before that, framing matters in terms of a dilemma, but you might say, a fortunate one. Why do people do the things they do, that tend to make us upset and angry? Marcus considers two possible answers.

If what the other person is doing is right, or more literally, done rights (orthōs), then you don’t need to (ou dei) be vexed or annoyed (duskherainein) by what they are doing (or for that matter what you assume or feel that they’re doing). As the messed-up creatures we are (I can say this from my own experience), we sometimes do in fact get angry with people who are actually doing the right thing, when it interferes with what we desire, or when we don’t like how they’re doing it. That’s just a sign of our as yet imperfect rationality and unfinished personal development. Learning that we were wrong in our reaction to their doing the right thing can certainly take the edge off our anger, providing we’re not too prideful or obstinate.

The other possibility is that what they’re doing is done wrongly (ouk orthōs), that they are indeed doing something wrong. The general Stoic position on this, which Marcus endorses at many points in his Meditations, is precisely what he tells us here. They quite clearly (dēlounti) do what they do involuntarily (akontes) and in ignorance, “not knowing” (agnountes). If we look at matters in this light, we can acknowledge that the person does something wrong, but that doesn’t have to mean that we have to take it as something we ought to get upset, let along angry about. It’s their mistake, and we don’t have to commit one ourselves as a response.

One might counter though: what if they are doing the wrong action deliberately and voluntarily? What if they do know that what they’re doing to us is wrong? What if they’re not ignorant, but well informed, having put some thought into it. It might seem a bit too pat an answer, but the standard Stoic response is to say: They’re still ignorant and mistaken, and also doing something involuntarily, because they’ve got something mixed up about what they’re choosing to do. One some level, they think it makes sense, or even is the right thing for them, to do what they realize is wrong.

The point that Marcus makes immediately following reinforces this. Every soul is prevented, or more literally, “deprived” (steretai) unwillingly. And from what? Two things. One of these is the truth. Nobody really wants to be deprived of the truth. If there are cases when a person does attempt to keep things from themselves, it’s always because they value something more than a truth that might be embarrassing or painful to them. The other is to deal with people as each of them deserve. Even those who treat people badly, Marcus would say, do so because they mistakenly think they don’t deserve to be treated better.

One bit of support for this, that might be helpful for using these reflections to move away from anger at others, is the last thing Marcus writes here. The fact that they are deprived or prevented from treating people as they deserve and from grasping the truth about matters is precisely why they get upset when hearing (akountes) others say certain negative things about them. People don’t like being called or thinking that they are unjust, or that they are arrogant or “hardhearted” (agnōmones), or greedy, prone to demanding or taking more than their fair share at the expense of others. Or, any sort of suggestion (kathapax) that they are the kind of person to harm or wrong (hamartēkoi) their neighbors. Why? They’d like to think they’re better people than they actually are.

Realizing how mistaken they are, that they really aren’t doing what they want to (or should want to) in behaving badly, can furnish us with a way to lessen or even let go of our anger at them.

There’s one more post to come in this set on the 12 remedies for anger Marcus provides in Meditations 11.18, examining numbers 4, 5, and 10. That one will get published later on this month.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, the co-founder of The Stoic Heart®, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

A bit earlier this month, I had a somewhat difficult conversation with a colleague from an organization we both belong to. It was difficult for both of us, I imagine, for quite different reasons. For my colleague, who wanted to have the conversation, the difficulty stemmed from being upset over perceiving themself as having been disrespected, jumbling together different matters a bit too indiscriminately, not getting the reactions they wanted or expected from me, and having to hear some uncomfortable responses and pushback on my part. For me, it was more a matter of my time being taken up late in the evening in a conversation I had no plans to be in, that required a good bit of work to untangle and perhaps fell on deaf ears.

(As a side note, my wife was not happy with the conversation having delayed our dinner plans, and rightly so. Our time as busy people is at a premium, and I already give more freely of it than perhaps I ought to. She also pointed out that I had in effect given some straight-talking, thoughtful, and needed coaching time away for free, something for which I generally charge clients a hourly rate. So there’s another aspect of difficulty.)

The situation that the colleague and I were in, and the points that I made to them, bear upon matters of “respect”, as people perceive, desire, expect, and speak about it. As I’ve been mulling the conversation over, it occurred to me that certain of the dynamics I recognized and outlined to my colleague could be useful for a wider audience to read about, not least since it can be helpful to think about this always-emotion-laden ambiguous thing that people call “respect”. I’m not going to try to define it, by the way, but instead just count on the experience that most people have some general idea of what it means, but recognize that people do have differing ideas about what respect looks like.

Outlines Of The Situation

The colleague felt that they had been disrespected, both by me and by other people. That wasn’t where the conversation started, but that was the kernel of it on their side. It really bothered them that, in their view, a number of tasks on a list that they had recently produced and posted were not being completed by other people by a certain time. And since these were tasks that absolutely had to be done, those tasks unfairly fell upon them. Other people were being disrespectful by leaving more than their fair share of tasks to be done by my colleague.

In point of fact, they had a legitimate complaint about a previous occasion involving another colleague who did show up late, and thereby did displace those tasks onto them. In our case, they had a much more tenuous case for complaint. These are pretty simple, non-onerous tasks, one of which I’d completed before my colleague even showed up, another of which I got to after they got a tad bit passive aggressive about how badly it needed to be done (as it turned out, it kinda didn’t). Another colleague had also pitched in. The colleague who felt disrespected blurred the two distinct situations from different days together, resulting in some initial unnecessary confusion when they were raising their complaints.

Clearly the amount of emotion they invested into their read on the situation was quite out of proportion to what actually took place and the relative importance of the tasks in question. But that makes sense when it’s framed in terms of how they interpreted what happened. They were disrespected in their eyes. Pretty trivial matters, when you look at them through the lens of feeling like someone else is showing disrespect or a lack of respect to one can produce some significant effects. That’s a fairly universal and timeless human dynamic that won’t go away in our lifetime and may be the case long after all of us are gone. So it’s understandable that my colleague, feeling disrespected, would be upset.

I’m not the kind of person who aims to police other people’s emotions, or even their judgements. People get to feel and think what they’d like, even if it’s not entirely on-point and well-founded. I know I make plenty of my own cognitive and emotional mistakes. But there’s a difference between forbidding or requiring emotions or thoughts, and making the judgement “what you’re saying you think or feel doesn’t really make a lot of sense, when you look at it more closely, and here’s why.” They’re then free to do what they want with that.

When we got to the point in the conversation about five minutes in where my colleague was able to articulate that they felt that they had been treated disrespectfully, I laughed briefly, which understandably made them even more frustrated, and they said that the laughing was also disrespectful. I responded that it was hard (for me, not necessarily for everyone) not to laugh at that point, because their insistence upon how they had been disrespected was incongruous with how they had themselves behaved disrespectfully towards other people. It seemed very odd to be so focused on disrespect towards oneself but at the same time seemingly oblivious to the disrespect one had directed at others.

A First Issue: Expecting Respect Without Giving It

So right at the start, when it comes to considerations of respect and disrespect, an issue of what we might call reciprocity or consistency can be raised. It’s perfectly fine for a person who feels they have been disrespected by another person to bring that up with them or with someone else. In fact, it’s often necessary, healthy, or useful to do so.

But a person involved in relationships with others, where respect is an expectation, also needs to be cognizant of whether they actually display respect or disrespect to the others they are saying disrespect them. As we often say, respect is a “two-way street”. It is supposed to go both ways when there’s an adult relationship between people who are more or less equals, concerned with some common activity or work. There would be a different sort of disrespect in assuming that respect is something that others have to show to oneself but one does not have to equally show to others.

Hearing from me that they had themselves been disrespectful towards others (including but not restricted to myself), rather than stopping to reflect on those concerns about consistency or reciprocity, my colleague shifted the focus of the conversation along three lines, to which I responded to rather explicitly during the conversation. Each of them can be fleshed out into important considerations about how respect or disrespect emerges within interpersonal relationships, precisely in how people deal with respect or disrespect. You could call them “reflexive” or say they involve a “meta-” level.

A Second Issue: Intentions Alone Don’t Determine Respect

One of these shifts is a familiar response not just when it comes to respect or its opposite but all sorts of other attitudes or valuations one person can perceive, assume, or ascribe to the behavior of another. My colleague was unwilling to believe at first that they had themselves behaved disrespectfully towards others. Their basis for that claim was that they had not intended any disrespect. So since they had not meant to behave disrespectfully towards others, in their mind they had not shown any disrespect. My response was to point out that whether or not they had shown disrespect or been disrespectful was not a call that was entirely up to them. The other person involved in a situation also gets to determine whether they feel or think disrespect has been shown to them.

It is common for people to dismiss or downplay the words of other people expressing to them that they have disrespected those other people along precisely those lines. “I didn’t mean it”. “That wasn’t my intention”. Even: “No disrespect.” Those claims made by the person about whether they aimed or deliberately chose to disrespect might indeed be true (though admittedly some people use that as as sort of cover, which I don’t think was the case in this conversation). But it kind of doesn’t matter. If another person has perceived disrespect, and they’re not just being unreasonably touchy, or chronically prone to take offense, or clearly misinformed about what occurred, it’s worth taking their perspective into as serious consideration as one’s own.

To conclude that because one didn’t intend to show disrespect to another person, one definitely didn’t disrespect them, and the other person is simply wrong in claiming they have been disrespected, that’s an incorrect inference. And people do make wrong inferences all the time. Those can be corrected, when one realizes that they’re wrong. But there’s another important step that people often take, and that is doubling down.

Going further, making the claim that one didn’t mean or intend to disrespect the other person who feels disrespected, the main or even only response to the person who feels themselves disrespected, that will then tend to be perceived (on some level) as an additional instance of disrespect on one’s own part. It’s in effect telling the other person: “Since I didn’t mean to show you disrespect, you’re wrong in feeling what I did was disrespectful”. If the goal is to respect the other person, telling them they haven’t been disrespected, and thus adding a new additional instance of perceived disrespect seems an inherently counterproductive course to take.

