Hi, a specific question (iirc i had asked Plotinus this some months ago, but maybe others have varied answers
) :
Which theologian (possibly of the 'dark ages' and in western europe) suggested that humans are collectively a kind of sensory organ (eg eyesight) of a god?
There is the (somewhat) similar aphorism that 'Deus est anima brutorum', meaning 'god is the soul of the animals', but i need info on the other claim
I'm afraid I've just never heard of this. The closest I can think of is the idea, associated with Newton, that the whole of space is God's "sensorium" or sensory organ. But I don't know of anyone saying this of human beings. It doesn't seem to me it would be very orthodox as it would suggest that God is dependent on human beings for his omniscience.
What translations/editions would you recommend for reading Duns Scotus?
Any you can get hold of, really. There aren't very many, and Scotus is brutally hard to read no matter what the edition, so I don't think it makes much difference.
What makes the CoE's claim dubious?
From the point of view of the C of E, it's not dubious, because Anglicans who care about such things take apostolic succession to require just the historical continuity of bishop to bishop going back to the apostles. And the Church of England has as much claim to that as any other church, since it can trace itself back to Augustine of Canterbury and Gregory the Great. But from an Orthodox point of view, the question isn't so clear, because the Orthodox typically take apostolic succession to involve more than this. It also involves uniformity of practice and belief. There is no clear position on whether Anglican churches have sufficient uniformity with Orthodox churches to count as having apostolic succession. But as I understand it, Anglican priests who convert to Orthodoxy are not considered Orthodox priests, and must be reconsecrated; so in practice Anglican claims to apostolic succession are not taken seriously.
It's clearer in the Catholic Church, which simply rejects Anglican claims to apostolic succession on the grounds that Anglican orders are straightforwardly invalid since they are rivals to Catholicism.
Where would NT Wright fit into this trichotomy? The New Perspective on Paul strikes me as Anglo-Catholic, but it's possible I'm misinterpretting that.
Wright is certainly an evangelical, though a relatively mild one. You're right that the New Perspective is quite contrary to traditional evangelical ways of understanding the Bible, and so Wright is controversial within evangelical circles for that. He's effectively a spokesperson within evangelicalism for the New Perspective, bringing it to the evangelicals, if you like. But there's no real inconsistency. Although the New Perspective means understanding Paul in a way different from how evangelicals have traditionally done, that doesn't in itself entail rejecting any traditional evangelical doctrines, let alone viewing the Bible itself differently. Wright rejects the term "inerrant" for the Bible but that's more because of the overtones it's taken on; I think that in practice he regards it as infallible at least. (Assuming you can see any distinction between these two terms - I'm not sure I can.)
More conservative evangelicals regard him as dangerously liberal though. From a non-evangelical viewpoint this seems pretty odd, but of course, extremists in any group always regard moderates within their own group with far more suspicion than they do people outside the group altogether.
On a different note, do you think the ideas of Divine Simplicity and the Trinity are at odds? What have the different approaches to reconciling them been? I've read that St. Gregory of Nyssa held to both Social Trinitiarianism and Divine Simplicity. Did he ever address the apparent contradition?
Quite what Gregory's position was on the Trinity is a matter of some contention. The traditional view is that he was a social Trinitarian. This is based on taking two short works of his -
To Ablabius and
Letter 38 (of Basil, actually written by Gregory) as definitive. In these works he likens the three Persons of the Trinity to three human beings, who are one because they are members of the same species; and from this starting point he then goes on to argue for their unity, on the grounds that all the things that make three human beings quite distinct, such as their location in space, material nature, etc. don't apply to God. However, Sarah Coakley has argued that this is the wrong way to interpret Gregory. If you start from works such as his much longer
Against Eunomius or his
Great Catechism you find a much more traditional and "Latin" approach to the Trinity. I don't know whether Coakley is right about this but it's certainly the case that Gregory was a complex and not always consistent thinker, so I'd be careful about categorising him too clearly. I don't remember whether he had much to say about divine simplicity though; he was more interested in emphasising the divine infinity, which at that time was a relatively novel idea.
I'd say that the doctrine of the Trinity could be inconsistent with divine simplicity depending on what you mean by "simplicity". If you take it to mean that there are no distinctions whatsoever within the Godhead then clearly they're incompatible. If you take it (in a Thomist way) to mean that God lacks the metaphysical distinctions found in created things, such as between form and matter, substance and accident, act and passivity, essence and existence, and so on, then I don't see why they should be incompatible. On this view the doctrine of divine simplicity is a statement or series of statements about the nature of the divine essence. And the doctrine of the Trinity is a statement that there are three Persons who instantiate that essence, though they constitute only one God. That in itself might be inconsistent, but if so, the inconsistency is internal to the doctrine and doesn't require the doctrine of divine simplicity to make it so.
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