Crusius’ work culminates on the question of properties that free spirits have because of their moral attributes. He notes that such properties are essentially based on the infinite perfection of the divine will. Particularly important in this context are the divine holiness, the divine goodness and the divine righteousness. Since God necessarily has these properties, Crusius argues, free spirits must also necessarily have the properties based on these divine properties.
The properties Crusius is speaking about fall roughly into two categories. Firstly, since God wants the whole world to be perfect, Crusius begins, he also wants that free spirits would act in accordance with the rules of perfection, that is, that they would act virtuously. Of course, Crusius adds, this does not mean that God would force them to act virtuously, because then they would not be free beings. What God can do is to ensure that virtuous spirits will be happy and that those violating laws of perfection will be punished. All free spirits are thus necessarily subjected to the divine law, which God expects the free spirits to follow obediently.
In addition to this subjection to divine law, Crusius speaks of one other property, that is, immortality. He adds that it is not enough that a spirit is indestructible, in order for it to be immortal, but it must also be constantly alive and conscious of its own state. Thus, a free spirit is not by its essence immortal, even if we ignore the fact that God could annihilate even free spirits, because even hostile conditions of bodies can make spirits unconscious. Hence, Crusius concludes that we must show that God wants to prevent all the obstacles that could hinder the immortality of free spirits.
Crusius is particularly adamant that the Leibnizian notion of a pre-established harmony of souls and bodies does not in any way justify the immortality of free spirits, even if it would be true, which Crusius obviously does not accept, because he believes that souls and bodies do interact with each other. Indeed, he continues, since Leibnizians have to assume that before its harmonisation with a body the soul could not yet represent anything, it would be analogously plausible that the soul would lose all representations after this harmonious correspondence was over after the death of the body.
Crusius’ own justification of the immortality of free spirits is ultimately based on their being the main purpose in God’s plans for the world. In addition to freedom, God has given free spirits abilities to reason and abstract, consciousness and drives toward perfection, communion with God and virtue. All these attributes, Crusius argues, contribute in free spirits aiming for an indefinitely extended life in constant pursue of evermore perfect stages of virtue, which in fact should be the highest purpose of the world. If free spirits would not be immortal, God would have given these abilities in vain and the main purpose of the world would be defeated.
Crusius still considers the possibility that only some spirits would be able to reach immortality, while others would only serve as means for the blessed immortals to reach their goal. Crusius thinks this possibility is unbelievable, since God would not have given freedom to such beings that were only means for other beings. Indeed, Crusius points out, even spirits who have acted morally wrong have to be immortal, so that God can punish them for the whole eternity.
A more difficult problem Crusius faces when he considers the fate of babies who die before they could have developed their reason and thus their ability to act freely and make moral choices. Although he does not have even a very probable argument to back it up, Crusius does suggest that these children will probably continue living, even if their life after death will probably be less perfect than with those who have reached the maturity of moral beings.
Crusius is also uncertain what the life after death will be like. We might need no body anymore or we might receive a new kind of body or one exactly like the one we used to have - or we might go through all of these stages at different stages of our life after death. Crusius does insist that the life after death won’t include long periods of sleeplike condition, while waiting resurrection, as some Catholic thinkers had suggested. Crusius reasoning is that such long periods of passivity make us lose our abilities, so it would probably be harmful to our consciousness also.
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