Fishy sheep

I’ve been asked to comment on some arguments for Catholicism by Bryan Cross. Before I discuss the specifics, I’ll make a few preliminary observations.

The basic problem with Bryan’s mode of reasoning is his wild use of metaphors. And the problem operates at more than one level.

i) A metaphor is not, itself, as argument for anything. It’s just an illustration. Take, for example, a sheep. A sheep is not an argument. Taken by itself, a sheep proves nothing and disproves nothing. It simply is what it is. Taken by itself, a sheep doesn’t refer to anything outside itself.

ii) Apropos (i), the difference between a real sheep and a figurative sheep is that a figurative sheep is used to stand for something else. It’s a figurative analogy.

And it’s necessary to delimit the range of the analogy. What sheepish properties are or are not being attributed to the analogue?

iii) Moreover, you have to do more than merely assert an analogy. You have to argue for your analogy. What makes two otherwise disparate objects analogous?

iv) Furthermore, Bryan has a habit of mixing metaphors. He will combine something from one metaphor with something from another metaphor as if he were talking about the same thing throughout. But, of course, what is true for a sheep may not be true for a fish. You can’t simply attribute fishy properties to sheep, or sheepish properties to fish.

You can’t infer the properties of one figurative analogy from the properties of another figurative analogy. At best, you can only infer properties belonging to a common object.

If a fish has fins, you might infer that it also has scales. If a sheep has hooves, you might also infer that it has horns or fur.

However, it would be fallacious to infer that if a fish has fins, then a sheep has scales. Likewise, it would be fallacious to infer that if a sheep has hooves, then a fish has fur.

There’s no essential continuity between one figurative analogy and another unless they just so happen to be the same kind of thing. The same species or natural kind. What applies to one sort of thing may be inapplicable to a different sort of thing. Isn’t that pretty obvious?

v) In addition, even that’s an overstatement. While you can infer one sheepish property from another sheepish property when you’re dealing with a real sheep, you can’t draw all the same inferences when dealing with a figurative sheep, since the metaphor was never meant to hold true across the board.

For example, when the Bible compares Christians to sheep, it isn’t comparing them at the level of horns or hooves or fur. That doesn’t carry over.

For someone who’s pursuing a doctorate in philosophy, there’s an oddly childish quality to the way Bryan Cross handles metaphors. You’d expect him to have a bit more sophisticated.

Moving along:

“I came to see that I did not fully trust Christ, not because I thought Him untrustworthy, but because I had not understood that Christ founded a visible hierarchically organized Body of which He is the Head, and which He has promised to protect and preserve until He returns. I had not apprehended the ecclesial organ Christ established through which the members of His Body are to trust Him. I came to see that faith in Christ is not something to be exercised invisibly, from my heart directly to Christ’s throne, as though Christ had not appointed an enduring line of shepherds. Inward faith was to be exercised outwardly, by trusting Christ through those shepherds Christ sent and established. Jesus had said, ‘The one who listens to you listens to Me, and the one who rejects you rejects Me; and he who rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me.’ This is the sacramental conception of faith, not simply belief that, but belief through. This is the sacramental conception of the Church, the basis for the priest speaking in persona Christi.”

Notice the seamless transition from a head/body metaphor to a shepherd/sheep metaphor to a sacramental conclusion. He does all that in one unbroken motion.

But how does he actually derive the sacramental conclusion? Is he inferring something about the shepherd/sheep metaphor from the head/body metaphor? And is he further inferring something about the sacramental conception from the corporeal-sheepish metaphor? What is the logical connection, exactly? All he’s really done is to juxtapose some metaphors and stipulate a conclusion.

What is distinctively sacramental about a body, or a sheep, or a flock of sheep?

“As I began to grasp that, I began to grasp that my Church-less faith was too small. Apart from the Church, I had conceived of faith in Christ as something entirely inward. But upon coming to understand that Christ founded a visible hierarchically organized Body of which He is the Head and which He promised to preserve, I came to see that the way to trust Christ is to trust His Church of which He is the Head, just as the early Christians trusted Christ precisely by trusting the teaching of the Apostles.”

But how, exactly, do the organs or body-parts correspond to the Roman Catholic hierarchy? What organs or body-parts match what holy orders? Is the priest to the lower intestine as the bishop is to the index finger? Is the pope is to the big toe as Christ is to the head? Is the College of Cardinals the liver or the spleen?

“In these [patristic] quotations we see the indefectibility of the Church grounded in the Church’s ontological union with Christ as His Mystical Body. Because the life of Christ is indefectible, and because the life of the Church is the life of Christ, therefore the Church is indefectible. Those who deny the indefectibility of the Church are denying that this union of Christ with His Church is anything more than extrinsic. They imply that Christ’s Mystical Body can become corrupted such that He may abandon His Body and take on a different body. By their denial of the indefectibility of the Church they imply that Christ can abandon the Bride with which He is ‘one flesh,’ and find a different bride. But such claims are contrary to the intimate and ontological union of Christ with His Body, which is also His Bride. In virtue of this union She can be neither defeated nor corrupted nor destroyed, since the risen Christ Himself can neither be defeated nor corrupted nor destroyed, and since His Spirit lives within her as her Soul.”

i) Notice how he oscillates between three different metaphors: head/body, body/soul, husband/wife. And he uses these shifting metaphors to establish an ontological union.

Are there not some rather glaring problems with his string of inferences? If you behead a body, the body expires. But if a married couple gets a divorce, the exes don’t expire. Divorce is not equivalent to decapitation.

Likewise, the soul can exist apart from the body. If the body dies the soul survives.

Likewise, there’s no ontological union between a shepherd and a flock of sheep. Indeed, a shepherd may slaughter some of his sheep for food. Is that an act of suicide?

Is it Bryan’s contention that a one-flesh union subsists between a shepherd and his sheep? Is Catholic ecclesiology synonymous with bestiality?

ii) I’d add that in the OT, where the husband/wife metaphor has its origins, a man could divorce his wife. By analogy, Christ can divorce the church.

Now, you might protest that conclusion. Christ would never divorce his church. And, depending on how you define the church, I agree.

However, you’re not getting that restriction from the metaphor itself. There’s nothing in the marital metaphor which precludes the possibility of divorce in case the wife is unfaithful.

So you can only block that possibility by refusing to press the metaphor. Yet pressing metaphors is what Bryan does from start to finish.

His argument for Catholic ecclesiology is a tissue of specious inferences. Looks like The Island of Doctor Moreau is the textbook for Catholic ecclesiology.