Metaphysics and Christology

Metaphysics and Christology: An Interview with Richard Cross

by Eduarda Machado

September 2023 – IPM Monthly has invited Professor Richard Cross for an interview, who very willingly volunteered. This encounter quickly became a pleasant and surprising conversation thanks to his charismatic personality and good humour. He has an insouciant curiosity, a sharp mind and impressive writing skills. We had the opportunity to talk about a vast group of topics, including the reasons that led him to study Christology, mainly from a philosophical-metaphysical point of view, his perspectives as a philosopher on how philosophical metaphysics and theology intersect in his work. We engage in a dense, detailed talk about the metaphysics of disability concerning the resurrected body, and human and divine natures in Christ. The interview could be shortened, but it was edited as little as possible to be faithful to the original conversation.

About Richard Cross

The Interview

Eduarda Machado: You work primarily in Metaphysics of Christology, and we will get there, but I saw that you had received an award on physical disability here at Notre Dame; I was intrigued, wondering what other interests you have and to what extent you are interested in disability issues. Can we start with this topic?

Richard Cross: Yes! I’ve done quite a lot of work reading philosophical and historical texts of a philosophical and theological kind theorised through the lens of disability studies. So, there are some things; if you dig around, you’ll find a few articles I did. At the moment, someone has asked me to write an essay on Gregory of Nyssa and disability. I travelled to Rome to stay there this last weekend, and I got a pdf document of the Complete Works of Gregory of Nyssa, and I read through it very quickly on the plane to see what I could find of interest. And there have been some other things too. So, I’ll give you an example.

I wrote an article for a book edited by a former student of mine, Scott Williams, on disability and medieval philosophy and theology. The article I wrote was on the Resurrection of the Body read from a disability studies perspective. There’s an assumption outside the discipline or the area of disability studies that disabilities are automatically bad-making; they’re undesirable in some way. One way to test what people think about an idealised human body is by seeing what they say about the resurrected body. There is much disagreement between different medieval thinkers, but a standard view was that the resurrected body has the gift of agility. And this doesn’t mean you are super good at using your limbs. It means you can move around without your limbs at all. So walking, being able to walk, being able to lift things, and being able to run, are not part of the resurrected condition. Or how is the body adapted to a given environment? For Aquinas, we cope with undesirable environments by being given a kind of shield to protect us. Whereas for Scotus, God sorts out to the environment and determines it’s not disadvantageous to you, whatever your particular physical condition in the resurrection. Would you be able to smell things in the resurrection? Well, you know, there’s a significant disagreement about this. Some people thought – and I can’t remember who, I’d have to look it up now – that you wouldn’t be able to smell or taste things because they are intrinsically damaging to the body, like anything involving touch. Would you be able to hear? Why would you be able to hear if there is nothing to hear? Apparently, according to Bonaventure, for example, most people thought you’d be able to see things, but that was the only thing that was much agreement about, though I don’t know what you need to see. Other bodies, I suppose. You wouldn’t be able to see God, so that wouldn’t matter. So that’s a little thing I’d been doing on the side. 

EM: This is a fascinating topic and runs from the mainstream of your work, Christology. What prompted the study of this subject?

RC: I was looking for a topic for my PhD when I was an undergraduate. I really enjoyed Scotus. Because of that someone said: “Well, you should look at Scotus as Christology because that’s an interesting topic that hasn’t been dealt with”, and so I did. I have been doing it on and off ever since then, I’ve been floating around in Christology. What happened with Scotus when I was an undergraduate was that I was reading a text – Quodlibet 17 – and the question was: whether the acts of natural and charitable love are specifically the same or not. I thought that was such a bizarre question, and it had such an interesting answer. Because the only thing that essentially differentiates them is a relationship to the divine will, which can’t by itself change the species of anything. And the discussion was short but very, very complex and incredibly interesting. So, I thought, “Well, I really want to study Scotus”. So, it was, first of all, Scotus that had interested me and then secondarily, Christology because of the suggestion that I might study Scotus’ Christology. Hence, I did my PhD on that, and that’s why – by chance, really.

EM: What followed the PhD that made you pursue this and related topics?

