What are we doing when we’re reading? Part 2: Gordon Clark’s occasionalism and Bernard Lonergan’s accumulation of insights converging on a viewpoint

This sequel to “What are we doing when we’re reading? Bernard Lonergan and Gordon Clark on ‘black marks on white paper’” is occasioned by Joseph K. Gordon‘s comment there. He is the author of Divine Scripture in Human Understanding: A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible (Notre Dame Press, 2019). Another book firmly on my legenda.

Gordon supplied the (for me) elusive passage in Insight where Lonergan elaborates on the role of those marks in human knowing. The narrowing of my search to a half-dozen pages was a godsend, for I would have never made the time to comb the 748 pages of the Longmans edition I’ve used since 1978. In either edition the textual “address” of this portion of Insight is Chapter XVII, “Metaphysics as Dialectic,” Section 3, “The Truth of Interpretation,” Part 7 (or subsection 3.7) “Counterpositions.” In the original edition, it comprises pages 581-86.

Before dipping into that pregnant passage, let me review the problem the previous post touched on. It’s theological. Or rather, it’s a hermeneutical problem governed by theological commitments. My point of departure was Gordon H. Clark’s epistemology, which he believed his commitment to the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) logically demanded he adopt.

According to Clark, human knowledge is restricted to the propositions that one either reads in Holy Scripture or can validly infer therefrom. That was Clark’s axiom, his absolute, nondemonstrable starting point. All other beliefs, even if true, are at best opinion if not so stated in or deducible “by good and necessary consequence” (WCF I:VI) from Scripture.

My question continues to be: how did Gordon Clark access the propositions of Scripture? He was adamant that ink marks on a Bible’s white paper pages (or pixels on a computer screen) convey nothing to the mind. The Holy Spirit, however, uses those marks to “stimulate” or occasion the divinely intended proposition in the believer’s mind.

Clark was aware of the issue. As he formulated and rebutted a criticism:

Don’t you have to read the Bible? Well do I know the objections that this [ideal of axiomatization of Biblical propositions] immediately raises. Evidentialist apologists and secular philosophies alike exclaim, “But that assumes the point at issue; you are begging the question; you are arguing in a circle.” The reply to this objection should be obvious. The opponents, both secular and religious, assume the authority of experience, the inerrancy of sensation, the validity of induction. But this assumes the point at issue, this begs the question, and the one is as circular as the other.[1]

Douglas J. Douma, Clark’s biographer, puts Clark’s distinctive epistemology in a favorable light by linking it with Augustine of Hippo:

Certainly, the senses [for Clark] were involved in some way when reading, but not in the way empiricism would have them. . . . Clark looked to the theory of divine illumination developed by Augustine in his De Magistro and other works. According to the theory of divine illumination, God gives knowledge directly to man’s mind though the divine light of His Logos. . . . [T]he role given to the senses in knowledge  acquisition is one of “a stimulus to intellectual intuition.” Sensation occurs at the same instant as knowledge is given to man, but it is not sensation itself that gives knowledge. This theory goes hand-in-hand with the theory of occasionalism  held by Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), a French theologian whom Clark admired. According to the theory of occasionalism, God is the sole and indefeasibly effective cause of everything throughout the universe. God speaks and it is done. God produces mental events simultaneously. Created things are at best “occasions” for divine activity.[2]

Some of you may already catch the irony: Clark imposed his occasionalism on the Scriptures in the name of fidelity thereto. For, according to his appropriation of occasionalism, the heavens don’t—cannot—declare the glory of God, nor can the firmament show his handiwork (Psalm 19:1). The human thought of God’s glory merely follows human perception of heavens and handiwork. And the following is divinely ordained, not causally connected.

To suggest that the thought of God’s glory was causally related to the perception of creation would be, for Clark, to commit the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc (i.e., after this, therefore because of this). God’s monocausality, his being the sole cause of whatever happens, makes every event a miracle, in which case “miracle” signifies nothing.

With respect to perceiving causality, Douma documents the common cause Clark made not only with David Hume (1711-1776), the father of modern empiricism, but also the Persian philosopher Abu Hamid Al-Ghazālī (c. 1058-1111):

 

While Hume denied all miracles, there was a medieval Moslem who anticipated Hume’s arguments against causality and concluded that every event is a miracle. Since no sensation can be the cause of another sensation, every event is immediately caused by God . . . We now concur with the Islamic anti-aristotelian Al Gazali [sic]: God and God alone is the cause, for only God can guarantee the occurrence of of Y, and indeed of X as well. Even the Westminster Divines timidly agree, for after asserting that God foreordains whatsoever comes to pass, an that “no purpose of yours an be withheld from you” (Job 42:2), they add, “Although . . . all things come to pass immutably and infallibly, yet by the same providence he ordereth them to fall out according to the nature of second causes . . .” What they called second causes, Malebranche had called occasions. But an occasion is neither a fiat lux nor a differential equation.[3]

One wonders what “nature” anything can have if no effect follows from its actions and therefore in what sense a “second cause” is a cause at all.  God’s doing all the causing, but He’s also (according to occasionalism) causing His created image-bearers to systematically, but fallaciously, ascribe causality to things that are not causes. How does He create that false impression? By “ordering” certain effects to “fall out” when certain “causes” act, with the falling out coinciding with the actions. Is God a man, that He should lie? (Numbers 23:19)

Yes, correlation is not causation, but Clark says nothing is causation except God, “the sole and indefeasibly effective cause of everything throughout the universe.” Does that view square with Scripture, allegedly Clark’s touchstone?

