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Western concepts of God have ranged from the detached transcendent
demiurge of Aristotle to the pantheism of Spinoza.
Nevertheless, much of
western thought about God has fallen within some broad form of theism.
Theism
is the view that God is unlimited with regard to knowledge (omniscience), power
(omnipotence), extension (omnipresence), and moral perfection; and is the
creator and sustainer of the universe.
Though regarded as sexless, God has
traditionally been referred to by the masculine pronoun.
Concepts of God in
philosophy are entwined with concepts of God in religion.
This is most obvious
in figures like Augustine and Aquinas, who sought to bring more rigor and
consistency to concepts found in religion.
Others, like Leibniz and Hegel,
interacted constructively and deeply with religious concepts.
Even those like
Hume and Nietzsche, who criticized the concept of God, dealt with religious
concepts.
While Western philosophy has interfaced most obviously with
Christianity, Judaism and Islam have had some influence.
The orthodox forms of
all three religions have embraced theism, though each religion has also yielded
a wide array of other views.
Philosophy has shown a similar variety.
For
example, with regard to the initiating cause of the world, Plato and Aristotle
held God to be the crafter of uncreated matter.
Plotinus
regarded matter as emanating from God.
Spinoza, departing from his judaistic roots, held God to be identical with the
universe, while Hegel came to a similar view by reinterpreting Christianity.
Issues related to Western concepts of God include the nature of divine
attributes and how they can be known, if or how that knowledge can be
communicated, the relation between such knowledge and logic, the nature of
divine causality, and the relation between the divine and the human will.
A.Sources of
Western Concepts of God.
Sources of western concepts of the divine have been threefold:
experience, revelation, and reason.
Reported experiences of God are remarkably
varied and have produced equally varied concepts of the divine being.
Experiences can be occasioned by something external and universally available,
such as the starry sky, or by something external and private, such as a burning
bush.
Experiences can be internal and effable, such as a vision, or internal
and ineffable, as is claimed by some mystics.
Revelation can be linked to
religious experience or a type of it, both for the person originally receiving
it and the one merely accepting it as authoritative.
Those who accept its
authority typically regard it as a source of concepts of the divine that are
more detailed and more accurate than could be obtained by other means.
Increasingly, the modern focus has been on the complexities of the process of
interpretation (philosophical hermeneutics) and the extent to which it is
necessarily subjective.
Revelation can be intentionally unconnected to reason
such that it is accepted on bare faith (fideism; cf.
Kierkegaard), or at the
other extreme, can be grounded in reason in that it is accepted because and
only insofar as it is reasonable (cf.
, Locke). Reason has been taken as
ancillary to religious experience and revelation, or on other accounts, as
independent and the sole reliable source of concepts of God.
Each of the three sources of concepts of God has had those who
regard it as the sole reliable basis of our idea of the divine.
By contrast,
others have regarded two or three of the sources as interdependent and mutually
reinforcing.
Regardless of these differing approaches, theism broadly construed
has been a dominant theme for much of the history of Western thought.
B.
Historical Overview
1. Greeks.
At the dawn of philosophy, the Ionian Greeks sought to understand
the true nature of the cosmos and its manifestations of both change and
permanence.
To Heraclitus, all was change and nothing
endured, whereas to Parmenedes, all change was
apparent.
The Pythagorians found order and permanence
in mathematics, giving it religious significance as ultimate being.
The Stoics
identified order with divine reason.
To Plato, God is transcendent-the highest and most perfect
being-and one who uses eternal forms, or archetypes, to fashion a universe that
is eternal and uncreated.
The order and purpose he gives the universe is
limited by the imperfections inherent in material.
Flaws are therefore real and
exist in the universe; they are not merely higher divine purposes misunderstood
by humans.
God is not the author of everything because some things are evil.
We
can infer that God is the author of the punishments of the wicked because those
punishments benefit the wicked.
God, being good, is also unchangeable since any
change would be for the worse.
For Plato, this does not mean (as some later
Christian thought held) that God is the ground of moral goodness; rather,
whatever is good is good in an of itself.
God must be
a first cause and a self-moved mover otherwise there will be an infinite
regress to causes of causes.
Plato is not committed to monotheism, but suggests
for example that since planetary motion is uniform and circular, and since such
motion is the motion of reason, then a planet must be driven by a rational
soul.
These souls that drive the planets could be called gods.
Aristotle made God passively responsible for change in the world
in the sense that all things seek divine perfection.
God imbues all things with
order and purpose, both of which can be discovered and point to his (or its)
divine existence.
From those contingent things we come to know universals,
whereas God knows universals prior to their existence in things.
God,
the highest being (though not a loving being), engages in perfect contemplation
of the most worthy object, which is himself.
He is thus unaware of the world
and cares nothing for it, being an unmoved mover.
God as pure form is wholly
immaterial, and as perfect he is unchanging since he cannot become more
perfect.
