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Natural Justice
Animals act in their own self-interest. Every tree and bush, every cat and bird and ant works to maximize itself, without any consideration for others. These creatures compete endlessly, sometimes by themselves, and sometimes in cooperation with others of their species or their parasites. The idea of an animal deliberately and consciously favoring a different animal would be nonsensical. Man is not necessarily any better, of course. As Hobbes put it, the natural state of mankind without society is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In a state of nature, man is merely another animal.
Natural justice is thus very easy to define: might makes right. This is hardly new or surprising, but it bears mentioning because a good society requires people to not act that way. And so it is troubling to me when people talk of imitating nature. “Natural” becomes synonymous with “good.” In the ancient world, people were more direct: they worshipped nature outright.
The problem with worshipping nature is that we also come to make what happens in nature into something that people ought to emulate. For example, if one worships nature and seeks to imitate it, then what arguments are there for altruism or kindness? What arguments are there for acting outside of our own natures, to choose, for example, to dampen our anger or encourage our empathy for others? If “natural” is good, then acting against our nature must be bad. More than that: it is against nature not to accept “might makes right.”
A key symbol of nature is the tree. Trees are the largest living things a normal person ever sees, and they reflect (or even lead) the seasons and the natural cycles. Trees are about natural life, from generation and growth to renewal. Trees (and poles made from trees) were also broadly worshipped in their own right in the ancient world, as representative of a deity, Asherah.
All of this is my way of getting to an answer to a question that biblical scholars have long wrestled with. And until yesterday, I did not have an answer that made sense to me. Here is the text that prompts the question:
The Torah gives us the following verses, in this specific order:
In all the communities which the LORD, your God, is giving you, you shall appoint judges and officials throughout your tribes to administer righteous justice for the people. You must not distort justice: you shall not show partiality; you shall not take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes even of the wise and twists the words even of the just. Justice, justice alone shall you pursue, so that you may live and possess the land the LORD, your God, is giving you. You shall not plant an asherah or any kind of tree next to the altar of the LORD, your God, which you will build.
The question, of course, is why is a tree or an Asherah antithetical to justice and impartiality? What do these verses have to connect them in any way?
The answer is given above: Justice needs to be impartial and blind. A judge cannot decide the winner of a case by choosing whichever party paid the bigger bribe. Yet a natural way to act would be in naked self-interest. If we worship nature, then we cannot pursue justice. If we put a tree in the place where we worship G-d, then we are accepting that nature is a deity, and acting naturally is emulating the divine.
The Torah is making a very important point, as relevant now as it was then: civilization and a just society must act in contrast against, not in consonance with, nature. If we worship nature, then we will seek to emulate it. And if we do that, then we will seek our natural self-interest, solicit bribes, blinding ourselves to what is good and right. A society that worships trees cannot be just.
Published in General
I hope we are not! Because on my page, associating G-d with simplicity is so far beyond heresy that it achieves pure silliness.
If God is the absence of all that is composite, and men are composite, and Jesus is a man, and Jesus is God, God is composite. He is not the Greek nous, pure mind.
Oh, he says it and then goes right ahead and does it!
In commenting on his Summa Theologica, he pronounced it void wherever it contradicted scripture. He would better have declared it void wherever it is not clearly supported in scripture, but obviously the implication is that he did not consider the work divinely inspired. The stories were flying about early that he was up late some nights conversing with Peter and Paul in his cell, and many of his admirers have insisted from his death and beatification to this day that the ST is fundamental doctrine and many tip over into saying the ST ranks with the Apostolic teaching.
I love the ST because it is an attempt to express a systematic theology, it may still be the most ambitious in scope, but my love of systematic theology comes from my love of scripture. They make the connections I might have missed or the interpretation that fits the verse better than mine. And, inevitably, some of each that are questionable. But authority? Authority belongs to scripture and the consensus, where there is one, of the early church fathers.
I like the Eastern Orthodox because they have gone without the kind of systematic theology we in the West seem to generate by the score, and are now trying to catch up. I find Pomazansky’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology a far more humble and credible effort than what I find in the West.
When I come to God, it is about Jesus, and Him crucified for me. And you. And everyone else. The Prime Mover stuff is for recess debates after lunch.
If you don’t like all the verbiage, another way to think of the doctrine of Divine Simplicity is this: God is the ultimate explanation for anything and everything; there are no explanations behind God that explain God, for the reason that those explanations would then be God.
So if God were not simple, i.e. He were composite, then there would arise the question of what is the explanation for the composition of God. What is the source of His parts and what explains their union in God? This implies an explanation behind God for God. Since this is impossible – because God is the is the ultimate explanation – God cannot be composite.
Whether one agrees with his argument or not, there is nothing particularly mysterious about it. God Himself is certainly mysterious, but arguments with respect to Him don’t have to be.
That’s fine. Thomas Aquinas would agree with you. But that doesn’t mean that those recess debates are a waste of time.
Careful now, you are doing theology. Isn’t that forbidden? Or can we pursue this line of argument and see where it leads?
That’s a fine argument against divine simplicity. (Not that its proponents have never thought of the argument. I’m sure they have. I don’t know much about how they responded.)
What are you talking about? Does what?
I would propose this answer:
Was God a man before the birth of Jesus Christ? No, He was not. God in His Nature is Pure Spirit. Yet in the Incarnation He “condescended” to become a man for our sake. He took on material form and all that entails – birth, suffering and ultimately death and yes, composition. Material beings are necessarily composite beings. For that reason we can always ask of a man, or any composite being: Where did you come from? What is the source of your being, since a composite being cannot be the cause of its own composition? We can ask that question of the man Jesus Christ, and Scripture provides us an answer: Jesus Christ was born of Mary and the Holy Spirit.
Can we ask that question of God in his Ultimate Nature? Where did you come from God? What is the source of your Being? If our answer is that the question makes no sense because there is no explanation behind God, then God cannot be a composite being in His Ultimate Nature. (He may have taken on composition as a gift to us, but that is far different than saying that God is composite in his fundamental Nature).
If, on the other hand, we accept that God is composite in His Ultimate Nature, then the question deserves an answer: What cause is responsible for the composition in God?
Remember that female spiders and octopi often sacrifice themselves when they give birth.
Perpetuating their DNA. Animals invest in their young.
Indeed. Jesus was super unnatural dying for people who didn’t have any of his DNA. That’s what I like about the guy.
Too funny. Yes, buy the guy a beer ! :)
I think he was more into wine but I imagine he wasn’t picky.
Follow Him, and in the eschaton I can almost guaranty that He’ll let you get him a beer.