Stephen Theron
What is God? This, our title question, is the first question St. Thomas
Aquinas is on record as asking. We might take the later quaestiones as the
working out of a lifetime's answer to his leading question. He did not first
ask, for example, if God exists. It is and remained a question of what to
call God, of identifying God.
Some people dislike the idea of God as implying, they think, lordship,
domination. We don't however know if that is implied, particular traditions
apart. What is surely implied though is an infinity, than which nothing
greater can be thought, as the "ontological argument" has it. Not everyone
agrees as to the necessary actuality of an infinite. For some it is an
impossible idea merely. A restricted infinity is itself only a finite, Hegel
declares, and the point seems analytic. The thinking self, the "I", is for him
infinite, since thinking is unrestricted. I can think anything and be "at
home" with it. Nothing external restricts me.
A related consideration is that the infinite, as unrestricted, has to be
differentiated. An undifferentiated or "simple" infinite is an abstract idea
and, as such, finite, which is contradictory. Not only so but the infinite
cannot be merely finitely differentiated. That is, the infinite is infinitely
differentiated.
This means, however, in our terms here, that God is infinitely
differentiated. This, we shall find, does not necessarily contradict the
Christian differentiation of God into three persons. We may also find that
that too has a basis in reason, once the religious tradition has proposed it
to us.
It will be claimed here that to the infinite differentiations of infinity, which
we are calling God, corresponds the human race plus any other race of
rational creatures so far unknown to us. These rational creatures are spirits
and not in reality extended as bodies in a material universe. There is no
such universe. Not only so, however, but we have no certain knowledge as
to an absolute quality pertaining to the finite concept of self. The self is in
all probability indefinite to the point of being subject to an indefinite
number of combinations. Hence the infinity of the differentiation. Other-
than-self is within self as, in Trinitarianism, otherness is in God and there
overcome. This overcoming is knowledge, a having of the other as other,
but finally it is love. Since time is not absolute or objective this
indefiniteness of combination has as at least one of its functions the
replacing of the religious doctrine of reincarnation, which indeed is to be
carried to the point where all are in each and each is in all. This is the only
perfect or infinite or non-abstract unity and simplicity.
The threeness of Trinity is therefore to be found within each spirit itself, as
Augustine almost divined, adding to his "psychological" comparison the
insight that infinity, God, is "closer to me than I am to myself". He is
therefore myself in the highest possible way. Therefore the Trinity is to be
found in me or as constitutive of any self, each self being in the end
identical with all putatively other selves. This was implicit from the
beginning of Christian experience, where one spoke of the Word
manifesting, and of mutual Love proceeding, from the self, the ego, the "I",
thought thinking itself. Each self, and hence there is just one, has the unity
of all within itself in a unity transcending the finite scheme or
categorisation of part and whole.
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Not only psychology and logic but also ethics may be found to coincide
with metaphysics as to its object, if we permit reason to question our finite
categories, whether as found at the base of university curricular divisions
or anywhere at all. This we have noted above. We reached the point, also
elsewhere, of suggesting a person might be a virtue, a virtue a person.
The divine persons are relations, relations persons, as we have noted in
connection with psychology. Now persons belong with a substance
ontology, unjustifiably implied in all our speech, where the subject (of
which we speak) is always presented as a "thing", even where we know it
is not (a thing), e.g. happiness, charity, someone's lack of foresight, etc. To
this thing attributes are then added, one after another.
Not only may any person's virtue differ from anyone else's. Your kindness
is not my kindness or, as an Eskimo might say, this snow is not that snow.
And he has two names for the two disparates, as he sees them. D.H.
Lawrence, who pointed out that not all virtues have names, also claimed
that all persons are equal in their total difference from one another (in
Women in Love).
Aristotle makes clear that speech is mere makeshift communication, since
the things themselves in their infinite number (always concrete and
individual) cannot pass through our minds. So we have one term for things
that are like but essentially different at the core.
