Appendix I

Prolegomena to Any Future Noumenology

David C. Braun

© 2006 David C. Braun

Appendix I

Given the premises of independence of harmony from consciousness, the reality of entities in a transcendent sense, the transcendent applicability of laws of harmony (including causation), and the reality of God, the self and the world of sense, one finds it possible to encounter realities not adhering to ordinary physical laws. Such events might be exhibited as miraculous grounds for asserting a special divine intervention, e.g., in favor of a body of religious doctrine. One may yet merely lack an understanding of what occurs during such events (e.g., some natural process). Thus what would otherwise pass for a demonstration of the alleged divine revelation of some pressing truth is arguably a mistaken interpretation of some other event. I assume that fraud on the would-be believer is not in issue, though fraud is an issue rendering any conclusion that a miracle occurred hazardous.[1]

One cannot eliminate the hypothesis of intervention by supernatural beings other than God in many cases where a miraculous event allegedly occurs.  While the likelihood of (e.g.) diabolical intervention is at least as remote as that of divine intervention, it is not beyond possibility if one concedes the existence of such an agency.  Some have alleged, moreover, that at least some humans have powers not altogether understood, powers not within the ordinary capacities of most persons or of the present writer to bend a recalcitrant world to their wills or to pry into hidden realms of the world (e.g., other minds).  Yet another will suggest that what I might deem the natural order, violated by a miraculous intervention, is in fact not a rule because of the exceptions miraculously carved out of it. In view of these problems, I suggest that those signs alone be counted as miracles (at least for apologetical purposes of showing something to be divine revelation) that require an action possible strictly only for God.  The prime example of such action is an action requiring power to create or annihilate an entity radically.  That with the power to create ex nihilo must be a Se, that with the power to annihilate must be able to sustain the annihilated.

Exemplary of such activity would be any miracle where matter would have to appear ex nihilo or pass in nihil.  (One herein assumes that impartial observers are available, observers without ideological or theological positions to support.)  Supposing at this point that a fitting miracle were duly found and documented, a supposition that might not be idle (one suspects) were one to consult records at the international medical bureau at Lourdes, or records of recent canonization causes or other investigations kept in the Vatican, can one claim to have secured the infallible indication that God has favored (e.g.) a shrine of the Virgin or the Sacrifice of the Mass, which would not be done unless God intended to endorse Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular?  But can one be assured that annihilation of matter has occurred or new matter has been contributed (as by creation), where no evidentiary basis exists for foreclosing the possibility that some other dimension has become the repository for the disappeared matter, or source of matter now contributed?  (This assumes, e.g., a universe with more than one “spatiotemporal” order.)

Granted that there is activity of the noumenon on the noumenon (referring for purposes hereof only to creatures), under what circumstances does it occur?  There must be a receptivity oriented toward reception of activity within the context of a certain order to which activity pertains, functioning alone in relation to order as it is clearly a relational, ordinal thing.  An activity toward which it is not ordered it does not receive.  (Every created entity is in some ordinal relation.)  Receptivity is as fundamental, basic and noncomposite as activity.   Were a pre-receptivity to receive something from another separate, created pre-receptivity to become one receptivity, must not each pre-receptivity be as if it were an already-constituted receptivity or orderability?  Receptivity, not further reducible, is ordinal and ceases to be receptivity to the extent it is no longer in an order in relation to which it receives action.  The void cannot receive activity and orderability or receptivity is impossible except in an ordinal relation.  Receptivity is a reality wholly ordinal in nature so that “to pass out of the order” must involve the being of receptivity.

The order may yet be a complex of subrelations whereof one at first may not be aware.  Thus it is possible for it to have (e.g.) folds or for some external natural process to affect the receptivity in such a way as to reorder it.  Subject to these reservations there is no escape for receptivity from the order wherein it is as receptivity contained.  Such a fold or external process, if natural, is uniform in its operation, not self-contradictory, and must, therefore, extract all receptivity presented for its operation.

