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Non Posse Peccare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Antonie Van Den Beld
Antonie Van Den Beld
Affiliation:
University of UtrechtThe Netherlands
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In a Dutch weekly it was recently stated that man's moral powers are overestimated in the christian faith. The proponent of this belief, the Dutch–American philologist and philosopher Staal seems to me to be closer to the truth of this matter than his distinguished German colleague Nietzsche. The latter used to fascinate me as a young student with his devastating criticisms of christian culture and the christian view of life. According to Nietzsche, the christian religion has not too high, but rather too low a view of mankind: it wanted man to be ugly and evil; in this way it has succeeded in making man so. The insignificance, ugliness and sinfulness of man is the outcome of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Someone who is being told again and again how insignificant, bad and sinful he is, will end up believing it and behave accordingly. A not implausible theory, I thought at that time. However, as I see the matter now, I would support Staal rather than Nietzsche (supposing that my choice would be restricted to them). The christian faith has an optimistic view of man. Does it overestimate him? Does it attribute imaginary moral powers to him? Does it demand the morally impossible? A positive answer to these questions is not unreasonable if one does not want to go beyond a secular, evolutionist or sociobiological under-standing of man and does not take into consideration the affirmations of the Church.

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Articles
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Religious Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , December 1989 , pp. 521 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

page 521 note 1 De Groene Amsterdammer, 6, 01. 1988, p. 19.

page 521 note 2 Cf.: ‘Es ist der Kunstgriff der Religion und jener Metaphysiker, welche den Menschen als böse und sündhaft von Natur wollen, ihm die Natur zu verdächtigen und so ihn selber schlecht zu machen: denn so lernt er sich als schlecht empfinden, da er das Kleid der Natur nicht ausziehen kann.’ And: ‘Die Sünde, nochmals gesagt, diese Selbstschändungs-Form des Menschen par excellence, ist erfunden, um Wissenschaft, um Cultur, um jede Erhöhung und Vornehmheit des Menschen unmöglich zu machen…’ The quotations (with original emphases) are from: ‘Menschliches, Allzumenschliches’ and: ‘Der Antichrist’, here cited from: Nietzsche, Friedrich, Sämtliche Werke, kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, edited by Colli, G. and Montinari, M. (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1980), vol. 2, p. 136, vol. 6, p. 229.Google Scholar

page 521 note 3 In this article I follow the traditional practice, in using the word ‘man’ and the masculine pronoun to refer indifferently to men and women. (The Dutch ‘mens’, like the German ‘Mensch’, is gender neutral.)

page 523 note 1 ‘Nondum considerasti, quanti ponderis sit peccatum’. Canterbury, Anselm von, Cur deus homo / Warum Gott Mensch Geworden, lateinisch und deutsch, besorgt und übersetzt von Franciscus Salesius Schmitt (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970), p. 74.Google Scholar

page 523 note 2 The distinctions go back via Hugh of St Victor and Peter Lombard to Augustine, see Kutsch, E., ‘Das posse non peccare und verwandte Formulierungen als Aussagen biblischer Theologie’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, LXXXIV (1987), pp. 268–269.Google Scholar For Augustine, see, among others, Solignac, A., ‘La condition’ de l'homme pécheur d'après saint Augustin’, Nouvelle Revue Théologique, LXXVIII (1956), pp. 359–387.Google Scholar

page 524 note 1 Cf. Warnock, G. J., The Object of Morality (London: Methuen, 1971), p. 17.Google Scholar

page 524 note 2 The Dutch original reads as follows:

Ach! waren alle Menschen wijs,

En wilden daer bij wel:

De Aerd waer haer een Paradijs,

Nu isse meest een Hel.

page 524 note 3 Warnock, , The Object of Morality.Google Scholar

page 524 note 4 Since Luther this function of the moral law has been referred to in Lutheran theology as ‘primus usus legis’. For Calvin it was the ‘secundus usus legis’. See Ebeling, G., ‘Zur Lehre vom triplex usus legis in der reformatorischen Theologie’, Wort und Glaube (Tübingen: Mohr, 1960), pp. 50–68.Google Scholar

page 525 note 1 Heidelberg Catechism, Sunday 2, answer 5 (see the edition of the H.C. in: The Constitution of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Part I, Book of Confessions (New York, 2nd ed. 1970), 4.005).

page 525 note 2 Their answer to question 6: ‘Did God create man evil and perverse like this?’ is: ‘No. On the contrary, God created man good and in his image’, Ibid. p. 4.006.

page 526 note 1 Gauthier, D., Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986).Google Scholar

page 526 note 2 Gauthier attempted to remedy this weakness by interpreting rationality not as individual utility-maximization at the level of particular choices, but as utility-maximization at the level of dispositions to choose. In this way, he can distinguish between a ‘straightforward maximizer’ (SM) who is disposed to make maximizing choices, and a ‘constrained maximizer’ (CM) who is disposed to choose in such a way that he ‘can expect his choices to yield no less utility than the choices he would make were he to hold any alternative disposition’. Unlike the SM, the CM may expect to be included in co-operative arrangements and so to maximize his utility, Ibid. pp. 182–183. However, I think that Gauthier has failed in his attempt. Constraint on choices can only be rational if the expected outcome of the constraint is a maximizing of utility. Therefore, as long as it remains possible to expect that a CM's constrained choice results in less than maximum utility in the long run, constraint can not always be considered to be the rational choice. So constraint can not be stable over time.