1
Aristotle, De soph. el. c.1, 165a 7-16; cf. Cajetan, De analogia nominum.
are no longer "things themselves") to agree with us. Speech, that is, is a
subjective commitment.
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But where the "we" and the destiny are finally identified, as they have to
be, we can no longer be seen as "our own worst enemies". Man muss sein
Schicksal tragen and that is what one slowly, cunningly, learns to do,
passing through that evil of which Hegel, in true Thomistic vein, while
granting its opposition to Good, says that
4
See our "Begotten not Made", The Downside Review, January 2006.
The error arises when we take Evil as a permanent positive,
instead of - what it really is - a negative which, though it would
fain assert itself, has no real persistence, and is, in fact, only
the absolute sham-existence of negativity itself.5
This indeed is what having a God means, since God can only be the God of
the living. God, we might even say, is the cipher for our immortality, as in
"If God is for us, who is against us." That is, simply, nothing, neither death
nor grave, is against us. Know thyself. If I do wrong then it is not I who do
it, as Hamlet again, the putatively non-existent, said to Laertes, and
therefore forgive me. Here the true self, atman, speaks, closer than close.
God, that is, is absolute subject, as sacred writings read properly attest the
world over. And so the journey outwards is the journey inwards and "The
kingdom of heaven is within you" as it is among you. Nothing new here, it
might seem, which is after all just as well. Old silver (speech is silver)
needs a polish now and then, merely; nor is it so old as to crumble at the
touch. Ecce omnia nova facio or, as the hymn says, "New every morning is
the light." The Word, again, is pristinely uttered eternally and not in the
finitude of pastness. This uttering, this act, is all, absolute, preceding, and
therefore answering, our question "What is God?"
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The reason God has a body is because I do and God is subjectivity. The
rational nature is capax Dei. It is, that is to say, a (the?) divine capacity,
infinite therefore.
A or the? The world is known entirely and is only known in subjectivity,
known as known by me or by you or him, who are other I's, other subjects.
And I am nothing apart from my world, in which I live and move and have
my being. This is the premise of ecology, after all. Yet I know as, and just
as, I am known. We beget one another, in perfect mutuality. Here,
however, appears the shortcoming, the finitude, of our notion of
knowledge, of cognition. For either we cast ourselves down before the
known as before the other not yet within ourselves or, in willing, the
alternative cognitional category, we seek to dominate it. This is why one
spoke of knowledge "made perfect" in love, which names or can name a
more perfect, an utterly perfect, mutuality. There neither finds the other as
a given, even if it is thus that it begins, but this fragmentary past is then
taken up into the eternal begetting of one another. In this sense God does
not merely change the past but stands as the annihilation of pastness as
anything fixed or absolute. What is God? God is love and love, therefore,
properly understood and fulfilled, is God. Whence came this love? It is,
simply, or, rather, it loves and don't ask why. Love generates the search
for explanation which terminates in its own rediscovery of itself, the
harmony negating all periphery. Only therefore is no one "on the
periphery". A virtue is needed to take this truth to oneself. This virtue will
5
Hegel, Enc. 35 (subtext). I quote from William Wallace's translation of 1873 (2nd edn.
1892, reprinted O.U.P. 1965).
eliminate all discontent and, in a (scriptural) word, cast out all fear.
Metaphysics and ethics here rejoin again, as was said.
It might be feared that such a position exposes one to psychiatric analysis,
deconstruction that is to say, from which academic Sachlichkeit has
always protected its practitioners. But the academy too, or especially, can
and should reflect upon itself. Nor can it be immune to the dialectical
process it has identified and which it studies. As orthodoxy transcended
itself into mysticism, classicism into romanticism, so such objectivity, as
Heidegger was not afraid to indicate, finds at length its own poetic truth,
as Hegel claimed that the destiny of philosophy was to fulfil religion, as
being itself religious. So indeed, as we began this paragraph, this is a fear,
but it is precisely fear that this position defines itself (previous paragraph)
as casting out. Ergo cadit objectio.
