Looking over my blog posts, I seem to have been on a bit of a philosophy-of-religion binge recently, so why not top it off with a post on Christology? I'm no Christologist. Indeed, as a lapsed Catholic, I don't really have a horse in this race. Yet I think that an examination of certain Christological theories may bear fruit in the form of refinements to our understanding of categories such as "mind", "psychological faculty", and "consciousness". In this essay, I hope to take a step in that direction.
Christian theology has traditionally regarded Christ as the "God-man" (Theandros), as an entity who unites divinity and humanity. In 451, the Council of Chalcedon declared that, in Christ, human nature and divine nature are united in a single "person" (hypostasis). Scholars frequently stress that the term "person" (Greek hypostasis, Latin persona) meant something different to early and medieval Christian writers than it means to us (cf. Olson and Hall 2002, 30). In particular, for early Christian writers, "person" did not mean "center of consciousness".
Thus, it's not a contradiction in terms to speak of a Chalcedonian person having multiple centers of consciousness. But is there any reason to conclude that Christ might actually have multiple centers of consciousness? Near the end of The Metaphysics of the Incarnation (2002), Richard Cross gives an argument for this conclusion. His argument is interesting in at least two ways. First, it reflects rather modern, critical sensibilities, since it relies on the claim that (if the gospel accounts are accurate) Christ's human mind seems to have been mistaken about some things.[1] Second, despite its modernity, it occurs within Cross's broader attempt to formulate a Christology that's consistent with Chalcedon. In this essay, I examine and critique Cross's argument.
1) What is a Chalcedonian person?
Medieval Latin theologians often used the terms suppositum and hypostasis interchangeably.[2] A suppositum is "any ultimate ontological subject of properties" (Cross 2002, 5). This seems to capture the meaning of hypostasis fairly well. A hypostasis is literally something standing (stasis) under (hypo), i.e. something standing under properties. Thus, a Chalcedonian person is an ultimate property-bearer.[3] Thus, Chalcedon claims that Christ's human and divine natures are united in a single property-bearer. This is the basis for the traditional practice of the "transfer of expressions" (communicatio idiomatum), the application of both divine descriptions (e.g. "creator of the universe") and human descriptions (e.g. "son of Mary"), indifferently, to the single person of Christ (cf. Cross 2002, 183).
Given that a person is an ultimate property-bearer, what does it mean to say that X and Y are united in a single person? At first, the answer might seem obvious: it means that X and Y are united in a single entity S, such that all of X's properties and all of Y's properties belong to S. However, that can't be right. If that were right, then two things could almost never be united in a single person: for example, my eyeball wouldn't be united with the rest of me in a single person, because my eyeball has the property of being a sphere, whereas I as a whole do not have the property of being a sphere. For X and Y to be united in a single person, it presumably isn't necessary that that person possess all of X's properties and all of Y's properties.
Here's my best attempt to capture what it means for X and Y to be united in a single person: X and Y are united in such a way that it's metaphysically appropriate to speak of a single property-bearer composed of X and Y. More straightforwardly: X and Y are united in a single person if and only if X and Y can be truly said to constitute a single object. What conditions must be met for X and Y to constitute a single object? For my purposes, I need not answer that question. The important point is this: according to Chalcedon, Christ's human and divine natures are united in such a way that Christ counts as a single object.
Now, given this definition, it's not obvious that a person can't have multiple centers of consciousness. The claim that X and Y are united in a single person is a metaphysical claim, not a psychological one. Is there any reason why two centers of consciousness can't unite in such a way that it's metaphysically appropriate to speak of a single object? Perhaps there is a reason, but I'm not aware of it. To really know whether there's a reason, we would probably have to know a lot more about the nature of consciousness (and the metaphysics of objects) than we currently do.
2) A "homunculus metaphor" for consciousness
But what can we say about consciousness? In answering that question, we must take a brief detour.
In her lecture What Sort of Human Nature?, Marilyn McCord Adams flatly asserts that, according to the Third Council of Constantinople, "in Christ there are two centers of consciousness" (1999, 8). However, as far as I can tell, the Third Council of Constantinople says nothing about two "centers of consciousness".
What might have led Adams to conclude that Christ has two centers of consciousness? This is pure speculation on my part, but it might have to do with the traditional claim—upheld by the Third Council of Constantinople—that Christ has two minds and two wills: a divine mind and will, and a human mind and will. From the claim that Christ has two "minds", one might conclude that Christ has two centers of consciousness. This would be a mistake.
Nowadays, we often use the term "mind" to refer to a center of consciousness. However, that wasn't always the term's primary meaning. For one thing, as Cross (2002, 322) notes, "the medievals did not think so explicitly of centres of consciousness anyway". Also, and more importantly, for many ancient and medieval writers, "mind" (Greek nous, translated into Latin as mens and intellectus) referred to a specific psychological faculty, the faculty of reason or intellect. Now, my faculty of reason isn't a center of consciousness any more than my faculty of sense-perception is. Rather, I have a single center of consciousness that experiences both my reasoning and my sense-perceptions.