RC: I didn’t write the dissertation into a book immediately. I wrote two other books, one on Scotus’ Physics and one on an introduction to Scotus Theology. Then I wrote up the Christology book I published 20 years ago on Christology from Aquinas to Scotus. At that time, I thought I wouldn’t like to write a book on Christological debates in the Reformation, but I didn’t get around to that immediately because someone asked me to write a book on Scotus on God, which I did. Besides I got interested in the philosophical problems to do with the doctrine of the Trinity, and I did quite a lot of work with the early Greek theologians on that topic. After that I published a book on Scotus, on God and some articles on the Trinity. Then, I moved to Notre Dame and thought, “Well, there’s no chance I’ll write the book on Reformation Christology” because there were no books on that subject here. Whereas in Oxford, I could be in the Bodleian library, reading all the little books published in Wittenberg in the sixteenth century. And I remember I was reading one of these books, and a little piece paper fell out while I was opening the book, and it had some date on it in old copperplate handwriting. I don’t know, “January the 15th, 1732” or something. Obviously, the last time anyone had read the book.

EM: Considering that you work primarily from the metaphysical perspective of both the study of Christology and the study of disability, this leads me directly to the question of possible intersections between different disciplines. So, how do these theological questions, such as resurrection and disability, intersect with metaphysical questions themselves? Could both fields benefit from the dialogue? What are the challenges?

RC: All these theology books I’ve written, I’ve written them with quite an eye on theology as well as an eye on philosophy. So, I worry that no one will ever actually read them. Perhaps I’m wrong. I would assume the people who’d be most interested in them would be theologians. But the only people with the intellectual equipment to understand them would generally be the philosophers, who wouldn’t be interested in them. The fundamental theological question is whether you basically follow the teachings of Chalcedon or you basically follow the teachings of Augustine among Western theologians. And Augustine, although his view is not compatible with the definitive Christological council, the Council of Chalcedon, in 451, sometimes pops up in the later middle ages. John Wycliffe is an excellent example. Wycliffe follows Augustine, not knowing that he shouldn’t do so. He expressed it by saying Augustine understood these things, and the scholastic philosophers and theologians – of whom he was one – don’t understand them. He just didn’t know that, in fact, they did because the person he needed to read for Chalcedonian teaching was John of Damascus and not Augustine. And in the West, Boethius understood the Chalcedonian stuff perfectly well, but he wasn’t such a good authority as Augustine. So, why Augustine’s view by and large disappeared around 1150 is precisely because John of Damascus showed up on the scene. What’s particularly interesting is the relationship between human nature and the divine person in Jesus. And there are lots of different ways of understanding it. And that’s fascinating. So, one position which you find in Thomas Aquinas is that what explains the union between the two items is that human nature lacks its proper esse, and it has the esse instead of the divine person. That wasn’t a popular view in the Middle Ages. Aquinas is about the last representative of it until you get to Cajetan in the 1520s, who revives it, and many other things in Aquinas too.

The other view is that you should think of human nature as related to the divine person as something akin to an accident. So, it depends on the divine person but doesn’t inhere in the divine person, and that’s the usual view. You find it in Scotus, in Hervaeus Natalis, the great supposed Thomist. You find it in Godfrey of Fontaines, and then you find it in almost everyone except for some of the Thomists after Cajetan, way up until the 17th century, which is as far as I know. But I’m interested in the Lutherans after 1700 because the they are a classic case of a group of people who adopted Augustine’s view instead of the Chalcedon view. They think that they say enough things which are consistent with Chalcedon for their position to be correct. They didn’t realise that they say many things that are inconsistent with Chalcedon or very hard to get sorted out. So, if you adopt a really complicated and kind an ad hoc semantics, you can get your Augustinian Christological locutions to have the correct Chalceondian truth values, but you know, doing so is just incredibly difficult, and they had great difficulty doing it. And that’s all. I don’t have a copy of the 17th-century book here, I gave it away to somebody, so I can’t show you, but it’s all in Oxford Scholarship Online. It has a lovely picture of Scotus on the front from 1650 called Scotus Lumen Orthodoxem, which I was pleased with.