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What is man? With the same wonder that one asks what God is, so one
can ask what man is. And if one has answered, in a way, that God is man,
so, uniting the two questions in one answer, one can say that man is God,
absolute. Only, it must be remembered, by man here is meant the subject,
subjectivity itself, and not some species in nature. We speak of man as not
being sure, for example, that we are embodied, or have hands and feet
(Newman). In Aristotle's terms, it is the form, the ultimate form, intellect or
consciousness, that is essential, and not some composite. All flows from
that in the mode of thought.
This consciousness, subjectivity, possesses all things, even objectivity.
Objectivity is a subjective concept, one we have made. This is why the
outside is the inside, the strange is the familiar, as our idea. This is why
God cannot be alien. This is why the notion of revelation must be
rethought. It has been understood as a message from outside, essentially,
something opaque to reason, a mystery. But reason recognises nothing as
outside, since even in forming that notion it takes it inside. Therefore one
must strive to understand what faith proposes, such as the Trinity. Such
knowledge will flow from the belly, as living water. So it need not be
"objective" intellectual knowledge. Rather one will, under whatever mode,
have made it one's own.
What then is revelation? It has to be the fullness of insight as this has to
be divine manifestation or glory. Thus Jesus turned his disciples into
friends and they progressed from seeing him as teacher to his being
intimate life within them, as they in him. Man, in this perspective, is he,
and she, who exists. "All things are yours", that is, you are all things. My
God and all things. I am that. Anima est quodammodo omnia.
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The tendency is to feel that Heidegger, say, has gone beyond, brushed
away, absolute idealism. This is not though the impression given by his
lecture “Hegel and the Greeks”. Also, when Heidegger speaks of being as
of something forever “implicit” (E. Gendlin's term), saying that “being
withdraws itself as it reveals itself in beings” (Holzwege, Klostermann.
1957, p.310), so that “hiddenness lies in the essence of being”
(Einführung in die Metaphysik, Niemeyer 1953, p.87), constitutes its
disclosure as transcendence, then we are surely meant to feel in the
presence of something which is real as nothing else is. There is a
coincidence with those urging the unreality of the finite as such, a key
thesis of Hegel's logic.
Nor is absolute idealism, even the apparent reduction of nature to idea, as
mystificatory and barren as Marx, say, would make out. It is a staple thesis
of the mystics, Christian and other, that only God is, that, again, as in the
common Bible, “in God we live and move and have our being”.
Evolutionary theory, as dependent qua theory, upon man's evolving
reason, can be made to point in the same direction. The mystics, of
course, far from being mystifiers, were transcendentalist philosophers
trying to exist under the dominance, even political, of an orthodoxy
routinely expressed in realist terms, such as those of the theory of the
analogy of being when applied to reality.
But now, what is God? Such an idealism is not committed to a mere
picture taken from unanalysed discourse, from religion. What is real is the
Idea, thought thinking itself. This might be my thought, your thought,
everyone's thought, God's thought. One might be led to conclude that the
unity of the Infinite in three persons, each perfectly and mutually requiring
the other two for its notion, is a preliminary picture, whether real or not in
itself, of the union of human persons or selves. This again is said without
pre-judgement as to what persons or selves might be. “You are all one
person in Jesus Christ”, runs one text. “I and the Father are one”, runs
another; what you did to anyone else you did to me, runs a third in effect,
and it is clearly susceptible of generalisation. As not constrained from
without so any thinking subject is infinite, by Hegel's usage, and in the end
subject and subjectivity, like God and godhead, are one.
The Heideggerian being might seem to have no place in this. The pure
presence he speaks of, does it not all the same require a theatre, a
situation, and will that not be prior? I mean, is not his being an abstraction
from the concrete beings merely? Is not that why it is essentially hidden,
forever implicit? It is more like the being of Scotus, which is a concept,
than that of Aquinas, which is act, though certainly conceived as such.
