The appearance of Faith in a Hard Ground (“FHG”), the second in a projected series of volumes collecting together papers by the late Catholic analytic philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe, following upon Human Life, Action, and Ethics (“HLAE”, 2005), invites a doubt about the editorial principles underlying the series. Anscombe's collected papers were published in 1981 in three volumes; she was active as a philosopher until her death in 2001. One might think, then, that some volumes in the series would be devoted to (A) published papers not captured by the earlier collection, whereas others would exclusively collect (B) unpublished papers which were valuable and interesting nonetheless. However, HLAE and FHG combine both: FHG has 6 papers from category (A) and 15 from category (B), whereas HLAE has papers in both categories, too, although with an opposite weighting. Both volumes also have papers from the 1981 collection, and widely available papers (such as “Modern Moral Philosophy”). Nor are the volumes distinguished thematically, such as “ethics” for the first and “religion” for the second, since FHG has several papers on ethics, and HLAE has several papers that are as much related to Anscombe's commitments as a Catholic as most papers in FHG.
This is not a mere editorial meta-squabble, because presumably papers which a philosopher might have published, but left unpublished, need to be presented differently from published work, just as papers deliberately left out of comprehensive collections by an author arguably have a different standing. For instance, when Anscombe writes in one unpublished paper that the Catholic laity “have chosen a form of life that is the opposite of renunciation” and “are a suspect sort of Christian” (p. 64) for not becoming priests or religious, this remark, included originally in a private communication to a friend in 1965, and therefore before the dispute over Humanae vitae, simply cannot be taken to represent her considered view – since from the four remarkable essays in FHG criticizing contraception, it would appear that Anscombe post-1968 recognized a considerable degree of heroism among Catholics who continued to be open to large families in the new circumstances.
Again, it is difficult to think that Anscombe would have liked to see the publication of some of the essays included in FHG without the addition of some major qualifications, as, for example, “The Immortality of the Soul” (pp. 69–83), which the editors in a note postulate was written in the late 1950s and delivered to a discussion group of Catholic philosophers which met at Spode House. This would therefore be a relatively early work, and not surprisingly is heavily influenced by Wittgenstein.
In that essay, Anscombe maintains that the human soul is properly described as “spiritual” but not “immaterial”; that to say that it is or has a part which is immaterial is to indulge in a façon de parler which typically masks a crude philosophical confusion (substance dualism); that there is no philosophical reason whatsoever for regarding the human soul as something that of itself continues to exist after death; and that personal existence ends for us at death, unless (as the faith teaches) there is a general resurrection. Her grounds seem to be: a mistaken conflation of the Aristotelian-Thomist view with Cartesianism, and faulty interpretations of two passages from Scripture offered as proof-texts.
The texts offered in proof are 2 Maccabees 12:44 (“For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should rise again, it would have seemed superfluous and vain to pray for the dead”, Douay-Rheims), and 1 Corinthians 15:16–18 (“For if the dead rise not again, neither is Christ risen again. And if Christ be not risen again, your faith is vain, for you are yet in your sins. Then they also that are fallen asleep in Christ, are perished”). The use of the former for Anscombe's purposes is odd, since the text has traditionally been used in the Church to support the practice of praying for the souls in purgatory; in any case the interpretation Anscombe favors could account at best for “vain” but not “superfluous”. As regards the text from St. Paul, Anscombe seems to be presupposing that the relevant Greek verb means “to perish” in the sense of “to go out of existence”, as in Plato's Greek, rather than more plausibly in the context, “to be lost or damned”. Also, Anscombe's construction has St. Paul supposing counterfactually that Christ ceased to exist when he died on the cross.