A Third Issue: Communicating About Disrespect

Another turn the conversation took was my colleague raising a response that, taken entirely by itself, is actually quite reasonable. If other people found what they were doing disrespectful, why hadn’t they brought it up personally, in conversation with them, precisely like they were doing with me. That does seem to be an expectation for many people in relationships, in the workplace, in schools, or the like. We might frame it along the lines of: “If I’ve done anything you don’t like, by all means tell me, and I’ll think about it”. Maybe even, if one is told by another person that what they are doing conveys disrespect, even apologize for and stop doing that thing.

Now the situation in this case was admittedly a bit more complicated. My colleague didn’t in fact bring up their own perception of having been disrespected with all of the people that they felt had done so by not doing their fair share of the tasks. They didn’t bring it up those occasions at all with the other people. Just with me. After they let themselves get frustrated and stewed a while, and then decided to talk about it. So the “why didn’t they just do the appropriate thing, like I characteristically do?” response rings a little hollow. But having noted it, let’s set that aside.

What we have here again is a mix of some reasonable ideas and some mistaken assumptions, rolled ultimately into a wrongheaded inference. It would indeed be a good thing, provided we are dealing with reasonable people, who have decent emotional management, motivated by good will, if when one person does something the other views as disrespectful, that person who feels disrespected brings it up with that person. Ideally they do so in a calm but assertive manner, relatively near in time to the occasion of the perceived disrespect.

Does this mean, we can ask, that there’s any sort of requirement or obligation to do so? Meaning that a person who feels disrespected should or ought to follow that course? It might be useful, even prudent, but it doesn’t seem like it’s morally incumbent upon them to do so. People deal with others disrespecting them in all sorts of ways, certain of which might be more appropriate responses than going to the offender each time and communicating with them.

Letting the disrespect slide (without pretending it didn’t happen) and then moving on with one’s work or further conversation, that is often a perfectly fine response, at least from where I sit. I pointed out to my colleague that other people who feel themselves treated or talked to disrespectfully might also choose not to say anything, and might just disengage going forward, thinking “I’m not dealing with this prick”. Others might do something they intend as disrespect, as a sort of retaliation for the disrespect that they perceive has been shown to them. If there are power differentials or other perceived relevant differences (for example the person displaying disrespect being significantly older than the other), the person disrespected might feel reticence in raising the issue.

I pointed out to my colleague that other people didn’t actually have any sort of obligation to communicate to them that they felt like they were disrespected. As a grown adult human being with a good bit of experience in life, relationships, business, and organizations, they ought to be able to figure out whether the ways they interact with others are going to be viewed as respectful or not. Not with 100 percent accuracy, of course, but not on the other extreme, where their colleagues would somehow be emotional “black boxes” until they communicated. If their colleagues don’t seem particularly interested in interacting with them, which will likely prove the case if they’re passively-aggressively “managing” them, they probably want to consider their own attitudes, expectations, words, and conduct, rather than passively waiting for others to come to them.

A Fourth Issue: The Golden Rule Isn’t Enough

At this point in the conversation, I asked my colleague an honest question. “Do you treat everyone else how you would like, and expect to be, treated?” And they emphatically said “Yes”. It made some sense why they would have the level of frustration and the perceptions of disrespect that were clearly weighing on them. It also made some sense, given this, why my colleague would get perceived as disrespectful by other colleagues and myself (not least when insisting on their having been disrespected, and them not having disrespected others).

We’re all familiar with what has come to be called the “golden rule” in one formula or another. One of these is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. That is, treat other people as you yourself would like to be treated. In order to work well as a moral rule, it does require some qualification, or you might say, establishing some guard rails.

What if someone has such poor self-esteem and has been routinely treated so badly that they expect, even want other people to treat them like crap? Should they then treat other people that way? Probably not. What if someone has odd and false beliefs about what treating someone well involves, for instance if they somehow acquired the idea that sarcasm and putdowns are the proper way to show affection to another person? We could come up with plenty of other such cases that would problematize the golden rule (or even its negative variant, the “silver rule”)

Setting aside those sorts of clearly problematic exceptions, which fortunately weren’t an issue in this situation, there’s still another, likely more common, problem that can arise. People do differ widely in what they consider to be respectful or disrespectful. These divergences might stem from differences in cultural background. The set of attitudes and style of interactions that get called “Midwest nice” can come across positively to some people and negatively to others. And it’s not just a matter of that satisfying cultural expectations in the Midwest that work there but don’t translate well elsewhere. There are plenty of places, situations, and people right there in the Midwest where or with whom that kind of engagement might not be welcome, and could even seem disrespectful.

We could easily multiply examples for this as well, but really the key point is that important differences do exist between people in what they regard as respectful or disrespectful behavior, words, attitudes, or even expectations on the parts of others. Grasping this reality doesn’t mean that one must therefore entirely abandon anything like the golden rule of treating others as one would like or expect to be treated by them. But it does mean that the golden rule requires some qualification.

It would be thoughtless to expect that simply because one is behaving towards another person in a way that feels or is thought respectful when directed towards oneself, that the other person should therefore view one’s behavior as indeed respectful, rather than disrespectful. The further we go down the level of specificity away from a rather abstract conception of “behaving respectfully” to something like “behaving respectfully by acting and speaking in this particular way when in this sort of situation”, the more good judgement (or even having some understanding or knowledge about the other person) becomes required.

Why? You can’t just assume that because you’re giving what you’d like to get from the other person that they are getting what they’d like from you. At a high level of generality, you can say: I give respect to others that I’d like to get from them. And they should do the same. That’s reciprocity or consistency in the abstract. But if I’m only giving the straightforward, unembellished, frank and direct speaking about issues or problems to other people that is a preferred mode of communicating for me, they might not like that. It might even come across as disrespectful, rather than respectful to them. And if my response to that is to justify myself by invoking the golden rule, I’m arguably being rather self-centered and willfully foolish.

To bring this to a close, these reflections aren’t intended as some comprehensive lessons about respect, let alone a general theory of it. They’re more an occasioned set of points that I made to my colleague along with additional thoughts filling them out a bit more adequately than how I made them in that conversation. Perhaps they might be useful for some readers. Quite likely not for all! But there they are.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

Accept, the end of my foolish exhortation, I beg you, in memory of my mutual affection. My talk I call foolish because it is mine, but not its content, for that comes from God. - St. Anselm to Odo and Lanzo.[1]

I. Wisdom as Divine Attribute

At several points in his works, Anselm provides listings of divine attributes, and wisdom (sapientia, or being wise, sapiens) invariably falls in these enumerations.[2] Before examining Anselmian treatments of divine wisdom, it might be useful to recall certain of Anselm’s teachings about the nature of the divine attributes. In order to save time, rather than going into interpretative exegesis of Anselm’s texts, which I and others have done elsewhere,[3] I will simply set a few points out and provide only barest explanations needed.

The first is that each divine attribute is fully, perfectly, and entirely what God is. So, he says, e.g. of justice (meaning for this to extend in parallel to other attributes) that it indicates what God is (quid sit) rather than what kind of thing or to what degree (qualis vel quanta) God is. Accordingly, God does not properly speaking have justice or participate in justice. Rather God is (existit)[4] just and is justice; He is supreme justice, and is the justice in which all other just things participate in a variety of differing but sometimes analogously related modes.

The second point is that, simplicity and unity being rightly counted among the divine attributes, we ought not be surprised to find that attributes are actually not different things from each other. While distinguishable, they are not separate, and each one of them is entirely what God is and entirely what each other are. So, though in our reasoning about them, representation (whether intellectual or imaginative) them, naming them, or affective relations towards them, me may distinguish them from each other, the attributes are in reality the same substance, supreme, existent, and entire justice, wisdom, goodness, etc. A few implications about this are worth dwelling upon.

First, in God, wisdom is intimately intertwined with all the other attributes, including reason, truth, justice, and eternity. Second, we can never know or represent, let alone comprehend, any of these attributes in their fullness. Given the real unity of what we easily over-rigidly distinguish apart from each other as epistemological, metaphysical, or moral attributes, we might overlook on the one hand that adequately understanding any of these requires extending our intellects to the others, and on the other that our very knowledge, understanding, reasoning, or wisdom calls to be understood as more or less adequate participation in the divine wisdom. Third, through the Trinity each attribute possesses a depth I have elsewhere termed “reflexive intensity,” a sort of reduplication and intensification of an attribute through the relations and simplicity of the divine persons. In the divine nature “repeated [attributes] always harmonize [convenit] with each other in perfect unity. . . [P]erfect harmony is what harmonizes in a one sameness and same oneness [unam identitatem et eandem unitatem]”.[5]

In Monologion, Anselm writes of the Son as being “perfect understanding [intelligentiam] or perfect knowing [cognitianem], or knowledge and wisdom of the entire Paternal substance, i.e. he understands, and fully knows [cognoscit et scit] and is wise about the Father’s very essence.”[6] This leads then to the realization that: “if the Father’s very substance is understanding, and knowledge, and wisdom, and truth, consequently it can be gathered that just as the Son is the understanding, and knowledge, and wisdom, and truth of the Father, He is understanding of understanding, knowledge of knowledge, wisdom of wisdom, and truth of truth.” [7] This is a manner of being-wise fundamentally excelling human modes. A human being does not coincide with her wisdom,[8] through which she is wise.[9] “A human cannot be wise through herself [per se]”, but only though her wisdom or wisdom more generally, itself (however mediatedly) a participation in wisdom itself. “The supreme wisdom,” however, “is always wise [or enacts wisdom, sapit][10] through itself,”[11] dynamically.