Heidegger cannot know, that is to say, that there is such being or
presence of such a kind as to make no difference to anything, like a
theorem of mathematics. Yet the presence is real enough. This presence
can be nothing other than the necessity implied in any consciousness, in
subjectivity. As necessity it takes away the question, why is there
something rather than nothing, a question posed in terms of being. But
God is not being, God is freedom. Being is just one of his ideas, standing at
the beginning of the dialectic, and the same would go for "presence". We
find in Jakob Boehme the idea that God, prior to or apart from creation, is a
pure freedom. His rocklike choice of the persons we are, just like his self-
organisation into a Trinity, constitutes necessity. He is necessarily a Trinity
and this means, can only mean, by his own choice.
Coiled within this choice, however, is the Trinitarian structure we call man,
repeated again and again. Since, though, this is the infinite differentiation
of infinity then there cannot be or have been a definite number of men.
This, in turn, requires that self or subject itself be indefinite, with possibly
all coinciding with all.
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6
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), Harper Torchbooks, New York 1966, pp.
85-86.
7
St. Paul, we remember, had wished to see Peter and James and John as such "pillars"
(styloi, columnae), though he deviated far more from their external presentation, at least,
as we might say also John did from the other two (in so far as we might be sure of the
identity of the author of "John's" Gospel). Yet their approval, their "right hand", was
important to him, though what he would have done if they had not given it we do not
anticipated all that is said here in his notion of God as closer than self to
self, i.e. as one's final identity. Newman echoes this, saying he is more
sure of God than that he has hands and feet. He though remains with the
all-encompassing dualism, "myself and God", as required for the language
and situation of piety.
So for Aquinas all that is outside goes inside, is included in, "the bodies of
the redeemed" which is to say, surely, within the redeemed as unitary
realities or spirits, subjects. A commitment to Hebraic realism, in his
understanding of resurrection, however, precludes him from saying this.
We can no more than guess at the reach of his personal vision, words
being always "the film on dark water" (Wittgenstein). St. Thomas, after all,
saw himself as writing for the community, seeking as teacher to build up
or "edify" it. Such medieval modesty cannot be paraded however where, in
true modern spirit, one strives prophetically to push vision to the utmost,
conscious today of the need rather to find ever new and better bottles for
the ever new wine. We have learned that to stand still is to go backwards.
Men like St. Thomas, indeed his whole epoch, laid solid foundations,
rather, for such advances. The prophet, anyhow, has his own humility, is
"meek and humble of heart" as he begs us to learn of him. "Here stand I
and can no other", "I was no prophet; neither was I a prophet's son", the
Son can do nothing without the Father.
For Hegel, as for McTaggart, and as already shown in Kant's Kritik,
whatever its faults, time and space, along with matter, are self-cancelling
finite notions lifted uncritically from common life, as so often God is thus
lifted from common religion, with or without the white beard. Neither
creation nor resurrection depend upon such notions. The body, therefore,
abstraction as it already is, is nothing other than a view, a filtered
refraction, of the subject. The subject, in turn, as individual self, will
similarly show itself to be self-cancelling, as in Trinitarian theology it
became identified with its relations to the other two Persons. This step will
be repeated in the analysis of human unity generally. "You are all one
person in Jesus Christ", Paul had long before prophetically uttered.
Aristotle also looks towards such a truth in his metaphysics, where instead
of man as composite (of form and matter) the pure or ultimate form which
is one with intellect becomes the whole reality of intellectual substance or
person (hypostasis, in later language).
But if there is no time, no matter, so no body even, from the divine
viewpoint we seek to unite with, then what after all is man? "What is man
that thou art mindful of him?" was already the Psalmist's question. For
McTaggart our seemingly temporal and bodily existence, though not in
reality having those illusory qualities, is all the same to be conceived as a
(dialectical) series. This is the "C-series", of which the last member or
result is actually the only reality, which yet has intrinsically to be seen as
result in this manner. And this is no more than Hegel says in the Preface
(actually a transition to his Logic) to his The Phenomenology of Mind,
which indeed McTaggart is exactly replicating. We should then consider
this notion of series, of seriality.
know for sure. His dilemma would have been Joan of Arc's, since voices are voices.