Another fascinating thing is that we have got this view, the standard view that we’ve got the divine person and human nature related like an accident, right? So, here’s a question: what ties the two things together? And then there are various ways you could go. You could say a relation ties the two things together, a real relation. So, in addition to the divine person and human nature, there’s a real relation of union. Some people thought, to my mind quite rightly, for example, Ockham, that there are no real relations, so the view will turn out to be false. Relations are just polyadic predicates, not things in the world that are over and above non-relational items. So, then you can go two ways. You could say, “Well, in that case, what ties the two things together is a quality, quality that unites the two things; or in Suarez, a mode tying mode the human nature to the divine person. A mode of union. In the category of quality or substance or something. That might be one way of dealing with the difficulty because, after all, scholastic accounts of general union with the divine make union with a divine a matter of possessing an appropriate quality. The category of quality is a created thing. So maybe hypostatic union could be explained in the same way. You find that in Gabriel Biel. Then there’s a bizarre view that you find in Gregory of Rimini and others: there’s nothing different about an assumed nature relative to what that nature would be like, whether not assumed or independent. The thing which ties them together is nothing in the ontology at all, it’s just a divine volition. Thus, you’d be walking around and you wouldn’t know that you were an incarnate divine person. Here, there’s nothing extra in the universe at all, just God decrees – and it’s true that that one’s united and not true that that one’s united. That’s a wild view. I thought that was metaphysically quite hopeful in a way because you don’t want too much metaphysics. You don’t want more metaphysics than you need, or more ontology than you need in a kind of Quinean sense of what’s included in the furniture of the universe. So, I recommended that at the end of my book The Metaphysics of Christology in the Late Middle Ages: William of Ockham to Gabriel Biel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). But I think it’ll drive the theologians insane because it’s the most degraded account of grace and union you could possibly find – there isn’t really grace in the ontology; it’s just a divine will.

EM: I’m glad you mentioned your books. Let us return to that subject. I was fascinated with how a massive writer you are.

RC: Well, I find it very easy to write. But, actually, when I arrived here at Notre Dame, I worked on Scotus’ Theory of Cognition, which I really disliked writing because it was challenging and there was no firm view. I think Scotus’s view and thoughts were in flux on the matter. And if he had lived, we’d probably have got something different in the end. I thought Scotus was really more like Ockham than earlier philosophers on that topic. Later, thanks to Google Books, I wrote a book on Reformation Christology and the debates between the Protestants. What happened next was that I knew so much really bizarre Lutheran Christology that I thought I might as well go on and see if the same thing happened with the Lutherans in the 17th century. There was so much, such a mass of material from all sides in the debate in the 17th century, I just wrote a general history of the metaphysics of Christology in the 17th century, and it goes from Suarez to Leibniz. So, about 1590 to 1700. And then I thought, “Well, why don’t I fill in the gap from Scotus to 1500?”. Thus, I wrote one that goes from William of Ockham to Gabriel Biel, and that’s with the Oxford University Press now on the same topic – just metaphysics and semantics of Christology, on the sort of theological issues.

Also, I thought that it was a shame not to go to the beginning of the Middle Ages. So, I’ve just got one I’ve finished. I’ve written these two books really in the last two years. I’ve just got one I’ve finished on Christology from 1050 to 1250 in the West, and that’s being read by Oxford University Press at the moment. Weirdly enough, I thought, “Well if you look at the – I go into details in a bit – the debate from 1050 to 1150, what basically is happening is people are abandoning Augustine’s view and adopting the view that you find in the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which you find in Boethius. Gilbert of Poitiers followed him. Then after 1150, when John Damascus is translated into Latin, Augustine’s view, sort of fades out more or less. And so now my question is: I wonder how it was that they forgot the key teaching from the Council of Chalcedon. What you find is that everyone seems well aware of the content of the council, and of some later Christological councils, right up to the end of the Carolingian period. But then it drops out of the picture for a few hundred years. So now my question is: why did that happen? I’m actually starting to work on one or think about one that will go from 430 – from the death of Augustine – until 1050. I’ll start doing that one probably next year.