Anselm identifies the Son or the Word with wisdom, as well as other associated attributes which in human beings we tend to identify as operations or faculties of the soul. At least in the divine substance, attributes such as knowledge, understanding, right affective response, even action are constitutive of and coextensive with wisdom. Integral to the nature of the Word is his knowing and understanding all created things, of which he is their '“true and simple essence.”[12]

All created things reside in the Word[13] in a way exceeding and preceding even their actual existence in themselves (not to mention our knowledge or experience of them), and the Word understands all of them,[14] understanding and knowledge[15] both of created beings and of the triune God being involved in wisdom. The Word’s wisdom also takes the form of memory or mindfulness [memoria],[16] and even extends to loving.[17] Anselm is also clear that the incarnate Word, fully human and fully divine, entirely possesses the plentitude of divine wisdom; he spells out implications:

That assumption of human [nature] in one person of God will not be done by the supreme wisdom except in a wise manner, and thus he will not assume in that human [nature] what is in no way useful, but rather detrimental to the work for which that very human [nature] was made. And indeed, ignorance would be of no usefulness to Him, but rather in many things harmful. For, how would he do so many and such works as He was to do, without measureless wisdom?[18]

When his student expresses doubts whether Christ as an infant would have been born wise, Anselm reasons:

God will wisely assume mortality, which since indeed usefully, He will use wisely. But, He would not be able to assume ignorance wisely, since it is never useful but rather harmful (unless perhaps when a bad will is held back from its effect, which will never be the case in Him) . . . From the moment when that man [i.e Christ] comes to be, He will always be God, just as his very self. So, He will never be without His power and fortitude, and wisdom.[19]

II. Wisdom and The Providential Ordering

Divine wisdom takes on fuller determinacy in the Anselmian view when understood in terms of God’s providential ordering of all things. Explicit mentions of this fundamental aspect occur in works where reasonability of the divine disposition comes into question, thereby furnishing an object of discussion and study. Rather than attempting full treatment of this massive topic which not only ultimately but quickly leads into mystery, here I will mention four main interrelated ways in which providence naturally expresses and embodies the divine wisdom in Anselm’s texts, briefly discussing the first three ways: creation of all beings ex nihilo; rational wills and their destinies of eternal punishment or reward; God’s promotion of good and derivation of good from evil; and the intelligibility [ratio] underlying the Fall (both of humanity and of the Devil and other angels), the Incarnation, and the Atonement.

All created things are made not only through God’s goodness, but also just as radically and intimately through His wisdom, about which Anselm remarks near the end of Monologion: “The term ‘wisdom’ is not enough to indicate to me that by which all things were made from nothing and are maintained [servantur] from nothing.”[20] The context is a discussion of our language’s (and by extension, thought’s) adequacy in the face of the divine, and it is not that the term “wisdom” is inappropriate to apply to God. Rather, there is no being to whom it is more appropriate to apply the “term,” whose signification we only partly, even dimly grasp, and only God entirely grasps, is, and rejoices in.

As noted earlier, all things, in the fabric and fullness of their being, exist in the Word eternally, so creation ex nihilo is thereby not separable from the providential ordering. When, in His wisdom, God creates and sustains all things in being, He endows them entirely with their specific natures and possibilities,[21] including for some those involving a freedom and rationality which can and in actuality does embroil them in complex historical, developmental, and volitional narratives and a history of salvation.

Rational creatures, i.e. human beings and angels, possess two faculties inextricably connected in Anselmian moral theory: reason and will.[22] Granted, animals also possess wills, but theirs are not reflexive, capable of self-determination and fundamental reorientation. Reason and the rational creature’s will also possess a complex teleology woven into their natures, the very nexus of created being, and analogically reflective of the divine economy. Anselm outlines the purposes of reason and will. The creature:

is rational so that it might discern between the just and the unjust, between the good and the evil, and between the more good and the less good. Otherwise it would have been made rational in vain. . . By a similar reasoning, it is proven that it received the power of discernment so that it would hate and avoid evil, and it would love and prefer the good, and even more greatly love and prefer the greater good.

He draws a further consequence, with implications for human wisdom: “It is certain then that the rational nature was made for this, that it should love and prefer the supreme good above everything else, and not for the sake of something else, but for its own sake.”[23] This purpose in its turn bears further intellectual implications: “the rational creature ought to apply all of its capacity and will [posse et velle] to remembering, understanding, loving the supreme good, for which end he knows himself to possess his very being [ipsum esse].”[24]

Now, for the rational creature so greatly endowed with freedom that it can even cast that freedom away, enslave its will and reason, and resist divine grace, there is an eternal destiny involving punishment and reward. Again Anselm explicitly connects this ordination with divine wisdom. It is wrong to think that “the supreme wisdom would make the soul [who loves God] so that it might at some time despise such a great good or while willing to keep it lose it by force.” Accordingly, the soul must be made to love God eternally. Anything else, Anselm says, would be “unbefitting to the supremely good, supremely wise, and omnipotent Creator,”[25] who provides and arranged for such a soul eternal beatitude. The soul which ultimately despises God will likewise suffer eternal misery, rather than the alternative of simply lapsing back into nothingness, since in that case, “the supremely wise justice would not discern between that which cannot do any good and wills no evil, and that which can do the greatest good and wills the greatest evil. And it is sufficiently clear that this would be unbefitting.”[26]

One centrally important aspect of divine wisdom exhibits that attribute’s identity with divine eternity, justice, and reason, namely that through it the providential ordering brings good even out of evil, right order out of bad order or disorder. Nothing is left unordered in the divine plan, which not only allows for and encompasses human and angelic freedom with all of their fateful consequences not only for individual beings but even for the cosmos and the history of all created being; within the providential order, it also encompasses all the complex interwoven workings of grace, offering, suggesting, reinforcing free choices towards or accepting of the good, an economy of grace in which rational creatures not only participate by accepting and using it, but also by being channels and collaborators.

When Anselm focuses on God bringing good out of evil, he typically frames this in terms only implicitly involving divine eternity and reason, but very explicitly justice and wisdom. The Devil unjustly torments human beings: “he d[oes] not do this by God’s command, but rather by permission of His incomprehensible wisdom, which even orders evil things well.”[27] In complex, unfolding ways involving human freedom and divine grace, God brings good, indeed even in the grand scheme the greatest goods, out of the fall of the Devil and other angels, the fall of Adam and Eve and ensuing original sin, the Incarnation of the Word, and the atoning death of the Son.

One De Veritate discussion illustrates this in ways usefully leading to the next and last section. Many actions (and by extension, volitions, thoughts, words, relationships, and states of affairs), which seemingly ought not to, do occur. In this chapter literally peppered with cognates of sapientia,[28] the central problem is how one can judge that evil actions “should not exist, when such goodness and such wisdom,” in one way or another “causes or permits”[29] them to be. The solution involves making a proper distinction between different respects in which the same action ought to be and also ought not to be.

The “supernal wisdom and goodness”[30] permits actions which in some respects are evil, and thus ought not be, but which in other respects are good, and thus ought to be. Christ=s death furnishes an example in two respects. Entirely blameless, he ought least of all to have been put to death, and yet his sacrificial death allowed and enacted reconciliation between humanity and God. In the order of volitional actions, his hands are those which ought least to have been pierced by the iron, and yet in the natural order it is entirely right that the iron penetrated his hands and inflicted agony upon him.

Two last points need be made about this. First, Anselm does not spell this out explicitly, but rather enacts this: making such distinctions and making them well is the proper function of reason and wisdom. God makes distinctions perfectly, and so far as we make them and make them more adequately, we make proper use of (and perhaps even expand our store of) what reason and wisdom we possess, thereby participating in wisdom and reason itself. Second, not every case of such distinctions so explictly involves the dramatic whole of salvation history.

Anselm discusses show how the human being might align himself with the divine wisdom, thereby acquiring more wisdom not only through intellection but also volition, even affectivity, action, and relationship. He acknowledges a commonplace of theological reflection in noting that God allows or even “creates detrimental things [incommoda], by which he both punishes the unjust and he tries and purifies the just,”[31] but also (in relation to Christ=s example) highlights the liberty a rational being possesses in understanding and making use of these, reasoning: Ait is not misery for one wisely and uncompelled by any necessity to grasp and accept any detrimental thing in accordance with one’s will.”[32]

III. Human Wisdom as Participatory in Divine Wisdom

Having sketched bare and necessarily dim outlines of divine wisdom as Anselm understands it, it is time to set out his conceptions of human wisdom, which he nearly always frames in relation to divine wisdom, but in rather varied ways. Given a few key features of Anselm’s writing and thought, this makes perfect sense.

First, mentioned earlier, Anselm’s writings are largely occasioned; he treats topics systematically only when he needs to and to the degree that Christian mysteries admit (even to admittedly one of the most powerful theological minds of his times).

Second, Anselm was a Benedictine monk and archbishop, and these preoccupations steered his focus; while 11th-12th century monasteries preserved, studied, continued, and commented on the heritage of classical pre-Christian thought (including discussions of wisdom), we actually know that the mundane application of wisdom in secular business wearied him.

Third, given Anselm’s Christian Platonic metaphysics, human wisdom will necessarily be such ultimately through participating in the divine wisdom; nevertheless, this participation will take place and form in a number of differing modes. Fourth, wisdom in inextricably central to Anselmian moral theory, which develops and possesses general principles, but employs them in very nuanced, progressive, and contextually reflective ways, so that the demands and the shapes of wisdom look quite different in one situation than in another.

A sort of composite picture can be pieced together from Anselm’s explicit statements about human wisdom. He ascribes wisdom to some, for instance in De Incarnatione, where he speaks of “such holy and wise people everywhere existing,@ who can provide reasoned defense and understanding of the faith.[33] Their wisdom is presumably something which can be cultivated, improved upon, and imparted reproducing itself in others. While the wisdom which a wise person teaches another is not the wisdom itself in which it participates, the wise person’s wisdom Ais not unbefittingly said to produce” the wisdom in the other person. “But although my wisdom would have its being and its exercising-wisdom [sapere] from his wisdom, still, when it now is, it would not be without its own being [essentia], and it would not exercise-wisdom except from itself.”[34]

Anselm also contrasts the wise against the foolish, quipping: “it is not always easy to wisely answer one who is asking questions foolishly,”[35] an experience to which professors might relate. Of course, in an Anselmian context, the paradigmatic representative of folly who comes to mind is the Fool of Proslogion 2-4, on whose behalf Gaunilo writes, whose foolishness in epistemological and metaphysical registers takes the form of allowing himself to be led astray in play with images and terms not adequately understood and not corresponding to intelligible realities.