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When McTaggart substitutes eternity for time as our real milieu the
common factor relating the two is seriality. Both time (A or B series) and
eternity (C series) are serial. In terms of this common factor he explains
the mistaking of the one for the other, and some common factor there
would need to be. The idea that time is a symbolic representation of
eternity rather than its antithesis is an old one, found, for example, in
Plato, and characteristic more of Eastern Christian thought than of early
Western or Carolingian.
A common factor of this seriality is the importance of the last member.
Regarding time, the A series at least, it is simply the case that the present
moment functions as a last inclusive member, we might say term, which
so to say captures all the others. They have no reality save as leading up
to it. One reconstructs the past with the help of memory. As for memory
itself, the memory qua memory is present, though what is remembered is
past. However, this pastness cannot be proved and one might argue that
memories can and even ought to actualise what is remembered. This is
the or a link with the C series, how we might in the course of our life or
lives pass over insensibly from the one to the other. Traumatic memories
are experienced as present. This is a main distinguishing feature indeed,
though an engaged response to narrative, or music, equally actualises or
"detemporalises" it.
The present does not similarly include the future. “Future” means not thus
included, or not yet(!) included. “Yet” cannot be used to explain what it is
itself part of, viz. the future and time in general. So we have an inclusive
series not moving physically but in logical progression to its last term, to
terms, that is to say, not otherwise (I avoid “previously”) included. We do
not know in advance that there has to be a last term. This is a key puzzle
in the case of the C series. Regarding time, why could not we choose to
see it as progressing backwards rather? We would then arrive at a
beginning, though only if, again, there be a final member.
On McTaggart’s hypothesis there might seem every reason to see time
thus. For what one finally arrives at is where one has been all the time,
eternity. Inexplicably, it belongs to this eternity that one misperceives
things now in such a way that one eternally perceives oneself
misperceiving them.8
What it comes down to is that backward or forward are concepts taken
from the temporal and material world the reality of which McTaggart
claims to disprove. Therefore we can see time either way, remembering,
with Henry Vaughan, that some men a backward motion love. In physics
the situation is different, up to a point. It is not easy to fix this point,
however, since backward causality, for example, would on McTaggartian
premises never literally be backward. Indeed in so far as this temporal
reference is thought essential to causality, as by McTaggart himself, then
causality itself reduces to a provisional because finite category in the
8
Not quite inexplicably. The question as to why the perfect law was not given from the
beginning has been treated both by theologians and, more generally, in relation to the
need for a dialectical result, by Hegel. Explanations, that is, have been offered. See
below.
dialectical series, which we have yet to consider as forming the basis for
series as such.
If we compare temporal or eternal series to the number-series we find
again this feature of one-way inclusiveness only. The later or larger
numbers include the smaller or earlier. This is what being larger means.
And we only speak of later and earlier in deference to the fact that our
notion of a series is formed from analogy with or in abstraction from our
experience of temporality, which we here attempt to get behind.
In what sense then does five include four, but not the reverse? The
assertion at once opposes us to a Pythagorean view of absolute numbers,
where each has its qualitative character on its own, as is more plausible
for smaller numbers. Where there are five things, four or three things are
included. We may say there are not four but five apples on the table but
this is “idiomatic” for there being more, and just one more, than four
there. So four are there. This is the sense of “more than”.
This means that number is tied to a milieu of enumerables, not
surprisingly. Whether it also transcends this milieu we may leave open. For
Aquinas number when applied to divine things does not denote quantity,
whether we speak of unity or trinity. The point here is that the series is
one-way and that the ultimate infinity includes all numbers, or will do if or
in so far as infinity is real. To the layman it seems one would never reach
it. A suitably robust machine would go on counting for ever, as children try
to do. These two factors, a world of enumerables and a possibility of
seemingly endless (the “bad infinite”) enumeration, suggest that number
belongs with the illusory world of time and matter we attempt to
transcend, in view of its inherent contradictions.
