Further Thoughts on Possible Worlds
Responding to Misunderstandings of Scotus and Ockham
In my last post, I explored the medieval theologian John Duns Scotus’s concept of “possible worlds” and its relevance in our own time, in which we create “virtual worlds” through social media, online virtual platforms like Meta and Second Life, and even video games such as so-called “massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). The structure of the virtual world determines the roles that are available and the sorts of choices that can be made.
As I explained, Scotus’s concept of possible worlds is based on the distinction between God’s absolute power and ordained power. The misleading names aside, these do not refer to two powers exercised by God, but rather to what God could have done (de potentia absoluta) and what God in fact has done (de potentia ordinata). Although something like this distinction seems necessary to explain key Christian beliefs like God’s freedom in creating (God could have chosen not to create) or the gratuity of salvation, the distinction has often been misunderstood or held in suspicion.
These misunderstandings may in part be due to theologians after Scotus pushing their explorations of the distinction near the breaking point—for example, the fourteenth-century theologian William of Ockham argued that God could have (de potentia absoluta) saved humankind by becoming incarnate as a donkey! Even so, here Ockham is raising important questions about God’s sovereignty and the causes of our salvation, and properly understanding the distinction between God’s absolute and ordained power is necessary for understanding what Ockham is up to. If, on the other hand, these concepts are misunderstood, then the arguments of theologians using the concepts can’t be properly evaluated.
Something like this happened during Ockham’s lifetime. In the year 1326, a commission of theologians condemned a number of propositions proposed by Ockham. These propositions included a handful based on the distinction between God’s absolute and ordained power. For example Ockham claimed that by God’s absolute power, God could accept us as worthy of eternal life even without being transformed by grace. The commission condemned this proposition as “Pelagian,” since it suggests that grace is not necessary for salvation. The commission, however, failed to understand that Ockham’s point was about what God might have done if he had ordered the world differently, not what God could or might do in the world as it exists. Ockham, in orthodox fashion, insisted that in the existing economy of salvation, grace is necessary for salvation. The commission made the mistake of thinking of God’s absolute and ordained powers as two ways God acts in the world. Perhaps surprisingly, this misunderstanding has persisted at least into the twentieth century, although as I noted several weeks ago, there were incentives in place for not carefully studying theologians outside the Thomist tradition.
More recently, the theologian David Bentley Hart has raised an interesting objection to Scotus’s account of possible worlds:
Thus we can say that, for God, there might just as well have been no creation (for creation adds nothing to God, but only participates in him), but assert nevertheless that creation is “necessary” in another, aesthetic sense: it has been from eternity fitting to God’s goodness to be a loving creator, manifesting his trinitarian love in creatures. No statement could be more demeaning of God’s transcendence than the conjecture of Duns Scotus that God could, should he wish it, create a world entirely alien to his own nature (as though God were a limited subject possessed of a limited nature). (The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, 2004)
Hart’s point here is to argue that, although there is a certain contingency in God’s creation, there is nevertheless also a kind of necessity, since creation is the perfect manifestation of God’s goodness. Scotus’s argument that God could have created otherwise, indeed could have created infinite other, possible worlds, for Hart therefore suggests that God could have created a world that less perfectly manifested God’s goodness, that was “alien to his own nature.”
But this is to misunderstand Scotus. Recall that, for Scotus, the infinite possibilities for creation exist in the divine intellect and therefore reflect God’s goodness. Any possible world, had God created it instead of ours, would have perfectly manifested God’s goodness just as ours does. Scotus would likely argue contra Hart that, precisely because God’s goodness is infinite, that goodness could be perfectly manifested in an infinity of possible worlds; indeed, it is Hart who demeans God’s transcendence by presupposing that our finite, created world exhaustively manifests God’s goodness.
This post has been less focused on demonstrating the value of Scotus’s ideas and more on clearing away some of the common misunderstandings of those ideas. I think this is still a helpful exercise, though, because I hope, as the occasion permits, to return to Scotus’s ideas and explore how they might help us address some of our contemporary intellectual and social problems, and so addressing these misunderstandings early on will help in that process.
Of Interest…
In Commonweal, Cathleen Kaveny presents a balanced analysis of the issues of privacy arising from the case of Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill, whose use of the gay hookup app Grindr was exposed by a group of Catholics who purchased and de-anonymized millions of people’s app data. She reaches many of the same conclusions I did here and in the earlier posts linked there. In my view, this is the money quote: Some claim “that priests who break their promises of celibacy don’t have a right to privacy. This claim is distorted, both morally and theologically. Morally, it is putting the cart before the horse. You can only tell who’s breaking those promises by violating that right. Theologically, the Church recognized some right to privacy for sinners by abandoning the requirement for public atonement in the fourth century.” [Emphasis mine]
U.S. President Joe Biden, during his recent trip to Ireland, visited the National Marian Shrine in Knock last Friday. Knock was the site of an apparition in which images of the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, St. John the Evangelist, and the Lamb of God appeared on the wall of the parish church on August 21, 1879. The visit was significant for Biden, who met the priest who gave his son the last rites, who is currently serving at the shrine. However, the visit also makes me wonder, is this the first ever visit of a U.S. president to an apparition site?
Coming Up…
I continue to be on the road, and so I still haven’t had a chance to do the proper preparation for some of the topics I want to write on. For example, I still plan on writing about Pope Francis’s recent remarks on the ethics of artificial intelligence. One reason I have hesitated is I would like to include in the post a review of at least some of the articles in the Journal of Moral Theology’s Spring 2022 issue on artificial intelligence.
For almost two years, I have been part of a committee of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) that has advocated that the Society divest from the fossil fuel industry. This upcoming Tuesday, April 25, the CTSA will be hosting an online town hall where the committee will be proposing our recommendations to members. CTSA members should receive information on how to log in. I bring this up because afterwards I hope to write a post outlining some of the issues the committee has faced over the past two years and what Catholic institutions of all kinds should know about divestment from fossil fuels.
The most likely U.S. President to visit an apparition site (other than Joe Biden) is John F. Kennedy. I found that he visited the the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1962. For more information, see https://historicalmx.org/items/show/177