This perfect and immutable God is therefore the apex of being and
knowledge.
God must be eternal.
That is because time is eternal, and since
there can be no time without change, change must be eternal.
And for change to
be eternal the cause of change-the unmoved mover-must also be eternal.
To be
eternal God must also be immaterial since only immaterial things are immune
from change.
Additionally, as an immaterial being, God is not extended in
space.
The Neo-Platonic God of Plotinus
(204/5-270 A.
D). is the source of the universe, which is the inevitable
overflow of divinity.
In that overflow, the universe comes out of God (ex deo) in a timeless process.
It does not come by
creation because that would entail consciousness and will, which Plotinus claimed would limit God.
The first emanation out
of God (nous) is the highest, successive
emanations being less and less real.
Finally, evil is matter with no form at
all, and as such has no positive existence.
God is an impersonal It who can be described only in terms of what he is not.
This negative way of describing God (the via
negativa) survived well into the middle ages.
Though God is beyond description, Plotinus (perhaps
paradoxically) asserted a number of things, such as that virtue and truth
inhere in God.
Because for Plotinus God cannot be
reached intellectually, union with the divine is ecstatic and mystical.
His
thought influenced a number of Christian mystics, such as Meister Eckhart (1260-1327).
2. Early Christian Thought.
Early Christians regarded Greek religion as holding views unworthy
of God, but they were divided as to Greek philosophy.
Christian philosopher
Justin Martyr (c.
100-c.
165) saw Christianity as compatible with the highest
and best Greek thought, whereas Tertullian (c.
160-c.
225) dismissed philosophy, saying that Jerusalem (faith) could have nothing to
do with Athens (philosophy).
Having been born out of Judaism, Christianity was unambiguously
monotheistic and affirmed that God created the material of the universe out of
nothing (ex nihilo). But it also affirmed the
Trinity as multiplicity within unity, a view it regarded as implicit in
Judaism.
Consistent with theism, Augustine (354-430) regarded God as
omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, morally good, the creator (ex nihilo) and sustainer of the universe.
Despite these
multiple descriptors, God is uniquely simple.
Being entirely free, he did not
have to create, but did so as an act of love.
As his creation, it reflects his
mind.
Time and space began at creation, and everything in creation is good.
Evil is uncreated, being a lack of good and without positive existence.
Though
God is not responsible for evil even it has a purpose: to show forth what is
good, especially what is good within God.
Augustine developed a theme found as
early as Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno of Citium, that
God is a perfect being.
After enumerating a hierarchy of excellencies
(things to be "preferred") Augustine affirms that God "lives in
the highest sense" and is "the most powerful, most righteous, most
beautiful, most good, most blessed" (On the Trinity, XV, 4). When
we think of God, we "attempt to conceive something than which nothing more
excellent or sublime exists" (Christian Doctrine, I, 7, 7). But where Aristotle concluded that the greatest being
must be aware only of himself, Augustine emphasized an
opposite and distinctly Christian theme: God loves creatures supremely to the
point of becoming incarnate in Christ in order to be revealed to them and to
reconcile them to himself.
Moreover, God is providentially active in history,
from an individual level (Confessions) on up to dealings with entire
nations (City of God). So as to the important subject of God's
relationship to the world, Christian thought could not be more opposite
Aristotle's view of a Being who contemplates only himself.
John Scotus Erigena
(c.
810-c.
877) had stronger affinities for Neo-Platonic thought.
God created
the universe according to eternal patterns in his mind and it is an expression
of his thought, however incomplete an expression the cosmos may be.
Erigena's pantheistic tendencies can be seen in his notion
that God creates out of himself and "God is in all things.
" Creation
is not in time but is eternal.
In the process God used universals and made them
particulars (e.g., humanity became individual persons). Immortality is the
reverse process of particulars going back to universals.
In Erigena's
terms, division is the process of differentiating universals into particulars;
analysis is the reverse, a return to unity and thus to God.
These are not mere
mental activities but mirror reality and God's relationship to the world.
God
is ultimately unknowable, being beyond all language and categories.
Aristotle's
predicates and categories cannot apply to God because they assume some type of
substance.
Nevertheless God can be described, albeit inadequately, using both
positive and negative statements.
Positive statements are only approximate but
can be made more exact by adding negative statements.
For example, it can be
said that God is good (positive), but also that he is not good
(negative) in that he is above goodness.
These can be combined in the statement
that he is "supergood.
" In spite of these
approximations, God must be reached by mystical experience.
3. Medieval Thought
Islamic Neoplatonist al-Farabi (875-950) held that universals are in things and
have no existence apart from particulars.
Objects are contingent in that they
may or may not exist; they do not have to exist.
Therefore there must be
something that has to exist-that exists necessarily-to ground the existence
of all other (contingent) things.
This being is God.
The world evolves by
emanation, and matter is a phase of that process.
The potential in matter is
made actual, and over time God brings out its form.