And one more thing, in the meantime, this year I’m going to make a second edition of the original Christology book, the one that goes from Aquinas to Scotus, because I’ve learned much extra stuff now that I didn’t know when I wrote that one, in particular about Christological semantics. I think things that I thought should be approached as metaphysical questions when I wrote the book 25 years ago should be approached better as semantic questions. So, the second edition will be quite different from the first edition. I can do this revision next year, and the year after that, I can do the book about late antiquity to the early Middle Ages.

As I said, I find it very easy to write. I write very quickly, and I really enjoy writing. And then I get bored and have to go to the next project. Well, you know, the things I write not all equally good. Sometimes, [laughs] I use little things to experiment to see if an idea will work; it’s not really as if someone’s reading it. I was just doing it for fun, on a rainy Saturday afternoon or something.

EM: Because they introduce cross elements from metaphysical philosophy and theology, as you have said before, your books are very complex analyses. They are dense texts. But you have a particular way of writing them and reaching people. Am I correct?

RC: Yes, you are not the first person who said that. Maybe I just go into too much detail. I don’t know. While I’m writing these books, I’m assuming that people won’t just read the whole thing. So, in the beginning, I always say, “Here’s one way in which you could read it”, or “Here’s another way”.

EM: And what other projects are you planning or developing?

RC: I’m in the middle of doing a critical edition book three of Peter Auriol’s Quaestiones ordinariae et reportatio parisiensis super tertium librum sententiarum, and also a collection of three ordered questions on Christology, that can be found in the manuscripts in Toulouse and Paris and a less good one in Florence. Some people have got a scheme to publish the Reportatio Parisiensis of Peter Auriol. I think I’m a bit ahead of them on this because I’ve thought about how all the Christological material needs to be edited. So maybe it’ll take me a while, two years. I’ve had to do much manuscript work, especially for the book from Ockham to Biel and some manuscript work on the material from 1050 to 1250. I’ve got the edition of Peter Auriol half done, because I did it on the way while I was writing the Ockham to Biel book. And another project, I do have half a book, which I wrote maybe eight, seven or eight, eight or nine years ago, on the doctrine of Trinity, sort of read through the eyes of relative identity to make more sense of it. And people have known this for a long time, that it was possible to make sense of the doctrine of the Trinity providing an elementary account of relative identity so that it might have the persons all being numerically the same but non-identical with each other or all the same substance, but not the same person. Something like that. I initially thought I would go from Augustine to John Wycliffe, and I’ve written everything from Aquinas to Robert Holcot. But I put it on hold for a while. The gist of it was, who has a relatively well-worked-out account of what you would need to say if you wanted to make sense of the thing? And, of course, the answer is Scotus. Because Aquinas is just equivocating without saying so on different notions of identity or unity, but it’s all clear in Scotus. I don’t think it’s completely worked out, but you can see he was working very hard on it. Whether I will ever write or finish that book, I don’t know. I might.

EM: For you, curiosity is an essential driver of writing. Is that right?

RC: Yes. It’s more about that, I think. Yes. I definitely have many questions that still need to be answered. You’re always finding new ones. Yes, and weirdly enough, I’ve got a research assistant because I’m looking for sources from 1700 until about 1870 among the Lutheran theologians. Because they have such a weird view, I’m wondering if it is possible to explain things in Hegel by thinking about the Christological context since he was extremely interested in the topic and has a very particular view, which you might be able to detect in the earlier tradition. And at any rate – I think people don’t realise this – there were many different views amongst the Lutherans in the 19th century about the question of what is called kenosis, God’s self-emptying when becoming human. And there was a lot of debate about this in 19th-century Lutheranism, and I suspect people may have been talking about cross purposes because they were trying to answer different questions, but I don’t know yet, and I’ve got to amass all the material. And so maybe that’s another book who knows? I like reading Latin a lot. I can read German, but I find it disagreeable as a thing to do, especially old academic German printed in the fraktur script and all of that.

EM: I am delighted that you agreed to do this interview and what a pleasant conversation it turned into. Finally, I would like to ask you what a day without philosophy is ideally like.

RC: Well, you know, I really enjoy what I do. Yes. The things I like… I like cooking a lot. I like playing the piano a lot, and I like drinking wine a lot.

EM: What is your favourite wine?

RC: Oh, red Wines from Burgundy, Pinot Noir – great – and my second favourite wine is White Wines from Burgundy.