Given the foregoing, where the following are met one might be able to find the sign showing power over being.  Any matter “disappearing” must be so contained that other matter must be affected were the process of extraction purely natural.  Where only particular matter is extracted though other matter is exposed therefor, no natural, neutral, external extraction is at hand. Such extraction must be a special affecting either of the being of the receptivity or of inherent harmonicity of being; otherwise it is an ontic annihilation.  The only remaining possibility, that one or a limited complex of whatever is within and for the order (given as bound thereto) might be removed in special fashion, which might otherwise give the appearance of involving an annihilation of matter, to the extent it requires a shift of matter to dimensions inaccessible to available knowledge in illo tempore, may give just cause for invocation of the estoppel of divinity.  A sign of this nature, specifically connected with such as the mystery of transubstantiation or the aforementioned shrine, works a semblance of divine endorsement thereof (as, indeed, of the entire “package” of Catholic Christianity), which God would not allow were it to indicate divine approval of deception of those constituted for knowledge of the truth.[2]  The same principle, protection of the people so privileged from error as to the communicandum, points to protection of the [Catholic] Church from formal dogmatic error.

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[1] Hume had set forth an a priori denial of credibility for any narrative regarding a miracle, based on his rule that the weaker evidence cannot overcome the stronger and his finding that the constant evidence of sensory experience was that laws of nature remain constant, whereas a miracle involves an apparently impossible violation of those laws (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, X, i, §§86-91).  He noted, moreover, that historical miracle narratives did not have the strongest possible confirmatory evidence of the testimony of numerous well-educated, intelligent, sophisticated, impartial scientists noticing events occurring in openly notorious places (id., ii, §92) but rested on the testimony, about obscure events in even more obscure places, of altogether ancient, barbarous, uneducated, unenlightened and gullible (or dishonest) sources received as “law and gospel” by an already worked-up unsophisticated rabble (id., §§93f).  Lastly, Hume noted, the miracles of the several competing religions could not possibly be credible but would cancel out one another’s evidence as the religions they upheld contradicted one another, hardly auspicious for a God Whose truth is supposed to be one harmonious, non-contradictory whole (id., §95).  But Hume’s a priori argument would do violence even to the established rule that one begin with the evidence of the senses, especially given that post-Humean techniques for gathering evidence allow (e.g.) the photographing or filming of actual prodigies, or sufficient quantities of evidence therefor, to make even the most distant almost a direct observer of the fact.  Would one who had seen a miracle (e.g.) have to pronounce the sentence, “I see it but I do not believe it,” were one to follow Hume’s objection rather than even sensory evidence?  One may be more readily forgiven the urge to doubt miracles for which no such evidence were forthcoming, an understandable doubt a Catholic (e.g.) might entertain for “alien” signage (and thereby turn the avowedly anti-Catholic Hume on his head!).   As weaker evidence cannot overcome the stronger, no sign should be admitted in foro philosophiae where no direct evidence, or (in the alternative) otherwise reliable evidence (any chicanery in which might be more easily exposed by an exacting scientific inquiry) were available, preferably investigated by scientists of every shade of belief and doubt (one thinks of Lourdes’ international medical bureau).  But one must still deal with the not inconceivable possibility that a competitor faith not otherwise disqualified from being divinely revealed by reason of dubious positions, such as polytheism (opposed to the infinity of God), pantheism (contrary to the proof for God), subsumption of exclusivist contrary creeds, or denial of the reality of the sensed world, could be supported by the testimony of (e.g.) a sign, of credibility and publicity equal to those for Catholicism (admittedly, so far as is known, only hypothetical, not an auspicious mark for the divinity of a sign to counter Catholicism if God would have all come to knowledge of the truth), involving the apparent annihilation or creation of an entity.  The Pauline or Augustinian answer (cf. I Cor. X: 20, II Cor. XI: 14; De civitate Dei, lib. XXII, cap. 10) that such signs would be but the work of Satan seems to be the last refuge in such a case, though it appears prima facie to subvert the argument for Catholicism’s divinity until one recalls that its (admittedly not hypothetical) sign — as also any other — is incomplete without reliance on God to indicate either actively or by nonaction (e.g., not sending reliably evidenced public countersigns) or by reference to the content of the apparently endorsed theological position which revelation be God’s, it being clear that God would protect directees of divine revelation from a falsehood purporting to be supported by signs of the apparent annihilation or creation of matter where no evidence of nondivine origin were patent and would not endorse (especially in response to entreaty) what was in fact not divine truth but a falsehood masquerading as the truth.  A loving God intending to communicate transcendent truth would indeed disable any other entity from working a sign that would counterfeit a true miracle, to avoid a “Gresham’s Law” of bad miracles’ driving out good as bad money does good.

