Two options on compositionalist personal ontology

To begin with, let me say a word about the metaphysical ‘picture’ of the incarnation with which I am working in this article. It is a version of compositionalism, construed along the lines of classical Christology, that is, the two-natures doctrine defined by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. On this view, Christ is said to be composed of several concrete ‘parts’: his divine nature and the human nature he assumes, which, in turn, is typically thought to include his human body and soul or mind, rightly configured. This is not the only live option in the metaphysics of the incarnation. One could, for example, say that Christ’s human nature is a property acquired by God the Son in order to become incarnate. But space does not permit me to run a version of the dead limb argument on that basis as well. I invite those sympathetic to such a view to elaborate their own accounts of how Christ’s human nature on Holy Saturday remains hypostatically united to God the Son.Footnote ¹⁰

Now, as I have just indicated, according to compositionalists who are substance dualists when it comes to human personal ontology, Christ is composed of three ‘parts’: (1) a divine nature, plus a human nature composed of (2) a human body and (3) a human soul, rightly configured. However, one could be a compositionalist who denies that human persons normally have a separable substantial soul. By ‘separable substantial soul’ I mean an essentially immaterial created substance that is the primary bearer of personal identity across time. The various components of this definition may be broken down as follows: something is immaterial if it is not composed of matter (e.g., spirits, abstract objects); to be created is to have been brought into existence by God (including, e.g., humans, planets, stars and the cosmos taken as a whole); substances are property bearers that may exist independently of other such property bearers (e.g., organisms like lions, human persons), and such independently existing substances are often called fundamental substances or supposits. Separable substantial souls are thus intimately connected with the human body whose souls they are, and yet are in principle separable from that body (e.g., upon somatic death).Footnote ¹¹

So, a compositionalist about Christology who denies that human persons have a separable substantial soul also denies that humans have an immaterial substance as a metaphysically constituent ‘part’.Footnote ¹² (Importantly, such a claim does not preclude the belief that humans have minds that are distinct from their bodies in some important sense. For instance, it could be that human minds are irreducible properties of properly functioning human beings.) Such theologians would hold to a two-part compositional picture of the incarnation, comprising (1) the divine nature and a human nature comprised of (2) a human body only, which has a human mind as a property – and thus not as a concrete part. Although properties may be instantiated in concrete things (such as when blueness is instantiated in the shirt), they are not themselves concrete things but rather abstract objects.

There are a range of different views about personal ontology that are consistent with this materialist perspective on the composition of human beings. But we need not go into such details here. For, to repeat: what we are after is a way of thinking about human personal ontology that maximises the number of metaphysical options on the table, as it were, rather than reducing those options or specifying which is the most plausible.Footnote ¹³ Taking up where the Lombard left off, our task is to give an account of compositional Christology that can motivate the claim that the various metaphysical ‘parts’ of Christ still constituted one hypostatic theanthropic person, that is, the one God-human whose human nature remained personally united to his divine nature without interruption or dissolution between the bodily death of Christ on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday.

Thus, for present purposes, let us divide Christological compositionalists into two broad groups that track with the provisos just given. We shall call them compositionalist-dualists and compositionalist-materialists, respectively.

Two dead limb stories

The next step is to put these two accounts to the test as explanations of how Christ may remain hypostatically united to his human nature during Holy Saturday when his human body is dead in the tomb. I shall present these two accounts in the form of two metaphysical just-so stories, which will help the reader to get a conceptual grip on the views under scrutiny. Then we will be in a position to consider the relative merits of these two ways of making sense of what I shall dub the dead limb argument for the continuity of the incarnation between Christ’s somatic death and resurrection, or the dead limb argument for short.

Here is the first story:

At the moment of his death on the cross, Christ’s human body ceases to function; it becomes a corpse. At that very moment, his human soul is decoupled from his human body and passes from this world to the next. Thereafter from the moment of his somatic death to the moment of bodily resurrection on Easter Sunday morning, Christ is in effect a scattered entity. Although the parts of his human and divine natures remain hypostatically united to God the Son without interruption or diminution during this period, they are ‘located’ in different ‘places.’ His human corpse occupies a particular region of space in the tomb where it is laid. His human soul is elsewhere, being ‘located’ in a region of the afterlife. His divine nature remains personally united to these ‘parts’ of his human nature whilst also continuing to uphold and sustain the created order. We might think of Christ’s dead body in the tomb as a kind of dead limb that remains vitally connected with the person who sustains it (in this case, God the Son), but which is non-functioning for a period of time (viz., between his somatic death and resurrection). Someone who sits or sleeps in an awkward position for too long often finds that one or more of their limbs have ‘gone to sleep’, so to speak, upon waking up. When they eventually attempt to move, the limb is unresponsive and numb until sensation is restored. Similarly, Christ’s ‘dead limb’ (i.e., his dead human body) remains hypostatically united to God the Son, but inert until it is resurrected on Easter Sunday.