The point I'm trying to get at here is that consciousness shouldn't be identified with psychological faculties or with psychological activities per se. It's not as though each psychological faculty (reason, sense-perception, imagination, etc.) has its own center of consciousness. Rather, a person has various psychological faculties, and those faculties are united in such a way that their activities are experienced by a single center of consciousness.
We might draw a comparison between the model of consciousness that I'm proposing here and the much-ridiculed "homunculus fallacy". The homunculus fallacy is the fallacy of thinking of my consciousness as a little man (a homunculus) who observes my psychological activity. The problem with thinking of my consciousness in this way is obvious: it leads to an infinite regress. If my consciousness is a literal observer of my psychological activity, then it must have its own consciousness!
I certainly don't want to commit the homunculus fallacy. However, I think there's something right about the metaphor of consciousness as an observer, as long as we remember that it's a metaphor. An organism has various psychological faculties, and those faculties are united in such a way that their activity is experienced by a single "observer". A star-nosed mole has a sense of smell but not a sense of sight. In contrast, in a dog, the senses of smell and sight are united in such a way that a single consciousness "observes" the activity of both senses.
3) Cross's argument
We're now in a position to examine Cross's argument. Cross (2002, 315) writes,
Jesus in the Gospels is not just agnostic about certain things: he is (or at least may be) actively mistaken. Agnosticism in one of Christ's minds might be wholly compatible with knowledge in the other mind; agnosticism is after all just a privation. But being mistaken does not seem to be compatible with knowledge. So Christ needs not only to have a human consciousness that is communicable to the second person of the Trinity, he needs to have a human consciousness of which some features are not communicable to the second person of the Trinity.
In short, Christ needs two centers of consciousness: one which experiences the omniscient knowledge in his divine mind, and another which experiences the mistaken beliefs in his human mind.
Unlike Cross, I don't think that the existence of mistaken beliefs in Christ's human mind means that Christ must have two centers of consciousness. Cross is correct when he says that mistaken beliefs are incompatible with omniscience. They are incompatible in the following sense: if a mind is is omniscient, then it can't contain any mistaken beliefs. Since Christ's divine mind is omniscient, it can't contain any mistaken beliefs. However, we must remember the distinction between consciousness and psychological faculties. My reason and my sense of vision are distinct psychological faculties, yet I have a single center of consciousness that experiences both my reasoning and my visual experiences. Likewise, I see no reason why Christ can't have a single center of consciousness that experiences both the omniscient knowledge in his divine mind and the mistaken beliefs in his human mind.
How might one reply to this objection? I can think of one possible reply. If Christ has a single center of consciousness, and this center of consciousness is aware of his omniscient divine knowledge, then why does he express his mistaken human beliefs? For example, why does he say that "this generation" (his own generation, presumably) won't pass away before the end-times arrive (Matthew 24:34)? Shouldn't Christ's conscious access to his divine knowledge prevent him from making mistaken statements? (This probably isn't how Cross himself would reply to my objection: Cross clearly thinks that Christ's human nature could have its own separate agency even if Christ had only one center of consciousness [cf. Cross 2002, 219].)
This reply assumes that an agent's statements are controlled by his center of consciousness. This assumption is false. An agent's statements are controlled by his psychological processes, particularly his volitions. Now, if Christ's human mind contains mistaken beliefs, then his human volitions—and, thus, his human statements—should reflect those mistaken beliefs. This is completely consistent with the hypothesis that Christ has a single center of consciousness that experiences both his divine omniscience and his human mind's mistaken beliefs and volitions. Again, recall the "homunculus metaphor" from section 2: we can think of Christ's consciousness—metaphorically!—as a homunculus observing both (a) the omniscient activity going on in Christ's divine mind and (b) the mistaken activity that occurs in Christ's human mind and causes him to make inaccurate statements.
4) Questions
As far as I can tell, the most contentious parts of this essay—apart from the suggestion that Christ had mistaken beliefs—are probably my "homunculus metaphor" and my claim that an agent's volitions as opposed to his center of consciousness controls his statements. So, am I right about these things? Or am I (as is all too possible) missing something?
References:
Adams, Marilyn McCord, 1999. What Sort of Human Nature?: Medieval Philosophy and the Systematics of Christology. Milwaukee: Marquette UP.
Cross, Richard, 2002. The Metaphysics of the Incarnation. NY: Oxford UP.
Olson, Roger E., and Christoper Alan Hall, 2002. The Trinity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
[1] Many medieval theologians rejected the notion that Christ's human mind could have been mistaken; they believed that God had given Christ's soul omniscient knowledge. See Adams 1999, 32-35, 43, 53-57, 78-85.
[2] See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3.2.3
[3] Of course, in the case of Christ, the ultimate property-bearer includes rationality among its properties. Medieval Latin theologians distinguished between persons (personae) and mere supposita, where a person is a suppositum with the property of rationality. More precisely, they followed Boethius's definition of a person as "an individual substance of a rational nature" (naturalis rationalis individua substantia). But all this is tangential. Throughout this essay, I'll simply define a person as an ultimate property-bearer.
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