Jesus told his adversaries that they knew how (γινώσκετε, ginoskete) to discern (διακρίνειν, diakrinein) the weather (be it fair or foul) from the sky’s color (Matthew 16:3). He did not say or imply that God uses the sky’s appearance (πρόσωπον, prosopon) to occasion His thought of the correct forecast in the human mind. But that is the construction Clark’s occasionalism must place on that verse.

If I may appeal to experience. Alfred North Whitehead notes somewhere—readers, please help out!—that if someone flashes a light at you while you’re in a pitch-dark room, you will blink; when you do, you don’t infer efficient causality, either soundly or fallaciously. You experience it directly., and thereby know it. If Clark commented on Whitehead’s refutation of Hume, I’m not aware of it.

Back to Lonergan: when he referred disparagingly to “black marks on white paper,” a phrase similar to Clark’s “ink marks on paper,” Lonergan was in effect concurring with Clark that they are cognitively inert. The human mind must interpret them, and interpreting is not a matter of looking.

But it doesn’t follow that no looking is involved.

The child and the advanced scholar (who the child may grow up to be) both look at marks, but their intelligence grasps the patterns those marks form. And, again apart from miraculous intervention, the Holy Spirit is not necessarily involved in that created process except, of course, insofar as the Godhead upholds creation and its constituent processes. Let’s look at the problem more closely.

Once upon a time Clark learned to read English (and later French and Greek, both Attic and Koine). In each case there was a process of hearing, listening, memorizing, trial-and-error, feedback from teachers and fellows speakers, microadjusting his linguistic performance appropriately, and writing until communicating in English became “second nature” to him.

According to Clark’s occasionalism, his learning of English (and French and Greek) from his parents and teachers was a divine miracle, one that apparently prepared the ground for the miracles in which divine thoughts were occasioned in his mind when he read Scripture (whether in the original Hebrew and Greek or in English or French translations; it’s worth noting that the Holy Spirit didn’t use Armenian or Georgian translations of the Bible to occasion thoughts his mind).

I must retract “prepared the ground for miracles,” for that suggests an efficient causality in the “second causes” that Clark denied. On the one hand, there were the events that occurred during his childhood and adolescence; on the other, events that manifested his linguistic competence. Any connection between those events was purely coincidental. To suggest otherwise would be, again, to risk committing a fallacy.

The same holds in the case of our learning other systems of visual symbolic representation, e.g., the systems of notation used by musicians and mathematicians.

Clark’s occasionalism denies that our sensory organs receive data into which verifiable and falsifiable insights are possible, insights that accumulate into viewpoints on a given object. But did not such insights occur whenever Clark read a sentence in any language in which he enjoyed competence? The road to that competence, however, was paved with his progressive attainment of rudimentary, intermediate, and advanced insights into that language. Apart from any Pentecost-level miracle, the Holy Spirit does not override the way people normally acquire language, i.e., step by painstaking step.

I’ll end with a few sentences from the section of Lonergan’s Insight that Professor Gordon graciously tracked down for me followed by one more comment on Clark.

If the real is the “out there” and knowing it is taking a look, then the ideal of interpretation has to be as close an approximation as possible to a reconstruction of the cinema of what was done, of the sound-track of what was said . . . . [T]he ideal of the cinema and the sound-track is the ideal not of historical science but of historical fiction. There is no verifiable cinema of the past nor any verifiable sound-track of its speech. The available evidence lies in spatially ordered marks in documents and on monuments, and the interpreter’s business is not to create nonexistent evidence but to understand that evidence that exists . . . .

If objectivity is a matter of elementary extroversion, then the objective interpreter has to have more to look at than spatially ordered marks on paper; not only the marks but also the meanings have to be “out there,” while the merely subjective interpreter “reads” his own ideas “into” statements that obviously possess quite a different meaning. But the plain fact is that there is nothing “out there” except spatially ordered marks; to appeal to dictionaries and to grammars, to linguistic and stylistic studies, is to appeal to more marks . . . . If the criterion of objectivity is the “obviously out there,” then there is no objective interpretation whatever; there is only gaping at ordered marks, and the only order is spatial. But if the criterion of objectivity lies in intelligent inquiry, critical reflection, and grasp of the virtually unconditioned, then the humbug about the “out there” and the simulated indignation about “reading into” are rather convincing evidence that one has very little notion of what objectivity is.[4]

If Clark could not acknowledge the “empirical” function of dictionaries, lexicons, concordances in his own cognition of Scripture’s contents, then he was effectively left “gaping at ordered marks” hoping the Holy Spirit would use them to occasion propositions in his mind. Ex hypothesi the monocausal God of Clark’s occasionalism sovereignly deigned to occasion not only Presbyterian propositions in his mind, but also liberal Lutheran thoughts in Paul Tillich’s, Neo-Orthodox notions in Karl Barth’s, and Dispensationalist doctrines in Lewis Sperry Chafer’s, to name no other biblically conversant writers. Did their incompatible theologies just “fall out according to the nature” of those all-too-human “second causes”?

I fail to see how this scandalous implication of occasionalism does not entail the blasphemy that God is the author of confusion (1 Corinthians 14:33).

I welcome comments on this, especially from champions of Gordon Clark.

Notes

[1]  “Empiricism,” Gordon-Conwell Seminary lecture, 1981. Available at http://www.trinitylectures.org/MP3/Empiricism.mp3 I found this passage in Douglas J. Douma’s The Presbyterian Philosopher: The Authorized Biography of Gordon H. Clark, Wipf and Stock, 2017, 186, but corrected his transcription to read “the inerrancy of sensation” where he had inadvertently written “the inerrancy of experience.”

[2] Douma, The Presbyterian Philosopher, 186-187.

[3] Clark, Lord God of Truth, Trinity Foundation, 1994, 24-25, 27.

[4] Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd, and New York: Philosophical Library, 582-83.