She rejects the Aristotelian-Thomist view because, it seems, she fails to distinguish it from Platonism and misconstrues its fundamental argument. “I cannot at present accept … the argument that thought and understanding are immaterial, since no act of a bodily organ is thinking or understanding, as e.g. an act of a bodily organ is seeing; hence thought and understanding are the acts of an immaterial part, and immateriality is spirituality” (p. 69). This seems a reference to the argument of Summa Theologiae I 75,2 and De Anima III 4. But notwithstanding her language she does not give that argument, only its conclusion (the argument depends crucially on premises which she never examines, viz. that to understand something is a kind of passio, and that the human intellect in principle can understand everything corporeal). Even the conclusion she seems to get wrong, from an equivocation: St. Thomas’ conclusion is that to think is not an act (sc. actualization) of a corporeal organ, but Anscombe was apparently understanding this to mean that to think is not an act (sc. action) of a corporeal organ – which then gets subjected to Wittgensteinian scorn for its suggestion that spirituality requires a substance just like a material substance, with parts just like material parts, which act just like material organs, but which nonetheless are all “immaterial”. What gets lost is the opportunity for a philosopher of the first rank to explore how the view that the human intellect subsists differs from the view that it is a substance.
One might conclude that these reflections on immortality were early and eventually superseded – if it weren't for another essay in FHG, “The Early Embryo” (pp. 214–223), which mirrors a similar and previously published essay in HLAE (“Were You a Zygote”). Admittedly, Anscombe presents her thought here as exploratory, as testing whether a certain view is tenable, which she suggests we might become obliged to accept by developments in biology. Yet that view – that a human embryo begins its life merely as “a living thing” and becomes a human being at roughly six weeks, when it has a discernible human form and organs – would seem to be compelled more by medieval than by modern biology; only difficulties about “twinning” might appear to point in that direction, and they extend no later than 14 days after conception.
Anscombe never explains why the visible form of something never meant to be seen proves relevant for signaling its humanity; or how it is that the embryo before six weeks, although not yet human, may nonetheless be identified as an animal, when it so little resembles familiar animals; or indeed why we should accept that an embryo at six weeks looks especially human. (What is a distinctive human form or organ anyway? The tongue? The hand?) Of course if function and mode of life are relevant instead, then we cannot rule out that perception and movement are in some way distinctively human, even from conception. Against the objection that early abortion becomes permissible on her view, as it would not be homicide, Anscombe replies that it would still be the “killing of an individual living thing whose life is at a stage in the development of one or more human lives”: yet she fails to explain why killing this admittedly merely developing thing wouldn't be justifiable under extreme circumstances of a conflict with the mother's life or substantive interests.
So her view looks weak and unmotivated – by biology, at least. One might wonder, then, if its motivation is instead philosophical, the result of persisting Wittgensteinian difficulties in accepting immaterial existence. After all, if what distinguishes a human being from a non-rational animal is a “subsistent” intellectual power, then it is unclear why life of that sort must be delayed until six weeks, or why at six weeks the embryo is any better suited to express it than earlier.
Some of the essays in ethics which attractively round out FHG cover such important principles as that an erring conscience, although binding, does not yet excuse; and that ignorance of the moral law does not excuse when it is culpable, as generally it is. Yet not so attractive is a crotchety essay against taking interest on a loan (“Philosophers and Economists: Two Philosophers’ Objections to Usury”), which seems to ignore the changed significance of money in a market economy and the opportunity cost of lending as opposed to investing. Likewise unattractive is a highly-charged essay, “Simony in Africa”, against the then widespread African practice of not administering baptism until the catechumen had made a token but definite commitment of financial support to the parish, which African pastors sought as proof of a correct understanding of the nature of Catholic life. Anscombe charges these pastors with simony, wonders how they were able “to deceive themselves so about what they were actually doing” (p. 242), and with much demonstration laments the practice as “worse than anything that has ever been in the Church” (p. 244).
The essay displays a potential weakness in Anscombe's distinctive approach to intention. By her own report, she became interested in intention, as a philosophical topic, through a concern to show the error in President Truman's defense of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, viz. that his intent was to end the war, not to murder civilians. Anscombe urged against this that we can be wrong about the correct description of our actions: merely thinking that we are doing a certain kind of action does not make it so – an idea which Anscombe uses to devastating effect in her critiques of contraception as well as nuclear warfare. Yet this approach, when misapplied – as it is, we believe, in the simony essay – can lead to an under-appreciation of the role of the agent's intention in determining the “moral species” of an action, and therefore a certain quickness in attributing bad faith. What results then is not a powerful critique, but overblown moral rhetoric – which in turn leads to a worry, felt by us at least, that through this approach lots of innocent or marginally doubtful practices are open to being counted as “worse than anything that has ever been”.