I presume most Christians will prefer something like this story, for most Christians have been substance dualists of some sort. Be that as it may, here is the second story:

At the moment of his death on the cross, Christ’s human body ceases to function; it becomes a corpse. At that very moment, his human mind, which is a property or cluster of properties that give rise to a unique first-person perspective that supervenes upon, or emerges from the material organisation of his brain, also ceases to function. (Note, it could be that his human mind ceases to exist from his bodily death to his resurrection on Easter Sunday. In that case, Christ’s human nature has a ‘gappy’ conscious existence. Alternatively, it could be that his mind merely stops functioning during the period of somatic death, rather like the electric light bulb that ceases to illuminate a room when the electricity that feeds it is switched off.) Thereafter from the moment of his somatic death to the moment of bodily resurrection on Easter Sunday morning, Christ is an entity, some of whose ‘parts’ are (temporarily) non-functioning or dead. Although the parts of his human and divine natures remain hypostatically united to God the Son without interruption or diminution during this period, they are ‘located’ in different ‘places’. His human body occupies a particular region of space in the tomb where it is laid. His human mind is literally nowhere. It either temporarily ceases to exist or is, as it were, ‘switched off’ or non-functioning at the moment of somatic death. Nevertheless, it will begin to function once more once the body is resurrected (as is the case with all human beings in this respect, given a Christian physicalist anthropology). His divine nature remains personally united to the ‘parts’ of his human nature whilst also continuing to uphold and sustain the created order. We might think of Christ’s corpse in the tomb as a kind of dead limb that remains vitally connected with the person who sustains it (in this case, God the Son), but which is non-functioning for a period of time (viz., between his somatic death and resurrection). His human mind, being a property of his human nature, would be non-functioning once his body becomes a corpse. Its proper functioning is dependent upon a properly functioning, living human body (or at least, a properly functioning brain and central nervous system). Someone who sits or sleeps in an awkward position for too long often finds that one or more of their limbs have ‘gone to sleep’, so to speak, when they wake up. When they eventually attempt to move the limb is unresponsive and numb until sensation is restored. Similarly, we can think of Christ’s dead body plus his non-functioning mind as like a ‘dead limb.’ It remains hypostatically united to God the Son, but inert until it is resurrected on Easter Sunday.

Comments on the two dead limb stories

With these two dead limb stories in place, we can turn to expounding and defending the key theological claims they each make.

First, let us consider the conceptual core that the two versions of the tale have in common, for this is the primary target of our dogmatic argument. The central claim is that between his somatic death and resurrection on Easter Sunday, Christ’s human body may be thought of as akin to a dead limb. This preserves the soteriologically vital notion that God the Son remains hypostatically united to his human nature throughout the period of his passion, including Holy Saturday when his human body is in the grave. Because he remains personally united to his human nature throughout this period, he can act as a saviour for humanity. In the background to this claim is the two-natures doctrine of classical (viz., Chalcedonian) Christology, according to which Christ must be wholly human and wholly divine in order to bring about his work of reconciliation.

Were he to divest himself of the union between his two natures for some period during which he was acting in his capacity as saviour, that would interrupt and imperil the saving act. To see how this would be the case, consider the act of wirelessly downloading a programme to your computer. If the wireless connection to your Wi-Fi hub is interrupted during the download, it will fail to complete the action. Just so, in the incarnation, any interruption to the personal union between Christ’s two natures during his work as mediator would, in effect, disrupt or disable the completion of the work. A soteriological assumption shared by defenders of classical Christology is that the hypostatic union is a sine qua non for incarnation and (therefore) atonement.