The mind of the Fool of the Psalms and other biblical Wisdom Literature, however, is much more deeply corrupted in the moral dimension, shot through by flaws which (in light of Anselm’s theory of truth) inevitably extend themselves into interrelated wrongheaded metaphysical and epistemological commitments. Examples of such folly abound in Anselm’s works, for instance in De Incarnatione, where he faults those who “are unable of grasping [the faith], and instead out of foolish pride judge that nothing which they are not able to understand can be, rather than acknowledging out of humble wisdom that there can be many thing which they are not capable of comprehending.”[36] They allow themselves to be misled by a facsimile, employing the Pauline trope “human wisdom, relying upon itself [in se confidens],”[37] unaware of the moral and spiritual concomitants for genuine wisdom, whose hallmark for Anselm remains participation in divine wisdom.

The opposition between wisdom and foolishness, and fuller understanding of their natures, assumes starkest contrast in De Humanibus Moribus, where Anselm discusses them as parts of happiness and misery. “A human being assesses himself as possessing [wisdom] and lacking [foolishness], if he knows something that another does not know.” This, however, only reveals the imperfection of what wisdom we do possess. “[W]hat is this wisdom,” Anselm asks. when a person is ignorant of their own self?” In that passage, among the matters which full wisdom will know is “what type of thing one’s soul is.”[38] He also sketches an eschatological fulfillment of wisdom and an absolute deprivation through folly:

the good person will be filled with perfect wisdom, which is God, and will contemplate [intuebitur] that wisdom “face to face.” And while one so attentively gazes at it, one will see the nature of the entire creature, which more fully dwells [melius . . . consistit] in God than in its very self. If, however one should be evil, then, entirely deprived of true wisdom, one will be driven by pains so that one becomes not only foolish, but entirely so, and loving [one=s foolishness].[39]

Several later De Humanibus Moralibus passages elaborate Anselm’s treatment of wisdom. In his discussion of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, he writes that the last two, “understanding and wisdom, are oriented to the contemplative life. . . [T]he Holy Spirit sets these two over the other five, so that the edifice of its gifts might be entirely completed.”[40] Understanding, and all the more wisdom, have and perform integrative functions for human beings, dimly mirroring perfectly integrated and integrative divine wisdom. Interestingly, though Anselm calls these contemplative, contrasting them with the active, understanding and wisdom are clearly practical just as much as theoretical.

Through its participatory gifts, the Holy Spirit “kindles [the human] mind to understanding why God gives this or that precept. . . . afterwards it adds even beyond these wisdom, so that one clearly understands through reason what is best tasting [sapidum] or delightful for oneself, and through love of rectitude alone pursues what one understands to be what ought to be pursued.”[41] Wisdom is also the source of the other gifts, whose progressively developed structure in the soul Anselm likens to a house being built, moving directly then into discussion of “qualities and moral dispositions of the soul,” leading into explicit identification of these with virtues and vices. Anselm does not spell out the relationship between wisdom and virtue in general, and a number of moral virtues he mentions or discusses seem involved in various manners with wisdom. Three mutually interrelated and virtues architectonic stand out, however: humility, justice, and love.

IV. Virtues, Relationships, and Wisdom.

Anselm likens humility to a mountain whose seven degrees one ascends intellectually, relationally and affectively, escaping the valley of pride, in which one roves in fog and shadows of self-deception, and is attacked by beasts representing the other vices. Along the ascent, “the very good people, that is, the virtues, approach him. But when he climbs to the highest level of humility, he rests with these very virtues in clear knowledge of self,”[42] or as he says later “perfect knowledge of self.”[43] Such knowledge, the product of humility is as we have seen a component of wisdom in Anselm’s view, and in turn wisdom participating in divine wisdom guides the person through the determinate grades of humility.

No virtue is as explicitly central and well-developed in Anselm’s moral theory as is justice. A sizable literature exploring and explicating Anselm’s views already exists, so here let us recall just two aspects connected with wisdom. First, Anselm defines justice as “rectitude of will kept for its own sake” (rectitudo voluntatis propter se servata),[44] and glosses this by adding “keeping rectitude of will for the sake of that very rectitude is, for each person, to will what God wills that person to will.”[45]

Stated as such, these are rather bare and abstract formulae, and require some exercise of wisdom in application to actual situations, on the part of the agent, on the part of someone advising or instructing him or her, even on the part of one judging another’s actions, volitions, words, thoughts, affections, or relationships. One ought to discern rightly, and must have some knowledge, even experience or appreciation of genuine goods (as opposed to merely apparent goods) for human beings generally and for the specific human beings with whom one is dealing.

There is another interconnection as well, which involves participation in divine wisdom in a yet more concrete and robust manner, namely wisdom as the means and the expression of discerning and enacting one’s place in the providential plan, aligning oneself with the divine will in extended into the particulars and temporality of human life and history.

Love or charity is more than merely an affection, passion, or desire for Anselm. God is love itself, in which all other loves, however mediatedly, corruptedly, misdirectedly they may be, participate, and so love indivisibly resides at the very heart of all other divine attributes: being itself, goodness, justice, eternity, truth, reason, and all the others. Anselm stresses at many points that justice in the will and truth in the intellect or reason remains incomplete (though nevertheless good and meritorious) so long as it does not assume shape, directedness, and constancy through desire, delight, and love.[46]

He also counsels a wise approach towards love understanding and expressing a grasp of true conditions,[47] for instance when he argues: “We should always strive more to love than to be loved, and to rejoice more, realizing that we gain more when we love than when we are loved.”[48] Reciprocally, even the eminently contemplative virtue of wisdom, which might be oriented towards God alone, in Anselm’s view, must be oriented towards others through loving action, evidenced both by his own example and by his advice to Gunther: “I consider it more advantageous for you to preserve the peace of contemplation by love in your mind and the obedience of brotherly charity in your actions than to wish to chose contemplation alone by despising the prayers and the need of others.”[49]

Human wisdom participates in divine wisdom dynamically and developmentally by integrating the human person=s affections, desires, emotions, will, actions, and relationships through moral virtues, but also extends just as naturally into the intellectual faculties and virtues. The triune God, supreme wisdom, is not only perfect love, but also perfect understanding and remembering or mindfulness. God acts and is these within the divine economy and in relation to all created being. The rational human mind dimly reflects this: ”it can remember not only itself but also that very supreme wisdom, and it can understand that [wisdom] and itself. For if the human mind were not able to possess any of its memory or understanding, it would not distinguish itself at all from irrational creatures and that [wisdom] from all creatures.”[50] In fact, only by turning not only its will and affections but its intellect towards the divine, can the rational creature hope to adequately understand itself, or even just its intellectual faculties, since the divine mind is not “after any likeness [to created minds], but rather [exists] paradigmatically, and the [created] rational mind is after its likeness.”[51]

To bring this paper to a close leaving sufficient time for discussion, several last remarks about human wisdom as participation in divine wisdom must be made with little supporting exegesis or argument. Genuine wisdom not only integrates all of the dimensions of human being, but strives to use these to more and more fully grasp the created world and its determinate natures, the human person, its history and relationships, the structures of the human mind, the ordering of providence, and the Triune and mysterious God. Some central functions of wisdom are employment, refining, judging, and ordering of the various means towards this, whether these be educable human reason working through discernment and argument, the moral virtues in what truths they reveal and make possible, the restructuring of the human will towards true freedom, or the self-revelation of God in Scripture.

One passage in De Processione suggestively ties together divine wisdom, the action of the incarnate word, and Scripture’s intelligible intentionality. After suggesting exegeses of the Johanine recollection of Christ’s breathing on the disciples, saying: “receive the Holy Spirit,” Anselm argues: “When divine Scripture signifies something hidden through likenings to sensible things [per sensibilium similitudines], the things that signify and the things signified cannot be entirely alike in every respect,” which suggests a deeper meaning to the act, and adds: “Unless perhaps someone would want to say that this breathing-upon was so done by God’s wisdom without any spiritual signification. But, I think, nobody is so senseless as to hold that sentiment.” [52]

I will close by tying together two suggestive Anselmian discussions providing a concrete example of interaction between divine and human wisdom in everyday life. A central issue in De Concordia is the interaction between divine agency and human agency, involving divine grace and human choice. God’s providential ordering is through and from eternity, but also develops temporally, through human actions and interactions, relationships, and development. For example, that preachers are sent to others occurs through their own volition following God’s will, but it is nevertheless a grace, because “what derives from grace is a grace.”[53]

There is constant interplay between the immanently human, involving free choice and agency, and the transcendently divine, in ways incredibly complex, but nevertheless possessing a simple schema. God often supplies grace to human agents faced with situations of free choice, and the mode in which he does so is through other past or present rational agents likewise confronted with the fateful choice: wisely cooperate and align oneself with the divine will, in which case one volitionally assumes one’s allotted place in the providential order, or foolishly pursue one’s own will (propria voluntas), surrendering one’s will to other agents or to objects of one’s poorly formed, oriented, or ordered desires.[54]

Imparting human wisdom to, refining in, and transmission through others not only illuminates, and ought to inform such willed participation in the workings of grace, it also represents a product of such interaction, so that in accepting and working with the wisdom of another person, one may also collaborate with grace. We know that Anselm imparted wisdom himself not only to monks, nuns, and clergy, and not only to secular authorities, but also to married people.

The texts which treat of this are tantalizingly brief, but revealing. His teaching to married people included duties, or modes of love, both reciprocally owed by each spouse to each other as well as those structured by what we now call complementarity. “To married people [conjugatos] he taught how great was the fidelity, love [qua. . . dilectione], and companionship [familiaritate] with which they should be [mutually] bound together [sibi invicem copulari] just as much in matters pertaining to God as in temporal matters [tam secundum Deum quam secundem seculum]. He also taught “that the man should love [diligeret] his wife as himself, knowing no other but her, caring for her body as he does for his own, and entertaining no evil suspicions; that the woman . . . . should diligently spur him [incitaret] to well-doing, and calm his mind by her easygoingness [affabilitate] should he wrongly get riled up with anyone.”[55] All of these are guided by the basic purpose of willing the good for the other, very similar to Anselm’s more explicit and common counsels to those living monastic discipline.

