Abstract
Eriugena claims that we understand creation ex nihilo by mentally subtracting the primordial causes from the actual universe of things and then coming up with nothing, and also by thinking of the primordial causes themselves without mentally adding any particular universe of things. We saw that Eriugena’s conception of the primordial causes as both divinely created and eternally existing in the Word is incompatible with Christian orthodoxy. Hugh works toward an alternative conception that identifies the primordial causes with angels as created causal principles manifesting uncreated divine power, wisdom, and goodness. Hugh can then take advantage of Eriugena’s thought experiment while safeguarding theological orthodoxy. However, externalizing the primordial causes engenders a modal paradox. A primordial causal principle determines that it is necessary for fire to burn wood and not possible for fire to freeze water. Yet as a divinely ordained contingency this principle can be entirely otherwise, so that it is not necessary for fire to burn wood and possible for fire to freeze water. The result is contradiction: it is both necessary and not necessary for fire to burn wood and both possible and not possible for fire to freeze water.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Meg Foster Romig, A Critical Edition of Peter Abelard’s Expositio inHexameron, (PhD Dissertation: University of Southern California, 1981), 45.5–11, available at: www.intratext.com/IXT/LAT0966/_P5.HTM.
The English translation quoted above is found in Peter King, “Metaphysics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, ed. Jeffrey E. Brower and Kevin Guilfoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 116 (footnote 60). Also see King’s discussion on 83–85.
J. Ramsay McCallum, Abelard’s Christian Theology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948), 93.
The “certain necessity” is not logical, since “God does otherwise than He does,” though false, is not a logical contradiction. For example, see Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will and Retractions, trans. Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 3. ii (88–90).
For Hugh’s thorough grounding in Augustine’s thought see Paul Rorem, Hugh of Saint Victor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 10.
The language of a “transfer” of necessity or mutability is borrowed from Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). See especially 164–171.
This problem remains even if a proponent of a crude divine command theory of moral goodness insists that God could have ordained that murder in cold blood or the wanton torture of children be morally good. For discussion of cruder and more sophisticated divine command theories of moral obligation and goodness see Robert Merrihew Adams, “A Modified Divine Command Theory,” in The Virtue of Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 97–122
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 95–113.
Copyright information
© 2014 Peter S. Dillard
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dillard, P.S. (2014). Sacramental Realism. In: Foundation and Restoration in Hugh of St. Victor’s De Sacramentis. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137377463_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137377463_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47900-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-37746-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)