[2] For God’s not giving a message regarding the falsity of the doctrine (e.g., of transubstantiation) were it false, and regarding the specific sign’s origin as other-than-divine would give at least passive endorsement to what would be blasphemous idolatry, were transubstantiation the false doctrine it would have to be if Islam, Talmudic Judaism, or most forms of Protestantism were right, or were Catholic orders invalid, as would have to be the case if the Baptist doctrine regarding immersion of adults as the only true baptism or the doctrine of some Orthodox theologians that mysteries celebrated outside the Orthodox Church are invalid were right.  That an alleged prophecy after the time of Christ (viz., that of Muhammad) put it that Christ’s prophetic religion was corrupted by His disciples after He took leave of them, and whatever it teaches (e.g., about the Eucharist) must therefore be foreclosed as not-of-God is no answer, as it makes God an inefficient communicator.  The prophetic texts of Judaism speak hardly at all against Christianity’s claims, and there exists no message within Protestantism (excepting those latter-day claimants to original revelation who cannot at all show how the God Who promised to abide by His Church lest the gates of death prevail against it broke faith for fifteen, or eighteen, or nineteen centuries until the coming of the appropriate revelation) that purports to be infallible beyond the bare text of the New Testament itself, which (Catholic and Orthodox alike insist) speaks in favor of the doctrine so confirmed.  (Note that the crux of many an alleged aporia regarding revelation, tradition or definitions of dogma is a matter of interpretation of the deposit of revelation and of accurate discernment of whether a given proclamation is in fact an infallible declaration of dogma.)  The Orthodox (or some of them) regard only ecumenical councils as infallible, and count as ecumenical only the first seven (of the twenty-one councils usually taken by Catholics as ecumenical), none of which councils endorsed either the neo-Donatist theology of sacramental efficacy the aforesaid theologians held or the doctrine of metousiwsiV (more generally accepted within the Orthodox churches, as itself approved by the local synods of Jassy and Bethlehem and as entirely consistent with the texts of the Divine Liturgy).  Those theologians could therefore hardly serve as God’s unfailing warning against one’s being “traduced by popish persons” (to quote the infelicitous phrase of the Epistle Dedicatory at the head of the Anglican Authorized Version), if the Catholic Church had not the very Body of Christ on its altars.  If the sign be not worked in honor of (e.g.) the Host, and it be of God, why would it be worked — to reward faith?  But why should God reward misplaced faith?  Far from arguing post hoc, ergo propter hoc, I say only that God’s allowing the sign without comment appears to endorse Catholicism insofar as the sign indicates that the finger of God is at work here.  Nor do I arrogate to myself a right to prescribe rules to God. God has evidently intended for knowledge of the truth those given cognitive faculties.  A sign implying the exercise of divine power where that power is not involved is false.  Where that sign’s falsity cannot be demonstrated by natural means, God alone could declare it false.  God’s withholding such a warning is inconsistent with intending us to know the truth.  The identification of circumstances where God would have a need to speak to avoid creating a falsehood for those intended to have knowledge of the truth counters the charge that this argument involves a mere “fallacy” of argumentum ad ignorantiam as the argument is not from the lack of evidence but from the need to speak to avoid creating the false impression otherwise where the matter is communicated to those intended for knowledge of the truth.  Notice that God’s intending directees of the signs to know the truth sets the basis for taking the Church to be protected from formal doctrinal error in formal definitions of the deposit of revelation as to faith and morals, a basis consonant with the promise of the above-cited synoptic text.  A like argument for discerning which councils are truly ecumenical weighs in favor of some central authority (the Pope, as successor of St. Peter).  Note further that the Council of Ephesus, in its formal sentence against Nestorius, deemed its own act bound by the prior letter of “blessed Celestine, bishop of the Church of the Romans” (Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, IV, coll. 1211f).  That pronouncement makes no sense in the context of the Orthodox theory that ecumenical councils are supreme over all including the Pope, but makes perfect sense in the context of the Catholic theory of papal supremacy, as echoed in the ancient outcry that “Peter has spoken through” a Pope whose pronouncement the council received as authentic dogma.  Hardouin, Conciliorum Collectio Regia Maxima, II, 305E (St. Leo I); III, 1422E seq. (St. Agatho).  Contrast St. Leo II, epp. (de anathemate contra Honorium), in C. Kirch, Enchiridion fontium historiae ecclesiasticae, 1085 seq.