All of his advice about the sort of marital relation a couple ought to grow into reflects the Anselmian understanding of the intricate interaction of divine grace with the free rational wills of human beings in determinate relations, indeed within the providential order, consistently acting, willing, loving, even one hopes understanding, remembering, reasoning as they ought do, as they are called to do. Through the sacrament of marriage, divine grace is bestowed. Within married life, grace is worked with and recirculated. Needless to say, human wisdom participating in divine wisdom, not least through allied virtues of humility, justice, and charity, ideally permeates a marriage’s entire structure, and ongoing shared history. In return, in the Anselmain view, marriage becomes a site in which spouses willingly become occasions and channels through which participatory wisdom is uncovered and offered to each other.

Notes

[1] Ep. 2. References to Anselm’s letters are from The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, 3 vols. trans and ed. Walter Frölich (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications). All translations from Anselm’s treatises are the author’s (I have consulted and greatly benefitted from translations by Hopkins and Richardson, Williams, Deane, and Charlesworth) and are from S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archepiscopi opera omnia, ed. Dom F. S. Schmitt, O.S.B. 5 vols (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons. 1940-1961), or from Liber Anselmi de Humanis Moribus, in Memorials of St. Anselm, R.W. Southern and F. S. Schmitt, O.S.B., eds. (London: Oxford University Press. 1969). All citations of Anselm’s texts will give the chapter number (prefaced where appropriate by the book number), and the page number of the appropriate volume of the Opera Omnia or Memorials Each text will be cited with these abbreviations.

M Monologion P Proslogion DI De Incarnatione Verbi DV De Veritate DL De Libertate Arbitrii DC De Conceptu Virginali et de DCD De Casu Diaboli CDH Cur Deus Homo Original Peccato DC De Concordia Praescientiae et Praedestionis et Gratiae Dei cum Libero Arbitri DM Liber Ansemi Archiepiscopi de Humanus Moribus per Simultudines DA (Alexandri Monachi Cantuariensis) Liber Ex Dictis Beati Anselmi

[2] In Monologion 16, God is supreme essence, life, reason, salvation, justice, wisdom, truth, goodness, greatness, beauty, immortality, incorruptibility, immutability, blessedness, eternity, power, unity. P 5 provides a much shorter explicit list: “Thus you are just, true, blessed, and whatever is better to be than not to be,” p. 104. This last term opens the door to other attributes (or accidents not changing God’s nature): “sensitive, all-powerful, merciful [not an attribute, but follows from them], impassible,” P 7, p. 105; “living, wise, good. . . eternal”, P 11, p. 110; “that very life, light . . . eternal blessedness and blessed eternity.” P 14, p. 11.

[3] Cf. eg. my “A Perfectly Simple God and Our Complicated Moral Lives: The 2008 Saint Anselm Lecture,” Saint Anselm Journal, v. 6, n.1.

[4] In translating Anselm’s Latin into English, occasionally esse as well as existere need to be rendered as “exist(s).” Anselm does use existere at critical junctures of his work, for instance, in the very end of his Proslogion c. 2 proof (Existit ergo procul dubio aliquid . . .p. 102), where one might instead expect continued use of esse. Clearly, there is some emphasis or difference in signification, rather than just variation or synonym, at work. Determining precisely what Anselm means in such uses of the verb existere at critical junctures is a topic admittedly calling for much further study and discussion.

[5] DI 15, p. 33, he develops this point using eternity, but is clear in the context that his account applies to every other attribute. In M 43, he speaks in a related manner of harmony: the Father and the Son Aare so harmonious by nature that either one always retains the essence [or being, essentiam] of the other.@

[6] M 46, p. 62.

[7] M 47, p. 63.

[8] In fact, on a related point, discussing divine unity, Anselm also contrasts human ways of being with the divine way: “when a human being is said to be a body and rational and human, he or she is not said to be these three things in the same way or from the same perspective. From one point of view, he or she is a body, from another, rational, and neither of these is entirely what it is to be a human being,” M 17, p. 31. There is also ontological distinction (though not separation) in the human soul: “neither reason nor will are the whole of the soul, but are something(s) in the soul,” namely instruments, which architectonically make use of all other instruments, DC 3.11, p. 279.

[9] M 44, p. 60.

[10] This is an active verb, and contrasts with Anselm=s use of esse sapiens; he uses the active consistently throughout the passage, and given his careful distinctions between speaking and thinking properly and precisely (proprie) and looser, perhaps misleading ways of speaking and thinking.

[11] M44, 60

[12] M 31, 50

[13] M 34, 53-4: The Word is “the supreme wisdom and supreme reason, in which all things that are made exist. . . . Before they were, and now that they are, and when they are corrupted or in any way change, they are always in that [Word], not as they are in themselves [in seipsis], but rather what that very same [Word] is. For in themselves they are mutable being [essentia] created in accordance with immutable reason. In that very [Word] they are that first being and first truth of being , to which the more any of these things are alike, the more truly and more excellently they are [existunt].

[14] M32, p. 51

[15] Among the passages supporting this intrinsic connection between gnoselogical divine attributes, is: “it is essential to the Supreme Wisdom that it knows and understands,” M 63, p.73

[16] “In the way that the Son is the understanding or the wisdom of the Father, he is also the paternal memory. For whatever the Son exercises wisdom in [sapit] or understands, he also likewise remembers,” M 48, 64.

[17] “For, each of these three singly is the Supreme essence and Supreme wisdom, so perfect that it remembers, and understands, and loves through itself,” M 60, p.71.

[18] CDH 2.13, p. 112.

[19] CDH 2.13, p. 113. Cf. also DCV 21, where he says of Christ: “Since that very soul, indeed entirely this man and the Word of God, and God, always existed [extitit] as one person, it was never without perfect justice and wisdom and power,” p. 160-1.

[20] M 65, p. 76.

[21] A passage near the end of Monologion (M 80, p. 87) ties all this together: “For just as it is established that all things are made and maintained [vigent] by that supremely good and supremely wise omnipotence, it would be entirely unbefitting if it were to be judged that He does not rule over the things made by Him, or that the things made by Him are ruled by something less powerful or less good or wise, or [that they] are not ruled by any rationality but only by an unordered randomness of happenstances.”

[22] In DC 3.2, alignment of these two is a criterion for either one of them being rightly ordered or properly functioning.

[23] CDH 2.1, 97. A similar discussion takes place in M 68.

[24] M 68, p. 79. Cf. also CDH 1.20, where there is a sustained discussion of what we owe to God, extending even to affectivity

[25] M 69, p. 79.

[26] M 71, p. 81. Two features of Anselm=s account are important to note here:

1) In his view, the relationship between one=s volitions and actions, one=s fundamental commitment in this life, and one=s reward or punishment, eternal happiness or misery, is not an extrinsic one. Anselm is not a voluntarist, and his moral theory is not a divine command theory, but rather, as Stanley Kane has named it, a “divine will theory” (and as Kate Rogers has demonstrated, also a form of eudaimonism, and as I have argued, concomitantly a sort of virtue ethics.

2) Anselm also acknowledges the difficulty of knowing these matters in specific cases, and for entire classes of beings, e.g. infants. (M72 and 74, and P 11)

[27] CDH 1.7, p. 57. Cf. also DCD 25, p. 273, where God teaches, via the Devil’s fall and its consequences, “not out of impotence, as if he could not have done it any other way, but rather out of the greater power which could produce good out of evil, so that no unordered evil would remain in the kingdom of omnipotent wisdom.”

[28] Sapienter or sapientia occur seven times.

[29] DV 8, p. 186. F or how it is that God Acauses” actions, cf. in particular DC I. 7, p. 259: God “causes all actions and all movements, because he makes the things with which and from which and by which and in which [actions and movements] occur; and no thing has any power of willing or doing unless He gives it.” Cf. also the accounts of doing and willing in the Phil. Frags, and CDH.

[30] DV 8, p. 186. Cf also CDH 2.18.

[31] DC 1.7, p. 258

[32] CDH 2. 12, p. 112. Numerous examples of this occur in the Letters and the Vita Anselmi

Virtue being the principal good, though not (as some people mistakenly claim) the only good, seems an absolutely central doctrine in Stoic philosophy. Of the texts by Stoic authors we currently possess, and the several summaries of Stoic doctrine, nearly all of them discuss the cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance quite a bit. And although they do not entirely agree in their listings of and references to the subordinate virtues falling under those four principal ones, a student of Stoicism reading across those texts can certainly develop a robust picture of virtues’ full extent from those works.

And yet, in the works of one of the most important Stoic authors we have, Epictetus’ Enchiridion and Discourses, we find surprisingly few references to, let alone systemic discussions of, the virtues. One might even speculate that if Epictetus were the only Stoic author whose works had survived from antiquity, we might get the idea that virtue was only one of a number of important concepts for the Stoics, rather than being an absolutely central one.

Why is this the case? Did Epictetus think that virtue wasn’t really that important a component of Stoic philosophy and practice? Having given a lot of thought to this on my own and discussion with thoughtful friends and colleagues, my verdict is that this is not the case. But then, why don’t we see as much discussion of virtue and virtues in Epictetus as we do, say, in Seneca, Musonius Rufus, or Marcus Aurelius, or in those authors providing us summaries of Stoic thought like Cicero, Arius Didymus, or Diogenes Laertes?

There are two main reasons that I would say best make sense of this.

One of these is a reminder that we need to make when we see something seemingly missing or given little space in Epictetus’ works, and then are tempted to make definitive statements from that absence. And that is that technically, what we have are not Epictetus’ works but rather those authored by his student Arrian, intended to convey to readers the thoughts and frankness of speech of his teacher. Of the original eight books Arrian wrote, we unfortunately have only four. So there might have been considerably more, longer, and fuller discussions of the virtues in those lost books, or for that matter within the many years of Epictetus’ teachings and conversations that weren’t set down by Arrian.

