Leftow 3: “A Latin Trinity”– Part 2

Last time, we saw the set-up from Leftow. He’s aiming at orthodoxy, which to him means theorizing in the tradition of the great medieval Latin-speaking theologians. He’s spent a good amount of ink defending the consistency of supposing that a person might travel back to the past, so that she, as it were, acts together with (nearby and at the same time as) her earlier self. In his terms, several stages, episodes, or parts of the time-traveller’s life are concurrent. Ever the cautious philosopher, he’s carefull to not commit to time-travel actually being possible. He urges that even if it isn’t, still such thought-experiments may help us to understand how God is. Or rather, understand how God might be. His main aim, don’t forget, is showing the (Latin) Trinity doctrine to be logically possible (i.e. consistent, non-contradictory). Here the second to last installment of my critical review. In the attempt to make his theory accessible, I’m going to leave out or quickly summarize many gruesome details in which only philosophers will be interested.

All these preliminaries accomplished, Leftow plays his hand, showing how he thinks the time-travel thought-experiment is relevant to theology:

There is one Jane [the time-travelling Rockette], but she was present many times over in the chorus line. At one point in our lives, many discrete maximal episodes in her life were co-present. …discrete in that along Jane’s own personal timeline, they did not overlap (they were strictly successive). …Suppose, then, that God’s life has the following peculiar structure: at any point in our lives, three discrete parts of God’s life are present. But this is not because one life’s successive parts appear at once. Rather, it is because God always lives His life in three discrete strands at once, no event of His life occurring in more than one strand and no strand succeeding another. In one strand, God lives the Father’s life, in one the Son’s, and in one the Spirit’s. The events of each strand add up to the life of a Person. The lives of the Persons add up to the life God lives as the three Persons. There is one God, but He is many in the events of His life, as Jane was in the chorus line: being the Son is a bit like being the leftmost Rockette. (312, original emphasis in italics)

Of course, being the Son is also somewhat different – this threefold structure to God’s life is supposed to be eternal and natural, and each Person-constituting “strand” of God’s life is supposed to (in some sense) count as a “complete” life (though for any one of the three, there’s more to God’s life than that). (312)

Leftow also thinks that just as the many stages of Jane’s life are united into stages of Jane by their being causally connected in the right way, so too, analogously, the lives of each of the three Persons count as being the “strands of” the life of God, because of the mysterious but somehow causal inter-trinitarian relations (the Father “generating” Son, and the Father and Son “spirating” the Spirit). (313-4, cf. 321-2)

What are the “Persons” on this theory?

…they are whatever sort [of “person”] God is – the Persons just are God… The Persons have the same trope of deity. Numerically the same substance generates their mental episodes. (314, original emphasis)

One and the same thing, that is, can truly think “I am the Father” and “I am the Son”, though these true thoughts must occur at different “points in His life”. (315) Again, “…facts about events in God’s life are what make Him triune.” (315) Specifically, he wants to say, along with Thomas Aquinas, that the event of God understanding himself just is the event of God’s (or the Father’s?) “filiation of” or “generation of” the Son. So “the Persons are distinguished [from one another] solely by relational properties” which God has solely because of his own eternal acts. “God the Father is God fathering [the Son].” (315) And

“God the Son is God… being fathered. The Persons simply are God as in certain acts – certain events – in His inner life. …none [of these events] are in time. …God just eternally does the acts which constitute His life; these acts render Him triune.” (316, original emphasis in italics)

Leftow wants to show what is wrong with the following argument:

1. the Father = God
2. the Son = God
3. God = God
4. the Father = the Son (from 1-3)
5. the Father generates the Son
6. God generates God (from 1,2,5) (305-6)

The point, of course, is that orthodoxy requires 1-3 and 5, yet 1-3 imply the unorthodox 4, and 4 and 5 seem to imply the unorthodox statement 6. So what to do? Leftow holds that his theory shows how this argument is invalid – that is, why 4 and 6 don’t really follow after all. This is the big payoff.

Passing over a somewhat technical discussion (316-324), it’s supposed to work like this. Leftow believes the above argument to be doubly invalid; that is, 4 doesn’t follow from 1-3, and 6 doesn’t really follow from 4-5. How can that be? By the logic of identity, (Dale says) those inferences are plainly valid. Leftow makes some (I think questionable) points about “temporary identities” and “phased sortals”, but in keeping with the non-specialist aims of this blog, I’ll resist commenting on that part of the paper. I believe (and if I’m wrong, perhaps Brian will be kind enough to correct me), that what he’s really urging is that the above statements need to be carefully analyzed, and when they are, we’ll see that 1, 2 are not identity statements. And so interpreted, the resulting argument is invalid. So if I understand him, his point is that than 1-6 above are properly understood as:

1. God, in and only in strand 1 of his life, lives in a Fatherly way.
2. God, in and only in strand 2 of his life, lives in a Son-like manner.
3. (From the standpoint of any one or more strands of his life,) God just is God (is self-identical).
4. Strand 1 of God’s life (the Fatherly one) just is (=) strand 2 of God’s life (the Son-like one).
5. There’s a timeless “generation” relation between strand 1 of God’s life, and strand 2 of his life.
6. (From the standpoint of any one or more strands of his life,) God generates God.

(Even if we don’t alter 3 or 5, if we simply analyze 1 & 2 as Leftow suggests, the argument is invalid.) In something like this way, then, he suggests we “index Trinitarian truths to appropriate sets of events” [i.e. those sets composing God’s various life-streams] (326), thus showing anti-trinitarian arguments to be invalid. Certainly, Leftow is correct in thinking that the argument just quoted is invalid, as he urges, at steps 4 and 6.

I end this segment of the review with a teaser. The last section of Leftow’s paper is: “The menace of Modalism“. Next time we’ll look at how Leftow tries to slay that beast.
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