page 527 note 1 See, e.g. Smart, J. J. C., in Utilitarianism, For and Against (Smart and Bernard Williams) (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 52–54.Google Scholar

page 527 note 2 See for the concept of freedom (or liberty) of indifference, Kenny, A., Will, Freedom and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), chap. 7.Google Scholar

page 528 note 1 See, for a fairly recent example, Dennett, D. C., Elbow Room. The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), chaps 6 and 7.Google Scholar

page 528 note 2 Here, I follow a suggestion made by Campbell, C. A. in his ‘Is “Free Will” a Pseudo-Problem?’, Mind LX (1951), pp. 441–465.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 529 note 1 See, e.g. Schlossberger, E., ‘Why Are We Responsible for Our Emotions?’, Mind XCV (1986), pp. 37–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 529 note 2 There is a beautiful passage in Proust's ‘Un amour de Swann’, in which this point is made. The narrator points out that passion can be influenced in mature age by the person who is–finally–seized by it. When youth has been left behind, one is no more just a helpless victim of passion: ‘…l'amour peut naître – l'amour le plus physique – sans qu'il y ait eu, à sa base, un désir préalable. A cette époque de la vie, on a déjà été atteint plusieurs fois par l'amour; il n'évolue plus seul suivant ses propres lois inconnues et fatales, devant notre coeur étonné et passif. Nous venons à son aide, nous le faussons par la mémoire, par la suggestion. En reconnaissant un de ses symptômes, nous nous rappelons, nous faisons renaître les autres.’ Proust, Marcel, A la recherche du temps perdu, 1, Du côté de chez Swann (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 233.Google Scholar

page 529 note 3 For a more complete presentation of the free will defence, see Plantinga, A., God, Freedom and Evil (London: Allen and Unwin, 1975), pp. 7–64.Google Scholar

page 530 note 1 The relevant passage from article XVI of the third and fourth chapter of the Canons of Dordrecht reads as follows (in my own translation): (‘But as man by his fall did not stop being a human being gifted with both reason and will…) thus this divine grace of regeneration does not work in men as in sticks and stones and does not destroy the will and its properties, nor does it force the will in spite of itself.’

page 530 note 2 In making the distinction between manipulative, contractual and love relationships, I am following V. Brümmer and others, see Brümmer, V., ‘Moral sensitivity and the free will defence’, Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religions-philosophie 29 (1987), pp. 93–97Google Scholar, and the literature mentioned there.

page 530 note 3 ‘Love (and not: friendly feeling, friendship and friend) is the only English word that is robust and versatile enough to cover philein and philia (and philos)’, Vlastos, G., ‘The Individual as Object of Love’, Philosophy through its Past (ed. Honderich, T.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 18.Google Scholar In a note, Vlastos adds the following to the quoted passage: ‘I say that “love” covers these Greek terms, bearing in mind that its connotation is considerably wider, since it does also the work of eran, which overlaps with philein, but differs from the latter in three respects: (i) eran is more intense, more passionate…; (ii) eran is more heavily weighted on the side of desire than of affection…; eran is more closely tied to the sexual drive…’

page 531 note 1 St. Augustine's Confessions. With an English Translation by Watts, William, vol. 11, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, Heinemann, 1970), pp. 146–147.Google Scholar

page 532 note 1 A striking example of passionate man is Swann in Proust's ‘Un amour de Swann’ (see note 19). Take, for example, the following passage in which the beloved (Odette) is described as intoxicating and the loving ‘victim’ as totally bemused: ‘…l'idée qu'elle était cependat restée là, près du piano, dans le moment actuel, prête à être embrassée et possédée, l'idée de sa materialité et de sa vie venait l'enivrer avec une telle force que, l'oeil egaré, les mâchoires tendues comme pour dévorer, il se précipitait sur cette vierge de Botticelli et se mettait à lui pincer les joues.’ Ibid., p. 280.

page 532 note 2 Translated from: Meertens, P. J., ‘Ruusbroec, die chierheyt der gheestelicker brulocht’, in Kerkelijke klassieken (ed. Haantjes, J. and van der Hoeven, A.) (Wageningen: Veenman, 1949), p. 143.Google Scholar

page 532 note 3 See Jantzen, Grace M., ‘Ethics and mysticism: friends or foes?’ Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift XXXIX (1985), pp. 314–326, especially pp. 321–323.Google Scholar

page 533 note 1 Elsewhere, I have argued against this view, see my ’Morele toerekenbaarheid’, Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte LXXV (1983), pp. 204–206.

page 535 note 1 ‘For the first free-will, which was given to man when he was created upright, was able not to sin, but was also able to sin. But this last free-will will be more powerful in that it will not be able to sin, and this also by the gift of God, not by the power of its own nature. It is one thing to be God, another to partake of God. God by nature cannot sin, while he who partakes of God receives from him the inability to sin.’ Augustine, Saint, The City of God against the Pagans. With an English Translation by Green, William M.. The Loeb Classical Library, vol. VII (London, Cambridge: Heinemann, Harvard University Press 1972), p. 377.Google Scholar For the pros and cons of the predication of logically necessary goodness to God, see Morris, Th. V., The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press 1986), pp. 108–136.Google Scholar