Another plausible reason might be that Epictetus took it for granted that his students were already conversant enough with Stoic perspectives on virtue already articulated for centuries. He points out in:

Who of us are not able to discourse competently [technologēsai] about matters good and evil? That some are good, some evil, and some indifferent? The good include the virtues and those things participating in [metekhonta] virtue. - Epictetus, Discourses, 2.9

What is needed, philosophers tell us, is more than simply learning (mathein) doctrines. We also must give attention (melētē) and engage in discipline or training (askēsis), otherwise all we will be able to do is discuss other people’s doctrines (allotriōn dogmatōn).

It’s clearly not the case that Epictetus thinks the virtues don’t require any discussion. In fact, if you’re familiar with the breakdowns of cardinal virtues into more specific subordinate virtues, you’ll see him referencing a number of those throughout his works. Look at the chapter already mentioned, where he notes that works or actions (erga) of virtuous sorts preserve that person as virtuous in those ways, and that vicious ones destroy that virtuous character (2.9).

What examples does he use? Virtues of being modest (aidēmōn) and trustworthy (pistos). Vices of not only the opposites of these, but also being abusive (loidoros), prone to anger (orgilos), and greedy (philarguros, 2.9). This is just one example of many. Throughout his works, if we know where and how to look, there are a number of virtues and vices named, praised, and criticized, and cautioned about.

Virtues and vices do bear importance within Epictetus’ Stoic philosophy, but they get reframed in terms of his own characteristic concepts and emphases. Consider his stress on developing, breaking, and replacing habits, particularly in 2.18, 3.12, and 3.25. This is precisely one key dimension of training or discipline. And what ultimately are we doing this to? Ourselves, and in particular the most central part of ourselves, our very core, the prohairesis, typically translated as “faculty of choice”, “moral purpose”, or even “will”.

This is the part that, as he says, makes use (khrōmenon) and takes care of (epimeleitai) everything else, and which can only be hindered (empodizein) by itself or its own distortion (autē d’heautēn diastrapheisa). This leads him to declare that in prohairesis alone (monē hautē) is where vice and virtue develop (ginetai, 2.23).

If we want to more fully understand Epictetus’ understanding of what virtues and vices are, and how they are developed or rooted out, we arguably need to focus on his many interconnected discussions bearing upon how we share our prohairesis through learning, attention, and discipline.

This piece first appeared in the February 2025 issue of the online magazine The Stoic. If this piece has you now interested in Stoicism, and you would like to know what to read next, this might be helpful for you.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

This is the fifth and final portion of the transcript of an online talk I was invited to give to the Dionysius Circle. It continues the question and answer portion of the talk. You can watch or listen to the full talk here.

Question: So when I’m reading that, I’ve always thought that there are two key things you gotta get your mind around. The first is really speaking to the formula of that than which nothing greater can be conceived, because that implies this sort of limit case and then beyond and continue beyond. The other thing is that I think the key assumption, and I could be wrong about this, is that it’s greater to be in reality than in the mind, and that’s like the driving force making the jump.

So that’s that’s one of the places where you could attack it. You could say like, let’s think about nerve gas. I can imagine the room here being filled up with nerve gas, and you dying from nerve gas is a horrible way to go. When I was in the Army, 30 years ago, we had to learn what the symptoms of nerve gas poisoning were, because we were worried that the Soviets would use it on us. We’d get all paranoid because you’d like think maybe you had some of them. That’s horrible stuff. So I can keep that in my mind. Let’s not have that in reality! It’s not greater than that in reality. So you could say: Well what about problems like that? Or the room being filled up with spiders. I like spiders but I wouldn’t want a room that’s all wriggly spiders biting me. So then you have to think your way through it. I think this may be something that Anselm would be cool with.

You know these meditations, which is what the Proslogion and the Monologion are, not designed to be treatises that answer every single thing, but provide us with like almost like a catalyst for our own dynamic thinking about this kind of stuff. Maybe we have to then say: All right, put those kinds of worries aside. What about something that is truly great? For that, is it greater to exist in reality than to exist in the mind?Maybe we have to do some qualification in order to make Anselm’s argument work. Maybe he’s a little bit too bold in the formulation there.

And this jibes with his response to Gaunillo, because Gaunillo brings up that I can think of a logically, not logically but a perfect island — the logically perfect, that’s 20th century language that gets used by people like Plantinga and Hartshorne, and later interpreters of Anselm’s argument. Anselm says: Well what you’re trying to do here, you know what you’re saying, it doesn’t work in the case of an island. It does work in the case of God. Maybe that’s what we have to do if we buy into it.

I’ve been grappling with Anselm’s argument now for roughly 30 years, and I go back and forth on it. I don’t know what what about the rest of you? Do you buy it or not? Now Anselm himself in the process of working on it, at one point, if you read the prologue to it, thought that it might be a tool of the devil to distract him from prayers. So all that that wavering back and forth, maybe that’s not a good thing.

In reading a lot of secondary lit, I know a lot of Thomists give it a really bad rap. It’s very strange because at one of our Thomisic meetings, we tried to understand why Thomas rejects it in Prima Pars q. 2, and a lot of us that were there. We could not understand why, and it seems to have something to do with how the argument (or at least as Thomas portrays it) assumes that you know the divine essence, which you don’t. But Anselm never makes that move, explicitly he never makes that move. So I did go and look at the Commentary on the Psalms, and Aquinas does in there seem a lot more open to some type of argument like Anselm is giving

Well he says that Anselm actually is correct, but he’s still framing it there in terms of saying that deus esse is something that’s per se nota. That the predicate is contained in in the subject is the way Thomas likes to talk about, and that’s what sort of set the agenda all the way to Kant’s time.

To go to the other question Thomas thinks that claiming that deus esse is per se nota, that’s correct but it’s only per se nota to the sapientes, to the wise. So it’s not going to be a good argument to make the ordinary people. It’s definitely not. So if the beginning of your Summa Theologiae has to start after you’ve explained the different kinds of readings of scripture with proving that the thing that you want to talk about actually exists, this is not going to be the way to do it. Because who’s the Summa actually written for? It’s not written for the sapientes, the wise. We think of it as a tough text. It’s actually written for incipientes, beginners.

So Aquinas is basically saying that whole idea of like pulling something out of the idea of God to show that that being necessarily exists, that works but it’s not going to work for the people that you have to target. At the beginning we got to go about things a different way. And then Aquinas is also interested in exploring causality and it’s not just let’s get that over with, with the five ways, and then we’ll move on to all the cool stuff that parish priests need to know. The five ways kind of set the agenda for Thomas’s whole approach to wow the creative trinity engages with us and the rest of creation, and how we can know you know something about that being through the effects that we see here, enough to guide our our actions and decisions and stuff like that.

So it kind of makes sense that he would reject Anselm, not because he thinks you’re just totally wrong, throw you in the flames, to use Hume’s famous phrase, get rid of Anselm’s books. No he appropriates Anselm over and over and over again on points where he thinks that he’s helpful to bring into the the structure of the Summa Theologiae, but Anselm’s Prosologion argument just is going to be kind of a non-starter. But somebody else has that point of view, John Locke about Descartes’ argument.

There’s kind of a three-prong tradition that runs throughout the history of philosophy when it comes to whatever we want to call ontological arguments. You’ve got one where they’re like: Yeah ontological arguments, they work. Here’s a version of it. You’ve got Anselm in the middle ages and a few other people as well picking up on him, and then Descartes very famously, and then Hegel. And each one is a totally different animal.

And then you’ve got this: No way! This is garbage! Get rid of it. So you got Gaunillo, and then you got Pierre Gassendi in the the modern period doing so for Descartes, and then you’ve got Kant.

And then you’ve got this more pragmatic: Well it’s a great argument. Yoo bad nobody’s going to buy it. That includes Thomas and Locke.

So you’ve got at least three different possible ways of going at the ontological argument in a serious way. You could have a non-serious way like saying: This is just silly nonsense or something like that, which is not quite the same thing as what the rejectors are doing.

Question: Maybe the last thing I would ask is all this supreme being talk in Anselm would probably raise some flags with people concerned with ontotheology. This question of God’s being sort of being comparable to creatures being. Platonists might want to say: Well no, God is a completely transcendent unity that’s beyond being um. What would be the answer to that be? Would he speak of analogy? Would he speak of univocity? Does he even have these terms?

Well, he doesn’t use those terms at all. It’s not “supreme being”. It’s supreme essentia that we translate as “supreme being”, and that’s only one of, for example in Monologion 16, like 18 different supreme things. Each one is conceived of as in a dynamic way. So supreme essentia is the same thing as supreme ens, and ens is not like an entity it’s like be-ing, you’re doing something. But God is just as much supreme justice, or here’s a weird one, supreme refuge, supreme solace. What the hell is that, you know? He’s not like he’s more supreme being than he is all these other supremes.

And Anselm has pointed out too, “supreme” is a relative term. He said: Well why do you use it so much then? It’s just kind of a marker. You could just as easily instead of saying supreme justice, say as he does justitia existens, whatever is at the top of the hierarchy. Now that’s a great question, is that beyond being conceived of an ontotheological way. I don’t know. I haven’t given that much thought. I mean interestingly, I know Marion has a piece on Anselm. But it’s been a long time since I’ve read it.

I would suspect that what’s going on in Anselm is not what Heidegger called “ontotheology”. And Heidegger was pretty fast and loose with with that term and made some huge sweeping assumptions of his own in deploying that against what he calls “epochal metaphysics”, with Christianity essentially being summed up as a new conception of being which places the supreme being, God as you know creating out of nothing and then everything following from from that. I think Heidegger’s depiction of Christian thought is kind of deficient. But here we’re getting way out of my area of competence.

Thanks very much for having me here. I’m glad to contribute something to such an interesting new initiative, and I hope that things continue to grow. Thanks for the questions and comments. I’ve got some good things to think about.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

This is the fourth portion of the transcript of an online talk I was invited to give to the Dionysius Circle. It continues the question and answer portion of the talk. You can watch or listen to the full talk here.