Now, one worry here is that the separation of the ‘parts’ of the composite Christ at the moment of somatic death on the cross does in fact jeopardise the hypostatic union. Separating the light bulb from its socket will normally mean that it cannot illuminate the room, since it is no longer appropriately connected to a source of electrical current. What the dead limb stories suggest is that this need not be the case with Christ. Even if the ‘parts’ of his two natures are decoupled from each other so that, say, his human soul and human body are no longer rightly configured, they are still personally united to God the Son. We might put it like this: the somatic death of Christ may decouple the ‘parts’ of his human nature from one another, but they remain coupled with the divine person who sustains them. Thus, they remain hypostatically united to God the Son directly through their ongoing and uninterrupted connection with a divine person. To return to the light bulb analogy, if one decouples the bulb from its socket, but then connects the bulb via another cable to the same circuit as the socket, they will both be connected to a source of electricity via the same circuit, even though the parts of the bulb and its socket are no longer connect to one another. They remain ‘united’ with the electrical circuit that feeds them the electrical current. This is the sort of claim being made here in both dead limb stories with respect to Christ’s human nature during Holy Saturday.

What about the things which distinguish the two stories? Let us turn to these next.

The most obvious difference, which we have already discussed, pertains to the personal ontologies that underpin these two stories. On the face of it, despite their very different conceptions of human personhood, these two accounts appear to be consistent with the claims of classical Christology and provide a coherent understanding of how Christ’s human nature is a ‘dead limb’ during Holy Saturday. Those who adopt a version of the compositionalist-substance dualist view can tell a fairly straightforward story about what happens to the ‘parts’ of Christ during this period, which will fit well with either the traditional Catholic notion of the harrowing of hell or of Protestant accounts of Christ’s passion that do not think Christ literally descends to the dead to preach to the faithful there.Footnote ¹⁴ Those who defend such a view will not have much difficulty aligning their view with the Christian tradition. Rather, they will have to pay attention to how this traditional sort of view sits with current scientific and philosophical notions of personal ontology, the majority of which have discarded substance dualism.Footnote ¹⁵

What the compositionalist-materialist wants to say is that, normally speaking, a human being is comprised of a human body plus a human mind, rightly configured – but that this human mind is not a substantial soul. It is, rather, a property (or set of properties) of the human organism that is not reducible to some non-mental physical feature of the body. Now, the compositionalist-materialist has some work to do in the case of Christology. Although it may appear reasonable to think that mere humans are material objects whose minds are properties of their bodies rather than a separable substantial soul, this poses certain problems for Christological orthodoxy. For, as I have just indicated above, the two-natures doctrine of classical Christology presumes Christ has a human body and a human soul, and that this is requisite for him to exemplify a complete human nature.Footnote ¹⁶ In light of this claim of classical Christology, an obvious criticism of compositionalist-materialism is that it is difficult to see how its defenders can square their metaphysical commitments with the traditional Christological claim that the complete human nature of God incarnate comprises a human body and human soul, rightly configured. For, ex hypothesi, compositionalist-materialism cannot make metaphysical room for substantial human souls.Footnote ¹⁷

Now, one might respond to this challenge by noting that while the fathers of the ecumenical Council of Chalcedon do state that Christ has a human body and rational soul (psychē logikē), it is also the case, as Richard Swinburne has pointed out, that this language is ambiguous as far as contemporary philosophy of mind is concerned.Footnote ¹⁸ A rational soul could be construed as a mind rather than as a separable substantial soul. To be sure, Swinburne observes that the fathers of Chalcedon, in declaring that Christ had a rational soul, seem to have meant a substantial (human) soul. However, as he goes on to say,

On the one hand, this line of reasoning opens the door to a version of compositional-materialism compatible with Chalcedon; on the other hand, talk of a human way of thinking and acting is so ontologically vague as to be of little theological use. For almost no sensible person will deny that there is a human way of thinking and acting. The question is what that entails, and it seems to me that it is very difficult to see how someone who is committed to materialism in the strictest sense with respect to philosophy of mind (viz., mental reduction or full-blown eliminativism) could embrace the tenets of Chalcedonian Christology. But that still leaves open a very wide range of permissible views that fall under the descriptor ‘compositional materialism.’