Thought is one emanation
from God, and through it knowledge arises in humans.
The actualized human
intellect becomes an immortal substance.
Avicenna (Ibn Sina;
980-1037), a Muslim, also distinguished between God as the one necessary being
and all other things, which are contingent.
The world is an emanation from God
as the outworking of his self-knowledge.
As such it is eternal and necessary.
God must be eternal and simple, existing without multiplicity.
In their
essence, things do not contain anything that accounts for their existence.
They
are hierarchically arranged such that the existence of each thing is accounted
for by something ontologically higher.
At the top is the one being whose
existence is necessary.
From contingent things we come to know universals,
whereas God knows universals prior to their existence in things.
Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) challenged any
joining of theology and philosophy, holding that because the mind and senses
are subject to error, truth must come by divine grace.
Rather than the
world existing necessarily in a Neoplatonic sense, it
exists by the will of God alone.
It is in no way autonomous, and even causal
relationships are non-necessary.
He rejected as un-Islamic Avicenna's view that
things like souls or intellects could be eternal.
Anselm (1033-1109), archbishop of Canterbury, raised the perfect
being concept to a new level by making it the foundation of his celebrated
ontological argument.
He accepted that God is the highest level of being under
which there are, by degrees, lesser and lesser beings.
Similar to Plato, Anselm
assumes the realist view that entities which share an attribution, such as
"good," also share in being.
And somewhere there must be a perfection
of that being (e.g., perfect goodness). That perfection is God.
Though a Muslim and an Aristotelian, Averroes
(Ibn Rushd; 1126-1198)
added to the growing concept of emanation by claiming that the universal mind
is an emanation from God.
Humans participate in this universal mind and only it, not the
soul, is immortal.
The mind of the common person understands religious symbols
in a literal way, whereas the philosopher interprets them allegorically.
Consequently, something understood as true philosophically may be untrue
theologically, and vice versa.
Working from Judaism, Maimonides
(1135-1204) accepted creation rather than an eternal universe.
He drew from
philosophic traditions to formulate three proofs based on the nature of God,
and these were developed further by Aquinas.
Following Aristotle Maimonides demonstrated the existence of a Prime Mover, and
with some inspiration from Avicenna, the existence of a necessary being.
He
also showed God to be a primary cause.
Though he considered God's existence
demonstrable, he held that nothing positive could be said about God.
Bonaventura (John of Fidanza, c.
1221-1274)
argued that the Aristotlean denial of Platonic ideas
would entail that God knows himself but not the world.
As such God could not be
its creator.
Furthermore, because some change in the universe is cyclic and
therefore unexplainable by chance, change would have to be deterministic.
But
this would deny God's providence as well as human moral responsibility.
So a
proper concept of God must include Platonic ideas.
Reason can prove God as
creator since an eternal universe entails both that the amount of time of its
existence is infinite and that it is increasing.
Yet there cannot be both an
infinite and a larger infinite (a view not held in modern times).
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) accepted both Aristotle and Christian
revelation.
He accepted both reason and revelation as sources of knowledge of
God.
Over the neo-Platonic notion of a hierarchy of reality in which lower
existences are less real and a mere shadow of the divine, Aquinas accepted
gradations of form and matter.
Atop the hierarchy is God as pure form and no
matter.
As pure actuality and no potentiality, he is perfect and therefore
changeless.
He is also pure intelligence and pure activity.
To these
Aristotelian concepts Aquinas added Christian convictions that God is loving,
providential, and ruler of the universe.
Reason and revelation are in harmony
because they have the same divine source, and revelation is not unreasonable.
Perception is also in harmony because the world's origins are divine.
This
being the case, God as cause can be known through the world as effect.
For this
reason empirical facts ground Aquinas's theistic proofs.
The God that can be known in part from the universe is
fundamentally different from it.
Only God is identical to his essence, being
neither more nor less than it.
By contrast, a being such as Socrates is
transcended by humanity because there are other people.
On the other hand,
Socrates has qualities ("accidents") that are not part of his
essence; for example, he may be sitting.
So unlike God, Socrates is both
greater than and less than his essence.
There is nothing that transcends God so
nothing is greater than his essence.
And there are no accidents in God because
accidents are caused by something else (just as part of the cause of Socrates
sitting is a chair).
God is not (completely) knowable because he is not material,
whereas our knowledge is normally dependent on our senses.
Furthermore, we
normally know things by knowing their genus and species, yet God is unique and
so cannot be known in that way.
We can know something of God the negative way (via
negativa) by removing limits, concluding for
example, that God is unmoved, and unlimited
by space.
What we can know of God positively is neither exactly like our
knowledge of temporal things (univocal) nor entirely different (equivocal).
Rather, it is analogical, being in some ways the same and in other ways
different.
God knows x in a way that is both like and unlike the way in
which Socrates knows x.
God knows, but in a way that is, among other
things, complete, immediate, and timeless.