Question: Alex wants to ask in the chat: Does Anselm use the term “spiration” for the procession of the holy spirit from the father and the son as Aquinas does, and if he does what does this mean?

He doesn’t use that. He just uses you the word “procession”. What does “spiration”? mean? I’m not a good person to answer that because just looking at it, it’s essentially a cognate for spirit, like it’s becoming spirit. It’s kind of a weird way to think about (I mean, what the hell does proceeding mean though?), Its both of these terms that we use in in the trinity talking about the relations, like begets, generates, but it’s not born. He’s thinking of being born. Whatever is going on there has got to be something quite impressive, if we could ever think it (but we don’t really know what it is we’re gesturing at), with metaphorical language.

Proceeding gives you the idea of walking from something. I guess one of the hints is that the holy spirit is love between the father and the son, so that’s there in both Anselm and Aquinas. So loving, is it in its fullest sense something that overflows from the two? The thing is that none of these take place in time, as Anselm stresses and Aquinas thinks as well. The holy spirit has always been just as much as the son just as much as the father. Anselm actually clarifies that in On the Incarnation of the Word and On the Procession of the Holy Spirit. There was never any point in time when these relations that we talk about happened. So I don’t have a good answer for that at all, I think.

Well that’s all good. That’s all helpful. Thank you. I appreciate it

I’m extraordinarily surprised that it was, because there must be something going on in your brain that’s doing better than what’s in mine when it comes to that, because I don’t understand it.

Oh no, you’re good. I’ve mainly read Aquinas’s discussion of the trinity in the Summa and your analysis of Anselm’s understanding of the trinity did help me to make some more sense of what Aquinas is saying in there.

I will say this about the connection between Aquinas. Aquinas brings up Anselm quite a bit in the Summa. There’s entire sections, like on the discussion of original sin, where he’s going to say Anselm basically has this right. Or the discussions of truth and Aquinas is trying to take what what Anselm has provided and go a bit further with it. So I don’t know. Maybe he brings Anselm up in that, although there’s so many other people who have written on the trinity, right? Boethius and Augustine. So by the time that Aquinas is on the scene, there’s so many people to draw upon

Question: As something of an internet atheist myself i’m probably having some of the hardest time here wrapping my head around this, but so to start off my question, I can kind of understand how we can arrive at finitude in one God from these infinite number of attributes, how all of these attributes become one and the same attribute in God. But then it seems to me there’s almost kind of another degree of finitude reinserted in that, through the trinity, that the trinity of personhood which complicates it for me. I assume Anselm is not just trying to take this doctrine of simplicity and mesh it with the trinity after the fact. So maybe to pose the question another way for Anselm: does the triune nature of God have kind of a necessity?

Is the idea of God necessarily trinitarian? That’s the whole point of the Monologion.

Okay if you can parse that out a little bit more. Why is God necessarily trinitarian?

I mean that’s that’s argumentation from, you could say that it begins from chapter 29 and runs all the way to chapter 63, right? That’s what’s going on in the Monologion. The Proslogion provides a shorter, not really argument, for it. More just like an exposition for it. But there isn’t a “here’s the simple argument for why God has to be a trinity”. I don’t know that finitude is the idea that you want. There’s a multiplicity from our perspective of divine attributes. That doesn’t mean that that’s what’s in God, that a multiplicity all of these attributes are what God is, which turns out to be a super unity, a unity that goes beyond what we typically think of as unity. These are difficult things to to conceptualize.

Question: I wonder if he makes more like a defense that the trinity is not against reason, and maybe he starts with his faith. Or do you think he’s going so far as to like rationally deduce the trinity? Because it seems like you were saying he doesn’t want to either.

I would say it’s neither. He’s not deducing, because he’s not providing some sort of straightforward, simple, syllogistic, deductive argument. I’s running through probably half of the Monologion, and he’s sort of taking stabs at it from this side and this side, and then looking at this and looking at this. Dialectical would be a better way of describing what’s what’s happening there. And yeah, he is starting from faith.

But starting from faith means a lot of different things. People start from faith by taking stuff out of the Bible and using it as premises in an argument that they take as incontrovertible starting points, and some would say: That’s terrible theology and terrible philosophy. You actually have to figure out what the scripture passages actually mean, and a lot of the time they don’t mean what the ordinary person thinks that they mean, according to Anselm. This is why he gets accused of being a rationalist by some people. He goes so far as to say when we understand scripture we have to understand what actually makes sense, not the surface level thing that might be leading us astray, which sometimes would get people kind of scared I think hearing that. So he’s he’s not trying to provide a defense. He’s not engaging in apologetics or anything like that.

Again what was the the whole point of the Monologion? This is the stuff Anselm was teaching as prior to these monks as meditations on the nature of the divine substance. He didn’t want to write them down, and they kept on bugging him until he finally said: All right, fine. I’ll write a book for you. Here you go. It’s the Monologion. So he’s not somebody who neatly fits into the ways in which we typically categorize, let’s call them activities. He thinks that God has given us rational minds so that we can make our way to understanding him.

He thinks that we we do have to start from some sort of basis of faith, but that basis, we’d better make it way more secure than the rudimentary, messed up, half picture- thinking starting points that we begin from. He wouldn’t say “pissed off” but I’m going to say that God would be pissed off at us for squandering our intellectual resources by just appealing to the Bible or something like that as a stop gap.

Question: So probably the most prominent in the last 300 years objections to Anselm’s argument, particularly in the Proslogion, is Kant right? So I think I’ve gotten a good enough sense about you might just say like Immanuel, you know we’re not predicating being. But God is being. But I’m still trying to make sense of: is the objection just completely misunderstood?

So Kant’s objection in the Critique doesn’t target Anselm’s argument at all. It targets Descartes, Spinoza, people like that. Anselm didn’t produce an ontological argument. It’s never called that until Kant’s time. And what’s going on in Descartes and Spinoza is quite different than what’s happening in Proslogion 2-4, that quo maius cogitari non posest being the linchpin is really the central thing to his argument. Even Aquinas by the way in Summa Theologiae gets Anselm wrong, because Anselm is not saying deus esse is per se nota. That’s not his his argument at all

He’s saying if you think out the implications of God being quo maius cogitari non posest, that then which nothing greater can be thought, if you like linger with that idea, you wind up seeing that God has to not only . . . it’s interesting too because he uses the language of esse there, being. But he also uses deus vera existit at the end of chapter 2, God truly exists, with existence being something perhaps more intensive than just mere being. So Anselm’s doing his own weird wacky thing over here.

And then people like Descartes and Spinoza come along and say: God’s essence necessarily includes existence, or God’s idea has to be that of something that necessarily exists. That’s more what Kant is targeting there. In his Lectures on Theology, Kant actually does target Anselm’s argument a bit more more closely. I don’t remember, it’s been a long time since I’ve read that.

Interestingly, all those of you who’ve read through the Critique of Pure Reason know that Kant is not going after the ontological argument just to knock that down. He’s also claiming that if you if you show the ontological argument doesn’t work, the cosmological and the design argument, the teleological argument, they both presume that. So you knock out all three with one blow. But Kant doesn’t appear to make, at least to me what’s a very convincing counter argument. He hits what he’s targeting, but that’s not every ontological argument, you could say right. And then Hegel comes along, he’s got a great retort to Kant saying the existence is not a predicate thing, that a hundred imaginary dollars isn’t 100 real dollars. Hegel says it makes a big difference whether one’s in your pocket or not, doesn’t it? Is that a great retort? No but there’s something to that. But the ontological argument, it’s an interesting one.

Anselm’s unum argumentum is not Proslogion 2-4, because the unum argumentum is supposed to show three things: that God exists or is; that God is the supreme good that all other things need in order to be good, which sounds very neoplatonic; and all the other things that we believe about God, which is sort of a miscellaneous junk drawer. And it’s supposed to be a resuming of of the Monologion and condensing it all into one unum argumentum. That is the totality of the Proslogion perhaps including chapter 1 which is a prayer, all the way to the last three chapters. The three chapters are conjectures. He calls them conjectiones. So they’re not actually part of the argument. They’re like adjuncts to it. But everything else is part of that unum argumentum, which means that if Anselm is making an ontological argument, that’s sort of a side piece you know.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

This is the third portion of the transcript of an online talk I was invited to give to the Dionysius Circle. It shifts to the question and answer portion of the talk. You can watch or listen to the full talk here.

I’m sure you’ve got some questions or comments. And comments could be: Well this doesn’t make any sense. Which is an understandable response to some of this

Jack: That was great. That’s a great overview of not only simplicity but Anselm’s take on the incarnation, so I guess we’ll move into the question and comment phase. I can open it up with a first one. So we were wondering, while we were working through some of the text (I think most of us were using the Hackett, but we have some different versions). So he starts off the Monologion with these two arguments getting to some sort of supreme good, and then getting to some sort of supreme notion of being. So we were wondering if you could kind of walk us through how he gets to this fundamental good and this fundamental being?

Well so the the being is coming in chapter 3. Before I do that too I want to say it’s kind of cool that he doesn’t, like so many people would do, start with proving that God exists, and then once we’ve got that, then that’ll be the springboard to go forward on everything. Instead he’s like: Let’s let’s start with good.

So his argument here is that he does sort of an analysis of goods that you see him working out. He’s not trying to provide like a complete theory, but he says there’s different types of ways in which things that are good. Later on he’s going to say: Who would doubt that this thing through which all goods exist is a very great good? So he’s going to argue that that there is something through which everything is good. Is this a good argument, by the way? Not really. That might be part of why he wanted to reappropriate that, and rework it in the Proslogion.

And so he says he is good through himself, since every good exists through him. No good that exists through another is equal to or greater than that good who alone is good through himself. Now you could say: Well what if there isn’t any such thing? What if everything is just good through some other good? And he doesn’t say it here, but it seems to be an assumption that sooner or later you have to hit something that is like the bedrock, the good through which other things are good. Even if we made a really complex web of let’s call them participatory or causal relations, you’re going to have to sooner or later have some sort of node that you wind up hitting. That seems to be the argument there to me. That that winds up giving us the supreme good.