Rather than give a taxonomy of different views that fit this description, I will outline one such view before turning to the vexed questions of hylomorphism. In previous work on the topic, I have defended a version of materialist Christology that does not, I think, require a departure from theological orthodoxy.Footnote ²⁰ In this view, human beings instantiate two distinct sorts of properties. The first we might call mental properties since they are properties that pertain to human mental life. The second we can designate physical properties, having to do with human physical life. Now, although mental properties are distinct from physical properties, it is still the case that the mental properties a person possesses are normally dependent upon the physical properties of a person. On this account, if a human being suffers a serious head injury and brain damage in a car accident, then their mental life may be adversely affected. Suppose a person suffers such a serious head trauma, such that they are thereafter incapable of reasoning or agency (viz., higher brain functions), though they are still alive (perhaps with the aid of artificial life support). In other words, on this way of thinking, though the mental life of a human person is distinct from their physical life (as reflected in the claim about distinct properties that human persons instantiate), their mental life depends in an important sense upon the proper functioning of their physical bodies, and in particular, their brain and central nervous system.

Clearly, this may be applied to the compositional-materialist dead limb story. Equally clearly, the upshot will be an account of the persistence of the hypostatic union through Holy Saturday that looks rather different from that offered by the substance dualist, though on its face it also seems compatible with the theological framework of the two natures doctrine of classical Christology. But it does seem that given compositional-materialism, upon his physical death on the cross Christ’s human mind becomes inert, either ceasing to function or temporarily ceasing to exist until Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday. This is a theological cost of sorts, though one that Christian materialists may be willing to stomach, given their metaphysical commitments in personal ontology.

A limit case: hylomorphism

Not all accounts of personal ontology fit neatly into our two categories, however. One obvious exception is hylomorphism – particularly Christian versions of hylomorphism, such as that developed by Thomas Aquinas. Given the prevalence of such views in the Christian tradition up to the present, we cannot conclude our discussion without some reference to this alternative.

On the hylomorphist understanding of human personal ontology, human beings are composed of matter that is organised by a substantial form, which we call the soul. Beyond this brief description, there is wide disagreement about the entailments of this view. Some characterise hylomorphism as a doctrine consistent with materialism about human persons. Others think of it as a clear example of substance dualism, because the soul may exist apart from the body in the intermediate state thanks to the miraculous preserving power of the Deity. Still, other scholars think of hylomorphism as occupying a kind of middle ontological ground between substance dualists and materialists.Footnote ²¹

I am inclined to side with this last group, who think of hylomorphist personal ontology as a kind of via media. This is because it does share aspects of both the substance dualist and materialist accounts as I have distinguished them thus far, though it does not seem to fit either of these alternatives in any neat fashion. Like the substance dualist, the hylomorphist thinks that at certain times humans have souls that exist independently of the human body. This occurs at somatic death when the soul is preserved in the intermediate state by the power of God until the resurrection of the body, whereupon it becomes the form of the body once more. Nevertheless, it seems like the disembodied state of the soul is rather attenuated and does not represent the complete human person. Instead, it is something like the metaphysical residue of a human person that cannot be metaphysically ‘complete’ until it is rejoined with a suitable parcel of matter that it may organise as its form. But like the materialist, the hylomorphist thinks that when embodied, the soul of the human being is a kind of structuring principle or pattern that makes the matter that composes the human a human animal. What is more, the soul is extended and distributed throughout the body of which it is the form. It does not exist as some distinct immaterial thing that is tethered to the body in some fashion, as caricatures of Cartesianism suggest.Footnote ²²

According to this brief characterisation, a Christian hylomorphic account of the human nature of Christ on Holy Saturday is more like the compositional-dualist dead limb story than the compositionalist-materialist dead limb story. Although prior to his somatic death, Christ’s human nature comprises a soul-plus-body compound, where the soul is the organising principle of the body that is located and distributed throughout the body, at his death, Christ’s human soul is decoupled from his corpse and is transferred to the afterlife by the miraculous power of God. Thereafter, at the moment of resurrection, his soul is reintegrated into his corpse and organises its matter into the human nature of Christ once more.

There is a resurgence of interest in hylomorphic personal ontology at present among Christian philosophers and theologians. It is not hard to see why, given the fact that it delivers much that will commend it to both defenders of traditional Christian theism (including classical Christology), as well as being a view that seems commensurate with much of the materialist literature in philosophy of mind. It is not without cost, of course.Footnote ²³ But that is true of any substantive metaphysical doctrine. As the truism has it, one must pay one’s money and take one’s choice, including the costs of the position for which one opts.