So the larger number includes smaller number as the present includes a
hypothetical past. The analogy does not go further, since there is no larger
number which is relatively more present than smaller numbers. It is rather
with unity, one, the first number, that we should look for analogies and
even ultimate identifications between the two (or more) series.
We have not considered the possibility of circularity, a conception
seemingly closer to simple unity than that of a line. Thus Parmenides saw
his One, saw being, as a sphere. Along these lines, or in this circular way,
rather, we can even see a hint of how the temporal series, like causality,
may have to be seen as provisional and to be discarded as misperception.
If time, as physics suggests now, has to return upon itself then what we
get is not necessarily eternal repetition. That is keeping the linear way of
thinking in the very act of renouncing it. An “eternal return”, rather, should
mean that the linear motion in terms of which common-sense time is
perceived is exchanged for a motion, not of repetition of events, but of the
same event ever coming back. It is not like getting up afresh each morning
but like for ever living through some getting up or other which never goes
away (except to come back again). This is clearly a mythical way of
representing the eternal presence of all reality (and here I have nothing to
do with Nietzschean exegesis). If, anyhow, it is in this way that infinity has
to be reached, as it cannot in linear progression, then we have further
support for the thesis of the necessarily concrete differentiation of any real
infinity. Thus the series of abstract numbers leading to but not reaching an
abstract infinity cannot be anything but linear. It cannot be thought
circular, as can space and time. The circularity of space and time,
however, would seem to imply the elimination of both, our results here
tend to suggest.
In a similar way the last member of McTaggart’s C series includes, is
indeed the inclusion of, all the rest. As such it is ever-present or, rather,
actual. It alone is concrete, not abstract or broken off (fragmentary). Any
reality we have now is our inclusion in that, where reality is seen, as it
exists, all at once. Here, therefore, we have to consider whether or how
this very notion of series is constitutive of absolute reality. It seems to me
it is not, but is, rather, extrapolated from our fragmentary experience as
we find it in consciousness. In a similar way it is not a third reality but the
only reality. The same would or should apply to the Fregean Drittes Reich
or the Popperian third world (freed from the author’s commitment to quasi-
naïve realism). There is an analogy with the process of argument here,
typical of course of dialectical thinking. In any case the last member is the
only member, i.e. not in reality a member at all, just as there is no series
in reality at all, but in our thinking merely. In eternity it will be perceived, if
at all, as misperception on the part of those conditioned to a temporal
framework. For this last member is in fact truth, in concreto, to which any
abstract concept of truth is to be referred. Truth, however, cannot be seen
as part of a larger world consisting of both the true and the false. That
would indeed be “logical Manichaeism”. Only the true is actual, since
“true” names the actual precisely in its entirety and beyond all partiality.
The model, we have made clear, for all series is the series constituting the
Hegelian dialectic, whereby the mind ascends to reality as it is in itself and
not in our idea of it. This, paradoxically perhaps, is called in the Logic the
“absolute idea”, though what is absolute is the Absolute or, simply, Spirit
(sc. Mind). As Spirit it is itself idea, the notion, with which our idea now, if
we reached it, would coincide. But in coinciding with the absolute idea we
actually pass out of the realm of ideas, our own limited and necessarily
dialectical ideas (in the sense that each has the seed of its own
contradiction within itself), and into eternal reality, inclusive of all that was
at first represented serially, as a way for us to get at it, though we
understand now that series, any series, was a finite illusion. Probably
thinking and knowledge are part of this illusion, the ultimate state being
more reciprocal and without the objectification knowledge essentially
entails. McTaggart calls this state love, as in religion. In both case the
content of this term is somewhat variable, but for the philosopher it is
intended to name whatever finally transcends knowledge, as he considers
something must do.