You could say: Well there’s a lot of assumptions built in there, aren’t there? What if we’re wrong about the assumption that any good Platonist would make, and actually I think a lot of other traditions would make, that whatever something is good through, whatever makes that thing good, let’s call it. So we’ve got thing b and we’ll call it thing a. If thing a is providing the reason or whatever it is that thing b is good, thing a is going to be more good. There’s an assumption there that somehow the cause is going to be greater than the effect. Is that always warranted?

I could think of philosophical positions that would not make that assumption, but maybe in the case of the supreme good, that has to be the case, which sounds a little circular though, doesn’t it? What do the rest of you think? Does that sound circular to you? I think the supreme good is the the supreme good because it’s the supreme good i mean if we put it like that sounds totally circular

Yeah that is an interesting point

I mean, either you have a supreme good that is a unity, or you have to have a whole bunch of supreme goods and then you’ve got to be able to account for their connection with each other, and is one higher than the other? Well then, drop that one out of the picture. This is kind of a dynamic process of thinking, I think. But just let me ask all of you: Is that satisfying for you or not? Because i go back and forth on this with Ansel, just like with the ontological argument. Sometimes I’m like yeah, actually that’s really good, and then sometimes I’m like there’s something wrong with this somewhere.

Now what is that a reflection of? Is that a reflection of there being something wrong with the line of thinking or is that a reflection of our own problematic status as understanders?

Question: The example he gives is interesting where he presents his own potential counter example to the claim that there’s a single good from which everything kind of inherits its goodness. He talks about a horse. He says the horse and the robber. So it seems like the horse is good because it’s strong or swift, and on the other hand um the robber he can be strong or swift and not be good. So it would seem to suggest that there’s kind of a multiplicity of ways of being good. I guess that’s the conclusion.

Anselm wants to recognize that there are a multiplicity of ways of being good, and this will run throughout his treatises. In terms of the will, there’s the good as justice, and the good as the entire range of things that make us happy, the commoda in On the Fall of the Devil, But that being so doesn’t mean that there can’t be some ultimate supreme good that all of their goodnesses in some way participate in

Does he does he ever provide a systematic exposition of how all these multiple modes of goodness participate? Not really, but he doesn’t seem bothered by that either, which is kind of a funny thing. He does mention that nothing is thought to be good except because of a certain usefulness, or because of some kind of excellence, honestum.

Question: So it was the idea like okay, there there would seem to be a multiplicity. This thing is good by being swift, that thing is good by being strong. But when you really analyze it, both of those are actually good, and so far as they’re both useful in that particular context, and thus we kind of return to . . .

Well in that context, yeah. Although that doesn’t preclude some things being good by being honestum. The ancients had this distinction that comes from from originally from like Aristotle talking about the good as useful, good as pleasurable, good as kalon or as beautiful. That gets translated almost immediately into latin as the utile, there’s a bunch of different Latin words for the pleasurable, um and then the honestum. The honestum just means intrinsically good.

And then later on some will bring in further distinctions like justice by itself as something honestum, but there’s a whole range of things that he calls commodum, which could be useful mor they could be pleasant, or they could also be good intrinsically, but they’re not justice. In the Dicta Anselmi, he actually talks about there being three different, well not different, three distinguishable ranges of good: justice the commodum, and then just being esse. So by being itself, you’re already good, which kind of makes sense. But any of them can be kind of misappropriated.

So you know what’s what’s wrong with the robber being swift and strong, which normally we’re cool with? Well he’s gonna use it for evil, so it’s it’s not like the robber’s swiftness by itself is no longer good. Strictly speaking it’s the perversion of the good that he has. I mean actually, let’s transpose that. Roscelin is sort of the the archetypical bad guy for Anselm, one of those dirty dialectician. He’s not by virtue of of having a rational mind, or even having an imagination, he’s not a bad guy because of that. It’s the ways in which he’s using it, and ordering it ,and then attacking the Church, and having somehow to write stuff in response that is actually bad.

This is sort of outside the scope of this, but Anselm has a typically Augustinian idea that evil is just privation or corruption of the the good.

Jack: I think that’s consistent with his thinking, because he’s got that solution where he talks about God’s power. Basically the famous objection that you get a lot of times from internet atheists as well. If God’s all-powerful, why can’t he think dirty thoughts?

That’s a new one to me. I’d say I haven’t been looking at internet atheists for quite a while, because I would get the can he make a stone so heavy he can’t lift it kind of kind of nonsense. So is that is that where they are now? Anselm’s response is: Well that’s not power. That’s weakness. I mean this is a little bit off topic, but I can think of a way in which God could be said to think about dirty thoughts. If God wants to make me a better person, and I think dirty thoughts, then God is giving some thought to how to get me to no longer think dirty thoughts. Which is not him thinking dirty thoughts directly, but you know presumably he knows what he’s about.

Some of the stuff that people bring up, I mean again off the topic, you wonder about the motivations. You’re like: do you really think that’s a good argument that you’re making, or are you just doing the argument equivalent of posting? What’s going on with that? What’s your motivation? Are you just trying to get a rise out of people?

But Anselm would have an answer to that. He’d say you’re trying to think your way towards something that’s already hard to wrap our heads around, and you’re using some of the most inadequate of tools to do so. So you know you’re bound to to go astray in doing that

Question: You were talking about how the trinitarian persons, each of them wholly have justice, or are justice. So I was wondering about that. Because that seems like a problem. If you say God is justice, it seems like you are forced to make a distinction between, I mean you wouldn’t say the persons are justice. And that’s it. I mean they’re distinct persons, and they all are justice. As soon as you do that it seems like you’ve got a distinction between something in God, and having justice or being justice. So I was wondering if you could maybe elucidate a little bit what that distinction is. Maybe it’s just a distinction of the persons, and if that’s the case how does he think it’s a distinction?

For Anselm, God, whether we think of God as the supreme substance, or whether we think of God in in terms of the trinitarian persons, God can’t have justice because that would be lesser than being justice. So it’s not like there’s justice first in you know the divine substance, and then it gets parcelled out to each of the members of the trinity. That wouldn’t work at all for conceptualizing what’s going on there. Each by virtue of each of these persons of the trinity being entirely God, every one of these attributes is entirely what they are. But it also gives us a kind of, like I mentioned, as he says a repetition, or a replication, or intensive reflexivity in each of these attributes y

Question: I wonder about like being a creator or something that relates to creation. Would that be not intrinsically the same as God? And then you have a distinction between attributes.

Well it’s not intrinsically the same as God, because God is the creator. It’s not like first there’s God, and then God’s like what kind of God do I want to be? Let’s create! There just is that. And creation for Anselm is involving both persons of the trinity or both of the first two people of the trinity. Because everything that exists exists in the word before it’s created, but the word is not doing the creating. It’s the father who’s creating. But is it just like God gives instructions to the word or says: Hey give me the blueprints? No it’s not like that. We use all these these ideas that we draw from our own, as Anselm would say, imagination. And none of them are adequate to the ineffable way, as he calls it, that this is happening. Strictly speaking, the holy spirit’s lurking around there somewhere too in creation, but he doesn’t he doesn’t tell us anything about that.

Question: Thank you very much I was wondering also, there’s this argument in Proclus, where you need a distinct monad to account for any distinct class of things. So for example all beings, or all living things, or all things that have capacity for intellect, that would require a distinct monad, sort of like a form to account for that. So you would need, for example, being, life, and wisdom as sort of like prior forms to all the classes of beings living things and wisdom. For Proclus, these prior forms have to be distinct from each other to account for the distinctness of the different classes and so therefore being, life, and wisdom for example will not be the same as the one or God for Proclus.

And in Dionysius he has the main processions that he talks about in the Divine Names. After the good are being, life, and wisdom. So i was wondering if Anselm would disagree with that argument and say: No, being, life and wisdom that just is God and they’re all the same

Yeah that’s exactly what Anselm does. That’s what’s going on in those parts of the Monologion that we we looked at, and then he just reiterates that over and over again in the Proslogion. Basically anytime Anselm has a chance in one of his treatises to consider two things that we would predicate about God, which are God, he stresses not only that they are God. Like God is the very life by which he lives. God is the very wisdom by which he is wise, etc. But that they are the same thing in some way.

So he’s rejecting any sort of ultimate distinction between them, and this is where there’s a kind of you either got to go this way or go this way in Platonism itself. Because this is a really centrally important thing. If you do believe that there are these unities or forms or whatever you want to call them, are they distinct from each other? Or are they all in one thing? For example Seneca is not a Platonist but Seneca will talk about the Platonic forms and say that they exist in the mind of God as the seminal reasons. That’s one option right?

Another option would be like what you’re talking about with Proclus, where these have to be distinct from each other, and maybe they can even be arranged hierarchically or something like that right. And then you’ve got somebody like Anselm, and I also think Augustine fits in there as well, where these all have to be what God is. And when we’re looking at them, it’s not it’s not impossible to look at things as say Proclus would, but that would be a mistaken point of view from Anselm’s point of view It’s mistaken about God. It’s also mistaken about how supreme justice, supreme life, supreme you know all these things relate to each other.

Question: I think that’s interesting. Dionysius, I think Divine Names 5,1: God is sort of the possessor of these divine names or processions. So it seems like Anselm might say: Well hold on a second, you can’t really possess being, life, and wisdom, yet be somehow beyond it.

Well you’re not even beyond it. You are it. So, the reason you can’t possess is just because you’ve already got (you notice I almost slipped into the “having” language there), you already are it in a superlative way. The most just way that justice can be is is God, so just having justice would be a step down. You know it gets really trippy! And justice is pretty easy for us to think about that way. But now think about three other things: being, simplicity or unity, and eternity.

God is being. God doesn’t have being, because to have being would be less than being being. Boy that’s a hard thing to wrap your head around, for me at least! Unity is even tougher. And eternity, which I’ve mentioned just a little bit ,is even even tougher. But it’s a good thing for us to try to challenge ourselves with.

I think to to go to your question, maybe what we have to talk about here are like fundamental decisions that have to be made within the the grand Platonic tradition about which way you go on on understanding these things.

Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.